December 15, 2025 • 54 mins
When Rachel McCarthy James and her father wrote their best-selling book The Man from the Train, Rachel became fascinated with axes. Were they good weapons during murders? What kind of killer used them? She wrote the story of the axe in her book Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I mean, there's so much wrapped up in the acts
with this streak of insurgent power, something where people who
are disempowered can take it back under the guise of
labor and use it to strike out.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:55):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. When Rachel McCarthy James and
her father wrote their best selling book The Man from
(01:16):
the Train, Rachel became fascinated with axes. Were they actually
good weapons during murders or what kind of killer would
use them? She wrote about the story of the acts
in her book Whack Job, The History of axe murder,
and yes, we talk about Lizzie Borden. Tell me about
what your first interest was with axe murderers. I have
(01:40):
to assume it goes back to, you know, the book
that you did with your father, The Man from the Train. Yes,
give me a brief overview for anybody who doesn't know
that story. And then you know, I know you're a
researcher and then a writer on it.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Of course. Yeah, it's really kind of the companion piece
and the origin story for this book in a lot
of ways. So about twelve years ago, my dad, baseball
writer Bill James, had recently published his first true crime book,
Popular Crime, in which he talks about Lizzie Borden as
well as another famous axe murder, Helen Jewett, And so
(02:13):
he was looking into the Veleska axe murders. He had
seen a documentary about it and was like, I bet
I can find some more crimes. As he started looking
into it, he found one more crime and then he
was like, all right, well, this takes a lot of
messing around with different archival newspaper databases. I really don't
(02:33):
want to do that. I'm going to hire my daughter,
who recently graduated from college and it's a good researcher
to look into that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
In cheap, in cheap, I'm assuming.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
In cheap, yes, very cheap. And I needed a job
because I was moving back to my hometown where my
dad lives just a block away from him, and so
he hired me. And you know, my dad's had a
lot of projects. He's had so many different things where
he's like, I'm working on this, this is my next thing,
and then you ask him about it two weeks later
and he's like, don't ever mentioned that to me again.
I don't want to talk about that. Know that exactly.
(03:04):
We all have a lot of projects. I could know
how that goes. So I kind of thought that this
was going to be one of those where I worked
with him for a couple of weeks and then it
didn't really go anywhere. But almost immediately once I started
looking at this, I started finding a lot of events
that looked a lot like the Vellesca axe murders and
the other murders that had been identified by other researchers
(03:25):
like Beth Clennen Smith and the Rundles and at Eberley
as connected to this crime in June nineteen twelve, whereas
eight people were murdered in the middle of the night
with an axe with the back of the axe. So
I started looking for crimes that looked like that, and
almost immediately started finding quite a few of them. I
think I found ten or twelve events that ended up
(03:45):
in the book within a couple of weeks, and within
a couple of months. That research led me back to
eighteen ninety eight where Paul Mueller killed the Newton family
three people in west Brookfield, Massachusetts. We are pretty sure
it was him because he was there were they had
visitors that night the night before the Newtants were murdered,
(04:06):
and Paul was seen walking towards the train after the
murders were committed that night. So that's a pretty clear
clear case for his guilt. And there's a lot of
similarities between the Newtons and the Veleska axe murders, a
lot of weird things like locking the door after covering
the windows, putting bedclothes over the body, things like that.
(04:29):
So within a couple of months we knew that we
had a narrative here for sure. Throughout that one of
the things that we were looking for, and it was
just one on a list of things. It wasn't really
something that stood out. We were looking for big families
being killed in the middle of the night, isolated farmhouse,
trained nearby, clothes on the body, and one of the
(04:51):
last things, the big thing was the back of the
axe being used. So the axe was a consistent thing
throughout this. And we believe that Paul was a lumberjack.
We know it was a lumberjack, so he was using
the acts for his labor throughout this. And then he
would you know, there were axes everywhere in America at
this point in our country's history. Every working farm had one.
(05:15):
There was often one just left in the woodpile on
the back of the in the backyard. So he would
just pick up an axe from a neighbor's woodpile, break
into a house, kill the whole family, and then leave.
So that was that story. It's a very long book.
It's much longer than Whackjaw because there's just so many crimes.
He killed. We believe about one hundred people from eighteen
(05:37):
ninety eight to nineteen fourteen, so this was a very
active serial killer, mass murderer. And after we published the book,
while we were talking about it, I fin found myself
talking about an axe murderer a lot, and I started
noticing jokes about axe murderers in popular culture and just
(05:58):
people using it around me random as kind of like
a joke, And I was like, where's that come from?
Why is that a joke? Why is this phrase so sticky?
Why do we say axe murderer when we don't say
knife slayer or gun killer or anything like that. But
generally ax murderer has, you know, really stayed in the
(06:18):
lexicon well past the age when axes were a very
common instrument of violence, almost kind of emerging as the
acts stopped being such a major player in domestic violence
and other violent situations. And so I started looking into that.
(06:38):
I started wondering, what is it about that phrase? What
is it about the axe? And I started researching the
axe itself, which I didn't realize how far back it
went into history, that it's basically our first tool. And
I became fascinated by that and just started digging it down,
and I was writing an article about it, kind of
about just about the phrase ax murder, and once a
(07:01):
balloon to ten thousand words, I was like, all right,
I think I've got a book here. I think this
is a book I would like to read. And when
you think of a book you'd like to read that
doesn't exist yet, you should be the one to write it.
So I started going into that looking for different AX
murders that I could kind of collect into an overall narrative,
kind of like Mary Roach, and try and look at
(07:21):
it as a concept as well through these different narratives.
So that took a long time, and now after about
seven years, here I am.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
When you're describing sort of why X murderer is a
phrase we use. There's such a specific connotation to me,
a crazed, out of control person to me, because there's
so much blood, there has to be a now, you know,
I mean, I think a misconception would be is you
have to be strong to be an AX murder. You
can be a small, tiny person with you know, as
(07:50):
long as you have the right leverage and you've got
your hands in the right place, it can be very deadly,
very easily. But I really do think it is that
crazed person versus the serial strangler. And I often don't
think of the father who kills his whole family as
the person who's using the axe, even though I've done
(08:11):
several of those stories. It really feels more of like
the person kicking in the door and breaking in and
their hair is disheveled and they're you know, just wildly swinging.
So that image is very much like kind of like
the chainsaw massacre image.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
To me, it's funny you bring up chainsaws because that's
also an implement for wood cutting as well as murder.
But what's interesting to me is that chainsaw murderer. Chain
saws are not very often used in murder.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
You can't hide them, I mean, where do you go.
You can put a hatchet in your pocket.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Exactly, and it's loud as well, and it's also you know,
this is true to a certain extent of big axes,
less so hatchets and smaller, lighter implements, but you know,
it's hard to You're as likely to hurt yourself as
you are to hurt the other person with the chainsaw,
so you really don't see that being used very much
as natural implement or whereas the axe absolutely was very
(09:02):
much an implement of violence and as well as a
household tool. So to go back to your point about
the wilely swinging axe murderer, I want to address that
because I think it very very much gets to something
about the axe that's very true, which is the brutality
of it, the fact that you have to be really
up close and personal and really pretty. I mean, you know,
(09:24):
it's accessible for a lighter person, but you do have
to put a lot of force into it to make
that kind of impact on their head or neck or whatever.
So it is something that requires a lot of passion,
requires a lot of brutality, and it's very up close
and personal, especially contrasted with you know, sniper rifles or
drone strikes. And I think what it gets back to
(09:44):
in terms of a joke, I think it really goes
back to I mean the phrase is older than this,
but why it continues to persist into the twenty first century,
it's two reasons. First of all, the shining, I mean,
you can't that's what you're thinking of when you're thinking
of an axe murder. I think the less true for
a lot of people. Is as much as any real
axe murderer. You're thinking of Jack Nicholson, hair, crazy, manic,
(10:08):
breaking down that door. Absolutely. And then the comic element
of it, which has always been an element of the
phrase axe murderer. You know, going back to the forties
and fifties, we saw Raymond Chandler and sure Lee Johnson
using it as a joke. But what made it a
joke into the twenty first century parody by Simpsons and
things like that, what made it kind of a staple
was also the Mike Myers movie So I Married an Axemur.
(10:32):
That's what really brought it into our lex con which
is funny because it's not you know, it was a
lot of hit at the time. It's become a cult phenomenon,
but it's also very recognizable. I think most people have
heard of that movie at some point, even though it's
nearly forty years old at this point. And I think
that that, you know, it's such a goofy movie and
(10:53):
such an absurdist movie, and I think that brings a
little bit of it to that. But I wanted to
go back where I was going before or that, which
was to say that, you know, we have this image
of the axe murder, who's more like the man from
the Train Pomula, where it's randomly finding people extremely brutal.
But what I found in looking at this was not
(11:14):
that usually I kind of wanted to stay away from
serial killers after having such a long serial killer book.
But also what I found is that most axe murders
are not premeditated. Like most murders, it's an object of convenience.
That's why it was used so often in interpersonal conflict.
(11:34):
In interpersonal violence, it's because there was always one in hand.
That's true in like crime and punishment, Raskolnikov raps An
acts from the kitchen. Nothing could have been simpler. It's
simply because there were so many actses. They were so
heavily in labor, They had so many different applications, there
were so many different kinds of axes that it was
(11:55):
very likely that a labor setting, domestic setting, especially if
it was at all rural, there was going to be
at least one axe on the property, if not several axes.
So it's really just something that was grabbed in the
heat of the moment as much as something that was
a fetish, as it was for the man from the train.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Thinking about on history, you know, I've written a book
about the Great Smog of nineteen fifty two, which was
my first book that involved a serial killer who strangled,
so he's not actually part of the story, but you know,
I have to assume that with the emergence of coal
as the main fuel source, rather than would maybe actses
weren't as available as we start approaching, you know, the
(12:33):
twentieth century. Do you think that's right.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
One hundred percent. That's absolutely a huge part of it.
I mean, industrialization really took so many different applications for
the acts that had been there for thousands of years,
hundreds of thousands of years. I took that and it
made it into something that was quick, that did not
happen in your house, that was a mechanical process rather
(12:57):
than something you did personally. Heating your house is definitely
one of the primary applications for that, you know, the
switch to electric and coal heating rather than having to personally,
you know, not just chop down a tree for wood,
but then break down the wood into kindling was a
big task for which people would have access because even
(13:17):
if you bought the wood from somewhere else, you would
have to go and process it yourself to a certain extent.
But there's also you know, there's butchery, there's barrel making.
There's so many different applications that were once a part
of the home, once a part of normal labor process
where you would do it yourself. That were just taken
(13:39):
away from that. And in the mid century especially, one
of the things was that, you know, a lot of
the steel steel axe heads were melted down for the
World War II effort as well. In addition to that,
there's also the chainsaw, which we were talking about earlier.
