Stuff You Should Know - How Lizzie Borden Worked

Episode Date: December 31, 2015

Everybody knows how many whacks Lizzie Borden gave her mother and father with that axe, but there is plenty about the infamous double homicide that remains unresolved, like who actually did it. Travel into the mystery of Lizzie Borden in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles the Beach of Bryant, and, and Jerry's back.

Wow, wow, wow. Look at that fine-looking lady over there. How's it going, Jerry? She gave us this fine thumbs up, just like old times. Yeah, Noel is just quietly weeping outside. He is, you know, like, back outside, Noel. He's peeking in our little portal window, scratching at it. The stint of Noel, okay, the reign of terror, is over.

Done. Yes, Noel's been deposed by Jerry. Yeah, so now it's not Noel sitting there, or nobody sitting there, which happened more times than I was comfortable with. At least four. Yeah, Jerry's like, wait a minute, we can do that? Yeah.

I'm out of here. Yeah, so long, Jerry. So welcome back, Jerry, and we already said congratulations on little Inez, but. Who just keeps getting cuter and cuter. Yep, I know things are going great, so we're happy to have you back. And little Inez, you're being very quiet,

just stay that way. She's just rocking in her little swing. Yeah. How great would that be? Having babies in here. Yeah, if they shut up, wouldn't that be cool? Oh, for sure. Good energy.

I just feel bad for him because it gets pretty gamey in here. Yeah. Even after like 15 minutes, like a couple hours. I kind of stink today, actually. I was going to apologize. Yeah, I didn't use deodorant last time I showered, which was like two days ago. That's fantastic.

I know, it's terrible. I even dressed up, man. That's great, Chuck. Thanks for that. Yeah, I'm going to take care of that tonight. That explains the sheen on your face. Yeah. Okay.

So we're here, Jerry's here. I smell, let's do it. Since you do smell, Chuck, I have to say, at least at the very least, I'm grateful that we don't happen to be in Fall River, Massachusetts on the morning of August 4th, 1892. Because that morning was particularly, particularly hot, unseasonably hot.

It was over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit by the time noon rolled around. Yeah. And that figures heavily in the case of Lizzie Borden in her 40 and 41 wax, which were more like 18 or 19 and 11. Yes. Are you familiar with Lizzie Borden?

Everybody knows Lizzie Borden, right? Yeah, Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother 40 wax. When she found what she had done, she gave her father 41. Yeah, wrong. There was no ax. Wasn't a real mother. Wasn't a real mother. There wasn't 40 and 41 wax.

No. So all about that was just made up, they think, to sell newspapers. Yes. Yeah, they think, it's a children's nursery rhyme these days, little sicko children. Sure. But they do think that it was possibly

some newspaper hawker, a Newsy, if you watch Disney movies, who came up with it and just took off. We should change it to, Lizzie Borden may or may not have taken a hatchet, given her stepmother 18 or 19 wax. Right. 13 of them crushed her skull. When she saw what she had done, her father got home,

she gave him 11 or so and then got away. Yeah, it's got free. That doesn't have the same ring. No, it doesn't. But you basically did just sum it up pretty well, pretty accurately, Chuck. Yeah. So for those of you who don't know who Lizzie Borden is,

just settle down, buckle in, prepare for a wild ride. For those of you who do know, do the same, okay? Yeah, because we have new evidence that we're gonna reveal at the end. Controvertible evidence of exactly who carried out these murders and the only people who have it is us. Yep. Because we're gonna make it up.

And you'll find out in 35-ish minutes or 40. And apparently two Stuff You Missed in History class did an episode on Lizzie Borden. Oh, I'm sure. So if this floats your boat, goes into that one too. Yeah. I should point out too, the very first thing we said, we told Jerry we were doing Lizzie Borden,

she said, lesbian. Yeah. And we said, maybe. That's one of the theories. Yeah. This'll all figure in. We're just teasing. Teasing like crazy.

All right. So the morning of August 4th, 1892, Fall River, Massachusetts, very cute town, by the way. I'm sure. You mean I visited recently? Ooh, did you go to the house? Yep. Why else would you go there?

