Fascinating Lizzie

[Curryong]

There are only a few murder cases that keep their fascination for the public long after the trial (or in the case of say Jack the Ripper no trial at all!) in the U.S the Lindbergh baby case comes to mind. Why would you say the Lizzie Borden case has kept people arguing, as on this forum, and reading books about the murder? Is it just that public opinion at the time was divided over her acquittal and has continued to be so over the 120 years, or is it the juxtaposition of a prim and proper spinster lady in a provincial Massachusetts town with parricide in a very brutal way. Everybody loves a mystery but the Borden case has retained its hold for over a century. Why Lizzie in particular above other Victorian murders, (or later ones?)

[leitskev]

The unsolved aspect still draws people. But you are right, there has to be something more.

I think there are several things.

1) an "axe" murder draws us for some reason. It's a brutal, bloody way to kill. It's up close and personal
2) the story permeated the common culture, and with the "nursery" rhyme, everyone grew up aware of it.
3) a young woman from a wealthy family killing her parents is shocking
4) she got away with it(if she did it)
5) I think there is something that draws us because of the era being so close to our own, but yet so far away. It's like an alien world just out of reach, but yet so familiar. There was no TV, radio, airplanes, movies. Electricity was still new. It was a time of horse and buggy and horse drawn street cars. An alien world, but one so close. We still live in the houses they built, walk the same streets. We can almost understand the Bordens as like ourselves...but then we can't quite. Women that didn't marry had few options and had to remain with their parents. Banks were not always safe places to keep money, as banks collapsed all the time. There was no social security or safety net. This world was so different and yet so similar that it fascinates. So when we go back to revisit an old murder case, it's a world we're eager to spend more time in, tourists in an exotic land.

[FactFinder]

The unsolved aspect still draws people. But you are right, there has to be something more.

I think there are several things.

1) an "axe" murder draws us for some reason. It's a brutal, bloody way to kill. It's up close and personal
2) the story permeated the common culture, and with the "nursery" rhyme, everyone grew up aware of it.
3) a young woman from a wealthy family killing her parents is shocking
4) she got away with it(if she did it)
5) I think there is something that draws us because of the era being so close to our own, but yet so far away. It's like an alien world just out of reach, but yet so familiar. There was no TV, radio, airplanes, movies. Electricity was still new. It was a time of horse and buggy and horse drawn street cars. An alien world, but one so close. We still live in the houses they built, walk the same streets. We can almost understand the Bordens as like ourselves...but then we can't quite. Women that didn't marry had few options and had to remain with their parents. Banks were not always safe places to keep money, as banks collapsed all the time. There was no social security or safety net. This world was so different and yet so similar that it fascinates. So when we go back to revisit an old murder case, it's a world we're eager to spend more time in, tourists in an exotic land.

leitskev I agree with all of the above, but I would add one more thing. People will never get tired of talking about the case because the more you learn about it, the more it becomes and enigma. Just when you think you might have it all figured out another piece of evidence blows that right out of the water. There are so many impossibilities and improbabilities that even the best fiction crime writer could not have come up with a story that good.

[Curryong]

Yes, it's both the 'quaintness' of another time not too far apart from our own, but also the layer after layer that can be examined anew in the true Classics of Murder, like the Borden case. Look how much information has been revealed here to us on this Forum for example. I think this is true of the Ripper murders too.

[NancyDrew]

No disrespect, intended, but I find nothing quaint about the 1800's. No middle class....none, zip, zilch nada. You were either well off or barely getting by. Disease wiped out entire families: women lost ALL their children. In the East there was commerce but in the West you still had gunfights in the streets, the stealing of land owned by Native Americans, and their subsequent reprisal (often bloody.)

It was a weird time. A vulnerable time. My goodness, a perfect stranger crept up to a U.S. President and shot him to death. There was a heightened public interest in the occult (I wonder why? Anyone have any theories?) Medicine wasn't regulated yet and people sometimes poisoned themselves.

