1. "Alice Doesn't Live There Anymore"
Posted by augusta on Jul-11th-02 at 9:54 PM

What was the basis for Alice Russell and Lizzie's friendship?  Emma testifies at the trial that they were not bosom buddies.  That they did not do any church work together.  (Tho they did attend the same church.) But they both visited each other a lot.  What was the common bond between them?  Fortune telling? 

(Message last edited Jul-11th-02  9:55 PM.)

Augusta, do you suppose since Alice Russell was Emma's friend that Lizzie just assumed she was her friend too?  Plus, Emma was away the night before the murders and Lizzie didn't have her usual "Mother" figure, Emma, to talk to.  So, I suppose since Alice was older than Lizzie, maybe she assumed she was wiser and a good stand-in for Emma.  I have to wonder what would have happened that day if Emma was around? 

Check the web-site, SPOTLIGHT CONTRIBUTIONS, "All Things Swift", by Terence Duniho, for more on Alice Russell...


PROCEEDINGS, Conference book, 1993, p.225+, Article: "They Would Like to Have Been Cultured Girls", by Robert T. Johnson, Jr.  (A wonderful Essay...)

"...We know little about Alice Russell, other than what we learn through her testimony.  We know that Alice was a spinster, that Alice lived in the Kelly house just south of the Borden house for approximately eleven years, until 1890, and during these years came to be a friend to both Lizzie and her sister Emma, and that this friendship continued after Alice moved to a home between 3rd and 4th streets on Borden Street, approximately 300 yards to the northeast of the Borden house.  From her testimony at the Inquest we know that she was working at home at the time of the murders.  She took in sewing;  Florence Brigham, long-time curator of the Fall River Historical Society, remembers her much later as teaching sewing to her and other young girls in the Fall River public schools.

...She was nearer to Emma's age than to Lizzie's.

...Lizzie frequently called on Alice Russell in the evenings to visit, and Alice often returned the kindness.  One senses from Alice's testimony that Alice and the sisters were very close friends, for their visits were frequent, two or three times per week sometimes, and unscheduled, which was unusal in this formal age.  The night before the murders, Wednesday evening, August 3, Lizzie spent two hours at Alice's home, talking wildly and excitedly about fears and premonitions that she had about danger facing the Borden family."

--[Lizzie DID send for Alice in her time of need...]

"...[Later] Whether learning that it was murder led Alice to reflect on Lizzie's premonitions of the night before, and to become suspicious of Lizzie, we do not know.  We do know that shortly succeeding events must have made her wonder."

--[The conflicting statements given to her and in front of her by Lizzie to the questioning officers.  The sending her out of the room on an odd errand and upon returning finding Lizzie had not only changed her dress but done it in Emma's room.  The cellar visit together Thursday night that had Alice shaking so much the officer outside could see her tremble.  Lizzie about to burn a dress.  Yet Alice stayed with Lizzie and Emma, testified 5 times in courts about them, tried to give good "spin" to questionable activities and stories by and about the girls].

"...We also know from her testimony that Alice offered much evidence which she knew to be helpful for Lizzie....She tried to minimize the contentiousness between Lizzie and her stepmother, describing it as the same as any family and nothing further than she was a stepmother.  She attributed the ill-feeling between the girls and both parents to a clash between old-fashioned ways and modern thinking...

...Alice consistently testified that she could not remember a thing about the dress Lizzie wore on the day of the murders...

...The Boston Herald recognized that Alice had few if any champions, stating that she 'has been roughly handled for the part she appeared to play in betraying her friend' and that she is said to be weighed down during the course of the trial by a 'load of anguish.'

...Years after the murder, one Fall River resident wrote that Alice was a neighbor and not a friend (Williams, 267).

Yet Alice must have been a very good friend to put up with the horror of staying in the muder house those four days and nights.

...she was torn by conflicting urges--the urge to help her friend, and the urge to tell the truth...Ultimately, the pangs of conscience must have overwhelmed her, and compelled her to tell the truth...Yet somehow...one suspects...she was relieved by the verdict."

--[Alice may even have had to pay for her own lawyer, Mr. Swift!  She was nominated by Lizzie to become part of this worldly drama which would change her life,  beyond her own comprehension.   And it is probably true that she saw or surmised more than she ever told.  Yet a disposable friend in the Borden girl's eyes?]

(Message last edited Jul-12th-02  5:06 AM.)

Reading Emma's trial testimony, Emma answers "yes" to being asked if Alice was a friend of Lizzie's.  Emma says that Alice visited up in the guest/sewing room 'very often'.

Reading Alice Russell's trial testimony, Alice says that she knew all four of the Bordens well from living next door to them before she moved slightly further away.

I don't see where she was a friend of Emma's in particular.

.

