Live From The Lizzie Borden House - America's Most Notorious Axe Murderer

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Fall River, Massachusetts, 1996.

It was an unusually cold November night, as Carl and his wife Bonnie drove through the

coastal town of Fall River.

Not that cold nights were uncommon in November, especially in New England, but this particular

evening was frigid.

There was a new bed and breakfast in town that the couple planned to stay at.

Carl spoke with Ronald, the owner, earlier that day, confirming the room for the night.

What exactly is this place called?

Bonnie asked.

Lizzie Bowen or Bowden or something like that.

Carl responded.

Bonnie perked up.

Lizzie Bowen, she asked excitedly.

Yeah, that's it.

Why, Carl asked.

Bonnie just looked at him, dumbfounded.

You've really never heard of the Lizzie Bowen case?

Lizzie Bowen took an axe, gave her mother 40 wax.

It was the biggest unsolved axe murder case of the last century.

Carl just shrugged.

Sounds familiar, I guess, he conceded.

Sounds awful though, he added.

We should find some place else.

Not a chance, Bonnie quickly retorted.

Maybe we'll see a ghost.

Carl wasn't a fan of the supernatural and didn't share the morbid curiosity his wife enjoyed,

but it was late and cold, so he bit the bullet and pulled in.

The house loomed tall and dark against the star-speckled backdrop of the Fall River night sky.

It took on a menacing look now that Carl knew its history.

He pulled the car around back and parked.

They were met at the front door by a man and woman who introduced themselves as Ronald

and Martha.

Bonnie quickly and excitedly shook their hands, not even taking a moment to shut the door

before bombarding them with questions about the house.

Martha laughed and guided her into the parlor, answering as many questions as she could.

Carl stood in the foyer with Ronald and collected the room key.

He then gathered his wife and headed to the second floor to their room.

Bonnie couldn't stop talking about the Lizzy Board in case and the prospect of seeing

her ghost or one of the other ghosts that apparently haunted this old house.

Carl was becoming increasingly more anxious, but he didn't want to sour his wife's excitement.

The room was set up to look just like it had in the 19th century, a detail that only

added to Carl's discomfort.

It was late and they had a long drive ahead of them the next day, so the couple decided

to go to bed.

Bonnie told Carl not to wait up for her because she intended to stay awake in hopes of seeing

a ghost.

Nevertheless, she was snoring within minutes and it was Carl who wouldn't be able to sleep.

He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the creaking and groaning of the old house.

He heard an occasional footstep that he assumed were other guests above, or he hoped anyways.

Eventually, he felt himself drifting off, but was awoken by the creaking sound of a door

slowly opening.

He looked over at the door to the hall to see its swinging carefully yet deliberately open.

The doorway was dark, but there seemed to be a shadow of a person in the frame.

The shadow moved closer, Carl was frozen in fear.

The silhouette of a woman came into focus and she was holding something in her hand.

In acts, Carl thought to himself.

He wanted to scream, but he couldn't move his mouth.

He couldn't even breathe.

The shadow woman lifted her arm to reveal she was, in fact, holding what looked like an

acts and slowly knocked all of the items on the dresser to the floor.

They hit the floor with a loud crash.

Bonnie kept on snoring, but the sound snapped Carl out of his state of temporary paralysis.

He raised his arm up defensively as the shadow woman hefted the acts and swung it down,

the blade slicing right through Carl's forearm and into his face.

That's when he woke up screaming.

Bonnie was shaking him, asking him if he was all right.

Carl scanned the room and saw no shadow woman, a nightmare.

Relief flooded over him and he was able to stop shaking.

He threw the covers off and stood up.

Suddenly, his blood ran cold as he looked at the floor by the dresser.

All of the items that had been on top were scattered about the floor, as if somebody

had knocked them off.

I'm Dave Wilkins from the hometown Ghost Stories podcast, and this is Talk as Jericho,

the Lizzy Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts.

Here we are with the hometown Ghost Story Guys, Rob, Dave, and Jesse.

This is our first in-person video podcast, and we are here at the Lizzy Borden House

in Fall River, Massachusetts, a great idea you guys had.

We just took the tour.

It's a bed and breakfast by day, by night, but it's unbelievable this whole house and all

of the things that happened in it.

As the poem is, Lizzy Borden took an axe and gave her father 40 wax when she had done

she gave her mother 41.

Up until this point, everyone knows the legend of Lizzy Borden.

I know more about the heavy metal band, Lizzy Borden, given the axe, the fatal crushing

blow.

Let's talk about this.

This was your guys' suggestion to come here and film in this amazing place, very creepy

as well.

They have been very accommodating for us.

We've come here before and taken the tour.

We've preserved this place tremendously.

You really get a feel of what life was like here in 1892 when you walk in here.

It's a really weirdly designed house, too.

Apparently they didn't understand what a hallway was at that point in time.

You just kind of ventured bedroom to bedroom and walking through it.

And it just keeps going up to you.

It's a very three stories way up at the top.

Yeah, a lot of people say it's small, but I don't think it's that tiny of a house.

I don't think it's that tiny, especially for 1892.

Right.

You're expecting like a one room little house in the prairie or something, but this

is a...

The Borns were an affluent family, though.

Yeah, they were an affluent family.

Andrew had this house and the daughters didn't love it.

They wanted to live up on the hill where all the other rich people lived, but he liked living

here because he did a lot of work around this area.

A little bit of a cheap man didn't have any plumbing in this house at all, and that

might be a stigma.

I probably take care of somebody as well if I didn't have a plumbing situation going

on.

But let's discuss one of the most things started in that direction.

We say there's no chambermaids either, so they had their own chamber pots, and they

were their own chambermaids, so they were taken care of their own stuff there.

But this is the site of one of the most infamous murders in American history.

If you want to just give a quick rundown of what happened, Dave.

Yeah, so let's take it back to...

Well, before we go to that, two people, the mother and the step mother and the father

were murdered with an axe, literally an axe, and what I did not know until today and

then you can go back to the start, was that there is some controversy as to whether Lizzie

actually did it.

She was acquitted, and we'll get that whole story.

But very interesting story that I think people have heard the name, but don't know the

whole situation behind it, and that's what we're going to do today is unravel that.

Take away days.

Actually pretty fascinating that so many people associate the name, Lizzie Borden, with

one of the most brutal axe murders of all time, and somewhat unfairly because she was

acquitted of these crimes, and they never found the killer.

But let's take it back to that day, back in on August 4th of 1892.

In this house, this house right here today, there were five people in the house that day.

And it was Andrew Borden, who was the homeowner.

It was his wife, Abby Borden, and his daughter, Lizzie Borden.

And then there was a house guest also, his name was John Morse, and that was actually the

husband of...

I'm sorry, that was the brother of Andrew Borden's ex-wife, and they stayed friends after his

ex-wife passed away.

And also Bridget Sullivan, who was the...

She was the house maid, and she lived upstairs.

She can get confused with Maggie, and it's her funny story, because the former maid of

the house was named Maggie, and when this new one came in Bridget, the Borden girls didn't

care to learn her new name, they just also called her Maggie.

It's kind of a pretentious thing to do.

One Irish chamber maid is the same as the next, right?

