I love folk art and original works that involve Lizzie Borden. I have some interesting things in my collection that I have found over the years. Here is one I wish I was on hand to buy when it was on sale: a hand made doll called “Tiny Lizzie Borden” by Devout Dolls.
Cute isn’t she?
Right now on eBay is for sale a Lizzie Borden Goth Bouquet of black silk roses spattered in blood. For that bloody valentine in your life.
Lizzie Borden Goth Bouquet
“Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her father 40 whacks”…..sounds like fun to me…anyway, here is the perfect bouquet for any morbid occasion. 7 beautiful black silk roses splattered with ‘blood’ and draped in ‘bloody’ ribbons of red and black…Yum, yum! That’s not all though, there are glass and acrylic beaded adornments hanging all over to dress up the ‘bloody mess’. The stem is covered in black silk and tied with skinny ribbons to be ragged and coffin feeling. The perfect bouquet for a Goth funeral or wedding….Tranquilla’s exclusively and one of a kind from the Sable Blood Line. 14.5″ tall. I have different styles of the bouquets.
Well . . . that got your attention, didn’t it? It got mine! When I went to the auction site, I found, to my dismay, that this image is not Lizzie Borden at all. At least not the Fall River woman who this blog is named for. Not the accused hatchet murderess. Not this lady. Not in a million years.
So sorry Smith Auction Gallery in Providence, RI. Nice try. Better luck next time!
You can now own genuine sand from the Lizzie Borden B&B, or so they say, in addition to practically any other place you can think of, all preserved in a keychain or magnet.
FootWhere Link. Wholesale only.
I’m not kidding. Found this on the web, of course, at this site: Pre-emptive Prayer Cards.
Lizzie Borden: The Patron Saint of Dysfunctional Families.
Found this on my out and abouts. I like it a lot. Folk art looking image on a rug. Someone make me one! Only $200.
From O’Lantern, Longshadow, and McCobb, Ltd.
Lizzie Borden Hooked Rug
The mildest, sweetest-looking silver-haired lady in gold-rimmed bifocals is sitting quietly at a booth at a smallish craft fair in an out-of-the-way town. Her name is Evelyn LLoyd, and she’s selling her hooked rugs, a product you see quite a lot of at these events, subject matter usually rather Grandma Moses-esque – apple trees, pink pigs, charming farm scenes. But at Evelyn’s booth things are a little odd: crows perched among bare branches, sinister black cats, and – most arresting of all – this exceedingly peculiar depiction of New England’s most notorious alleged murderess, Lizzie Borden, the one immortalized in that grisly skip-rope rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an ax/ And gave her mother forty whacks/ And when she saw what she had done/ She gave her father forty-one.”
Of course the apparent tone of the piece reads as all in fun: the figure is both childlike in style and bodily proportions. But just look at it for a while. To begin with, note that there isn’t the least attempt at even stylized portraiture here. A quick web search will show you the real Lizzie, a stolid sort fully covered-up in a long-sleeved edwardian gown, hair respectably restrained in a bun – nothing like this bare limbed maenad with pin-wheeling eyes, and hair somehow both wild and closely cropped: the style of one prepped for electroshock or the guillotine.
Look at that cocked head, that tightlipped little smile, that single crazed eyebrow. Look at the deep maroon shift or smock, not hanging straight as it ought to on a standing figure, but instead weirdly aswirl, and reminiscent in shape both of a gory smear and the blade of an ax. Note the undulating line of grass blades snaking unstably behind the figure’s ankles. And look too at her shoeless feet. They aren’t really feet at all, are they? Do her legs just end in bones? Or satyr’s hooves perhaps? There is far more fierce energy here then one would expect from a simple joke. Even Lizzie’s pose, arms bent at the elbow and upraised, one hand brandishing an ax, is strangely evocative. On first seeing her, I found myself thinking of an ancient Aegean goddess rising from the ruins at Knossos.
