The AXE Murderer Who Got Away

She taught Sunday school. She sang in the church choir. She was the quiet, unmarried daughter that all of Fall River agreed could never hurt a soul. And yet, she may have gone away with the most brutal double murder in American history. Lizzy Borden was arrested and tried for the savage hacking of her stepmother and her father in Massachusetts in 1892. She became so famous that even during her lifetime, this little song haunted her. Lizzy Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 wax when she saw what she had done. She gave her father 41. And today we're going to walk through exactly what happened on 92nd Street. Not the legend, not the rhyme, but the record. We're going to lay out all the testimonies, the autopsies and the evidence that the actual jury saw and the evidence they panel of judges made sure that they would never see. And by the end, we're going to understand why this case has stayed unsolved for more than 130 years and why the honest answer isn't she did it or she didn't do it, but why it's way more complicated than just that and how pieces of the puzzle would continue to get uncovered over the next several decades. Two bodies, one locked house and only one person inside, the innocent, youngest church going daughter, who had secret motives to want them both dead and yet she still walked free. Which leaves us with the question, if Lizzy Borden didn't kill her father and stepmother, then who did? Who walked into that occupied house in broad daylight and murdered two people 20 minutes apart, and vanished without leaving a single drop of blood. How did Lizzy do it? Or if she's innocent, how does she not see or hear anything? We're going to answer all these questions and more, so sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? Welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting fascinating controversial stories from around the world from all time forever. That is what I do in this tent as I try to deep dive in all the craziest mysteries and rabbit holes that are under the sun. That is what I do. I go on Wikipedia and I find like a thing to a M and I'm like, what is this? And I click on five more links and now I'm deep in the hole. It's 5 a.m. I'm tired. My baby's waking up and I'm like, I got to do an episode on this. And that's kind of what this one is about. The first time I ever heard about the story, my good pal, Chris does, fuck it up with us. How are you, friend? Chris does, we have no time because I actually have to go directly to you to ask you a question. You told me the rhyme. That's right. And where did you learn this rhyme? I remember it back in elementary school. I never heard this in my life. And I was like, this is an axmer to her children's rhyme, which most children's rhymes are always pretty dark for the record. Yeah. Bring around the Rosie pocket pole of Posey, ashes to ashes, we all fall down. I mean, that is about the plague. Yeah. Pretty crazy. Yeah. And this one is no different. It's like literally Lizzy Borden killed both her parents and that's the whole nursery room. She's the original Menendez brothers. Whoa, that's an excellent point, Christos. Good golly. You're on it today. Yep. Now, before we jump into this whole story, I want to say thanks to you for tuning in. And for making the show possible, every time you click, comment, like, subscribe, anything like that on our channel, you tell the algorithm overlords. Hey, Mark and Christos, you're doing a pretty good job. And you keep the lights on the tension. You keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, where does it all start? Well, if you go to fall river, Massachusetts today, you can actually pay to sleep in a room where a woman was hacked to death. Yeah. That's awesome for you. And people book it months in advance and it's still there right now. And that house is where our entire story starts. And honestly, the house itself is like kind of a character in the mystery. So let's back up and I will set the stage for you. All right. We're in Fall River, 1892. And it's what they call a boom town. Things are going pretty good. You got cotton mills. You got migrant labor. You got fortunes getting made overnight. And one of the guys getting rich off of all of this is a man named Andrew Jackson, Gordon. He's involved in all sorts of stuff. He's making money every which way. He's got a real estate thing, a bank thing. He owns a piece in the mills. All that is said with all of his investments, Andrew's loaded. And that's the first thing it doesn't really add up in this whole story because a guy with that kind of money could live anywhere that he wanted to. And I mean, he's got money coming in from all these income streams. He's like working with the banks. Like he could live in like Boston property. He'd live in New York City. The fancy families of Fall River all lived in a place called the Hill. And these big gorgeous mansions. But not Andrew. Andrew Borden lives downtown packed in among the shops and the stables and like a narrow little house on the second street with no indoor plumbing and no electricity. And keep in mind, this is the 1890s when a man of his means could have absolutely afforded both of those things. And not only is the house not like, okay, it's small and it's in a weird area. But it's nice. It's not even really nice. The house is weird. Like there's no hallways to get from one room to the other. You have to like physically walk through each room between kind of like a railroad situation. The bedrooms open right into each other like train cars. And half of them are locked with a key. Now part of that is just because the place had been chopped up from like an old two family home. But the other part of it. And everyone who knew Andrew agreed on this is that Andrew is cheap. So cheap and so frugal. He had like the craziest reputation in the whole town for being a penny pincer and he would never spend a cent if you could help it. So who's actually living in this tiny little house? Well, you have Andrew Borden, who's about seven years old, his second wife, a woman named Abby Durphy Borden, who he had been married to back in 1865, a couple years after his first wife died. And Andrew's two grown daughters from that first marriage, Emma, the older one, and Lizzie, who had just turned 32 in the summer of 1892. So let me paint you a quick picture of these two sisters because they were pretty