Mondo Lizzie Borden

In Edmonds, Washington, the Driftwood Players will present a new play about Lizzie Borden entitled “A Memory of Lizzie” by David Foxton.

• 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 24-26, “A Memory of Lizzie.” Transport back to Victorian America and glimpse into Lizzie Borden’s childhood, the woman who allegedly took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. Note special times for this production.

Show times are 7 p.m. Sundays, 8 p.m. Mondays at the Wade James Theatre, 950 Main Street, Edmonds. For tickets call 425-774-9600, or visit www.driftwoodplayers.com.

Link.

Another example of the truth of old cliche “Don’t believe everything you read.”

Today’s AP story. Unfortunately, the AP gets is wrong! The Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum is not suing over the Borden name, but the word MUSEUM. Hmmm. Maybe they get other stuff wrong too? . . . . .

Mass. businesses battle over Lizzie Borden legacy

BOSTON — Two Massachusetts businesses are battling in court over the macabre legacy of Lizzie Borden.

The owner of the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River — which is in the home where many believe Borden used an ax to hack her father and stepmother to death in 1892 — has filed a federal lawsuit to prevent a new museum and gift shop in Salem from using Borden’s name.

The owner of the Fall River facility says in his suit the Salem attraction infringes on his trademark.

He’s asking a judge to prevent the Salem museum from using the term Lizzie Borden in a trade name, trademark, domain name or e-mail address.

The owners of the Salem facility say their museum will actually bring more interest to Fall River.

Borden was acquitted, but many people think she got away with murder.

Read all about it! Mass. businesses battle over Lizzie Borden legacy.

One thing of note in this retelling . . . . Fall River is described as “a hardscrabble fishing community 80 miles south of Salem.”

Sounds quaint. But this is a new one! Repeat after me . . . hardscrabble fishing community . . . hardscrabble fishing community . . . .

The new one-woman show, Lizzie Borden Live, written and starring Jill Dalton and directed by Jack McCullough, has a nice assortment of performances lined up around the nation. Perhaps they are coming to a theatre near you!

Sunday Sept.7, 2008, 3:00 pm 78th Street Theatre Lab, 236 W. 78th St.,NYC,Between B’way & Amsterdam

Sunday Oct. 5, 2008, 3:00 pm 78th Street Theatre Lab, 236, W. 78th St.,NYC,Between B’way & Amsterdam

Friday Nov. 14, 2008, 8:00 pm Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, RI

Saturday Nov. 15, 2008, 8:00 pm Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, RI

Sun. Dec. 7, 2008, 3:00 pm 78th Street Theatre Lab, 236 W. 78th St.,NYC,Between B’way & Amsterdam

Thurs, Fri, Sat, January 8,9,10, 2009, 7:30 pm Canyon Moon Theatre 6601 Highway 179, Sedona, AZ

Sunday Jan.11, 2009, 3:00 pm Canyon Moon Theatre 6601 Highway 179, Sedona, AZ

Thurs, Fri, Sat, January 15, 16, 17, 2009, 7:30 pm Canyon Moon Theatre 6601 Highway 179, Sedona, AZ

Sunday Jan.18, 2009, 3:00 pm Canyon Moon Theatre 6601 Highway 179, Sedona, AZ

Filmmaker Richard Behrens has done it again . . . he has created another wonderful little film that focuses, this time, on an experiment that was done at the Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum in May where a group of case studiers tested the time that it would have taken Bridget to run from the Borden house to the Bowen house across the street, and then run again to Alice Russell’s house on Borden Street, in Fall River.

I certainly enjoy this type of investigation—involving people in the process and then sharing the results with all. KEWL!

UPDATED VIDEO REPLACING OLD COPY.

In a letter to the editor of the Arizona Republic, a Chandler resident voices her opinion that a new museum devoted to true crime artifacts, like the Lindbergh killer’s electric chair, is in bad taste. She bases her views on being the “adult child of a convicted murderer.”

She tries to make her point in the most awkward way. It seems it is ok for Lizzie Borden museums, and their niche, to have tacky, small exhibits. Dissing Lizzie Borden and Fall River will get you nowhere madam.

Newseum exhibit shows bad taste
Aug. 16, 2008 12:00 AM

As the adult child of a convicted murderer, I try to advocate for all affected by violent crime, including the victims’ and offenders’ families.

I can comfortably speak for both sides of the aisle when I say that the Newseum’s display of violent-crime “artifacts” is a slap in the face to the families affected by these crimes.

The display of the electric chair used to execute the Lindbergh kidnapper is especially disgusting. The Lindbergh baby has nearly a dozen living siblings and the Lindbergh kidnapper has two middle-aged adult children. This electric chair insults these relatives and glorifies the public fascination with violence.