I'm so glad I was born in the 20th century. Not that I'm too keen on the 21st century. When I look at popular culture, I just shake my head. But then again, my parents though my generation was nuts, with disco music, integration, etc. Yesterday my husband and I had dinner at a really nice restaurant, and the young couple sitting next to us consisted of a man in his 20's who had his pants around his hips. I could see his underwear quite clearly...and he sat like that for the entire dinner. I chatted quietly with the server about it and she just shrugged. In my 20's this would have been seen as exposing oneself. Why do young people want us to see their underpants...why is this macho? Can ANYONE explain? (God, how did I get from the 1800's to underwear... )

[Curryong]

Yes, NancyDrew, I agree about the underwear, and here in Australia some young teenage girls who still had baby fat used to wear very brief tops exposing their middles that people nicknamed 'muffin-tops!
With regard to 'quaint' I meant, I suppose, (bad choice of words) the idea that many have when they read about the Victorian era without knowing much about the social conditions, a Downton Abbey view of history I suppose, carriages and beautiful gowns and servants and cobbled streets.
I was a lecturer on Victorian England here in Australia for some years. Also I posted on the largest forum for discussions of Jack the Ripper several years ago. I love unsolved mysteries of all kinds. Of course, conditions in Jack's East End of London in the 1880's were absolutely horrendous. I was just talking in my post in a general way about how some of these crimes are remembered by the public, whether through rhymes, or myths of top-hatted killers with Gladstone bags striding through London fog.

[PossumPie]

Honestly, for me, I love a true mystery. My shelves are full of books on unsolved mysteries. What set's us apart from other animals is the ability to abstractly think, "what if" and speculate. I love to take each puzzle piece, look at it for validity, then try to put it in place. The challenge is, not all puzzle pieces are real. Some urban legend, some rumor passed along until it seemed true, and some misinterpretation of the fact during the incident. We sometimes fall into the trap that just because a statement was registered hours or days after the event, it MUST have been accurate. Not true. I love the complexity, and I love to debate...some of the conjectures here keep my debating skills honed. I also have a love/hate relationship with something unsolved. Occasionally irrefutable proof of some mystery will arise and I will be both relieved and saddened that it was solved.

[Curryong]

As far as the exploration of the occult is concerned (seances etc) it seems to have been born (only in my opinion) from the rise of religious doubt due to pre-Darwin discoveries and of pseudo sciences like mesmerism. There seems to have been a genuine wish to harness Science as an aid for communication with the dead. Of course, it became a form of entertainment for some!
I believe Spiritualism began in the U.S. didn't it, with the Fox sisters in the 1840's? Sorry, PossumPie, my rattling on about the occult was due to a previous post by NancyDrew. I'm not fast enough!

[Curryong]

Indeed, PossumPie, I have loved unsolved mysteries all my life. I think it is due to the fact of my having a lot of Scorpio in my birth chart! However, I digress. Many of what I suppose you could call the great classics of true crime have such a lot of myth and legends attached to them that you could write a thesis on it. I believe its sheer laziness with some authors as they will not go back to the primary sources when publishing their 'novels' and too often twist evidence to fit their particular theory. Thank heavens for this Forum as far as the Lizzie Borden case is concerned, so people can sort the wheat from the chaff. I very much enjoy your posts, and indeed, everyone's.

[leitskev]

I am intrigued by medieval Europe. I would love to visit there. I would not want to live there. How can people not understand that difference? No offense.

I would love to visit ancient Rome. Attend the Colosseum. Observe the conquest of Britain. The assassination of Caesar. The debates in the Senate. I would not want to live there.

I would love to ride for a day with the hordes of Ghengis. Just to watch. Not because I enjoy slaughter, but because it's history.

I would love to visit Salem during the witch trials. I wouldn't choose to live there.

How on earth can someone possibly confuse interest in visiting a historical world with advocating it as somehow better than our own? It's strange to even draw that conclusion.

And you might want to take a closer look at your history. No offense. Your understanding of the old west is taken more from the 50s black and white films. Gunfights were relatively rare. Terrible injustices were committed against the Native Americans...but if you think the only time Indians attacked settlers was in retaliation, you have been sold a politically correct cleaning up of that history. There were hundreds of native tribes, each with a distinct culture. Some were very peaceful and got really screwed, but some were brutally violent, without provocation...and that violence was not just against whites, but against other tribes.

No middle class? Look at those pictures of downtown Fall River. Hundreds of small shops. Every city in New England looked the same. Those shops were not Wallmart. Each was owned by independent proprietors. That world gave birth to today's middle class.

