May 14, 2022 • 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 classic episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, everybody, this is going to creep you out
a little bit because this episode is about murder, a
very famous murder. This goes back to Jeez. I don't
know why I rereleased it on New Year's Eve, but
we did from December. This is all about that famous
lady and her famous acts, how Lizzie Borden worked. It's
(00:22):
pretty grizzly, So warning about the content right now. Welcome
to stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles wry And and Jerry's back. Wow. Wow, Wow, look
(00:48):
at that fine looking lady over there. How's it going, Jerry?
She gave us it's just like old times. Yeah, Nol
was just quietly weeping outside. He is, you know, like
that out side Noel. He's peaking in her little portal window,
scratching at it. The stint of Noel a k. The
rain of terror is over done. Yes, has been deposed
(01:09):
by Jerry. Yeah, so now it's not Noel sitting there
or nobody sitting there, which happened more times than I
was comfortable with, at least four. Yeah, Jerry's like, wait
a minute, that we can do that. Yeah, I'm out
of here. Yeah, so long Jerry. So welcome back, Jerry.
And uh, we've already said congratulations on little Inez, but
who just keeps getting cuter and cuter. Yep, I know
(01:31):
things are going great, so we're happy to have you back.
And Lily neez, you're being very quiet. Just stay that way.
She's just rocking in her little swing. Yeah. Great. Would
that 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
(01:52):
in here. Yeah, even after like fifteen minutes, a couple
of hours. I kind of stink today. Actually, I was
going to apologize. Yeah, I didn't use to you sutorant
uh the last time I showered when just like two
days ago. It's fantastic. I know, it's terrible. I dressed up. Man,
that's a great choke that. Yeah, I'm gonna take care
of that tonight. That explains the sheen on your face. Okay,
(02:17):
so we're here, Jerry's here, I smell. 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
(02:37):
was over a hundred degrees fahrenheit by the time noon
rolled around. And that figures heavily in the case of
Lizzie Borden and her forty and forty one wax, which
we're more like eighteen or nineteen and eleven. Yes, are you?
You were familiar with Lizie Boyd. Everybody knows Lizzie Borden, right, Yeah,
(02:58):
Lizzie Borden took an X, gave her mother forty wax.
When she found what she had done, she gave her
father forty one. Yeah. Wrong, there was no ax. 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
(03:19):
rhyme these days, little sicko children. Um, but but they
do think that it was possibly some newspaper hawker, a
newsy if you watch Disney movies, Um, who came up
with it and it 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
(03:41):
of them crushed her skull when she saw what she
had done. Her father got home, she gave him eleven
or so and then got away. Yeah it scot 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 Lizie
Borden is, just settled down, buckling, prepare for a wild ride.
(04:05):
For those of you who do know, do the same. Okay, Yeah,
because we have new evidence, yeah, that we're gonna reveal
and 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 issue minutes or forty apparently to Stephie misson
(04:28):
history class in an episode on Lizzie boardon 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, Fall River, Massachusetts. Ah,
(04:55):
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 like I said, it was over a hundred
degrees fare height on August four, really really hot for
that area. And at about ten I think about ten
(05:17):
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. That there's you know, a given take there.
So about ten forty five am, one Andrew Jackson Borden
returns to his home at nine two Second Street in
Fall River, mass and, um, the the house isn't a
(05:41):
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
Andrew Borden was an extremely well the man. Yeah, he
(06:01):
was worth between seven and ten million today dollars. I've
I've heard twelve let's say between seven and twelve then
of today dollars. 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 sections of town. Um. His house
did not have indoor plumbing, which was kind of odd
(06:25):
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
kerostene lamps. And uh, he kept doors locked. He was
very afraid of being robbed. Yeah, let's cover this bit
(06:46):
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 Tale else Well, what was
that Neil Jordan's take on a little ride ride and
her hood? Yeah, I remember she wrote the same lady.
