tv, legal scholar cara robertson discusses the 1893 murder trial of lizzie borden who accused of murdering her father and stepmother in falls river, massachusetts. hello. good afternoon. welcome to politics and prose. thank you so much for coming out on this really beautiful day. we're pleased to have cara robertson here to talk about her new book the trial of lizzie borden. before we get started a little housekeeping, let's take a moment to silence our cell phones. i'll do that too. we're recording, c-span is here with us today and we don't want any extra noise and interrupts. after cara speaks there will be time for a q&a. so if you have a question, would you like to ask her, if you could use this microphone here so that we could pick it up on all of our stuff that would be great. many of us -- many of you know that we have a lot going on here at politics and prose including at the wrarve at union market and check out our events calendar and our social media. and also if are a fan of this book you might like the true book crime book that meets in the coffee house. cara robertson is a lawyer, educated at harvard, oxnard and stanford law school. formerly a supreme court law clerk, served as a legal adviser to the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia at the hague and a visiting scholar at stanford law school. she started researching the lizzie borden story while at harvard. at the trial is robertson's first book and addressing one of the most infamous murders in american history. the murders of andrew and abby borden an the subsequent trial of their daughter lizzie were so sensationalized they remain a ubiquitous part of american lore now over years later. in details and using primary sources like court transcript and lizzie own letters providing a examination of the case. she am is faced how the social expectations and biases of the gilded age influenced the treatment and set the stage for the legend that borden has become. and now here is cara robertson. >> thank you. >> i'm not expecting a call. this is just to make sure i don't speak too long. thank you so much for coming. particularly on such a beautiful day. also, i think that when you've been working on a subject as long as i have, there is always a fear that you're involved in some sort of intellect all stockholm syndrome, and once the book is out, people want to hear more about it. i'll tell you about what drew me into the case to give you a sense of what my approach is. and then although it is a very familiar case to many people, i'll give you a little bit of background about the story so that we're all on the same page for the question-and-answer period. and i'm looking forward to knowing what it is that grabs you about the case. i started out by thinking that something like this, a great public trial would be a good way to get a window into the gilded age. which was a time of great change and intention in american society. also one that seems uncan illy like our own at this point. and some of that is because obviously in a trial the lawyers need to explain in a way that is comprehensible to people who are specifically supposed to be representative of the community at large. the jury. how something might have happened. and so it gives one, i think, good insight into the stories that a culture wants and expects to here. and it also -- i found while doing the research, it made me question also the shark distinction that many people from a law background make between what the legal professionals and what the lawyers might argument to the jury. it seems that the same cultural assumptions were at play when the lawyers and judges were discussing the evidence rulings as when the lawyers were making their arguments specifically to the jury. so that is just something that i had in the back of my mind. and then as for this particular story, you know, i must say i was attracted to the mystery, that is technically speaking, it is a whodonit. and even if you're sure who did it, it is certainly a why done it. but in that mystery is almost a locked room story. a locked room mystery out of the golden age. it is very there is a small space. there are limited number of suspects. it is very difficult as a practical matter to understand how anyone could have done it at all. and it is certainly difficult to imagine how anyone besides the person who was ultimately put on trial for it could have done it. and so it has some of the, if you will, the pleasures of that kind of puzzling out for those of us who like mysteries. but it also has a mythic quality. in the book, i've said that it is a locked room mystery but as written by sofo cleez that it is added space, a story of an extremely unhappy family and the tensions that erupt that many people see as symbolic of wider social questions or familial relations. so that is basically my approach. and i should probably give you a non-spoiler alert. which is that i don't actually solve the mystery in the course of the story. that i thought it was important to lay out the story from the beginning to the verdict to the strange cultural after life of the case. without officially taking a position. so that it would be as even handed as possible and would allow the readers to puzzle it out for themselves. there is also something that i think that always feels a little bit of like a cheat when you're reading a nonfiction narrative and there is a solution to the central mystery that it is hard not to think that -- and i think that this has been the case with prior works on the borden mystery, you do have a sense that people are really emphasizing parts of the story. and again that was something that i didn't want to do. so anyway, all of that is the background. and just to begin with, what we know for certain and that is