That's about it. Yeah. That was on your death tour, your murder tour. Yeah. But in 1892, like I said, it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit on August 4th, really, really hot for that area. And at about 10, I think about 1045 AM, wasn't it? Yeah, about 1045.

What, the first murder? No, the father coming home. Oh yeah. Yeah, they placed both of these events within like 30 to 45 minutes. Okay. There's, you know, a give and take there. So about 1045 AM, one Andrew Jackson Borden

returns to his home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Mass. And the house is in a part of town that was very popular among recent immigrants, specifically Irish Catholics and Portuguese. Yeah. And I believe there's some Chinese immigrants there as well. Why not? It wasn't an upscale part of town by any means,

despite the fact that Andrew Borden was an extremely wealthy man. Yeah, he was worth between seven and 10 million today dollars. I've heard 12. Let's say between seven and 12 then. What? Of today dollars. Right.

That's a lot of dough and also a good reason to kill somebody. Yeah, and despite having a lot of dough, he lived in one of the lower rent sections of town. Yeah. His house did not have indoor plumbing, which was kind of odd by this time for that area. Apparently, many of the people who were far, far worse off

than his family financially had indoor plumbing. He did not. He also didn't have any kind of electric lighting. Instead, he used kerosene lamps. And he kept doors locked. He was very afraid of being robbed. Yeah, let's cover this bit real quick. I think we should read this.

There's a lady named Angela Carter who wrote about the case. She actually factored into our fairy tales episode. She was the feminist writer who rewrote fairy tales. Well, she's all over the place. I think she wrote, what was that Neil Jordan take on Little Rod riding her hood? Yeah, I don't remember. She wrote the short story.

Same lady? Yeah. Wow. So she said the house was originally a two-family home, and they converted it to a single-family home, but didn't take a lot of time. Apparently, just knocked down some walls through in a staircase, and it ended up being a weird house

because of that. It is very weird. And she describes it as this way, a house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors. For upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms led in and out of one another like a maze and a bad dream. It is a house without passages.

There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmate's personal territory, inmate. Very nice. It is a house with no shared, no common spaces between one room and the next. It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal document. Creepy.

No hallways or anything? No. Weird. No, each room led into the next, and in fact, Lizzie's bedroom led right into her sister Emma's bedroom. Yeah. For Emma to go to bed,

she would have had to go through Lizzie's bedroom, and then her stepmother and father's bedroom was behind hers, but it was sealed off by a locked door and accessed through staircase that only her father used that you could get to only with the key. Yeah, and to go up and down the stairs, they had to go through their parents' bedroom, right? Yes, but they didn't do that.

That was, it was off limits. It was locked. They just jumped out the second-story window. No, there was a front staircase. They actually built a second staircase so that their parents could come and go to their room without having to go through Lizzie's room. So for all intents and purposes, but this locked door,

it was a wall that sealed off their parents' room from theirs. Yes, and when we say parents, this is stepmother. Lizzie was born to Sarah Morse in her father in 1860, third child, had an older sister named Emma, 10 years older, second daughter named Alice, who died when Lizzie was two. Yes, she died from hydroencephaly.

You could just make up anything back then. Yeah. It's something believable. Right. And then her mother died in 1863 when she was just two of uterine congestion. And then when Lizzie turned, right before she turned five, he remarried to Abby Gray,

who the daughters were in their 30s by the time the murder took place, unmarried spinsters, and never seemed like they had a great relationship with Abby. They didn't, but they both adored their father and he personally appreciated that for his benefit for his benefit, they referred to her as mother and they did for decades. Yeah.

Until a time, which we'll get to. But the reason that Andrew Borden kept the house locked all the time was because a couple of years before, there had been a burglary where some mysterious burglar had come in and made off with $100 and some trolley tickets and some jewelry, I think. And it was basically pretty well known around town that it was Lizzie who'd done it.

Yeah, it sounds like an inside job to me. Yeah, she robbed her own father. Rather than accuse his daughter of this extraordinarily scandalous behavior at the time. Sure. He just locked everything and all doors were locked all the time and he kept the key to his room on the mantle, basically daring anybody to even try it

because he would know what happened because the only way you could get in was through this key. The only way to get to the key would be to have a key to the outside doors. So we say all this to say that when Andrew Borden came back home that day on August 4th that morning, he was locked out of his own house.

