TW/CW for this review: discussions of murder, child abuse, sexual abuse.

Amanda and I once discussed the cold cases we’d most like answers to. For me, it might be the murders of Abby and Andrew Borden in 1892. The case is perplexing, the trial of their daughter, Lizzie, was a highly publicized mess, and to this day the entire thing seeps its way into popular culture.

If you’re looking for a book that offers any theories as to whether or not Lizzie Borden did indeed kill her parents, then The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson is not for you. Instead Robertson meticulously details everything that has been recorded about the murders and the trial, remaining objective and giving the reader what she needs to formulate an opinion. Since I’d rather arrive to conclusions of guilt or innocence on my own, this worked for me.

The murders here are baffling, and the trial that followed was sensational. Reading about both kept me up way too late.

I do want to warn potential readers that there are graphic crime scene photos in the book, so be cautious.

On August 4, 1892 Abby and Andrew Borden were both murdered in their home with what was presumed to be a hatchet or axe. Both died from blunt force trauma to the head. At the time two women were home with them, their maid Bridget Sullivan, and Andrew’s daughter (Abby’s stepdaughter) 32-year-old Lizzie Borden.

She was later arrest for and found not guilty of the murders. Her jury was made up of only men. Women would not be able to serve on a Massachusetts jury until 1951 (yay misogyny!)

Part of the appeal for me, as a reader, was that The Trial of Lizzie Borden serves up lots of detail I didn’t previously know about the murders. Roberston points out the impossibility of the crime: either someone inside the home or someone who invaded it must have killed the Bordens, but neither theory quite works.

Bridget and Lizzie were both home during the murders (but possibly outside). Neither of them had any blood evidence on them despite the murders being grisly affairs (there was speculation that Borden burned a dirty dress days later, but that wasn’t confirmed). That points to an outside killer. Still, that would mean someone would need to break into the home and kill both Andrew and Abby violently without being seen and approximately an hour and a half apart (if we are to believe the coroner’s estimated time of death). They would also need to flee the crime scene in a fairly busy suburban area carrying a bloody weapon and remain unnoticed.

Neither situation sounds plausible, although the author notes that the crime scene was hardly secure and forensic analysis of the day wasn’t especially reliable.

The trial of Lizzie Borden would become a national fascination. People lined up to fight for a space in the courtroom, packing sack lunches. The idea that a well-bred, relatively wealthy, White New England woman could commit such a brutal crime was then totally mind-boggling and threatened concepts of female-placidity among the White upper-classes. If Lizzie could kill her parents, then so too could your well-bred daughter, dudes.

The defense’s case against Lizzie seemed to hinge on the fact that she was “emotionless” after the murders which clearly, as she was a woman, was baffling. There was also a possible falling out with Abby from years ago that led her to call her stepmother ‘Mrs. Borden’ instead of ‘Mother.’

Essentially, Lizzie didn’t meet the expectation of her gender role, ergo murder.

The author also points out that part of the reason this case continues to fascinate is that it’s very easy to look at the Lizzie Borden trial through the lens of current discourse on feminism and psychosexuality. There is enough evidence against Lizzie to be compelling, but not enough to be concrete, which gives her “character” fluidity to mold itself to any number of arguments:

Most interpretations tell us more about the preoccupations of its chroniclers than any essential truth about the mystery. Just as Lizzie Borden’s contemporaries saw their own worst fears refracted through the prism of her trial, later commentators have seized upon whatever aspect of the mystery speaks most eloquently to their time.

For example, an early-1950’s solution imagined Lizzie Borden as a nightmarish “feminist” heroine, concluding: “If today woman has come out of the kitchen, she is only following Lizzie, who came out of it with a bloody ax and helped start the rights-for-women bandwagon.”

Equally telling is the widely held speculation, which gained currency in the early 1990’s, that Lizzie Borden had committed the murders after enduring years of sexual abuse by her father. The bedrooms that opened onto each other, the dead mother, the powerless stepmother, the special understanding between father and daughter as symbolized by the “thin gold band”–all crystalized into a suddenly obvious solution, a solution that seemed to not only explain the identity of the killer but also the brutality of the crimes.

In such examples, the Borden case serves as a cultural Rorschach test, in which Lizzie Borden’s guilt is assumed and her imagined acts are wrenched out of their time and place. In this way, every generation reinvents the case.”

It’s also worth noting that in 2018, the movie Lizzie was released, which imagines Lizzie Borden (played by Chloe Sevigny) and Bridget Sullivan (played by Kristen Stewart) as lovers. The discovery of their relationship by Andrew, and his reaction, led to his killing.

For me this was the perfect book: a combination of a deep dive into a true crime and a feminist view of how Lizzie Borden’s gender impacted not only her trial but our views of her for generations to come.

Did I come to any conclusions? Personally, I tend to think Lizzie did not commit the murders, if only because it seems impossible that she could have. I think that much of the forensic examination (including time of death) can be thrown out with the understanding that even with today’s science, many of the conclusions then-investigators came to are tenuous at best. I think it’s entirely possible that someone else could have killed the Bordens in close succession while Lizzie and Bridget were otherwise occupied, and that Lizzie’s lack of hysterics, her coolness toward her stepmother, and a misguided understanding of the evidence led to her being tried.

If you’re a true crime lover like me and love lots of detail to chew on in an unsolved case, The Trial of Lizzie Borden will not disappoint you. If you want to read about how our understanding of gender vilified and later exonerated and then again vilified a complicated woman, then again this book is for you. It’s easily one of the best true crime books I’ve read to date.