The Secrets of Lizzie Borden

by Brandy Purdy

  Cold, cold, cold! Everyone said I was, icy and unfeeling, a human icicle. But I didn’t care. Despite the sweltering August heat, I felt like an ice queen swathed in crystals and ermine sitting on a throne carved out of ice despite the blood-boiling heat of that courtroom. I knew that was how they must all imagine me. Cold, cold, cold! “That girl has a heart of ice!” I heard a lady seated behind me hiss to her neighbor, who was emphatic in her agreement. Cold, cold, cold!

  Everyone kept waiting for the incessant and probing questions to wear me down, for my icy cold composure to crack, and finally it did.

  “I don’t know what I have said. I have answered so many questions, I don’t know one thing from another!” I practically shouted in Mr. Knowlton’s face as I wiped the exhausted and angry tears from my eyes.

  I saw triumph in his expression; he knew he had gotten the best of me, God blast him! He’d made me crack, and I wanted to slap him so hard his eyes would stay permanently crossed. How dare he smile at me in that condescending gloating fashion? That was no way to treat a lady!

  Yet in spite of their private suspicions, publicly no one wanted to believe that I, a respectable New England spinster lady who taught Sunday school, had done it; that would have been unthinkable and shattered too many dearly cherished illusions. The New York Sun summed it up best: She is either the most injured of innocents or the blackest of monsters. She either hacked her father and stepmother to pieces with the fierce brutality of the ogre in Poe’s story of the Rue Morgue or some other person did it and she suffers the double torture of losing her parents and being wrongfully accused of their murders.

  Of course, the public wanted to believe the latter, that poor innocent Lizzie was the living victim of this tragedy, but it was admittedly very difficult to do, even the most charitable souls were sorely tested. No one liked to think of a lady simmering day in, day out for years with such a potent stew of pent-up rage, grievances, frustration, self-denial, secrets, and maybe even—gasp!—repressed carnal passion, all bottled up for years just waiting to explode!

  Yet what fool or madman would be so bold as to stride, hatchet in hand, into a house in the broad bright light of a summer morning, with the maid outside washing windows, and the womenfolk most likely still at home at that hour, and go right upstairs and kill Abby while she was bending over making the bed in the guest room, then linger about, hiding somewhere on the premises, for well over an hour hoping he would not be discovered while he awaited a fortuitous opportunity to kill Father, and me downstairs in the kitchen desultorily ironing handkerchiefs or lazily leafing through a magazine or loitering outside under the pear tree or out in the barn rummaging for bits of iron for one reason or another? It was just too mad, too brazen to believe; not even the most crazed killer would take such risks. Only Bridget and I were in the right place at the proper time, and Bridget, pardon the pun, “had no ax to grind.” She had always spoken highly of Abby, and had been seen by several passersby that morning outside washing the windows just as she always said she was and hanging over the fence having a gossip with Mary Dooley, the neighbor’s Maggie. So it had to be me. Practical, New England common sense could point the finger at no other culprit than Lizzie Borden. No one else had so much hate in their heart for the miserly millionaire and his fat cow of a wife.

  I knew things were going badly. I barely made it back into the matron’s room before I vomited twice and my face broke out in mottled purple blotches and I could not draw a deep breath. When they came to arrest me I was lying slumped over on a sofa with my stays unlaced after receiving another injection from Dr. Bowen, with Emma and the police matron appointed to watch me hovering anxiously over me, one armed with smelling salts, the other vigorously rubbing my hands.

  Since Fall River’s jail did not have suitable accommodations, they informed me I would be transported to Taunton in the morning, to the Bristol County Jail, there to await trial for my life.

  I remember standing up. Then everything went black. The next thing I remember is the train station, walking sandwiched between Reverend Buck and a police matron, with uniformed officers trailing behind and all the people, curious and crowding close, hemming me in, pointing and hissing, “There she is! Lizzie Borden! The murderess!” while I stood there stoically with my veil down—the police had insisted on it, but no one was fooled—and not moving a muscle. Many took my air of detachment as proof of my guilt. I suppose they expected tears and terror or even for me to swoon. I remember the Reverend Buck holding tight to my arm and loudly insisting to all, “Her calmness is the calmness of innocence!”

