Lizzie Borden and her Axe (Update)

In 1892, a Massachusetts couple was brutally murdered; the only serious suspect was their daughter, Lizzie Borden. Borden was acquitted, but people have speculated about the crime ever since. Tune in to learn how new evidence might shed light on her case.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast
o Fair Dowdy and I'm to Blaine and Choko reboarding.
And in our recent Roanoke update, we talked a little
bit about how much we love and evolving history story,

(00:21):
so something that's far in the past that still has
the ability to have the story change through new research,
new exploration, new discoveries. And in that episode, the discovery
and question was a patched over portion of a map
that was written in invisible inc So real history sleuth
kind of stuff that could hopefully offer new information about

(00:44):
the lost Colony at some point. In this episode, though,
which focuses on a sensational trial of Lizzie Borden, the
new information comes from something much simpler to leather bound
journals that just hadn't made their way into a story
in his hands until earlier this year. So Sarah and
Katie recorded a podcast on Lizzie Borden in two thousand ten.

(01:05):
The young woman accused of killing her father and stepmother
with an act in Eine two was one of this
podcast top requests, up there with Tesla for recent listeners.
I would compare Lizzie Borden to Tesla. But by two
thousand eleven, so just a few months after the podcast,
there were already updates to the story. A book came

(01:27):
out that year called Parallel Lives, and it was written
by the curators of the Fall River Historical Society, which
holds most of the Boarden trial board and murder artifacts,
and it contained plenty of previously unpublished information on Lizzie,
including documents, photographs, even some letters that were written in
her own hand. And some of the letters had been

(01:49):
written while she was in prison leading up to her trial,
so a very um specific time frame there, one where
you'd be curious about what frame of mind she was in.
And they did sort of shake up the general perception
of Lizzie as a very cold, unfeeling person toward her family.
According to one of the authors, Michael Martin's quote, there
was a tremendous outpouring of grief in the letters, and

(02:11):
that's a new side to the story. But even more
information started to come out earlier the spring, and that's
when the Historical Society came into possession of the two
journals that we just mentioned, which had spent most of
the century stored in a Victorian bathtub, so we won't
lead you on too much here. So far, there's not
really any sort of smoking gun pointing to Lizzie's guilt,

(02:32):
but there is some new insight into Lizzie's successful defense.
But first, we're gonna give a listen to the original
episode on Lizzie, which provides the details about the murders,
the trial, and some prevailing theories. So check that out. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm

(02:54):
Sarah Dowdy, and we're going to start off with a
modified nursery rhyme here. If you're ready, Are you ready?
I'm ready for it. Okay, Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother nineteen wax, and when she saw
what she had done, she gave her father ten. Wait,
that's not much of a nurse for your hyme. That's
because the real rhyme, Sarah is a lie. So she

(03:16):
gave her mother forty wax and gave her father forty one.
That is not true, And Lizzie Borden is one of
the podcast topics that we have always resisted. We probably
get this request, maybe more than any other topic. I
don't know. I don't want to. I don't want to
put one above the other, but it's way way up there,
along with Jack the Ripper, that kind of thing. But

(03:36):
the subject has never interested us much because, you know,
here's the story. A woman was accused of brutally murdering
her parents and hacking their faces to pieces. But she's
acquitted and we still don't know if she really did it.
That's that's the whole story, and that's kind of your
standard nightly news fair. I mean, I hate to say it,
but it's something that happens almost every day. One. Of course,

(03:59):
the story of some on who murders a family member
is nothing new. You know, We've got Caine and Able
and Caligula and Drusilla. But we had to rethink our
point of view because if so many of you are
captivated by the story, there must be a reason why,
and we aim to put our prejudices aside and try
to find it. So here we go, Okay, the basics

(04:20):
of our case. On August four, in Fall River, Massachusetts,
a woman is brutally murdered in her home with a hatchet.
Not long after her husband meets the same fate while
he's asleep on a couch in his living room. The
main suspect is their thirty two year old daughter, Lizzie Borden,
and we have a few possible motives. Money, the father

