Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

accounts of her actions, she was arrested. At a preliminary hearing, the judge determined she was likely guilty. Now she sat in the Taunton Jail, awaiting the grand jury.

Her sister, lawyers, and ministers visited, but Borden had no use for reporters. Every twitch of her eyebrow triggered an avalanche of criticism. The cruelty and forceful violence of the crime was such a repudiation of femininity, as upper-middle-class white women were supposed to perform it, the papers and their mostly male reporters were beside themselves. The New York Herald described her as a “masculine looking woman, with a strong, resolute, unsympathetic face” and a voice with a “peculiar guttural harshness.” The Boston Post noted, “Her hands and arms are as muscular as a man’s.” Indiana’s Logansport Reporter suggested that Lizzie had “a repellent disposition, at times sulky, at other times haughty and domineering.” She wasn’t distraught enough. Descriptions of the crime scene left her unmoved. Her mourning outfits were insufficiently somber. She laughed at odd times. In short, she was a perversion of nature, a monster.

As a result, Lizzie refused all interviews, except this one. She knew Kate Swan McGuirk from their work with Fall River Fruit and Flower Mission, bringing bouquets to hospitals, food to sick families, picture books to orphanages.

Of course, they were distinct from each other, particularly in the light of New England’s rigid class rules. Both came from long-time Fall River families, but Swan edited her high school newspaper, married local journalist Arthur McGuirk at nineteen, went to work first as a proofreader and then, fired with determination, as a stringer for outlets in Boston, New York, and, eventually, Washington DC. A photo shows a long face, dark eyes under peaked brows, and a mischievous look behind a black speckled veil. A newspaper friend described Kate as “the embodiment of laughter and fun.”

Borden, five years older, had been a listless student, eventually dropping out of high school. She never married and had no need to scramble for money. Her father had owned a bank, sat on the board of two mills, and was rumored to be worth half a million dollars. In contrast, Kate Swan McGuirk’s father was a bookbinder, and her grandfather had been a mill watchman into his late sixties.

But still, they knew each other outside this bloody business, and McGuirk remembered Borden piling turkey on the plates of poor children during charity holiday dinners. Now, sitting across from each other, one asked the other how she was finding life in jail and wondered whether she was really facing some sort of demon.

“To tell the truth, I am afraid it is beginning to tell on my health,” Borden said. “This lack of fresh air and exercise is hard for me. I have always been out of doors a great deal.” Insomnia plagued her, maybe because of the enforced stillness, maybe because of the dark nights, not even relieved by a candle. Looking at the prisoner, pale and drawn, with red eyes protected by a “shade” from the glare of the whitewashed brick walls, McGuirk felt for her.

“It know I am innocent” is the first line of the September 19 interview, published in the Recorder. McGuirk gave the opening to Lizzie, and what follows is a meticulous defense, including an evaluation of the evidence, under the headline “A Persecuted Woman’s Plea.”

McGuirk used investigative skills to formulate her rebuttal to prosecutors and other journalists. A rival paper mentioned an unknown woman “whose card has taken her into the Bordens’ inner circle. She is a detective for a New-York paper, or a stenographer from Boston, or an every-day spectator from Providence.” Though she’s never named, odds are high that this person poking her way into the funeral home and crime scene was McGuirk.

One of the critics’ complaints about Borden was that she didn’t cry, proof of her monstrous nature, so McGuirk tallied the tears. When Borden viewed the cleaned-up body of her father the night after the murders, she burst out crying with a vehemence almost frightening, according to the undertaker’s assistant. The prisoner’s letters documented the many nights she cried herself to sleep. The matron at Fall River witnessed Borden crying so much she (almost) couldn’t eat supper before she was taken to Taunton Jail. “When the State comes to argue its case again it will have to give Lizzie Borden credit for every tear that she has shed,” McGuirk wrote.

One suggested motive for the crime was Borden’s desire to wrest her inheritance from her infamously tight-fisted father. She resented living in a spartan house in the unfashionable section of town, people said, near the tenements (just a few blocks from the McGuirks) and not perched on the hill with other mill owner’s daughters. But Lizzie Borden didn’t lack for money, as the reporter showed by giving the balance of the Borden sisters’ bank accounts and the annual dividends on mill stocks they owned. Exploring the Borden home, McGuirk recorded pretty blue carpets and other decorative touches. If a bathtub and running water on the second story were missing, she reasoned, it was because the family was planning a move, the father finally yielding to his daughter’s desires. The reporter prowled the house, gauging angles, trying the soundness of locks, looking for hiding places for any murderous stranger who might have crept in.

Hatred for the stepmother? They could often be found sharing a church pew. The letter, whispered to exist, where Borden told friends that when she joined them on a vacation to a Connecticut cottage, she’d bring a hatchet? Just a joke. Piece by piece, McGuirk addressed the evidence in a lawyerly effort to explain it away.

Throughout, the reporter stressed that the prisoner, despite her physical strength and lack of emotion, was a woman. True, she’s strong, McGuirk argued, but she used her muscles for good purposes—running the sewing machine when her stepmother was too weak, offering to chop wood for those who needed it.

Leaning on the authority of an insider, McGuirk presented Lizzie as