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Lizzie Borden was tried for the axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892 — and acquitted after barely an hour of jury deliberation. More than 130 years later, the case is still argued over, partly because the surviving record is so incomplete: no confession, no verified murder weapon, and a defendant who never spoke publicly about it again. These seven books approach that gap from different angles — a court reporter’s contemporary account, newly surfaced letters, a graphic novel, an FBI profiler’s re-read of the evidence, and a novel that invents what the record can’t supply.
| Book | Best for | Type |
|---|---|---|
| The Trial of Lizzie Borden (Cara Robertson) | Readers who want the deepest, most sourced account | Nonfiction |
| The Borden Murders (Sarah Miller) | First-time readers, teens, a fast overview | Nonfiction (YA) |
| The Fall River Tragedy (Edwin H. Porter) | Readers who want the original 1893 press account | Nonfiction, contemporary source |
| A Private Disgrace (Victoria Lincoln) | Readers open to a guilt-focused theory of the case | Nonfiction |
| The Cases That Haunt Us (John Douglas & Mark Olshaker) | Readers who want a modern profiler’s read on the evidence | Nonfiction |
| The Borden Tragedy (Rick Geary) | Readers who want a visual, quick-read walkthrough | Graphic novel, nonfiction |
| See What I Have Done (Sarah Schmidt) | Readers who want the psychology imagined in fiction | Fiction |
1. The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson
Robertson, a lawyer who first researched the case as a Harvard undergraduate in 1990, spent roughly two decades working from trial transcripts, contemporary newspaper coverage, and letters written by Lizzie herself. The result reads less like true crime and more like a legal history — it walks through the prosecution’s case, the defense’s counter-theories, and the courtroom theater around a woman who was, by the standards of 1892, not supposed to be capable of the crime. It won the New England Society Book Award and is generally considered the most thoroughly sourced modern account.
2. The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century by Sarah Miller
Miller’s book, aimed originally at a young-adult audience but read widely by adults too, leans heavily on the newspaper reporting that shaped public opinion in real time — then shows how much of that reporting turned out to be rumor dressed up as fact. It’s the shortest, clearest entry point on this list if you want the sequence of events without wading through a full legal analysis first.
3. The Fall River Tragedy by Edwin H. Porter
Porter was a local court reporter who covered the case as it happened, and his 1893 book is the earliest full-length account of the murders, the inquest, and the investigation — reportedly rushed into print so quickly that, according to local legend, the Borden family tried to buy up and destroy copies. Modern historians treat it less as objective journalism and more as a raw, unfiltered record of what Fall River residents were saying and believing in real time.
4. A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight by Victoria Lincoln
Lincoln grew up in Fall River a generation after the murders and drew on local knowledge and family recollections most outside researchers never had access to. Her 1967 book argues, controversially, for Lizzie’s guilt and proposes a psychomotor epilepsy theory to explain the crime — a claim that’s disputed among modern historians but that shaped decades of later Borden writing.
5. The Cases That Haunt Us by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Douglas, a former FBI profiler who helped pioneer criminal behavioral analysis, re-reads the Borden case alongside Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac using modern profiling methods rather than period assumptions about who could or couldn’t commit an axe murder. It’s a useful counterweight to the older books on this list, since it applies a different discipline’s tools to the same limited evidence.
6. The Borden Tragedy by Rick Geary
Part of Geary’s long-running A Treasury of Victorian Murder comic series, this 1997 volume walks through the murders, the household’s tangled family finances, and the police investigation using detailed maps and period-accurate illustration. It’s narrated as if by a childhood friend of the Borden sisters — a fictional framing device around otherwise factual research — and it’s a fast, visual way to get the layout of the house and the timeline of that morning straight in your head.
7. See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
This is a novel, not a history — Schmidt invents interior monologue for Lizzie, her sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and a fabricated stranger named Benjamin, and it’s told from all four points of view. It doesn’t claim to solve anything; it’s an attempt to imagine the emotional texture of a house that was, by every account, an unhappy one long before the murders. If you want atmosphere and psychological speculation rather than sourced argument, this is the pick — just don’t treat its invented scenes as documented fact.
Why the Case Still Gets Argued Over
Part of what keeps Borden books coming is how much of the 1892 case rests on inference rather than physical proof. There was no confession, the murder weapon was never conclusively matched, and the defense successfully argued that a proper Victorian woman of Lizzie’s social standing was, in the jury’s eyes, simply not a plausible axe-murderer — a bias historians now treat as central to the acquittal rather than incidental to it. That gap between what’s provable and what’s psychologically plausible is exactly the terrain these books argue over from different directions, and it’s the same kind of gap that keeps popping up in other unresolved American hauntings and true crime cases turned into movies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Lizzie Borden ever convicted?
No. She was tried in 1893 for the murders of her father Andrew and stepmother Abby, and the jury acquitted her after about ninety minutes of deliberation. The case has never been officially solved.
Which book is the most historically accurate?
Cara Robertson’s The Trial of Lizzie Borden is generally considered the most rigorously sourced, since it draws directly from trial transcripts and newly surfaced letters rather than secondary retellings.
Is See What I Have Done based on real events?
It’s based on the real 1892 case and real people, but it is a novel — the internal thoughts, dialogue, and some scenes are invented by the author rather than documented.
Did Lizzie Borden write about the murders herself?
Cara Robertson’s research drew on some of Lizzie’s personal letters, but Lizzie never gave a full public account of the day of the murders or of what she believed happened.
Are there good beginner books if I’ve never read about the case?
Sarah Miller’s The Borden Murders is written for a general and teen audience and is the fastest way into the timeline before moving on to denser accounts like Robertson’s or Porter’s contemporary report.
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