Yeah. And he had to be led in by the maid, whose name was Bridget. Yeah. But who Emma and Lizzie called Maggie because they had had another maid named Maggie and they decided that they just were gonna call this one Maggie, too. Yeah, that sounds like...

Do you watch this show Another Period? Uh-huh. It's great. It's basically a reality TV spoof of like Downton Abbey. Nice. And the two lead Natasha Ligiero and... Oh, I can't remember her name from Garfunkel on Oats, The Blonde.

She does the... She's the other... I think they co-created the series. Okay. But they're just these rich girls who would like... They renamed one of the maids chair. I've got to check this out. How have I not even heard of this?

I don't know, man. It's really funny. It's got a huge, great cast. Nice. Have you seen Anthony Jeslenick special on Netflix yet? Oh, no. Dude. Love that guy, though.

It's really great. Yeah. So awful, but wonderful. Yeah. So Andrew Borden gets let back into his own house? Yes, not Anthony Jeslenick. No. And he gets let back in by the maid and he decides

he's gonna lay down for a little while on the couch, right? Apparently the whole family was under the weather, including the maid. Yeah. Because they had been eating the same mutton for like five days. Mutton sounds so gross. Mutton's gross to begin with.

Five day old mutton that had been stored in the heat in an ice box outdoors is not just gross. It's really bad for you. So the whole family had basically come down to varying degrees of food poisoning, apparently. So much so that Mrs. Borden, Abby Borden, had gone to talk to the doctor the day before the murders and said, I think we're being poisoned

by one of my husband's business rivals. Yeah, or my stepdaughter. Right, you know. Something like that. Yeah, that's not all the weirdness that was going on. In the months and weeks before the murders, there was a lot of, not strange, but a lot of financial goings on

that kind of raised the ire of the daughters. Notably, Andrew started being fairly generous with other members of the family, giving away properties and things. Yeah. Including to Abby, he gave her a house that she let her sister live in. Yeah, her sister was in big trouble, so he helped her out.

Yeah, so he's got money. He's helping out. And the daughters are like, um, um. So he said, you know what? I'll give you each a property as well. For a dollar. And you're welcome, and they ended up reselling that back to dad for cash later, which was kind of jerky.

Yeah, well, it was a rental property, and he had a bunch of rental properties, and apparently his miserliness was very well known. He also directed some mills, right? Yeah. And Fall River's incredibly famous for its mills. It's a huge mill town. So he knew that if you worked in the mills

and rented a home from him, or a room from him even, he knew if you got a raise, and if you got a raise, he would raise your rent. Yeah. So this is a rental property, one of his rental properties that he sold to his daughters so that they could have rental income. Apparently they didn't feel like doing that,

so they just sold it back to him for like, I think 2,400% increase. Yeah, not bad. No, for doing nothing. The other thing that happened in the, actually the night before the murder is their uncle John, John Venicom Morse, who was their deceased mother's brother, he came a calling to speak about some business with Andrew,

and there's a lot of speculation on what was going on here. Basically they think that it just ramped up a tense situation even more, like he probably had his hand out. Yeah, maybe. That was my guess. I think it was fairly common for him to come by, and I think he was also, I don't think he was supplicant to Andrew Borden.

I think they had business together a lot. Well, Lizzie didn't like him. So that's news to me too. Yeah, she apparently didn't even speak to him. She said at the trial while he was there. Right, like when he came to visit and stay the night, she hadn't spoken to him the whole time. When he came and then spent the night

and then left the next morning, because it's very important he was not in the house when Andrew Borden came back into the house, right? Yeah, and she never called him Uncle John, which is the dead giveaway if you love your uncle. Yeah, I didn't realize there was animosity between the two. I don't know that there necessarily was. Here's one of the problems that we're gonna run into

over and over again, and it's also one of the reasons why Lizzie Borden's legend has remained alive for so long. We have a propensity to take very complex, complicated people and their very complex, complicated relationships with one another and boil them down into caricatures that we can understand and easily explain. And so yeah, so over the century or so,

we've done the same thing to Lizzie Borden case. So it's really easy to speculate on, and it's also easy to interpret little things one way or the other, which also makes the whole thing a lot of fun. Yeah, no one, everyone loves a cold case. Yeah. All right, so let's take a break

and we'll get back to some of the nitty-gritty deets right after this. No, something you should know, something you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

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because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, you were saying that the family, it was tense in the house. Yeah. To be certain. It sounded like it was always tense, but notably tense. Right.