on august 4th, 1892, andrew and abby borden, an elderly couple, were found hacked to death in the words of their local paper, in their fall river massachusetts home. it seemed initially like the work of a mad man. mrs. borden had been feld by 19 blows in the upstairs guest room. and then about an hour and a half later, after he had returned from a business downtown, mr. borden was himself killed by ten blows while he was having a nap on the sitting room sofa. so it was a pretty horrifying scene regardless of anything else. i mean that that alone was enough to generate front page news. but the police soon discovered some anomalies. they expected, as i said, that this was the work of a mad man and that some crazed stranger would be found wandering the streets with a ax or a hatchet. but they noted two central facts. the first, was as i mentioned in describing the murderers, the interval between the murderers seemed odd. that it was strange that someone from the outside would have come in, killed mrs. borden, waited at least an hour and a half to kill mr. borden and then departed. it was a small house. quite narrow. with no central halls because it had been a converted two-family tenant house so there weren't that many places to hide and there were other people in the house. so if someone from the outside had come in, that person would have to allude the others. and the second more important to have been locked. front door was certainly locked and the back door was locked and that left a side door that was kept closed and latched by custom of the house. and was often in the sight of the family house keeper but it wasn't conclusively shown that it was locked throughout. but that still left little room for an outside perpetrator to have come in. so the police turn their attention to the people known to be in the house at time. there were three others who woke up in the house that morning, who survived the carnage. the first was a man named john morse. he was andrew borden's brother-in-law. he had been the brother of andrew's first wife, abby, who was killed upstairs as i mentioned was the second wife. and he arrived the day before to pay a visit on the bordens. and that seems suspicious to many people. and he was also an attractive suspect because he was an outsider. he was from the+úî/z west. he was a horse trader. people said he consorted with gyp gypsy traders so he seemed plausible. but he had an alibi that was straight out of a detective novel. shortly after breakfast, he had gone to visit other relatives in a different part of town and he had been riding on the the horse car with six priests. and while -- if this were an agoage a christy, he would have doon it. so that left two women in the house at the time of the murders. the first bridget sullivan, the family's irish catholic housekeeper. who incidentally was called maggie but everyone except mrs. borden an the reason waz that maggie was the name of their last housekeeper and they just couldn't be bothered to learn a new name. so, anyway, mrs. borden did maggie, a.k.a. bridget sullivan, another favor was was to askler to wash windows that morning inside and outside. so that meant that bridget sullivan had to be outside washing windows if sight of other people at the time that mrs. borden was killed so that seemed to rule her out of that possible murder and it was thought that whoever killed mrs. borden had killed mr. borden as well. at the time that mr. borden was killed, she was upstairs in attic room napping. family had suffered from some food poisoning the day before she was felling unwell and getting a head start on her usual thursday half day. so that left one person and that was andrew borden's younger daughter lizzie who was 32 years old, unmarried and still living at home. she had an older sister named emma who was about ten years old ber but she was away visiting friends for two weeks so she was in the clear. and there were a number of suspicious things about lizzie. the first was that she hadn't actually looked for her stepmother when she discovered her father's body at around 11:00. she said that her stepmother had received a note and had gone out. no note was ever found and investigation failed to disclose any potential sender of the note. it was also the case that she seemed to give shifty accounts of where she was. she said that she was downstairs ironing handkerchieves at the time that mr. borden died. a task that was significantly left undone. and that she was outside in the barn looking variously for a sinker for a fishing line or a piece of tin to fix a screen. and also eating pears in the upper part of the barn at at time that her father was murdered. all of this probably wouldn't have been enough to place her under arrest. but it was also discovered that she had tried to buy poison the day before the murders. she had gone to the local drug store or she was identified as a woman who had gone to the local drug store to be totally precise and asked for pressic acid to clean a steel -- cape and we only sell that on doctor's prescriptions and this particular woman had insisted that she had done so on various occasions. but to one believed that she had actually -- that woman had managed to purchase the acid and the bordens themselves were not poisoned. but it went along way towards explaining why a woman might turn to a readily available household implement to execute a murder as planned, that she had already formed. poison was considered to be a woman's weapon and so that held a lot of sway. and it also was discovered that the family seemed implaquablely divided between the generations. there was ill feeling and that lizzie in particular had disliked her stepmother. so, all of these things culminated in lizzie borden's arrest. and that catapulted