Hatchet Whacks and Lizzie Borden, Part 2 | Mayhem in the Morgue

0:00 Lizzie Borden possibly took a shingle hatchet and gave her stepmother 18 whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 10. That is a sort of correction of the old nursery rhyme. Of course, it does not rhyme anymore, but I am a doctor, not a poet. Last episode, we explored the double murder that rocked Fall River, Massachusetts, and examined the autopsy reports of Andrew and Abby Borden. Today, we are going to recreate those injuries on a ballistics gel head before discussing how Borden fared at court. Now, before we begin, I will be depicting and discussing graphic violence, which some viewers may find upsetting. If that's the case, here's your chance to leave. Maybe you could write a

0:50 new poem about Lizzie Borden. So let's get started. This is Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns. Okay, so we're going to simulate the wounds on Andrew and Abby Borden on this ballistic head. This ballistic head has been through a few things already. If you check out our last episode about baseball death, In one of our TikTok videos, you know what I'm talking about. But we're going to get our money's worth out of it. So we're going to start with the wound to Andrew Borden's face to cut his eyeball in half. So it would be placed right about here. Cutting his eyeball in half.

1:41 Then he has nine other wounds in quick succession across his face and the side of his head. Now I'm not going to do all of them, but I'll do quite a few on the side here. Now we'll turn to Abby Borden, who had the wounds on the back of her head. The problem is, is the head's already kind of torn up from our other demonstration, but we're just going to go with it. You've got a large fracture coming across here. But Abby's wounds are to the back of the head predominantly. because she's face down on the ground. And what I think it is, it's a combination of the hatchet side, or the cutting chopping side, and the hammerhead side. So, she has 18 wounds. I'm not going to do the whole 18. But she has

2:47 struts to the back of the head with both the hatchet and the hammer. And then she has multiple wounds to the side of the head as well. creating a large, gaping wound in the side of her head that goes deep into the brain. So you can see, from the extensiveness of the injuries, there'd be bits of skull, bits of tissue, and blood all over the scene. And I'm sure when Lizzie found her dad, it was quite gruesome.

3:28 All right. So let's look at the wounds just a little closer. I know the skull's pretty beat up at this point, but still, there's some interesting facts that we can go over. So, what I thought were chop wounds, this is a chop wound. This deep wound with underlying fractures of the skull. Not an incised wound, which would be caused by a knife kind of cutting across the tissue and not fracturing the skull. That's why I think all the wounds that were described were chop wounds and not incised wounds. taking this layer of tissue off, which is free-floating because we damaged it so much, we can look at the skull a little bit closer. You can see the chop wounds themselves creating the big, gaping fractures

4:14 of the skull, and then you get kind of a pattern still, removing some more of the tissue. You can spot areas where there is squaring off. much like I was talking about earlier in the pictures of Andrew Borden's head. That squared-off look, to me, looks like a hatchet wound, and we're seeing that again in our plastic representation. So, I do think that a hatchet was used. Was it that specific hatchet? Hard to say. But it was probably a hatchet. Now, what these reports cannot tell me is, who did it? That is for the courts to decide.

4:53 And the trial of Lizzie Borden is perhaps as curious as the murders themselves. As the investigation began, an immediate suspect was, of course, Lizzie Borden. A clerk at the drugstore told a local paper that she had tried to buy prussic acid, an old name for hydrogen cyanide, a known poison, the day before the murders. So obviously, she had murder on her mind, right? Her main alibi was that she was not in the house when her father died. Instead, she was out in the family barn looking for fishing weights.

5:30 As for her stepmother, she simply did not keep track of her whereabouts. Throughout the whole process, the police and her maid found Lizzie strangely callous, as if she did not care, although it should be noted that her doctor had her on a heavy prescription of morphine. and they never found any direct evidence incriminating her either. It was all circumstantial. As I have mentioned, no definitive murder weapon was ever found. The hatchet head found at the house was blood-free. Even so, she was imprisoned and found probably guilty at a preliminary hearing. Next came a formal indictment and a criminal trial. partly spurred on because of testimony from one of Lizzie's friends who said that Lizzie had

6:23 burned a blue dress a few days after the murders because it was covered in paint. Was the paint red? Who knows? She was wearing a blue dress on that fateful day. However, as Lizzie headed to court, it's important to remember that she had inherited a fortune from her father. and was able to afford a talented defense, including a former governor of Massachusetts, who had appointed one of the judges overseeing the trial. Another judge was a family acquaintance.

6:56 There were three in total, and even one of the prosecutors was a personal friend of Andrew Borden. The trial was not without its drama. The prosecution brought in the skeletonized heads of Andrew and Abby Borden, showing them before the entire court. which is something that never happens nowadays. Lizzie, of course, fainted. The trial also received significant media attention as newspapers carefully followed each development, sending the details of the ordeal out to a national audience with ornate illustrations and a little exaggeration here and there. Much of the testimonies revolved around her home life and whether she would have a motive to kill her dad and stepmom. The results were contradictory at best. Some pointed to her high

7:44 standing in the community and apparent altruism. Her doctor, the one who prescribed her the morphine, verified her story about looking for fishing weights and suggested that Andrew Borden was having trouble with some of his rental tenants. As the trial went on, it became increasingly clear that the prosecution could not overcome its lack of hard evidence. There was no obvious murder weapon, no testimony that was contradiction-free, and other potentially useful pieces of evidence were ruled inadmissible. The jury, consisting of 12 men, after a brief deliberation, acquitted Borden of any wrongdoing. She walked away a free woman. Yes, for all the infamy she is attracted and the adaptations depicting her as a brutal killer, the court would argue otherwise.

8:38 Lizzie and her sister soon moved out of her dad's old house and settled in a more affluent community, where she spent the rest of her life. Now perhaps a question to leave you with is why is the story of Lizzie Borden still so captivating? From my perspective, regardless of whether she is guilty or not, the crime is hardly remarkable. Domestic double homicides are not an uncommon sight down in the morgue, and parents are often the victims of these incidents. Sometimes they can also be the perpetrators.

9:10 In truth, at least two or three times a year, I have seen instances where far more than two were slain. But their cases often do not even make the local news, and there are certainly not Netflix specials coming out about any of them. So what determines what cases catch the national eye and achieve a sort of immortality, subject to continued investigation and adaptation? What determines which ones remain forever obscure?

9:39 The victims quietly buried, the murderer uneventfully interned, and what are the implications of it all? For all these questions, I have no answer for any of you. And that brings us to the end of the episode. I hope you were entertained, and I hope you learned something. Until the next time.