My hacking cough kept me up all night, so I was watching a so-called documentary on Lizzie Bordon.
They had a couple of foresics guys checking things out. They were actually cute at first. They gave them the step mothers scarf and the hatchet head and they were like little kids with a new toy. No problem with that. I did commiserate with them that the state refuses to exhume the skulls to examine tool marks to perhaps match it up with the hatchet in hand.
They even luminall’d the underside of the first floor from the basement and got a good glow about where the father would have bled out and soaked through the floorboards. They even found blood spatter on the wall of teh basement near the ash bin where the hatchet was found.
They totally lost me on 2 points - the claim that the hatchet was cut off the handle. The handle break is pretty much exactly like about 4 or 5 broken handles that are tossed in the scrap wood bin in our barn from where the cheap kindling hatchets haft break and mrAru gets a new cheap handle to replace it with. Really. It looked broken. Not all breaks splinter guys…
The main idiocy was when they luminall’d a dry sink. A dry sink of that era is more or less like one of our american modern laundry tubs which may or may not actually be associated with laundry … They got a positive glow.
Well no fucking shit guys. This is back in the era of using cloth rags as menstrual blood collectors, and you have to wash them out somewhere like, say THE FREAKING DRY SINK … or if you are slaughtering chickens for dinner, and get blood on your clothing, you have to wash it out somewhere… like the fucking dry sink… and if you watch any other documentary on the Borden house there were no plumbed in bathrooms at that time, but there was a privy hole in the basement leading to the sewers. How many women here have ever gotten blood on their hands while changing menstrual pads? Do you walk around with bloody hands or do you wash them in the nearest available area?
Fucking idiots. As a hoot you should really luminol the average bathroom belonging to the average breeding age woman. You would be amazed at the blood spatter sometime. The stuff is insideous, it gets all over the place. Hell, our house probably looks like a murder scene - mrAru is accident prone and frequently cuts himself [including embedding the corner of a hatchet into his kneecap when a piece of gnarly cedar split oddly.] I have cut my hand and dripped blood into the bathroom from the kitchen, or sort of accidently hosed blood around learning how to use my deva cup [oops ]
Do they ever stop to think about how things were done differently in the 1800s? In the house that my great grandfather had built in about the same decade had an almost identical dry sink that was used for laundry, washing up after chores by the servants [though he put in bathrooms and the house generated its own lamp gas for the gas lights that were installed. Even the servants quarters had their own bathroom.]
I saw it, and it has always struck me as the same problem with retro-CSI on non modern cases.
Although Giles de Rais must be baffled at not being considered a serial killer, as is Elizabeth Bathory, the Sawney Bean clan and numerable other pre Jack the Ripper serial killers… Just the statement that Jack the Ripper was the first serial killer was boggling…I can see them looking out of the ether going WTF? …
Modern profilers simply do not have the understanding of the differences in cultural mores between Victorian Britain and now. The whole thing about Jack having to live in Whitechapel simply because he killed in whitechapel doesnt hold water. Men from less poverty stricken areas trolled for sex in whitechapel all the time, and it would not be particularly unusual to see non slumdwellers there soliciting sex.
Did they mention that this may very well have been part of the reason she ‘got away’ with it? Apparently the coppers saw some soaking clothes and she told them ‘flea bites’ (a euphemism for period stains).
It’s not even clear that the broken hatchet was used in the crime. There were several hatchets in the house, and IIRC, no blood was on any of them. That head was not with the others, but there was no particular reason to think it was used in the killings.
They didnt even bring up the her and brigit hot lesbo conspiracy thang, though they did mention the posibility of incest and abuse as the trigger.
I also sort of had issues with the reenactment of some 200 pound guy body slamming himself down to prove that brigit should have heard mom falling … if you look at the picture of her step mother [Lizzie Borden - Wikipedia](on wiki) she looks as if she was almost kneeling, as if she was rummaging for something that fel under the bed. I think she was bent over either rummaging for something or tucking something from teh looks of it, or at least the edge of the bed blocked her falling like the idiot body slamming onto the floor. If she was bent over, kneeling or partially supported by the bed during the fall, nothing was heard outside the house.
They also made a big deal about the door to the house being locked, but from what I remembe rreading they commonly kept the house locked up.
I thought there was another story about some friends watching Lizzie burn a dress splattered with brown stains…when questioned, she blamed the stains on either “flea bites” or paint.
I haven’t yet read the entire OP, but I wanted to point out that I find the correlation of “hacking cough thus Lizzie Bordon documentary” rather amusing.
Lizzie Borden DID burn an old dress, but this was well after the police had been through, inspected everything, and taken away evidence. Lizzie’s explanation was that she was just getting rid of an old dress, and you can argue that, unless it was well-hidden (and the police had dragged out that broken hatchet head from a deep spot in the cellar), it would’ve been a dress that they’d already seen and passed over as not important. They sure as heck would’ve noticed a dress with fresh (no more than a few hours old) blood stains. Whether or not it’s important is up for grabs, but it’s not proof positive of her guilt.
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