Abby’s Time of Death

Everyone knows what time Andrew Borden was murdered on the morning of August 4th, 1892. He succumbed very near 11:00 a.m., within the brief thirteen-minute gap between the time Bridget Sullivan went upstairs to her attic room take a nap (around 10:57) and the time Lizzie called her downstairs after she discovered him hacked to death on the sofa (11:10). This narrow window allowed the defense to cast doubt on Lizzie’s ability to accomplish all the things she would have had to do in order to be seen so soon by others without any evidence of blood on her, or without a believable weapon within reach. Having such a clear idea of Andrew’s time of death made it more difficult for the prosecution to convince a jury of Lizzie’s guilt, to the point even District Attorney Hosea Knowlton privately told the state’s attorney general that he expected her to be acquitted (she was).

But for those who wrestle with the logistics of how Lizzie Borden was able to commit two blood-spattering murders without leaving behind any physical evidence for police to find, getting a better understanding of the time Abby died becomes more important. The answer could have significant bearing on questions that have been repeatedly posed over the years, such as why no one, either inside or outside the house, heard Abby cry out or fall as she was being attacked. Abby’s time of death could also have great bearing on questions that have not often been asked, yet are perhaps even more salient, such as how Lizzie could have premeditated the murder of Abby Borden in the guest room when Abby supposedly only rarely went into the guest room. Or, for those who lean toward Lizzie’s innocence, how and when an intruder could have realistically entered the house.

As the medical experts only offered that hour-long window for Abby’s time of death, we will need to turn to what Lizzie and Bridget said they remembered happening in the preceding 30 minutes or so. Both women testified they last saw Abby dusting in the dining room, and that they both last spoke to her while she was in the midst of that task. But when it comes to figuring out exactly what time each woman saw her there, and the amount of time Abby spent at the chore before disappearing upstairs, Lizzie and Bridget told two different tales. Thus, trying to come up with a reasonable scenario for exactly when Lizzie (or an unknown intruder) carried a hatchet into the guest room to kill her stepmother in the few minutes Abby was in that room putting shams on the pillows, without the chance of her murder being heard by Bridget, becomes challenging.

Two Versions of Murder Morning

According to Lizzie, she first descended the stairs that morning about ten or fifteen minutes before 9 a.m., and we know this is probably close to accurate because neither she nor John Morse saw each other that morning (he left about 8:40 a.m.), but she did speak to her father and give him a letter to mail to Emma before he left the house around 9 a.m. (at least according to Mrs. Churchill’s recollection). Lizzie said she first saw Andrew in the sitting room, reading the Providence Journal, but she spoke to him only after she encountered Abby on her way to the kitchen. Lizzie testified that as she went through the dining room, Abby was there dusting and they had a short conversation in which Abby informed Lizzie that she’d soon be going back upstairs to put clean slips on the small pillows on the bed. (This conversation, Lizzie said, also included Abby telling her she’d had a note from a sick friend and so she would be going out). Bridget confirmed hearing Lizzie and Abby talking in the dining room as Lizzie “came along,” and described it as a “civil” conversation in which Abby asked Lizzie some questions and Lizzie answered normally. But it is at this point that Lizzie and Bridget’s stories diverge.

At the inquest, Lizzie said that when she went into the kitchen, it was already clean and everything was put away except the coffee pot, and that Bridget was just gathering her window washing equipment. She denied having breakfast, saying “I did not feel as if I wanted any,” although she said it was possible she ate half a banana or a molasses cookie, she couldn’t remember. She said once Bridget went out to wash windows, her father came into the kitchen and told her he did not know whether he would go down to the post office or not. (Apparently, she talked him into it.) Lizzie would also say that soon after coming downstairs she went down into the cellar to visit the water closet. When she came back up, Bridget was nowhere to be seen, presumably out washing windows, and neither was Abby anywhere that she could see, presumably finished with the pillow shams and now out of the house on a sick call. Lizzie said it was upon coming back up from the cellar that she took her clean clothes (which Bridget typically left on the kitchen table) and carried them up to her room. As she was putting them away she must have noticed something wrong with one of the items of clothing because she said she spent five minutes or so sewing a loop on a sleeve. When she came out of her room to head back downstairs, she said she noticed the guest room door was closed; she assumed Abby had shut it “to keep the dust out.” Lizzie then went back downstairs and started getting her things together to iron some handkerchiefs, and this, she believed, was about the time her father left the house.

