Bedford Cord

The “Bedford Cord” is the blue corduroy dress that Lizzie Borden famously burned in her kitchen stove on Sunday, August 7, 1892, three days after the murders, and the morning after she officially learned she was suspect. This evocative action—ripping a dress to pieces and feeding those pieces into the flames—is a prime example of what makes the Borden murder case so confounding. It can easily be interpreted as an innocent act, Lizzie going about an ordinary task she had undertaken many times before, on a day in which she was trapped in the house with nothing better to do. More often, though, it is interpreted as the guilty act of someone brazenly destroying evidence.

We know about the dress-burning only because Alice Russell brought it to the grand jury’s attention a full four months after it happened. (Although Alice had told O.M. Hanscom, the private investigator hired by the Borden sisters, about the dress-burning only a few days after it happened). The grand jury had convened in November of 1892, and 21 jurors heard the state’s evidence against Lizzie in the charge of murder before adjourning with no action. But when Alice Russell went to the district attorney to add the dress-burning to her story, the grand jury reconvened on December 1st to hear what she had to say. The very next day, the jury voted to indict Lizzie Borden for the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden. Thus, we will begin with Alice’s testimony from the 1983 trial.

Alice Russell’s Story

On Sunday morning, Bridget Sullivan had just left the tragedy-rocked house on Second Street for good and Alice Russell, a close friend of the Borden sisters who had been staying with them, cooked breakfast for Lizzie, Emma, John Morse, and herself. They all ate in the dining room and, afterward, said Alice, “I went upstairs, after breakfast, to put my room in order, and left Miss Emma to do the dishes.” When she came back down to the kitchen, sometime before noon, she found Emma at the sink washing dishes and Lizzie standing near the stove, holding the skirt of a dress in her hand.

Alice then heard Emma ask Lizzie, “What are you going to do?” Lizzie answered, “I am going to burn this old thing up; it is covered with paint.” During cross examination, Alice said that Lizzie held up the hem of the dress to show her the paint stains, and she could indeed see that it was “soiled.” She also said she didn’t see any blood on the dress. Alice didn’t say anything to Lizzie at that moment, merely left the room. When she returned to the kitchen soon thereafter, she saw Lizzie by an open cupboard door, which Alice believed to be a cupboard for coal and other items like kitchen utensils. Lizzie, she said, “appeared to be either ripping something down or tearing part of this garment.” Alice then spoke, saying, “I wouldn’t let anyone see you doing that, Lizzie.” Alice claimed that in response, Lizzie stepped back a little behind the cupboard door. (The police were outside, clearly visible through the windows, as they had been since the murders.) Alice then left the room again.

It’s important to note that Alice also said she had seen the Bedford Cord only once before that burning incident, back in the Spring, soon after it was made by the family seamstress, Mary Raymond. Alice testified she was “quite sure” she hadn’t seen the dress again until the Sunday morning after the murders when she saw Lizzie tearing it up. Clearly, she did not recognize it as the dress Lizzie was wearing when she arrived at the house in the minutes after Andrew was found dead.

Interestingly, Alice did not mention this dress-burning a few days later when she testified at the inquest, nor did she say anything about it a few weeks later at the preliminary hearing. She also didn’t speak of it during her first appearance before the grand jury. In fact, she continued visiting Lizzie in prison for several months after she was arrested. It was only after returning for a second visit to the grand jury, with specific intent to reveal what she saw Lizzie doing at the stove that Sunday, that she then stopped visiting Lizzie.

Most assume that Alice’s doubts about Lizzie’s innocence had grown over time, and that is why Alice decided to tell all about the dress-burning and also why their friendship came to an end. This assertion is supported by speculation in the book, Parallel Lives, as well as a story that appeared in the the September, 2002, Fall River Historical Society Report introducing the donation of the only known photograph of Alice Russell to the Society by the grandson of Alice’s Russell’s first cousin, Ida Russell Minor. According to the report, Alice had told her cousin that she thought Lizzie Borden was innocent of the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Borden until the day “she saw her burn the dress in the kitchen stove. From the day of that observation until she breahed her last, she was convinced of Lizzie Borden’s guilt.” Yet, if it is true Alice was convinced of Lizzie’s guilt on that day, only three days after the murders, then why would she not only fail to mention the dress-burning to authorities for as long as she did but still continue to visit her in jail for months afterward?