You know, the chainsaw became really professionalized and also available
to home use in the mid century, especially the mid sixties.
(14:02):
Part of the appeal of axes, I think, and part
of the resurgence of them in the last twenty years
or so. We're seeing a resurgence of people who are
interested in acxes, people who are interested in using it
for hobby and for tearing for their home. You know,
that's part of returning like a reaction against technology, whereas
in the mid century people were very much wanting to
lean into technology. And the chainsaw seems so fun. It's
(14:26):
so you know, it's big and loud, it's kind of
like a motorcycle. So I think a lot of people
who were diy ing it or like doing repairs around
their home would want to go out and get that
the same way one hundred years earlier, they had wanted
to go out and get an axe, because that wasn't
as accessible as it had been, you know, in eighteen
sixty it was a lot more accessible than it wasn't
seventeen sixty. So it was a novelty to be able
(14:49):
to go out and buy this big axe for not
that much money and take it home and use it
however you want it. That's part of the story of
you know, George Washington and the Cherry Tree too, is
this little boy who's got the fascination with the axe,
wants to chop it down and play with it. By
the mid century, that novelty had definitely worn off, and
the chainsaw had a lot more novelty.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Well, you know, I was thinking about the axe as
a weapon. You can get hurt really easily. You're not
getting out of there most likely without getting blood all
over you, and you have to it's it's got to
be almost like unlike a gun. It's like hand to
hand combat. You have to get close enough to really
get the person, and you're risking whether you're a man
or a woman, the person catching the wood and you know,
(15:32):
being able to turn it on you. So like when
your theory about the crimes of passion that seems more
likely to me than somebody who just grabs an axe,
you know, with the intent of murdering people he doesn't
even know, because man, it's risky. And knives are risky
to me too, because you know, you can cut your
hand and all kinds of bad stuff. But the axe
(15:52):
just seems like so brutal that you're mad or something.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, especially with certain kinds of acts.
Is like the labyris the double sided axe. That's an
axe where it's got two different sides, which is great
for woodsmand because once one side gets dull, that can
just turn it around and keep going. But there's twice
it's twice as likely you're going to stick your own
axe in your back if you've used it a double
(16:17):
sided axe. And yeah, you have to be very careful
to not chop off your own toe when you are
using especially a big axe, but hatchets too. I mean,
you swing too hard and you can definitely make impact
with yourself.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
It's just risky. Don't you think it's risky as a weapon.
But again, your point is people are not thinking about risk.
They're just thinking they're mad. And this is the closest
thing to them.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Absolutely, yeah, And I think that's part of the interesting
thing about Lizzie Bordon too. One of the biggest mysteries
is that her dress was so clean after that. You
couldn't kill someone with an axe and have addressed that clean,
you know, ten minutes later. A very hard thing to imagine.
But also your point about get someone getting the axe
(16:59):
from that was a big element in the Betty Gore
Candy Montgomery murder. Was that probably Betty, who was the
victim there, introduced the acts into the confrontation and then
eventually Candy was able to wrest away from her. And
just you know, she was a small woman. We're talking
about how even small people can use a big axe
to do a lot of damage. She was a very
(17:20):
small woman, did not usually use an axe, and she
was able to hit Betty forty one times, which is
way more than Lizzie ever would have used. The acts
eighteen strikes altogether. For Lizzie, despite the forty.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Rumor the brutality of the acts, you know, every time
I hear struck forty one times, for a long time,
I just thought, conventional wisdom is this, this is overkilled.
This is very personal. But you know, my other show
Buried Bones with Paul Holes. He and I talk about it,
and he said a lot of times, it's not overkill,
it's you have to guarantee that this person's dead. They're
(17:55):
moving around, they're not just laying there unless they're asleep.
And so the number of of wax doesn't necessarily have
to be mad. It's scared. It's fear, like, oh my god,
this person. I have to leave this person dead for sure.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Adrenaline, and I think people who have and I think
that's especially true for people who have not used the
axe a lot. I think with people who have used
the acts more as a tool are a lot more
confident with it as a weapon. I would say, I
think the story of Tonna Cressen and William Tillman kind
(18:31):
of shows that both of them were very experienced with
the Tomahawk and the Coopers Acts respectively, and were able
to strike pretty true and kill them immediately, whereas people
who were less experienced with the acts, which I would
say is most of the most of the other killers
(18:53):
in the more modern section, Lizzie Borden, if that was her.
Fred Strobel, the La Child Lester was definitely a case
of that. He used several different weapons to make sure
that she was dead and wouldn't tell on him. Basically,
then Candy and Betty definitely that was a case where
the adrenaline from the confrontation was so intense that she
(19:16):
was just whacking and whacking until she was absolutely sure
that Betty was dead.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Since you just talked about Candy, let's talk about Candy,
so kind of set this whole thing up. How do
they know each other? Who are these people? So?
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore both went to the same
church in suburban Dallas in the late nineteen seventies early eighties.
These women were in their mid to late twenties, but
they were already coming up on basically midlife crises. They
both got married early on and settled into their marriages
(19:51):
and were feeling kind of bored and listless and not
unfulfilled by it. Betty was married to a real piece
of work guy named Alan Gore, who had an affair
with Candy Montgomery. Candy was much more popular, She was
more vivacious, prettier, if we're being honest, and she was
much more popular than Betty, and she decided she wanted
(20:12):
to have an affair because she was bored, and she
decided on Betty's husband because he seemed like a safe bet.
So they carried on this affair up through throughout Betty's
pregnancy and until after she had had the baby, and
then ended it soon after that. And throughout all this time, also,
Betty and Candy's children are becoming very very close friends,
(20:35):
so they're over at each other's houses all the time,
having sleepovers, going to movies, caring for each other's kids,
so their lives were very intertwined in more ways than
Betty knew. And then on June thirteenth, nineteen eighty, it
was Friday the thirteenth. Both The Shining and Friday the
Thirteenth had just come out in the movie theaters. Betty
(20:57):
was getting ready to go on kind of a second
honeymoon with Allan. They were planning a trip to Europe,
and her daughter was over at Candy's house and they
wanted to sleep over the last another night, so Candy
stopped by, dropped the kids off at vacation Bible school,
told them a story about a wood chopper, and then
went over to Betty's house to pick up a swimsuit
(21:21):
and talk a little bit about childcare. That's what we
know for sure. Once Candy gets to Betty's house, it's
all Candy's story. We don't really know exactly what happened,
but according to Candy, they went over, chattled a little bit,
it was normal, and then out of nowhere Betty. Betty says,
have you been having an affair with my husband? And
(21:42):
Candy goes, yes, but it's over now. I don't want
anything to do with him now, I'm done with them.
And after that, Betty says, okay, wait here for a second,
and then goes and grabs and acts from the garage
and menaces with her with it, and then apparently goes
back to just normal chit chat for a little bit.
I don't know why Candy didn't leave at this point.
(22:04):
It's kind of one of the most damning parts of
the story to me is that she just did not
get the hell out of the house when the ax
showed up. Eventually, Betty starts to push Candy with the
axe and starts to like menace her with it, says,
don't take my husband. You can't have them, Candy saying
I don't want him, I don't want to. Eventually they
(22:25):
start hitting each other with the axe, have a big struggle,
and eventually candy story is that at some point in
this Betty shushed her and that sent Candy back to
an incident when she was shushed by her mother in
the er when she was four, and that caused her
to disassociate and hit Betty forty one times with this axe,
(22:51):
absolutely obliterated her, like they thought it was a gunshot
rather than an axe when the police first got there.
Then Candy leaves, leaves Betty there. Her daughter is in
there as well, just crying, you know, left by herself
for hours and hours and hours. Alan is on a
work trip at this point, so once they find him,
(23:13):
it becomes immediately clear. You know, her terrible husband did
not actually do this. He was in Minnesota at the time,
So who is it. They thought immediately that this is
some axe wielding maniac. They did not think it was
going to be some interpersonal conflict. They thought it was
a serial killer or something like that, because that was
in the news a lot lately, and they just wouldn't.
(23:33):
It's kind of funny. It's kind of the inverse of
a lot of stories in The Man from the Train,
because in the Man from the train. There's so many
different stories where somebody comes in kills the whole family
out of nowhere, and then leaves town. Immediately everyone looks
at the neighbors. They want to say, Oh, this is
this neighbor whose wife he was having an affair with.
This is somebody who was having a business conflict with.
(23:56):
This was somebody else. And it's kind of funny because
in Betty and Candy, the culprit was her neighbor, it
was her friend, it was a member of her community.
But the police immediately went to this is an ax
wielding maniac, probably a serial killer or someone random. But
eventually they realize Candy was the last person there. She's
(24:16):
acting weird, she's acting squirrely, she's got to cut on
her foot. She can't explain, so eventually they do figure
out that it was her, and the case goes to trial,
and she is eventually acquitted because of her rather inane
and ludicrous to our modernized defense that it was trauma
from her mom's shushing her when she was four. And
(24:38):
I mean, I do want to say, I think there's
a whole story where Candy goes through life and she
never kills anyone with an axe. I think it was
probably maybe closer to manslaughter or something like that, because
it was. I do believe that there was an argument,
and I do think that Betty probably introduced the action
into the argument.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Was it Betty's axe?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
It was Betty's acx, Yes, it absolutely was Betty's axe. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Was it some more obvious like next to the hearth
or was it was in the garage? You said, right, Yes,
it was.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
In the garage, and then the confrontation where turned fatal
was in the utility room with the washer, dryer in everything,
right next to the garage. So yeah, it was just
an axe that her husband happened to have for like
taking out bushes or things like that, not something that
was in regular use, not something that just one of
(25:26):
the tools that a suburban man had to feel like
he was in control of his property, that kind of thing.
So it was a huge axe, and it was you know,
despite the fact that Candy was a really small person,
she was able to really brutalize Betty just with the
adrenaline and the force and the leverage of the thing.
(25:47):
It was a huge you know, probably two and a
half three pound acts three feet long, So you can
really do some damage really quickly if you've got some
adrenaline behind you.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah. Absolutely. And you know again that goes back to
a woman with a knife could get overpowered by another woman,
could get overpowered by you know, a teenage girl, a
man whoever. But a woman with an axe who can
lift it. You just need one good whack with a
heavy axe. Three feet sounds like a pretty big x
to me.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Absolutely. Yeah, it's true. You can really do a lot
of damage pretty accidentally. In the last chapter of the book,
which is about a murder in Kansas City, in double
murder in Kansas City in twenty nineteen, the way that
the conflict apparently started was that the first victim fell
(26:35):
on the ground onto the axe and accidentally injured himself,
and then the conflict escalated from there and he ended
up killing both batman and the homeless man who was
sleeping rough nearby.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
So tell me about the self defense case you have
in there. It's William Tilman.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I love the William Tillman story. It was such an
interesting story to me. It's it's great. You know, this
is a gallery of evil people as well as people
who are in very sad, desperate circumstances pushed to the
end of their ropes, which is also true of William Tillman.
