EX-GOVERNOR ROBINSON.
EX-GOVERNOR ROBINSON.
EX-GOVERNOR ROBINSON.
Then he said that he had searched for it, Dr. Bowen; it is Miss Russell telling it, and at any rate she says what was said about that was said in the presence of Lizzie and “the same person said she must have burned it?” “I think I answered that question.” That is Miss Russell. Well now you get nothing from the officers, merely that Mr. Fleet learned from Miss Lizzie that Mrs. Borden had a note and had gone out. Officer Wilson says the same thing, that she said she had received a note and that she thought she had gone out. That was after the murder, and she said that Mrs. Borden had a note and she thought she had gone out, that is during the forenoon she thought she had gone out. Dr. Dolan says the same thing, so that when you come to consider it you see that the evidence in regard to the note comes from what was told at the very first. If you believe that Mrs. Borden told both Lizzie and Bridget about the note it all looks plain. And why should it not? They were all in the family there together, and she receives a note to go out, and she did have the note, or else they both tell something that Mrs. Borden told that was not true, and we are not going to believe that. Taking the evidence that comes from the living and that drops from the lips ofthe dead, you must find that Mrs. Borden did have the note and that she told the two women about it and hurried off, as they thought, and did not tell Bridget or either one of them where she was going. It was not of any great account probably. She got a note to go out, and see a woman, and did go out, as far as we learn to the contrary. It was a natural and ordinary thing, and the note was thrown away and tossed into the fire. It was not a bank note to be kept, but a little scrap of paper probably indicating what was wanted. Now, a person may say “Where is the note?” Well, we would be very glad to see it, very glad. They looked after it and they could not find it. The construction of Miss Russell was that she had burned it up. Very likely that was it. They say that nobody has come forward to say that she has sent it. That is true. You will find men now, perhaps living in this county, who do not know that this trial is going on. They do not know anything about it, don’t pay much attention to it, they are about their own business: do not consider it of any consequence. And after a lawsuit, it very often happens in every court room that some one will come forward and say, “Well, if I had really known that that question was in dispute, I could have told you all about it.” Bless his dear heart, why didn’t he come out of the cellar so we could see him? Well, sometimes people don’t want to have anything to do with it. They don’t want to get into the court room, even if a life is in danger—women especially; they have a dread of all sorts of things. The note may have been a part of the scheme in regard to Mrs. Borden. It may have got there through foul means and with a criminal purpose. We don’t know anything about it. But that a note came there on this evidence you cannot question. That Lizzie lied about it is a wrongful aspersion, born out of the ignorance of the facts as they were to be developed in this case, not with a purpose to wrong her but mis-stating the evidence as we all do when we do not know quite what is coming, really anticipating something that is not proven. So I say that it is not true that Lizzie told a lie about it. If she did Bridget did the same. I would not say that for a minute. There is nothing to connect Bridget with this transaction. See how quickly you would suspect anybody because you get them under pressure. Now look at it. Suppose that Bridget were suspected of this crime, and Mrs. Churchill came forward and told that Bridget said these words that I read, how quick some people would be to say, “O, Bridget!” “She did it. She did it because she told a lie about that note.” Do you see it? It is plain, it is a demonstration. Now I dismiss it with the remark that nobody thinksthat Bridget Sullivan had anything to do with this crime at all. Lizzie does not think so, because she has said so openly. Now she told about her visit out to the barn they say. She told the officers that she went out to the barn; went out in the yard, some twenty or thirty minutes. Now remember that we get this information in regard to the time from the police officers. The others tell us that she said she went to the yard and the barn. It takes assistant marshal Fleet here to tell us about the thirty minutes. You see him. You see the set of that moustache and the firmness of those lips and the distinction he wrought in the court room telling that story.
