Lizzie Borden Society Forum

Dusting off a cold case with modern forensics: Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave ... : An article from: The Forensic Examiner [HTML] (Digital)
by Megan Augustine (Author)

It's not much money for the download, but with no creditial background on the author, I don't know whether to bother with this. So many Lizzie items are just poor rehashes of old information. I have no familiarity with the publication. Gory details for crime junkies or professional forensic journal?

Has anyone on the forum read this? What's your opinion of its worth?

Please disregard above--found it for free at

http://www.acfei.com/pdf/cases/LizzieBorden.pdf

Good for newbies.

Only thing of interest was

Today, with modern forensic technology,
the evidence presented would not
determine that Abby died 1-2 hours
before Andrew. First, the fact that
Andrew’s blood was not coagulated is
unusual, but not unheard of. When a
person dies suddenly and violently, the
blood becomes uncoagulable shortly
after death. Secondly, pathologists today
would not rely on the use of touch to
determine body temperature. An internal
thermometer would be used to take
measurements over a period of time.
Also, research has found that the body
temperature of the deceased drops very
little in the first few hours after death.
Thus, the varied body temperatures,
measured by touch, would have very little
meaning. And finally, people digest
food at different rates, so the amount of
food found in the victims’ stomachs
does not shed light on the time of their
deaths.

Uh Oh! Maybe Lizzie did hear Abby come in...and the murderer chase after her?

If Abby was running fast enough, she might have gotten past Lizzie without notice. After all, people run at different speeds, and with a murderer hot on her heels, well... Might have been enough to turn her blood to jello and send her digestion into retrograde, too!

I'm not sure what exactly to make of that article. I had such hopes but...oh well. Some of what this author asserts is of course true. The irony is that 12 years after he was a witness at New Bedford, Dr. Draper wrote a book called A Text-book of legal medicine that really is a fascinating read - especially the final chaper on Medico-legal autopsies as against ordinary autopsies.

It's really shocking to read the book in the context of its day and relative proximity to the Borden case. The methods were a bit primitive, but there's a lot of stuff in there, you read it and think Yeah!! That's the ticket!

Little stuff, like control the crime scene, don't move the bodies untilthey've been thoroughly documented in their "as found" state, Don't wait a week to do the postmortem, etc.

The aforementioned book may be located thru (and a copy snarfed from) http://books.google.com/

Wow! Thanks, Doug! At first I thought you were joking, but the book is there once you type the title in. And it's free to read online. Looks like a long book, but it should be interesting.

It is a pretty hefty tome now that you mention it, augusta. From about page 539-551 is where the chapter on medico-legal autopsies is, so it's not terribly bad, as far as slogs go! A caution though: Doctor Draper does not "sanitize" much at all. They're just words on the page, but the picture they paint is not at all pretty.

At the risk of having you say "there he goes again," I thought this was not much of an article. What did she "dust off?" The author seems a bit confused about Dr. Bowen's comings and goings, and why does this annoying idea that Abby was nearly decapitated persist?

Did this writer see that dreadful TV show in which the detectives used Luminol? Big surprise! There was blood in the crime area which may have seeped down to the cellar. Shocking! I really doubt that old bloodstains are going to be found on new molding and drywall and wallpaper.

I will bear in mind that she's not telling us about anything we haven't fretted over ourselves. I've long been gripped by the idea that if (!) I could only go back in time and secure the crime scenes and remove the "players" to another location, there'd be no mystery.

Of course, who'd want THAT? :) Now, all we need is for the the writer to show up and try to initiate a dialogue.

I do know one book that asserts Abby was "nearly decapitated" is Spiering. It took me reading the source docs before I found out it was fiction.