Lizzie The Story of Lizzie Borden Author:Frank Spiering On that hot August morning in 1892, the house was locked. As Lizzie's stepmother, Abby, was tidying the upstairs guest room, she was brutally hacked to death, her head almost severed from our body. An hour and a half later, her father came home for his daily nap and was similarly related on the sitting room sofa. — A week later the police arr... more »ested Lizzie, a Sunday school teacher and ardent church worker, and charged her with the murders. The Bordens were among the richest families in the industrial town of Fall River Massachusetts. Andrew Borden's estate was worth, in today's dollars, about $12 million. The murders occurred in broad daylight--they couldn't have happened, but they did. Lizzie was jailed, tried, and acquitted.
But doubts about the verdict still remain: why did Lizzie try to buy poison at a local pharmacy only a few days before the murders? On the other hand, how could she have done it-- where was the ax? Why was there no blood on any of her dresses? Drawing on new information, and re-creating the story from trial testimony, court records, interviews, and voluminous contemporary reports, Frank Spiering not only reveals the identity of the real murderer but goes beyond to unfold an all-too-human tragedy of a particular time and place.« less