The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

Upon the fourth day of August of the last year, an old man and woman, husband and wife, each without a known enemy in the world, in their own home, upon a frequented street in the most populous city in this county, under the light of day and in the midst of its activities, were, first one, then, after an interval of an hour, another, severally killed by unlawful human agency. To-day, a woman of good social position, of hitherto unquestioned character, a member of a Christian church and active in its good works, the own daughter of one of the victims, is at the bar of this court accused by the Grand Jury of this county of these crimes. There is no language, gentlemen, at my command, which can better measure the solemn importance of the inquiry which you are about to begin than this simple statement of facts. For the sake of these crimes and for the sake of these accusations, every man may well pause at the threshold of this trial and carefully search his understanding and conscience for any vestige of prejudice, and, finding it, cast it aside as an unclean thing. It is my purpose, gentlemen, and it is my duty to state to you at this time so much of the history of the cause and so much of the evidence which is to be introduced upon this trial as shall best enable you to understand the claim of the Government and to appreciate the force and application of the testimony as it comes from the witnesses on the stand. It is my purpose to do that in the plainest, simplest and most direct manner. And it is not my purpose to weary you with a recital of all the details of the evidence which is to come before you. Andrew Jackson Borden, the person named in the second part of the indictment, was at the time of his death a man of considerable property—somewhere, I believe, between $250,000 and $300,000. He had been retired from business for a number of years. He was a man who had obtained his fortune by earning and saving, and he retained the habit of saving up to the time of his death; and it will appear in the course of this trial that the family establishment was upon what might well be called, for a person in his circumstances, a narrow scale. He had been twice married. The first wife died some twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before he died, leaving two children, now alive—the prisoner at the bar, Lizzie

Andrew Borden, the younger, and then somewhere between two and three years of age, a sister, Miss Emma Borden, being a woman at the present time in the neighborhood of ten years older than the prisoner. Not long after the death of the first wife Andrew Borden married again a woman whose maiden name, I believe, was Abby Durfee Gray. The marriage, I believe, was something over twenty-five years before the time of their deaths, and there was no issue of the second marriage, at least none living and none that I have been informed of at any time. Abby Durfee Borden, at the time of her death, was about six years younger than her husband, and that would make her, of course, sixty-four years of age. Mr. Borden, I may say here, was a spare, thin man and somewhat tall. Mrs. Borden was a short, fat woman, weighing, I believe, in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds. The house in which these homicides were committed had been occupied by the Borden family for some twenty years. I shall have occasion to consider its construction and its relation to other buildings and streets later on in the course of this opening. There was, or came to be, between the prisoner and her stepmother, an unkindly feeling. From the nature of the case, from the fact that those who know the most about that feeling, except the prisoner at the bar, are dead, it will be impossible for us at this hearing to get anything more than suggestive glimpses of that feeling. It will appear that some five years before the death of Mr. and Mrs. Borden some controversy had arisen about some property, not important in itself. Mr. Borden had seen fit to do some benefaction for a relative of Mrs. Borden, and in consequence of that fact the daughters thought that something should be done for them by way of pecuniary provision as an offset. The details of what happened at that time are, as I have said, by no means important. It is significant, however, that enough of feeling has been created by the discussion which arose to cause a change in the relations between the prisoner and Mrs. Borden. Up to that time she had addressed her stepmother as “mother.” From that time she substantially ceased to do so. We shall show to you that the spring before these homicides, upon some occasion where a talk arose between the prisoner and a person who did the cloak making for the family, the latter spoke of Mrs. Borden as “mother.” The prisoner at once repudiated that relation and said, “Don’t call her mother. She is a mean thing, and we hate her. We have as little to do with her as possible.” “Well, don’t you have your meals with her?” “Yes, we do sometimes; but we try not to, and a great many times we wait until they

are over with their meals, and we stay in our own rooms as much as possible.” I know of nothing that will appear in this case more significant of the feeling that existed between Mrs. Borden and the prisoner than a little incident which occurred not long after the discovery of these homicides. When one of the officers of the law, while the father and the step-mother lay at the very place where they had fallen under the blows of the assassin, was seeking information from the prisoner, he said, “When did you last see your mother?” “She is not my mother. My mother is dead.” You cannot fail, I think, to be impressed in this respect with what will appear as to the method of living of this family. It will appear later on in the evidence that, although they occupied the same household, there was built up between them by locks and bolts and bars almost an impassable wall. In the early part of August of last year the older daughter, Miss Emma, was away, I believe at Fairhaven at the time. When Miss Emma was away the household that was left consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Borden and a servant, who had been in the service of the family nearly three years, Bridget Sullivan, and the prisoner. Upon the day preceding the homicides, John V. Morse, a brother of Mr. Borden’s first wife, and, therefore, the uncle of his daughters, came upon a visit, or a passing visit, to the Bordens. The homicides, I may say now, were upon a Thursday, and the visit of Mr. Morse was on Wednesday. He came a little after the completion of the dinner; went away, I think, during the afternoon, returned in the evening and slept at the house upon the Wednesday night. Upon Tuesday night, Tuesday, August 2, an illness occurred in the household. Mr. and Mrs. Borden were taken suddenly ill with a violent retching and vomiting sickness, and it is said to a less degree the prisoner herself was affected by this illness. Bridget Sullivan was not. Upon the Wednesday morning Mr. and Mrs. Borden rose, feeling, of course, in the condition that people would be in after a night of that character, and Mrs. Borden consulted a physician with reference to her condition. Upon the noon of Wednesday, which you will keep in mind was the very day before these homicides, the prisoner went to a drug store in Fall River, the situation of which will be pointed out to you, and there asked the clerk for ten cents worth of prussic acid for the purpose of cleaning a sealskin cape. She was told that that was a poison which was not sold except on the prescription of a physician, and after some little talk went away. I think, gentlemen, you will be satisfied that there can be no question that the person who made this application for

