Borden murders’ legacy still enthralling

‘‘Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father.’’

With those words — called across a yard to a neighbor on a summer day in 1892 — a woman named Lizzie Borden entered history as villain, victim, punchline and the media sensation of the Gilded Age.

By the next morning, 1,500 gawkers had gathered outside the Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts. There was speculation that Jack the Ripper had come to America.

Someone had killed father — and stepmother, too. Their bodies were discovered hacked to death; his, lying on the couch where he had been napping; hers, facedown in the spare room, bludgeoned almost twice as many times.

‘‘There was something about the locked-room mystery of the Borden murders that turned everyone into an amateur detective,’’ Cara Robertson writes in ‘‘The Trial of Lizzie Borden,’’ her enthralling new book, almost 20 years in the making. A former legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, she draws upon

court transcripts, unpublished reports and Lizzie’s recently discovered letters to tell the story chronologically, from murder to verdict to the case’s long, strange afterlife.

Robertson marshals us to no conclusion. She only reopens the case and presents the evidence afresh (the mystery of Lizzie’s burned dress, the curious disappearance of a hatchet handle). The reader is to serve as judge and jury.

We begin in the singularly unhappy home ruled by Andrew Borden, a dour, tightfisted patriarch. His first wife died while the couple’s daughters, Emma and Lizzie, were young, and he married Abby Gray soon after. Andrew sought a mother for his children, and Abby, considered a spinster at 37, longed to leave her crowded home. It was a bad bargain for both, and little warmth existed between the couple.

Lizzie and her sister reacted to their stepmother as a usurper. By the time the girls were in their 30s, open hostility reigned, and the family maintained parallel lives. Meals were served in two sittings; the daughters refused to dine with the parents or even talk to Abby. • "The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story" (Simon & Schuster, 375 pages, $28) by Cara Robertson

Robertson evokes the conditions that could birth and sustain such rancor — the narrow world of Emma and Lizzie Borden. They were too old for college, too old to marry and too highborn to work.

Robertson explains that Lizzie’s testimony of her activities on the day of the murders was regarded as so bizarre because police and prosecutors could not conceive of the lack of purpose in the lives of unmarried women of her class.

Almost from the beginning, Lizzie, 32, was the only serious suspect. Lizzie and the housemaid (who had an alibi) were both home; how would a stranger have escaped notice during the murders — and the time between them? Other sinister details emerged: Lizzie was reportedly seen trying to buy highly poisonous prussic acid the day before the killings.

“Most interpretations tell us more about the preoccupations of its chroniclers than any essential truth about the mystery,” Robertson writes.

In the 1950s, Lizzie Borden was resurrected as a feminist heroine. As one book from that period put it: “If today woman has come out of the kitchen, she is only following Lizzie, who came out of it with a bloody ax and helped start the rights-forwomen bandwagon.”

In the 1990s, another theory surfaced: that Lizzie murdered her parents after years of sexual abuse by her father. This theory relied on the fact that their bedrooms were connected by a door, the intensity of their relationship and the detail that instead of a wedding ring, Andrew wore a gold ring given to him by Lizzie.

Every generation reframes the story in the light of its signal preoccupations. Robertson does, too. She refers to youngadult novels and films that have offered more fully realized portraits of Lizzie as well as documentaries such as “The Staircase” and “How to Make a Murderer,” which relitigate old cases with fresh evidence.

The real riddle of Lizzie Borden isn’t whether she did it, or why, but can be found in the dark fascination she continues to exert.