Furthermore, Edward Radin quotes Alice Russell in an interview he said she gave to the Fall River Evening News, soon after her testimony in the 1893 jury trial, in which Alice says, “Neither by anything I heard in the Borden house before or after the murders was I ever made to believe that Lizzie committed the murders. I don’t believe in her guilt now.” If that was indeed said by Alice to reporters (the archive of the Fall River Evening News is not easily available in order to confirm), it seems just as likely that either the friendship simply couldn’t take the strain of such dramatic events and ended by mutual decision, or Lizzie herself chose to end it because Alice was actively helping the district attorney to prosecute her and Lizzie no longer felt her friend was safe to trust.

Emma’s Story

Alice wasn’t the only one who saw Lizzie preparing to burn the Bedford Cord. Lizzie’s sister, Emma, was also in the kitchen that morning, or at least in the sink room just off the kitchen, and was asked about what happened while on the stand.

Emma continued her story, describing how Alice Russell came to her and Lizzie the next day and claimed she had told Mr. Hanscom a “falsehood” about the dresses. This conversation, says Emma, “frightened her so thoroughly” that she couldn’t even remember the whole thing. She did confirm that Alice said burning the dress was the worst thing Lizzie could have done, and that a surprised and upset Lizzie asked Alice why she had let her do it. She and Lizzie then told Alice she should tell Mr. Hanscom the truth, and Alice went and did just that. But while Alice did let Hanscom know that day, for some reason Hanscom seems not to have related it to anyone else, not the police, and not even Andrew Jennings, the man to whom he was reporting. And Alice herself didn’t mention it to any authorities until four months later at her second appearance before the grand jury.

Other Testimony About the Bedford Cord

The family seamstress, Mrs. Mary Raymond, a defense witness, testified that she had indeed seen paint stains on the Bedford Cord she had only days earlier sewn together for Lizzie while she was at the house for a three-week stay. She recalled it was drab-colored paint that had stained “the front of the dress, and around the bottom of the dress, around the ruffle, on the underneath part of the hem.” She also confirmed that even though it had been stained, Lizzie had continued to wear the dress during the time she was there, and added that by the time she left, “it either faded, or the color wore off, I can’t tell you which. It changed color.” When asked by the defense what was done with the stay-at-home dress the Bedford Cord was meant to replace, Mrs. Raymond said Lizzie “cut some pieces out of it and said she was going to burn the rest.” A house painter then followed her to the stand to testify that he was present when Lizzie got the paint stains on the dress.

Meanwhile, two of the police officers who were part of the searches of the Borden home, Deputy Marshal John Fleet and State Detective George Seaver, described their search of the clothes press where Emma said she’d seen the Bedford hanging the night before. Seaver said he took each dress off the nail on which it hung, gave the dress a look over, then handed it to Fleet, who stood by the window in better light. Fleet then gave each dress a careful examination, looking for signs of blood, before handing it back to Seaver to return it to its place on the nail. They repeated this procedure with all the dresses hanging in the closet, which theoretically should have been all the dresses in the house except for those that belonged to Abby and Bridget, and what Lizzie and Emma were wearing on their person at that time. While Fleet testified that they looked at each dress “very closely,” they did not carefully inspect the few heavy silk dresses that hung in the corner of the closet. Seaver said they “looked at” those dresses but did not take them down from their nails. Both men were asked specifically if they noticed any paint stains on any of the dresses, and both said no. Nor did any other officer find any dresses, paint-stained or otherwise, stashed anywhere else in the house.  

Because District Attorney Hosea Knowlton didn’t know about the dress burning until long after the fact, Lizzie was never questioned about the dress at the inquest.

Did Lizzie Hide the Bedford Cord?

While Emma testified that she saw the paint-stained Bedford Cord in the clothes press after Fleet and Seaver had searched it, the officers said they did not see it. This meant only one thing to Knowlton, who said in his closing, “Men are not critical observers of dresses. I do not claim that. But Officers Fleet and Seaver could see a dress that was so dirty that it had to be destroyed. And it was not there. It was not found. It was concealed.”

At the same time, Knowlton also insisted that Lizzie was wearing that Bedford Cord when the house filled with people in the minutes after Lizzie discovered her father’s body, pointing to Mrs. Churchill’s detailed description of the dress she recalled Lizzie wearing—light blue ground with a dark blue diamond figure—as evidence of this. But a dozen people in addition to Mrs. Churchill saw Lizzie right after the murders, and not one of them, including three police officers, noticed any paint stains on the dress Lizzie was wearing, let alone blood. So, Knowlton apparently wanted the jury to believe that Lizzie was able to wear the paint-stained dress openly in front of thirteen people with not one of them noticing the stains, yet two officers standing in a closet couldn’t possibly have missed noticing them.