(04:44):
was a very wealthy man, or hatred of the stepmother. Stepmother,
that's a crucial part to this story. A combination of
the two, combination of the two. Yeah, So the jury's
verdict is acquittal, and that's probably the main reason why
people are so fascinated with the story. What really happened?
How did Lizzie Boarden get acquitted? So a little family

(05:07):
background to start with. Sarah Anthony Morris married Andrew Jackson
Boorden the Christmas of eighteen forty and they had three
children together, Emma, Alice and Lizzie. Alice died at the
age of two and Sarah herself died when Lizzie was
about three, so she never got to know her mother.
And as Sarah mentioned, Andrew was very wealthy. He owned property,

(05:29):
he had holdings in textiles and banking, he directed corporations
and one would imagine that made him an attractive prospect
for a husband, and so it did. Plessie has two
young girls and so Lizzie's father remarried and he marries
Abby Durfy, and Lizzie was about five at the time
and Emma, the older sister, about fourteen, And according to

(05:51):
Lizzie's testimony at the inquest, Emma always called her stepmother Abby,
but Lizzie always called her mother until about five or
six years before the murder went down. So make of
that what you will, but it seems like this is
a woman who she thought of as her mother for
most of her life. And again later when the d A.

(06:11):
Jose A Nolton asked if Lizzie's relationship with her stepmother
was cordial, she replied, it depends upon one's idea of cordiality, perhaps,
which isn't exactly the picture of a happy home. But
Emma and her trial testimony so that their relationship was
cordial and that Lizzie and her father had a very
good one. So we're going to give you the outline

(06:34):
of if she did it, this is what happened. Okay,
So here's here's just a basic starting fact. Lizzie and
Emma both admitted that they were upset about their father
giving one of his properties to Abby and her sister
instead of them. They're both older, they're unmarried, and they
expected their elderly father would provide for them and set

(06:54):
them up for the rest of their life financially. And
according to some there was this rumor that he was
going to change his will in favor of his wife
and that might cause a few family problems, I'd say so.
On August three, which was the day before the murders,
Lizzie attempted to buy prussic acid, a poison, from pharmacist

(07:14):
to Eli Bentz, and he refused her, but the Boardens
and their maid, Bridget Sullivan, all reported feeling sick that
day and the next morning. On August four, Emma was
in fair Haven, Massachusetts, but there were a few other
people around the maid. We just mentioned Bridget, but also

(07:36):
kind of randomly, the deceased Sarah's brother, John Moore, so
Lizzie's uncle from Lizzie's uncle on her mom's side. Uh,
he's visiting. He'd arrived the night before, but he left
in the morning to go visit another cousin, so he's
not around when the murders go down, but he's there
immediately before and then he comes back, so he's thereafter.

(07:57):
Andrew board, and her father left the house that morning
as well to get some business done in town. Abby
stayed in the house and she began doing chores and
headed to the guest room to make the bed, you know,
put on pillow shams, tidy up, and she asked Bridget
to wash the outsides of the windows. So she's in
the house, bridges outside the house. The only other person

(08:18):
who's inside the house is Lizzie Borden. Okay, So according
to Lizzie's story, at this point, Abby received a note
from some messenger we don't know who, calling her to
some sick person's home. We don't know the sick person either,
and Abby left the house on this errand. But this

(08:38):
is where our events are going to start down. Like,
if Lizzie did it, here's what happened. So what happened then,
if if Lizzie did it, is she found Abby on
the second floor, hit her from behind with an axe,
and then hacked her eighteen more times, and she left
the body. She cleaned herself up and the axe. She

(08:59):
knew her father probably wouldn't come home for a while.
It ended up being an hour and a half, so
in the meantime she did some reading and some ironing
and some sewing, you know, between murders. And when he returned,
Bridget unlocked the door for him, and as she did,
she heard Lizzie laughing on the second floor landing after
she had killed her stepmother. Right, So Lizzie told Andrew