While the Newseum has the First Amendment right to exhibit these items, I feel that its organizers have no journalistic value and are in completely bad taste. I expect this type of macabre display at small, niche true-crime museums like the Lizzie Borden Museum or the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum, but not the largest journalism museum in the world located next to the Smithsonian.

Newseum’s major donors, such as Time Warner, Cox, Comcast and the owners of The Arizona Republic, should reconsider future multimillion dollar donations to this museum. - Jenn Carson,Chandler

WBUR in Boston ran a story about Salem’s True Story of Lizzie Borden today. They provided a link to some great images on Flickr taken from inside the facility. Love the skulls! Love the grave monument. Looks fascinating to me!

WBUR’S images from inside the Salem exhibit.

Today’s Morning Edition on NPR did a story on the legal dispute between the Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum and Salem’s True Story of Lizzie Borden. The transcript follows the link to listen to the story.

Listen here to the story.

An Axe To Grind
By Andrea Shea

BOSTON, Mass. - August 12, 2008 - One hot August day in 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally killed in their Fall River home. Their daughter Lizzie was tried and acquitted of the crime. But still, she’s gone down in popular history as the woman who “took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks.”

This week, a new museum about the murders is scheduled to open in Salem, home of the notorious witch trials. And, as WBUR’s Andrea Shea reports, that’s sparked a fight over who can claim Lizzie Borden’s infamy.

TEXT OF STORY:

FILM CLIP from the 1974 TV movie, “The Legend of Lizzie Borden:” “Do come in, someone has killed father.” (sound of children singing) “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done, gave her father 41.”

SHEA: That creepy cut is from an old TV movie about Lizzie Borden. It’s really popular on YouTube, but Leonard Pickle says he has a problem with the number of whacks in the infamous verse.

LEONARD PICKLE: The rhyme is completely incorrect because it was really a total of 38, 39 strikes, we think, so it certainly wasn’t 40 and 41.

[Sound of circular saw in Salem museum]

SHEA: Pickle, a Haunted House entrepreneur, owns the new “True Story of Lizzie Borden” Museum in Salem. As he works on the space Pickle describes its mission: to separate reality from myth in the Borden story. It was, he says, the O.J. Simpson trial of its day.

LEONARD PICKLE: It’s a murder mystery and people can’t stand not to know the answer to it and so they’ve constantly trying fill in the gaps to figure out exactly how she did it, why she did and if she did it or who else could’ve done it and we’ll never know for sure.

SHEA: Huge photographs, text and reproductions of the Borden’s crushed skulls are on display inside Pickle’s museum. Outside a busy walkway is littered with magic shops, witch kitsch and tourists.

PHIL SMITH: I’m Phil Smith from Boxborough, Mass. I’m just a little confused why something that relates to Fall River’s history is doing up in Salem (laughs).

LEE ANN WILBER: I hate to say it but if anyone is going to capitalize on the tragedy it should be Fall River, it really should.

SHEA: Lee Ann Wilber co-owns the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum about 80 miles southwest of Salem. Visitors pay to take tours and, if they’re brave enough, actually spend the night in the house where the Bordens met their brutal demise in 1892.

[Sound of Tour: "This is the sitting room; this is where Lizzie discovered Mr. Borden's body, the photo on the wall."]

SHEA: More than 10,000 “Lizzie” fans, from all over the world, travel to Fall River to see the house each year. Wilber says they buy Lizzie mugs, “I Survived the Night” t-shirts and axe-wielding bobble-heads. A fleet of massive, historic naval ships also draws tourists to the city. But still, she admits, it’s tough.

WILBER: Other than the battleship and Lizzie Fall River doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, another mill just closed down it’s becoming a depressed market, let Lizzie be the doorway to draw people in and then show them what else Fall River has to offer.

SHEA: Wilber worries the new Lizzie Borden Museum in Salem will cut into her business. Her partner Donald Woods has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to protect the B&B’s trademark. This raises questions about ownership of Lizzie Borden’s legacy.

ARTHUR MOTTA: Rather than ownership I would say really the issue is authenticity.

SHEA: That’s Arthur Motta of the local Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. The B&B is a member. Motta says the Fall River Historical Society holds evidence from Borden’s trial, including the famous “handle-less hatchet.” And, he says, the B&B is the crime scene.

ARTHUR MOTTA: And if anyone has a right to call it a museum it’s this location.

FILM CLIP of documentary in gift shop: “Miss Borden’s head went down upon the rail in front of her and the prisoner wept with joy.”

SHEA: A documentary plays inside the B&B’s gift shop where Motta sits, but he acknowledges what he calls “Terror Tourism.” Fall River, he says, has grappled with promoting its dark past over the years. Jack Levin, Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University, says selling killers and heinous crimes is nothing new.

