The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (30 page)

Frankie Silver was the first woman to be hung in the state of North Carolina. She killed her husband, Charlie Silver, on December 22, 1831.

Frankie, born Frances Stewart, had been a young girl of about seventeen years old when she married Charlie Silver, who was probably all of eighteen. It was a hard life that they lived, and within a year, Frankie had given birth to a baby girl. Her life was miserable. The Silvers lived in an isolated area, miles from the nearest town, and Charlie had a habit of leaving his young wife alone for days at a time while he was off drinking and chasing women. To add to Frankie's misery, when Charlie came home drunk, he was abusive. Everyone knew that Charlie beat Frankie. They may not have approved, but wife beating was an accepted practice in those days. There was the unwritten, but accepted law that was called “rule of thumb,” which said that a man shouldn't beat his wife with a stick that was wider than his thumb. Charlie, it was said, broke the rule.

On December 23, 1831, Frankie came to the house where Charlie's family lived to tell them that Charlie hadn't been home for days. Their cabin was cold, she'd burned up all the firewood, and she was taking the baby
and going home to her folks. She didn't care if Charlie never came home again. Charlie's family searched the woods and river for him, thinking maybe he'd fallen through the ice or been attacked by an animal.

Finally, Charlie's father hiked forty miles across the mountains to Tennessee, where there lived a slave who, folks said, could “conjure.” The slave was gone, but his master used the conjure ball, a ball on a string that moved like a pendulum, over a map that Charlie's father had drawn. It stopped right over the crude sketch of Charlie's cabin. That's where to look for Charlie, said the man.

Meanwhile, a neighbor, Jack Collis, explored the abandoned cabin. He noticed that there was an extraordinary amount of ash in the fireplace; Frankie's last fire seemed to have consumed a huge amount of wood and burned very hot and very long. The ashes were suspiciously greasy. Poking around in the fireplace, Collis discovered bits of human bone. Neighbors pried up the floorboards and found a puddle of blood “large as a hog's liver.” Next, the family and friends searched around outside the house and found grisly parts of Charlie—parts that wouldn't burn—hidden all over. In a recently dug hole filled with ashes was the iron heel of one of his hunting shoes. A hollow tree stump concealed his liver and heart. Charlie's family buried the body
parts as quickly as they found them. When they found more parts, instead of opening the grave, they dug a new grave. As a result, Charlie Silver has three graves.

On January 10, 1832, Frankie was arrested for the murder of her husband. But there was a problem: Frankie stood four feet, ten inches high, and Charlie was big, weighing twice as much as she. How could she have dragged his body to the fireplace and chopped it up herself? She had to have had help. Her mother and her brother were arrested, only to be released for lack of evidence. Frankie was brought to trial alone, and within two days she was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. The prosecution—and the legend—accused her of hacking up Charlie and burning his pieces out of jealousy for his affairs with other women. Frankie never got to tell her side of the story because she was not allowed to testify.

LIZZIE BORDEN'S FORTY WHACKS

In August 1892, spinster Lizzie Borden was thirty-two years old, and her sister Emma was forty. The Borden family, including the girls' father, Andrew, and their stepmother, Abby, lived in a dark, cramped wooden house in a shabby neighborhood in Fall River,
Massachusetts. The only running water came from the kitchen sink, and the only toilet was located in the cellar. They didn't even own a horse and buggy.

Andrew Borden was, ironically, a retired undertaker and very rich. But he also was a miser. He had married plain, heavyset Abby because he needed a wife and unpaid housekeeper. Emma and Lizzie refused to call her Mother.

Lizzie experienced some severe trauma in her childhood. For example, she loved animals and kept a coop of pigeons in the family's barn. When small boys started breaking into the barn, presumably to get at the pigeons, Andrew Borden's solution was to chop the heads off all the birds. Lizzie later recalled asking her father, “Where are their heads?”

Perhaps her father's cruelty to her pigeons fueled Lizzie's own inherent cruelty, or perhaps the trauma of the pigeon experience merely hardened Lizzie's heart, for not long after, Lizzie chopped off the head of her stepmother's cat. The cat had pushed open the door to Lizzie's bedroom, where Lizzie had been entertaining guests. Lizzie carried the cat downstairs, put its little head on the chopping block, and chopped it off. For days Abby wondered where her cat had gone. Finally Lizzie told her, “You go downstairs, and you'll find your cat.”

On the morning of August 4, 1892, while Andrew was out checking on one of his businesses and Emma was away visiting friends, Lizzie told the Borden's maid, Bridget, that her stepmother had gone off to see a sick friend. Later in the morning, Andrew returned home, carrying a small parcel wrapped in paper. It contained a broken lock that he had picked off the floor of one of his properties. Bridget opened the door for him, and as she stood at the entrance, letting him in, she heard a sound that was very unusual in the Borden house. Lizzie Borden was standing at the top of the stairs, laughing out loud.

Like a solicitous daughter, Lizzie helped her father relax on the dark horsehair sofa, so that he could nap. She pulled off his shoes and folded his coat under his head for a pillow. She then told Bridget about a sale of goods at the local shop, perhaps to get her out of the house. Bridget said she'd go later and climbed the stairs to her little attic room to lie down for a while. She was roused shortly after 11
A.M.
by Lizzie's shout, “Come down! Father's dead!”

Bridget and Lizzie quickly called for doctors and friends galore, and by 11:45, there was a crowd gathered outside the house. The doctor, after examining Andrew Borden's gory remains, asked for a sheet to cover the body.

Lizzie answered, “Better get two.”

And where was Mrs. Borden? First Lizzie repeated the story that her stepmother had gone to see a sick friend. Then she added that she might have heard Abby come in and that maybe she was upstairs. Bridget and another woman climbed the stairs to find Abby, with her head crushed in, lying in a pool of congealed blood on the floor of the upstairs guest bedroom. During the funeral, the police searched Lizzie's closet for a bloodstained dress, to no avail. The following week, she was arrested for the murder of her father and stepmother.

Although there was great evidence that could prove Lizzie was the murderer, she was acquitted. The jury saw her as too much of a lady to have committed such a gruesome crime. After the trial, Lizzie and Emma, now rich, bought themselves a fourteen-room mansion in a neighborhood called the Hill, where the rest of the gentry lived. Though it was never proved, the rest of the gentry living up on the Hill had to wonder, did Lizzie Borden kill her father by hitting him with an axe ten times and her stepmother nineteen? And could she have hit them hard enough to crush Abby Borden's skull, slice Andrew's eye in half, sever his nose, and render his face into an unrecognizable pulp? They never
bothered to find out. They didn't care to socialize with Lizzie Borden—not one bit.

“Lacking ladylike poison, Lizzie (Borden) did what every over-civilized, understated Wasp is entirely capable of doing once we finally admit we're mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more: She went from Anglo to Saxon in a trice.” —FLORENCE KING

ONE MORE REASON TO FEAR CLOWNS

John Wayne Gacy was an overweight, unattractive man with a passion for raping and murdering young males. Like so many other serial killers, Gacy had delusions, or at least dreams of grandeur. He wanted to be a local icon, so he joined local political groups, threw parties, and dressed as a clown named Pogo to entertain the local kids. His efforts were well received, and he was popular with children and parents alike, until authorities found the bodies of scores of neighborhood boys buried in his basement. In 1980, a jury convicted Mr. Gacy of murdering thirty-three young men, and he was executed fourteen years later.

NO WILLY WONKA