The Trial of Lizzie Borden(45)
Harrington had one other nugget to share: he had seen Dr. Bowen with “some scraps of note paper in his hand.” Bowen told him it was “nothing.” Robinson was out of his seat immediately: “I cannot let this go in unless you give me an assurance that it has nothing whatever to do with it.”
Knowlton responded, “It has nothing to do with the case at all.”
Robinson pressed, “You claim the paper has no significance.”
Knowlton replied, “Well, he said it has no significance.”
What worried Robinson? According to Officer Harrington, Dr. Bowen said that the note had something to do with his daughter. Yet, Harrington claimed he saw “Emma” written on the upper-left-hand corner in lead pencil. Did the note contain something damaging to Lizzie’s defense? The trial record is silent. But Harrington also said he observed a rolled-up paper “about twelve inches long and no more than two inches in diameter” that had been burned in the stove earlier. The dimensions coincided with the likely length of the missing handle of the handleless hatchet. Robinson appeared concerned that Harrington was implying that the burned paper had been used to cover the hatchet handle.
Patrick Doherty was the next officer on the stand. Moody and Robinson clashed over whether Doherty could repeat Dr. Bowen’s exclamation that Mrs. Borden had died of fright. Ultimately, Moody agreed not to pursue it. Doherty was the first officer to examine Abby’s body. According to Doherty, Abby was lying facedown, her head to the east, with her hands above her head. Aside from moving one of her hands and lifting her head, he did not move the body. Doherty then left to telephone the marshal. When he returned, he saw Lizzie with Adelaide Churchill and Alice Russell in the kitchen. Lizzie told him that she had been in the barn when the murder had been committed and added that she had heard a peculiar noise, “something like scraping.” Thinking about possible suspects, Doherty asked her whether “there was a Portuguese working for your father?” She named her father’s two farm employees, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Eddy, but said neither would hurt him.
The next witness, Patrolman Michael Mullaly, a fifteen-year veteran of the Fall River police force, was a disaster for the prosecution. Mullaly, wrote Julian Ralph, “did not look like a powder magazine on the point of exploding, but that is what he proved to be in the metaphorical sense.” On the day of the murders, he had searched the attic and, later, it was he who called Fleet’s attention to the axes and hatchets in the cellar. He identified the handleless hatchet as the same one Moody proffered but testified that the break had been covered with ashes. On cross-examination, Robinson pursued the exact nature of the material covering the hatchet head. Mullaly then casually disclosed his stunner: he had seen the handle in the box containing the hatchets. He claimed Fleet took it out and then put it back in the box. Elizabeth Jordan wrote that Mullaly seemed “in blissful unconsciousness that he had revealed anything of importance,” yet, according to Howard, “if a bomb had fallen in the courtroom more astonishment could not have been caused.” Robinson himself exclaimed, “The rest of the handle? The other piece . . . where is it?” Robinson demanded the prosecution produce the handle. Knowlton disclaimed all knowledge of it and offered to send an officer to the Borden house to look for it. Robinson scoffed at that suggestion. Instead, he recalled Fleet to the stand. Meanwhile, Jennings quickly sent his assistant Arthur Phillips and a detective from Cambridge to watch the foot and the head of the courthouse stairs to make sure that Mullaly did not warn Fleet about what he had said.
From then on, Fleet was done for, trapped in Robinson’s “merciless and masterful grasp.” Fleet agreed Mullaly was present when he found the hatchet but denied that he saw another piece of the handle. As Julian Ralph explained, “The theory of the Commonwealth is that she took the hatchet after murdering her father, broke off the handle, burned it, and then cleansed the blade, rubbed it in ashes, and put it in a box in the cellar.” If the handle had been there all along, then the hatchet had no great significance. As the New York Times declared, “They nearly destroyed the Government’s hope of producing the instrument with which the deed was done.” From then on, the prosecution could not claim that it had found the murder weapon without reminding the jurors of the officers’ contradictory testimony. As Julian Ralph concluded, “The tattered web which the legal spiders for the Commonwealth have been weaving around her had one of its strongest threads snapped by a sudden and totally unexpected blow.” Joe Howard was harsher in his assessment of the police: “Of course he was certain about it; they all are. There hasn’t been an officer on the stand who has not been absolutely confident, nor has there been one who has not been flatly contradicted by one of his associates.” In the same vein, Elizabeth Jordan declared: “In the minds of those present at the Borden trial a little hatchet will never more be solely emblematical of the father of this country and veracity. It will always bring to their minds the Fall River police force and some of the most extraordinary swearing ever heard on a witness stand.”
The rest of the witnesses had little to add. Officer Wilson testified that he heard the conversation between Fleet and Lizzie about the search of her room. Robinson hammered away at the idea of any resistance to the search: “There was no objection made to your search except [to] . . . wait a minute and then you went right in, didn’t you?” George Pettey, an acquaintance of Andrew Borden, who had lived in the upper part of the Borden house when it was a two-family tenement, saw Bridget Sullivan washing windows around 10:00 a.m. Like many in Fall River, he went into the house after the murders and viewed the bodies. Remarkably, he testified that he had put his hand on Abby’s head, noticing that “the hair was dry, that it was matted.” Augustus Gorman owned the paint shop on the corner of Borden and Second Street and did little more than confirm the timeline already established.