Episode 15: The Help Done It

Caitlin and Francesgrace promised you an episode on Bridgit Sullivan and they deliver.

LINK TO SHOW NOTES*

Season 2. Episode 3. The Help Done It.

Caitlin: Hello, and welcome to Grave Escapes, the podcast helps those who've died tell their stories once again.

INTRO MUSIC

Caitlin: Hey, Frances!

Frances: Hey,

Caitlin: I want to give you the space to feel your feelings.

Frances: I have so many feelings,

Caitlin: So many feelings. But you seem to have a belief in relation to our first episode of the season, that Lizzie Borden did not kill her parents.

Frances: Yes.

Caitlin: And I want to…I want to let you explain why that is.

Frances: Okay. So basically, I need to talk to you a little bit about Bridget Sullivan, the maid. Bridget was born in Ireland in 1870. I know absolutely nothing about her life before she gets hired by the Bordens. In fact, I'm not even sure when she got hired by the Bordens. I do. You know, she'd been working for them for at least a couple of years. At that point, she is 22 years old in 1892, when the murders take place. She's in the…I don't know what her birthday was. So somewhere in there.

Caitlin: I mean, yeah, that's like the phase you go through. It's like adolescence, young adulthood. Murder. adulthood.

Frances: As you do, right?

Caitlin: Normal. All right.

Frances: All right. Okay, so some people think that the maid was named Maggie. Because Lizzie and Emma both called her Maggie. They refused to learn the names of the new maids.

Caitlin: What the fuck?

Frances: Their first maid was named Maggie. And they refused to learn the names of the new maids so they call them all Maggie.

Caitlin: Okay, like again, I don't feel like people should be killed. But there's some times where you're like, huh, I see what you push someone over the edge.

Frances: Fair. Yeah, she testified in court that she didn't mind being called Maggie but again, she's not the most reliable witness on the stand.

Caitlin: I will tell you…I tell people all the time. I don't care how they say or spell my name because I have actually kind of a weird name of you call me Kate. I swear to God, I’ll kill you.

Frances: Yeah.

Caitlin: I actually…I shouldn't put that on record. Maybe I swear to God…

Frances: I’ll smack you?

Caitlin: No, reality is I swear to God, I will be disgruntled about it. I will stew on it for years and I will say nothing to you because I am too afraid to have conflict. That is the actuality of what will happen.

Frances: If you call me Fran, I will not respond. Even if I know you're talking to me.

Caitlin: I still think it's funny that I spelled your last name wrong on my phone. So you are Frances Ferdinand

Frances: Haha! I love that. that's very funny.

Caitlin: So Maggie, aka Bridget.

Frances: So Bridget Sullivan. So she's working as the maid. There is a distinct possibility that she's being underpaid because Andrew Borden kind of a kind of a skinflint kind of a Scrooge.

Caitlin: Like oh my god, I'm shocked that he was abusing and underpaying his poor employees Crazy.

Frances: Right? Also, we know that according to Bridget's testimony, the mother…the stepmother mistreated her. So the morning of the murder, according to Bridget, she gets up she's not feeling well. She has a headache. She probably has whatever food poisoning the rest of the family had the day before. She's not feeling well. She comes down and makes breakfast anyway at six o'clock. I think it was. So she's in the kitchen. The family eats from six to 630 or 630 to seven somewhere in there. And over breakfast. The mom, Abby, instructs her to wash all the downstairs windows. There's a possibility that Bridget indicates to her that she is feeling poorly because she testifies that she then goes outside and vomits for 15 minutes.

