Lizzie Borden Events This Weekend

From today’s Providence Journal comes another great piece by Paul Davis on Lizzie Borden, this time detailing the goings-on in Fall River on Sunday, the 121st anniversary of the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden. He interviews three Michaels: Michael Shogi, Michael Martins, and Michael Thomas Brimbau!

Actors will recreate the crime at the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River
August 01, 2013 01:00 AM
BY PAUL DAVIS
Journal Staff Writer

FALL RIVER: Michael J. Shogi isn’t a real sleuth. Shogi, 47, manages software projects at an insurance firm in Ohio.
But on Sunday, he’ll poke around the basement of Lizzie Borden’s old house, looking for clues left by the killer of Borden’s parents, Andrew and Abby, an elderly Fall River couple.
According to the police, someone crushed their skulls with an axe or hatchet on Aug. 4, 1892. The grisly murders shocked the nation but were never solved.
“It’s the classic whodunit,” said Shogi, who will play George F. Seaver, a Massachusetts detective who investigated the killings.
Shogi is one of a dozen Borden buffs who will re-create the 121-year-old crime scene at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum, at 230 Second St.
The actors, from Rhode Island, Massachusetts and elsewhere, will portray the policemen, reporters and Borden family members who gathered at the house the day of the murders.
The police charged Andrew’s daughter, Lizzie, with the crimes. But the 32-year-old Sunday school teacher was acquitted a year later.
“To have the event in the same house where the murders occurred that’s not only historically important but pretty amazing,” said Lee-ann Wilber, manager of the bed and breakfast.
Borden buffs have been re-creating the crime since the 1990s.
But the script, now called “CSI: Lizzie Borden” has changed with the times.
“We’re trying to make it more interactive. People in the audience serve as deputies, and they get to interact with the characters,” said Shogi, who became interested in the Borden case six years ago after visiting the murder site.

The group will present eight performances, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with a break for lunch. Visitors can order tickets from the bed and breakfast.
It’s a big day for Lizzie fans.
Not far from the bed and breakfast, the Fall River Historical Society will unveil a new Lizzie Borden exhibit.
Called “From the Scene of the Crime,” it will include rarely seen letters, autopsy reports and legal documents tied to the case, curator Michael Martins said.
A blood-spattered sheet mounted on a nine-foot-high frame also will be on view. The bed has been exhibited only once since 1893, Martins said.
Guided tours will begin every hour, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“The tours will be more intense than previous offerings,” Martins said. “There’s a tremendous amount of material, but the material, some of it very fragile and reflects the reality of the story, not the legend.”

Author Michael T. Brimbau will sign copies of his 600-page novel about Lizzie Borden at the historical society’s granite mansion at 451 Rock St.
The new book, “The Girl with the Pansy Pin,” is a story of love, betrayal and murder, said Brimbau, who grew up in Fall River and lives next to Lizzie Borden’s last home, Maplecroft.
While the book includes real-life figures, Brimbau invents some scenes and characters. In Paris, for instance, Lizzie Borden meets Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer and poet. “The ending is a big surprise,” Brimbau said.
Over the years, writers and armchair sleuths have named different killers in their fiction and nonfiction works. Some have accused Lizzie Borden’s older sister, Emma; her uncle, John Morse, at the Bordens the morning of the murders; and the Bordens maid, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan.
But Sunday’s re-creation won’t name a killer, Shogi said.
Instead, the actors will appear in scenes that occurred just after the murders — vignettes based on court testimony and other sources.

North Providence resident Carol Ann Simone will play murder suspect Lizzie Borden.
She will appear in Lizzie’s second-floor bedroom. Another actor, playing a police officer, will quiz her about the crimes.
Simone, who embroiders school uniforms for a living, made her costume for the event. It’s a Victorian wrap or robe based on eyewitness accounts, she said.
Simone, 31, said she looks a bit like Lizzie and shares her hair color — and some of her traits. “I can be nice and outgoing, but if you tick me off, I could probably grab a hatchet and do you in.”