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the bulk of his property to his wife; and not to his daughters. If that happened, Lizzie would have even less. She would be forced to live on what Abby doled out to her; her social status already tenuous would descend further. There would be no parties, no need for new clothes or fancy dresses: Abby (scarcely five feet tall) was a 200 pound recluse who seldom even left the house.

A year before the murders-in broad daylight-Abby's room was ransacked for jewelry, cash and horse-car tickets. Though Andrew and his wife were out that day, Lizzie, her older sister, Emma, and the Borden's maid, Bridget Sullivan, were all at home. Andrew had the police investigation stopped. Lizzie was a known kleptomaniac; after the "robbery," he saw to it that his bedroom door was locked, but he left the key on the sitting room mantela silent admonition to his youngest daughter that he knew who the thief was.

The day before the murders though the jury never knew it Lizzie was trying to buy highly poisonous and illegal prussic acid; and the spine on her mother's book of household hints was, in fact, broken so that the book automatically fell open to a page describing prussic acid. Abby may have seen it; she went across the street where a doctor lived and told him she and Andrew had already been vomiting for two days and she suspected poison. Since Andrew was a notorious miser and Abby disclosed that they'd been dining on warmed over mutton and warmed over fish for several days, the doctor assured Abby that spoiled food not poison was the culprit.

The night before the murders Lizzie went to visit Alice Russell and told about how she was afraid that the Bordens were being poisoned, that her father had enemies and, for the first time, about the robbery that had taken place the year before.

She was certainly hoping to use Alice as a kind of alibi established before the fact; to lend support to the theory that outsiders murdered the elderly Bordens for one reason or another.

Of course, she did not tell Alice that while sitting up in her hot stifling bedroom and listening to her parents talk in the sitting room below, she overheard her father's plan to transfer the Swansea farm Lizzie had known and loved since childhood to her detested stepmother the next day.

It's no wonder Lizzie's bedroom is supercharged with pain, betrayal, anger; a terrible oppressiveness. The physical and mental symptoms I suffered there stayed with me throughout the rest of that day's tour and did not leave till

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