what would have been probably a passing horror into something much darker and a case of international significance. so at this point, i'm just going to read you the description of the newspaper coverage of the opening of the trial. the trial of lizzie borden according to the providence journal would be one of the greatest murder trials in the journal" would be one of the greatest murder trials in the world's history. "the new york world" more modestly declared it the trial of the most extraordinary criminal case in the history of new england. the "boston globe" proclaimed it will be impossible to exaggerate the interest felt and manifested by intelligent readers throughout the country in the outcome of this trial of a comparatively young woman for the murder of her father and stepmother. the "globe" estimated that among its own readership there are at this moment 100,000 persons devoting what they are pleased to call their minds in a hopeless analysis of this tremendous case. to satisfy this demand so many correspondents and reporters came to new bedford, to see whether the new bedford had a more unique collection of writers were ever to detail to cover a murder trial. some of them, you know, included many of what you might call the bold-faced names of the day, journalists who were so famous that they themselves wrote memoirs and were -- were talked of in the same way as significant literary figures. one was a man named james joe howard jr. who covered the case for the "boston globe." he was at the time the highest paid correspondent in america. he traveled, it was stayed, with a blond stenographer, and he devoted a great deal of attention of bringing his readers into the courtroom so that people could follow along in the proceedings, not just what actually happened while the -- while court was in session but also the sense of urgency that so many felt in their attempts to get into the courthouse. the fact that so many women were in the audience. the numbers of women steadily increased throughout the trial so that by the end more than half were women. some even put the number higher, and he would scan the crowd for, you know, pretty faces as he was wanting to do and other celebrities of the day, you know, would receive mention. he turned minor court officials into characters so that the readers would have the -- you know, the pleasure of reading about their, you know, the familiar people and the pomposity of the sheriff or the eloquence of the lawyer. he even reported on the activities as what he referred to as the cow of the day which was a cow that just happened to be across the street whose mooing who was kind of auditory at different moments and seemed to provide a commentary. the "globe" said that the -- that joe howard's cow will go down in history on the same level as mrs. o'leary's cow, the cow that, you know, started the chicago -- the chicago fire. and in terms of what they were looking at, of course, the person who was of most interest to all of the correspondents was lizzie borden herself, and she presented a conundrum for people because she had this quite extraordinary self-possession, and that was read in opposing ways. so that for those who were inclined to think that she was guilty, they saw her as one newspaper wrote as the sphinx of coolness, someone with this detachment that suggested the kind of masculine nerve that was consistent with premeditated violence and not consistent with, you know, late 19th century notions of proper femininity. for those who were inclined to be sympathetic, and as happened turned out to be most reporters from out of town especially like joe howard, they saw this consistent with the kind of in-born dignity, a mark of ladyhood, as they would put it, that this was someone who ticked all the boxes of respectable femininity. she had been active in -- she had been active in her local church and she was engaged in all the culturally sanctioned activities that one might expect of an unmarried woman in her day. for those reporters her behavior is sort exactly what you would expect. she acquitted herself admirably, and that she was just bearing up in an impossible situation. and it was also noted that -- that -- and this gives you some idea of the theater that's involved in the trial. there's a moment where the prosecution displays a bag that happens to hold the skulls of the bordens, and lizzie borden promptly fainted then, and -- and earning the approval of all journalists, even the pretty hostile irish catholic paper from fall river. so there is the sense that her own behavior, her own demeanor during the trial was central to the question of her guilt or innocence as the argument being made by the lawyers. and i should say that the book is mostly about the trial so i'll just very briefly give you a sense that for the prosecution as was indicated by my summary of the murders, the trial is one of a case of exclusive opportunity mixed with a powerful motive. basically no one else could have done it. therefore, lizzie borden did it, and we know that she hated her stepmother. they are largely silent on the question of i would she killed her father. that seems to be something that the prosecutors can't quite grapple with themselves. that all the focus about the household is about lizzie and her stepmother, not about her father so that the only thing the prosecution can really argue is that lizzie borden meant to call her stepmother and then didn't get out in time to establish her own alibi say that she was transformed, and that's the word they used, transformed sort like jekyll and hyde into a murderess who then kills her father, too, and you can imagine the defense makes a lot of that. they ridicule the prosecution for not being able to three what they thought was a reasonable