Trial, Emma,Pg. 1563+
Q.  Did you make any use of the guest chamber?
A.  Yes, sir.

Q.  What for?
A.  As a sewing room.

Q.  Anything else?
A.  Why, we sat there in making it a sewing room.

Q.  Anything else beside that?
A.  Except when someone came that we put there to sleep.

Q.  Anything else?
A.  No, sir.

Q.  Did you receive your friends there?
A.  Oh, just as it happened. If it was someone we were very well acquainted with and we were in there sewing, we had them come up.

Q.  And didn't you usually receive your friends there?
A.  No, sir.

Q.  Didn't you usually receive Miss Russell there?
A.  Very often.

Q.  Didn't you usually receive Miss Anna Borden there?
A.  No, sir; she was never in that room in her life.

--While Emma testifies that the guest room is the sewing room and NOT their sitting room, Alice tends to state right out that the "sewing/guest room" IS the girls sitting room...And I could never figure out this discrepency.  I thought Emma was "distancing" herself and Lizzie from this room.  One of them is fibbing.
--In Emma's Inquest she says SHE is the one who asked Alice to stay those nights after the murders. (113).


--Also, about their friendship:
Inquest, Alice, 146+
Q.  Was that quite a frequent thing, for her (Lizzie) to visit you?
A.  She has done so more this Summer, because she has not had quite so much outside work, but we have always visited, been friends.

Q.  Have you visited there a great deal?
A.  Yes, sometimes perhaps I would go in quite often, and then again quite a spell I would not go.

Q.  When you went in, did you see the whole family, or Miss Lizzie or Emma?
A.  I saw the girls mostly.

Q.  Your acquaintance was mostly with the daughters?
A.  Yes Sir.

Q.  Not so much with the old people?
A.  No Sir.

Q.  Where did you usually see them?
A.  Upstairs what they used for a sitting room usually.

Q.  Which room was that?
A.  What they call the guest chamber.

Q.  It was used as a sitting room?
A.  Generally, for them.

Q.  Who used that as a sitting room?
A  The two girls.

Q.  Was that where they usually sat when they were at home?
A.  I think so.

Q.  That is, so far as you know?
A.  So far as I know.

Q.  Do you recollect the last time you visited them?
A.  The last time I visited them, or visited there?

Q.  Either one.

A.  I went in there, I am sure, once after Emma had gone to Fairhaven.

Q.  Who were you more particularly intimate with, Emma or Lizzie, or both?
A.  I dont think there was very much difference.

--I always thought people assumed Alice was more a friend of Emma because of their ages:  Emma born March, 1851....Alice born January, 1852....and Lizzie born July, 1860.
--Alice implies she is equal friends to both, in her estimation.  What the girls thought may be different.
Emma asking her to stay, may have been asking a favor of a good friend of her own...or could be construed as asking her to stay for the sake of Lizzie.

I find Alice Russell to be one of the most interesting figures in the whole Borden story. A close and long-time friend of both Emma and Lizzie she was certainly well acquainted with Abby and Andrew and probably on at least nodding or even speaking terms with many of the other Borden relatives, friends, and neighbors (Uncle John, the Whiteheads, the Millers, the Bowens, the Churchills, people from the church, to name some). And, Alice was there, conversing with Lizzie about her (Lizzie's) premonitions only hours before the crimes were committed and then in and around the Borden house (also the murder scene) for four days and nights afterward!

There must have been much that Alice saw, and heard, and pondered during those four days and nights and long afterward, too. I find some of her testimony disappointing, there was much she said she did not remember, and given all the circumstances such testimony is not difficult to understand. How ironic that it was probably Alice Russell's grand jury testimony that made the difference to the prosecution and allowed the Commonwealth to bring Lizzie to trial.

Different people have said that if they could speak today to just one participant in the Borden story they would choose John Morse. Uncle John would indeed be an interesting conversation, but if she was willing and able I might just choose to talk to Alice Russell!

LINCOLN
Pg. 245
"Apropos this odd habit that the Borden girls had of burning up their dresses: Alice Russell after testifying found herself deluged with mail from strangers. Compulsively, she read it all, the foul and the threatening, day after day; she found it hard to be denounced as a police spy, a Judas. I was always told that Mr. Swift also took it to heart and felt responsible for her unhappiness and new self-questionings; he had been firm about her speaking to Mr. Knowlton.

This is one of those countless bits I always laid to unreliable hearsay until I found it in newsprint. Alice Russell was widely loved, people talked, and reporters on the Fall River scene picked up the story and played it for its human-interest value. I am sure that she never knew that she was featured in the Baltimore Sun as the victim of all that nastiness; nor would she have liked to know it. Like her dear Emma, she was retiring."

