The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

CHAPTER XIX.
District Attorney Knowlton’s Argument.

OFFICER MICHAEL MULLALY.

Knowledge of the splendid presentation of the case of the defence by Mr. Jennings reached the streets almost in advance of its conclusion, and the effect was apparent at the opening of the afternoon session. The court room was crowded to excess, and there were larger throngs at the entrances on the square than had been noticed since the opening of the hearing. Everybody expected an interesting answer from the District Attorney, and the gathering assembled to listen to it included the leading professional men of the city. Attorney General Pillsbury arrived at noon, and was seated beside the District Attorney, as the latter began to speak. Lizzie Borden was pale as she entered, but she flushed a vivid crimson as the District Attorney arose to speak. He said: “I can fully appreciate Your Honor’s feelings, now that the end of this hearing is about to be reached. The crime of murder touches the deepest sensibilities of feeling. There is the deepest feeling of horror about it, and above all in the unnaturalness that brings the thrill of horror to every mind. The man who is accustomed even to conflicts of arms may not be expected to be free from horror at the thought of the assassin. While it was not a pleasant summons that came to me, the almost despairing cry that came to me to come over here, I should not have been true to duty if I had not undertaken to ferret out the criminal. It was so causeless a crime. The people interested in it were so free from ordinary bickerings or strife that of all cases that transcend the ideas of men, this case was that case. The murdered man’s daughter was arrested. I perfectly understood the surprise and indignation that started up. I am sorry that Your Honor was criticised. Does not Your Honor believe my own soul is filled with anguish that I must go on and believe the prisoner guilty, and yet the path of duty is not always the path of pleasure. The straight and narrow path is often full of anguish, and does not have the popular voice behind it. What is it we have done? There are three stages, yes, four, which are junctions of the law in a case like this. First, the stage of simple inquiry. I am sworn on

that book before Your Honor that an inquest shall be held, which is necessarily private. That step has been taken. There then comes another stage, when by the laws of inquiry it finally sees the evidence points to any particular person and such an occasion as this follows. That is the present state. To that tribunal it is Your Honor’s duty to direct such cases as seem too grave for Your Honor to decide. Then the evidence appears to indicate that the balance of probabilities is in favor of finding the accursed guilty of the act. The Commonwealth advances no statements as to probable guilt. Your Honor’s duty is before you. Let us go back to the pictures. They are before you. Such was the scene presented four weeks ago this morning. What are they? One is a man retired from business, of simple and frugal habits, and so far as we know without an enemy in the world. If there was some friction between him and his wife’s relatives, that domestic and honorable lady was absolutely without harsh feelings on the part of the world, yet she was murdered, and there was a hand that dealt those blows, and a brain that directed them. There was not a man, woman or child in the world of whom we could not have said, they would have done it. But it was done. The presumption that some enemy killed him and then killed her, for I presume that Your Honor will prefer the evidence of the chemist, Prof. Wood, rather than the story of a Medical Examiner who has not examined the stomachs, is that Mrs. Borden was dead fully an hour and a half before the murder of Mr. Borden. Who could have done it? As an eminent attorney once said, there is no motive for murder. There is reason for it, but no motive. I never in all my experience saw a man so utterly low as to believe him guilty of such a deed. But it was done. By what? Obviously by a hatchet. The blows were struck from behind. It was the act of a physical, if not a moral coward. It was the act of a person who, while willing to murder, was not willing to let the murdered people see who was doing it. As you listened to the description of the blows, you are convinced of the fact that no man could have struck them. You are struck with the thought that it was an irresolute, imperfect feminine hand that could strike, and yet not with the strength of a man, and we do not know who did it. It was not the result of spite as first thought, but the blows were fast, swift blows of somebody who had a reason for doing it. The first obvious inquiry is, who is benefited by that removal. God forbid I should impute that motive, but what have we before us? I don’t know what was the cause of it. I have discovered the fact that she has repudiated the relation of mother and

