The Cases That Haunt Us (13 page)

The Borden household, normally a rather dour place, would have been particularly unpleasant that Wednesday. At 7:00 in the morning, Abby had gone across the street to the home of Dr. Seabury Warren Bowen complaining that both she and Andrew had been violently ill during the night with nausea and vomiting and she was afraid someone was trying to poison them. After a quick exam, Dr. Bowen told her he did not think the illness was serious and sent her home. Later that morning, just to be certain, Bowen paid a call on the Bordens. Andrew ungraciously declared that he was not ill and had no intention of paying for an unsolicited house call. Since Andrew was as excessively thrifty with food as he was with everything else, the gastrointestinal upset had possibly been caused by the mutton stew the family had been having at various meals for several days in a row, despite the warm weather. Bridget, who was suffering some of the same symptoms, was convinced the stew had gone bad, but Andrew would not let her dispose of it.

On Thursday, John Morse had breakfast with Andrew and Abby. Lizzie did not join them, which would have been normal. Despite living in the same small house, Lizzie seldom dined with her father and stepmother. Morse left the house around 8:40 A.M., stopped at the post office, then went across town to see other relatives, the Emerys. Mr. and Mrs. Emery later reported that Morse had been with them between 9:40 and 11:20 A.M., and their impression was that after leaving them, he was headed home by way of New Bedford.

Abby had directed Bridget to wash all of the windows, inside and out. This would have been a formidable task on any hot summer day, but it was particularly taxing this morning when she had already prepared and cleaned up after breakfast and was still feeling so ill. Around 9 A.M. she had to interrupt her work to rush outside to the yard to vomit.

A few minutes later, Andrew left for his business rounds. Mrs. Churchill, the next-door neighbor on the north side, saw him leave. Bridget was still in the backyard being sick, and Abby was upstairs straightening out the guest room that John Morse had occupied. When Bridget came back in the house, she overheard Abby and Lizzie talking in the dining room.

At a store he owned that was being remodeled, Andrew Borden told carpenters he didn’t feel well and was going home, where he arrived around 10:40 A.M. He tried to open the front door with his key, but found it bolted from the inside with an additional lock, unusual during the day. So he knocked and Bridget came over to open it. She had trouble springing the bolt, and according to Bridget, Lizzie was standing at the top of the stairs and laughed at her brief struggle.

Andrew was carrying a small package wrapped in white paper. We do not know what was in this package. Since a burglary in the house the year before, he had kept his and Abby’s bedroom locked, so he took the key from its place on the mantel and went up the back stairs. When Andrew returned downstairs, Lizzie told him that Mrs. Borden—she had some time ago stopped calling Abby “Mother”—had received a note from a sick friend and had gone out. Still characteristically dressed in his tie and jacket, Andrew lay down for a nap on the couch in the sitting room with his feet resting on the carpet.

So as not to disturb him, Bridget moved into the dining room and began on the windows there. Lizzie came into the room carrying an ironing board, which she set up and began ironing handkerchiefs.

“Maggie, are you going out today?” Lizzie asked. Interestingly, Maggie was what Lizzie and Emma called Bridget, since that had been the name of the previous Borden maid. Apparently, the habit was too hard to break. Andrew and Abby called her by her actual name.

Bridget replied, “I don’t know. I might and I might not. I don’t feel very well.”

“If you go out, be sure and lock the door, for Mrs. Borden has gone out on a sick call and I might go out, too.”

“Miss Lizzie, who is sick?” Bridget asked.

“I don’t know. She had a note this morning. It must be in town.”

Bridget found this odd, since Abby, who was shy, plain, short and overweight, normally told her when she was planning to leave the house, which didn’t happen all that often. But Bridget accepted Lizzie’s story.

As Bridget was finishing up the dining room windows, Lizzie said to her, “There is a cheap sale of dress goods at Sargent’s this afternoon at eight cents a yard.”

This elicited a more enthusiastic response from the young woman, who declared, “I’m going to have one!” She left Lizzie ironing in the dining room and went upstairs to her own room in the attic to rest for a little while, hoping to feel better. She lay down on top of the bedspread without taking off her shoes. It was too hot for a deep sleep, but she fell into a doze until she heard the city-hall clock strike 11 A.M. She lay on the bed for another few minutes.

At that point she heard Lizzie calling urgently from downstairs, “Maggie, come down!”

“What is the matter?” Bridget called back.

“Come down quick! Father’s dead! Somebody came in and killed him!”

Bridget rose quickly and rushed down two flights of stairs. As she was about to head into the sitting room where Andrew had been napping, Lizzie said, “Oh, Maggie, don’t go in!” She then instructed her to go find Dr. Bowen.

THE
CRIME
SCENE

Mrs. Adelaide Churchill had been returning home after buying groceries when she saw Bridget Sullivan darting back in vain from Dr. Seabury Bowen’s house across the street. She set her parcels down, then rushed over to the Bordens’, fearing from Bridget’s actions that someone was gravely ill. Lizzie was standing just inside the screen door on the side of the house, looking dazed. Mrs. Churchill called out to her, “Lizzie, what is the matter?”

“Oh, Mrs. Churchill,” Lizzie responded, “do come over! Someone has killed Father!”

The neighbor went around the fence and up to Lizzie. “Where is your father?” She had to ask several times before Lizzie finally responded:

“In the sitting room.”

Mrs. Churchill went into the sitting room and beheld the carnage for herself. When she emerged moments later, she asked Lizzie where she had been when this happened.

Lizzie replied that she had been in the barn behind the house, where she’d gone to find some iron to use as fishing weights for an upcoming trip. When she’d heard a noise, she had come out and noticed that the screen door was open.

“Where is your mother?” Mrs. Churchill asked.

Lizzie replied, “I don’t know. She had got a note to go see someone who is sick. But I don’t know but she is killed, too, for I thought I heard her come in.” Then she offered, “Father must have an enemy, for we have all been sick, and we think the milk has been poisoned. I must have a doctor.”

At that point, Adelaide Churchill went out in search of Dr. Bowen herself, setting in motion the chain of events that summoned law enforcement authorities.

As it happened, most of the Fall River Police Department was out at their annual picnic and clambake at Rocky Point, Rhode Island. Hilliard dispatched George W. Allen, a young and relatively inexperienced officer, one of the few he had on hand.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bowen had arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Bridget’s return with Lizzie’s best friend, Alice Russell. Bowen quickly went to the sitting room and came upon Andrew Borden’s body. The corpse was half-sitting, half-lying on the sofa, the head resting on Borden’s carefully folded coat, used as a pillow. His boots were still on his feet. The face was essentially unrecognizable. Blood spots were on the floor, on the wall over the sofa, and on the picture hanging on that wall. But the clothing was not disturbed, and there was no apparent injury to any part of his body other than the face.

The most immediate concern of those in the house was Abby’s whereabouts. Lizzie had reported her outing to a sick friend. With Abby’s limited circle, the only one Bridget could imagine her going to see was her younger half-sister, Mrs. Sarah Whitehead. Bridget suggested that she go try to find Mrs. Whitehead, and if Abby was with her, to tell her only that Mr. Borden was very sick and she needed to hurry home. Then they could give her the horrible truth.

Lizzie brought up again her suspicion that Abby had returned home, but if she had, then why hadn’t she come downstairs when she heard the commotion? “Maggie,” she said, “I am almost positive I heard her coming in. Won’t you go upstairs to see?”

That was the last thing Bridget wanted to do, fearing what she might find. “I am not going upstairs alone,” she insisted.

Mrs. Churchill said she would go with her, so together the two women climbed the stairs.

When they got to the top, they could see her, lying facedown in the guest room, propped on her knees as she had fallen. They raced back downstairs, where they found Lizzie now lying down.

Alice Russell asked, “Is there another?”

“Yes, she is up there,” Adelaide Churchill replied.

By this time Officer George Allen had arrived at the Borden home, finding a housepainter named Charles Sawyer on the street near the house. He enlisted Sawyer to guard the house while he went in to investigate. The front door was locked, so Allen moved around to the back, but was able to get in through the screen door on the left side near the rear of the house. When he got there, Dr. Bowen had already left to send a telegram summoning Emma home.

