Lizzie Borden with Princess Weekes

You made a million on caskets, so now you're a customer, my lad.

Welcome to your roundabout.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we're bringing you a creepy crawly Halloween episode, just like we love to do.

Today we are learning about famous Massachusetts woman and nursery rhyme subject, Lizzie Borden, and we are learning about her with our friend Princess Weeks.

We are so thrilled to have Princess on the show.

She is an amazing YouTuber.

She's a public intellectual.

I love talking to her in conversations where she tells me stuff.

And she also, if you saw one of the shows we did in Brooklyn this spring, is great at pieing people.

She's available for your pieing needs if you can afford her.

This will be a subject that's familiar to anyone who watched too much cable TV-based American history content when they were growing up.

And it's interesting to me because it's one of the many stories where we know there was a crime, there was a murder, there was a woman at some point.

And this show, in many ways, is at its most comfortable when we're talking about a woman whose name became a punchline.

And here we are back at it again.

If you want to support our show show in ways other than emotionally, you can do that on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions.

And you can hear the bonus episodes that we do, often kind of kicking our shoes off and having fun with our beloved guests.

And the one we have up that's most recent is a conversation with Blair Braverman about a book called Baby Island.

I will give you no more information than that.

I can't think of a more tantalizing combination of title and person.

Another piece of news, in just a few weeks, we're going to do our first Christmastime holiday comedy seance with our good friends at American Hysteria.

It's going to be at the Aladdin Theater in Portland on December 6th, the very theater in which I once fell asleep at a badly drawn boy concert.

Wasn't badly drawn boys' fault.

I was just very tired from being in 10th grade.

And we would love it if you could come.

Tickets are going on sale later this week, so keep your eyes on our social media this week.

You'll see the information you need about it show up there.

And if you are subscribing on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions, you will get to buy tickets first.

And listen to Baby Island.

And maybe listen to Baby Island while you are getting tickets.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for being in this Halloween season with us.

Or thank you so much for existing in July if you're listening to this later on.

Either way, let's go to Massachusetts.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we talk about the hard news stories behind nursery rhymes.

And with me today, of course, is Princess Weeks.

And we are talking today about Lizzie Borden.

When I was like 11, I spent a lot of time watching shows on the travel channel like World's Spookiest Hotels or whatever.

And Lizzie Borden was connected to one of the world's most haunted bed and breakfasts there was like a segment that I remember watching multiple times that had like old-timey photography of the crime scene at the Bordens house and the story was that Lizzie Borden had killed her father and stepmother with an axe famously 40 wax and then 41 for the mother and the story was that you could stay there as like a tourist accommodation and that they were always booked months in advance and people talked about the room being haunted and scary stuff happening.

You could like stay in an old crime scene, basically.

And I think one of the interesting themes here is how with a little bit of history, crime scenes become cute tourist attractions.

And about Lizzie Borden, who's a figure of legend, I have so many questions, including I know that this story is like a focal point of lesbian rumors, rumors about the potential for lesbians, not necessarily rumors discussed by lesbians, although I'm sure there's a lot of overlap.

It's a case of a woman accused of murder in history, which I think is just one of the most interesting and revealing topics you can ever talk about.

First of all, who are you for people who know you or don't know you?

You do so much amazing work and I'm so happy to have you on.

And I would love for you to tell people where to find your work these days.

Oh my God.

Thank you so much.

Like it's honestly like a dream come true.

I love your work as well.

My name is Princess Weeks.

I do video essays on YouTube.

I talk about pop culture, the intersections between that and gender and race.

I used to do the It's Lit podcast with Lindsay Ellis on PBS.

I used to do the Geek podcast with Netflix.

I've done a lot of things, but my favorite thing recently, without meaning to, has been like wanting to debunk certain narratives in true crime.

I recently just did a thing about the Menendez brothers and right after them was Lizzie Borden because I think the same as you.

Like when I first heard about that Chloe Seveny and Kristen Stewart movie, which plays up all the lesbian rumors, I was like, well, this must have truth in fact, right?

Like

there must be something.

And then you read the actual thing and you're like, well, we can't say that they were gay, but the possibility is there.

Right.

And it's like, well, the possibility is always there, to be frank.

So, you know, exactly.

And you know what?

If wishes are dreams, and so on and so forth.

I use two books for doing research for this.

The first one is The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Kara Robertson.

And the second one is The Borden Murders, Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century by Sarah Miller.

And what they both really well illustrate is why the case is so popular.

Because the big thing is that if Lizzie Borden didn't kill her parents, which I, my hot take, I don't think that she did.

I'm just gonna say it as I don't think she did.

Amazing.

One, okay, this is exciting.

I want to hear the defense of Lizzie Borden.

And there's no one that they can say that they know who did it.

There's just no other known perpetrators or know, like the people who have been highly suspect are her, her older sister, her uncle, and then xenophobic concerns about the Portuguese.

During wow, the Portuguese.

This is truly the mystic pizza part of the world.

The amount of white-on-white racism that was happening during the Lizzie Borden trials, because our case takes place in a lovely small town in Massachusetts that at this time had a mostly waspy population, but had an influx of Portuguese, Italian,

and Quebec Croix.

immigrants.

But whenever a crime would happen in Fall River, everyone would assume that it was those kind of people.

And what's interesting about the relationship, the queerness assumed between Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan, who is the maid, is that their relationship and how they are treated in the media is very emblematic of the ethnic tensions at the time.

Because everyone is just like, well, why are you blaming this nice, waspy Protestant girl?