Caitlin: Urgh

Frances: This is after…so after her breakfast. So over the parents’ breakfast, the mother says Abby says watch all the downstairs windows inside and out. Brigitte clears the table eats her own breakfast and then get started on the on the breakfast dishes cleaning up. So what she does every morning is clean, wash the dishes and clean the stove from breakfast. According to Bridget the morning of the murder this takes her over an hour to complete: washing three breakfast dishes and cleaning the stove. At nine o'clock just after Lizzy comes downstairs. Brigitte testified that she went and she felt immediately ill went out back and vomited for 10 to 15 minutes. Then came back inside and finished cleaning up the dishes. This takes her an additional 20 minutes, half an hour. Unclear. So at this point, Bridget…this is when Bridget testifies that she gets told to wash the wash the windows. It was the uncle who said it was actually over breakfast. So there's a discrepancy—when she was instructed to wash the windows.

Caitlin: We should also do like a bonus about the weird uncle but anyway keep going.

Frances: He has a very odd duck. Around 9:30 Bridget claims that this is when she goes outside to wash the windows. So it took her somewhere in the vicinity of an hour and a half to clean the dishes and the stove. According to Lizzie's testimony, Bridget had already started washing the windows at nine when she came downstairs. So when she came down when Lizzie came downstairs she claimed that Bridget already had the the brushes and the bucket of—the pail of water and she was just getting ready to go out and start the windows. So that's a half an hour of time that doesn't match up between the two of them. It apparently takes Bridget somewhere in the vicinity of an hour to wash seven exterior windows. So she doesn't wash the kitchen window or the pantry window. I'm not really sure why. But she washes the seven exterior windows. And then at 10:30ish, she comes back inside to wash the interior windows.

She's just started the interior windows when the dad comes back home. Right so he—she has to let him in the front door because she's locked it. She locks him in, he comes in he lays down on the couch. She goes back to washing the windows. It takes her somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 20 minutes to wash the interior windows. The interior windows would have been more difficult to wash because she needed a stepladder and she had to be careful not to get water on any of the furniture or carpeting. It takes her about 20 minutes to do this—seven interior windows. She then says that she is feeling poorly again. It's about 11 o'clock now, just past 11 And she goes upstairs to lay down. Her room is the hottest room in the house. Because it's the attic. It's very poorly ventilated. She claims that she lays down fully clothed with her shoes on. 10ish minutes later, Lizzie screams up the stairs to come quick. The father has been stabbed. And she says she comes downstairs and Lizzie doesn't have any blood on her. Her hair looks fine. Bridget gets sent across the street to get the doctor.

So that's the timeline according to Bridget. Here's so there's there's that half an hour gap between the testament and Lizzie's testimony as to what Bridget was doing and Bridget's testimony about what she was doing. I have a theory. My theory is that Bridget…the washing of the windows thing when she was feeling ill was the last straw for Bridget.

Caitlin: I'm not gonna lie. The second you said that I was like, oh fuck that quit.

Frances: So I think it was the last straw for her in that half an hour, which is within the timeframe of when the mother was killed. We only think that the mother was a live at 930 Because that's what Bridget says. She was the last person to see Abby alive at 9:30.

Caitlin: That's interesting.

Frances: A little sus. So I think around nine o’clock-sh in that half an hour window of time when Lizzie was actually down in the basement washing out her menstrual rags and whatever else she was doing down there.

Caitlin: God I love being a woman.

Frances: I think Bridget took a hatchet out of the kitchen or out of the barn because she'd been into the barn that morning to get the brushes to wash the windows. I think she took a hatchet, she went upstairs to the bedroom. Because here's an interesting thought of everyone in the house. Who was the only person who could be carrying around an axe and not be suspicious to Abby? That would be the person who chops their firewood. The maid.

Caitlin: Ohhh…

Frances: Bridget Sullivan.  She goes upstairs to the second floor bedroom. Abbey turns sees or was an axe maybe says, I thought you were washing the windows. And she's like I needed to chop some firewood for the stove for Lizzie's breakfast or whatever. And hatchets her in the head. That's my thought.

