Books to the Ceiling

The Death of Grace Brown, 1906

March 21, 2019 at 1:48 am (True crime)

The Borden killings are baffling and appalling. The same can be said of the killing of Bobby Franks by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold.

The murder of Grace Brown is certainly just as appalling as the above named, but it is not baffling. On the contrary, considering the circumstances in which it occurred, it was almost inevitable. Above all, it is heartbreaking.

In Bringing Down the Colonel (2018), Patricia Miller tells the story of the scandal that broke in 1893 when Madeline Pollard brought suit against W.C.P. (William Campbell Preston) Breckinridge for breach of promise. In the early 1880s, in the words of the jacket copy, Breckinridge was “…a handsome, married, moralizing lawyer running for Congress” when he initiated an affair with Pollard, then a student at Wesleyan Female College, now known simply as Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. The relationship continued for nearly a decade. The inevitable pregnancies – note the plural – resulted. When Breckinridge’s wife died in 1892 and the anticipated marriage proposal failed to materialize, Madeline Pollard had reached the end of her tether.

Very early in this absorbing chronicle, Patricia Miller states the following:

The charges were shocking, given that Breckinridge was such a well respected figure. What was even more shocking, and novel, however, was what Madeline had to sacrifice to bring the suit. She had to reveal herself as a “ruined” woman–a woman who had acquiesced to sex outside of marriage. Few things could be more injurious to a woman in late nineteenth-century America. A woman’s chastity was  the bedrock of her social capital. Its loss, the specter of the “fallen” woman, haunted society.

When stating her purpose in bringing this suit, Madeline Pollard declared bluntly: “I’ll take my share of the blame. I only ask that he take his.”

Pollard was no ingenue. She was reasonably experienced in the ways of the world, particularly when those ways involved powerful men. Grace Brown was another story altogether. An unworldly farm girl from a small town in upstate New York – South Otselic, in Chenango County – she had come to the “big city” – Cortland – in 1904 to work in the Gillette Skirt Factory. She had a married sister in that city, with whom she could live. Her family back home could use the money she would make at the factory.

In 1906, Chester Gillette, a scion of the factory owner’s family, arrived in town to work at the skirt factory. He and Grace struck up a friendship which soon turned into a love affair.

According to an account told to a reporter after Grace’s death, Chester met Grace when a ring, an inexpensive gold band with an opal stone, slipped off her narrow finger and rolled across the factory floor until it came to rest at his feet. He picked it up and made a bow and a remark before handing it back to her.

From Murder in the Adirondacks by Craig Brandon

By such small gestures are our fates determined….

The relationship was secretive. For one thing, Chester was eager to rise into the upper crust of Cortland society. There was simply no place there for Grace. In truth, she was a stopgap for Chester, someone to make him feel less lonely as he was  learning the ropes in an unfamiliar environment.

Just as Chester was starting to pull away from Grace, she gave him news that he did not want to hear: she was pregnant. In those days, if you got a girl “in trouble,” you married her. No question; it was simply what was expected and what was done. Grace was desperate for the marriage to take place. But Chester was just as desperate not to do it.

Chester advised Grace to quit her job at the skirt factory and return for a time to her home in South Otselic. This she did, but once there, she was miserable. She loved her mother and her siblings dearly, but she could not bring herself to confide in them. Eventually, she and Chester made  plan to meet in another town and travel north into the Adirondacks. It was Grace’s fervent hope that they were running away to be married. And yet, in one of her last letters to Chester, in which she describes bidding farewell to the places and people she loves, she betrays her anxiety:

And mamma! Great heavens, how I do love Mamma! I don’t know what I shall do without her (…) Sometimes I think if I could tell mamma, but I can’t. She has trouble enough as it is, and I couldn’t break her heart like that. If I come back dead, perhaps if she does not know, she won’t be angry with me.”

At length, they came upon a place called Big Moose Lake. They took rooms there.