Clearly, the Irish maid is the one who did this.

Right.

The ethnic tensions around Irish people.

And I wonder if Bridget Sullivan is this like character who is seen as like bringing murder and sex into the household because she's from

Ireland.

From the Emerald Isle.

They're like, you know, you can't trust Catholics.

That's really what their whole thing is.

You can't trust them.

They are duplicitous.

And there are many aspects of Catholicism I don't trust, but like, you know, I...

What's also fascinating to a lot of people is that you have Lizzie Borden, who at the time of the crime is in her early 30s, unmarried, living at home with her stepmother that she does not like,

and her sister, and her dad.

And only Elle Woods can definitely.

Do you know what it's like to have a stepmother who's the same anxious you?

And all of that idea that she must be struggling under some kind of weight.

But let's get into it.

So, Lizzie Borden is the second child of Andrew Borden.

And he is someone who claims to be self-made, but he already came from a rich family.

He just was part of the branch that wasn't good at saving their money.

And so he does end up making a quarter of a million fortune through manufacturing and selling caskets and investing in certain properties.

Oh, boy.

That's like red flag.

You made a million on caskets, so now you're a customer, my lad.

I know.

It's like a red flag filter on Tic Tac.

It's like, makes caskets, says he's self-made.

In America, I think self-made generally means I manage not to lose all the money I started with.

It's like, you're doing great, sweetie.

That kind of energy.

So that is a big part of it.

And so his first wife, Sarah, dies after giving birth to Emma and Lizzie.

And she dies from the

disturbing combination of disease of the spine and uterine congestion, which just sounds like something that my doll could not handle.

Uterine congestion sounds like

just one of the many ways that like medicine at the time talked about the uterus as if it was a giant squid, where it was like, no one has seen a uterus before.

They jet around the depths of the abyssal ocean continually.

So it's hard to know what they do, but sometimes they get congested.

There's too much traffic after making those babies.

So she passes away and makes her older daughter, Emma, promise to be like a mother to Lizzie.

So we start off the gate already with oldest daughter trauma of like, all right, it's the 1800s.

I got to protect my family.

So Emma and Lizzie are very close.

They're very close to their father.

And then eventually he remarries a woman named Abby Gray.

And she is also a spinster because she gets married to him when she is 37.

And that's her first marriage.

Wow.

I hope she pursued some interests.

It doesn't look like it.

From what she was just a very quiet, humble woman.

And Emma never liked her.

Emma was like, I don't need a mom.

You're not my real mom.

I'm holding down the fort.

Goodbye.

So they were always cantankerous.

But Lizzie, because she was younger, they were very close until five years before the murder.

Abby's half-sister gets gets kicked out of her home and she wants money to help rebuy it.

So she goes to her husband and is like, hey, babe, you're really wealthy.

I don't ask you for much.

Like literally, she wasn't in charge of running the household.

Lizzie was the one who took care of it.

He didn't wear his wedding ring.

He wore a ring that Lizzie gave to him, which starts a whole bunch of other rumors that we will get into.

And her allowance, in terms of what she got for being a wife, was the same amount of money as her stepdaughter's.

So she enters the family with no

interests of her own, no ability to control the household, and a family unit that, besides her husband, is not really interested in her being there.

And the first time she asks for something, the daughters are like, what do you mean you're buying her a house?

If you're going to buy her a house, daddy, you have to buy us houses, daddy.

And so.

And what is, do the girls grow up in prosperity?

Like, are they rich by the standards of the time?

They are very well off.

The problem is that their dad is kind of a miser.

Like, they live in the not the fancy part of the town.

And on top of that, even though indoor plumbing is absolutely a thing,

they do not have it.

He doesn't want to put out the money for it.

And your butt would get cold in Massachusetts.

They're not unhappy.

They just are like, would be nice to live not here.

And the way that their house was organized was that the girls' room and their parents' room was interconnected through a door.

And to go into certain parts of the house, they would have to go through each other's rooms.

I guess, you know, historically people slept communally a lot more than we're used to now, but that's like,

it's blah.

They don't get along.

This is the tension in the house.

And then the day before the murders, the first day before the murders, they all get really bad diarrhea.

Oh boy.

They have bad mutton and they have bad swordfish and they just start

having terrible stomach aches all over the house.

And Lizzie is afraid that they're being poisoned.

I wonder why she's worried.

Yeah.

There's an incident where someone robs the house and steals about like $81

from the house, which in inflation is a lot of money.

And so Lizzie has this anxiety and tells some of her friends that she's worried that someone's going to try and hurt her father, that he's making some business decisions that are like a little upsetting other people.

Like she talks about overhearing a fight.

And she's just, she's nervous.

And then on August 4th, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife are found dead.

Only two people that are in the house for the majority of the time this could have happened are Lizzie and Bridget.

and they both claim they didn't see anything and they both didn't hear anything and even though the 41 wax is an exaggeration it's about 1819 for uh abby and a little bit less for the father

their bodies were completely brutalized it was horrible and abby being a heavier woman they make jokes about the fact that someone must have heard her fall which i'm just kind of like why

boston globe why can't can't you just be normal for like two seconds?

That's a great question.

And so, Lizzie goes in and says that they found her father murdered.

She asks Bridget to go get help.

The police eventually come.

A lot of them are away on this annual excursion.

There are some off-duty cops, there are some on-duty.

They come to the house, and there is just no evidence of any break-in.

Everything is normal.

And so everyone is concerned, like, how did this upstanding moral family get destroyed?

And that is the question that everyone's been asking for over 100 years.

