December 31, 2015 • 42 mins
Everybody knows how many whacks Lizzie Borden gave her mother and father with that axe, but there is plenty about the infamous double homicide that remains unresolved, like who actually did it. Travel into the mystery of Lizzie Borden in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles and and Jerry's back. Wow. Wow, wow,
look at that fine looking lady over there. How's it going, Jerry?
(00:23):
She gave us the fine thumbs up. It's just like
old times. Yeah, Nol is just quietly weeping outside. He is,
you know, like back outside Noel. He's peaking in her
little portal window, scratching at it. The stint of Noel ak,
the rain of terror is over done. Yes, has been
deposed by Jerry. So now it's not Noel sitting there
or nobody sitting there. Happened more times than I was
(00:47):
comfortable with, at least four. Yeah, Jerry's like, wait a minute,
that we can do that. I'm out of here. Yeah,
so long, Jerry. So welcome back, Jerry. And uh, we've
already said congratulations on little Is, but who just keeps
getting cuter and cuter. Yep, I know things are going great,
so we're happy to have you back. And Lily Nez,
(01:09):
you're being very quiet, just stay that way. She's just
rocking in her little swing. Yeah, would be having babies.
In here. Yeah, if they shut up, wouldn't that be cool?
For sure? Good energy. I would just feel bad for
him because it gets pretty gamey in here. Yeah, even
after like fifteen minutes, a couple of hours. I kind
of stink today. Actually, I was gonna oppolize. Yeah, I
(01:30):
didn't use deodorant the first time I showered him, just
like two days ago. It's fantastic. I know, it's terrible.
I even dressed up. Man, that's great. That. Yeah, I'm
gonna take care of that tonight. That explains the sheen
on your face. Okay, so we're here, Jerry's here, I smell.
(01:52):
Let's do it. Since you do smell, chuck, I have
to say, at least, at the very least, I'm grateful
that we don't happen to be in Fall River, Massachusetts
on the morning of augusto because that morning was particularly
particularly hot, unseasonably hot. It was over a hundred degrees
fahrenheit by the time noon rolled around, And that figures
(02:15):
heavily in the case of Lizzie Borden and her forty
and forty one wax, which were more like eighteen or
nineteen and eleven. Yes, are you? You were familiar with
Lizzie Boy. Everybody knows Lizzie Borden. Right, Yeah, Lizzie Borden
took an X, gave her mother forty wax. When she
found what she had done, she gave her father forty one.
(02:36):
Yeah wrong, there was no ax. It wasn't a real mother.
Wasn't a real mother. There wasn't so all about that
was just made up. They think to sell newspapers. Yes, yeah,
they think it's a children's nursery rhyme these days, little
sicko children. Um. But but they do think that it
(02:56):
was possibly some newspaper hawker, a newsy if watch Disney movies, Um,
who came up with it and they just took off.
We should change it to Lizzie Borden may or may
not have taken a hatchet given her stepmother eighteen or
nineteen wax, thirteen of them crushed her skull when she
saw what she had done. Her father got home, she
(03:18):
gave him eleven or so and then got away. Yeah
it Scott Free. That doesn't have the same ring. No,
that doesn't. But you basically did just sum it up
pretty well, pretty accurately, Chuck. So for those of you
who don't know who Lize Boorden is just settled down, buckling,
prepare for a wild ride. For those of you who
(03:38):
do know, do the same. Okay, Yeah, because we have
new evidence, Yeah, that we're gonna reveal the controvertible evidence
of exactly who carried out these murders, and the only
people who have it is us, because we're gonna make
it up and you'll find out in thirty five ish
minutes or forty apparently to stuffy miss and she classed
(04:00):
an episode on Lizzie Board. If this floats, your boat
goes into that one too. Yeah, I should point out
to the very first thing we said. We told Jerry
were doing Lizzie Board and she said lesbian. Yeah, and
we said maybe that's one of the theories. Yeah, this
will all figure in. We're just teasing, teasing like crazy,
all right. So the morning of August four, Fall River, Massachusetts. Ah,
(04:26):
very cute town, by the way. I'm sure you mean
I visited recently? Who did you go to the house?
Why else would you go there? That's about it. Yeah,
that was on your death tour, your murder tour, um.
But in two like I said, it was over a
hundred degrees ferrent height on August four, really really hot
for that area. And at about ten I think about
(04:48):
ten forty five am, wasn't it. Yeah, about ten forty
five the first murder, No, the father coming home. Oh yeah, yeah.
They placed both of these events within like thirty to
forty five minutes. There's you know, a given take there.
So about ten forty five am one, Andrew Jackson Boorden
returns to his home at nine two Second Street in
(05:08):
Fall River, mass And. Um, the the house is in
a part of town that was very popular among recent immigrants,
specifically Irish Catholics and Portuguese. Uh. And I believe there's
some Chinese immigrants there as well. It wasn't an upscale
part of town by any means. Despite the fact that
(05:29):
Andrew Borden was an extremely wealthy man. Yeah, he was
worth between seven and ten million today dollars. I've I've
heard twelve let's say between seven and twelve. Then that's
a lot of dough and also a good reason to
kill somebody. Yeah. Um, and he despite having a lot
of dough, he lived in one of the lower rent
(05:50):
sections of the town. Um. His house did not have
indoor plumbing, which was kind of odd by this time
for that area. Um. Apparently many of the people who
were far far worse off than his family financially head
indoor plumbing. He did not. He also didn't have any
kind of electric lighting. Instead he used kerosene lamps, and uh,
(06:12):
he kept doors locked. He was very afraid of being robbed. Yeah,
let's cover this bit real quick. I think we should
read this. Um. There's a lady named Angela Carter who
wrote about the case. She actually factored into our our
fairy Tales episode. She was the feminist rewrote fairy Tales.
She wrote what was that Neil Jordan's take on Little
(06:35):
Rod Ride and her hood? Yeah, I remember she wrote
the So she said the house was originally a two
family home and they converted it to a single family
home but didn't take a lot of time. Apparently just
knocked down some walls through in a staircase and it
ended up being a weird house because of that. It
is very weird. And she describes it as, uh, this
(06:58):
way a house full of doors that open only into
other rooms, with other locked doors for upstairs and downstairs.
All the rooms led in and out of one another
like a maze and a bad dream. It is a
house without passages. There is no part of the house
that has not been marked as some inmates personal territory
inmate very nice. It is a house with no shared
(07:19):
no common spaces between one room and the next. It
is a house of privacies sealed as close as if
they had been sealed with wax on a legal document. Creepy.
No hallway is or anything weird. No, each room led
into the next, and in fact Lizzie's bedroom led right
into her sister Emma's bedroom too. For Emma to go
(07:40):
to bed, she would have had to go through Lizzie's bedroom,
um and then her Her stepmother and father's bedroom was
behind hers, but it was sealed off by a locked
door and access through staircase that only your father used
that you could get to only with the key. Yeah,
And to go up and down the stairs, they had
to go through their parents bedroom right, Yes, but they
(08:01):
didn't do that. That was it was off limits. It
was locked. They just jumped out the second story window.
There was a front staircase, actually built a second staircase
so that her their their parents could come and go
to their room without having to go through Lizzie's room,
so for all intentsive purposes, but this locked door, it
was a wall that sealed off their parents room from there. Yes,
(08:22):
and when we say parents, uh, this is a stepmother.
Lizzie was born Um to Sarah Morse and her father
in eighteen sixty third child. Um had an older sister
named Emma, ten years older. The second daughter named Alice,
who died when Lizzie was two. Yes, she had. She
died from hydra and cephily. You could just make up
(08:43):
anything back then, something believable, you know. Uh. And then
her mother died in eighteen sixty three when she was
just two of uterine congestion. And then when Lizzie turned
right before she turned five, he remarried to Abby Gray,
who the daughters were in their thirties by the time
(09:04):
the murder took place, unmarried at Spinster's Uh. And never
seemed like they had a great relationship with add they didn't,
but they both adored their father and Um he he
personally appreciated that for his benefit, they referred to her
as mother, and they did for decades until the time
(09:24):
which we'll get to um. But they they the reason
that Um Andrew Borden kept a house locked all the time.
Was because a couple of years before there had been
a burglary where some mysterious burglar had come in and
made off with a hundred dollars and some Charlie tickets
and some jewelry. I think, and Uh it was basically
(09:44):
pretty well known around town that it was Lizzie who
had done it. Sounds like an inside job in nation
she robbed her own father rather than accused his daughter
of this extraordinarily scandalous behavior at the time. Sure, Um,
he just locked everything and all doors were locked all
the time. Um, and he kept a key to his
room on the mantel, basically daring anybody to even try it,
(10:08):
because he would know what happened, because the only way
you could get in was through this key. The only
way to get to the key would be to have
a key to the outside doors. We say all this
to say that when Andrew Um Borden came back home
that day on August four, that morning, Uh, he was
locked out of his own house and he had to
be led in by the maid whose name was Bridget,
(10:30):
but who Emma and Lizzie called Maggie because they had
had another maid named Maggie, and they decided that they
just were gonna call this one Maggie too. That sounds like, um,
do you watch the show another period? Huh? That's great.
