Lizzie Borden Murders: Lawyer’s Journals Could Shed New Light On The Case

120 years after the notorious Lizzie Borden murder case, newly-surfaced journals belonging to her lawyer, Andrew Jackson Jennings, could shed new light on the infamous 19th-century trial.

In the famed 1892 case, Borden was accused of brutally murdering her father and her stepmother with an ax. Lizzie was ultimately acquitted of the charges, but the murder case went unsolved. Jennings kept much of the case’s evidence for himself–including the journal–and passed it down to his grandson, who then left all of it with the Fall River Historical Society before dying last year.

The journals, each about 100 pages, contain Jennings’ notes on Borden’s murder trial, including newspaper clippings, and personal notes. Jennings’ notes reference several known individuals involved with the case, but it also contains interviews with a number of people not previously known to be connected with the murder trial.

“A number of the people Jennings spoke to were people he knew intimately, on a social or business level, so many of them were perhaps more candid with him than they would have been otherwise,” Martins said in a statement to ABC. “But it’s also evident that there are a number of new individuals he spoke to who had previously not been connected with the case.”

Among the notes were interviews Jennings conducted with individuals close to the Borden family that suggests that Lizzie was very close to her father, Andrew Borden.

“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.”

Source: ABC News