Murder is not as common as the various law and orders would ultimately have us believe, but like it happens, you know, fairly often in America, I would say.

Definitely.

It could happen less often.

I think that's something we could really work on.

But brutal murder.

is rarer.

Yeah.

And it's harder to understand where that could have come from, I think.

Yeah.

Even if you take into consideration the motive that people think Lizzie has, which is inheritance, she's already 32 years old and unmarried.

It's unlikely that she is going to get married.

She's already going to inherit things.

It's between her and her sister because women can inherit because it's America.

There's really no need for it.

Right.

Because her financial situation is already good.

And I feel like we have this thing, too, where when we imagine avarice in women, we imagine that like women kind of are equally capable of all forms of wickedness, be they like petty or like extremely destructive.

So we're like, well, she was greedy, so she killed him.

And it's like being greedy and killing someone are actually like very different levels.

Yeah.

And I think also this idea that she just hated her stepmother so much.

I'm like, listen, I know that fairy tales are a thing and we all have evil stepmother energy that we, you know, think about.

But I also just feel like it's a bit of an exaggeration to be like she was just, she's been mad at her stepmother for five years.

And she decided randomly on August that I'm not just going to murder my stepmother, but I'm going to brutally murder my father.

What's the immediate aftermath of this?

They woke up about seven o'clock, had breakfast.

Andrew's brother-in-law from his first marriage is there.

He leaves around 8.45.

Around 9.15, he leaves Andrew Borden to go do business downstairs.

And then 9.30 a.m.

is when they assume that Abby went upstairs to make the guest bed.

And that's when she got struck 19 times.

Then by 10.45, Andrew Borden comes back home.

And somewhere between 10.45 and 11.45, while he's taking his nap, he gets murdered.

So he's attacked while he's sleeping.

Yeah.

That's rough.

What I also think is so interesting is that the timeline is that this killer had to be in the house around 9 o'clock, kills Abby at 30 and then waits over an hour that is pretty crazy did he have a sandwich did they have a sandwich with all the blood to hit someone 19 times with an axe right it really was an axe it was with a hatchet with a hatchet so is it is a hatchet basically a smaller axe it's a smaller one the grip is different and they were very common in the house like most houses right just for like wood and stuff exactly right but the i guess the point is that like a hatchet even like a really nice

even a really nice hack shit, really sharp and well maintained.

It's like you would, I assume, get like pretty splattered.

Exactly.

Now they would get splattered.

And what they kind of assume is that with Abby specifically, that she was facing.

the person who struck her when she was first hit.

So whoever was doing the hitting would have gotten blood splatter all over them.

If not like Dexter levels, there would initially be some of it.

And, you know, not to stereotype women, but when we do commit these crimes, we're poison people.

We really are.

And then when you make it so that society is organized where really the only way to get a lump sum of money is by a man dying and giving it to you, then like

you got to kill some men.

I'm sorry.

That's because what that is encouraging.

But yeah, we're poison people, not to stereotype, but in general.

Yeah.

And to, I mean, to quote Jay-Z, ladies is pimps too.

We do have women who do take it to that level, but it's rare.

And it's usually an intimate partner murder.

Like it's usually a husband, right?

So the person who finds the father's body is Lizzie, and she calls out to Bridget.

So she calls Bridget Maggie.

And the reason why she does this is because they had another maid who was Irish called Maggie, and they just chose not to learn Bridget's name.

Wow, Lizzie.

Wow.

Cancel Lizzie Borden, honestly.

Honestly, for class crimes, Lizzie Borden should go to jail.

But

so she finds them and she tells Maggie to go get Dr.

Bowen, the family physician.

So he comes and then one of the neighbors sees Lizzie, Mrs.

Churchill, and she's like, oh no, they've killed father.

In the immediate aftermath of the crime, she kind of waffles between being very collected and being emotional.

And during this time period, it was normal for you of a certain class to be very calm and collected.

The problem is, just like today, if you are a woman and you are not performing your gender norms appropriately,

the police will assume it's you.

Right.

And I feel like you kind of are screwed either way, because if you're collected, then you seem cold.

And if you're upset, then people can accuse you of acting.

Exactly.

And I think everyone was quickly believing that it was likely to be either her or Bridget.

Someone quoted in the book, this is from Kara Robertson book, she wrote, one of Marshall Hillet's civic-minded correspondents told him to arrest Bridget Sullivan, who, quote, carried out the orders of her priest.

Oh, my God.

Adding that true Americans will learn in time to never employ a Catholic.

Another warned that servants were a sly and lying class.

Okay, wow.

So, and wait, where is Lizzie's sister during all this?

Emma was out doing errands, which good for her, honestly.

Which is not also not the strongest alibi, unless, like, everyone is like, Yes, I remember her.

She bought legumes.

Yeah.

Emma was out at the time.

Okay.

So she had that as her alibi.

That's she was about 15 miles away at the time.

And one of the conspiracy theories that they planned it together.

But I also feel like if you made a deathbed promise to your mom to always protect your little sister, you're the one doing the axe wielding.

As an older daughter, that's so true.

As the older sister, I totally like, you're good at eating on the axe.

So I don't think that she'd be a part of it.

The other thing was that they said, although an axe, this is again to quote Robertson, again, why they weren't racist against Bridget, they said, although an axe was a man's weapon, because of the physical strength and proximity required, working-class Irish women were known to be perfectly capable of swinging one for domestic service, often included chopping wood and slaughtering animals.

Probably any working class woman, when you really think about it, but

specifically the Catholic ones.

