Father and stepmother. In massachusetts. The bookstore in falls river hosted this event. Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to politics and pros. Thanks for coming out on this very beautiful day. Were very 34r50esed to have Cara Robertson here to talk about her new book the trial of Lizzie Borden. A little housekeeping. Lets take a moment to silence our cell phones. Ill do that, too. We are recording. Cspan is with us today so we dont want any extra noise or interruptions. After cara speaks there will be time for q a so if you have a question youd like to ask her, if you could use this microphone here so we can pick stuff it l of our would be great. We have a lot going on at politics and pros, even at the what were and union market and check it out on our social media. You may enjoy our True Crime Book Group that meets every third tuesday of the month in the coffee house. My name is jenny, im a bookseller here and really glad to introduce Cara Robertson. Shes a lawyer and educated at harvard, oxford and stanford school. Formerly a Supreme CourtCourt Law Clerk and served as a Legal Advisor for the former yugoslavia at the hague and a visiting scholar at stanford law school. She first started researching the Lizzie Borden story at harvard and published her first paper on the trial in 1997. The trial of Lizzie Borden is her first book and examines the most infamous murders of history, the murders of andrew and Elizabeth Borden and daughter lizzie are so famous they remain a ubiquitous lore now. In the trial robertson strips away the salacious and mythology details and uses Court Transcripts and lizzies own letters and provide as meticulous exppings of the case and tells us how the social expectations and biases of the guilded age influenced her treatment and set the stage for the ledge tend has become. Now heres Cara Robertson. Cara thank you. Im not expecting a call, this is to make sure i dont speak too long. Thank so you much for coming, particularly on such a beautiful day. When youve been working on a subject as long as i have, theres also a fear youre involved in some sort of intellectual stockholm syndrome. So it is nice to know once the book is actually out there are people who might want to hear a little more about it. What i thought i would do is tell you a little bit about what drew me into the case to give you a sense of what my approach is. Although it is a very familiar case to people, ill give you a little background about the story so were all kind of on the same page for the question and answer period. And you know, i look forward to knowing what it is that grabs you about the case. Something y thinking like this, a great public trial would be a good way to get a window into the guilded age which was a time of great change and tension in american society, also one that seems uncannily like our own in some regards at this point. And you know, some of that is because obviously in a trial, the lawyers need to explain in a way that is incom prehencible to people who are supposed to be representative of the community at large, the jury, how something might have happened. It gives one good insight into the stories that a culture wants and expects to hear. And also, i found while doing the researching it made me question also the sharp distinction that many people from a law background make between what the legal professionals do and what, for example, thes might argue to the jury, that it seemed to me that the same cultural assumptions were at play when the lawyers and the judges were discussing the evidence rulings as when the lawyers were making their arguments specifically to the jury. Thats just something that i had in the back of my mind. And then as for this particular story, you know, i must say i was attracted to the mystery, that technically speaking, its a whodunit and even if youre pretty sure who did it, it certainly is a why done it . In that story is a locked room mystery out of the guilded age. Theres a small space, there are limited number of suspects, its very difficult as a practical matter to understand how anyone could have done it at all. And its certainly difficult to imagine how anyone besides the person who was ultimately put on trial for could have done it. You has some of the if will, the pleasures of that kind of puzzling out for those who like mysteries. But it also has a mythic quality. You know, in the book ive said hat its a locked room mystery but as written sofocles. At its base is the story of an extremely unhappy family and the tensions that erupt that ny people see as symbolic of wider social questions or familial relations. So that was basically my approach. And i probably should give you a nonspoiler alert, which is that i dont actually solve the mystery in the course of the story, that i thought it was important to lay out the story from the beginning, to the verdict, to the strange cultural after life of the case without officially taking a position so that it would be as evenhanded as possible and would allow the readers to puzzle it out for themselves. Theres also something that i think always feels a little bit like a cheat when youre reading a nonfiction narrative and theres a solution to the central mystery that its hard not to think that, and i think it has been the case with prior works on the borden mystery, you do have the sense that people are really emphasizing and deemphasizing parts of the story. And again, that was something i didnt want to do. So anyway, all of that is the background. And just to begin with what we know for certain and that is on ugust 4, 1892, andrew and abby borden, an elderly couple, were found hacked to death, in the words of their local paper, in their fall river, massachusetts home. It seemed initially like the work of a madman. Lled by en had been fe 19 blows in the upstairs bedroom and an hour and a half later after he returned from a business downtown, mr. Borden was himself killed by 10 blows while he was having a nap on the sitting room sofa. So it was a pretty horrifying scene regardless of anything else. I mean, that that