(07:10):
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. And she
describes it as uh this way a house full of
locked doors that open only into other rooms, with other
(07:31):
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 no common spaces between
one room and the next. It is a house of
(07:51):
privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed
with wax on a legal document. Creepy, no hallways 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 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
(08:17):
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 didn't do that.
That was it was off limits. It was locked. They
just jumped out the second story window. No, there was
a front staircase. They actually built a second staircase so
(08:38):
that her there there's parents could come and go to
their room without having to go through Lizzie's room. So
for all intentsive purposes, with this locked door, it was
a wall that sealed off their parents room from there. Yes.
And when we say parents, uh, this is a a stepmother.
Lizzie was born Um to Sarah Morse and her father
(08:58):
in eighteen sixty third child. Um had an older sister
named Emma, ten years older second daughter named Alice, who
died when Lizzie was two. Yes, she had She died
from hydra and cephili. You could just make up anything
back then, something believable, you know. Uh. And then her
mother died in eighteen sixty three when she was just
(09:19):
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 the
murder took place unmarried at Spinster's Uh, and never seemed
like they had a great relationship with Abby. They didn't,
(09:40):
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,
which we'll get to um, but they they The reason
that um Andrew Borden kept the house locked all the
time was because a couple of years before there had
(10:02):
been a burglary where some mysterious burglar had come in
and made off with a hundred dollars and some trolley
tickets and some jewelry. I think and Uh it was
basically pretty well known around town that it was Lizzie
who had done it. It sounds like an inside job.
She robbed her own father rather than accused his daughter
of this extraordinarily scandalous behavior. At the time, Um he
(10:26):
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, 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,
(10:49):
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, but who
Emma and Lizzie called Maggie because they had had another
maiden named Maggie, and they decided that they just we're
going to call this one Maggie too. That sounds like, um,
do you watch the show another period? Uh? It's great.
(11:12):
It's Comedy Central, basically a reality TV spoof of like
Downton Abbey and um the two lead Natasha Giro and
uh oh, I can't remember her name from Garfunkle 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
(11:34):
maid's chair. Check this out. 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 jes Nick special in Netflix yet Oh no, dude,
I love that guy though. It's really great. Yeah, it's
so so awful but wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Andrew
(11:54):
Borden gets let back into his own house. Yes not
Anthony jes Nick no, 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 on the couch. Right.
Apparently the whole family was under the weather, including the maid, um,
because they have been eating the same mutton for like
(12:14):
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 family had basically come down
to varying degrees of um food poisoning, apparently so much
so that Mrs Borden Abbey Borden had gone to talk
(12:35):
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. Yeah,
that's not all the weirdness. It 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
(12:57):
ire of the daughters. Um. Notably, Andrews started uh being
fairly generous with other members of the family, giving away
properties and things, uh, including to Abbey. He gave her
a house that she let her sister live in. His
sister was in big trouble, so he helped her out. Yeah,
so he's got money. His daughters are like, um. Uh,
(13:22):
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 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
(13:46):
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 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 renal properties
that he sold to his daughters so that they could
have rental income. Apparently they were they didn't feel like
(14:07):
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 happened in the um actually the
night before the murderer is there uncle John John Vinnegum Morris,
who was there decease mother's brother. He came a Colling
(14:27):
uh to speak about 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
situation even more like he probably had his hand out
that was maybe. I think it was fairly um common
for him to come by, and I think he was also.
(14:48):
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.
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.
(15:09):
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
dead giveaway if you love your uncle. Yeah, I I
just I I didn't realize there was animosity between the two.
I don't know that there necessarily was. Here's one of
the problems that we're going to run into it over
(15:30):
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
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,
(15:53):
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,
no 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 deats right after this. So, Chuck,
(16:31):
you're 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 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
(16:51):
room for a few days, I guess, to ease herself
back into having to live in this house again, like
a halfway house kind of that's weird, maybe three quarters
to 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,
(17:12):
that extra house to her right, her sister was living in.