Listen, when you are full of the body and blood of Christ, is there anything that you can't do?

Oh, that's so true.

Including murder your employer.

Bridget wanted to leave so many times because she's like, These people don't know my fucking name.

They keep calling me Maggie.

How old is Bridget, by the way?

Bridget is, I believe she's about the same age as Lizzie.

She's older.

Okay.

Yeah.

And she very much was like, I don't really want to do this anymore.

But Abby was like, please just stay.

I'll pay you more money.

So that's how miserable poor Bridget was.

But when the things started to turn for Lizzie was because she was not performing her femininity well.

And

during an incident where she was talking to one of the police officers, and he was like, Did you know if your father and your mother got along?

And Lizzie just goes, She's not my mom.

That is like, no one in 1892 has any excuse for not knowing how you behave when you're recently bereaved because like everyone had probably lost her friend or a relative by adulthood by then, you know, as many people have now, but I think in somewhat lower numbers.

And

isn't it clear that like, yeah, as you said, you just kind of vacillate wildly between moods at times and correct people.

Yeah.

But her saying, she's not my mother.

She's my stepmother.

My own mother is dead

literally made the investigators think there's something wrong with her, which I think is.

Oh, shit.

God.

If I have just had like my father and stepmother murdered and someone's like, so is that your mom, sweetie?

I would just be like, no.

Like, it's too much today.

And just that alone, just her saying that's not my real mom, got her to become the primary suspect.

Okay, you guys.

Really?

They're like, she's sassed a man.

She's got to be a murderer.

The officer literally literally said, quote, I don't like that girl.

Oh, my God.

First of all, she's in her 30s.

It's interesting that they found her so unlikable that they didn't focus on the we hate the Irish theory.

Well, the thing that happened is that Bridget was a very good witness because she was very calm.

She was collected.

And Lizzie was very...

impersonable.

She was very terse.

And when she was answering questions, she would not answer it it properly.

And during the inquest, so the murder was on the fourth and the inquest was on the eighth.

And during the inquest, one, she wasn't able to have her lawyer with her, which is red flag number two, because I really think like even rich people should know, talk to, have your lawyer with you.

But he wasn't allowed to be there with her.

And she's giving all these answers that they're seeing as contradictory.

They'll ask, where were you in this point?

And she will say that she was one place.

And then Bridget's testimony will say that she is somewhere else.

At certain points during the inquest, they'll ask her, like, Did you and your stepmother quarrel?

And Lizzie will be like, We got along.

And they'll try to extrapolate.

She's like, I don't know what you want me to say.

It's very like proto-Karen energy.

And the men do not like that.

They take it very aggressively.

And they keep saying that she seems very dazed and out of it.

And it is this inquest that leads to her being brought to a hearing and the grand jury trial.

But what is important to understand is that while she is being interrogated, she has been on 16 milligrams of morphine every single day.

Oh my God.

And the morphine, all of it contained opium, which they say was also an hallucinogenic.

So part of why she's so disoriented as she's talking to the officer is because she is disoriented.

She is high.

I feel like this is a great example of the kind of tunnel vision that we get as like spectators to crime, you know, as people who consume media or whatever, and also that people who investigate and prosecute crime get of like, once you decide someone is suspicious.

everything they do you can then read as suspicious it's really very easy absolutely she needs to prove that she's innocent and she's not doing that with her behavior and you would think that it's already bad enough that the murders happen in her home the only other person who's there with her is saying things that contradict her testimony.

But on top of everything else, she's on her period.

So I, you know, mileage varies for everybody, but I would say my experience of being on my period, I'm so tired.

I fall asleep all the time.

You fall asleep all the time.

So she's on her period.

Her father, who she did love, has just been murdered.

And her stepmother's been murdered, which is still traumatic.

And her stepmother, who she at least seemed to like feel okay about you know maybe she's being snappy but that doesn't mean they hated each other even and even if she did hate her it doesn't mean you want her dead you know like you could right that's the thing there's frankly plenty of people i hate and i have killed none of them exactly look how strong we are look how strong look how strong

exactly and back then they called being on your period having fleas which i think is horrific on the 11th they issued a warrant for her arrest and they have a preliminary hearing.

And during this hearing, they introduced evidence that at one point before the murder, she tried to get some poison at the druggist.

And they're like, you see, she has had murder on the brain.

And Lizzie's like, I've never even been in that store.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Interesting.

And the druggist essentially claims that some woman, who he says is Lizzie Borden, came in asking for poison, a specific kind of poison that you would use on like a seal skin or like a fur coat to help get rid of like moss or something.

I don't have, I don't wear fur.

I'm not rich, so I don't understand how that works.

God bless.

These are right.

I wonder what today's equivalent of that would be like.

But there, you know, there are so many household like cleaners, bathroom kitchen cleaners, chemicals that we buy that.

I'm sure could also be used in a case like this to prove that we have murder on our minds.

Exactly.

I I bought too much Ajax and they were like, are you trying to build a bomb?

I'm like, no, I just want to, I just really like cleaning my tub.

I just bought a big economy thing of Drano yesterday.

You know, I'm armed and fabulous.

I always think about like, wow, can anyone ever buy like a barrel?

ever again without people thinking, oh, they're going to put a human body in.

Right.

Well, and I used to, for years, I would always have rope in my car in my trunk just in case someone needed to tie like for moving furniture or like kayaks or whatever.

But so many people saw it and were like, oh, it looks like you're a serial killer.

And I was like, why have serial killers ruined being handy?

Exactly.

She is indicted officially for the murder of her parents.

