The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson

Are times of social change connected to notorious serial murders?  Was Charles Manson a product of the 1960s, the Hippie Movement, and the Summer of Love?  Was Ted Bundy a murderous response to the Feminist Movement of the 1970s?  In truth, serial murders and assassinations occur throughout history, and there is little correlative evidence that connects sociological upheaval with increased bloodshed.  Humans kill humans for various reasons, one of the most common being greed and jealousy.  Lizzie Borden did not hack her father and stepmother to death one hot August day, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, because of the burgeoning Women’s Suffragist Movement.  In Cara Robertson’s book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story (Simon & Schuster, 2019), the author takes us through the entire case, the murders, the trial, and the verdict.  Although Lizzie was a blank canvas for the townspeople to project their views of women and their role in society, it is clear that this bloody crime involved the more mundane familial greed and not any social revolution.

There were only two people in the Borden household that morning who survived the carnage:  Lizzie and a domestic servant named Bridget Sullivan.  Andrew Borden, her father, had his skull shattered with an ax as he lay napping on the sofa downstairs.  He was not the killer’s first victim.  That would be Lizzie’s stepmother, Abby, found dead from a crushed skull in the upstairs guest bedroom.  In the limited forensic crime scene technology of the day, investigators determined Abby died first, possibly as much as an hour and a half before Andrew.  Bridget was outside washing windows during that time; Lizzie was inside ironing, or out in the barn looking for fishing tackle, or was somewhere else in the home, depending on what story she was telling.  Her account changed during the investigation and trial.  Only Lizzie had motive, access, and the opportunity to kill her parents.  She hated her stepmother—she was jealous of her and afraid Abby would take all of Andrew’s money, leaving Lizzie and her sister, Emma, with nothing.

Townspeople described Lizzie as a sheltered, wealthy, privileged woman of thirty-two years, old enough to be considered a spinster.  She had no marriage or family of her own, and she had lived in her father’s home all her life.  She tried to keep up with her wealthy friends, but Andrew guarded his finances with an iron fist.  He bought the cheaper house in a not-as-fashionable neighborhood, an embarrassment for socially conscious Lizzie and sister, Emma.

Once she was on trial for the murders, the townspeople had even more to gossip about, namely that she was always so cool and calm during the proceedings.  She rarely cried or displayed any emotion, even when the testimony turned graphic.  Her parents’ skulls were cleaned of flesh and brought into the courtroom so that the prosecution could show how the ax fit into the shattered openings in the bone.  The people also argued about the murderer’s method of attack.  Hacking two people to death seemed more like the work of a maniac, someone in a rage.  No woman could do such a crime.  A woman’s method of murder was poisoning, something subtle and less gory.  Robertson traces how Lizzie allegedly went to a drugstore in the days leading up to the murders to purchase prussic acid, a potent poison.  When confronted by the druggist, she claimed she wanted it to clean a seal-skin cape.  She was refused service, and witnesses were not sure of the identity of the customer.  The prosecution had trouble getting that evidence into the trial.

Robertson spends time discussing the missing murder weapon.  Several axes were present in the Borden home, but none had telltale signs of blood on them.  One had a broken handle and the blade was covered in ash.  Another was found during the trial on the roof of a nearby barn.  These weapons matched the skull damage on both victims, but not conclusively.

Robertson’s forte is the trial itself, and she does a bang-up job taking the reader through each point of the proceedings.  The book would make an excellent teaching tool in a law class.  Not only is the crime subjected to intense scrutiny, but New England culture at the time also is part of the analysis.  She discusses theories of crime going back into history.  She writes about the cultural fascination with eugenics and the criminal element.  Does a murderer have a specific, animalistic body structure?  Do those descended from violent tribes have a genetic disposition to violent acts?  She dives into the criminal theories of Dr. Arthur MacDonald and Cesare Lombroso.

One interesting note about the trial concerns, of all things, menstruation.  Lizzie was in the throes of her “monthly illness,” as the male lawyers describe it.  There is a discussion about whether this could have incited Lizzie to commit such violent murders.  Robertson is good at tracing how women and their intellectual and physical lives were so mysterious to men at the time.  Could a woman lie?  Could she take up an ax and split someone’s skull?

Lizzie Borden got away with murder.  That’s no spoiler as the case is well known in history, but how she could be found not guilty in the face of such a preponderance of evidence is the real mystery unraveled here.  Cara Robertson presents a thorough, deeply analytical account of one of the most famous cases in U.S. history.  Every scrap of evidence, every nuance is explored.  The book is a study of the case and a thorough analysis of an enigmatic figure who has become legendary in American crime.