Handkerchiefs (Lizzie’s)

Q: What were you doing when he started away?

A: I was in the dining room I think; yes, I had just commenced to iron.

Q: It may seem a foolish question. How much ironing did you have?

A: I only had about eight or ten of my best handkerchiefs …

Q: When your father went away, you were ironing then?

A: I had not commenced, but I was getting the little ironing board and the flannel.

A bit later, Knowlton asked her to repeat what she was doing when her father was away from the house.

A: I sprinkled my handkerchiefs, and I got my ironing board and took the ironing board in the dining room and left the handkerchiefs in the kitchen on the table, and whether I ate any cookies or not I don’t remember. Then I sat down looking at the [Harper’s] magazine while I waited for my flats to heat. Then I went into the sitting room and got the Providence Journal and took that into the kitchen. I don’t recollect doing anything else.

Lizzie said after reading the magazine for awhile, “I tried my flats.” Apparently, they weren’t hot enough yet, so she picked up the magazine again. She estimated that she was reading the magazine for half an hour, but said she never got around to reading the paper. At some point, she said she put “a stick of wood” into the stove to try to get the fire to catch and burn. (She would eventually add that she also “went into the sitting room to direct some paper wrappers,” which were address labels for their newspaper subscription, because Abby had asked her to do so.) She denied going back upstairs again at any time. She also said she was still in the kitchen, eating a pear, when her father came home an hour and forty minutes after he left.

As Knowlton listened to her tale, five days after the murders, he clearly did not believe her. He had spoken to Bridget earlier in the day, and Bridget had told him that when she came in from washing windows (which she estimated to be at 10:20), she didn’t see Lizzie in the kitchen at all but did hear her laugh upstairs as she let Andrew in the door. And it wasn’t until Bridget was washing the last window in the dining room, after Andrew had already returned, that she saw Lizzie set up her ironing board in the dining room and begin to iron her handkerchiefs, the two of them chatting briefly as they worked on their individual tasks. Bridget would also say that she saw a pile of handkerchiefs on the dining table as Lizzie began, although she hadn’t noticed them beforehand, and she agreed that they had been sprinkled, while several were “rolled up as clothes are when they are ironed” and “some were already ironed.”

Even though Bridget confirmed that she had seen Lizzie ironing, Knowlton found it impossible to credit that Lizzie had started the job of pressing those eight to ten handkerchiefs soon after 9 a.m. and still hadn’t finished by the time Bridget found herself in the dining room with her, nearly two hours later. Even Lizzie herself had said the ironing job should only have taken about “20 minutes.” But, Lizzie added, that only would have been possible if the irons were hot enough, and she had to keep stopping to wait for them to heat again.

Strangely, Lizzie would also say she had not gone back to ironing after her father returned home, nor that she had seen Bridget washing windows in the dining room, giving Knowlton yet another reason to believe her dishonest (see Inquest: Conflicting Statements). Even more strangely, she kept insisting that she hadn’t seen or talked to Bridget in the dining room even when Knowlton challenged her on it. “It is certain beyond a reasonable doubt she was engaged in washing the windows in the dining room or sitting room when your father came home,” Knowlton said, several times, and he seemed stunned when Lizzie continually repeated that she knew nothing of it. This makes one wonder whether she was purposely lying (although what it would have gained her to do so is unclear, she only damaged her own credibility), or if her memory of the morning had been scrambled from the traumatic shock she had so recently experienced (see Inquest: Mitigating Factors).     

Whatever the reason for her denials of what Bridget asserted had happened, Lizzie said that after her father lay down in the sitting room, she was still hoping that, given enough time, her flat irons would reheat, and that is why she went out to the barn to go look for iron for sinkers for her upcoming trip to Marion. However, when she came back inside, the “fire had gone out,” so she gave up on ironing her handkerchiefs, thinking to resume the task after Bridget had built up the fire again to cook the noon meal, and she was on her way through the sitting room to go upstairs “to sit down” when she discovered her father’s body.

The district attorney didn’t—and could not possibly—believe one word of her jumbled version of events. Yes, Alice Russell testified that after the murders she had found a number of handkerchiefs on the dining table, most of them ironed, and few of them still damp. When pressed to estimate how many of each, Alice replied, “As nearly as I could judge there were four or five ironed and two or three sprinkled to be ironed.” (Again, this shows us that Lizzie must have had several of them completed before she entered the dining room with the ironing board as Bridget said had nearly finished with her own task.) Alice said she took the handkerchiefs upstairs and asked Lizzie what she should do with them. Lizzie directed her to put the pressed ones in a drawer, and Alice said she then “took those that were sprinkled and laid them on Miss Emma’s towel rack to dry.” Still, as Knowlton would repeat several times in his closing, “her story was absurd.”

Through the Lens of Guilt

The prosecution had no doubt that Lizzie’s story about waiting all morning for her flat irons to heat up so she could finish ironing handkerchiefs was false. First, it was demonstrably untrue that the fire in the stove had gone out that morning because Officer Phillip Harrington saw a small fire still burning in the stove an hour after Andrew was killed, which meant there had to be fire enough to heat her flat irons an hour earlier. So why, Knowlton asked the jury, didn’t she didn’t take the extra “minute or two it would have taken to finish?” He considered this “terribly significant.” Why, he asked, did she stop? “Why did she stop the work she set herself to do right at the eve of its being done?” The answer was obvious. She stopped because once Bridget disappeared up into her attic bedroom, Lizzie turned to her true task: killing her father.

