Jump rope was huge fun for us girls in my grammar school. I grew up skipping over a swinging rope to all kinds of rhymes, and I remember well the rhythmic cadence of the gruesome chant, “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks …” So, I have known the outlines of Lizzie’s story for as long as my memory stretches. Of course, 12-year-old me was going to watch Elizabeth Montgomery in The Legend of Lizzie Borden. And, of course, I was going to check out a book about Lizzie at the library and study the macabre crime scene photos. And, of course, I had no doubt Lizzie was guilty of killing her parents.

One summer I took my 16-year-old daughter to Massachusetts, to see Salem for her and to visit Fall River for me. We stayed in the Lizzie Borden House for one restless night, and I became obsessed again with the murders. I decided not to wait for someone to respond to my pitch and hire me to write the story; I’d write it for my own pleasure and hopefully sell it at some point. In between writing other true crime scripts, I began the research process for a Lizzie Borden movie.

And there came my second wave of surprise, the creep of reasonable doubt into my previous assumption that Lizzie Borden was guilty. I found that I agreed that the jury didn’t have enough to convict her (those pesky judges ruling important evidence inadmissible and all). I knew she was still probably guilty, there seemed to be evidence enough to believe so, and in the first script I wrote about her, I did put a hatchet in Lizzie’s hand. But I also wrote up a courtroom scene in which I could portray the scenario put forth by the defense, allowing me to put a hatchet in an intruder’s hand as well. That script didn’t go anywhere; after all, who wants to watch a movie about a killer who might not even be the killer?

Spending Time at Probably Guilty

For the next decade, when someone asked me if I thought Lizzie was guilty, I’d put it in terms of “Yeah, I’m about 75 percent sure she did it.” And that was my mindset when I decided to make an attempt to tell Lizzie’s story again, only by this time, limited series were all the rage, which I believed the perfect format to write a more complete take on the story. So, I started researching again, reading more books, articles, re-reading transcripts, and by the time I started putting words on paper for my series idea, I was no longer at 75 percent sure Lizzie was guilty, I was down to about 50/50.

Somewhere along the way the lack of direct evidence had become a significant factor to me—the lack of blood on her person, the lack of a realistic weapon to be found anywhere in the house. In the past, the dearth of such evidence was a vaguely annoying aspect I didn’t think too much about. It was merely a “difficulty of ignorance,” as the legal scholar John Henry Wigmore wrote in 1893 about why it didn’t matter to him that the prosecution in the Borden case wasn’t able to explain the lack blood on their suspect. But suddenly it loomed large to me as an important thing to consider and it factored into my calculation.

Still, for everything that pulled me in the direction of innocence, there was always a compelling piece of circumstantial evidence that would drag me back in the direction of guilt. I was fascinated by that push-pull dynamic and thought it would make an interesting framework. I would write a series about the murders in which we switch back and forth between telling the story two ways—one episode would tell it from the guilt perspective, say through the eyes of reporter Edwin Porter; the next episode would view it from the innocent perspective, say through the eyes of reporter Joe Howard. Back and forth I’d go in order to preserve the insoluble nature of the case.

I was happily working on this in the Summer of 2025 when I learned that a limited series about Lizzie Borden was already in the works and would, in fact, be the next installment of the Monster series developed for Netflix by Ryan Murphy. That was the end of my project. I went into a bit of a depression for a few months—all the research I’d done! I didn’t want it to have nowhere to go. Maybe I’d write a book. And so, with that vague intention in mind, I started organizing my research into distinct categories—putting everything I knew about the Bedford Cord into one document, putting everything I knew about the Handleless Hatchet into one document. Eventually the idea of a Lizzie Borden Encyclopedia hit me. I’d always wished I’d had access to something like an encyclopedia of the case when I was researching my script projects; why not write one? I first cautiously embraced the idea, then warmed up to the challenge of it. I knew that would require more rigorous research than I’d done to that point. But hey, the subject remained as interesting to me as ever, so why not start?

I then spent several more months going through my box of Lizzie books and reading through ones I’d read already, this time making more detailed notes, as well as turning to new books that I hadn’t read before. I revisited transcripts, read the Witness Statements for the first time, started delving into collections of newspaper articles on the subject (a process that still continues). I searched for everything I could find on each particular piece of evidence, gathering testimony and quotes about each element from the perspective of different authors. Then I started writing the entries. I decided that after introducing each entry first in a journalistic way, I would then interpret it through the lens of guilt and then again through the lens of innocence. That’s when something funny began to happen.

The Unbearable Lightness of Guilt

As I worked on the Evidence entries for this encyclopedia, I found that when I wrote from the perspective of guilt, I couldn’t help but become aware of how much that specific piece of evidence used in the prosecution’s case against Lizzie was based on inference and conjecture—and a strangely small amount of substance. For example: Lizzie burned her paint-stained Bedford Cord three days after the murders. To consider that bare fact as “evidence” of guilt, one first had to ignore any information that suggested it could be have been an innocent act (such as burning outworn dresses was a normal thing to do in that household). Then, one had to throw some unproven speculation on top of it: She must have done it because it had blood on it. She wasn’t just burning a dress; she was destroying evidence!  