daughter. I knew once two boys who in growing to be men discovered that their father had committed a crime and called him Mr., but I never heard of another case of that sort. We’ve got the terrible fact. She has repudiated the name of mother. Has Your Honor, as I have, ever learned that no more lasting hatred ever springs up than between step-parents and their children? We have seen that he didn’t provide the house with gas, that he hadn’t in the house what those daughters very much wanted, a bath tub, and that they quarrelled about property. Do you suppose that was a sufficient motive? I grant that that is not an adequate motive for killing her. There is no adequate motive for killing her. But I have found the only person in the world with whom she was not in accord. Let us look around and it cannot be imagined how anybody could have got in or out. I listened to the eloquent remarks of my brother and failed to hear him tell how anybody could have got in there, remained an hour and a half, killed the two people and then have gone out without being observed. Doors locked and windows closed. Here was a house with the front door locked, the windows closed, the cellar door locked and the screen door closed, with somebody on guard in the kitchen. Nay, Mr. Borden locked the barn every night, and you can’t go from one part of the house to the other without keys. That makes us begin to think. Of course, this is negative evidence. Of course it is neither sufficient, reliable or conclusive, but all evidence is made up of circumstances of more or less weight. Yet from this house, on a main street, near the centre of the city, passed by hundreds of people daily, no man could depart without being seen. And that isn’t the most difficult part of it. I can’t devise any way by which anybody could have avoided those locks. Tell me not about the barn which Mr. Borden always locked himself; the front door was locked when Mr. Borden came in; there was not a hiding place when they came in; they could not get upstairs to the front of the house by the back way; they must be seen passing through the house; and I haven’t dwelt on the chances of anybody escaping the notice of these five people and the refusal of the human mind to accept such a possibility. I can conceive of a villain. I can’t conceive of the villain who did this; and I can’t also conceive of a villain who is a fool. All the movements of this family must have been known, and

so the mind, not the mind which is actuated by sympathy and which I understand but cannot follow, because I am sworn to my duty, but the impartial mind looks toward the house. There has been no idle and unjust suspicion. It was natural that suspicion should be directed towards the inmates of that house. Morse is out of the way and then comes the servant girl, perhaps the next one thought of. The discharge of my duties have found in my eyes no difference between one class and another. When I came to Fall River I knew no difference between honest and reputable Lizzie Borden and honest and reputable Bridget Sullivan, and so Bridget Sullivan was brought here to what my learned friend calls a star chamber inquiry, and was questioned as closely and minutely as any other member of the family. The innocent do not need fear questioning. In all my twenty-five years experience will my learned brother say that he ever heard or knew me to treat a female witness discourteously. She sitting in one chair and the inquirer in another, presumably as innocent as anybody; and yet fault is found that she is suspected when she answers questions in two ways. I’m going to assume that Your Honor believes Bridget Sullivan has told the exact truth. What took place, Bridget Sullivan? Mr. Morse went off that morning and left Lizzie in the kitchen alone. The only time when Mrs. Borden could have been killed. Mrs. Borden told her to wash windows and she goes out to do it. Lizzie didn’t go up the back way because she couldn’t get up that way. In the lower part of the house there was no person left and Lizzie and her mother were upstairs. Then Lizzie comes to the screen door. Maggie says, don’t lock the screen door. Mr. Borden was then alive. Mrs. Churchill saw Mr. Borden go off and then saw Bridget washing windows. Then the hatchet was driven into the brain of Abby Borden. Many a man has been convicted because he alone could have committed a crime. Maggie finishes her work, and then, until Mr. Borden comes in, Lizzie and Mrs. Borden are alone upstairs, and this is not all; Mr. Borden comes to the front door. I don’t care to comment on Lizzie’s laughter at Bridget’s exclamation, but Lizzie was where, if Mrs. Borden fell to the floor, she could not have been twenty feet away from her, and where, if the old lady made any noise, she could have heard it. Then Lizzie comes down stairs and commences to iron. Bridget leaves her alone with her father. Less than fifteen minutes later the death of Mr. Borden takes place. She could have but one alibi, she could not be down stairs; she could not be anywhere except where she could not see any person come from the house. It is now more difficult in the cool of September

