I just saw a show in which a modern forensics team examined evidence and got results from luminol that showed the killer had washed during the half hour it took the police to arrive. They concluded that it was indeed Lizzie that did the killing.
Premieres Saturday, January 25 on Lifetime:
8:00PM (EST) Lizzie Borden Took An Ax (2014)
On a scorching, hot summer day in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden returns home to the house she shares with her father Andrew, stepmother Abby and sister Emma. But, unlike any normal day, Lizzie encounters the bloody scene of her parents violently murdered. Police quickly question multiple suspects in town, but evidence keeps pointing back to the Bordens youngest daughter Lizzie, the seemingly wholesome Sunday school teacher, as the prime suspect. Lizzies lawyer, Andrew Jennings, proclaims her innocence arguing that it is inconceivable a woman could commit the heinous crime of brutally murdering her family with an ax. Or is it? Lizzie is put on trial for the murders, both in the courtroom and in the press, sparking a widespread debate about her culpability. As the case rages on, the courtroom proceedings fuel an enormous amount of sensationalized stories and headlines in newspapers throughout the country, forever leaving Lizzie Bordens name in infamy...
http://www.mylifetime.com/movies/liz...den-took-an-ax
I am actually looking forward to this movie. Although I haven't seen her performance, Christina Ricci seems like a good choice. She certainly resembles her more than Elizabeth Montgomery (please tell me I am not the only other person old enough to remember her excellent performance as Lizzie).
I beleive Lizzie committed the murders. There is a good layout of the house in one of the books written by John Douglas (last one of his I will ever purchase, but the diagram was interesting). Looking at that I was even more convinced than ever that she did it. I just don't see, with the layout, that a stranger entered that house, murdered two people and was not seen by Lizzie or Bridgett. That, combined with all the other circumstantial evidence just points to Lizzie IMO.
This "all male jury" thing -- counterintuitive and not in a good way, what, to believe they'd acquit a woman of killing her stepmother and her father, the latter a (wait for it) man, and a not unpowerful one in the community? Because -- um, why? -- that's what all-male juries do in a patriarchy, acquit women of nefarious deeds? I don't think that's how it works.
I find it rather received "wisdom" to believe that, because Ms. Borden's legal team was effective, she therefore did the murders.
Most who account the crime to have been hers do so because of the child's rhyme
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she found what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
There was, is, and will remain a great possibility that she was not guilty of the crimes she was found not guilty of committing.