Prussic Acid: New Bedford

The same day that Emma traveled to Fairhaven, Lizzie had gone to New Bedford to visit Mrs. Nancy Pool, the mother of Augusta Tripp, one of Lizzie’s childhood friends, and Augusta’s sister, Carrie. She would remain at Mrs. Pool’s for five days, from Thursday, July 21st until Tuesday,  July 26th, when they traveled to see Augusta Tripp in Westport before Lizzie took the train back to Fall River. Lizzie’s movements during her stay in New Bedford were thoroughly investigated by the police, and officers were able to identify one small window of opportunity for Lizzie to have gone alone to one or more pharmacies near Mrs. Pool’s house. The only time Lizzie was not in her company during that visit, said Mrs. Pool, was for a 90-minute period on Saturday morning when Lizzie walked into town to buy “dress goods,” along with a bunch of sweet pea flowers she brought back to Mrs. Pool “because they will be pretty for Sunday.” Later that afternoon, Mrs. Pool and Lizzie “went to Fairhaven” and took with them a “little boy.” (Most likely he was the 6-year-old child of the Howland family, cousins of Nancy who lived with the Pools at 20 Madison Street.)

Armchair sleuths have since pored over late 19th-century maps of New Bedford and discovered that the two drug stores where Wright and Church worked were within a short distance of Mrs. Pool’s residence. These sleuths find more support for a visit to a drug store by pointing out that Mrs. Pool also told Andrew Jennings that, during a walk with Lizzie after they returned from Fairhaven, Lizzie “told me about getting Frank’s pills.” While it is not clear who Frank was—the Pool residence also served as a boarding house— this statement suggests that Lizzie likely picked up a prescription for someone at the house from a drug store during her solitary shopping trip into New Bedford. If so, one wonders why Mrs. Pool didn’t simply say she knew Lizzie had gone to a drug store.

Yet, whether Mrs. Pool did know that Lizzie had been to a drug store that Saturday or not, it would appear the prosecution had no doubt that Lizzie had visited at least one pharmacy there, and perhaps even two.

Unraveling the New Bedford Drug Store Visit

Mrs. Pool’s comment that Lizzie had “picked up Frank’s pills” is a good indication that Lizzie probably did walk into a pharmacy in New Bedford, so it is not surprising that two druggists from New Bedford showed up on the prosecution’s witness list. What is unknown is exactly what the pharmacists would have relayed about Lizzie’s visit while on the stand. In his opening statement, Moody was clear that they intended to show that Lizzie had made an “attempt” to buy prussic acid, and most assume that is exactly what Wright was going to testify had happened.

We do know that police officers canvassed every pharmacy in New Bedford not long after the murders, at least according to an August 22 article in the New Bedford Evening Standard. “It was decided to make an investigation to see if she sought to buy prussic acid here. Inspectors Hathaway and Parker with City Marshal Hilliard of Fall River have visited all the drug stores in the city, and the registering of sales of poison at the various stores has been carefully examined. No prussic acid sales on the days investigated were found, although one druggist had a recollection that it was called for and refused. No tangible evidence resulted.”   

Perhaps they didn’t get tangible evidence that day, but Marshal Hilliard clearly hadn’t given up because two days later, on August 24th, the newspaper recounted an almost comical attempt by police to get a druggist to identify Lizzie while she was being held in the Taunton jail. “A New Bedford drug clerk was taken there by the police and shown the cell in which she was locked. He paced up and down the corridor several times in an attempt to see Lizzie’s face, but each time she was sitting with her back to the door … He remained in Taunton a half-day but finally left without having seen Lizzie.” This story of a furtive attempt by police to have the druggist identify Lizzie is questionable; there is no legal reason why officers would be prevented from having a suspect already under arrest turn and face a witness for the purposes of identification in an activity related to that crime. It wouldn’t have been a proper lineup, true, but it would have been an improvement on the underhanded method they used to have Bence identify her—which was to bring him into her house without her permission or even her knowledge on the night her father was murdered. But if the New Bedford story is true, it could be why this unnamed druggist (probably Edward Wright) was not called to testify along with Bence, Kilroy, and Hart at Lizzie’s preliminary hearing, which began on August 25th.  