But before this happens, in a stunning turn of journalism, on October 10th, an article comes out by by the Boston Globe.

Spotlight.

It is

exactly spotlight.

They released an article that is titled Lizzie Borden's Secret.

And they claim the following things.

That Lizzie Borden was pregnant.

That her father knew about it.

And that he threatened to kick her out if she didn't tell him who got her knocked up.

And according to the Globe, how they wrote it, he issued an ultimatum saying that she had 24 hours, essentially, to let them know the name or leave this house forever, and that there were going to be 25 witnesses

that were present for this quarrel.

I don't even have 25 friends.

How are we supposed to

just you wait?

And then they also had other witnesses who, quote, had seen a hooded Lizzie Borden in the guest room at the time of her mother's murder.

That is so they had all of that.

Within 10 hours, it was discovered by the editors that it was a hoax.

What?

Oh my God.

Really?

Literally, so this guy, his name is Henry Tricky, terrible name.

He was their star crime reporter, and he bought what he thought was the government case from a private detective named Edwin McHenry for $500.

But McHenry wanted to fuck with him because the previous year they were on opposite sides of a murder murder case, and this was his revenge.

Which, first of all, why would you trust information from a man you know you screwed over in a court of law?

Because you just think so highly of yourself, maybe.

I don't know what Tricky was thinking, but he spent $500 on a hoax, and it got published in the Boston Globe.

Fantastic.

It just goes to show that fact-checking has never been something people have been terribly interested in.

And

that has not served us very well.

I mean, you can tell it's hoaxy because it's like, I think normally if you were rich and your 30-something old maid daughter was pregnant, you would be like, well, it seems like you have to marry the fella, sweetheart.

Or you would be like, here, take this tonic and have a really heavy period.

Yeah.

People, I think, when confronted with dramatic events, like often kind of like figure it out and don't kill anyone.

Exactly.

And I think they want this narrative.

There's been these rumors that Andrew Borden was engaged in some sort of incestuous relationship with Lizzie.

That's been a rumor that's been circulating for quite some time.

And I think the main reason why that happens is because, one, she's unmarried.

Two, they had a close relationship and people like to demonize that.

There's this underlying assumption that if she is single at her age, there must be a reason.

And it can't be an indifference towards marriage, knowing that marriage is actually quite an L if you already have money.

And an idea of like, well, her father must be keeping her on a tight rope, and that's why she can't get married.

Who knows either way, but I feel like in the absence of specific evidence supporting a theory, it's best to just kind of stick with what we actually know.

And it's, yeah, it's worth pointing out that, like, at this time in history, whatever other factors are involved, like if you're an old maid with a rich dad you probably have quite a lot of freedom and like your life is still being run by a man and it would be if you were married but in this case your body isn't going to be completely destroyed in about eight years

And I also think that like, you know, when your mother dies very young and like you don't really have healthy relationships, like there's no evidence that she was like missing out on some great love affair.

Yeah.

It's like she was single.

She didn't have to pay any bills.

From everything I've read, the life of a middle-class woman of her caliber was actually very boring.

So in my opinion, like you just kind of like have a lot of free time.

And she was in a bunch of charities.

She was involved in temperance.

She was involved in like some children's charities.

Like she had her little activities that she was doing.

It's okay to be single.

That's one of the worlds here.

You shouldn't be tried for murder simply because you're single.

Listen up, ladies.

Just because you're single and you love your dad and you hate your stepmom does not mean you're a murderer.

Yeah, it's really true.

And well, and temperance is interesting, too, because my understanding of that is that the temperance movement, you know, had many points, some good, some bad.

A lot of Think of the Children in there.

You know, it was about criminalizing.

alcohol, which ultimately did happen for a while.

But that it was one of the first social movements and one of the first aspects of

American politics that allowed women to speak speak publicly and organize.

Exactly.

And build bonds outside of the home.

And I think that one of the things that's interesting about Lizzie Borden is that we don't know much about her personality.

We don't know anything about her life explicitly before the murder.

So even when people talk about her being cold or her being indifferent, like she was not an interesting enough person before the murders for people to know who she was.

And I think it's so indicative of what it was like to just be a woman of a certain class in that period.

It's like you just kind of, you lived and you died.

Yeah.

And there is nothing exceptional about your experience.

And I think overall, the thing that's fascinating about Lizzie Borden is that other than this, she's a deeply uninteresting person.

Like she's just,

which honestly.

Good for her.

I mean, like, shout out to all the, all the brunettes out there who think, I'm never going to accomplish anything in life.

It could just fall into your lap.

Yeah.

I love this as a read because I think it really is true that like some of these legendary figures are just people who things happened to or who were kind of there in a moment that became historically significant in a way they doubtlessly would have preferred not to have happened.

And it's like the ultimate truth that they're just like kind of boring and that's their right.

Exactly.

And with Lizzie, because she was like this wealthy woman, all the papers were kind of split.

You had the upper class papers that were very much, she didn't do it.

She's a good girl.

Yada, yada, yada then the working class magazines were really talking about the big issue of how she was getting treated how long it took her to get arrested and indicted which you know fair and valid and then the anxieties about the immigrant class and how they're the ones that we should be going after.

And this was all the things swirling around her.

So anytime she appeared, anytime she was brought up in the magazine, it was all about what's her mental health like?

Is she crazy?

And the term hysteria was thrown around quite a bit.

An oldie but a goodie.

So as soon as people found out that she was on her period during the murders, they were like, oh no.

The theory that people had was that menstruation was the entire problem of female behavior and that the onset of Menzies was viewed as a time of great danger.