Months leading up to the murders. Yeah. And apparently both Emma and Lizzie took off for several weeks right before the murders. When they came back, Lizzie didn't even come back to the house. She rented a room for a few days, I guess to ease herself back into having to live in this house again. Like a halfway house. Kind of.

That's weird. Maybe three quarters of the way house. And she and Emma both stopped calling Mrs. Borden mother all of a sudden around the time that their father had given the house that extra house to her, right? Yes. Her sister was living it. She was calling her Mrs. Borden, including to her face. That's pretty chilly, right?

Yeah. So that's tense. Like you say, Uncle John Morris might have increased this tension. And the house is very, very chilly, civilly, cordial to an extent, but just it was a house full of adults who were not getting along and like you say, probably hadn't been for a while. Yeah. The daughter of in June, 1892, Andrew, the father killed a bunch of pigeons in the barn

outside the house to make a pigeon. Well, so Abby could make a pigeon pie and supposedly Lizzie kind of thought of these pigeons as her pets. So that would not have been a very cool thing to do if you knew your daughter loved these pigeons. So I'm in the mood for pigeon pie. Yeah. He apparently also defended his actions by saying that he was worried about intruders

because local boys used to like to come, let themselves into their barn and hang out with these pigeons and play with them. So he solved two problems, dinner, and boys coming over by just killing Lizzie's pigeons. That's right. And she also, beyond just liking these pigeons, she was also a huge animal lover. Yeah. She left a lot of money to an animal rights group when she died. So I mean, she probably would have taken this fairly hard.

Sure. On the flip side though, so her father, this is that caricature thing I was talking about, her father's painted is like this Ebenezer Scrooge type, super miserly, tight-fisted. He definitely was that, but it's very easy to extend this idea that he and Lizzie hated each other. And that's absolutely not true. Yeah. Both Lizzie and Emma apparently very much loved their father and their father loved them.

Yeah. As a matter of fact, he wore a pinky ring that Lizzie gave him when she was like 15 and he'd worn it every day, never took it off. Yeah. They seem to like each other a lot. It was a foolery ever wore. It was like, there was definite affection there that often gets overlooked when you're just kind of painting this thing in broad strokes, you know?

Yeah. But like you said, he wasn't beloved in the town because if you ask me, if you have money and you're a tightwad, that's like the worst thing. It is. If you have money, be generous. That's what I say. Sure. You know, pick up checks, be generous with your friends.

If you have dough and you're, I don't know, it's not going to make any friends. Let's just say that. It's true. And it didn't in his case. So also, if you think about it, it reveals a lot psychologically that the whole family's been eating the same mutton for five days. And the first thing that Mrs. Borden thinks of is that their milk is being poisoned by one of her husband's business rivals.

Yeah. That's where her mind went. Exactly. So there's, I mean, yeah, it's not just inside this house, the tension. It's also coming from outside a little bit as well. Yeah. And I guess we'll go ahead and point out a few of the, the circumstantial evidence surrounding Lizzie.

So one of the things was in the days before the murder, she was trying to, she'd been seen trying to buy a poisonous prusik acid. Yeah. She said she wanted. Cyanide. Yeah. She said she wanted it to clean things. But other people in the trial said maybe she was trying to poison them, although Autoxi's

revealed no poison in the bodies, no poison in the milk. No, but the prosecutors wanted to use that to suggest that she had murder on her mind. Inadmissible. It was ruled inadmissible because they figured it'd be too inflammatory and it was entirely possible that she really did want to clean this seal skin coat with that stuff. All right. What else? This, the dress thing, it's pretty damning.

