The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

CHAPTER XXXI.
District Attorney Knowlton’s Plea.

Hosea M. Knowlton, attorney for the State, spoke as follows: May it please your honors, Mr. Foreman and you, gentlemen of the jury—Upon one common ground in this case all human men can stand together. However we may differ about many of the issues in this trial, there can be no doubt, and I do not disguise my full appreciation of the fact, that it is a most heartrending case. Whether we consider the tragedy that we are trying and the circumstances that surround it, the charge that followed it, the necessary course of the trial that has been had before you, the difficult and painful duty of the counsel upon both sides of the case, or the duty that shall finally be committed to your charge, there is that in it all which lacerates the heart strings of humanity. It was an incredible crime, incredible but for the cold and merciful facts which confront and defeat that incredulity.

There is that in the tidings of a murder that thrills the human heart to its depths. When the word passes from lip to lip and from mouth to mouth that a human life has been taken by an assassin, the stoutest hearts stop beating, lips pale and cheeks blanch, strong men grow pale with the terror of the unknown and mysterious, and if that be so with what I may, perhaps, by comparison call an ordinary assassination, what were the feelings that overpowered the community when the news of this tragedy was spread by the lightning to the ends of the world? Nay, gentlemen, I need not ask you to imagine it. You were a part of the community. It came to you in your daily avocations, it sent a thrill through your beings and you felt that life was not secure. Every man turned detective. Every act and fact and thought that occurred to the thousand, to the million men all over the United States, was spread abroad and furnished and given for the identification of the criminal, and still it remained an impenetrable mystery. My distinguished friend says, Who could have done it? The answer would have been, nobody could have done it. If you had read the account of these cold and heartless facts in any tale of

fiction before this thing had happened, would you not have said, Mr. Foreman—you would have said, That will do for a story, but such things never happen.

In the midst of the largest city of this county, in the midst of his household, surrounded by people and houses and teams and civilization, in the midst of the day, right in that household, while they were attending to their household duties in the midst of their families, an aged man and an aged woman are suddenly and brutally assassinated. It was a terrible crime. It is an impossible crime. But it was committed. And very much, very much, Mr. Foreman, of the difficulty of solving this awful tragedy starts from the very impossibility of the thing itself. Set any human being you can think of, put any degraded man or woman you ever heard of at the bar, and say to them, “You did this thing,” and it would seem incredible. And yet it was done; it was done. And I am bound to say, Mr. Foreman, and I say it out of a full heart, that it is scarcely more credible to believe the charge that followed the crime. I would not for one moment lose sight of the incredibility of that charge, nor ask you to believe it, unless you find it supported by facts that you cannot explain or deny. The prisoner at the bar is a woman, and a christian woman, as the expression is used. It is no ordinary criminal that we are trying to-day. It is one of the rank of lady, the equal of your wife and mine, of your friends and mine, of whom such things had never been suspected or dreamed before. I hope I may never forget nor in anything that I say here to-day lose sight of the terrible significance of that fact. We are trying a crime that would have been deemed impossible but for the fact that it was, and are charging with the commission of it a woman whom we would have believed incapable of doing it but for the evidence that it is my duty, my painful duty, to call to your attention. But I beg you to observe, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen, that you cannot dispose of the case upon that consideration. Alas, that it is so! But no station in life is a pledge or a security against the commission of crime, and we all know it. Those who are intrusted with the most precious savings of the widow and the orphan, who stand in the community as towers of strength and fidelity, suddenly fall, and their wreck involves the ruin of many happy homes. They were christian men, they were devout men, they were members of some christian church, they had every inducement around them to preserve the lives that they were supposed to be living, and yet, when the crash came, it was found that they were rotten to the core. Nay, Mr. Foreman, those who are installed with

