The Trial of Lizzie Borden(81)

To match Lizzie’s opportunity was her enmity toward her stepmother: “It was . . . malice against Mrs. Borden that inspired the assassin. It was Mrs. Borden whose life this wicked person sought; and all the motive that we have to consider . . . bears on her.” Knowlton reminded the jury that Lizzie was the only person known to wish Abby ill. He chastised Lizzie for slighting the woman who raised her, for denying her the honorific of “Mother” in favor of Mrs. Borden: “It was a living insult to that woman, a living expression of contempt.” But he reserved his greatest condemnation for what he described as her ingratitude to her father. Commenting on the property transfer that sparked the tension in the household, he remonstrated: “How wicked to have found fault with it. How petty to have found fault with it.” Andrew was well within his rights to give anything he wanted to Abby, “his faithful wife who has served him thirty years for her board and clothes.”

Knowlton’s diction reduced Abby to the status of servant in her own household. Whether or not that was strictly accurate, it was metaphorically apt, capturing the consistent treatment of her death as the lesser tragedy. According to the prosecution’s theory, Abby was the intended murder victim, yet nearly a month elapsed before her murder was added to the charges against Lizzie Borden. Abby herself remains a cipher. She might as well be a domestic ghost, materializing only as the unwitting precipitant of the Bordens’ slow-burning conflagration. Yet, at times, she looms much larger, cast as the stepmother of fairy tales, the usurper who comes between father and daughter, who siphons off family wealth to her own impecunious line, and whose physical size instantiates her greed. As for clues to her actual personality, according to Bridget Sullivan, Abby was “always very kind and good to her.” Mrs. Southard Miller, Dr. Bowen’s mother-in-law, who also lived across the street from the Bordens, said that “she had lost in Mrs. Borden, the best and most intimate neighbor she had ever met.” And before the property dispute, Lizzie said that she would ask her stepmother to intervene with her father on the rare occasions he denied her something she really wanted. Though that perceived influence was recast as betrayal, Abby’s single monetary demand on the Borden fisc was for the benefit of her half sister (and her own stepmother), not for herself.

Knowlton depicted the Borden house as one beset by festering tensions, literalized in the family’s elaborate locking rituals. Knowlton expounded: “It is said that there is a skeleton in the household of every man, but the Borden skeleton . . . was fairly well locked up from view.” The external and internal system of locks and hooks made it impossible, he claimed, for anyone else to be hiding in the house before the murders. But, more than that, the myriad locks showed the nature of the household. When you have a dispute with an outsider, “He goes his way and you go yours.” “But,” Knowlton explained, “these people day in and day out, year in and year out under the same roof, compelled to eat the same bread, compelled to sleep in the same house, compelled to meet each other morning, noon and night yet maintain this strained, unnatural hostility.” Finally, at a loss to convey the psychological damage wrought by such an existence, he said, “This was a cancer.”

Despite his evident distaste for her behavior before the murders and his belief in her guilt of the crimes, Knowlton found himself in verbal knots at the thought of calling Lizzie Borden a liar. The missing note Lizzie claimed Abby had received was a key part of the prosecution case. It prevented Andrew from looking for Abby upon his return. Had he done so, he would have found her already murdered, perhaps preventing his own death. The purported note also gave Lizzie a convenient rationale for not seeking out Abby immediately after discovering her father’s body. Knowlton, however, prefaced one of his strongest pieces of evidence with a caveat: “Conscious as I am . . . that any unjust or harsh word of mine might do injury that I never could recover my peace of mind for, I reaffirm that serious charge.” Putting aside the absurdity of someone seeking to lure an old, frail woman out of the house while leaving two younger, heartier women inside, Knowlton asked why, if a note existed, its author had never come forward: “Little did it occur to Lizzie Borden when she told that lie to her father that there would be 80,000 witnesses to the falsity of it.” He then oddly asserted that he had “hoped somebody would come forward . . . and relieve this case of that falsehood” as if the lie were more shocking to contemplate than the murders. Recovering himself, he concluded simply: “No note came; no note was written; nobody brought a note; nobody was sick; Mrs. Borden had not had a note.”

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It seemed as though Knowlton was “warming up . . . to a white heat of intense mental activity and physical development, walking to and fro, gesticulating with violence, and looking with comprehensive sweep . . . from the bench to the jury, from the prisoner to the counsel, and thence about the audience.” But, realizing that the afternoon session was drawing to a close, Knowlton gave the jury a précis of his argument thus far: “God forbid that anybody should have committed this murder, but somebody did.” Abby Borden, he insisted, “was killed, not by the strong hand of a man, but by the weak and ineffectual blows of a woman . . . the only person in the universe who could be benefitted by her taking away.” As Knowlton walked up and down in front of the jury, everyone in the courtroom leaned forward so as not to miss a moment of his oration—including Lizzie, who “looked at him fixedly and steadily with a curious, set expression upon her features.” Reaching deep into his rhetorical quiver, he then delivered a biblically inspired rhetorical coup de grace, causing a sensation in the courtroom: “There was coming a stern and just man who knew the feelings between them and would say to her, as the Almighty said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel, thy brother?’?”