Bridget Sullivan Biography

An immigrant from Ireland, Bridget Sullivan, was the domestic servant employed by the Borden family. Emma and Lizzie called her “Maggie,” Victorian-era shorthand for an Irish maid, as was the fashion at the time in upper-class circles in New England. At the time of the murders, she was 25 years old and had been with the family for two years and nine months.

Bridget’s responsibilities included cooking, laundry, ironing and other “heavy” tasks such as washing windows. She was given Sundays off, along with half-a-day on Thursdays. She apparently had a number of friends in the Irish community and would often leave the house at night to visit with friends who lived nearby. In her testimony, she mentioned friends visiting her at the Borden house and sitting on the back step with her.

When asked in court how she liked her job with the Bordens, she said, “I got along all right.” A reporter from the New York Herald would later claim that Bridget told him she had openly spoke of wanting to return to Ireland throughout her employment with the Bordens. “She says that Mrs. Borden was a very kind mistress, and that she was much attached to her. Mrs. Borden used to talk to her about going home to Ireland and used to tell her that she would be lonely without her. Accordingly, the young woman says that she did not have the heart to leave.”

The Day of the Murders

Bridget was the only other person besides Lizzie known to have been in or around the house at the time of the murders. She felt sick when she awakened that morning (the Bordens had all been sick the day before) and had even run out back to vomit after cooking breakfast, but she still continued on with her duties afterward, washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. Having been instructed by Abby to wash the windows “inside and out,” Bridget was outside the house, performing that task, in the presumed time window Abby was killed. Later, as she was in the midst washing windows on the inside, she let Andrew in the house upon his return from his business rounds downtown. Bridget last saw Andrew in the sitting room before going up the back stairs for a “lie down” and before preparing the noon meal. The last she saw of Lizzie, she was headed into the dining room to iron handkerchiefs. (For more details on movements about the house, see Morning of the Murders.)

It was Bridget who Lizzie first called to after she found her father’s body on the sofa. Lizzie told her to fetch their family doctor from across the street; then as soon as she got back, Lizzie asked her to go get her friend, Alice Russell, to come sit with her. As Agnes DeMille wrote in her 1968 book, “There are people still living in Fall River who remember Bridget when she broke the peace, running, gasping, and praying, her hair all a-straggle and the sweat pouring from under the black wool shawl.” It was also a frightened Bridget who, afraid to go look for Abby Borden alone, was followed by Mrs. Churchill up the front stairs to the guest room where they discovered Abby’s mutilated body.

After answering questions all day from police, a shaken Bridget wanted nothing more than to leave the house, and she spent that first night at a neighbor’s house. When she returned to the house to fulfill her duties the following day, reporters who saw her step outside for any reason would report that she seemed terrified and emotional, often shaking or crying. Despite Emma letting her know she was welcome to stay in the Borden sisters’ employ, she chose to leave her position. The following Monday Bridget left the house for the last time, never to return.

A Star Witness

Bridget was soon considered the prosecution’s most important witness. At the inquest, her memory of events the morning of the murders became the official timeline in the case against Lizzie. The fact that Lizzie’s memory of events as she relayed them at the inquest differed substantially from Bridget’s made Lizzie look guilty in the minds of police. Even after the inquest, police continued talking to Bridget, trying to draw more information from her that would be helpful to them in building their case.

Edmund Pearson, a crime journalist writing decades later, interviewed the Irish officer, Martin Feeney, who was assigned to escort Bridget to and from the preliminary hearings, and later became chief of police. Feeney told Pearson that he made several unofficial attempts to get Bridget to reveal more. “I thought that a young Irish fellow like meself might get an Irish girl to talk. So, when we went through the streets, I asked her what she thought about the murders. She wouldn’t say a wor-r-d!  She said, “I’d be afraid to say anything at all. If I did, that terrible man that killed poor Mrs. Borden might come back and kill me, too!”

Although a traumatized Bridget felt desperate to return to Ireland, police could not allow her to leave until the trial and set “bail” for her, as well as for John Morse, a sum meant to ensure important witnesses would stay in town to testify. The bail for both was paid by the owner of the Fall River Evening News. Police then secured a job for Bridget in the jailhouse at New Bedford. Although she would later complain to an officer about the lack of enough to do, she remained in the job until the trial, out of reach of Lizzie’s defense attorneys who several times tried to speak with her and were thwarted.

Ironically, even though she was considered a star witness for prosecutors, her testimony did little to make Lizzie look guilty, and more likely helped her defense. The prosecution had been trying to establish a pattern of Lizzie’s hatred for Abby as a motive for murder, but Bridget could report no quarrels or difficulties between Lizzie and her stepmother. Up to the hour before the murders, Lizzie and Abby been talking pleasantly according to Bridget.

As far as is known, Bridget never claimed to believe Lizzie was guilty of the murders, and had in fact, in the early weeks after the murders (before she was told by police to stop talking to reporters), defended her innocence. In the New Bedford Evening Standard of August 14th, we find: “[Miss Sullivan] strongly insisted on her belief that Miss Lizzie was not guilty.”

