The Trial of Lizzie Borden(73)
Moody then recalled Annie White to read three significant exchanges from the preliminary hearing. The transcript showed that passerby Alfred Clarkson had originally claimed to have arrived at the murder scene about 11:40 a.m. (and not 11:30, as he had said the day before). Regarding the relations in the Borden household, Emma had been more forthcoming about the tension in the house at the preliminary hearing. When asked whether “the relations between you and your stepmother” were “cordial,” she replied, “I don’t know how to answer that. We always spoke.” She added, “[P]erhaps I should say no then.” She also admitted that relations between Abby and Lizzie were not “entirely cordial.” When Knowlton inquired about the reason, Emma answered: “Well, we felt she was not interested in us, and at one time father gave her some property, and we felt we ought to have some too; and he afterwards gave us some.” But that gift, as Knowlton framed it, “did not entirely heal the feeling.” Moody also asked Annie White to read Phoebe Bowen’s description of the dress Lizzie Borden wore the morning of the murders. Then she had called it “a blouse waist of blue material, with a white spray . . . running through it.”
After a brief consultation, the prosecution decided not to wait for its last witness, then on his way from Fall River. (The tardy witness was a lad who would have contradicted the testimony of Barlow and Brown, the boys who said they had searched the barn for the killer.) Instead came the announcement: “The evidence is closed on both sides.”
Chief Justice Mason then admonished the jury that “notwithstanding the evidence is all in, there is much more to be submitted to them, and they should keep their minds open . . . until the last word has been said, and the case finally committed to them.” Yet they could not have been unmindful of the fraught atmosphere. As Joe Howard observed: “There has been no communication between the jury and public since they were impaneled two weeks ago . . . Tell me they don’t know what popular sentiment is and public feeling? That’s nonsense, for they are part of the populace themselves.”
SATURDAY, JUNE 17, AND SUNDAY, JUNE 18, 1893
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For the jurors, this meant another weekend in the hotel, away from their homes and families, with only each other as company. Elizabeth Jordan lamented: “No convicts at hard labor in Sing Sing prison are under stricter surveillance than the Borden jurors.” On Sunday, the jurors agreed to attend church. Howard followed them, observing their military cadence: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, up the street moved the double line.” Once seated at the Trinitarian Church, “Sheriffs occupied the end seats in the pews to see that no brother escaped before the benediction was pronounced.” Taking 1 Corinthians 1:17 (“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel”) as his text, Reverend Julien told his congregation and their guests: “Clothes did not make the man or the woman; that a black heart could beat beneath a dress suit or a silk dress; that human nature is much the same in all; that moral tendencies and the power of control may differ.” The seriousness of the message and its meaning for the duty that still lay ahead of them did not affect their appetites. After a “remarkably hearty dinner at the hotel,” the jurors took an excursion to Dartmouth, “packed in like sardines, perspiration taking the place of oil.” Whether they enjoyed the trip was not reported.
Unlike his judicial colleagues, Judge Dewey remained in New Bedford for the weekend. He had also attended the church service, sitting a dozen pews behind the jurors. He, too, treated himself to an outing, apparently walking to Clark’s Point, more than four miles from the city center. Later that afternoon, he sat by himself on a large rock. “The brisk harbor breeze was dallying with his iron-gray hair and the sunlight was reflected from his shining silk hat,” reported Joe Howard. “He looked happy, just and contented.”
For the lawyers, it was a busy weekend. Knowlton walked his normal route from home to office and back again. He found time, however, to go to church on Sunday. Robinson, busy crafting his closing argument, took only short breaks for meals. Ralph humorously described him as “working like a beaver, or rather, a lawyer, for lawyers work a good sight harder than beavers.” Howard observed Robinson as he “dashed down to breakfast at the hotel, dashed back; hurried down to dinner and hurried back; flitted down at supper time and flitted back.” By contrast, “Col. Adams,” Howard wrote, “was taking things more moderately, and getting more of the good things of this life to eat and drink. He dallied for some time over the supper table particularly.”
The courthouse also enjoyed a respite: “For the past two weeks its windows have been crowded with spectators; its halls and corridors filled with officers and waiting witnesses; its anterooms occupied by attorneys and stenographers; its back yard turned topsy turvy by telegraph operators and newspaper men and its sidewalks lined with unfortunate ones who did not get around in time to enter the portals of the charmed structure.” Over the weekend, the windows were wide open and the building vacant. Outside, “The sidewalk [was] frequented by pedestrians who hurried to and fro in attendance on their every day business, while the hive of industry in the back yard looked like a closed-up bar room in a no-license town.” Howard reported that the members of the exclusive Wamsutta Club (“nobody admitted under eighty years of age”) looked forward to reclaiming their croquet lawn to the rear of the courthouse.