The Trial of Lizzie Borden(71)
Emma also gave Jennings a comprehensive inventory of the sisters’ dresses. Of the eighteen or nineteen they owned, ten were blue. Two of those belonged to Emma; the remaining eight belonged to Lizzie. (One of the dresses in the shared closet was Abby’s.) Emma described the Bedford cord dress in detail: “blue cotton Bedford Cord, very light blue ground with a darker figure about an inch long and . . . three quarters of an inch wide.” At its creation, it had been a cheap dress, made from eight or nine yards of 12.5-or 15-cent-a-yard fabric, and, at the time of its destruction, “it was very dirty, very much soiled, and badly faded.” And it was stained with paint along the front and on one side toward the bottom. Jennings elicited a description of the dressmaking intended to evoke cozy domesticity in which all the Borden women participated.
Emma testified that she told Lizzie to destroy her paint-stained dress. She explained the innocuous impetus: on Saturday, when Emma could not find a hook for her own dress, she said, “You have not destroyed that old dress yet; why don’t you?” When Lizzie announced the next day, the Sunday after the murders, that she planned to burn her dress, Emma told her it was a good idea. She could not remember her exact expression: perhaps she had said “?‘why don’t you,’ or ‘you had better,’ or ‘I would if I were you,’ or something like that . . . but it meant—Do it!” And she affirmed that the windows were wide open and police were in the yard.
Jennings sought to get the Bordens’ “habit” of burning dresses admitted into evidence in order to shore up Emma’s account. He tried a number of questions—“Did you or your sister keep a ragbag?”; “What was done with the pieces of cloth . . . that you wanted to dispose of?”; “Do you know of your sister’s habit of burning old dresses . . . previous to this time?” but Knowlton objected to each one and the evidence was excluded. In his review of this case, Wigmore questioned this ruling and thought it might have been a reversible error. Not noted, however, was the oddity of thrifty Yankees not keeping a “ragbag” so that they could reuse old fabric.
Emma also put a less ominous gloss on Alice Russell’s account. According to Emma, Alice said nothing while Lizzie burned the dress. The next day, however, Alice announced that Hanscom had asked her if all of Lizzie Borden’s dresses were in the house. As she herself had testified, Alice Russell lamented she had told a “falsehood” by agreeing that all the dresses were present and accounted for. According to Emma, “it was decided” that Alice should go to Mr. Hanscom and tell him what had happened. A few minutes later, Alice returned to the kitchen and, like a member of a Greek chorus, intoned her grim conclusion that burning the dress was “the worst thing Lizzie could have done.”
Knowlton did his best to resurrect the prosecution’s theory of consciousness of guilt—shown by the dress burning and the purported conversation in the matron’s room. According to the Fall River Daily Herald, Knowlton “advanced toward her with something like the impetus of a locomotive and he shook her bits of testimony as a terrier would shake a rat.” Elizabeth Jordan viewed the beginning of Knowlton’s cross-examination with alarm. Turning the scene into a set piece for a sentimental novel, she reminded readers of Knowlton’s “rasping, unrelenting, irritating and not infrequently bullying methods of cross examination” of Lizzie at the inquest and feared for Emma, “now turned over to his tender mercies.” According to Jordan, Lizzie “visibly shrank back in her chair, and at the first sound of his voice gave him a startled glance.”
Jordan made much of the contrast in the two figures: “She looked very frail and weak compared to the stocky, bulldog build of the lawyer.” Contrary to Jordan’s imagined fears, Emma held up well under Knowlton’s cross-examination, keeping her eyes focused on him and answering his questions clearly and precisely. Julian Ralph reveled in the contest between the “[c]olossus pitted against the slender sister of the prisoner,” noting how “she turned a cold, steely eye, a set mouth, and proudly held head” toward Knowlton.
Knowlton brought into focus the tension in the Borden household, forcing Emma to admit that Andrew Borden’s gift to Abby’s sister caused “trouble” that was not remedied by his gift of the grandfather’s house on Ferry Street to his daughters. Knowlton inquired: “Was there some complaint that it was not an equivalent?”
Emma admitted that their grandfather’s house was, if anything, more valuable. Yet it did not repair the breach.
Knowlton pressed on: “Were the relations between you and Lizzie and your stepmother as cordial after that occurrence?”
Emma answered carefully: “Between my sister and Mrs. Borden they were.” Knowlton read several extracts from her prior testimony that seemed to acknowledge Lizzie’s ill will. She admitted that Lizzie began to call Abby “Mrs. Borden” rather than “Mother” at about the time her father intervened to purchase Abby’s stepmother’s share in the house on Fourth Street. As Ralph observed, “He could not shake her testimony on any main point, so he took to prodding her on the shadings and edgings and lacework of the meanings of words and the smallest details.” In frustration after one such exchange, Emma said, “I don’t say I didn’t say it, if you say I did. I don’t remember saying it.”
In the afternoon, Knowlton redoubled his attack. The missing note, the dress burning, and the quarrel in the station all pointed to Lizzie’s consciousness of guilt. What happened to the note from a sick friend that Lizzie offered as an explanation for Abby’s apparent absence on August 4? Had she searched for it? Emma said, “I think I only looked in a little bag that she carried downstreet with her sometimes, and in her work basket.” She admitted that they had advertised unsuccessfully for the writer (or messenger) in the Fall River Daily Evening News, a newspaper with “a large circulation.” Knowlton questioned Emma about the dress burning. Didn’t Alice say, “I wouldn’t let anybody see me do that, Lizzie”?