different from each other. Emma is the older sister by about nine years. She's pretty quiet. And by most accounts, she, you know, looked a little older than her age. She seemed pretty plain. One reporter at the trial said that she looked as many years older than she was as Lizzie looked younger, which I mean, insane diss to be like, Hey, my mom, my stepmom and my dad just got murdered. And now someone of the jury is like, there's this old broad, I mean, tough. But Lizzie, the younger sister is the more outgoing the two. And she's the one that people found harder to pin down. Here's a fun little mythbuster for you. Pop culture always paints Lizzie as like a fiery redhead. But that's actually not true. According to her own passport application, Lizzie is about like five foot three, light brown hair, gray eyes. And the red hair thing seems to be something that later storytellers invented, which was added on in these kinds of stories to give like a woman with like a fiery kind of, you know, temper, like angry. They often give her red hair. So, but it seems like cornered her passport. That wasn't the case at all. In her younger years, she was considered fairly attractive and had a few suitors. And in her later years, she was, I guess you could say a bit stout, a bit matronly, as you would say, right? I think that's a reasonable term. Just say what you mean, Mark. She was a faddled pig, right? So plus there was a live and made, all right? This was an Irish immigrant named Bridget Sullivan. And here's a detail that tells you a lot about the household. The family didn't even call her by her real name. They called her Maggie, which was the name of the previous maid and Bridget just let them. I mean, that's how little like the employers thought about her as a person. Like think about that. Like they had a maid. That made is named Maggie. That made leaves. They got a new maid named Bridget. And they go, it's Maggie. And they just roll with it. And Bridget has such low self-esteem. And she's a maid and like the 1800s and, you know, mass chooses. So she's like, whatever you want to call me, just let me work. And the people that are running this house just have no respect for the people helping them. So that's the town. That's the house and the people who live there together. There's also another interesting detail that you should know about the household. Lizzy, the second daughter, flat out refused to call Abby Mother. She wouldn't do it even though Abby had helped raise her since she was a toddler since Lizzy's real mom died when she was young. Yet Lizzy still insisted on calling her Mrs. Borden, which is both kind of disrespectful for a child, but also like super cold. It was a pretty cruel and indirect way of saying like, Hey, I'm going to respect you just enough because like my mom, my dad decided to marry you, but you're not my mom. You're always going to be Mrs. Borden and you're never really going to belong to us. And in a house that's small, that is a conflict that is pretty ever present. So Lizzy and Emma even started skipping family dinners to just avoid their stepmom. So the maid had to lay out two separate meals and two separate seatings just to keep the daughters and the parents from having to sit at the same table. Now picture that household before we move on. The, you know, rooms basically all being on top of each other feeding into each other the locked doors. Everyone orbiting around each other and like dead awkward silence eating meals and two separate areas just so they didn't have to talk and keep that in your head because in just a minute, the entire case is going to come down to one impossible question in a house where you can hear everything where everything is close and compact and on top of each other. How did nobody hear Mrs. Borden? Abby. How did no one hear her get murdered? Well, here's how it all started. Lizzy kept pigeons out in the barn. They were like, they were her thing. It was like a little hobby. And Andrew decided the birds were attracting neighborhood kids who kept sneaking around the property. So he solved the problem in his own way. He grabbed a hatchet and he killed all the pigeons. Now Lizzy was devastated. I mean, her father just like slaughtered all of like her pets like her hobby, like the thing that she liked and didn't really give her a say in it. He just killed all of them. I mean, I'd be pissed too. If I had a bunch of pigeons in the barn and someone just came with her and hacked all their heads off of you like, dude, what? And you got to remember this and the pigeon story is important because it's honestly one of the details that paints a bigger picture and all of these other details I'll tell you will start adding up. So the real line got crossed, not necessarily just because of the pigeons, but because of money. So let me explain a few years before the murders. Andrew did something that was pretty sketchy. Back in 1887, he took a rental house that he owned and signed it over to Abby's side of the family, specifically so that Abby's sister could live in it and to Emma and Lizzie, this was a hardcore betrayal. I mean, like they're aging extremely wealthy father seem to be funneling property and money to his second wife's relatives. People who weren't even blood. And every dollar that drifted over to Abby's family was the way that the sister saw it. A dollar coming out of their rightful inheritance. Like, hey, you are our actual dad and you're giving money to your new wife's sister. Like, I don't even know that girl. So the daughter started getting pissed. They're like, Dad, what are you doing? And the dad Andrew, he tries to smooth it all over by giving them a house. And he's like, Hey, I'll give you a house. They got a house. This is going to keep the peace, right? It doesn't work. The situation just keeps growing and the resentment starts to fester. And it even gets more complicated too. Because at one point, the sisters actually sold that house back to their father for $5,000 in cash. So this tells us that these were not warm family gestures. These were people who were negotiating like rival businesses, cutting deals who just happened to live together. And then in 1891, the year before the murder, someone broke into Andrew and Abby's bedroom and stole cash and jewelry right out of the master bedroom in their own locked house. So of course, the police were called. They went through all the motions. But