The Trial of Lizzie Borden(57)
Adams’s cross-examination also covered familiar ground. First, he drew Draper’s attention to the wound which “went down through the eyebrow, through the eye, and into the cheek bone.” Draper had explained that the bone over the eye “is strong . . . well thickened and buttressed.” (Draper clarified: “The thickest point is at the back; the next thickest point is over the top.”) In light of that anatomy, asked Adams, “Was it a blow that required considerable force?” Draper agreed, after some wrangling, that it was “the heaviest blow.”
Second, Adams drew Draper’s attention to the bloodstains at the scene. Draper explained that one of the blows severed Andrew’s carotid artery. Surely that plus the injuries to Andrew’s temple would also result in a large blood flow? Draper explained that the severed artery would not “cause a spurt”; instead “it would sputter or bubble out through the wound, but would not go beyond the immediate surface of the wound.” Adams inquired: Wouldn’t “the instrument, whatever it was . . . be naturally covered” with blood such that the “swinging of the weapon and . . . the impact of the weapon” would account for the blood spots on the wall above Andrew and around the sitting room generally? Draper cautiously agreed. As for whether the assailant would have been “spattered,” Draper answered, “The part that was exposed, that was not covered either by furniture or by other protecting substances.” Draper cautioned that there is no rule of blood spatter. It was impossible for him to rule out or rule in any particular direction of blood spatter. When asked about Abby’s murder, Draper made a similar point. Assuming the assailant stood astride the victim, “I should think the front of the dress; possibly the face, possibly the hair.” Alive to any assumption that the murderer was female, Adams quickly followed up: “When you say the dress, you speak of the clothing worn by both sexes?”
Third, Adams turned to the weapon that Draper had neatly fit into Andrew’s skull. It fit too well for the defense’s comfort. He asked: “The handleless hatchet is not an uncommon instrument, is it?” Draper agreed. Adams continued: “It has a very general circulation?” Draper cautiously hedged: “I think so.” Adams then produced a hatchet with the same size cutting edge and asked him to fit it in the skull. He seemed to want Draper to note that the typical handle for such a hatchet was about a foot long. Unfortunately for Adams, his new hatchet did not fit as neatly as the one found at the Borden house. Adams’s point had been to force Draper to note the length of the foot-long handle standard on such a hatchet, leading him to a discussion of the proximity of the assailant to the victims. Knowlton, however, seized on this apparent miscalculation to show that “not all hatchets with a cutting edge of three and a half inches would fit the wound.” He then asked whether the handleless hatchet could have inflicted those wounds.
Adams said, “Wait a moment.”
Knowlton explained, “I don’t think I asked that question before . . . I had it on my memorandum, but in the numerous details, it escaped me. I did ask whether a hatchet of three and a half inches would. Now I ask whether that hatchet could have done it.”
Adams protested that Knowlton had asked “that precise question . . . in the direct examination.”
Knowlton turned to him and asked: “What did you understand the answer to be, Mr. Adams?”
The seasoned trial lawyer Adams replied, “I do not propose to tell what the answer was.” Draper agreed that the handleless hatchet could indeed have caused all of the wounds.
Adams asked Draper to make a chalk mark showing “the length, location, and direction” of Abby’s wound on his own back. Draper described it “as a clean cut wound in the neck, where the neck joins the shoulders, just to the left of the middle line.” He explained that the wound could have come from a blow originating “from below upward, from the right toward the left . . . [or] from the left toward the right, downward.” He believed the latter description was most likely, but the marks in the skull were all beveled right to left. Draper explained that this meant that the blows came from right to left: “It is a clear indication of the plane at which the edge of the weapon came down upon the plane of the skull.” He added: “I found none that would be an exception to the rule.”
Finally, Adams did everything possible to make the hatchet hard to clean. No bloody implement had been found in the Borden house: if Lizzie was the killer, then the weapon must still be in the house. How quickly would the blood dry on a hot day “in August, in our climate”? Wouldn’t the blood “readily and quickly intermingle with the meshes of clothing and coarse substances like dirt or rust?” Draper thought it would be possible to remove the blood but agreed “that it would not be easily done.”
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To break the monotony of “a miserable, poky, mind-wearing, physique-exhausting session,” the columnists shared their accounts of a curious incident in the courtroom. A young freelance illustrator named de Lipman had permission to attend the trial but could not find a place to sit. He relied upon his colleagues to let him rotate through their assigned seats. But the sheriff had decided that his frequent movements constituted a disturbance and had him ejected “with unnecessary violence.” Elizabeth Jordan wrote: “Without a word the Sheriff set upon him a heavy-weight deputy, who seized him by the collar as he was bending over his work, dragged him brutally, and breaking the desk before him and splashing ink all over his clothes, shoving and pushing him as though he were a drunken disturber.” Outraged, Howard wrote: “Officials ought to understand that newspaper workers don’t attend trials for fun . . . They are present for the transaction of mind-straining, muscle-wearing business in the interests of thousands of individuals who are following intelligently the . . . celebrated case.”