The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

May it Please Your Honors, Mr. Foreman and Gentlemen—One of the most dastardly and diabolical of crimes that was ever committed in Massachusetts was perpetrated in August, 1892, in the city of Fall River. The enormity of it startled everybody, and set all into diligent inquiry as to the perpetrator of such terrible acts. Our society is so constituted, gentlemen, that every man feels that the right must be done and the wrong punished and the wicked doer brought to his account as promptly as due procedure of law will permit. Here, then, was a crime with all its horrors, and well may those who stood first to look at the victims have felt sickened and distressed at heart, and human nature be broken so that the experience of a lifetime will never bring other such pictures. “Who could have done such an act?” says everybody. In the quiet of home, in the broad light of an August day, upon a street of a populous city, with houses within a stone’s throw, nay, almost within touch, who could have done it? Inspection of the victims disclosed that Mrs. Borden had been slain by the use of some sharp and terrible instrument, inflicting upon her head eighteen blows, thirteen of them crushing through the skull; and below, lying upon the sofa, was Mr. Borden’s dead and mutilated body, with eleven strokes upon the head, four of them crushing the skull. The terrors of those scenes no language can portray. The horrors of that moment we can all fail to describe. And so we are charged at once, at the outset, to find somebody that is equal to that enormity, whose heart is blackened with depravity, whose whole life is a tissue of crime, whose past is a prophecy of that present. A maniac or fiend we say. Not a man in his senses and who has heart right, but one of those abnormal productions that deity creates or suffers, a lunatic or a devil. So do we measure the degree of character or want of it, that could possibly prompt a human being to such acts. They were well-directed blows. They were not

the result of blundering. They were aimed steadily and constantly for a purpose, each one finding its place where it was aimed, and none going amiss on the one side or the other. Surely we are prompted to say at the outset that the perpetrator of that act knew how to handle the instrument, was experienced in its control, had directed it before or others like it, and it was not the sudden, untrained doing of somebody who had been unfamiliar with such implements. Now, suspicion began to fall here and there. Everybody about there was called to account so far as could be. That is proper. That is right and necessary. Investigation proceeds. The police intervene. They form their theories. They proceed to act. They concern this one and that one. They follow out this and that clew. They are human only. When once a theory possesses our minds you know how tenaciously it holds the place, and how slow the mind is to find lodgment in something else. Now, no decent man complains of investigation. No one says there ought not to have been anything done. Everything ought to have been done. Nay, more, we say everything was not done and that the proper pursuit was not taken. Now, proceed with this matter a little and let us see how it stands. A person is charged with a crime, like this defendant, suspicions surround her, investigations in regard to her proceed, and inevitably, naturally, if the matter is deemed of consequence, she is brought before the court, the district court in that instance, to have an examination preliminary into the probabilities of the crime on her part. Then if she, having nothing to do with it, having no control of it, having no opportunity to accept, to be heard, be bound and compelled to answer to this court, what then? Then the grand jury of the county is called together and sits by itself under the direction of the district attorney, to investigate and see whether it ought to come before a jury like yourselves. Now remember that at that time, and when this indictment of last December was framed, this defendant had no voice, it was purely one sided. They said, “We make this charge, serious as it is, against the defendant. We will ask her to come to the Bristol county court house and meet that charge, and if we cannot prove it against her in the ordinary way she shall go free: she is not guilty.”

Now, that is one sided up to that point, practically, and so you are to draw no inference whatever, and I know you will not; you will draw no inference whatever as against this defendant until you have heard the evidence in this case, in this court room, at this time. You have nothing to do with what was done in Fall River any more