explanation of the father's murder. they also point to many suspicious% the vicinity. my favorite is the dr. handy's wild-eyed young man who is spotted staring at various people and staring into the ground. essentially the argument is, look, it's not your business to unravel the mystery so that if you have any kind of doubt at all, then you can't send this woman to the gallows. the trial lasted two weeks which is a long period for that period. but it's worth noting that the jury was unanimous on the first ballot. they found that they were in total agreement and really didn't need to discuss the evidence. however they waited in the jury room for about an hour and a half so that it would seem like they were properly deliberative. and then when they came out to deliver their verdict, the foreman was so excited that he couldn't wait for the clerk to finish the question and he blurted out not guilty, and at that point there's pandemonium in the courthouse and tears, many congratulations to lizzie borden and her supporters. and the assumption is that lizzie borden will return to fall river and live down her notoriety, but her supporters cooled in their enthusiasm pretty quickly. people began to wonder if she didn't do it, then who did. she found that the pews around her own seat at her local church were empty when she tried to return. and this church formed the bedrock of her support during the trial and that pretty much set the tone for her -- for her treatment in the polite circles of society. her sister who i mentioned was ten years older and a bit of a mother figure with her lived with her. they had moved from the more cramped house to what you might call a mcmansion in the elite residential district of fall river, and they lived there 12 years ago with lizzie borden increasingly isolated until they had a mysterious fight and the rift persisted until the sisters died within a month of each other. lizzie borden lived her last days alone, shunned by the people that she most wished to know, and it always struck me that -- that also shows the nerve that is remarked upon at trial and possibly also the provincialism that she had a sense that her universe was fall river and that's where she was going to live. i think it's that piece of the story, too, that contributes to the legend because very little about her later life is known for sure and so it enhances the -- the enigma that she presented at trial. and i just want to be sensitive to the question period, so i -- i think i'll leave it there and then see where you all want to go with this. thank you very much for your attention. [ applause ] i should say if there are no questions i'm going to talk some more. >> i'm sorry. >> just kidding. >> is this on? >> yeah. >> these days, of course, we'd expect marissa hargitay with the dna stuff and all that sort of thing. was there evidence? what happened to the evidence? do you think there was any travcy travesty of justice or travesty of evidence that went on? >> in one sense there was state of the art csi fall river and the police came in and picked up pieces of carpeting and picked up wood molding. the bodies were autopsied. the stomachs were sent to harvard, so in -- you know, in some ways they did what they could. this is before fingerprint evidence, long before dna but even before fingerprint is used as identification let alone, you know -- let alone for investigative purposes. and then, on the other hand, you can say they really botched things because there was nothing like the preservation of the crime scene that you would expect. i mean, one of the striking things about reading the accounts is how many people are just wandering through the crime scene on the day of the murders, and we know that based on the testimony that mrs. borden was moved so there are things that, you know, insofar as they hinge on the exact placement of the body or the way that the bodies fell, we can't real be certain about them. so i think it's kind of a mixed -- a mixed bag, but, i mean, one thing would i say is that based on how quickly the jury came to its decision -- i actually don't think that more evidence would have made that much difference. that this was a -- this was a story about what people believe someone like lizzie borden might be capable as opposed to just a question of whether or not she did it, that i think it wasn't -- you know it wasn't what you might call reasonable doubt as much as kind of an unreasoning certainty or anxiety at least not to -- to believe that that was impossible. yes. >> thank you for educating me. i've been hearing about the lizzie borden case, hearing of the existence of the thing for, you know, all my life but never really ever known any detail about the murder or the case. but it does strike me that it would make possibly good material for a film, and i don't know whether there have even been films, good or bad films made on the case up to this point in time, but the real question i have is do you think it would make a good film? and do you think it especially one based on any -- any new material that you have in in this book? and another related question would be would it be possible in your opinion to make a good film with this without changing the story in any -- in any significant way, without -- certainly without changing the facts or, i don't know, adding in, you know, a romantic interest or whatever. >> yeah. these are really -- >> just comment on the cinema potential of all this. >> yeah. it is -- it is a story that's been retold over and over again in many genres, including film, or, you know, a tv movie and a couple of films, and plays, a ballet, an opera. i just recently saw a rock musical, but it -- which was good, by the way. i recommend it, but all of them resort to heavy fictionalizing