"Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one" -American nursery rhyme.
"Lizzie? Lizzie!" A hard male voice echoed through a seemingly empty house on the corner of a London Street.
A middle age man clambered up the wooden staircase of the centuries old house, peering into bedrooms looking for his daughter.
"Elizabeth! Answer me dammit!" There was a loud, dull thump and he turned and faced the door of his own bedroom which he shared with his wife, Mrs. Borden.
"Lizzie?" He called and walked slowly down the hall and to the bedroom, he pushed the ajar door open and the hinges squealed and whined shrilly.
The sight he beheld shocked him.
The decorative carpet and hardwood floor was splattered with crimson droplets and the floral wall paper was decorated with a similar spray. In the middle of the floor a large, growing red puddle flooded the wood panels and soaked into the flooring.
The puddle surrounded the head of a similarly aged woman with greying hair that was matted with gore like a hellish halo, and soaked into the pink cotton blouse the corpse wore.
Two feet away lay a heavy steel blade axe with a wooden handle, the blade stained with the scarlet blood as was the handle that had been broken in half and dropped as if from shock or panic.
Mr. Borden stumbled back with his hand over his mouth before leaning over the banister and vomiting his stomach clean. Pale and shaking with shock and fear he ran down the stairs and to the living room where he fumbled with the rotary phone
"Operator! I need the police!" He stammered into the phone, "My wife is dead! There's blood everywhere!"
The operator sent the police swiftly and asked the shaken man if there was anyone else in the home, to which he replied with an unsure realization. "My daughter, My daughter Lizzie. She's supposed to be home but I don't know where she is for sure."
As soon as he said that he felt a sharp, sudden pain between his shoulder blades and he jerked forward over the coffee table as the butt of a wooden handle rose above his head and came down hard, missing his cranium slightly and bashing his shoulder.
He turned and pushed off his attacker into the brick mantle. He pinned the small, frail looking young woman to the hearth and wrestled the wooden handle out of her grasp as she screamed and cursed at him. Spitting Like a wild cat she gave up the handle and scratched at him and grabbed, as if reaching for his thin, wrinkled throat to throttle him.
She managed to fight free from his grip and darted up the stairs with her father in close pursuit, yelling her name in desperation as she slammed her parent's bedroom door shut and locked it, listening to her father bang on the wood and plead with her from the other side.
The police arrived shortly after and followed the man's fraught cries upstairs where they forced open the door and knocked it off its hinges. They looked around the gory room and found no sight of the girl until one bobby knelt down to look at the body of the former Mrs. Borden and saw a thin, bony hand disappear from sight.
Lizzie was dragged out from under the bed like a limp rag doll, devoid of emotion, and handcuffed before being dragged down to police station while an ambulance and more police cars parked in front of the house as well as a mob of onlookers and reporters who photographed her and forced microphones into her face only to be pushed back by cops.
She was shoved into the back seat of a police car as journalists snapped pictures of her, getting the perfect view of her face as she stared out at then with no expression and two dark, empty eyes.