Wow.

A systemic shock repeated monthly with vary intensity.

And so experts like Austrian criminal psychologist Hans Gross contended that menstruation lowered women's resistance to forbidden impulses, opening the floodgates to a range of criminal behaviors.

If by forbidden impulses, you mean chocolate.

He didn't say not chocolate.

And he argued, quote, menstruation may bring women to the most terrible crimes.

Various authors cite numerous examples of sensible women driven to do the most inconceivable thing, in many cases, to murder.

And my response to this again is that I think when men are confronted, especially by cases where women murder men in self-defense or after a

prolonged period of abuse, that they're like, what could the motive possibly be?

Because being abused by your husband is part of the natural order.

That can't be it.

But your period...

That's dangerous, though.

That's the bad one.

That's what's killing you right now, isn't it?

Yeah.

And like, again, to talk of periods, which I didn't know we would do today, I get a period every month.

I always have.

For whatever reason, I have not tried to keep it away and it has never left.

And it just, I just get tired.

And I feel like maybe we want periods to be about something more than just like physical battery.

But as someone who has PMDD

and other severe forms of PMS, I do think it's interesting how like there are literal actual conditions that do appear during menstruation that affect people who menstruate.

And yet, the thing that we mostly hear about is like, but it's going to make you want to murder everyone.

It's like, well, maybe I just want to cry.

Yeah.

Most people just want to watch Pride and Prejudice and cry.

You know, like, we don't just murder our stepmoms.

And if we do, then like, there's, there's more to it.

There's more to it.

It's like these, it's kind of based on the idea that like menstruation is this like very dangerous, volatile thing as opposed to a vulnerable thing that makes someone kind of require extra care.

And also that, you know, in this historical period, it feels like people really believe that women are always like one bad day away from max murder.

It just makes me feel empathy for her because I just think of how horrible it must be to be accused of something because you just don't.

conduct yourself in a realistic way.

Totally.

And I will say that having read the information in both of these books, I think what the trial really perfectly illustrates is that the police

did not do a very good job.

The case was always very weak.

She is the most natural suspect, but it doesn't mean that all the evidence points clearly to her.

And one of the things that happened right before the trial started is on May 30th, another axe murder happened.

And a 22-year-old woman had 23 hits in the back of the skull.

They found the person who did it.

It was unfortunately a Portuguese man, so that was obviously something that made everyone really nervous.

The only reason why this murder is seen as so important is because the people involved already had subscribed importance.

If this was a murder that had happened to a family that was working class,

you probably wouldn't have heard of it.

And so, this idea that it was abnormal, yes, it was brutal, but we know about brutal cases all the time.

Like, Jack the Ripper is well known because of how consistently brutal it is.

Like, that's what supersedes it from being murder that upsets a certain working class, you know.

Because I think that if it wasn't so brutal, they wouldn't have cared about sex workers dying.

It was the entire circus of it that really makes it fascinating.

And I think with the T Border, it's the exact same thing.

It's the appeal of this spinster killing her own family to gain something, some nebulous something.

And it's like the fascination the public has with the person they imagine, which is so interesting.

Because I think that what makes,

I think, in my opinion, what made Jack the Ripper captivate people and continue to captivate them is that...

you know, if it had been the murder of one sex worker who was, you know, sleeping out on the street because she had nowhere else to go, then

there's no way we would remember that.

There's no way we'd be talking about it now.

There's no way people would have talked about it for more than a day back then.

But because we can connect these murders and use them to create this idea of this like violent, scary ubermengsch, we care about him and we care about this like theoretical, violent, greedy spinster murderer who we make.

But then, you know, the real people still get left behind.

You know, we both covered true crime stories, and I think the women at the center are always so interesting to me because they unveil what people really prioritize.

And even reading like the accounts on the first day of the trial, people were like describing Lizzie Borden, and it's all waffles between very plain-looking old maid to modest and well-bred

to, of course, those who didn't like her pulling in early transphobia transphobia and highlighting the fact that she has a masculine jaw oh no she just looks like a regular woman who didn't know about sunscreen you know like and that's okay

who had the misfortune to not invent it for herself right exactly yeah so as the trial happens the big thing that screws over the prosecution because they'll bring up all these people saying that they saw Lizzie doing something and their big star witness is this woman named Alice Russell because she was a really good friend of Lizzie Borden.

They were really close and she testifies that she knew that Lizzie was gonna burn a dress.

So Lizzie had this particular dress that she says had green paint on it and the same day as the inquest she burned it because What some people would do was burn their old clothes.

And when it happened, Alice is like, oh girl, you shouldn't have done that.

And it's one of those things where it's like, that does sound very, very bad.

But it also sounds like something that if you think that everything is fine, you're like, I'm just going to burn this old dress.

It has paint on it because that's the thing.

It has paint on it.

And this is what I would do.

And I told two people, because she told her sister, she told, I was like, I'm going to go do it.

And they were all like, okay, fine.

Go burn your dress.

But yeah, she burned the dress.

And this was seen as like a huge betrayal by Lizzie and they never spoke again.

But basically what the testimony said was that like she didn't hide the dress.

The argument being made is that the police searched the entire house and they didn't find it.

So they must have been sneaking it around.

But then the defense, which I think is really hilarious, is just like, well, the police aren't all bright.

They essentially.

Which is perfect.

And like, if you want to be charitable to the police in a story like this, which you can, you can say, look, everybody makes mistakes.

Everybody overlooks things.

This is part of what it means to do a job.

