Dead Pool 4th August 2024

Contender, ready! Gladiator, ready!!! No winners today though! Might as well sit down and  have a Tiramisu. 

Look Who You Could Have Had:

• John Anderson, 92, Scottish athletics coach and television personality (Gladiators). 
• Erica Ash, 46, American actress (Mad TV, The Big Gay Sketch Show, Survivor’s Remorse), breast cancer. 
• Roberto Linguanotto, 81, Italian chef, disputed inventor of tiramisu. 
• Robert Banas, 90, American dancer and actor (West Side Story). 
• DJ Randall, 54, British DJ and record producer. 

In Other News

Miriam Margolyes has shared a health update as she experiences difficulty walking, due to problems with problems her spine. The 83-year-old Harry Potter actor has opened up about dealing with spinal stenosis – the narrowing of the spinal canal – which can cause compression on the spinal nerves. As the condition progresses, it can cause back and leg pain. Margolyes said that she is now registered as disabled and has started using a mobility scooter. “I can’t walk very well, and I’m registered disabled,” she told the Flying Monkeys. “I use all kinds of assistance. I’ve got two sticks and a walker and they’re such a bore, but I’ve just got a mobility scooter, which is a lot of fun.” Last year, the Australian actor underwent major heart surgery to replace her aortic valve, and has since shared concerns that she won’t have enough money to cover her health and medical support costs as she gets older. “I’m worried that I won’t have enough money for carers when I finally get paralysed or whatever it is that’s going to happen to me, I’m saving up cash so that I can pay people to look after me and my partner. We don’t have children, so I need to make sure I’m going to be looked after in the way that I’ve become accustomed. When I started kind of failing physically, I remember saying to directors and producers, please don’t show me clambering out of a car or climbing upstairs on my hands and knees. I didn’t want people to see that because I was embarrassed to see myself looking so pathetic. But, subsequently, I’ve met loads of people who have said I gave them the courage to do things that they never thought they could. So I’m very pleased about that.”  

Following on from last weeks story of the 23-year-old Australian surfer who survived having his leg bitten off by a suspected great white shark, he has vowed to be back in the water “in no time”. Kai McKenzie was attacked off the mid-north coast of New South Wales last week, and his severed leg later washed up on the beach. The limb was placed on ice and taken to a hospital about 200km away from the place where the attack took place, with the hope that it could be reattached. It’s not clear if doctors attempted surgery to reattach the leg, but an Instagram post by Mr McKenzie on Monday confirmed that he had lost the limb. “Spot something missing? Hahah,” Mr McKenzie quipped in a caption alongside an image showing him standing arm-in-arm with a group of friends. Mr McKenzie was taken to Port Macquarie Base Hospital and later flown to John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle after last Tuesday’s attack. He was riding the waves off the shore of New South Wales when a 10ft shark attacked and nearly killed him. In an earlier post on Instagram on Saturday he detailed the incident and thanked people for the support he received. “To be here right now just to fucking be able to hold my beautiful Eve and my family is everything to me,” he wrote. “A few days ago I went through a crazy shark attack, biggest shark I’ve ever seen, which was a very crazy scene and scared the living fuck out of me. But to all you fucking kind-hearted people, all you legends, to anyone and everyone all your support has meant the absolute world to me. I can tell you now if you know my personality this means fuck all. I’ll be back in that water in no time, big fuck off to that shark and big thanks to Steve for saving my life.” In a statement on Thursday, the McKenzie family also thanked all of the “medical staff … bystanders and first responders” who had worked to save the surfer’s life. 

Good Morning Britain contributor Iain Dale has shared an update on his health following the news earlier this week that he had been admitted to hospital with “acute pain”. The broadcaster, 62 – who’s made numerous appearances as a panelist on the ITV show over the years – announced just days ago that he had ended up in A&E over a suspected “gall bladder issue”. He however later told fans that he was in intensive care awaiting an operation to remove the organ. The LBC radio host took to Twitter, on Wednesday afternoon to share an update. He stated that his gallbladder is “infected and inflamed,” with Iain adding that his operation had been postponed amid other treatment. Addressing his followers, he wrote in the post: “FURTHER UPDATE: No sign of gallstones but gallbladder infected and inflamed. Decision on op put off until we see if antibiotics work.” He continued: “Hope to be discharged tomorrow, but won’t be at full capacity for some time, I’m told.” Iain also expressed gratitude to his followers for their well wishes and support. He concluded the recent tweet by writing: “Renewed thanks for all the kind comments and to the wonderful people who have been caring for me.” It comes just days after Iain shared that he was “suffering” due to his health recently. He initially took to the platform on Sunday to apologise to his followers for his “lack of interaction,” attributing it to a “bout of food poisoning”. 