And there he was, up in this young woman’s room in the afternoon, attended with some other officers, plying her with all sorts of questions in a pretty direct and peremptory way, saying to her: “You said thirty minutes, and now you say twenty minutes: which way will you have it?” Is that the way for an officer of the law to deal with a woman in her own house? What would you do with a man—I don’t care if he had blue on him—that got into your house and was talking to your wife or daughter in that way? You would do just what Marshal Hilliard did with Caldwell, get him out. That is the way to do. Recollect that this was after the tragedies, this was when the terrible pall was over that house and the neighborhood, and an officer should be pretty careful. Recollect that the air was full of policemen at that time; they were running all over that house, putting her to every possible strain, asking her in her loneliness, her absence from any friend, her sister gone—following her up in this way, insinuating in that way and talking to her as if she were a liar. Well I can tell the truth and behave pretty well, if a man treats me decently, but I want to get him out if he talks to me as a liar to begin with. Now she told about her visit to the barn, and they undertake to tell you that she did not go out to the barn. Now let us see about it. They say that it’s another lie. We have got so we know what the small words in the English language mean in the idea of the commonwealth. We can get rid of three letters pretty quick, but you cannot dispose of the facts. Now, let’s see about that. Did she go to the yard or the barn? She told them she did, and they bring it in here, and they say she could not have gone to the yard or the barn. Now let us see whether she did or not. If she did not go out to the yard or the barn then she was there upon her own showing at the time when the murder of her father was committed. You see that. That will end the case if you see it. Now, Bridget Sullivan said: “I went right over to Dr. Bowen’s and when I came back Iasked her, ‘Miss Lizzie, where was you?’ I says ‘Didn’t I leave the screen door hooked?’ She says, ‘I was out in the back yard and heard a groan and came in and the screen door was open.’”
I am going to talk about going to the barn, and by and by talk about the groan—take them separately. Now, she says that she went into the yard. You understand? What did they have in the yard? Pear trees. That is the evidence, and the evidence that in the partially digested contents of the stomachs pear skins were found. Bridget says Mr. Borden had been out and had brought in a basket of pears and they had these in abundance. You saw the trees; the neighbors saw the trees; Patrick McGowan saw them and got in one of them and helped himself. We know that there is no lie about it. This was an August morning, and it appeared that before this time Lizzie had been ironing, had been around the kitchen trying to iron some handkerchiefs. No doubt about that. She had been in and out about her work. She tells us she has been out in the yard. That was true, we will say, upon that statement. Now, Dr. Bowen said, “where have you been?” Her reply was, “in the barn, looking for some irons,” or “iron.” Both can be reasonably true, can’t they? She could not get into the barn unless she went into the yard, naturally, and that she should stop there by the trees five or ten minutes is perfectly consistent. Does that look unreasonable? Do you not see families out in the yard, strolling about in your own yards, stopping under the trees, sitting under the trees, especially when they have a right to have a little leisure. Mrs. Churchill says, “I stepped inside the screen door, and she was sitting on the second stair, at the right of the door. I put my right hand on her arm, and said, ‘O Lizzie.’ I then said: ‘Where is your father?’ She said, ‘In the sitting room,’ and I said, ‘Where were you when it happened?’ and said she, ‘I went to the barn to get a piece of iron.’” Miss Russell says, “she told about going to the barn, she says she went to the barn, she told us when she came in she saw her father, and he was killed.” “Did she say anything about why she went to the barn?” “Not until I asked her.” “State what you asked her and what she replied?” “I said ‘What did you go to the barn for, Lizzie?’ and she said, ‘I went to get a piece of tin or iron to fix my screen.’” “Did she refer to any screen in particular, or simply ’my screen?’” “My screen.”
