The Trial of Lizzie Borden(54)

But Adams was not finished. Knowlton had already explored the wounds in detail; the defense wanted its own turn. As Julian Ralph observed, “Horror has been piled upon misery . . . For two days the medical examiner has been going over and over the bloody details of the two murders.” It was too much for some listeners. Juror Hodges, the oldest man on the jury, felt woozy and seemed on the verge of fainting, forcing a brief recess until “vigorous fanning, strong salts, and a change of position” restored him and permitted the trial to resume.

The number and size of the wounds gave the defense a useful argument about the murder weapon. Did the prosecution really have a plausible candidate? What sort of a weapon could have produced wounds of varying size and depth? The claw-hammer hatchet, initially thought to be the murder weapon, was about four and a half inches long. The handleless or “hoodoo” hatchet was only three and a half inches long. Yet, one of Abby’s deepest wounds was only about two inches wide and others were much longer. At the preliminary hearing, Dr. Dolan had favored the claw hammer as the murder weapon; the day before, he preferred the “hoodoo” hatchet. He agreed with Knowlton that “nothing in the length of wounds . . . is inconsistent with their having been inflicted by a weapon, for example, of three and one half inches in length.” Adams suggested an even more basic explanation, asking: “Is there anything unreasonable in a cutting edge four and a half inches in length making a wound on the head or face four and a half inches in length?” The handleless hatchet presented another problem: Was it really sharp enough to have bisected Andrew’s eye? Adams asked Dolan if the hatchet had “a good edge, a sharp cutting edge?” Dolan’s affirmative prompted a sarcastic follow-up question: “Did you observe that the edge is turned?” When Dolan claimed not to see it, Adams was incredulous and redoubled his attack: “[N]otwithstanding the anatomy of the eye . . . you think a blow which cuts through these three outer coverings and the humor inside—this injury could have been done by a hatchet?”

Flustered by the hatchet question, Dr. Dolan also admitted that blood spatter would have reached the assailant. But he did so reluctantly. Howard observed that Dolan, “an excellent arguer, seemed to have an idea that he must bother the defense as much as possible.” Denying he had ever believed that the murderer stood in the dining room, reaching around the doorjamb to kill Andrew, Dolan explained that the assailant likely stood at the head of the sofa and, in Adams’s formulation, “rained blow after blow, left and right.” He agreed that the murderer would have been spattered with blood on the upper part of the body and also the hands. Dolan believed that, after stunning Abby with an initial blow, the murderer stood astride Abby’s body. That position would, of necessity, result in some blood spatter as well.

Professor Edward S. Wood, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Adams repeatedly attempted to lure Dolan into an opinion that the blows were delivered with great force. The blows that entered Abby’s skull had to pass through a mass of hair as well as a thick part of the skull itself. Dolan would not commit to a description of Abby’s hair. Howard wrote: “Although this gentleman has cut off Mrs. Borden’s head, he could tell nothing about her hair, but he knew all about the wounds, which he had examined and counted, and which he described with such graphic zeal as to send the red blood to the prisoner’s face and the hot tears to her eyes, both of which she hid as well as she could with her handkerchief and eyes.” Dolan, however, stood firm on the most critical point that the blows required no more than ordinary strength. Indeed, all the medical professionals agreed that a woman could have inflicted the wounds, but the very brutality of the murders favored the defense and was worth emphasizing. Moreover, Howard argued, “thus far the learned brothers have not taken a step to establish the guilt of the accused, nor have they put in one scintilla of testimony which connects her with the case or which does not trend just as certainly in the direction of Bridget Sullivan as in that of Lizzie Borden.”

The next witness, Dr. Edward S. Wood, was a professor of chemistry at Harvard Medical School. Wood was the first of a distinguished roster of prosecution medical experts. A “red-faced, gray-haired, stalwart, and handsome man,” he looked less like a scientist than “an army officer burned brown by a long life on the plains.” He may have been built like “a heavy-weight pugilist,” but he was the most distinguished expert at the trial. He alone had years of experience, including investigations of several hundred medicolegal poison and bloodstain cases. As Howard explained, “Knowlton, in his most gracious way, gently led the professor along a commendatory autobiography, eliciting the fact that he is an expert in medical chemistry and is in every sense on the topmost twig of his branch of a dignified and honorable profession.”

Wood testified that he received an express box containing the Borden’s stomachs. Later, he received a trunk containing a hatchet, dresses, and carpet and hair samples. Wood began “with a recital of the most repellent, bloody, and altogether unpleasant things that not even a Borden trial could be expected to bring out.” Yet, as with the earlier grisly medical testimony, Lizzie seemed transfixed. According to Ralph, “Lizzie Borden’s interest in his testimony, bloody and hideous as it was, had no shadow of concealment. It amazed this semi-rustic girl to meet with a man who could extract eloquence from mute, insensate things.”