It's a comedy Central basically a reality TV spoof of
like Dounton Abbey and Um. The two lead Natascheaa Gerro
(10:53):
and uh oh, I can't remember her name from Garth
funcle On notes the blonde she does the she's the other.
I think they co created the series, but they're just
these rich girls who would like they renamed one of
the maid's chair. How have I not even heard of this?
I don't know, man, It's really funny. It's got a huge,
great cast, big fan. H have you seen Anthony Doeslick
(11:16):
special on Netflix yet? Oh? No, dude, I love that
guy though. It's really yeah so so awful but wonderful.
Yeah yeah so uh Andrew Boording gets let back into
his own house, not Anthony does. Um and he uh.
He gets let back in by the maid and he
decides he's going to lay down for a little while
(11:38):
on the couch. Right. Apparently the whole family was under
the weather, including the maid, because they have been eating
the same mutton for like five days. Mutton's gross to
begin with. Five day old mutton that had been stored
in the heat in an ice box outdoors is not
just gross, it's really bad for you. So the whole
(11:58):
family had basically come down to very degrees of um
food poisoning. Yeah, like so much so that Mrs Borden
Abbey Borden had gone to talk to the doctor the
day before the murders and said, I think we're being
poisoned by one of my husband's business rivals or my stepdaughter, right,
you know something like that. Uh. Yeah, that's not all
(12:18):
the weirdness that was going on, um in the in
the months and weeks before the murders. Uh, there was
a lot of uh not strange, but a lot of
financial goings on that kind of raised the ire of
the daughters. Um. Notably, Andrews started uh being fairly generous
with other members of the family, giving away properties and things, uh,
(12:40):
including to Abbey. He gave her a house that she
let her sister live in. Her sister was in big trouble,
so he helped her out. Yeah, so he's got money,
he's like, um uh so he said, you know what,
I'll give you each a property as well for a
dollar and you're you're welcome. And they ended up reselling
(13:03):
that back to Dad for cash later, which was kind
of jerky. Yeah. Well it was a rental property and
he had a bunch of rental properties, and apparently his
miserliness was very well known. Um. He also directed some
mills right and Fall Rivers incredibly famous for its mills.
It was it's a huge mill town. So he knew
that if you worked in the mills and rented at
(13:25):
home from him or a room from even he knew
if you got a raise, and if you got a raise,
he would raise your rent. So this is a rental property,
one of his reynal properties that he sold to his
daughters so that they could have rental income. Apparently they
were they didn't feel like doing that, so they just
sold it back to him for like I think, increase.
Not bad for doing nothing. Uh. The other thing that
(13:48):
happened in the um actually the night before the murderer
is there uncle John John Vinnegam Morris, who was there,
deceased mother's brother. He came a call in, uh to
speak about out some business with Andrew. And Um, there's
a lot of speculation on what was going on here.
Basically they think that it just ramped up a tent
(14:09):
situation even more like he probably had his hand out
that maybe. I think it was fairly um common for
him to come by, and I think he was also,
I don't think he was supplicant to Andrew Borden. I
think they had business together a lot. Well, Lizzie didn't
like him, so I that's news to me too. Yeah.
(14:29):
She she apparently didn't even speak to him, she said
at the trial while he was there, right like, when
he came to visit and stay the night. She hadn't
spoken to him the whole time when he came and
then spent the night and then left the next morning.
Because it's very important. He was not in the house
when Andrew Borden came back into the house, right. Yeah.
And she never called him uncle John, which is the
(14:50):
dead giveaway if you love your uncle. Yeah. I just
I didn't realize there was animosity between the two. I
don't know if there necessarily was. Is one of the
problems that we're going to run into it over and
over again, and it's also one of the reasons why
Lizzie Borden's legend has remained alive for so long, Like,
we have a propensity to take very complex, complicated people
(15:13):
and they're very complex complicated relationships with one another and
boil them down into caricatures that we can understand and
easily explain. And so yeah, so over the century or so,
we've done the same thing to Lizzie Borden case. So
it's really easy to speculate on and it's also easy
to interpret little things one way or the other, which
also makes the whole thing a lot of fun. Yeah,
(15:34):
that one. Everyone loves a cold case. Yeah, alright, so
let's take a break and uh, we'll get back to
some of the nitty gritty deets right after this. So, Chuck,
(16:02):
you you were saying that the family it was tense
in the house. To be certain, it sounds like it
was always tense, but notably tense months leading up to
the murders. Yeah, and apparently at both Emma and Lizzie
took off for several weeks right before the murders. When
they came back, Lizzie didn't even come back to the house.
She rented a room for a few days. I guess
(16:24):
the ease herself back into having to live in this
house again. Kind of that's weird. Maybe three quarters of
the way house and she um, she and Emma both
stopped calling Mrs Borden mother all of a sudden around
the time that um, their father had given the house,
that extra house to her right, her sister was living in.
(16:47):
They started calling her Mrs Borden, including to her face.
That's pretty chilly, right, So that's tense. Like you say,
Uncle John Morris might have increased this tension. And the
house was very very chilly, civilly cordial to an extent,
but just it was a house full of adults who
were not getting along and and like you said, probably
(17:08):
hadn't been for a while. Yeah, then' there was a
matter of in juneo um, Andrew, the father killed a
bunch of pigeons in the barn outside the house to
make pigeons while so Abby could make a pigeon pie.
And supposedly Lizzie kind of thought of these pigeons as
her pets. So uh, that would not have been a
(17:29):
very cool thing to do if you know your daughter
loved these pigeons. So I'm in the mood for pigeon pie. Yeah. There.
He apparently also defended his actions by saying that he
was worried about intruders because local boys used to like
to come let themselves into their barn and hang out
with these pigeons and play with them. So he solved
two problems dinner and boys coming over by just killing
(17:52):
Lizzie's pigeons. That's right. And she also beyond just liking
these pigeons, she was also a huge animal lover. She's
a lot of money do it animal rights group, and
she died, so I mean, she probably would have taken
this fairly hard. On the flip side, though, so her
father just that characters caricature thing I was talking about.
Her father's painted is like this Ebenezer Scrooge type, super
(18:14):
miserly type visted. He definitely was that. But it's very
easy to extend this idea that he and Lizzie hated
each other, and that's absolutely not true. They both Lizzie
and Emma apparently very much loved their father, and their
father loved them. As a matter of fact, he wore
a pinky ring that Lizzie gave him when he was
(18:35):
when she was like fifteen, and he'd warn it every day,
never took it off, just like each other. A lot
only jewelry he ever wore. It was like there was
definite affection there that often gets overlooked when you're just
kind of painting this thing in broad strokes, you know. Yeah,
but like you said, he wasn't beloved in the town
because if you ask me if you have money and
(18:56):
you're a tight wade, it's like the worst thing it is,
does he have money? Be generous, That's what I say. Sure,
you know, pick up checks, be generous with your friends.
If you have dough and your I don't know, I can,
it's not gonna make any friends. Let's just say that.
And it didn't in his case. So um, Also, if
you think about it, it is it reveals a lot
(19:16):
psychologically that the whole family has been eating the same
mutton for five days and the first thing that Mrs
Borden thinks of is that their milk is being poisoned
by one of her husband's business rivals. That's where her
mind went exactly. So there's a I mean, yeah, it's
it's not just inside this house the tension. It's also
coming from outside a little bit as well. Yeah, and uh,
(19:39):
I guess we'll go ahead and point out if you
have the the circumstantial evidence surrounding Lizzie. So, one of
the things was in the days before the murderer, she
was trying to uh, she's been seen trying to buy
a poisonous prussic acid. She said, yeah, she said she
wanted it to clean things. But other people, when the
(20:00):
trial said maybe she was trying to poison them. Although
autopsies revealed no poison in the bodies, no poison in
the milk, no, but the prosecutors wanted to use that
to to suggest that she had murder on her mind. Inadmissible.
It was ruled and admissible because they figured it'd be
too inflammatory, and it was entirely possible that she really
did want to clean this seal skin coat with that stuff.
(20:22):
All right, what else? This is the dress? Things pretty
damning well, hold on, before we get any further into that,
let's let's let's talk about the actual murders. You're ready.
So it talkings. Fourth. Her father has just come back in.