Look at the Fall River of the Borden case. Andrew rose from poverty. Dr. Bowen got his medical degree and set up a practice. The entire neighborhood was surrounded by independent businesses. Have you been to the neighborhood lately? Want to walk through there at night?

A stranger shot President McKinley. Senators stabbed Julius Caesar. Lee Harvey shot JFK. Two immigrant punks on welfare blew up the Boston Marathon. What is your point?

Women lost all their children...did the father not also experience that loss? Or is all that matters now the female perspective?

I have visited local cemeteries where you find evidence of families in the 1600s that lost all of their children in one winter. Presumably small pox. Hard to imagine that pain. But it was certainly not their fault that they had not discovered small pox inoculation yet. I would not want to raise a family in such times...but I would love to meet those that did, see how they persevered.

This place is starting to remind of my first philosophy class in college. We were studying the writings of Aristotle, and it became impossible to discuss his work because feminists in the class could not get beyond the perceived misogyny of the ancient Greeks. So therefore nothing Aristotle had to say could possibly be of any interest. It's impossible to learn anything in that environment. No offense.

[PossumPie]

Dr. William Glasser's Choice theory states that we all deal with life and interpret things through the filters we have built. If you are a liberal, black female feminist, you will see things differently than a Conservative, white, male. Science says do everything possible to take off those filters, they only blind you to ultimate truth. Good example:

It drives my crazy to see people argue Afrocentrism- that all knowledge came from Africa, and that The pharaohs were black, and Jesus was black, and the ancient Greeks and Romans stole all of their knowledge from Africa. I once heard a guy lecture for an hour about how Aristotle stole all his knowledge from the great Library of Alexandra which was built by Egyptians, who were black. When I pointed out that Aristotle had been dead 100 years BEFORE the Library was built, I was accused of being prejudiced. Yikes...talk about skewing facts with your filters...

Anyway we all need to be aware of our biases.

[FactFinder]

I am intrigued by medieval Europe. I would love to visit there. I would not want to live there. How can people not understand that difference? No offense.

I would love to visit ancient Rome. Attend the Colosseum. Observe the conquest of Britain. The assassination of Caesar. The debates in the Senate. I would not want to live there.

I would love to ride for a day with the hordes of Ghengis. Just to watch. Not because I enjoy slaughter, but because it's history.

I would love to visit Salem during the witch trials. I wouldn't choose to live there.

How on earth can someone possibly confuse interest in visiting a historical world with advocating it as somehow better than our own? It's strange to even draw that conclusion.

And you might want to take a closer look at your history. No offense. Your understanding of the old west is taken more from the 50s black and white films. Gunfights were relatively rare. Terrible injustices were committed against the Native Americans...but if you think the only time Indians attacked settlers was in retaliation, you have been sold a politically correct cleaning up of that history. There were hundreds of native tribes, each with a distinct culture. Some were very peaceful and got really screwed, but some were brutally violent, without provocation...and that violence was not just against whites, but against other tribes.

No middle class? Look at those pictures of downtown Fall River. Hundreds of small shops. Every city in New England looked the same. Those shops were not Wallmart. Each was owned by independent proprietors. That world gave birth to today's middle class.

Look at the Fall River of the Borden case. Andrew rose from poverty. Dr. Bowen got his medical degree and set up a practice. The entire neighborhood was surrounded by independent businesses. Have you been to the neighborhood lately? Want to walk through there at night?

A stranger shot President McKinley. Senators stabbed Julius Caesar. Lee Harvey shot JFK. Two immigrant punks on welfare blew up the Boston Marathon. What is your point?

Women lost all their children...did the father not also experience that loss? Or is all that matters now the female perspective?

I have visited local cemeteries where you find evidence of families in the 1600s that lost all of their children in one winter. Presumably small pox. Hard to imagine that pain. But it was certainly not their fault that they had not discovered small pox inoculation yet. I would not want to raise a family in such times...but I would love to meet those that did, see how they persevered.

This place is starting to remind of my first philosophy class in college. We were studying the writings of Aristotle, and it became impossible to discuss his work because feminists in the class could not get beyond the perceived misogyny of the ancient Greeks. So therefore nothing Aristotle had to say could possibly be of any interest. It's impossible to learn anything in that environment. No offense.