Like, you don't have to think the police are corrupt and incompetent, although I do, to think that they're human and therefore fallible.

Yeah.

When one of the officers fleet testified, quoting from...

Robertson again, he said that he had not seen a dress with any bloodstains, nor had he found a paint-stained dress.

In other words, if Lizzie Borden had burned a dress covered with paint, then where was it at the time of the search?

A hum ran through the court as the minds of the people grasped the fact that if he did not see the paint-soiled dress, it must have been because it was skillfully hidden.

Skillfully.

That sounds like an assumption to me because I think that like if it's green paint against any colored dress and it's not red, you would just glaze over it.

Yes.

But you know.

Fine, maybe she hid the dress.

But if she hid the dress, she'd almost have to wash her face in a house with no indoor plumbing because where is the blood?

Right.

Is there like a creek for her to like run down to or something?

There is no creek.

And that's a big thing for me is that if the timeline is that her father was murdered around 1045 and that at 1110, she's like, they killed my dad.

She like.

washed off entire blood of her in under 30 minutes.

And even if something is like technically, physically possible, like that doesn't mean that it's anywhere near likely to have happened or you know possible but not probable one of the things that came out of the um Elizabeth Montgomery did a Lizzie Borden movie in the 70s perfect and in that movie they are the ones who play with the idea that she committed the murders naked and that's why she didn't have any blood on her It's a pretty unintuitive idea, isn't it?

I just think like it just sounds so like, so 70s.

Like, yeah, she did it naked.

I'm like, I'm like, I don't think so.

I don't think if you're going to be swinging a hatchet to bludgeon your family members, that you want titty flaps.

You know, that's a bra wearing situation.

I really, I really want full coverage if I'm going to

murder my parents.

Like, especially when you think about it, like, it's a swinging motion.

Like, you need a sports bra for that.

You would be distracted.

You'd be in the middle and you'd be like, ow.

Do my boobs really look like that?

And so, like, I just, it's one of those things where I'm like, that is such a reach, in my opinion.

During the case, one of the reporters made a comment that I kind of think was very funny in ACAB for the time.

His name is Joe Howard.

He wrote about all the police officers that were coming in: Nearly everyone who has taken an active part in the endeavor to fasten this awful crime upon Miss Borden has, within the year, been promoted.

Until now, captains in Fall River must be thick as flies in a cow pasture.

Which I was like, that's very good, Acab.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

I was like, wow, look at the Boston Globe trying to redeem themselves.

I love it when the Boston Globe is a character.

Look, all the writers there, and there were female reporters there as well.

Like, and a lot of reporters actually believe that Lizzie Borden was innocent, which I think is interesting.

Yeah.

But he does make a comment about that there's a group of women who are in the watching area who are like, if I was there, I could convict Lizzie Borden.

And I'm just like, it's like, I'll be like anti-amber heard women who are like on TikTok just being like, oh, I know what real abuse looks like.

Oh, boy.

Like, thanks, guys.

But there were a lot of really interesting female journalists who really came and worked on the case as well and whose testimony and transcripts are part of what we know about the case, which is really interesting.

Yeah.

While post the trial, Lizzie's reputation really never improved.

During the case itself, a lot of people were saying that

there was a lot of balanced coverage of the trial itself.

The big issues was that the prosecution's own witnesses would constantly contradict each other about what happened, especially about the discovery of things like the search of the dresses.

And eventually they did end up discovering a hatchet, but not on the property.

It was like far away from where they actually were, which would require that either Lizzie or someone else like ran far miles to like throw the hatchet away.

First, Medley and Desmond, two of the cops, gave vastly different descriptions of the wrapping of the hatchet head.

Second, Flea and Desmond appeared to differ on whether the search of the household was thorough.

Finally, there was, in the eyes of some, a conspicuosity of Bridget Sullivan in the above events, because it was Bridget who led them to the box containing the hatchet in the basement.

According to Mulaney, Bridget handed him the hatchet, though she had testified that she had never touched it.

Bridget, too, had blue dresses that were not given the same scrutiny as those of Lizzie's.

And was the hatchet clean when they found it?

It was clean.

There was no blood on it.

Okay, then, like, how?

I just don't think that's the hatchet.

And some more things that would happen is they claim that they went to a barn that Lizzie was supposedly taking care of some fishing lines in, and the cops were like, oh, it was undisturbed.

And then, literally, during the defense's cross-examination, two boys came and said, Oh, yeah, we were messing around in there like earlier.

So, it wasn't undisturbed.

So, great police work.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So, like, the police work is just very inconsistent.

And then, eventually, when Emma takes the stand to testify in defense of her sister, she essentially says, Look, I hate our stepmother more than she did, and I didn't kill her.

And I think what was really telling is that there was nothing

that the prosecution could do that gave Lizzie enough motive to be there or enough evidence to keep her there.

And when she finally showed like typical female emotion because she fainted at one point during the trial,

I think that also helped her like, oh, she's delicate.

You got to prove you're not too sturdy.

Men are really creeped out by that.

Exactly.

She was not sturdy when she needed to be.

And during the final remarks, her lawyer said, A policeman is even more susceptible to bias because he is possessed and saturated with the thoughts and experiences he has with bad people.

He also told the jury, you do not get the greatest ability in the world inside a policeman's coat.

And I was just like, wow, he really is going for the ACAP.

And then one of the news officers said, not one police officer in a thousand is possessed of the acute sensibility or a trained habit of observation.

That's fantastic.

They had so much reasonable doubt that when everything was said and done, it only took an hour and a half of deliberation before she was acquitted.