He's laying down on the sofa, right, and he goes
to sleep, and he never wakes up. The reason he
(20:43):
never wakes up is because like you said he got
hit from behind and above about eleven times with an
axe and hit and about the same area, so that
basically his face was cut clean away into nothingness. Um,
probably a hatchet, not an X. Yeah, yeah, you're right,
I'm sorry, I hatch it. Um. And at about eleven ten,
(21:05):
Bridget was upstairs sleeping because again she's been throwing up
from the mutton um. When she gets roused by Lizzie
calling from downstairs saying, hurry, something's happened. She comes downstairs
and she says, someone's coming and killed father. So now
this alert has just gone out. The first body has
been discovered, Andrew Borden, who's still bleeding right, and his
(21:26):
face is hacked away. It's pretty grotesque. You can see
the picture online. Yeah, so Bridget runs across the street
to the doctor to get him. Uh, comes back with
him and they say, where's your where's your mother? She's
like stepmother. They're like, where's your stepmother? And she says, uh,
somebody came with a note or something like that. I
think she went to go visit a sick friend who
(21:46):
knows and um, then she goes, well, actually I think
I heard her come back in why don't you guys
go look upstairs, and Bridget is like, I'm not looking upstairs.
There's a dead body here. How do we know there's
not another another dead body? So a neighbor lady and
Bridget goes upstairs and they see from the staircase into
the bedroom. It's really cool when you go on the
(22:08):
tour of the house, you can stand where they stood
and see exactly what they would have seen. And there's
Mrs borden All I think two forty pounds of her
laid down on the floor with the back of her
head just split wide open with something like eighteen blows
and again thirteen of them have been um, have just
completely crushed her skull. So now there's two dead bodies.
(22:31):
And eventually they are dragged into the dining room where
they're autopsied, and rather than be buried there before they're buried,
they're decapitated and their heads are sent to Harvard and
then eventually buried at the foot of their graves. Yes,
like all decapitated heads exactly. So um. Almost immediately the
(22:52):
cops went, uh, you yeah, you're the Lizzie was the
only person in the house right because Bridget was out
side when her around the time that her mother Um
would have been killed, Lizzie was ironing handkerchiefs with a
little mini iron and a little mini ironing board in
the dining room. Yeah, Emma was fifteen miles away out
of town. That's right. Uncle John Morris was away in
(23:14):
town at the post office. I think on business because
he doesn't need stamps dot com right. Yeah, and Andrew
Borden was in town on his own business as well.
So Lislie was the only one in the house at
about nine thirty am, around the time when her stepmother
would have been murdered. She says that when her father
came home and laid down around the time he would
(23:35):
have been murdered, she wasn't in the house then. Yeah,
she said she uh went out to that barn that
she liked to hang out with the pigeons. Uh two,
and she was eating pears, just hanging out in the
loft eating pears, eating pears. And the reason she was
in the loftice because she's getting led to make sinkers
to go fishing with. Yeah, but she while she was there,
(23:57):
she's like, I like getting here in the hundred degree
was there especially upstairs in this loft, she's gonna eat
some pairs. So she ate some pairs minutes and when
she came back in she discovered her father called bridget
down in the whole chain of events entered the public
record around that time. Yes, uh so, we already mentioned
the prossic acid um. She was caught burning a dress. Yeah,
(24:22):
family friend witnessed her doing that, and then later uh
gave testimony about that, and that's what led to her
being indicted for murder. That's right. And she said that
the dress was stained and that's why she was burning it.
Staying with paint though, yes, staying with paint, right, But
this is three days after the murder. All of a sudden,
she's pulling a dress out of the coal shoot and saying, Ah,
(24:45):
this dress, the stain with paint. I'm just gonna go
a him and burn it. So this family friend, Alice, says,
I wouldn't do that if I were you, And Lizzie said,
shut up you, and Alice said okay and goes and
tells the cops. Uh So, in the basement they found
two axes, two hatchets, and then a hatchet head that
it had the handle broken off. They suspected that it
(25:07):
was broken off recently, and that hatchet had um they say,
looked like it had been planted there and covered with
dust and ash to make it look like it had
been there a long time. Um, basically tampered with evidence. Wise.
One officer at the trial said, the handle is actually there,
and we found it. Another officer says, no, we didn't,
(25:28):
So who knows. Yeah, I think they The consensus is
among historians is that they never found his handle. Yes,
but it's never explained why. The one officer said they did. Yeah, so, um,
that hand that that hatchet had that they did find, though, Chuck.
They never conclusively showed that it was the murder weapon.
They just said this is probably a pretty good stand in, right,
(25:52):
And they never found any blood or anything on it,
which that's kind of difficult if you think to completely
get a hatchet head clean totally, right, So that's kind
of weird in essence, they never found the murder weapon essentially, Well, well, yeah, sure,
the prosecution said that this was it. Again, all suspicion
(26:13):
is just immediately falling onto Lizzie. Uh. And there were
a number of different um hearings and inquests and things
and grand juries before she was formally indicted um and
each time, apparently it looked like she was going to
get off because, despite what the cops thought at this time,
(26:33):
in this place and era, Victorian ladies did not murder
people with hatchets, So that in and of itself was
enough to get her off right, or to keep her
from even being indicted. But each time her friend Alice
from down the street would come in and say, I
saw Lizzie Byrne addressed that had some sort of brownish
(26:54):
red stain all over it, and the jury or the
judge or whoever would say, ah, we think that's enough.
And so finally it got to the point where I
think the grand jury was indicted her for three counts
of murder right, uh, one of her stepmother, one of
her father, and then one of her stepmother and father,
which is bizarre even at the time, but she was.
(27:17):
She faced three counts of murder, and they used the
hatchet head. That was their big case. But they had
some real problems. Number one, if that dress had been
covered with blood, it was gone now. But number two, Emma,
her sister, said that dress actually was covered in paint.
That was just paint that had nothing to do with blood. Right,
(27:39):
And the big problem here is it almost goes without saying.
If somebody murdered Mrs Borden with a hatchet and then
murdered Mr. Borden with a hatchet, they would be covered
in blood twice. So what do you do? How? How
could you have gotten around that? One of the theories
was that Lizzie Borden stripped down, was naked, killed, Mrs Borden,
(28:00):
put her clothes back on, and then when she had
the chance to her close back off and then killed
her father and then rinsed off both times and put
her clean clothes back on. That probably didn't happen, though
probably not. We need to take another break, though, and
when we come back we will wrap up what happened
in the trials and what happened afterward. Right for this,
(28:38):
All right, we're back, Lizzie Borden on trial in big trouble,
and uh, a lot of circumstantial evidence, but no no
hard evidence at this point at the trial. No smoking
gun as they say, no, not even want smoking hats,
No fingerprints, finger they didn't do any fingerprinting at this point.
Fingerprinting was new and uh, not really trustworthy. So they
(29:01):
didn't even bother. Well. Yeah, and pretty much every step
of the um police investigation was fouled up for the
to begin with, the murders took place while almost the
entire police force was off on the annual police picnic
out of town. Um, all these neighbors and looky loose
came through the crime scene and totally messed up. But
the big thing was is forensic science wasn't really a
(29:22):
big It wasn't in widespread use at the time. Yeah,
So at the trial they point out a lot of
incongruencies her. Her story changed a lot during the questioning,
which is a little weird. The cops went into the
barn and they said, you know, it's super hot in here.
I don't see how anyone would choose to just sit
here for twenty minutes and eat pairs. And we don't
(29:43):
see any footprints anywhere around, which was weird because two
workmen later testified that they had been up in that place,
um like the week before. Yeah, which, well, who knows
after a week what a footprint in a barn will do. Uh.
And then the day before the murders, Lizzie went to
her old friend Alice and said some weird things that
(30:04):
she felt like something bad was going to happen to
her family, almost like there was She said, I feel
as if something were hanging over me and I can't
throw it off, And she was frightened. So this sort
of looks like she was setting up an alibi. Yeah,
she said she was worried something bad was gonna happen
to her father. That was the day before the murders,
the night before him. Right. So for the prosecution, they
(30:26):
were like they took two pretty big hits. One the
prussic acid the cyanide got thrown out of evidence. Uh,
and then two so did um Lizzie's own testimony because
the judge determined that she had been on copious amounts
of morphine at the time, and they were contradictory, and
even at their base, they weren't admissions of guilt, they
(30:48):
were protestations, right. So, Um, the prosecution didn't have a
lot to go on. They had almost an entirely circum
not even almost a completely circumstantial case that really had
tons and tons of holes in it. That's right. It
was a two week trial. Lizzie never took the stand herself,
and um, it was it was huge. It was the
(31:08):
trial of the century. Um, she was deemed guilty. But
while the trial was taking place in her town, basically
in her town, newspapers all over the world at this point.