But it's good to have one where he's fighting back.
He's taking his power back in a very righteous way
(27:18):
that I think we can all get behind. So I
actually found this via Lizzie Borden, and Lizzie Borden, the
acts that she was supposed to use that tripped up
the prosecution so much was called a who do hatchet
in the papers of the time, which is a way
to say, basically that it was playing tricks on the prosecution,
(27:39):
that it was tricky, it wasn't to be trusted. And
I was I was like, why are they calling it
a who doo hatchet? That's so weird? Is it racist?
Is this just some slang I don't understand? And while
I was looking through old newspapers, I found the word
who doo and hatchet in reference to William till Who
do had nothing to do with it. Who doo was
referring to a party in this case. But elsewhere on
(28:01):
the same page was the story of William Tillman and
his hatchet. So William Tillman was born free in Delaware
in eighteen thirty four. Delaware was a slave holding state
at that point, but he was born free. And soon
after that they moved to Rhode Island, and pretty early
on in his teens he began working on ships. He
(28:24):
began working mostly as a cook or a steward on ships.
So in the late eighteen fifties he was working on
the SJ. Wearing. In eighteen sixty one, which was right
when the Civil War was really getting started, they took
off to go to Uruguay and Argentina transporting cargo which
(28:46):
was worth one hundred thousand dollars, which is a huge
amount of money that was in eighteen sixty one money.
So he was there with a big, big crew. And
then once they got to New Jersey, Confederate pirate ship
the USR see Jefferson Davis basically captured his ship and
took a hold of the ship and the cargo, and
they considered William Tillman to be part of the cargo.
(29:10):
They told him explicitly, once we get down to South Carolina,
you are going to be sold into slavery. They knew
he was free, they knew he was never enslaved, but
they were going to enslave him in fact, the captain
of the Jefferson Davis, called Tillman to him and told
him to report to his house in Savanna to be
taken care of. So this was a very active threat.
(29:30):
But he said to one of the sailors on the wearing,
I am not going to Charleston a live man. They
can take me there dead. But basically he played it
very cool. He did not give any idea as to
the fact that he was planning on resisting. He just
pretended to comply, continued to work as his cook, continued
to work on the upkeep of the ship and things
(29:51):
like that, which is why he was able to store
a Cooper's hatchet, which is used for barrel making and
making boxes and things like that, in a corner of
his room. Nobody noticed it. After a couple of weeks
of being captured, he was able to make a plan
with a couple of the sailors who were there. There
was one German sailor in particular who was afraid of
(30:13):
being taken as a prisoner of war in the Civil War,
and they made a plan together to basically, undercover of darkness,
go and immediately kill the captain and first mate and
then take over the rest of the ship, which they
were able to do pretty quickly because he was so
sure with the axe, he was so good with the axe,
(30:33):
he was able to do it quickly and before anyone
was able to scream or raise a fuss. So it
was a very efficient instrument in this case. And what
was especially notable about this, why we remember it, is
that Tillman, who was not a sailor, just a steward
who had lived on ships for a long time, was
able to pilot the ship back up to New Jersey
(30:57):
and he was going through some really rough territory there.
The outer banks were not far from there. He had
to navigate through that. He was able to get back
up to New Jersey and playing the bounty on the ship,
so he was able to you're entitled to a share
of the profits if you are able to recover the
cargo from being stolen. So he was given a big
sum of money and was celebrated basically across the nation
(31:19):
as a hero, even in like Phrenology newspapers. They were like,
here's a great example of a black guy, which is
not great, but it's nice that he was being celebrated. Also,
the defender wrote about him a black newspaper as well.
We get some really good coverage of that. So it's
a really exciting story, really heroic tale. He gets right
(31:41):
off into the sunset. We're not quite sure what happens
to him after that. I'm sure really another researcher could
probably figure it out. But yeah, it's a really interesting
story of heroism and bravery and how the acts can
be a really handy instrument in that case, partially because
it does double duty as a labor instrument that's kind
of below people's notice.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Yeah, I was thinking about that too, singing what's in
the corner of my bedroom? And it's a baseball bat,
which would have been an axe, I guess one hundred
years ago, one hundred and fifty years ago. Just something
that is just a you know, as you say over
and over in the book that I think is great.
It's just this utilizing a common tool that would have
been around, but that can be deadly at the same
time depending on who's holding it. And speaking of that,
(32:21):
you want to talk about Lizzie Borden. I visited the
Lizzie boardon House and I'll just tell you this quick
little thing. I think I've probably said this on another show.
They took me to the Lizzie Bardon house because we
were talking about the book that I just released, you know,
like six or eight months ago, The Sinner's all about,
And we're in the basement and they have a black
light and you can see the blood that came down
(32:42):
from her father. We were right on the basement when
you know where you first walked down the steps and
there's the washer and they said, this is where she
was washing out her clothes. And you know, you're sitting
in this little sitting area and you look up and
you can see with a black light blood for Andrew Borden,
who had been laying literally just right above. So when
you're talking about how bloody it can be, I was thinking, well, yeah,
(33:03):
I mean, if you're going back to the basics of
Lizzie Borden, for sure, tell me. You know, I know
everybody knows the story, but tell me what your take
is after doing all this research on it.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
What I love about the acts, going back to what
we're talking about just a minute ago, is that it's
something that is below notice. And I think that's why
it was. There was no popular history available to me
when I was first writing this book is that it's
just something that's existed for so long that we take
it for granted, not something that we think about actively.
(33:36):
And I love to kind of pick that out and
try and shine a light on it and see what
it reflects back on us. So Lizzie Borden, it's such
an old story and we almost take it for granted
a little bit. I think some people, including me, at
the start of this book, are kind of like, ah, yeah,
Lizzie Borden heard a million times, not that interested. But
it's just so fascinating. It's just such a weird case.
(34:01):
I mean, the acts is what attracts me to the case,
but what makes it such a puzzle is the timeline
is that it's such a you know, there's like twenty
minutes between Andrew Borden being killed and everyone in the
neighborhood seeing Lizzie and being in the house. And it's
such a fascinating case too, because it's right at the
beginning of there being actual, like scientific basis on which
(34:24):
to base prosecutions. You know, they had actual some actual forensics.
They actually had photographs of the scene, which they moved
the scene to take photographs of it. Which shows you
how early is in the history of photography and grime
scene photography. Fingerprints were not a thing yet, but they
were able to, like test blood in things like that.
(34:44):
Let me just give you the basics. August fourth, eighteen
ninety two, very very hot day. Probably even worse for
them than it is for us experiencing extreme heat because
they did not have air conditioning. You know, of course
they wouldn't have air conditioning in eighteen ninety two, but
they also didn't have indoor plumbing, didn't have a lot
of electricity, were still using gas despite the fact that
(35:07):
these things were becoming very common in their neighborhood. They
lived in a fairly well to do neighborhood. Andrew Borden
was a rich man, but he wasn't living like one.
He was living on a very tight budget. He was
living with his wife, Abby of many years, who was
stepmother to his daughters, Lizzie and Emma. Emma had moved
away gotten married at this point. Lizzie was still living
(35:29):
with them. She was in her thirties and she was
kind of chafing at the boundaries of Victorian society. That morning,
there was Abby Andrew, Lizzie, but also Andrew's brother John,
and there made Bridget Sullivan, who were all there that morning.
(35:50):
Just to give you an example of how close with
the dollar Andrew was. They were having stew for breakfast,
which had already spoiled, so this was bad stew, and
they were having it for breakfast for some reason. Andrew, Abby,
and John all ate earlier on and went off to
do their chores. Lizzie rose later and came down had
(36:10):
she was on her period at that time, which is
kind of her explanation for some of the very small
amount of blood that was on her dress. Later. So
they are hanging out trying to get through a very
hot morning and deal with the heat. Andrew goes off
to the post office, John goes off to run errands.
So it is Abby, Lizzie, and Bridget and this very
(36:32):
small house. You've been there, I've been there. It's been
a while, but it's a very tightly constrained house. It
is not I would be surprised if it were over
in a thousand square feet very narrow stairways. But somehow
someone was able to approach Abby around nine o'clock and
kill her while she was doing chores in an upstairs bedroom.
(36:55):
I believe there were eighteen wounds to her head. Andrew
comes back. He walks around the house a little bit,
even goes up to the second floor, but somehow does
not see his wife lying there dead on the floor.
He and Lizzie have a couple of words. He talks
to Bridget a little bit, and then Bridget goes outside
to wash windows. Andrew says he's going down for a
(37:17):
nap and Lizzie question mark, question mark, question mark. She
doesn't even have a good alibi for this time. She
says that she went out to the barn and got
some fishing wire, which doesn't sound like her. Maybe she went,
she said, maybe I went and had a pair from
the yard, which was visible to a lot of people
who did not see her outside eating a pear. She
was very weird in the inquest. Fuzzy memory of events
(37:41):
doesn't really take pains to find an alibi by her
for herself. So between ten forty five and eleven o'clock,
Andrew goes to take a nap in the front room.
He lies down. He's got his jacket behind him as
kind of a makeshift pillow. At some point, somebody steaks
up from behind him, wax him at ten times with
something he has killed immediately. There's no scream or anything.
(38:04):
He never even woke up. But it's a very bloody event.
That was between ten forty five and eleven. At eleven o'clock,
Bridget went up for a nap, and about ten minutes
later she hears Lizzie screaming, there's been a murder, and
there's been a murder. She says, Maggie, Maggie, come quick.
Maggie was not Bridget's name, but the previous maid's name
was Maggie, so they kept calling her Maggie, which to
(38:27):
me speaks to One of the big theories about this
is that Lizzie and Bridget colluded in this.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Because Bridget skipped down with money. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Now, you know, there's so many different theories and I
don't really land on one theory or another. I don't
think it's something that can be solved at this point.