I had many of the same thoughts that you did Leitskev. The main point I agree with is the fact that there was indeed a middle class. Not everyone was incredibly rich, or exceedingly poor. The medical field was not as advanced at it was today, but not everyone walked around on the verge of death either. It's true that child birth was a riskier proposition. That infant mortality was higher. What I find interesting is that in spite of the lack of technology, medical knowledge,the backwards views on women, what have you, they still lived their lives with the same hopes and aspirations that we do today. They were after all still human. People tend to think of them as emotionless people who married for convenience and had children because it was expected of them. I've read the love letters soldiers sent home to their wives during the civil war. I've read incredible real life stories that tell me otherwise. To say that living in the nineteenth century must have been horrendous because we are looking at it through the eyes of today is unfair. With all of our advanced technology I wouldn't say our society is in fact better. We have more modern conveniences. But not less crime, less homelessness and poverty, less political unrest, less unrest about equal rights, or about religious tolerance, and we have indeed lost some of the quaintness of a time when people were not quite so suspicious of each other. In any ways we have advanced technologically I'd say we have not advanced as a society as a whole. When children could still go outside and play. When you could possibly leave your door unlocked at night. When people were modest in dress and in manners. When neighbors looked out for each other instead of closing the curtains because they didn't want to get involved.

And I think history has been somewhat sanitized on both sides when it comes to the American Indian. Through out history people of other races were wiped out by us or enslaved by us. True some Indian tribes may have attacked the whites. It was also Indians who showed us many ways to survive here. They may have even attacked other tribes. But we cannot deny that we systematically slaughtered entire tribes and wiped them off the face of the earth because we wanted their land, or the gold that was on it. That wasn't the doing of the Indians. They had been warring with each other for generations. We have a habit of sanitizing history when it makes us look good. We fought against Hitler and it seems a little ironic in light of our history. A country who had wiped out hundreds of tribes of Indians, enslaved an entire race, and set up the concentration camps on our own soil for Japanese Americans just because they were of Japanese descent.

[Mara]

My father used to say, so often that for a while I neglected to appreciate his wisdom in saying it, "A little perspective is a dangerous thing." He was referring to our tendency to compartmentalize knowledge based on how we perceive its value, its relationship to other things we think we know, and above all, whether or not we have agreed to accept it as true. Once we begin to do that, almost everything else we study -- unless we keep our minds open to as many perspectives as possible, not just our own -- gets shoved into its compartment, never to blend with and enrich our overall understanding.

Recently, I've found myself reading posts by others who currently post here and thinking, "God, what I wouldn't give to be able to meet these folks for coffee or a beer sometime." And that's even when the ideas expressed come obviously from a life experience very different from mine. Maybe even especially then.

Asidem: I've been reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," and recommend it for what seems to be an unvarnished presentation of reality concerning the native people of North America after the coming of Europeans to these shores, and the lives of the working poor -- male and female -- from then until now. Of course the man writes from a certain political birthplace, but then, so do the authors of other US history books. The trick is to read them all, go back to the sources as much as possible to draw our own conclusions, then be ready to face being wrong about all of it. Daddy, I got the message. Thanks.

[FactFinder]

History is one subject I've always been passionate about. Even in elementary school when everyone else was complaining "Why do we need to know this stuff?", I was paying rapt attention. It wasn't until I was older and started doing research on my own that I realized just how sanitized these text book versions had been concerning some areas of history. I was somewhat of a geek I guess you could say. At an age when most kids are checking out books about vampires and cartoon characters I was checking out books on Abraham Lincoln. Mara, that is good advice your father gave you. Some of the best advice I ever got in my life is to always try to see things from the other side, because there is always more than one side to everything.

[Mara]

FactFinder, your childhood interests were like mine. I was the kid who hung out in the reference section of the library and was bored to death by novels, though I carved out a reasonable chunk of mental real estate for drama and poetry. We're all wired differently and the less we allow ourselves to be brainwashed, the more we can benefit from that. Thanks for what you said about my dad's advice. He was a pretty amazing guy. Many fathers are, as it turns out ;)

[PossumPie]

LOL, My father was a high school history teacher when I was a kid. Our vacations were to Williamsburg, Gettysburg, the Lewis and Clark trail. I never understood the other kids complaining about history class I LOVED IT! My father says that history should not be about memorizing dates, but about seeing how events shaped the BIGGER PICTURE.