particularly on the point that you raise is that people seem to find that the story is kind of incomplete without a romance. >> and that the -- you know, the festering tensions in the house hold don't -- plus a money motive don't seem to provide an adequate motive for dramatic purposes, that there needs to be, you know, a thwarted romance. the most recent movie puts lizzy and bridget in a relationship and that hats practical -- i mean, it affords some practical help which is it's easier if they were in it together from the point of view from the cleanup, but there's no particular historical basis for that. >> right. >> so i -- i do think that the trial can be inherently dramatic. of course, i'm biased because that's what my book is about but i do think that that would provide a way to capture the drama. there are real highs and lows in the story and with the skulls, all these moments of great theater, and, you know, there's still the -- the question of -- which i think we struggle with in many other contexts, too, trying to understand human behavior, you know. how is it that someone who led basically a normal life for 32 years might have committed two horrible murders in one day and then went on to live a basically normal life afterwards? >> right. so maybe -- maybe in a contemporary sense the lack of a romance might be a good thing to do in a film. in other words, it would give movie reviewers something to say about this film and how it differs and that films shouldn't need a romance. >> mm-hmm. thank you. hi. >> hi. >> i was wondering what precedent, if anything, you think this case set for law enforcement officials and court officials handling similar cases in the near future? >> yeah, i struggled with this one because i think that it doesn't -- it doesn't do much in the doctrinal sense because it was -- because it was so out of the ordinary. you know, so that -- it's hard to imagine the rulings, for example, on evidence in the case, two significant rulings that favored the defense were the exclusion of the attention to buy poison. the jury never heard about her attempt to buy poison, and the jury never got to hear her inquest testimony, which was lizzie borden's only testimony under oath. both of those rules were criticized with being inconsistent with current evidence law, even if you could argue them on both sides. it seems pretty clear the fact that lizzie borden was not just a woman but a particular kind of woman had an affect on how the black letter law was applied to the place. so i don't think i offered much precedent, but i do think that's a real interesting question. thank you. hi. >> hi. really enjoyed your talk. >> thank you. >> and i enjoyed the book. i have two questions. one is kind of technical, and the other is more overarching. first one, overarching question. you've touched on this a little bit but i'm curious as to what your take is why we're still fascinated with this case. what it it is that keeps it current and in our interest? and then the second question is if lizzie borden did do the murders, if we assume that just for the sake of argument, how do you think that she was found never to have any bloodh);u-÷ on her? that seems like an amazing little detail that if she committed it, how could she not have had a trace of the blood. >> i'll take the second one blood. obviously that's a huge part of the defense case. and the short answer is she burned a dress the sunday after the murders. it was a dress that had been stained with paint and she was able to demonstrate that via testimony from the dressmaker and also the painter. but it's also clear that the police searched the house and looked for all her dresses but had not found one that was stained with paint. so the prosecution clearly thought that was the explanation. it's also true that the medical experts all testified that whoever committed the crimes would have been spattered on some part of their body. depends on which particular murder we're talking about. so i'm not sure if the burnt dress even explains all that have given the practical problems of the cleanup. but, you know, that's pretty much what the prosecution's theory was. and as to, you know, why we're still fascinating, it's a truly horrible case that ended with an acquittal which leaves it much more open-ended than a case that ended with a conviction. it's hard to know what an acquittal really means. do they think she didn't do it? did they want her to do it but didn't get away with it. i think there's a mythic quality in this question -- that it's hard -- hard to understand how somebody who seemed so normal transformed into such a violent murderess without benefit of, you know, the tonic that turns jekyll into hyde. thank you. >> i once read a book about another famous massachusetts trial some decades later on sacco and vanzetti. it was an interesting book to read because it pointed out some injustices in the prosecutor's office and the defense and the judge failed in his duties, so in the end he concluded there was no conclusion which could come to which made it an interesting book to read. what's your judgment about the quality of justice in massachusetts at the time of this trial? >> well, i thought the lawyers were excellent on both sides. and i should -- you know, one of the many things i left out for this short talk is that the prosecution was led by a man named hosea nowlton, a man who went on to become the attorney general of massachusetts and his junior in the case is william moody, a friend of theodore roosevelt and ends up on the supreme court in addition to having an excellent record as a trial lawyer. and on the defense side, lizzy borden put her considerable inheritance to good use very quickly in hiring expensive legal talent from boston. one a trial lawyer