Yeah.

That's all the same, right?

The idea behind that.

Pretty rude, though.

Yeah, very.

But we're going to refer to her as Bridget, because I feel like that's a more respectful

name, too.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually, funny story about Bridget Sullivan, later in life, after all of this went down,

she moved out, she moved somewhere else, and married a man with the last name Sullivan,

so she wouldn't have to change her name again.

So back on that day of the murder, 6am is pretty much when the household wakes up.

Bridget was up first.

She comes down to do the chores, and also to start breakfast, and breakfast was the left

over mutton from the day before.

Swordfish mutton.

Sounds delicious.

Wow.

Swordfish mutton is in the dead of heat in the summer.

But is it a mutton lamb?

Mutton is sheep.

Yep.

So the swordfish sheep, it's like a half fish, half sheep, so you're conflating two different

meals.

So the mutton was from the night before, and the swordfish was actually from a couple

nights prior to the day.

Which is recommended for swordfish.

You let it sit out in the summer heat for a few days in the middle of Massachusetts.

And mix it with your mutton.

Right.

Yeah.

Left over sheep was for dinner.

And then around seven o'clock is one Andrew and John and Abby woke up, and they came

down and hung out for a little while before breakfast.

Lizzy who was sleeping upstairs didn't typically join the family for breakfast.

She kind of did her own thing, and that was the same on this morning.

She eventually came down later, but she wasn't feeling good, because the family had actually

had what was believed to be food poisoning from that swordfish a few nights prior.

It could have been poisoning poisoning.

That was one of the theories, but it's actually...

Lizzy, actually.

Okay.

Yeah.

That was debunked with the medical examiner after the autopsy, who I will talk about some

work, because maybe not.

Yeah.

Well, maybe, maybe not.

But so the family eats breakfast, and then Andrew and John kind of hang out for a little

while.

John leaves the house to go take care of some business, and I'm sorry, Andrew leaves the house.

Nope.

John leaves the house to go take care of some business.

He had to go meet somebody about selling a horse.

So he's gone.

Bridget gets sent outside by Abby to go clean windows, and Andrew leaves the house to go

to the bank and run a few errands.

So basically, we have Abby Borden, who goes upstairs to take care of some...

The room where John was staying.

And we have Bridget outside, and then Lizzy was in the house somewhere unaccounted for.

So during this time, while Abby is in that upstairs bedroom, somebody confronts her and hits

her with an axe.

Now the person who hit her, hit her the first time, was facing her, and then she fell on

her face, and then they continued to hit her another 17 times in the back of the head

with the hatchet.

And after that, there was a period of rest.

The house was quiet for about an hour and a half.

Okay, hold on a second here.

So Abby is Lizzy's stepmother.

Correct.

So everybody is downstairs, except for some people who have left or whatever.

She goes upstairs by herself, and somebody hits her in the head with a hatchet multiple

times.

Nope.

No screams, no yells, nobody...

Not only that, I mean, she was a short woman, but she was a plump woman as she was described

in the books.

Not the roaster, Jesse.

Jesus.

You're trying to put it nicely out.

She was like five foot, like, nothing and two hundred pounds, which isn't a huge woman,

but she was portally.

So, but you would have heard that.

You would have heard her hit the ground, for sure.

Okay.

But no scream, maybe she died on impact.

Who else was in the house at the time?

So depending on what story you believe, Lizzy could have been in the house.

Now Lizzy told several different stories when investigated.

She said that she was downstairs, ironing, handkerchiefs in the dining room.

She also said that she was outside in the shed looking for fishing lures, and she also

said on a different occasion that she was in the barn loft eating peaches, pears, pears.

Thank you.

It's also important to note that she was also prescribed to a bunch of morphine at the

time.

Why would she prescribe the morphine?

So she was...

Well, during...

Well, she was...

What happened was, when she would jump around to the timeline a little bit, but when

she found out that she was the prime suspect, the family doctor, Dr. Bowen prescribed her

to morphine for her anxiety.

So she was not on morphine during the holidays, but she was on morphine through a lot of the

police investigation.

A lot of her investigation.

When there a question, which might be...

It was morphine for everything.

Yeah.

It was like, you know, it was like, like, a robotusson.

Yeah.

The good old days.

You have some morphine.

You have some morphine.

No.

Not only were they given her morphine though, like, when she was getting questioned, they

give her the morphine, then they would give her uppers as well, like, whether it was

like a caffeine intake or something like that, it's right there.

So like, you're just like, I don't know what to feel right now as you're trying to tell

these stories.

Right.

So Abby is now murdered.

Abby is dead.

She's upstairs, but nobody knows she's dead at this time.

And now the house is quiet for a little while.

And about 90 minutes goes by.

And then the next thing that happens is Andrew Borden comes home.

And when he comes home, he tries to get in the front door, but it's locked.

And he can't...

He's fumbling with the lock and he can't figure out how to unlock the door for whatever

reason.

And Bridget, who had finished cleaning the windows, she didn't feel good herself.

So she had gone upstairs and laid down in bed, but didn't fall asleep.

She's on the third floor now.

She hears Andrew Borden at the front door trying to get in.

So she comes down.

She lets him in.

And she allegedly heard Lizzie laughing from her bedroom on the second floor.

So Andrew...

This is kind of an important note too, because they had called this house like, potentially

one of the most secure houses in fall river at the time.

They had the triple locks on the front door.

And we talked about it earlier, the absence of a hallway on the second floor.

So basically to get from each room to each room, you just did the torso, you probably

saw it yourself.

You have to go through someone's bedroom to get the next bedroom.

And you basically have to come through a bunch of locked doors, which is going to come

to play seriously when we start looking at suspects for this case.

And they had to walk by that bedroom too, where Abby was laying.

Right.

Deceased.

Yeah.

It was assuming there'd be blood and gore all over the walls and floors and everything.

Right.

I mean, it sounds crazy, but you walked by that bedroom earlier, and what the way her

body's positioned is when you're walking by the doorway, she was behind the bed on the

other side.

Yeah, you can't see it unless you go into the room.

Right.

See, well, we wouldn't have jumped out at you necessarily.

So Andrew Borden comes home.

He's not feeling good.

And he lays down on the couch, Lizzie claims that she took his boots off, but that's later

disproved by some of the crime scene photos where he's laying there with his boots on.

So he lays down to take a nap, Bridget goes back upstairs and Lizzie is unaccounted for.

And then about 10 minutes later, somebody is standing at the head of the couch where Andrew

is lying asleep and hits him in the face with an axe 11 times.

And it's so hard to that one of the axe, one of the wounds goes right through his eye

and slices his eye in two, right?

I think it's even on one of these skeletons here.

Yeah, you can see.

Can you guys get a shot of that skeleton right there?

Yeah, you can see the part of the eye socket there that's hanging from where it just shattered

the eye socket.

Yeah, curious.

And there's a few, yeah, there's a few important notes and you can see it in the crime scene

photos.

He does have his shoes on.

For two, if you look at the way he's positioned, his feet are kind of just sitting on the floor

and it looks to me like who takes a nap like that?

Who takes a nap with their feet on the floor while laying down on the couch?

