About Us

Like so many of my generation, I first learned about the Borden murders from watching the 1975 TV movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Elizabeth Montgomery. My adolescent self was so entranced by the movie that I took myself to the library to check out a book about the murders and spent hours poring over the crime scene photos within. I also studied the photo of Lizzie on the cover, looking for hints of a brutal killer in her placid face. It seemed impossible to reconcile the slightly-smiling Sunday School teacher with a book in her hand with someone who could hack her parents to death. I think I checked out that book half-a-dozen times over the next few years.

It was Lizzie and the Borden murders that ignited a fascination with true crime that I would eventually turn into a satisfying career as a screenwriter of true crime and mysteries, eventually earning over 50 produced credits to my name (so far). So, I have delved into numerous murders cases, studied them closely and pulled them apart to better render them onscreen. Yet, no matter how many murder tales I have become absorbed by for a time, it is the Borden murders that seem never to let go of my imagination. In the decades since my first introduction to the case, I have returned to it again and again, digging into source documents, wanting to know, somehow needing to know: Did Lizzie do it, or didn’t she? I have developed such a drive to know the answer that whenever someone asks me that perennial hypothetical, “If you could travel back in time, where would you go?” I always answer, “To Fall River in 1892, to find out if it was Lizzie Borden who swung that axe.” And I mean it.

I do think it would require one to become a time-traveling fly on the wall in order to definitively know the solution to this mystery. Not from lack of trying by generations of lawyers, scholars, and armchair sleuths like me. Every time the did-she-or-didn’t-she question grabs hold of me again, I can spend hours trying to track down some small fact in various books and Web sites. While there are many great resources available to the Lizzie Borden-obsessed (especially from the site lizzieandrewborden.com), I have often longed for a way to more easily look up what part of the case I am specifically focused on in the moment and find a full explanation and analysis of that one thing. Something like an encyclopedia. With all the research I have done, and the many Borden books on my shelf and documents sitting on my computer, it finally occurred to me that I am as qualified as anyone to write such a reference book.

Still, while I will be well-satisfied if other Borden buffs find this encyclopedia helpful, I have not been working on it for over a year just for them. I also wanted to write it for the Bordens, for the ones who died that August morning, and for the one accused of killing them. I wanted to help free Lizzie, Andrew, and Abby, even if just a little, from the mythology that lies heavy as gravestones over their memories. As a writer of true crime for television, I often had to fly off to where a crime occurred and interview the surviving family members and friends of murder victims, asking them to describe to me the most painful moments of their lives. I became keenly aware of the tension between my job as a writer tasked to transform personal tragedy into an entertaining television movie, and my responsibility as a human being to respect and protect the truth of the victim’s experience. Most of the time, I managed to walk that line without feeling as if I had done a disservice to the dead. But not always. And not when it came to Lizzie.

If you were to type my name into the search bar on imdb.com, you’d find I have an executive producer credit on one of the Lizzie Borden movies made for television. I had approached a pair of producers I’d worked with before with my obsession and the idea to tell a new version of the Borden murders, with the assumption they would hire me to write it. They liked the idea, sold it to a network, but hired a different writer to develop the project rather than me (long story). I had nothing to do with the production, and, in the end, the team that developed the movie did exactly as the creators of the other Lizzie Borden tales made for screen did before and after them and leaned heavily into different myths around the case rather than the actual facts about the case. While the movie did well in the ratings, it seemed to me that Lizzie, and especially Andrew and Abby, deserved a more accurate telling of their story.

So why not try to write a better movie myself? I have, several versions, but I have never been satisfied by the result. I suspect an accurate TV movie—or series, or film—about the Borden murders might be all but impossible to make, for in telling the story for a visual medium, one must choose an answer to that unanswerable question of “Did she or didn’t she?” then commit to telling the story in a way that supports the chosen answer. If the choice is that Lizzie was guilty, then all the scenes leading-up to the killings must give Lizzie a compelling reason to take such drastic action, and either Andrew or Abby must be villainized, or Lizzie made into a murderous psychopath, or both. If the choice is that Lizzie was innocent and wrongfully charged, then very different scenes would need to be constructed, and, without an actual killer to portray, the police and prosecutors would be made into villains. One cannot keep both guilty and innocent options open and easily tell a coherent and satisfying story for the screen.

Thus, I am glad to be telling the story about the tragedy-stricken Bordens in encyclopedia form, a format in which there is less temptation to sensationalize or creatively invent scenarios that might keep an audience glued to their screens but ignores what we know to be true about the case. The format does, however, allow space for non-linear complexity, for nuance, and for conjecture. In essence, it allows us to have it both ways, guilty and innocent, while staying true to the known facts. Of course, how we interpret and weigh those facts is highly influenced by whether we decided to look through the lens of guilt or innocence, so I have tried to examine each Evidence entry through the lens of each. And, I try to present arguments for each, much like one would encounter if sitting in a jury box in a courtroom. (For more details on this strategy, see Our Approach). Within this dichotomy of guilt/innocence lies the everlasting pull of the Borden murders on those of us who go back to it again and again:  Lizzie couldn’t possibly have done it, even though no one else could have done it, and yet it was done.

Author/Editor Bio

She has written a dozen scripts about actual murders (Natalee Holloway, Untouchable: The Drew Peterson Story, The Grim Sleeper, The Hunt for the I-5 Killer, Beautiful & Twisted, Sex & Lies in Sin City, Fatal Honeymoon, Amish Grace, and the Satellite Award-winning A Little Thing Called Murder), as well as noteworthy national scandals (Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal, The Pregnancy Pact, The Wronged Man). Additionally, she has written over 25 fictional murder mysteries for Hallmark’s Movies and Mysteries Channel. Booth is also the author of the young adult novel, Falling From Fire, published by Random House in 2004. She is the mother of three, the grandmother of three, and splits her time between California and Arizona with her husband, Michael Vance, the talented designer of this Web site. (For more on her personal view of the Borden murders, and the life circumstances that have informed that view, see How I Got From Guilt to Innocence).