The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

But for that crime they would be enjoying the air of this day. But for that assassin many years of their life, like yours, I hope, sir, would have been before them, when the cares of life were past, when the anxieties of their daily avocation had ceased to trouble them, and together they would have gone down the hill of life serene in an old age that was happy because the happiness had been earned by a life of fidelity and toil. Over those bodies we stand, Mr. Foreman. We sometimes forget the past. Over those bodies we stand, and we say to ourselves, is it possible that this crime cannot be discovered. You are standing, as has been suggested, in the presence of death itself. It is only what comes hereafter, but it is the double death that comes before. There is a place—it is the chamber of death—where all these personal animosities, passions and prejudices have no room, where all matters of sentiment are one side, where nothing but the truth, the naked truth, finds room and lodgment. In that spirit I adjure you to enter upon the trial of this case. It is the most solemn duty of your lives. We have brought before you as fully and frankly as we could, every witness whom we thought had any knowledge of any surrounding of this transaction, I do not know of one that has been kept back.

They were not merely the officers of the police. They were the domestic of that establishment, the tried and faithful servant, and, for aught that I know or have heard, the friend of these girls to-day. They were the physician who was the first one called on the discovery of the tragedy. They are the faithful friends and companions of this defendant. And we have called them all before you and listened to what they had to say, whether it was for her or against her. Nay, we called the relative himself and had his story of what he knew in the matter, and all the people who by any possibility could have known anything about this thing we have tried to produce to you to tell all that they could tell. Then there came another class of witnesses, if I may classify them. As soon as this crime was discovered it became, Mr. Foreman, did it not, the duty of those who are intrusted with the detection of crime to take such measures as they thought were proper for the discovery of the criminal. They are officers of the police. When you go home, sir, to your family, after this long agony is over, and a crime has been committed that approaches this in magnitude, or any crime whatever, where will you go? to whom will you appeal? on whom will you rely? Upon the very men that my distinguished friend has seen fit by direction to criticise as interested in this case. He put a question the other day

which I forgave him for because it came in heat, but it illustrates what I am saying—saying to one of these officers, “speaking to you not as a police officer but as a man.” It is true they are police officers, but they are men, too. They are to find out what the truth of it is. They made many mistakes. The crime was beyond the experience of any man in this country or in this world; what wonder that they did? They left many things undone that they might have done; what wonder that they did? It was beyond the scope of any men to grasp in its entirety at that time. But honestly, faithfully, as thoroughly as God had given them ability, they pursued the various avenues by which they thought they might find the criminal. My distinguished friend has not charged in words, and it is not true that their energies have been bent to this unfortunate prisoner. It was in evidence that many things were followed up, that many trails were pursued, and I am not permitted even to tell you how many men were followed with the thought that perhaps they had something to do with this crime, how many towns and cities were investigated, and how many people were watched and followed, how many trails have been pursued. Don’t you suppose, Mr. Foreman, they would be glad to-day if it could be found that this woman did not do this thing? Is there a man so base in all this world that hopes she did it, that wants to believe she did it, that tries to believe she did it? Nay, nay, Mr. Foreman. All the evidence in this case that is entitled to great weight from the police officers came before (as I shall show you by and by) any suspicion came to them that she was connected with it. And it was only after they had investigated the facts, had gotten her stories and put them together, that the conviction forced itself upon them, as perhaps it may upon you, that there is no better explanation which will answer the facts that cannot be denied.

A blue coat does not make a man any better; it ought not to make him any worse. They are men; Mr. Fleet is a man, Mr. Mullaly is a man, Mr. Medley is a man, and they are not to be stood up in a row and characterized as good or bad because they are officers, but upon what you think of them as men. There is another thing that troubles my friends—I now include the learned advocate who opened this case as well as the distinguished counsel who closed it—and which perhaps from your ordinary and accustomed channel of thought may have troubled you. I speak of it frankly, for many honest men have been heard to say—I have heard many an honest man say, that he could not believe circumstantial evidence. And I respect the honesty of the man who says it: But, gentlemen, the

crime we are trying is a crime of an assassin. It is the work of one who does his foul deeds beyond the sight and hearing of men. All it means is this: That when one sees the crime committed or one hears the crime committed then the testimony of him that sees or hears is the testimony of a witness who saw it or heard it and is direct evidence. All other evidence is circumstantial evidence. That is the exact distinction. Did you ever hear of a murderer getting a witness to his work who could see it or hear it? Murder is the work of stealth and craft in which there are not only no witnesses, but the traces are attempted to be obliterated. What is called sometimes circumstantial evidence is nothing in the world but that presumption of circumstances, it may be one or fifty. There isn’t any chain about it: the word “chain” is a misnomer as applied to it; it is the presentation of circumstances from which one is irresistibly driven to the conclusion that crime has been committed. Talk about a chain of circumstances! When that solitary man had lived on this island for twenty years and believed that he was the only human being there and that the cannibals and savages that lived around him had not found him nor had not come to his island, he walked out one day on the beach, and there he saw the fresh print in the sand of a naked foot.