So if you, if I'm just looking at that scene, it looks to me like someone hit him and he

fell onto the couch.

Right, fell onto the couch.

Just judging from the picture.

And then the other important note is that he has his suit jacket is curled up in his

behind his head being used as like a pillow.

On that new Andrew Borden at the time, they said that's something he would never do.

He's very stately man.

He was very clean.

God, he wouldn't just roll up his coat and he would just use a pillow.

He says a pillow, right?

Yeah.

He would use an actual pillow.

He's not going to use his coat as a pillow.

So it was kind of a weird detail.

So both of these people are killed within 30 minutes, 60, 90 minutes and no, it's still

ridiculous.

And nobody in that 90 minutes was wondering where Abby was or to go upstairs to look.

Abby is where they shouldn't be to see any of this.

It's very coincidental.

What's interesting is while Lizzie was in the house, people were asking her like, hey,

where's Abby?

And when Andrew got home, he asked, he's like, oh, where's Abby?

She's like, oh, she received a note and she had to leave the house.

So she was implying that Abby wasn't even in the house at the time, which was later looked

at as pretty suspicious because where's this note where she allegedly go?

Right.

She's been upstairs dead for an hour.

Right.

The note never turned up.

Yeah, but the doctor was found burning a note later as well.

So there's a lot with this case.

Well, let's start getting into it then because these two people are dead.

And once again, they're, they're hit with a hatchet multiple times.

It's not just one.

These 11 for Andrew and how many for Abby?

18 or 19?

18.

I mean, that's a lot of, yes, the clown doing crazy things.

Yeah, it's overkill.

Yeah.

And it seems personal, right?

Right.

Right.

Right.

If it's a random break in and a random robbery.

Yeah, this is not that.

That's the other thing.

Right.

When you have these things, it's like usually back to back to back, like every other case

that we talked about.

It's like he, this guy went from this room to this room and he just like kind of wiped

out the family.

This person just like kind of chilled and waiting waiting for Andrew to get home.

The day was interesting too because if you look at the day, all of the police were out

of town.

So they were all in Rhode Island for like their annual, like, fair or something like that.

The police men's fair.

Police men's ballroom.

Yeah.

So there was, they had literally like hired like deputized people on the day to be police

officers for that day.

Now there was a couple of actual detectives who did show up and the first thing that they

noticed, which is why we know that there was this time in between the murders, was that

Andrew's blood was very fresh.

Abby's blood had been sitting there for a while.

So they had determined that they'd been at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half between

the kills.

One thing I think about that though, like, and I'd have to talk to our friends, it's

guy.

She's on the second floor.

Heat rises.

The Massachusetts in August, it's so humid here.

I wonder if like, her blood was coagulating a little faster because of where she was in

the house, but that was an original theory.

But there was a myth that it was a hundred degrees that day and that's not true.

You can actually go back and I did this.

I went to the, the US signal service website and looked up what was the exact temperature

on August 4th, 1892 and it reached a high of 83 degrees at two o'clock PM, which means

you could assume around the time of the murders was probably closer to like 75 or so.

So not crazy hot.

Also when they did an autopsy, they autopsy the contents of the stomach.

Now the, the two of them had both eaten breakfast at the same time, but Andrew's breakfast was

significantly more digested than Abby's and it was to the tune of about 90 minutes.

So it was consistent.

So they do believe that there was actually a 90 minute period in between.

Sort of this poisoning thing actually get debunked because one of the things that was weird

leading up to the case was there was a local pharmacist who had described that he encountered

Lizzie Borden a couple of days prior to the ax murder and she came in and she was looking

for a poison called Prussic acid and she had received a seal kit, a seal skin coat or

cape or something like that from Andrew Borden as a gift when she got back from Europe

and she said that she needed the Prussic acid to like curate or something or.

Moths, yeah, like they used it to get rid of moths and stuff.

Yeah, but it's also cyanide.

Yeah, so at the time it was a perfect poison if you were looking to poison kill someone who's

kind of undetectable at the time and he wouldn't sell it to her for two reasons.

Number one, it was kind of suspicious.

And number two was you actually needed like a doctor's prescription to purchase that kind

of acid at the time, but she was looking for it.

She made up a story saying that she had previously been able to purchase it for this purpose

and she was basically trying to get her hands on some poison and that was pretty fishy.

A couple other fishy things leading up to someone before you pull off of this and yes,

it is pretty much debunked.

And that's because for two reasons, reason number one was because in the autopsy they checked

for the cyanide and there was none.

So she didn't actually poison them.

Now what she trying to poison them maybe that's the point I was making was that she didn't

actually get the poison because he wouldn't sell it to her, but it is very fishy that she

was looking to purchase something that was like an undetectable poison that you could use

to kill someone.

Well, here's part two.

The other thing is that's interesting is there was actually a sting operation going

on at the time and one of the state investigators wives, he had sent out to all different pharmacies

in town trying to test them basically to see if they'd sell products they weren't supposed

to sell.

Kind of like an underage look or store situation.

So this woman was going around in Fall River to different pharmacies doing exactly that.

And when Lizzie's friends were questioned about that during the trial, they said that

the guy's wife actually resembled Lizzie Boyle.

Well, I mean, if you can't poison someone subtly with cyanide, just chop them in the head

18 times.

Very subtle, hard to detect.

So let's go to kind of the next step of this.

So now we have these two dead bodies and what happens next?

So we got two dead bodies, Abby's dead upstairs, Andrew's dead on the couch, and Lizzie is

the one who finds Andrew.

And when she sees him, she calls out to Maggie, she says Maggie come down quick, father's

hurt.

So Bridget runs downstairs and sees Andrew's mutilated body and Lizzie tells her go for

doctor bored and quick.

So Bridget leaves the house, doctor who does a boredom, Dr. Bowen, sorry, very close.

Dr. Bowen who lives nearby and she goes to his house, but he's not there.

And the neighbor, Miss Adelaide Churchill at this point, she is alerted and she comes to

the house.

And she makes note of Lizzie's unusually calm, cool, and collected behavior.

And you'd think that, I say unusually, that is how Lizzie would typically be, but you

would assume she wouldn't be that way if she had just found her father's mutilated

corpse.

Right.

So she comes and then by this time, Bridget does get a hold of Dr. Bowen and he comes

over to the house as well.

And also by this time, the police have been alerted and the police that are in the area

that weren't at that picnic also come to the house.

And now they're all trying to figure this out.

Now all they know at the time is that Andrew Borden has been murdered on the couch and

they don't know yet that Abby's dead upstairs.

So the cops ask, where's Mrs. Borden?

They didn't even ask about it.

It was Mrs. Churchill that asked and then it was just kind of forgotten about, no one cared

about Abby in this family.

Right.

Yeah, they were still going off this theory that I got.

She's been asked to leave this house.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

And so the cop then says, oh, can you to Bridget, can you go upstairs and find Abby?

Now this is an active crime scene.

Somebody was just murdered with an axe.

They don't know if the guy is still in the house and they send the, and the mage is like,

no, I'm not doing that.

So Adelaide Churchill says I'll go and she goes upstairs and she finds the body.

I love it.

None of the police still stepped up like, oh, you know, there might be an active axe

murderer.

You go take care of it.