Now, Mr. Fleet told us that she went into the dining room, she said that her father lay down and that she went out into the barn: and he brings in the half-hour—he is the only one that does. And then he goes there and talks to her about it, as to whether she means ahalf-hour or twenty minutes. Now just listen to this man. Recollect when this was, Thursday afternoon. Recollect he is the same man that said “Dr Bowen was holding the door on him—holding the fort.” Think of it. And Mrs. Holmes and Dr. Bowen and Miss Russell tell you, and Wilson, the officer who went with him, comes right up here and says there was not the slightest resistance, that he knocked at the door, and just as soon as Dr. Bowen could ask them if they were ready to have the officers come in, and I am sure that was perfectly proper—they were admitted without any trouble. Now this man Fleet was troubled, and he was ascent for a job. He was ferreting out a crime. He had a theory. He was a detective. And so he says, “You said this morning you were up in the barn for half an hour. Will you say that now?” I think the man impertinent. I beg your pardon, the defendant thinks he was: thinks he was impertinent. She said, “I do not say half an hour; I say twenty minutes to half an hour.” “Well, we will call it twenty minutes then.” Much obliged to him. He was ready to call it twenty minutes, was he? What a favor that was; now Lizzie has some sense of her own, and she says, “I say from twenty minutes to half an hour, sir?” He had not awed her into silence. She still breathed although he was there. Think about a woman saying something, ordering something in the presence of a man who talks that way to her, under such circumstances. Mr. Harrington states that she said to him that she was there about twenty minutes. He asks her whether she would not have heard the opening or closing of the door. Why not? “You were but a short distance away, and you would have heard the noise if any was made.” But Bridget said she did not hear the screen door shut at all and she said she would not hear it in her room, and never heard it when it shut unless somebody slammed it or was careless about it. You remember that.
Now you see there is no inference to be drawn from the fact that Miss Lizzie did not hear it when she was in the barn or in the yard for that matter. And you recollect how the side door stands with reference to the yard. That when a person is out around the corner, under the pear tree, or even under the first pear tree that stood from the south door to the barn, he cannot see up to that door because of that jog. So that if she was even out under that pear tree anybody could have passed in or out that side door without her hearing him, much more if she were in the barn, either upstairs or down stairs. Wilson has told us that she said, “twenty minutes to half an hour.” He was there with Fleet. Medley says, “She says she was upstairs inthe barn—I am not positive as to the stairs part, she was up in the barn.” Now take that, is there anything unnatural or improbable in her going to the barn for anything she wanted? She was, you will say, a person who was free to go about, and did go about, and went in the natural call of things that she was going to do. You have heard talk of the party at Marion, and you know where it is better than I do, but I suspect from what has been said about it that it is somewhere near the water and where the fish swim, and it would not be strange if a party of women were going there, they would try to catch something—I mean fish; and when they got there they would want something to catch fish with. Perhaps they do; that is the way we bob around for fish up in the country. We don’t have much to do with seafish, but isn’t that common? She said she wanted some lead for sinkers. She also said she wanted something to fix the screen. Perhaps she had both things in her mind. It is perfectly natural. She wanted a piece of tin or iron to fix the screen. If she had set out to be this arch criminal that they claim, she would have had it all set down in her mind so that she would tell it every time just the same, line for line and dot for dot. He had to stay in the court room until the other fellow was heard to hold him. We had twins here; they didn’t look alike. We kept them here; that is Mr. Mullaly.