One of the big theories, and kind of the only
one that makes sense to me for Lizzie's guilt, is
that Bridget and Lizzie worked together. If Lizzie did it,
I don't see how she could have done it without
Bridget's help. But she and Bridget were not friends. I
(38:58):
do not see them planning a murder together. So anyway,
immediately the whole town basically files into the Boarden house
and sees this whole scene and sees the condition of it,
and sees Lizzie completely spotless dress, does not look like
she's just killed two people with an axe. And there
are some interesting like friends, like I was saying, forensic
(39:21):
insights into this, Like they could tell Abby had been
killed an hour and a half earlier because of the
contents of her stomach, and also because the blood when
they discovered her was much more ropey and matted than
Andrew's blood, so they could tell that she had been
dead for longer than Andrew had been dead.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
You know what's interesting about that is one thing that
Paul and I talk about on Buried Bones is if
you've got somebody who's targeting, as in I want to
get these murders done and steal something or I want
to get this revenge done, You're going to take the
man out first. You're not going to take the woman
out first.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
And it's so interesting that there was never really another
good suspect besides Lizzie and Britt yet there was never
really anyone. There was somebody who came to the door
a couple of weeks earlier and had some kind of
disagreement with Andrew, but that's like the only other glue
really as to who could have done it.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
There was a murder because I ended up doing an
episode on this for one of my last seasons of
Templemore Wicked, just like a documentary series, and there was
a woman who was murdered, you know, not far by
birth of Manchester, and I think the similarity was it
was in the same sort of vicinity, and it was
an axe, and that was pretty much it. And it
turned out to be you know, her father who owned
(40:32):
the farm, her father's ex employee who was really pissed
off at him and just saw her. He was gone
and saw her and killed her. And the thought was
the defense was was going to use that because Lizzie
was in jail when that happened. So it's like we're
back right back to your beginning phrase, crazed axe murderer
(40:52):
on the loose, And I get my argument has always
been everybody had an AX. I mean, you know, you
craze killer is about as far as you're going to
get with that.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I think, yeah, I don't really think this is that likely.
But what I see when I see that is an assassin.
There were assassins that at that point it's not super likely,
but that does happen. There are, you know, paid killings
that goes back a long time. I see someone who
knew what they were doing and knew how to hide
(41:21):
and escape notice and strike when they could anyway. Getting
back to access. They immediately the police are immediately interested.
They immediately think it might be an axe because that
was a pretty common weapon back then. That's not like
now where you know, you immediately go to a gun
or something like that, where an ax would be an
exotic weapon. Immediately they thought, okay, this looks like it
(41:43):
could be an ax. There's clearly some blunt trauma as
well as some sharp wounds as well, so it would
have to be something with both of those capabilities. So
they go downstairs, they look at the basement, they look
at the different access In the basement there are I
think two wood cutting axes, and then there are three
or four hatchets that were over kind of collected, which
(42:06):
Andrew had bought to do repairs himself. Again, this is
a very cheap guy. He wanted to do his own roofing.
He wanted to chop off his own pigeons. Says that
was what Lizzie thought that he had gotten them for.
So he was really getting them to do his own
things rather than just hiring out for it. And then
he would buy these axes for one project and then
(42:27):
put them in the basement and forget about them. So
they're going through these axes and they find one that
looks like it's got a little bit of blood on it.
They're very excited about that. They go and they take
it test. It does not turn out to do it.
They go back down later and they find an axe
covered an ash in this shoe box in the basement basically,
(42:47):
and they come up with this wild backstory for it.
They think, okay, so she got blood on the handle,
so she immediately a for comitting these crimes. She went
out to the pried off the handle with advise, then
ran down to the basement, stuck the handle in the
(43:08):
fire to burn up the evidence, and then put ash
on the axe head so that it would look like
it had been down there for a while, which is
really like just from the go is very convoluted. But
I think it's interesting because it speaks to how much
we want to impose our own narrative on these events
(43:32):
which are inexplicable. We want to try and find an
explanation for how they did this. Sometimes we'll go to
some crazy places for that. Because, like I laid out
with the timeline earlier, it was a very quick timeline.
And I can accept that Lizzie did a quick costume
change and no, but that's why nobody too quick costume
(43:52):
changes actually, because she was seen in between Babby and
Andrew and her dress was completely clean and white. Okay,
I can accept that in the fifteen minutes after Andrew
was killed, before he was found. But on top of that,
you got to send her out to the barn to
pry off a handle. That's crazy. Then send her down
(44:15):
to do this weird thing where she hides the axe.
That's a really that strains credulity for me.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Because why wouldn't she just hide it somewhere or toss
it if he had that many actses and hatchets?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, exactly. And so what was crazy about this was
once they got to the trial, they presented this whole
theory about the axe and how she'd secreted away the evidence.
And then they're interviewing one of the policemen and they're like,
so you didn't find the handle, where he's like, no, no, no,
I found the handle. It's in the shoe box. So
the whole thing about the handle being gone and burned
(44:49):
up was just completely made up. They did not double
check their facts. The handle was right there the whole time,
and that kind of blew their theory of the case.
And after that the defense was really grasping at straws.
It's such a bizarre, illogical event, it's hard to impose
a narrative on it. There's just inherently a lot of
(45:09):
reasonable doubt. So it makes total sense to me why
Lizzie was acquitted for this, because it's, you know, either
she covered her tracks very very well, or she got lucky,
or this was some kind of other random event. And
you know, they tore that house apart. They did not
find another axe, They did not find an axe in
the cistern or anything like that. They did find an
(45:31):
axe with a very new axe that was flung onto
a neighboring roof. A kid found it while looking for
a baseball, and that one is interesting to me because
they found it was covered in guilt, was new acts,
and they found a sliver of guilt in Abby's skull,
So that to me is a little bit of a
(45:53):
physical connection there, but also not enough to really base
a case on. So I'm of a couple of mine
about it. To me, I don't think Lizzie did it.
What really, Yeah, I think the timeline's too tight. I
don't think the motive is strong enough for me. I mean,
money is a good motive, but it doesn't explain everything.
(46:14):
And also, you know, she maintained her innocence for the
rest of her life. Having looked at a lot of
crimes people who you know, not that Obviously, people don't
come up with false alibis and deny things that they
did till they're dying day. A lot of people who
commit crimes eventually come forward about it. I find that
that happened. Oh found that it happened over and over again.
(46:37):
Is that when people were caught, they will be like, yeah,
I did it, but here's why. Rather than just saying
I did not do this, I never did this, which
is what Lizzie said. But really what it was and
this is what Emma said when she was interviewed about
twenty years later, her only interview, she was like, there
was no weapon. They never found a weapon, They never
had a weapon to pin on her. That's why I
(46:58):
don't believe it. The only thing I can see with
Lizzie is that if she used some other kitchen implement
to do this crime and then she washed it off
in the sink real quick. Okay, that's something I could see.
Maybe a cleaver, which is often called a meat axe,
or maybe like she was ironing handkerchiefs right before that,
(47:20):
maybe the iron she was using had a sharp edge
and she used that as the implement. But again, those
are pretty far fetched. And to me, I don't know.
You know, it's such a wild case. It's such a
tight timeline. I've never really found an answer that feels
satisfactory or convincing to me.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Thinking about the authors who've written books about this. But
it is a mystery, and so you know, this is
probably not a very popular opinion, but I don't really
want to know, and I definitely don't want to know
about Jack the Ripper. I mean, you will completely deflate
that story, and in my opinion, Fall River, Massachusetts will
be a less popular place if we find some sort
of confession letter from Lizzie or from somebody else with
(48:01):
you know, DNA proof that we can run. I just don't.
I think it is one of those, you know. I mean,
I think Lizzie Borden that case is our jack the
Ripper case.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Yeah, I think that's what keeps people going. I think
people are still gonna be talking about Jean Benet and
the staircase in one hundred years because there's not really
satisfactory answer. I mean, there's people like Lizzie, there's people
we think, okay, it's obviously then if you know the
basic facts of the case, but then things keep coming
up and you're like, well that's weird, and that's weird,
and that's weird. So yeah, I mean the puzzle aspect
(48:31):
of it is what's really interesting. But at the same time,
you know, I'm in the business of solving one hundred
year old axeburger cases, and Veleska Axe murder House is
kind of a tourist traction. They seem to be doing fine.
So yeah, so maybe Falls River would be fine after.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
All in true crime. And you know, again, I come
back to it's such a hap for me, it's such
a haphazard weapon. It can go so many different ways.
It's really really messy. But at the same time, I'm
not sure anything expresses anger as well as an axe would.
And I have to say, I don't know if everybody
else does this. It never occurs to me that people
(49:09):
use the blunt edge. I always think they're using the blade.
You know, the Servant Girl annihilator here in Austin in
the late eighteen hundreds, he would a lot of times
stun them by using the blunt edge and then assault
them and then turn it and kill them like that. So,
you know, utilizing in a lot of different ways. I
mean not to be so crass about it, but it
(49:29):
just is. It seems like such an odd yeah weapon
in general, like man, can you it's risky.
Speaker 2 (49:35):
I think what part of what it harkens back to
is partially the legacy of like state violence. This was,
you know, the axe is very associated with executions. It's
very much a weapon. You know, it's part of the facies.
The word fascists come from the facies was an axe
covered with rods, and if the axe was in the fascis,
(49:58):
then it showed that the lictors who cared it, carried it,
were able to carry out executions. So I think that
there's a long legacy of power associated with it and
with that blade of the axe, more so than the
blunt end, which is often a hammer. But you know,
that power is also something that can be taken back
(50:19):
because it's such a common weapon, because it's such a
tool of the laborer and of the domestic world. It's
something where the power can be easily taken back in
a lot of cases. You know, one of my first
earlier cases was a tyrant named Stessi Gorris who takes
over an area in ancient Turkey and is assassinated with
(50:40):
a concealed axe by a citizen who was tyrannized by
his reign. Basically, it's more complicated than that big political backstory,
but there's a lot of that where you're able to
conceal it and use it as something that might be
used for labor, and in that way quickly take it
(51:01):
out something that's been secreted and turn it against the
levers of power. You know, Nat Turner used an ax
in his rebellion. I mean, there's so much wrapped up
in the acts with both you know, there's labor, there's domesticity,
there's war, there's state power, and then there's also this
streak of insurgent power, something where people who are disempowered
(51:23):
can take it back under the guise of labor and
use it to strike out.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Absolutely well, never have I thought so much about a
weapon as I have now thought about the acts. You know.
One of the things that I think is so interesting
about it is it can be basically untraceable in a way.
And I know that I just said that. It's just
you know, it's a risky weapon. But with guns, you
can trace them, you can get blood blowback into the barrel.
(51:50):
Knives they can cut you. I know, you can get
cut by an axe. But it just seems like a
pretty efficient way in a lot of ways to dispatch someone.
And you know, I guess as stories move forward, it's
interesting you're talking about drones. Tell me about like a
drone assassinated. I mean, I don't even know if we
want to get into that, right, we're evolving into something
We're like a gun at some point is going to
(52:10):
be as obsolete as a weapon as an axis.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Absolutely. I mean there's plenty of guns that are absolutely
they'll talk about flit locks and things like that. But yeah,
I mean it's so accessible too. Even now, it's very accessible.
You can walk into any hardware store and buy an
axe for like twelve bucks. It's not expensive, it's easy
to use, and like you were saying, I never actually
thought about that before, the fact that it's so anonymous
(52:34):
and untraceable the way a bolt is not, or even
in the way you know, like computer paper is not.