this deadly poison was the prisoner. There were three persons in the drug store, two of whom knew her by name and sight; one of these, too, knew her as the daughter of Andrew J. Borden, and the third recognized her at once as he saw her.

New Bedford Court House (outside).

New Bedford Court House (inside).

On the evening of the Wednesday the prisoner made a call, not in itself unusual or peculiar, upon a friend of hers, Miss Alice Russell, and we shall commend to your careful attention what occurred during that interview. It will appear that the prisoner had been intending to spend a vacation with a party of her friends at Marion, and had made some arrangements about going to Marion, and the talk between the two friends started upon that topic. The prisoner said: “I have made up my mind, Alice, to take your advice and go to Marion, and I have written there to them that I shall go, but I cannot help feeling depressed; I cannot help feeling that something is going to happen to me; I cannot shake it off. Last night,” she said, “we were all sick; Mr. and Mrs. Borden were quite sick and vomited; I did not vomit, and we are afraid that we have been poisoned; the girl did not eat the baker’s bread and we did, and we think it may have been the baker’s bread.” “No.” said Miss Russell. “If it had been that some other people would have been sick in the same way.” “Well, it might have been the milk; our milk is left outside upon the steps.” “What time is your milk left?” “At 4 o’clock in the morning.” “It is light then, and no one would dare to come in and touch it at that time.” “Well,” said the prisoner, “probably that is so. But father has been having so much trouble with those with whom he has dealings that I am afraid some of them will do something to him. I expect nothing but that the building will be burned down over our heads. The barn has been broken into twice.” “That,” said Miss Russell “was merely boys after pigeons.” “Well, the house has been broken into in broad daylight when Maggie and Emma and I were the only ones in the house. I saw a man the other night when I went home lurking about the buildings, and as I came he jumped and ran away. Father had trouble with a man the other day about a store. There were angry words, and he turned him out of the house.” And so the talk went. That, I beg you to keep in your minds, was with Miss Russell—Alice M. Russell. There comes now the most difficult duty which I have in this opening. I am consoled, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen, by the fact that you will be aided beyond any explanation that I give you by a view of these premises that I am about to explain. I hope I shall be able, even without the view, to

make myself entirely intelligible to you, because no one can understand this testimony that is to come and rightly reason upon it without an exact knowledge of the interior and exterior of that house. In the first place, I may say that the house occupied by this family was a common type of house in this community and in this State, a house with the end to the street and the front door upon the end. It was a rectangular house. It was situated upon Second street in Fall River, which is one of the most frequented streets outside of the main thoroughfares in the city, and is within, as all probably know, a very short distance of the City Hall. It may fairly be called a thoroughfare as well for foot passengers as for carriages. It is a street used partly for residences and partly for business purposes. Second Street runs substantially north and south. It is a street which ascends toward the south. The higher part is south, the lower part is north, and upon the east side of Second Street this house is situated. At the south of the house is the residence of Dr. Kelly, and also very near the house. To the north of the house, and also near it, is the residence occupied by Mrs. Churchill, and diagonally in the rear of the house is the residence occupied by Dr. Chagnon. The house is separated from the sidewalk by a wooden fence, a picket fence, with two gates and in the rear of the yard, in which is situated a barn, there is a high board fence, on the top and the bottom of which there was at the time, and is, I believe, now, a line of barbed wire. There are three exterior doors, three entrances to these premises, and only three, excepting of course, the windows. There is the front door leading directly from the sidewalk up a pair of steps into the hall. There is a side door upon the north side, facing Mrs. Churchill’s house, leading into a small entryway which leads into the kitchen. There is a third door exactly in the rear of the house, which leads down to the cellar. There is what might be called a porch, and a door leading into it, as you will see. As you enter the front door you enter a hall, from which lead two doors, a door into a parlor, which is the front room in the house, making the northwest corner of the first story, a door leading into the sitting room, and a stairway leading upstairs. Let us, in the first place, go upstairs and see the arrangements there. It will aid us in considering this arrangement to remember that this house was originally a double tenement house, and with the slight exception that I shall refer to later on, the arrangement as it is upstairs is as it is upon the first story. As you are about to see the premises, gentlemen, I do not deem it wise to detain you at the present time by explaining this