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
(17:34):
were not getting along and and like you said, probably
hadn't been for a while. Yeah. Then there was a
matter of in June two, um Andrew, the father killed
a bunch of pigeons in the barn outside the house
to make pigeon while so Abby could make a pigeon pie, right,
And supposedly Lizzie kind of thought of these pigeons as
her pets. So uh, that would not have been a
(17:58):
very cool thing to do if you know your daughter
loved these pigeons, So I'm in the mood for pigeon
ply 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
(18:20):
by just killing Lizzie's pigeons. That's right. And she also
beyond just liking these pigeons, she was also a huge
animal lover. She left a lot of money to it
animal rights group, and 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,
(18:43):
super mis early typefisted. 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 my e fact, he wore
a pinky ring that Lizzie gave him when he was
(19:03):
when she was like fifteen, and he'd warn it every day,
never took it off to like each other a lot.
Only jewelry 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
(19:24):
you're a tight wad, that'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
it's true. And it didn't in his case. So, um, also,
if you think about it, it is it reveals a
(19:45):
lot 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,
(20:07):
and uh, 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'd been seen trying to
buy a poisonous prussic acid. She said she yeah, she
said she wanted it to clean things. But other people
(20:28):
and the 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 would
be too inflammatory, and it was entirely possible that she
really did want to clean this seal skin coat with
(20:50):
that stuff. All right, what else? This 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's August 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.
(21:10):
That's the reason he 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 hatchet. Um. And at about
(21:32):
eleven ten, 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,
(21:54):
and his face is hacked away. It's pretty grotesque. You
can see the picture online. Yeah, so Bridget run 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
(22:15):
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
(22:36):
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
lay 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.
(22:59):
And if actually 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. Yes,
and then eventually buried at the foot of their graves. Yes,
like all decapitated heads exactly. So Um. Almost immediately the
(23:21):
cops went, uh you yeah, you're the Lizzie was the
only person in the house, right, That's right, because Bridget
was outside 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
(23:43):
in 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
(24:03):
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 loft is because she was getting led to make
sinkers to go fishing with. Yeah. But she while she
(24:25):
was there, she's like, I like getting here in the
hundred degree weather, especially upstairs in this loft, I'm gonna
eat some pears. 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,
(24:50):
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 stained 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
(25:12):
shoot and saying, Ah, this dress is staying with paint.
I'm just gonna go ahead 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.
(25:33):
They suspected that it 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 was actually there, and we found it.
(25:54):
Another officer says, no, we didn't, So who knows? Yeah,
I think they. The consensus is among historians is that
they never found this 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.
(26:17):
They just said, this is probably a pretty good stand in, right,
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. Yeah, right, So that's
kind of weird in a sense. They never found the
murder weapon essentially, well, they said they did. Well, yeah, sure,
(26:37):
the prosecution said that this was it. But again, all
suspicion 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
(27:01):
this time, 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
(27:22):
brownish 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,
(27:42):
which is bizarre even at the time, but she was
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.
(28:04):
That was just paint that had nothing to do with blood. Right.
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,
(28:28):
put her clothes back on, and then when she had
the chance, took 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,
(29:07):
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, I didn't want smoking hatch,
no fingerprints, finger They didn't do any fingerprinting at this point.
Fingerprinting was new and uh, not really trustworthy, so they
(29:30):
didn't even bother. Well. Yeah, 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 luky loose came
through the crime scene and totally messed up. But the
big thing was is forensic science wasn't really a big
(29:51):
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
(30:12):
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, um, Lizzie went
to her old friend Alice and said some weird things
(30:32):
that 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 going to
happen to her father. Yeah. That was the day before
the murders, the night before him. Right. So for the prosecution,
(30:54):
they 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
(31:16):
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
(31:37):
trial of the century. Um, she was deemed guilty. But
while the trial was taking place in her town basically,
and 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,
(31:59):
we're trying to prosecut cue a woman for a crime
that clearly some maniac had had carried out, and that
they should just leave her alone. Finally, Yeah, 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.
