Speaker 1: It's May thirtieth, eighteen ninety three, about ten months after
Speaker 1: someone murdered Andrew and Abby Borden with an axe. Andrew's daughter,
Speaker 1: Lizzie is about to stand trial for the gruesome crime.
Speaker 1: She's been in custody for months, and her jury is
Speaker 1: about to be selected. But then a young woman is
Speaker 1: killed just two miles away. Bertha Manchester was twenty two
Speaker 1: years old, the daughter of a Fall River farmer. Her
Speaker 1: body was discovered in their kitchen, also bludgeoned with an axe.
Speaker 1: There was blood everywhere, and some of the family's valuables
Speaker 1: were missing. This story is mentioned sometimes because, with Lizzie
Speaker 1: Borden's trial about to start and lessen week, it seemed
Speaker 1: like too great of a coincidence to many people in
Speaker 1: Fall River. Another brutal murder in the same small town
Speaker 1: also committed around the same time of day as the
Speaker 1: Bordon murders, and more importantly, carried out with an axe.
Speaker 1: It couldn't have been Lizzie Borden this time, though, because
Speaker 1: she was in police custody, as she had been for
Speaker 1: almost a year. Would the similarities with Bertha Manchester's murder
Speaker 1: end up having an impact on Lizzie Bordon's jury. Police
Speaker 1: and fall River were certainly concerned that Bertha's case might
Speaker 1: influence things, so they poured themselves into Bertha's case. They
Speaker 1: seemed to think that a quick resolution would help remove
Speaker 1: the mystery around the second axe murderer. So here we
Speaker 1: go the end of Bertha Manchester's story. Her father, Stephen Manchester,
Speaker 1: was initially considered suspicious, but police apparently ruled him out quickly.
Speaker 1: Bertha's eleven year old brother had reacted almost gleefully on
Speaker 1: the day of the murder, which definitely seemed odd, but
Speaker 1: as Paul Holes and I often say, it's hard to
Speaker 1: predict how someone will act when a loved one is
Speaker 1: subjected to trauma, so police ruled out the brother. Also,
Speaker 1: Bertha never left the farm. She had no boyfriends that
Speaker 1: anyone knew of, few close friends, and she seemed to.
Speaker 2: Have no enemies.
Speaker 1: But it seems likely that whoever did murder her must
Speaker 1: have known the farm fairly well. Here's why it appeared
Speaker 1: that the killer likely forced his way through the kitchen door,
Speaker 1: not the front door. Yes, he might have seen Bertha
Speaker 1: in the window stirring her gingerbread dough, but he also
Speaker 1: knew to start out in that direction to find her.
Speaker 1: The Manchester's dog reportedly barked just once. That's strange, and
Speaker 1: the dog wasn't hurt.
Speaker 2: Maybe it knew the man.
Speaker 1: Also, after the killer murdered Bertha, it seems he spent
Speaker 1: some time in the house looking for valuables. He must
Speaker 1: have known that only Stephen Manchester would be around that day,
Speaker 1: and with him gone, the house.
Speaker 2: Would be empty.
Speaker 1: But robbery didn't seem to be a motive because he
Speaker 1: left behind some obviously valuable items. When the killer decided
Speaker 1: to leave, he knew to exit through the kitchen and
Speaker 1: out a door that faced the barn at the back.
Speaker 1: The killer knew that on the other side of the
Speaker 1: barn was a winding trail that would lead him to
Speaker 1: a major street and to an undetected escape. This killer
Speaker 1: knew the farm, and with this assessment, police were now
Speaker 1: searching for someone who hated the family, but not Bertha Manchester,
Speaker 1: someone who hated her father. On Sunday, June fourth of
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety three, the day before jury selection for Lizzie
Speaker 1: Borden's trial, the Fall River Daily Herald evening edition featured
Speaker 1: a screaming headline captured Carrero in jail, charged with killing
Speaker 1: Bertha Manchester. It was the same day that Bertha was
Speaker 1: buried near her home in the Oak Grove Cemetery. The
Speaker 1: investigation had lasted just five days, and very quickly police
Speaker 1: had begun to suspect a disgruntled former employee of Stephen Manchester's,
Speaker 1: a Portuguese immigrant named Jose Carrero de Mello. His capture
Speaker 1: wasn't especially exciting, but it was intriguing. It was a
Speaker 1: family drama. This is according to my favorite historical true
Speaker 1: crime blog, Murder by Gaslight. The police contacted Jose's uncle,
Speaker 1: Jacindo Munez Macado and Frank Macado Silva, a leader in
Speaker 1: the Portuguese American community, and they persuaded the pair to
Speaker 1: tell Jose that they needed him as a witness to
Speaker 1: a horse theft and they would pay a hefty witness fee.