Well, hold on. Before we get any further into that, let's, let's talk about the actual murders. Okay. You ready? Sure. Let's just come back in. He's laying down on the sofa, right? And he goes to sleep and he never wakes up.

That's right. The reason he never wakes up is because, like you said, he got hit from behind and above about 11 times with an axe and hit in about the same area so that basically his face was cut clean away. Yeah. Into nothingness. Yeah. Probably a hatchet, not an axe.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. And at about 11, 10, Bridget was upstairs sleeping because, again, she'd been throwing up from the mutton. When she gets roused by Lizzie calling from downstairs saying, hurry, something's happened. She comes downstairs and she says, someone's come in and killed father. So now this alert has just gone out.

The first body's been discovered, Andrew Borden, who's still bleeding, right? Yes. And his face is hacked away. Yeah. Pretty grotesque. You can see the picture online. Yeah. She goes across the street to the doctor to get him, comes back with him, and they say,

where's your mother? She's like, stepmother. They're like, where's your stepmother? And she says, somebody came with a note or something like that. I think she went to go visit a sick friend. Who knows? Yeah. And then she goes, well, actually, I think I heard her come back in.

Why don't you guys go look upstairs? And Bridget is like, I'm not looking upstairs. There's a dead body here. How do we know there's not another dead body? So a neighbor lady and Bridget goes upstairs, and they see from the staircase into the bedroom. It's really cool. When you go on the tour of the house, you can stand where they stood and see exactly what they would have seen.

Yeah. And there's Mrs. Borden, all I think 240 pounds of her, laid out on the floor with the back of her head just split wide open with something like 18 blows. And again, 13 of them have just completely crushed her skull. So now there's two dead bodies, and eventually they are dragged into the dining room where they're autopsied. And rather than be buried there before they're buried, they're decapitated, and their heads are sent to Harvard.

Yes. And then eventually buried at the foot of their graves. Yes. Like all decapitated heads. Exactly. So almost immediately, the cops went, you were the only person in the house, right? That's right. Because Bridget was outside, around the time that her mother would have been killed, Lizzie

was ironing handkerchiefs with a little mini iron and a little mini ironing board in the dining room. Yeah. Emma was 15 miles away out of town. That's right. Uncle John Morris was away in town at the post office, I think, on business. Yeah, because he doesn't use stamps.com. Right.

Yeah. And Andrew Borden was in town on his own business as well. So Lizzie was the only one in the house at about 9.30 a.m. around the time when her step mother would have been murdered. She says that when her father came home and laid down around the time he would have been murdered, she wasn't in the house then. Yeah. She said she went out to that barn that she liked to hang out with the pigeons.

And she was eating pears, just hanging out in the loft, eating pears. Eating pears. And the reason she was in the loft is because she was getting lead to make sinkers to go fishing with. Yeah. And while she was there, she's like, oh, I like it in here in the 100 degree weather. Right. And especially upstairs in this loft, she's going to eat some pears.

Right. So she ate some pears. For, I don't know, 20, 15, 20 minutes. And when she came back in, she discovered her father called Bridget down in the whole chain of events and her the public record around that time. Yes. So we already mentioned the prusik acid. She was caught burning a dress.

Yeah. She even witnessed her doing that and then later gave testimony about that. And that's what led to her being indicted for murder. That's right. And she said that the dress was stained and that's why she was burning it. Stained with paint though. Yes. Stained with paint.

Right. But this is three days after the murder. All of a sudden she's pulling a dress out of the coal chute and saying, oh, this dress is stained with paint. I'm just going to go ahead and burn it. So this family friend, Alice says, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And Lizzie said, shut up you. And Alice said, OK, and goes and tells the cops.

So in the basement, they found two axes, two hatchets, and then a hatchet head that it had the handle broken off. They suspected that it was broken off recently. And that hatchet head, they say, looked like it had been planted there and covered with dust and ash to make it look like it had been there a long time, basically tampered with evidence-wise. One officer at the trial said the handle was actually there and we found it. Another officer says no, we didn't.

