The Trial of Lizzie Borden(72)

Emma replied, “I don’t say it was not said. I say that I didn’t hear it.” He then questioned Emma’s description of Alice Russell as a “calling friend” rather than an “intimate friend.” The fact that Alice had been such a reluctant witness gave greater weight to her testimony. The closer the friendship, the less likely any untoward suspicion. Hadn’t she stayed for four nights at the Borden house after the murders? Knowlton had pointed out that the dress had been stained while the dressmaker was still at the house and “notwithstanding the paint she wore it mornings.” What, he implied, was the urgency in destroying it months later? Regarding the matron’s story of a quarrel, he tried to pin her down on the physical details. Did she, for example, sit in the chair as Mrs. Reagan had said? These and other details would shore up the matron’s story. And, finally, he introduced the subject of “waterproofs,” raincoats that might have protected the assassin from blood splatter. Jennings, however, punctured the potential shock: Lizzie’s waterproof was still in the closet.

Howard remarked of Emma’s performance: “She stood with perfect self-possession on the stand, answered with deliberation and decision every question and met the skillful cross-examination of Mr. Knowlton without defiance, but with an evident determination to have the meaning of her well-weighed words thoroughly understood.” Elizabeth Jordan concluded: “Mr. Knowlton’s cross-examination was so fruitless that even people who sympathize[d] with the prosecution turned to each other and smiled.” Emma, however, was apparently less confident that “she had done her sister’s cause . . . any good.” She asked Jennings plaintively “why he had called her, when he had more than enough evidence without her.”

Jennings still needed confirmation that the dress Lizzie burned had indeed been stained with paint. John Grouard, the housepainter, testified on Thursday that he had painted the Borden house in May 1892. Lizzie had supervised his paint mixing in the barn and then approved his test patch on the house. That explained the source of the paint. The dressmaker Mary Raymond swore that Lizzie’s Bedford cord dress did have paint on the hem. She had made it during her three weeks’ tenure that May. It was, she said, “light blue with a dark figure, and made of cheap cotton.” The dress “had a blouse waist, and a full skirt, straight widths,” with “ruffle around the bottom.” Jennings managed to sneak in the notion of routine dress burning, asking the dressmaker what Lizzie had done with the old wrapper that the Bedford cord had replaced. Mary Raymond answered: “She cut some pieces out of it and said she would burn the rest.” Knowlton objected: the part about burning was not based on her own knowledge. But, of course, the jury had heard the exchange.

With the main event of the day over, the remaining witnesses seemed anticlimactic. So nervous was Dr. Bowen’s wife, Phoebe, when she took the stand that her hand shook while she tried to drink a glass of water. She testified that she had gone to the house after the murders. She saw Lizzie “reclining in a chair, with her head resting against Miss Russell.” She said: “I thought she had fainted, she was so white, until I saw her lip or chin quiver, and then I knew she hadn’t fainted.” Significantly, she testified that she saw no blood on Lizzie Borden: she especially noticed how “very white” her hands were “as they laid against her dark dress, in her lap.” For Knowlton, “clean and white” hands cast doubt on Lizzie’s claim to have been in the barn looking for sinkers. For the defense, all that really mattered was the absence of blood. Like her husband, Phoebe Bowen “noticed nothing unusual about the dress” and insisted she could not describe the dress in much detail. All she could say was that the dress “had a blouse waist, with a white design on it.”

The defense also recalled two witnesses, Lizzie’s friend Mary Brigham and Annie White, the stenographer who took notes at the inquest. Jennings asked Mary Brigham about the day of the alleged quarrel in the matron’s room, which he pinpointed as “the afternoon of the day when some experiments were made with an egg.” She testified that the reporter Edwin Porter had been talking with Matron Reagan. Mrs. Reagan had told her: “That reporter has come after me again, and I told him that I had nothing to tell him.” She also said Mrs. Reagan said she would have signed the affidavit prepared by Lizzie’s friends had the marshal not told her not to do so. Mary also detailed her own amateur sleuthing. After the murders, she experimented with the spring lock on the front door, discovering, as Jerome Borden had testified, that “the spring lock was not sure.” Mr. Morse joined in, lying prone on the guest room floor, so that the others could determine if he was visible from the hall. She said that she could not see him from the hall, only when she “advanced a few feet into the room.”

Robinson then recalled the stenographer Annie White to confirm something Bridget Sullivan said and something Assistant Marshal Fleet did not. At the inquest, Bridget Sullivan had indeed said that Lizzie “seemed to be more excited than I ever saw her” and that “she was crying” when she first told her that Andrew had been killed. Assistant Marshal Fleet, however, had never testified that Lizzie had told him, as he had claimed during the trial, that “her father was feeble and [she] went to him and advised and assisted him to lie down upon the sofa.”

The prosecution had its own slate of rebuttal witnesses. Moody recalled Marshal Hilliard to give his own account of the Reagan imbroglio. After he had heard of the quarrel the morning of Thursday, August 25 (the first day of the hearing), he went to see her at her house that night. The following afternoon, Mr. Buck entered his office, trailed by Mrs. Reagan, and showed Hilliard the affidavit she had apparently agreed to sign. Hilliard testified that he told Mrs. Reagan, “If you sign that paper, you do it in direct violation of my orders. If you have got anything to say about this you will say it on the witness stand in Court.” Moody then recalled Officer Mullaly to recount his conversation with Hymon Lubinsky, the ice cream peddler. According to Mullaly, he interviewed Lubinsky on August 8. Lubinsky told him he had seen a woman walking from the barn toward the house at 10:30 a.m. on August 4. Mullaly produced his notebook as corroboration. Robinson questioned whether he had properly investigated the timing or simply learned that Lubinsky’s route usually started around that time.