The Trial of Lizzie Borden(60)

Then came two women, as prosecution witnesses, with dark stories about the atmosphere in the Borden house. The Bordens’ seamstress, Mrs. Hannah Gifford, was asked to recall an uncomfortable conversation with Lizzie Borden about her stepmother nearly six months before the murders. Robinson objected to her testimony. He described March 1892 as “too remote.” But, in a blow for the defense, the judges decided she could answer. Gifford testified that after she casually referred to Abby as Lizzie’s mother, Lizzie said, “Don’t say that to me, for she is a mean, good-for-nothing thing.”

Mrs. Gifford replied, “Oh Lizzie, you don’t mean that?”

Lizzie said, “Yes, I don’t have much to do with her; I stay in my room most of the time.” As if for emphasis, she added, “[W]e don’t eat with them if we can help it.” Julian Ralph dismissed it as gossip unworthy of a criminal proceeding rather than “the firecracker that the District Attorney had promised.”

Veiled Anna Borden posed more trouble for the defense. Anna Borden was, according to Ralph, “the most dainty and charming woman that has thus far appeared in this anything but dainty case.” She and Lizzie Borden shared a cabin on the ship returning from the European trip in 1890. The women had a common great-great-grandfather; however, Anna made a point of denying Lizzie Borden was her cousin. In Fall River, one did not have to claim anyone beyond a second cousin.

Before she could recount a conversation with Lizzie, Robinson again sought to have her story excluded. This time, the judges agreed to let the lawyers make their arguments out of the jury’s hearing. In his offer of proof, Moody explained that Lizzie Borden told her repeatedly that she did not want to return to her “unhappy home.” “This conversation,” Moody said, was not “a mere passing word of resentment” but rather “repeated several times.” Robinson distinguished that comment from the one made to the dressmaker in March 1892 on the grounds that the shipboard conversation was too remote in time and was not “an express declaration in regard to one individual.” Moody retorted that Hannah Gifford’s testimony demonstrated “the continuity of feeling” to spring 1892. The judges, however, sided with Robinson. They determined Lizzie’s comments were “too ambiguous, so that aside from its remoteness the evidence is not competent.”

Elizabeth Jordan doubted that the story would have damaged Lizzie’s defense; yet, as with Alice Russell’s testimony about the dress-burning, she considered Anna Borden’s revelation a serious betrayal. She painted the scene in mawkish colors: “After this first glimpse of real sunshine Lizzie had had in her narrow, cheerless life, she had lamented the fact that she was coming back to the dreary gloom of her Puritan home. She had confided this much to her cousin on some cosy evening at sea and in the unbosoming intimacy which the close contact of shipboard life breeds, and now, two years later, those words spoken in confidence away off somewhere in the solitude of the North Atlantic, were coming home to her to weigh in the balance against her.” Forty years later, Jordan imperfectly recalled the details of testimony but she well remembered her own reaction: “I could have strangled the creature as she sat in the witness chair, feeling important and smugly manufacturing her little strand of the rope that might hang her fellow-voyager.”

Moody called a series of minor witnesses who had the distinction of reporting what they did not see on the morning of the murders: no suspicious strangers in the vicinity, no bloodstained maniacs fleeing the scene. They provided the testimonial equivalent of the curious incident of the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime. Robinson suggested alternative routes of escape in his questions to these witnesses, something they were in no position to dispute. For example, Lucy Collet testified that she had been on the veranda overlooking the Chagnon yard from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on August 4 but had not seen anyone escape over the fence. In response to Robinson’s question, however, she admitted she had not seen one of the police officers climb the fence within that window of time. Similarly, the Chagnons’ neighbor Aruba Kirby, “a very old lady who wore colored spectacles and who gave various evidences of defective sight,” did not see anyone pass by the Chagnon yard at the time of the murders. Robinson’s questions demonstrated that, in order to perform her work in the kitchen, she would mostly have been facing away from the window from which one might have spotted a departing murderer.

But Moody would have his revenge: he called Hannah Reagan, the matron of the Fall River police station, who had a tale to unfold. She had overheard a conversation between Lizzie and Emma Borden on August 24. Lizzie had been in her charge for nine or so days and Emma was a frequent visitor. But this time was different. While in an adjoining toilet room, she heard “very loud talk.” She looked through the door and saw Lizzie lying on the couch with Emma bending over her.

Lizzie said, “Emma, you have gave me away, haven’t you?” Emma denied it. Lizzie said, “You have . . . and I will let you see I won’t give in one inch.”

According to the matron, “[S]he sat right up and put up her finger” to demonstrate an inch. She then turned onto her left side, faced out the window, and did not speak again until Jennings arrived around 11:00 a.m. The prosecution never explained what Lizzie might have meant by her comment, but it was dynamite nonetheless. If true, Reagan’s story undermined the sisters’ public show of complete solidarity and revealed an almost preternaturally determined side of Lizzie Borden. Oddly enough, the New York Times reported that “Lizzie Borden was unusually cheerful today, and at the conclusion of Mrs. Reagan’s testimony laughed and seemed more amused than disturbed by it.”