Altogether, her childlike appearance, her connection to a children’s rhyme (and that rhyme’s horrible subject matter), her abbreviated dress, her placement out of doors, her non-human feet, her ritual gesture, and her general aura of unpredictable energy makes this Lizzie seem a representation of a wild freedom, the victory of childhood over adulthood, the mythic over the mundane. But whatever freedom she represents is at least as threatening as it is inviting – she’s an ax murderer after all, and the gaze she turns toward us is not merely mischievous but deranged.
There’s still another aspect to this little rug that convinces me it springs from deeper sources than it might first appear, and that’s the ambiguous positioning of title and signature. Note that directly under the figure you have the label-like block letters “E L ‘03,” while along the composition’s edge there is the distinctly signaturish “Lizzie Borden,” in a schoolgirl cursive the same coagulated maroon that dyes the dress. Was ‘03 a particularly tumultuous year in the life of the artist? Was she feeling guilt about an impulse to break away from some aspect of her past? Or perhaps anxiety that her own creativity might be a kind of crime, a flight from adult responsibility? Lloyd, I’m sure, would wave away such suggestions. Her Lizzie Borden rug, she told us, was just an idea that came to her one day, something a little different, something that would be fun to make. But to us, that makes this piece that much more fascinating. There is nothing self-conscious or self-important about it. The unsettling quality it has – that sense of strange depths – can’t be deliberately manufactured, but is rather a thing now and again called forth when an artist gives herself over to the simple pleasure of creating.
From the January 24, 1893 issue of the Boston Globe.
Very early this morning it snowed in Fall River. Here is a lovely image of Maplecroft in the dusting that happened over night.
Thanks MB for the image!
On 16 October 1910, the Boston Daily Globe reported that City Marshal John Fleet had a high regard for Fall River.
If you remember, John Fleet was Assistant City Marshal under Marshal Hilliard at the time of the Borden murders of 1892. According to Commonwealth of Massachusetts VS. Lizzie A. Borden; The Knowlton Papers, 1892-189 3. Eds. Michael Martins and Dennis A. Binette. Fall River, MA: Fall River Historical Society, 1994, this is what we know of Fleet:
“FLEET, JOHN 1848 – 1916: born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, England, son of Richard and Charlotte (Brown) Fleet. He emigrated to the United States as a youth and was employed at the American Linen Company in Fall River, Massachusetts. He then enlisted as a landsman in the United States Navy in 1864, serving a seventeen-month term. Following the Civil War, he returned to Fall River where he worked at various trades and married Miss Lydia Wallace of that city. In 1877, he was appointed to the police department and rose through the ranks from patrolman to city marshall, retiring in 1915. He died one year later in Fall River. It was as assistant city marshal in 1892 that he was called upon to arrest Miss Lizzie A. Borden for the murders of her father and stepmother. His extensive testimony at the preliminary and final trials concerned the police search for evidence at the Borden residence, providing detailed information about the hatchets found there.”
Interesting find by Harry Widdows. Thanks!
I finally received my copy of the Fall River Historical Society Report for Fall 2007 and was pleased as punch to read that this year they are going to publish an important new book that centers on Lizzie Borden.
I may be behind on the news, but I still wanted to share the information they have provided regarding the publication.
Lizzie Borden Live is a one-woman play, written and performed by Jill Dalton, and directed by Fall River’s Jack McCullough. You can read more about the play and Jack and Jill in the November 2007 issue of The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies and on a recent entry on MondoLizzie.
I invite you now to the newly created website for the show. In the interest of full disclosure, I assisted the web designer, Richard Behrens (filmmaker of the Lizzie Minis on YouTube) in the creation of the site.
The show’s next performance will be February 10th at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, in NYC, at 3PM.
This is Jill in Maplecroft.
Every so often I read an article or news story that makes me shake my head and grumble. I kvetch when an author makes inaccurate statements regarding the Borden murders of 1892. Not the small details, which most are prone to do, because unless you really study this case you might miss those tiny facts. I am not that nitpicking about things. No, I mean the big facts. Like the number of whacks, or who did what and when, or the names of the main characters in the family. Stuff that one should know if one is going to, let’s say, assemble “the facts and a jury of her peers on a chilly January night at the Belleville Area Museum to hear the evidence.” That sort of thing.