The lake was beautiful; the country, secluded. They rowed to a remote spot. Chester claimed that Grace, though fully clothed, had suddenly jumped into the water. Unable to save her, he swam back to shore. The boat, overturned, remained out on the lake; there was no sign of Grace. Her body was recovered the following day. Soon after, Chester was arrested.

The trial was a sensation. Grace’s letters were read, bringing many in the courtroom  to tears. Meanwhile,  when speaking of Chester, prosecutor George W. Ward let loose like an avenging angel:

“He has more stability of purpose, more determination, more cunning than a wolf has got…and when a pretty flower had come down from the hills he scented her out as the instrument of his lust, plucked the petals one by one and threw them under his feet.”

Quoted by Craig Brandon in his book

Chester was judged guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair. A subsequent appeal was denied.

There is of course much more to the story than what I have heretofore related. The post on  NewYorkUpstate.com provides a good summary of events and some excellent visuals. If you need more – and I definitely did – I recommend Murder in the Adirondacks by Craig Brandon. (Be sure to seek out the revised and updated edition, copyright 2016.)

Part Two of Brandon’s book is entitled “The Murder That Will Never Die.” First there was Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, based on the events described above and published in two volumes in 1925. This work was adapted for the stage in the early 1930s. The film version, with the same title, came out in 1931. The film A Place in the Sun, a somewhat looser adaptation, came out in 1951. I simply must interject here that this to me is one of the most brilliant films ever made. It starred an impossibly handsome Montgomery Clift, an impossibly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor – at the time of the filming, nineteen years old! – and Shelley Winters as the doomed and desperate Alice Tripp. Utterly riveting.

Finally, an operatic version of the original novel was commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The premiere performance was presented in 2005. The composer is Tobias Picker.

In his introduction, Craig Brandon reprints the words to a ‘murder ballad’ called Omie Wise. The crime to which it refers occurred in 1807 or 1808:

I’ll tell you a story about Omie Wise,
How she was deluded by John Lewis’s lies.

He promised to marry her at Adams’s spring;
He ‘d give her some money and other fine things.

He gave her no money, but flattered the case.
Says, “We will get married; there’ll be no disgrace.”

She got up behind him; away they did go
They rode till they came where the Deep River flowed.

“Now Omie, little Omie, I’ll tell you my mind:
My mind is to drown you and leave you behind.”

“Oh, pity your poor infant and spare me my life!
Let me go rejected and not be your wife.”

“No pity, no pity,” the monster did cry.
“On Deep River’s bottom your body will lie.”

The wretch he did choke her as we understand;
He threw her in the river below the mill dam.

Now Omie is missing as we all do know,
And down to the river a-hunting we ‘II go.

Two little boys were fishing just at the break of dawn;
They spied poor Omie’s body come floating along.

They arrested John Lewis; they arrested him today.
They buried little Omie down in the cold clay.

“Go hang me or kill me, for I am the man
Who murdered poor Naomi below the mill-dam.”

(This ballad exists in several versions; this one is offered by  Bob Waltz.)

Also in his introduction, Craig Brandon offers this provocative theory concerning why  the story of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown has such a hold on the popular imagination:

The real question–why do we still care about Chester after all this time?–continues to evade us. What is it about this story of a cruel and self-centered young man who murders his pregnant lover in a lake only to be discovered and executed? One answer that comes up over and over again is that the story is what psychologist Karl Yung called an archetype, a psychological script so compelling that, once initiated, forces the protagonist to follow it, powerless to resist–and, in this case, compels others to tell the story over and over.

So, did Chester Gillette actually kill Grace Brown? The better question is, Was he responsible  for her death? Craig Brandon quotes this summation by a reporter for the Utica Daily Press:

Whether Chester Gillette struck the cruel blow which killed the girl who loved and trusted him, or whether he overturned the boat with the purpose of drowning her, or whether, according to his own statement, he drove her to suicide by refusing her the only reparation in his power and then cold-bloodedly left her to drown without making one attempt to save her, makes little difference in the essential fact that he was morally her murderer.