Speaker 1: On Saturday night, June fifth, Jose went to the police
Speaker 1: station with his uncle, and he had no idea that
Speaker 1: he was a murder suspect. This was not even a
Speaker 1: week after Bertha's murder, so this happened very quickly. It
Speaker 1: turns out that Stephen Manchester didn't pay people very well,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't very sympathetic, so police had focused their
Speaker 1: investigation on some of his former employees, the ones who
Speaker 1: never stuck around for very long. Stephen Manchester told a
Speaker 1: newspaper quote, I can't remember the names of these Frenchmen
Speaker 1: and Portuguese I have had. Half of the time, I
Speaker 1: don't know them. I have had Antoine's and Joe's and George's.
Speaker 1: The police have been pestering me all day to remember
Speaker 1: some of the names, but I cannot break my jaw
Speaker 1: over their names. I always pay a man what I
Speaker 1: think he is worth, and if he don't like it,
Speaker 1: it don't make any difference. He won't get any more.
Speaker 1: Carrera de Mello had been placed at the top of
Speaker 1: the suspect list because he had recently left the farm
Speaker 1: very angry over money and since Bertha's murder. Jose had
Speaker 1: gone missing. When he was discovered in nearby Taunton, his
Speaker 1: uncle agreed to bring him to the station peacefully. Jose
Speaker 1: was reportedly interrogated by the local police for four hours.
Speaker 1: These were the same investigators who were assigned to the
Speaker 1: Borden murders. There were four detectives and four captains in
Speaker 1: the room with him, as well as a stenographer who
Speaker 1: took copious notes. There was little information for hours until
Speaker 1: detectives in Fall River reported to the police station they
Speaker 1: had found something. On the day of Bertha Manchester's murder,
Speaker 1: Jose was hoping to buy a new pair of shoes
Speaker 1: and he ended up negotiating with the saale salesman at
Speaker 1: a shoe store. There was another Portuguese man there who
Speaker 1: helped to translate. As part of his payment, Jose offered
Speaker 1: the man behind the counter what's called a trade dollar,
Speaker 1: which was a silver coin, and then he also handed
Speaker 1: the salesman a fifty cent piece with a tiny hole
Speaker 1: in it, called a plugged half dollar. The salesman said
Speaker 1: no to this. The price of silver had gone down,
Speaker 1: so the trade dollar wasn't worth a dollar, and the
Speaker 1: fifty cent piece was worthless because it had a hole
Speaker 1: in it. But the shoe dealer was in a rush
Speaker 1: to get to the races, so begrudgingly he took the
Speaker 1: money as well as two quarters, and that was Jose's mistake.
Speaker 1: Police showed the money to Bertha's sister, Jenny, and as
Speaker 1: she looked down at the coins, she recognized the date
Speaker 1: on the trade dollar eighteen seventy eight, and of course
Speaker 1: not everyone had a fifty cent piece with a hole
Speaker 1: in it. She told police that her father had given
Speaker 1: the coins to Bertha. Jose sat quietly as the detectives
Speaker 1: peppered him with questions. He listened to the man near
Speaker 1: him translate from English to Portuguese. Jose was dressed smartly
Speaker 1: in a rust colored soft hat, a light colored coat,
Speaker 1: dark pants with light stripes, and those new shoes. He
Speaker 1: was quite tall and very young, just eighteen, and he
Speaker 1: sported a little black goatee and a mustache. A key
Speaker 1: point here, Jose was very thin. Bertha Manchester, according to
Speaker 1: her friends, would have been a formidable woman for him
Speaker 1: to overpower. The shoe salesman had come and gone and
Speaker 1: had already identified him as the man who bought shoes
Speaker 1: from him. Despite his objections, the salesman gave detectives a
Speaker 1: little bit more information. Jose had taken the odd coins
Speaker 1: from a lady's pocket book, which opened with a clasp
Speaker 1: on top. Another set of witnesses claims to have seen
Speaker 1: Jose running down a thoroughfare of the day of the murders,
Speaker 1: wearing the same clothes he was wearing in the police station,
Speaker 1: but Jose refused to confess, and he was eventually assigned
Speaker 1: a lawyer. The police theorized that Jose came to the
Speaker 1: Manchester farm expecting to find Stephen Manchester, perhaps to demand money. Instead,
Speaker 1: Jose discovered Bertha all by herself. After a huge fight,
Speaker 1: he murdered her. Jose was angry with Stephen Manchester and
Speaker 1: he took out his rage on Bertha, and soon Jose
Speaker 1: confessed another brutal axe murder, right at the start of
Speaker 1: Lizzie Borden's high profile trial. It's quite a coincidence, and
Speaker 1: the motive is startling, a disgruntled employee taking revenge on
Speaker 1: his employer. To the police investigators in Full River, that
Speaker 1: motive for murder felt familiar because it's actually what they
Speaker 1: first thought had happened at the Bordon House that day.
Speaker 1: Kara Robertson is the author of the most comprehensive Lizzie
Speaker 1: Borden book to date.
