The Trial of Lizzie Borden

In the 131 years since Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death in their own home there has been no new evidence, no new suspects and no high-tech forensic data to prove whether Andrew's daughter Lizzie was the culprit or not.It remains an eternally puzzling and fascinating mystery why a Victorian spinster, church woman and member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union might even be suspected of such a violent crime.Author Cara Robertson is an attorney who has been researching the Borden case for more than three decades. While she tells what lead up to the trial, her focus is on the trial itself. She doesn't bring in new evidence and she doesn't second-guess the jury.She quotes heavily from the trial transcript and from contemporary newspaper reports. Reporters of the day commented in detail on Lizzie Borden's clothes, behavior and complexion. She also discusses the difficulty the prosecution had in laying out their case without having it appear that they were persecuting an upstanding Victorian lady.Ultimately, prosecutors were unable to overcome the bias that a white middle class woman could not possibly have hacked her father and stepmother to death. But while reporters, spectators and the jury agreed with the defense attorneys that Lizzie couldn't have done these crimes, the community of Fall River, MA, slowly and completely ostracized her. No one would sit near her in church, friends stopped calling, organizations dropped her membership. She became a virtual recluse.This is a well-researched example of how bias can work in court.

The Lizzie Borden trial in the summer of 1893 in New Bedford, Massachusetts was one of the first media sensations of the new era of readily available, cheaply printed and priced, highly competitive newspapers. It occurred in the heart of the Gilded Age, an era dominated by scandal, corruption, and corporate and political buffoonery unequaled until our own time. The trial and the crime that precipitated it captured the national imagination and has never fully retreated from it. There have been many accounts of the trial, but this new history by Cara Robertson is the first that I've read that goes so thoroughly into each and every step during those hot summer days in New Bedford, detailing every witness's testimony and producing a vivid account drawn from newspaper stories as well as memoirs by many of those who participated.Because this is an account of the Borden trial itself the actual crime and the other events that led up to it occupy only about the first 90 pages of this 290 page plus meticulous Notes volume. Miss Lizzie Andrew Borden was a 32 year old spinster who, in the summer of 1892, led an obscure existence in a cramped and badly designed house on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, sharing it with her older sister Emma, their wealthy but penny-pinching father, his second wife (the daughters' mother had died years earlier), and an Irish housemaid. Lizzie considered the Second Street house and the uncomfortable living conditions there to be beneath her status as a member of one of Fall River's finest families. On August 4, 1892 two horrific crimes ended Lizzie's obscurity: her father and stepmother were found axed to death,and a few days later she herself was arrested, charged with both murders, and taken into custody.The trial the next summer attracted international attention and enormous press coverage. Robertson does an excellent job describing the hot and steamy atmosphere that made the courtroom a miserable place for most of the trial, and is just as skilled in describing the tactics used by the prosecution and the defense teams as the various witnesses came and went. Even Lizzie's dresses are carefully described, using accounts from newspapers of the time. Under Robertson's guidance (she is a former Supreme Court clerk and legal adviser at The Hague) the verdict of Not Guilty, rendered after an extremely short period of deliberation by an all male jury, becomes an understandable one.The book finishes with a brief section detailing Lizzie's life after the trial. She and her sister moved to a larger, more elegant home in the best neighborhood of Fall River. She spent the rest of her life living there (Emma moved out after several years), shunned by most of the people she considered to be her peers, before quietly passing away in 1927. Robertson provides a final chapter on the enduring enigma of the case, noting that an important file kept by one of her primary defense attorneys remains locked away and unavailable to researchers.I enjoyed The Trial of Lizzie Borden very much. I've read many of the books Robertson mentions in her account and I agree with her assessments of them, making only one additional recommendation of Robert Sullivan's "Goodbye Lizzie Borden," which has an acerbic and rather amusing take on the trial and the presiding judge's summings-up.

