The Trial of Lizzie Borden(76)

After that comic interlude, Robinson turned to the evidence most favorable to the defense. He reminded the jury of the brutality of the crimes, arguing that the Bordens were felled by “well directed blows.” “Surely,” he continued, “we are prompted to say at the outset the perpetrator of that act knew how to handle the instrument . . . and it was not the careless, sudden, untrained doing of somebody who had been unfamiliar with such implements.” Robinson took special care to make the jurors see the murderer as a skilled male assassin. After considering the mechanics of the murders, Robinson continued, “You must conclude at the outset that such acts are morally and physically impossible for this young woman defendant.” Despite the spatter such blows would have produced, no blood—“[n]ot a spot”—had been noticed on her hair, face, or dress by any of the people who came to lend support in her time of crisis.

After invoking the specter of a mysterious male assassin, Robinson returned to his theme of Lizzie as innocent bystander. He transformed Lizzie into the paradigmatic “angel in the house,” her lack of alibi proof of her feminine normality. He argued: “They say she was in the house in the forenoon. Well, that may look to you like a very wrong place to be in. But it is her own home . . . I don’t know where I would want my daughter to be . . . than to say that she was at home, attending to the ordinary vocations of life, as a dutiful member of the household.” Robinson made a similar point about her account of her actions before and after the murders. She believed her stepmother had received a note and had gone out; therefore, she would have had no reason to look for her. As for the prosecution’s contention that “she must have seen . . . the dead body of Mrs. Borden . . . as she went up and down the stairs,” Robinson assured the jury, “Now if we had marched you up and down the stairs and told you nothing of what we wanted you to look at, there isn’t one of you that would have squinted under the bed, on that particular tread of stairs.” He insisted: “Now do not ask her to do things that nobody does.” As for her visit to the barn, corroborated by the ice cream peddler Lubinsky, “Is there anything unnatural or improbable in her going to the barn for anything she wanted?” In the same vein, he defended her shifting stories about her whereabouts. He said that variations in witnesses’ accounts were often a sign of truthfulness. “Honest people,” he claimed, “are not particular about punctuation and prepositions all the time.” More important, Robinson provided a belated rejoinder to Knowlton’s incredulity about Lizzie’s purported inability to recall whether she was upstairs or downstairs or out in the yard or barn at various points in the morning. It was a woman’s problem: “Do you suppose that your wives and daughters can tell the number of times they went up and down stairs six months ago on a given day?” Of course, it had not been a typical day, but Robinson emphatically added: “Not at all, or even the day before, unless they were very careful about something.”

Next Robinson denied that anything was amiss in the Borden household. He normalized the many locks in the Borden house. Yes, it was a well-secured home, but Robinson dismissed the many locks as “a matter of protection to keep people out.” Robinson rejected the notion that Andrew was a miser who deprived his daughters of domestic comforts. Robinson asked the jurors whether they lived as well: “Are all your houses warmed with steam? Do you have carpets on every one of your floors, stairs and all? Do you have pictures and pianos and a library, and all the conveniences of luxury? . . . Well, I congratulate you if you do.” Lizzie herself, he reminded the jury, had her own bank account and “property of her own.” He asked: “Did she want any more to live in comfort?” For him, this was proof Lizzie had no motive to commit the murders.

Leaving aside the unthinkable notion that Lizzie might have wanted independence rather than mere comfort, Robinson deliberately obscured the source of Lizzie Borden’s purported dissatisfaction with her circumstances. It arose from a sense of relative deprivation, not the literal absence of material comfort. She wanted, according to Alice Russell, “to live as others did,” and “others,” in this context, meant her more socially elevated cousins. Robinson could have revealed that Andrew had been “looking for a nice place for his daughters” in the more fashionable Hill district shortly before his death. But there was a risk in revealing Andrew’s apparent change of heart. It might have been seen as the act of a desperate man trying to mollify his disgruntled daughters and buy domestic peace, rather than—as Lizzie had suggested in her pretrial interview with Mrs. McGuirk of the New York Recorder—the decision of a considerate father trying to gratify them. That he was apparently contemplating such a significant acquisition also raised the question of whether this was part of a larger plan to put his affairs in order, to finalize a will that may well contain terms to which his daughters might object. Finally, Robinson ignored the most disturbing possibility, that Lizzie would have considered any residence, whatever the size, intolerable if it also housed her stepmother and father.

To the contrary, Robinson trivialized the much-discussed “ill feelings” in the household. He gave a rambling paean to departed mothers, a series of images, in Joe Howard’s words, “not fertile in fancy, nor poetic in sentiment, nor particularly felicitous in phrase.” Robinson’s point, however belabored, was that even a long-departed biological mother held a special place in a child’s affections. Therefore, Lizzie’s decision to stop calling Abby her mother had no great import because she was not, in biological fact, her mother. As for Lizzie’s correction of Assistant Marshal Fleet when he referred to Abby as her mother, Robinson observed: “There is nothing criminal about it . . . nothing that savors of a murderous purpose, is there?” He sarcastically reminded the jurors of Marthe Chagnon’s testimony in which she referred to her father’s second wife as her stepmother: “I advised the City Marshal to put a cordon around that house, so that there will not be another murder there.” More seriously, he agreed that Lizzie’s comments to the dressmaker Mrs. Gifford were “not a good way to talk” and admitted that Lizzie was “not a saint.” But he contended she was simply a plain speaker. Other people speak hastily, “yet we don’t read of murders in those houses.” He opined: “It is not the outspoken, blunt and hearty that are to be heard about it that do the injury.”