Lizzie Borden Society Forum

Reading the testimony again has given me some fresh ideas. I know that Lizzie burned the dress in the stove. That has always been a very suspect occurence. I can't help but think that if that dress had been up in that cabinet all along, the police would have seen it, examined it, and questioned if the brown paint was indeed paint or blood.

When Alice Russell testified about the dress burning, why didn't anyone speak up..."Yes, we found that dress and examined it...it had no blood on it"?

Perhaps this dress was doing some moving about...it could have been wrapped in the "bundle on the floor of Emma's closet", which the police did not examine. I'm sure there were many places it could have been hidden before it made it into the cabinet to be burned.

So let's say Lizzie wore this dress. How did she get changed so quickly after the murders?

With Abby, who may have been her primary target, she did have more time to change back into her clothing after she made sure she had no blood on herself. With Andrew, she was on a tight schedule. Uncle John would be back soon, and Bridget would be down to start dinner.

Obviously, removing all her clothing and wearing just the dress while committing the murders was the best thing to do. The dress could be disposed of. But she had to get dressed again...fast! The obvious thing would have been to leave off her corset. I'm not sure how hard they were to get into, and if it could be done alone...but leaving it off would save a lot of time. She was apparently wearing a loose sort of blouse which would have made the fact that she didn't have on a corset less obvious. And when someone tried to loosen her clothes, she said that her clothing was loose. Perhaps she didn't want anyone to find out that she was half-dressed.

The blood that she might have gotten on herself could have been minimal...but she could have easily cleaned it up in her room with a basin of water and a menstrual cloth...and poured the bloody water in the slop pail.

The theory that Lizzie (if she did it) wore something over her clothes probably arose because of the question you ask.

Some think the Prince Albert coat of Andrew's, because it was lying in a place where it doesn't seem to have been usually kept, was used to shield the murderer.

Any person who killed Andrew would face the same question, wouldn't they? As in, did they change?- how soon? how fast? or wear something over their clothes? You couldn't exactly escape the premises without changing something about one's attire.

It's possible Lizzie did change- she might have had tops and bottoms that were simillar and interchangeable. Or she might have used a waterproof- so might an outsider. There was at first a big question about Lizzie's dress pattern- it was wanted but not found, and then later, it was dismissed as irrelevant but I don't think we know why.