The Trial of Lizzie Borden(43)
Fleet then went to the cellar and found Officers Mullaly and Devine looking for a possible murder weapon. They found two axes and two hatchets on the cellar floor. As Moody produced these items for Fleet to identify, they jostled against one another. The noise was jarring, metal against metal, a clanking, according to Julian Ralph, “that sounds terrible to those who sympathize with the prisoner and try to put themselves in her place.” Yet Lizzie seemed more intrigued than horrified by the racket: “[s]he raised her head and looked at the weapons with some show of interest.”
Fleet testified that he spoke to the other officers on the scene (in the dining room and out in the yard). Then he went to search Lizzie’s room himself. This time the door was closed. Dr. Bowen opened the door six to eight inches, asked him what he wanted, and closed the door again. When he reopened the door, Lizzie asked if it was necessary to search the room. Fleet was reluctantly admitted. Lizzie asked him to search as quickly as possible and observed that no one could get into her room so there was really no point in searching. Fleet asked Lizzie about her morning activities. She said she had been in the barn for between twenty minutes to half an hour. She had last seen her stepmother about 9:00 a.m. She also told him that someone had brought a note to Abby.
After searching Lizzie’s room, Fleet returned to the cellar. He saw a box containing a hatchet head with other tools, including pieces of iron. He then described what would become known as the handleless hatchet. He observed a new break in the wood close to the head, and where other implements were covered with dust, this blade, oddly, seemed to have ash on both sides. Robinson interrupted to prevent him from sharing how he imagined a hatchet head might have become covered with ash. He confirmed that the cellar door leading to the backyard was bolted from the inside. He also visited the barn and found it “hot and close” in the loft.
Fleet returned to the house on Saturday just after the funeral procession departed for the cemetery. Significantly, he testified about his search of the upstairs clothes closet. He said that he had not seen a dress with any bloodstains, nor had he found a paint-stained dress. In other words, if Lizzie Borden had burned a dress covered with paint, then where was it at the time of the search? Julian Ralph observed: “A hum ran through the court as the minds of the people grasped the fact that if he did not see the paint-soiled dress, it must have been because it was skillfully hidden.”
Fleet had done real damage. It was nearly the end of the day and Robinson did not want his testimony to settle in the jury’s mind overnight. But Fleet was “the coolest, clearest-headed, shrewdest man the wily lawyer ha[d] yet had to deal with.” Robinson assumed a sardonic pose, hoping to rattle the policeman. Gone was the avuncular Robinson who had coaxed Bridget Sullivan into agreeing that the Borden household was “pleasant.” “When ex-Gov. Robinson took hold of Assistant Marshal Fleet,” pronounced Julian Ralph, “he did so as a terrier takes hold of a rat.” Robinson immediately went on the attack: he pressed Fleet about his previous testimony, inquiring, “Do you think you told the same story then that you tell now?” That set the tone for the rest of the day.
Fleet glared and responded “impudently” as Robinson revisited the inconsistencies between his inquest testimony and his testimony of the afternoon. (In fairness, Julian Ralph observed: “Job himself could not have endured his tone and words with patience.”) At the inquest, Fleet testified that Lizzie’s dresses were covered with a cloth, which he lifted to examine the dresses for any sign of blood. But now, observed Robinson, “you didn’t look carefully enough . . . to find whether there was a cloth hung over them.”
Robinson quoted so much of Fleet’s prior testimony that Moody interjected, “I don’t know how much further you are going to read; there should certainly be a limit.” Fleet said that he had “just looked in behind the dresses.”
Robinson queried, “You were not expecting to find any man behind those women’s dresses?”
Fleet insisted: “There was a possibility of a man being in that room.”
Robinson sneered, “Really, were you looking for him there . . . You thought you would find him?”
According to Ralph, Robinson “showed his consummate art by simulating irritability, sternness, and impatience.” And just before the day’s adjournment, Robinson forced Fleet to admit that no one had impeded the search and that Lizzie herself unlocked the clothes closet door. According to Julian Ralph, Fleet “showed evident bias against the prisoner,” but, as the New York Times observed, “Mr. Fleet’s description of the weapon was so minute, and his reputation for veracity and honorable dealing in police and private matters is so well known here, that belief is general that he has really found the weapon with which the deed was committed.”
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Thursday was the day Lizzie Borden’s luck seemed to run out. As one reporter noted, “It is the general belief that the Government brought out its worst to-day.” Another put it more simply: “It was a bad day for Lizzie Borden.” Knowlton and Moody called a series of witnesses whose testimony revealed Lizzie Borden’s odd behavior before and after the murders and, most damaging of all, that she had burned a dress she had worn on the morning of the murders. To Julian Ralph, “The operation could almost be likened to a pigeon-shooting match, in which District Attorney Moody kept flinging up the birds . . . while the ex-Governor as constantly fired, and often, but by no means always, wounded or brought them down.” Throughout these exchanges, Lizzie sat motionless. In the words of one observer, “All of her stoicism seemed to have returned to her.” Joe Howard wrote: “Lizzie Borden has a remarkable temperament and her control over herself does she lose the strong grasp she has upon the muscles of her entire person . . . It seems that with almost every successive hour of her presence in the courtroom she becomes stronger.”