Poison (Arsenic)

At 9 p.m. on the evening of Tuesday, August 2nd, only 36 hours before they were found dead from the brutal blows of a hatchet, Andrew and Abby Borden became suddenly very ill and began to vomit. They continued to heave loudly for the next three hours, to the point Lizzie later said she knocked on the locked door between their rooms and asked if she could do anything for them. They said no. By midnight, Lizzie would report that she began feeling sick as well. (According to what Abby later told Dr. Bowen, Lizzie was throwing up, too, although Alice Russell would say Lizzie told her that despite feeling sick, she didn’t vomit.) The next morning, Bridget would learn that everyone else in the house had been sick, and she had been the only one spared.

Was It an Inquiry or Entrapment?

“Here was a girl they had been suspecting for days. She was virtually under arrest and yet, for the purpose of extracting a confession from her to support their theory, they brought her here and put her to the rack, a thing they knew they would have no right to do if they placed her under arrest … Day after day the same questions were repeated to her in the hope to elicit some information that would incriminate her. Is it a wonder there are conflicting statements?”