Booklist describes Robertson's book as "a fast-paced, page-turning read," and so it is. A professor of law at Stanford University describes it as "beautifully written." Check. "Rich in detail"? Yes, as regards the trial itself. Regarding the events of the day of the murders, however, not only is her account surprisingly deficient, but she gets a number of things plainly and embarrassingly wrong. Unlike Joseph A. Conforti, author of "Lizzie Borden on Trial" (2015), Robertson doesn't devote a single chapter focused on those events and their chronology. Instead, she presents them in a disjointed, sometimes misleading, way.Excluding Robertson's excellent account of the trial, I discovered 15 errors of fact, a few of them truly egregious. Here are several:Incredibly, the author gets the time of Mr. Borden's death wrong. She writes that it occurred "sometime between 10:45 a.m. and 11:45 a.m." (p. 19). Further on in the book, she repeats the error in part, writing that he was dead "by 11:45" (p. 45). In fact, at 10:45 Borden had only just returned from his daily doings "downstreet" (i.e., downtown). At 11:45, he had been dead a good half hour. Going by the testimony of the housemaid, Bridget Sullivan, the only living person in the house at the time besides Lizzie, the man would have died somewhere between 11:00 and 11:15. That's certain.Speaking of Bridget, the author states (page 39): "After cleaning the breakfast dishes, she washed the outside windows, chatting with the neighbors' housemaid, and then moved inside. She felt so tired that she decided to lie down. (Bridget had Thursday afternoons and Sundays off and may have simply been getting a head start on her half day.) Lizzie called for her, told her Andrew was dead, and sent her for Dr. Bowen," the family doctor who lived across the street. (The parenthetical statement is Robertson's.)That is grossly simplistic and misleading. Just briefly: When Bridget re-entered the house she didn't lie down, she started to wash the inside windows, as Mrs. Borden (Abby) had instructed; Andrew returned to the house in the midst of her doing so; she overheard Lizzie tell him that Abby had gone out on a sick call, which was a lie (the woman was upstairs in the guest room, dead); soon after, Lizzie attempted to lure Bridget out of the house with talk of a sale of dress goods "downstreet" in order to be alone to do her father in; Bridget expressed interest but needed a little time to rest beforehand; then she went up to her attic bedroom. Some 10 or 15 minutes later, Lizzie yelled to her to come down because "someone" had killed her father. Soon after, she sent Bridget to Dr. Bowen's.On page 16, Robertson asserts that Adelaide Churchill, a widow who lived next door to the Bordens and who came to Lizzie's aid very soon after she learned of Andrew's murder (Abby's body had not yet been found), was the first to ask Lizzie where she was when it happened. No, she was not the first to ask; Bridget was, shortly before Lizzie sent her to fetch Dr. Bowen. Robertson goes on to state that when Lizzie answered Adelaide, she said she had gone to the barn to get a piece of iron and went back to the house "after hearing a strange noise." On the contrary, she testified, "I don't remember that she told me she heard anything at all." What's more, Adelaide didn't testify that Lizzie gave her the reason she'd returned to the house. In fact, it was to Bridget that Lizzie said she had been drawn back to the house after hearing "a groan." She also told her she had been in the back yard at the time, not in the barn.After Abby's body was discovered upstairs by Bridget and Adelaide, Alice Russell, a friend of Lizzie's, asked them, "Is there another [body]?" "Yes," Adelaide replied. According to Robertson, Lizzie remarked then and there, "O, I shall have to go to the cemetery myself" (page 17). But at trial, Adelaide was asked to state anything else she could think of which was said "that morning," other than the words exchanged between herself and Alice. As regards Lizzie's mention of going to the cemetery, she stated that she said to Lizzie, "Oh, no, the undertaker will attend to everything for you." Nothing in her testimony suggests that Lizzie said those words immediately after Adelaide told those present that Abby's body had been found. (See Widdows and Koorey's "The Trial of Lizzie Andrew Borden: Book One," page 317.) What Robertson writes makes Lizzie seem stunningly, not believably self-absorbed.On page 121, Robertson relates that when Bridget had gone out to begin washing windows, Lizzie appeared at the door and asked her if that was what she was out there to do. Yes, she replied. According to the author, Lizzie then said, "You needn't lock the door. I will be out around here but you can lock it if you want to." But it was Bridget who said that to Lizzie. In Lizzie's mouth, the words would make no sense since she was indoors.

It was for my Grand-daughter’s birthday. She so far is enjoying the book. Not finished yet

Book lived up to it’s reviews

Just a bunch of newspaper articles &old news.

This story is lovely for amateur sleuths and lawyers. A young unmarried woman, Lizzie Borden, was tried for the gruesome murder of her father Andrew Borden and step-mother, Abby. Both were hacked to death but the murder weapon was not positively identified although a couple of suspicious hatchets were found; one without its handle. One of the issues at trial was whether Andrew Borden died before or after Abby – their bodies were found in different parts of the house. Some suspicion also fell on Bridget, the housemaid, but she was never charged and became, instead, a chief prosecution witness. A large part of the book concerned the legal battle between George Robinson, one of the defence counsel and Hosea Knowlton one of the prosecutors. A key issue of evidence concerned the admissibility of evidence that Lizzie had tried unsuccessfully to buy a deadly poison the day before the murders. Readers will be drawn to guessing what the motive was; whether the evidence of character, past conduct, and the purchase of poison would be relevant. Ultimately, will the reader agree with the verdict of the jury? This is not a classic cliff-hanger but it is a well-written and arresting story. I agree with a previous reviewer that the use of the word 'mansplained' is a terribly sexist word, but the rest of the story was presented fairly and no further trace of sexism was detected.

Great!