September 4, 2025 • 35 mins
Lizzie Borden took an axe, She gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one. It is a gruesome school yard rhyme known by millions of people, but it is factually inaccurate. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the UNSOLVED Murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in August 1892. Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged in the double homicide and went on trial in June 1893. Many people have heard of the crime but very few know what really happened, including how the schoolyard rhyme is incorrect and how the prosecutor brought the skulls of Andrew and Abby Borden into court!
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.88 Introduction
03:06.17 Fall River, Mass
05:11.48 Skulls in court
11:08.63 Faces Lab at LSU
16:08.46 Andrew Borden, tightwad
20:04.96 Andrew killed Lizzie's pigeons
24:56.48 Head injuries were bad on both
30:55.64 Jury sees the skulls
34:47.96 Conclusion part 1
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body does. But Joseph's gotten more. Lizzie Borden took an axe.
She gave her mother forty wax. When she saw what
she had done, she gave her father forty one. My friends,
(00:23):
that's a lie. That's inaccurate. I don't know who did
the computation on that in order to create that Wow
children's rhyme nursery rhyme. Though they did create it, it's
inaccurate numerically and also from a forensic assessment perspective as well.
(00:50):
As I sit here, I have the autopsy reports of
both Abby and Andrew Borden, who back in eighteen ninety
two were in fact killed with what appears to have
been a hatchet, and their bodies were found in their home,
(01:13):
one on the second floor that would be Abbey, and
one in the parlor reclined on a sofa that would
be Andrew. But since that date, back in eighteen ninety two,
one hundred and thirty three years ago, mystery still abounds.
(01:36):
Coming to you from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University,
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags Dave.
I approached you about this case for a couple of reasons. One,
I've told you these deaths occurred in August of eighteen
(02:00):
ninety two, you know, kind of peeling back the history
a little bit from a forensics perspective and going in
and kind of taking a look at the autopsy reports
of Andrew and Abby Borden. But also I'm kind of
doing this as a favor. Did you know that out
of all of the cases that are out there that
(02:22):
people have approached me about relative to bodybags, this is
the number one case that they want to be over. Yeah,
and I know about as much regarding this case as
the average person. Now, I know that there are huge
Borden followers out there. I didn't know there was such
a thing, but apparently there are such a vast number.
(02:48):
And I don't even know I was looking through I couldn't.
I lost count after a while of all the books
that have been written about this event that took place
in Falls River, Massachusetts. Honestly, I didn't even know where
this town was. It's kind of, or was kind of
a little village. It's actually closer to the shore than
(03:12):
it is some metropolitan area. I think that roughly it's
about forty to fifty miles due south of Boston and
beautiful area. You hear people go on and on about
it and the house to this date, and I'm sure
that many of our listeners here have visited this site.
(03:34):
I for one have not. I've also never been to Salem, Massachusetts.
I've never been to see Plymouth Rock. So I've got
I've got some traveling to do. I need to go
do that. I'm fascinated also in Massachusetts about the executions
in Salem witch trial, because I'd like to visit those
spots as well. There's some very interesting stories surrounding those cases.
(03:54):
Maybe we can get to that, say around Halloween. I
don't know, let's go and mark that in our.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I think we need to plant a road. We need a.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Body bags body bags on the road.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
The problem with that, man, I will tell you.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I thought that the nurser you mentioned, the child nursery
rhyme whatever it was, the Lizzie Bourdon rhyme. I thought, Okay,
I know there was a murder that occurred too, double homicide.
And you know Lizzie Borden took an axe. Okay, gotcha.
(04:27):
That's actually maybe not even true, because Lizzie Borden was
charged with the crime. And we'll get into this in
just a minute. But when Joe brought this up, he said,
did you know they had the skulls in the courtroom
in eighteen ninety two? They had skulls in the courtroom? No, Joe,
(04:49):
that does not even sound right listen.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
No, no, no, that's that's kind of one of the
things that made this, uh, that drew my interest. I'd
seen the images of the skull before, okay, I and
they're they're quite striking from an evidentiary standpoint. And no,
these are not models.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
These are the actual skulls they Andrew and Abby's domes
without skin.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Here you go. How did they even get them down
into that form? Do they didn't? Did they boil them?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
And no, no, no, they probably did. And kind of let
me tell you what happens now. I will go ahead
and make a confession. I think I've said it before,
but for those that are new and haven't heard me
say this before, I have, in fact decapitated bodies. Before
you do it in the morgue, it does happen, and
there are a number of reasons why you do it.
(05:41):
First off, if you have severely decomposed bodies, you go
in and you you can actually decapitate the body in
order to work with the jaws. Uh, that has happened.
I've decapitated remains and our heads that were still partially attached,
and you take them to a forensic anthropologist. Uh. I
(06:03):
got actually pulled over in my corner's car one time
driving at a high speed. Ever told you the story? Y, Yeah,
this day.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I was hoping you weren't gonna say this, but you
need to tell it now. Yeah, I gotta tell it.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
So anyway, Yeah, we had a victim that came in
and we were doing we were doing the autopsy, and
the forensic pathologist at the time said, I was very
young and young and dumb as you are, and uh,
or as I was, and still I still got a
(06:38):
little dumbness that goes along with me to this day.
But the doctor who I was deathly afraid of. You know,
if you're if you're twenty three years old and there's
a doctor talking to you and here's your boss, it's like, uh,
you know, coming from the burning bush, you're going to
do it, you know. And he said listen, he says,
(07:01):
you got to get dry ice. We're going to take
this guy's head off, you're going to do it. I
took it off in between the C one and the
C two Vertebra, and we're going to place it in
dry ice inside of a star from cooler and with
all speed. You're going to drive to Baton Rouge to
(07:21):
the Faces Lab at the Anthropology Anthropology Lab there Faces
Lab at LSU And I took him. I took it
at his word. And here I am, and I'm speeding
down it in westbound out of New Orleans and I'm
headed toward toward Baton Rouge across the what's called the
Bond Carry Spillway, which is this elevated portion of it
(07:45):
that goes over the most further portion of Lake Ponta Train.
It's not the causeway, nothing long bridge. It's at the
far west end. It separates what's called Lake Pontratrain. There's
another lake there called Lake Marapa, and it goes on
for and look, State troopers, as everybody knows, they set
up in strategic locations to nail you, you know, when
(08:07):
you're going to high speed, particularly on elevated bridges where
they can't set up radar. And man, I had my
foot in it, had my little blue light going on
my dashboard. Back then, you could plug it in a
cigarette lighter. And when I hit the end of that
bridge and came down onto Terra Firma, there he was.
(08:28):
He was sitting there, and my lord, even though I
had a blue light going, he pulled in right behind me.
And he came stomping out of that car. And if
you've ever seen a Louisiana State trooper, they've got the
most magnificent uniforms. They're blue with gold piping. They got
the smokey the bear hat, and their badge is shaped
(08:48):
like the State of Louisiana. And they all wear pat
and leather shoes, and I swear some of them have
clicks on the heels. Because you can hear them walking
towards you. It sounds like drill sardant and uh. He
came up and he was, you know, what the hell
are you doing? Just going on and on and and
I said, I pulled out my badge, and he said
(09:10):
something like you better have a good reason. And I
pointed to the star from cooler and I opened the
lid and he looked in. He said, I'll give you
an escort, and off we go. He literally drove me on.
I followed him onto the campus of LSU with a
head in my front seat and uh, you know, walked
(09:30):
into the building. My dear friend uh uh uh was
the was the forensic anthropologist there, Mary Manheut. I recommend
anybody by the way that it's not familiar with Mary's work.
She's one of the first people to ever digitize the
human skull. And uh she's since retired, but she's written
a pretty cool series of books called The Bone Lady.
(09:52):
And she is a real deal. I've worked, I've sweated,
sweated in the sun with her. I've you know, we've
excavated graves together or bare and she is she's a
real gym. So if you get a chance to check
her out. But yeah, that's my story of of of
heads and what we you know, what we can do
with them. And she wound up creating a cast of
(10:13):
the skull and plus doing a very thorough examination. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
I said something almost as a throwaway line, you said
that you had to take it to the faces lab
at l s U.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
What is the faces lab?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, the faces Lab. Literally it is I can't remember
the acronymic. It's like forensic anthropological. I can't it's like
it has to do. They were the first lab anthropological
lab that really entered onto the stage doing these these
clay modelings, and this is back in the eighties with skulls,
(10:52):
and they eventually wound up doing digital reconstructions. They were
the first people to kind of step off into this region.
And now it's kind of row you know, you see
it all the time, but they were on the cutting
edge back then. And fantastic facility by the way, and
just really enjoyed my time working with them. But yeah,
it is called the Faces Lab. Look it up for
(11:14):
yourself at LSU, and really good people there, and they've
had some really bright individuals that have come through that program.
You hear a lot about the Body Farm and as
well you should because they're quite quite notable, but the
Faces Lab has produced quite a number of great practitioners
out there as well. And they were doing and they
(11:34):
still do archaeological research as well. And as a matter
of fact, my friend Mary and I dig this. She
was the lead on site forensic anthropologists for the recovery
of the CSS Huntley, which was in I think Charleston Harbor.
It was the first submarine that was used during the
(11:55):
Civil War and there were I think close to twenty
guys that went down in this and she was part
of the body recovery of that. These bodies have been
encapsulated in this metal tube, buried down in the in
the mud there in Charleston Harbor, and you know, they
they brought it back to life and she did the
(12:15):
excavation on that. So and there was a big documentary
creative about that. But that's kind of work that she's
done over the years. So, you know, we everybody, and
I'm sure you can include this in your professionists as
as well, Dave. You know, we all, you know, stand
on the shoulders of giants. You know, those individuals that
took time to teach us, you know, when we were
young and they didn't have to. And I know a
(12:37):
lot that we do is it's self learning, you know,
through failure and repeat and all that stuff. But there
are those people that really gave us insight. And the
trick is when you're young or you're bright enough to
listen to advice. And I had a couple of flashes
of moments where I showed some level of intelligence where
I actually held onto things. And there's stuff that Mary
(12:57):
said way back then that I still teach in class
to this day. And I've been at this for actually
my career. I was just thinking, I was telling a
group that we were speaking to today, I was my
career I'm in combined with practice in the field and academia.
I'm in my forty first year now. So it's it's
(13:21):
been it's been an ongoing process, to say the least.
You know, you just keep on grinding. You just keep
on grinding, man, And you know me, I don't. I
don't ever stop. So we'll see how long. We'll see
how long the train goes. But yeah, okay, well but
I digress. I'm glad. I'm glad you let me tell
that story because it always it's gruesome. But it also
(13:41):
makes me reflective and think about, you know, those times
that I spent in the morning and everything that I
learned from that. First off, I don't speed on the
Bond Carry spillway anymore, and uh, because I don't know
if I'd have as much luck now. Uh. My wife
gets on to me because I go so slow. Now drive,
I drive like a popaul. Uh because I'm in I'm
in no rush to get anywhere anymore. Don't, I don't,
(14:03):
I don't have to get anywhere fast.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
But with Andrew and Abbey Borden's skulls, this is one
of the things that really kind of attracted me, you know,
to the idea of covering this because this is such
a it's such an oddity, it's such an oddity that
these skulls would have been utilized in the midst of
(14:28):
this horrific case that occurred up there again one hundred
and thirty three years ago. The tribal was one hundred
and thirty two years ago, that they would be used
as tools of demonstration, that they would be displayed not
just for the gallery, not just for the judge, and
(14:48):
not just for the jury, but also for Lizzie herself,
who upon seeing them, fainted in co the skulls therein
(15:15):
rest the evidence. They rest the evidence of the trauma
that was visited upon these folks. And you know, a
couple in their sixties. Andrew Borden was wealthy, well known
to be wealthy, and he was somewhat of a tight wad.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
It's funny that he was well known to be wealthy.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
He was. He owned a lot of properties, owned a
number of factories, owned a number of rental properties. He
was president of the Union Savings Bank and was known
and they lived in Fall River, mass Now it's interesting
that Fall River was an upscale neighborhood. However, the more
wealthy families in town had moved further away from the factories.
(16:04):
And Andrew Bordon said, now this is good enough, but
a little side to give you an idea of the
tightwad that he was at that point in time. In
eighteen nineties, most wealthy families had indoor plumbing. It was
common for the bigger homes in the nicer neighborhoods to
have plumbing, indoors, indoor plumbing. They didn't have it. Andrew
(16:26):
just couldn't be bothered with that, that it was an expense.
He just didn't want so it and money actually became
a real issue within the family dynamic between Lizzie and
her older sister, And you know I mentioned this to
you earlier in the nursery rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an
(16:47):
action and gave her mother forty wax. It wasn't her
mother and her stepmother, Abby's. Lizzie's mom died three years
after she was born. Her mother Sarah died in eighteen
sixty three and Andrew Borden remarried. He married Abby three
years later, and when Lizzie was about six years old
(17:10):
and her older sister was fifteen, and so there's that
dynamic there of the stepmother and the father and a
bit of jealousy between the girls and the stepmom. Lizzie
apparently never called Abby anything other than missus Borden Iszarre. Yeah,
(17:31):
you know, we found or it is because we found
that out from They had a maid. She was from
Ireland and she was about twenty five years old at
the and had been with the family for a number
of years. The reason she's important is because she's a
witness to what was taking place in the home before, during,
and after. But she's the one that told us about
(17:57):
that Lizzie called Abby missus Borden. Lizzie's older sister, Emma,
and Lizzie never ate with the Boardens. They did not
eat dinner together. They didn't eat meals together, and that
was a big part of life in the eighteen nineties
when you lived inder the same roof. You know, they
didn't have radio and TV and things like that. They
(18:17):
ate and they would gather together around the table and
they would eat not on the boarding household. The girls
would not eat at the same table with that.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
These were women that first off, they were outside of
the societal norms at this point because they were plus
thirty plus, they were unmarried, and they were living at
home with their with their father, right, and they were
like completely dependent upon Hilm and his wealth in order
to get by, correct.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
And they were both and you're dead on and I
go ahead, and I'll mention this now because I really
want to get into the forensics of this show. Yeah, yeah,
just to give you an idea here, friends, Lizzie and
Emma Borden, they were they were unmarried, and they were
(19:10):
engaged around the house. They were not looking for a
way out. They both had chores. They're adult women and
they have chores. Lizzie is thirty two, Emma is thirty
is forty one, Okay, they're not young women, and yet
they still had daily chores. And that actually comes into
play here. In the months leading up to the murders,
(19:32):
Emma and Lizzie actually left for an extended period of time.
Andrew Borden decided to kill a bunch of pigeons that
were out in the backyard. He killed them with an axe,
and he did it in May of eighteen ninety two.
The reason he killed the pigeons because they were drawing
the attention of young boys who were coming by to
(19:55):
shoot them, to hunt them the pigeons, you know, trying
to shoot them, I guess. So rather than have these
kids around their yard shooting whatever guns they had or
whatever weapons they used in the eighteen nineties as children,
he killed the pigeons. Well, Lizzie had just spent time
building hutches for them, if that's what you call it,
(20:17):
yeah coop, yeah, coop for the She had built a
coop to house these pigeons to take care of them.
So she gets the things built and Andrew goes out
and kills all of them. Well, prior to that happening,
Emma and Lizzie had been arguing with their father because
he kept giving away property to Abby's family, their stepmother's family.
(20:38):
Now it isn't like they Lizzie and Emma always thought
Abby was a gold digger, but Joe, they were married
for a long time. They've been married twenty nine years
at this point. Okay, Abby was there for again three
decades and so Andrew's seventy years old and he's giving
away property to her family, and Lizzie and Emma got mad,
(20:59):
and they actually fought over a house and demanded since
dad gave Abby's sister this house a rental property, the girls,
Lizzie and Emma demanded a house, demanded Andrew give them
their old home place, so they place they lived with
their mother because when Andrew remarried, Abby wouldn't live in
that house, so he built a different house, bought a
(21:20):
different house, and that other house became a rental so
Andrew sold that original home to Lizzie and Emma in
eighteen ninety two, he sold it to him for a dollar.
After the pigeon thing happened, Emma and Lizzie left. They
went to New Bedford and they stayed gone for weeks
(21:43):
because of what had happened with the pigeons and everything else.
And when they returned the week of the murders, Lizzie
didn't go to the house. Emma did. Lizzie stayed in
the boarding house for four days. She couldn't bring herself
to go to that house. She was so mad about
those pigeons, so that's kind of the same. By the way,
they ended up reselling the house back to Andrew. The
(22:04):
house they bought for a dollar, they sold it back
to him for five grand, and in eighteen ninety two
dollars today it would be about one hundred and seventy
five thousand dollars. So Andrew gave them one hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars basically in today's money. That was
what was going on in this family dynamic at the
time of these murders. Okay, it was not a happy
(22:26):
household and the girls had just come back, so well,
you're the women had just come back.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
The women, Yeah, absolutely, you think about what would be
the motivation, because Dave, this is not some kind of
like this is not a passive act. You know, this
isn't like a one off, you know, like punch in
the nose. It's not a single gunshot woman. Now, we
were kind of making light of the nursery rhyme, Yeah,
(22:54):
which it kind of is a nurser rhyme or at
least you know, kids are going to skip rope to
it maybe, but this is not a passive act. This
these injuries that both of these individuals sustained were so
gruesome that when you think about the force of and
(23:18):
this is not you know, in the nursing nursery rhyme
they use the word acts. It seems as though that
this is more akin to a hatchet, you know, which
if you've never seen a hatchet, hatchet like a smaller
version of an axe. And many times with hatchet you
can actually flip them over and they have a blunt
a blunt side to them that you can use to
(23:41):
hammer with. And also if you look on the underside
of the blade of a hatchet, it's got little a
little curved out area there that you can use as
a nail puller, you know, because you know with claw
hammer we use the claw to pull nails with, right, Well,
that feature exists on many hatchets where you, yeah, you
(24:02):
can slide it under there and pull out meals with it.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah, so it's even I've got one, Joe, it's more.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, it's a multi I guess, I don't want to
say multi tool, but it has multiple utility. And people
have carried hatchets forever, you know, you you even think
about Native Americans carrying tomahawks. Now, I don't know the
utility of a tomahawk. But you know, frontiersmen carried carried hatchets.
There's a lot to be said for the portability of
(24:30):
it because you can you can take down small trees
with it. You could build something, you know, if you
wanted to to create, you know, some kind of shelter,
that sort of thing. It's not as cumbersome as an axe.
And it takes a bit more work to utilize a
hatchet than it does in acts.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
But so.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
These these insults that both these individuals sustained are rather
gruesome because you have you have the weight. Just think
about this now, it's not just the blade that's doing
the damage here. If you think about the way a
hatchet is shaped, it's got that kind of robust blunted
(25:11):
back to it again like a hammerhead. So as you're
driving this thing through the air and you're targeting, say
someone's face, like in the case of Andrew Borden, you
have the added mass of the backside of that hatchet
driving downward and it's transferring that energy into this space.
(25:35):
So not only and this is obvious, you know when
you take a look at these skulls, this is obvious
that these are not just, and even the pathologists make
or the doctor makes note of this. These are not
just These are not just in sized injuries, which he
calls them in sized injuries. You've also got crushing injuries too.
(25:58):
So the fact the devastating blows that both these individuals
sustained Andrews are primarily anterior, which means to his face
as a matter of fact, the facial bones. It's his
I think the left side his facial bones, like if
you look at like his eye sockets for instance, particularly
(26:22):
the lower to left is almost completely decimated. The structures
within his cheeks are crushed as well. So when I've
given this some thought, David, you know that. Can you
imagine when you're the pro sector, the pathologists in this
(26:43):
particular case, or the doctor that's doing the autopsies. There
were two doctors that were both assisting. I can get
into that because the way their bodies are treated afterwards.
It's kind of interesting as well. You're concluding this thing,
and there's representative from the DA's office there too. If
I'm not mistaken, I wonder if the DA, in consultation
(27:08):
with the doctor said, hey, you know what, these are
really gruesome. These injuries are so profound, I need a
demonstrative in court. Can is it possible? Is it possible
to to capitate these bodies and display them in court?
(27:30):
And I'm sure the doctor said, yeah, sure. Remember this.
Even though this is we think of Massachusetts being very
sophisticated and that sort of thing, you know, old money
and all that, there's still rural people. They know what
it means to render down a hog. And you know,
part of rendering down a hog is boiling of a hog.
(27:50):
And you know, they actually say that humans are not
too dissimilar in that sense. As a matter of fact,
medical students they used to use hog's feet in order
to practice sutrain, So there's utility in this sort of thing.
So yet I think probably what happened is they decapitated
(28:12):
these bodies and began to render them down. That would
be I guess you would say, well, the shortest route
would be just to take instruments and kind of carved
the flesh off of them. Well, no, it wouldn't be.
And this is why even modern anthropologists do this, because
(28:33):
modern anthropologists actually rendered down bodies. We had two boilers
at the mme's office in Atlanta in the anthropology lab
where you could take the limbs and put them in
there and render them down. One of things you avoid
from an evidentiary standpoint when you begin to render down
bone and you don't use sharp instruments, is that sharp
(28:55):
instrument is not coming in contact with a bone. So
if you think about a bone from the perspective, from
a culinary perspective, if you think about putting, say a roast,
a bone in roast in a crock pot, the roast
becomes very tender, and what happens to it if there's
a bone there, It falls away from the bone and
(29:17):
you're left with the bone and then the tissue is
sitting there. The principle is the same thing. So if
you render down this element, this anatomical element, the tissue
literally falls away and you can carefully pick up that bone. Now,
the problem is is that there's only one well, well,
(29:41):
let's just think about Andrew okay, his facial bones, and
it's kind of if you touch your left eye at
the bottom of the orbit, okay, your eye socket, and
you kind of go back. This thing is like really fragmented.
So when you're rendering down something like this and you're
(30:04):
trying to assess it, for evidentiary value. Maybe you're looking
at tool marks and this sort of things, which is
one of the things they would have been doing, not
in the same way we do today, but in their
own way. It would be really easy to lose these
little bits and pieces because it's kind of like if
you had a jigsaw puzzle that's covered in tissue and
you want to strip away the tissue so that you
can put together the jigsaw puzzle, you have to reassemble it.
(30:27):
And look, let's face it, they wanted a demonstrative for this, Dave,
because they're going to take this. They're taking this into
court so that the people of the jury in the court,
everybody present there could actually observe, observe what had happened
to these people. And what a first off, it's very prejudicial,
(30:49):
but what a powerful, powerful tool to have at your
disposal if you're the prosecutor. Because you know, now we
can't even show you have to go through pre child now, Dave,
with bloody photographs. We've talked about this before you. They
go in in pre child. Let me just frame this
(31:09):
out in modern terms. They go in in pre trial,
and like all of the photographs that are going to
be shown at trial. People don't realize this. In pre
child motions, they both sides agree on what photos are
acceptable and not acceptable because they have inflammatory content in them.
The defense will say they're prejudicial because they're so gory
(31:30):
and over the top. Dude, we're not talking about photographs here.
We're talking about the skulls of two individuals which people
that are sitting on this jury had conversations with in life.
Now they know these people. This is not some stranger
(31:54):
that rolls into town and is butchered with a sharp instrument.
These are These individuals are citizens and high profile citizens.
So I know, I understand scientific value in this, and
you're trying to demonstrate the mechanics of this instrument that
was used, how extensive it is, but it's highly prejudicial.
Can you imagine if they tried to do this today. Oh,
(32:17):
they render down a couple of skulls and bring them
into the courtroom and say, yeah, these are our victims. Here,
these are our victims. You know you think that photos
are over the top, My lord, you're actually bringing in
anatomical elements of the victims. People would be screaming from
the rooftops nowadays, if something like this was done, but
(32:40):
it was done, and in spite of those being brought
in and demonstrated before the court, they still found Lizzie
Borden not guilty. Dave had mentioned earlier that mister Borden
(33:18):
didn't have indoor plumbing. Now, back then, I think modern
refrigeration would have been viewed as almost magical. Certainly, I
think that ice boxes and my grandmother still referred to
her refrigerator as an ice box or a thing, and
(33:40):
you know, that's where the iceman would come by and
deliver the blocks of ice that would go into a
special area in your ice box, and you could store
meats and that sort of thing. But to think that
you would have a walk in refrigerator like we do
now in Morgues is kind of It would have been
(34:02):
something that would have been unheard of at this point
in time. So in Fall River they had a location
that dig this from if you like history, this is
kind of fascinating. They had an area in their local
cemetery and the cemetery is actually called Oak Grove Cemetery,
(34:23):
still there today, and there's like a crypt. It's built
into the ground and it's a walk in kind of
crypt that you know, I don't know if the corner
or whoever it was had access to it had keys,
you know, the city fathers that kept control over this
sort of thing. And the reason they had a crypt
(34:45):
like this out there was not for burial, it was
for storage of bodies. Here's why I was fascinated by this.
During the wintertime up there in Massachusetts, the ground was
so hard that if someone died, you couldn't dig a
(35:06):
hole to stick them in. So what they would do
if people died in the winter months, they would take
these bodies and they would store them in this crypt,
and after the thaw began, they'd send out a team
of people and they would begin to dig graves and
they could, you know, send people to their eternal rest.
(35:29):
And it was in this such facility that Andrew and
Abby were kept. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body by
Body does. But Joseph's gotten more. Lizzie Borden took an axe.
She gave her mother forty wax. When she saw what
she had done, she gave her father forty one. My friends,
(00:23):
that's a lie. That's inaccurate. I don't know who did
the computation on that in order to create that Wow
children's rhyme nursery rhyme. Though they did create it, it's
inaccurate numerically and also from a forensic assessment perspective as well.
(00:50):
As I sit here, I have the autopsy reports of
both Abby and Andrew Borden, who back in eighteen ninety
two were in fact killed with what appears to have
been a hatchet, and their bodies were found in their home,
(01:13):
one on the second floor that would be Abbey, and
one in the parlor reclined on a sofa that would
be Andrew. But since that date, back in eighteen ninety two,
one hundred and thirty three years ago, mystery still abounds.
(01:36):
Coming to you from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University,
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags Dave.
I approached you about this case for a couple of reasons. One,
I've told you these deaths occurred in August of eighteen
(02:00):
ninety two, you know, kind of peeling back the history
a little bit from a forensics perspective and going in
and kind of taking a look at the autopsy reports
of Andrew and Abby Borden. But also I'm kind of
doing this as a favor. Did you know that out
of all of the cases that are out there that
(02:22):
people have approached me about relative to bodybags, this is
the number one case that they want to be over. Yeah,
and I know about as much regarding this case as
the average person. Now, I know that there are huge
Borden followers out there. I didn't know there was such
a thing, but apparently there are such a vast number.
(02:48):
And I don't even know I was looking through I couldn't.
I lost count after a while of all the books
that have been written about this event that took place
in Falls River, Massachusetts. Honestly, I didn't even know where
this town was. It's kind of, or was kind of
a little village. It's actually closer to the shore than
(03:12):
it is some metropolitan area. I think that roughly it's
about forty to fifty miles due south of Boston and
beautiful area. You hear people go on and on about
it and the house to this date, and I'm sure
that many of our listeners here have visited this site.
(03:34):
I for one have not. I've also never been to Salem, Massachusetts.
I've never been to see Plymouth Rock. So I've got
I've got some traveling to do. I need to go
do that. I'm fascinated also in Massachusetts about the executions
in Salem witch trial, because I'd like to visit those
spots as well. There's some very interesting stories surrounding those cases.
(03:54):
Maybe we can get to that, say around Halloween. I
don't know, let's go and mark that in our.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I think we need to plant a road. We need a.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Body bags body bags on the road.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
The problem with that, man, I will tell you.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I thought that the nurser you mentioned, the child nursery
rhyme whatever it was, the Lizzie Bourdon rhyme. I thought, Okay,
I know there was a murder that occurred too, double homicide.
And you know Lizzie Borden took an axe. Okay, gotcha.
(04:27):
That's actually maybe not even true, because Lizzie Borden was
charged with the crime. And we'll get into this in
just a minute. But when Joe brought this up, he said,
did you know they had the skulls in the courtroom
in eighteen ninety two? They had skulls in the courtroom? No, Joe,
(04:49):
that does not even sound right listen.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
No, no, no, that's that's kind of one of the
things that made this, uh, that drew my interest. I'd
seen the images of the skull before, okay, I and
they're they're quite striking from an evidentiary standpoint. And no,
these are not models.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
These are the actual skulls they Andrew and Abby's domes
without skin.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Here you go. How did they even get them down
into that form? Do they didn't? Did they boil them?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
And no, no, no, they probably did. And kind of let
me tell you what happens now. I will go ahead
and make a confession. I think I've said it before,
but for those that are new and haven't heard me
say this before, I have, in fact decapitated bodies. Before
you do it in the morgue, it does happen, and
there are a number of reasons why you do it.
(05:41):
First off, if you have severely decomposed bodies, you go
in and you you can actually decapitate the body in
order to work with the jaws. Uh, that has happened.
I've decapitated remains and our heads that were still partially attached,
and you take them to a forensic anthropologist. Uh. I
(06:03):
got actually pulled over in my corner's car one time
driving at a high speed. Ever told you the story? Y, Yeah,
this day.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I was hoping you weren't gonna say this, but you
need to tell it now. Yeah, I gotta tell it.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
So anyway, Yeah, we had a victim that came in
and we were doing we were doing the autopsy, and
the forensic pathologist at the time said, I was very
young and young and dumb as you are, and uh,
or as I was, and still I still got a
(06:38):
little dumbness that goes along with me to this day.
But the doctor who I was deathly afraid of. You know,
if you're if you're twenty three years old and there's
a doctor talking to you and here's your boss, it's like, uh,
you know, coming from the burning bush, you're going to
do it, you know. And he said listen, he says,
(07:01):
you got to get dry ice. We're going to take
this guy's head off, you're going to do it. I
took it off in between the C one and the
C two Vertebra, and we're going to place it in
dry ice inside of a star from cooler and with
all speed. You're going to drive to Baton Rouge to
(07:21):
the Faces Lab at the Anthropology Anthropology Lab there Faces
Lab at LSU And I took him. I took it
at his word. And here I am, and I'm speeding
down it in westbound out of New Orleans and I'm
headed toward toward Baton Rouge across the what's called the
Bond Carry Spillway, which is this elevated portion of it
(07:45):
that goes over the most further portion of Lake Ponta Train.
It's not the causeway, nothing long bridge. It's at the
far west end. It separates what's called Lake Pontratrain. There's
another lake there called Lake Marapa, and it goes on
for and look, State troopers, as everybody knows, they set
up in strategic locations to nail you, you know, when
(08:07):
you're going to high speed, particularly on elevated bridges where
they can't set up radar. And man, I had my
foot in it, had my little blue light going on
my dashboard. Back then, you could plug it in a
cigarette lighter. And when I hit the end of that
bridge and came down onto Terra Firma, there he was.
(08:28):
He was sitting there, and my lord, even though I
had a blue light going, he pulled in right behind me.
And he came stomping out of that car. And if
you've ever seen a Louisiana State trooper, they've got the
most magnificent uniforms. They're blue with gold piping. They got
the smokey the bear hat, and their badge is shaped
(08:48):
like the State of Louisiana. And they all wear pat
and leather shoes, and I swear some of them have
clicks on the heels. Because you can hear them walking
towards you. It sounds like drill sardant and uh. He
came up and he was, you know, what the hell
are you doing? Just going on and on and and
I said, I pulled out my badge, and he said
(09:10):
something like you better have a good reason. And I
pointed to the star from cooler and I opened the
lid and he looked in. He said, I'll give you
an escort, and off we go. He literally drove me on.
I followed him onto the campus of LSU with a
head in my front seat and uh, you know, walked
(09:30):
into the building. My dear friend uh uh uh was
the was the forensic anthropologist there, Mary Manheut. I recommend
anybody by the way that it's not familiar with Mary's work.
She's one of the first people to ever digitize the
human skull. And uh she's since retired, but she's written
a pretty cool series of books called The Bone Lady.
(09:52):
And she is a real deal. I've worked, I've sweated,
sweated in the sun with her. I've you know, we've
excavated graves together or bare and she is she's a
real gym. So if you get a chance to check
her out. But yeah, that's my story of of of
heads and what we you know, what we can do
with them. And she wound up creating a cast of
(10:13):
the skull and plus doing a very thorough examination. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
I said something almost as a throwaway line, you said
that you had to take it to the faces lab
at l s U.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
What is the faces lab?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, the faces Lab. Literally it is I can't remember
the acronymic. It's like forensic anthropological. I can't it's like
it has to do. They were the first lab anthropological
lab that really entered onto the stage doing these these
clay modelings, and this is back in the eighties with skulls,
(10:52):
and they eventually wound up doing digital reconstructions. They were
the first people to kind of step off into this region.
And now it's kind of row you know, you see
it all the time, but they were on the cutting
edge back then. And fantastic facility by the way, and
just really enjoyed my time working with them. But yeah,
it is called the Faces Lab. Look it up for
(11:14):
yourself at LSU, and really good people there, and they've
had some really bright individuals that have come through that program.
You hear a lot about the Body Farm and as
well you should because they're quite quite notable, but the
Faces Lab has produced quite a number of great practitioners
out there as well. And they were doing and they
(11:34):
still do archaeological research as well. And as a matter
of fact, my friend Mary and I dig this. She
was the lead on site forensic anthropologists for the recovery
of the CSS Huntley, which was in I think Charleston Harbor.
It was the first submarine that was used during the
(11:55):
Civil War and there were I think close to twenty
guys that went down in this and she was part
of the body recovery of that. These bodies have been
encapsulated in this metal tube, buried down in the in
the mud there in Charleston Harbor, and you know, they
they brought it back to life and she did the
(12:15):
excavation on that. So and there was a big documentary
creative about that. But that's kind of work that she's
done over the years. So, you know, we everybody, and
I'm sure you can include this in your professionists as
as well, Dave. You know, we all, you know, stand
on the shoulders of giants. You know, those individuals that
took time to teach us, you know, when we were
young and they didn't have to. And I know a
(12:37):
lot that we do is it's self learning, you know,
through failure and repeat and all that stuff. But there
are those people that really gave us insight. And the
trick is when you're young or you're bright enough to
listen to advice. And I had a couple of flashes
of moments where I showed some level of intelligence where
I actually held onto things. And there's stuff that Mary
(12:57):
said way back then that I still teach in class
to this day. And I've been at this for actually
my career. I was just thinking, I was telling a
group that we were speaking to today, I was my
career I'm in combined with practice in the field and academia.
I'm in my forty first year now. So it's it's
(13:21):
been it's been an ongoing process, to say the least.
You know, you just keep on grinding. You just keep
on grinding, man, And you know me, I don't. I
don't ever stop. So we'll see how long. We'll see
how long the train goes. But yeah, okay, well but
I digress. I'm glad. I'm glad you let me tell
that story because it always it's gruesome. But it also
(13:41):
makes me reflective and think about, you know, those times
that I spent in the morning and everything that I
learned from that. First off, I don't speed on the
Bond Carry spillway anymore, and uh, because I don't know
if I'd have as much luck now. Uh. My wife
gets on to me because I go so slow. Now drive,
I drive like a popaul. Uh because I'm in I'm
in no rush to get anywhere anymore. Don't, I don't,
(14:03):
I don't have to get anywhere fast.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
But with Andrew and Abbey Borden's skulls, this is one
of the things that really kind of attracted me, you know,
to the idea of covering this because this is such
a it's such an oddity, it's such an oddity that
these skulls would have been utilized in the midst of
(14:28):
this horrific case that occurred up there again one hundred
and thirty three years ago. The tribal was one hundred
and thirty two years ago, that they would be used
as tools of demonstration, that they would be displayed not
just for the gallery, not just for the judge, and
(14:48):
not just for the jury, but also for Lizzie herself,
who upon seeing them, fainted in co the skulls therein
(15:15):
rest the evidence. They rest the evidence of the trauma
that was visited upon these folks. And you know, a
couple in their sixties. Andrew Borden was wealthy, well known
to be wealthy, and he was somewhat of a tight wad.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
It's funny that he was well known to be wealthy.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
He was. He owned a lot of properties, owned a
number of factories, owned a number of rental properties. He
was president of the Union Savings Bank and was known
and they lived in Fall River, mass Now it's interesting
that Fall River was an upscale neighborhood. However, the more
wealthy families in town had moved further away from the factories.
(16:04):
And Andrew Bordon said, now this is good enough, but
a little side to give you an idea of the
tightwad that he was at that point in time. In
eighteen nineties, most wealthy families had indoor plumbing. It was
common for the bigger homes in the nicer neighborhoods to
have plumbing, indoors, indoor plumbing. They didn't have it. Andrew
(16:26):
just couldn't be bothered with that, that it was an expense.
He just didn't want so it and money actually became
a real issue within the family dynamic between Lizzie and
her older sister, And you know I mentioned this to
you earlier in the nursery rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an
(16:47):
action and gave her mother forty wax. It wasn't her
mother and her stepmother, Abby's. Lizzie's mom died three years
after she was born. Her mother Sarah died in eighteen
sixty three and Andrew Borden remarried. He married Abby three
years later, and when Lizzie was about six years old
(17:10):
and her older sister was fifteen, and so there's that
dynamic there of the stepmother and the father and a
bit of jealousy between the girls and the stepmom. Lizzie
apparently never called Abby anything other than missus Borden Iszarre. Yeah,
(17:31):
you know, we found or it is because we found
that out from They had a maid. She was from
Ireland and she was about twenty five years old at
the and had been with the family for a number
of years. The reason she's important is because she's a
witness to what was taking place in the home before, during,
and after. But she's the one that told us about
(17:57):
that Lizzie called Abby missus Borden. Lizzie's older sister, Emma,
and Lizzie never ate with the Boardens. They did not
eat dinner together. They didn't eat meals together, and that
was a big part of life in the eighteen nineties
when you lived inder the same roof. You know, they
didn't have radio and TV and things like that. They
(18:17):
ate and they would gather together around the table and
they would eat not on the boarding household. The girls
would not eat at the same table with that.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
These were women that first off, they were outside of
the societal norms at this point because they were plus
thirty plus, they were unmarried, and they were living at
home with their with their father, right, and they were
like completely dependent upon Hilm and his wealth in order
to get by, correct.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
And they were both and you're dead on and I
go ahead, and I'll mention this now because I really
want to get into the forensics of this show. Yeah, yeah,
just to give you an idea here, friends, Lizzie and
Emma Borden, they were they were unmarried, and they were
(19:10):
engaged around the house. They were not looking for a
way out. They both had chores. They're adult women and
they have chores. Lizzie is thirty two, Emma is thirty
is forty one, Okay, they're not young women, and yet
they still had daily chores. And that actually comes into
play here. In the months leading up to the murders,
(19:32):
Emma and Lizzie actually left for an extended period of time.
Andrew Borden decided to kill a bunch of pigeons that
were out in the backyard. He killed them with an axe,
and he did it in May of eighteen ninety two.
The reason he killed the pigeons because they were drawing
the attention of young boys who were coming by to
(19:55):
shoot them, to hunt them the pigeons, you know, trying
to shoot them, I guess. So rather than have these
kids around their yard shooting whatever guns they had or
whatever weapons they used in the eighteen nineties as children,
he killed the pigeons. Well, Lizzie had just spent time
building hutches for them, if that's what you call it,
(20:17):
yeah coop, yeah, coop for the She had built a
coop to house these pigeons to take care of them.
So she gets the things built and Andrew goes out
and kills all of them. Well, prior to that happening,
Emma and Lizzie had been arguing with their father because
he kept giving away property to Abby's family, their stepmother's family.
(20:38):
Now it isn't like they Lizzie and Emma always thought
Abby was a gold digger, but Joe, they were married
for a long time. They've been married twenty nine years
at this point. Okay, Abby was there for again three
decades and so Andrew's seventy years old and he's giving
away property to her family, and Lizzie and Emma got mad,
(20:59):
and they actually fought over a house and demanded since
dad gave Abby's sister this house a rental property, the girls,
Lizzie and Emma demanded a house, demanded Andrew give them
their old home place, so they place they lived with
their mother because when Andrew remarried, Abby wouldn't live in
that house, so he built a different house, bought a
(21:20):
different house, and that other house became a rental so
Andrew sold that original home to Lizzie and Emma in
eighteen ninety two, he sold it to him for a dollar.
After the pigeon thing happened, Emma and Lizzie left. They
went to New Bedford and they stayed gone for weeks
(21:43):
because of what had happened with the pigeons and everything else.
And when they returned the week of the murders, Lizzie
didn't go to the house. Emma did. Lizzie stayed in
the boarding house for four days. She couldn't bring herself
to go to that house. She was so mad about
those pigeons, so that's kind of the same. By the way,
they ended up reselling the house back to Andrew. The
(22:04):
house they bought for a dollar, they sold it back
to him for five grand, and in eighteen ninety two
dollars today it would be about one hundred and seventy
five thousand dollars. So Andrew gave them one hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars basically in today's money. That was
what was going on in this family dynamic at the
time of these murders. Okay, it was not a happy
(22:26):
household and the girls had just come back, so well,
you're the women had just come back.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
The women, Yeah, absolutely, you think about what would be
the motivation, because Dave, this is not some kind of
like this is not a passive act. You know, this
isn't like a one off, you know, like punch in
the nose. It's not a single gunshot woman. Now, we
were kind of making light of the nursery rhyme, Yeah,
(22:54):
which it kind of is a nurser rhyme or at
least you know, kids are going to skip rope to
it maybe, but this is not a passive act. This
these injuries that both of these individuals sustained were so
gruesome that when you think about the force of and
(23:18):
this is not you know, in the nursing nursery rhyme
they use the word acts. It seems as though that
this is more akin to a hatchet, you know, which
if you've never seen a hatchet, hatchet like a smaller
version of an axe. And many times with hatchet you
can actually flip them over and they have a blunt
a blunt side to them that you can use to
(23:41):
hammer with. And also if you look on the underside
of the blade of a hatchet, it's got little a
little curved out area there that you can use as
a nail puller, you know, because you know with claw
hammer we use the claw to pull nails with, right, Well,
that feature exists on many hatchets where you, yeah, you
(24:02):
can slide it under there and pull out meals with it.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah, so it's even I've got one, Joe, it's more.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, it's a multi I guess, I don't want to
say multi tool, but it has multiple utility. And people
have carried hatchets forever, you know, you you even think
about Native Americans carrying tomahawks. Now, I don't know the
utility of a tomahawk. But you know, frontiersmen carried carried hatchets.
There's a lot to be said for the portability of
(24:30):
it because you can you can take down small trees
with it. You could build something, you know, if you
wanted to to create, you know, some kind of shelter,
that sort of thing. It's not as cumbersome as an axe.
And it takes a bit more work to utilize a
hatchet than it does in acts.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
But so.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
These these insults that both these individuals sustained are rather
gruesome because you have you have the weight. Just think
about this now, it's not just the blade that's doing
the damage here. If you think about the way a
hatchet is shaped, it's got that kind of robust blunted
(25:11):
back to it again like a hammerhead. So as you're
driving this thing through the air and you're targeting, say
someone's face, like in the case of Andrew Borden, you
have the added mass of the backside of that hatchet
driving downward and it's transferring that energy into this space.
(25:35):
So not only and this is obvious, you know when
you take a look at these skulls, this is obvious
that these are not just, and even the pathologists make
or the doctor makes note of this. These are not
just These are not just in sized injuries, which he
calls them in sized injuries. You've also got crushing injuries too.
