Christina Ricci To Play Axe Murderer Lizzie Borden

Christina Ricci has landed the role of Lizzie Borden in an upcoming movie for Lifetime. The young woman was charged with brutally killing her parents with an axe in 1892. She was tried for the murders and acquitted. Ricci seems like the perfect actress to take on this role, as she can play a very good crazy person. 

Here are the gruesome details of how the murders went down:

On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden had breakfast with his wife and made his usual rounds of the bank and post office, returning home about 10:45 am. The Bordens' maid, Bridget Sullivan, testified that she was in her third-floor room, resting from cleaning windows, when just before 11:10 am she heard Lizzie call out, "Maggie, come quick! Father's dead. Somebody came in and killed him." (Sullivan was sometimes called "Maggie", the name of an earlier maid).

Andrew was slumped on a couch in the downstairs sitting room, struck 10 or 11 times with a hatchet-like weapon. One of his eyeballs had been split cleanly in two, suggesting he had been asleep when attacked. Soon after, as neighbors and doctors tended Lizzie, Sullivan discovered Abby Borden in the upstairs guest bedroom, her skull crushed by 19 blows.

Police found a hatchet in the basement which, though free of blood, was missing most of its handle. Lizzie was arrested on August 11; a grand jury began hearing evidence on November 7 and indicted on December 2.

Here are some pertinent points in the trial:

• The hatchet head found in the basement was not convincingly shown to be the murder weapon. Prosecutors argued that the killer had removed the handle because it was bloody, but while one officer testified that a hatchet handle was found near the hatchet head, another officer contradicted this.
• Though no bloody clothing was found, a few days after the murder Lizzie burned a dress in the stove, saying it had been ruined when she brushed against fresh paint.
• There was a similar axe murder nearby shortly before the trial, though its perpetrator was shown to have been out of the country when the Bordens were killed.
• Evidence was excluded that Lizzie had sought to purchase prussic acid (for cleaning a sealskin cloak, she said) from a local druggist on the day before the murders.
• Because of the mysterious illness that had struck the household before the murders, the family's milk and Andrew and Abby's stomachs (removed during autopsies performed in the Borden dining room), were tested for poison; no poison was found.
• The victims' heads were removed during autopsy. After the skulls were used as evidence during the trial – Borden fainted upon seeing them – the heads were later buried at the foot of each grave.

On June 20, after deliberating an hour and a half, the jury acquitted her. After she was released from the prison that she had been held during the trial, Borden continued to live in Fall River, Massachusetts for the rest of her life, despite facing significant ostracism. No one else was ever charged with the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden; speculation about the crimes continues into the 21st century.

Do you think she did it?