Grace Mae Brown, March 20,1886-July 11, 1906

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True crime, from a librarian’s perspective: books and essays on the Borden case

March 7, 2019 at 2:50 pm (True crime)

The above mentioned librarian would be me; the subject, one to which I somehow feel compelled to return, year after year. Because of new, more recent transgressions in the news? No, although there are plenty of  those from which to choose. Instead, I find myself returning to the same older ones.

I am currently preparing a program entitled ‘Who Done It: True Crime Stories From A Librarian’s Perspective.’ This presentation, to which an hour and a half has been allotted, is to be given to a local group ten days from now. (That excellent title BTW was conceived by my friend Jean S.) Once again, I’ve become deeply immersed in this material. Three cases in particular have hijacked my mental apparatus:

The murder of Andrew and Abby Borden, alleged to have been committed by Lizzie Borden (1892);
The murder of Grace Brown, alleged to have been committed by Chester Gillette (1906);
The murder of Bobby Franks, committed by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (1924).

Let’s start with the Borden case.

Andrew and Abby Borden

My search for an early and accessible retelling of the Borden story led me to The Borden Case by Edmund Pearson. This lengthy essay was included with four other true crime narratives in a volume by Edmund Pearson entitled Studies in Murder. First published in 1924, it was reissued in a Modern Library edition in 1938.

The edition which I now possess was put out by the Ohio State University Press in 1999 and remains in print. It  features an introduction by Roger Lane, Emeritus Professor of History at Haverford College. Professor Lane observes in regard to Edmund Pearson’s writing that he possesses a

 lively, urbane, and ironic style …, one that anticipated Truman Capote and Norman Mailer in bringing a touch of class to a form that needed it.

Edmund Pearson 1880-1937

Mr. Pearson hailed from Newburyport, a small city on the Massachusetts coast northeast of Boston. Although he later moved to New York City to take up the post of publications editor for the New York Public Library, his attachment to his New England roots remained strong throughout his life. He wrote about a variety of crimes, but the Lizzie Borden case was his chief preoccupation. Studies in Murder was published in 1924. In the course of The Borden Case, he mentions that he had the good fortune of being able to speak to some people who had  been living in Fall River at the time the murders took place.

This passage appears near the beginning of The Borden Case:

On the intensely hot morning of August 4, 1892, something more than an hour before noon, an elderly gentleman named Andrew Jackson Borden was walking through South Main Street, Fall River. He was returning to his home which was only a few steps from the principal business street, and little more than around the corner from the City Hall, and the center of the town. It is probable that his mind was chiefly concerned with business, or with his family affairs…. So securely is the future hidden from us, that there is no way to imagine the astonishment which would have been his, could he have had any intimation not alone of the sufficiently startling fact that the remainder of his lifetime was then numbered by minutes, but that his name was to engage his countrymen’s attention, for weeks and months to come, as if he were somebody of national importance.

How  about years, decades to come?  In True Crime: An American Anthology, Harold Schechter states  that “Among connoisseurs of American true crime writing, Edmund Pearson (1880-1937) is esteemed as the dean of the genre….”

In The Borden Case, Pearson includes a lengthy quote from The Fall River Tragedy by Edwin H. Porter. Written and published in 1893, this hot-off-the press title followed closely on the heels of the actual crimes. Porter was the police reporter for The Fall River Globe and a correspondent for The Boston Herald.

This  book has a curious history. For years following its publication, it was very difficult to obtain. In the Appendix to Studies in Murder, Edmund Pearson hints rather breathlessly that the Porter book may have been deliberately “suppressed.” He goes on to state: “In Fall River it seems to be on the index librorum prohibitorum; it is mentioned in hushed tones, and is not included in the catalogue of the public library.” To my surprise, I was able to obtain – rather easily – a copy of The Fall River Tragedy through interlibrary loan. The book that was sent to me is actually a facsimile edition of the 1893 issue.

Facsimile of the title page of the original 1893 edition

It is frequently alleged that before copies of this book could reach their intended audience, Lizzie Borden bought up the entire edition and destroyed it. In her 1967 book A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight, author Victoria Lincoln, herself a native of Fall River, gives credence to that legend. Supposedly there was something very damning in Porter’s book – something that Lizzie did not wish to become known.