--Are you psychic, Doug?  That's 2x today!  I've been collecting *Alice* references for a good while now, since Augusta asked on here "whose friend was Alice, anyway"?
--It is so odd to imagine what these regular people went through, just on the Periphery of the case!
--She lived at 33 Borden St., and I wondered if anyone remembered another character that lived also on Borden street around that time?  I thought there might be a connection?

I can't remember who lived near Alice, nor can I quickly find a reference in Hoffman or Rebello.  However, Hoffman says Hiram Harrington WORKED at a blacksmith shop on the corner of Fourth and Borden Streets, so there might have been more than one connection...

Lucy Collet testified she lived on Borden St.  In a news article it said she lived on Borden between Second and Third Sts.

Alice lived at #33 between Third and Fourth.

Gorman's store (where Cunningham called from) was at the corner of Borden and Second.

Down from Alice and across the street at #30 was Hiram C. Harrington's Blacksmith shop.

There's a nice layout in Rebello, page 563.

Didn't A R Brown say that Uncle Hiram Harrington OWNED that blacksmith shop? Correct?
An obvious difference in status between owning a business and being a hired hand.

Does anyone disagree with the report that the girls loved their aunt Mrs. Harrington?

Thanks again.
That was exactly what I was looking for.
The Hiram connection AND the Collett connection, to Borden Street. 
I could not remember where I saw or read that.

How the heck
did you remember Collett?

Now I wonder did Alice & Lucy know each other, as neighbors?

Somehow, Ray, I can't feel those girls loving anyone...

Well, Lucie/Lucy Collett would have been 18 in 1892, and Alice Russell was 40.  So there was quite an age difference.  Also, the Collett family was French, or probably French-Canadian.  I suspect they were about as close to Alice as the Chagnon family was to Lizzie.  As to Lizzie's being able to love, remember that letter that she wrote to a friend, speaking of her own loneliness and desire to see the friend?  It's sometimes used as evidence that Lizzie was a lesbian.  Whether or not she was, I certainly think Lizzie was capable of loving.  Emma I'm less sure about.

I thought maybe Alice had taught Lucy and also knew her as a neighbor.  But if Lucy was French/Canadian maybe she was in the parochial school system...

I can feel passions from Lizzie, but I don't know as it is *love*, per se.  I do feel what you mean about Emma.  (But that any love she may have felt would be for Lizzie).

--Anyway--From Terence Duniho's article in LBQ, July, 2001, "Friends From Boyhood?"
"...(Phil) Harrington's next employer was Mr. Mark A. Sullivan.  They are listed in the 1882 city directory as 'Sullivan (Mark A.) & Harrington, Philip, painters, 5 Spring, h. 110 Third [Sullivan's]...h. 79 S. Main [Harrington's].'  Like 92 Second, 79 S. Main was between Spring and Borden (streets), one block to the west of Second (street).  110 Third (street) was on the North East corner of Third and Branch, two blocks south of Morgan (street).

At the trial, Bridget Sullivan was asked, 'You went out to meet some friends Wednesday night [Aug. 3]?...How far did you go from the house?'

(Her answer)...'I couldn't tell.  I went as far as Third street, up Third street.  I went down Second street, through Borden street and up Third street.  I went down Main street and up Main street, and out as far as Morgan street.'(Trial, 264)

In 1892, Phil Harrington's mother lived on Third, between Morgan and Wade.  Many other Harringtons and Sullivans also lived on Third."  [City directory, 1892]

--I have always wanted to know what Bridget saw & did Wednesday night while Lizzie was at Alice Russell's house.  Were they both in the same general area that fateful night?

I too would like to know, in the trial Bridget is asked where she passed Wednesday evening and her only reply is she was up in her friend's in Third street.  Not who's house she was visiting and what she did while there; did they talk, drink beer, play cards, what?

I can't remember which book I read it in, will have to hunt it down, but, I recall reading that Lizzie's brand of loving was akin to a schoolgirl's crush.  In other words, the author was stating that she was immature in her passions.

And poor dear Emma lavished whatever affection she had on her only outlet, Lizzie.  Emma comes across at times as a very passionate woman, such as when she is angered, or on the stand when she feels she has been misquoted.  But, I have to wonder how far those passions extended to the rest of her emotions? 

Didn't that story (alleged from Hiram Harrington) say Andy's girls loved their aunt, but he was unwelcome at Andy's house?
Isn't it a chapter in Porter's book?

There is actual testimony about the relationship.
Hiram says at inquest that he does not enter Andrew's house but that he brings letters or invitations to the girls from his wife.
He says that Luranna mentioned that she had not seen Lizzie since the past winter, but put it down to her busy outside activities with the church, etc.  Apparently the girls were on friendly terms with their aunt, and got along with their uncle Hiram.  Emma seems to be more interested in the ralationship than Lizzie.
--This is merely from the Inquest.  The Prelim and/or Trial may elucidate...