privately, the family was pretty sure they knew who had done it. And they blamed Lizzie. Now, no one was ever charged. But after that, Andrew started keeping his bedroom door bolted during the day. So between the situation with, you know, the stepmother and the separate dinners and the pigeons and the houses and the inheritance and the buying and selling and now the stealing. This is not a family that has grown to trust each other at all. And at least one of the daughters has now resorted to basically every man for himself. So now we've got to be straight here because this is where the legend can get carried away without the facts. Nobody has ever found a diary or a letter or a confession or anything where Lizzie says, I killed my dad and my stepmom for money. That motive is something that the prosecution built out of all of this bad blood. And to be fair, it's a really strong theory. Actually, I think makes a lot of sense. It might even be the right one. But it is still a theory nonetheless. It's not a smoking gun. We have no, you know, confession that really, you know, like cemented and seals the deal. We have to keep this difference in mind as we move forward. So what we can say for a fact is that by the summer of 1892, the house was just, it was a pressure cooker. And all of the smoke was about to explode. And then the first week of August, something happened that turned all the heat all the way up because the whole household started to get suddenly and violently sick. And Abby Borden was convinced that someone was poisoning them. So Abby actually went to a neighbor, a doctor friend that she had. And she started telling him about her belief that they were being poisoned. But he just kind of brush it off. He figured it was due to food poisoning, probably like, you know, cheap leftovers and a beat up house. And, you know, well, your husband has really spent a lot of money on food. So he probably got like, you know, like the lower shelf kind of meat. And you guys are getting sick. And it's also the middle of August. You don't really have refrigeration because you don't want to pay for it. So you guys are probably getting food poisoning. And remember, Abby's got feeling them about feeling poisoned. We're going to come back to that. So remember that detail. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? That's a power move. You got a buddy that has like a backup generator and a bunch of canned food and somehow knows that a blackout's coming before the power company does. That's a power move. And do you have a friend that hired Morgan and Morgan? Well, guess what? That's a power move. Yep. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm with over 100 offices nationwide and over 1,000 lawyers. They've recovered over $30 billion for more than 500,000 clients. In Florida, they secured a $644 million verdict after the defense argued that the victim and his wife should get nothing. That is a power move. So if you are ever injured, you can check out Morgan Morgan and their fee is free unless they win go to for the people.com/gagnon or dial pound law that's pound 529 from your cell phone. That is for the people.com/gagnon. This is a paid advertisement. Now in the house, that same week, they were all sick. Everyone is feeling super ill. There's a visitor. John Vinicom Morse. He was Andrew's brother in law from his first marriage. So he'd shown up and stayed the night. And the older sister Emma was conveniently out of town visiting friends. So on the morning of August 4th, 1892, the people connected to that house were Andrew, Abby, Lizzie, Bridget, the maid, and of course, Uncle John. They went about their normal morning routine. Uncle John eats an early breakfast and goes to visit relatives across town. So he's gone with witnesses for the whole critical window. Andrew heads out on his usual rounds downtown, checking on his business interest. Bridget, the maid, is given a job for the day. She has to wash the window. So she's busy outside all day and all the way around the house. So Abby goes upstairs to the guest room to tidy it, to put fresh pillowcases on the bed. And that is the last time Abby Borden is seen alive. Somewhere in the stretch of that morning, while the movements of the people in the house are only partially accounted for someone followed Abby upstairs. And this is an important detail for the case later on. Abby is a pretty heavy woman. So when she went down, she went down hard face first between the bed and the dresser. Whoever was in the room directly below her would have absolutely heard it. I mean, you could hear just the faintest footsteps. You're definitely going to hear if a full-grown person goes face down into the ground. But nobody in the house at this point likely only Lizzie reports hearing a thing. Now here's what the autopsy would later establish about Abby's death. She wasn't killed with one clean strike. The medical examiner, a guy named Dr. William Dolan, documented around 18 or 19 separate crushing wounds to the back of her head. A sharp, hatchet-like instrument brought down over and over long after any single blow would have already killed her. So this wasn't some type of hit. It wasn't a clean execution. It was an emotional frenzy. And the truth is we do not know the exact minute that Abby died. We do not have a perfect reconstruction of where the killer stood or how the killer was there or where even Abby was positioned when the first blow landed. What the medical evidence gives us is the nature of the tack. It is a repeated overwhelming bloody and catastrophic attack. And the strong indication is that she was struck from behind likely as she leaned over to make that very bed. Now here's what turns us from a murder into a puzzle. Abby died first. The medical evidence supports that she'd been dead for a while, likely more than an hour before the second murder ever even happened, which means that her body was lying in a pool of blood in an upstairs guest room in the sweltering August heat with no air conditioning for over an hour. While downstairs, the rest of the morning just continued on. So the people will continue to ask and a house that small with a body that heavy hitting the floor that hard, how does anyone in the house not know that something happened upstairs. Unless, of course, they already do. Later that morning, Andrew Borden comes home from his various business trips that he was doing around the city. And