The Trial of Lizzie Borden(61)

Jennings, however, did not take the matron’s story lightly. In his “clean cut, emphatic, and understandable” manner, Jennings attacked her story from every angle. First, he wanted her to admit she had denied the story to Reverend Buck and that she had declared herself willing to sign an affidavit refuting the story. Secondly, he wanted her to agree that Marshal Hilliard had ordered her not to sign the affidavit. Because he himself was present in the marshal’s office and instrumental in seeking her signature, Jennings was effectively testifying through his questions. Matron Reagan, however, would not cooperate. She even declared that she could not recall Jennings’s presence in the marshal’s office that day. Jennings challenged her recollection of the time and day of the alleged conversation, mentioning Lizzie Borden’s other regular visitors, Mrs. Charles J. Holmes; her daughter, Miss Annie Holmes; and the ever-attentive Reverend Buck, who visited every day she was held there. And his prompting disclosed an intriguing incident: Mrs. Reagan said that she had bet Lizzie a dollar that she could not break a raw egg by squeezing it in her hand. Lizzie was Andrew Borden’s daughter and the apple had not fallen far from the tree: she was up to the challenge but would wager no more than a quarter. After failing the test, she announced, “That is the first thing that I undertook to do that I never could.” According to Joe Howard, Jennings “succeeded in working the witness up to a point of defiance,” noting Reagan claimed not to recall Lizzie’s other visitors but remembered the overheard conversation between Lizzie and Emma verbatim. Even if the cross-examination had not shaken the matron’s story, it had all been too much for her. She “staggered” rather than walked out of the room, past the Bordens’ bloodstained sofa in the corridor, and collapsed in the next room.

The next witness, Eli Bence, was one the defense was keen to keep from testifying. When Bence took the stand, Lizzie “fairly glared at him, leaned forward and stared him squarely in the eye.” Bence had barely begun to detail his service at D. R. Smith’s drugstore when Robinson interrupted him to argue that he had a matter “of vital importance . . . to be discussed with the Court alone.” Moody happily offered to explain what the prosecution expected to prove. Robinson hastily interjected: “I think you better not state it now.” Before Moody could respond, he repeated, “It is nothing that ought to be stated now.” Robinson did not want even a whisper of the prosecution’s explanation to reach the men of the jury. The judges sent the jury out of the room.

Moody explained that the prosecution sought to offer Bence’s testimony that Lizzie Borden had attempted to buy prussic acid on August 3, the day before the murders. Prussic acid, a 2 percent dilution of hydrocyanic acid, was “one of the most deadly poisons that is known to human kind.” It was so toxic that, as early as 1837, a physician described it as “commonly used for suicide and is fit for little else.” In the latter half of the nineteenth century, physicians prescribed a diluted solution as a sedative or antispasmodic, but it was not the preferred choice. At the normal prescription dilution, less than a teaspoon was a fatal dose.

Bence would also testify that no one had ever asked him for prussic acid before that day—even though, in his account of the conversation, Lizzie insisted that she had bought poison on many occasions—and that she wanted the drug to clean her sealskin cape. Robinson interrupted the presentation to confirm that there was no evidence of any sale at D. R. Smith’s or anywhere else. In other words, he wanted to make sure that the prosecution was only proposing to offer evidence of her alleged attempt to buy poison.

Knowlton fielded the question, responding: “It would be fair to say we have evidence to show some attempt to purchase prussic acid in another place, with the same negative results.”

Robinson immediately disputed the relevance of such evidence: Lizzie Borden was on trial for “killing these two people with a sharp instrument . . . Nothing else.” Even if she did try to buy the substance, where was the connection to the murders? He elaborated: “It is an attempt to buy an article which is used for other purposes . . . [I]t is an article which a person may legitimately buy.” He asked rhetorically: “Does it have any tendency at all to show that this defendant killed these two persons with an axe?” Answering his own question, he continued: to the contrary, “It is an attempt to charge her with an act causing death by a wholly different means.”

Not at all, claimed Moody. It was not being introduced as evidence of attempted poisoning. Instead it was evidence of intent. Though he readily agreed that the “failure to purchase prussic acid on the 3rd day of August has no tendency whatever to show a killing by an axe on the 4th day of August,” he explained that the prosecution needed to demonstrate the defendant’s state of mind: “This indictment not only charges that the prisoner killed Mr. and Mrs. Borden, but that she did it with a certain intent and with premeditation.” He declared: “[t]here is no purpose of offering this testimony . . . than as bearing upon the state of mind of the defendant prior to the homicide; the intent, the deliberation and the preparation.”

Moody reminded the court of the Borden family’s gastrointestinal distress the night of Tuesday, August 2. Moody did not claim that Borden poisoned her family; however, he explained that the food poisoning “was an illness suggestive of opportunity to a person desiring to procure the deaths of one or other of those people.” In his view, Lizzie seized the moment. On Wednesday morning, she tried to buy poison. That night, Lizzie visited Alice Russell, planting clues about her father’s nameless enemies who might harm the family. Thursday morning the hatchet fell. Moody argued that the events leading up to the murders showed her state of mind, specifically her “deliberation and premeditation.” The standard for admitting relevant evidence was broad and only required the evidence to be pertinent to that question of intent. Moody asked: Did the attempt to buy prussic acid on Wednesday, August 3, indicate that “this prisoner was in what may be called a murderous state of mind?” Yes, he concluded, because prussic acid “is an article which is not sold except upon the prescription of a physician . . . [I]t is not used for the purpose of cleaning capes, sealskin capes, or capes of any other sort, and has no adaptability to such use.”