Time Gap Between Murders

On the morning of August 4th, 1892, Lizzie Borden claimed she left her father in the sitting room of their house, about to take a nap, when she went out to the barn to look for a piece of iron to serve as fishing sinkers for an upcoming trip. When she returned to the house 20 minutes later, she found her father dead on the sofa, his face hacked up and immediately raised the alarm. Within 15 minutes, Dr. Seabury Bowen, the family doctor, would himself see Andrew dead on the sofa and notice that his blood was still trickling from his wounds. And, when he checked Andrew for a pulse, his body still felt warm to the touch. Within another 15 minutes, the county medical examiner, Dr. William Dolan, would make the same observations. Andrew’s blood, he said at the preliminary hearing, was not clotted but “was flowing—oozing would be probably a better term—from the wounds on the face and head.”

This was a shocking realization to those who had immediately assumed a madman had come into the house and killed both Andrew and Abby at the same time. Police officers reported that Dr. Bowen, before noticing Abby’s wounds, had thought for a moment that the killer may have chased Abby upstairs after killing Andrew, and that she had “died of fright.” But the understanding that Abby had been murdered quite a while earlier had serious implications. That meant that an intruder, if there was one, had killed Abby first, then lurked in the house for a significant amount of time before Andrew came home and lay down for a nap. How could that be possible when both Bridget and Lizzie had been in and around the house?

Later that afternoon, Dr. Dolan would lay the bodies of both Andrew and Abby on an autopsy board and cut them open to remove their stomachs, then seal those stomachs in a jar and send them to Harvard to have their contents analyzed. He did this because Dr. Bowen had told him of Abby’s visit to him the morning before to tell him they had been violently ill and share her fears that the family had been poisoned. But while the stomachs of the victims would eventually show no signs of damage from poisoning, the findings of Dr. Edward Wood at Harvard did show that they were in different stages of digestion of the breakfast they had both eaten at the same time that morning.

Dr. Dolan had already confirmed as much when he did a full autopsy on the bodies a week after the murders, testifying at Lizzie’s trial that he had noted then that Andrew had already finished digesting his breakfast (his small intestine was more or less empty of food), and Abby was still in the process of digesting (her small intestine still contained food). Dolan stated they had likely died “an hour to an hour-and-a-half apart.”

Dr. Wood followed Dr. Dolan onto the stand at the trial and gave his opinion that because of the large amount of food still left in her stomach from her breakfast (which she ate at about 7 a.m.), Abby had likely died between two and three hours after eating, or between 9 and 10 a.m. Meanwhile, Andrew’s stomach was nearly empty, and Dr. Wood believed he died about three-and-half to four hours after eating. Indeed, from Bridget’s testimony of when she last saw him alive, Andrew was known to have died somewhere around 11 a.m.   

Taking these findings into account, along with when Abby was last seen by Bridget in the dining room (around 9:15 a.m.), the prosecution eventually landed on an approximate time for Abby’s death of 9:30 a.m. That meant Andrew and Abby were killed about 90 minutes apart, a conspicuous time gap. It was, in fact, a stunning time gap.

Lizzie’s lawyers did not contest this surprising time difference between Andrew and Abby’s deaths; the scientific findings were inarguable. But it did make the defense’s job far more difficult to contend that an intruder, and not Lizzie, had committed the murders. Who could possibly believe that an intruder not only got into the Borden house unseen or unnoticed by either Lizzie or Bridget but had also remained hidden in the house for an hour-and-a-half, biding his time for Andrew to return? Well, apparently the jury believed it, for they found Lizzie “not guilty.” But in the years since, not many have believed it.

Through the Lens of Guilt

District Attorney Hosea Knowlton, in his closing, said the 90-minute time gap between the murders “is a controlling factor in this case. It is the key of the case. It is a tremendous fact. It appears in this case from beginning to end.” He did not exaggerate. That long stretch of time between Abby being struck down with a hatchet upstairs and Andrew succumbing to the same hatchet downstairs made it seem almost certain that someone in the house was able to pick and choose their opportunity. Because Bridget had no obvious motive and was outside a good part of the morning, that someone had to be Lizzie.

Indeed, Lizzie herself made the prospect of an intruder slipping inside and waiting around the house seem all but impossible with her inquest testimony, in which she placed herself downstairs in the kitchen most of the morning, in sight of the back door. She claimed not to hear any noises in other parts of the house. She also claimed to not know where Abby was that entire time, eventually saying she “supposed” she was out due to a note Abby told her she had received from a sick friend. (That note was never verified and the prosecution asserted it was a cover story that Lizzie made up to explain Abby’s absence to her father.)

