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

ample pictures, she brought the courtroom as close as she could, occasionally slipping into the intimate tone of second person: “To-day, as yesterday, you squeezed your way when you entered the court-room past a blood-soaked sofa on which an old man sleeping securely in his own house at 11 o’clock in the morning, with members of his own family about him, was chopped to death by a murderer.”

And, though she found the audience’s glares at Borden unseemly, no one observed Borden more closely than Elizabeth Jordan.

Descriptions of women’s bodies and appearance were influential, Jordan knew, and she considered how to do it. To call a woman “pretty” was one way to create sympathy, deserved or not. And ugliness may be deemed to reflect sin. Jordan clearly found Borden unattractive, with sickly skin, doughy cheeks, a double chin, lips that she licked constantly, but she struggled not to make this a judgment. The defendant’s face, “plain to the point of homeliness” viewed straight on, was “not without womanly gentleness” in profile, Jordan wrote. The nape of her neck had a nice curve. And clutching a bouquet, a black fan in her black-gloved hands, with freshly curled bangs, Borden was at least very tidy. “She radiated cleanliness like an atmosphere,” Jordan concluded.

Elizabeth Jordan

Elizabeth Jordan, Tales of the Cloister, frontispiece, 1901 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

But trial testimony about Borden’s body kept getting in the way of efforts to portray her as feminine. A bucket of bloody rags found in the cellar was explained away by the claim that Borden was menstruating. A spot of blood on her petticoat might have been from a fleabite. The prosecutor suggested she committed the murders naked, and that’s why her clothes remained clean. Her arms looked suspiciously strong. This all made her seem more bestial than angelic.

On a good day for Borden (the headlines of Jordan’s articles were all from the perspective of the accused, like “Lizzie Borden Fatigued,” and “Going Lizzie’s Way,” implying a sympathy with her) the police contradicted themselves about where they’d found a hatchet handle. Maybe it was on the box in the cellar, next to the hatchet head. Or maybe it was in the stove, where someone might have attempted to burn it. On a second day, her doctor described giving her morphine to calm her, a possible cause of her confused and contradictory testimony at the coroner’s inquest. On still a third day, the judge banned evidence from a drugstore clerk who said Borden tried to buy prussic acid, a poison, from him several days before the murders.

But not everything went her way. On a bad day, a neighbor mentioned that she’d seen Borden burning a dress not long after the killings, one Borden claimed was ruined by paint.

“I would not be seen doing that, Lizzie,” the neighbor had cautioned. She knew this was damning but didn’t go to the police for months. In another setback, the matron of the Fall River Central Police Station reported a fight between the Borden sisters.

“You have given me away, but I will not yield an inch,” Lizzie Borden allegedly said.

Nights, after Borden climbed into the carriage for the trip back to jail, and the lawyers returned to their desks to refine the next day’s orations, Jordan and other reporters gathered on the balcony of one of their hotel rooms, looking for a little relief from the humid air, and tried to make sense of what they’d heard. Perhaps the only logical explanation was some grim twist, like one might read in a Poe tale: a murder in a room with no escape route, a clue hidden in plain sight. The male reporters in her circle all considered Borden innocent, but Jordan felt the power of her words to sway readers one way or another. She kept her thoughts to herself.

As the evidence unfurled, though, Jordan let her mask of impartiality slip. The police clearly conspired against the defendant, making even innocuous actions seem suspicious. The evidence was all circumstantial. When the jaw of Mr. Borden’s skull, waved around by the prosecution, fell open, like something out of a horror story, Jordan told a reporter friend from The Sun:

“The old man is trying to testify.”

“What’s he saying? What’s he saying,” asked the Sun reporter.

“He’s saying that she’s innocent,” Jordan replied.

As the trial wound down, the fact of Borden’s sex took center stage, both for the defense and prosecution. In the final days, crowds gathered on the verandas of surrounding houses, not wanting to miss the verdict. In closing arguments, a prosecuting attorney said, “A woman’s cunning devised how to cover up that dress.” In response, the defense concluded, “I ask you to consider this defendant as a woman, and to say to the Commonwealth, whom you represent, ‘It is unjust to hold her a minute longer.’” The judge’s jury instructions included the command, “you must consider the sex, size, and strength of the assailant.” He emphasized the fact that even if Borden’s testimony didn’t explain what happened, no one else’s did either: “The case is said to be mysterious; the defendant is not required to clear it up.”

When the jury came in after deliberating less than two hours and declared Lizzie Borden “not guilty,” Borden collapsed in her seat, almost insensible, her head against the rail in front of her. Amid the applause and cheering, a reporter for the New Bedford Evening Journal recalled that during the announcement of the verdict, Kate Swan McGuirk was sitting behind him. The reporters knew one another as editors of rival high school newspapers, and when he turned to marvel with McGuirk at the outcome, he found her overcome with joy, weeping.

Jordan, too, felt justice had been done. “Miss Borden’s vindication was clear, complete, and absolute,” she wrote in her report of the trial’s final day.

But at least in her imagination, Jordan allowed for a different outcome. At the time of Borden’s arrest, Jordan continued to venture into fiction. In her short story “Ruth Herrick’s Assignment”