Knowlton seems not to have considered, or at least never suggested during the trial, that Lizzie may have worn the Bedford Cord during Abby’s murder, which would have presumably stained it with blood, forcing her to remove it, hide it, then put on another dress. Victoria Lincoln claimed to be the first to suggest Lizzie changed her dress between murders, and it is a reasonable assumption. Experts testified that Abby’s killer had to have been straddling her body to deliver the 18 or 19 blows inflicted on her, and if it was Lizzie, the bottom of her dress would have been heavily spattered with blood. Lincoln was certainly the first to suggest that Lizzie hid the Bedford Cord behind the heavy silk dresses in the corner of the clothes press, which is why the officers examining the other dresses in the closet missed it. That idea still has adherents, but others say it would have been foolhardy to stick a bloodied dress in that closet, knowing the police were scheduled to come at 3 p.m. that day for a thorough search. They are more likely to believe Lizzie concealed the dress in a different location, somewhere the police would not know to look, perhaps the same place she secreted the bloodied hatchet.

Of course, the belief that Lizzie hid the Bedford Cord from the police necessarily means that Emma was lying on the stand when she said that she saw the dress hanging in the closet on Saturday evening. Those who are convinced of Lizzie’s guilty are willing to accept that Emma perjured herself for Lizzie’s sake, although whether she lied because she was trying to protect a sister she believed innocent and in the midst of wrongful prosecution or she lied to protect a sister she knew to be guilty is usually left unclear. Either way, most in the guilty camp agree that Emma lied under oath, and in his closing argument, Knowlton accused her exactly of that, along with other lies regarding the Bedford Cord.

Knowlton Picks a Fight

Alice and Emma told slightly different versions of the burning of the dress, varying in minor details as to the exact words said and their order. Alice claimed she heard Emma ask Lizzie what she was going to do. Emma claimed she didn’t remember asking such a question, and that she only turned from the sink because she heard Lizzie talking about her intention to burn the dress, something Emma herself had encouraged her to do the night before. Knowlton, in his cross examination of Emma, repeatedly tried to get Emma to admit she’d started the conversation, but Emma would not do so, saying it did not match her memory. Yet, rather than acknowledge that each woman had a somewhat different memory of that moment—as people often do, and as many of the officers who took the stand did—Knowlton set up a face-off between Alice and Emma, then asked the jury to pick which one to believe.

“You saw her,” said Knowlton of Alice. “You heard how that testimony was wrenched from her conscience and not from her interest.” In Knowlton’s dramatic re-telling, “Emma was the one that was surprised, the one that now pretends that she advised her to do it. ‘What are you going to do Lizzie?’ … That dress had been good enough to keep through May, through June, through July, through the first week in August.” He called the burning of the dress that Sunday “an astonishing thing, and well may Emma have asked her what she was doing. She would not have asked it if she had advised it be done.” He asked the jury to search their consciences, “tell me which of these two women you think is entitled to credence.” He then commended “the stern Puritan conscience” of Alice that made her speak the truth to Hanscom about the dress, while Emma merely “pretended” that she and Lizzie wanted Alice to tell Hanscom the truth.

In Knowlton’s version, only Alice was truthful, while Emma lied about seeing the dress, lied about telling Lizzie she ought to burn the dress, and even lied about her conversation about it with Lizzie in the kitchen.

Through the Lens of Guilt

If Lizzie burned a dress only three days after the murders—and most tellingly, the very morning after she was told that she was a suspect in the murder—it seems almost certain she burned it because it was spattered with blood that would prove she had committed the murders. The timing of that act is simply too coincidental to look at it any other way. Indeed, the “destroying evidence” argument is one of the more convincing signs of Lizzie’s consciousness of guilt. It certainly convinced the grand jury she ought to be indicted, as noted by reporter Elizabeth Jordan during the trial. She called the dress-burning, “the most damaging of all their evidence against the prisoner …Without that dress, the Commonwealth’s case is a mere tissue of speculation.” It is no wonder Knowlton put the incident front and center in his closing argument.

Later writers have have also used the dress-burning to add fiery color to a convincing picture of guilt. Victoria Lincoln wrote vividly about how she imagined Lizzie decided she must burn the dress, how she must have got up in the middle of the night to pull it from its hiding place and stick it in the coal cupboard before sneaking back to bed to wait for her chance the next morning. Lincoln asserted that Lizzie thought she would be unseen on Sunday morning because Alice had changed her dress and left the house to attend church but, fearing all the question that might be asked of her, ended up going back to her own house for a time before returning to the Borden house, where, says Lincoln, “Emma unhooked the screen” for her. Alice, of course, did no such thing, she simply went upstairs to do some tidying and came back down, but Lincoln, who claimed to have read the entire trial transcript, clearly employed her fiction writing skills to make her tale more compelling.