(32:19):
Lizzie saw this, Uh, swooned and fainted, which of course
is 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. Yeah, 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
(32:41):
that she was like in a fugue state and committed
these murders. Uh. Yeah, but a fugue state that lasted
ninety minutes where she was able to conceal the murder
weapon in her own guilt and wait for a father
to come home and fall asleep. That's not a fugue
states what they say. And it could have been less
than ninety minutes. Uh, if you take the shorter side
(33:02):
of both ends of the 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, thinking that he might understand,
(33:25):
and he got really mad and so they killed both
killed 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. One is that the maid um.
There was a deathbed confession from the maid to her
(33:46):
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 maid eventually remarried, got married.
(34:10):
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 say that it was because
(34:30):
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 nineteen o five and her sister was like,
I am done with you. Who knows. One of the
(34:51):
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 Borton? Yeah? I
thought he was hypothetical. Is he like a real person? Uh?
(35:14):
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. Yeah. So basically anyone who
had anything to do closely with the family, there's a
theory that they did it, right. Yeah, And these are
all theories. Like you, if you look at the evidence,
you can I think you can basically get rid of
(35:35):
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 d forty pounds and the police
came and they dropped a two hundred pound weight in
(35:57):
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. I'm sure, right, so,
and Lizzie's like, I didn't hear anything. That's that's kind
of a weird thing, right. Um. Then Lizzie also was
(36:17):
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. Yeah,
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 folded over in his lap.
(36:38):
And that'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 in 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
(36:59):
one of the big 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
(37:21):
that one big photo 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
(37:44):
rotten eggs at her house 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 men her
basically a hero. By the time she died, like most
(38:04):
people had left her. Um. 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,
(38:25):
the original Mrs Borden uh 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.
(38:45):
I might have gone with something completely different without l
I Z even in the name. That would have been
my recommendation, maybe like Tammy Borden or something, or Tammy Smith.
Oh yeah, you could get rid of the board and
thought about that you know. Yeah, She's like, hmm, I
want to disappear about Elizabeth Borden instead of Lizzie Board
(39:06):
and I'll ever suspect that I'm Lizzie Gordon. And she
was pretty young. She was sixty six and she died. Yeah,
and her sister was like a several almost a decade
older than um. So she died at a I guess
a respectable old age. Lizzie died young ish. Her sister
didn't even die of an illness. She fell down the
stairs supposedly with push marks in her lower back. Right,
(39:29):
So we've basically just given like a really like broad overview.
You can dedicate all of 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 Borden house and take
(39:49):
the tour. It's pretty cool to stay there, right, Yeah,
it's a ben breakfast that you can stay in supposedly
haunted allegedly. Yeah, yeah, if you believe in that kind
of stuff. Wait our new evidence though, we and reveal
it Okay, go ahead, I have none. I don't. Okay, man,
you scared me. I thought like you really did. After
a second, No, they'd that'd be great. I wouldn't be
sitting on that. Uh. And you can type Lizzie board
(40:12):
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 since I
said elsewhere, it's time for listener mail. Greetings gents and
Jerry or Knoll 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
(40:35):
how I did and how I should be carrying myself
in the world. UM. I'd like to believe I've 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
(40:56):
down to one eye, causing redness and swelling that makes
eye remain more lows and the other interresting state I
was surprised of how many of my friends and strangers
in public I could tell her 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.
(41:17):
In my case, at least, it's not as simple as
just ignoring the condition, but it goes 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 and fresh
(41:40):
perspective it's brought you. If you got a brush 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. Yeah, Happy New Year, and happy birthday you me,
Happy birthday, you me? Okay, So if you want, you
(42:01):
can tweet to us an s y ESK podcast. You
can join us on Facebook, dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff
podcast at House to worst dot com and has always
joined us at at Home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
(42:22):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
All right, everybody, this is going to creep you out
a little bit because this episode is about murder, a
very famous murder. This goes back to Jeez. I don't
know why I rereleased it on New Year's Eve, but
we did from December. This is all about that famous
lady and her famous acts, how Lizzie Borden worked. It's
(00:22):
pretty grizzly, So warning about the content right now. Welcome
to stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles wry And and Jerry's back. Wow. Wow, Wow, look
(00:48):
at that fine looking lady over there. How's it going, Jerry?