On This Day

• 1693 – Date traditionally ascribed to Dom Perignon’s invention of champagne. 
• 1783 – Mount Asama erupts in Japan, killing about 1,400 people. The eruption causes a famine, which results in an additional 20,000 deaths.
• 1892 – The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home. She will be tried and acquitted for the crimes a year later. 
• 2020 – Beirut Port explosion: At least 220 people are killed and over 5,000 are wounded when 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate explodes in Beirut, Lebanon.

Deaths

• 1875 – Hans Christian Andersen, Danish novelist, short story writer, and poet (b. 1805).
• 1962 – Marilyn Monroe, American model and actress (b. 1926).
• 1999 – Victor Mature, American actor (b. 1913).

How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder

The Lizzie Borden murder case is one of the most famous in American criminal history. New England’s major crime of the Gilded Age, its barbarity captivated the national press. And the suspected killer was immortalised by an eerie rhyme passed down through generations:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

While the public largely believed that Borden committed the murders, the rhyme is not quite correct: the female victim was Borden’s stepmother, and the weapon wasn’t an ax, but rather a hatchet, a smaller, lighter tool. Also, the killer struck the victims around half as many times as stated in the rhyme, 19 blows rained down on 64-year-old Abby Borden, and 10 or 11 rendered the face of Lizzie Borden’s 69-year-old father, Andrew Borden, unrecognisable. Still, the rhyme does accurately record the sequence of the murders, which took place about an hour and a half apart on the morning of August 4th, 1892. 

In the early hours, after the discovery of the bodies, the public only knew that the assassin had struck the victims in broad daylight at their home on a busy street, one block from the town’s business district. There was no evident motive like robbery or sexual assault. Neighbours and passers-by heard nothing. No one saw a suspect enter or leave the Borden property.

Moreover, Andrew Borden was no ordinary citizen. Like other Fall River Bordens, he possessed wealth and standing. He had invested in mills, banks and real estate. But Andrew had never made a show of his good fortune. He lived on the unfashionable Second Street, in a modest house, now a spooky bed and breakfast, instead of on “The Hill,” Fall River’s lofty, leafy, silk-stocking enclave.

Lizzie Borden, then a 32-year-old who lived at home, longed to reside on The Hill. She knew her father could afford to move away from a neighbourhood increasingly dominated by Catholic immigrants. 

Police initially considered the killings the work of a man, probably a “foreigner.” Within a few hours of the murders, they arrested a suspect: an innocent Portuguese immigrant from the town’s new diaspora of European workers. 

On the day of the murders, Lizzie claimed that she’d come into the house from the barn and discovered her father’s body. She yelled for the Bordens’ 26-year-old Irish servant, Maggie Sullivan, who was resting in her third-floor room. She told Sullivan she needed a doctor and sent the servant across the street to the family physician’s house. He was not at home. 

Initially, this helped keep Lizzie off the suspect list. She was, after all, a Sunday school teacher at her wealthy Central Congregational Church. Members of her social class didn’t think a person like her would slaughter her parents. 

But during the interrogation, Lizzie’s answers to different police officers shifted. And her inability to summon a single tear aroused police suspicion. Then an officer discovered that Borden had tried to purchase deadly prussic acid from a nearby drugstore a day before the murders. 

Five days after the murders, authorities convened an inquest. Lizzie took the stand on each of its three days; the inquest was the only time she testified in court under oath.

Even more than the heap of inconsistencies that the police compiled, Lizzie’s testimony led her into a briar patch of seeming self-incrimination. She did not have a defence lawyer during what was a closed inquiry. But she was not without defenders. The family doctor, who staunchly believed in her innocence, testified that after the murders, he prescribed a double dose of morphine to help her sleep. Its side effects, he claimed, could account for her confusion. Her 41-year-old sister, Emma Borden, who also lived at home, claimed that the sisters harboured no anger toward their stepmother. 

However, authorities arrested Lizzie on August 11th, one week after the murders. The judge sent her to the county jail. This privileged suspect found herself confined to a cheerless 9.5-by-7.5-foot cell for the next nine months. 

Lizzie’s arrest provoked an uproar that quickly became national. Women’s groups rallied to her side, especially the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and suffragists. Borden’s supporters protested that at trial, she would not be judged by a jury of her peers, as women did not have the right to serve on juries.

Lizzie’s upper-class status benefited her throughout her ordeal. During the preliminary hearing, one of Boston’s most prominent defence lawyers joined the family attorney to advocate for her innocence. 

Her attorneys stressed that the prosecution offered no murder weapon and possessed no bloody clothes. As to the prussic acid, Lizzie was a victim of misidentification, they claimed. In addition, throughout the saga, her legion of supporters remained steadfast that Lizzie’s guilt was culturally inconceivable: A well-bred, virtuous Victorian woman, a “Protestant nun,” to use the words of the national president of the temperance union, could never commit patricide. 

At the preliminary hearing, Lizzie’s defence attorney  delivered a rousing closing argument. Her partisans erupted into loud applause. It was to no avail. The judge determined she was ‘probably guilty’ and should remain jailed until a state Superior Court trial. 

Neither the attorney general, who typically prosecuted capital crimes, nor the district attorney was eager to haul Lizzie into Superior Court, though both believed in her guilt. There were holes in the police’s evidence. And while Lizzie’s place in the local order was unassailable, her arrest had also provoked a groundswell of support.

Though he did not have to, the district attorney brought the case before a grand jury in November. He was not sure he would secure an indictment. Twenty-three jurors convened to hear the case on the charges of murder. They adjourned with no action. Then the grand jury reconvened on December 1st and heard dramatic testimony. 

Alice Russell, a single, pious, 40-year-old member of Central Congregational, was Lizzie’s close friend. Shortly after Andrew Borden was killed, Lizzie sent Sullivan to summon Alice. She slept in the Borden house for several nights after the murders, with the brutalised victims stretched out on mortician boards in the dining room. Russell had testified at the inquest, the preliminary hearing and earlier before the grand jury. But she had never disclosed one important detail. Distressed over her omission, Russell returned to the grand jury. She testified that on the morning after the murders, Lizzie had pulled a dress from a shelf in the pantry closet and proceeded to burn it in the cast iron coal stove. The grand jury indicted Lizzie the next day. 

The district attorney perhaps underestimated the legal and cultural impediments he faced. With her father’s money in hand, Lizzie could afford the best legal team to defend her, including a former Massachusetts governor who had appointed one of the three justices who would preside over the case. That justice delivered a slanted charge to the jury, which one major newspaper described as “a plea for the innocent.” The justices took other actions that stymied the prosecution, excluding testimony about prussic acid because the prosecution had not refuted that the deadly poison could be used for innocent purposes. 

Not surprisingly, the jury quickly decided to acquit Lizzie. They waited for an hour so it would not appear they’d made a hasty decision. 

The courtroom audience, the bulk of the press and women’s groups cheered Lizzie’s acquittal. But her life was altered forever. Two months after the innocent verdict, the Borden sisters moved to a large Victorian house on The Hill. Yet many people there and in the Central Congregational Church shunned her. Lizzie became Fall River’s curio, followed by street urchins and stared down whenever she appeared in public. She withdrew to her home, but even there, neighbourhood kids pestered Lizzie with pranks. 

Lizzie enjoyed traveling to Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., dining in style and attending the theatre. She and her sister Emma had a falling out in 1904, and Emma left the house in 1905. The sisters never saw each other again. Both died in 1927, Lizzie first and Emma nine days later. Both were buried in the same plot as their father and stepmother.

Last Week’s Birthdays

Meghan Markle (43), Billy Bob Thornton (69), Barack Obama (63), Lee Mack (56), Evangeline Lilly (45), Stephen Graham (51), Martin Sheen (84), Steven Berkoff (87), John C. McGinley (65), Mamie Gummer (41), Sam Worthington (48), Edward Furlong (47), Kevin Smith (54), Jason Momoa (45), Daisy May Cooper (38), Wesley Snipes (62), Michael Biehn (68), Emilia Fox (50), Dean Cain (58), J.K. Rowling (59), Christopher Nolan (54), Arnold Schwarzenegger (77), Lisa Kudrow (61), Hilary Swank (50), Laurence Fishburne (63), Frances de la Tour (80), Terry Crews (56), Jean Reno (76), Carel Struycken (76), and Wil Wheaton (52).