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The Trial of Lizzie Borden Kindle Edition

by Cara Robertson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 1,133 ratings

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WINNER OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY BOOK AWARD

In Cara Robertson’s “enthralling new book,” The Trial of Lizzie Borden, “the reader is to serve as judge and jury” (The New York Times). Based on twenty years of research and recently unearthed evidence, this true crime and legal history is the “definitive account to date of one of America’s most notorious and enduring murder mysteries” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her murder trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars, and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?

An essential piece of American mythology, the popular fascination with the Borden murders has endured for more than one hundred years. Told and retold in every conceivable genre, the murders have secured a place in the American pantheon of mythic horror. In contrast, “Cara Robertson presents the story with the thoroughness one expects from an attorney…Fans of crime novels will love it” (Kirkus Reviews). Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper accounts, unpublished local accounts, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is “a fast-paced, page-turning read” (Booklist, starred review) that offers a window into America in the Gilded Age. This “remarkable” (Bustle) book “should be at the top of your reading list” (PopSugar).

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Enthralling…[Robertson] reopens the case and presents the evidence afresh, all those alluring details out of an Agatha Christie novel (the mystery of Lizzie’s burned dress, the curious disappearance of a hatchet handle). The reader is to serve as judge and jury.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"With deft storytelling and convincing scholarship, Cara Robertson does the seemingly impossible by bringing new life to perhaps our oldest true-crime saga: the Gilded Age case of Lizzie Borden. By giving us Fall River, Massachusetts, in full and in context, as well as the panoply of characters who made the trial so sensational, Robertson has written that rarest of things: a page-turner with a point." —Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America

“A fascinating social history.” —Mary Higgins Clark, bestselling author of I’ve Got My Eyes on You

“The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a taut, understated masterpiece: the rare history book that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Cara Robertson scours the Trial of the (Nineteenth) Century with the perseverance of a scholar, the gimlet eye of a detective, and the elegance of a novelist. As she depicts the Borden murders and the young lady accused of committing them, Robertson reveals the seething class, ethnic, and gendered tensions that roiled the glittering surface of the Gilded Age.” —Jane Kamensky, author of A Revolution in Color and the Jonathan Trumball Professor of American History at Harvard University

"Robertson presents the story with the thoroughness one expects from an attorney...Fans of crime novels will love it." —Kirkus Review

"A fast-paced, page-turning read." —Booklist, starred review

"You won’t be disappointed." —Hello Giggles

"Remarkable." —Bustle

"A fascinating and definitive account of the notorious trial of Lizzie Borden, the woman accused of the brutal murder of her father and her stepmother. Beautifully written and rich in detail, The Trial of Lizzie Borden sheds new light not only on the trial itself, but also on the setting, the period, and, in a sense, on the American soul at the end of the nineteenth century. —Lawrence M. Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law, Stanford University

“The definitive account to date of one of America’s most notorious and enduring murder mysteries…a superior, page-turning true crime narrative.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

Susie Carder?is a globally recognized profitability coach and inventor of the Predictable Success Method™. Her radical business strategies have helped thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners achieve exponential growth and triple their profits. As a private consultant, Carder coaches small business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs in professional management and efficiency to streamline channels of profit for companies. She is the former president and COO of Motivating the Masses, Inc., an international transformation and training company for small business owners led by Lisa Nichols. She and her business have been featured in The New York Times, the Associated Press, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and NBC News, to name a few. Visit SusieCarder.com.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07GNTCD8G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (March 12, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 12, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 87026 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 401 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #29,519 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #5 in Criminal Law (Kindle Store)
- #8 in Criminology (Kindle Store)
- #31 in Biographies & Memoirs of Criminals

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John D. Cofield

One Of The First "Trials Of The Century"

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2019

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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.

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Jeannette Hartman

Why Lizzie Borden was never convicted of killing her father and stepmother

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2023

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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.

3 people found this helpful

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Shiela K

Good Read

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2023

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Interesting, well documented and researched. Easy to follow. Good read on a fascinating and historic crime and the trial that followed.

One person found this helpful

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nomoGods4me

15 errors of fact

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2019

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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.

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