Bridget as Suspect, Then and Now

While Bridget was never seriously considered a suspect by the police—especially as Lizzie herself was quick to rule her out along with other Borden employees—in those early days reporters wondered why she was so easily let off the hook. After all, she had the same opportunity as Lizzie and, as a foreign immigrant who did manual labor, she would have presumably had strength to go with the problematic ethnicity. Even Andrew Jennings, while avowing he didn’t believe her guilty, wondered aloud at the preliminary hearing why Bridget was easily believed by police while Lizzie was not. But, of course, Bridget told a consistent story and spoke openly to police about her emotional distress, whereas Lizzie did neither.

That is not to say that the authorities closed their minds to the idea of Bridget as the culprit or at least as co-conspirator. From letters District Attorney Hosea Knowlton exchanged with the attorney general, we know they discussed rumors circulating that Bridget had a hand in the 1891 burglary of the Borden House, committed by a boyfriend said to be a thief. But as there was no proof of such accusations, Knowlton continued on his path to prosecute Lizzie.

Yet, although police couldn’t imagine a motive for Bridget to kill the Bordens, many creative writers in the years since have speculated motives for her. The most common suggestion is that Bridget, feeling miserable and having just been outside to vomit, became infuriated at Abby for telling her to go outside and wash windows in the thick August heat. In his 1961 book, Edward Radin even marshaled support for this theory by pointing out problems with Bridget’s timeline for the murders that few others ever paused to notice. A 1999 book by Muriel Arnold posited the same thing.

There is no evidentiary basis for such a conclusion, but in a case where it seems difficult for many to believe that Lizzie could have pulled off the killings without leaving any evidence behind, many reach for Bridget as an alternative on which to pin the blame. Even those who don’t believe Bridget wielded the fatal hatchet will sometimes look at her through a conspiracy lens and suggest, as Victoria Lincoln did, that Bridget was an accomplice after the fact, accepting money from the Borden sisters to “keep quiet” about what she knew. What exactly she was supposed to know is usually left vague and murky.

Today, the impulse to rope Bridget into a murderous plot has reached full flower, with the most recent depictions of the murders onscreen reimagining Bridget as a lesbian lover of Lizzie’s who helps her concoct the entire plan. But, of course, in reality, Lizzie and Bridget gave every indication that they were indifferent to each other. Again, such nonsensical stretches of the imagination are employed in telling the story of the murders, because, in part, there is so little motive to justify Lizzie as killer that writers must invent something.

Bridget’s Later Life

After Lizzie was found “not guilty” at trial and walked free from prison, Bridget was also finally free to go where she wished. She did make that trip back to Ireland after all, two years after the trial, leaving in 1895. (Records show she traveled in steerage, the least expensive way, which should dispel any rumor she had been handsomely paid by Lizzie to lie for her in court.) According to research by Borden historian Stefani Koorey, Bridget returned to the U.S. only nine months later, in February of 1896. Drawn to the West by relatives who had settled there, Bridget was living in Anaconda, Montana by the 1900 census. There she met a man by the name of John Sullivan and married him in 1905.

Holm did recall Bridget talking about a woman for whom she worked by the name of Lizzie Borden. “But that didn’t mean anything to me then, because I was just a high school girl when she lived with us. Besides, she never mentioned any murder.” Clearly, Bridget kept her past quiet, even with her family.

There was a rumor, however, that she was at one time prepared to spill everything she knew, a rumor presented by that profligate promoter of Borden mythology, Victoria Lincoln. In A Private Disgrace, Lincoln tells us that an elderly Bridget had become very sick and summoned Minnie Green, a childhood friend, to her bedside. She told Green, who knew nothing about the murders, about working for the Bordens when they were butchered. She allegedly claimed to have liked Lizzie and often took her side during conflicts at the Borden house. She said she “helped Lizzie out at the trial,” and that while she didn’t tell any falsehoods on the stand, she hadn’t revealed everything she knew.

Bridget was allegedly too sick to say anything more that day, and by the time Minnie visited again, she had recovered and refused to talk about it, making Minnie promise to never reveal what she had been told. Minnie kept her promise until after Bridget’s death, when she visited the Butte library and got to talking with the librarian about actual murders. She then told her tale, and the librarian allegedly shared it with Lincoln. Whether Lincoln really believed this story or not is unclear, but Lincoln also claimed that Bridget had six children, when she had none at all.

Of course, it is highly unlikely Bridget made any such confession near the end of her life. She had testified under oath that she was unaware of any conflicts in the Borden house, so how could she take Lizzie’s side in them? And by all accounts she was close to Abby, who made her feel valued, and not Lizzie, who didn’t even call Bridget by her given name. This story can almost certainly be chalked up to yet another curious offshoot that sprouts from the fertile ground of Borden mythology.

In March 1948, Bridget died of cardiac failure at the county hospital in Butte. She was 81 years old. She now lies buried beside her husband, John, in Anaconda.

For more interesting information on Bridget, see the following articles from The Hatchet Online.

• The Strange Story of Bridget Sullivan, by Sally Campbell  
• Bridget Sullivan After Fall River, by Jerry Ross
• Sullivan’s Travels, by Stefani Koorey