Now you are going to say, gentlemen, whether you believe Mr. Lobinsky, who stands uncontradicted and undisputed, or believe another man who is fully contradicted by a man with him who was his own associate in the police court. Now, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen, the government knew where Mr. Lobinsky was, and that was at the tinshop of Mr. Wilkinson. They knew where he was. And they knew, too, that Lobinsky’s horse was kept at Mr. Gardner’s stable on Second street, corner of Rodman, and they could have found whether Lobinsky had left the stable at 11 o’clock or10:30. But we have not troubled them to do that. Mr. Gardner, who owns the stable has told his own story, and has he not told you that Lobinsky’s statement is correct, that he did not leave the stable until after 11 o’clock? He testified that that was because other teams were to be hitched up to go ahead of Lobinsky, and he was late, so that he did not get away until 11 or five minutes past 11 o’clock. My friend Knowlton in cross-examining him wanted to know whether he told the time on his watch by the long hand or the short hand. But that is all right. Its good practice, but it is no test. Gardner remembers it, and gives it, even, but Lobinsky didnot have the watch. He told us what time he left and the time he was passing by the yard on Second street. And then we have Mr. Newhall, a man from Worcester, who happened to be there; he comes here and tells you he went along the street, and he fixes the time by the hour that he went to the bank, and the places where he was that morning, and you have these three men that hold it down to the time I refer to, that is10:30o’clock. Is it not fair to say Mr. Mullaly is mistaken, to say the least? Then if they want to find anything more about it, we land Mr. Douglass in this case, who was there at the time, in Fall River. They knew about it and they could have proved about it and they know it was as we say, and yet they did not try to prove it. They say a story is true because told all times alike, but those of us that have dealings with witnesses in court know that witnesses that tell the truth often have slight variations in their stories and we have learned to suspect the ones that get off their testimony like parrots, as if they had learned it by heart. Honest people are not particular about punctuation and prepositions all the time. Now did she go to the barn? She says she did and her statement is entitled to credit as she gave it on the spot the moment when Bridget was upstairs and might know about it. Did she go to the barn? Well, we find she did, find it by independent, outside witnesses, thanks to somebody who saw her. Possibly this life of hers is saved by the observation of a passenger on the street. There comes along a pedler, an ice cream man, known to everybody in Fall River. He is not a distinguished lawyer or a great minister or a successful doctor. He is only an ice cream pedler, but he knows what an oath is, and he tells the truth about it, and he says he passed down that street that morning, and as he passed right along it was at a time when, he says, he saw a woman, not Bridget Sullivan whom he knew, coming along, walking slowly round the corner just before she would ascend those side steps. Now there was no other woman alive in the house except Bridget and Lizzie at that time. He knew it was not Bridget by the best instinct, because he had sold her ice cream and he knew her. He says “it was the other woman whom I had never sold ice cream.” Recollect, that was Lizzie or some stranger in the yard. You will say undoubtedly it was Lizzie as she comes back from the barn. It may be asked why did he look in. I say because anyone might do so. They say Lizzie must have looked under the bed. I say Lubinsky must have looked into the yard. He was an enterprising young man, he was looking for business because he has sold ice cream there before, and therefore,he noticed the yard. Now is that something he remembers today and comes up here to tell about or anybody has brought him to tell about? Nobody will make that insinuation in regard to the defendant. Was he got to tell it? Let us see. He told it on the8thof August to the police, and they had it all in their possession. Now, that is not a yarn made up for the occasion at all, and the only sort of conflict about it is attempted in this way, not to dispute it but to admit or say that Mr. Lubinsky is mistaken about a half-hour of time.
Mr. Mullaly is one of the knights of the handle, you know. You know who he is—Mr. Mullaly. Mr. Mullaly comes with a book, and it is thrown down here on the table with a great display to us, for us to pick it up, and with something written in it. It is not competent evidence and has no business on the table, because it might be lost and carried away, and it should be, but Mr. Mullaly says that on the8thof August he had a talk with Mr. Lubinsky and Mr. Lubinsky told him it was half-past ten o’clock. Now, if Mr. Lubinsky went by that yard at half-past ten he did not see Miss Lizzie go to the barn. Is Mr. Mullaly mistaken? Gentlemen, as you take cases in court, carefully weighing the evidence, would not you say that Lubinsky went there at the time he states and that the two others passed along that street and that he saw Miss Lizzie going into the house? If that is true, then the commonwealth must take back the charge that she lied about going to the barn. She was out of the house at the very time when the slayer murdered Mr. Borden. I will stop at this time for a moment.
Chief Justice Mason: “The jury may withdraw with the officers for a recess of five minutes.”
