The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

feeling, begotten in the heart. Show me the man that does not stand for the reputation and character of his mother, for nobody forgets that his own mother was the one he first was interested in, although he from a prattling child has never known her to remember her. Now, says Mr. Fleet, in his emphatic police manner, Miss Lizzie said to him, “She is not my mother; she is my stepmother.” Perhaps she did. We will assume she said it, but there is nothing criminal about it, or nothing that indicated it, or nothing savoring of a murderous purpose, is there? Why, Martha Chagnon, a very good looking little girl that was here a day or two ago, stepped on the stand and began to talk about Mrs. Chagnon as her stepmother. Well, I advise the city marshal to put a cordon around that house so that there will not be another murder there. Right here in your presence she spoke of her stepmother. And a good-looking woman came on the stand afterward, and I believe the blood of neither of them has been spilled since. Why, Lizzie, who undoubtedly speaks in just that positive way, when the police asked her about where she was and what she was doing, spoke positively. There are a good many people living in New England who would do the same. They know when they are insulted, and are free in expressing their minds, and sometimes do so too freely and talk too much, but we never think they are going to murder any one. Now you have got the whole thing right there in that statement, as they call it. Now, they say that Mrs. Gifford told us this. It was told on the stand. Let us have it for all it is worth. She is the cloakmaker, you remember. I do not discredit her. “Don’t say mother to me. She is a mean, good-for-nothing thing.” “I said, ‘O.’ She said, ‘I don’t have much to do with her. I stay in my room most of the time.’ And I said, ‘You come down to your meals, don’t you?’ and she said ‘Yes, but we don’t eat with them if we can help it.’” That is the whole of it. That was a year ago last March. Now, my learned friend who opened the case said that Mrs. Gifford would say that she hated her. My friend, the district attorney, who makes the argument, will take out that, will admit she did not say any such thing. You heard her story on the stand, and that was not so. Now I agree with you that Lizzie A. Borden is not a saint, and, saving your presence, I have some doubts whether all of you are saints; that is to say, whether you really never speak hurriedly or impatiently. I hope that is so for the peace of our families, but I do know good-looking men, just as good-looking as you, if you will allow me to say it, that speak sometimes in their households a little hastily and quickly, and

sometimes the daughters, too, and sometimes their fathers and mothers do. It is to be regretted that they do, but they will. Yet you don’t read of murders in those houses. There is nothing to indicate any deep-seated feeling. You will hear people speak to each other on the street in such a way that if you thought it really amounted to anything it would shock you. Now, is there anything bad about this case, where a woman like this defendant speaks openly and frankly, and says right out, “She is not my mother: she is my stepmother.” She spoke so about the man who was called a Portuguese. What did she say? “He is not a Portuguese. He is a Swede,” in just the same tone of voice. That is her way of speaking, you will find on this testimony, and she speaks right out. Now these people are not the ones who do the harm in this world. The ones who do harm are like the dog that does not make any noises about it. The dog that comes round your heels and barks is not the one that bites. It is the one that stays inside and looks serious, you will find. So it is with individuals. It is not the outspoken, blunt and hearty that do the injury. But now I do not want to trouble myself about that.

Bridget Sullivan, who lived in the family two years and nine months, who was nearer to all of them than anybody else, tells you the condition of the household. She says, though brought in constant contact with them, she never heard anything out of the way. There was no quarreling. Everything seemed cordial among them. The girls did not always go to the table. They were often out late, and I suppose they did not get down to breakfast as early as the old folks. The longer ago you were born the earlier you will probably rise now. If you were born seventy years ago, you will probably be up in the morning at 4 o’clock, and be disposed to find fault with the Creator that it cannot be summer all the time with more light and longer days. But the girls did not come until they wanted to. They had a right to do that. Bridget says she never heard a word of complaint. And mark you, that Thursday morning on which they tell you that Lizzie was entertaining that purpose or plan to murder both those people—that is, their theory is what they will undertake to satisfy you of—that Lizzie was talking to Mrs. Borden. Bridget Sullivan says: “I heard them talking together calmly, without the least trouble, everything all right.” Mr. Borden talks about the meal, and the conversation goes on in the usual way without the slightest indication of any ill-feeling. That is the way my people do at home. That is the way your family greets you in ordinary conversation.

They are waiting for you to come back just now, and they will meet you in the same way I know, and there will be no suspicion about it. O, they say, just look at her, wretch and fiend and villain that she was, she could put all this on when she had terrors unimaginable in her heart and purposes that no language could describe. Well, gentlemen, you have to judge of people according to the ordinary things. There being no proof of such purposes on her part, you will not justify yourselves in ascribing them to her. You will remember that Mrs. Raymond, the dressmaker, a lady to all appearances, came and testified of their being together a few months before, four of them being dressmaking, sitting in the guest chamber sewing, a regular dressmaking party. Philip Harrington ought to have been there and had the whole style developed to him, to learn more than he knows, if it is possible to put anything into his head on the subject. There they are. Was that an angry family? Was that a murderous group? You take another thing. You have them there, as Bridget says, and there is no evidence to the contrary; they have told you the whole thing; when Emma Borden comes on the stand to tell the inside condition of the family they will say to you that Miss Emma Borden, the sister who was away from home on a visit at this time, against whom they have not the slightest suspicion, but they will say that her sisterly affection carries her along to swing her from the truth. You’ll judge of her. I will not apologize for her. She has a right to be where her sister is. It is creditable that she does stand by her and it will take a long time for a man in his heart to say she is untruthful for telling what she does here.