(09:23):
that his wife had received that note and had gone
off on that urrand. And she settled him down on
the couch and tried to convince Bridget to go out
of the house. There was supposedly a really good sale
on ribbons, drigg and sale who can resist entice the maid,
but Bridget isn't interested. She instead goes to the attic,
probably worn out from all that window washing and her

(09:44):
upset stomach from the poison the night before, but possible poison,
possible poison. Um. So, after Lizzie settled her father on
the couch, he falls asleep, and then supposedly she hits
him in the face and head with the axe end times,
so hard that she snaps the handle off the ax.

(10:04):
But then in ten minutes, according to the timeline that
the police tried to put together based on what everyone
said they were doing that day and and Um, Lizzie's
own conflicting testimony. She would have had to clean herself off,
her clothes and the murder weapon in ten minutes, and
only then acting someone ten times. Let's see, I imagine

(10:25):
that would be a messy scene. Yeah, I think so.
And only after this did she called to Bridget for
help and announced that her father had died. She didn't
say anything about Abby because she thought that Abby had
left the house. He's off on the Errand so now
we're going to move on to the bodies and the scene.
And this is pretty disturbing stuff. But Abby had a

(10:48):
five inch hole in her skull, and her head and
her face were completely unrecognizable. She was lying face down
in collagulated blood, and her clothes were soaked in it,
and the bed in the pillow sham next to her
were all bloody. In the wall in the chair in
the bureau all covered in blood. Of just a small

(11:10):
disturbing detail. Her braid had even been hacked off. And
Andrew was on his back on a lounge, his face
turned as he slept, and his face and head too
were no longer recognizable. You can find pictures of the
crime scene online if you so desire, which you very
well might not. The axe had gone through his cheekbone,

(11:30):
it had severed his eye in half. There was blood
dripping onto the floor and from the sofa and on
the walls, painting on the wall, the ceiling, the door,
and it was still wet and flowing when others entered
the scene, which is why we assume that Abby had
died first and he had died second. But it seems
very personal to attack only a person's face, and had

(11:53):
to us definitely in so many times too. But here's
an important detail. The rooms were are perfectly in order.
There was no sign of a break in, no sign
of a struggle. It seemed likely that whoever did this
new the couple and also the boardings kept all of
their doors locked all of the time, And supposedly this

(12:16):
is because there had been a theft in the home
and perhaps Lizzie had a history of shoplifting. Um, so
their house was always on lockdown, which pains rather disturbing
scene for the house too, I'd say, make her move out,
not well, and don't think of it. Just as like,
the front door is locked like a normal house would be,
but all of the rooms and everything just completely locked

(12:39):
down all the time. So and if it is all locked,
the person probably would have had to be in the
house the whole time. Yeah, exactly. So after the murders,
Lizzie called for Bridget after this ten minute window we have,
and then sent Bridget to go get the family doctor,
Dr Bowen. Bridget couldn't find the doctor, he wasn't there.

(13:00):
She comes back without him, and then Lizzie sent her
out again, this time to get a family friend, Alice Russell.
But in the meantime, their neighbor, Adelaide church Hill, showed
up and she went off for help. So just imagine
all of these people sort of coming in and out,
but large periods of time where Lizzie is in the
house by herself, possibly doing anything. Dr Bowen does come

(13:23):
to the house finally, and Bridget and Adelaide return and
they're the ones who discover Abbey's body upstairs. Because of course,
that police officer asked Lizzie, when's the last time you
saw your mother? She said she went off on the stepmother. Yeah,
and she said she was gone from the house, but
the last time she'd seen her was in the guest room.
So the maid and their neighbor go upstairs and find

(13:45):
Abby's body, and you can imagine we've already listed all
of these people who are at the crime scene. Soon
enough we have more officers, more neighbors, and onlookers. Everyone
is trampling all over everything. Police are walking through the
crime scenes that ever dance, whatever evidence there would have been,
is completely contaminated. And one with Katie just kind of mentioned.

