The Trial of Lizzie Borden(77)

Most tellingly, Robinson made the tension in the Borden household purely feminine. This strategy had two components. First, it reinforced his version of the ill feeling in the household as an inconsequential disagreement among the ladies, an understandable tension between grown daughters and their stepmother. Second, it allowed him to emphasize the undiminished bond between father and daughter. Robinson consistently invoked Andrew Borden’s close relationship with Lizzie, presenting a picture of strong paternal attachment, as if her father’s love proved her innocence: “No man should be heard to say she murdered the man who so loved her.” He emphasized Lizzie and Andrew’s special understanding, remarking of Andrew Borden, “He was a man that wore nothing in the way of ornament, of jewelry but one ring, and the ring was Lizzie’s . . . and the ring stands as the pledge of plighted faith and love, that typifies and symbolizes the dearest relation that is ever created in life, that ring was the bond of union between the father and the daughter.” At the mention of their father’s ring, both Borden daughters wept openly . . . and Lizzie dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. This lachrymose display was, according to Joe Howard, “but a transient flood: her perfect composure was soon recovered, and, without a glance at any other individuals, she continued her attention to her counsel.”

It was fortunate that Lizzie’s tears provided a distraction, for Robinson was venturing onto unstable terrain. In theory, he presented the jury with a sentimental fantasy, defusing the tension in the Borden household and creating a portrait of idealized love and harmony particularly attractive to jurors who were fathers themselves. But his suppression of any discord between father and daughter and his decision to depict their relationship as a “union” (symbolized by a ring as “a pledge of plighted faith and love”) was unsettling. In his zeal to demonstrate Andrew’s undying love, he inflated the significance of the ring, reshuffling the roles of father and daughter into those of husband and wife. Insisting on Lizzie and Andrew’s intense attachment raised the possibility that this was, at its heart, a crime of passion. If so, then “periodic insanity”—a form of female temporary insanity in which otherwise respectable women killed husbands or lovers—might provide a way of making sense of the otherwise inexplicable crimes. And, as he pointed out, Lizzie was in the throes of “her monthly illness,” a fact he used to explain the bloody towels in the cellar, the tiny spot on the inside of her skirt, her inconsistent stories, her visit to the cellar the night after the murders, and even her premonitions of doom when she visited Alice Russell. He said: “You will recollect that Miss Lizzie’s monthly illness was continuing at that time, and we know from sad experience that there is [sic] many a woman at such a time as that is all unbalanced, her disposition disturbed, her mind disabled for a period of time.” His choice of language—“unbalanced,” “disturbed,” “disabled”—was uncomfortably close to the medical-criminological discussions characterizing menstruation as a time in which an otherwise sane woman might be tragically susceptible to an insane impulse.

Whether or not he realized the danger, Robinson pivoted back to safer ground. He had another ready explanation for Lizzie’s prescience when she told Alice Russell that she feared “someone would do something.” He pointed out “a good many people . . . believe in premonitions, and things will happen sometime for which we see no adequate cause . . . but an event will so happen as to seem to furnish a connection.” He said, “I do not say it is one way or another.”

As if ticking off events involving Alice Russell, Robinson discussed two incidents that the prosecution believed showed Lizzie’s subterfuge after the murders: Lizzie’s second visit to the cellar on the night of August 4 and her burning of the dress the next Sunday. Robinson remarked on the ordinariness of the visit, alluding to Lizzie’s “monthly sickness” and the location of the pail. He also noted Lizzie’s lack of concealment, insisting that “a person who is going to do anything to cover up a crime will not carry an electric light with him.” He then turned to the most damning piece of evidence: Lizzie’s burning of her dress after the murders. Robinson sowed confusion about what Lizzie was wearing on the morning of the murders: “It was not a time for examining colors and afterwards they recollected as well as they could.” “So,” he admitted, “there has been a conflict of testimony” about Lizzie’s dress. But he reminded the jury: “They had all seen her and every one says there was not a spot of blood on it.” As for the burned Bedford cord dress, both the dressmaker and the painter agreed that it had been stained with paint. Moreover, the police had already conducted a comprehensive search of Lizzie’s wardrobe. So what if Lizzie burned a paint-stained dress at Emma’s suggestion? Ridiculing the prosecution’s theory that she used the missing dress as a sort of coverall, he said: “I would not wonder if they are going to claim that this woman denuded herself and did not have any dress on at all when she committed either murder.” There was, in fact, a persistent rumor that the prosecution would argue that Lizzie Borden committed the murders in the nude, a suggestion almost as shocking as the killings themselves, but the prosecution never made that argument. (Ralph dismissed the notion as a “peculiarly French” theory.)

Robinson reserved his sharpest humor for the array of hatchets and axes offered into evidence, a collection he described as “all the armory of the Borden house.” According to Robinson, “The government has a theory about it, or at least seems to have a theory, and then does not seem to have a theory.” Robinson methodically described the hatchets and axes, picking them up and putting them down as he explained they had been “declared innocent.” Robinson asked: “Is the Government trying a case of may-have-beens[?] . . . And if they cannot tell you that that is the implement that committed the crimes, where is it?” Echoing the imagery used by the preacher Jonathan Edwards in his most famous and terrifying sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Robinson warned the jury: “Gentlemen, you walk upon the edge of a precipice. You think you feel the hand of the Commonwealth guiding but . . . [i]t is a fraud, it is a theory, born in an emergency at a time of disaster.” Had the trial been held any earlier, Lizzie might have been mistakenly convicted on the basis of “cow’s hair and the appearance of blood” on the hatchets “now declared to be innocent.” Relying upon shifting explanations of the medical authorities, they risked “murder at the hands of theorizing experts.”