A similar murder
Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 8:54 am
Some of this I posted in 2002 but thought it interesting enough to post again for the new members.
This article appeared in a newspaper on June 27, 1893, a little more than a week after the Borden trial ended. The name of the newspaper is not known.
"MURDERS IN PAIRS.
The believers in to coincidences will find a strange confirmation of their theories in comparing the murder committed in a suburb of Indianapolis last Thursday morning with the Borden murder in Fall River, Mass. The similarity between the two crimes is as striking as it was between the victorious Whitechapel murders in London, England, and if Indianapolis and Fall River were not so widely separated it would be concluded at once that both were perpetrated by one and the same person. The only marked difference is that in Indianapolis there was one victim, while a Fall River there were two.
William Kline, a night engineer, went home last Thursday morning and after handing his wages to his wife retired. An hour afterward the wife found him murdered and the hatchet with which the bloody work had been done was lying by his side. The woman declares that she was about her household duties in the room next to the one in which the murder was committed and yet she did not see any one of daylight the house or hear any struggle or any blows given. Moreover, she confesses that she had laid the fatal hatchet on a table in the kitchen only a little while before the murder. With this instrument the skull of the murdered man had been crushed in, but the blunt end had been used instead of the sharp edge as in the Borden case.
The only explanation the wife can give of how the crime could have been committed without her knowledge is that she made one or two trips to a shed in the rear of the house, staying only a few minutes each time, however. A similar statement was made by Lizzie Borden, and a witness on the trial swore that he saw her going leisurely from the barn to the house about the time the crime occurred. The house in Indianapolis is a small one, consisting of a front and rear room opening into each other and a sleeping room off each room. There is much less probability that a murder could enter it in broad daylight while the wife and children were in the house and the yard, do his fiendish work and escape unobserved, then there is that the same train of events could have occurred in the Borden house. And yet no one saw a man enter or leave the house, no one heard a struggle and the last known person to see the victim alive is the wife, who found him murdered, and the hatchet with which the murder was committed must have been taken almost from under her hand.
Here is a train of circumstances that point more clearly to the wife as the Indianapolis murderer than any that was developed against Lizzie Borden. The Indianapolis house is much smaller than the Borden house in Fall River, and the chance of entering the former and committing murder and escaping unobserved are much less than in the latter. The Indianapolis woman had blood on her garments, got there she says by the effort to help her husband when she found him murdered. No blood was found on Lizzie Borden's garments. In the Indianapolis case no reason is known why the wife should kill the husband. They lived happily together and are not believed to have had any differences; while in the Fall River case a motive was conjured up from an exaggerated antipathy of step-daughter to step-mother. But no one appears to suspect the Indianapolis woman of murdering her husband. It is looked upon as a case of attempted robbery, discovery by the victim and of murder to conceal the lesser crime.
Lizzie Borden, however, to whom circumstances do not point near so clearly, was branded as a murderer by the authorities, immured in prison for ten months and then tried, and though acquitted is even now considered morally guilty by many people who permit their judgment to be swayed by their prejudice. "
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There was also this article on the same crime:
"Manitoba Free Press, June 24, 1893
BRUTAL MANSLAUGHTER
A Crime Committed in Indiana That Suggests The
Famous Borden Murder - No Clue to the Perpetrator.
New York, June 23. A Times special from Indianapolis, Ind., says: A crime committed yesterday morning at Brightwood, a suburb of Indianapolis, suggests the famous Borden murder. At 9 o'clock yesterday morning Wm. Kline, night officer at the Brightwood shops, went to his home, gave his wife his month's wages and went to bed. At 10:30 o'clock his wife says she heard him moaning and opening the door she saw a horrifying spectacle. The floor, bed and wall was red with blood. Lying beyond the bed was her husband, his head horribly mutilated and his brains oozing out. On the table was a bloody hatchet. There was nothing to indicate who had used it. A front door and a front window to the room in which he lay were closed. A back door was opened an it led through the kitchen to the back yard. Mrs. Kline says that a short time after her husband went to bed she left the premises for a few minutes and the assault must have been committed during her absence. There are no indications in any other room of any one's entrance. Nothing in Kline's room was taken. In the absence of tangible clues the neighbors think Kline had an enemy. They recall that he said a few days ago that he had been robbed by an unknown person of $30 and that he then declared he would have the life of the man who had wronged him or would lose his own life in the attempt. Nothing has developed as yet as to who the unknown enemy is. Last evening Kline was in a comatose condition with no hopes of recovery. He has three children. "
This article appeared in a newspaper on June 27, 1893, a little more than a week after the Borden trial ended. The name of the newspaper is not known.