So who knows? Yeah. I think that the consensus among historians is that they never found this handle. Yeah. But it's never explained why the one officer said they did. Yeah. Yeah. So that hand that hatchet had that they did find though, Chuck, they never conclusively

showed that it was the murder weapon. And they just said, this is probably a pretty good stand-in, right? And they never found any blood or anything on it, which that's kind of difficult, if you think, to completely get a hatchet head clean. Totally. Yeah. Right? So that's kind of weird.

In a sense, they never found the murder weapon, essentially. Well, they said they did. Well, yeah. Sure, the prosecution said that this was it. Right. But who knows? Right. Again, all suspicion is just immediately falling onto Lizzie.

And there were a number of different hearings and inquests and grand juries before she was formally indicted. And each time, apparently, it looked like she was going to get off. Because despite what the cops thought, at this time and this place and era, Victorian ladies did not murder people with hatchets. So that in and of itself was enough to get her off, right, or to keep her from even being indicted. Yeah.

And each time, her friend, Alice, from down the street would come in and say, I saw Lizzie Byrne address that had some sort of brownish-red stain all over it, and the jury or the judge or whoever would say, we think that's enough. And so finally, it got to the point where I think the grand jury was indicted her for three counts of murder, right? One of her stepmother, one of her father, and then one of her stepmother and father, which is bizarre even at the time. But she faced three counts of murder, and they used the hatchet head.

That was their big case. But they had some real problems. Number one, if that dress had been covered with blood, it was gone now. But number two, Emma, her sister, said that dress actually was covered in paint. That was just paint. That had nothing to do with blood, right? And the big problem here is, it almost goes without saying, if somebody murdered Mrs. Borden with a hatchet and then murdered Mr. Borden with a hatchet, they would be covered

in blood twice. So what do you do? How could you have gotten around that? One of the theories was that Lizzie Borden stripped down, was naked, killed Mrs. Borden, put her clothes back on, and then when she had the chance, took her clothes back off, and then killed her father, and then rinsed off both times and put her clean clothes back on. That probably didn't happen, though.

Probably not. We need to take another break, though, and when we come back, we will wrap up what happened in the trials and what happened afterward. Right for this. All right, we're back, Lizzie Borden, on trial, in big trouble, and a lot of circumstantial evidence, but no hard evidence at this point at the trial. No smoking gun, as they say. No.

Not even a smoking hatchet. No fingerprints? They didn't do any fingerprinting at this point. Fingerprinting was new and not really trustworthy, so they didn't even bother. Well, yeah. Pretty much every step of the police investigation was fouled up. To begin with, the murders took place while almost the entire police force was off on the annual police picnic out of town.

All these neighbors and looky-loos came through the crime scene and totally messed up, but the big thing was, is forensic science wasn't really in widespread use at the time. Yeah. At the trial, they point out a lot of incongruencies. Her story changed a lot during the questioning, which is a little weird. The cops went into the barn and they said, you know, it's super hot in here. I don't see how anyone would choose to just sit here for 20 minutes and eat pears, and we don't see any footprints anywhere around.

Which is weird because two workmen later testified that they had been up in that place like the week before. Yeah. Which, well, who knows after a week what a footprint in a barn will do. And then the day before the murders, Lizzie went to her old friend Alice and said some weird things that she felt like something bad was going to happen to her family. Almost like that was, she said, I feel as if something were hanging over me and I can't throw it off and she was frightened.

So this sort of looks like she was setting up an alibi. Yeah. She said she was worried something bad was going to happen to her father. That was the day before the murders, the night before them, right? So for the prosecution, they were like, they took two pretty big hits. One, the prusik acid, the cyanide, got thrown out of evidence. And then two, so did Lizzie's own testimony because the judge determined that she had been on copious amounts of morphine at the time and they were contradictory and even

at their base, they weren't admissions of guilt, they were protestations, right? So the prosecution didn't have a lot to go on. They had almost an entirely circum, not even almost, a completely circumstantial case that really had tons and tons of holes in it. That's right. It was a two-week trial. Lizzie never took the stand herself and it was huge. It was the trial of the century.

