Thirteen Minutes

Bridget Sullivan, the family maid and cook, testified she was washing windows in the sitting room when Andrew Borden returned home from his trip downstreet at about 10:40 a.m. She then went into the dining room and washed the two windows there while chatting with Lizzie, who stood at the small ironing board on the dining table while ironing handkerchiefs. When she was finished, Bridget saw Andrew in a chair by the window in the sitting room as she went into kitchen to put away her supplies. She then headed upstairs to her attic room to “have a lie down” with the half-hour she had free before she had to start cooking the noon meal. She testified she was certain she went upstairs about 3 or 4 minutes before 11 a.m., because she remembered hearing the city hall clock strike the hour only a few minutes after she entered her room. She said she was lying down for only about ten minutes when she heard Lizzie holler for her to come down, because her father had been killed. (Lizzie would later tell Mrs. Marianna Holmes that she called up to Bridget saying her father had been “hurt.”) So, if Bridget came rushing down the stairs at 11:10, that meant Andrew Borden was killed within that 13-minute space between the time she went upstairs at about 10:57 and the time she came back downstairs at 11:10.

Now, how can we be sure it was 11:10? Actually, it might have been a minute or two earlier, but it could not have been later. Once Bridget made it downstairs, an upset Lizzie asked her to go to fetch Dr. Bowen, crying, “I must have a doctor!” Bridget went running across the street to the Bowen house, was told Dr. Bowen wasn’t there, then ran back across the street to report this to Lizzie. A distraught Lizzie then asked her to go fetch Miss Alice Russell, telling her, “I can’t be alone in this house!” Bridget then ran off again to find Lizzie’s friend. Within another minute or so, the neighbor from next door, Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, arrived, having seen Lizzie’s distress from her kitchen window. After exchanging a few words, in which Lizzie babbled on about her father’s enemies and what she and Abby believed had been an attempt to poison the family, Mrs. Churchill then hurried across the street and down to a local stable to find someone willing to go look for a doctor. She explained to the men gathered there that Andrew Borden had been attacked, and one of those men relayed the news to a passing newspaper dealer named John Cunningham, who then walked a few doors down to a paint shop to place a phone call to the police station to notify them of the trouble. The Police Marshal took the call and noted that the time was 11:15. Much had already happened before Hilliard recorded that call, certainly 5 minutes’ worth if not more. So …

Thirteen minutes is a close-to-accurate estimation of the time window Lizzie Borden would have had to work with to kill her father and make evidence of the murder disappear. Some authors give her a few more minutes, some a minute or two less. But all agree it was an incredibly narrow window in which to accomplish a great many actions in order to be seen looking “normal” by the dozen or so people who walked into her house as soon as she raised the alarm.

The Timer Starts …

If Lizzie was guilty and indeed killed Andrew, then first, once she was sure Bridget was upstairs and out of earshot, she would presumably have had to retrieve the hatchet from wherever she stashed it after killing Abby with it. Then she would have had to quietly sneak up on her father so as not to disturb his nap. Then she would have had to kill him with 10 blows to the head without getting sidetracked by emotion. Then she would have had to deal with any blood spatters that had hit her person. Some speculate that Lizzie may have first grabbed her father’s long, black Prince Albert Coat, hanging in the dining room, and put it on backwards to protect her dress from the blood flying from the hatchet blows and spurting on the walls, before folding it up and putting it under his ruined head afterward. If she did think to do such a thing, that may have saved her from spending the time it would have taken to change her dress. Even so, she would have had at least some blood on her hands, or her face, or her hair to deal with, to clean up, to make disappear without a trace. There was a sink right off kitchen near the back door, so perhaps she used that.

Next, she would have had to dispense with the bloody weapon. Many, if not most, in the guilty camp today believe she hid it somewhere in the house, a place she somehow felt confident the police would never think to look. But during her trial, the prosecution contended that Lizzie dealt with the weapon by breaking off the handle. She then thoroughly washed the blood off the blade, then ran the blade down to the cellar, then dipped it in the ash heap there, then tossed it into an old salt box of odds and ends. (What she did with the handle in that scenario, they left unclear.)

Lizzie would then have had to go outside and do something out back, although what, exactly, was not addressed by the prosecution. (Victoria Lincoln believed she went to the barn to use the vise there to break the handle from the hatchet blade: others think she went out back to go the corner of the fence to fling the bloody hatchet atop the Crowe barn.) Lizzie herself said she was out in the barn looking for sinkers, and not in the house killing her father, which the prosecution declared a lie, but either way, Lizzie almost certainly had been out back because a witness, Hyman Lubinsky, saw her walking toward the side door from the back yard at about ten minutes after 11 a.m. Which just happened to be the time Lizzie said she came in and found her father dead and then called for Bridget.

