Hatchet Whacks and Lizzie Borden, Part 1 | Mayhem in the Morgue

0:00 What do hatchet murders, morphine, and a former governor of Massachusetts have in common? Lizzie Borden. The mysterious and violent death of her father and stepmother is a gilded age cold case that filled many a newspaper in its time and has gone on to inspire several novels, films, and TV adaptations. And most recently, Netflix has taken a swing at adapting this story. Her family's house has even been preserved and is now a themed bed and breakfast, where you can hang out in the same space where two people were murdered. Today, I'm going to take a medical examiner's eye to this case and see what I can find out. So let's get started. This is Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns. On today's episode, I

0:52 will be discussing death and graphic violence, which some viewers may find upsetting. If that's the case, here's your chance to leave. As an alternative activity, may I recommend going to the hatchet aisle at your local hardware store and pondering which styles would make for the best murder weapon. Lizzie Borden had a comfortable life, at least materially, save for a small hiccup that began in August 1892 and ended in June 1893. Her father was Andrew Borden, a man who made his fortune selling coffins, his riches buoyed by the Civil War. before turning to banking and real estate.

1:43 Despite his wealth, Andrew was not one to flaunt it, preferring to stay put in Fall River, Massachusetts, even though other wealthy residents had fled the town for various reasons. He and Lizzie were close. Her mother died when she was three, and Andrew remarried, taking Abby Gray as his second wife. Lizzie herself never married, but did lead an active life volunteering, organizing community events, and teaching lessons at her church. Other residents of the Borden's house included Lizzie's older sister, Emma, and a maid, a young Irish woman named Bridget Sullivan. How well the Bordens all got along with each other is subject to debate and contradictory reports.

2:29 Some suggest Lizzie and her stepmother had an actively antagonistic relationship. While others observed, they were not close, but still perfectly civil with one another. Then came August 1892. At first, the month seemed hardly out of the ordinary for the Borden family. Emma was off on vacation, while Lizzie's uncle, the brother of her dead mom, was visiting to discuss business with her father. But on the 4th of August, as the city bell rang, an unraveling of Lizzie's world began.

3:05 She found herself standing by her father's dead body, strewn across the family's sofa, his face hacked to pieces. It seems his afternoon nap became that forever sleep of death. She called out to her maid. The police soon arrived, and so did a friend of Lizzie's, who wanted to comfort her. This same friend was the one who discovered the body of Abby Borden. She was lying face down on the carpet, blood oozing from the back of her head.

3:36 The bodies were moved to the kitchen to wait an autopsy. It would be a week until the medical examiner, W.A. Dolan, arrived, and while he autopsied them in their own kitchen, something I would never do, he and other investigators did leave behind a decently detailed report, along with a few sadly low-quality photos. As a medical examiner myself, I thought I would look over the evidence and tell you what I found.

4:07 So let's talk a little bit about the alleged murder weapon. It was a shingle hatchet. What they found at the scene was just the head of the hatchet. This is a modern example of a shingle hatchet. It has the cutting edge that causes the sharp force injuries or a chop wound. And then it has a hammer head on the back. which can cause blunt force injuries of a particular pattern. But to emphasize, the head that was found at the murder scene was not covered in blood. So again, we're not even sure if it's the right weapon. So now let's look closer at the two autopsy reports of Abby and Andrew Borden. What I have done is I've taken the information from Andrew and Abby's autopsy reports and created my own autopsy diagrams. I also took the photographs

5:07 of the skulls from the trial and marked the injuries on them. So let's take a look. All right, so we're going to start with Andrew Borden's autopsy. He was described to have 10 incised wounds about his face. But from the description of the incised wounds, I feel they're more chop wounds. And that is because an incised wound would be created with a knife that is slashed across the body, creating a long, shallow injury. And what is described are these large wounds, but they have crushing of the bone underneath, which is typically created by an axe hitting the skin, cutting through the skin surface, and then crushing the bone. So what is described as typically a chop wound which is very consistent with the hatchet that

5:56 was found. So let's look at the wounds themselves. He has clusters of wounds about his face that cut his eye in half, crush the facial bones, fracture his jaw. And on the side of his head, he has a large cluster of wounds, some that are superficial, only fracturing the outer table of the skull. and then a grouping of them that actually break the bone and force the bones into his brain parenchyma. These are devastating wounds that would have caused death. This wound here in the face that split his eye in half would have caused blindness and would have caused a significant amount of pain, but would not have necessarily immediately incapacitated him. The wounds that really killed him were the ones on the side of

6:41 his head. So let's look at the skull itself. This is a picture of the skull From the actual trial, you can see the large fracture on the side here. These are chop wounds 7, 8, and 9 all together creating this large gaping fracture that would have gone also underneath to the brain and caused massive brain damage. You can see wounds 5 and 6 here are superficial from just strikes to the head. This wound here is number 2 described in the autopsy report. is the one that splits the eye in half. And when you look at it, the fracture lines don't cross it. So to me, this one probably came first. And also, it has this squared off top on it. And that is, again, consistent with the hatchet itself. So now we're switching to Abby Borden's autopsy.

7:36 Abby had 18 separate incised wounds, which again, I think were chop wounds based on the information in the autopsy report. She also had some bruises on her face. The majority of the wounds were to the back of the head. She was found face down at the crime scene. So she was probably hit, brought to the floor, and then beaten to death on the floor face down. She had some bruising of the face that was probably from falling or while being beaten in the head, she got bruises on her face. Then she has a cluster of wounds to the back of her head, cluster of chop wounds, causing skull fractures. and then a large cluster of wounds about 10 to the one side of her head that broke through her skull penetrating her brain causing massive brain damage.

8:23 The pictures of her body actually are interesting because when you look at them you can see these separate chop wounds on her head and the other interesting part is these wounds right here. So look at those wounds a little closer. And this kind of triangular wound here, this circular wound here, and this kind of rectangular wound here, they're smaller than these larger chop wounds here. And what that is, is I think they switched the hatchet around and used the hammer side. So I do think these wounds represent the use of a shingle hatchet to murder Abby Borden. You have the chop wounds, consistent with the chopping edge, and then you have the hammer wounds consisting with the hammerhead. Let's look at a picture of her

9:11 skull from the time of trial. She has that large cluster of hatchet wounds to one side of her head. It's about nine to ten wounds all clustered in one spot. And that's what you're seeing here is this large gaping fracture that would have exposed her brain and then caused massive brain damage. And again, you have this kind of rectangular squared off portion that's consistent with a hatchet. So again, I do think that they were killed with some sort of hatchet. Was it a shingling hatchet? It could have been because we do have wounds that are consistent with both the chopping edge and the hammer side. Now why stop at these autopsy reports when I have a ballistic gel head sitting in my refrigerator and a hatchet in

9:58 my hand? That right. Tune in next week to watch a practical experiment and hear the rest of the Lizzie Borden story. Until the next time.