there's a small weird moment here that becomes a crack in the entire story. Andrew's key doesn't work. The front door is bolted and triple locked from the inside. Bridget the maid has to come over and let him in. And as she's fighting with the stuck lock, she later testifies that she hears something above her. She hears Lizzie up on the stairs. The stairs that lead right past the open door of the guest room where Abby's body is laying in plain sight. And Bridget the maid reports that Lizzie is laughing. Andrew comes in. He's tired. He's not feeling so well. Remember he's a little bit sick. He lies down in the sitting room sofa to rest. Bridget exhausted from doing the windows all day. Heads up to her own attic room to lie down. And over the next stretch of time, a window of maybe 15 or 20 minutes someone walks into that sitting room where Andrew was sleeping and brings a hatchet down on his face. There are 10 to 11 blows. They are so savage that the police photographs, which you can still find today show a man whose face is just gone. Like there's just nothing there. Nothing identifiable. One of his eyeballs are just just clean and half. There's a detail that tells investigators that he was almost certainly asleep when it started and he never even saw it coming. So he comes home, sits down the room, goes to sleep and never wakes up. He was killed defenseless in his own front room. And then it was just quiet. A few minutes later, Bridget resting upstairs. Here's Lizzie call up to her. And Lizzie says, come down quick. Father is dead. Someone came in and killed him. So where was Lizzie when her father's face was being destroyed 20 feet away? This is the center of the whole case. This is the alibi. And I need you to listen to it closely because Lizzie told it herself under oath. And it is one of the weirdest alibis in the history of American crime. Lizzie says that she wasn't ever in the house. She said that while her father was resting on the sofa, she had gone out to the barn out back to that little barn behind the house where she used to keep her pigeons. But why? She said she went up to the loft, the second floor of the barn to look for a piece of lead. She wanted to make sinkers. These are like fishing sinkers. These are weights for a fishing line for a fishing trip that she was planning a few days later. So look at the whole picture. It's one of the hottest days of the year. Her father is asleep inside. And Lizzie says that she climbed up into a sealed barn loft, which on a day like that would have been just like cooking like an oven with, you know, easily over 100 degrees to hunt around for like scraps of lead to make fishing weights using fishing lines that she admitted she hadn't touched in five years. And when they pressed her on it because just like how you're skeptical right now and how I'm skeptical, they were like, how long were you there for? Like what? She says 15, 20 minutes in the heat, looking for lead. And like almost as an afterthought, she added another detail while she was up in that little hot loft. She said that she ate some pairs. Now in fairness, an alibi being weird is not the same thing as an alibi being false. People do strange, aimless things all the time. And grief and shock also do things to people's memory. I mean, the defense could argue that she was an eccentric woman kind of just puttering around a barn. And here's why investigators couldn't let it go. When the police went up to that barn loft, the dust on the floor was completely undisturbed. There were no footprints, no sign that anyone had been walking up there and no sign that anyone had been searching for lead at all. The loft was exactly as you would expect. It was brutally hot and basically undisturbed. The barn was supposed to be the thing that put Lizzy somewhere else other than the house, but instead it didn't really put her anywhere. So when people started asking that morning, they were like, okay, where's Abby? Lizzy had an answer ready, locked in. She said Abby had gotten a note, a message delivered that morning calling her to go visit a sick friend. That's why Abby wasn't around. She had gone out, except Abby hadn't gone out. Abby was upstairs in the guest room dead and had been for over an hour. So let's assume Lizzy genuinely believed that Abby had left the house. Who was this note from them? Because here's the thing, the note was never found. The sick friend was never identified. No messenger ever came forward to say that they delivered it. The police even put out word asking the person who wrote it to come explain themselves and no one ever did. So as far as the historical record is concerned, the note never existed. Which leaves two possibilities and both of them were pretty bad. Either the killer wrote the note, delivered it to Abby and then took it again when they were done with her or Lizzy knew that Abby was up there and the note was a story to basically explain her ignorance of where Abby was. Now, here's the way the prosecutors posed it. If Lizzy knew that Abby was dead, why say that she went out? And if Lizzy didn't know, how did she land on the exact explanation for a note that seemed to have never existed? Well, the murders happen on the Thursday. Now let's jump ahead to Sunday. Three days later, the police are already circling. Lizzy is already quietly the very obvious prime suspect. Lizzy's close friend, a woman named Alice Russell is at the house. And Alice walks into the kitchen and sees Lizzy standing at the stove, tearing up a dress and feeding it into the fire. It is a blue Bedford court dress. It's a type of fabric. And Alice alarm says something like, Lizzy, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And Lizzy's explanation is that the dress is old and it's ruined and it's covered in paint stains and she just wants to get rid of it. I mean, maybe, you know, paint happens. Sometimes things get stained and you want to get rid of your stuff. But here's the context that makes it unforgettable. This is happening days after literally her dad and stepmom are hacked to death while police officers are literally surrounding the house. And Lizzy chooses that moment to destroy an article of her own clothing in the kitchen fire. And because she burned it, we will never ever really know what was on it. Was it paint like she said or maybe it was covered in blood? Alice Russell sat on what she saw and it ate away at her and eventually