One other thought, as you remember, that Lubinsky saw Manning as he was going down and I think Gardner and Newhall also and you know when Manning got there to the house all about it, so that you see it is confirmed again in another way. Then they have an opportunity to find out by Mr. Wilkinson whether this man was really late that day or not, and as they have not told anything to the contrary, we will assume that that is proved. Now the district attorney brought out the fact from Mrs. Bowen that when Lizzie sat there in the kitchen her hands were white and she was pale and distressed, as you know from other witnesses. And I suppose from that he is going to argue to you that she was not all covered with rust and dust that she got in the barn. Well, you will see the strength of that argument, and think what it amounts to. Think whether she could not go up there and look; whether she picked upanything there or not nobody knows. I don’t know how he can tell whether she was fumbling around with dusty iron and lead. There is no evidence here about it, and I have seen many a young woman, and I presume most of them, who could walk out into the barn and come back without getting their hands dirty. So I will not stop long about that. Bridget told about the groan and Mullaly told about the scraping, speaking of her statements, but there is nothing else.
Whether she said that or not, we don’t know. If she did, it was nothing more than the statement that all of us are likely to make. When anything happens we imagine that we heard something; if it had not happened we should not have heard anything. How common that is. Then there were noises not connected with this tragedy which might actually have been heard. There are noises in that street; you were there long enough to find out about that; such noises are a common occurrence. Then it may be that the people in their excitement—Bridget in great excitement because she was running about breathless to find something and Mullaly in the breathlessness of his search may have got it wrong—may not have got it just right. It is not a serious matter. They may argue it for all it is worth on the part of the commonwealth. She thought she heard Mrs. Borden come in. They undoubtedly will make something out of that, so I want your attention there to see about that. This comes now in the first place from Bridget Sullivan. She is asked, after detailing the circumstances to a certain point, “What happened then?” You recollect that Bridget had told Mrs. Churchill that Mrs. Borden had a note and had gone out—“hurried off, did not tell me where she was going.” So you see anything from Bridget about that note and about Mrs. Borden coming in is all sustained. Now Bridget Sullivan says, in answer to the question, “What happened then?” “O, I says, Lizzie, if I knew where Mrs. Whitehead’s was I would go and see if Mrs. Borden was there, and tell her that Mr. Borden was very sick.” You see the confirmation about that note business right there right off. What should she say that she should go and see Mrs. Whitehead for if Mrs. Borden was there, unless she (Bridget) knew that Mrs. Borden had a note and supposed she had gone out as they both did. Then Lizzie said, “Maggie, I am almost positive I heard her coming in, and won’t you go up stairs and see.” Bridget said: “I am not going up stairs alone.” Now, following the testimony down, the very next question is: “Before that time that she said that, had you been up stairs?” “No, sir: I had been upstairs after sheets for Dr. Bowen.”
Now remember how that occurred. When Dr. Bowen came he wanted a sheet to cover up the body of Mr. Borden and he called upon Bridget and Mrs. Churchill to get one. They went into the sitting room and took the key off the mantel and went up the back stairs (where you went) unlocked the door to Mrs. Borden’s room, got the sheets and came down the back. So Bridget had been up the back stairs to that room, but she had not been up the front stairs. Therefore when they got down stairs with the sheets Bridget and Mrs. Churchill knew that Mrs. Borden was not in her own room, because they had been up there. Therefore they knew that she was not in the back of the house, and Lizzie knew that she was not in the back part of the house, because they went up to get the sheets into Mrs. Borden’s room. See how plain that is when you look at the testimony, and it is brought out plainly in the testimony in the questions that are asked by the commonwealth. So you see that when Lizzie spoke about going upstairs to see if Mrs. Borden was in, Lizzie meant the front stairs, because they all knew, the three of them, that Mrs. Borden was not in her own room, and that if she was anywhere in the house she must be in the front part of the house. So Lizzie knew that Mrs. Borden had had a note and had gone out, and Bridget knew that she had a note and had gone out, as they both believed; that Lizzie had seen her up in the room making the beds and finishing up before 9 o’clock, and she had not seen her since, believing that she had gone out, and she recalled that she might have heard her come in before her father came back, before Mr. Borden did, and she said at once, “Go up at once and see if Mrs. Borden is not up in her room. Mrs. Borden is not here. I heard a noise as though she came in, and she must be upstairs in the front room somewhere. Go and see.” Now, that is natural. They thought she was in the upper and back part of the house, and there can be no