Send the help.

Yeah.

So then she discovers the body of Abby.

Exactly.

And that's when they start questioning people and they start questioning Lizzie and whatnot

and they're, you know, where's Emma, the older sister and she was actually away out

of town in New Bedford.

So it couldn't have been her.

So that's kind of where we get the murders.

And from there, the police stop building a case and then we get the trial.

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I think before we talk about the trial, we should talk about this house because we are

a ghost story podcast.

And we are sitting in it.

We are sitting in it.

We should talk about some of the ghosts and then dig into it.

Yeah, please.

Because we heard about some of the stories about some of the ghosts here.

It's actually interesting downstairs.

I don't know if it's a fire pit or if it's a laundry shoot, but if you take a picture

of it with a flash on, you see the face of Lizzy Borden and they try to scrub it off

but it didn't go away.

Yeah, it's so creepy because it's not one of those and we've been to so many haunted

houses and there's sort of like little gimmicky things like that.

Like you see in the picture and you're like, kind of, when you take this picture and

you look at it, it's immediately right there.

It looks like Lizzy Borden.

You see cheekbones, kind of a round face, you can see it right there.

Yeah, you can also draw the conclusion that it could also, I mean, it's a face so you

can see who you want.

But a lot of people think it looks like Andrew Borden because if you look it down the

bottom, it kind of looks like there's that kind of beard that he has.

Well, well, so let's talk about some of the hauntings here, right?

So the most prominent ghost in the house is Abby Borden and she's the one who's seen

mostly and she's seen typically in that room that she was killed in and there's, you

get full body apparitions of her doing different things in different positions.

She's showed up on the floor laying face down.

This also shows up standing in the doorway and bending over as if she's folding laundry

over the bed or something like that.

And there are, it's typically described as a full body apparition of a heavy set woman

described in old-fashioned clothing.

Yeah, we're just going to keep roast hair the whole time.

Wow.

Exactly.

And also the ghost of Andrew Borden is seen throughout the house and he's seen as a shadow

figure crossing through the parlor, vanishing near the sofa.

People have claimed to have seen him going up the stairway right here in the foyer.

And guests who stay overnight report the sound of someone sitting heavily on the bed breathing

sounds in the dark or watching eyes from the doorway.

And these are usually attributed to the ghost of Andrew Borden.

And then this is known as one of the most haunted houses in all of America.

It's got the reputation for that.

It hits like every top ten list that you look at.

And you know, you can think what you want about these lists, like how can you say something

places the most haunted.

But I think it ties in with also the unbelievably, you know, infamous crime that had here.

So it ties in.

And then you also look at the hauntings and there's others as well.

So on the third floor, you have a lot of hauntings of children.

And you say, well, no children down this house, why would children be haunting here?

And you look next door.

And there now it's a little coffee shop, but you used to have that used to be part of

the board in a state.

And there was a horrible crime, arguably just as bad if not worse, where children died

over there.

Have you heard of the children of the well?

No.

So it's Lodwick and Eliza Borden lived over there.

And this is in 1848, where Lodwick had married Eliza.

They had three children together.

And in 1848, they believed she was suffering from postpartum depression at the point in time.

But that's like looking at hindsight, trying to figure that out.

One day, she took author of her children who were aged four, who was Maria, two, who

was holding.

And then their youngest was Eliza, so named after the mother.

She brought them downstairs.

And it's actually a sister and they call it a well, but it's the same idea.

And she started by drowning the newborn in the well.

And then she went to the two-year-old and the four-year-old got scared, so the four-year-old

ran away.

And then Eliza, the mother, went and got a straight razor and took her own life in the

basement.

She actually came into the Lizzie Borden trial because they tried to say that mental illness

ran in the family.

But Eliza was married in this year, so that marriage.

And something just another crazy fact I found when I was looking this up, after Lodwick,

he got remarried again.

And his next wife's name was Eliza.

How do you do that?

How do you marry someone with the same name that chose you here to, like you just can't

both be crazy.

Yeah.

There's also a ghost cat in the house that we heard about before we went on.

That's right.

Yeah, so the ghost cat is more recent addition to the ghost of the house, but I believe

the cat died in 2021.

So do you guys, as a quick segue, for talking about the recent addition of the cat, for

example, if you have a haunted house, and is it more akin to having extra hauntings

added on top of it, like the cat, because of the, because of the already sort of been

established, that this is a spiritual place, compound hauntings, works like compound

interest.

Right.

The higher the haunting level gets.

But if you take a location like this, where people are constantly coming here for

tours, constantly coming here for ghost hunts, they do multiple ghost hunts a week here.

It's not just the big shows that come in and do the ghost hunts here, but they've been

here too.

But if you think about just ghost hunters in general, if they're bouncing from haunted

place to haunted place to haunted place, it necessarily might not be a cat that died

here, but they say spirits can attach itself to you.

And there's proper ways to cleanse yourself after investigations, if you believe in that

stuff.

But who knows what you could be carrying around.

So it's like when you have a haunted location that's constantly bringing new people who

constantly might have something attached to them, they could just be making the building

perpetually more haunted every single day.

So it's something to think about.

Interesting.

Who knows where their cat could have came from?

Could have came from here, or it could have been brought in by something else, or it

could be nonsense.

But you know, you got to think of all those possibilities.

Home town ghost stories.

So nothing is nonsense.

It's all true.

It's all true.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but I do want to go back to the children ghost, because this

is like one of the more serious hauntings in this place, and they believe they'll hunt

mostly the third floor.

But you get all sorts of activity, you get people getting their clothes tugged on, excuse

me, they're closed tugged on.

They have a box of toys up there for the kids.

And frequently, tour guides and investigators have said that they found the toys that were

all inside the box.

Now they're outside the box.

There's a doll now sitting on a table.

There's a ball that rolls around.

There's all sorts of activity that happens with these toys.

And it's really interesting, because it takes some serious energy to move things like

that.

It's also been the sound of footsteps running around, sounds like children's footsteps.

They hear children's laughter.

All sorts of different hauntings affiliated with these children that allegedly are haunting

the third floor.

And it very well could be the kids from next door.

Again, it's the same family.

This is all before the, you know, the axe murders, of course.

But it's very well.

Why wouldn't they feel comfortable?

Connected.

The Dave, the tour guide, showed us an area downstairs.

There's a corner of the basement that apparently something bad lives in.

He said that a guy was showing us some bravado and was acting all tough and got scratched

up downstairs to where afterwards he was just covered in these, you know, long nail

guys.

I think it was another tour guide.

I don't know if that person still works here or not, but they had photo evidence of

massive scratches they got on the back of their leg.

And it was right after he, I don't remember who he was looking at in the picture.

It might have been a woman, but he had said that, oh, this, this is the woman.

And she looked like a man.

And it was after he kind of just taunted her a little bit.

It was kind of like, it wasn't with ill intent, but that's when he said he was walking

outside.

And forget about it, it might have been a woman tour guide.

I don't remember who this was, but the tour guide was walking outside to the, the barn

out back.

And that person started feeling like a burning on their leg and they, it looked like brutal

scratches.

So, you know, sometimes you get a scratch and you're like, ah, did you scratch yourself

for the picture?