Speaker 3: What they first suspected might have happened at the Bordon House,
Speaker 3: namely that some you know, deranged former employee had broken
Speaker 3: in and killed Andrew Borden because of some kind of dispute,
Speaker 3: and just unfortunately for her, happened upon Abby Bordon and
Speaker 3: killed her as well, that you know, some version of
Speaker 3: that had actually happened out of the Manchester farm.
Speaker 1: It seemed like their suspicions had come true, only on
Speaker 1: a whole different case. And here they were arresting an
Speaker 1: immigrant for murdering the daughter of his former boss. I know,
Speaker 1: this sounds like the kind of story that would be
Speaker 1: political football today. It turns out that it was then too.
Speaker 3: You know, here this Portuguese immigrant who's nuts comes in
Speaker 3: and kills her because he can't get to her father.
Speaker 1: Lizzie Borden's defense could have had a field day with
Speaker 1: this sort of story. How could they accuse this young
Speaker 1: woman of a brutal crime against her own parents when
Speaker 1: a crazed immigrant had been on the loose during the
Speaker 1: Bordon murders. But as the trial got started, the prosecutor
Speaker 1: in Lizzie's case instructed the jury not to be swayed
Speaker 1: by the defense's ridiculous argument. The police chief certainly didn't
Speaker 1: believe that Jose Carrero de Mello had killed the Burdons.
Speaker 1: He was sure that Lizzie had done it herself.
Speaker 3: And Marshall Hilliard's quite dismissive because he said that the
Speaker 3: you know, the murders seemed quite different, you know, in
Speaker 3: terms of forethought and you know, even even on some
Speaker 3: level of the violence. I mean, as horrible as it
Speaker 3: was for the murders to be committed by an axe,
Speaker 3: you know, he just took a couple of swings. It
Speaker 3: wasn't the same obliteration of the you know, the face
Speaker 3: that you know you saw in Andrew's murder.
Speaker 1: But the defense was keen on exploring any possibility that
Speaker 1: someone other than Lizzie Borden murdered her parents. That would
Speaker 1: mean ignoring the basic details of the case, like if
Speaker 1: Jose did kill the Burdens, would he really not have
Speaker 1: been spotted coming out of the house on Second Street
Speaker 1: in broad daylight?
Speaker 3: But I think, you know, a crazy Portuguese guy with
Speaker 3: the ass walking around town would have been noticed.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 3: The odd thing about the Bordon murders, and I have
Speaker 3: said this before, but you know, it always surprised me
Speaker 3: were how many people were walking past the house, you know,
Speaker 3: just on an ordinary late morning in August. I think
Speaker 3: of it as being a relatively quiet area, but it
Speaker 3: was a you know, a mixed business and residential area.
Speaker 4: So there's a fair amount of foot traffic.
Speaker 1: So logistically, is it possible that Carrera de Mello was
Speaker 1: the one carrying the axe. Some people in Fall River
Speaker 1: thought so, but it was because of his ethnicity, and
Speaker 1: Lizzie Bordon's defense certainly took.
Speaker 2: Full advantage of that.
Speaker 1: They tried to create reasonable doubt using just about anyone
Speaker 1: in the city at the time, anyone who could have
Speaker 1: possibly been responsible, anyone but Lizzie Borden.
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of discussion of the trial of
Speaker 3: who else has seen or not seen around the time
Speaker 3: of the murders. So the defense does quite a bit
Speaker 3: with you know, they're these odd looking people who are
Speaker 3: spotted in the area.
Speaker 1: Kara Robertson says that the defense brought in witnesses just
Speaker 1: so they could present them as other potential suspects.
Speaker 3: And then they also talk about how Andrew Borden was
Speaker 3: not seen by people on his walk home, to suggest
Speaker 3: that it might be possible for someone to make that
Speaker 3: walk and be in the area and be lurking around
Speaker 3: and not be seen. You know, they managed to have
Speaker 3: the busyness kind of cut both ways that it might
Speaker 3: have provided cover for an assassin, but it also it
Speaker 3: also presented many suspects who could have been in the area.
Speaker 1: By this point, you've likely noticed that all my historical
Speaker 1: crime stories are grounded by social issues. Why are we
Speaker 1: telling this story right now? In the case of Bertha Manchester,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to explore the issue around nativism in the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. Bertha became an avatar for the idealized white
Speaker 1: woman as a victim.
Speaker 3: She was kind of the perfect nativist victim, and this
Speaker 3: was the perfect nativist murder in the sense of it was,
Speaker 3: you know, this deranged immigrant person, you know, kills this nice, virtuous,
Speaker 3: native born daughter at home.
Speaker 1: Why was it not surprising to people in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century that an immigrant like jose had committed this brutal murder.
Speaker 3: So that's the case that's kind of out of the
Speaker 3: nativist nightmare.
Speaker 4: You know that this this crazy immigrant in a dispute over.