I've seen first hand what Andrew Jackson and others did to the original Native American peoples. It makes me sick. BUT you don't hear about it like you do the slavery issue b/c the African Americans have a louder voice, and more political clout. Native Americans are STILL living on reservations tucked into the most undesirable land in the country. We would never think of having a cartoon black with an afro eating watermelon on a football helmet of a team called the "Washington Darkies" but we think nothing of a cartoon native American with a feather in his hair on the helmet of the Washington REDSKINS. Just makes me Sick...

[Curryong]

Ah yes, Abraham Lincoln, that Bonaparte, traitor, and subverter of the American Constitution! Sorry, I was just re-reading Kauffman's 'American Brutus' only yesterday, the story of John Wilkes Booth and his band of conspirators. A brilliant book in my humble opinion, and one I picked up at the bookstore in Ford's Theatre. Lincoln, man and myth, is a brilliant example of how history plays with the reputation of great individuals. As for Booth, what is history's verdict?

[Darrowfan]

Honestly, for me, I love a true mystery. My shelves are full of books on unsolved mysteries. What set's us apart from other animals is the ability to abstractly think, "what if" and speculate. I love to take each puzzle piece, look at it for validity, then try to put it in place. The challenge is, not all puzzle pieces are real. Some urban legend, some rumor passed along until it seemed true, and some misinterpretation of the fact during the incident. We sometimes fall into the trap that just because a statement was registered hours or days after the event, it MUST have been accurate. Not true. I love the complexity, and I love to debate...some of the conjectures here keep my debating skills honed. I also have a love/hate relationship with something unsolved. Occasionally irrefutable proof of some mystery will arise and I will be both relieved and saddened that it was solved.

Well said, PossumPie. I too "love a true mystery". I have always been interested in homicide cases, especially those in which there is no concrete evidence linking the chief suspect with the crime, as is the case with Lizzie. Lizzie Borden's case is one in which no one actually saw her commit the crime, and yet, we can be virtually assured from the circumstantial evidence that she is guilty. (The Jeffrey MacDonald case is similar in that respect.) I guess I will probably never lose my fascination with the Borden murders.

[PossumPie]

Honestly, for me, I love a true mystery. My shelves are full of books on unsolved mysteries. What set's us apart from other animals is the ability to abstractly think, "what if" and speculate. I love to take each puzzle piece, look at it for validity, then try to put it in place. The challenge is, not all puzzle pieces are real. Some urban legend, some rumor passed along until it seemed true, and some misinterpretation of the fact during the incident. We sometimes fall into the trap that just because a statement was registered hours or days after the event, it MUST have been accurate. Not true. I love the complexity, and I love to debate...some of the conjectures here keep my debating skills honed. I also have a love/hate relationship with something unsolved. Occasionally irrefutable proof of some mystery will arise and I will be both relieved and saddened that it was solved.

Well said, PossumPie. I too "love a true mystery". I have always been interested in homicide cases, especially those in which there is no concrete evidence linking the chief suspect with the crime, as is the case with Lizzie. Lizzie Borden's case is one in which no one actually saw her commit the crime, and yet, we can be virtually assured from the circumstantial evidence that she is guilty. (The Jeffrey MacDonald case is similar in that respect.) I guess I will probably never lose my fascination with the Borden murders.

The American judicial system is based on the premise that "better 100 guilty go free than one innocent be convicted" There are many cases where we can be almost assured that the suspect is guilty, but not enough evidence or a slick lawyer prevails. Look at O.J. Simpson. He basically said he did it later, and was convicted under a civil case, BUT a really slick lawyer coined the phrase "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" and the rest is sad history.

[Curryong]

The OJ Simpson case is indeed a fascinating one, especially to a person living away from the United States. Intense public interest like the Borden case, a public divided after the jury verdict, again a repeat, though in the Simpson case it seemed to be on racial grounds, and later, for OJ, a civil case and then public disgrace and prison. In both cases how powerful is the court of public opinion! The jury in the Simpson case seemed to ignore quite prominent DNA evidence. I can remember waiting up in the middle of the night here as the jury verdict came through and feeling very surprised at his being found not guilty.

[Mara]

It thing that always bothers me about the "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit" is that the leather glove in question had been waterlogged before being collected as evidence, then allowed to dry. Naturally, it would have shrunk significantly. Why did the prosecution not say so?