Wow.

This is an all-male jury, right?

There aren't female jurors yet.

Oh, yeah,

it's all male jury.

That's interesting.

And do we have any insight into why they voted that way?

They just didn't really believe that she was capable of it.

What we do know about the juries is that like they voted unanimously for acquittal and then they just waited a little bit longer.

So they just are like, we'll just wait a little bit longer before we announce that we're done.

They're like, let's play poker a little bit so this is not embarrassing.

But they didn't trust the police as much as I think other people.

do which i think is actually kind of interesting of like they were able to just poke holes and she had a very good defense team with her like there was a former governor involved family lawyers yeah good for you lizzy she had her own little dream team i mean i'm sure that that that's a big part of it too is that she had like good lawyers which like you know and then you know it's not just a question of skill right it's a question of having the resources to have the time to be like hey there are all these holes i can poke and what the police are saying and then discredit them in front of a jury in the time that she was in it was possible for her to come across as maybe a little cold and distant, but ultimately for there to be no reason to just think of her as this dark figure.

She was just an ordinary person that happened to have something very horrific happen around her.

And while in many ways it makes sense for her to be the primary suspect, nothing she does even after she's acquitted, to me screams of guilt.

Like she literally just moved to a better part of town, but stayed there her entire life with her dogs.

And I would want to get away from the murder house.

So, you know, with her dog.

Yeah, she moved out of the murder house.

She got dogs and she actually had her car built a special so that she could ride around with her dogs in the seats.

She's innocent.

I was like, free her.

I was like,

that is a free woman.

And, you know, she just kind of lived quietly for the rest of her life.

Obviously, they didn't sell the old house because they believed in the value of good property investment, which, and she just lived for the most part alone.

She gave money to children.

She did some charity work.

She was ostracized in the town, but she still chose to live there.

And either you're very innocent or you're very delusional.

Yeah.

You know, like, those are the only two choices.

You didn't do it and you're like, I'm not leaving.

Or you're like, I'm delusional and I'm going to just be here anyway.

And I have chosen to believe the former because I just don't think the police did a very good job and I think there's enough reasonable doubt that even if she was responsible they don't prove it well enough.

Yeah and I feel like it just it works for me to give the benefit of the doubt to people both in stories like this and you know

looking at kind of crime media especially things that are unfolding generally and I think you know I mean one of the things that people talk about thoughtfully or as part of the kind of general raft of excuses for the toxic parts of the true crime fandom, is this idea of like, I have to hone my sense of fear so I can be safe.

The world is very predatory.

And it's like, it is, but like,

it feels like true crime often allows us to distract ourselves as women, especially from the fact that like, we don't need to worry about the guy at Walmart, like almost certainly, very low odds that that's anything.

We do need to worry about the guy we're going home to.

But in cases of female patricide and matricide, it's almost always abuse-related,

which I think is why the myth of sexual assault and incest has persevered so much in the case, because that is the most common seeming rationale for why she would have done it if she did.

Right.

And in many ways, it's like the most reasonable.

one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially with the Menendez brothers case, this idea of killing for inheritance is so often used as like, well, it has to be about the money.

And not to sound totally anti-capitalist, but when you already come from money, when you already have money, and you already, as a woman, have so many limited options, her dad being alive is the best thing that could have happened to her.

Right.

Right.

Because he would just keep giving her more stuff.

She don't have to work.

She just gets to just enjoy her father's money.

And she would even say like, yeah, if I wanted to ask, I don't know if I'd have to ask him for something twice, but he never denied me things.

So the only motivation that they can give is like something made up or unfounded by the fact.

She just was, you know, a woman in her 30s, single, who didn't like her stepmom and lived at home.

And that's many of our listeners right now.

Aside from the fact that this nursery rhyme is a bit of an earworm, like, why do you think we're still talking about Lizzie Borden?

Because if you asked most people, if you asked me, like, what other American murders can you think of from the 1890s, you know, the answer would be, oh my God, zero.

Yeah, I think it's like between this and like the death of the Limberg baby, you know, it's like,

those are the two big ones.

I think that one, it's a woman, and, you know, phenomenally still building her empire and whatnot.

And I think the fact that it's unsolved.

Right.

Because as far as legally is concerning,

they don't know who killed this family.

Yeah, and who was this fucking axe murderer?

Hatchet murderer.

Spreading misinformation.

Who is this person who came into this house, murdered two people, and then just left?

Yeah.

And no one saw anything.

The specter of lesbianism in this story, it seems pretty obvious to me now is like, Brickett doesn't want to have sex with someone who refuses to learn what her actual name is.

That just feels like something you would slap on to to make Lizzie seem like even more of a modern and therefore dangerous woman.

Yeah.

The idea that one person on one of the like many theories is that, like, oh, that the father caught Bridget and Lizzie together in bed.

And I'm just like, he wouldn't have even known what he was saying.

This is why you shouldn't have adjourning rooms, but also,

yeah, but we're like, but what's her motivation?

Lesbianism.

Lesbianism.

It's the basic instinct approach to crime.

Yeah, it's, I know you want her to be a murderer, but it is okay that she's not.

Yeah, we can still pay attention to her even if she didn't kill anyone.

It's so interesting how history will choose a villain and that that's what they stick with because it doesn't matter that she was acquitted.

And we should be okay with the idea of reasonable doubt.

And I just think, you know, if the hatchet marks don't fit, you must have quit.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you to Princess Weeks for being our guest and taking me on this journey.

Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing.

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing.

See you in two weeks.