Speaker 3: Wages, kills the daughter of his employer, and she's presented
Speaker 3: in the newspapers as if she is, you know, pretty
Speaker 3: much a paragon of feminine traits.
Speaker 1: Historian Nel Darby says that at a minimum, white people
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds were suspicious of immigrants.
Speaker 5: You get it for anyone who is perceived to be different,
Speaker 5: who isn't the majority, you know, And again we have
Speaker 5: the equivalent in England in the nineteenth century with class,
Speaker 5: but also with immigrants to England, sort of Irish immigrants
Speaker 5: particularly were viewed with suspicion.
Speaker 1: Nell says that the Irish and England were targeted much
Speaker 1: like the immigrants in America were targeted.
Speaker 5: And they were deemed to be particularly violent men, drunken men.
Speaker 5: So if a crime happened, you know, there was always
Speaker 5: this suspicion that, oh, well, it must have been an irishman.
Speaker 1: Nell says that those generalizations have played out throughout the
Speaker 1: history of crime.
Speaker 5: So there's all these these generalizations and kind of a
Speaker 5: lack of education about people where you'll get the majority
Speaker 5: kind of picking on, you know, anybody who is other,
Speaker 5: anybody who isn't them, and saying, well, it must be
Speaker 5: them who are committing these clients. It couldn't possibly be
Speaker 5: one of us.
Speaker 1: But the dynamic between immigrants and whites was shifting in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds, much to the dismay of the Nativists.
Speaker 3: To think about the time period that you know, eighteen
Speaker 3: seventy to you know, the early part of the twentieth
Speaker 3: century is when the biggest migrations are from well, from
Speaker 3: the parts of Europe that you know, were considered to
Speaker 3: be less desirable at the time.
Speaker 1: Kara says that this was all taking place in a
Speaker 1: time that the Irish and the Portuguese communities had begun
Speaker 1: to join forces and new political alliances were beginning to form.
Speaker 3: You know, so the mayor is a Catholic at the
Speaker 3: time of the murders, so you know, you sort of
Speaker 3: have the sense of the maybe the Yankees kind of
Speaker 3: losing their political stranglehold. They might they might still have
Speaker 3: a social a social status that the others go quite
Speaker 3: happ yet, but it seems like there's more mixing in
Speaker 3: the communities.
Speaker 1: She says that it was actually a marriage that helped
Speaker 1: alter the political landscape in Fall River.
Speaker 3: There's a marriage that unites the it's actually the Irish
Speaker 3: and the French Canadian families political families, and that results
Speaker 3: in the successful mayoral campaign of the man who's the
Speaker 3: mayor at the time of the Bordon murders.
Speaker 1: But even though times were changing, could a defense strategy
Speaker 1: grounded in racism actually work? Would a jury believe that
Speaker 1: Jose Carrera de Mello, the Portuguese immigrant had killed not
Speaker 1: just Worth of Manchester, but also the Burdens. Could this
Speaker 1: convince the panel of men that Lizzie Borden was innocent?
Speaker 1: Hopefully not, but we'll never know for sure because the
Speaker 1: investigators who interrogated Jose Carrera Demelo discovered something else important
Speaker 1: about the timeline of the Bordon murders, and it was
Speaker 1: in this beautiful evidence.
Speaker 3: In the case of Birth of Manchester's murder, a Portuguese
Speaker 3: immigrant had a dispute with her father over his wages,
Speaker 3: and he had an axe and he killed Birth of Manchester.
Speaker 3: She happened to be at home and it was pretty straightforward.
Speaker 3: And the police were also able to determine that he
Speaker 3: had not been in the country at the time of
Speaker 3: the Bordon murders, so it wouldn't work to say that
Speaker 3: he had committed both.
Speaker 1: Jose Carrera de Mello had been in Portugal until April
Speaker 1: of eighteen ninety three. He had not arrived in the
Speaker 1: United States until eight months after the Burdons were murdered.
Speaker 3: You know, if you assume that they got the right person,
Speaker 3: then he couldn't have done He couldn't have committed those murders,
Speaker 3: and the fact that they found him and that he confessed,
Speaker 3: assuming we believe the confession, then that it means that
Speaker 3: there wasn't somebody who could have committed all of those murders.
Speaker 1: But at least in Bertha's case, was a confession, assuming
Speaker 1: we believe it. Paul Hols often reminds me that confessions
Speaker 1: can't always be believed, and we know that since most
Speaker 1: forensic tools weren't available in the eighteen hundreds, police often
Speaker 1: leaned on undeniably violent interrogation techniques to get confessions out
Speaker 1: of suspects. Kara Robertson seems to agree he confessed.
Speaker 3: Now, I mean, given what we know about police's behavior,
Speaker 3: particularly towards people who are considered undesirable members of society,
Speaker 3: I don't know what to make of that. Like, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe there is some room room for doubt there,
Speaker 3: but I don't think there's any connection between him and
Speaker 3: the Borden murders.