However, in Bridget’s version of the morning, Bridget was not gathering window washing equipment when Lizzie first entered the kitchen because in her version Abby hadn’t told her to do so yet. Bridget said she’d seen Andrew go upstairs before Lizzie came into the kitchen, and she herself was still washing dishes as Lizzie entered. She asked Lizzie if she wanted anything for breakfast, and Lizzie told her she didn’t think she wanted anything, except for coffee and a cookie, which she got for herself. Bridget said she saw Lizzie sit down at the kitchen table to start drinking coffee. A few minutes later, Bridget felt suddenly sick and went out the back door to vomit. She estimated she was out in the back yard under the pear tree for about “ten to fifteen” minutes, and when she returned to the kitchen Lizzie was no longer in the kitchen, and Andrew had already left the house. She then finished washing the dishes and took the clean ones into the dining room to reset the table, which is where she saw Abby dusting. (She guessed the time to be about 9 a.m., although it had to be at least ten or fifteen minutes after 9 o’clock if she was outside at the time Andrew left and she still had dishes to finish.) This is the point she remembered Abby giving her instructions to wash the windows, inside and out. Bridget said she would, then went back into the kitchen for what she estimated at the preliminary hearing to be another “30 to 40 minutes” to finish cleaning the kitchen and put everything away.

During this time, she still hadn’t seen Lizzie again, and when she went back into the dining room and sitting room to close the windows in preparation for washing them, Abby was no longer in the dining room or anywhere else she could see. After gathering a pail and brush, she headed out the back door. She said she had barely stepped out onto the steps when Lizzie appeared at the screen door behind her and asked her if she was going to be washing windows. Bridget told Lizzie she didn’t have to hook the screen, but she could if she wanted to because she could get the water she needed from the barn. Lizzie, said Bridget, didn’t hook the screen. And that’s the last Bridget saw of Lizzie until after Andrew returned home. She never saw Abby again.

So here we have two different versions of what happened at the Borden House between Lizzie coming downstairs at around 8:45 a.m., and Bridget heading out to wash windows at least 45 minutes later, at least according to Bridget’s timekeeping. Because Lizzie was the accused, she was (and still is) considered to be entirely wrong, and most likely lying, in everything she said that contradicted Bridget’s version. But, of course, John Morse also contradicted Bridget’s version of when Abby told her to wash windows. Morse said he heard the instruction given in the dining room, and he described the conversation between Abby and Bridget much the same way Bridget did, only he said the conversation took place over an hour earlier, when he was eating breakfast with Andrew and Abby. So, it’s possible, even likely, Bridget misremembered exactly when Abby told her to wash windows and perhaps misremembered a few other things as well. There is no doubt that Lizzie’s memory of events, as presented at the inquest, was full of conflicting statmentes and flawed recollections; for one, she seemed to have entirely forgotten her first conversation with Bridget about not wanting breakfast.

So with two such inexact and error-prone accounts of events murder morning, how can we determine when exactly Abby was killed? Or, to be more precise, at what point did Abby carry pillow shams back up to the guest room where she met her tragic end?

Wherefore Art Thou Opportunity?

One of the few points of agreement between Lizzie and Bridget’s version of events is that Lizzie spoke to Abby in the dining room as soon as she came downstairs. Bridget confirmed she heard them talking. As Lizzie described the conversation to Knowlton at the inquest: “[Abby] said she had been up and made the bed up fresh and had dusted the room and left it all in order. She was going to put some fresh pillow slips on the small pillows at the foot of the bed and was going to close the room because she was going to have company Monday and she wanted everything in order.” Knowlton then asked Lizzie how long she thought it would have taken Abby to put on the pillow slips? Lizzie answered, “About two minutes.”

Of course, Lizzie did not then turn around and rush back upstairs to lie in wait for her stepmother to go back up to the guest room. She saw Bridget. She spoke to her father. She probably went down to the water closet. She maybe ate a little something. However, because Bridget did not see Lizzie after she came back into the house after being sick, most assume Lizzie had by then made her way back upstairs to retrieve whatever hatchet she presumably had hidden in her room to wait for Abby to show up in the guest room. In Bridget’s description of her own movements, once she came back into the house, it was another ten minutes at least before she saw Abby dusting and received the instruction to wash the windows (which would have made it about 9:15 a.m.). Afterward, she returned to the kitchen to finish cleaning up before gathering her window-washing supplies, and when she returned to the dining room to close the windows, she didn’t see Abby in that room, or the sitting room either.