Shaken by the grisly sight in the sitting room, Allen quickly searched the remainder of the first floor, then raced back to the police station and reported his findings to Marshal Hilliard, leaving Charles Sawyer guarding the residence. Other officers had returned to the station house, and Hilliard sent them out with Allen. By 11:45 A.M., seven police officers were in the Borden residence, along with Bristol County medical examiner William Dolan.

Based on the comparative temperatures of the bodies, the condition of the blood on each, and an examination of the contents of the digestive systems, Dolan determined that Andrew had died at least one hour after Abby.

Andrew Borden had been struck in the face. One eye was cut in half. His nose was severed, and eleven distinct cuts extended from the eye and nose to the ear. Fresh blood was still seeping from the wounds when he was found. Despite the severity of the attack, the clothing was not disturbed. The wounds were inflicted by a sharp, heavy weapon. He had been struck from above the head while he slept.

The postmortem exam on Abby Borden revealed that her head had been crushed, apparently by the same weapon that would kill her husband. One misdirected blow had struck the back of her head, almost at the neck, cutting off a chunk of scalp. When her body was discovered, the blood was already dark and congealed.

Abby Durfee Borden had also been hacked to death, suffering a total of nineteen blows from a sharp-bladed instrument. As with her husband, the first blow was probably sufficient to cause death.

Officer Michael Mullaly asked Lizzie if there were any hatchets in the house.

“Yes,” she said. “They are everywhere.” Later, at the coroner’s inquest, she testified that she did not know if there were any hatchets in the house. This was only the first of a number of troubling inconsistencies in Lizzie’s responses.

Bridget accompanied Mullaly down to the basement, where he found four hatchets. One was a rusty claw-headed hatchet. A second was dusty and appeared little used. The blade of a third one was covered in ashes and had all but a few inches of the handle broken off. From the condition of the wood fiber, the break appeared to be recent. A fourth bore the residue of dried blood and hair.

About this time, John Morse came back, having been asked by Andrew to return for the noon meal. He strolled into the backyard, where he picked some pears from the trees beyond the barn and spent several minutes eating them, apparently unaware of what was going on inside the house.

Officer William Medley went to the barn and climbed up to the loft where Lizzie said she had been looking for lead to make sinkers for her planned fishing trip after she joined Emma in Fairhaven. He found the loft floor thick with dust and no evidence that anyone had been there recently. By this time, Dr. Bowen was back. He took Lizzie upstairs and gave her bromo caffeine for her headache and to calm her nerves. (The next night he administered the first of what would be a series of injections of sulfate of morphine as a tranquilizer.) Alice Russell noted that while Lizzie was upstairs, she changed from the light blue dress she had been wearing to a pink and white outfit.

Police found a small spot of blood on the sole of one of Lizzie’s shoes and another small spot on one of her underskirts, about a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. It was consistent with human blood, and later laboratory examination determined that the saturation was more concentrated on the outside of the fabric than on the inside. This is important because Lizzie explained the spot as a flea bite, a euphemism at the time for menstrual blood, which was not discussed in polite society, even when speaking with the police.

At 3 P.M. the bodies of Andrew and Abby Borden were carried into the dining room and placed on undertaker’s boards, like a folding table. Dr. Dolan performed autopsies there, where just that morning the two victims had had their breakfast. He removed and tied off the stomachs, which were sent by special messenger to Dr. Edward S. Wood, professor of chemistry at Harvard.

Upstairs, Deputy Marshal John Fleet questioned Lizzie, asking her if she had any idea who could have committed the murders. She said that a few weeks ago, her father had had an argument with a man she didn’t know, but other than him, she couldn’t think of anyone. Fleet then asked directly whether her uncle John Morse or Bridget Sullivan could have killed her father and mother. She pointedly reminded Fleet that Abby was not her mother but her stepmother, then said it would have been impossible for either Uncle John or Bridget to have committed the crimes.

Emma returned from Fairhaven just before 6:00 that evening. The bodies of the Bordens were still in the dining room, awaiting the arrival of the undertaker. Sergeant Philip Harrington continued questioning Lizzie. Finally, the police left, cordoning off the house to keep away the curious, who had assembled en masse. Bridget left to stay with Dr. Bowen’s maid while Emma and Lizzie remained in the house. Uncle John slept in the guest room where Abby had been killed, and Alice Russell slept in the Bordens’ bedroom.