Hello, is it true that Lizzie Borden did NOT actually kill her parents? Thank you.
We may never know the truth, but she was acquitted in a court of law, which means as far as history is concerned, no, she didn’t do it.
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When he saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Oh, you can’t chop your Momma up in Massachusetts
And then blame all the damage on the mice.
No, you can’t chop your Momma up in Massachusetts,
That kind of thing just isn’t very nice.
Turns out it was more like 19 and 11 whacks.
You can see pictures of the Borden parlor here. Also two forensic photos, which the squeamish may wish to avoid.
When in Fall River, Massachusettes, be sure to drop by the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, in the ill-fated home.
For dopers with access to Lexis or Westlaw (sorry, couldn’t find it posted online for free), there is an excellent account of the investigation and trial of the Borden murders in Cara W. Robertson’s article Representing “Miss Lizzie”: Cultural Convictions in the Trial of Lizzie Borden, 8 Yale J.L. & Human. 351 (1996).
No, “she didn’t do it” or No, “she got away with it”?
I recall seeing a TV show about the murders. The detective investigating the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Borden got a court order to sever the heads of the murdered couple-the flesh was then removed from the skulls, and the skulls were presented at the trial as evidence!
Now, I don’t know how long Massachusetts law requires evidence to be kept, but I suspect that an evidence filein Fall River contains these two bashed-in skulls! Can anyone verify this?
No, she wasn’t convicted so, if she did it, she got away with it. The link Bibliophage provided has a very good synopsis of what is known.
What does seem apparent from the accounts I’ve read is that the prosecution tripped over their own feet far worse than Marcia Clark & Co. did in the OJ Simpson trial. While that doesn’t prove her innocence, it sure inclines me to think I would’ve voted “not guilty” if I’d been on the jury myself.
If she was guilty, she was sophisticated and clever enough to hack up her parents without getting blood all over herself while other people were there in the house with her, and coldly capable of doing the axe-work firsthand, yet not sneaky or malicious enough to bother framing anyone or giving herself anything akin to an ironclad alibi.
The prosecution did stupid things like introducing an axe head as “the murder weapon” and claiming LIzzie must’ve burned the (necessarily blood-soaked) handle in the stove, only to have it come out in later testimony that the handle to that axe had been found in the same cardboard box by the same investigating officer at the same time, dusty, dry and blood-free. (Forensic experts also testified that there was no known means by which absolutely all traces of human blood could’ve been removed from the axe head, and tests showed there were none). Their case ended up sounding a lot like “Well, it could’ve been her, she was there, and we don’t have any reason to think it wasn’t her.”
There is a chapter on Lizzie Borden in the book The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas, a former FBI profiler.
Douglas cites evidence that Borden’s father was about to change his will to Lizzie’s disadvantage and this would have been sufficient motive for her to kill them as they were estranged already. He argues that she could have killed her father and stepmother without splattering herself with blood by standing back from them as she used the axe with her arms extended. It was his guess that she was guilty.
Douglas has convincing arguments regarding a number of other infamous cases. For instance, he gives reasons for believing that Jack the Ripper was not a doctor, nor any of the well-known suspects authors have blamed over the years, but instead some as-yet unnamed degenerate little punk.
On the other hand, he found nothing particularly suspicious about either of JonBenet Ramsey’s parents, for whom he worked as a consultant. Among his other arguments in their defense, he says that Mrs. Ramsey could not have written the ransom note since it quoted the movie Speed, whereas she would have been likelier to have quoted a Disney movie, since she is such a sweet, wholesome homemaker. Just what quotes she could have used from a Disney family movie in writing a threatening ransom note he didn’t say; maybe that part in Snow White where Grumpy says “(h)ey: I don’t want to have to cut you, bitch…”
One of the most convincing pieces of evidence, to me, was the fact that the Borden maid Bridget refused to stay in the same house with Lizzie from then onward, even though she was a witness for the defense at the trial. Bridget was the only other person in the house at the time of the murders. She knew all of the principals involved, perhaps too well.
Yet Bridget remained on good terms with Lizzie the end of her life, and to the time of her own death praised Lizzie and said that she liked her.
I draw no conclusions from any of this, though I can’t rule out that Bridget could have been generously “bought off” by Lizzie or someone acting on her behalf. This surely would have made her more kindly disposed to Miss Borden in her later years.
For her part, Bridget outlived nearly all the major players in the case by decades. I certainly don’t see her her as a suspect, player or a participant in the double murders, her closeness to the Borden family notwithstanding.
For all that, Bridget was close but not that close, and she had no serious issues with any of the Borden family members.
john b., in case you missed it, the post you are replying to is around sixteen years old, and its author has been dead for nearly ten. He’s not going to be able to continue the discussion.
(emphasis mine)
So, a truly, truly zombie thread?
Only if the dead person in question shambles back to undeadness and posts a reply. If they do, let’s hope it’s something more original than “braaaains”.
It will be if he responds.
That article is now freely available:
Abstract:
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol8/iss2/2/
Article: