Lizzie Borden in 1890
In 1893 Lizzie Borden, spinster, of Fall River, Massachusetts, was tried for the ax murders of her father and stepmother. The little ditty survives to this day: Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her father forty wacks/ When she saw what she had done, she gave her mother forty-one.
For the record, Ms. Borden was acquitted of the crimes. No one else was ever charged with the murders. By the time she died in 1927, her legend was firmly established.
Now, the house where the murders were committed is the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast and Museum. I am not going to link to their site because I felt rather soiled by contact with the whole idea. If you were wondering where bad taste ends and sheer depravity begins… it’s here.
You can sleep in the Murder Room, buy postcards showing genuine crime scene photos of the butchered victims, and even buy a Lizzie Borden bobble-head doll complete with cute little ax. Why anyone would want any of this is well beyond me. But this is a successful business, so it must have customers.
Uh, hello–anybody there? Two people were hacked to death in here. The last moments of their lives must have been unimaginably horrible. And if Lizzie, as the court found, didn’t kill them, imagine living the rest of your life with virtually everyone in America believing you did such a thing. And singing a song about it!
The human heart, wrote Jeremiah, is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jer. 17:9)
This is why we need a Savior. Good thing we’ve got one.
Horrible to contemplate. I remember reading of this as a young person, couldn’t stand to think about it.
Yes, If not for the Lord, we would all be doomed.
The 20th century had an equivalent, the Jon Benet Ramsey murder. Everyone just “knew” her parents were involved, conveniently forgetting that DNA evidence pointed to a 3rd party intruder. Their lives were forever ruined which added insult to the injury of having had a child brutally murdered.
The Ramsey’s only “crime” was being prosperous. John Ramsey had built a successful business by working very hard for years and it had paid off. Beyond losing a child to murder, he lost his career and wasn’t able to live in the home he had worked so hard to buy. (To the best of my knowledge, it remains vacant to this day.)
Rumors are deadly.
Wow so depraved…the act is grotesque already, to think there is a celebration of it is something else…sigh.
I could hardly believe what I was seeing on my computer screen.
How depraved our society is!
At least Lizzie had due process. The Dems of today convict in the court of public opinion with the adage “guilty until proven innocent.” You know, Donald Trump is a KGB agent, Brett Kavanaugh is a sexist pig, and the John Birch Society is actually a communist organization.
No Democrat ever tells the truth on purpose.