Lizzie's Story
At 2 P.M. on Tuesday, August 9, Lizzie Borden went to the Fall River police station to testify at the inquest. She went on the stand that afternoon, returned on Wednesday morning, and was recalled on Thursday, August 11. Before she testified, Andrew Jennings, the Borden family lawyer, shown at the left of Figure 3.1, asked that he be allowed to counsel Lizzie. Judge Blaisdell turned him down; the inquest was closed, particularly to lawyers. Jennings did, however, represent Lizzie in all subsequent court hearings on the Borden case.
It turned out that Lizzie could have used a lawyer at the inquest; she came close to breaking down a couple of times. Knowlton started out very mildly, establishing that her name was Lizzie, not Elizabeth, that Andrew Borden had only two living children, and other trivia. Then, during a tedious discussion of the dates at which John Morse had visited the Bordens, Knowlton suddenly turned sarcastic. Lizzie, in response to a question, asked him if he remembered the winter that the Taunton River froze over. Knowlton snapped, "I am not answering questions but asking them."
From that point on, Knowlton became an aggressive, relentless prosecutor. Lizzie seemed to lose her composure, frequently showing confusion. When Knowlton asked her where she was when her father came back from downtown on August 4, she couldn't remember whether she had been downstairs or upstairs. Knowlton pressed her on this matter, prompting Lizzie to exclaim:
"I don't know what I have said. I have answered so many questions and I am so confused that I don't know one thing from another. I am telling you just as nearly as I know how."
Later on, Knowlton seemed on the verge of losing his temper when the following exchange took place:
Q. (Knowlton) "Miss Borden, I am trying in good faith to get all the doings that morning of yourself and Miss Sullivan and I have not succeeded in doing so. Do you desire to give me any information or not?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "I don't know it; I don't know what your name is."
Perhaps the worst moment for both of them came when District Attorney Knowlton, for some inexplicable reason, insisted that Lizzie describe her father's appearance when he lay dead on the sofa.
Q. (Knowlton) "You saw his face?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "No, I did not see his face, because he was covered with blood."
Q .(Knowlton) "You saw where his face was bleeding."
A. (Lizzie Borden) "Yes, sir."
Q. (Knowlton) "You saw his face covered with blood?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "Yes, sir."
Q. (Knowlton) "Did you see his eyeball hanging out?"
A. Lizzie Borden) "No, sir."
Q. (Knowlton) "See the gashes where his face was laid open?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "No, sir."
When this interrogation finally ended, the stenographer entered the following statement into the court record: "Witness covers her face with her hand for a minute or two; then examination is resumed."
Altogether, Lizzie's inquest testimony filled more than forty single spaced pages. Here we'll concentrate on a few of the more relevant and interesting topics covered in the three days she was on the stand.
One thing that Knowlton asked Lizzie about was her relationship with Abby Borden:
Q. (Knowlton) "You have been on pleasant terms with your stepmother . . . ?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "Yes, sir."
Q. (Knowlton) "Cordial?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "It depends upon one's idea of cordiality, perhaps."
Q .(Knowlton) "Cordial according to your idea of cordiality?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "Quite so."
Q. (Knowlton) "What do you mean by quite so?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "Quite cordial. I do not mean the dearest of friends in the world, but very kindly feelings and pleasant. I do not know how to answer you any better than that."
Later on, near the end of her testimony, Lizzie described the incident, five years prior to the murders, that led her to call her stepmother "Mrs. Borden" rather than "mother". It seems that Abby's half sister, Sarah Whitehead, owned the house at 45 Fourth Street jointly with her mother, Mrs. Oliver Gray. Mrs. Gray wanted to sell the house, which would have left Sarah homeless. To prevent that, Andrew Borden bought out Mrs. Gray's interest and gave it to Abby. Lizzie told Knowlton:
"I said if he gave that to her he ought to give us something; told Mrs. Borden so. We always thought she persuaded father to buy it. At any rate, he did buy it and I am quite sure she did persuade him. I said what he did for her people he ought to do for his own children. So he gave us grandfather's house." [That was the house on Ferry Street, where both Emma and Lizzie were born. On July 15, 1892, three weeks before the murders, Andrew bought it back from the girls, paying them $5000.]
According to Lizzie, that was all the trouble she ever had with Abby. When Knowlton asked her why, after this incident, she stopped calling Abby "mother", her answer was a simple one. "Because I wanted to", Lizzie said.
Lizzie testified that she last saw her father alive, resting on the sofa, at about 10:55 A.M. on the morning of August 4. At that point, she went to the barn in hopes of finding lead sinkers that she needed for a fishing trip with friends the following week. On the way to the barn, she picked up some pears that had fallen from the trees in the back yard.
While Andrew was being killed in the sitting room, Lizzie claimed she was rummaging through a box resting on a work bench in the barn loft. In the box, she found some nails, a doorknob and the thing she was searching for: flat pieces of lead suitable for sinkers. At more or less the same time, she was munching pears and occasionally looking out the window. Apparently she was in no hurry; as Lizzie put it, "I don't do things in a hurry."
Knowlton wasn't buying any of this. For one thing, Lizzie claimed earlier that she went to the barn to get a piece of iron, not lead. More important, he was convinced by now that she was in the house chopping up Andrew around 11 A.M., not in the barn loft. Knowlton hammered away at Lizzie's alibi, using a mixture of ridicule and exasperation. It didn't work; Lizzie stuck to her story. Consider the following exchange:
Q. (Knowlton) "The first thing in preparation for your fishing trip the next Monday was to go to the loft of that barn to find some old sinkers to put on some hooks and lines that you had not then bought?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "I thought if I found no sinkers I would have to buy the sinkers when I bought the lines."
Q. (Knowlton) "You thought you would be saving something by hunting in the loft of the barn before you went to see whether you should need them or not?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "I thought I would find out whether there were any sinkers before I bought the lines. If there was I should not have to buy any sinkers."
Q. (Knowlton) "You began the collection of your fishing apparatus by searching for the sinkers in the barn?"
A. (Lizzie Borden) "Yes, sir."