Often, a second round of spin was required to keep it viable evidence for guilt. In the example of the Bedford Cord, one had to next explain away why, if she burned the dress to get rid of blood evidence, the police didn’t find a blood-spattered dress when they thoroughly searched the house the day before.That required more speculation. The district attorney who prosecuted the case was very helpful here; Hosea Knowlton insisted that Lizzie concealed the dress. She hid it! But then Emma Borden climbed up onto the stand and said, no, that dress wasn’t hidden during the search, she herself saw it hanging in the clothes closet after the police searched it. Well, then came a third round of speculation in which Knowlton had to claim that Emma was being untruthful. He had to turn Emma into a perjurer, maybe even an accomplice after the fact, helping her sister get away with murder—all to keep that piece of “evidence” supporting Lizzie as killer.

In writing about the Bedford Cord, I found that when looking at it through the lens of guilt, the “guilty” part was essentially a subjective interpretation of what happened, not the objective fact about what happened. Not that some of the interpretation wasn’t reasonable. It’s certainly reasonable to question Lizzie’s timing—burning the dress the morning after she officially learned she was a suspect. But the timing could also have been completely irrelevant. There is no objective ground from which to assert that Lizzie burned a blood-spattered dress that she had concealed for three days because she had just learned she was a suspect. There is no provable thing anywhere in that assertion, no proof the dress was blood-spattered, no proof she hid it, no proof the timing had anything to do with it. There is just reasonable wonder. But when wonder transforms itself into speculative storytelling, it then becomes counterfeit proof, imposter evidence. Or so it felt to me.

I also found that when I wrote about the Bedford Cord through the lens of innocence, it more easily rang true to me. Lizzie Borden, trapped in the house after being told by police not to leave, decided to get to a chore she had been meaning to get to for awhile, a chore her sister testified she had encouraged her to do just the night before: burn a dress that wasn’t fit to wear anymore, just as she usually did with dresses she didn’t want to wear anymore. She burned it in the morning, with people around and policemen outside, not trying to hide it, no attitude of shame. That fit the bare fact well, no speculation or spin required, and no turning sisters into liars required either.

As I worked through entry after entry, I went through the same experience again and again—the Bengaline Silk, the Handleless Hatchet, the Motive. The level of speculation and interpretation required to turn bare fact into evidence for guilt was sometimes stunning to me. Hosea Knowlton set the standard at Lizzie’s trial, he was a veritable lion of speculation, his closing argument a towering achievement of creative spin. But ultimately, the case was almost entirely, as reporter Elizabeth Jordan noted during the trial, a “mere tissue of speculation.” In the following decades, most of the authors who wrote their own accounts of the case—Pearson, Lincoln, Sullivan—added more layers of speculative storytelling. Their conclusions remained (mostly) unchallenged and their interpretations leached into the culture, becoming  such settled “common knowledge” about the case that it took the unpredictable journey of this project to make me realize I could turn around and look it square in the eye.

Now, it wasn’t that way for every entry, there were a few in which bare fact seemed plainly indicative of guilt. For example: Lizzie’s story about the note she claimed her stepmother had received about a sick friend, a note never found. The testimony of three men who swore it was Lizzie who came into their store the day before the murders asking for prussic acid. Lizzie’s inquest testimony that was a morass of contradictions and seeming obfuscations that fairly shouted guilt. These pieces of evidence required no spin, and they remain legitimate linchpins on which any belief in Lizzie’s guilt can confidently rest. (Unfortunately for the prosecution, two of those three were ruled inadmissible at the trial, making a “not guilty” verdict all but inevitable.) Yet, even with those incriminating pieces of evidence, I found I could also align them with innocence (mostly), at least if I gave Lizzie the benefit of the doubt.

More Light Dawns

There were several other things along the way that turned on light bulbs for me, such as realizing how openly biased police officers were against Lizzie, in both their words (as quoted in the press) and in their actions during the investigation. Reading crime journalist Edward Radin’s 1961 book, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, was a minor revelation. Until that point I had yet to come across a serious book that argued for Lizzie’s innocence, and his book did so in a well-sourced way that made sense to me. And while I wasn’t swayed by Radin’s speculation toward the end that Bridget Sullivan could have been the murderer, he did make valid points about problems with Bridget’s timeline of events.

