The Trial of Lizzie Borden(84)

As if to emphasize that point, the court stood in recess for five minutes. When Knowlton resumed his argument, he stepped back from the specifics of the case to laud the Anglo-American tradition of the jury trial. He explained: “It is absolutely necessary . . . that the witnesses that are to give their evidence shall be brought before you for you to look at them, for you to look in their faces, for you to hear them answer the questions that are put to them, for you to hear them sustain the test of cross examination.” “There is,” he insisted, “no better test.” This paean revealed itself as Knowlton’s rehabilitation of Matron Reagan’s testimony. Mrs. Reagan claimed to have overheard a quarrel between the sisters during which Lizzie told Emma, “You’ve given me away!” Knowlton said: “I am not quite so willing to dismiss the conduct of Miss Lizzie Borden in the guard room of the police station in so supercilious and satirical a manner as my distinguished friend.” In spite of (or perhaps even because of) the efforts of Lizzie’s allies to suppress the story, Knowlton considered it “extremely significant.” Much like the tale of the dress burning wrenched from the “Puritan conscience” of Alice Russell, the story of the quarrel came from someone who liked Lizzie and who was even willing to retract it so long as it was not under oath.

One other mystery remained: the murder weapon. Knowlton observed: “My distinguished friend has seen fit to make some humorous comments upon the various hatchets that have been produced in this case.” He offered a more straightforward explanation for the initial mistake in identifying the claw-hammer hatchet as the murder weapon. When the police found a hatchet stained with blood and with a hair on it, they naturally assumed that was the weapon. As it happens, they were wrong. They then turned their attention to the handleless hatchet head, a hatchet head that was covered in ashes rather than dust. He reminded the jury that the hatchet head with the broken handle fit Mr. Borden’s wounds precisely. (Out of deference to the sensibilities of Lizzie Borden, whom he called “this unfortunate woman,” Knowlton did not ask for the skulls to be brought into the courtroom for another demonstration.) Most tellingly, the “handle was broken off not as axe handles are splintered . . . broken off not as accidental, but as by design, that no part of the wood of that handle should be exposed to view.” Nonetheless, he continued, “We do not say that was the hatchet. It may well have been.” Lizzie could have an inaccessible hiding space: “The recesses and mysteries of that house are all within her twenty years [sic] acquaintance of it. How little can any one else know of it?” Most significantly, the apparent absence of a murder weapon at the scene contradicted the idea of an outside assassin: “The very fact that no hatchet was found there is a piece of evidence, is one of those chips that float right with the stream, which points directly to the inmates of the house as authors of this awful crime.” The killer “never would have gone into the streets, armed and loaded and fated with the evidence that would convict him.”

Knowlton returned to the overwhelming circumstantial evidence in his summary of the prosecution case, arguing that every piece of the puzzle made sense if Lizzie was the killer. He said: “We find a woman murdered by blows which were struck with a weak and indecisive hand . . . We find that woman had no enemies in all this world except the daughter that had repudiated her. We find that the woman was killed at half past nine when it passes the bound of human credulity to believe it could have been done without her knowledge, her presence, her sight, her hearing. We find a house guarded by night and by day so that no assassin could find lodgment in it for a moment . . . We say these things float down on the great current of our thoughts and tell us where the stream leads to.” Knowlton concluded: “We get down now to the elements of ordinary crime. We get hatred, we get malice . . . we get absurd and impossible alibis. We get contradictory stories . . . we get fraud upon the officers by the substitution of an afternoon silk dress as the one she was wearing that morning ironing, and . . . a guilty destruction of the dress that she feared the eye of the microscope might find blood upon.” Ending his closing with a burst of eloquence, Knowlton thundered: “What’s the defense? Nothing. Nothing. I stop and think, and I say again, nothing.” He enjoined the jury: “I submit these facts to you with the confidence that you are men of courage and truth . . . Rise, gentlemen, rise to the altitude of your duty. Act as you would like to think of having acted when you stand before the Great White Throne at the last day.” Knowlton sermonized, “What shall be your reward? The ineffable consciousness of duty done . . . Only he who hears the voice of his inner consciousness—it is the voice of God himself, saying to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’—can enter into the reward and lay hold of eternal life.”

Most commentators applauded Knowlton’s efforts. Julian Ralph and Joe Howard, two of Borden’s most fervent supporters, agreed that it was a great speech. Howard, for his part, believed Knowlton “rank[ed] with the ablest advocates of the day.” In Knowlton, a “big burly man with a square, earnest face, a tremendous physique, a powerful voice and a bearing indicative of great courage,” Howard saw “the same pride of bearing, the same earnestness of purpose, the same tremendous potentiality which we find displayed in the engine No. 999 on its 20 hour trip from New York to Chicago.” Ralph agreed: “The magnificent figure of the speaker helped him. His powerful voice was seldom raised, but, impressively subdued, kept the people silent and still.” But would such eloquence be enough? “Down to the opening of Gov. Robinson,” Howard reported, “the bets were 2 to 1 in favor of an acquittal; now they were 2 to 1 in favor of a disagreement.”