Now, as Bridget testified she’d been working in the kitchen since speaking to Abby in the dining room, Abby could not have gone up the back stairs to her own room without Bridget seeing her. Most likely, Abby had already gone up to the guest room to put those slips on the pillows, and presumably that’s what she was doing while Bridget was in the dining room and sitting room closing up the windows. So, the opportunity for Lizzie to kill her stepmother was right then, before Abby finished the task that wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. But those few minutes were rapidly ticking away while Bridget went about closing windows and gathering supplies. Unless, of course, Lizzie had already acted, and Abby was by then already murdered and lying dead by Lizzie’s hand on the floor (the favorite theory of Borden scholar William Spencer and others). But …

Bridget said that as she went out the back door, Lizzie showed up at the screen door to ask her about washing windows. And Lizzie was surely not splashed with blood at that point. So, if it was she who killed Abby, she almost certainly hadn’t done it yet. Indeed, most assume that Lizzie went to the back door to make sure Bridget was about to be out of the way and out of earshot for the coming slaughter. They also assume that Lizzie then hurried back upstairs, where Abby still helpfully lingered at her pillow-covering task, to grab her hatchet and rush into the guest room and kill her stepmother. If all that is true, that would make the time of death right around 9:30 or a little later, just as the prosecution surmised to the jury.

This all works if Bridget was completely accurate in everything she remembered. But as already noted, when looked at more closely, there is something not quite right about Bridget’s timeline of events.

Bridget Sullivan’s Vague Sense of Time

Elsewhere in this encyclopedia, the tendency to take Bridget’s version of the murder morning as an accurate timeline was shown to be one of the primary reasons that authorities back in 1892 believed Lizzie was lying when, at the inquest, she described what she herself remembered of the morning. But accepting Bridget’s memories without question has also led to conclusions about how the murders unfolded that don’t quite stand up to closer inspection.

Andrew Jennings, in his closing arguments at the preliminary hearing, was the first to notice problems in Bridget’s timekeeping. He pointed out that in her telling of what happened after she re-entered the house, it took 20 minutes to “wash the upper part of one window” in the sitting room, and that she ultimately washed “only three and half windows” in the space of “three quarters of an hour.” Writing decades later, in 1961, Edward Radin also noted puzzling gaps in Bridget’s timeline in which, if the morning had unfolded as she claimed, it would have taken her an oddly long while (from about 8 a.m. to close to 9:30 a.m.) to wash the breakfast dishes (albeit with a ten or fifteen-minute break to vomit), while the more complicated task of washing the outside windows would have taken less time (from 9:30 a.m. to about 10:20 a.m.) To be fair, Bridget was fairly honest about her own inability to keep track of time, saying things such as, “I can’t tell the time, what time it was. I never noticed the clock, although there was enough of them around.”

Then there is the whole problem with Bridget’s memory of when Abby told her to wash the windows. If it happened as she said it did, after she’d gone outside into the back yard to vomit (which she claimed happened after she’d heard Lizzie talk to Abby) and after she’d come back into the kitchen ten or fifteen minutes later (at which time Andrew had already gone), and after she spent more time finishing the dishes then taking them into the dining room, then Abby must have been engaged in dusting that dining room for over half an hour since Lizzie saw her doing it at 8:45 a.m. It’s unlikely that Abby had been stuck in place with her feather duster for all that time (especially as John Morse would say she’d started dusting the sitting room and dining room soon after breakfast). Add to that Morse’s memory of Abby asking Bridget to wash windows much earlier, and it seems possible that Bridget’s memory of getting ready to wash the windows at 9:30 was off, which means it’s also possible Lizzie really did see her with the window-washing equipment earlier. That would help explain why Bridget’s timeline seems to not have enough room to do all the window washing she said she accomplished, as well as give her time for her over-the-fence chat she said she had with the Kelly’s maid.

If so, that makes the 9:30 time of death for Abby less certain. It could have happened earlier and still been within the time frame suggested by the medical experts. Of course, that wouldn’t do anything to help Lizzie’s claim of innocence, it would actually give her more time and opportunity to go up to her room to wait for Abby to re-ascend the stairs instead of relying on the fortuitous coincidence that Abby took herself upstairs just moments after Bridget had taken herself outside and out of earshot.

But if we hold fast to Bridget’s version and Bridget saw Abby dusting in the dining room at about 9:15, and Bridget was still drifting around the lower rooms of the house—kitchen, dining room, sitting room—without seeing or hearing Abby until she went out to wash windows at 9:30, how could murder-minded Lizzie have possibly relied on Abby staying up in the guest room once her brief pillow-slip chore was finished? She couldn’t have. She would have had to act while she had the rare opportunity to corner Abby upstairs with Emma not at home. As Spencer observed, “Abby’s short visit to the guest room [necessarily] determined the time she was attacked, not the planning or waiting of the perpetrator for the best time to attack her.” And, “As Lizzie knew that Abby would be there only two or three minutes [to put on the pillow slips], Lizzie had to kill Abby within that short span, when the opportunity presented itself, no matter the prevailing conditions in the household.”