She gave us it's just like old times. Yeah, Nol
was just quietly weeping outside. He is, you know, like
that out side Noel. He's peaking in her little portal window,
scratching at it. The stint of Noel a k. The
rain of terror is over done. Yes, has been deposed
(01:09):
by Jerry. Yeah, so now it's not Noel sitting there
or nobody sitting there, which happened more times than I
was comfortable with, at least four. Yeah, Jerry's like, wait
a minute, that we can do that. Yeah, I'm out
of here. Yeah, so long Jerry. So welcome back, Jerry.
And uh, we've already said congratulations on little Inez, but
who just keeps getting cuter and cuter. Yep, I know
(01:31):
things are going great, so we're happy to have you back.
And Lily neez, you're being very quiet. Just stay that way.
She's just rocking in her little swing. Yeah. Great. Would
that 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
(01:52):
in here. Yeah, even after like fifteen minutes, a couple
of hours. I kind of stink today. Actually, I was
going to apologize. Yeah, I didn't use to you sutorant
uh the last time I showered when just like two
days ago. It's fantastic. I know, it's terrible. I dressed up. Man,
that's a great choke that. Yeah, I'm gonna take care
of that tonight. That explains the sheen on your face. Okay,
(02:17):
so we're here, Jerry's here, I smell. 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
(02:37):
was over a hundred degrees fahrenheit by the time noon
rolled around. And that figures heavily in the case of
Lizzie Borden and her forty and forty one wax, which
we're more like eighteen or nineteen and eleven. Yes, are you?
You were familiar with Lizie Boyd. Everybody knows Lizzie Borden, right, Yeah,
(02:58):
Lizzie Borden took an X, gave her mother forty wax.
When she found what she had done, she gave her
father forty one. Yeah. Wrong, there was no ax. 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
(03:19):
rhyme these days, little sicko children. Um, but but they
do think that it was possibly some newspaper hawker, a
newsy if you watch Disney movies, Um, who came up
with it and it 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
(03:41):
of them crushed her skull when she saw what she
had done. Her father got home, she gave him eleven
or so and then got away. Yeah it scot 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 Lizie
Borden is, just settled down, buckling, prepare for a wild ride.
(04:05):
For those of you who do know, do the same. Okay, Yeah,
because we have new evidence, yeah, that we're gonna reveal
and 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 issue minutes or forty apparently to Stephie misson
(04:28):
history class in an episode on Lizzie boardon 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, Fall River, Massachusetts. Ah,
(04:55):
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 like I said, it was over a hundred
degrees fare height on August four, really really hot for
that area. And at about ten I think about ten
(05:17):
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. That there's you know, a given take there.
So about ten forty five am, one Andrew Jackson Borden
returns to his home at nine two Second Street in
Fall River, mass and, um, the the house isn't a
(05:41):
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
Andrew Borden was an extremely well the man. Yeah, he
(06:01):
was worth between seven and ten million today dollars. I've
I've heard twelve let's say between seven and twelve then
of today dollars. 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 sections of town. Um. His house
did not have indoor plumbing, which was kind of odd
(06:25):
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
kerostene lamps. And uh, he kept doors locked. He was
very afraid of being robbed. Yeah, let's cover this bit
(06:46):
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 Tale else Well, what was
that Neil Jordan's take on a little ride ride and
her hood? Yeah, I remember she wrote the same lady.