Speaker 1: I agree it sounds like Jose Carrera de Mello was
Speaker 1: truly guilty of murdering Birtha Manchester, that it was simply
Speaker 1: a case of wrong place, wrong time, but still it
Speaker 1: was such an odd coincidence and it certainly impacted the
Speaker 1: way the people of Fall River thought about both cases.
Speaker 1: In the end, Jose was given a life sentence, but
Speaker 1: that wasn't the end of his story, because he would
Speaker 1: eventually get a reprieve. This next part is also from
Speaker 1: Murder by Gaslight. Jose served nearly twenty years of his
Speaker 1: life sentence. Then, through the persistence of John C. Santos,
Speaker 1: a prominent Portuguese resident of Taunton, Massachusetts, he was pardoned
Speaker 1: on December thirty first, nineteen thirteen. It sounds like Jose
Speaker 1: was also required to stay out of trouble. If he
Speaker 1: were arrested in Portugal for any reason, even something minor,
Speaker 1: he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
Speaker 1: He was also required to return to his native town
Speaker 1: in Portugal and never come back to the United States.
Speaker 1: So remember that Jose's uncle had convinced his nephew to
Speaker 1: turn himself into police that weekend. Since then, the uncle
Speaker 1: became an outcast in the Portuguese community, where it was
Speaker 1: believed that he had sold out his nephew for five
Speaker 1: hundred dollars. We don't know if he really did receive
Speaker 1: money for persuading Jose to go to the police station,
Speaker 1: but his uncle certainly lied to him. Not surprisingly, this
Speaker 1: caused a fissure between the two men. Jose reportedly refused
Speaker 1: to see his uncle when he came to visit over
Speaker 1: those two decades that he was imprisoned for Bertha's murder.
Speaker 1: Less than eight weeks after Jose's release, his uncle died
Speaker 1: in his home. The official cause of death was pneumonia,
Speaker 1: but friends say he actually died of a broken heart.
Speaker 1: Just a little aside here. Jose Carrera de Mello was
Speaker 1: imprisoned with hard labor in the United States. I had
Speaker 1: wondered about the conditions of Lizzie Borden's prison. She was
Speaker 1: held less than a year, but I'm sure it must
Speaker 1: have been really difficult on her.
Speaker 3: She did go to an ordinary prison, but she was
Speaker 3: given special treatment within that prison. She had her own room,
Speaker 3: she was allowed to have her own furniture, She had visitors.
Speaker 3: You know, the matron was very kind to her. You know,
Speaker 3: there was even a cat that she sort of adopted.
Speaker 3: She received gifts of chocolate. She had a bit of
Speaker 3: a sweet tooth, so that comes up in her correspondence
Speaker 3: whenever she received something like that. So she didn't have
Speaker 3: an ordinary experience of being in prison, even when she
Speaker 3: was in jail awaiting.
Speaker 1: Trial, sounds about right. Kara says, it was all about
Speaker 1: class structure, as most things were in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: I wondered what.
Speaker 1: Would have happened if she were deemed legally insane.
Speaker 3: She would have been considered someone who needed care rather
Speaker 3: than rather than just being locked up in a dungeon.
Speaker 3: And that had a lot to do with her class
Speaker 3: status and ethnicity and self presentation. You know, she ticked
Speaker 3: the boxes of being a lady, you know, as it
Speaker 3: was understood in those days. And so there's no way
Speaker 3: they would have subjected her to know what we might
Speaker 3: think of as this sort of horrors of the worst
Speaker 3: kind of group mental institution in that era.
Speaker 1: Now that the mystery of the murder of Bertha Manchester
Speaker 1: was settled, the prosecutor in Lizzie's trial moved on to
Speaker 1: establishing her motive. The district attorney needed to explain why
Speaker 1: Lizzie Borden, a woman from a respectable household, would have
Speaker 1: killed her father and stepmother. But instead, what the prosecution
Speaker 1: team claimed was there was no motive, just insanity.
Speaker 3: They really thought Lizzie Borden must be insane. They were
Speaker 3: convinced she was guilty, and for them, that was really
Speaker 3: the only explanation that made sense to them. I mean,
Speaker 3: after all, they're confronting this very typical looking, upper middle
Speaker 3: class woman who's involved in all the appropriate charities, and
Speaker 3: she's supposed to have killed her father and her stepmother
Speaker 3: with a hatchet or an axe, and it just seems
Speaker 3: so unbelievable that there had to be an explanation of insanity.
Speaker 3: I mean, really, it was the only it was the
Speaker 3: only thing that they could imagine.
Speaker 1: The prosecutor tried to get the defense to agree to
Speaker 1: have Lizzie Borden examined by a psychiatric expert.