Here is a the report in question. It appeared yesterday, January 24, in the online version of The View from Belleville, MI.
One can theorize that some of the problem with the retelling of the case here stems from an inaccurate reporter. I never met one who could be 100% exactly right yet—but then as you read on, you see that the subject of the piece is described as an “Historian, author and former Van Buren Police Dept. detective.” You’d sorta think they would know how to get their facts in order.
Anyway, I present to you the defective dispatch. I have underlined the erratum for your reading pleasure.
Cold Case
Sleuths re-try Lizzie Borden case in unique program at Museum
By William ZilkeIt was a hot spell that centered itself over Falls River, Mass. in the August of 1892.
It was the kind of merciless, sweltering heat that could make a good woman a widow, or brand an innocent daughter a killer for life.
The last thing the Borden home in Falls River, Mass. needed was the extra tension of an extended heat wave with 10 days over 90 degrees.
To say things were slightly askew in the Borden home was a major understatement.
To say they would end in a gruesome, bloody case of patricide and murder – that would stun homicide investigators today – was unthinkable in Victorian society.
So what happened at 92 Second Street on the blistering morning of Aug. 4, 1892?
Historian, author and former Van Buren Police Dept. detective Cathy Horste may have hung up her shield and side arm but the detective inside her mind doesn’t retire, can’t retire and won’t rest until one of the best known cold cases in American history is brought to light.
Last Thursday, Horste assembled the facts and a jury of her peers on a chilly January night at the Belleville Area Museum to hear the evidence.
“I firmly believe there is nothing like a good mystery to warm you on a cold night,” she said.
“And the murders of Andrew and Lizzie Borden certainly make for a good mystery.
Though the Borden family was one of the richest in Falls River, they lived on the wrong side of the hill, or as we would now say, the wrong side of the tracks.
Father Andrew Borden owned several successful businesses in town and by today’s standards was a multi-millionaire.
The residents of the Borden home consisted of father Andrew, stepmother Abby, and Andrew’s daughters, Emma, 41, and Lizzie, 32 and their maid, Maggie “Bridget” Sullivan.
For whatever reasons, the Bordens liked referring to all of their maids as Bridget, and Sullivan was no exception to this puzzling – if not dismissive and insulting – habit.
Even more puzzling, was the fact that the Borden household had experienced “gastric distress” for two days prior to the murder.
Abby and Lizzie Borden, as well as Sullivan, had mentioned to numerous friends and neighbors that they were experiencing symptoms of poisoning.
“The neighbors assumed they meant food poisoning,” Horste said.
The Bordens had eaten cold mutton for three days in a row. In the days before refrigeration, the “summer ailment” was not only common but expected.
Perhaps that’s why Mr. Borden refused to let a doctor be summoned to the home.
The Borden sisters were typical of well to do, single women of the day.
Branded as spinsters, though both were still vital young women, the two each attended separate churches and did various charity and club work, hardly the profile of vicious murderers.
“Lizzie, was active in her Sunday school at church, which she taught for many years,” Horste said.
“She was a founding member of both the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the local animal rescue league.”
Both sisters and their step-mother Abby all volunteered time at the local hospital.
But, on Aug. 4, 1892, that serene illusion of upright, Victorian dedication and proper appearance would be shattered by a voice screaming bloody murder.
Sullivan was resting in bed after having washed the outside windows on the orders of Emma Borden, who was out of town that day.
Why she would assign her maid the exhausting chore of climbing ladders and scrubbing windows on an oppressively hot morning is unclear.
Was she posted as a lookout?
Sullivan could hear the bell at City Hall toll sharp as a razor and glanced at her clock on the nightstand.
It was 11 a.m., the time of day for brunch, a stroll before the August sun parched everything under it’s gaze, a time to set babies down for a feeding or a time when all hell could break loose.
It was a split second in time that would reverberate for 116 years.
Soon after 11 a.m. Lizzie screamed for Sullivan to come downstairs, her father had been murdered.