her conscience won and she told the authorities. And when she did, she became one of the most devastating witnesses that the prosecution had. It was Lizzy's own friend describing Lizzy burning a dress with the police standing nearby in the yard. And this is the frustrating pattern of the entirety of the board in case every single piece of evidence is suggested, but none of it is conclusive. The barn story is suspicious, but not fully disproven. The note is damning, but just kind of unexplained because it doesn't really exist. And the dress is incriminating, but it's also destroyed. So suspicion is piling on suspicion, piling on suspicion, and underneath the whole pile still there's no solid ground. There's no murder weapon. There's nothing concrete. So Lizzy was arrested on August 11, 1892, one week after the murders at the close of a three-day inquest where she had been questioned under oath. And that inquest is the turning point because on the stand, Lizzy just falls apart. Her answers were confused and contradictory sometimes like borderline nonsensical. She would say one thing and then she would just like kind of say the opposite and she couldn't keep her own timeline straight. If you read the testimony today, it reads like someone is either genuinely having a mental episode like genuinely rattled or someone is improvising very badly under pressure. Now the defense had an explanation ready for all of it. They said morphine. After the murders, the family doctor had put Lizzy on morphine to steady her nerves and morphine they argued was scrambling her answers. And it's a pretty fair defense and it's worth considering for sure, but and this is crazy. It wouldn't end up mattering either way because the judges at her trial ruled that the entire inquest testimony was inadmissible. Meaning the jury that would decide Lizzy's fate would never hear a word of any of this interrogation under oath. And that's the first of the two rulings that would gut this entire case. Here's the second. Remember Abby telling her neighbor the doctor friend that she felt that she was being poisoned? Well, investigators found a a drugist. This is a pharmacy clerk named Eli Benz who was prepared to testify that the day before the murders, a woman he identified as Lizzy bored and had come into his shop trying to buy what they call Prussic acid. Now Prussic acid is hydrogen cyanide. It is a lethal poison. Lizzy allegedly said she needed it to clean the edge of a seal skin cape and Benz refused to sell it to her without some type of proper prescription from a doctor. So the whole family gets mysteriously sick with vomiting. Abby says out loud that she thinks that they're being poisoned. She goes and tells the doctor and the day before they're murdered, the accused daughter allegedly tries to buy cyanide. I mean, that's a sequence that is very hard to just explain away. But yet you're hearing it right now. I know this, but the jury never heard it because the judges excluded that two ruling that trying to buy poison didn't sufficiently prove intent, especially because Prussic acid did have a legitimate household use. So once again, another significant allegation was just walled off. And the 12 men deciding Lizzy's fate were never even allowed to consider it. So the trial opened in New Bedford in June of 1893. And it was in the language of the day, the trial of the century. I mean, there were newspapers and journalists from across the country, entire crowds standing outside and a defendant who didn't look like anyone's idea of an axe murder, right? This is a respectable, unmarried church going Sunday schoolteacher sitting quietly behind a fan. And that image was the defense's single greatest weapon. The prosecution had to stand in front of 12 ordinary men. I mean, farmers, tradesmen, fathers with daughters of their own and convinced them that this proper upstanding Victorian lady who loved God had basically stripped down butchered two people with a hatchet and calmly just cleaned herself up. Yeah. The prosecution actually floated the theory that Lizzy may have committed the murders without her clothes on. That's how they explained the total absence of blood on her. But that theory in a 19th century courtroom about a Sunday school teacher, it just it didn't make any sense to the jury. Like this upstanding dignified woman would murder her own father fully naked. I mean, the evidence file was thin and it was even getting thinner. Police brought in a handless hatchet that they found in the cellar, basically the head of a hatchet with like the wooden handle broken off. And they said it's possible this was the murder weapon, but the blade was clean and it was covered in a coating of like ash or like maybe even dust and police suggested that it had been deliberately applied to make it look old and unused. But of course, they couldn't prove that. So a Harvard chemist testified that he found no blood on the hatchet head. In fact, no blood on any of the hatchets or axes from that cellar and the dress that Lizzy handed police had at most a microscopic spec on the hem. I remember this was still years before fingerprinting before blood typing and then came the trials single most theatrical moment to connect that hatchet to the crime. The prosecution brought out physical evidence for the jury to see the actual skulls of Andrew and Abby Borden. So a medical expert could demonstrate how the blade fit the wounds. One juror got so sick that he nearly passed out and Lizzy who sat stone face through days of testimony about the murders took one look at her father and stepmother's skull and just fainted right there in the corner just collapsed. Some say that it was from genuine horror seeing the skulls of her deceased parents, but yet others suspect that it was a perfectly timed swoon from a woman who knew exactly how it would look to a room full of sympathetic men. And if it was the latter, it absolutely worked. It landed as the reaction of a grieving innocent daughter just overwhelmed by grief and too soft for any kind of violence. So by the time that the defense was done, the case had been hollowed out. The inquest testimony completely excluded the prostate acid literally like buying cyanide a couple days before all of that excluded. So what is left to work with a confusing alibi a note that no one could produce a burned dress that maybe genuinely had paint on it real motive driven by money and