From the perspective of guilt, it is also significant that Lizzie decided to set up her ironing board in the dining room while Bridget was in that room washing windows. She was clearly trying to keep an eye on Bridget to make sure she knew where the maid was and if she would soon be out of the way. That is why she followed Bridget into the kitchen and chattered on about the sale of dress goods at Sargent’s, to keep track of Bridget’s movements in preparation for killing Andrew. She did the same earlier as she was preparing to kill Abby; she followed Bridget to the screen door to ask her if she was going to be out washing windows. After Andrew lay down on the sofa, Lizzie hovered in the kitchen until she saw Bridget head upstairs, and the last Bridget saw of her, Lizzie was heading back into the dining room, presumably to finish ironing. But she did not go back to ironing. Those last few sprinkled handkerchiefs that never got pressed were a dead giveaway. Lizzie didn’t spend the morning waiting for her flat irons to heat up; she spent the morning plotting, and then committing, the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden. And her rambling, nonsensical inquest testimony about ironing her handkerchiefs, which so openly contradicted Bridget’s memory of that morning, only made her guilt more obvious.

Through the Lens of Innocence

It is true that Lizzie didn’t finish ironing all of her handkerchiefs but, from the perspective of innocence, this is not significant at all; quite the opposite, it was the most mundane of outcomes in a morning that Lizzie was moving through in her ordinary, mundane way. So mundane, in fact, that she had a difficult time remembering the particulars when she faced Knowlton at her inquest. Cara Robertson, in The Trial of Lizzie Borden, had an interesting observation about Knowlton’s difficulty in believing Lizzie’s story:

“Knowlton’s incredulity may have arisen, in part, from a lack of understanding of the life of leisured women. Lizzie’s account of her activities seemed unfathomable to a man accustomed to a life of purpose. It was hard to imagine Knowlton tarrying to eat a pear while on the hunt for some object he needed. But was Lizzie’s progress around the house and out to the barn any more dilatory than that of other women of her station? One day was much like another. Would other women like Lizzie Borden be able to account for their time minutely even if their lives were of manufactured and restless activity?”

Clearly, ironing her handkerchiefs was not an urgent matter to Lizzie. In her telling, she wasn’t paying much attention to the fire that she was waiting on to heat her irons, she was more absorbed in reading. If the irons got hot enough, as they seemed to be at the time Bridget was washing windows, then fine, she would resume the task. Bridget confirmed that at least some of her handkerchiefs had already been ironed before she saw Lizzie pressing several more. But flat irons cooled quickly, and needed constant rotation; it wasn’t all that easy to keep them hot long enough for the careful work of pressing a lace-edged handkerchief. So, if there wasn’t enough fire to heat the flats again, well, also fine, there was no big rush. There was no one else to care if the handkerchiefs got pressed that morning or not, so why hang around the hot kitchen any longer and risk disturbing her father’s rest, why not go out to the barn looking for something to fix her screen? And while she was out there, why not look for some iron to serve as sinkers for her upcoming trip?

In his closing, Robinson described the issue in his usual folksy way, saying of the morning that “Lizzie was going about the house as usual. What was she doing? Doing just the same as any decent woman does, attending to her work, ironing handkerchiefs, going up and down the stairs, going down to the cellar, to the closet.” He asked the jury what he supposed their own wives were doing on an ordinary day, said he was sure just doing their normal housework type things, just like Lizzie had been doing. “You can see it photographed in your mind,” he said, “It is just the same there. She was ironing.”

In other words, the district attorney was making mountains out of molehills; in a case where direct evidence was completely absent, Knowlton was desperately searching for significance in Lizzie’s insignificant chore. Furthermore, if Knowlton believed that Lizzie had no real intention of heating her flats in order to finish ironing her handkerchiefs, then how did he suppose that the fire he insisted was still burning in the stove after the murders was still able to burn? Bridget testified she hadn’t tended the fire since breakfast; so, if it was still alive when Harrington saw it at noon, then it was by Lizzie’s efforts that it finally caught and burned, even if she thought the stick she put into that stove didn’t catch. Why would she keep a fire going if she didn’t fully intend to heat her irons? She wouldn’t. She wanted to iron those handkerchiefs, but the fire was being finicky, flaring then dying, and dying then flaring. But she wasn’t too worried about it because for Lizzie Borden, it was just an ordinary morning.

Author’s Take

It always strikes me when Robinson does a quick sidestep of an issue, waving a dismissive hand as if it isn’t important, when the other side is stressing it as very important. Usually, when something came up he believed harmful to the defense, he seemed to dive into a witty deconstruction of that thing. Yes, he did address the issue of the handkerchiefs, but only in an offhand way, more to establish how ordinary the morning was for Lizzie. Of course, he made his closing argument before Knowlton made his and might not have anticipated the district attorney was about to declare it a “terribly significant” issue. So maybe it didn’t occur to Robinsons there was much to defend against when it came to Lizzie ironing her handkerchiefs. But it seems to me it was an issue he should have been more concerned about.

I don’t agree with Knowlton that it was terribly significant, but at the same time, it is not without significance, at least in my mind, that Lizzie appeared not to have started ironing, or at least not focused on it, until much later than when she said she did, at least if Bridget was correct in her observations. But even if the morning went exactly as Lizzie described, two hours really is a long time to fitfully attend to a mundane task, to let it drag out.

Then again, I am not a woman of leisure as Lizzie was. I can accept that getting her handkerchiefs ironed may not have been all that important to check off her to-do list. Even with all I have to get done, I can also get so absorbed in reading that I will shove my to-do list aside. And it does appear that Lizzie had managed to get several of her handkerchiefs pressed before Bridget saw her ironing a few more. So, it’s not that I am pushed hard in the direction of Lizzie’s guilt because of those two or three un-pressed handkerchiefs, but it does nudge me in that direction at least a bit. And, I can see why those in the guilty camp believe that ironing handkerchiefs was not on her to-do list at all but was merely a poorly executed cover for what became the top item on her list that morning: getting away with murder.