Yet, at some point, Wright must have found the wherewithal to identify Lizzie as the visitor to his store because by November newspapers were listing the names of witnesses who had testified before the grand jury, and Edward Wright’s name (although not Church’s) does show up there, along with a William R. Martin, also a “New Bedford druggist.” These newspapers believed, or perhaps were speculating, that Wright and Martin were men “who think it was Lizzie Borden who tried to buy hydrocyanic acid of them.” Of course, testimony before the grand jury is secret, so we have no idea what these men actually said. But it is interesting to note that if they did convey that Lizzie asked for poison in New Bedford as well, the grand jury was not immediately swayed toward guilt, for they adjourned without issuing an indictment. Of course, several newspapers reported that it was Attorney General Pillsbury who called a temporary adjournment of grand jury proceedings in order to wait on more evidence; it could be that that Knowlton had just heard from Alice Russell about Lizzie burning her Bedford Cord dress three days after the murders and they needed to learn more about that particular incident. But whatever the reason for the delay, it wasn’t until Alice Russell testified for the second time before the grand jury, belatedly revealing her story about the dress-burning, that the jury voted to indict Lizzie for murder.

Either way, it remains an open question whether Wright and Martin intended to tell the jury at Lizzie’s trial that she had specifically asked for prussic acid during her visit to their drug store presumably to “pick up Frank’s pills.” Did the prosecution plan to characterize Lizzie merely showing up at a drug store as a possible “attempt” to purchase prussic acid? It seems a reasonable possibility; Knowlton was a master of taking small molehills of fact (she didn’t like Abby) and building them into mountains of speculation that sounded terrible for Lizzie (she hated Abby so much that she took a hatchet to her head). The original newspaper article about police learning that prussic acid had been requested at a pharmacy in New Bedford concluded that “no tangible evidence resulted,” which could indicate that officers couldn’t connect Lizzie to that particular request. However, they may have had decided that Lizzie simply walking through the door of a pharmacy was enough to plant a seed in the minds of the jury about Lizzie harboring a murderous intention to poison her parents, especially if it came on the heels of the testimony by Eli Bence accusing Lizzie of trying to buy prussic acid in Fall River.

Another possible signal that police trips to New Bedford didn’t result in a conclusive finding that Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid there is that no report of such a finding shows up in the Witness Statements—a compilation of police reports gathered to assist the district attorney in prosecuting his case against Lizzie. The report from Officer Medley about his trips to New Bedford to speak to Mrs. Pool are included. The report from Officers Harrington and Doherty about their visit to D.R. Smith’s and Bence’s allegation against Lizzie is included as well. So why wouldn’t a report on a similar discovery in New Bedford be included?

One might also wonder why, if Lizzie did try to purchase prussic acid in New Bedford, it managed to stay a well-kept secret in the sensationalized environment in which every scrap of information and rumor about Lizzie was whipped up into daily headlines. The story that Lizzie Borden tried to buy poison in Fall River was prominent in newspapers throughout the state from the earliest days of the investigation, so one might expect that other pharmacists who had encountered Lizzie inquiring for the same poison would have been hounded by reporters. The names of the New Bedford druggists on the prosecution’s witness list were not a secret, they were printed in newspapers starting in November 1892, more than six months before Lizzie’s trial, so the press had plenty of time to work out what those men had to add to the case. Reporters wouldn’t have even had to rely on official confirmation, even half-baked speculation often ended up as headline news in the months between the murders and the jury trial. Of course, it’s likely that police told them not to talk to the press, but they also told Eli Bence the same, and newspapers trumpeted his story long before he ever appeared in a courtroom. Yet any allegation of supposed previous attempts by Lizzie to purchase prussic acid are not mentioned anywhere other than those few vague items in the New Bedford Evening Standard, which were far from conclusive.

Furthermore, if Lizzie did attempt to buy prussic acid in New Bedford, and was refused at two different stores because—as the pharmacists would have certainly informed her—the law required it be sold only by prescription, then why try yet again to buy it in Fall River, the day before the murders, not far from her own house, where she was more likely to be recognized? If she decided to take such a risk, it was clearly not a carefully considered choice. Her alleged trip to that pharmacy to ask for prussic acid, discovered the very night of the murders, was the single most powerful reason police had to believe her guilty, and the reason she became their only real suspect in less than a day.