You know, you could print out computer paper and they
can tell I can tell what computer you use specifically
from this sheet of paper that you sent me. So
it is there is an annymage to it. And I
think that's a big part of the Man from the
Train too, is just the fact that he was not
(52:55):
carrying axes with him. He was just grabbing them from
davers wood piles and picking them up very randomly.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen. If you haven't already,
(53:33):
this has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is
our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark,
Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
(53:55):
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This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I mean, there's so much wrapped up in the acts
with this streak of insurgent power, something where people who
are disempowered can take it back under the guise of
labor and use it to strike out.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:55):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. When Rachel McCarthy James and
her father wrote their best selling book The Man from
(01:16):
the Train, Rachel became fascinated with axes. Were they actually
good weapons during murders or what kind of killer would
use them? She wrote about the story of the acts
in her book Whack Job, The History of axe murder,
and yes, we talk about Lizzie Borden. Tell me about
what your first interest was with axe murderers. I have
(01:40):
to assume it goes back to, you know, the book
that you did with your father, The Man from the Train. Yes,
give me a brief overview for anybody who doesn't know
that story. And then you know, I know you're a
researcher and then a writer on it.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Of course. Yeah, it's really kind of the companion piece
and the origin story for this book in a lot
of ways. So about twelve years ago, my dad, baseball
writer Bill James, had recently published his first true crime book,
Popular Crime, in which he talks about Lizzie Borden as
well as another famous axe murder, Helen Jewett, And so
(02:13):
he was looking into the Veleska axe murders. He had
seen a documentary about it and was like, I bet
I can find some more crimes. As he started looking
into it, he found one more crime and then he
was like, all right, well, this takes a lot of
messing around with different archival newspaper databases. I really don't
(02:33):
want to do that. I'm going to hire my daughter,
who recently graduated from college and it's a good researcher
to look into that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
In cheap, in cheap, I'm assuming.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
In cheap, yes, very cheap. And I needed a job
because I was moving back to my hometown where my
dad lives just a block away from him, and so
he hired me. And you know, my dad's had a
lot of projects. He's had so many different things where
he's like, I'm working on this, this is my next thing,
and then you ask him about it two weeks later
and he's like, don't ever mentioned that to me again.
I don't want to talk about that. Know that exactly.
(03:04):
We all have a lot of projects. I could know
how that goes. So I kind of thought that this
was going to be one of those where I worked
with him for a couple of weeks and then it
didn't really go anywhere. But almost immediately once I started
looking at this, I started finding a lot of events
that looked a lot like the Vellesca axe murders and
the other murders that had been identified by other researchers
(03:25):
like Beth Clennen Smith and the Rundles and at Eberley
as connected to this crime in June nineteen twelve, whereas
eight people were murdered in the middle of the night
with an axe with the back of the axe. So
I started looking for crimes that looked like that, and
almost immediately started finding quite a few of them. I
think I found ten or twelve events that ended up
(03:45):
in the book within a couple of weeks, and within
a couple of months. That research led me back to
eighteen ninety eight where Paul Mueller killed the Newton family
three people in west Brookfield, Massachusetts. We are pretty sure
it was him because he was there were they had
visitors that night the night before the Newtants were murdered,
(04:06):
and Paul was seen walking towards the train after the
murders were committed that night. So that's a pretty clear
clear case for his guilt. And there's a lot of
similarities between the Newtons and the Veleska axe murders, a
lot of weird things like locking the door after covering
the windows, putting bedclothes over the body, things like that.
(04:29):
So within a couple of months we knew that we
had a narrative here for sure. Throughout that one of
the things that we were looking for, and it was
just one on a list of things. It wasn't really
something that stood out. We were looking for big families
being killed in the middle of the night, isolated farmhouse,
trained nearby, clothes on the body, and one of the
(04:51):
last things, the big thing was the back of the
axe being used. So the axe was a consistent thing
throughout this. And we believe that Paul was a lumberjack.
We know it was a lumberjack, so he was using
the acts for his labor throughout this. And then he
would you know, there were axes everywhere in America at
this point in our country's history. Every working farm had one.
(05:15):
There was often one just left in the woodpile on
the back of the in the backyard. So he would
just pick up an axe from a neighbor's woodpile, break
into a house, kill the whole family, and then leave.
So that was that story. It's a very long book.
It's much longer than Whackjaw because there's just so many crimes.
He killed. We believe about one hundred people from eighteen
(05:37):
ninety eight to nineteen fourteen, so this was a very
active serial killer, mass murderer. And after we published the book,
while we were talking about it, I fin found myself
talking about an axe murderer a lot, and I started
noticing jokes about axe murderers in popular culture and just
(05:58):
people using it around me random as kind of like
a joke, And I was like, where's that come from?
Why is that a joke? Why is this phrase so sticky?
Why do we say axe murderer when we don't say
knife slayer or gun killer or anything like that. But
generally ax murderer has, you know, really stayed in the
(06:18):
lexicon well past the age when axes were a very
common instrument of violence, almost kind of emerging as the
acts stopped being such a major player in domestic violence
and other violent situations. And so I started looking into that.
(06:38):
I started wondering, what is it about that phrase? What
is it about the axe? And I started researching the
axe itself, which I didn't realize how far back it
went into history, that it's basically our first tool. And
I became fascinated by that and just started digging it down,
and I was writing an article about it, kind of
about just about the phrase ax murder, and once a
(07:01):
balloon to ten thousand words, I was like, all right,
I think I've got a book here. I think this
is a book I would like to read. And when
you think of a book you'd like to read that
doesn't exist yet, you should be the one to write it.
So I started going into that looking for different AX
murders that I could kind of collect into an overall narrative,
kind of like Mary Roach, and try and look at
(07:21):
it as a concept as well through these different narratives.
So that took a long time, and now after about
seven years, here I am.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
When you're describing sort of why X murderer is a
phrase we use. There's such a specific connotation to me,
a crazed, out of control person to me, because there's
so much blood, there has to be a now, you know,
I mean, I think a misconception would be is you
have to be strong to be an AX murder. You
can be a small, tiny person with you know, as
(07:50):
long as you have the right leverage and you've got
your hands in the right place, it can be very deadly,
very easily. But I really do think it is that
crazed person versus the serial strangler. And I often don't
think of the father who kills his whole family as
the person who's using the axe, even though I've done
(08:11):
several of those stories. It really feels more of like
the person kicking in the door and breaking in and
their hair is disheveled and they're you know, just wildly swinging.
So that image is very much like kind of like
the chainsaw massacre image.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
To me, it's funny you bring up chainsaws because that's
also an implement for wood cutting as well as murder.
But what's interesting to me is that chainsaw murderer. Chain
saws are not very often used in murder.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
You can't hide them, I mean, where do you go.
You can put a hatchet in your pocket.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Exactly, and it's loud as well, and it's also you know,
this is true to a certain extent of big axes,
less so hatchets and smaller, lighter implements, but you know,
it's hard to You're as likely to hurt yourself as
you are to hurt the other person with the chainsaw,
so you really don't see that being used very much
as natural implement or whereas the axe absolutely was very
(09:02):
much an implement of violence and as well as a
household tool. So to go back to your point about
the wilely swinging axe murderer, I want to address that
because I think it very very much gets to something
about the axe that's very true, which is the brutality
of it, the fact that you have to be really
up close and personal and really pretty. I mean, you know,
(09:24):
it's accessible for a lighter person, but you do have
to put a lot of force into it to make
that kind of impact on their head or neck or whatever.
So it is something that requires a lot of passion,
requires a lot of brutality, and it's very up close
and personal, especially contrasted with you know, sniper rifles or
drone strikes. And I think what it gets back to
(09:44):
in terms of a joke, I think it really goes
back to I mean the phrase is older than this,
but why it continues to persist into the twenty first century,
it's two reasons. First of all, the shining, I mean,
you can't that's what you're thinking of when you're thinking
of an axe murder. I think the less true for
a lot of people. Is as much as any real
axe murderer. You're thinking of Jack Nicholson, hair, crazy, manic,
(10:08):
breaking down that door. Absolutely. And then the comic element
of it, which has always been an element of the
phrase axe murderer. You know, going back to the forties
and fifties, we saw Raymond Chandler and sure Lee Johnson
using it as a joke. But what made it a
joke into the twenty first century parody by Simpsons and
things like that, what made it kind of a staple
was also the Mike Myers movie So I Married an Axemur.
(10:32):
That's what really brought it into our lex con which
is funny because it's not you know, it was a
lot of hit at the time. It's become a cult phenomenon,
but it's also very recognizable. I think most people have
heard of that movie at some point, even though it's
nearly forty years old at this point. And I think
that that, you know, it's such a goofy movie and
(10:53):
such an absurdist movie, and I think that brings a
little bit of it to that. But I wanted to
go back where I was going before or that, which
was to say that, you know, we have this image
of the axe murder, who's more like the man from
the Train Pomula, where it's randomly finding people extremely brutal.
But what I found in looking at this was not
(11:14):
that usually I kind of wanted to stay away from
serial killers after having such a long serial killer book.
But also what I found is that most axe murders
are not premeditated. Like most murders, it's an object of convenience.
That's why it was used so often in interpersonal conflict.
(11:34):
In interpersonal violence, it's because there was always one in hand.
That's true in like crime and punishment, Raskolnikov raps An
acts from the kitchen. Nothing could have been simpler. It's
simply because there were so many actses. They were so
heavily in labor, They had so many different applications, there
were so many different kinds of axes that it was
(11:55):
very likely that a labor setting, domestic setting, especially if
it was at all rural, there was going to be
at least one axe on the property, if not several axes.
So it's really just something that was grabbed in the
heat of the moment as much as something that was
a fetish, as it was for the man from the train.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Thinking about on history, you know, I've written a book
about the Great Smog of nineteen fifty two, which was
my first book that involved a serial killer who strangled,
so he's not actually part of the story, but you know,
I have to assume that with the emergence of coal
as the main fuel source, rather than would maybe actses
weren't as available as we start approaching, you know, the
(12:33):
twentieth century. Do you think that's right.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
One hundred percent. That's absolutely a huge part of it.
I mean, industrialization really took so many different applications for
the acts that had been there for thousands of years,
hundreds of thousands of years. I took that and it
made it into something that was quick, that did not
happen in your house, that was a mechanical process rather
(12:57):
than something you did personally. Heating your house is definitely
one of the primary applications for that, you know, the
switch to electric and coal heating rather than having to personally,
you know, not just chop down a tree for wood,
but then break down the wood into kindling was a
big task for which people would have access because even
(13:17):
if you bought the wood from somewhere else, you would
have to go and process it yourself to a certain extent.
But there's also you know, there's butchery, there's barrel making.
There's so many different applications that were once a part
of the home, once a part of normal labor process
where you would do it yourself. That were just taken
(13:39):
away from that. And in the mid century especially, one
of the things was that, you know, a lot of
the steel steel axe heads were melted down for the
World War II effort as well. In addition to that,
there's also the chainsaw, which we were talking about earlier.
You know, the chainsaw became really professionalized and also available
to home use in the mid century, especially the mid sixties.