So she leaves her there. She's got up, she's probably wearing an apron. I'm guessing she takes the apron off, stashes it somewhere maybe upstairs in her bedroom where there is a defunct water tank and goes back down, like maybe washes off her face, goes back downstairs, washes the windows. She's probably freaked out because she just murdered somebody. And she's probably trying to stay out of the house as long as possible. Right, because there's a dead woman in it. That's why it takes her an hour plus to wash the exterior windows and only 20ish minutes will wash the interior windows. So I think she then comes back in starts to get interior windows, the dad gets home. Maybe he witnessed something that was a little suspicious that morning and the minute they find Abby's body he's gonna be like, Oh, it was definitely Bridget because he saw her say something to Abby or something earlier in the day, and he just had to go to or maybe she was just like you're evil as well bye or maybe she wanted to make it look like if somebody else had done it. And I think when she is washing the interior windows, and Lizzie is in the barn looking for the sinkers. She hatchets the dad to death because he's sleeping on the couch and doesn't wake up and stashes the murder weapon outside somewhere. And then ditches the and maybe another apron or whatever she was wearing. And goes upstairs.

If there’re unexplained stains on a maid's dress, I’m guessing no one's noticing. When she got sent across the street to the doctor's house, there was a boy in the road who noticed her going across the street because he thought she looked like the Bordens’ maid, but she had a limp all of a sudden, and he knew that Bridget Sullivan didn't have a limp. So he watched her cross the street with a limp. What if she had the axe under her skirts and she was smuggling off the property across, to stash it in the bushes across the road or something or stick it down the

gutter?

Caitlin: Tricksie!

Frances: That's that sequence of events… She changes her testimony a whole bunch. She actually gets hired by the matron of the jail to clean after the after the murders because she won't go back to work for the Bordens. She's seen the night of the murders. She leaves the house and doesn't stay there that night. Even though she is…they—everyone was instructed by the police to stay in the house.

Caitlin: Mm hmm.

Frances: She is seen with a bundle of clothes or a bundle of cloth that evening going somewhere else. She stayed with a…supposedly stayed with a cousin. So she leaves she comes back the next day to like serve breakfast and do all the rest of it and then leaves again. So she's in and out all weekend. And then she she never comes back to work permanently for the board and is after that and ends up working for this like lady who's like the matron of the of the jail or something, some police person, his wife. She ends up working for them for a little while she testified at the trial.

And then she claims I don't know how much evidence there is to support this. But Bridget claimed that Lizzie gave her a sum of money because she testified so…like in her defense so well. As a thank you Lizzy gave her enough money to go home to Ireland. So she goes home to Ireland. Then she comes back to America and goes out to Montana where her best friend from childhood is living. And she settles in Montana, in Anaconda, Montana.

Caitlin: Okay.

Frances: So she lives there for the rest of her life. She gets married in 1905. She's 35. He's 37. His name is also Sullivan. His name is Tom Solomon. So she doesn't have to—She’d never changes her name. Her name is always Bridget Sullivan. And then, so fast forward to the end of her life. So she's getting up there. She died when she was 83. I think. She’s getting a little bit older. She has a…like a death scare. Basically she catches pneumonia. She thinks she's dying. she summons her best friend to her bedside her best friend who is also really old at this point. She's in her late 70s.  Because she has a secret she has to tell her before she dies.

Caitlin: What?

Frances: So the woman shows up, but by the time she shows up, it's clear that Bridget is not dying and she's going to recover from the pneumonia. So she tells the woman that she testified so well for Lizzie that Lizzie gave her a bunch of money to go home. And then she came and then like to cover the cost of coming back. And that Lizzie just liked her so much. That's why she gave her the money. That's the… That's the secret.

Caitlin: That’s not a secret!

Frances: So don't tell anybody. Yeah, you can't tell anybody this big secret I just told you. And the friends like Lizzie who? And so the she has to be like, my old mistress, who I worked for, who is Lizzie Borden, the axe murderer. And the woman apparently…we know the story because the woman apparently went to the library and was like, I need a book on the Bordens murders. And the librarian was like about why we're in Montana. And she told her the story.