(14:07):
An officer on the scene asked Lizzie when she had
last seen her mother, and she was very careful to say, no,
it's my stepmother, And she said her mother died when
she was the baby. And this turns out to be
a really big piece of evidence, or at least it
keeps coming up, turned into a big piece of evidence.
But I don't know how much how much there is

(14:28):
to that. Maybe she was just trying to be very precise.
Abby is her stepmother, no matter what kind of relationship
they had. So no one thought Lizzie was guilty, and
instead all manner of suspicious characters are implicated. Lizzie had
mentioned an angry tenant that she'd heard with her father.
Others were called seeing suspicious men near the house recently,

(14:51):
including a mysterious Portuguese farmhand who perhaps was the fiendish
murderer that ends up not panning out. And another Portugue
guy had recently killed someone in town, so we thought
maybe it was him, and arrested a different one, So
try not to be Portuguese around the board and murders.
But in early newspaper accounts they said that Lizzie had

(15:12):
been in the barn, she came into the house, she
saw her father's body, rushed upstairs and found her mother's,
And then they recounted any possible theory, this angry tenant,
a man who had been sleeping in the hay loft
and planning these murders, someone who was poisoning the family's milk,
some kind of trickster who sent Abby this note to
try to get her out of the house and commit

(15:33):
other sinful deeds and and go after Mr Borden. And
the newspapers aren't suggesting Lizzie as the possible murderer at
all at this point. According to the Boston Harold quote,
in Lizzie Borden's life, there is not one unmaidenly nor
a single deliberately unkind act. So people were pretty confident
it was not this well bred young woman. It was

(15:57):
some sort of dastardly man, preferably a Portuguese farm, has
systerious foreigners, a mysterious man who's briefly in town. It
couldn't be Lizzie Borden herself. But the evidence starts piling
up because who else could have done it? According to
this timeline and all the other aspects, like the locked doors,

(16:19):
she was pretty much the only one. And this mysterious
man theory begins to seem a little thin. Lizzie's isn't
a good mysterious man around, no, and she's emerging as
the most likely suspect, especially after her in quest testimony.
So the inquest was August nine, and it's Josea Nolten
questioning her and also Bridget and John Morris and some

(16:39):
of the others, and Lizzie continually contradicts herself about times
and the sequence of events, and she says some very
odd things. She seems confused by the questions and was
disquietingly calm. Yeah, And just a few days later, on
the eleventh of August, she was arrested and claimed she
was not guilty. August there was a preliminary hearing and

(17:04):
at that the judge said, well, she probably is guilty,
and she's going to have to go in front of
a grand jury. But the grand jury wouldn't agree to
actually meet until they got this just sort of decisive
account from Alice Russell. And Alice Russell said she was
the friend and neighbor. Remember she said that she saw

(17:26):
Lizzie burning a dress in the kitchen just a few
days after the murder. So once the grand jury here's that,
they're like, all right, we better hear, we better hear
what Lizzie has to say. The trial began June, and
again some more fabulous newspaper quotes um in the Boston
Herald quote her dark, lustrous eyes ordinarily flashing, were dimmed,

(17:48):
and her pale face was evidence of the physical suffering
she was undergoing and had experienced. Poor Liszie, Poor Lizzie.
So the prosecution was led by Joseah Nolton and William Moody,
the defense led by Andrew Jennings, Melvin Adams and George Robinson.
And Moody told the jury that Lizzie had planned the murders,

(18:09):
committed the murders, and then couldn't even keep her story straight,
and they hadn't seen a tear from her. You know
she was not reacting as a woman in this position.
Should she hated her stepmother, she wanted her father's money.
That's the story that they were presenting. But there are
plenty of things that Lizzie had going for her, starting

(18:31):
with she's this woman of breeding from a good family.
She has those newspaper quotes, she had plenty of character recommendations,
and not many people thought a woman was capable of
hacking someone's face to pieces. You know, poison sounds like
a nice feminine way to kill someone, not a hatchet.