Speaker 3: But the defense understandably didn't want to do anything that
Speaker 3: would suggest that she wasn't innocent, because, you know, for
Speaker 3: their part, that was what they needed to do to
Speaker 3: defend her. But also, I think it's fair to say,
Speaker 3: based on you know, the information that you know that
Speaker 3: we have from journals and the like, that they really
Speaker 3: believed she was innocent.
Speaker 1: The defense certainly wasn't going to hand the prosecution anything
Speaker 1: that they could have used to suggest that Lizzie might
Speaker 1: be mentally ill or guilty things really haven't changed. And
Speaker 1: then there were the national and the local newspapers.
Speaker 3: You know, it's just a juicy story, and that there
Speaker 3: was such a media surface around the case, you know,
Speaker 3: of the kind that those of us who are old
Speaker 3: enough for member from oj Simpson that you know, pretty
Speaker 3: much anything that was salacious or juicy in any way
Speaker 3: from Fall River's past that had even a vague connection
Speaker 3: to the case was brought out.
Speaker 1: Kara says that even the columnists themselves became part of
Speaker 1: the stories.
Speaker 3: So pretty much anything was fair game to gin up
Speaker 3: excitement about this case that you know, was going to
Speaker 3: sell a lot of newspapers.
Speaker 1: With pressure from the press, the prosecutor tried to dig
Speaker 1: into Lizzie Bordon's family history for signs of insanity. Might
Speaker 1: she have inherited it?
Speaker 3: You know, The prosecution, since they got no cooperation from
Speaker 3: the defense, did their own investigation of Lizzie Bordon's family
Speaker 3: to see if they could trace anything that looked like
Speaker 3: insanity in the family tree, you know, and went so
Speaker 3: far as to ask the former and current directors of
Speaker 3: the McLean Asylum for the Insane in Massachusetts for their opinion,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of off the record, and then sent
Speaker 3: out a police officer to interview anyone that they could
Speaker 3: talk to who knew anything about Lizzie Borton's biological ancestors.
Speaker 1: Now that was intriguing. I asked Kara if they had
Speaker 1: any look, did they find any evidence of insanity?
Speaker 4: They came up with nothing.
Speaker 3: I mean, there was some talk of her mother being
Speaker 3: peculiar and maybe subject to fits of rage, and one
Speaker 3: person said he thought Lizzie Borton was very ugly, you know,
Speaker 3: in this in the sense of, you know, not being
Speaker 3: a nice person. I don't think it was a physical
Speaker 3: characterization that she had an ugly disposition, but you know,
Speaker 3: there may have been some odd apples in the family tree,
Speaker 3: but but you know, no suggestion of actual insanity.
Speaker 1: So then they looked outside the immediate family tree, and
Speaker 1: the papers picked up on something from almost half a
Speaker 1: century earlier, those murders that had taken place right next
Speaker 1: door by another Burden, Eliza Hathaway Darling Bordon. Though Lizzie
Speaker 1: Borden and her great aunt Eliza Darling Bordon shared the
Speaker 1: Bordon name, they were only related by marriage. But that
Speaker 1: didn't stop the oppress and the prosecution in Lizzie's case
Speaker 1: from digging into their similarities.
Speaker 3: As you say, there's no genetic, biological connection at all.
Speaker 3: I think it was just that it was, you know,
Speaker 3: the combination of the last name and the proximity.
Speaker 4: You know, it was just next door.
Speaker 3: So the idea that, wow, these these terrible things have
Speaker 3: happened so close to each other.
Speaker 1: Still, despite the fact that there was no shared blood
Speaker 1: between Lizzie Borden and Eliza Borden, the prosecutor did bring
Speaker 1: up Eliza's name. Bordon tour guide Ashley Bolero and relative
Speaker 1: Cary Nolty say that the prosecution was anxious to make
Speaker 1: the connection.
Speaker 6: Now we're pushing it forty years later during the Lizzie
Speaker 6: Bordon trial and they bring up this horrendous crime that
Speaker 6: happened next door, and they're like, well, maybe Lizzie committed
Speaker 6: these murders because insanity just runs in the family.
Speaker 2: Because it was.
Speaker 7: Still fresh in everyone's memory, you know, they could bring
Speaker 7: that up was it was known the time, which tells
Speaker 7: me that it was.
Speaker 4: A pretty big deal even if Therewig was gone. Lodwig
Speaker 4: was gone.
Speaker 7: Lodwig was gone, but Maria was still around.
Speaker 6: They actually reached out to Maria during that time, and
Speaker 6: she was still living in Fall River, she had children,
Speaker 6: and she was thriving, so that even put more ends
Speaker 6: to the claim.
Speaker 2: They kind of threw that out.
Speaker 6: They're like, oh, well, you know, another reason not to
Speaker 6: think that Lizzie did it because she insanity.
Speaker 1: So then the prosecutor asked Lizzie Borden's attorneys if she
Speaker 1: could be tested by a mental health professional, but again
Speaker 1: they were denied. I wonder what they were looking for.