(07:10):
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. And she
describes it as uh this way a house full of
locked doors that open only into other rooms, with other
(07:31):
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 no common spaces between
one room and the next. It is a house of
(07:51):
privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed
with wax on a legal document. Creepy, no hallways 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 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
(08:17):
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 didn't do that.
That was it was off limits. It was locked. They
just jumped out the second story window. No, there was
a front staircase. They actually built a second staircase so
(08:38):
that her there there's parents could come and go to
their room without having to go through Lizzie's room. So
for all intentsive purposes, with this locked door, it was
a wall that sealed off their parents room from there. Yes.
And when we say parents, uh, this is a a stepmother.
Lizzie was born Um to Sarah Morse and her father
(08:58):
in eighteen sixty third child. Um had an older sister
named Emma, ten years older second daughter named Alice, who
died when Lizzie was two. Yes, she had She died
from hydra and cephili. You could just make up anything
back then, something believable, you know. Uh. And then her
mother died in eighteen sixty three when she was just
(09:19):
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 the
murder took place unmarried at Spinster's Uh, and never seemed
like they had a great relationship with Abby. They didn't,
(09:40):
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,
which we'll get to um, but they they The reason
that um Andrew Borden kept the house locked all the
time was because a couple of years before there had
(10:02):
been a burglary where some mysterious burglar had come in
and made off with a hundred dollars and some trolley
tickets and some jewelry. I think and Uh it was
basically pretty well known around town that it was Lizzie
who had done it. It sounds like an inside job.
She robbed her own father rather than accused his daughter
of this extraordinarily scandalous behavior. At the time, Um he
(10:26):
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, 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,
(10:49):
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, but who
Emma and Lizzie called Maggie because they had had another
maiden named Maggie, and they decided that they just we're
going to call this one Maggie too. That sounds like, um,
do you watch the show another period? Uh? It's great.
(11:12):
It's Comedy Central, basically a reality TV spoof of like
Downton Abbey and um the two lead Natasha Giro and
uh oh, I can't remember her name from Garfunkle 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
(11:34):
maid's chair. Check this out. 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 jes Nick special in Netflix yet Oh no, dude,
I love that guy though. It's really great. Yeah, it's
so so awful but wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Andrew
(11:54):
Borden gets let back into his own house. Yes not
Anthony jes Nick no, 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 on the couch. Right.
Apparently the whole family was under the weather, including the maid, um,
because they have been eating the same mutton for like
(12:14):
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 family had basically come down
to varying degrees of um food poisoning, apparently so much
so that Mrs Borden Abbey Borden had gone to talk
(12:35):
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. Yeah,
that's not all the weirdness. It 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
(12:57):
ire of the daughters. Um. Notably, Andrews started uh being
fairly generous with other members of the family, giving away
properties and things, uh, including to Abbey. He gave her
a house that she let her sister live in. His
sister was in big trouble, so he helped her out. Yeah,
so he's got money. His daughters are like, um. Uh,
(13:22):
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 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
(13:46):
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 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 renal properties
that he sold to his daughters so that they could
have rental income. Apparently they were they didn't feel like
(14:07):
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 happened in the um actually the
night before the murderer is there uncle John John Vinnegum Morris,
who was there decease mother's brother. He came a Colling
(14:27):
uh to speak about 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
situation even more like he probably had his hand out
that was maybe. I think it was fairly um common
for him to come by, and I think he was also.
(14:48):
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.
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.
(15:09):
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
dead giveaway if you love your uncle. Yeah, I I
just I I didn't realize there was animosity between the two.
I don't know that there necessarily was. Here's one of
the problems that we're going to run into it over
(15:30):
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
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,
(15:53):
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,
no 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 deats right after this. So, Chuck,
(16:31):
you're 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 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
(16:51):
room for a few days, I guess, to ease herself
back into having to live in this house again, like
a halfway house kind of that's weird, maybe three quarters
to 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,
(17:12):
that extra house to her right, her sister was living in.