doubt about that, because Miss Russell testifies to the same thing Mrs. Churchill does, Bridget Sullivan does, and then, after they came down, there it was that conversation about going to Mrs. Whitehead’s occurred. “What happened then?” “Oh,” I says, “Lizzie, if I knew where Mrs. Whitehead’s was, I would go and see if Mrs. Borden was there.” These two women acting in perfect good faith about it, relying upon the truth of that note story, which Mrs. Borden had told them. Then Bridget would not go up the front stairs, because in order to go up the front stairs they must necessarily pass through the room where Mr. Borden’s dead body was lying, or else they must pass through the dining room way and go by the corner ofthe room. They went that way, and found Mrs. Borden killed. Mrs. Churchill and Miss Russell tell precisely the same thing in substance about going up and finding Mrs. Borden. Now the suggestion on the part of the commonwealth would be, if this evidence was not so clear, that Lizzie knew that she was up there, and if you assume Lizzie had killed her, then, of course, it would be quite plain that she knew where she was, but if you do not presume the defendant guilty to begin with, it shows nothing until she is proved guilty. Then we have no difficulty with the statement of these three women. They define and make it very plain. Mr. Borden, you will remember, came in, as I have said, about10:45o’clock. Now the inference that Mrs. Borden had come in was the most natural thing in the world; hearing some noise in the house, perhaps the shutting of a door. By and by we will say something about who might have shut it—perhaps the movement of somebody else in that house that she heard—she had no occasion to go to look and see, she was not called to, and her father came in, and as Mrs. Borden had not appeared in the sitting room, you understand, and as the two women going upstairs found she was not in the back room upstairs, they would undoubtedly think if she had come in she was in the front part of the house, and then she recalled as she thought she did the fact that she had heard a noise which indicated to her Mrs. Borden had come in. Now, I submit to you, gentlemen, that, taking the testimony as it is here, and there is no other that I know of, it exactly and clearly gives the situation as it was, and just as they acted. Then they said that she showed no feeling when her stepmother was lying dead on the guest-room floor; that she laughed on the stairs.
Well, Bridget said something about opening the door. She said she said, “O, pshaw,” and she said it in such a way that Lizzie laughed, standing somewhere at her room door, a room where she could not see into the guest chamber, and the door of which, so far as we know, was closed. Nobody knows anything about it. What was there then why she shouldn’t laugh? O, they say, she had murdered her step-mother. Oh, hold on. That is not proved yet. You might think that everything was all right in your house, and somebody track a joke on you and you laugh, but if the evidence should turn out that your son had fallen dead on the floor above, that does not warrant the conclusion that you were laughing when his dead body was lying on the floor, because you did not know it. They say she knew it. Well, then, I should agree if she knew it and was laughing and joking about what Bridget said that she should be blamed, and we wouldcriticize her and condemn her, but they have not any evidence of it. They assume it, and the district attorney opened it, that while the dead body of Mrs. Borden was lying in the guest chamber Lizzie laughed. Well, the inference was that she had murdered her and then laughed. But that is assuming what they have not proved. They say she did not look at her dead father. Well, she had looked at him with horror. She had come in from the outside into the back hallway and come into the kitchen, and the door stood ajar, and she started to go into the sitting room when this horrible sight met her gaze. She had seen her father. Did they ask her to go and wring her heart over the remains that were mutilated beyond recognition? and because she did not rush into the sitting room and stand over against that mutilated body they say she is guilty. Why, Mrs. Churchill and Bridget Sullivan and Miss Russell could not pass through there unless they touched the corner after the body was covered. Let us ask of other innocent people the same thing that you would ask of Lizzie. They say that Miss Lizzie did not show any signs of fear, but that Dr. Bowen and Mrs. Sawyer were afraid. They told you about it. Well, how do they know she did not show any signs of fear? Why do they make any such statement as that? Because she said to Bridget, “You must go get somebody, for I can’t stay in this house alone.” Look at things in a natural and easy way, in a common sense way, assuming her innocence and not assuming her guilt. That is the way you will meet these things and all of the facts. Then they start off on another track, and they say she killed her stepmother and her father because that was a house without any comforts in it. Well, gentlemen, I hope you all live in a better way than the Borden family lived, so far as having good furniture and conveniences. Are your houses all warmed with steam? Do you have carpets on every one of your floors, stairs and all? Do you have pictures and pianos and a library and all conveniences and luxury? Do you? Well, I congratulate you, if you do.