JACK LEVIN: You want to be famous, you want to be immortalized, just kill someone and then you’ll go down in history and they might even build a museum in your honor, and communities might even compete for the that museum.

[Sound of drill in Salem museum]

SHEA: For Leonard Pickle, owner of the new Lizzie Borden Museum still under construction in Salem, the 32 year-old spinster is a fascinating character. After being tried and acquitted Borden was ostracized by Fall River society. But she never moved away, and is even buried in a cemetery there. Pickle says shear numbers drove him to choose “Witch City” for his museum.

LEONARD PICKLE: There are 600,000 tourists who come to Salem, Massachusetts looking for the dark side of history and it is after all Massachusetts history, and we feel like we can share Lizzie’s story with more people here than we ever could in Fall River.

[Creepy music from the movie, "The Legend of Lizzie Borden"]

SHEA: While Lizzie Borden has pretty much nothing to do with Salem, there is a tenuous connection. A statue of another pop culture icon stands a block away from the new museum. It’s a bronze Elizabeth Montgomery, star of the popular 60s/70s sit-com, “Bewitched.” As it turns out Montgomery also played the accused axe-murderess in the 1974 TV movie, “The Legend of Lizzie Borden.”

For WBUR, I’m Andrea Shea.

The second issue of The Literary Hatchet is accepting submissions for its October issue.

We accept poetry, prose, short stories, and humor pieces on the following themes: true crime, Victoriana, Lizzie Borden, Fall River, murder, mystery, Victorian history, death, and gothic interests.

Please submit your original, never before published, works to peartreepress (at) mac.com. Submissions should be sent on or before September 1, 2008 to be considered for publication.

The Literary Hatchet pays its authors and artist! For information regarding submissions, pay scale, and content, please visit the website of The Literary Hatchet.

To download a free copy of the first issue of The Literary Hatchet, please visit here.

Today’s Boston Herald had a story on the lawsuit between The Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum in Fall River and The True Story of Lizzie Borden in Salem. It appeared in the Business section. Pretty much the same thing we have been reading all along, but this piece is not just a rehash of other articles. There are several new quotes here and it is sort of an update as to where the story stands.

Photo by Lisa Hornack, Boston Herald

Lawsuit over Lizzie legacy

Fall River museum challenges Salem shop over trademark

By Donna Goodison
Sunday, August 10, 2008

How long will it take the two sides in a lawsuit over Lizzie Borden to bury the hatchet?

Fall River’s Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast and Museum is suing a yet-to-be-opened Salem attraction dedicated to the infamous woman acquitted of the 1892 ax murders of her parents.

The lawsuit accuses the True Story of Lizzie Borden Gift Shop and Museum, which has pushed back its intended Aug. 4 opening due to construction delays, of federal trademark infringement. The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston last week.

Donald Woods and Lee-Ann Wilber, the owners of the B&B where the murders occurred, say they purchased the federal trademark “Lizzie Borden Museum” when they bought the Bordens’ former Fall River home in 1994. They’re seeking a court order to stop the rival Salem business from using “Lizzie Borden Museum” in its trade name, Web site and e-mail address.

The Salem museum already is causing confusion and prompting phone calls from potential visitors interested in one of Massachusetts’ most famous unsolved murder mysteries, according to Woods.

“They want to know if we’re affiliated, and we said, ‘No, not all,’ ” he said. “And that’s part of the problem - the confusion.”

The B&B, which first opened to the public in 1996, hosts more than 10,000 visitors a year from around the world, and its Web site averages a million hits a month, according to Woods, who said he attempted to resolve the issue out of court.

“We really didn’t get a response,” he said.

The Web site for the True Story of Lizzie Borden, which is owned by South Carolina-based Diversified Adventures, describes it as an historical, interactive walk-through museum designed to separate the truth from the myth about the unsolved double murder.

“This museum will turn visitors into detectives using modern forensic techniques to try and discover who murdered Abby and Andrew Borden on Thursday, August 4, 1892,” the site says.

The new museum contains photographs and newspaper articles from the era and reproductions of the victims’ skulls among other artifacts, according to Beverly resident and museum curator Leonard Pickel.

Pickel said he and Diversified Adventures previously operated the Mayhem Manor attraction in Salem and “realized this is where the true story of Lizzie Borden needed to be.”

Pickel believes the lawsuit lacks merit. Lizzie Borden still is not a topic discussed in polite society in Fall River, he said, and so the city has never fully embraced her parents’ murders as a tourism generator.

“The sad thing is we’re going to drive more people to Fall River than the Fall River tourist bureau ever dreamed of by being in Salem,” said Pickel, who’s also the editor of Haunted Attraction magazine.