the sacred robes of the church are not exempt from the lot of humanity. Time and again have we been grieved to learn, pained to find, that those who are set up to teach us the way of correct life have been found themselves to be foul as hell inside. Is youth a protection against crime. It is a matter of the history of the commonwealth that a boy of tender years was the most brutal, the most unrelenting, the most cruel, the most fiendish murderer that the commonwealth ever knew. Is sex a protection to crime? Is it not a matter of common knowledge that within the remembrance of every man I am talking to, a woman has been found who murdered a whole cart load of relatives for the sake of obtaining a miserable pittance of a fortune. Ah, gentlemen, I do not underestimate, I do not speak lightly of the strength of a christian character. Far be it from me to join in the sneers which are sometimes thoughtlessly indulged in that a man who is a good Christian is not therefore a good man. Most of them are. Many times all of them are. But they are all sons of Adam and Eve. They fall because they are human. They fall all at once because they have never been shown to the light, and their fall is all the greater because their outward lives have been pure before. I do not forget what a bulwark it is to you and me, Mr. Foreman, that we have heretofore borne a reputation that is above the suspicion of crimes and felonies. It is sometimes the only refuge of a man put in straits. But nobody is beyond the rank of men. Else would it not have been said even by the disciples themselves, “Lead not thy servant into presumptuous sins.” It was not ordained by the Saviour that the weak and the trembling and the wicked and the easily turned only should utter the prayer, lead us not into temptation. We are none of us secure. Have you led, sir, an honorable, an upright life? Thank your Heavenly Father that the temptations have not been too strong for you. Have you, sir, never been guilty of heinous crime? Is it your strength of character or is it your fortune that you have been able to resist what has been brought against you? Mr. Foreman, let me not be misunderstood. Not for one moment would I urge that because a man or a woman has led an upright and devout life that therefore there should be any reason for suspecting him or her of a crime. On the contrary, it is a buttress to the foundation, to the presumption of innocence with which we start to try anybody. I am obliged to tread now upon a more delicate ground. The prisoner is a woman, one of that sex that all high-minded men revere, that all generous men love, that all wise men acknowledge their indebtedness to. It is hard, it

is hard, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen, to conceive that woman can be guilty of crime. It is not a pleasant thing to reflect upon. But I am obliged to say what strikes the justice of every man to whom I am talking, that while we revere the sex, while we show our courtesies to them, they are human like unto us. They are no better than we; they are no worse than we. If they lack in strength and coarseness and vigor, they make up for it in cunning, in dispatch, in celerity, in ferocity. If their loves are stronger and more enduring than those of men, am I saying too much that, on the other hand, their hates are more undying, more unyielding, more persistent? We must face this case as men, not as gallants. You will be slow to believe it is within the capacity of a man to have done it. But it was done. You will be slower to believe that it was within the capacity of a woman to have done it, and I should not count you men if you did not, but it was done. It was done for a purpose. It was done by hatred. But who did it? You have been educated to believe, you are proud to recognize your loyalty, your fealty to the sex. Gentlemen, that consideration has no place under the oath you have taken. We are to find the facts. I am said to be impervious to criticism, but those who have said one thing of me may have the consolation of knowing that the shaft has struck home. When it has been said of me that in the trial of this cause, in the prosecution of this case, there entered into it anything but the spirit of duty, anything like a spirit of revenge, any unworthy motives like ambition or personal glory, if they had known how I shrank from this horrible duty, those slanderous tongues would never have uttered those words. Gentlemen, it is the saddest duty of my life—it is the saddest duty of my life. Gladly would I have shrunk from it if I could have done so and been a man. Gladly would I have yielded the office with which I have been intrusted by the votes of this district if I could have done so honorably. And if now any word I say, any evidence I state, any inference I draw, shall be done with any purpose or intent to do that woman an injustice, may my right hand wither and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. With that spirit, gentlemen, let me ask you to enter upon this case. It was a crime that may well challenge your most sober and sacred attention. That aged man, that aged woman, had gone by the noonday of their lives. They had borne the burden and heat of the day. They had accumulated a competency which they felt would carry them through the waning years of their lives, and hand and hand they expected to go down to the sunset of their days in quiet and happiness.

Hosea M. Knowlton.