named melvin adams who was also a bit of a dandy. he used to have a little curl right there before the trial. and most significantly the former governor of massachusetts, a man named george robinson who was very folksy. i almost could hear a southern accent, though, of course, he was from massachusetts, or springfield, so there's no way he had one, but he had that heir of just stopping by to chat with the jury and being extremely reasonable. so that's not really an answer to -- to the quality of justice, but i think she was -- that the lawyering was good on both sides. >> my interest in this case goes back to seventh grade, but peaked there and i haven't really thought about it but i got interested it in there because my cousin ed raden wrote a book that you probably know, about the case. it was a best-seller back actually in the early '60s, and ed took a different tact. he was a journalist in addition to a crime writer, and he basically decided she's innocent and picked the guilty one. now you know who he picked. >> yes. >> as guilty one. and you don't have to solve the case now, but do you think he probably was right? >> no. i think he -- i think he was a terrific writer, and it's a great book, you know, so i recommend it highly as a read, but -- can i spoil the book? i don't want to ruin your cousin's sales. >> no, no. i don't think he's at risk of that at all. >> he fingers the servant, bridget sullivan, and, you know, it makes sense, if it's not lizzie borden it makes sense that it would be bridget sullivan. but i would say he brings to bear a lot of the prejudices that would have been very familiar to late 19th century readers she -- i mean, although his book is much later. lizzie borden's lawyer at one point wonders out loud, you know works in the natural course of things should be the party suspected? you know, the stranger, and he might as we will have said, you know, the imgrandparent or lizzy borden. and so, you know, his book also has a -- yeah, so i would say that it incorporates some of those biasses in that the only explanation for why she would have done it is that she just didn't want to wash the windows on that day and it just pushed her over the edge. >> so without solving this case, tell us who you think probably but not certainly done it. >> well, this is -- you can imagine -- >> you're not convicting them but i don't want you to exonerate them them either. >> sure. sure. this is the question i get the most. i would have to say it's hard to imagine how anyone else besides lizzy borden could have done it. it's also true that after looking through everything i am struck by how difficult it would have been for her to do it, too. i think that i was more smug when i first started about it, that this being a case about the biasses of a particular era leading to some blindnesses on the part of the men who were conducting the trial. i do think it's harder than that, but, you know, i do come back to see it's hard to see how it could have been anyone else and i'm content to let it be unsolved. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> i only read the first chapter, but i read a lot of reviews, and a number of them seem to be bringing up the adjoining door connecting the rooms and the ring that she wore, and seemed to be creating a relationship between the father and -- father and daughter. >> yeah. so this is -- you know, i struggle -- in some talks i've talked about that and in others i haven't. there are many odd things about the family, and one that seems to particularly grab people's attention is the way in which the house has no feng-shui to put it mildly. it's a converted two-family tenement house, which means the upstairs and downstairs are the same. there's no central hall. and so what that means for the upstairs is that the bedrooms open on to each other. and at the time of the proper dispute to which i had allude, that either raised the tension in the borden household or, you know, created some new grievance, the bordens lock and move furniture to separate l lizzie's bedroom from the parents bedroom. so that now -- for example, if you were going to the house, which is a b & b, which you can walk from the second floor to the front and back but then you would not have been able to because the doors that separated the daughter suite of rooms from the parent suite of rooms was locked and the furniture was moved in front of it. i think this gives us an example of the way in which we bring our own biasses and preoccupations to this kind of case. i think it's not a coincidence that in the '90s people looked at the fact of the case and said this is an incest story. this is a story about sexual abuse and someone who struck back against a father who victimized her and the stepmother who was complicit in the -- in the victimization. and it suddenly seems very obvious, and there are little details like lizzie borden had given her father a ring and he wore it an his finger always and he's buried with it, though he wore no ring to commemorate his wedding to his second wife. but it overlooks the -- that sort of analysis just shows us more about our own personal concerns at the time. many of the things that are shown to be signs of that kind of relationship would have been equally true of unmarried women in that era. the fact they were two systems livings unmarried, it wasn't an unusual close relationship with his father where he controlled most of the money, also would not have been that unusual. and -- but it provides -- i think it also gets at our desire to have an examination at the identity of the killer and the ferocity of the attack. and it's much more troubling to think that there might not be something like that at its base. thank you. 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