Whack Job!

Lizzie and Maggie meet in the garden to choose a method, and Maggie argues for the axe as the most personal weapon there is. In the workshop she watches Andrew fit a body into a coffin too small for it by cutting off its legs — and their conversation is interrupted by John Morse, the brother of Lizzie's dead mother. Morse wants a $200 loan to open a butcher shop. Andrew refuses on principle; Morse pulls a knife on Maggie; Andrew invites him to dinner anyway.

The dinner gathers Morse, Nance O'Neil, and Bertha Manchester. Afterward Maggie shows Lizzie the scars Bertha's whip left on her and proposes killing Bertha first, to prove they can. That night they lure her downstairs with a story about broken china. Lizzie's axe sticks; Maggie finishes it with a smaller one. They stage a robbery, wash their clothes in a lake, and go home. A week later the body is found, and police arrest painters already under suspicion for theft. Lizzie, unsettled that Maggie froze, asks for the first strike when it is her parents' turn.

John Vinnicum Morse was real. He arrived at the Borden house on August 3, 1892, stayed the night, and left the next morning to visit relatives, which gave him an alibi for the killings. Why he came is still debated; a loan for a butcher shop and a knife held to the maid are the show's.

Bertha Manchester was real, and her death is one of the strangest footnotes to the case. She was 22 when she was killed with an axe in the kitchen of her family's Fall River farmhouse on May 30, 1893, six days before Lizzie's trial began. For a few days some people wondered whether it pointed to a killer still loose in the city. It did not: José Correia, a young Portuguese farmhand who had worked for her father, was convicted and served about twenty years before being pardoned on condition he return to the Azores. The series moves the killing to before August 1892, hands it to Lizzie and Maggie, and swaps the convicted man for a wrongful arrest.

Whack Job! is the clearest example of how this season works. It takes a real name from the edges of the Borden story and rebuilds it as evidence for the show's answer. If you want to know which characters are historical, the cast guide separates the real people from the invented ones; for how far the season departs from the 1892 timeline as a whole, see the true story page.