Lizzie Borden Comes to Salem
The True Story of Lizzie Borden is set to open in Salem, MA, on August 4. An article on the museum appeared today in the Salem News.
Leonard Pickel, who calls himself curator of the new Lizzie Borden museum on Essex Street, holds replicas of the skulls of Abby and Andrew Borden. The museum, which will open Aug. 4, will include a CSI approach to the famous Fall River murders.
Deborah Parker / Staff photo
Lizzie Borden to be Salem’s latest tourist draw
By Chris Cassidy
Staff writerSALEM — A new museum, The True Story of Lizzie Borden, opens on the pedestrian mall Aug. 4, which is the 116th anniversary of the day Borden allegedly gave her mother 40 whacks (and her father 41).
The museum — at least, that’s what they’re calling it — will be run by Leonard Pickel, a familiar Salem resident who operated the haunted house named Mayhem Manor about 10 years ago and is now the editor of Haunted Attraction magazine.
We chatted with Pickel this week about his latest venture.
Q: Does Lizzie Borden actually have any connection to Salem?
A: Not at all. It was a pure financial decision and the opportunity to get Lizzie’s story out to the most number of people.
Q: Get Lizzie’s story out there?
A: Really, it was the first O.J. Simpson type of murder. It was right at the turn of the century when newspapers were first trying to understand what kind of power they had in a court case, the ability to sway public opinion so a guilty person could go free or an innocent person could go to prison because of the slant of the press coverage toward the person.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there. Even in the nursery rhyme, she takes about 40 hacks each, when it was closer to 30 total. She was acquitted, but by public opinion she was basically guilty by association for the rest of her life.
Q: But why Salem?
A: Salem, because of its massive tourist draw and people looking for dark history. There’s so much redundancy in the witch museums, it seemed to me a no-brainer to bring the museum up here. … We were shocked no one’s done it before. We were calling it “Project X” for fear of someone hearing about it and pulling it off before us.
Q: Your Web site calls Lizzie Borden “the most famous person ever to live in Massachusetts.” Really? What about JFK, Paul Revere or anyone on the Red Sox?
A: She certainly was (the most famous) in 1892. She absolutely has worldwide appeal. … Certainly, I think she’s the most famous woman ever to live in Massachusetts.
Q: What has the response been so far?
A: The reaction has been pretty funny. We’ve gotten both hate mail from people in Fall River that say Lizzie Borden belongs to them, and we’ve gotten people in Salem saying, ‘What does Lizzie Borden have to do with Salem?’ …
Well, you have a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery at the end of the block. She plays Lizzie Borden in one of her movies.
Q: So what’s the museum going to be like?
A: We have something tentatively called “CSI: Fall River.” We look at modern forensic techniques and figure out if we had the technology we have today, could we have solved the crime. It’ll always be a mystery and we’ll never figure out what happened. … If we go through and say, “These are the facts,” it’s pretty clear that Lizzie probably did it. But we’ll probably never know. …
We outline what it was like to be alive in 1892. The telephone was brand-new, electricity was brand-new. Even running water was fairly recent. It was a very backward time. It wasn’t like Lizzie could flip open a cell phone and call the police when she found her father dead on the couch.
The next section is the cast of characters. We go through each of the people who are more or less suspects in the crime. You get to know the people involved, so you can get a feel for where everyone is coming from.
Q: You’re also going to have sort of a mock trial?
A: We’re going to go through the trial. … Back then, it was a three-judge panel and 12 jurors, and the stand literally was a stand. There was no place to sit down. …
We’re going to show the evidence. One of the things they did was, before they buried the bodies of the two victims, they cut the heads off and boiled the flesh off them, so they could get the skull and see if the ax head would fit into the holes in the skull.
That was kept hush-hush until the trial, when they flipped up this covering and exposed the skulls. They were buried headless. We’ve made reproductions of the skulls and a reproduction of the hatchet that was supposed to be the murder weapon.
Q: What else do you want people to know about this place?
A: This is going to be very much like a museum. More like the Peabody Essex than the witch museums. Don’t expect to come and be entertained, but come to learn something about the true story of Lizzie Borden.