  Shellshock I think now would be a better word for it. Years later when I saw the walking wounded come back from the Great War stunned and scared, with that glazed, vacant look in their eyes, starting at every sound, I saw myself in them the day I was taken to jail.

  Our family attorney, Father’s boyhood friend, Mr. Andrew Jennings, was most solicitous; he promised to care for me, and my interests, as though I were his very own daughter. A gentle, portly man with a horseshoe of white hair encircling his shiny bald pink pate and brows like snowy fat caterpillars, he held my hand in a fatherly manner and spoke softly, as though he were endeavoring to gentle a wild, frightened horse. “It’s going to be all right, little girl,” he told me over and over again until I almost believed him. He seemed so confident and sure, and so very kind, consoling, and warm.... If only my father had been like that! It might all have been a different story—one of the nice ones with a happily ever after ending.

  Mr. Jennings urged me to have a greater care for my image and valiantly set to work trying to undo the damage I had done in the court of public opinion. Black dresses and nothing but until the verdict, he emphatically insisted; not even my darkest blue would do. And to redress the persistent reports of my icy indifference, he had me give an interview from my cell, filled to near bursting with flowers from well-wishers, and cards inscribed with such uplifting and inspiring sentiments as “God is with the poor storm-tossed girl. He will vindicate and glorify her.”

  “The thing that hurts me most,” I dutifully confided in an exclusive interview with Mr. Edwin H. Porter, the reporter from The Fall River Globe Mr. Jennings arranged to have visit me, “is to hear people say that I don’t show any grief. Of course I don’t in public, I was not brought up that way, and I cannot change my nature now, the habit of containing my emotions is too deeply ingrained. They say I don’t cry,” I continued, pausing to blink back the tears from my eyes. “Well . . . they should see me when I am alone. I see nothing but the deepest shadows. I see no ray of light amid the gloom. I try to fill up the waiting time as best I can, with my Bible and volumes of Dickens, but every day feels longer than the last. I cannot sleep nights, and nothing the doctor gives me will produce sleep. The hardest thing for me to endure here is the night, when there is no light. They will not allow me even a candle to read by, and to sit sleepless in the dark all night is very hard. I know my life can never be the same again if I am ever allowed to leave this place and go home. But I know that I am innocent, and I have made up my mind that, no matter what happens, I will try to bear it bravely and make the best of it.”

  When Mr. Porter took his leave I thought I saw tears in his eyes. Almost like a suitor, he bowed gallantly over my hand and brushed his lips fleetingly against my quivering flesh. His mustache tickled and I almost swooned.

  “God be with you, Lizzie Borden,” he said.

  I dreamed of him that night, that I was acquitted and when I left the courtroom he knelt down at my feet and asked for my hand in marriage. The very next day he sent me a box of bonbons tied with a big blue satin bow and a bouquet of lilacs to thank me for my graciousness in granting him such a personal and emotional interview. I hoped he would come to visit me again, to bring a breath of spring and maybe even romance into my grim, tiny cell, and he began to vie with Bridget and Lulie for a place in my dreams, but I never saw him again except as a face in the crowd. I was just another story to him, as time, a
book about what he called “The Fall River Tragedy,” and further headlines would tell. He never really was my friend. He had a wife named Winifred; I alternately imagined her as sour as pickles or a honey-blond temptress. “Any way the wind blows, that is the way you go, Mr. Porter!” I used to shake my head and say with bittersweet tartness in years to come whenever I spied his byline.

  On the legal front, things were looking brighter for me as the brilliant Mr. Jennings craftily scored several pivotal victories. He succeeded in having my inquest testimony stricken from the record, and since no trace of poison had been found in either Father’s or Abby’s stomach, he managed to bar any mention of that tattletale Eli Bence’s story from the trial. I thought it was an indecent invasion of privacy for a druggist to go about gossiping about what people bought, or tried to buy, in his shop, and I sincerely hope he lost numerous customers from the fear that he would be similarly indiscreet with their own personal business! It also helped that Hyman Lubinsky, an ice-cream man who had been driving slowly down our street August 4, hoping his cold treats would prove tempting on such a hot day, had unexpectedly come forward and claimed to have caught a glimpse in passing of a redheaded woman in a blue dress in our backyard walking in the direction of our barn. Who else could it have been but me? Mr. Jennings was also able to persuade our three-times former governor, George Robinson, to help represent me.