Yet Lincoln’s most creative device was putting herself in Lizzie’s shoes. She described her own visit in the 1960s to the actual kitchen at 92 Second Street and, when standing in front of the coal cupboard, said she experienced “a sharp and singular identification” with Lizzie. “I shall never forget that strange, hallucinatory moment of false recall; for one moment I was Lizzie, hidden but still frightened, knowing that I must be secret, quick. Before Emma should leave the sink or Uncle John come downstairs, I must burn that dress stained with Abby’s blood.”

In the ensuing decades, the dress-burning has continued to be a hot topic of discussion on evidence against Lizzie, and today it remains a given that Lizzie must have hidden away the Bedford Cord, and that is why Fleet and Seaver didn’t notice it in the closet. Certainly, two sets of eyes looking carefully for signs of blood on the dresses in the clothes press would have noticed paint stains. It must have been concealed, just as Knowlton asserted, although exactly where this mysterious hiding place could have been, after having every nook and cranny of the house searched, is anyone’s guess. One popular theory is that Lizzie hid it in her room, the place the police in the Victorian era were most uncomfortable invading, perhaps somewhere inside the lounge she placed herself upon throughout the afternoon of the murders. Lizzie telling Fleet that it was no use searching her room as she didn’t see how the killer could have possibly got past her locked door is often interpreted as a red flag that there was indeed something hidden in her room. The police clearly thought so; Marshal Hilliard himself made a half-hour visit to the house on Saturday, while the family was away from the house for Andrew and Abby’s funeral, specifically to search the lounge and beds in both Lizzie and Emma’s rooms. He did not find anything suspicious, thought.

Wherever the hiding place, Lizzie had lived there over twenty years, she would certainly know of some place unfindable by the men who did the searching. Although, to be fair, her sister, Emma, who also lived there the same amount of time, would tell a reporter from the Boston Post in 1913 that one reason she was so convinced Lizzie was innocent was because she knew her sister “could never have hidden the instrument of death so that the police could not find it. Why, there was no hiding place in the old house that would serve for effectual concealment.”

Through the Lens of Innocence

Lizzie burning a dress certainly doesn’t shout innocence, but for those who lean toward believing Lizzie didn’t commit the murders, the dress-burning is not a persuasive indicator of guilt for the following reasons:

1. The police thoroughly searched the house several times, down to the “bumps on the wallpaper,” and never noticed any blood (or paint) on any dress they examined.
2. On Saturday, after the most intensive search was finished, Marshal Hilliard told Andrew Jennings that they’d finished their search except for the cellar. In Robinson’s words, Lizzie and Emma had been told that the police “had taken all they could find and all they wanted and notified them that they had got all through.” So Lizzie had little reason to think they would come back and search again, or to worry that a hidden dress might be found, which undermines the timing argument. Also, if the assumption is the dress had been hidden in the same place with the bloodied hatchet (which was never found), then why bother to take the dress from hiding yet leave the hatchet?
3. Lizzie did not secretly burn the dress in the cover of darkness but did it openly in the middle of the day in front of two witnesses, with a possible third, John Morse, wandering about the house, as well as with police officers milling about outside. One might expect that if the dress really was spattered with blood she would have burned it covertly, with no one to see.
4. Lizzie held up the hem of the skirt, the part most likely to have blood on it if she’d worn it while killing Abby, and showed it to Alice, who testified that she did not see anything that looked like blood on the hem.
5. When Alice Russell informed Emma and Lizzie she was uncomfortable not telling Hanscom about the dress burning, Emma and Lizzie instructed her to tell the truth.
6. Bridget Sullivan, the one person to see her moving about the house both before and after the time of Abby’s murder, and before and after Andrew’s murder, did not notice any change in what Lizzie was wearing that morning. In fact, in The Jennings Journals we find Charles Sawyer telling her attorneys that he overheard Bridget tell Officer Medley that Lizzie had not changed her dress that morning and had worn the same dress all morning. And, according to an August 6th article in the New York Herald: “The statement of the serving girl that Lizzie Borden wore the same dress all the morning and that upon that garment there was no spot of blood has been verified.” True, Bridget couldn’t describe what that dress looked like in court, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t recall a difference in dresses throughout the morning as she crossed paths with Lizzie at various times.
7. The Bedford Cord was cheap and not worth keeping. In Robinson’s words, “We are talking about a dress that did not cost but 12 ½ or 15 cents a yard, and took 8 or 9 yards to make it, and did not cost altogether when it commenced, probably over $2, and was not good for anything after they got done.” 
8. Burning old dresses that had not been cut up for rags was a common practice in many households, as there were no such things as city trash pick-ups in those days, so anything that could be burned was usually disposed of in that way.
9. Mrs. Raymond the seamstress confirmed that Lizzie had burned her old dresses in the past.
10. Lizzie appeared to be genuinely surprised when Alice told her she thought Lizzie burning the dress was the worst thing she could have done, saying, “Oh what made you let me do it?  Why didn’t you tell me?”