Yeah, for the picture.

It was like gouges.

Like it was like, all right, you had to really be committed to fake that.

Why would you do that to yourself?

And it looked like claw marks.

So, it's pretty concerning stuff.

So, you have like every level of haunting here, which is why it's interesting.

That combined with the reputation, I mean, the history of the place.

Also with the tour guide and the basement there, his injuries were on his back.

So, it's hard to self inflict wounds on your own back.

These are two different instances.

I'm pretty sure.

No, I know what I was going to do.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure, careful on your back.

Do they show you the, the black light in the basement where you can still see a blood

stain?

No.

So, there's a, they didn't show me that either, but I've seen that.

Someone's been showing that.

So let's continue on to the, to the trial, I guess, right?

Well, before we do that.

I do feel we should probably mention many people believe, and also many people don't believe

that this house is haunted by the ghost of Lizzy Borden herself.

Hmm.

Now, she didn't die here.

She died down the street at Maplecroft, but she, she, I mean, she lived here and she

definitely expended some serious energy here through the course of at least that day.

So it's definitely plausible that she could be haunting this.

What her name is mentioned every day, and it's like, you know, this would be the place

that she would probably congregate if she was going to be a spirit.

Yep.

But most of the evidence for her haunting is through EVPs.

People have heard her laughing during spirit box sessions.

They've got an intelligent response as the suggestion might be the spirit of Lizzy Borden.

So I think it's definitely not out of the, out of the question that Lizzy Borden would

be haunting the Lizzy Borden.

No, I was so sure.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah, but she moved all of five minutes away and had her house at Maplecroft events

where she died.

Finally, at her house on the hill, up there, she got acquitted.

Yeah.

Spoiler alert.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, was she instantly a suspect, Lizzy?

Pretty much.

So she was, she did a whole lot of peculiar things on that day that led people to suspect

that she might be the killer.

Number one, well, number one, she was the only one in the house, right, that they know

of.

There were no intruders that were noticed by any of the people that were outside.

It was a busy day outside.

There were a lot of street vendors because this was like the main road of town.

And so nobody had noticed anything.

Not to mention the Borden's were notorious for keeping all of their doors locked.

Yeah, again, very secure house with no hallways.

Right.

It's very, very secure.

But she had done things and this kind of put it around the radar was she was doing peculiar

things in the week leading up.

It wasn't just the alleged poison incident where she may or may not have been trying to purchase

plastic acid, but there was also like a staged robbery that had happened inside this

house.

Really?

A week or two before.

Staged?

Well, it turns out, I mean, the police basically came in and investigated it and Lizzy was

all excited to tell him like, oh, they could have broken him from the basement.

They could have broken him from here.

And as they continued to listen to her tell the story about how this robbery happened,

they were like, it was her.

And in Andrew Borden was basically like, all right, forget about it.

I don't want this investigated.

Please go away.

Make sure it doesn't get in the papers.

It got in the papers.

Right.

And it was like, you know, so basically there was a bunch of suspicious things that led up

to this robbery for one no sign of forest entry for too Lizzy was all excited about explaining

it.

Lizzy had a history of, now this typically doesn't lead to ax murder, but she had a history

of shoplifting around town for no reason.

She had the money, but it seemed like more of like just a middle finger to her dad.

Yeah, the one that was not right or thing where like you, you have the money, but you're

just looking for that rush type of thing.

It was to a point where Andrew Borden had gone around to these shops and was like, listen,

if she comes in and steals some stuff, don't report it to the police.

Just write me a bill and I'll take care of it.

So, but the botched robbery thing was what kind of put that, because police responded

to that.

So they're like, all right.

So she's already doing weird stuff.

She was already saying weird things to the neighbors and it basically led her to be a suspect.

And her story just wasn't adding up when they questioned her.

Right, because she, you know, she told one inspector that she was out looking in the shed

for fishing equipment.

She told somebody else that she was up in the loft, like I had mentioned earlier.

She's had a lot of conflicting, conflicting stories, eating strawberries, eating strawberries.

Yeah.

It's got to.

Now, why do you think that she told all those different types of stories?

Who knows?

It could have been nerves.

It could have been.

She also could have been doing all of those things, different points during the day, right?

She could have gone out to go get the fishing lowers and just stopped at the shed, discovered

her dad shopped up.

She's maybe not in her right mind.

Right.

So that's, but I mean, we don't really know.

The police tried to debunk the whole barn thing where they were like, we went to the barn

and there was a level of dust.

So nobody could have been in there.

But they also, the defense ended up debunking that because two kids came when the murders

happened and they were trying to see what was going on and the police kind of shoot them

away.

And they were like, yeah, but we went and hid in the barn.

So like, the police were getting caught lying.

Wow.

Literally investigation, too.

Yeah, they had one suspect.

I don't remember his name, but they had immediately just started suspecting, you know,

people that have recently immigrated to the country, a lot of Portuguese people were

in the area, still are, and there was a lot of Irish and British people.

But they immediately suspected this one guy and they're like, all right, let's go question

them.

So they go to his house and they see his kids and all his kids are just covered in blood.

And they're like, well, this looks suspicious.

I think we got our guy and the mother, the mother of the kids like, no, they just all have

noisbleeds.

And they're like, that's not what they did.

They were all like, great.

Just as a quick thing, that door just closed and I was like, what happened?

It was Kevin, our cameraman walked through out there and came around.

Ah, I thought we actually had a ghost closing and opening the door over there.

So yeah, so the kids had noisbleeds, gotcha, so it wasn't as they wrote him off.

They wrote off a lot of suspects early that we're just making the rest on Lizzie though.

No, not quite yet.

So what happened next was they start suspecting her, but they didn't have any real hard evidence

on her.

There was no murder weapon.

There were no witnesses.

Witnesses were a big deal back in these days because there wasn't a whole lot of

other ways to do security cameras around fingerprints.

Exactly.

So what the police decided to do was what was called an inquest.

Now this is weird because typically for an inquest back in 1892, at least in Massachusetts,

you would do that for a case where there was a death in which the circumstances surrounding

the death looked like it could be murder.

So you do the inquest to figure out if it was possibly a murder.

There was no question that this was a murder, like these people in that stuff.

Something just doesn't look right.

So it was weird that they just decided to do this inquest and they possibly shouldn't

have been able to do it because of that reason.

And what today would have come around to bite them in the ass ended up not for whatever

reason back then, but during an inquest, the person being inquested does not have a right

to an attorney.

It's inquesturized.

It's inquesturized.

So they went through this whole police inquest and they asked her all these questions.

She had no attorney present and they got her to contradict herself left and right.

And so they used that to be able to find grounds for the grand jury indictment and then

she was arrested and officially put on trial.

And this immediately became one of the biggest stories in the country.

Yeah.

The AP started putting it across their telegram stuff that they were doing.

So it was in newspapers all across the country.

So not only were people in Fall River getting the news the next day, everyone in the country

was formulating whether they thought she was guilty or innocent throughout the entire

thing.

So it tells us what the trial.

Yep.

So the trial began.

The bus.

So as soon as the trial was announced, all of the local newspapers went crazy.

Rob was just talking about the AP.

The Boston Globe was another big one.

