The Trial of Lizzie Borden(38)

Moody began his examination of Bridget Sullivan with little preamble. He established that her job was “washing, ironing and cooking, with sweeping” in the common areas of the house, but she was only responsible for her own bedroom on the third story over the senior Bordens’ bedroom. The Monday before the murders was washing day; therefore, she washed sheets in the cellar. This led Moody to the prosecution’s key contention that no outsider could have been in the house during the murders. Bridget was able to confirm that the cellar door, a potential point of entry for an outside assassin, was bolted from the inside between Tuesday and the time of the murders. She also stated that the side door had been securely locked on the night before the murders. This meant that the prosecution could focus on minimizing the small window of opportunity on the morning of August 4.

According to Bridget, she awoke that morning with a “dull headache,” perhaps related to the illness Andrew and Abby experienced the previous day. Nonetheless she was in the kitchen before Abby came down between 6:30 and 6:40 a.m. Andrew followed about five minutes later, bearing a slop pail and the bedroom key. He put the bedroom key on the sitting room mantel and emptied his slop pail outside. When he reentered the house, he brought in a basket of pears, washed his hands, and then joined Abby and John Morse at breakfast. Once they had finished, the men went out to the backyard. Andrew came back inside and retrieved his bedroom key. He then took a bowl of water upstairs. That was the last she saw of him until he came back from his trip downtown. As Bridget was washing the dishes, Lizzie came downstairs with her own slop pail. While Lizzie had coffee and cookies for breakfast, Bridget went outside to vomit. She estimated that she was outside for ten to fifteen minutes at most. When she had recovered, she brought the clean plates into the dining room. There, according to her testimony, she saw Abby Borden for the last time.

Abby interrupted her dusting to ask Bridget to wash the windows inside and outside. Bridget went to the cellar for a bucket and brush to wash the windows. When she was just outside the back door, Lizzie appeared and asked her if she was going to wash the windows. Lizzie then advised: “You needn’t lock the door. I will be out around here but you can lock it if you want to.” To complete her task, Bridget went in and out of the barn several times for water—the task required six or seven buckets—making it even harder for an intruder to have timed his entry. After washing the outside windows, Bridget came inside and started on the windows inside the sitting room. She heard the sound of someone trying to unlock the door. She went to the door, found it bolted, swore, and unbolted it to admit Andrew Borden. He was carrying a small white parcel. Apparently in response to Bridget’s cursing, Lizzie laughed from the upstairs landing. Bridget returned to washing the windows in the sitting room.

Andrew sat down in the dining room. Lizzie came downstairs and asked her father if there was any mail. She volunteered that Abby had received a note and had gone out. Andrew went into the kitchen and then to the sitting room, where he retrieved his bedroom key from the mantel. He then went up to his bedroom. When Bridget had started on the dining room dishes, Andrew returned to the sitting room. Lizzie brought an ironing board into the dining room and ironed handkerchiefs. She asked Bridget if she was going out in the afternoon and told her that if she did go out, she should lock the door, “for Mrs. Borden has gone out on a sick call, and I might go out, too.” Later in the kitchen, Lizzie informed her of a “cheap sale of dress goods at Sargent’s . . . at eight cents a yard.” This was a good deal—Lizzie herself had a cheap Bedford cord dress made from material that had cost between twelve and fifteen cents a yard—and Sargent’s was located on North Main Street, less than a ten-minute walk from the house. (It was, in fact, too good of a bargain: Sargent’s had already been shuttered for a month by the time Bridget recounted her story in New Bedford.) Bridget, however, was in no condition to go out. Instead, she went upstairs to her bed. It was this midmorning respite that led Julian Ralph to term her “the Queen” of the household.

There was to be no rest for Bridget. Lizzie called for her: “Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.” Bridget testified that she ran down the stairs and saw Lizzie at the threshold of the screen door at the side of the house. Lizzie told her to get Dr. Bowen, who was not at home. When Bridget asked where she had been, Lizzie replied that she had been out in the backyard and had heard a groan. Lizzie then instructed her to summon Alice Russell. By the time she returned, next-door neighbor Adelaide Churchill and Dr. Bowen had arrived. Adelaide Churchill was in the kitchen with Lizzie as Dr. Bowen emerged from the sitting room, announcing, “He is murdered.” When Adelaide asked about Abby, Lizzie volunteered that she thought she had heard her come back. Bridget did not want to look for her but Adelaide Churchill said she would go with her. As they ascended the stairs, Bridget saw Abby’s body under the bed.

Her tale told, in Joe Howard’s assessment, “straight as a string,” Bridget remained standing for Robinson’s comprehensive cross-examination. The wily Robinson thrust out his belly, turned his “kindly eye” toward her, and unleashed his insinuating charm. In contrast to the prosecution’s careful step-by-step eliciting of Bridget’s movements to determine the timeline of events, Robinson probed for background about the household. In his “confidential manner,” he asked Bridget if “it was a pleasant family to be in?” Bridget hedged and replied, “I don’t know how the family was; I got along all right.” Robinson pressed her, moving delicately from a positive description (“pleasant”) that she would not confirm to negative descriptions she could firmly disavow. She had not seen anything “out of the way,” nor had she seen “conflict” or “quarrelling,” for example. She stopped short of agreeing that “they all got along genially,” replying “as far as I could see.” Bridget had been far less sanguine about Borden family relations in a conversation in late August 1892 with Nellie McHenry, wife and sometime assistant of the detective Edwin McHenry. She had told Nellie that, as a result of the unpleasantness in the house, she had intended to leave on three separate occasions, but “Mrs. Borden had coaxed her to stay and once raised her wages.” Robinson, however, suggested that her inquest testimony painted a rosier picture of domestic relations. Julian Ralph described the process as less a dance than a “long duel” in which Bridget Sullivan faced “a learned and cunning man, a man so far her superior that he had been three times Governor of the State.” Perhaps, Robinson asked, as a result of her new employment in New Bedford, she had spent more time in the company of prosecutors and police officers? As Howard would put it more bluntly, “During her long stay and virtually confinement in the family of jailer Hunt she has become so permeated with the ideas of the prosecution that she really doesn’t know whether she stands on her head or her heels.”