This seems logical, and Spencer could be right that if Lizzie was the killer, she may have decided to kill Abby even with Bridget downstairs in the house. But then … How to explain Lizzie showing up at the back screen door, mere minutes after that bloody murder, without any visible blood on her person? If Lizzie was the killer, it had to have happened after Bridget went outside and saw her at the screen door, and not before. But if Abby wasn’t already dead, then where was she during the 15 minutes, perhaps more, that Bridget didn’t see or hear her as she finished her tasks in the kitchen and moved around the sitting room and dining room to close up the windows? For that matter, where was Lizzie before she showed up at the screen door? She might have been upstairs, but she wasn’t killing Abby, not yet. Thus, if Bridget’s version of events is accurate, then matching Lizzie as killer to Abby’s likely time-of-death (when she went upstairs to put on the pillow shams) becomes problematic.

Questions Without Answers

As William Spencer put together The Case Against Lizzie Borden, one of the most thorough and well-researched books on the Borden murders, he became well aware of the difficulties in trying to make the case against Lizzie hang together logically. In his follow-up book he wrote, “The seemingly trivial issue of when Abby took the shams up to the guest room goes to the heart of why the case has been debated for more than one hundred years. It highlights that there are two unresolved issues in the case: Not only do we not know for certain who perpetrated the crimes, how it was accomplished also evades our grasp.”

Yet, even with that caveat, Spencer eventually worked through several speculative scenarios that brought him to the conclusion that the only thing that “fit the evidence” was that Lizzie was guilty of the murders. But, he admitted this conclusion is reasonable only if we accept that Bridget was probably mistaken as to the timing of certain events; otherwise, there would not have been enough space for Lizzie to take advantage of the rare opportunity of Abby going up into the guest room, with Andrew gone downstreet and Emma away from home, that allowed her to kill her hated stepmother undetected.

But one wonders, what would Lizzie have done without that unexpected opportunity? What if Abby hadn’t decided to go back up to the guest room to put on fresh pillow shams that morning? Would Lizzie have said, oh never mind, and not tried to kill her at all? Or would she have tried to corner Abby or chase her around the house with a hatchet anyway? Was it really just the odd coincidence of John Morse arriving unannounced the day before to spend the night, which prompted Abby to have to change the bedding, that triggered Lizzie to suddenly decide to chop her to death? Were her long running thoughts “maybe I’ll kill Abby if I get the chance, but otherwise I might not?”

And what about that hatchet? Where did it come from? Yes, the prosecution introduced a handleless hatchet that was found in the cellar, but few today believe that particular bloodless and rusted blade was the actual weapon used. Even back in 1893, the prosecution only suggested it as a possibility. And, thanks to the testimony of druggist Eli Bence, they were convinced Lizzie intended to kill her parents with a poison like prussic acid, not a hatchet. The most oft-repeated theory has been that she turned to killing her parents with a hatchet only when she repeatedly failed to buy the poison; so, as all the hatchets known to be in the Borden house were accounted for after the murders, when and where did she procure this last-minute hatchet?

Such questions fray at the efforts to make the case against Lizzie make logical sense. Even Spencer seems to wrestle with the logic of his own conclusions, admitting Lizzie would have had to be “playing it by ear,” not knowing when fortuitous opportunities to wield that hatchet would reveal themselves. Then again, someone who suddenly rises up, without known provocation, to kill her parents was unlikely to act within the bounds of logic anyway.

These challenges in making a case against Lizzie that holds up logically would go away if one was willing to consider that maybe Lizzie didn’t do it. It is clear that whoever attacked the Bordens was determined to see them dead, but it is difficult to see how two ruthlessly butchered bodies can be reconciled with the idea of Lizzie coming downstairs, hearing about the pillow slips and impulsively deciding “oh maybe now would be a good time to run upstairs and kill Abby, at least if Bridget goes outside in time.” Then to have to simply “play it by ear” the rest of the morning to see if her father might lie down for a nap on the sofa so she could kill him, too? Is this the most logical conclusion? Many are willing to make that leap because of other evidence against Lizzie.

An intruder, however, with a grudge against Andrew so strong that he would stake out the house and find a chance to slip inside and hide somewhere out of the way (the parlor?) to wait for Andrew to return wouldn’t have to fit into anyone’s timeline. He could do as he pleased, move between unused spaces as he pleased, at least as he long as he was willing to dispatch whatever witness may have had the misfortune to run into him, a witness like Abby, who only wanted to finish her quick little task …

Of course, this hypothetical intruder also introduces many questions without answers available to us. But what is more illogical? Is it an intruder of unknown character accomplishing the murders in clandestine fashion, and taking the mystery of how he did it out the door with him? Or, is it the daughter of the house with her respected character accomplishing it and remaining behind, yet leaving us all unable to penetrate the mystery of how and when she did it?