When She Saw What She had Done

 From the sitting room, we went up to the spare bedroom.  One of our tour guides was lying on the floor to show us where Mrs. Borden had been, demonstrating that anyone on the front stairs would have seen the body.  Mrs. Borden had been making the bed when someone approached her, and struck her on the side of the head with a hatchet.  She spun, and fell face down on the floor, whereupon her assailant straddled her and struck her an additional 19 times to the back of the head.  The top picture is the bed Mrs. Borden was making when she was murdered, and she died on the floor to the left of it.  The second picture is Lizzie's bedroom.

After Bridget had let Mr. Borden in, she spoke to Lizzie, who gave her permission to go to a department store sale, but being ill, she went upstairs to nap instead.  Lizzie's story of events following her father's return home changed, as she originally stated that she went into the barn to look for tin to fix a door, and hung around in the loft eating pears.  At the trial, she said she was looking for sinkers in the barn for a fishing trip she was to undertake with her father the next week, and had remained there only ten minutes.  In either case, she said she came back to the house and yelled to Bridget, "Maggie, come quick!  Father's dead! Somebody came in and killed him."  (Note--Emma was away at the time, but both girls called Bridget "Maggie," the name of their previous maid.  Nice.)

According to our tour guide, the main Fall River police officers were chilling at Rocky Point that day, leaving behind inept officers who processed the scene very sloppily.  They asked Lizzie where her step-mother was, and she said Abby had received a note asking her to visit a sick friend.  Lizzie then told Bridget to go upstairs and look, and Bridget was all "HELL NO," and didn't go up until a neighbor came with her, and half way up the stairs, they saw Mrs. Borden's body on the floor.

Lizzie was calm and cool during her interviews, but contradicted herself several times.  Despite this, they didn't check Lizzie for bloodstains, and tromped all over the house, disturbing evidence, and some even clipped pieces of Mr. Borden's clothes and hair for souvenirs.  In the basement they found two axes, and a suspicious looking hatchet, that had been freshly broken off from the handle, and had been covered in ash to make it look like it'd been there for some time.  The police left these tools at the house.

By this point, Uncle John had returned with a solid alibi, somehow having managed to remember everyone he'd seen on the bus, along with the bus driver's name and serial number.  When human Shannon takes the bus, she's lucky if she can remember her own name.

Two days later, on August 6th, the police did a more thorough investigation of the house, and took the hatchet with them.  That evening, they told Lizzie she was a suspect, and the next morning, a neighbor walked in on Lizzie burning a dress in the oven.  She said that it had been covered in paint.