The Boston Globe ran so many bogus stories about this.

Basically any time they got any sort of tip, they wouldn't vet it.

They just run with the story and they had to retract them over and over and over and

over.

There was one that was particularly alarming, in my opinion, it was.

They ran with the story.

They got a tip from a guy.

The guy's name was Edwin Tricky.

Hell yeah.

It seems trustworthy to me.

And they paid 500 bucks for this tip from Mr. Tricky.

And the tip was that Lizzie was pregnant and the father was John Morse.

And the father found out so Lizzie and John conspired to kill both of them.

And there was no evidence to support this.

And we know now because Lizzie wasn't pregnant.

Right.

It was completely the Boston Globe.

It was actually a Boston Globe subsidiary.

It wasn't actually the Globe that ran it with more of like a lower tier tabloid kind

of like.

And this didn't help the reputation at all.

But they had to retract that story and everybody media hasn't changed in 150 years.

Not out of the bed.

But John Morse was pretty suspicious.

Are we going to get into suspects?

Let's talk John Morse.

Let's talk John Morse.

Let's talk John Morse.

So for one, he just kind of showed up and they're like, oh, he was John Morse again.

He was like the...

Who's Lizzie and Emma's uncle?

Yeah, who's the uncle?

So he's a suspect?

Yeah.

He was the one who was there the day.

He was there for breakfast.

And he left.

And he left before the murders.

Gotcha.

He happened.

Yeah.

He was the one who was staying in the room where Abby was murdered.

Okay.

And he had a rock solid alibi.

But it was so rock solid that it ended up being really suspicious.

So he had gone out to do whatever he was doing.

But one of the things that he could recount in particular was his trolley ride back to the

house.

And on that trolley ride, he met six Irish priests.

And he remembered not only every single one of their first and last names, mind you,

this is just random guys on Charlie.

So like, and I know you probably do this when you're on the bus is get everyone's first

and last name and memorize them.

But not only did he have that, he also had their sash numbers and in their first and

last name, completely memorized.

All six of them.

And the badge number for the trolley driver or the badge number for the...

I knew there was a badge number mixed in there somewhere.

So once again, very suspicious and that it's too good of an album.

Yeah.

And then it was also...

There was also this rift between the English and the Irish at the time.

Like to a point down here in Fall River, where if there was Irish priest on one side, the

English would just cross the street and they wouldn't even, like, so not only was he

talking to people that he normally wouldn't talk to, but he's finding out that he's memorizing

their names.

He's a fishy story.

He was also a butcher.

So familiar with sharp objects.

He showed up for no reason.

Nobody really knows what he was going to show up, but who's in town on business?

So that's one...

Is there any other suspects?

There were a few that were ruled out.

There was another ax murderer.

Yeah, so there wasn't...

Yeah, it's a commonplace at the time.

There was an ax murderer.

I can't remember what was right before or after the trial, but another woman was in Fall

River was hit with an ax 19 times.

She's the least.

Now they think they solved this one.

They were like, we know it was a Portuguese worker on her farm.

They got him to admit to it.

But as we know, with former cases, they used to get people to confess stuff that they

never did.

There was multiple people that confessed to this crime.

Right.

And the police took them in and they're like, no, you didn't do it.

20 years later, they acquitted this.

They pardoned him and just sent him back to the A's Wars.

So it's just...

It's a really weird thing.

It doesn't get talked about as much, but yeah, there was another ax murderer that had

about the same amount of...

And then this...

This town is a township.

And it's not Boston or New York City or something.

It's probably...

It probably had 2,000 people here at the time or something.

It was the third largest city in Massachusetts at the time of the murder, but to your point,

it doesn't mean that that's...

Well, yeah.

What did the ax murder is not exactly the most common of things, right?

Right.

Exactly.

Interesting.

So that could have been connected possibly.

It was intimate.

Okay.

We know.

I mean, we have the benefit of being in retrospective.

Sure.

But at the time, you could think it might be connected.

For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

So...

But so the...

On to the trial, the prosecution had really four legs that they thought were these bullet

proof pieces of evidence that were going to put Lizzy Board in a way for sure.

And the first one was the blue dress.

Now when the police initially came to the crime scene, they asked Green.

They asked Green.

I think it was blue.

I think it was blue.

Maybe it was blueish green.

I don't know.

Who does?

Aqua.

Well, what's funny about the confusion on the color is one of the key witnesses for

the prosecution when he said, I saw her in that dress.

And the...

And the defense was like, sir, are you not color blind?

Well, I am.

So that was...

No, no, no.

I'm just blind blind.

Exactly.

I swear I saw her in that dress.

So she gave the police the dress, the day that they...

The day of the murder.

I said, this is the dress I was wearing.

And it didn't have any blood or anything on it.

And then five days later, the neighbor was over.

And she said, she caught a conversation between Emma and Lizzie about burning the dress.

And she's like, what dress?

And the neighbor was like, Lizzie, you probably shouldn't do that.

And I think they ended up not burning the dress.

I thought there was no way for her to say that.

They saw Green.

That was on it.

She said there was Green paint on it.

That's what it was.

I thought they had talked about burning the dress, but then ended up not burning the

dress.

And they did actually find a speck of blood on it.

Maybe I'm confusing the two dresses, the one that she handed over and the one.

Either way, the talk of burning the dress, the prosecution was like, of course, this is

the dress.

She burned the real piece of evidence, gave us bogus evidence.

So that...

That was one.

That was one.

And the defense did a pretty good job of discounting that evidence.

Number one, the guy who saw her, who was colorblind.

And number two, Emma Borden actually testified in court that said there was no blood on that

dress.

She saw the dress.

Okay.

The number one, the number two, was the poisoning evidence.

Now we had talked about this already, so I won't rehash it, but they thought they had

a really good motive where they thought Lizzie was trying to poison her family unsuccessfully.

They talked about the food poisoning.

They said that could have been the poison, but the autopsies didn't show any sign of

that poison.

So that one was discounted.

The next one was the murder weapon.

They knew she was killed with a hatchet.

They found a hatchet head without a handle.

And they basically deduced that that had to be because she got rid of the handle because

there was blood on it.

The problem is the hair they found on the axe head and the red stains that they found

were actually just livestock hair and rust.

Yeah, and rust.

And where did they find that axe in the basement?

In the basement.

It was also a way to dull to match up with what they've looked at.

There were also so many other hatchets in the house too, they were like, it's impossible.

They tried to...

They matched up the hatchet head with the axe wounds and like, look, it looks perfect.

And then the defense was like, look, this hatchet match is also, and this hatchet match

is also...

Oh, okay.

It has to hatch it pretty much.

Yeah.

Since you're talking about the axe wound that was matching the head, can I take a quick

segue and talk about the medical examiner?

Because it's insane.

So the medical examiner who got the bodies, right, they did the funeral the next day, but

the medical examiner took the bodies without the family knowing, and he performed the

autopsie.

The first day, he took out all the organs and everything like that.

Then he left the body just sitting there for five days, just chilling, just hanging out

on the table.

Next to the swordfish.

And then he was like, what should I do next?

He decided the thing I need to do is I need to go get a lobster pot, cut off their heads,

and boil their heads until the skin comes off.