So the impression I have though, is that out of
town they had a different take on it, that these
these bumbling dummies, the yokels in Fall Fall River, Um,
(31:30):
we're trying to prosecute a woman for a crime that
clearly some maniac had had carried out and that they
should just leave her alone. Finally, interesting, Um, during the trial,
this helped the sensationalized aspect of it. They actually brought
in the chopped up skulls and presented it and like
it was out of a TV movie. Lizzie saw this, Uh,
(31:52):
swooned and fainted, which of course was going to get
some sympathy from the jury. And um, it didn't take long.
It was about ninety minutes and the jury said not
guilty and she got away with it. So thinks many
many people, what do you think. I don't know, Well,
here's some here's some theories. One that she was like
(32:13):
in a fugue state and committed these murders. Uh, yeah,
but a feuge state that lasted ninety minutes where she
was able to conceal the murder weapon in her own
guilt and wait for her father to come home and
fall asleep. That's not a FuG states what they say,
and it could have been less than ninety minutes if
you take the shorter side of both ends of the
(32:34):
murders of the time range. Uh. One was that she
was gay and that she was having an affair with
the maid. They were caught by the stepmother. She was
really super mad and so Lizzie killed her with a candlestick.
And then I went and confessed this to her father,
(32:54):
thinking that he might understand, and he got really mad
and so they killed both kill him. Okay, that's another theory.
One that she was abused by her father sexually and
physically abused, although there's no evidence to substantiate this. Right
one is that the maid um There was a deathbed
(33:15):
confession from the maid to her own sister, um, which
no one knows if that's true or not. Yeah, I mean,
the maid was most likely not a lesbian. It's entirely
possible that Lizzie Borden was, because later on after the murder,
she and her sister continued to live together. They bought
a mansion in the well healed part of um Fall
River and Lizzie named at Maple Croft and Um the
(33:38):
Maid eventually remarried, got married. Well, she just totally falls
off the map for five years and then pops up
again and Butte Montana and gets married and dies in Um.
But Lizzie and her sister lived together until nineteen o five,
and then all of a sudden, her sister moves out
of the house and they never speak again for twenty
two years until they die. And uh it's Some people
(34:00):
say that it was because her sister didn't improve of
a relationship with this um woman named Nance O'Neill. Yeah, Um,
which is entirely possible. Who knows what happened? Um. It
could have been that her sister believed she was innocent
and then finally Lizzie admitted it in five and her
sister was like, I am done with you. Who knows.
(34:22):
One of the other theories is that William Borden, who
was the illegitimate son of Andrew and also a butcher, um,
was the the Basically he killed him because of like
failed extortion attempts. So was he proven to exist William
B Yeah, I thought he was hypothetical. Is he like
(34:43):
a real person? I think so? Huh uh. And then
the final two was that Emma did it and had
the perfect alibi and setting up that she was fifteen
miles away. Uh, And that Uncle John did it who
was there visiting, so basically anyone who had anything to
do closely with the family. There the theory that they
did it right, Yeah, And these are all theories, Like
if you look at the evidence, you can, I think
(35:05):
you can basically get rid of everybody except Lizzie. And
there were some big problems with their story to like,
even if you believe she's innocent, there's some stuff you
really have to contend with. Like, for example, she says
she was in the house at the time her stepmother
would have been killed, and her stepmother was like two
forty pounds, and the police came and they dropped a
(35:26):
two hundred pound weight in the place where her stepmother
had fallen when she would have been killed. And um,
the cop downstairs, whose job it was to listen to
hear if you heard anything, said it felt like the
whole house shook right. So, and Lizzie's like, I didn't
hear anything. That's that's kind of a weird thing, right. Um.
(35:47):
Then Lizzie also was she behaved rather strangely here there,
Like when the neighbor came over, she was like, oh,
Mrs Churchill, do come in. Someone's come in and killed father, Like,
come in for tea. There's just a lot of weird
stuff that she's done. And then the dad was posed
afterward on the couch. Yeah, his favorite coat was rolled
up beneath his head. Yeah, and he had his arms
(36:08):
folded over in his lap and it's just creepy. Yeah.
But if you really look at all the evidence to
especially the prosecution's case, there's no way that that jury
should have convicted her. They definitely did the right thing
and acquitting her because they had there was no case
against her really. Yeah. I mean she was little, She's
like five ft one, and basically one of the big
(36:31):
defense points was like this, this tiny little lady just
couldn't have done this. These were like brutal, powerful, forceful
blows with this hatchet. And uh, despite I mean the
fact that she has crazy guys. Maybe it's just that
one picture. I don't know, but it definitely didn't do
her any favors in history, like that one big photo
(36:53):
of her. She looks like a psycho killer. She does,
you know a little bit for sure. But they said
that there's no way this little lady could have done this,
and that was kind of one of their main defense points.
But it didn't matter what happened because everyone thought she
did it. And she would go to church and have
people whisper about her and kids through rocks at her
windows for years and through rotten eggs at her house
(37:16):
and ding Dong ditch and basically was shunned by her
local town folk yeah, as a murderous and even the people,
all the out of towners who came and used her
as you know, to promote their own stuff, like the
Suffragettes like made her, uh, basically a hero. By the
time she died, like most people had left her Um
(37:37):
and she she died a fairly lonely old woman, despite
having not spoken to her sister in twenty two years.
They died within nine days of each other. Lizzie died first,
and then Emma and Sweetly Oddly weirdly Um all of
the Bordens, Lizzie, Emma, Andrew Abby, the original Mrs Borden, Uh,
(37:58):
and their sister, who died as a child, are all
buried next to one another in the family plot. Yeah,
that's normal. It's not weird. That's just how they did things,
not weird. Um. She did change her name to which
I thought was you didn't go far enough. She changed
her name to Elizabeth Borden. I might have gone with
something completely different without l I z even in the name.
(38:22):
That would have been my recommendation, maybe like Tammy Borden
or something, or Tammy Smith. Oh yeah, you could get
rid of the boarding. You know. She's like, hmm, I
want to disappear. How about Elizabeth Borden instead of Lizzie Borden.
Suspect that izz And she was pretty young. She was
sixty six when she died. Yeah, and her sister was
(38:45):
like a several almost a decade older than um. So
she died at a I guess a respectable old age.
Lizzie died young if her sister didn't even die of anilence.
She fell down the stairs supposedly with push marks in
her lower back. Right, So we've basically just given like
a really like broad overview. You can dedicate all of
(39:07):
your spare time to this case. It's really fascinating and
there's a lot of stuff on it on the internet too.
And if you're ever in the Providence or Boston area, like,
do yourself a favor and go down to the Lizzie
boarden house and take the tour. It's pretty cool. Yeah,
it's a ben breakfast that you can stay in supposedly
haunted allegedly. Yeah. Yeah, if you believe in that kind
(39:29):
of stuff. Wait our new evidence though we didn't reveal it. Okay,
go ahead, I have none. Man, you scared me. I thought,
like you really did. After a second, that would be great.
I wouldn't be sitting on that Uh. And you can
type Lizzie board and all you want in the search bar.
It just turns up some lame definition of her, I
think on our site. So just go look elsewhere. And
(39:50):
since I said elsewhere, it's time for listener mail. Greetings
gents and Jerry Ornel or empty space. Um. I've recently
developed somewhat of a novel biological effect or remember we
talked about those, uh, And it's taught me a lot
about how I did and how I should be carrying
myself in the world. Um, I'd like to believe I've
(40:11):
been polite about it, but I'm definitely the type of
person has a hard time not noticing and having my
attention drawn to irregularities about people, especially on their faces.
About two weeks ago, I developed a bacterial infection of
my skin that covers about half of my forehead and
extends down to one eye, causing redness and swelling that
makes the eye remain more closed than the other in
(40:32):
arresting state. I was surprised of how many of my
friends and strangers in public I could tell are distracted
by it when talking to me, and it made me
feel a little self conscious on top of my own
hang ups about such things. I think I've learned a
little bit from the experience about what it might be
like to be someone that goes through their whole life
in this situation. In my case, at least, it's not
as simple as just ignoring the condition, but it goes
(40:52):
a long way for people to acknowledge it and be
able to accept it without judgment. Thanks for the work
you guys do for keeping me company with a wide
variety of topics. That is from Andrew in Utah. Thanks
a lot, Andrew, We appreciate that. Yeah, sorry to hear
about that, man, and but I like your attitude about it,
fresh perspective. It's brought you if you got a brush
(41:16):
with fresh perspective, we want to hear about that, no
matter what it has to do with. You can tweet
to us. Oh wait, Chuck, we want to say Happy
New Year at everybody, Happy New Year, and happy birthday
you me, Happy birthday, you me? Okay, So if you want,
you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash Stuff
(41:37):
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast the house at first dot com and has
always joined us at Home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles and and Jerry's back. Wow. Wow, wow,
look at that fine looking lady over there. How's it going, Jerry?