She was deemed guilty while the trial was taking place in her town, basically. In her town. In her town. Newspapers all over the world at this point. So the impression I have, though, is that out of town, they had a different take on it, that these bumbling dummies, these yokels in Fall River were trying to prosecute a woman for a crime that clearly some maniac had carried out and that they should just leave her alone finally.

Interesting. During the trial, this helped the sensationalized aspect of it. They actually brought in the chopped up skulls and presented it and like it was out of a TV movie, Lizzie saw this, swooned and fainted, which of course was going to get some sympathy from the jury and it didn't take long. It was about 90 minutes and the jury said not guilty and she got away with it. So thanks, many, many people. What do you think?

I don't know. Well here's some theories. One that she was like in a fugue state and committed these murders. Yeah, but a fugue state that lasted 90 minutes where she was able to conceal the murder weapon and her own guilt and wait for her father to come home and fall asleep. That's not a fugue state. That's what they say and it could have been less than 90 minutes if you take the shorter side of both ends of the murders of the time range.

One was that she was gay and that she was having an affair with the maid. They were caught by the stepmother. She was really super mad and so Lizzie killed her with a candlestick and then went and confessed this to her father thinking that he might understand and he got really mad and so they killed, both killed him. Okay, that's another theory. One that she was abused by her father sexually and physically abused although there's no evidence to substantiate this.

One is that the maid, there was a deathbed confession from the maid to her own sister which no one knows if that's true or not. Yeah, I mean the maid was most likely not a lesbian. It's entirely possible that Lizzie Borden was because later on after the murder she and her sister continued to live together. They bought a mansion in the well-heeled part of Fall River and Lizzie named it Maplecroft. The maid eventually remarried or got married. She just totally falls off the map for five years and then pops up again and butte Montana

and gets married and dies in like 1948. But Lizzie and her sister lived together until 1905 and then all of a sudden her sister moves out of the house and they never speak again for 22 years until they die. Yeah. And some people say that it was because her sister didn't improve her relationship with this woman named Nancy O'Neill. Yeah, an actor. Yeah, which is entirely possible.

Who knows what happened? It could have been that her sister believed she was innocent and then finally Lizzie admitted it in 1905 and her sister was like, I am done with you. Who knows? One of the other theories is that William Borden, who was the illegitimate son of Andrew and also a butcher, was basically he killed him because of like failed extortion attempts. So was he proven to exist? William Borden?

Yeah, I thought he was hypothetical. Is he like a real person? I think so. Huh. And then the final two was that Emma did it and had the perfect alibi and setting up that she was 15 miles away and that Uncle John did it, who was there visiting. Yeah. So basically anyone who had anything to do closely with the family, there's a theory

that they did it. Right. Yeah. And these are all theories. Like if you look at the evidence, you can, I think you can basically get rid of everybody except Lizzie. And there are some big problems with their story too. Like even if you believe she's innocent, there's some stuff you really have to contend with.

Like for example, she says she was in the house at the time her stepmother would have been killed. Yeah. And her stepmother was like 240 pounds. And the police came and they dropped a 200 pound weight in the place where her stepmother had fallen when she would have been killed. And the cop downstairs, whose job it was to listen to hear if he heard anything, said it felt like the whole house shook.

I'm sure. Right? Yeah. So, and Lizzie's like, I didn't hear anything. That's kind of a weird thing, right? Sure. And then Lizzie also, she behaved rather strangely here there. Like when the neighbor came over, she was like, Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come in.

Someone's come in and killed father. Yeah. Like come in for tea. Yeah. There's just a lot of weird stuff that she's done. And then the dad was posed afterward on the couch. Yeah. His favorite coat was rolled up beneath his head.

Yeah. And he had his like arms folded over in his lap and this is creepy. Yeah. And if you really look at all the evidence too, especially the prosecution's case, there's no way that that jury should have convicted her. They definitely did the right thing in acquitting her because there was no case against her really. Yeah.

I mean, she was little. She's like five foot one and basically one of the big defense points was like, this tiny little lady just couldn't have done this. These were like brutal, powerful, forceful blows with this hatchet. And despite, I mean, the fact that she has crazy eyes. Maybe it's just that one picture. I don't know, but it definitely didn't do her any favors in history. Yeah.

