The famous Lizzie Borden trial during the 19th century is making news again now that the journal she kept while she was in prison for ten months, reports ABC News.
She was 32-years-old at the time of the murder. The Fall River, Massachusetts native was tried and then acquitted for the hatchet deaths of her father and step-mother that occurred on August 4, 1892.
Borden was portrayed as a heartless killer but the handwritten journals tell a different story. The entries show that Borden was grieving over the death of her father, far different from the stoic murderess the public made her out to be.
Michael Martins is a curator at the Fall River Historical Society and recently received two 100 page journal from the grandson of Andrew Jackson Jennings, Lizzie Borden’s lawyer.
“You have to create villains in order to justify the murders, and Andrew Borden is portrayed as evil, but he gave his daughters a lot more than some other fathers were giving theirs,” Martins said.
At the time people thought that Andrew Borden was a horrible man who was not able to properly provide for her family.
“Lizzie Borden cared for her father very deeply,” Martins said. “There was a tremendous outpouring of grief in the letters, and that’s a new side to the story.”
He continues, “Most of what is known about Lizzie Borden is based on legend, innuendo and outright lies. Fact has been suppressed by fiction, and the fiction is much more interesting to a lot of people.”
Despite her acquittal the public believed her to be a brutal ax murderess, which is evident based on the popular rhyme about the supposed murderer.
“Lizzie Borden took an Ax, And gave her mother forty whacks, When she had seen what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.”