than you have with what is now proceeding in Australia. The finding of Judge Blaisdell of the district court in Fall River, worthy man as he may be, is of no sort of consequence here, and has no sort of influence or obligation over you. We would not be safe if in these great crises our lives hung upon the decision of a single man in a prejudiced and excited community. No, we walk away from Fall River, we come down to the broad seashore, we sniff the breezes of the sea, and here is freedom, here is right, here are you, gentlemen. I say, then, at the outset, as you begin to contemplate this crime and its possible perpetration by the defendant, you must conclude at the outset that such acts as those are morally and physically impossible for this young woman defendant. To foully murder her stepmother, and then go straightway and slay her own father is a wreck of human morals; it is a contradiction of her physical capacity and her character. Now, before I pass, let me say that this defendant complains of no prosecution on the part of the district attorney of this district. He has only one duty, and that is, as a gentleman and lawyer, to conduct this investigation so that the truth as to her may be elicited. With his well-earned reputation and his high standing at the bar he would have no need to search for laurels for his fame, and he is one of the last men that would demean himself so as even to think of it. He stands above the miserable assertions that unthinking people will make, and he walks into this court room only as the representative of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, that is, yours and mine and his, and says: Gentlemen, all I have to show you is the case we have against this woman. And if the case I have brought to me by the Fall River police is not sufficient, or you have any doubt about it, he will say, if he speaks what his heart prompts him to utter, he will say, “For God’s sake, say so, like men, and Bristol county will be the happier and the securer afterward.” He is not here for blood, neither is he helped to such dishonorable work, if it were attempted, by our excellent friend, the district attorney from the great county of Essex, one of our best and most reliable lawyers. So you will see no small play, you will see no mean tactics on the part of the commonwealth here, but only a presentation not overstrained in one jot or one tittle, a presentation of what has been proven here, and only that. So merciful is our provision of the law that a defendant shall have a decent chance that she becomes convinced how faithfully that is carried out when she recalls the numerous kindnesses and considerations on the part of the sheriff of this county. He has done with her, not as a convicted criminal, but as a young woman of his county,

entitled to her rights, guaranteed to her in the constitution and laws of our State. And so she comes into this court, presided over by our best of the judiciary, clean, able, honorable gentlemen, who sit vigilantly upon the bench to guard against any possible wrong, who want the commonwealth’s case tried, but the defendant to pass without abuse or wrong, and taking the law into your hands as they will give it to you, you have only to deal with the facts. I said the case was brought to the district attorney by the Fall River police. I have not time to go into sarcasm or denunciation of those gentlemen. They are like a great many bodies of police that you find in all communities. Policemen are human, made out of men, and nothing else, and the blue coat and the brass buttons only cover the kind of a man that is inside. And you do not get the greatest ability in the world inside a policeman’s coat. You may perhaps get what you want, and what is sufficient, but you must only call upon him for such services as he can render. Now, when a police officer undertakes to investigate a crime, he is possessed and saturated with the thoughts and experiences he has with bad people. He is drifting and turning in the way of finding a criminal, magnifying this, minimizing that, throwing himself on this side in order to catch somebody, standing before a community that demands the detection and punishment of the criminal, blamed if he does not get somebody into the lockup before morning. “What are the police doing?” says the newspaper, and the newspapers, you know, are not always right, mostly. Saying to him: “Look here, Mr. Marshal, these murders were committed yesterday and we haven’t a murderer in the lockup. Get somebody in.” Now they are sensitive to all those expressions. Naturally policemen, feeling the responsibility of their office, must go there and do just such work as that, in that way. That can only be expected of them. And when they come upon the witness stand they reveal their weakness, do they not? They knock their own heads together. They make themselves, as a body of men, ridiculous, insisting that a defendant shall know everything that was done on a particular time, shall account for every moment of that time, shall tell it three or four times alike, shall never waver or quiver, shall have tears, or not have tears, shall make no mistakes. But they, stripped of their blue clothes, and in their citizens’ garb, show themselves to be only men here, and liable to human infirmities and errors. Now I dismiss them without any unpleasant reflection. I will talk about them a little later on: but I have nothing to say now, any more than this, that you must not ask of them more than they ought to give, you must not be

surprised that they fail even of the standard that they set up for everybody else. So I say to you, as a distinguished advocate in a similar cause expressed himself to the jury: This defendant comes before you perfectly satisfied that the jury is the most refreshing prospect in the eye of accused innocence ever met in human tribunal. Who are you twelve men, and how came you here? Selected out of one hundred and fifty men that were drawn from the body of this county, passing the gauntlet of criticism and objections put upon you by the court or the attorneys, you are sworn here in this cause. Who are you? Men: Bristol county men. Men with hearts and men with heads, with souls, and men with rights. You come here in obedience to the laws that we prescribe for the orderly administration of our courts. You come here because, in answer to the demand, you feel that you must render this great service, unpleasant and trying as it may be, exhaustive as are its labors; you come here because you are loyal men to the State. Nay, more. You are out of families, you come from firesides, you are members of households, you have wives and daughters and sisters and you have had mothers, you recognize the bond that unites and the flash that plays throughout the households. Now bring your hearts and your homes and your intellects here and let us talk to you as men, not as unmeaning things.