(00:23):
She gave us the fine thumbs up. It's just like
old times. Yeah, Nol is just quietly weeping outside. He is,
you know, like back outside Noel. He's peaking in her
little portal window, scratching at it. The stint of Noel ak,
the rain of terror is over done. Yes, has been
deposed by Jerry. So now it's not Noel sitting there
or nobody sitting there. Happened more times than I was
(00:47):
comfortable with, at least four. Yeah, Jerry's like, wait a minute,
that we can do that. I'm out of here. Yeah,
so long, Jerry. So welcome back, Jerry. And uh, we've
already said congratulations on little Is, but who just keeps
getting cuter and cuter. Yep, I know things are going great,
so we're happy to have you back. And Lily Nez,
(01:09):
you're being very quiet, just stay that way. She's just
rocking in her little swing. Yeah, would be having babies.
In here. Yeah, if they shut up, wouldn't that be cool?
For sure? Good energy. I would just feel bad for
him because it gets pretty gamey in here. Yeah, even
after like fifteen minutes, a couple of hours. I kind
of stink today. Actually, I was gonna oppolize. Yeah, I
(01:30):
didn't use deodorant the first time I showered him, just
like two days ago. It's fantastic. I know, it's terrible.
I even dressed up. Man, that's great. That. Yeah, I'm
gonna take care of that tonight. That explains the sheen
on your face. Okay, so we're here, Jerry's here, I smell.
(01:52):
Let's do it. Since you do smell, chuck, I have
to say, at least, at the very least, I'm grateful
that we don't happen to be in Fall River, Massachusetts
on the morning of augusto because that morning was particularly
particularly hot, unseasonably hot. It was over a hundred degrees
fahrenheit by the time noon rolled around, And that figures
(02:15):
heavily in the case of Lizzie Borden and her forty
and forty one wax, which were more like eighteen or
nineteen and eleven. Yes, are you? You were familiar with
Lizzie Boy. Everybody knows Lizzie Borden. Right, Yeah, Lizzie Borden
took an X, gave her mother forty wax. When she
found what she had done, she gave her father forty one.
(02:36):
Yeah wrong, there was no ax. It wasn't a real mother.
Wasn't a real mother. There wasn't so all about that
was just made up. They think to sell newspapers. Yes, yeah,
they think it's a children's nursery rhyme these days, little
sicko children. Um. But but they do think that it
(02:56):
was possibly some newspaper hawker, a newsy if watch Disney movies, Um,
who came up with it and they just took off.
We should change it to Lizzie Borden may or may
not have taken a hatchet given her stepmother eighteen or
nineteen wax, thirteen of them crushed her skull when she
saw what she had done. Her father got home, she
(03:18):
gave him eleven or so and then got away. Yeah
it Scott Free. That doesn't have the same ring. No,
that doesn't. But you basically did just sum it up
pretty well, pretty accurately, Chuck. So for those of you
who don't know who Lize Boorden is just settled down, buckling,
prepare for a wild ride. For those of you who
(03:38):
do know, do the same. Okay, Yeah, because we have
new evidence, Yeah, that we're gonna reveal the controvertible evidence
of exactly who carried out these murders, and the only
people who have it is us, because we're gonna make
it up and you'll find out in thirty five ish
minutes or forty apparently to stuffy miss and she classed
(04:00):
an episode on Lizzie Board. If this floats, your boat
goes into that one too. Yeah, I should point out
to the very first thing we said. We told Jerry
were doing Lizzie Board and she said lesbian. Yeah, and
we said maybe that's one of the theories. Yeah, this
will all figure in. We're just teasing, teasing like crazy,
all right. So the morning of August four, Fall River, Massachusetts. Ah,
(04:26):
very cute town, by the way. I'm sure you mean
I visited recently? Who did you go to the house?
Why else would you go there? That's about it. Yeah,
that was on your death tour, your murder tour, um.
But in two like I said, it was over a
hundred degrees ferrent height on August four, really really hot
for that area. And at about ten I think about
(04:48):
ten forty five am, wasn't it. Yeah, about ten forty
five the first murder, No, the father coming home. Oh yeah, yeah.
They placed both of these events within like thirty to
forty five minutes. There's you know, a given take there.
So about ten forty five am one, Andrew Jackson Boorden
returns to his home at nine two Second Street in
(05:08):
Fall River, mass And. Um, the the house is in
a part of town that was very popular among recent immigrants,
specifically Irish Catholics and Portuguese. Uh. And I believe there's
some Chinese immigrants there as well. It wasn't an upscale
part of town by any means. Despite the fact that
(05:29):
Andrew Borden was an extremely wealthy man. Yeah, he was
worth between seven and ten million today dollars. I've I've
heard twelve let's say between seven and twelve. Then that's
a lot of dough and also a good reason to
kill somebody. Yeah. Um, and he despite having a lot
of dough, he lived in one of the lower rent
(05:50):
sections of the town. Um. His house did not have
indoor plumbing, which was kind of odd by this time
for that area. Um. Apparently many of the people who
were far far worse off than his family financially head
indoor plumbing. He did not. He also didn't have any
kind of electric lighting. Instead he used kerosene lamps, and uh,
(06:12):
he kept doors locked. He was very afraid of being robbed. Yeah,
let's cover this bit real quick. I think we should
read this. Um. There's a lady named Angela Carter who
wrote about the case. She actually factored into our our
fairy Tales episode. She was the feminist rewrote fairy Tales.
She wrote what was that Neil Jordan's take on Little
(06:35):
Rod Ride and her hood? Yeah, I remember she wrote
the So she said the house was originally a two
family home and they converted it to a single family
home but didn't take a lot of time. Apparently just
knocked down some walls through in a staircase and it
ended up being a weird house because of that. It
is very weird. And she describes it as, uh, this
(06:58):
way a house full of doors that open only into
other rooms, with other locked doors for upstairs and downstairs.
All the rooms led in and out of one another
like a maze and a bad dream. It is a
house without passages. There is no part of the house
that has not been marked as some inmates personal territory
inmate very nice. It is a house with no shared
(07:19):
no common spaces between one room and the next. It
is a house of privacies sealed as close as if
they had been sealed with wax on a legal document. Creepy.
No hallway is or anything weird. No, each room led
into the next, and in fact Lizzie's bedroom led right
into her sister Emma's bedroom too. For Emma to go
(07:40):
to bed, she would have had to go through Lizzie's bedroom,
um and then her Her stepmother and father's bedroom was
behind hers, but it was sealed off by a locked
door and access through staircase that only your father used
that you could get to only with the key. Yeah,
And to go up and down the stairs, they had
to go through their parents bedroom right, Yes, but they
(08:01):
didn't do that. That was it was off limits. It
was locked. They just jumped out the second story window.
There was a front staircase, actually built a second staircase
so that her their their parents could come and go
to their room without having to go through Lizzie's room,
so for all intentsive purposes, but this locked door, it
was a wall that sealed off their parents room from there. Yes,
(08:22):
and when we say parents, uh, this is a stepmother.
Lizzie was born Um to Sarah Morse and her father
in eighteen sixty third child. Um had an older sister
named Emma, ten years older. The second daughter named Alice,
who died when Lizzie was two. Yes, she had. She
died from hydra and cephily. You could just make up
(08:43):
anything back then, something believable, you know. Uh. And then
her mother died in eighteen sixty three when she was
just two of uterine congestion. And then when Lizzie turned
right before she turned five, he remarried to Abby Gray,
who the daughters were in their thirties by the time
(09:04):
the murder took place, unmarried at Spinster's Uh. And never
seemed like they had a great relationship with add they didn't,
but they both adored their father and Um he he
personally appreciated that for his benefit, they referred to her
as mother, and they did for decades until the time
(09:24):
which we'll get to um. But they they the reason
that Um Andrew Borden kept a house locked all the time.
Was because a couple of years before there had been
a burglary where some mysterious burglar had come in and
made off with a hundred dollars and some Charlie tickets
and some jewelry. I think, and Uh it was basically
(09:44):
pretty well known around town that it was Lizzie who
had done it. Sounds like an inside job in nation
she robbed her own father rather than accused his daughter
of this extraordinarily scandalous behavior at the time. Sure, Um,
he just locked everything and all doors were locked all
the time. Um, and he kept a key to his
room on the mantel, basically daring anybody to even try it,
(10:08):
because he would know what happened, because the only way
you could get in was through this key. The only
way to get to the key would be to have
a key to the outside doors. We say all this
to say that when Andrew Um Borden came back home
that day on August four, that morning, Uh, he was
locked out of his own house and he had to
be led in by the maid whose name was Bridget,
(10:30):
but who Emma and Lizzie called Maggie because they had
had another maid named Maggie, and they decided that they
just were gonna call this one Maggie too. That sounds like, um,
do you watch the show another period? Huh? That's great.