This is not a down-trodden people. There is lots of comfort in our country homes. I know something of them, but I remember back in my boyhood we did not have gas and running water in every room. We were not brought up that way. We did not have such things as you saw in the Borden house. It wasn’t in poverty-stricken, desolate quarters like a shanty, where the folks simply live and breathe and do not eat anything. They paraded here the bill of fare for breakfast. I do not know what they are going to talk about, what sort of breakfast the ordinary country people have in the houses. They do not live as well as we do in hotels, perhaps they live better.I do not wish to say a word against the hotel, but perhaps a coarser fare is as good as the fixed-up notions that we get on the hotel table, but at any rate it is the way people live in our towns and cities, and no considerable number of people have come to harm.
Andrew Borden was a simple man, an old-fashioned man. He did not dress himself up with jewelry. He carried a silver watch. He was a plain man of the every day sort of fifty years ago. He was living along in that way. His daughters were brought up with him. They had become connected with prominent things in Fall River, for they lived at home. They had the things which you saw upon them. You will know well enough they were not poorly supplied, and were not pinched and were not starved into doing this thing. Do you think it looked as if they were starved into the crime and pinched into wrong? Here was a young woman with property of her own. Starved to death, they say; pinched so that she could not live, wrought up to frenzy and madness, so that she would murder her own father for the want of things, and yet, as has been shown here worth in her own right of money and personal property from$4000to$5000, owning also real estate in common with her sister there in Fall River. What is the use of talking about that? Did she want any more to live on in comfort? Do they say she wanted to get her father’s property or a half of it? Do they reason that she went and killed the stepmother first so that when the property came by inheritance it would pass to herself and sister. They must say something. They say she killed her stepmother because of trouble. That is one of the arguments about which I will speak by and by, but then there is no trouble with her father, as they see, and then she had a change of purpose, or she had a double purpose, to kill Mrs. Borden because she did not like her, and to kill her father because she liked him, but she wanted his money. What sort of a compound! Two motives are running through that argument inconsistent with each other, each directed independently to a specific end: Carried out as to one in the early part of the murder, and then she not only changed her dress and cleaned herself and became another woman, but found herself inhabited with a distinct motive and then slaughtered her father. Sometimes when a young man goes on a rig and becomes dissolute and a spendthrift he will do almost anything to retrieve what he calls the misfortune which he has brought upon himself, and many an old father has found the gray hairs in his head multiplied because of the waywardness of his boy. Sometimes these great crimes are committed in that way, but if you expect to find inthis case that a young woman like her was slaughtering her father when she herself was moral and upright and christian and charitable and devoted to good things in this world, you will find something that the books have never recorded, and which will be a greater mystery than the murder itself. They tell us about the ill-feelings. Well, gentlemen, I am going to consider that in a very few words, because I say to you that the government has made a lamentable failure on that question. They say that is the motive that so qualifies the different acts that are testified to here that it puts this defendant in close connection with the murder of Mrs. Borden, and then they say that Mrs. Borden being murdered, Lizzie murdered Mr. Borden for his property, or possibly they may say, murdered him to conceal her crime—for that or some other reason, but it does not rest at all on this foundation of family relations. Let us see what there was in it. What have they proved? They have proved that from five or six years ago Lizzie did not call Mrs. Borden mother. Lizzie is now a woman of thirty-one or thirty-three years old, thirty-two when these crimes were committed. Mrs. Borden was her stepmother, and she was not her own mother. It is true that Mrs. Borden came there when Lizzie was a little child of two or three years, and sometimes we see that where a stepmother has come into a large family and has brought up a family the children know no difference and always call her mother just the same. That is true in a very large degree, happily so, too: but sometimes when the children get grown up, and when they are told about their mother that died long ago, somehow or other there springs up in the mind of the children a yearning or a longing to know of the parent that they really had; and how many a man says, in speaking of the family from which he came, “She is not my mother.”
