WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET EMOTIONAL:

On the day before the murders, Lizzie joined Abby and Andrew for lunch for the first time in five years -- an air-tight alibi, for who would do murder after doing lunch? That evening, she paid a call on Alice Russell and craftily planted some red herrings. If Machiavelli had witnessed this demonstration of the fine Wasp hand he would have gone into cardiac arrest.

"I have a feeling that something is going to happen," she told Alice. "A feeling that somebody is going to do something." She hammered the point home with stories about her father's "enemies." He was such a ruthless businessman, she said, that "they" all hated him, and she would not put it past "them" to burn down the house.

When she returned home, Uncle John had arrived with plans to spend the night. Since she was Not Speaking to him, she went directly to her room.

The next day, August 4, 1892, the temperature was already in the eighties at sunrise, but that didn't change the Bordens' breakfast menu. Destined to be the most famous breakfast in America, it was printed in newspapers everywhere and discussed by aficionados of the murders for years to come: Alexander Woollcott always claimed it was the motive.

If Lizzie had only waited, Abby and Andrew probably would have died anyway, for their breakfast consisted of mutton soup, sliced mutton, pancakes, bananas, pears, cookies, and coffee. Here we recognize the English concept of breakfast-as-weapon designed to overwhelm French tourists and other effete types.

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