After 11:30 a.m., after police had searched for evidence of an intruder and covered Andrew’s still warm body, neighbor Adelaide Churchill made a horrific discovery on the second floor of 92 Second Street.
The lifeless, hacked body of Abby Borden lay cold and mutilated, leading police to believe she had been killed 90 minutes before Andrew – 90 minutes? That would be a long time for a killer to stalk a home with four people in it.
Lizzie was arrested and a week later, she entered a plea of not guilty after being arrested and held in the jail in nearby Taunton, Mass.
Though it doesn’t seem possible, the story gets stranger.
“Abby died from 18 blows to the head and Andrew died of 10 blows to the head and one to the face,” Horste said.
“The scenes of both murders were described as “bathed in blood” by many witnesses.”
Oddly enough, the police moved both bodies to the family’s dining room table for autopsy in the oppressive August heat and remained there for three days.
“They were taken to the cemetery but not buried,” Horste said, “Five days after that the caskets were opened and Mr. and Mrs. Borden’s heads were removed.”
The heads were actually presented as evidence at Lizzie’s trial.
After presenting the basic facts as a talented author and historian would, Horste then went into detective mode.
“Criminal investigation has come a long way since the Borden murders, but police officers, then as now, look at three basic criteria,” she said.
“Motive, means and opportunity.”
But there are a great many of gaps in the Borden story, and not surprisingly, prosecution and defense saw things very differently.
But here are the facts they did agree on.
“Five people were alive and well in the Borden home in the early morning hours of Aug. 4, 1892, two were savagely murdered by noon,” she said.
“And the other three lived under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives.”
Now a shadowy figure most of us had never heard of arises.
Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse, the brother of Andrew’s first wife and Lizzie’s mother also was present at the house.
Morse, couldn’t seem to hold a regular job though he was trained as a butcher and was refused a loan from Andrew and left the house.
Lizzie’s older sister Emma claimed to be out of town the entire week of the murders, visiting a friend in Fairhaven, Mass., about three hours from Falls River.
Though over one half of Falls River’s police department was out of town for a picnic the day of the murders, their offical version of the events that day were that at 9:30 a.m., Lizzie and Abby were alone in the house while Bridget was washing windows, Andrew picked pears in the yard then left to attend to his daily business rounds and Uncle John, at an unspecified time was denied a loan.
Andrew returned home at around 11 a.m. and must have met his death soon afterwards.
At 11:30 a.m. a rookie police officer named George Allen was dispatched to the scene of “an injured man.”
“According to reports he was so overwhelmed by the sight of Mr. Borden’s mangled head that he ran screaming from the house,” she said.
Officer Allen literally ran into a housepainter named Charles Sawyer and deputized him to stand guard at the Borden’s front door.”
Neighbors, the police and Lizzie and Sullivan were allowed to contaminate the crime scene and move freely through the house.
The prosecution’s view was that Emma and Morse had alibis and that Lizzie hated her stepmother and her family.
As it came out, the Borden house rented out rooms, and Lizzie could keep the rent as income.
However, Abby’s family moved in rent free, with Andrew’s blessing.
However, the government claimed Lizzie savagely attacked and killed Abby, and when Andrew came home, “Laughed a wicked laugh,” and proceeded to kill him, too.
Despite the lack of bloody clothes – and these were gory, gruesome and sickening acts – the prosecution insisted Lizzie met the three criteria of motive, means and opportunity.
The motive? Greed. Andrew’s estate was worth $423,650 or $59.3 million in today’s money.
But Lizzie’s chief defender was none other than George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts.
The prosecution also stated Lizzie hated Abby. But her mother died before Lizzie would have been old enough to remember much of anything of her.
Her older sister Emma did remember her and truly hated Abby.
Though police claim she showed no sign of surprise or remorse over the deaths, Lizzie’s doctor stated on record he had given her a “sizeable” dose of morphine when he arrived on scene and then gave her double doses everyday, including the day of testimony.
“Neighbors testified she was hysterical,” Horste said, “and there was no blood anywhere on her.”