He calls her mother, perhaps. He introduces her as “my mother,” but the first words after you engage him in conversation are, “She is not my mother, she is my stepmother. My mother died long ago. She lies buried twenty-five years, but still she was my mother.” I suspect that man never lets into the inner chambers of his heart the feeling that anybody else in the world can stand where his mother did. You may gloss it over, you may talk about it as much as you will, but happy is the man that remembers his mother, that pure mother that lived to see him grow up, and kind as anybody else may be, there never goes out of his heart the feeling for that dead one that is gone, that stood first and foremost to him, and nursed him in his babyhood. It does not require passion or ill will to hold thatfeeling, 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, andsometimes 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 dispositionsoften 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 theywanted 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 seemsto 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.”
But that house was surrounded by policemen, and Officer Hyde was there, and Miss Lizzie had a full-grown kerosene lamp in her hand and the windows were all open with ample opportunity for observers outside to see in and those within the house knew that policemen were all around so that there was nothing concealed. Now, a person who is going to do anything to cover up crime will not carry an electric light with him. The criminal goes into the dark to do his dark deed. Miss Lizzie did not see anybody, though they say Officer Ferguson was in front, but he is not brought forward, and if he were he could not see through two high board partitions. That would tax the energy and perspicacity of even a Fall River policeman. Then they say she burned a dress. Well, the general thought in the mind of everybody is that if a person burns up anything in connection with some important transaction, he does it to get it out of the way for the purpose of avoiding observation. That is natural. The government stakes its case on that dress.
The government says: “You gave us up the blue dress that lies before me. That is not the dress. You practically commit a falsehood by giving us that.” The defendant says that this is the dress. The government says we want that bedford cord, and if we had that bedford cord we should know all about it, and you burned the bedford cord. Now, let us look at it. There is a dispute here, a disagreement, not intentional, but unavoidable, among the persons who saw what Lizzie had on that morning, some of them saying that she had on this very dress, or a dark blue dress and another, and Mrs. Churchill speaking of it as a light blue coming almost up to a bay blue, or something a good deal lighter than this.
Now between the two there is a difference of recollection; just as good people on one side say it was a dark blue as those on the other who say it was a light blue. But you will remember that at that time there were several ladies and Bridget was there with a lighter-colored dress, and that those who speak of a lighter-coloreddress may have had in mind what Bridget had on. It was not a time for examining colors, and afterward they recollected as well as they could. They are good, honest people, but some of them are mistaken, and of course are not wilfully stating what they do not believe to be the fact. So that there is a conflict of testimony about that. That dark blue dress lying here is given as the one that Lizzie had on. They say, “You had a light blue dress on.” We say it is not so, but we say to you when we produced the dark blue dress you took it and put into the hands of Dr. Dolan, the medical examiner, and you went away with it and used it in framing your indictment, and now you find throughProf.Wood, a man who knows something, instructing Dr. Dolan, that there is not and never was any blood on it.