He had no lawyer to tell him that was nothing but a circumstance. He had no distinguished counsel to urge upon his fears that there was no chain about that thing which led him to a conclusion. His heart beat fast, his knees shook beneath him, he fell to the ground in fright, because Robinson Crusoe knew when he saw that circumstance that man had been there that was not himself. It was circumstantial evidence; it was nothing but circumstantial evidence, but it satisfied him. It is not a question of circumstantial evidence, Mr. Foreman; it is a question of the sufficiency of circumstantial evidence. It is like the refuse that floats upon the surface of the stream. You stand upon the banks of the river and you see a chip go by; that is only a circumstance. You see another chip go by. That is another circumstance. You see another chip in front of you going the other way. That is only another circumstance. By and by you see a hundred in the great body of the stream, all moving one way, and a dozen or two in this little eddy in front of you going the other way. The chain is not complete, some of the chips go up the stream; but you would not have any doubt, you would not hesitate for a moment, Mr. Foreman, to say that you knew which way the current of that river was, and yet you have not put your hand in the

water, and yet have only seen things from which you inferred it, and even the things themselves did not go the same way. But you had the wit and the sense and the human and common experience to observe that those that went the other way could be explained, and the great body of them went that way. Mr. Foreman, there have been very few cases of assassination in which there was direct testimony. My learned friend, the counsel, who opened this case, has culled out from the billion of cases that have been tried by juries in English-speaking countries—I think I do not exaggerate—from the thousand million of cases which have been tried upon circumstantial evidence in English-speaking countries, an instance here and an instance there where it was found, perhaps, that there was a mistake; and even those cases, with one single exception (and in that case the man never got hanged) are open to great doubt and discredit. But every lawyer knows, every man who is accustomed to the trying of cases is familiar with the fact that the testimony of men is wrong a hundred times where facts are wrong once. What impresses one as the remarkable and distinguishing feature of this case is the gradual discovery of the surprising fact that these two people did not come to their death at the same time. I have no doubt that each one of you, as you heard the stories as they came flashed over the wires, had the idea that was common to everybody who did not know anything about it, and there was nobody that did, that some man had come in, rushed through the house, killed the old gentleman, rushed upstairs and killed the old lady, and then had made his escape. But it was found that that was not so. It has been proved so conclusively that counsel do not dispute the proposition. It is scarcely worth while for me to recapitulate the evidence. I will not do it. Mr. Wixon, Mr. Pettee, who is not in any way connected with the government and holds no government office—came in there and made their explanation, and as Dr. Dedrick put it, it appeared to him—for he is a physician of experience, that the deaths were several hours apart. Dr. Dolan examined more carefully the blood and the wounds and the head, and he thought there was a difference of from an hour to an hour and a half.

But, Gentlemen, there is within us, provided by the Almighty, a clock by which the eye of science can tell the time. When a man falls into the water and drowns, his watch stops and fixes the time when he drowns; anybody can tell that. But when the human life stops, if precautionary measures are taken, as were taken in this case, a man who is skilled in the examination of these things can tell as accurately

the relative time of the death of that man as we can tell the time by that clock up there. And so we proved—ah, it was a suspicion born of consciousness and not of anything we said in this case when it was suggested that we were trying to show the poverty of the mode of her life here; there never has been a word of that on our side of the case; my learned associate did not even hint that we were going to claim there was anything mean or poverty-stricken in this family, and it never was said until my distinguished friend saw fit to defend that family from what never was charged. But for the purpose of scientific investigation which was necessary, we proved—and for no other purpose whatever—what was the breakfast of that family that morning, and that the members of it sat down and partook together. It was a good breakfast, it was the ordinary New England breakfast, and nobody has said the contrary. Do not let me be misunderstood for one single moment in this case. And for that purpose we showed you that these people sat down to breakfast at from seven to quarter past seven, and finished from half past seven to quarter of eight, and ate together and ate at the same time. They lived their lives out prematurely cut off by the hand of the assassin: their bodies lay upon the floor. Their stomachs were taken out, digestion stopped when they stopped, and were sent to the eminent, that scientific, that honest, that utterly fair man, Prof. Wood, whom my learned friends will join with me in saying is the most honest expert there is in Massachusetts to-day. He alone was able to determine accurately the time of their death, assuming that digestion went on normally within them, and he says that in all human probability the time of her death preceded his by an hour and a half; it might possibly have been a half hour less; it might possibly have been a half hour more: Singularly enough, science is corroborated by the facts. Singularly enough, everything fits into that proposition. Andrew Jackson Borden probably never heard the clock strike 11 as it pealed forth from the tower of city hall; and she was found dead with the implement with which she had been engaged in dusting the rooms at her head and close by her death. She was stricken down while she was in that morning work in which she was engaged the last time anybody saw her. And all the evidence in the case points to the irresistible conviction that when Andrew Borden was down at his accustomed place in the bank of Mr. Abraham Hart, the faithful wife he had left at home was prone in death in the chamber of the house he had left her in. At half-past nine, if we are to believe the consensus of all this testimony, the assassin met her in that room and put an end to her innocent old life.