Trial of lizzie borden

The sight of her parents' skulls, according to a newspaper account, caused Lizzie to fall "into a feint that lasted for several minutes, sending a thrill of excitement through awe-struck spectators and causing unfeigned embarrassment and discomfiture to penetrate the ranks of counsel. The first several witnesses for the state testified concerning events in and around the Borden home on the morning of August 4, The most important of these witnesses, twenty-six-year-old Bridget Sullivan, testified that Lizzie was the only person she saw in the home at the time her parents were murdered, though she provided some consolation to the defense when she said that she had not witnessed, during her over two years of service to the family, signs of the rumored ugly relationship between Lizzie and her stepmother.

For example, Hannah H. Gifford, who made a garment for Lizzie a few months before the murders, described a conversation in which Lizzie called her stepmother "a mean good-for nothing thing" and said "I don't have much to do with her; I stay in my room most of the time.

She testified that she opened the door for Andrew Borden after he returned home from his walk about town, and then described hearing Lizzie's cry for help a few minutes after eleven o'clock. Several witnesses described seeing Andrew Borden at various points in town in the two hours before he returned home to his death.

Household guest John Morse, age sixty, described having breakfast in the Borden home on the morning of the murders and then leaving the house to perform chores. The next set of witnesses described events and conversations after discovery of the murders.

Seabury Bowen, the Borden family physician summoned to the home by Lizzie in the late morning of August 4, recounted Lizzie's story about looking for lead sinkers in the barn and her contention that her father's troubles with his tenants probably had something to do with the murders. On cross-examination, Seabury agreed with the defense's suggestion that the morphine he prescribed for Lizzie might account for some of the confused and contradictory testimony she gave at the inquest following the murders.

Adelaide Churchill, a Borden neighbor and another important witness, remembered Lizzie wearing a light blue dress with a diamond figure on it, but did not recall seeing any blood spots it.

Lizzie corrected him, he testified, when he called Abby Borden her "mother. The most compelling testimony came again from Alice Russell. Russell described a visit from Lizzie the night before the murders in which she announced that she would soon be going on a vacation and felt "that something is hanging over me--I cannot tell what it is.

Russell recounted that when she asked Lizzie what she was doing with the blue dress, she replied, "I am going to burn this old thing up; it is covered with paint. Russell also recounted a conversation with Lizzie about a note, which according to Lizzie's account, she received from a messenger on the morning of the murders summoning her to visit a sick friend.

Lizzie used the note to explain why she thought her mother had left the home and therefore didn't think to look for her body after discovering her father's. Despite a thorough search of the Borden home, the alleged note never was found. Russell said she sarcastically suggested to Lizzie that her mother might have burned the note.

Lizzie, according to Russell, replied, "Yes, she must have. A newspaper account of the prosecution case likened it to "a pigeon shooting match in which District Attorney Moody kept flinging up the birds and defying his antagonist to hit them, while the ex-Governor defense attorney Robinson constantly fired and often, but by no mean always, wounded or brought them down.

Robinson's performance impressed reporters, with one writing that the ex-Governor "is certainly without equal in New York City as a cross-examiner. The defense made its case using, for the most part, the state's own witnesses. The defense also explored holes in the prosecution case: Where, the defense asked, is the handle that supposedly broke off from the axe head that the state hauled into court and claimed was part of the murder weapon?

The state had no answer. The defense also exploited the government's own timeline, which allowed from eight to thirteen minutes between Andrew Borden's murder and Lizzie's call to Bridget Sullivan, Robinson tried to suggest the difficulty of washing blood off one's person, clothes, and murder weapon of blood, and then hiding the murder weapon, all within that short span of time.

The decisive moment in the trial might have come when the three-judge panel ruled that Lizzie Borden's inquest testimony, full of contradictions and implausible claims, could not be submitted into evidence by the prosecution. The judges concluded that Lizzie, at the time of the coroner's inquest, was for all practical purposes a prisoner charged with two murders, and that her testimony at the inquest, made in the absence of her attorney, was not voluntary.

Lizzie should have been warned, the judges said, that she had a right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to remain silent. The judges rejected the state's argument that Lizzie was only a suspect, not a prisoner, at the time of the inquest, and that anyway her statement should be admitted because it was in the nature of a denial rather than a confession. The prosecution rested its case on June 14 after one final defeat.

The state wanted to have druggist Eli Bence recount for the jury his story of Lizzie Borden visiting a Fall River drug store on the day before the murders and asking for ten cents worth of prussic acid, a poison. With the jurors excused, each leaving the courtroom with a palm leaf fan and ice water, the state tried to establish through medical experts, druggists, furriers, and chemists, the qualities, properties, and uses of prussic acid.

The judges, after listening to the state's foundational case, concluded that the evidence should be excluded. Immortalized in rhyme, told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror, but one typically wrenched from its historical moment.

Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden offers a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties. A killer weekend with Lizzie Borden Enter for a chance to win the ultimate weekend investigating the alleged and infamous murderess! One grand prize winner will receive:.

Fill out my online form. Open to legal residents of any 1 of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are at least 18 years old. Void where prohibited by law. Come down quick; Father's dead; somebody came in and killed him. On the second floor of the Borden home, Churchill found the body of Abby Borden, Lizzie's step-mother.

Investigators found Abby's body cold, while Andrew's had been discovered warm, indicating that Abby was killed earlier--probably at least ninety minutes earlier--than her husband Lizzie Borden Trial Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.