The police testimony became increasingly bizarre.
One Sgt. Herrington testified Andrew was wearing shoes that laced up the front and were tied.
When shown a photograph taken by Herrington himself revealed Borden was wearing a slip-on type shoe, Herrington bafflingly claimed the photo was “wrong,” not his memory.
He also claimed to have discovered a tube of paper that Lizzie had wrapped an axe handle in and bunned in the stove.
Yet, the alleged, unseen axe handle burned, not the paper surrounding it.
Other officers claimed they were – or weren’t – given axe blades or boxes containing a broken axe or were even eating pears in the loft before the murder investigation.
“As far as motive, the Bordens died without a will and under Massachusetts law, sister Emma inherited the full estate,” Horste said.
“Lizzie did not inherit one thin dime.”
Emma, with an out of town alibi, had far more to gain than Lizzie by the murder of her father.
Morse also had motive, means and opportunity and a case could be made against Sullivan too.
As Horste sent the jury into chambers for a verdict, she gave them the same 10 minutes it took the Falls River jury on June 1, 1892 to acquit Lizzie.
The Belleville jury’s verdict?
Not guilty.
So what happened to the cast of characters- and suspects in the original murder trial?
Emma gave Lizzie half interest in all of the very sizeable Borden properties in town and a monthly allowance to live on. She also released the property jointly owned by her father and the mysterious Uncle John to Morse.
Emma and Lizzie moved to the Maplecroft Estate and Emma returned to Falls River society.
Sullivan was given a considerable severance package and lived until 1948.
Lizzie took up with New York theater people, who were held a little higher than axe murderers by polite society and Emma severed all ties with Lizzie.
Lizzie died in her Maplecroft home on June 1, 1927 with an estate worth $8.5 million today.
Horste also is the co- author of “Water Under The Bridge: The History of Van Buren Township,” with Diane Wilson.
UPDATE: As of 10 PM tonight, just four short hours since my rant below, the owner of the site in question has removed the content in question. Three cheers for truth and justice. Thank you to all who wrote and sent me good wishes! I thank you all for your good work.
There is a thief among us. And it is my hope that this posting will embarrass them to the point that they do the right thing. Or at least, get a good volume of you to write them to help me in my cause.
Since 1997, I have been trying to purchase the URL lizzieborden.com. Unfortunately, it is owned by one Tom O’Brien. He sat on this web address for five years, never building a web site or having a web presence. I wrote him repeatedly, asking him if I could purchase the domain address since he wasn’t doing anything with it. He never replied.
Squatting on a web address, by the way, is illegal. You cannot just buy up a domain and not do anything with it. You have to show you mean to build a presence or people can appeal to have your ownership revoked. I never went anywhere near that idea, but each year, as the domain registration was due for renewal, I would sit and wait for Mr. O’Brien to forget to pay the fee or decide he didn’t want it anymore so I could purchase it fair and square. But alas, that day never came.
If you go to the waybackmachine at the Internet Archives site, you will see that in 2002, Mr. O’Brien finally decided to post a “coming soon” page, that stayed a “coming soon” page all the way until September of that year.
Then came a sort of outline of a website that was mostly there for sales purposes. It contained only links to empty pages and lots and lots of links to Lizzie books for sale on Amazon.com and his golf sales business.
In January of 2003, O’Brien stated on his site that his was “The Original Lizzie Borden Website”—how that can ever be true is beyond me! But still no significant content. Still lots of empty “coming soon” pages and ads.
The site stayed that way, unchanged in any specific way, until late last year (2007). At that time, Mr. O’Brien did add some content to his website. Loaded it up with images and text. Problem was, all of it was swiped from my site, LizzieAndrewBorden.com.
He took lots of things that didn’t belong to him, including my layout, photos submitted by friends of mine for my site, and perhaps worst of all, used the Edward Radin description of the case that I use and attribute to Radin, but took Radin’s name off, as if Mr. O’Brien wrote it himself.
This type of plagiarism must not be allowed to continue. It is one thing to take content, it is quite another to steal words.