So, if Lizzie was the killer, at least that much had to have happened in those 13 minutes. The details of how exactly she accomplished her to-do list are, of course, up for debate. And there have indeed been a great many debates about what Lizzie may or may not have done to make the weapon disappear, get herself clean of blood and present herself so normally that not a single witness noticed anything amiss with her appearance. She also managed to accomplish it so flawlessly that not a single one of the dozens of police officers who trooped all over the house that day saw anything suspicious to collect as evidence.

Now, here is the most debated question of all: Was 13 minutes really enough to accomplish all that?

Was it Possible?

When presenting his case to the jury, Knowlton acknowledged that Lizzie hadn’t had a lot of time to do all he suggested she did in that short 13 minute window, but declared it was “time enough.” Writing years later, Edmund Pearson would echo Knowlton (as he did in most things) and say, “The time was ample.” He even helped her out by suggesting the handle on the handleless hatchet broke during the killing of Andrew, so she wouldn’t have had to deal with that pesky detail.

In the years since, those in the guilty camp have been of the same mind. Sure, she would have had to rush a bit, but she could have done it. Many an enterprising Borden buff has even sought to prove it by taking a tour of the actual Borden house and breaking out a stopwatch to time all the actions they believe Lizzie took. Some of these buffs go on Borden-dedicated message boards and post their times, and a few have gone as low as eight minutes. This seems reasonable to many; after all, we are accustomed to watching crime capers on television in which complicated series of events are pulled off in a short time by clever culprits who beat the clock every time.

So sure, it is technically possible Lizzie could have killed her father and erased the evidence in only thirteen minutes. But was it realistically possible? Lizzie’s jury apparently thought not. They couldn’t imagine it, and many observers today also struggle with the idea.

So, for argument’s sake, let’s give an intruder the same 13-minute window. All he would have had to do once Lizzie stepped out of the house to go to the barn was give it a few minutes to make sure all was quiet, then slip out of his hiding place (perhaps the upstairs guest room, sitting with Abby’s body, or perhaps the parlor). The hatchet would, of course, already be in his hand, so he would simply have to put himself at the end of the sitting room sofa where Andrew slept, deliver ten blows of the hatchet into Andrew’s unsuspecting face, perhaps wipe some blood off the hatchet as well as his face or hands with the sleeve of a dark coat that wouldn’t easily show blood, then move quickly through the kitchen and step out the screen door (perhaps hanging back another minute or two, if he saw Lizzie still under the pear tree picking up pears).

Once the coast was clear, in about two seconds he would have been around the corner of the house there at the back door and out of sight of the street. In another thirty seconds he would have been able to step up onto the lumber pile and get over the back fence of the Borden yard and into the Chagnon orchard, where he would become nearly invisible under the shadows of thick trees. Perhaps he tossed the hatchet up from there onto the Crowe barn to his right, or perhaps he simply walked nonchalantly onto Third Street to blend into normal traffic, the hatchet hidden and unnoticed beneath his coat. He could have done all that in five or six minutes. So which scenario seems more realistically possible?

Author’s Take

When it comes to the thirteen minutes and the question of whether Lizzie could have managed to kill her father and make the weapon disappear and clean herself up so expertly in that small time window, there is no “proof” to be found one way or the other; we can’t know with any certainty what she did or didn’t do. It then becomes either believable or not believable depending on who you ask. It’s one of those eye-of-the-beholder situations, as so many elements about the case are, and our answer will be dictated first by whether we lean toward Lizzie’s guilt or innocence, as that determines how we interpret everything we learn about the case. Yet, it will also be influenced by how we have experienced our own ability to get things done in a certain amount of time.

Some—like those Borden murder buffs with their stopwatches—will shrug off Lizzie’s after-murder to-do list as almost too easy. (I imagine these people to be track and field stars able to bound up and down stairs lickety-split, or world-champion chess players trained to think fast under pressure.) But someone like me, old enough to have encountered enough real-world situations where things never feel exactly like I expect them to feel (and how does it feel to chop into the head of one’s own father anyway?), and things rarely go exactly as I imagined them to go, so I cannot shrug it off. Especially when I factor in all the times I have accidentally forgotten one little thing, or left a smear of something behind I didn’t realize, or I have dropped something, or tripped on something, or failed to see something right in front of my face … and that’s not even taking into account what happens when a good jolt of adrenaline hits my brain.

No, in the eye of this beholder, it is not realistically possible, or at least not realistically probable, that Lizzie could have done what she would have needed to do to commit a blood-drenched murder of her own father and then stand before witnesses in pristine condition, no bloody weapon to be found. Not in the thirteen minutes she had available to her. To borrow a phrase from Knowlton, “I assert that that story is simply absurd, I assert that that story is not within the bounds of reasonable possibilities.”