What does that do?

He took their skulls and the...

The boardens had no idea of this until the trial.

So like, he's on the stand and they're like, you have their skulls and he's like telling

the process that he did, as Lizzie and Emma are sitting in the courtroom and they're like,

dude, what the f**k is happening right now?

And then they eventually brought the skulls in the show and like Lizzie fainted, didn't

she?

Yeah, she fainted.

This actually really helped her case.

Was that she fainted because the jury was like, oh, she obviously...

And just to add to that, once again, Dave, the tour guide, they actually just to make

this clear, they did the autopsie on the family's kitchen or family's dining room table.

The initial one.

And he said, though, because it was unsanitary to put the body right on the table, they've

like a little kind of tray, like a little rack.

Yeah, wicker.

A wicker, yeah, that they put down first, then it's okay to do an autopsie on your family

dinner table.

Some would say it might just be unsanitary to do it inside your own house at all.

Yeah, cool, amazing.

Well, yeah, exactly, exactly, so good call.

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So what's the fourth one?

He said the axe, he said the poison, the dress, what's the last one?

The last one was testimony from a jailmate friend who was at the jail where Lizzie was being

capped.

And this one's kind of funny.

So the jailmate who worked there was, she told reporters that she'd overheard a conversation

between Lizzie and Emma one day, and she heard Lizzie accuse Emma of telling the police

too much, saying, you gave me away.

You gave them too much information, and Emma said, I only gave them what I had to give

them.

So she told this reporter, and then of course the papers printed it, and now the prosecution

has this, what they thought was like this is they're going to be the nail in the coffin.

This is going to put her away, but the defense was so good.

The defense, during the cross examination, he started questioning this matren, her name

was Hannah Reagan, and they said, so you heard this conversation, she goes, yes, and then

he started asking her more questions about that day.

Now the defense attorney had the advantage of being the person who came and visited Lizzie

after Emma on that day, so he was familiar with what went on at that jail.

So he's questioning her about specific details, and she's like, I don't remember, I don't

remember.

And finally, she goes, I was so disturbed about the conversation between Lizzie and Emma

that I forget everything else that happened that day, and the defense attorney goes, well,

that's awfully convenient.

Let me ask you something else.

Do you remember a story about an egg, and she goes, oh, yeah, yeah, remember, I bet Lizzie

that she couldn't crack an egg with one hand just by squeezing it.

And Lizzie took me up on the bet, and she couldn't do it.

And Lizzie was famously quoted at saying, this is the only thing I've ever tried and

wasn't able to do.

And he goes, that's so funny, because that happens while I was there right after Emma

on that day.

So it turns out you do have a recollection.

So he was able to bring her character in the question, and basically her testimony was

thrown out.

So the four main things that the prosecution thought they had were all pretty much discounted.

Add that with the court of public opinion swaying towards Lizzie Borden during the time

of the murder.

They went to the closing arguments, and the jury deliberated for not a lot of time.

It was 90 minutes tops, 90 minutes, and they said they only did that as respect for the

process.

They basically knew right away that they weren't going to, yeah, they actually deliberated

for like less than two minutes, and the rest of the time they just sat there like, we'll

go out in like an hour and a half.

Yeah.

We don't have to have a coffee, right?

Yeah.

And I think you're sitting next to the picture.

They actually signed a picture that you might be.

It might be someone completely different, I'm pretty sure that's the jury, but they signed

it.

After the trial, they signed a picture of themselves and sent it over to Lizzie as like

a gift.

Congrats.

We had your back.

And then she sent them each a personal thank you letter as well as what we heard.

So okay.

So it was found that the verdict came in and the judge said, would a form, would you

please stand?

Would you read this in the form of the form and cut the judge off and said, not guilty?

And the court room went crazy.

Everyone was a fan of Lizzie Borden at the time of the acquittal.

Everyone was kind of on her side, but it's funny how over time the court of public opinion

swayed back.

And once again, just to the segue here is that like I think most people don't realize

that she was acquitted for the murder.

I had no idea until I was doing some research just yesterday.

I thought that she killed her family and Lizzie Borden, the band and the poem and all

that stuff.

So not only the court of public opinion, history has basically been rewritten.

And if this lady was innocent, it doesn't matter.

She did it.

You know, if you asked 100 people that have heard the story of Lizzie Borden, did she

do it?

Probably 99 would say, well, yeah, duh.

Of course she did.

Her famous axe murder revolta.

Yeah, of course.

Exactly.

That might not have been an axe murder at all.

One of my favorite things is from the author Bill James when he talks about this case.

He said there's two things about this case.

He goes, the over it, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but the evidence is so overwhelming

that anyone but Lizzie Borden could have done this.

And then he's like, the evidence is so overwhelming, only Lizzie Borden could have done this.

So it's just, it's one of those things that you just don't know.

And no other suspects were ever arrested.

And this is unsolved crime.

The way it reads historically is it seems like they kind of just stopped investigating.

They're like, I guess we'll take that loss and then they stopped looking as far as I

know.

And if they did, it was under, you know, it wasn't any, it wasn't any incredible because

I mean, the way that the murders happened, it's almost like there had to be people in

this area.

I mean, we're in the house.

And like you said, it's the main drag.

It would seem like you could find some other suspects if you really dug deeper.

Yeah, they, they arrested a few people, they, like we said earlier, they went to the

Portuguese.

They, they arrested two Portuguese men in the same day.

One because he withdrew his life savings, which was $60 out of his account.

The other one they arrested because he asked for directions in New York City.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is absolutely.

Right.

Yeah.

So it seemed like to me, and I'm sure they didn't stop investigating.

It just didn't make the papers because they didn't get anything solid after.

But it seemed to me that they had their, they had their, they had their, they had their

suspect, they lost the case.

And sure, they probably did their due diligence of looking into some other people as well.

But nothing else stuck.

It kind of strikes me as like, what was the case that just happened with Karen Reed?

So I don't know if you followed that case at all.

But it's the police locked and they're like, we have our girl.

They likely allegedly framed her.

And then, but after that, like they're not looking in as far as I know, there's like no

real investigation.

It was a little different because the police were probably the actual culprits.

So let me ask you this.

Did Lizzy have any type of a motive to kill her mom and stepmom?

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

So there's, so there's, there's famous sort of like post-hoc rational days and rational

normalizations that, thank you, that kind of got really big in snowballed over history.

And I think a lot of them aren't really based in truth.

And a lot of them are just, you know, the court of public opinion swayed against Lizzy

Borden again.

And in order to rationalize a woman murdering her parents with an axe in such a brutal fashion,

you have to say there must be a reason.

Those people who were murdered must have been horrible people.

And since then, there have been all sorts of rumors that have kind of risen up about

Andrew Borden because he had a reputation of being sort of stingy with his money.

They say, well, they must have been so greedy with his children, but there's no evidence

of that.

There's actually evidence to the contrary.

Wasn't they jealous because he had bought a house for somebody or something?

So he had given a house to, I believe it was his new wife Abby's sister, one of her family

members who was going to do financial hardship and the girls rightly said, well, what the heck,

we want a house.

But to be fair, he then gave them one and they ran it for a while.

