the trial of lizzie borden by cara robertson

The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central, enigmatic character has endured for more than a hundred years, but the legend often outstrips the story. Everyone-rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople-had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. Radin debunked Pearson, while others since have debunked Radin, but Robertson finds his book “a gripping read.When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August of 1892, the arrest of the couple’s daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Radin, whose Edgar-winning Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story (1961) made a case against Borden maid Bridget Sullivan, who is really the only remotely feasible alternate suspect in this borderline locked-room mystery. Among the true crime writers were Edmund Pearson and Edward D. Wilkins Freeman, and Marie Belloc Lowndes. Among those making fictional use were Evan Hunter, Lillian de la Torre, Mary E.

Writers of crime fiction and fact have long been drawn to the case. Anna Katharine Green, leading American mystery novelist of the time, was quoted as believing in Lizzie’s innocence, as did many of her fellow citizens of Fall River, Massachusetts, who could not believe a quiet, upper-middle-class spinster, active in church and charitable pursuits, could be guilty of such horrific crimes.

The time and place come alive with an unexpected immediacy, making it possible to see how a verdict that appears absurdly wrongheaded to present-day observers seemed right and proper and even inevitable to people of the time. The reader gets a sense not only of the defendant, victims, and witnesses but of the lawyers, judges, writers, and spectators. Among the many books about the case, this one is notable for its detailed account of the trial, drawn not only from transcripts but from contemporary newspaper reports of some talented and thorough journalists. Simpson a century later, the verdict of history has found her guilty. Though Lizzie Borden was acquitted in her 1892 trial of the hatchet murders of her parents, as with O.J.

The trial of lizzie borden by cara robertson