Caitlin: Hah!

Frances: So we never found…we never got to hear the secret. She dies when she's like 83 or whatever in Butte, in the hospital in Butte, Montana. And her great niece, I think it was describes her as being mean, and stern. And a little bit weird. So that is Bridget Sullivan.

Caitlin: So you totally and utterly believe this, Huh?

Frances: She’s the only person who could have approached Abby with an axe and have Abby not scream. And Abby didn't scream, even though she got axed in the face. And she's strong enough to wield an axe like that. She's accustomed to handling one. She's got to chop the firewood all the time. She lugs buckets of water everywhere. So she's probably really strong. And she wasn't a small woman by any stretch. She was tall. So she might have been tall enough to actually, like have the power to bring the axe down on Abby's head with that kind of

force.

Caitlin: So I guess like what it comes down to like Don't piss off your employers.

Frances: Whoooo!

Caitlin: Or don't put Don't piss off your employees.

Frances: Yeah, like be nice to the help, because they might hatchet you in the face.

Caitlin: So listeners, what do you think, for dissolving? Could she have done it? Or was it Lizzie? Or was it the weird uncle? Therefore we have to mention—

Frances:  Or was it Emma? I've heard that theory too.

Caitlin: I've heard that theory too. And like I wouldn't totally be surprised. Like everyone focuses on the breakup of their their, like family relationship being that Lizzie told Emma. What if Emma told Lizzie?

Frances: Yeah. Or what if Lizzie just found out somehow… she found something that proved it.

Caitlin: I don't know. Still completely unknown. Well, we don't typically get into true crime here. But this is a fun one. Again, murder is not fun finding out about people's lives and who they were. That is the fun part.

Frances: Yes.

Caitlin: You're just…you’re just dying to ask Bridget. If she did it, aren't you?

Frances: Oh, my God. Like, I'd love to go back to that moment where she was sick and just be like, I need to know what's the secret?

Caitlin: It's not a secret of convenience. Or like, did you do it? Oh, I'm getting better. Oh…my old boss really liked me.

Frances: Right?

Caitlin: That’s not the secret you tell someone on your deathbed.

Frances: No, it really isn’t. like, deathbed confession is I murdered the Bordens.

Caitlin: Right? Yeah.

Frances: And then tried to frame the daughter for it.

Caitlin: No. Interesting. All right. Well, let us know your thoughts. Hit us up on social media slide into our DMS and also just a quick thank you to all of you who've been sending us such lovely emails and giving us ideas and inviting us to the cemeteries on your home properties We’re so there! In a ‘Stay sexy. Don't get murdered’ kind of way like don't— you know.

Frances: Yeah.

Caitlin: You know what we’re doin’. But with that, everyone, thanks for listening this little bonus episode. We'll see you in the cemetery.

OUTRO MUSIC

Caitlin: Grave Escapes is hosted, written and produced by Caitlin Howle and Francesgrace Ferland and is produced and edited by Jesse D. Crichton. The music is melancholy after sound by Kai Engel. Follow us on social media to see images of today's graves and more about us. Our social handle is Grave Escapes. For a transcript, show notes, and land acknowledgement, visit us online at www.graveescapes.com We'll see you in the cemetery.

Frances: We’d like to acknowledge that we recorded this podcast on the traditional lands of the Wampanoag, Pokanoket, and Narragansett peoples. Here in the Northeast and all across the country, native peoples are still here and thriving. For more information about indigenous history, we’ve added a link in the show notes to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States as a place to begin. For ways to support native leaders and communities, we’ve added links to both the North American Indian Center of Boston and Native Land Conservancy.

*The show notes are the same as for the Lizzie-Emma episode, because the sources were the same and Bridgit is buried somewhere in Montana. We don’t have any pictures of her grave.