(18:52):
And then we have the character references coming in here too.
So her sister and her uncle and the maid all
said that she had a good relationship with Andrew and Abby,
there was no motive to kill either of them. And
then this is sort of the crucial thing. They didn't
have the murder weapon. They have some axes, of course,

(19:12):
there are plenty around if you've got a barn, and
they've got one that doesn't have a handle, But there's
no blood anywhere on it, and we're missing the handle,
so it could be the ax, but it could just
be a broken ax sitting around from farm work. And
we also have no blood on her clothes or her shoes.
We have nothing, no bloods Borden. It's not a really

(19:32):
great case for the prosecute. It's all completely circumstantial. And
then this is the killer thing here. Her in her
inquest testimony, which is what of course made the judge
think she needed to go in front of a grand
jury in the first place, was ruled in admissible in court.
And that's because the judge believed that she had been

(19:54):
treated as a prisoner instead of as a suspect while
she was having her inquest, and she like, she wasn't
just a witness, she was under questioning, yeah, and should
have had an attorney present. Since she didn't, he didn't
think that they could actually take her in quest seriously well.
And as a side note, Dr Bowen had dosed her
with morphine before this inquest to keep her calm, but

(20:16):
obviously that could have made her kind of loopy. So
I mean, that could explain her contradicting story, stimy and
why everything could kind of confused her. But the prosecution
was saying even in her inquest she denied everything. There
wasn't anything in the inquest, no confession. Yeah, she wasn't
coerced into confessing to these murders in it because she's

(20:36):
all doped up on morphine. If she didn't confess to it,
then why couldn't they use it? That was their their point.
But the testimony was excluded and also ruled in invisible
was Eli Bentz, the pharmacist, his testimony about her trying
to buy poison from him. These are two key points
that are missing from that entire trial, so that loopy

(20:57):
inquest and the poison Act, which seems very significant. So
there is still a fair amount of evidence against her.
Though according to bridget the Maid, there was no way
anyone else could have gotten into the house during the
timeline of the day without being seen, and Lizzie was
simply the only person who would have had access. And

(21:20):
I also thought it was very strange that Lizzie didn't
wonder where her mother went and that she was also
in the house and didn't hear her being murdered and
falling to the ground. You know, maybe after you come
across your father's body, you begin to wonder what happened
to your mother, Yeah, or you would just hear her
falling upstairs. But the family may have said that Lizzie

(21:41):
and Abby had a pretty okay relationship, but others were
testifying no, they Lizzie hated her stepmother and the friend
the family. Friend Alice Russell, said that Lizzie had come
to her the night before the killings and said, quote,
I feel afraid something is going to happen, so starting
to pay a darker picture of Lizzie's psychological state before this.

(22:04):
Lizzie also said that she had been in the barn
during the time of her father's homicide, but when officers
went to investigate the loft, it was very dusty and
there were no footprints but the officer's own, which seemed
a little bit strange, and it was also extremely hot
in there. She claimed to have been there for thirty
minutes on this silly errand looking for lead for sinkers,

(22:27):
which again, something's not quite right there, ye, maybe not
an area or a tory do in the middle of
the day. And then there's that note which seems very sketchy. Indeed,
the note that Lizzie said Mrs Borden received. No one
ever found the note, no one ever figured out who
the messenger was. No one ever even figured out who

(22:48):
the sick person was who needed visiting in the first
place there was a reward offered. Nobody came forward with
any news. And again her timeline that day made no sense.
And the dress Alice saw her burning, she said it
had paint on it, just doing a little wardrobe cleaning
a few days after her and it could very well,

(23:09):
of course, have been blood. And the dress that she
gave the police and said she was wearing that day
wasn't the dress she was wearing at all at the
time of the murders. It was a much too. It
was silky and kind of a nice dress, not the
sort of thing you'd shore a dress around the house.
And then Lizzie was eerily calm during the whole trial.
According to the New York Times quote, the most remarkable

