Our Approach

The Borden Murders of 1892 are not only the most famous unsolved murders in American history, but the most enduring in our cultural imagination. Over the many decades since Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her parents with a hatchet, she has become an American icon. That no one has produced an encyclopedia on the perennially discussed subject until now amazes me. There have been fiction and non-fiction books galore (too many to count), a film, two television movies, a television series (and another on the way),  plays on Broadway and off, two different musicals, a ballet, an opera, articles, graphic novels, documentaries, Web sites and blogs, podcasts, a national centennial conference, a quarterly newsletter that lasted a decade, a magazine (The Hatchet) that published for another decade, and numerous honest-to-God academic studies—all of which have been attempts to answer to the burning question:  Did she or didn’t she?

Most people assume Lizzie did do it, thanks to the jump-rope rhyme that begins with “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe” as well as most every creative interpretation of the story. (You will never see a play or movie about Lizzie in which she didn’t do it, because how boring would that be?) But the jury that heard the case in 1893 didn’t think she did it and found her “not guilty” of the murders of her father and stepmother. Does that mean she didn’t do it? Or was the jury wrong? For those who have yet to form an opinion, I hope this encyclopedia will help readers decide for themselves, or perhaps even decide not to decide.

When I committed to this project (see About for my reasons why), I wanted to be sure to include every factor I could find relating to each entry so that each element of the case could be more accurately considered by the reader. That means a handful of the entries in this encyclopedia are quite long, and while I have been tempted to edit them down for smaller screens and limited attention spans, to shorten them would be missing the point. One can find all manner of concise summaries of some of these elements on other sites, blogs or video reels, but only here will you find a comprehensive online description and discussion of every aspect of the labyrinthine case against Lizzie Borden. (Well, outside of the excellent Hatchet Online, a magazine which published for ten years, and the archive of which was a trusted resource for this encyclopedia.)

I also set out to write each entry from the most objective journalistic perspective I could muster. I knew there was a lot of mythology that clings to the case that needed to be waded through, and I wanted to make sure that I stuck to the facts and only the facts as I found them, even if I had to kill some sacred cows (the stories about Lizzie that most take for granted) along the way. But I soon discovered that even when you get down to the bare facts, there is still no objective perch from which to expound on a crime that has resisted every attempt to solve it for over a century. The known facts are largely circumstantial, which means they can be slotted into different ways of looking at the case, and what serves as proof for one can often serves as proof for its opposite. Yet, one cannot tell an intelligible story that ends with nothing but a shrug of “who knows?” That is why writers who take on Borden murders usually pick a side and present either through the lens of guilt, or through the lens of innocence, much as we would encounter in a courtroom during a trail.

And so, I decided to embrace the courtroom-style approach for this encyclopedia, first by presenting evidence and issues around the case, then explaining as a prosecutor how that element points toward guilt, followed by an explanation of how that piece of evidence looks through a lens of innocence. (To make up for our powerful cultural bias toward Lizzie’s guilt, I admit to putting extra effort into elaborating the innocence side.) Readers, as impartial jury members, can make their own minds on which side is most compelling to them.

But of course, none of us are truly impartial. As noted Borden scholar Kat Koorey wrote, “Each of us, still learning about this Borden murder case, can assess our own threshold of fact, dramatic appeal, or a combination of both, such as this case coverage uniquely offers.” Indeed, the case against Lizzie Borden, with all its contradictions, is much like an ink-blot test; we often see what we want to see, or at least what our own personal experiences make reasonable to us. (See Analyzing the Case.) I know that I am not immune to the influence of my own expectations and biases either, and so at the end of most of the evidence entries, I openly disclose my own “take” on how the evidence appears to me personally.

Still, although we are not impartial creatures by nature, when judging whether another human being is responsible for something as soul-blackening as two brutal murders, it seems a moral imperative to at least try for some measure of impartiality. And so, as you peruse these entries, I ask you, the reader, to do the same thing that prosecutor William A. Moody asked the jury in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Lizzie A. Borden and keep an open mind. “For the sake of these crimes, and for the sake of these accusations, every man may well pause at the threshold of this trial and carefully search his understanding and conscience for any vestige of prejudgment, and, finding it, cast it aside as an unclean thing.”

A Word About Sources

Every entry in this Lizzie Borden Encyclopedia has been thoroughly researched, and every quote or claim is attributed to its source where possible. (Some assertions about the case have been repeated so many times over the previous century that it is impossible to know just who came up with them.) My primary sources are the inquest testimony (from August, 1892), the preliminary hearing transcripts (also from August, 1892), the trial transcripts (from June, 1893), and witness statements, all of which I have pored over several times, and all of which are available in print and online at the ultimate site for Borden case material, lizzieandrewborden.com. My secondary sources are reference books on the case (The Knowlton Papers, and The Jennings Journals); newspaper accounts from the time  (which I attribute by name of paper and date it appeared); articles from The Hatchet Online; plus various books known for their accuracy (such as Leonard Rebello’s Lizzie Borden: Past and Present and William Spencer’s The Case Against Lizzie Borden). I also found much relevant information on the forum hosted at lizzieandrewborden.com, a searchable discussion platform that has been administered by the pre-eminent Borden scholar Stefani Koorey for over 20 years . It now boasts thousands of posts filled with well-researched facts and thoughtful commentary by the most dedicated scholars and students of the case. On occasion, I will also throw in a quote from books such as Victoria Lincoln’s A Private Disgrace, which can be wildly inaccurate about many particulars, but are well-known for their contributions to what is considered “common knowledge” about the case.

This encyclopedia is meant to be a popular work and not an academic tome, so while I do identify the source of any direct quote from courtroom testimony, I do not cite specific pages from the transcripts as is the convention among the most dedicated Borden enthusiasts who comment on the case. First, because of the scope of this work, and the depth of each entry (especially the section on evidence), the time it would have taken to double check the exact transcript page assigned in 1892 and 1893, which is always different than the actual page of the book in which the transcript has been published, would have left me stuck in a research loop for who-knows-how-long rather than writing content.

More importantly, I believe that citing page numbers of transcripts often lends false weight to an argument being made by a writer. True, specific page citations are helpful for those who want to be able to quickly flip to the source themselves. But they can also lend authority that may not be deserved by giving what is essentially an opinion the imprimatur of fact. All authors pick and choose their quotes from testimony to support the view they are espousing, and often those quotes are taken out of context (in my mind), or don’t take into account what later came out during cross-examination or from testimony from other witnesses. As I am making an effort here to present multiple views of the evidence in the case, I don’t want to give any view false weight. With my years of experience in writing true crime (see About), I thoroughly understand the art of cherry-picking sources, as well as the human brain’s wiring for confirmation bias and interpretation through the lens of personal experiences. (See Analyzing the Case.)

In the end, I have tried to be as accurate as possible in citing my sources, but as I am human (no A.I. here!), and writing from my own passionate interest in this subject, I am sure I have made errors or inaccurate claims here and there. I welcome correction and/or feedback from sharp-eyed readers who know their stuff at teenabooth@lizziebordenencyclopedia.com.