Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Just wait till you read about ’em,” the young woman crowed and handed Sweet the pamphlet “How to Be Beautiful” by Gervaise Graham, the “Beauty Doctor.”

Sweet sent the collection to a chemist, then published the products’ extravagant promises alongside his analysis (including an illustration of his letter, giving the piece a documentary feel). The Wrinkle Unguent was lard and wax scented with almond oil. The Freckle Lotion and Face Bleach contained corrosive sublimate (now known as mercury chloride, which the expert called “a most virulent poison”; modern chemists would agree). The Cucumber and Elder Flower Cream was cottonseed oil and almond oil. The value of each, he estimated, was less than 2 cents. Sweet’s friend deflated as she listened to the report and finally tore the booklet to shreds. The title of the article was “Valueless and Poisonous,” with the subhead “‘Annie Laurie’ Exposes the Dangers of Quack Cosmetics.” With this, Sweet risked offending advertisers and the whole beauty industry that propped up the women’s pages.*

As Sweet expanded her range, she caught the eye of one of her Examiner coworkers. He was not physically overbearing, but handsome and chivalrous. On nights when everyone had to stay late, he would put on his hat and coat and escort female colleagues to their cab or streetcar. A writer himself, he traveled with hobos and worked alongside fruit pickers, but he was more known as an encouraging editor. Despite the many warnings about the dangers awaiting young women leading public lives, Winifred apparently responded to his attention. And despite the admonishments that office flirtation would lead to dismissal of a female reporter as being “pretty and coquettish” and having a reputation as a “fool,” Winifred married Orlow Black in June 1891. Her son was born seven months later.

Chapter 8

1892

Exercising Judgment

From the eagerness of woman’s nature competitive brain-work among gifted girls can hardly but be excessive, especially if the competition be against the superior brain-weight and brain-strength of man.

—William Withers Moore, The Lancet, 1886

In the tiny jail cell, in Taunton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1892, reporter Kate Swan McGuirk perched on a provided chair, prepared to interview the inmate, and took in the room. Friends of the prisoner had attempted to decorate; a table held flowers, books, and a fruit dish. But these small reminders of the prisoner’s wealth and status couldn’t erase the stark white paint; the narrow bed; the bucket; the high, barred window that offered a glimpse of trees on the jail’s manicured grounds and ivy that smothered the walls.

Even outside the prison, the area could feel claustrophobic. Nearby Fall River, McGuirk’s hometown, was dominated by textile mills, powered by eight waterfalls on the Quequechan River, and ruled by rigid New England social hierarchies that made the distance between the mill workers’ tenements by the water and owners’ houses on the hill seem greater than it was. A reporter for the local paper described Fall River residents as “families who lived, all of them, drab, narrow, and dreary lives, apparently deriving nothing from their rapidly increasingly wealth but the pleasure of mere possession and the joy of keeping expenses down.” The city was near the ocean, but perhaps not near enough for a salty breeze to stir the heavy air.

McGuirk, twenty-six, had just escaped the stifling environment the year before, moving to Washington DC to further her journalistic career. Her witty articles, syndicated all over the country, offered an insider’s view of the Capitol and humanizing details about politicians. She traveled to Vermont to document President Benjamin Harrison’s vacation. In another article she reversed the usual scrutiny of women’s clothes by commenting dryly on the attire of male senators: “It is very hard to have any veneration for a body of men costumed with the lack of care displayed by the senate for the last few weeks.”

Her work was eminently respected and respectable. The St. Paul Globe lauded her as “clever Mrs. McGuirk, who knows the ins and outs of Washington life better than any woman in the country.” A Boston Globe columnist declared, “‘Kate,’ as her numerous friends call her, is, in my opinion, a rare journalist for a woman.” Despite the casual affection of the Globe writer, and the fact that her husband stayed behind when she moved south, her signed articles always referred to her as “Mrs. McGuirk,” wielding the “Mrs.” like a shield.

How strange to be back in this sleepy part of Massachusetts as an out-of-town reporter for the New York Recorder, pencil and notepad at the ready, evaluating familiar landmarks with a journalist’s eye. But here she was, waiting to interview an acquaintance from her Fall River days, accused of hacking her father and stepmother to death with a hatchet.

“How do you get along here, Miss Borden?” she asked.

A few weeks before, on a hot day in early August, someone had killed Lizzie Borden’s father, leaving him slumped on the sofa in the parlor, his skull crushed, blood arcing over the walls. The multiple wounds appeared to have been made by a heavy, sharp, tool.

Upstairs, Borden’s stepmother lay crumpled on the floor in the guest room. When the dead body was turned over, it was clear she had also been hit many, many times. Maybe with an ax.

The crime was mystifying. The doors to the house, on a busy street, were locked. Nothing had been stolen; Mr. Borden’s watch and cash were undisturbed. The killing took place in the middle of the day when both Lizzie Borden and the maid were home. And where was the weapon? Where were the blood-covered clothes of the killer? Surely such brutal murders, accompanied by screams and falling bodies, must have made some noise, some disturbance.

Suspicion quickly turned to Lizzie, rumored to hate her stepmother, whose alibi was that she’d stepped outside to the barn for a few minutes to look for sinkers for an upcoming fishing trip, then lingered, eating pears. A few days after the crime and after a series of contradictory