(14:02):
Part of the appeal of axes, I think, and part
of the resurgence of them in the last twenty years
or so. We're seeing a resurgence of people who are
interested in acxes, people who are interested in using it
for hobby and for tearing for their home. You know,
that's part of returning like a reaction against technology, whereas
in the mid century people were very much wanting to
lean into technology. And the chainsaw seems so fun. It's
(14:26):
so you know, it's big and loud, it's kind of
like a motorcycle. So I think a lot of people
who were diy ing it or like doing repairs around
their home would want to go out and get that
the same way one hundred years earlier, they had wanted
to go out and get an axe, because that wasn't
as accessible as it had been, you know, in eighteen
sixty it was a lot more accessible than it wasn't
seventeen sixty. So it was a novelty to be able
(14:49):
to go out and buy this big axe for not
that much money and take it home and use it
however you want it. That's part of the story of
you know, George Washington and the Cherry Tree too, is
this little boy who's got the fascination with the axe,
wants to chop it down and play with it. By
the mid century, that novelty had definitely worn off, and
the chainsaw had a lot more novelty.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Well, you know, I was thinking about the axe as
a weapon. You can get hurt really easily. You're not
getting out of there most likely without getting blood all
over you, and you have to it's it's got to
be almost like unlike a gun. It's like hand to
hand combat. You have to get close enough to really
get the person, and you're risking whether you're a man
or a woman, the person catching the wood and you know,
(15:32):
being able to turn it on you. So like when
your theory about the crimes of passion that seems more
likely to me than somebody who just grabs an axe,
you know, with the intent of murdering people he doesn't
even know, because man, it's risky. And knives are risky
to me too, because you know, you can cut your
hand and all kinds of bad stuff. But the axe
(15:52):
just seems like so brutal that you're mad or something.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, especially with certain kinds of acts.
Is like the labyris the double sided axe. That's an
axe where it's got two different sides, which is great
for woodsmand because once one side gets dull, that can
just turn it around and keep going. But there's twice
it's twice as likely you're going to stick your own
axe in your back if you've used it a double
(16:17):
sided axe. And yeah, you have to be very careful
to not chop off your own toe when you are
using especially a big axe, but hatchets too. I mean,
you swing too hard and you can definitely make impact
with yourself.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
It's just risky. Don't you think it's risky as a weapon.
But again, your point is people are not thinking about risk.
They're just thinking they're mad. And this is the closest
thing to them.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Absolutely, yeah, And I think that's part of the interesting
thing about Lizzie Bordon too. One of the biggest mysteries
is that her dress was so clean after that. You
couldn't kill someone with an axe and have addressed that clean,
you know, ten minutes later. A very hard thing to imagine.
But also your point about get someone getting the axe
(16:59):
from that was a big element in the Betty Gore
Candy Montgomery murder. Was that probably Betty, who was the
victim there, introduced the acts into the confrontation and then
eventually Candy was able to wrest away from her. And
just you know, she was a small woman. We're talking
about how even small people can use a big axe
to do a lot of damage. She was a very
(17:20):
small woman, did not usually use an axe, and she
was able to hit Betty forty one times, which is
way more than Lizzie ever would have used. The acts
eighteen strikes altogether. For Lizzie, despite the forty.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Rumor the brutality of the acts, you know, every time
I hear struck forty one times, for a long time,
I just thought, conventional wisdom is this, this is overkilled.
This is very personal. But you know, my other show
Buried Bones with Paul Holes. He and I talk about it,
and he said a lot of times, it's not overkill,
it's you have to guarantee that this person's dead. They're
(17:55):
moving around, they're not just laying there unless they're asleep.
And so the number of of wax doesn't necessarily have
to be mad. It's scared. It's fear, like, oh my god,
this person. I have to leave this person dead for sure.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Adrenaline, and I think people who have and I think
that's especially true for people who have not used the
axe a lot. I think with people who have used
the acts more as a tool are a lot more
confident with it as a weapon. I would say, I
think the story of Tonna Cressen and William Tillman kind
(18:31):
of shows that both of them were very experienced with
the Tomahawk and the Coopers Acts respectively, and were able
to strike pretty true and kill them immediately, whereas people
who were less experienced with the acts, which I would
say is most of the most of the other killers
(18:53):
in the more modern section, Lizzie Borden, if that was her.
Fred Strobel, the La Child Lester was definitely a case
of that. He used several different weapons to make sure
that she was dead and wouldn't tell on him. Basically,
then Candy and Betty definitely that was a case where
the adrenaline from the confrontation was so intense that she
(19:16):
was just whacking and whacking until she was absolutely sure
that Betty was dead.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Since you just talked about Candy, let's talk about Candy,
so kind of set this whole thing up. How do
they know each other? Who are these people? So?
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore both went to the same
church in suburban Dallas in the late nineteen seventies early eighties.
These women were in their mid to late twenties, but
they were already coming up on basically midlife crises. They
both got married early on and settled into their marriages
(19:51):
and were feeling kind of bored and listless and not
unfulfilled by it. Betty was married to a real piece
of work guy named Alan Gore, who had an affair
with Candy Montgomery. Candy was much more popular, She was
more vivacious, prettier, if we're being honest, and she was
much more popular than Betty, and she decided she wanted
(20:12):
to have an affair because she was bored, and she
decided on Betty's husband because he seemed like a safe bet.
So they carried on this affair up through throughout Betty's
pregnancy and until after she had had the baby, and
then ended it soon after that. And throughout all this time, also,
Betty and Candy's children are becoming very very close friends,
(20:35):
so they're over at each other's houses all the time,
having sleepovers, going to movies, caring for each other's kids,
so their lives were very intertwined in more ways than
Betty knew. And then on June thirteenth, nineteen eighty, it
was Friday the thirteenth. Both The Shining and Friday the
Thirteenth had just come out in the movie theaters. Betty
(20:57):
was getting ready to go on kind of a second
honeymoon with Allan. They were planning a trip to Europe,
and her daughter was over at Candy's house and they
wanted to sleep over the last another night, so Candy
stopped by, dropped the kids off at vacation Bible school,
told them a story about a wood chopper, and then
went over to Betty's house to pick up a swimsuit
(21:21):
and talk a little bit about childcare. That's what we
know for sure. Once Candy gets to Betty's house, it's
all Candy's story. We don't really know exactly what happened,
but according to Candy, they went over, chattled a little bit,
it was normal, and then out of nowhere Betty. Betty says,
have you been having an affair with my husband? And
(21:42):
Candy goes, yes, but it's over now. I don't want
anything to do with him now, I'm done with them.
And after that, Betty says, okay, wait here for a second,
and then goes and grabs and acts from the garage
and menaces with her with it, and then apparently goes
back to just normal chit chat for a little bit.
I don't know why Candy didn't leave at this point.
(22:04):
It's kind of one of the most damning parts of
the story to me is that she just did not
get the hell out of the house when the ax
showed up. Eventually, Betty starts to push Candy with the
axe and starts to like menace her with it, says,
don't take my husband. You can't have them, Candy saying
I don't want him, I don't want to. Eventually they
(22:25):
start hitting each other with the axe, have a big struggle,
and eventually candy story is that at some point in
this Betty shushed her and that sent Candy back to
an incident when she was shushed by her mother in
the er when she was four, and that caused her
to disassociate and hit Betty forty one times with this axe,
(22:51):
absolutely obliterated her, like they thought it was a gunshot
rather than an axe when the police first got there.
Then Candy leaves, leaves Betty there. Her daughter is in
there as well, just crying, you know, left by herself
for hours and hours and hours. Alan is on a
work trip at this point, so once they find him,
(23:13):
it becomes immediately clear. You know, her terrible husband did
not actually do this. He was in Minnesota at the time,
So who is it. They thought immediately that this is
some axe wielding maniac. They did not think it was
going to be some interpersonal conflict. They thought it was
a serial killer or something like that, because that was
in the news a lot lately, and they just wouldn't.
(23:33):
It's kind of funny. It's kind of the inverse of
a lot of stories in The Man from the Train,
because in the Man from the train. There's so many
different stories where somebody comes in kills the whole family
out of nowhere, and then leaves town. Immediately everyone looks
at the neighbors. They want to say, Oh, this is
this neighbor whose wife he was having an affair with.
This is somebody who was having a business conflict with.
(23:56):
This was somebody else. And it's kind of funny because
in Betty and Candy, the culprit was her neighbor, it
was her friend, it was a member of her community.
But the police immediately went to this is an ax
wielding maniac, probably a serial killer or someone random. But
eventually they realize Candy was the last person there. She's
(24:16):
acting weird, she's acting squirrely, she's got to cut on
her foot. She can't explain, so eventually they do figure
out that it was her, and the case goes to trial,
and she is eventually acquitted because of her rather inane
and ludicrous to our modernized defense that it was trauma
from her mom's shushing her when she was four. And
(24:38):
I mean, I do want to say, I think there's
a whole story where Candy goes through life and she
never kills anyone with an axe. I think it was
probably maybe closer to manslaughter or something like that, because
it was. I do believe that there was an argument,
and I do think that Betty probably introduced the action
into the argument.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Was it Betty's axe?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
It was Betty's acx, Yes, it absolutely was Betty's axe. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Was it some more obvious like next to the hearth
or was it was in the garage? You said, right, Yes,
it was.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
In the garage, and then the confrontation where turned fatal
was in the utility room with the washer, dryer in everything,
right next to the garage. So yeah, it was just
an axe that her husband happened to have for like
taking out bushes or things like that, not something that
was in regular use, not something that just one of
(25:26):
the tools that a suburban man had to feel like
he was in control of his property, that kind of thing.
So it was a huge axe, and it was you know,
despite the fact that Candy was a really small person,
she was able to really brutalize Betty just with the
adrenaline and the force and the leverage of the thing.
(25:47):
It was a huge you know, probably two and a
half three pound acts three feet long, So you can
really do some damage really quickly if you've got some
adrenaline behind you.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah. Absolutely. And you know again that goes back to
a woman with a knife could get overpowered by another woman,
could get overpowered by you know, a teenage girl, a
man whoever. But a woman with an axe who can
lift it. You just need one good whack with a
heavy axe. Three feet sounds like a pretty big x
to me.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Absolutely. Yeah, it's true. You can really do a lot
of damage pretty accidentally. In the last chapter of the book,
which is about a murder in Kansas City, in double
murder in Kansas City in twenty nineteen, the way that
the conflict apparently started was that the first victim fell
(26:35):
on the ground onto the axe and accidentally injured himself,
and then the conflict escalated from there and he ended
up killing both batman and the homeless man who was
sleeping rough nearby.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
So tell me about the self defense case you have
in there. It's William Tilman.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I love the William Tillman story. It was such an
interesting story to me. It's it's great. You know, this
is a gallery of evil people as well as people
who are in very sad, desperate circumstances pushed to the
end of their ropes, which is also true of William Tillman.
But it's good to have one where he's fighting back.