The clerk swore you to your duty, and perhaps you did not hear that oath so closely as I did. But I heard him say, “You shall well and truly try and true deliverance make between the commonwealth and the defendant, whom you shall have in charge.” In no case except a capital case is the oath offered in that way—“whom you shall have in charge.” And Lizzie Andrew Borden from the days when we opened this trial until this hour, has been in your charge, gentlemen. That is the oath you took. And not alone with you, Mr. Foreman, or any one of you, but with each and all of you. You have her in charge. Now has come the time when not alone her lawyers are to speak for her, not alone the judges are to watch for protection, not alone is the learned attorney of the commonwealth to ask no more than he ought to have, but the twelve men who sit here to try this question take the woman in this charge, and the commonwealth says, “We intrust her to you.” Now that is your duty. She is not a horse, she is not a house, she is not a parcel of land, she is not the property of anybody, but she is a free, intelligent, thinking, innocent woman, in your charge. I noticed one day as we were proceeding with this trial, a little scene that struck me forcibly. It was one morning as the court was about to open, when you were coming

into your seats and standing there and the judges were passing to the bench to take their positions and the defendant was asked to pass around from the place where she now sits in order that she might come in so as to be near her counsel, and right at that moment of transition she stood here waiting between the court and the jury; and waited in her quietness and calmness until it was time for her properly to come forward. It flashed through my mind in a minute; there she stands protected, watched over, kept in charge by the judges of this court and by the jury who have her in charge.

If the little sparrow does not fall unnoticed to the ground, indeed, in God’s great providence this woman has not been alone in this court room, but ever shielded by his providence from above and by the sympathy and watchful care of those who have her to look after. You are trying a capital case, a case that involves a human life, a verdict in which against her calls for the imposition of but one penalty, and that is that she shall walk to her death. You are then to say, “I will critically consider this question, and I will make no mistake, because if I do, no power on earth or in heaven can right the wrong.” You come here without prejudice or bias, I take it. You said you did. I believed you. I believe you now. You said that though you might have read about this transaction, you might have formed an opinion, might have expressed an opinion, as I think some of you with perfect honesty said, because in this intelligent age people do think and read and talk, and it is all right they should, but when a man is big enough to walk up and say in answer to the questions the chief justice put to him, “I have read and thought and judged about it, and I stand up here now, and before my God and my people, say I will find a true verdict on the evidence under the law.” That is a man we all want to see in the jury box. I would rather see him there than to have one of these miserable pieces of putty on whom the last man who stuck his finger into him can make an impression. You will need at the outset, gentlemen, to dismiss from your minds entirely everything that the press ever said about the case, anything that your neighbors have ever said about it, anything that you have ever heard about it except in this court room at this time. Every rumor, every idle tale or every true tale that has been told you must banish from your minds absolutely and forever. Why, gentlemen, if we were to try the case on the street we need not have spent these days and you would have been enjoying your entire freedom like the rest of us, you would not have been prisoners yourselves. But we are not trying the case in this way. And so certainly, I believe, does the

court guard it, that you are shut off from reading the newspapers, from having communications, from indulging in conversation about the case during the progress of the trial. What use in taking these precautions if you are all coming in with your heads brim full of what you have heard before and will not give that up? Now every man of you is man enough to say, when you go to the jury room to deliberate on this thing, and somebody presents an idea. “Well, that is not in this case. You have no right to consider any such thing. You have no more right to do it than you have to take a knife and cut this woman’s throat”—I mean under your duties as prescribed by the law. Then you come here patiently day after day, and you will sit here again and again until this case is concluded, and then proceed with your deliberation with that calmness and fidelity that is guaranteed in the expression of your countenance.