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
(17:34):
were not getting along and and like you said, probably
hadn't been for a while. Yeah. Then there was a
matter of in June two, um Andrew, the father killed
a bunch of pigeons in the barn outside the house
to make pigeon while so Abby could make a pigeon pie, right,
And supposedly Lizzie kind of thought of these pigeons as
her pets. So uh, that would not have been a
(17:58):
very cool thing to do if you know your daughter
loved these pigeons, So I'm in the mood for pigeon
ply 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
(18:20):
by just killing Lizzie's pigeons. That's right. And she also
beyond just liking these pigeons, she was also a huge
animal lover. She left a lot of money to it
animal rights group, and 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,
(18:43):
super mis early typefisted. 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 my e fact, he wore
a pinky ring that Lizzie gave him when he was
(19:03):
when she was like fifteen, and he'd warn it every day,
never took it off to like each other a lot.
Only jewelry 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
(19:24):
you're a tight wad, that'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
it's true. And it didn't in his case. So, um, also,
if you think about it, it is it reveals a
(19:45):
lot 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,
(20:07):
and uh, 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'd been seen trying to
buy a poisonous prussic acid. She said she yeah, she
said she wanted it to clean things. But other people
(20:28):
and the 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 would
be too inflammatory, and it was entirely possible that she
really did want to clean this seal skin coat with
(20:50):
that stuff. All right, what else? This 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's August 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.
(21:10):
That's the reason he 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 hatchet. Um. And at about
(21:32):
eleven ten, 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,
(21:54):
and his face is hacked away. It's pretty grotesque. You
can see the picture online. Yeah, so Bridget run 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
(22:15):
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
(22:36):
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
lay 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.
(22:59):
And if actually 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. Yes,
and then eventually buried at the foot of their graves. Yes,
like all decapitated heads exactly. So Um. Almost immediately the
(23:21):
cops went, uh you yeah, you're the Lizzie was the
only person in the house, right, That's right, because Bridget
was outside 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
(23:43):
in 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
(24:03):
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 loft is because she was getting led to make
sinkers to go fishing with. Yeah. But she while she
(24:25):
was there, she's like, I like getting here in the
hundred degree weather, especially upstairs in this loft, I'm gonna
eat some pears. 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,
(24:50):
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 stained 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
(25:12):
shoot and saying, Ah, this dress is staying with paint.
I'm just gonna go ahead 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.
(25:33):
They suspected that it 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 was actually there, and we found it.
(25:54):
Another officer says, no, we didn't, So who knows? Yeah,
I think they. The consensus is among historians is that
they never found this 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.
(26:17):
They just said, this is probably a pretty good stand in, right,
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. Yeah, right, So that's
kind of weird in a sense. They never found the
murder weapon essentially, well, they said they did. Well, yeah, sure,
(26:37):
the prosecution said that this was it. But again, all
suspicion 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
(27:01):
this time, 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
(27:22):
brownish 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,
(27:42):
which is bizarre even at the time, but she was
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.
(28:04):
That was just paint that had nothing to do with blood. Right.
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,
(28:28):
put her clothes back on, and then when she had
the chance, took 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,
(29:07):
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, I didn't want smoking hatch,
no fingerprints, finger They didn't do any fingerprinting at this point.
Fingerprinting was new and uh, not really trustworthy, so they
(29:30):
didn't even bother. Well. Yeah, 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 luky loose came
through the crime scene and totally messed up. But the
big thing was is forensic science wasn't really a big
(29:51):
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
(30:12):
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, um, Lizzie went
to her old friend Alice and said some weird things
(30:32):
that 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 going to
happen to her father. Yeah. That was the day before
the murders, the night before him. Right. So for the prosecution,
(30:54):
they 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
(31:16):
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
(31:37):
trial of the century. Um, she was deemed guilty. But
while the trial was taking place in her town basically,
and 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,
(31:59):
we're trying to prosecut cue a woman for a crime
that clearly some maniac had had carried out, and that
they should just leave her alone. Finally, Yeah, 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.
