LIzzie Borden: The Untold Story

Originally published in 1961, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story covers the original "True Crime" story in America.

On a hot August morning in 1892, Mrs. Abby Borden was tidying up the guest room in her house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Someone entered, carrying an ax. An hour and a half later her husband, Andrew J. Borden, lay down to take a nap on the sitting-room sofa. Again, someone entered, ax in hand. The two violent, brutal murders shocked the country. And when, a week later, police arrested Lizzie Borden, a Sunday-school teacher and ardent church worker, and charged her with having killed her father and her stepmother, interest in the crimes became worldwide.

It stands today as the most famous of all American murder cases. Lizzie Borden has become an American legend. She has been immortalized in novels, plays, articles, books, legal opinions, an Agnes De Mille ballet, and in verse: "Lizzie Borden took an ax/And gave her mother forty whacks/When she saw what she had done/She gave her father forty-one."

At the end of a sensationalist, headline-making trial, the jury acquitted Lizzie, and no one else was ever charged with the murders. Was Lizzie innocent, as the jury said? Or guilty, as the verse states? It is difficult to believe that a young woman with Lizzie's background could have committed such brutal crimes, but the man who wrote what students of the case have long accepted as the authoritative work on her trial concluded that she was guilty.

In Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, after nearly three years of research, Mr. Radin presents a fascinating picture of the real Lizzie Borden, her life and times, her trial and its aftermath-a picture which casts new light on the murders and turns most of the opinions on the case upside down. He answers the question of Lizzie's guilt brilliantly. He discovers a completely unsuspected and shocking literary hoax. He examines a recently discovered confession and proves it to be a forged document. He supplies new facts and produces long-unknown trial testimony which enables the reader himself to name the shadowy person who used the ax. In short, he solves the case seventy years after the fact. It is a revealing story of an unusual woman as well as a brilliant job of detection.