She went on to say that they had trouble five or six years ago in regard to property and there was no resentment so far as Lizzie was concerned; it was all adjusted. When we get the open and unrestrained testimony of Miss Emma we are told there was trouble. The father had put in Mrs. Borden’s hands a piece of property, and she says: “we did not feel satisfied, and we told him so, and then came the word to us through another person, ‘your father is all ready to give you a property for yourselves to make it even if you will only ask for it.’” They asked for it and got it. And Emma says she never felt right about it afterward. She says up to the day of the death of Mrs. Borden she had not overlooked it, but she says as to Lizzie there never was any trouble about it—never was after that time. There is a difference between the two girls. One blurts out exactly as she feels, the other bears what she is called upon to endure in silence. You will find the same separate and distinct dispositions

often in the same family. From that time, five years, more than half of it covered by the residence of Bridget Sullivan, there is no word of any trouble or indication of anything except this remark made by Mrs. Gifford. If you take it all, what is there in it that signifies anything, enough to find the motive for these dastardly crimes?

But there is another thing: Here was an old man with two daughters, an elderly one and a younger one. They had gone on together. He was a man that wore nothing in the way of ornament or jewelry but one ring, and that ring was Lizzie’s. It had been put on many years ago when Lizzie was a little girl, and the old man wore it and it lies buried with him in the cemetery. He liked Lizzie, did he not? He loved her as his child. And the ring that stands as the pledge of plighted faith and love, that typifies the dearest relationship that is ever created in life, that ring was the bond of union between the father and the daughter. No man should be heard to say that she murdered the man that so loved her. The old-fashioned man lived in a simple way, did not care anything about the frivolities of life, was not attractive, perhaps, to some of the younger and go-ahead people, but was one who lived in his own way, had worked himself up to what would be called a fortune, had taken care of it, was then superintending its use and the income, and for all that on his little finger was that ring which belonged to his little girl. You may tell me, if you want, that the relation between that parent and child was such that alienation was complete, and wrong was the purpose of her heart, but you will not ask me to believe it. Mind you that on this question of the relations of these people there is not a word that comes from Mr. Morse of any ill-feeling, or from Miss Russell or any other living person, and so I think you will agree with me that there is not anything whatever in this assumption that the feelings were such that the defendant could have had guilty intent and worked out this guilty act. I pass. The learned district attorney, in his opening, said that there was an impassable wall built up through that house. But the moment we got at the wall, down it went, doors flew open and instead of showing a line in the house shut in and hedged in by locks, we find that Mr. Borden’s room was doubly and trebly locked, Bridget’s room was locked and Mrs. Borden’s door was locked, and you find Miss Lizzie’s room locked, as well as Emma’s, the guest chamber is locked, the parlor and sitting room—I don’t know but what everything, and that was all because there had been a burglary in the house and barn, and Mr. Borden, old-fashioned, in that he was, thought they

wanted to lock the house pretty securely. He kept a safe in that back room which kept valuables. This was locked day and night, and not a little care was given to the fastening of the doors and all parts of the house. But you see the impassable wall was not as against the two girls, but was simply a matter of protection to keep people out. If it was an impassable wall, and not to keep people out, why did they have a lock on the door to the back stairs, and why did they lock up the attics? They say she rushed in from the outside and discovered the homicide. There is no proof of that. In another place they say she did not go out of the house. They claim in one breath that she did not go to the barn and then say that she ran in and discovered the homicide. Rushed in from where, if she did not go out? But if after she discovered it, she passed in and saw the horrid sight, the testimony shows that she retreated to the side room, and got as far from it as she could. She undoubtedly dreaded an attack from the murderer who had killed her father, and she stood at the closed screen door with the open wood door behind it and shouted to Bridget. Bridget was the quickest to respond. She could not go to the front part of the house without passing the horrible sight, her dead father. Where could she go? Where would you go under the circumstances? She called for Bridget to run and get some one as quickly as she could. If she had murdered those two people do you think she would have called for Bridget as quick as that? Wouldn’t she have gone down the street or done something of that kind where she would not have been in such close proximity to the scene of this tragedy? But she went and shouted for Bridget and asked her to come down, all in the trepidation and alarm, to find Mr. Borden killed. You cannot faint away, you cannot look pale when you try to, and so when Bridget had gone this woman stood pale and trembling by that open door on that August morning. Looking over she saw Mrs. Churchill; Mrs. Churchill, too, saw her, and noticed the distress she was in, and as she stood by the closed window where she could not speak to her she hurried at once to the open window and called out, “O, Lizzie, what is the matter?”

Have you any patience with any man who will tell you that Lizzie stood at that door that morning like a marble statue, without any feeling? I have told you about Mrs. Borden. All those three people were sick in the house on Tuesday, including Lizzie. It was in August weather, and whether they had eaten something or the weather had caused it, we do not know, but the government seems

to be floundering around with the idea that because Bridget was not sick, they had been poisoned. There was talk about poison, and poison was feared in the family, because all had been made sick. Then they say for some reason, I do not know what, that Miss Lizzie went downstairs in the cellar that Thursday night. There had been people there examining the rooms and looking over the bodies, and there was water in the pitcher up in her room, and people had been washing there during the day, that Mrs. Holmes said, “If I should stay there all night I should want the slop-pail emptied.”