He's taking his power back in a very righteous way
(27:18):
that I think we can all get behind. So I
actually found this via Lizzie Borden, and Lizzie Borden, the
acts that she was supposed to use that tripped up
the prosecution so much was called a who do hatchet
in the papers of the time, which is a way
to say, basically that it was playing tricks on the prosecution,
(27:39):
that it was tricky, it wasn't to be trusted. And
I was I was like, why are they calling it
a who doo hatchet? That's so weird? Is it racist?
Is this just some slang I don't understand? And while
I was looking through old newspapers, I found the word
who doo and hatchet in reference to William till Who
do had nothing to do with it. Who doo was
referring to a party in this case. But elsewhere on
(28:01):
the same page was the story of William Tillman and
his hatchet. So William Tillman was born free in Delaware
in eighteen thirty four. Delaware was a slave holding state
at that point, but he was born free. And soon
after that they moved to Rhode Island, and pretty early
on in his teens he began working on ships. He
(28:24):
began working mostly as a cook or a steward on ships.
So in the late eighteen fifties he was working on
the SJ. Wearing. In eighteen sixty one, which was right
when the Civil War was really getting started, they took
off to go to Uruguay and Argentina transporting cargo which
(28:46):
was worth one hundred thousand dollars, which is a huge
amount of money that was in eighteen sixty one money.
So he was there with a big, big crew. And
then once they got to New Jersey, Confederate pirate ship
the USR see Jefferson Davis basically captured his ship and
took a hold of the ship and the cargo, and
they considered William Tillman to be part of the cargo.
(29:10):
They told him explicitly, once we get down to South Carolina,
you are going to be sold into slavery. They knew
he was free, they knew he was never enslaved, but
they were going to enslave him in fact, the captain
of the Jefferson Davis, called Tillman to him and told
him to report to his house in Savanna to be
taken care of. So this was a very active threat.
(29:30):
But he said to one of the sailors on the wearing,
I am not going to Charleston a live man. They
can take me there dead. But basically he played it
very cool. He did not give any idea as to
the fact that he was planning on resisting. He just
pretended to comply, continued to work as his cook, continued
to work on the upkeep of the ship and things
(29:51):
like that, which is why he was able to store
a Cooper's hatchet, which is used for barrel making and
making boxes and things like that, in a corner of
his room. Nobody noticed it. After a couple of weeks
of being captured, he was able to make a plan
with a couple of the sailors who were there. There
was one German sailor in particular who was afraid of
(30:13):
being taken as a prisoner of war in the Civil War,
and they made a plan together to basically, undercover of darkness,
go and immediately kill the captain and first mate and
then take over the rest of the ship, which they
were able to do pretty quickly because he was so
sure with the axe, he was so good with the axe,
(30:33):
he was able to do it quickly and before anyone
was able to scream or raise a fuss. So it
was a very efficient instrument in this case. And what
was especially notable about this, why we remember it, is
that Tillman, who was not a sailor, just a steward
who had lived on ships for a long time, was
able to pilot the ship back up to New Jersey
(30:57):
and he was going through some really rough territory there.
The outer banks were not far from there. He had
to navigate through that. He was able to get back
up to New Jersey and playing the bounty on the ship,
so he was able to you're entitled to a share
of the profits if you are able to recover the
cargo from being stolen. So he was given a big
sum of money and was celebrated basically across the nation
(31:19):
as a hero, even in like Phrenology newspapers. They were like,
here's a great example of a black guy, which is
not great, but it's nice that he was being celebrated. Also,
the defender wrote about him a black newspaper as well.
We get some really good coverage of that. So it's
a really exciting story, really heroic tale. He gets right
(31:41):
off into the sunset. We're not quite sure what happens
to him after that. I'm sure really another researcher could
probably figure it out. But yeah, it's a really interesting
story of heroism and bravery and how the acts can
be a really handy instrument in that case, partially because
it does double duty as a labor instrument that's kind
of below people's notice.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Yeah, I was thinking about that too, singing what's in
the corner of my bedroom? And it's a baseball bat,
which would have been an axe, I guess one hundred
years ago, one hundred and fifty years ago. Just something
that is just a you know, as you say over
and over in the book that I think is great.
It's just this utilizing a common tool that would have
been around, but that can be deadly at the same
time depending on who's holding it. And speaking of that,
(32:21):
you want to talk about Lizzie Borden. I visited the
Lizzie boardon House and I'll just tell you this quick
little thing. I think I've probably said this on another show.
They took me to the Lizzie Bardon house because we
were talking about the book that I just released, you know,
like six or eight months ago, The Sinner's all about,
And we're in the basement and they have a black
light and you can see the blood that came down
(32:42):
from her father. We were right on the basement when
you know where you first walked down the steps and
there's the washer and they said, this is where she
was washing out her clothes. And you know, you're sitting
in this little sitting area and you look up and
you can see with a black light blood for Andrew Borden,
who had been laying literally just right above. So when
you're talking about how bloody it can be, I was thinking, well, yeah,
(33:03):
I mean, if you're going back to the basics of
Lizzie Borden, for sure, tell me. You know, I know
everybody knows the story, but tell me what your take
is after doing all this research on it.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
What I love about the acts, going back to what
we're talking about just a minute ago, is that it's
something that is below notice. And I think that's why
it was. There was no popular history available to me
when I was first writing this book is that it's
just something that's existed for so long that we take
it for granted, not something that we think about actively.
(33:36):
And I love to kind of pick that out and
try and shine a light on it and see what
it reflects back on us. So Lizzie Borden, it's such
an old story and we almost take it for granted
a little bit. I think some people, including me, at
the start of this book, are kind of like, ah, yeah,
Lizzie Borden heard a million times, not that interested. But
it's just so fascinating. It's just such a weird case.
(34:01):
I mean, the acts is what attracts me to the case,
but what makes it such a puzzle is the timeline
is that it's such a you know, there's like twenty
minutes between Andrew Borden being killed and everyone in the
neighborhood seeing Lizzie and being in the house. And it's
such a fascinating case too, because it's right at the
beginning of there being actual, like scientific basis on which
(34:24):
to base prosecutions. You know, they had actual some actual forensics.
They actually had photographs of the scene, which they moved
the scene to take photographs of it. Which shows you
how early is in the history of photography and grime
scene photography. Fingerprints were not a thing yet, but they
were able to, like test blood in things like that.
(34:44):
Let me just give you the basics. August fourth, eighteen
ninety two, very very hot day. Probably even worse for
them than it is for us experiencing extreme heat because
they did not have air conditioning. You know, of course
they wouldn't have air conditioning in eighteen ninety two, but
they also didn't have indoor plumbing, didn't have a lot
of electricity, were still using gas despite the fact that
(35:07):
these things were becoming very common in their neighborhood. They
lived in a fairly well to do neighborhood. Andrew Borden
was a rich man, but he wasn't living like one.
He was living on a very tight budget. He was
living with his wife, Abby of many years, who was
stepmother to his daughters, Lizzie and Emma. Emma had moved
away gotten married at this point. Lizzie was still living
(35:29):
with them. She was in her thirties and she was
kind of chafing at the boundaries of Victorian society. That morning,
there was Abby Andrew, Lizzie, but also Andrew's brother John,
and there made Bridget Sullivan, who were all there that morning.
(35:50):
Just to give you an example of how close with
the dollar Andrew was. They were having stew for breakfast,
which had already spoiled, so this was bad stew, and
they were having it for breakfast for some reason. Andrew, Abby,
and John all ate earlier on and went off to
do their chores. Lizzie rose later and came down had
(36:10):
she was on her period at that time, which is
kind of her explanation for some of the very small
amount of blood that was on her dress. Later. So
they are hanging out trying to get through a very
hot morning and deal with the heat. Andrew goes off
to the post office, John goes off to run errands.
So it is Abby, Lizzie, and Bridget and this very
(36:32):
small house. You've been there, I've been there. It's been
a while, but it's a very tightly constrained house. It
is not I would be surprised if it were over
in a thousand square feet very narrow stairways. But somehow
someone was able to approach Abby around nine o'clock and
kill her while she was doing chores in an upstairs bedroom.
(36:55):
I believe there were eighteen wounds to her head. Andrew
comes back. He walks around the house a little bit,
even goes up to the second floor, but somehow does
not see his wife lying there dead on the floor.
He and Lizzie have a couple of words. He talks
to Bridget a little bit, and then Bridget goes outside
to wash windows. Andrew says he's going down for a
(37:17):
nap and Lizzie question mark, question mark, question mark. She
doesn't even have a good alibi for this time. She
says that she went out to the barn and got
some fishing wire, which doesn't sound like her. Maybe she went,
she said, maybe I went and had a pair from
the yard, which was visible to a lot of people
who did not see her outside eating a pear. She
was very weird in the inquest. Fuzzy memory of events
(37:41):
doesn't really take pains to find an alibi by her
for herself. So between ten forty five and eleven o'clock,
Andrew goes to take a nap in the front room.
He lies down. He's got his jacket behind him as
kind of a makeshift pillow. At some point, somebody steaks
up from behind him, wax him at ten times with
something he has killed immediately. There's no scream or anything.
(38:04):
He never even woke up. But it's a very bloody event.
That was between ten forty five and eleven. At eleven o'clock,
Bridget went up for a nap, and about ten minutes
later she hears Lizzie screaming, there's been a murder, and
there's been a murder. She says, Maggie, Maggie, come quick.
Maggie was not Bridget's name, but the previous maid's name
was Maggie, so they kept calling her Maggie, which to
(38:27):
me speaks to One of the big theories about this
is that Lizzie and Bridget colluded in this.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Because Bridget skipped down with money. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Now, you know, there's so many different theories and I
don't really land on one theory or another. I don't
think it's something that can be solved at this point.
One of the big theories, and kind of the only
one that makes sense to me for Lizzie's guilt, is
that Bridget and Lizzie worked together. If Lizzie did it,
I don't see how she could have done it without
Bridget's help. But she and Bridget were not friends. I
(38:58):
do not see them planning a murder together. So anyway,
immediately the whole town basically files into the Boarden house
and sees this whole scene and sees the condition of it,
and sees Lizzie completely spotless dress, does not look like
she's just killed two people with an axe. And there
are some interesting like friends, like I was saying, forensic
(39:21):
insights into this, Like they could tell Abby had been
killed an hour and a half earlier because of the
contents of her stomach, and also because the blood when
they discovered her was much more ropey and matted than
Andrew's blood, so they could tell that she had been
dead for longer than Andrew had been dead.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
You know what's interesting about that is one thing that
Paul and I talk about on Buried Bones is if
you've got somebody who's targeting, as in I want to
get these murders done and steal something or I want
to get this revenge done, You're going to take the
man out first. You're not going to take the woman
out first.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
And it's so interesting that there was never really another
good suspect besides Lizzie and Britt yet there was never
really anyone. There was somebody who came to the door
a couple of weeks earlier and had some kind of
disagreement with Andrew, but that's like the only other glue
really as to who could have done it.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
There was a murder because I ended up doing an
episode on this for one of my last seasons of
Templemore Wicked, just like a documentary series, and there was
a woman who was murdered, you know, not far by
birth of Manchester, and I think the similarity was it
was in the same sort of vicinity, and it was
an axe, and that was pretty much it. And it
turned out to be you know, her father who owned
(40:32):
the farm, her father's ex employee who was really pissed
off at him and just saw her. He was gone
and saw her and killed her. And the thought was
the defense was was going to use that because Lizzie
was in jail when that happened. So it's like we're
back right back to your beginning phrase, crazed axe murderer
(40:52):
on the loose, And I get my argument has always
been everybody had an AX. I mean, you know, you
craze killer is about as far as you're going to
get with that.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I think, yeah, I don't really think this is that likely.
