Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2016-09-30 06:31 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2016-09-30 06:31 pm
[ SECRET POST #3558 ]
⌈ Secret Post #3558 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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08. [SPOILERS for Great British Bake Off]
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09. [SPOILERS for Dark Matter]
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #508.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Conspiracy theories
(Anonymous) 2016-09-30 11:40 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Conspiracy theories
(Anonymous) 2016-10-01 12:10 am (UTC)(link)1) Everyone in that house expected to die. Abby thought they were being poisoned (rather than the fairly obvious assumption that it was just food poisoning). Lizzie told a close friend she had a terrible feeling that something awful was going to happen.
2) The house itself--the physical house as well as the family--was just bizarre. Half the doors were locked, such that you had to go downstairs and physically leave the house to move from one second-floor room to the next. On its own, not such a big deal. Added to the weirdness already in that family, I think it's suggestive of a lot of fear.
3) Emma (the older sister) was out of the house staying with friends at the time of the murder--the first time she had stayed overnight away from home in years. I can't believe that's a coincidence.
4) Why were both daughters unmarried and still living at home in their thirties/forties? Obviously, some people just don't find anyone, but they were well-connected, well-off, reasonably attractive women. I suspect their father wanted them to stay at home (a controlling personality seems in keeping with the evidence on his character).
5) Both the mother and the father died, and in a horribly brutal manner. If it was only one or the other, or if the death was of a less violent nature, I could believe it was an outside, or it was a money matter, or something like that. The fact that it was both of Lizzie's parents makes me think it was someone in the family, and it's well established that when someone is murdered in a particularly violent fashion, 9-10 times out of 10 the murderer was very close to them.
tl;dr: weird family clearly had secrets, death was so violent it was clearly personal. Marcia Carlisle has an essay explaining this theory much better than I can here: http://www.americanheritage.com/content/what-made-lizzie-borden-kill?page=show
Re: Conspiracy theories
(Anonymous) 2016-10-01 03:37 am (UTC)(link)* Any supposed feelings of doom can't be taken seriously as evidence after the event. It's confirmation bias. There'll always be people who swear up and down that they KNEW something terrible was going to happen, but that's really easy to claim after, you know, something bad actually HAS happened. Keep in mind that despite all of the family's fears of poisoning, no poisons were found in the autopsy.
* With 13 blows to Mr. Borden's head and at least 18 to Mrs. Borden, that's major overkill and rather personal. It's notable that it was the stepmother who was the target of the most rage and blows to the head. Both Lizzie and her sister had good reason to resent their stepmother (Mr. Borden had given valuable real estate to her family) and their relationship was known to be rocky.
* the peculiarity of the house layout and the narrow time window both indicate that it had to be an inside job, someone who was familiar with the house itself and the family's habits. It's true that such a small time window seems improbable that Lizzie could've done it (more on that later) but the same reasoning indicates that it'd be even more unlikely that a stranger just happened to get lucky and come along at the right time. Even if a stranger had been stalking the family, they couldn't have known that Lizzie would send the maid out of the house. If someone had killed Mrs. Borden, they would've had to wait for more than an hour, covered in blood with a bloody murder weapon, in a house with a weird layout and very little place to hide, until they could then kill Mr. Borden. What are the odds?
* The locked rooms on the second floor aren't "suggestive of a lot of fear" to me, it's suggestive that either Mr. and Mrs. Borden or perhaps Lizzie and Emma or all of them desired privacy. Nothing weird about that. Mr. and Mrs. Borden's room was separate from Lizzie's, Emma's and the guest room. Also, I think you made an error-- they wouldn't have had to "leave the house" to move from one second floor room to the other. They simply would've had to go downstairs and take the staircase by the front entry rather than the staircase by the kitchen.
* Both the daughters were still unmarried and at home because Mr. Borden was notoriously cheap and neither of them were considered particularly attractive at the time. Both daughters believed their chances at marriage were damaged by the fact that he made them all live in a relatively small house (considering how wealthy he was), with few social opportunities compared to other young women of their economic status.
* Lizzie had no visible blood spatter, but then again, she wasn't examined closely. After Mrs. Borden's murder, she had time to dispose of any bloody clothing (and she was seen with bloody clothing AND burning a dress she said had gotten paint on it after the fact). With Mr. Borden's murder, she could've put on his jacket over her clothing (which again, wasn't examined closely afterwards), murdered him, then put the jacket underneath his head. Forensic investigation in that day was not detailed. They would not have known to examine the jacket to see if the blood stains were from his head wound vs. spattered cast off stains.
* The person who had motive and opportunity is Lizzie. That combined with her peculiar behavior, changing alibi (that no one can confirm), and the fact that she benefited directly from her parents' death makes her the most likely suspect. It's possible she had a confederate, but there is no evidence of that.
I think that incest/sexual abuse is possible, but there's no evidence for it and it seems unlikely. The author of the article you cite can't come up with anything more compelling than "the affection between a teen-age Lizzie and her father would not be inconsistent with a past history of sexual abuse", which... yeah. That's not a strong argument. And the Eileen Franklin-Lipsker case she references to point to a case where memories of past trauma resurface after many years? Yeah, that conviction was later overturned, because it turns out that "repressed memories" are extremely unreliable. And if it had been Lizzie lashing out at her father for past sexual abuse, then it's odd that her stepmother was the one who was more brutally attacked.