“There are a large number of people that come to Salem every year looking for the dark side of history, and the majority of those people have no idea where the Borden murders took place,” Pickel said. “We’re going to make (Woods and Wilber) money, so I don’t understand why they feel they own Lizzie Borden.”

So I get this blog alert that someone has been talking about Lizzie Borden on the Internets and I am intrigued because of the headline.

Hmmm. Lizzie Borden whacks her father, step mother? That’s not right. She was acquitted. The source appears to be ProJo, which is the Providence Journal.

So I click on the link and see that the actual headline for the story is not the same thing.

A misprint by the alert service? Not likely. What is more than reasonable to assume is that the journalist who posted the original Today in History item first posted it using the incorrect headline. It was recorded by the google bot that created the alert.

So, even in Providence, some 15 minutes from Fall River, they still get the story messed up some times. Funny story, huh?

A website called USAUCTIONSLIVE.com has an unusual item for bid—not because the item itself is rare or original, but because the auction details and description are mostly incorrect. Plus they are using images of the filming of the Monsterquest show at the Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum to help sell their wares.

The bible of Editha ellen Borden who lived in new hampshire in 1907. Emma borden moved to very close to her when she had a falling out with her sister the notorious infamous Lizzie Borden. Who shot Lizzie Bordens father and step mother? Did Lizzie do it like most believe? or was it emma? or was it the maid? or perhaps was the perfect crime committed and it was Editha Borden?

“Who shot Lizzie Bordens father and step mother?”—that’s a new one. Reminds me of JR and the old TV show Dallas.

Starting bid is $199.99 and you have until September 5, 2008 at 21:11:31 to snag this item without a provenance. Happy bidding!

After reading the text of the Lizzie Borden B&B, LLC, v. Leonard Pickel motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, the case is about trademark infringement.

Reasons given:

You can read the full text of the lawsuit here: Lizzie Borden Lawsuit

It is for real. The Lizzie Borden B&B/Museum filed a lawsuit against The True Story of Lizzie Borden for trademark infringement. Read all about it here.

Businesses battling for the Borden name
Lizzie Borden

By Grant Welker
Herald News Staff Reporter

Fall River — The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast showed it’s serious about protecting its reputation as a museum to the Borden murders, suing The True Story of Lizzie Borden in Salem for trademark infringement.

In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court Wednesday, the Fall River bed and breakfast seeks a ruling that would keep the Salem museum from using “Lizzie Borden museum” in its name. The bed and breakfast said it will “suffer irreparable harm” if the Salem museum is able to use the name.

The Salem museum plans to open next week and is billing itself as a “museum designed to separate the truth from the myth” in the murders. “The concept of a Museum devoted to separating fact from myth and telling the true story of Lizzie Borden is long overdue,” its Web site says.

Donald Woods, the bed and breakfast owner, declined to comment. Woods’ attorney, Jeremy Blackowicz, did not respond to a call seeking comment.

The Salem museum has created the Web site www.lizziebordenmuseum.com, which the bed and breakfast owner said is ‘confusingly similar’ to the Fall River museum’s www.lizzie-borden.com. Operators of the bed and breakfast said the site has held the copyright to “Lizzie Borden Museum” since 2002.

Visitors to the bed and breakfast on Second Street have asked tour guides about the connection between the Fall River and Salem museums, and people are likely to believe the two are affiliated, the Fall River museum said. The bed and breakfast has already suffered irreparable harm because of it, the lawsuit said.

Leonard Pickel, owner of the True Story museum, said the bed and breakfast sent him three notifications beginning June 17 demanding he end use of “Lizzie Borden Museum” and that he knew of the copyright to the phrase. But, according to Pickel, the trademark belongs to a company that owned the bed and breakfast before Woods bought it.

Still, Pickel said, he agreed to stop using the words “gift shop and museum” at the end of the name because he “wanted to be nice,” and to avoid a lawsuit. Pickel said he won’t stop using www.lizziebordenmuseum.com because he bought the Web name in 1996, before the trademark was awarded. Pickel pointed out another Web site, for the Lizzie Andrew Borden Virtual Museum and Library, and asked why the Fall River museum wasn’t suing that group.

But Pickel, who said in a July 31 Herald News story that he’s received letters from angry Fall River residents, said his museum will help draw attention to the Borden story and benefit Fall River.

“Because of where we are, with a number of tourists, we are going to drive an incredible amount of business to Fall River from people who had no idea that Lizzie Borden even occurred in Massachusetts,” he said. “It’s very sad that they’ve decided they own Lizzie Borden and no one else can play in their sandbox.”

Woods, the bed and breakfast owner, said in the July 31 story that The True Story of Lizzie Borden shouldn’t include the name “museum” because it doesn’t have artifacts.