And then when they were done running it and we were like, we don't want to do this anymore,

he actually bought it back from them for their actual value.

So he was not stingy with his daughters.

He was very generous.

He did have a big reputation of being very frugal with his money, though.

There was an instance, actually, when they were all not poisoned, according to Dave and

the autopsy, that a doctor had come to the house and he stood on his doorstep and was like,

the neighbors reported him yelling at this doctor, like, get out of here.

I am not paying you for this visit.

He was a very stingy guy.

Right.

Coming in the house, either, like he could have had, they could have had indoor plumbing

and we put one toilet in the basement.

So like that could upset, like it just showed how frugal he was.

The town, most of the people were happy when he died because he was considered like sort

of like a slum lord and he was very like, you pay me on time no matter what your circumstances

are, type of deal.

So yeah, he was known to raise people's rent if they're going to raise it work.

So if you find out you're going to raise it, I'll rent it from you, raise it in your

rent.

It's true that he was stingy around town, but it's not true that he was stingy.

There's no evidence that he was stingy with his family, you know, he bought Lizzie that

seal skin cape.

He sent Emma, or he sent Lizzie to Europe and paid for the trip.

All the evidence shows that he was actually very generous towards his daughter.

So there would have been no motives.

Right, but the motive was the daughter started to fear because they got the same allowance

that the stepmother was getting at the time.

They started to fear that his inheritance wasn't going to go to them.

It was going to go to the stepmother.

I'm just going to hide you didn't say the fat stepmother.

So but in the old irony, the inheritance did go to Lizzie and her sister.

Well, it couldn't go to Abby.

She was dead.

Right.

So if that was the motive, they took care of it.

They got it.

Yeah.

Because then she went and bought a big house.

They mentioned maple crop.

Maple crop.

Maple crop.

Maple crop.

Maple crop.

They had an estate on the hill.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's a possible motive.

She got the inheritance, right?

Yeah.

I don't know if it's, if I'm looking at it, you know, it was a completely objective

onlooker.

I would say that there's probably not enough evidence after the fact to say, well, then

she must have done it, right?

Right.

Right.

My parents happened to die in the correct order where I get an inheritance that doesn't

mean I killed them with an axe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, so then let's go to the next step, which I always ask you guys, what do you think

happened then?

Do you have a theory?

I don't think she did it.

I mean, and the one thing we didn't bring up, like I think is the most pertinent, she

might have known about it, known that this was happening, but she had no blood stains

on her.

This is an axe murder.

Right.

They have no plumbing in the house.

It's like, it's, it's just, it seems inconceivable that she could have done it and gotten

all of the splatter off of her in time to call out and it just seems, maybe she knew about

it.

I mean, my personal theory is John Morse, the uncle knew about it.

He had someone hiding in the room, Abby came into that room, he was already in there somewhere

hiding.

He was taking his time, learning all those Irish priests first and last week.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

Like, so like, I feel like he had something to do with him more than other, or it could

have just been a random person.

We've talked about random axe murders.

This is sort of the crime of the time.

Wait, not in this house, triple dead, dead bolt to door, every doorway is locked to each

other.

That is between kills.

Yeah, that's the weird part.

Yeah.

So he kills one and then just sits around like, wow, I wonder if anyone else is going to

come home.

Yeah.

Like, see if I can try this again.

So what do you think then?

I am of the opinion that Lizzie probably did it.

I mean, it's just like that's, I know it's not a really hot take, but I think her sister

knew about it.

If you look at their relationship after the murders, they live that maple croft together

for a little while.

Then their relationship fractured and her sister moved away, Lizzie stayed in fall river,

even though she was kind of shunned by the town after that because after time, even

though it seems like people were on her side at the time of the trial, afterwards the

whole town's like, dude, that's a crazy way.

Nobody else was caught.

Yeah.

So she had like her lavish parties at the house when she had like, they considered like

the theater group of people, like people that worked in the theaters, like a lowly part

of society.

And that's who she chose to hang out with and stuff.

But nobody really knows why these sisters who were so close that their relationship fractured

over time.

And what was their sister's name, so I think Emma, Emma, Emma, so Emma moved off, I think

to New Hampshire and Lizzie ended up dying at the house, strangely enough, I think they

did.

They died as a part of it within a week or two of each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they're all back together.

Okay.

Well, the two sisters and Abby and Andrew, they're all like 10 minutes away at the same

zone today.

I think they were in on it.

There's other theories about Bridget where she might have been in on it because after

she worked as a maid in this house not making a lot of money, she moved, I don't know if

we mentioned earlier, but she moved off and bought a ranch with a bunch of horses and

it's like, everyone's kind of like, where'd she get all that money?

So maybe she was paid off for it.

And yeah, there's a lot of suspicious activity.

What do you think, Dave?

I don't think Lizzie did it, but I don't know who it could have been.

I don't know how many.

It's just, you know, the fact that we don't know who it is doesn't mean that it was Lizzie.

It had to be somebody in that house.

It has to be somebody inside job.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like you mentioned, it was so much security.

It wasn't like some hobo just walked off the street with his new hatchet and like you

said, killed one, waited for 90 minutes, killed another, it's inside.

If it was John Morris, who'd paid somebody to do it and they're waiting in that closet,

they'd have to wait for Andrew to come home, right?

Because that was the, oh yeah, because you have the targets.

Oh, we're coincidence too, with John Morris is, he was actually, we've talked about

Velisca here on the show before as well.

He was quickly a suspect in the Velisca one because he was in Velisca for some reason.

And so they were like, oh, it must have been John Morris.

He was part of the Lizzie board thing.

Yeah.

But he had been dead for a few years.

They're like, oh, good enough.

This could, this went from being the most famous ax murderer in history to one of

the most famous cold cases, unsolved mysteries in history, which once again, I'm glad we

did this show because I don't think people really know that that's the case, you know?

Wow.

So it's, and the fact that we're still here at this house and it's haunted and it's got

a reputation.

It's like Lizzie lives on like she'll, she's probably one of the most infamous characters

in American history for this size, this type of event.

Yeah, especially because you said so much of misinformation around what people actually

believe and know with this, it's just, it's going to live on forever.

So the poem, I'll say the original poem and then you tell me with the real poem, it's

the important took an axe, gave her mother 40 wax.

Once you saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.

Yes.

All this information it would have to be, if we're going to be legally not liable here

until we don't get sued, it would have to be, Lizzie Borden may or may not have taken

an axe.

She gave her mother 19 wax.

Well, she went by Lisbeth at the end.

If you could do it for what you want.

You can go on and slow, he's wrapping here.

Gave her stepmother 19 wax.

When she saw what she may or may not have done, she went downstairs and gave her father or

maybe didn't give her father 11.

I think that's even better.

Let's put that in the t-shirt, sell it in the merch stand in the back which by the way

is available.

That would be hilarious to, we're going to do it.

It's hilarious t-shirt.

Guys, it's always great to talk to you.

We should make this a thing, like we should see who call the amenable house and see who

lives in there now.

Can we come in your house?

Did you show?

I'm sure I love it.

Great having you guys as always, great idea and you guys pulled it off and thank you

to the Lizzy Board and Ben Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Come on down and have the bejesus scared out of you.

You