  Despite his blue blood, old money, and Harvard education, Governor Robinson had a charming, folksy, backwoodsman style akin to Davy Crockett that juries just loved; they just ate him up “like deer eatin’ corn out o’ my hand,” he boasted proudly. And during his term of office, he had raised Judge Dewey, who would be presiding over my trial, to the bench, and Governor Robinson had an inkling that my trial might be the perfect occasion for Judge Dewey to again say “thank you.”

  These legal triumphs made my hopes soar. I knew I had made a poor show at the inquest, and the story of my visit to Smith’s Drugstore kept coming back to haunt me. Everyone kept hounding me, insisting they must know if there was any truth in it, the better to safeguard my interests.

  Finally, to shut them all up, I drew Emma down to sit beside me on my prison cot, and confided that I had been feeling so melancholy and miserable, stuck and stagnant, watching my life and all my hopes and chances pass me by, that I had decided to kill myself and I had gone to that drugstore on the wrong side of town where no one knew me, to buy poison to put an end to my wretched life. But I had changed my mind and didn’t want anyone to know I had been so foolish and weak or to think I might be a danger to myself and need to be locked away in some sanitarium somewhere for my own protection. I swore to her that my desperate thoughts had truly been just a fleeting fancy and had never darkened the threshold of my mind again. But if the public knew of my misery they might misunderstand and think it a just motive for murder, that I had not been in my right mind at the time, and the legal men might all put their heads together and decide to save themselves a lot of bother and just have me committed to an asylum instead of letting me hang or leaving me to rot in prison, and I just could not bear that.

  “I just don’t want anyone to know,” I told Emma.

  Of course she ran straightaway and told Mr. Jennings. I knew she would! But it gave me an excuse to sulk and avoid her tedious and tearful visits, at least for a few days.

  “Emma, you have given me away!” I stormed the next time she came to see me, and turned my back on her even as she wept and swore on her heart, “Never! I swear, Lizzie, I did no such thing!”

  As the fickle sprite of luck would have it, the matron, Mrs. Regan, overheard, and had to tell her little tale to the newspapers. But all she truly knew was that Emma and I had quarreled and fallen out about something. But when the journalists came clamoring, Emma loyally denied everything and kept her mouth shut. It really was just a tempest in a teapot, and soon my sister and I were weeping in each other’s arms and forgiving each other everything, including murder, though it remained unspoken of course, politely ignored like a bloodstained elephant in the parlor, and we went on offering a reward no one could possibly ever claim and pretending that some unknown audacious madman had snuck in and killed Abby and Father.

  “It’s all for the best,” became Emma’s mantra. Whenever the need arose, and the specter of my murderous deeds loomed over us and cast too giant a shadow, my sister would hug me tight, pat my back, and whisper, like a devout Catholic saying the Rosary, “It’s all for the best; it’s all for the best. . . .” That was Emma’s way of dealing with it. In this life, appearances and reputations must be maintained, form and formality come first, but everything after that she would leave to God, for Him to dispense divine and final justice. She simply washed her hands of it. Of course, it helped that hers weren’t stained with blood. Lucky Emma! She may have looked brittle and bird boned, but her spine was solid steel; she never bent or broke.

  But the luckiest strike of all, the golden mother lode of legal triumphs, came mere days before my trial began when Bertha Manchester, a rawboned redheaded dairy farmer’s daughter, was hacked to bloody bits with a hatchet in broad daylight in her own kitchen at nine o’clock in the morning by an unknown assailant who just walked in through the back door, then vanished like a phantom. In a demise eerily like Abby’s, Bertha took twenty-three blows, one for each year of her life, to her head and back while she was bending over putting breakfast on the table.

