The Trial of Lizzie Borden(53)
Summarizing the afternoon’s events, Julian Ralph concluded: “The seventh day of the Borden trial did not discredit the reputation the cause has earned as unique and crowded with sensations. Gore and hatchets, axes, plaster casts that might have been borrowed from a Bowery chamber of horrors, bloody garments, bits of bloody carpet and blood-spattered furniture and house fittings—these were the stage properties in this legal drama.” Yet he also noticed something interesting about Lizzie Borden herself on the first day of intense medical testimony: “It is said that this woman has no art. That is a mistake . . . Whenever the lawyers who oppose her come to the subject of bloodstains, and the discussion of the gory details of the murders, she hides her face in her hands, but when her own lawyers take up the same subjects of inquiry she keeps her head up and her eyes bright, and tries not to miss a word of what is said. At first it was thought that she could not endure the horrible topic, but enough time has passed to show that it depends upon who discusses it.” “Of course,” he quickly added, stepping back from the implications of his observation, “this is very natural, and quite feminine, and amounts to nothing one way or the other.”
TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 1893
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On Tuesday, a light rain in the early morning “seemed only to intensify the discomfort and the irritation of all enveloped by the steaming atmosphere.” But this repeat of the prior week’s heat wave did nothing to dampen the prospective spectators’ enthusiasm for the trial. “Surely,” wrote Elizabeth Jordan, “the green grass and the flowers and the waving trees are a prettier sight than the mortuary relics and the awful human misery within, but the women of New Bedford do not seem to think so.” The courthouse, according to Joe Howard, “was the scene of universal attraction, the mecca toward which all footsteps tended.” Over an hour before the courtroom opened, “the same old crowd was on hand . . . It took four stalwart policemen to hold the three-foot gate, and they were being worsted in the fight when the deputy at the door came to their rescue with a signal to ‘let them come,’ given ten minutes early.” The unexpected arrival of a truant officer “created a panic among the messenger boys. Some of them have been playing ‘hookey’ to get into the trial and as a purely outside issue earn a few spare quarters.” By contrast, the interior of the courthouse was serene: Lizzie Borden arrived at “her usual time, five minutes before 9 o’clock.” Though “clad a la mode,” she appeared pale, perhaps “anticipating the horrors of the day.” For her, the horrors began with the spectators: “the wild-eyed, haggard-featured, thick-skinned women” in the audience “stared at her through their spectacles and opera glasses as though she were a beast.” Julian Ralph lamented that the women “create a hostile atmosphere in the courtroom” and “in that cruel environment the prisoner sits every day . . . the loneliest girl of wealth and social position in all America.”
Upon arriving, the attorneys immediately went to the judges’ room for a private meeting. But whatever the legal teams discussed took no more than five minutes and the proceedings resumed. It was to be a day, in Julian Ralph’s words, of “blood, skulls, and bowels.”
Dr. Dolan returned to the stand, the first medical expert in a series of witnesses. All were called to establish the estimated times of death, the interval between the murders, and the likely weapon used. The longer the interval between the two murders, the harder it would have been for an outside assailant to lurk in the house undetected. The prosecution also hoped to show that one or more of the hatchets in the house could have been the murder weapon. The identification of the murder weapon cut, as it were, both ways. If the prosecution could not point out the murder weapon, then it needed a theory of its disposal to shore up its case against Lizzie Borden. But the absence of a murder weapon also seemed inconsistent with an outside murderer. It was one thing to imagine a murderer escaping into the midday traffic; it was quite another to imagine his carrying away a bloody hatchet.
Adams resumed Dr. Dolan’s cross-examination. He sought to unsettle the timeline, to narrow the interval between the murders and to push Andrew’s time of death as late as possible. The defense wanted to give its hypothetical intruder more time to enter and to exit unobserved. To do so, Adams questioned how Dolan arrived at the time of death. The answer was threefold: blood coagulation, body temperature, and state of digestion. But, under pressure, Dolan admitted that blood coagulation was not a reliable indicator of the time of death after fifteen minutes. What about body temperature? Dolan explained that Andrew was still warm, yet Abby felt cool to the touch. Adams affected skepticism: Dolan used no thermometer. How could he be certain? Well, there was always the digestion. Assuming both Abby and Andrew ate their breakfast together, as Bridget Sullivan and John Morse had testified, then the progress of the solids through their respective intestinal tract would provide the answer. Unlike Abby’s, Andrew’s intestine contained solid feces, suggesting that he died more than an hour later. Unfazed, Adams observed, “Well, the stomach is a rebellious member of the body . . . and often doesn’t perform its duty well?” He asked if food sometimes passed through the intestines undigested. Dolan said that would not happen in a normal stomach and neither Abby’s nor Andrew’s stomach showed any evidence of inflammation that would account for such dysfunction. But, Adams wondered, could Dolan be certain that was not the case here, especially in light of the food poisoning incident? Dolan grudgingly admitted it was possible and, therefore, that the intestinal contents were not sufficient to provide a definitive time of death. By the end of Adams’s cross-examination, it was easy to forget that, taken together, the scientific evidence of time of death was clear.