So I wrote Mr. O’Brien about his site and he assured me that it was the designer’s mistake, that he only meant the content as a placeholder, and he would have it taken away immediately. He said the site belonged to his dear old dad who is a Lizzie Borden aficionado.
Well, that was in mid October of 2007. Let’s see, by my calculation, that is three months ago. Well, as you probably guessed, the content has not been removed, even after I again wrote Mr. O’Brien at the end of last year asking him once again to do so. No reply from him at all this time. Zip.
So here is what you can do for me, dear reader. You can write Mr. O’Brien at his address and demand he do the right thing.
Here is his email address: tob@golflink.net
Here is his snail mail address:
Golf Link, Inc.
Tom O’Brien
17 Angel Rd.
New Paltz, NY 12561
His other domains are:
ArchitectsGolfClub.com
AuroTekInc.com
CentennialGolf.com
CoastalGolfAway.com
DoubleEagle.com
Gldesign.net
GolfLink.com
GolfLinkCommunities.com
GolfLinkCourses.com
GolfLinkDesign.com
GolfLinkProShop.com
GolfLinkTravel.net
GolfOnTv.com
JulesAlexander.com
LegacyPinehurst.com
Newpaltzgolf.com
Newpaltzgolf.net
Online-Golf-Clubs.com
PineHillsGolf.com
SwingsTheThing.com
TravelPinehurst.com
UsGolfArchitects.com
WitchGolf.com
Does it sound like he give a hoot about Lizzie Borden?
Check this out! Filmmaker Richard Behrens has done it again—made a Lizzie Mini film and posted in on YouTube.com.
This one stars Shelley Dziedzic as Lizzie and offers us a truly great tour of the cellar at 92 Second Street by the author of Lizzie Borden Past & Present, Leonard Rebello.
The film is fabulous! It takes us back to the evening of August 4th, 1892, when Lizzie made two trips to the cellar, one with Alice Russell, and one alone.
As first reported in the London Telegraph.co.uk, and most recently on Laura James’ wonderful blog CLEWS, Great Britain’s leading crime historian passed away on January 10th at the age of 76.
His Lizzie Borden connection is that he penned the compendium Bloody Versicles, a must-have for any Borden library.
In the 1970s Goodman edited the Celebrated Trials series, and in the 1980s produced a string of anthologies of classic true murder cases, including The Railway Murders (1984), The Seaside Murders (1985), The Christmas Murders (1986), The Country House Murders (1988) and The Vintage Car Murders (1988).
In other books he assembled collections of criminous footnotes: in Posts-Mortem (1971) Goodman chronicled the correspondence of murder, while in Bloody Versicles (also 1971) he explored the rhymes of crime, ranging from the sombre beauty of Housman’s The Culprit to the gory gaiety of an American lyric illustrating the Fall River axe murders of 1892, attributed to the parricide Lizzie Borden, You Can’t Chop Your Poppa Up In Massachusetts.
After working as managing editor for a firm of specialist technical publishers, Goodman became a full-time writer in 1982. In his true-crime work, he maintained what he called his 40-year rule, after which time, he believed, a crime loses its horror, becoming a puzzle with all its attendant pleasures.
Although fascinated by forensics, he admitted to a certain squeamishness and once turned down an invitation to a post-mortem (he was one of the few lay members of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences) because the doctor had toothache, and Goodman would first have had to accompany him to the dentist.
His tastes in murder were particular: he disliked mass murderers, pointing out that “it becomes a trade then, and from a murderer’s point of view, the murder should be the most important moment in his life – not diffused”.
Goodman’s walls at home were lined with many hundreds of crime books, including a complete set of Notable British Trials.
His shelves and scrapbooks bulged with the murder memorabilia of two centuries, including Victorian bottles of poison; letters from celebrated killers; a cheque signed by Haigh, the 1940s acid bath murderer (marked Return To Drawer); and another, from the 1920s, signed by Major Armstrong, the only solicitor to hang for murder. A jaunty postcard from the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, began: “Just to let you know we are spending our holidays in Palma…”