  Clearly I could not have done it; I didn’t even know Bertha Manchester, and I was locked safely away in jail at the time. The culprit turned out to be a Portuguese farmhand who thought himself short-changed and ill-treated by Bertha’s father, and Bertha herself because she wouldn’t lift her skirts for him, but no matter, everyone knew that I hadn’t done it, and it cast a lovely cloud of reasonable doubt over my supposed guilt. I could not have been more grateful. Months later it came out that the Portuguese couldn’t possibly have killed Father and Abby, as he had not yet emigrated from his native country when they were slain, but my trial was all over by then, so it didn’t matter.

  Despite all this, I was still afraid. I knew I had come off badly with all my contradictions and that worried me incessantly, even when both Mr. Jennings and Governor Robinson held my hand and promised me that everything would be all right. To help allay my fears, Dr. Bowen was called to the stand and queried about the effects of morphine upon an anguished mind. “Might it not affect the memory and change and alter one’s view of things and possibly even cause hallucinations?” Mr. Jennings asked craftily.

  “Yes, sir,” Dr. Bowen answered emphatically. “Most certainly!”

  Across the crowded courtroom our eyes met and I knew that was his gift to me—a clouded mind and the perfect excuse to cover it. But why did he do it? Was it because he knew what my life was like in the house at 92 Second Street and felt sorry for me? Or was it one single frayed and lingering shred of affection he still held in his heart for me? I like to think it was the latter—a much-belated Valentine.

  My trial, also known as “That Carnival in New Bedford,” began on June 5, 1893, at the courthouse in New Bedford. It lasted fourteen days. I sat beside Emma, my jaw pillowed on my fist, and wore the same heavy, boring, and distinctly unflattering black silk dress Emma had bought off the rack for me every single day. Sometimes I played with my fan. Fluttering it did nothing to alleviate the heat. But I must do something or go mad!

  Even though it was mostly about me, the testimony was dull, dull, dull, and I sat there glassy-eyed and almost catatonic. There were times when it made my cramped little jail cell seem almost like a paradise I longed to return to; at least Mr. Dickens’s novels were there waiting for me. I did not take the stand; I let Mr. Jennings speak for me, and he did it quite well. He was almost worth the $25,000 bill he sent. Almost. The worst moment, by far—besides waiting for the jury to come back with their verdict—was when the skulls were brought in and the blade of the handle-less hatchet that had been found smeared with ashes in a dusty old box in
the cellar was shown to fit the wounds. I leapt to my feet in a fit of panic, wanting to flee, only to turn green and teeter precariously. I almost fainted. Fortunately, Mr. Jennings, Governor Robinson, and Emma all rushed to catch me in time. Only later did I learn these skulls were made of plaster and the real skulls had been returned to Oak Grove Cemetery and interred above Father’s and Abby’s coffins. It was a cruel, dirty trick for Mr. Knowlton to play upon a lady! I never forgave him for it!

  The time the jury was out was the longest hour and six minutes of my life; each instant seemed to creep by like an eternity. The tension was unbearable. I gnawed my lips raw and shredded my handkerchief into my lap. My head began to throb with the searing red pain of a migraine and my vision wavered and rippled like heat waves with flashes of starry red Fourth of July fireworks. I had never been more afraid. Innocent, innocent, you are innocent! I kept chanting in my head, willing the jury to see it my way, to do the right thing for me and for Fall River. Later, when I learned that they had voted to acquit me in less than two minutes but had sat and bided their time merely as a formality, so no one would think they had reached a verdict in unseemly haste, I wanted to slap each one of them hard across the face for torturing me so needlessly. To my mind, if they had come immediately back it would have been a greater victory; it would have shown the world my innocence was so obvious they didn’t even need two minutes to debate it.

  I was so relieved to hear the word not before guilty that I fainted dead away. I just dropped like a stone, right where I was standing. I fell so heavily I’m constantly surprised that no impertinent jokester in that hell-hot and overcrowded courtroom stood up and cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, Timber! like a lumberjack. When Emma, Governor Robinson, and Mr. Jennings helped me up, they had to repeatedly assure me that it wasn’t all a dream. When they had me in my chair again I covered my face with my hands and burst into tears. “Thank God! Thank God!” I exclaimed over and over again as relief and joy flooded me until I thought I would surely drown. And then I began to laugh. I was so happy and relieved I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop.