September 9, 2025 • 39 mins
Lizzie Borden was arrested days after the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden. Her trial was held the following June. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack finish telling the story of what happened in the Borden home that fateful August morning and the investigation that followed. Professor Morgan explains how the heads of both victims were removed and what it took to prepare the skulls to appear in court for the trial of Lizzie Borden.
It is no secret that Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother. The case remains an unsolved homicide.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction
01:10.88 Timeline of Borden murders
03:25.18 Bodies in state of decay
07:09.39 What happens to injuries one week later
12:30.25 Mr and Mrs Borden both wore dentures
17:25.23 Borden ladies familiar with hatchet
22:55.84 Who was the target?
28:36.97 Mr Borden was large man
33:52.18 Injuries were vicious
39:21.22 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality vous with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of the things
that I love about autopsy reports that predate modern times,
and certainly both of the Borden's autopsy reports do that, indeed,
is that they transport you back to a time where
(00:26):
I think that many of us have so placed this
case on a pedestal, so kind of sealed it in
the past, that we don't really fully appreciate true violence.
And guess what, the violence in the eighteen nineties was
(00:49):
just as real as it is in the twenty first century.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body bags. Dave,
give me, give me this timeframe again. The homicides took place.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
In August fourth, at well between nine thirty in the
morning and eleven fifteen, and the autopsies took place. That
was on August fourth. The autopsies took place seven days later,
on August eleventh, at eleven fifteen am.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
So we're talking seven it's seven days later, yeah, seven
days later. And this is in August. And I don't
care if it is Massacusetts. August is warm all right,
by the way, beautiful places go. I haven't been to
Fall River, but i've been to Massachusetts in the summertime.
The weather compared to Alabama is delicious that time of year.
(01:48):
I mean, it's it's really really pleasant. Well, it's unclear
as to why it necessarily took this much time. I'm
assuming that they had to find somebody that they felt
like that was a medical examiner qualified medical examiner. By
the way, state of Massachusetts is the first place in
the Union to use the term medical examiner, and this
(02:11):
happened back in the eighteen seventies. They were also one
of the first states to do away with the office
of corner. Isn't that fascinating, And so you kind of
got this evolution going on. There's a lot of forensic
tie backs here in this case that are quite fascinating
historically anyway. So it took them seven days. So when
(02:32):
you begin to read both Abby and Andrews autopsy reports,
it's obvious, I mean literally in the first paragraph they
talk about he doesn't use his term, but the term
is actually flaccid, and flaccid means limp, it means not rigid,
(02:52):
and the pro sector here is saying that both bodies
are not stiff, they're both flaccid as a result of decomposition.
So by the time the doctor puts the coal steel
to both of these bodies, they're already in a state
of decay. Dave, They've already begun to break down. And
(03:18):
I find this absolutely fascinating that they weren't able to
get to these bodies sooner than seven days down range.
From let's face it, all right, I don't know what
else was going on in August of eighteen ninety two
in Fall River, but I would imagine everybody in the
in the you know, in the surrounding countryside had heard
(03:40):
about this by this time. This is top of the news,
all right, and that this took so long to get
these pro sections done. It's just a fascinating thing that we,
you know, you think about in the modern context. It's
quite amazing. And as a matter of fact, you know,
(04:01):
I talked about the extensive head injuries that both these
individuals sustained, and that's primarily where this trauma is in dwelling, Dave,
they had decomposed so much that both of the brains
had liquefied. Really, yeah, they had begun to liquefy, and
they the brain was removed through the defects. Essentially now
(04:24):
when you look at I think it's Andrews Andrew's image,
the one image of his skull, you can see this
kind of linear incision that's been made that looks like
a circumferential, you know, incision that you would make like
with a modern saw. They would have used handsaws back then.
(04:45):
I've actually had to use a handsaw on skull and
it's not fun. My saw went out, my electric saw.
It's a laborious undertaking to make your way through a
human skull with a handsaw. That's what they would have
been using. Uh, But I don't know if they thought
that it was better to take it out this way.
(05:07):
And one of the problems with this is that when
you're not doing a fresh autopsy on somebody with trauma,
the brain does, in fact really begin to break down.
It's one of the organs that does, in fact, because
it's real. The brain in the brain anyway is I
know some people take exception of this, but it's I've
(05:27):
always thought of thought of it as kind of gelaginous,
you know, it's kind of you know, it's it's very
fatty and it's very greasy, uh, and it begins to
kind of break down anyway. To me, it breaks down
quicker than any other organ in the body. You know,
you can go to the liver and liver will be
kind of greasy and that sort of thing if it's decomposed,
(05:47):
but it's still it still has kind of a firmness
to it, kind of bounces back, you know when you
touch it. Not not the brain so much. It liquefies.
And so when you're trying to assess like hemorrhage, like
you if you've got a strike with a sharp instrument
or a blunted instrument, you have to appreciate underlying hemorrhage. Well,
(06:10):
that's really hard to do on something that's liquefied. So
I'm not saying that their conclusions are speculative. They're not,
because you've got evidence that the skull has literally been
in sized and blunt force fractured. But it makes it
a bit tougher, you know, if you're trying to do
(06:31):
like a nuanced dissection. But back to you know, back
to Andrew Andrew. Now, what was that number for Andrew
Andrew was he was forty one? Right? Well, actually he's eleven.
He's got eleven documented insults to his head, right, wow.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, But Joe, they waited a week seven days between
the time of the strikes on the head and the
time they're actually looking at what would have had happened
to those injuries. Wouldn't they as part of the process
of decomp wouldn't they really look considerably different than they
did when they first happened.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Yeah, but you could still appreciate that there was that
there was anti mortem hemorrhage in there. Okay, you know
like that these are not like like you can separate
out by eyeball in it. Okay, you can actually eyeball
it and delineate somebody. That's really good. They can delineate
between anti mortem injuries and post mortem changes. Now, this
(07:36):
is the one thing that you run into problems with
where you have open injuries like that decomposition is will
kind of affect that area more than say a closed area.
All right, so it's going to change it. But if
you've got a keen eye for it, and you've done
enough cases, you can make that delineation and say, yet,
(07:59):
this is I can see the margins here, I can
see this little area of hemorrhage, and I can assess
that this is an anti mortem injury at this stage now, Dude,
if they had gone on for like over a month
for this, it would have been much more of an
uphill climb for them, I think. And they're not They're
(08:21):
not going into These autopsy reports are in no way
as and not insulting, you know, the ancestors here, but
they are in no way as detailed as as ours
are today as But I got to tell you some
of the autopsy reports I reviewed, it modern ones compared
(08:43):
to what they did to Andrew and Abbey. I'd rather
have this guy doing the autopsies than some of the
people that I've seen that have generated some of the
garbage I reviewed, you know, over that's been sent in
my way as a result of stuff that we're covering
in the news and whatnot. But yes, so Andrew had
eleven and it's fascinating. And I say this tongue in cheek.
(09:09):
Missus Borden, Missus Borden actually had eighteen injuries. Oh wow.
And the speculation is is that she was killed first. Dave,
(09:35):
you know, we talked quite a bit about Abby Borden's
autopsy report and something that kind of struck me. I
wanted to point out to you about about miss Borden's
autopsy report is that it's not just about injuries with her.
(09:57):
It also gives you kind of this let's say it's
probably it probably wouldn't be good for me to say
slice of life, but it kind of gives you an
insight into these people are real. You know, you just
think about the injuries that we've seen. Let me give
you for instance, you know, kind of reflecting back. We
have to remember these autopsies were done roughly a week
(10:19):
after the homicides had taken place, so they've been sitting
up in a family crypt. There is no cult storage
for bodies. This is a location where bodies are kept
during the winter months until they can bring them out
and bury them in the you know, in the iced
over soil. And so when you begin to read into
(10:43):
this report, you learn a little bit about missus Bordon
Abbey Board and that is and and she's sixty four
years old. They describe her, and you don't hear this
term in modern in modern parlance, they describe her as
being very well nourished and you're ready for this day, fleshy, flesh, fat. Yeah, yeah,
(11:04):
that's that's essentially what they're saying. Now that they're p yeah, no,
no kid in fleshy and I so she.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Could have been on the Biggest Loser, right.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah, I guess so, you know perhaps, And you know,
the thing about it is is that you know, now
in modern times, we give these very specific measurements, you know,
for bodies in the morgue. She measures out at five
foot three, but we have no idea how much she weighs.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So for them, that would have been super impolite.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah. Perhaps I don't know, or maybe they just did
not have the ability in a crypt to place a
body onto a scale because obviously back then we didn't
have digital scales. We didn't have a floor scale that
would have been portable to bring it there. You know,
nowadays you just take a body and you wheel it
(11:53):
up onto a floor scale and it gives you a
digital reading. They didn't have that ability. You'd have to
go to someplace like a warehouse or something to get
a weight. And that's just kind of fascinating to me.
And they actually talk about her her dentition, which is
it's kind of fascinating. They talk about how she's got
(12:16):
artificial teeth in her jaw. Well, that's something that you
know most people you don't consider it, but her teeth
are present. That gives you an idea that a peek
into her life. She's working around the house that day,
she's not going to walk around without her teeth in,
you know, she might take them out at bedtime.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I looked it up when I saw the As we
were preparing this, I didn't know very much about the case,
and so I educated myself a little bit on the
family dynamic. And I saw that about the teeth, and
I thought, well, I don't think about dentures other than
George Washington's made out of wood or walris or whatever
(12:54):
they used, you know, and him having his dentist on
the battleground with him, you know, so he always looked
because his teeth always are. And I looked at these.
They're not that dissimilar from what we have today in
terms of denters. They look like teeth. They don't look
like something that you'd be embarrassed to wear and be
better than having nothing. But anyway, I just was I
(13:15):
I don't know what I was thinking about, but I
didn't expect them to look like a real set of denters.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, and so, yeah, and you know, dentistry obviously since
this point, time has come a long way, but they
did have dentures, and you know some of these dental
appliances back then, well they would be enough to you know,
to how do they say, make your blood curdle? I
guess if you looked at it and you thought, I'm
going to stick that in my mouth. But you know,
(13:41):
it does, in fact give you an insight into her life.
And here's the other thing that's significant that does actually
Dave marry up with something that you and I talk
about regularly on body bags, and that's the fact that
doctor Dolan, who is actually the medical examiner in this case,
he makes reference to the fact that there are no
(14:04):
marks of violence on Abby's body. That is he's and
he specifically says, on the front of the body. And
you know, he's already thinking about orientation. You know, when
she's found, she's in a prone position adjacent to the
bed in that second on that second floor bedroom, and
so he's you know, he's already thinking, you know, how
(14:26):
did this go down? But yet you go over to
Andrew Borden, her husband, and of course.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Joe I got to ask you this because well, we know,
based on what we've already learned that that she was
hit in the face, in the head right on the
side she was facing her attacker.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Well, yeah, at least the initial blow they think, okay,
so you've got this kind of and he describes it
as a it's a superior Remember I talked about he
uses the term ear hole right, which you know a
modern doctors would say the left miatus or the external
(15:12):
auditory canal. And that strike is on the left side.
I think that probably they were thinking after she is
struck on the left side and they just they describe
it as as a glancing blow, so it would not
have necessarily have been a fatal blow, at least in
the immediate and he actually says it doesn't penetrate the skull.
(15:34):
It's when she spins around. And maybe, Dave, you know,
you have a lot of people that are attacked and
the first thing that they will do is, and I
think it's a problemal response, is they turn their back
to their attacker. They almost they almost take on the
appearance of a turtle shell. You know, they give you
their back. They're protecting the very delicate area on the
(15:56):
front of their body. So maybe it's spun her around
she struck. She does in fact have a contusion on
her nose, but I think that might be an impact
injury from just going straight down to the floor.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
See I was thinking a hatchet. Well actually in my
head I was thinking AXX, but in a hatchet sense.
If you're swinging an axe, you're coming down all the
way across the head, down the body. That's why I
was kind of thinking there would be some marking on
the body. But with a hatchet in your hand, you know,
one hand on the hatchet, you wouldn't you'd have more control.
It doesn't have nearly the weight, it doesn't have nearly
(16:27):
the strength to hit, and so yeah, it would stop
and go. If it was to be a glancing blowing,
you know, bouncing off and not hitting the bone, it
would not come down, it would go to the side.
So that makes sense, now.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yeah, it does. And keep in mind a hatchet back
during this period of Tom Dave, this is a very
standard implement that you would find a home. And let
me tell you why. My great grandmother used to complain
about my grandmother because she had a big family, and
she would say, my grandmother's maid names Killian. She said
(17:02):
every time those damned killions. Kill a chicken, everybody shows
up at the house. Well, what she meant, well, first off,
she didn't like big crowds, and my grandmother did. She
loved to have all of her family over. But what
that meant in that generation is that it was very
common of particularly more rural areas, to keep chickens and
(17:25):
to cut their heads off and you know, dress them
out for dinner. So the ladies of the house, they
were well aware of how to use a hatchet. You know,
they could use it for any number of things. Also,
if you had an ice box, you would chip ice,
you would use a hatchet to chip ice with. You
would cut kindling with it. Just to get a fire
started in the kitchen. You know, we're not talking about
(17:46):
a roaring fire. We're talking about if you've got an
oven that requires firewood. You're going to be adept at
using this. So whoever used this thing probably has been
using it for a while. They would be rather skilled
with it. And of course the handle on it near
as long as an axe handle, much easier to manage.
That's why hatchets for a long time were used in warfare,
(18:09):
because you can use them in close quarters combat. So
it's an interesting weapon, to say the very least. Dave
makes it.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
That makes a lot more sense, though, and I'm glad
you were able to explain it because I was trying
to in my head figure this out. All right, So
now after the autopsy of the fleshy somewhat OBEs Yeah,
sixty four year old missus bordon right, what happens? Because
(18:37):
this is just the autopsy and we've still got to do,
mister Borden. But at some point in time they removed
the skulls. Do they do that during autopsy or is
this done later on?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
No, My suspicion is is that they You're not going
to go back in and create a new mess after
you've cleaned up one mess. So one fail sweep and
don't nobody out there. I don't want you to think
that that this is not a beheading. This is a beheading.
(19:10):
It's a beheading, a decapitation in a clinical sense. And
I can't really say how neat and clean it would be.
I can tell you this. There would have been sharp
instruments that would have been used to cut down through
the fleshy areas in the neck until they can get
to the rear attachments running running up to support the
(19:33):
skull in the rear, and you have to trim away
all of the tissue. You go in with scalpels and
you're going to make you're going to make those little
tiny incisions to get rid of any of the ligaments,
the tendons, all of those attaching structures that are in there.
Free that up, cut through the muscle, and then at
(19:56):
that point in time they would not necessarily have had
to have used a saw because you can go through
you can actually go through the disc in the back
on the neck and cut through there and they have
little attachments too. If you can free those up, you
can decapitate a body. Remember we've talked about this quite
(20:18):
a bit with dismemberment, and this is the case where
you've got medical professionals for that time that had the
tools at their disposal in order to be able to
facilitate this. And so you know, and that's kind of interesting.
Most people don't think about, you know, a decapitation taking place,
but for evidentiary benefit, it would after you have cleaned
(20:40):
up this body. And when I say cleaned up, kind
of closed, sewed the body up, gotten the body ready
for whatever the family is going to do with the
body at that point in time. I think one interesting
element here I can't imagine that they would have even
considered having an open casket for this. My suspicion is
(21:03):
is that they would have taken the heads immediately and
defleshed them in some way that can either be boiling,
or the really hard route is to actually go in
and strip the tissue off of there. Manually. It's very
difficult to free up because you don't just have muscle
laying on top of bone. You have what's called fascia.
(21:23):
And if anybody who's ever heard of fasci itis, it's
an inflammation of that connective tissue that runs between the
muscle and the bone. Essentially, it's kind of white. If
you've ever taken out ribs from the grocery store, it's
got kind of a white film on it, and that's
stripped off. If you ever go to a barbecue or
(21:44):
something like, that's fascia, and so you've got this kind
of connection that has to be stripped away as well.
It's a lot easier if these elements are boiled and
you can render them down. My suspicion is that's what
they had to do. And keep in mind as well,
the skulls, Dave, and we've talked about this already, because
that's what is so striking to me about this. They
(22:05):
used both of these skulls at trial. These people were decomposing.
They were decomposing, So you're not going to bring a
skull into a courtroom that is emitting this foul odor.
It would have been cleaned thoroughly and then set up.
(22:26):
You know, it was roughly, I think roughly a year
between the actual homicides and the trial itself, so they
had time to secure these skulls and bring them in.
But I do know this, I know that they had
put great thought into what they were going to do.
They knew that they were going to prosecute this case.
(22:50):
And the only thing that we have to really think
about here who was the actual target? Was it abby
or was it ander? It It's an interesting thing as
(23:16):
you age, those things that you put a value on
when you were younger, maybe even a kid, they just
don't hold the same as they once did now at
the point in life that I'm at, Dave. You know
what I truly enjoy in the afternoon if I can
go home and either sit in my recliner or on
(23:39):
my sofa in my living room. By the way, Kim
bought a buffalo hide leather sofa. I don't ask no questions.
I just say I like it and anyway, but it's
good for sleeping. I can lay on this thing and
there's something peaceful about it. It's different than taking a
(23:59):
nap on your I thought about this because of Andrew Borden.
Did you see that picture of his body where he
has reclined on that sofa and can you imagine he's
kind of got he's kind of kicked back on the
you know, on the surface.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I'm so glad you just said that, because Andrew Borden
went out for a walk. If you remember, at nine am,
after breakfast they had their company relative who was with him.
He went off and did his business. Andrew went for
his normal walk and returns around ten thirty. Now by
ten thirty, Abby Borden is upstairs dead. She's been hagitted
(24:38):
to death and according to their maid, the Irish twenty
five year old, she claims that when mister Borden returned
from his walk, she actually helped take his boots off
and put his house slippers on. However, the picture Joe's
talking about, which, by the way, it is available, you
can see it. He shows mister Borden is clearly wearing
(25:03):
his boots, his walking boots. Now, does that go to
a lie of misunderstanding a miss? You know, that's what
she normally did when he returned from his walk. But
does it also maybe lean towards he came in the
door and was attacked before he got on the couch.
I mean, what could have happened? What do the boots
(25:23):
say to you, Joseph Scott Morgan based on what you
know about how his body was found on that couch reclining.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, well he's he's fully he's fully clothed, all right,
And yeah, I mean I'm literally looking at these shoes
right now that are, as you stated, on his feet.
And for those that haven't seen it, when you observe
Andrew Borden's body, his feet are bilaterally resting on the floor, okay,
(25:56):
and he is listening to his right. So if you
imagine you're sin on your sofa and at your waist,
just kind of cock yourself over to the right, to
the right side. And his head is actually on a
pillow As a matter of fact, the right aspect of
his head is contacting a pillow that's also contacting his
(26:18):
right shoulder, so he's kind of leaning into the into
this pillow. It's an odd position to be in. I
got to tell you, you know how I made reference
to my naps, dude, brother, let me tell you something.
Shoes are coming off, might be in my sock feet,
might not. My little dog will probably hop up on
my chest. I'm going to lay there, uh, and I'm
(26:40):
going to be fully supported on the sofa, same way
my recliner. I'm not going to get in this kind
of odd pretzel like position that he's in. And when
you look at this position, I think that you know,
the first thought is, well, was he in fact was
he in fact asleep dozing? Or was he seated upright?
(27:05):
And then attacked and kind of went over to decide.
I don't know. I'm just looking at this, Dave, and
I got to tell you, it doesn't look like the
most comfortable position to, you know, to catch a cat
nap in. I don't know. Maybe maybe he had the
ability to do that, but look, man, it's my house.
I know that you've got this kind of Victorian where
(27:27):
they call it propriety. Back then, you know where you
didn't take your shoes off, You walked around with a
tie on all the time. You know you're not going
to sit around. But man, he's where are your house slippers?
This is a rich guy. I always imagine he had
house slippers that were like embroidered with gold thread or something.
Of course, he was supposedly a tightwad, right, so exactly
(27:50):
I don't know. I don't know. It's an excellent point
that you bring up, and certainly something to be considered here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
And it has everything to do with at trial there
were issues. So let's go right now. We have Andrew Borden,
and I'm looking at the picture that you were describing.
I'm looking at it right now. You're the legal death investigator,
and you're coming into this where you're not having to
figure out a whole lot about where he died. It
(28:18):
doesn't look like he was killed someplace and drug over
there and placed on the couch. But is that a possibility.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
I think that it would be very very difficult. As
a matter of fact, if he were killed somewhere else, Dave,
you would have to take claws rags, towels, whatever, and
wrap them around this guy's head. Okay, in order to
transport him. And again you're creating new evidence by doing that.
You'd have to incinerate it. Of course, there's been talk
(28:46):
that there had been a fire, of things being burned
in order to move him from one location to another.
Now I don't know his weight. They don't really talk
about a you know, they don't give a description of
his size as far as his weight goes. However, Dave,
(29:07):
he's five eleven and for this period of time, that's
a that's a pretty pretty good sized guy. I mean,
you think the average Civil War soldier, which was thirty
years earlier prior to this was the average soldier was
five to eight in height. This guy's five to eleven. Yeah. Wow.
(29:27):
And I think they roughly weighed about one hundred and
forty pounds. So this guy is seventy years old and
he's still five to eleven. And you know what they say,
as you get older, you shrink, You're you know, you're
not going to maintain the same height for a variety
of different reasons, gravity for one. And really all that
we know about him is that he is in an
(29:51):
advanced state of decomposition. They do, in fact, find that
he's got a hernia. Uh that's on his right side,
which is kind of interesting. Uh. I don't know what
they had to do back then for hernial repair. And
he he like his wife, has got artificial teeth in
(30:13):
his upper jaw. So you know, I'm sure that people
fall asleep with dentures. But to me, my gag reflects
would kick in if I'm going to take it now.
I got to tell you, man, those puppies are coming out.
I'd be so afraid I was going to choke on
these things. But he has he has dave again, no
(30:34):
marks of violence on his body. Yeah, and doctor doctor
Dolan makes reference to that again, which is something that
we do in the modern context. Really has no, Yeah,
he has no signs of violence on his body. And
then he goes on to say, but on the left
side of head and face there are numerous and sized wounds,
(30:55):
one contoosed one one contoosed wound which means it's bruised,
which this happened in life, and that same wound penetrates
into the brain. All right, So no other signs of
violence this this event day when you're talking about him
being attacked is solely taking place on his head. He's
(31:21):
being hammered over and over and over again. And this
is dramatic. Now, as I'd said previously, Dave, there are
not forty one injuries here, They're not. They're literally ten
for him. And again going back to Abby, Abby had
(31:45):
far more than Andrew had. As a matter of fact,
she had total of eighteen. So if we you know,
if you begin to you know, you begin to think
about targeting here. You know, you know, we're mad at Dad,
but boy, we're really mad at stepmom here. And I
don't know if we can actually, you know, even draw
conclusion about that. But there was a lot more violence
(32:07):
directed at this fleshy woman who's only five foot three
inches tall as opposed to this man who is, you know,
almost six feet tall, and he's laying there fully clothed.
You know, you would think that he might present as
a more formidable, you know, aggressor, but he has fewer
(32:34):
bits of trauma, but it is focalized, so he's he
is in a position day where once he is is
hammered with this hatchet and this is cutting literally through
his face. You know, some of these injuries. You know, Dave,
this first injury they talk about. Let me tell you
(32:56):
how gruesome this thing is. The left nasal bones to
the left side of your nose, all the way down
to the lower edge of your jaw, cutting through the nose,
the upper lip, the lower lip, and slightly into the
bone of the upper and lower jaw. This is a
(33:17):
powerful blow. So he took this thing on the left aspect,
to the left of the mid line, right in the face.
And I can't say, because remember what we have said
before on body bags, and in this case in particular,
just because the pathologist gives you an enumeration of injuries
(33:38):
that does not correlate to the sequence. All they're doing
is merely giving it a number. This is injury one,
This is injury two, this is injury three, and so
forth and so on. That doesn't mean that they're sequenced
in that way. But the injuries that he sustained were
so incredibly ghastly. And you know, we talked about rendering down,
(34:00):
rendering down his skull for presentation. Dave, let me tell
you something, and I urge anybody that has a strong
stomach to go and look at these images of these
skulls that are rendered down, because when you see Andrew's skull,
the left side of his face, including his eye socket
all the way down to his jaw, is completely caved in.
(34:24):
I mean, it is just it's like the Red Sea
being parted here. And you can tell it was a
powerful weapon that did this. This almost looks like the
type of wound that you would see in combat, like
in ancient combat, where they're using heavy bladed instruments to
drive this instrument into a structure on the face the
(34:49):
body and that sort of thing. It actually reminded me
a little bit. You remember when we did the King
in the car park and we were talking about Richard
IID and he had that big area on the backside
and the right occput of his head. When they recovered
King Richard the third skull, it had literally been sliced
in two. And those weapons that they used back then
(35:11):
were very, very heavy, So you could take something like
a hatchet of battle axe or something like that and
really compare these injuries that the Borden sustained to those
injuries that would have occurred several centuries earlier before the
advent of firearms. These are brutal brutal injuries. Dave.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
When you see mister Borden on the couch picture, you know,
you look at his head and it looks like if
you saw Men in Black three, when Tommy Lee Jones
uses a pan to beat the head and he mashes
the guy's melon into the floor. That's what it looks like.
It looks like his head has been flattened. And when
(35:49):
you look at the skull you see why it looked
that way. But as I'm looking at this, my biggest
question mark, and it's more of a Nancy Grace question,
why did they need to bring this into trial? It
just seems that two things are going to happen. One
(36:11):
the jurors going to think, no woman would do that
to her own father. No daughter would do her father
like that. It's horrible. Now some crazed guy who's illegal
alien from Portugal, maybe the Portuguese fisherman who had, you know,
killed somebody by chopping their head all the bits two
(36:31):
months earlier, maybe that was him. This looks like something
a man would do, not a woman.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
But that had come up previously, and you begin to
think about would a would a man? It would to
speak more of the crime of a man, and particularly
during this time. I'm very fascinated by the fact that
we're right in the heart of the Victorian era and
(36:56):
it would I think that it would give anybody pause
back during that time. And this is a great point
that you make, that is it possible that a young
woman and not young women strike that actually very Uh
she's she's a spencer at this time by she's thirty
(37:18):
by the conventions of that time though, and her sister, yes,
she's forty one. Would would they would she be capable
of doing this? And I'm not just talking about physically,
you know, because keep in mind what what happened in
court when they brought the skulls out. She fainted. She
(37:39):
fainted in court, you know, so what what would be
the motivation? And again back to Victorian propriety here, the
fact that they're actually bringing in human skulls of citizens
that were like of of rank in this little community.
It's not about it Loan Bank, Yeah, I mean, everybody
(38:02):
knew and people dealt with him when he's on his
daily walk. Hey mister Gordon, how are you today, sir?
You know that sort of thing. But yet here we
are and you're staring at their skulls in the courtroom.
It's kind of a it's almost like through the looking glass,
because you would not expect this type of thing to
take place in this environment. And that's for me, this
(38:27):
one piece of evidence, and going back to what you
said about a lawyer question, what would be what would
be the reason? Because I would never presume to speak
on behalf of the queen, Miss Grace. However, I think
that even she would say that this was inflammatory. So
(38:48):
what would be the motivation behind doing this? I don't know,
and I you know, I got to tell you, I
don't know that we will ever know, But what we
can understand is that it makes for one heck of
a story. And again it comes back to the fact
that out of all the cases that maybe have been
(39:12):
covered in the history of American crime annals, this one
might be the coldest of them all. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags
Quality vous with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of the things
that I love about autopsy reports that predate modern times,
and certainly both of the Borden's autopsy reports do that, indeed,
is that they transport you back to a time where
(00:26):
I think that many of us have so placed this
case on a pedestal, so kind of sealed it in
the past, that we don't really fully appreciate true violence.
And guess what, the violence in the eighteen nineties was
(00:49):
just as real as it is in the twenty first century.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body bags. Dave,
give me, give me this timeframe again. The homicides took place.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
In August fourth, at well between nine thirty in the
morning and eleven fifteen, and the autopsies took place. That
was on August fourth. The autopsies took place seven days later,
on August eleventh, at eleven fifteen am.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
So we're talking seven it's seven days later, yeah, seven
days later. And this is in August. And I don't
care if it is Massacusetts. August is warm all right,
by the way, beautiful places go. I haven't been to
Fall River, but i've been to Massachusetts in the summertime.
The weather compared to Alabama is delicious that time of year.
(01:48):
I mean, it's it's really really pleasant. Well, it's unclear
as to why it necessarily took this much time. I'm
assuming that they had to find somebody that they felt
like that was a medical examiner qualified medical examiner. By
the way, state of Massachusetts is the first place in
the Union to use the term medical examiner, and this
(02:11):
happened back in the eighteen seventies. They were also one
of the first states to do away with the office
of corner. Isn't that fascinating, And so you kind of
got this evolution going on. There's a lot of forensic
tie backs here in this case that are quite fascinating
historically anyway. So it took them seven days. So when
(02:32):
you begin to read both Abby and Andrews autopsy reports,
it's obvious, I mean literally in the first paragraph they
talk about he doesn't use his term, but the term
is actually flaccid, and flaccid means limp, it means not rigid,
(02:52):
and the pro sector here is saying that both bodies
are not stiff, they're both flaccid as a result of decomposition.
So by the time the doctor puts the coal steel
to both of these bodies, they're already in a state
of decay. Dave, They've already begun to break down. And
(03:18):
I find this absolutely fascinating that they weren't able to
get to these bodies sooner than seven days down range.
From let's face it, all right, I don't know what
else was going on in August of eighteen ninety two
in Fall River, but I would imagine everybody in the
in the you know, in the surrounding countryside had heard
(03:40):
about this by this time. This is top of the news,
all right, and that this took so long to get
these pro sections done. It's just a fascinating thing that we,
you know, you think about in the modern context. It's
quite amazing. And as a matter of fact, you know,
(04:01):
I talked about the extensive head injuries that both these
individuals sustained, and that's primarily where this trauma is in dwelling, Dave,
they had decomposed so much that both of the brains
had liquefied. Really, yeah, they had begun to liquefy, and
they the brain was removed through the defects. Essentially now
(04:24):
when you look at I think it's Andrews Andrew's image,
the one image of his skull, you can see this
kind of linear incision that's been made that looks like
a circumferential, you know, incision that you would make like
with a modern saw. They would have used handsaws back then.
(04:45):
I've actually had to use a handsaw on skull and
it's not fun. My saw went out, my electric saw.
It's a laborious undertaking to make your way through a
human skull with a handsaw. That's what they would have
been using. Uh, But I don't know if they thought
that it was better to take it out this way.
(05:07):
And one of the problems with this is that when
you're not doing a fresh autopsy on somebody with trauma,
the brain does, in fact really begin to break down.
It's one of the organs that does, in fact, because
it's real. The brain in the brain anyway is I
know some people take exception of this, but it's I've
(05:27):
always thought of thought of it as kind of gelaginous,
you know, it's kind of you know, it's it's very
fatty and it's very greasy, uh, and it begins to
kind of break down anyway. To me, it breaks down
quicker than any other organ in the body. You know,
you can go to the liver and liver will be
kind of greasy and that sort of thing if it's decomposed,
(05:47):
but it's still it still has kind of a firmness
to it, kind of bounces back, you know when you
touch it. Not not the brain so much. It liquefies.
And so when you're trying to assess like hemorrhage, like
you if you've got a strike with a sharp instrument
or a blunted instrument, you have to appreciate underlying hemorrhage. Well,
(06:10):
that's really hard to do on something that's liquefied. So
I'm not saying that their conclusions are speculative. They're not,
because you've got evidence that the skull has literally been
in sized and blunt force fractured. But it makes it
a bit tougher, you know, if you're trying to do
(06:31):
like a nuanced dissection. But back to you know, back
to Andrew Andrew. Now, what was that number for Andrew
Andrew was he was forty one? Right? Well, actually he's eleven.
He's got eleven documented insults to his head, right, wow.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, But Joe, they waited a week seven days between
the time of the strikes on the head and the
time they're actually looking at what would have had happened
to those injuries. Wouldn't they as part of the process
of decomp wouldn't they really look considerably different than they
did when they first happened.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Yeah, but you could still appreciate that there was that
there was anti mortem hemorrhage in there. Okay, you know
like that these are not like like you can separate
out by eyeball in it. Okay, you can actually eyeball
it and delineate somebody. That's really good. They can delineate
between anti mortem injuries and post mortem changes. Now, this
(07:36):
is the one thing that you run into problems with
where you have open injuries like that decomposition is will
kind of affect that area more than say a closed area.
All right, so it's going to change it. But if
you've got a keen eye for it, and you've done
enough cases, you can make that delineation and say, yet,
(07:59):
this is I can see the margins here, I can
see this little area of hemorrhage, and I can assess
that this is an anti mortem injury at this stage now, Dude,
if they had gone on for like over a month
for this, it would have been much more of an
uphill climb for them, I think. And they're not They're
(08:21):
not going into These autopsy reports are in no way
as and not insulting, you know, the ancestors here, but
they are in no way as detailed as as ours
are today as But I got to tell you some
of the autopsy reports I reviewed, it modern ones compared
(08:43):
to what they did to Andrew and Abbey. I'd rather
have this guy doing the autopsies than some of the
people that I've seen that have generated some of the
garbage I reviewed, you know, over that's been sent in
my way as a result of stuff that we're covering
in the news and whatnot. But yes, so Andrew had
eleven and it's fascinating. And I say this tongue in cheek.
(09:09):
Missus Borden, Missus Borden actually had eighteen injuries. Oh wow.
And the speculation is is that she was killed first. Dave,
(09:35):
you know, we talked quite a bit about Abby Borden's
autopsy report and something that kind of struck me. I
wanted to point out to you about about miss Borden's
autopsy report is that it's not just about injuries with her.
(09:57):
It also gives you kind of this let's say it's
probably it probably wouldn't be good for me to say
slice of life, but it kind of gives you an
insight into these people are real. You know, you just
think about the injuries that we've seen. Let me give
you for instance, you know, kind of reflecting back. We
have to remember these autopsies were done roughly a week
(10:19):
after the homicides had taken place, so they've been sitting
up in a family crypt. There is no cult storage
for bodies. This is a location where bodies are kept
during the winter months until they can bring them out
and bury them in the you know, in the iced
over soil. And so when you begin to read into
(10:43):
this report, you learn a little bit about missus Bordon
Abbey Board and that is and and she's sixty four
years old. They describe her, and you don't hear this
term in modern in modern parlance, they describe her as
being very well nourished and you're ready for this day, fleshy, flesh, fat. Yeah, yeah,
(11:04):
that's that's essentially what they're saying. Now that they're p yeah, no,
no kid in fleshy and I so she.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Could have been on the Biggest Loser, right.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah, I guess so, you know perhaps, And you know,
the thing about it is is that you know, now
in modern times, we give these very specific measurements, you know,
for bodies in the morgue. She measures out at five
foot three, but we have no idea how much she weighs.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So for them, that would have been super impolite.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah. Perhaps I don't know, or maybe they just did
not have the ability in a crypt to place a
body onto a scale because obviously back then we didn't
have digital scales. We didn't have a floor scale that
would have been portable to bring it there. You know,
nowadays you just take a body and you wheel it
(11:53):
up onto a floor scale and it gives you a
digital reading. They didn't have that ability. You'd have to
go to someplace like a warehouse or something to get
a weight. And that's just kind of fascinating to me.
And they actually talk about her her dentition, which is
it's kind of fascinating. They talk about how she's got
(12:16):
artificial teeth in her jaw. Well, that's something that you
know most people you don't consider it, but her teeth
are present. That gives you an idea that a peek
into her life. She's working around the house that day,
she's not going to walk around without her teeth in,
you know, she might take them out at bedtime.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I looked it up when I saw the As we
were preparing this, I didn't know very much about the case,
and so I educated myself a little bit on the
family dynamic. And I saw that about the teeth, and
I thought, well, I don't think about dentures other than
George Washington's made out of wood or walris or whatever
(12:54):
they used, you know, and him having his dentist on
the battleground with him, you know, so he always looked
because his teeth always are. And I looked at these.
They're not that dissimilar from what we have today in
terms of denters. They look like teeth. They don't look
like something that you'd be embarrassed to wear and be
better than having nothing. But anyway, I just was I
(13:15):
I don't know what I was thinking about, but I
didn't expect them to look like a real set of denters.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, and so, yeah, and you know, dentistry obviously since
this point, time has come a long way, but they
did have dentures, and you know some of these dental
appliances back then, well they would be enough to you know,
to how do they say, make your blood curdle? I
guess if you looked at it and you thought, I'm
going to stick that in my mouth. But you know,
(13:41):
it does, in fact give you an insight into her life.
And here's the other thing that's significant that does actually
Dave marry up with something that you and I talk
about regularly on body bags, and that's the fact that
doctor Dolan, who is actually the medical examiner in this case,
he makes reference to the fact that there are no
(14:04):
marks of violence on Abby's body. That is he's and
he specifically says, on the front of the body. And
you know, he's already thinking about orientation. You know, when
she's found, she's in a prone position adjacent to the
bed in that second on that second floor bedroom, and
so he's you know, he's already thinking, you know, how
(14:26):
did this go down? But yet you go over to
Andrew Borden, her husband, and of course.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Joe I got to ask you this because well, we know,
based on what we've already learned that that she was
hit in the face, in the head right on the
side she was facing her attacker.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Well, yeah, at least the initial blow they think, okay,
so you've got this kind of and he describes it
as a it's a superior Remember I talked about he
uses the term ear hole right, which you know a
modern doctors would say the left miatus or the external
(15:12):
auditory canal. And that strike is on the left side.
I think that probably they were thinking after she is
struck on the left side and they just they describe
it as as a glancing blow, so it would not
have necessarily have been a fatal blow, at least in
the immediate and he actually says it doesn't penetrate the skull.
(15:34):
It's when she spins around. And maybe, Dave, you know,
you have a lot of people that are attacked and
the first thing that they will do is, and I
think it's a problemal response, is they turn their back
to their attacker. They almost they almost take on the
appearance of a turtle shell. You know, they give you
their back. They're protecting the very delicate area on the
(15:56):
front of their body. So maybe it's spun her around
she struck. She does in fact have a contusion on
her nose, but I think that might be an impact
injury from just going straight down to the floor.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
See I was thinking a hatchet. Well actually in my
head I was thinking AXX, but in a hatchet sense.
If you're swinging an axe, you're coming down all the
way across the head, down the body. That's why I
was kind of thinking there would be some marking on
the body. But with a hatchet in your hand, you know,
one hand on the hatchet, you wouldn't you'd have more control.
It doesn't have nearly the weight, it doesn't have nearly
(16:27):
the strength to hit, and so yeah, it would stop
and go. If it was to be a glancing blowing,
you know, bouncing off and not hitting the bone, it
would not come down, it would go to the side.
So that makes sense, now.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yeah, it does. And keep in mind a hatchet back
during this period of Tom Dave, this is a very
standard implement that you would find a home. And let
me tell you why. My great grandmother used to complain
about my grandmother because she had a big family, and
she would say, my grandmother's maid names Killian. She said
(17:02):
every time those damned killions. Kill a chicken, everybody shows
up at the house. Well, what she meant, well, first off,
she didn't like big crowds, and my grandmother did. She
loved to have all of her family over. But what
that meant in that generation is that it was very
common of particularly more rural areas, to keep chickens and
(17:25):
to cut their heads off and you know, dress them
out for dinner. So the ladies of the house, they
were well aware of how to use a hatchet. You know,
they could use it for any number of things. Also,
if you had an ice box, you would chip ice,
you would use a hatchet to chip ice with. You
would cut kindling with it. Just to get a fire
started in the kitchen. You know, we're not talking about
(17:46):
a roaring fire. We're talking about if you've got an
oven that requires firewood. You're going to be adept at
using this. So whoever used this thing probably has been
using it for a while. They would be rather skilled
with it. And of course the handle on it near
as long as an axe handle, much easier to manage.
That's why hatchets for a long time were used in warfare,
(18:09):
because you can use them in close quarters combat. So
it's an interesting weapon, to say the very least. Dave
makes it.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
That makes a lot more sense, though, and I'm glad
you were able to explain it because I was trying
to in my head figure this out. All right, So
now after the autopsy of the fleshy somewhat OBEs Yeah,
sixty four year old missus bordon right, what happens? Because
(18:37):
this is just the autopsy and we've still got to do,
mister Borden. But at some point in time they removed
the skulls. Do they do that during autopsy or is
this done later on?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
No, My suspicion is is that they You're not going
to go back in and create a new mess after
you've cleaned up one mess. So one fail sweep and
don't nobody out there. I don't want you to think
that that this is not a beheading. This is a beheading.
(19:10):
It's a beheading, a decapitation in a clinical sense. And
I can't really say how neat and clean it would be.
I can tell you this. There would have been sharp
instruments that would have been used to cut down through
the fleshy areas in the neck until they can get
to the rear attachments running running up to support the
(19:33):
skull in the rear, and you have to trim away
all of the tissue. You go in with scalpels and
you're going to make you're going to make those little
tiny incisions to get rid of any of the ligaments,
the tendons, all of those attaching structures that are in there.
Free that up, cut through the muscle, and then at
(19:56):
that point in time they would not necessarily have had
to have used a saw because you can go through
you can actually go through the disc in the back
on the neck and cut through there and they have
little attachments too. If you can free those up, you
can decapitate a body. Remember we've talked about this quite
(20:18):
a bit with dismemberment, and this is the case where
you've got medical professionals for that time that had the
tools at their disposal in order to be able to
facilitate this. And so you know, and that's kind of interesting.
Most people don't think about, you know, a decapitation taking place,
but for evidentiary benefit, it would after you have cleaned
(20:40):
up this body. And when I say cleaned up, kind
of closed, sewed the body up, gotten the body ready
for whatever the family is going to do with the
body at that point in time. I think one interesting
element here I can't imagine that they would have even
considered having an open casket for this. My suspicion is
(21:03):
is that they would have taken the heads immediately and
defleshed them in some way that can either be boiling,
or the really hard route is to actually go in
and strip the tissue off of there. Manually. It's very
difficult to free up because you don't just have muscle
laying on top of bone. You have what's called fascia.
(21:23):
And if anybody who's ever heard of fasci itis, it's
an inflammation of that connective tissue that runs between the
muscle and the bone. Essentially, it's kind of white. If
you've ever taken out ribs from the grocery store, it's
got kind of a white film on it, and that's
stripped off. If you ever go to a barbecue or
(21:44):
something like, that's fascia, and so you've got this kind
of connection that has to be stripped away as well.
It's a lot easier if these elements are boiled and
you can render them down. My suspicion is that's what
they had to do. And keep in mind as well,
the skulls, Dave, and we've talked about this already, because
that's what is so striking to me about this. They
(22:05):
used both of these skulls at trial. These people were decomposing.
They were decomposing, So you're not going to bring a
skull into a courtroom that is emitting this foul odor.
It would have been cleaned thoroughly and then set up.
(22:26):
You know, it was roughly, I think roughly a year
between the actual homicides and the trial itself, so they
had time to secure these skulls and bring them in.
But I do know this, I know that they had
put great thought into what they were going to do.
They knew that they were going to prosecute this case.
(22:50):
And the only thing that we have to really think
about here who was the actual target? Was it abby
or was it ander? It It's an interesting thing as
(23:16):
you age, those things that you put a value on
when you were younger, maybe even a kid, they just
don't hold the same as they once did now at
the point in life that I'm at, Dave. You know
what I truly enjoy in the afternoon if I can
go home and either sit in my recliner or on
(23:39):
my sofa in my living room. By the way, Kim
bought a buffalo hide leather sofa. I don't ask no questions.
I just say I like it and anyway, but it's
good for sleeping. I can lay on this thing and
there's something peaceful about it. It's different than taking a
(23:59):
nap on your I thought about this because of Andrew Borden.
Did you see that picture of his body where he
has reclined on that sofa and can you imagine he's
kind of got he's kind of kicked back on the
you know, on the surface.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I'm so glad you just said that, because Andrew Borden
went out for a walk. If you remember, at nine am,
after breakfast they had their company relative who was with him.
He went off and did his business. Andrew went for
his normal walk and returns around ten thirty. Now by
ten thirty, Abby Borden is upstairs dead. She's been hagitted
(24:38):
to death and according to their maid, the Irish twenty
five year old, she claims that when mister Borden returned
from his walk, she actually helped take his boots off
and put his house slippers on. However, the picture Joe's
talking about, which, by the way, it is available, you
can see it. He shows mister Borden is clearly wearing
(25:03):
his boots, his walking boots. Now, does that go to
a lie of misunderstanding a miss? You know, that's what
she normally did when he returned from his walk. But
does it also maybe lean towards he came in the
door and was attacked before he got on the couch.
I mean, what could have happened? What do the boots
(25:23):
say to you, Joseph Scott Morgan based on what you
know about how his body was found on that couch reclining.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, well he's he's fully he's fully clothed, all right,
And yeah, I mean I'm literally looking at these shoes
right now that are, as you stated, on his feet.
And for those that haven't seen it, when you observe
Andrew Borden's body, his feet are bilaterally resting on the floor, okay,
(25:56):
and he is listening to his right. So if you
imagine you're sin on your sofa and at your waist,
just kind of cock yourself over to the right, to
the right side. And his head is actually on a
pillow As a matter of fact, the right aspect of
his head is contacting a pillow that's also contacting his
(26:18):
right shoulder, so he's kind of leaning into the into
this pillow. It's an odd position to be in. I
got to tell you, you know how I made reference
to my naps, dude, brother, let me tell you something.
Shoes are coming off, might be in my sock feet,
might not. My little dog will probably hop up on
my chest. I'm going to lay there, uh, and I'm
(26:40):
going to be fully supported on the sofa, same way
my recliner. I'm not going to get in this kind
of odd pretzel like position that he's in. And when
you look at this position, I think that you know,
the first thought is, well, was he in fact was
he in fact asleep dozing? Or was he seated upright?
(27:05):
And then attacked and kind of went over to decide.
I don't know. I'm just looking at this, Dave, and
I got to tell you, it doesn't look like the
most comfortable position to, you know, to catch a cat
nap in. I don't know. Maybe maybe he had the
ability to do that, but look, man, it's my house.
I know that you've got this kind of Victorian where
(27:27):
they call it propriety. Back then, you know where you
didn't take your shoes off, You walked around with a
tie on all the time. You know you're not going
to sit around. But man, he's where are your house slippers?
This is a rich guy. I always imagine he had
house slippers that were like embroidered with gold thread or something.
Of course, he was supposedly a tightwad, right, so exactly
(27:50):
I don't know. I don't know. It's an excellent point
that you bring up, and certainly something to be considered here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
And it has everything to do with at trial there
were issues. So let's go right now. We have Andrew Borden,
and I'm looking at the picture that you were describing.
I'm looking at it right now. You're the legal death investigator,
and you're coming into this where you're not having to
figure out a whole lot about where he died. It
(28:18):
doesn't look like he was killed someplace and drug over
there and placed on the couch. But is that a possibility.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
I think that it would be very very difficult. As
a matter of fact, if he were killed somewhere else, Dave,
you would have to take claws rags, towels, whatever, and
wrap them around this guy's head. Okay, in order to
transport him. And again you're creating new evidence by doing that.
You'd have to incinerate it. Of course, there's been talk
(28:46):
that there had been a fire, of things being burned
in order to move him from one location to another.
Now I don't know his weight. They don't really talk
about a you know, they don't give a description of
his size as far as his weight goes. However, Dave,
(29:07):
he's five eleven and for this period of time, that's
a that's a pretty pretty good sized guy. I mean,
you think the average Civil War soldier, which was thirty
years earlier prior to this was the average soldier was
five to eight in height. This guy's five to eleven. Yeah. Wow.
(29:27):
And I think they roughly weighed about one hundred and
forty pounds. So this guy is seventy years old and
he's still five to eleven. And you know what they say,
as you get older, you shrink, You're you know, you're
not going to maintain the same height for a variety
of different reasons, gravity for one. And really all that
we know about him is that he is in an
(29:51):
advanced state of decomposition. They do, in fact, find that
he's got a hernia. Uh that's on his right side,
which is kind of interesting. Uh. I don't know what
they had to do back then for hernial repair. And
he he like his wife, has got artificial teeth in
(30:13):
his upper jaw. So you know, I'm sure that people
fall asleep with dentures. But to me, my gag reflects
would kick in if I'm going to take it now.
I got to tell you, man, those puppies are coming out.
I'd be so afraid I was going to choke on
these things. But he has he has dave again, no
(30:34):
marks of violence on his body. Yeah, and doctor doctor
Dolan makes reference to that again, which is something that
we do in the modern context. Really has no, Yeah,
he has no signs of violence on his body. And
then he goes on to say, but on the left
side of head and face there are numerous and sized wounds,
(30:55):
one contoosed one one contoosed wound which means it's bruised,
which this happened in life, and that same wound penetrates
into the brain. All right, So no other signs of
violence this this event day when you're talking about him
being attacked is solely taking place on his head. He's
(31:21):
being hammered over and over and over again. And this
is dramatic. Now, as I'd said previously, Dave, there are
not forty one injuries here, They're not. They're literally ten
for him. And again going back to Abby, Abby had
(31:45):
far more than Andrew had. As a matter of fact,
she had total of eighteen. So if we you know,
if you begin to you know, you begin to think
about targeting here. You know, you know, we're mad at Dad,
but boy, we're really mad at stepmom here. And I
don't know if we can actually, you know, even draw
conclusion about that. But there was a lot more violence
(32:07):
directed at this fleshy woman who's only five foot three
inches tall as opposed to this man who is, you know,
almost six feet tall, and he's laying there fully clothed.
You know, you would think that he might present as
a more formidable, you know, aggressor, but he has fewer
(32:34):
bits of trauma, but it is focalized, so he's he
is in a position day where once he is is
hammered with this hatchet and this is cutting literally through
his face. You know, some of these injuries. You know, Dave,
this first injury they talk about. Let me tell you
(32:56):
how gruesome this thing is. The left nasal bones to
the left side of your nose, all the way down
to the lower edge of your jaw, cutting through the nose,
the upper lip, the lower lip, and slightly into the
bone of the upper and lower jaw. This is a
(33:17):
powerful blow. So he took this thing on the left aspect,
to the left of the mid line, right in the face.
And I can't say, because remember what we have said
before on body bags, and in this case in particular,
just because the pathologist gives you an enumeration of injuries
(33:38):
that does not correlate to the sequence. All they're doing
is merely giving it a number. This is injury one,
This is injury two, this is injury three, and so
forth and so on. That doesn't mean that they're sequenced
in that way. But the injuries that he sustained were
so incredibly ghastly. And you know, we talked about rendering down,
(34:00):
rendering down his skull for presentation. Dave, let me tell
you something, and I urge anybody that has a strong
stomach to go and look at these images of these
skulls that are rendered down, because when you see Andrew's skull,
the left side of his face, including his eye socket
all the way down to his jaw, is completely caved in.
(34:24):
I mean, it is just it's like the Red Sea
being parted here. And you can tell it was a
powerful weapon that did this. This almost looks like the
type of wound that you would see in combat, like
in ancient combat, where they're using heavy bladed instruments to
drive this instrument into a structure on the face the
(34:49):
body and that sort of thing. It actually reminded me
a little bit. You remember when we did the King
in the car park and we were talking about Richard
IID and he had that big area on the backside
and the right occput of his head. When they recovered
King Richard the third skull, it had literally been sliced
in two. And those weapons that they used back then
(35:11):
were very, very heavy, So you could take something like
a hatchet of battle axe or something like that and
really compare these injuries that the Borden sustained to those
injuries that would have occurred several centuries earlier before the
advent of firearms. These are brutal brutal injuries. Dave.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
When you see mister Borden on the couch picture, you know,
you look at his head and it looks like if
you saw Men in Black three, when Tommy Lee Jones
uses a pan to beat the head and he mashes
the guy's melon into the floor. That's what it looks like.
It looks like his head has been flattened. And when
(35:49):
you look at the skull you see why it looked
that way. But as I'm looking at this, my biggest
question mark, and it's more of a Nancy Grace question,
why did they need to bring this into trial? It
just seems that two things are going to happen. One
(36:11):
the jurors going to think, no woman would do that
to her own father. No daughter would do her father
like that. It's horrible. Now some crazed guy who's illegal
alien from Portugal, maybe the Portuguese fisherman who had, you know,
killed somebody by chopping their head all the bits two
(36:31):
months earlier, maybe that was him. This looks like something
a man would do, not a woman.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
But that had come up previously, and you begin to
think about would a would a man? It would to
speak more of the crime of a man, and particularly
during this time. I'm very fascinated by the fact that
we're right in the heart of the Victorian era and
(36:56):
it would I think that it would give anybody pause
back during that time. And this is a great point
that you make, that is it possible that a young
woman and not young women strike that actually very Uh
she's she's a spencer at this time by she's thirty
(37:18):
by the conventions of that time though, and her sister, yes,
she's forty one. Would would they would she be capable
of doing this? And I'm not just talking about physically,
you know, because keep in mind what what happened in
court when they brought the skulls out. She fainted. She
(37:39):
fainted in court, you know, so what what would be
the motivation? And again back to Victorian propriety here, the
fact that they're actually bringing in human skulls of citizens
that were like of of rank in this little community.
It's not about it Loan Bank, Yeah, I mean, everybody
(38:02):
knew and people dealt with him when he's on his
daily walk. Hey mister Gordon, how are you today, sir?
You know that sort of thing. But yet here we
are and you're staring at their skulls in the courtroom.
It's kind of a it's almost like through the looking glass,
because you would not expect this type of thing to
take place in this environment. And that's for me, this
(38:27):
one piece of evidence, and going back to what you
said about a lawyer question, what would be what would
be the reason? Because I would never presume to speak
on behalf of the queen, Miss Grace. However, I think
that even she would say that this was inflammatory. So
(38:48):
what would be the motivation behind doing this? I don't know,
and I you know, I got to tell you, I
don't know that we will ever know, But what we
can understand is that it makes for one heck of
a story. And again it comes back to the fact
that out of all the cases that maybe have been
(39:12):
covered in the history of American crime annals, this one
might be the coldest of them all. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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