(25:58):
So the fact the devastating blows that both these individuals
sustained Andrews are primarily anterior, which means to his face
as a matter of fact, the facial bones. It's his
I think the left side his facial bones, like if
you look at like his eye sockets for instance, particularly
(26:22):
the lower to left is almost completely decimated. The structures
within his cheeks are crushed as well. So when I've
given this some thought, David, you know that. Can you
imagine when you're the pro sector, the pathologists in this
(26:43):
particular case, or the doctor that's doing the autopsies. There
were two doctors that were both assisting. I can get
into that because the way their bodies are treated afterwards.
It's kind of interesting as well. You're concluding this thing,
and there's representative from the DA's office there too. If
I'm not mistaken, I wonder if the DA, in consultation
(27:08):
with the doctor said, hey, you know what, these are
really gruesome. These injuries are so profound, I need a
demonstrative in court. Can is it possible? Is it possible
to to capitate these bodies and display them in court?
(27:30):
And I'm sure the doctor said, yeah, sure. Remember this.
Even though this is we think of Massachusetts being very
sophisticated and that sort of thing, you know, old money
and all that, there's still rural people. They know what
it means to render down a hog. And you know,
part of rendering down a hog is boiling of a hog.
(27:50):
And you know, they actually say that humans are not
too dissimilar in that sense. As a matter of fact,
medical students they used to use hog's feet in order
to practice sutrain, So there's utility in this sort of thing.
So yet I think probably what happened is they decapitated
(28:12):
these bodies and began to render them down. That would
be I guess you would say, well, the shortest route
would be just to take instruments and kind of carved
the flesh off of them. Well, no, it wouldn't be.
And this is why even modern anthropologists do this, because
(28:33):
modern anthropologists actually rendered down bodies. We had two boilers
at the mme's office in Atlanta in the anthropology lab
where you could take the limbs and put them in
there and render them down. One of things you avoid
from an evidentiary standpoint when you begin to render down
bone and you don't use sharp instruments, is that sharp
(28:55):
instrument is not coming in contact with a bone. So
if you think about a bone from the perspective, from
a culinary perspective, if you think about putting, say a roast,
a bone in roast in a crock pot, the roast
becomes very tender, and what happens to it if there's
a bone there, It falls away from the bone and
(29:17):
you're left with the bone and then the tissue is
sitting there. The principle is the same thing. So if
you render down this element, this anatomical element, the tissue
literally falls away and you can carefully pick up that bone. Now,
the problem is is that there's only one well, well,
(29:41):
let's just think about Andrew okay, his facial bones, and
it's kind of if you touch your left eye at
the bottom of the orbit, okay, your eye socket, and
you kind of go back. This thing is like really fragmented.
So when you're rendering down something like this and you're
(30:04):
trying to assess it, for evidentiary value. Maybe you're looking
at tool marks and this sort of things, which is
one of the things they would have been doing, not
in the same way we do today, but in their
own way. It would be really easy to lose these
little bits and pieces because it's kind of like if
you had a jigsaw puzzle that's covered in tissue and
you want to strip away the tissue so that you
can put together the jigsaw puzzle, you have to reassemble it.
(30:27):
And look, let's face it, they wanted a demonstrative for this, Dave,
because they're going to take this. They're taking this into
court so that the people of the jury in the court,
everybody present there could actually observe, observe what had happened
to these people. And what a first off, it's very prejudicial,
(30:49):
but what a powerful, powerful tool to have at your
disposal if you're the prosecutor. Because you know, now we
can't even show you have to go through pre child now, Dave,
with bloody photographs. We've talked about this before you. They
go in in pre child. Let me just frame this
(31:09):
out in modern terms. They go in in pre trial,
and like all of the photographs that are going to
be shown at trial. People don't realize this. In pre
child motions, they both sides agree on what photos are
acceptable and not acceptable because they have inflammatory content in them.
The defense will say they're prejudicial because they're so gory
(31:30):
and over the top. Dude, we're not talking about photographs here.
We're talking about the skulls of two individuals which people
that are sitting on this jury had conversations with in life.
Now they know these people. This is not some stranger
(31:54):
that rolls into town and is butchered with a sharp instrument.
These are These individuals are citizens and high profile citizens.
So I know, I understand scientific value in this, and
you're trying to demonstrate the mechanics of this instrument that
was used, how extensive it is, but it's highly prejudicial.
Can you imagine if they tried to do this today. Oh,
(32:17):
they render down a couple of skulls and bring them
into the courtroom and say, yeah, these are our victims. Here,
these are our victims. You know you think that photos
are over the top, My lord, you're actually bringing in
anatomical elements of the victims. People would be screaming from
the rooftops nowadays, if something like this was done, but
(32:40):
it was done, and in spite of those being brought
in and demonstrated before the court, they still found Lizzie
Borden not guilty. Dave had mentioned earlier that mister Borden
(33:18):
didn't have indoor plumbing. Now, back then, I think modern
refrigeration would have been viewed as almost magical. Certainly, I
think that ice boxes and my grandmother still referred to
her refrigerator as an ice box or a thing, and
(33:40):
you know, that's where the iceman would come by and
deliver the blocks of ice that would go into a
special area in your ice box, and you could store
meats and that sort of thing. But to think that
you would have a walk in refrigerator like we do
now in Morgues is kind of It would have been
(34:02):
something that would have been unheard of at this point
in time. So in Fall River they had a location
that dig this from if you like history, this is
kind of fascinating. They had an area in their local
cemetery and the cemetery is actually called Oak Grove Cemetery,
(34:23):
still there today, and there's like a crypt. It's built
into the ground and it's a walk in kind of
crypt that you know, I don't know if the corner
or whoever it was had access to it had keys,
you know, the city fathers that kept control over this
sort of thing. And the reason they had a crypt
(34:45):
like this out there was not for burial, it was
for storage of bodies. Here's why I was fascinated by this.
During the wintertime up there in Massachusetts, the ground was
so hard that if someone died, you couldn't dig a
(35:06):
hole to stick them in. So what they would do
if people died in the winter months, they would take
these bodies and they would store them in this crypt,
and after the thaw began, they'd send out a team
of people and they would begin to dig graves and
they could, you know, send people to their eternal rest.
(35:29):
And it was in this such facility that Andrew and
Abby were kept. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body by
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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