Reading the closing arguments of both prosecutor and defense attorneys back-to-back was also eye-opening. As a writer of true crime and murder mystery screenplays, I could easily see how Knowlton the prosecutor was taking a weak circumstantial case and using his storytelling skills, rich in hyperbole, to cover the gaps in the evidence. Governor George Robinson’s closing lacked the over-the-top grandiosity of Knowlton’s arguments; it was far more simple in its logic. But its logic was persuasive and it contained a simple line that made an enormous difference in how I looked at the case from that moment on. Robinson asked the jury to “Look at these things in a natural and easy way, a common sense way, assuming her innocence and not her guilt. That is the way you will meet these things and all of these facts.”

One would think that such a throwaway line would not have much impact, but it did on me. I was, in fact, thunderstruck by it, because I realized that until then I had been unconsciously looking at the case from our cultural bias toward guilt and not from a true presumption of innocence to which Lizzie Borden was legally and morally entitled. Through all my research and writing I had believed myself to be open-minded and objective, but I was still going at the evidence from a subtext of “guilty until proven innocent,” still arguing myself out of guilt instead of into it. Basically, I had boarded the crime-solving train at Station Guilty when, according to our standard of justice, I was supposed to board that train at Station Innocent. I had started the journey from the wrong place.

This was not exactly my fault; after all, I’d been steeped in that idea that “Lizzie Borden Took An Axe” since grade school. We are all more or less placed on the train at Station Guilty by our culture. But it is important to understand that when we start with that bias toward guilt, whether it is conscious or not, we can remain trapped in a feedback loop in which we automatically interpret Lizzie’s words and actions through a guilty lens, which then makes those words and actions appear to point toward guilt, which then further convinces us she is guilty. It is only by starting from a position of innocence that we can step out of that loop, and, in theory at least, see the case more objectively. Of course, bias toward innocence can create a loop of its own, within which we can talk ourselves out of taking seriously the few pieces of solid evidence against Lizzie. But overall, I believe Robinson was right, as was Judge Dewey in his charge to the jury, that analysis of the evidence that leads to a just verdict must begin from a default of innocence.

Once I took that position, delving into the case became a much different experience for me, much less fraught and heavy. I no longer had to wend my way through so many mazes of speculation or twist my mind into mental pretzels trying to figure out things such as how Lizzie managed to free herself of blood. I no longer had to squint suspiciously at every witness, wondering who might have been lying to help Lizzie, making themselves accomplices to murder after the fact. I also no longer had to wonder what terrible thing Andrew or Abby might have done to cause Lizzie to suddenly rise up and kill them. (The movies about Lizzie always villainize Andrew and Abby, make them awful people who practically deserved to die.) It seemed I could simply look at the evidence and analyze which pieces objectively pointed to guilt, without a huge dollop of speculation and spin, and which did not. And for me, most of them did not.

If someone asks me today which way I lean, I say I lean pretty far toward innocence, although how far depends on the day and where I am in my research. If my mind wanders to Lizzie’s story of the note she claimed Abby received (which seems so obviously a lie), then I probably lean around 75 percent toward innocence. But most other days I’d say I’m about 90 percent of the way there. (For more on my personal and very opinionated take on specific aspects of the case, see Why Innocence Makes More Sense Than Guilt.)

I do admit to several reasons why the idea of innocence may come more easily to me than to others. For one, back when I was near Lizzie’s age, I also unexpectedly found a parent lying dead with a blood-covered head, her fists clenched—just like Andrew Borden’s fists in the 1892 crime scene photos. The traumatic shock of her suicide and my discovery of it caused me to act strangely enough that I put myself under the eye of suspicion from police officers for an entire afternoon. This naturally makes me view Lizzie’s actions in the hour after the murders more sympathetically than most.

Another reason I lean toward innocence is that I strongly suspect that Lizzie, who struck so many people as “odd” and emotionless, was actually autistic; and, as someone who has lived with autistic people literally all my life, I understand that behaviors which most people interpret as indicative of Lizzie’s guilt are fairly standard behaviors for someone on the autism spectrum. Yet another reason is that I once wrote a movie, The Wronged Man, in which a man was wrongfully incarcerated for 21 years because of a case of mistaken identity in eyewitness testimony; and, after all the research I did for that movie on the hows and whys of mistaken identity, I feel less certain than most that Lizzie was the woman who tried to buy prussic acid the day before the murders.

Now, I have no way of knowing if my own life experiences make me able to see certain aspects of the case more clearly, or if they simply blind me to their true import. I think all of us who look at the case have our own individual perspectives, forged by the things we have lived through, that may either help or hinder our objectivity and/or predispose us toward Lizzie’s guilt or innocence. But ultimately, what has most impacted my slow, decades-in-the-making evolution from guilt to (probable) innocence is captured in another line by Governor Robinson in his closing.

“If they can come into court and show all the things I have seen in the newspapers, gossip and rumor and report, I might feel that I ought to [find Lizzie guilty]. But now, when I find the government’s case only the thing that it is—insufficient, weak, contradictory, crucial, lame—why I have nothing else to do in my conscience but to say… you have not proved it against her, so we will keep charge of her, and we say to you, “You have not proven this against her and she is not guilty.”