As for why Fleet and Seaver didn’t notice the paint-stained dress in the clothes press during their Saturday afternoon search, it could be that the officers simply weren’t that observant. Robinson demonstrated as much when he got Seaver to admit on the stand that he couldn’t recall examining any blue dresses in the closet at all, when blue dresses made up the bulk of Lizzie’s wardrobe. (Emma revealed that Lizzie owned eight blue dresses, and she herself owned two.) Seaver also had to admit that although he’d made up an inventory of the dresses in the closet, a list that might have shown that the Bedford Cord had indeed been examined by them, he’d lost the inventory. Plus, the officers may have failed to register any paint stains because they had no idea such stains would become so significant. The burning of the Bedford Cord was not known to them until months later.

It also remains hard to believe that Emma, known for her principled nature, would swear an oath to tell the truth and then lie on the stand. No matter how protective she may have felt toward her younger sister, why would she perjure herself and make herself an accessory to murder after the fact?There is a middle-ground possibility in which a guilty Lizzie might have convinced Emma that the Bedford Cord was in the closet during the police search, but they would never take her word for it, and Emma could have said something like, “Okay fine, I’ll just say I saw it.” But that is still perjury under oath, and that doesn’t match the actions of the Emma Borden who told Alice Russell she must tell Hanscom the truth about the Bedford cord. Nor does it match the Emma who openly supported all the police searches, unlocking doors and trunks for them, and repeatedly encouraging officers to do everything they could to find the killer. Either Emma was lying to help to cover up the murder of her father, or the Bedford Cord was in that closet.  

So, while Lizzie burning one of her dresses has nothing to do with innocence, it probably didn’t have much to do with guilt either. That the prosecution was so quick to assign sinister motives over what looks to have been an ordinary, mundane task just goes to show that they had little “real” evidence against Lizzie–the “mere tissue of speculation” as Jordan called it– and how desperate they were to grab onto whatever detail they could spin their way.

Author’s Take

When we imagine someone tearing up a dress and throwing it into the fire, it feels to us like very dramatic and very incriminating action. We see it all the time in movies, the culprit burning away evidence by throwing damaging photos into the fireplace or putting a pile of blood-covered clothing in the yard, saturating it with lighter fluid, then setting it on fire. But in Lizzie’s day, burning unwanted items in a fire was neither dramatic nor unique; it was commonplace to throw trash and outworn things that would burn into the kitchen stove, in which a fire more or less burned continually.

While Lizzie’s choice to burn the dress, and doing so shortly after learning she was a suspect does give one pause, it’s still not a compelling argument for guilt to me. It does seem a strange time (to us) for Lizzie to burn an old dress, but she was going through the strangest time of her life, what with two murders taking place in her own home, then burying her father, and then being told she was suspected and effectively put under house arrest, all in just three days. She was not able to attend church that Sunday as she normally would, and I can imagine during a time of such great emotional upheaval she may have felt desperate for something “normal” to do, something that may have given her some feeling of control over the events that were ripping her life asunder.

I’m also not ready to accept the assumption that Lizzie was able to hide the dress so well that the police simply couldn’t find it after numerous searches. Some officers of the Fall River Police Department might not have been overly observant, but they did go back again and again, with different officers and fresh eyes taking part in the searches each time. They dug up the dry well, poked around the privys, had a mason come to disassemble part of the chimney. Even if there was a place they didn’t find, a place large enough to stuff a dress (and presumably a hatchet), how could Lizzie have been confident they wouldn’t find it?

Most compelling to me, though, is that Emma supported Lizzie’s story and swore on the stand she saw the Bedford Cord in the clothes press on Saturday. If I have to choose between believing that Emma perjured herself to help her sister escape the consequences of murder or believing that Fleet and Seaver simply failed to notice a dress with drab paint stains, I am going with Emma.

Now, if Lizzie had been caught doing it secretly in the dead of night, that would make much more compelling case for guilt. Then again, a killer so brazen as to hack into the heads of her victims in broad daylight, with the maid going in and out of the house at will, might find that burning a blood-stained dress in front of witnesses easy as pie.