Good (or should I say bad?) ol' Lizzie has been on my mind as of late after catching the "bewitched" Elizabeth Montgomery play a memorable performance of Lizzie on the made for TV movie "The Legend of Lizzie Borden." If you haven't seen the movie or the biography of Lizzie on the A&E channel, then you just might have overheard the eerie ditty sung on the school playgrounds:
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.
It was a sweltering morning in August, the year of 1892, when Lizzie Borden discovered the body of her father on the couch of the sitting room, where he had laid down for a nap only twenty minutes earlier. Lizzie was a 32-year-old unmarried woman at the time, living in a cramped house in the quiet town of Fall River, Massachusetts with her father Andrew Borden, stepmother Abby Borden, sister, and housekeeper. The body of her stepmother was lying upstairs on the floor of the guest room, struck down a hour and a half earlier. Both victims suffered numerous severe blows to the head from a blunt object, believed to have been a hatchet.
Lizzie Borden was arrested one week later for the double murders based on several clues pointing to her as the perpetrator. Most importantly, a local pharmacist testified that she attempted to purchase a deadly poison called prussic acid from him shortly before the murders (claiming she needed it to kill moth eggs on her sealskin coat). The pharmacist stated that he found this very unusual considering that moth eggs couldn't survive on sealskin and he refused to sell her the poison.
Lizzie and her housekeeper Bridget (who was outside washing windows) were the only two people on the property during the time the murders were committed. Lizzie claimed during the inquest that she heard no screams from either victim. Since all of the rooms in the house were connected by adjoining doors, and the house was very small as you can see in the floorplan at: http://www.halfmoon.org/borden/download.... ,it would have been impossible for Lizzie to not pass by or hear the perpetrator in the cramped house. Abby Borden was murdered at approximately 9:00 in the morning, and Andrew was murdered about at 10:30. While it could be reasoned that the murders were committed by two different people, this is unlikely, considering the similarities of the murders; therefore the killer would have remained inside or around the house without being noticed by Lizzie or Bridget.
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