(23:31):
feature of the trial has been the demeanor of Lizzie Borden.
From start to finish, she has manifested no feeling of weakness,
and has listened to the recital of the most cold
blooded and shocking details of the crime with a perfectly
impassive and unmoved countenance. I maintain it could have been shocked,
could have been shocked. But here we do start to
see the papers turn a little bit against her. So

(23:54):
she does bait when the skulls of her parents were
revealed that they considered that a point for her. There
are some rebuttals as far as that whole dusty hay
loft thing. There were some men doing work a few
days before the murders and they were like, listen, we
were in there, and there are no footprints of ours either,
So this is a ridiculous piece of evidence. And also

(24:16):
would a killer be that open about burning a dress
in the kitchen? That was the other point. Wouldn't she
be sneakier about it? If you've got to get rid
of the dress, you gotta get rid of it. And again,
where's our bloody hatchet? Where's this axe handle that supposedly
came off from the force of the blows? How could
she wash herself, her clothes and a murder weapon in

(24:36):
about ten minutes before she called bridget Some people were like,
maybe she didn't naked and that's how But I mean,
it certainly paints the wilder. And then one more final
important rebuttal Andrew was a really rich guy, so it's
not too unlikely that somebody might have something against him
or want to get money somehow. And then some people

(24:59):
did say that they had suspicious characters, just nobody they
could specifically name hanging around the house right for the murders.
Then again, this is all circumstantial evidence and there is
a reasonable doubt, and I think we can all agree
if we were on that jury, we would have thought
the same thing. And the judge agreed and Lizzie was acquitted.

(25:19):
So picking up with Lizzie's life after the murders, what
happens after a trial like this and sensational murders like this.
Emma and Lizzie bought a nice house together in Fall River.
Lizzie named it Maple Croft and changed her name to Lizabeth.
Emma became very involved in church, but eventually moved out.

(25:40):
They had some sort of falling out our argumentum, possibly
because Lizzie had a relationship with an actress and Emma
changed her name as well. And they died only nine
days apart, which is one of those spooky little connected
to the end of this bizarre little thing. So there
you go, guys, the Boarden episode. And I mean, we've

(26:02):
got to think about sort of modern connections to what
we see in the news right well, and and why
it's so important. I mean, today like you mentioned earlier,
when you're looking at the news, the murder of a
child or a spouse or a parent is unfortunately all
too common, and after a while, maybe the horror of
that stops being so shocking, and maybe it's easier to

(26:25):
contemplate a crime like this with the safety that distance provides.
You're looking back at it in time, it's not so present.
And this has become such a part of American lore
that we've got a nursery rhyme about it. Yeah, Lizzie
Borden has become a club nursery rhyme. Maybe playing rhymes,
not what you're seeing in the nursery. Um. You know,

(26:45):
I visited Salem about a year and a half ago,
and Lizzie Borden is not from Salem, but there are
all these shops with Lizzie Borden memorabilia, and you know
this hologram things where it's this stay a portrait of nice,
buttoned up Lizzie Borden, and then it's like scary acts
or that kind of thing. I think it just she's

(27:08):
a cult figure. She's caught people's attention somehow, And of
course we're always fascinated by Gore and violence, human beings
in general, not just Sarah and I um, but also
by what is unsolved, because you know, we'd like to
tie up loose ends, we like to find our answers.
But in this case, the only real satisfying answer would

(27:29):
be for Lizzie Borden to appear right before us and say, yes,
I did it, perhaps in hologram. For I hope it
would just be the real her. But that's the answer
we can't have. Okay. So, now that we've listened to
the older podcast, Katie and I really discussed in depth
of the perception of Lizzie as as cold and unfeeling

(27:51):
and how that sort of changed over over the course
of the trial. So clearly the letters and other documents
from last year have somewhat altered that perception of her.
She did seem to be grieving, although naturally that doesn't
totally get her off the hook. For anyone still speculating
on this too, just because you're grieving doesn't mean you
didn't do it. But it's the new info that really

