The Trial of Lizzie Borden(58)

? ? ?

The last medical expert was Dr. David W. Cheever, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and former president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. In recommending him to Knowlton, Draper wrote: “To wide knowledge and experience, he adds a peculiarly cool and impressive manner, and is reckoned here a model witness.” Cheever had practiced for thirty-five years and had been teaching at Harvard since the year of Lizzie Borden’s birth. “Mild, deliberate, and gracious,” Cheever was “very tall, very thin, very methodical and very slow” in his manner. He agreed with his colleagues on the prosecution’s most salient points: the order of death, the interval between the two murders, the nature of the wounds, and the likely murder weapon.

Based on his examination of the skulls, Cheever described the murder weapon as “a heavy, metallic weapon with a cutting edge beveled, with a sharp angle, and with the cutting edge not exceeding three and a half inches in length.” He agreed that the handleless hatchet could be the culprit, fitting it into the depressions in the skull. Unlike the others, he emphasized that the cutting edge could have been shorter than three and a half inches, but no longer. He had found a notch in one of Andrew’s injuries that showed the maximum length of the edge.

But he, like the others, also testified that the assailant would likely have been spattered with blood. Dr. Cheever testified that both arteries in Andrew’s head were cut. The temporal artery might spurt a distance of two or three feet, assuming it was exposed. As for the carotid artery wound, whether or not “there would be a good deal of effusion of blood” depended upon whether it was one of the first blows or one of the last. Dr. Cheever said that, for surgeries on the head, he wore protective outer clothing, a “linen jacket or a white linen gown” and “sometimes an India rubber apron.” Adams slyly asked why he needed protection.

“Blood,” replied Dr. Cheever.

In this as in his prior questions about blood splatter, Adams took care to make the assailant male, asking, for instance, about blood in a beard. Knowlton, however, turned the surgeon’s outerwear to the prosecution’s advantage.

He asked Cheever: “The garment you speak of, when you put it on in your surgical operations, protects your clothing entirely?”

Cheever not only agreed but also added, to Adams’ chagrin, that the garment is “changed between every operation, with rapidity.”

Moreover, Cheever testified, like his predecessors, that the wounds could have been inflicted by “a woman of ordinary strength”—“[w]ith a handle of sufficiently long leverage,” he added, “I should think not less than twelve or fourteen inches.” This length matched the likely handle length of the “handleless” hatchet. Cheever provided a “dramatic illustration” of one of the blows by holding the hatchet “aloft” over his full height, “inclined to the left . . . then [it] flashed through the air, straight as it seemed for the skull of Mr. Adams.”

But just before “it seemed as if the crash of bone must be heard,” Elizabeth Jordan wrote, “the hatchet stopped and remained steady.” The result: a collective gasp, followed by nearly a minute of silence. Adams scored another point when Cheever explained that most of the blows fell from right to left, but that a few might have been left to right. “That is,” Adams clarified, “right to left, wood chopping fashion?” Wood chopping, after all, was seen as “male.”

The notion that a crime could be clearly gendered was rooted in European models of criminology, but such models of criminality struggled to account for a female criminal. Within the prevailing models of the human mind, women were seen as somewhat less evolved than men and with a corresponding lack of rational control over their actions—barely protected from their underlying degeneracy by male control, especially over their sexuality. Even Lombroso revised his model of the “born criminal” to fit the female counterpart. Though fewer in number than the male “born criminal,” the female “born criminal” surpasses him in cruelty and in the exaggerated atavism of her features and sentiment. Because the less civilized woman is really merely impure and not criminal, Lombroso argued that women destined to criminal activity are morally more depraved than their male counterparts. While prostitution is an understandable, even natural atavistic impulse, nonsexual crime represents true depravity for women. “As a double exception,” Lombroso wrote, “the criminal woman is a monster.” Lombroso, however, noted one exception to his “double exception”: “the peculiarity of the female criminal lunatic . . . is that her madness becomes more acute at particular periods.” One of those periods was menstruation.

Lizzie Borden’s arrest unsettled an ethnically and class-determined model of criminality and, as Jennings had argued at the preliminary hearing, outraged “the natural course of things.” As a white, upper-middle-class “lady,” Borden fell safely outside the evolutionary framework of degeneration that underlay nineteenth-century criminological discussions. Could the secretary-treasurer of the local Christian Endeavor Society and member of the Ladies’ Fruit and Flower Mission be a born criminal? Her combination of good works and an acceptable percentage of noncriminal features—with the exception of her oversized jaw—seemed to acquit her of that damning charge. Lombroso’s model of criminality determined by class, ethnicity, and gender could not reconcile the idea of Lizzie Borden repeatedly wielding a hatchet with the image of the gloved Miss Lizzie who nearly fainted in court. As Howard had pointed out, the medical consensus that a woman of ordinary strength could have directed the blows “trend[ed] just as certainly in the direction of Bridget Sullivan as Lizzie Borden.” And Bridget Sullivan was not a lady.