Evan Hunter - Lizzie

“Suppose she had said, abroad in 1890, ‘My home is unhappy’? Suppose she had said it two or three times with no reference to anybody in person? Is that significant of a state of mind that was operative down through till the fourth of August, 1892? Within the lines of the distinctions made in the case of Commonwealth versus Abbott — which Your Honors must be quite familiar with — it is properly held to be too remote. I do not need to enlarge on this,” Robinson said. “It seems to me it lies right close up to our experience all around.”

The three judges who now conferred all appeared much older than they actually were, perhaps because each of them had white hair and a white beard, perhaps because the heat had caused them all to wilt prematurely on this sweltering June day. The chief justice, Albert Mason, was only fifty-seven years old, a veteran of the Civil War and a former member of the Massachusetts state legislature where he’d worked in committee with the then-senator from Plymouth County — Robinson himself. Although his expression was a somewhat mournful one, his pale eyes were alert. Robinson knew that he had three daughters whose ages were close to Lizzie Borden’s.

Caleb Blodgett of Boston was the senior of the two associate justices sitting with Mason. A graduate of Dartmouth, he had been an expert in bankruptcy law before his appointment to the Superior Court bench eleven years earlier. The unfortunate possessor of a lantern jaw exaggerated by the further thrust of his beard, he rather resembled a belligerent bulldog draped in judicial robes. But for all his fierce demeanor, Robinson knew him to be a genial, unaffected man.

The junior associate justice, a man named Justin Dewey, flanked Mason on the side opposite Blodgett. Dewey was strikingly handsome in a leonine way, with a full head of white hair and a white beard trimmed rather more closely than was Mason’s. He was a graduate of Williams College, a former member of the state legislature, a former state senator, and had been a Superior Court justice for the past seven years now, ever since his appointment in 1886. Robinson knew him well. In fact, it was Robinson who — while serving as governor of the state of Massachusetts — had appointed Dewey to his present position, a lifetime post.

“The Court are of the opinion,” Chief Justice Mason said, “that the character of the testimony offered, the expressions used, are too ambiguous, so that — aside from its remoteness — the evidence is not competent.

“If the expression were distinct of personal ill will to either the father or the stepmother, it might not be too remote.

“We think the evidence should be excluded.”

It had taken a remarkably short time to settle upon the twelve men who would weigh the evidence and deliver the verdict, especially when one considered that virtually all of them examined had formed a prior opinion about the case, and many of the candidates were opposed to capital punishment. On the first day of the trial, Chief Justice Mason had put the identical questions to each of the prospective jurors:

“Are you related to the prisoner, or to Andrew J. or Abby D. Borden?”

“Have you formed or expressed an opinion in relation to this case?”

“Are you sensible of any bias or prejudice in it?”

“Have you formed any opinion that would preclude you from finding the defendant guilty of an offense punishable by death?”

Each side had been allowed twenty-two challenges. The prosecution had exhausted fourteen of them and the defense twenty-two by the time the last juror was selected at three in the afternoon. That first day of the trial had been uncomfortably hot, and the atmosphere inside the courtroom oppressive at best. Lizzie, sweltering in a black brocade dress and black lace hat, had sighed in relief when the twelfth man took his seat in the jury box.

She watched them now as they came back into the courtroom. Most of them were farmers; one of them was a blacksmith. Three of them had similar last names: Wilbar, Wilber and Wilbur. All of them were wearing either mustaches or beards. Her fate, it appeared, would be decided by twelve hirsute jurors and three equally hirsute judges. Somehow she was grateful that Governor Robinson was clean-shaven and that Mr. Jennings’s mustache was somewhat less flamboyant than that of Melvin Ohio Adams, her third attorney, whose name she found almost as preposterous as the adornment over his upper lip. She had fainted yesterday.

She had fainted after Moody’s opening statement to the jury.

The reporter for the Times had written:

The prisoner sat behind the Deputy Sheriff and listened to Mr. Moody’s careful address with the closest attention, as calm and as unmoved as ever. Her eyes looked straight toward the speaker. Indeed, the spectators seemed as much interested in the prosecutor’s words as did Miss Borden, and but for the uniformed being sitting beside her, she might have been taken by a stranger for one of those who had come to the courtroom with no greater interest than that of curiosity. It was a great surprise, therefore, to everybody when just as Mr. Moody finished speaking Miss Borden fell back in her chair in a faint.

As if the swoon had been something entirely within her power to control, and not an honest reaction to Moody’s grisly recitation of the Government’s case against her.

As the District Attorney ceased speaking, the prisoner — who, with her face covered by the fan, had sat motionless for the last hour — suddenly succumbed to the strain that had been put upon her nervous system and lost consciousness. The Reverend Mr. Jubb, sitting directly in front of her and separated only by the dock rail, turned to her assistance, and Mr. Jennings, the attorney, hurried to the place from his position. Smelling salts and water were brought into immediate requisition, and soon entire consciousness returned. In the meanwhile, the jury had retired to enjoy a brief recess, and when they returned Miss Borden again resumed her old position of interest, though marks of agitation were still plainly visible.

That same reporter was undoubtedly in the courtroom now, she surmised, somewhere among the spectators; his story had not been signed. Neither had the one in the Sun, which still annoyed her because it had described her so unfairly:

Her forehead is low but shapely, and her eyes are large and clear. She has pretty ears, small and delicate and held closely to her head. Her nose is straight...

All well and good up to that point.

... and if it might be disassociated from the heavy jaws, the wide mouth, and the thick, long and somewhat protruding lips beneath it, it could be called sensitive.

And now it began in earnest:

That which makes Lizzie Borden’s face a coarse face and all that leaves it possible for her to have committed this crime are the lower features — the mouth, the cheeks and the chin. Here her face is wide and full. It seems to possess little mobility and it indicates the possession of a sort of masculine strength that one does not like to observe in the face of a woman.

Well, she had never thought of herself as beautiful. And yet...

But looked at anywhere else, she is seen to advantage. Her attitudes are entirely graceful and womanly and her movements always easy and refined...

Thank God for small favors.

She sits for long periods motionless, with her eyes closed and her head resting lightly on the fan which she holds at her chin. Her dress, dark, plain and ordinary, is rather more in the mode than one is apt to see in a New England town...

Tailored by a dressmaker!

Her hat, too, was made by someone who understood the milliner’s art. She wears her hair in the old French twist, which, however suggestive of an antiquated fashion-plate...