"MURDERS IN PAIRS.
The believers in to coincidences will find a strange confirmation of their theories in comparing the murder committed in a suburb of Indianapolis last Thursday morning with the Borden murder in Fall River, Mass. The similarity between the two crimes is as striking as it was between the victorious Whitechapel murders in London, England, and if Indianapolis and Fall River were not so widely separated it would be concluded at once that both were perpetrated by one and the same person. The only marked difference is that in Indianapolis there was one victim, while a Fall River there were two.
William Kline, a night engineer, went home last Thursday morning and after handing his wages to his wife retired. An hour afterward the wife found him murdered and the hatchet with which the bloody work had been done was lying by his side. The woman declares that she was about her household duties in the room next to the one in which the murder was committed and yet she did not see any one of daylight the house or hear any struggle or any blows given. Moreover, she confesses that she had laid the fatal hatchet on a table in the kitchen only a little while before the murder. With this instrument the skull of the murdered man had been crushed in, but the blunt end had been used instead of the sharp edge as in the Borden case.
The only explanation the wife can give of how the crime could have been committed without her knowledge is that she made one or two trips to a shed in the rear of the house, staying only a few minutes each time, however. A similar statement was made by Lizzie Borden, and a witness on the trial swore that he saw her going leisurely from the barn to the house about the time the crime occurred. The house in Indianapolis is a small one, consisting of a front and rear room opening into each other and a sleeping room off each room. There is much less probability that a murder could enter it in broad daylight while the wife and children were in the house and the yard, do his fiendish work and escape unobserved, then there is that the same train of events could have occurred in the Borden house. And yet no one saw a man enter or leave the house, no one heard a struggle and the last known person to see the victim alive is the wife, who found him murdered, and the hatchet with which the murder was committed must have been taken almost from under her hand.
Here is a train of circumstances that point more clearly to the wife as the Indianapolis murderer than any that was developed against Lizzie Borden. The Indianapolis house is much smaller than the Borden house in Fall River, and the chance of entering the former and committing murder and escaping unobserved are much less than in the latter. The Indianapolis woman had blood on her garments, got there she says by the effort to help her husband when she found him murdered. No blood was found on Lizzie Borden's garments. In the Indianapolis case no reason is known why the wife should kill the husband. They lived happily together and are not believed to have had any differences; while in the Fall River case a motive was conjured up from an exaggerated antipathy of step-daughter to step-mother. But no one appears to suspect the Indianapolis woman of murdering her husband. It is looked upon as a case of attempted robbery, discovery by the victim and of murder to conceal the lesser crime.
Lizzie Borden, however, to whom circumstances do not point near so clearly, was branded as a murderer by the authorities, immured in prison for ten months and then tried, and though acquitted is even now considered morally guilty by many people who permit their judgment to be swayed by their prejudice. "
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There was also this article on the same crime:
"Manitoba Free Press, June 24, 1893
BRUTAL MANSLAUGHTER
A Crime Committed in Indiana That Suggests The
Famous Borden Murder - No Clue to the Perpetrator.
New York, June 23. A Times special from Indianapolis, Ind., says: A crime committed yesterday morning at Brightwood, a suburb of Indianapolis, suggests the famous Borden murder. At 9 o'clock yesterday morning Wm. Kline, night officer at the Brightwood shops, went to his home, gave his wife his month's wages and went to bed. At 10:30 o'clock his wife says she heard him moaning and opening the door she saw a horrifying spectacle. The floor, bed and wall was red with blood. Lying beyond the bed was her husband, his head horribly mutilated and his brains oozing out. On the table was a bloody hatchet. There was nothing to indicate who had used it. A front door and a front window to the room in which he lay were closed. A back door was opened an it led through the kitchen to the back yard. Mrs. Kline says that a short time after her husband went to bed she left the premises for a few minutes and the assault must have been committed during her absence. There are no indications in any other room of any one's entrance. Nothing in Kline's room was taken. In the absence of tangible clues the neighbors think Kline had an enemy. They recall that he said a few days ago that he had been robbed by an unknown person of $30 and that he then declared he would have the life of the man who had wronged him or would lose his own life in the attempt. Nothing has developed as yet as to who the unknown enemy is. Last evening Kline was in a comatose condition with no hopes of recovery. He has three children. "