It's a comedy Central basically a reality TV spoof of
like Dounton Abbey and Um. The two lead Natascheaa Gerro
(10:53):
and uh oh, I can't remember her name from Garth
funcle On notes the blonde she does the she's the other.
I think they co created the series, but they're just
these rich girls who would like they renamed one of
the maid's chair. How have I not even heard of this?
I don't know, man, It's really funny. It's got a huge,
great cast, big fan. H have you seen Anthony Doeslick
(11:16):
special on Netflix yet? Oh? No, dude, I love that
guy though. It's really yeah so so awful but wonderful.
Yeah yeah so uh Andrew Boording gets let back into
his own house, not Anthony does. Um and he uh.
He gets let back in by the maid and he
decides he's going to lay down for a little while
(11:38):
on the couch. Right. Apparently the whole family was under
the weather, including the maid, because they have been eating
the same mutton for like five days. Mutton's gross to
begin with. Five day old mutton that had been stored
in the heat in an ice box outdoors is not
just gross, it's really bad for you. So the whole
(11:58):
family had basically come down to very degrees of um
food poisoning. Yeah, like so much so that Mrs Borden
Abbey Borden had gone to talk to the doctor the
day before the murders and said, I think we're being
poisoned by one of my husband's business rivals or my stepdaughter, right,
you know something like that. Uh. Yeah, that's not all
(12:18):
the weirdness that was going on, um in the in
the months and weeks before the murders. Uh, there was
a lot of uh not strange, but a lot of
financial goings on that kind of raised the ire of
the daughters. Um. Notably, Andrews started uh being fairly generous
with other members of the family, giving away properties and things, uh,
(12:40):
including to Abbey. He gave her a house that she
let her sister live in. Her sister was in big trouble,
so he helped her out. Yeah, so he's got money,
he's like, um uh so he said, you know what,
I'll give you each a property as well for a
dollar and you're you're welcome. And they ended up reselling
(13:03):
that back to Dad for cash later, which was kind
of jerky. Yeah. Well it was a rental property and
he had a bunch of rental properties, and apparently his
miserliness was very well known. Um. He also directed some
mills right and Fall Rivers incredibly famous for its mills.
It was it's a huge mill town. So he knew
that if you worked in the mills and rented at
(13:25):
home from him or a room from even he knew
if you got a raise, and if you got a raise,
he would raise your rent. So this is a rental property,
one of his reynal properties that he sold to his
daughters so that they could have rental income. Apparently they
were they didn't feel like doing that, so they just
sold it back to him for like I think, increase.
Not bad for doing nothing. Uh. The other thing that
(13:48):
happened in the um actually the night before the murderer
is there uncle John John Vinnegam Morris, who was there,
deceased mother's brother. He came a call in, uh to
speak about out some business with Andrew. And Um, there's
a lot of speculation on what was going on here.
Basically they think that it just ramped up a tent
(14:09):
situation even more like he probably had his hand out
that maybe. I think it was fairly um common for
him to come by, and I think he was also,
I don't think he was supplicant to Andrew Borden. I
think they had business together a lot. Well, Lizzie didn't
like him, so I that's news to me too. Yeah.
(14:29):
She she apparently didn't even speak to him, she said
at the trial while he was there, right like, when
he came to visit and stay the night. She hadn't
spoken to him the whole time when he came and
then spent the night and then left the next morning.
Because it's very important. He was not in the house
when Andrew Borden came back into the house, right. Yeah.
And she never called him uncle John, which is the
(14:50):
dead giveaway if you love your uncle. Yeah. I just
I didn't realize there was animosity between the two. I
don't know if there necessarily was. Is one of the
problems that we're going to run into it over and
over again, and it's also one of the reasons why
Lizzie Borden's legend has remained alive for so long, Like,
we have a propensity to take very complex, complicated people
(15:13):
and they're very complex complicated relationships with one another and
boil them down into caricatures that we can understand and
easily explain. And so yeah, so over the century or so,
we've done the same thing to Lizzie Borden case. So
it's really easy to speculate on and it's also easy
to interpret little things one way or the other, which
also makes the whole thing a lot of fun. Yeah,
(15:34):
that one. Everyone loves a cold case. Yeah, alright, so
let's take a break and uh, we'll get back to
some of the nitty gritty deets right after this. So, Chuck,
(16:02):
you you were saying that the family it was tense
in the house. To be certain, it sounds like it
was always tense, but notably tense months leading up to
the murders. Yeah, and apparently at both Emma and Lizzie
took off for several weeks right before the murders. When
they came back, Lizzie didn't even come back to the house.
She rented a room for a few days. I guess
(16:24):
the ease herself back into having to live in this
house again. Kind of that's weird. Maybe three quarters of
the way house and she um, she and Emma both
stopped calling Mrs Borden mother all of a sudden around
the time that um, their father had given the house,
that extra house to her right, her sister was living in.
(16:47):
They started calling her Mrs Borden, including to her face.
That's pretty chilly, right, So that's tense. Like you say,
Uncle John Morris might have increased this tension. And the
house was very very chilly, civilly cordial to an extent,
but just it was a house full of adults who
were not getting along and and like you said, probably
(17:08):
hadn't been for a while. Yeah, then' there was a
matter of in juneo um, Andrew, the father killed a
bunch of pigeons in the barn outside the house to
make pigeons while so Abby could make a pigeon pie.
And supposedly Lizzie kind of thought of these pigeons as
her pets. So uh, that would not have been a
(17:29):
very cool thing to do if you know your daughter
loved these pigeons. So I'm in the mood for pigeon pie. Yeah. There.
He apparently also defended his actions by saying that he
was worried about intruders because local boys used to like
to come let themselves into their barn and hang out
with these pigeons and play with them. So he solved
two problems dinner and boys coming over by just killing
(17:52):
Lizzie's pigeons. That's right. And she also beyond just liking
these pigeons, she was also a huge animal lover. She's
a lot of money do it animal rights group, and
she died, so I mean, she probably would have taken
this fairly hard. On the flip side, though, so her
father just that characters caricature thing I was talking about.
Her father's painted is like this Ebenezer Scrooge type, super
(18:14):
miserly type visted. He definitely was that. But it's very
easy to extend this idea that he and Lizzie hated
each other, and that's absolutely not true. They both Lizzie
and Emma apparently very much loved their father, and their
father loved them. As a matter of fact, he wore
a pinky ring that Lizzie gave him when he was
(18:35):
when she was like fifteen, and he'd warn it every day,
never took it off, just like each other. A lot
only jewelry he ever wore. It was like there was
definite affection there that often gets overlooked when you're just
kind of painting this thing in broad strokes, you know. Yeah,
but like you said, he wasn't beloved in the town
because if you ask me if you have money and
(18:56):
you're a tight wade, it's like the worst thing it is,
does he have money? Be generous, That's what I say. Sure,
you know, pick up checks, be generous with your friends.
If you have dough and your I don't know, I can,
it's not gonna make any friends. Let's just say that.
And it didn't in his case. So um, Also, if
you think about it, it is it reveals a lot
(19:16):
psychologically that the whole family has been eating the same
mutton for five days and the first thing that Mrs
Borden thinks of is that their milk is being poisoned
by one of her husband's business rivals. That's where her
mind went exactly. So there's a I mean, yeah, it's
it's not just inside this house the tension. It's also
coming from outside a little bit as well. Yeah, and uh,
(19:39):
I guess we'll go ahead and point out if you
have the the circumstantial evidence surrounding Lizzie. So, one of
the things was in the days before the murderer, she
was trying to uh, she's been seen trying to buy
a poisonous prussic acid. She said, yeah, she said she
wanted it to clean things. But other people, when the
(20:00):
trial said maybe she was trying to poison them. Although
autopsies revealed no poison in the bodies, no poison in
the milk, no, but the prosecutors wanted to use that
to to suggest that she had murder on her mind. Inadmissible.
It was ruled and admissible because they figured it'd be
too inflammatory, and it was entirely possible that she really
did want to clean this seal skin coat with that stuff.
(20:22):
All right, what else? This is the dress? Things pretty
damning well, hold on, before we get any further into that,
let's let's let's talk about the actual murders. You're ready.
So it talkings. Fourth. Her father has just come back in.