But what I see when I see that is an assassin.
There were assassins that at that point it's not super likely,
but that does happen. There are, you know, paid killings
that goes back a long time. I see someone who
knew what they were doing and knew how to hide
(41:21):
and escape notice and strike when they could anyway. Getting
back to access. They immediately the police are immediately interested.
They immediately think it might be an axe because that
was a pretty common weapon back then. That's not like
now where you know, you immediately go to a gun
or something like that, where an ax would be an
exotic weapon. Immediately they thought, okay, this looks like it
(41:43):
could be an ax. There's clearly some blunt trauma as
well as some sharp wounds as well, so it would
have to be something with both of those capabilities. So
they go downstairs, they look at the basement, they look
at the different access In the basement there are I
think two wood cutting axes, and then there are three
or four hatchets that were over kind of collected, which
(42:06):
Andrew had bought to do repairs himself. Again, this is
a very cheap guy. He wanted to do his own roofing.
He wanted to chop off his own pigeons. Says that
was what Lizzie thought that he had gotten them for.
So he was really getting them to do his own
things rather than just hiring out for it. And then
he would buy these axes for one project and then
(42:27):
put them in the basement and forget about them. So
they're going through these axes and they find one that
looks like it's got a little bit of blood on it.
They're very excited about that. They go and they take
it test. It does not turn out to do it.
They go back down later and they find an axe
covered an ash in this shoe box in the basement basically,
(42:47):
and they come up with this wild backstory for it.
They think, okay, so she got blood on the handle,
so she immediately a for comitting these crimes. She went
out to the pried off the handle with advise, then
ran down to the basement, stuck the handle in the
(43:08):
fire to burn up the evidence, and then put ash
on the axe head so that it would look like
it had been down there for a while, which is
really like just from the go is very convoluted. But
I think it's interesting because it speaks to how much
we want to impose our own narrative on these events
(43:32):
which are inexplicable. We want to try and find an
explanation for how they did this. Sometimes we'll go to
some crazy places for that. Because, like I laid out
with the timeline earlier, it was a very quick timeline.
And I can accept that Lizzie did a quick costume
change and no, but that's why nobody too quick costume
(43:52):
changes actually, because she was seen in between Babby and
Andrew and her dress was completely clean and white. Okay,
I can accept that in the fifteen minutes after Andrew
was killed, before he was found. But on top of that,
you got to send her out to the barn to
pry off a handle. That's crazy. Then send her down
(44:15):
to do this weird thing where she hides the axe.
That's a really that strains credulity for me.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Because why wouldn't she just hide it somewhere or toss
it if he had that many actses and hatchets?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, exactly. And so what was crazy about this was
once they got to the trial, they presented this whole
theory about the axe and how she'd secreted away the evidence.
And then they're interviewing one of the policemen and they're like,
so you didn't find the handle, where he's like, no, no, no,
I found the handle. It's in the shoe box. So
the whole thing about the handle being gone and burned
(44:49):
up was just completely made up. They did not double
check their facts. The handle was right there the whole time,
and that kind of blew their theory of the case.
And after that the defense was really grasping at straws.
It's such a bizarre, illogical event, it's hard to impose
a narrative on it. There's just inherently a lot of
(45:09):
reasonable doubt. So it makes total sense to me why
Lizzie was acquitted for this, because it's, you know, either
she covered her tracks very very well, or she got lucky,
or this was some kind of other random event. And
you know, they tore that house apart. They did not
find another axe, They did not find an axe in
the cistern or anything like that. They did find an
(45:31):
axe with a very new axe that was flung onto
a neighboring roof. A kid found it while looking for
a baseball, and that one is interesting to me because
they found it was covered in guilt, was new acts,
and they found a sliver of guilt in Abby's skull,
So that to me is a little bit of a
(45:53):
physical connection there, but also not enough to really base
a case on. So I'm of a couple of mine
about it. To me, I don't think Lizzie did it.
What really, Yeah, I think the timeline's too tight. I
don't think the motive is strong enough for me. I mean,
money is a good motive, but it doesn't explain everything.
(46:14):
And also, you know, she maintained her innocence for the
rest of her life. Having looked at a lot of
crimes people who you know, not that Obviously, people don't
come up with false alibis and deny things that they
did till they're dying day. A lot of people who
commit crimes eventually come forward about it. I find that
that happened. Oh found that it happened over and over again.
(46:37):
Is that when people were caught, they will be like, yeah,
I did it, but here's why. Rather than just saying
I did not do this, I never did this, which
is what Lizzie said. But really what it was and
this is what Emma said when she was interviewed about
twenty years later, her only interview, she was like, there
was no weapon. They never found a weapon, They never
had a weapon to pin on her. That's why I
(46:58):
don't believe it. The only thing I can see with
Lizzie is that if she used some other kitchen implement
to do this crime and then she washed it off
in the sink real quick. Okay, that's something I could see.
Maybe a cleaver, which is often called a meat axe,
or maybe like she was ironing handkerchiefs right before that,
(47:20):
maybe the iron she was using had a sharp edge
and she used that as the implement. But again, those
are pretty far fetched. And to me, I don't know.
You know, it's such a wild case. It's such a
tight timeline. I've never really found an answer that feels
satisfactory or convincing to me.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Thinking about the authors who've written books about this. But
it is a mystery, and so you know, this is
probably not a very popular opinion, but I don't really
want to know, and I definitely don't want to know
about Jack the Ripper. I mean, you will completely deflate
that story, and in my opinion, Fall River, Massachusetts will
be a less popular place if we find some sort
of confession letter from Lizzie or from somebody else with
(48:01):
you know, DNA proof that we can run. I just don't.
I think it is one of those, you know. I mean,
I think Lizzie Borden that case is our jack the
Ripper case.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Yeah, I think that's what keeps people going. I think
people are still gonna be talking about Jean Benet and
the staircase in one hundred years because there's not really
satisfactory answer. I mean, there's people like Lizzie, there's people
we think, okay, it's obviously then if you know the
basic facts of the case, but then things keep coming
up and you're like, well that's weird, and that's weird,
and that's weird. So yeah, I mean the puzzle aspect
(48:31):
of it is what's really interesting. But at the same time,
you know, I'm in the business of solving one hundred
year old axeburger cases, and Veleska Axe murder House is
kind of a tourist traction. They seem to be doing fine.
So yeah, so maybe Falls River would be fine after.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
All in true crime. And you know, again, I come
back to it's such a hap for me, it's such
a haphazard weapon. It can go so many different ways.
It's really really messy. But at the same time, I'm
not sure anything expresses anger as well as an axe would.
And I have to say, I don't know if everybody
else does this. It never occurs to me that people
(49:09):
use the blunt edge. I always think they're using the blade.
You know, the Servant Girl annihilator here in Austin in
the late eighteen hundreds, he would a lot of times
stun them by using the blunt edge and then assault
them and then turn it and kill them like that. So,
you know, utilizing in a lot of different ways. I
mean not to be so crass about it, but it
(49:29):
just is. It seems like such an odd yeah weapon
in general, like man, can you it's risky.
Speaker 2 (49:35):
I think what part of what it harkens back to
is partially the legacy of like state violence. This was,
you know, the axe is very associated with executions. It's
very much a weapon. You know, it's part of the facies.
The word fascists come from the facies was an axe
covered with rods, and if the axe was in the fascis,
(49:58):
then it showed that the lictors who cared it, carried it,
were able to carry out executions. So I think that
there's a long legacy of power associated with it and
with that blade of the axe, more so than the
blunt end, which is often a hammer. But you know,
that power is also something that can be taken back
(50:19):
because it's such a common weapon, because it's such a
tool of the laborer and of the domestic world. It's
something where the power can be easily taken back in
a lot of cases. You know, one of my first
earlier cases was a tyrant named Stessi Gorris who takes
over an area in ancient Turkey and is assassinated with
(50:40):
a concealed axe by a citizen who was tyrannized by
his reign. Basically, it's more complicated than that big political backstory,
but there's a lot of that where you're able to
conceal it and use it as something that might be
used for labor, and in that way quickly take it
(51:01):
out something that's been secreted and turn it against the
levers of power. You know, Nat Turner used an ax
in his rebellion. I mean, there's so much wrapped up
in the acts with both you know, there's labor, there's domesticity,
there's war, there's state power, and then there's also this
streak of insurgent power, something where people who are disempowered
(51:23):
can take it back under the guise of labor and
use it to strike out.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Absolutely well, never have I thought so much about a
weapon as I have now thought about the acts. You know.
One of the things that I think is so interesting
about it is it can be basically untraceable in a way.
And I know that I just said that. It's just
you know, it's a risky weapon. But with guns, you
can trace them, you can get blood blowback into the barrel.
(51:50):
Knives they can cut you. I know, you can get
cut by an axe. But it just seems like a
pretty efficient way in a lot of ways to dispatch someone.
And you know, I guess as stories move forward, it's
interesting you're talking about drones. Tell me about like a
drone assassinated. I mean, I don't even know if we
want to get into that, right, we're evolving into something
We're like a gun at some point is going to
(52:10):
be as obsolete as a weapon as an axis.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Absolutely. I mean there's plenty of guns that are absolutely
they'll talk about flit locks and things like that. But yeah,
I mean it's so accessible too. Even now, it's very accessible.
You can walk into any hardware store and buy an
axe for like twelve bucks. It's not expensive, it's easy
to use, and like you were saying, I never actually
thought about that before, the fact that it's so anonymous
(52:34):
and untraceable the way a bolt is not, or even
in the way you know, like computer paper is not.
You know, you could print out computer paper and they
can tell I can tell what computer you use specifically
from this sheet of paper that you sent me. So
it is there is an annymage to it. And I
think that's a big part of the Man from the
Train too, is just the fact that he was not
(52:55):
carrying axes with him. He was just grabbing them from
davers wood piles and picking them up very randomly.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen. If you haven't already,
(53:33):
this has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is
our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark,
Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
(53:55):
and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked, and on Twitter at
tenfold more. And you know of a historical crime that
could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked
Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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