Speaker 1: It sounds like perhaps because of her gender, they were
Speaker 1: so ensure of their case that they hoped that even
Speaker 1: the prospect of this connection would convince the jury that
Speaker 1: Lizzie Borden was mentally ill and that therefore she was
Speaker 1: a killer.
Speaker 4: You know, are you full of telling the difference between
Speaker 4: right or wrong?
Speaker 3: And you know, I think she would have passed that
Speaker 3: without any any difficulty.
Speaker 1: Kara says that it might have been easy to convince
Speaker 1: an all male jury that she was legally insane because
Speaker 1: compared to men, women were considered unstable in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: One thing that they were looking at, you know, that
Speaker 3: was specific to that era, though we do see echoes
Speaker 3: of it even today, is this idea that women are
Speaker 3: particularly vulnerable to a species of insanity, a specifically gendered insanity,
Speaker 3: at the time of their menstrual periods or in other
Speaker 3: parts of their cycle of life.
Speaker 1: That seems like a lot to unpack, and it had
Speaker 1: been Lizzie Borden's lawyers who brought it up. At first,
Speaker 1: they didn't want any mention of her mental health, and
Speaker 1: now somehow they're talking about her time of the month.
Speaker 3: There is this tricky bit in the trial where Lizzie
Speaker 3: Borden's defense lawyers are using the fact that she was
Speaker 3: on what they called her monthly illness as an explanation
Speaker 3: for some things that she did that what might otherwise
Speaker 3: say show consciousness of guilt. You know, that she made
Speaker 3: predictions of something terrible happening on the night before the murders.
Speaker 3: Also that there was a tiny bit of blood found
Speaker 3: on an internal skirt, so they were able to use
Speaker 3: it for things that suited them. But they were somehow,
Speaker 3: very cleverly able to not raise the specter of menstrual insanity,
Speaker 3: which would have been a potential diagnosis.
Speaker 1: Kara says that no one wanted to talk about menstruation
Speaker 1: at a Lizzie Borden trial neither side, even if it
Speaker 1: might have helped them, and the prosecutor stayed far away
Speaker 1: from it.
Speaker 3: It seemed as if they didn't want to talk about
Speaker 3: menstruation either, you know, that it made them uncomfortable for
Speaker 3: whatever reason.
Speaker 4: You know. And there's the famous incident.
Speaker 3: Of the discovery of the bloody towels in the basement
Speaker 3: of the house on the day of the murders. This
Speaker 3: essentially a bucket or a pail with some what were
Speaker 3: described as menstrual claws.
Speaker 1: But even so, that bucket of bloody clothing hadn't really
Speaker 1: been investigated by the male officers.
Speaker 3: And you know, you might think, if you're investigating this,
Speaker 3: you know, horribly violence, double homicide where the murderer was
Speaker 3: likely to have been spattered with blood, that finding a
Speaker 3: pail of blood soaked rags, you know, might raise some suspicion.
Speaker 3: But you know, they were quite happy to accept that. No, no,
Speaker 3: that's that's just evidence of menstruation. So she was quite
Speaker 3: lucky in that regard because it could have gone It
Speaker 3: could have gone badly, I think.
Speaker 1: So what ties all of these tragedies together once again?
Speaker 1: It's time to circle back to the supposed curse of
Speaker 1: Fall River and the supposed curse of the family lines
Speaker 1: of Thomas Cornell Junior and Sarah Earl. The stories of
Speaker 1: their descendants litter the pages of Fall River crime history books.
Speaker 1: So I asked relative Caring Noulty about the connection between
Speaker 1: Eliza Borden and Lizzie Bordon.
Speaker 7: They tried to say that insanity ran through the family
Speaker 7: by bringing this up, but they pointed out the opposing
Speaker 7: council pointed out that Eliza actually was not a Bordon.
Speaker 4: She was only a Bordon by.
Speaker 1: Marriage, right, it wasn't direct and so that argument was dropped.
Speaker 1: But what if the prosecutors just didn't look back far
Speaker 1: enough down the family line. Remember, both Eliza and her
Speaker 1: husband were related to Sarah Earle and Thomas Cornell, and
Speaker 1: so was Lizzie Borden. But we are talking about in
Speaker 1: some ways that doesn't matter. What we're looking more towards
Speaker 1: is several generations up in the Earls.
Speaker 4: And Sarah Earle.
Speaker 3: Who you think, and I'm kind of on your wavelength
Speaker 3: about whether she was really more heavily involved in the
Speaker 3: death of Rebecca Briggs.
Speaker 1: I thought a lot about Carrie's belief that perhaps Rebecca
Speaker 1: Briggs Cornell was murdered, and that it was her daughter
Speaker 1: in law, Sarah who had done it. Maybe there was
Speaker 1: more than just a mean streak in the Earle family.