(32:19):
Lizzie saw this, Uh, swooned and fainted, which of course
is 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. Yeah, 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
(32:41):
that she was like in a fugue state and committed
these murders. Uh. Yeah, but a fugue state that lasted
ninety minutes where she was able to conceal the murder
weapon in her own guilt and wait for a father
to come home and fall asleep. That's not a fugue
states what they say. And it could have been less
than ninety minutes. Uh, if you take the shorter side
(33:02):
of both ends of the 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, thinking that he might understand,
(33:25):
and he got really mad and so they killed both
killed 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. One is that the maid um.
There was a deathbed confession from the maid to her
(33:46):
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 maid eventually remarried, got married.
(34:10):
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 say that it was because
(34:30):
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 nineteen o five and her sister was like,
I am done with you. Who knows. One of the
(34:51):
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 Borton? Yeah? I
thought he was hypothetical. Is he like a real person? Uh?
(35:14):
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. Yeah. So basically anyone who
had anything to do closely with the family, there's a
theory that they did it, right. Yeah, And these are
all theories. Like you, if you look at the evidence,
you can I think you can basically get rid of
(35:35):
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 d forty pounds and the police
came and they dropped a two hundred pound weight in
(35:57):
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. I'm sure, right, so,
and Lizzie's like, I didn't hear anything. That's that's kind
of a weird thing, right. Um. Then Lizzie also was
(36:17):
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. Yeah,
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 folded over in his lap.
(36:38):
And that'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 in 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
(36:59):
one of the big 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
(37:21):
that one big photo 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
(37:44):
rotten eggs at her house 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 men her
basically a hero. By the time she died, like most
(38:04):
people had left her. Um. 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,
(38:25):
the original Mrs Borden uh 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.
(38:45):
I might have gone with something completely different without l
I Z even in the name. That would have been
my recommendation, maybe like Tammy Borden or something, or Tammy Smith.
Oh yeah, you could get rid of the board and
thought about that you know. Yeah, She's like, hmm, I
want to disappear about Elizabeth Borden instead of Lizzie Board
(39:06):
and I'll ever suspect that I'm Lizzie Gordon. And she
was pretty young. She was sixty six and she died. Yeah,
and her sister was like a several almost a decade
older than um. So she died at a I guess
a respectable old age. Lizzie died young ish. Her sister
didn't even die of an illness. She fell down the
stairs supposedly with push marks in her lower back. Right,
(39:29):
So we've basically just given like a really like broad overview.
You can dedicate all of 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 Borden house and take
(39:49):
the tour. It's pretty cool to stay there, right, Yeah,
it's a ben breakfast that you can stay in supposedly
haunted allegedly. Yeah, yeah, if you believe in that kind
of stuff. Wait our new evidence though, we and reveal
it Okay, go ahead, I have none. I don't. Okay, man,
you scared me. I thought like you really did. After
a second, No, they'd that'd be great. I wouldn't be
sitting on that. Uh. And you can type Lizzie board
(40:12):
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 since I
said elsewhere, it's time for listener mail. Greetings gents and
Jerry or Knoll 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
(40:35):
how I did and how I should be carrying myself
in the world. UM. I'd like to believe I've 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
(40:56):
down to one eye, causing redness and swelling that makes
eye remain more lows and the other interresting state I
was surprised of how many of my friends and strangers
in public I could tell her 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.
(41:17):
In my case, at least, it's not as simple as
just ignoring the condition, but it goes 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 and fresh
(41:40):
perspective it's brought you. If you got a brush 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. Yeah, Happy New Year, and happy birthday you me,
Happy birthday, you me? Okay, So if you want, you
(42:01):
can tweet to us an s y ESK podcast. You
can join us on Facebook, dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff
podcast at House to worst dot com and has always
joined us at at Home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
(42:22):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
Show Links
Order Our BookRSSStoreSYSK ArmyAboutPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Death, Sex & Money
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.