But that legend has since been debunked by, among others, Sarah Miller, author of The Borden Murders (2016). Miller is dismissive of Porter’s efforts:

In reality, Lizzie had little to fear from Edwin Porter….If  the people of Fall River were hoping for shocking new revelations, or perhaps even a solution to the mystery, Porter was a complete disappointment.

Maybe so, but I found his minute by minute analysis of the crimes – to be cogently reasoned and quite persuasive. In other words, circumstances must have ordered themselves in precisely  the way Porter describes in order for someone from the outside to have gained entry to the house, murdered both elderly Bordens, and then escaped undetected. The following was quoted by Edmund Pearson in Studies In Murder:

 To those who stopped to contemplate the circumstances surrounding the double murder, it was marvelous to reflect how fortune had favored the assassin. Not once in a million times would fate have paved such a way for him. He had to deal with a family of six persons in an unpretentious two-and-a-half story house, the rooms of which were all connected and in which it would have been a difficult matter to stifle sound. He must catch Mr. Borden alone and either asleep, or off his guard, and kill him with one fell blow. The faintest outcry would have sounded an alarm. He must also encounter Mrs. Borden alone and fell her, a heavy woman, noiselessly.

To do this he must either make his way from the sitting room on the ground floor to the spare bed room above the parlor and avoid five persons in the passage, or he must conceal himself in one of the rooms up stairs and make the descent under the same conditions. The murdered woman must not lisp a syllable at the first attack, and her fall must not attract attention. He must then conceal the dripping implement of death and depart in broad daylight by a much frequented street….Bridget Sullivan, the servant, must be in the attic asleep on her own bed. Her presence in the pantry or kitchen or any room on the first or second floors would have frustrated the fiend’s designs, unless he also killed her so that she would die without a murmur.

In making his escape there must be no blood stains upon his clothing; for such tell-tale marks might have betrayed him. And so, if the assailant of the aged couple was not familiar with the premises, his luck favored him exactly as described. He made no false move. He could not have proceeded more swiftly nor surely had he lived in the modest edifice for years. At the most he had just twenty minutes in which to complete his work. He must go into the house after Miss Lizzie entered the barn and he must disappear before she returned.

There’s more in this vein – quite a bit more. It is very persuasively argued. Porter concludes by exclaiming:

It was a wonderful chain of circumstances which conspired to clear the way for the murderer; so wonderful that its links baffled men’s understanding.

But Porter is not quite right about the  twenty minutes required to perform the killings, as Pearson points out. Examination of the blood evidence and later, the stomach contents of each of the victims, led investigators to conclude that Abby Borden had died an hour to an hour and a half before her husband.

So: Andrew Borden had only just arrived home; he’d decided to lie down on the couch in the sitting room for a brief nap. Bridget the maid was napping upstairs in her bedroom.  Emma Borden, Lizzie’s older sister, was visiting friends out of town. A relative, John Vinicum Morse, was staying with the family, but had gone out and did not return until later. Abby Borden’s whereabouts were not immediately known. Lizzie said that she had gone out to visit a sick person. Lizzie herself claimed to have been in the barn out back while her father was being slaughtered. Yet circumstances pointed to her more than to anyone else, so she was duly arrested. And tried. (Sarah Miller’s book describes the trial in vivid detail.) And ultimately acquitted.

There is of course much more to this story than what I have related here. I recommend Sarah Miller’s The Borden Murders, a book which is rather disconcertingly – to me, at least – reviewed as a YA (Young Adult) title, and even as one for older children! (Sarah Miller has penned several works for this demographic.) My dear friend Barb L, children’s librarian extraordinaire, offered the following insight to me via email:

Lizzie (later Lizbeth) Andrew Borden 1860-1927

The ballet Fall River Legend was made by Agnes DeMille in 1948 for the American Ballet Theater. Music composed by Morton Gould.

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