Got to thinking- Maybe Lizzie didn't do it?

[snokkums]

I was watching "Lizzie Borden too an axe", and got to thinking: What if she didn't do it? I mean, there was a chance she would have been found guilty and she wouldn't have gotten any of the money. I wonder if she thought about that.

She could have gotten someone else to do the deed, that would one explanation as to why she didn't have any blood on her, but then they may have sang and told on her. She still wouldn't have gotten any of the money.

What's everyone elses thoughts on this.

[doug65oh]

Well, the first thing you have to remember it seems to me is this: That even if Lizzie got someone else to commit the murders, that in no way absolves her of guilt or spares her from any consquences (even in the "sheltered" age in which she lived.) Conspiracy to commit puts her away from the murders, but the fact of it - at this point theoretical - would make her just as guilty as if she were covered in blood.

The "Oh, they won't get me" is a possibility I suppose, but the fact is that even in the 19th century women did hang by the neck for arguably lesser crimes. Lizzie was a small child at the time, but she had only to ponder the collective memory and recall the example of Mrs. Mary Surratt, executed in 1865.

[Kat]

It's possible it happened without her complicity, but knowledge after the fact. I do think she knew who did it.
Which would mean she was tried instead of someone who really did have Borden blood on their hands.

It would have been awful for her to stand trial, if innocent of all knowledge. Tragic. An orphan and put up in the public spotlight and called a monster.

[augusta]

While doing research some years back for a book I did, it's supposedly a well-known fact - or assumption - that when someone kills someone, they are not thinking of any consequences because they don't figure they'll be caught.

Lizzie thought she could tell Alice Russell a story about a premonition. And she could commit a daylight robbery, showing ahead of time that someone could have gotten in the house during the day with people in it. I think she really thought this prep work would be believed and exonerate her.

They had hung a pregnant woman earlier in Massachusetts, Doughoh, and I have read that the general feeling was they did not want to do something so barbaric again.

The electric chair was just put into use. I often wonder if the jury had found her guilty, if she would have been given the chair.

[doug65oh]

Boiled, fried, or blue in the face, one thing doesn't change - dead is still exactly that.