alone was front page nerate news. But the police soon discovered some anomalies. They expected this was the work of a madman and some crazed stranger would be found wandering the streets with an axe or a hatchet. But they noted two central facts. The first was as i had mentioned in describing the murders, the intervals between the murders seemed odd. It was strange someone from the outside would have come in, illed mrs. Borden, waited at least an hour and a half to kill mr. Borden and then departed. It was a small house, quite narrow, with no central halls because it was a converted and amily tenement house there was nowhere to hide and if someone came in, that person would have to allude the others. And the second and even more important point was the house seemed to have been locked. The front door was certainly locked and the backdoor was certainly locked and left a side door that was kept closed and latched by with us tom of the house and was often in the sight of the familys housekeeper but wasnt conclusively shown it was locked throughout but still left very little room for an outside perpetuator to come in. So the police turned their attention to the people known to be in the house at the time. There were three others who woke up in the house that morning who survived the carnage. The first was a man named john morris. He was andrew bordens brotherinlaw. He had been the brother of andrews first wife, abby, who was killed upstairs as i mentioned, was his second wife. And he had arrived the day before to pay a visit on the bordens, and that seemed suspicious to many people. And he was also an attractive suspect because he was an outsider. He was from the west, he was a horse trader. People said he consorted with gypsy traders who were down in west port. There were just things about him that werent so appealing. So he seemed plausible. But he had an alibi that was straight out of a detective novel. Shortly after breakfast, he had gone to visit other relatives in a different part of town and had been riding on the horse car with six priests. And while if this werent agatha christy, he definitely would have done it and left a pretty good alibi and left two women in the house at the time of the murder. The first, Bridget Sullivan, the familys Irish Catholic housekeeper, who incidentally was called maggie by everyone except mrs. Borden, and the reason she was called maggie is maggie was the name of their last housekeeper and they just couldnt be bothered to learn a new name. So anyway, mrs. Borden did maggie, a. K. A. Bridget sullivan, another favor which was to ask her to wash windows that morning inside and outside. So that meant that Bridget Sullivan happened to be outside washing windows in sight of other people at the time mrs. Borden was killed and seemed to rule her out of that possible murder and it was thought whoever killed mrs. Borden had killed mr. Borden as well at the time mr. Borden was killed, she was upstairs in her attic room napping. The family suffered from Food Poisoning the day before and she was feeling unwell and possibly was getting a head start on her usual thursday half day. So that left one person, and that was andrew bordens younger daughter, lizzie, 32 years old, married, still living at home and an older sister emma, 10 years older, but had been away visiting friends two weeks so was definitely in the clear. And there were a number of suspicious things about lizzie. The first was that she hadnt actually looked for her stepmother when she discovered her fathers body at around 11 00. She said her stepmother had received a note and had gone out. No note was ever found and an investigation failed to disclose any potential sender of the note. It was also the case that she seemed to give shifting accounts of where she was. She said she was downstairs ironning handkercheifs at the time mrs. Borden died, a task significantly left undone. And that she was outside in the barn looking variously for a sinker for a fishing line or a piece of tin to fix a screen and also eating pears in the upper part of the barn at the time her father was murdered. All this probably wouldnt have been enough to place her under arrest but it was also discovered that she had tried to buy poison the day before the murders. She had gone to the local drugstore or was identified as a woman who had gone to the ocal drugstore and asked for pressic acid to supposedly clean a seal skin cape and said we only sell that on doctor prescriptions and this particular woman insisted she had done so on various occasions. But no one believed she had actually that woman had actually managed to purchase the acid and the bordens themselves were not poisoned. But it went a long way towards explaining why a woman might turn to a readily available household implement to execute a murderous plan she had already formed. Poison was considered to be a womans weapon, so that held a lot of sway. And it also was discovered that seemed implaqueably divided between the generations and there was a lot of ill feeling and lizzie in particular had disliked her stepmother. So all of these things culminated in Lizzie Bordens arrest and that catapulted what would have been probably a passing horror into something much darker, and a case of international significance. So at this point, im just going to read you a description of the newspaper coverage of the opening of the trial. The trial of Lizzie Borden, according to the Providence Journal would be one of the greatest murder trials in the worlds history. The new york world more modestly declared it the trial of the most extraordinary criminal case in the history of new england. The boston globe proclaimed it will be impossible to exaggerate the interest felt and manifested by intelligent readers throughout the country in the outcome of this trial of a comparatively young woman for the murder of her father and stepmother. The globe estimated among its own readership, there are at this moment 100,000 persons devoting what they are pleased to call their minds in a hopeless analysis of this tremendous case. To satisfy this