Like that one big photo of her. She looks like a psycho killer. She does, you know, a little bit for sure. But they said there was no way this little lady could have done this and that was kind of one of their main defense points. Yeah. And it didn't matter what happened because everyone thought she did it and she would go to church and have people whisper about her and kids through rocks at her windows

for years and through rotten eggs at her house and ding dong ditch and basically was shunned by her local town folk as a murderous. And even the people, all the out of towners who came and used her as, you know, to promote their own stuff like the suffragettes like made her basically a hero. By the time she died, like most people had left her and she, she died a fairly lonely old woman. Yeah. Despite having not spoken to her sister in 22 years, they died within nine days of each

other. Yeah. Lizzie died first and then Emma and sweetly, oddly, weirdly, all of the Bordens, Lizzie, Emma, Andrew, Abby, the original Mrs. Borden. Yeah. And their sister who died as a child are all buried next to one another in the family plot. Yeah. That's normal.

It's not weird. That's just how they did things. Not weird. She did change her name too, which I thought was, you didn't go far enough. She changed her name to Lisbeth Borden. Yeah. I might have gone with something completely different. Yeah.

Without L I Z even in the name that would have been my recommendation. I mean, like Tammy Borden or something or Tammy Smith. Oh yeah. You could get rid of the board. Just go whole hog. Hadn't thought about that. You know, yeah. Yeah.

I want to disappear. How about Lisbeth Borden instead of Lizzie Borden? No one will ever suspect that I'm a Lizzie Borden. She was pretty young. She was 66 when she died. Yeah. Her sister was like a civil, almost a decade older than her. So she died at, I guess, a respectable old age.

Lizzie died young. Not bad. Her sister didn't even die of an illness. She fell on the stairs, supposedly. With push marks in her lower back. So we've basically just given like a really like broad overview. You can dedicate all of your spare time to this case. It's really fascinating and there's a lot of stuff on it on the internet too.

And if you're ever in the Providence or Boston area, like do yourself a favor and go down to the Lizzie Borden house and take the tour. It's pretty cool. You can stay there, right? Yeah. It's a bed and breakfast that you can stay in. Supposedly haunted? Allegedly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh wait, our new evidence though. We didn't reveal it. Oh, okay. Go ahead. I have none.

I don't either. Man, you scared me. I thought like you really did after a second. No, that'd be great. I wouldn't be sitting on that. And you can type Lizzie Borden all you want in the search bar. It just turns up some lame definition of her, I think, on our site. So just go look elsewhere.

And since I said elsewhere, it's time for listener mail. Readings, gents, and Jerry or Noel or Empty Space. I've recently developed somewhat of a novel biological effector. I remember we talked about those. And it's taught me a lot about how I did and how I should be caring myself in the world. I'd like to believe I've been polite about it, but I'm definitely the type of person that has a hard time not noticing and having my attention drawn to irregularities about people, especially on their faces.

About two weeks ago, I developed a bacterial infection of my skin. It covers about half of my forehead and extends down to one eye, causing redness and swelling that makes the eye remain more closed than the other in a resting state. I was surprised at how many of my friends and strangers in public. I could tell they're distracted by it when talking to me. And it made me feel a little self-conscious on top of my own hangups about such things. I think I've learned a little bit from the experience about what it might be like to be someone that goes through their whole life in this situation.

In my case, at least, it's not as simple as just ignoring the condition, but it goes a long way for people to acknowledge it and be able to accept it without judgment. Thanks for the work you guys do for keeping me company with a wide variety of topics. That is from Andrew in Utah. Thanks a lot, Andrew. We appreciate that. Yeah, sorry to hear about that, man. But I like your attitude about it and the fresh perspective it's brought you. Yeah.

If you've got a brush with fresh perspective, we want to hear about that. No matter what it has to do with, you can tweet to us. Oh, wait, Chuck, we want to say Happy New Year to everybody. Yeah. Happy New Year and happy birthday, Yumi. Happy birthday, Yumi. Okay, so if you want, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathousethefirst.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We'll see you next time. Bye, bye, bye.