Speaker 1: Maybe there was something darker.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And then also potentially you don't necessarily have to
Speaker 7: wield the weapon yourself to cause someone's death.
Speaker 1: Even if Sarah didn't push Rebecca into the fire herself,
Speaker 1: Carrie thinks that she might have convinced Thomas to do it.
Speaker 1: And then perhaps Eliza Darling Borden might have been driven
Speaker 1: to suicidal thoughts, not just from postpartum depression, but also
Speaker 1: by a cruel husband.
Speaker 7: And if Lodwig was of a mind to be cruel
Speaker 7: to his wife and to deny her support someone who
Speaker 7: had lost her mother, young, lost her father, lost uncles,
Speaker 7: lost grandparents, lost her first child in a moment of
Speaker 7: real upheaval, that's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 1: There might be something to this. I asked crime historian
Speaker 1: Nel Darby about inheriting certain traits from past generations, past
Speaker 1: criminal traits that run in the family.
Speaker 5: I think from my experience obviously looking at historical cases,
Speaker 5: there was often this thing of oh, well, that relative
Speaker 5: had displayed similar traits in the past, and you'd get
Speaker 5: kind of neighbors or family members coming up with these
Speaker 5: stories about how they remembered other relatives behaving in an
Speaker 5: odd way, or the whole family being regarded as odd
Speaker 5: or peculiar.
Speaker 1: Neil says that in smaller communities, you'd get this kind
Speaker 1: of knowledge being passed down about a particular family and
Speaker 1: about the fact that they were known to have these
Speaker 1: kinds of traits.
Speaker 5: And it wasn't necessarily described explicitly as a mental illness
Speaker 5: or insanity, but it was just this recognition that, oh, yes,
Speaker 5: we remember her father or her grandfather or her mother
Speaker 5: or grandmother being slightly peculiar.
Speaker 1: I've heard that repeatedly in my own stories. One killer
Speaker 1: is a bastard, and so was his father and his grandfather.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there's something shared in their blood, or maybe it's
Speaker 1: just the situation surrounding a particular family, you know.
Speaker 5: And I think today we probably in more reasoned about it,
Speaker 5: not only seeing it as like possible family history mental illness,
Speaker 5: but looking at the circumstances in which someone grows up
Speaker 5: and the effect that can have on you mentally.
Speaker 4: So I think, you know, it does vary, you know,
Speaker 4: And I don't think it's.
Speaker 5: A straightforward case of saying, well, we're more aware of
Speaker 5: it now, and we recognize that these things can run
Speaker 5: in families and it's something out of a particular individual's control,
Speaker 5: because I think there was some recognition of that certainly
Speaker 5: a century even two centuries ago.
Speaker 1: This isn't the end of the curse in fall River.
Speaker 1: Those two or three city blocks would still endure one
Speaker 1: more widely publicized tragedy, an entirely different murder in a
Speaker 1: building that would become the focus of the media almost
Speaker 1: one hundred years later, and another that's connected strangely to
Speaker 1: the boarding case. In our final episode, we explore the
Speaker 1: terrible rise of the satanic panic. On the final episode
Speaker 1: of tenfold More Wicked on exactly right.
Speaker 6: The Fall River police wanted to question him about some
Speaker 6: murders that had happened, and that some ties that he
Speaker 6: had to these murders.
Speaker 8: It's a love hate relationship, I think, similar to the
Speaker 8: way Salem, Massachusetts has a love hate relationship with its
Speaker 8: witchy history. You can't argue that it brings in tons
Speaker 8: of people. However, I'm sure if you live there, you're like,
Speaker 8: could we be known for something else?
Speaker 6: And they spoke to Karen asking her to basically make
Speaker 6: a statement, and she was like, well, if I'm going
Speaker 6: to talk to anybody.
Speaker 2: I need to speak to a priest first.
Speaker 6: So they brought her over to the church and that
Speaker 6: was the last time she was seen alive.
Speaker 8: Absolutely real the people that lost their lives in a ritual,
Speaker 8: whether there's such a creature as Satan or not, if
Speaker 8: you die in a sacrifice, that's pretty real to you.
Speaker 5: Thanks.
Speaker 1: If you love true crime, check out my books American
Speaker 1: Sherlock and All That Is Wicked. I also have an
Speaker 1: audio book called The Ghost Club. I can't wait to
Speaker 1: tell you the real story about the world's most famous
Speaker 1: ghost hunter, who was the head of the world's most
Speaker 1: famous ghost club and how he investigated England's most famous
Speaker 1: haunted house. This has been an exactly right tenfold more
Speaker 1: media production producer Jason Whaling, Senior producer Alexis m Rossi,
Speaker 1: consulting producer Kyle Ryan, sound designer Eric Friend, composer Curtis Heath,
Speaker 1: additional music Jeremy Buller, artwork Nick Toga. Executive producers Georger
Speaker 1: hart Stark, Karen Kilgareff and Danielle Kramer.