Plus, after first saying she had been in the kitchen when Andrew came home from his business rounds, she then briefly admitted she had been upstairs when her father returned but quickly reversed herself and put herself back in the kitchen, as if trying to avoid the impression of being anywhere near Abby’s body. But she only made herself appear to be a liar, as Bridget had testified that she heard Lizzie laughing upstairs as Bridget struggled to open the front door for Andrew. If Lizzie was indeed upstairs when Andrew came home, with her bedroom door open, this suggests she was guarding the guest room and was prepared to head anyone off who may have decided to go up the stairs and discover Abby’s body before she was ready for it to be found.

The time gap between murders was also financially advantageous to Lizzie (and Emma, too), adding credence to the theory that Lizzie killed Andrew to get her hands on his money. In fact, some in the guilty camp (including Abby’s niece, Abby Potter, who was 8 years old at the time of the murders) have gone so far as to assert that Lizzie purposely killed Abby much earlier in order to make it obvious she died before Andrew, thereby ensuring Abby would not posthumously inherit a share of Andrew’s estate, which would then go to Abby’s heirs. Such a line of thinking is not only cynical but unrealistic. It’s doubtful that Lizzie would have understood how easily the time of death for both victims could be established. Yet, that in itself points a guilty finger at Lizzie, who no doubt assumed that police would suppose that both Abby and Andrew had been butchered near the same time, while she was out in the barn “looking for lead for sinkers,” according to the alibi she chose for herself. But forensic analysis undermined her alibi and exposed her guilt.  

Through the Lens of Innocence

The time gap between murders is a challenge to reckon with in arguing for Lizzie’s innocence. The idea of an intruder not just getting in, but lurking in the house for hours unnoticed, is difficult to wrap one’s mind around. But those who knew Lizzie and believed in her innocence had no choice but to do just that.

Andrew Jennings, who was Andrew Borden’s friend and longtime lawyer, clearly considered the matter carefully, and had this to say to a Boston Post reporter on August 6th, two days after the murders.

“To consider the almost miracle necessary for a man to enter, commit the deed and escape without being discovered, it would be a remarkable combination of circumstances, but not a miracle,” said Mr. Jennings. “Impressed with it, as everybody has been, I have recalled how frequently I have entered and gone through my mother’s house and out again without meeting a soul, and how I could at such times have carried off most anything without being discovered.”

It is telling that people like Andrew Jennings and Andrew’s business manager, Charles C. Cook—men who knew Andrew and his family and were presumably emotionally invested in finding and punishing the culprit who so horrifically ended his life—took up Lizzie’s defense and remained convinced that an intruder had indeed killed her father and stepmother, problematic time gap notwithstanding. They also seemed to understand that Lizzie’s equally problematic inquest testimony, which made the time gap more difficult to grapple with, was unreliable testimony thanks to a number of mitigating factors.

Meanwhile, those who believe it would have been too difficult for an intruder to remain hidden in the house for two hours clearly aren’t acquainted with the numerous news stories about people who have managed to live in attics or crawl spaces of occupied homes for surprising amounts of time. In fact, it happens so commonly there is even term for it today: phrogging. If it’s possible to live for days or even weeks in someone else’s house without detection, it would obviously not be all that difficult for someone to do so for a few hours.

Yes, it would have been an inarguable challenge for an intruder to withstand the stress of waiting, never knowing whether he might be discovered. But it would have been no less stressful for Lizzie to withstand waiting either. She would also have had to endure the same risk that Abby’s body could be discovered by Bridget, or by Andrew when he got home. And while an intruder could merely sit in his hiding place sweating bullets with no one to notice, Lizzie had to face the two other people in the house and act so normally that neither would suspect she had just committed one brutal murder and was planning the next.

For those who contend the time gap rules out the possibility of intruder, Governor Robinson had pointed words when he spoke of the danger of a deciding on a guilty verdict against Lizzie “simply for the reason that you do not see how anybody else could do it. That is very dangerous ground.” He was right; the time gap is not in itself evidence against Lizzie, it merely tells us that the killer, whoever it was, was determined to succeed despite obstacles. (For an in-depth look at how an intruder may have accomplished the feat, see Intruder Theory.)

Author’s Take

When I first discovered that Andrew and Abby had been killed an hour-and-a-half apart, my initial thought was, yep, Lizzie did it. There seemed to be no way that an intruder could or would just hang around the house that long waiting to make his next kill. In fact, the idea seemed absurd. Yet, over time, as I did more and more research on the case, and looked at it from the perspective of those who actually knew Lizzie and believed in her innocence, the more possible it became to me that an intruder could have navigated that time gap after all.

That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the improbability of it. It may not be direct evidence against Lizzie, but the time gap between the murders of Abby and Andrew, however circumstantial, remains one of several legitimately credible reasons to believe her guilty.