He's laying down on the sofa, right, and he goes
to sleep, and he never wakes up. The reason he
(20:43):
never wakes up is because like you said he got
hit from behind and above about eleven times with an
axe and hit and about the same area, so that
basically his face was cut clean away into nothingness. Um,
probably a hatchet, not an X. Yeah, yeah, you're right,
I'm sorry, I hatch it. Um. And at about eleven ten,
(21:05):
Bridget was upstairs sleeping because again she's been throwing up
from the mutton um. When she gets roused by Lizzie
calling from downstairs saying, hurry, something's happened. She comes downstairs
and she says, someone's coming and killed father. So now
this alert has just gone out. The first body has
been discovered, Andrew Borden, who's still bleeding right, and his
(21:26):
face is hacked away. It's pretty grotesque. You can see
the picture online. Yeah, so Bridget runs across the street
to the doctor to get him. Uh, comes back with
him and they say, where's your where's your mother? She's
like stepmother. They're like, where's your stepmother? And she says, uh,
somebody came with a note or something like that. I
think she went to go visit a sick friend who
(21:46):
knows and um, then she goes, well, actually I think
I heard her come back in why don't you guys
go look upstairs, and Bridget is like, I'm not looking upstairs.
There's a dead body here. How do we know there's
not another another dead body? So a neighbor lady and
Bridget goes upstairs and they see from the staircase into
the bedroom. It's really cool when you go on the
(22:08):
tour of the house, you can stand where they stood
and see exactly what they would have seen. And there's
Mrs borden All I think two forty pounds of her
laid down on the floor with the back of her
head just split wide open with something like eighteen blows
and again thirteen of them have been um, have just
completely crushed her skull. So now there's two dead bodies.
(22:31):
And eventually they are dragged into the dining room where
they're autopsied, and rather than be buried there before they're buried,
they're decapitated and their heads are sent to Harvard and
then eventually buried at the foot of their graves. Yes,
like all decapitated heads exactly. So um. Almost immediately the
(22:52):
cops went, uh, you yeah, you're the Lizzie was the
only person in the house right because Bridget was out
side when her around the time that her mother Um
would have been killed, Lizzie was ironing handkerchiefs with a
little mini iron and a little mini ironing board in
the dining room. Yeah, Emma was fifteen miles away out
of town. That's right. Uncle John Morris was away in
(23:14):
town at the post office. I think on business because
he doesn't need stamps dot com right. Yeah, and Andrew
Borden was in town on his own business as well.
So Lislie was the only one in the house at
about nine thirty am, around the time when her stepmother
would have been murdered. She says that when her father
came home and laid down around the time he would
(23:35):
have been murdered, she wasn't in the house then. Yeah,
she said she uh went out to that barn that
she liked to hang out with the pigeons. Uh two,
and she was eating pears, just hanging out in the
loft eating pears, eating pears. And the reason she was
in the loftice because she's getting led to make sinkers
to go fishing with. Yeah, but she while she was there,
(23:57):
she's like, I like getting here in the hundred degree
was there especially upstairs in this loft, she's gonna eat
some pairs. So she ate some pairs minutes and when
she came back in she discovered her father called bridget
down in the whole chain of events entered the public
record around that time. Yes, uh so, we already mentioned
the prossic acid um. She was caught burning a dress. Yeah,
(24:22):
family friend witnessed her doing that, and then later uh
gave testimony about that, and that's what led to her
being indicted for murder. That's right. And she said that
the dress was stained and that's why she was burning it.
Staying with paint though, yes, staying with paint, right, But
this is three days after the murder. All of a sudden,
she's pulling a dress out of the coal shoot and saying, Ah,
(24:45):
this dress, the stain with paint. I'm just gonna go
a him and burn it. So this family friend, Alice, says,
I wouldn't do that if I were you, And Lizzie said,
shut up you, and Alice said okay and goes and
tells the cops. Uh So, in the basement they found
two axes, two hatchets, and then a hatchet head that
it had the handle broken off. They suspected that it
(25:07):
was broken off recently, and that hatchet had um they say,
looked like it had been planted there and covered with
dust and ash to make it look like it had
been there a long time. Um, basically tampered with evidence. Wise.
One officer at the trial said, the handle is actually there,
and we found it. Another officer says, no, we didn't,
(25:28):
So who knows. Yeah, I think they The consensus is
among historians is that they never found his handle. Yes,
but it's never explained why. The one officer said they did. Yeah, so, um,
that hand that that hatchet had that they did find, though, Chuck.
They never conclusively showed that it was the murder weapon.
They just said this is probably a pretty good stand in, right,
(25:52):
And they never found any blood or anything on it,
which that's kind of difficult if you think to completely
get a hatchet head clean totally, right, So that's kind
of weird in essence, they never found the murder weapon essentially, Well, well, yeah, sure,
the prosecution said that this was it. Again, all suspicion
(26:13):
is just immediately falling onto Lizzie. Uh. And there were
a number of different um hearings and inquests and things
and grand juries before she was formally indicted um and
each time, apparently it looked like she was going to
get off because, despite what the cops thought at this time,
(26:33):
in this place and era, Victorian ladies did not murder
people with hatchets, So that in and of itself was
enough to get her off right, or to keep her
from even being indicted. But each time her friend Alice
from down the street would come in and say, I
saw Lizzie Byrne addressed that had some sort of brownish
(26:54):
red stain all over it, and the jury or the
judge or whoever would say, ah, we think that's enough.
And so finally it got to the point where I
think the grand jury was indicted her for three counts
of murder right, uh, one of her stepmother, one of
her father, and then one of her stepmother and father,
which is bizarre even at the time, but she was.
(27:17):
She faced three counts of murder, and they used the
hatchet head. That was their big case. But they had
some real problems. Number one, if that dress had been
covered with blood, it was gone now. But number two, Emma,
her sister, said that dress actually was covered in paint.
That was just paint that had nothing to do with blood. Right,
(27:39):
And the big problem here is it almost goes without saying.
If somebody murdered Mrs Borden with a hatchet and then
murdered Mr. Borden with a hatchet, they would be covered
in blood twice. So what do you do? How? How
could you have gotten around that? One of the theories
was that Lizzie Borden stripped down, was naked, killed, Mrs Borden,
(28:00):
put her clothes back on, and then when she had
the chance to her close back off and then killed
her father and then rinsed off both times and put
her clean clothes back on. That probably didn't happen, though
probably not. We need to take another break, though, and
when we come back we will wrap up what happened
in the trials and what happened afterward. Right for this,
(28:38):
All right, we're back, Lizzie Borden on trial in big trouble,
and uh, a lot of circumstantial evidence, but no no
hard evidence at this point at the trial. No smoking
gun as they say, no, not even want smoking hats,
No fingerprints, finger they didn't do any fingerprinting at this point.
Fingerprinting was new and uh, not really trustworthy. So they
(29:01):
didn't even bother. Well. Yeah, and pretty much every step
of the um police investigation was fouled up for the
to begin with, the murders took place while almost the
entire police force was off on the annual police picnic
out of town. Um, all these neighbors and looky loose
came through the crime scene and totally messed up. But
the big thing was is forensic science wasn't really a
(29:22):
big It wasn't in widespread use at the time. Yeah,
So at the trial they point out a lot of
incongruencies her. Her story changed a lot during the questioning,
which is a little weird. The cops went into the
barn and they said, you know, it's super hot in here.
I don't see how anyone would choose to just sit
here for twenty minutes and eat pairs. And we don't
(29:43):
see any footprints anywhere around, which was weird because two
workmen later testified that they had been up in that place,
um like the week before. Yeah, which, well, who knows
after a week what a footprint in a barn will do. Uh.
And then the day before the murders, Lizzie went to
her old friend Alice and said some weird things that
(30:04):
she felt like something bad was going to happen to
her family, almost like there was She said, I feel
as if something were hanging over me and I can't
throw it off, And she was frightened. So this sort
of looks like she was setting up an alibi. Yeah,
she said she was worried something bad was gonna happen
to her father. That was the day before the murders,
the night before him. Right. So for the prosecution, they
(30:26):
were like they took two pretty big hits. One the
prussic acid the cyanide got thrown out of evidence. Uh,
and then two so did um Lizzie's own testimony because
the judge determined that she had been on copious amounts
of morphine at the time, and they were contradictory, and
even at their base, they weren't admissions of guilt, they
(30:48):
were protestations, right. So, Um, the prosecution didn't have a
lot to go on. They had almost an entirely circum
not even almost a completely circumstantial case that really had
tons and tons of holes in it. That's right. It
was a two week trial. Lizzie never took the stand herself,
and um, it was it was huge. It was the
(31:08):
trial of the century. Um, she was deemed guilty. But
while the trial was taking place in her town, basically
in her town, newspapers all over the world at this point.
