Trial of Lizzie Borden author coming to Fall River

Fall River Public Library, 104 North Main Street, presents an author talk and book signing with Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden, on Thursday, August 1, 2019, at 6:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden tells the true story of one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporters flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone—rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople—had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. Was she a cold-blooded murderess or an unjustly persecuted lady? Did she or didn’t she?

Author Cara Robertson, a lawyer and former Supreme Court law clerk, brings a strong legal background to her study of the Borden trial. She was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Law School. Robertson first started researching the Lizzie Borden story as a senior at Harvard, and published her first paper on the trial in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities in 1997. The Trial of Lizzie Borden draws on the author’s years of research into the case, including newly discovered first-hand accounts, such as unpublished letters by Lizzie Borden herself.

This free program is sponsored by The Friends of the Fall River Public Library. Books will be available for purchase and signing from Ink Fish Books following the author’s talk.
For further information, contact Kate Kulpa, Assistant Library Administrator.