The Trial of Lizzie Borden(78)

Robinson then turned to the prosecution’s most important point: Lizzie Borden’s exclusive opportunity. He countered: “Exclusive opportunity is nothing but an anticipation that was not realized.” He reminded the jury that the side door was unfastened in the morning: “There is nothing to show that Bridget was in a position so she could control the inside of the house, for she was not.” He reminded the jury of the strange man spotted on Second Street the morning of the murders. Robinson compared the apparent invisibility of the assassin with the absence of eyewitnesses to parts of Andrew Borden’s walk from the house to the bank the last morning of his life: “You cannot see everybody.”

Robinson returned to his theme of Lizzie as hapless female victim, again bringing his point literally home to the members of the jury. Comparing Lizzie Borden’s story of her activities with one their wives might tell, he cautioned: “I am taking you into the house just as I would go into your house, for instance, and say, What are your wives doing now? Well, doing the ordinary work around the house, getting the dinner.” His message to the jurors was clear: any respectable woman, perhaps one of their own wives or even daughters, could be sitting in the dock. And he asked them to empathize with her ordeal, his language freighted with innuendo: “How would your wife or mine act if taken by an officer, investigated and crowded and pushed and then bound over to lie in the jail of this county for ten months, being scanned by everybody?”

Warming to his theme, Robinson painted the police investigation as highly improper. He asked them to visualize Assistant Marshal Fleet, “the set of that mustache and the firmness of those lips,” interrogating Lizzie Borden in her bedroom: “And there he was, up in this young woman’s room in the afternoon, attended with some other officers, plying her with all sorts of questions in a pretty direct and peremptory way.” “Is that the way,” he asked, “for an officer of the law to deal with a woman in her own house? What would you do with a man . . . that got into your house and was talking to your wife or your daughter in that way?”

After enjoining the jurors to see Lizzie as their own wife or daughter, Robinson advanced the key defense proposition: a woman like Lizzie could not have committed these murders. He reminded the jury of the singular brutality of the murders. The murderer stood astride Abby and leaned over Andrew’s head to deliver the blows—some of which crushed their skulls—so that “the person of the assailant in both cases must have been thoroughly covered and spattered.” “Such acts as those,” he insisted, “are morally and physically impossible for this young woman defendant.” Though he urged the jury to accept the discredited notion that Lizzie could not physically have committed the murders, he was primarily concerned with the moral impossibility of her having done so. But as if suddenly recalling a weak point in his argument, he urged the jury to suspend judgment about his client’s notable composure, even quoting a maudlin song for the proposition that her lack of tears belied a deep reservoir of feeling: “The eyes that cannot weep / Are the saddest eyes of all.” (He all but promised the jury that she would have her overdue nervous collapse in private once the trial was over.)

Having dispensed with Lizzie’s self-possession, he returned to a variation of his theme that she simply could not have committed the murders. He evoked Lizzie Borden’s life before the murders, a life that exemplified respectable feminine virtue. An active church member outside the home and a dutiful daughter within its boundaries, she was a credit to her sex and class. How could such a woman be a murderer? Robinson insisted: “It is not impossible that a good person may go wrong . . . but our human experience teaches us that if a daughter grows up in one of our homes to be 32 years old, educated in our schools, walking in our streets, associating with the best people and devoted to the service of God and man . . . it is not within human experience to find her suddenly come out into the rankest and baldest murderess.”

Here, as he had done many times previously, Robinson played upon the incongruity between the image of a raving maniac who perpetrated the murders and the prim embodiment of femininity accused of the crime. He juxtaposed the two contradictory images of Lizzie Borden: “Gentlemen, as you look upon her you will pass your judgment that she is not insane. To find her guilty you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it? . . . [H]ave you seen anything that shows the lack of human feeling and womanly bearing?” Robinson’s formulation left the jury with no rational, scientific explanation for Lizzie Borden’s guilt. He had foreclosed a medical diagnosis that would deny Lizzie Borden’s responsibility even as it affirmed her guilt. Therefore, she either sanely butchered her stepmother and her father or she was an unjustly accused and persecuted young woman. After presenting the jury with a stark choice—daughter or fiend—he concluded his argument with a warning: “There must be no mistake, gentlemen.” Alluding to the mandatory death sentence, he reminded the jury that any error would be “irreparable.” This warning morphed into a curse: a guilty verdict in the face of reasonable doubt would be so “deplorable an evil that tongues can never speak of its wickedness.” Setting Lizzie free, by contrast, would be “sanctioned and commended.” Lizzie, he reminded them—partly as encouragement, partly as a threat—was “not without sympathy in this world.” After letting that register, Robinson shifted his tone again, thanking the jurors for their patience and conferring on them, almost as a benediction, the role of paternalistic guardians. He urged them “to take care of her as you have and give us promptly our verdict of not guilty.” It was just after 3:00 p.m.