inheritance, but no proof of a plan genuine opportunity, but no eyewitness or confession, no murder weapon that anyone could actually tie to her hand and of course no blood on the defendant. The former governor of Massachusetts himself, George Robinson stood for the defense and hammered on that single point over and over suspicion is not proof and beyond a reasonable doubt is the standard. Could you really send a church going woman to be executed on just a pile of circumstance and inferences and maybes. Lizzie never took the stand in her own defense. The only word she spoke aloud in that courtroom before the jury went out where I am innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me. So a jury of 12 men went out to deliberate and they were back in about like an hour and a half. Some accounts say that they effectively made up their minds almost immediately but they just waited a respectable interval just for show. But no one can really know for sure. They came back and they said they're verdict, not guilty. The courtroom just erupted. And here's a crucial thing to understand about what that verdict actually meant. The jury did not declare that someone else had murdered the board and it's like, they didn't say like, oh, it's actually this person. They didn't solve anything. They just answered one specific narrow question. Did Lizzy Borden kill her father and stepmother beyond a reasonable doubt? And their answer was no, but there is doubt here. Now, acquittal is not innocence, of course. It's just the absence of proof. And the verdict settled the trial, but it did not settle this overlooming question. And so for them, the truth was the killer is still out there. So Lizzy walked out of the courtroom, a free and now at this point, very wealthy woman. She and her sister Emma finally got the thing that they had wanted for years. They took their inheritance and they bought a big beautiful house up on the hill in the fashionable neighborhood that their very cheap father had always denied them. Lizzy named it maple croft. She even re-styled it herself, going by Lisbeth from then on. And while she had won the trial, Lizzy lost the town. I mean, the people of Fall River never accepted the verdict. To her neighbors, she wasn't just an innocent woman. She was a woman who had gotten away with the worst possible thing. She was shunned and whispered about and pointed at. And to be specific about what this shunning look like, she did keep going to her church. The Central Congregation Church, at least at first, but the story that comes down to us from when she showed up, no one in the congregation would sit next to her. So she basically stopped going. Her lifelong involvement with that church, the Sunday school teaching, the charity groups, the choir, effectively ended. And the community that she built her whole identity round quietly closed its doors to her. Neighborhood kids would throw eggs and gravel at her house. And of course, the famous nursery rhyme Lizzy Borden took an axe. Emerged during her own lifetime, following her around until the end of her life, legally cleared, socially condemned. She would basically just live out the rest of her life as the most famous outcast in all of Massachusetts. The sisters themselves eventually had a falling out in 1904, something happened between them. The exact cause is still unknown, is still debated, even though it's often linked to a disagreement over Lizzy's lifestyle and her friendships. And Emma moved out of Mabelcroft the following year in 1905. The two never reconciled and they actually never saw each other again. Emma eventually settled in new market, new Hampshire. And now before I give you the last detail about Lizzy's life, I want to circle back to the other people who fell under suspicion. Because you might be wondering was it anyone else besides Lizzy? Well, let's walk through it. So first we have the maid, Bridget Sullivan. Was she ever a suspect? Kind of, but never seriously charged. She was on the property and to this day some people argue that she either helped Lizzy or maybe she knew more than what she said. After all, how does she not hear a 200 pound body hit the floor or Andrew being bushered just like one room away? But she was never arrested because she became one of the prosecution's key witnesses at the trial. After it was all over, Bridget got out of Massachusetts entirely. She moved west eventually to Anaconda, Montana. And she got married, lived a long quiet life and eventually died in 1948. Now here's a eerie little footnote though. According to one account later in her life, Bridget told a friend in confidence that she had helped Lizzy out at the trial and that had been less than fully honest on the stand. But she was too ill to explain fully what she meant. And she made the friend promise not to repeat it until after she died. So take that for what it's worth. It's kind of second hand family lore once again not proof. But it's the kind of detail that really keeps this case alive. And then of course there's the uncle. Remember Uncle John, John Vinicom Morse? He drew a media suspicion. And honestly you can see why. He had just shown up the night before. Kind of unannounced. He slept in the very guest room where Abby's body would later be found. But Morse had what people at the time called an iron clad alibi. He was across town visiting relatives during the murders with witnesses. He even claimed that he had ridden a street car with a group of priests. And police checked out all these details and they were satisfied. In fact, the day after the murders when Morse tried to leave the house, a crowd of hundreds mobbed him in the streets. I mean the town was so hungry for a culprit and for justice that the police literally had to rescue him and hustle him back inside. But suspicion or not, Morse was cleared and was never charged. And now here's the strangest lead of all. What people will call the wild man theory. In the days around the murders, several towns people reported seeing an unfamiliar, unkempt young man lurking near the Borden House, acting kind of strange. One woman said she saw him leaning on the Borden's own gate post. And then about 12 days after the killings, a French-speaking farmer, four miles outside of the town, claimed that he came across a man in the woods muttering, poor Mrs. Borden over and over. And when the farmer approached the man supposedly picked up a hatchet, shook