than it was at the inquest, to imagine the improbability of the story told by Miss Lizzie. Where he was she can’t tell; where he came from she didn’t know; where was she between the hours of nine and ten, when her mother was killed; whatever else I may not say of Lizzie Borden, I will say that for one to even suggest that from the time she found her father dead she was not in full control of all her faculties, is to confess that they do not know the facts. She has not shed a tear, and it is idle for any one to say she has been confused or dazed. I asked her where she was when her father came back, and we get this story: ‘I was down in the kitchen.’ That’s the kind of thumbscrew I apply, and it was a most vital thing. Almost a moment after: ‘Where were you when the bell rung?’ ‘I think I was upstairs in my room.’ ‘Were you upstairs when you heard the bell?’ No thinking now, no daze: ‘I think I was on the steps coming down.’ Isn’t it singular, isn’t it a vital thing that upon this most important subject she should not tell the same story upon two pages of the testimony. I prefer to take the story of one who gives the same answer twice, for I am not affected by the heat and the turmoil which surrounds this case, and for which I have no hard feelings towards anybody. Then I asked her: ‘What were you doing while your father was out?’ and she said she was waiting for the irons to heat. Unsatisfactory explanations. Isn’t it singular that I can’t get a satisfactory explanation from her as to how she spent the hour and fifteen minutes while her father was out and her mother was being killed upstairs. Finally, however, she says after urging twice, she saw him take off his slippers, when the photographs show he did not take off his boots, and after speaking to her father she tells him that she thinks her mother has gone out; and then she tells us that she went to the barn. And when we asked her ‘where was your mother?’ She answers, ‘she is not my mother, but my stepmother,’ and her bosom friend, Miss Russell, is compelled to testify that Lizzie told her she went out to get a piece of something to fix her window. Then she tells Dr. Bowen it was to get a piece of iron; then she tells the story of the fish line and the sinker. I say to her, ‘Where did you spend twenty minutes or half an hour on that hot morning?’ She says she went to fix a curtain at the west end of the barn and ate pears there. Let me say I never saw an alibi labor as this one does; you can see by reading that testimony how she was away from home during the questioning. She was going to that barn on the hottest of days to get something unnecessary. I don’t say this is enough to convict her, but with Maggie’s story that she had been where she

could have committed the crime, there is something to challenge our credulity. Relation of mother and daughter. There was so little in common between the daughter and the mother that it was to Bridget the mother gave notice of her intended movement, and not to the daughter. We have it from Lizzie that her mother received a note from sick friends. Who sent it? Where did it come from? It did not come in the screen door, because Bridget was in the kitchen. Mr. Borden knew nothing about it. Lizzie says she told him. Some laughter was heard when a witness said a reporter was found sitting on the steps when the first officer arrived. I am not one who joined in that laughter, for the reporter in this case represents the anxious and agonized public, who wish to know any fact in this matter and every point of evidence, true or false. If there was any person in the world who wrote that note would he not in the interest of humanity come forward. There never was a note sent. It was a part of the whole cunning scheme, and if there had been, and the writer of it had been in the remotest corner of the world, he would certainly have come forward. It’s an easy thing to say, but it is one of those things that, when a matter becomes public property, cannot be concealed. Nobody, Your Honor, has said this family was poisoned with prussic acid. All that the Commonwealth says is that this was the first proposition. I intended to say at the outset that the crime was done as a matter of deliberate preparation. Those young men recognized her not by her voice, but recognized her and her voice. Is there any different point of view in Lizzie Borden from any other person who is accused of crime. We find here the suggestion of a motive which speaks volumes. The druggist told her plainly she couldn’t have it. Then how could this thing be done? Not by the pistol, not by the knife, not by arsenical poisoning. There was but one way of removing that woman, and that was to attack her from behind. That is a dreadful thing. It makes one’s heart bleed to think of it. But it is done. I’d rather resign my office than deal with it, but I will not flee from duty. I haven’t alluded to and I think I will not comment upon the demeanor of the defendant. It is certainly singular. While everybody is dazed there is but one person who, throughout the whole business, has not been seen to express emotion. This somewhat removes from our minds the horror of the thing which we naturally come to. Atrocious and wicked crime is laid to the door of some women. The great poet makes murderesses, and I am somewhat relieved that these facts do not point to a woman who expressed any feminine feeling. When Fleet came there she was

annoyed that any one should want to search her room for the murderer of her father and step-mother. I know there are things that have not been explained. It has been a source of immense disappointment that we have not been able to find the apron with which she must have covered her dress, and which must contain blood, just as surely as did the shoes. It is a source of regret that we have not been able to find the packet, but she had fifteen minutes in which to conceal it. This was not a crime of a moment. It was conceived in the head of a cunning, cool woman, and well has she concealed these things. If Your Honor yielded to the applause which spontaneously greeted the close of the remarks of my earnest, passionate brother, if Your Honor could but yield to the loyalty of his feelings, we would all be proud of it, and would be pleased to hear him say: ‘We will let this woman go.’ But that would be but temporary satisfaction. We are constrained to find that she has been dealing in poisonous things; that her story is absurd, and that hers and hers alone has been the opportunity for the commission of the crime. Yielding to clamor is not to be compared to that only and greatest satisfaction that of a duty well done.”