(28:14):
might change perceptions about this case. I think. Yeah. After
the trial, Lizzie's lawyer, Andrew Jackson Jennings, wound up with
much of the evidence sustained pillow shams, the hatchet with
its handle broken off, and he kept all of this
plus his two leather journals, one which contained an annotated
newspaper clippings a collection of annotated newspaper clippings, and the

(28:35):
other contained his handwritten notes, and all of this was
in a Victorian tub. As we mentioned an entry, he
wouldn't want to put all this kind of grizzly stuff
in your closet, of course, and you just can't live
it and leave it in any random place. But his daughter,
Marian Jennings Wearing, left most of the collection to the
Fall River Historical Society in the nineteen sixties, but then
his grandson Edward Waring, held on to the journals himself,

(28:58):
since he was afraid researcher would be unable to read
his grandfather's messy handwriting and then they might misquote him.
So he was worried about this stuff and just decided
to hang onto it. Mr Waring died though, in late
two thousand eleven, leaving the journals to the society and
his will. So since that point, curator Michael Martin's has
been able to examine some of what's contained inside. Although

(29:21):
the journals are still too fragile to read entirely, they
need to be better preserved. First, and according to The
Boston Globe, Martin says, quote, it's the only file Jennings retained,
and it's the first idea we have about how the
defense went about building its case. So clearly those annotated
news clippings in that first journal might be of interest
to historians considering how much the press reaction to the

(29:44):
trial transformed over its course. So um, you know, we
might be able to find out what concerned Lizzie's lawyer,
what was being printed about her at the time that
caught his attention. But the real kicker is jennings list
of people in viewed for the case and his notes
on those interviews. According to Martin's and ABC News quote,

(30:05):
a number of the people Jennings spoke to were people
he knew intimately on a social or business level, so
many of them were perhaps more candid with him than
they would have been otherwise. But it's also evident that
there are a number of new individuals he spoke to
who had previously not been connected with the case, So
new witnesses, I mean, new kinds of information here and possibly, um,

(30:29):
possibly some kind of information about why these people weren't
involved in the case publicly, Yeah, kind of inside scoop.
Why did her lawyer not want them involved? So Jennings
also peppered the one hundred page written journal with a
lot of his own insights and just I mean it
gives you a sense of that, just the fact that
he knew a lot of the people um involved pretty closely,

(30:51):
he had some insights himself. So for instance, he wrote
about how Andrew Borden had always spoken of his girls
and he'd call him his girls quite far only and
provided for them well, So that slightly debunked the miser theory.
You know, Andrew Borden was well off, but he was
supporting his his adult daughters. And then um, he also

(31:12):
supposedly mentioned how much he liked receiving letters from them,
how much he enjoyed that. So, as of this spring,
the journals hadn't been entirely reviewed yet, even though the
Society does plan to eventually publish them. So maybe by
that time, by the time the whole thing comes out,
we'll be ready for another update to this podcast. You
guys keep us updated on it. This is when one

(31:34):
of those episodes that we got a lot of suggestions
for it before it came out, but then we got
a lot of links and news stories sent to us
when all this new information. People really love gruesome as
it as People really love the story and just continue
to want to find out more about it. Incidentally, Lizzie
was big in the news for another reason the spring too. Though. Maplecroft,

(31:58):
the fourteen room queen and she lived in after her acquittal,
is up for sale for six d and fifty thou dollars.
So if you're a really big Lizzy boarding buck, there
you go. Um. So, if you have any new information
to to share with us or any thoughts on this case,
you know why it continues to fascinate people, while why

(32:19):
it continues to fascinate you if it does, let us
know where at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Twitter at Miston History, and we're on Facebook.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about the techniques that people might use to solve a
crime like this, today, we have an article called how
blood stained pattern analysis works and you can find that

(32:42):
by searching on our homepage at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot Com named
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