The Trial of Lizzie Borden(80)

Knowlton returned to the sex of the accused. He acknowledged that “it is hard . . . to conceive that women can be guilty of crime.” But he enjoined the jurors to remember that women “are human like unto us. They are no better than we; they are no worse than we.” Despite this nod to equality, Knowlton then drew a picture of the female criminal illustrated by Shakespeare and Dickens (the two “great master[s] of human nature”) and supported by prevailing attitudes about women’s nature. Contending that “many of the most famous criminals have been women,” he alluded to the character of Lady Macbeth, implying that a woman might strike down a sleeping king, the nation’s father, when a strong man would, in the same position, lose his nerve. Similarly, he described Tulkinghorn’s murder in Bleak House as “the most dastardly, the most desperate, the most absolutely brutal crime” in Dickens’s oeuvre. Knowlton was a better lawyer than a literary critic: Lady Macbeth, he failed to observe, had not actually delivered any of the blows; and Sikes’s bludgeoning of Nancy in Oliver Twist was far more brutal than the maid Hortense’s shooting of the sinister lawyer Tulkinghorn. After running through these dubious literary examples and failing to produce historical precedents, he fell back upon ancient tropes about female nature: what women “lack in strength and coarseness and vigor,” Knowlton contended, “they make up for . . . in cunning, in dispatch, in celerity, in ferocity. If their loves are stronger and more enduring than those of men, am I saying too much that, on the other hand, their hates are more undying, more unyielding, more persistent?” For that reason, he enjoined the jurors to “face this case as men, not as gallants.”

As he spoke, Knowlton “time and time again left his place behind the bar, walked around to the jury, stood at their side or immediately in front of them, and spoke with marked earnestness, distinctness, and emphasis.” While he moved around the court, Lizzie’s gaze never wavered. She craned her head to one side or the other so that her view remained unobscured. According to Howard, “She lost no word, no inflection, no gesture, but looked at him as though with a pitying amazement at the whole procedure.”

In a tonal pirouette, Knowlton defended himself and his colleagues. He admitted that he had personally been stung by “slanderous tongues” imputing unworthy motives to his prosecution. Nothing but the sheer weight of evidence could have persuaded him to proceed. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it is the saddest duty of my life.” In the same vein, he defended the police, the objects of his opposing counsel’s sarcasm: “A blue coat does not make a man any better; it ought not to make him any worse.” He admitted the police made mistakes but contended that they did their work “honestly, faithfully.” As for the medical experts, whatever cavils they might hear from the defense, the scientific testimony was uncontroverted. He noted: “You will find that their conclusions are accurate because those who could have disputed them have not done so.” The most important point of agreement, the evidence that made it seemingly impossible for an outside intruder to have committed the crimes, was the medical judgment that more than an hour separated the two murders, a point to which he would return with great emphasis.

To prepare the jury to understand the cumulative effect of the evidence introduced at trial, he carefully outlined the value of circumstantial evidence. First, he explained the simple distinction between direct and circumstantial evidence: “Direct evidence is the evidence of a man who sees and hears: circumstantial evidence is all other kinds of evidence.” He refuted the defense argument that circumstantial evidence was an inferior class of evidence, something calling for special skepticism. If anything, “Men will not tell the truth always: facts cannot tell but one story.” “Murder is the work of stealth and craft,” he reminded the jury, “in which there are not only no witnesses, but the traces are attempted to be obliterated.” Lest anyone still question the reliability of circumstantial evidence, he turned again to classic literature. He alluded to Robinson Crusoe’s famous discovery of another set of footprints on his apparently uninhabited island. Knowlton explained: “It was circumstantial: It was nothing but circumstantial evidence but it satisfied him.” After all, Knowlton continued, “[H]e had no lawyer to tell him that there was nothing but circumstance.” For the nonliterary juror, he provided a natural metaphor: “It is like refuse that floats upon the surface of the stream. You stand upon the banks of the river and you see a chip go by. That is only a circumstance. You see another chip go by. That is another circumstance.” Yet, “You would not hesitate,” after viewing those chips travel by, “to say you knew which way the current of that river was.”

Returning to the case at hand, Knowlton explained that the prosecution’s case was based on Lizzie’s exclusive opportunity. He explained that the “discovery . . . that these two people did not come to their death at the same time” was the “controlling fact” of the case. The time lapse meant “[i]t was no sudden act of a man coming in and out. It was the act of a person who spent the forenoon in this domestic establishment, killing the woman at her early work and waiting till the man returned for his noon day meal.” No one but Lizzie had the opportunity to commit the murders. If no one else could have committed the crimes, then she must have been the perpetrator.

More than that, the very nature of the wounds was feminine. Knowlton remarked of the haphazard injuries to Abby’s skull: “What sort of blows were they? Some struck here at an angle, badly aimed; some struck here in the neck, badly directed; some pattered on the top of the head. . . . weak, puttering, badly aimed, nerveless blows.” He concluded: “The hand that held that weapon was not the hand of masculine strength . . . It was the hand of a person strong only in hate and the desire to kill.” Leaving that aside for the moment, he wondered how Lizzie, assuming she was innocently in the house, could not have heard her stepmother fall. Knowlton reminded the jury: “This poor woman was standing when she was struck, and fell with all the force of that 200 pounds of flesh, flat and prone and dead on the floor. That jar could not have failed to have been heard all over that house . . . Nothing happened in one part of that house that wasn’t heard in the other.”