it at him and fled over a stone wall with what looked like specks of blood on his shirt. It is a wild story, literally, and the defense loved dangling it in front of the jury, but here's the thing. The judges told the jurors to disregard that testimony completely because it came too long after the murders to be reliable. And no wild man to this day was ever found, identified or detained or charged. It's just kind of like a story with no ending. There was even one man briefly hauled in on the very first day. He was a Portuguese farmhand named Antonio Orrell. And they grabbed him from a local saloon because early on, police assumed that the killer was some type of outside laborer. So Antonio had a solid alibi and no connection to the family, and as a result, he was released within a couple hours. Worth noting, honestly, that a lot of the early suspicion was really aimed at immigrant workers and kind of just low class people in general, which says more about the prejudices of the time than about any of the actual evidence. So here's the bottom line. With all those names, the maid, the uncle, the wild man, the laborer, none of them were ever arrested and tried for these murders. Only Lizzy. She was the only person ever formally charged. The only person ever to stand trial. And when the jury said not guilty, that was it. The case just stopped. And to this day, legally speaking, nobody killed Andrew and Abby Borden. It remains officially an unsolved murder. Now, here's the final detail that I will give you about Lizzy Borden's life. She died on June 1, 1927. And her sister Emma died nine days later. After a lifetime of a strangement, the two of them kind of just slipped out of the world within the same week. And they were buried in the same family plot back in Fall River. In the ground next to the father and stepmother, whose murders, neither of them have ever explained. These two sisters who never reconciled, buried right next to each other, only officially seeing each other in the afterlife. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee. And then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things. I'm lifting, I'm eating protein, I'm taking creatine, I'm trying to sleep. I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good. 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Now let's get back to the show. At the end of the day, it seems like Lizzy got everything she wanted. She got the money. She got the inheritance. She got the house on the hill that her dad was always too cheap to buy her. And maybe more importantly, she didn't have to put up with her stepmother ever again. And yet, it cost her everything. Her place in society was never the same. Her community remained suspicious of her until the very end, and she even lost her relationship with her sister, the only person that she had left to rely on. Because Fall River had already reached its own verdict, and it didn't match the jury's, she spent 30 more years in that town, free, wealthy, and completely alone. And the murder case just stopped. Legally to this day, Lizzy is not guilty of murdering anyone. Which means whoever stood in that hot little house and swung the hatch at 19 times and then 11 more, whoever snuck up the stairs without knowledge of anyone else in the house and then snuck in the living room without being seen or heard. Whoever did that got up cleaned off, walked back into a completely ordinary day and was supposedly never seen again. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history of the case of Lizzy Borden and the murder of her father and stepmother. So, Christos, you heard everything that I had to present to you? She definitely killed her dad, right? I mean, just take a look at a photo of her. I'll be honest, kind of bad. Kind of bad for the time. Like, for the time, like, I know I linked up pictures of her and I was like, "What does it look like?" Kind of, not bad, not bad, but also dead behind the eyes. Yeah, she got some crazy eyes, but sometimes those old photos will do it, you know what I mean? Sometimes the old photos will have that vibe a little bit, but I think she's kind of a piece. I don't know. I mean, comic crazy. Would you risk it all for a alleged ax murder if you could get a sweet inheritance live on the hill? That's what I'm saying. She's flushed with cash right now in a house. Right? That's not the worst. Let me take a look at the rest of the body, at least what we could tell in this picture. I mean, not super gifted. No, but like, she's kind of got like an ogre fion of vibe. Yeah, which is kind of a piece. I'm actually kind of into that. Well, I'm back her shoulders. Yeah, that's, I mean, I'm into it. But let me just say, so she has these pigeons. Her dad kills the pigeons with a hatchet. She has a stepmom that she hates. She misses her own mom. She has childhood trauma from the death of her mom. She has an inheritance and her dad is super cheap and won't let her access any of it until the day he dies. And not only does he not give it to his own daughters, he's giving the money to whom his new wife's sister. Right. That's not going to fly. Lizzy Borden is trying to poison her family with cyanide. She goes in to try to get it. The doctor says, no, I'm not giving you cyanide. And then she goes home and says, well, if I'm not going to be able to get any more poison, because I think she was using a poison and it wasn't working. She had found some other type of poison like a rat poison or something and like was putting in the food and it wasn't working. And as a result, they weren't dying. So then, and I bet you the maid was in on this part. This is what I'm saying. I think she went with the maid and was like, hey, let's poison them. We're going to knock them out. And so she's working with the maid, Bridget. Bridget's like, all right, fine. I'll poison them and yada yada. And then her maybe Bridget saw her snooping around the food and was like, is she poison? And then Lizzy was like, chill. And then she can't get the cyanide to officially finish the job because now it's been like a week and no one's dying. So she's like, this is annoying. So then what does she do gets a hatchet? I go on, I think she's probably wearing that dress that she burned. Has a dress, kills them, waits for the dead, kills the dead, goes out to the barn and changes or whatever. And then comes back and is like, I also, she locked the door from the inside