Damn you, Discovery Channel...
...now I am interested in yet another notorious crime from a way-bygone era.
There I was, innocently channel-surfing, and then I landed on a Discovery channel program about Lizzie Borden. I've heard of her, of course; just about every self-respecting true crime fan or horror-phile (I'm the latter) has heard of Lizzie Borden, if not the ghoulish counting-rhyme that was fashioned about the murders:
Lizzie Borden got an axe
She gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
Quite inaccurate, of course, at least in the terms of the number of "whacks" that Lizzie's mother (stepmother, actually) and father suffered. Not surprisingly, the program played both sides of the case, placing reasonable doubt in the minds of the viewers just as Lizzie's attorney did in the minds of the jurors at her trial -- she was acquitted, after all -- but then turning it around and establishing how she could have done it, using modern forensic investigation techniques and "a look into the mind of a killer."
And I didn't want to get sucked in, but damned if I wasn't glued to my TV anyway. And now I've spent a couple hours looking up Lizzie Borden on Wikipedia and so forth, reading articles and analysis, putting The History Channel's take on the Borden case on my Netflix list.
Yes, it's morbid. Melancholy personalities, and I have one, tend to gravitate toward the morbid. I've been a Stephen King fan since I was thirteen and read Pet Sematary when it had just come out in paperback. I like horror movies. I love Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which is peppered with too many goth-looking characters for it to be coincidence. I might have gone goth myself in my teens or early 20s had I known exactly what goth was.
Anyway, the Lizzie Borden case continues to fascinate people for many reasons...chief among them, that the main suspect in the double murders is a woman, and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise. Murders committed by women aren't unknown, nor were they in Lizzie's time, but they were/are definitely less common than those committed by men...especially when it comes to murders as bloody and violent as these were. Had the victims been shot in the head (so-called "clean kills," which is an oxymoron if ever there was one) perhaps the case wouldn't have held people's attention quite so strongly.
In the end, though, one fact looms above all others: Lizzie, if she committed the murders, got away with it. She was shunned by the townspeople and didn't have a terribly happy life after being acquitted, but she got away with it all the same.
Which leads to the question as to whether I personally think Lizzie committed the murders. My answer: probably. Not that it really matters; I'm not connected to the case in any meaningful way, and Lizzie herself is long dead, so even if some evidence turned up that irrefutably proved she did it, it's not like she can be punished. But, I guess as with all notorious "unsolved" murders, people will continue to analyze and pick over and minutely study all aspects of the case for years, if not decades, to come.
And I'll be watching/reading right along with them.
There I was, innocently channel-surfing, and then I landed on a Discovery channel program about Lizzie Borden. I've heard of her, of course; just about every self-respecting true crime fan or horror-phile (I'm the latter) has heard of Lizzie Borden, if not the ghoulish counting-rhyme that was fashioned about the murders:
Lizzie Borden got an axe
She gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
Quite inaccurate, of course, at least in the terms of the number of "whacks" that Lizzie's mother (stepmother, actually) and father suffered. Not surprisingly, the program played both sides of the case, placing reasonable doubt in the minds of the viewers just as Lizzie's attorney did in the minds of the jurors at her trial -- she was acquitted, after all -- but then turning it around and establishing how she could have done it, using modern forensic investigation techniques and "a look into the mind of a killer."
And I didn't want to get sucked in, but damned if I wasn't glued to my TV anyway. And now I've spent a couple hours looking up Lizzie Borden on Wikipedia and so forth, reading articles and analysis, putting The History Channel's take on the Borden case on my Netflix list.
Yes, it's morbid. Melancholy personalities, and I have one, tend to gravitate toward the morbid. I've been a Stephen King fan since I was thirteen and read Pet Sematary when it had just come out in paperback. I like horror movies. I love Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, which is peppered with too many goth-looking characters for it to be coincidence. I might have gone goth myself in my teens or early 20s had I known exactly what goth was.
Anyway, the Lizzie Borden case continues to fascinate people for many reasons...chief among them, that the main suspect in the double murders is a woman, and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise. Murders committed by women aren't unknown, nor were they in Lizzie's time, but they were/are definitely less common than those committed by men...especially when it comes to murders as bloody and violent as these were. Had the victims been shot in the head (so-called "clean kills," which is an oxymoron if ever there was one) perhaps the case wouldn't have held people's attention quite so strongly.
In the end, though, one fact looms above all others: Lizzie, if she committed the murders, got away with it. She was shunned by the townspeople and didn't have a terribly happy life after being acquitted, but she got away with it all the same.
Which leads to the question as to whether I personally think Lizzie committed the murders. My answer: probably. Not that it really matters; I'm not connected to the case in any meaningful way, and Lizzie herself is long dead, so even if some evidence turned up that irrefutably proved she did it, it's not like she can be punished. But, I guess as with all notorious "unsolved" murders, people will continue to analyze and pick over and minutely study all aspects of the case for years, if not decades, to come.
And I'll be watching/reading right along with them.