The Trial of Lizzie Borden(82)

The assumption had been that Knowlton would finish his closing argument that evening, but after a short recess the judges decided “that a late session would be an intolerable burden in this day of excessive heat.” The court adjourned until the following morning. As Joe Howard wryly observed, “The judges are in no hurry; they are on the bench for life.”





TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 1893




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On the last day of the trial, interested citizens redoubled their efforts and laid siege to the courthouse. The Fall River Daily Globe reported: “Over an hour before the time of opening, the doors were besieged by people, mostly ladies in holiday attire, all hoping for seats. But there were too few of them for accommodation for the tenth part of the claimants.” The Fall River Daily Herald also drew attention to the feminine element: “The intensity of the crush this afternoon is abominable. The pushing and struggling New Bedford women are a disgrace to femininity. Every foot within the bar enclosure is filled, and every seat without is occupied.” They flowed out into the anterooms, the stairways, and the halls. Outside, the approach to the courthouse resembled a human wall as people vainly attempted to secure admittance. All wished to be present for what one newspaper termed “The Last Scene in the Great Borden Trial.”

Lizzie Borden herself arrived early, bearing a bouquet of pond lilies and white carnations. She had “an animated conversation” with former governor Robinson before the start of the court proceedings. The New Bedford Evening Standard noticed that “there was a restless activity about her which betrayed itself in an unusual nervousness, and it is plain to see that despite her wonderful self-control that she is full of internal excitement.” When Knowlton began speaking, she watched him intensely, and “blood ebbed and flowed to her face.”

Knowlton resumed his argument with a reminder that the commonwealth did not have to prove motive: “We are called upon to prove that the thing was done, and our duty stops there.” No motive, he acknowledged, could ever be adequate to explain the murders. But he directed the jury to focus on Lizzie Borden’s hatred of her stepmother: “The malice was all before the fact. The wickedness was all before the fourth day of August.” He speculated that Andrew may have been planning to make a new will. But, he admitted, “We cannot tell . . . what new fuel was added to the fire of discontent . . . We do not know what occurred in that family that kept that young woman from the delightful shore of Marion, where all her friends are; and kept her by her father and mother during those hot days of that hot summer.” He may have sensed the gravitational force of intense family feuds, but he faltered as he tried to explain the intensity of the hatred, concluding that “there was a jealousy which was unworthy of that woman.” Then he asked the jury to leave “the dead body of that aged woman upon the guest-chamber floor . . . and . . . come down with me to a far sadder tragedy, to the most horrible word that the English language knows, to a parricide.”

At this point, Knowlton stumbled over the corpse of Andrew Borden. Even he could not bring himself to accuse Lizzie Borden of premeditation in the “far sadder” murder of her father. Knowlton assured the jury that “it is a grateful relief to our conceptions of human nature to be able to find reasons to believe that the murder of Andrew Borden was not planned by his younger daughter, but was done as a wicked and dreadful necessity.” In his telling, Lizzie Borden plotted the demise of her loathed stepmother, but Andrew Borden’s unexpected return interrupted her in her plan to establish an alibi, and she was forced to kill him as well. Alluding to the earlier daylight theft hushed up by Andrew, Knowlton contended that Lizzie must have suddenly realized that this was too horrible an act for her father to keep in the family: “When the deed was done she was coming down stairs to face Nemesis.” But in suppressing any motive but that of hatred of her stepmother, Knowlton was forced to argue that Lizzie Borden killed her father because whoever killed one victim murdered the other, a weakness Robinson was able to exploit. Significantly, Knowlton ignored the most straightforward reason for the order of the murders: if Andrew Borden had been killed first, his daughters would have shared the estate with their stepmother’s beneficiaries. Even Knowlton could not bring himself to raise the crime to this level of cold-blooded calculation. When he suggested that Andrew might have been about to make a will, he considered it only as adding “new fuel” to Lizzie’s malice against Abby, not as a motive for Andrew’s murder. Whether he himself could not contemplate this eminently practical scenario or he believed that the jury would find it as unthinkable as the crime itself, he sacrificed a coherent narrative in favor of a more palatable motive: feminine frenzy erupting out of a stepdaughter’s smoldering resentment. By refusing the more probable plot, he was left with a chain of circumstantial evidence, a chain with one very weak link—the apparent normality of Lizzie Borden.

Just as the defense had earlier argued that only a fiend could have committed the murders, Knowlton seized upon this metaphor as a compromise that held Lizzie Borden responsible for the crime, yet ultimately not responsible for her father’s death. According to Knowlton, “It was not Lizzie Andrew Borden, the daughter of Andrew J. Borden, that came down those stairs, but a murderess, transformed from all the thirty-three years of an honest life, transformed from the daughter, transformed from the ties of affection, to the most consummate criminal we have read of in all our history or works of fiction.” Lizzie Borden’s imagined transformation solved the problem of her apparent normality. Knowlton envisioned a kind of temporary insanity reminiscent of Dr. Jekyll’s metamorphosis into Mr. Hyde. If she committed the murders in an altered state, then she could be found guilty without being morally responsible for her actions. But even if Knowlton’s explanation seemed momentarily reassuring, such an argument still left the jury in an uncomfortable quandary. How could one tell if a dutiful daughter harbored an inner fiend?