three times so she could murder her stepmom. And then comes back, has the dress a couple days go by. She burns the dress. And then the maid is like, okay, I don't know if she murdered them for sure. I don't think she would murder them with a hatchet, but she was trying to kill them with poison and I locue saw it happen. But I'm not going to tell the whole truth because I don't want her to come murder me. And then all this stuff happens with the case. They can never prove it definitively. And then she gets off. I found the wild man theory interest thing. Sure, but it's like, what are you going to do with that? But what if Lizzy saw that guy was like, hey, come over here. I got a job for you. He needs work. That's a fire theory gets him to do it. And then he leaves. And then he feels bad about it. And that's why he's saying poor Mrs. Borden. Oh, and do you know what she pays him with? Jury that she stole. I was going to say sexual favors. Well, get your head out of the guy dude. Come on. No, she goes and steals jewelry and then says, Hey, I'm going to hire this crazy guy. Give him some jewels. Kill them. And then you dip. That's kind of fire. And it's kind of fire. It's also a perfect alibi because they catch the guy. They're like, what is all this stuff? And it's like, oh, you stole it from them. That's obviously why you did it. It gives him a perfect motive immediately. And then if they're like, Oh, Lizzy Borden told me to do it. She'll be like, I would never. And then she just has to faint again. And then she wins. There's not a good definitive explanation on this. But like they said they threw out that testimony because it came too far after. I wonder how long that time period is if people in town started being like, Oh, let's connect it to this so that she doesn't get it. But then I don't know. But allegedly, this guy's like, Oh, poor Mrs. Borden. Borden. It's a little convenient. But also if he's a crazy like, get so do it and she just pays him in jewels to go do it. And then he does it. He might be like, Oh, I didn't really want to do that because he's mentally ill. So he's like, damn, I really just, I shouldn't have done that. It's a perfect crime. It's kind of a good, it's actually, that's like fire theory creatures. Can I say, I've thought about it a lot. I thought about what? Lizzy Borden. That's a good point. I guess you've been saying about it since you were just a boy. That's true. Now I'm curious. There is a Netflix doc coming out about this. That's right. It might already be out. But I'm curious if they're going to uncover any more details. There's got to be something. I think so, right? I wonder if Netflix is going to try to flip it on and be like, actually, Lizzy's innocent. And they're going to go hardcore wild man theory. That'd be crazy. Or they find the wild man. Oh, interview him. 120 years later. Yeah. He's probably not with us. But who knows? I mean, they were able to do some crazy work on like Jack the Ripper. And they're able to use like a scarf that belonged to one of the victims and use DNA analysis on the scarf to then kind of pin it to one of the main suspects. It's a crazy story. We did a whole episode on that. You should check it out. But what do you guys think? Who do you think really did it? I mean, the obvious case is Lizzy Borden had something to do with the death. She was involved. Now, was it her actually swing the axe or was it some other person that is maybe a little bit contested? But she got away scot free. And as a result, suffered the rest for life for it. Also, how far has Fulver from Boston 56 minutes driving? I would say in like the greater Boston area. Also, the death brother-in-law ex brother-in-law was at the house that night. Like, it's all. Well, I wonder if that was a part of the thing where Lizzy sees her uncle because that's Lizzy's uncle. That's her actual mom's brother. And so Lizzy sees her uncle and is like, see, like, he needs to be taken care of. Like, I wonder if that brings back memories for her, where she's just like longing for her mom. Maybe they look exactly the same. And she's like, wow, like, I've been living with like this evil step mom that I don't like at all. I wish I had my real mom. And all of a sudden, my step brother coming to the fray is just like adding on the emotional burden of dealing with the, the lost trauma of never spending time with my own mother. It's all weird. I wonder if that's like the, I wonder if that's like the, the scars, you know. Drop a comment. I mean, if you've read more about this or if you study this closely or maybe you know the truth, maybe you're related to Lizzy Borden and you have all the answers. I would love to know what your thoughts are. Please drop a comment, YouTube or Spotify. I read all of them, but I might not get back to all of them. I mean, I'll get back to some of them. But some will get back to you and it'll be productive for the conversation here at the campsite. Just keep it civil and nice. Please, we have a nice little cut out on the internet where everyone's cool with each other. So just keep it that way if you can. Also, we have a couple other channels that are pretty cool. We got religion camp where we deep dive on all the craziest religious theories from all time forever. I tell you why every religion is cool. And I try to take all the cool things from every religion and apply to my own life. Additionally, we have history camp where we deep dive on crazy historical topics similar to this in many ways, but going over the heavy heavy hitters. I'm talking to polling, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, all the craziest, most infamous men in our history. And sometimes women. And if you just like to rock with the crazy deep dives on the mysteries of the day, we'll great news. You're in the right place at camp Gagnon. That is what we do here twice a week. Every single week, so make sure you comment, like and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And we have a secret society. We're going to get every episode of this show completely out of free. And you're going to get bonus episodes that never got to the public. And you're going to get monthly zims with me and the rest of the squad. All that can be yours for just $5 every single month. Now, thank you guys so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it. God bless you both. Crestos, thanks for being here. And I'll see you next time. Peace.