demand, so many corresponds and reporters converged on new bedford that the new bedford Evening Standard questioned whether a more distinguished collection of newspaper writers were ever detailed to cover a murder trial. Some of those included many of what you might call the bold faced names of the day, journalists so famous they themselves wrote memoirs and were talked of in the same way as significant literary figures. One was a man named joe howard covered case for the boston globe and at the time was the highest paid correspondent in america. He traveled, it was said, a blond stenographer, and he devoted a great deal of attention to bringing his readers into the courtroom so that people could follow along the proceedings not just what actually happened while the court was in session but also the extensive urgency so many felt in their attempts to get into the courthouse, the fact that so many women were in the audience and the numbers of women steadily increased throughout the trial so that by the end, more than half were women. Some even put the number higher. And he would scan the crowd for , you know, pretty faces as he would want to do and other celebrities of the day would receive mention. He turned minor Court Officials into characters so that the readers would have the pleasure f reading about the familiar people and the pomposity of the sheriff or the eloquence of the lawyer. He even reported on the activities of what he referred to as the cow of the day who was or which was a cow that just happened to be across the street and whose mooing was audible at different moments and seemed to provide a commentary. The globe said joe howards cow will go down in history on the same level as mrs. Olearys cow, the cow that tarted the chicago fire. And in terms of what they were looking at, the person of course who was of most interest to all of the correspondents was Lizzie Borden herself. And she presented a conundrum for people because she had this quite extraordinary selfpossession and that was read in opposing ways so that for those who were inclined to think that she was guilty, they saw her as one newspaper wrote as the sphinx of coolness, someone with a detachment that suggested the kind of masculine nerve that was consistent with premeditated violence and not consistent with late 19th century notions of proper femininity. For those inclined to be sympathetic and as it happened, turned out to be most of the reporters from out of town especially, like joe howard. They saw this as consistent with the kind of inborn dignity, a mark of ladyhood, as they would put it. That this was someone who ticked all the boxes of respect able femininity. She had been active in her and she was engaged in all the culturally sanctioned activities one might expect of an unmarried woman in her day. So for those reporters her behavior was what you would expect, she acquitted herself admireably and she was just bearing up in an impossible situation and it was also noted that and this gives you some idea of the theater involved in the trial. Theres a moment where the that ution displays a bag happens to hold the skulls of the bordens, and Lizzie Borden promptly fainted then, and earning the approval of all journalists, even the pretty hostile Irish Catholic paper from fall river. So there is the sense that her own behavior, her own demeanor during the trial was a central to the question of her guilt or innocence as the arguments that are actually being made by the lawyers. And i should say the book is mostly about the trial, so i just will very briefly give you a sense for the prosecution, as was indicated by my summary of the murders, the trial is a case of exclusive opportunity, you know, mixed with a powerful motive so that basically no one else could have done it, therefore Lizzie Borden did it. And we know she hated her stepmother. Theyre largely silent on the question of why she killed her father. That seems to be something the prosecutors cant quite grapple with themselves, that all the focus about the am netty amneti in the household is about lizzie and her stepmother and not with her father and the only thing the prosecution can argue is that Lizzie Borden meant to kill her stepmother and then didnt get out in time o establish her own alibi so she was transformed, thats the word they used, transformed sort of like jekyll and hyde, into a murderess who then kills her father, too. And as you can imagine, the defense makes a lot of that. They ridicule the prosecution for not being able to supply what they consider to be a reasonable motive for her fathers murder. They also point to many suspicious characters seen in the vicinity. My personal favorite is dr. Handys wildeyed young man who is spotted staring at various people and staring into the ground. And just essentially the argument is look, its not your usiness to unravel the mystery , so that if you have any kind cant t at all, then you send this woman to the gallos. The trial lasts over two weeks which is an unusually long trial for that period. But its probably worth noting that the jury was unanimous on the first ballot. They found that they were in total agreement and really didnt need to discuss the evidence. However, they waited in the jury room for about an hour and a half so it would seem like they had been properly deliberative. And then when they came out to verdict the foreman was so excited he couldnt wait for the clerk to finish the question and blurted out not guilty. And at that point theres pandemonium in the courthouse and tears, many congratulations to Lizzie Borden and her supporters, and the assumption is Lizzie Borden will then return to fall river and live down her notoriety. But her supporters cooled in their enthusiasm pretty quickly. People began to wonder if she didnt do it, then who did . She found that the pews around her own seat at her local church were empty when she tried to return, and the church had formed the bedroom of her support during the trial. And that pretty much set the tone for her treatment in the polite circles of society. Her sister, who i mentio