So the impression I have though, is that out of
town they had a different take on it, that these
these bumbling dummies, the yokels in Fall Fall River, Um,
(31:30):
we're trying to prosecute a woman for a crime that
clearly some maniac had had carried out and that they
should just leave her alone. Finally, interesting, Um, during the trial,
this helped the sensationalized aspect of it. They actually brought
in the chopped up skulls and presented it and like
it was out of a TV movie. Lizzie saw this, Uh,
(31:52):
swooned and fainted, which of course was going to get
some sympathy from the jury. And um, it didn't take long.
It was about ninety minutes and the jury said not
guilty and she got away with it. So thinks many
many people, what do you think. I don't know, Well,
here's some here's some theories. One that she was like
(32:13):
in a fugue state and committed these murders. Uh, yeah,
but a feuge state that lasted ninety minutes where she
was able to conceal the murder weapon in her own
guilt and wait for her father to come home and
fall asleep. That's not a FuG states what they say,
and it could have been less than ninety minutes if
you take the shorter side of both ends of the
(32:34):
murders of the time range. Uh. One was that she
was gay and that she was having an affair with
the maid. They were caught by the stepmother. She was
really super mad and so Lizzie killed her with a candlestick.
And then I went and confessed this to her father,
(32:54):
thinking that he might understand, and he got really mad
and so they killed both kill him. Okay, that's another theory.
One that she was abused by her father sexually and
physically abused, although there's no evidence to substantiate this. Right
one is that the maid um There was a deathbed
(33:15):
confession from the maid to her own sister, um, which
no one knows if that's true or not. Yeah, I mean,
the maid was most likely not a lesbian. It's entirely
possible that Lizzie Borden was, because later on after the murder,
she and her sister continued to live together. They bought
a mansion in the well healed part of um Fall
River and Lizzie named at Maple Croft and Um the
(33:38):
Maid eventually remarried, got married. Well, she just totally falls
off the map for five years and then pops up
again and Butte Montana and gets married and dies in Um.
But Lizzie and her sister lived together until nineteen o five,
and then all of a sudden, her sister moves out
of the house and they never speak again for twenty
two years until they die. And uh it's Some people
(34:00):
say that it was because her sister didn't improve of
a relationship with this um woman named Nance O'Neill. Yeah, Um,
which is entirely possible. Who knows what happened? Um. It
could have been that her sister believed she was innocent
and then finally Lizzie admitted it in five and her
sister was like, I am done with you. Who knows.
(34:22):
One of the other theories is that William Borden, who
was the illegitimate son of Andrew and also a butcher, um,
was the the Basically he killed him because of like
failed extortion attempts. So was he proven to exist William
B Yeah, I thought he was hypothetical. Is he like
(34:43):
a real person? I think so? Huh uh. And then
the final two was that Emma did it and had
the perfect alibi and setting up that she was fifteen
miles away. Uh, And that Uncle John did it who
was there visiting, so basically anyone who had anything to
do closely with the family. There the theory that they
did it right, Yeah, And these are all theories, Like
if you look at the evidence, you can, I think
(35:05):
you can basically get rid of everybody except Lizzie. And
there were some big problems with their story to like,
even if you believe she's innocent, there's some stuff you
really have to contend with. Like, for example, she says
she was in the house at the time her stepmother
would have been killed, and her stepmother was like two
forty pounds, and the police came and they dropped a
(35:26):
two hundred pound weight in the place where her stepmother
had fallen when she would have been killed. And um,
the cop downstairs, whose job it was to listen to
hear if you heard anything, said it felt like the
whole house shook right. So, and Lizzie's like, I didn't
hear anything. That's that's kind of a weird thing, right. Um.
(35:47):
Then Lizzie also was she behaved rather strangely here there,
Like when the neighbor came over, she was like, oh,
Mrs Churchill, do come in. Someone's come in and killed father, Like,
come in for tea. There's just a lot of weird
stuff that she's done. And then the dad was posed
afterward on the couch. Yeah, his favorite coat was rolled
up beneath his head. Yeah, and he had his arms
(36:08):
folded over in his lap and it's just creepy. Yeah.
But if you really look at all the evidence to
especially the prosecution's case, there's no way that that jury
should have convicted her. They definitely did the right thing
and acquitting her because they had there was no case
against her really. Yeah. I mean she was little, She's
like five ft one, and basically one of the big
(36:31):
defense points was like this, this tiny little lady just
couldn't have done this. These were like brutal, powerful, forceful
blows with this hatchet. And uh, despite I mean the
fact that she has crazy guys. Maybe it's just that
one picture. I don't know, but it definitely didn't do
her any favors in history, like that one big photo
(36:53):
of her. She looks like a psycho killer. She does,
you know a little bit for sure. But they said
that there's no way this little lady could have done this,
and that was kind of one of their main defense points.
But it didn't matter what happened because everyone thought she
did it. And she would go to church and have
people whisper about her and kids through rocks at her
windows for years and through rotten eggs at her house
(37:16):
and ding Dong ditch and basically was shunned by her
local town folk yeah, as a murderous and even the people,
all the out of towners who came and used her
as you know, to promote their own stuff, like the
Suffragettes like made her, uh, basically a hero. By the
time she died, like most people had left her Um
(37:37):
and she she died a fairly lonely old woman, despite
having not spoken to her sister in twenty two years.
They died within nine days of each other. Lizzie died first,
and then Emma and Sweetly Oddly weirdly Um all of
the Bordens, Lizzie, Emma, Andrew Abby, the original Mrs Borden, Uh,
(37:58):
and their sister, who died as a child, are all
buried next to one another in the family plot. Yeah,
that's normal. It's not weird. That's just how they did things,
not weird. Um. She did change her name to which
I thought was you didn't go far enough. She changed
her name to Elizabeth Borden. I might have gone with
something completely different without l I z even in the name.
(38:22):
That would have been my recommendation, maybe like Tammy Borden
or something, or Tammy Smith. Oh yeah, you could get
rid of the boarding. You know. She's like, hmm, I
want to disappear. How about Elizabeth Borden instead of Lizzie Borden.
Suspect that izz And she was pretty young. She was
sixty six when she died. Yeah, and her sister was
(38:45):
like a several almost a decade older than um. So
she died at a I guess a respectable old age.
Lizzie died young if her sister didn't even die of anilence.
She fell down the stairs supposedly with push marks in
her lower back. Right, So we've basically just given like
a really like broad overview. You can dedicate all of
(39:07):
your spare time to this case. It's really fascinating and
there's a lot of stuff on it on the internet too.
And if you're ever in the Providence or Boston area, like,
do yourself a favor and go down to the Lizzie
boarden house and take the tour. It's pretty cool. Yeah,
it's a ben breakfast that you can stay in supposedly
haunted allegedly. Yeah. Yeah, if you believe in that kind
(39:29):
of stuff. Wait our new evidence though we didn't reveal it. Okay,
go ahead, I have none. Man, you scared me. I thought,
like you really did. After a second, that would be great.
I wouldn't be sitting on that Uh. And you can
type Lizzie board and all you want in the search bar.
It just turns up some lame definition of her, I
think on our site. So just go look elsewhere. And
(39:50):
since I said elsewhere, it's time for listener mail. Greetings
gents and Jerry Ornel or empty space. Um. I've recently
developed somewhat of a novel biological effect or remember we
talked about those, uh, And it's taught me a lot
about how I did and how I should be carrying
myself in the world. Um, I'd like to believe I've
(40:11):
been polite about it, but I'm definitely the type of
person has a hard time not noticing and having my
attention drawn to irregularities about people, especially on their faces.
About two weeks ago, I developed a bacterial infection of
my skin that covers about half of my forehead and
extends down to one eye, causing redness and swelling that
makes the eye remain more closed than the other in
(40:32):
arresting state. I was surprised of how many of my
friends and strangers in public I could tell are distracted
by it when talking to me, and it made me
feel a little self conscious on top of my own
hang ups about such things. I think I've learned a
little bit from the experience about what it might be
like to be someone that goes through their whole life
in this situation. In my case, at least, it's not
as simple as just ignoring the condition, but it goes
(40:52):
a long way for people to acknowledge it and be
able to accept it without judgment. Thanks for the work
you guys do for keeping me company with a wide
variety of topics. That is from Andrew in Utah. Thanks
a lot, Andrew, We appreciate that. Yeah, sorry to hear
about that, man, and but I like your attitude about it,
fresh perspective. It's brought you if you got a brush
(41:16):
with fresh perspective, we want to hear about that, no
matter what it has to do with. You can tweet
to us. Oh wait, Chuck, we want to say Happy
New Year at everybody, Happy New Year, and happy birthday
you me, Happy birthday, you me? Okay, So if you want,
you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook, dot com, slash Stuff
(41:37):
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast the house at first dot com and has
always joined us at Home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
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