Preliminary hearing transcripts

[camgarsky4]

Kat -- all along, I've been using an electronic copy of the prelim hearing I got long ago and don't even remember how.

Wanting a hard copy, I went to Amazon.com as the LBVM site suggests. I read the description on Amazon and it mentions that parts of the PH transcripts were missing and/or edited since the actual event.

Do we have strong confidence the preliminary hearing transcripts are accurate?

Thanks for your opinion!
Steve

[Kat]

Do you have the PDF of the prelim from PearTreePress?
If you do, the "Forward" page explains how the document came about.
If you don't, I will ask Stef if I can reproduce the "Forward" here.
-Kat

[PossumPie]

Kat -- all along, I've been using an electronic copy of the prelim hearing I got long ago and don't even remember how.

Wanting a hard copy, I went to Amazon.com as the LBVM site suggests. I read the description on Amazon and it mentions that parts of the PH transcripts were missing and/or edited since the actual event.

Do we have strong confidence the preliminary hearing transcripts are accurate?

Thanks for your opinion!
Steve

I bought my PDF copy on Amazon, it's 1100+ pages long, not Peartree Press, and no forward. Nothing except "eBook formatting by Mike Stewart copyright 2017."
Having said that, I've seen various other editions and some were missing quite a lot.

The only physical copy available from Amazon is the one Stef edited: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; New edition. It's 500+ pages so must be formatted differently if it is unabridged.

This excerpt from the Forward of the first edition Stef published is reproduced on the Lizzieandrewborden.com website by Stef, so I feel there is no infringement to reproduce it here:

"The court stenographer, Miss Annie White, made only two copies of her report of the hearing; one was given to Hosea M. Knowlton, for the prosecution, and the other to Andrew J. Jennings, for the defense. This latter copy is the only one known to have survived. It has recently been discovered that this copy, one that we have all come to know as the official copy of the proceeding, is, in fact, both incomplete and inaccurate in regards to the order of witnesses, having been altered and edited for some long-forgotten reason. According to painstaking research by the editor of the Lizzie Borden Quarterly, Maynard F. Bertolet, there are major discrepancies between the order of the pages in the Preliminary Hearing and the events as they actually occurred.

Much to the chagrin and frustration of those who study the primary documents in the Borden case, the Jennings’s copy of the preliminary trial transcript is missing several rather important items, including the testimony of Thomas Keiran and Annie White, the reading of the Lizzie Borden inquest testimony by Mr. Knowlton, and all events from the seventh and final day of the trial—defense arguments, prosecution arguments, Judge Blaisdell’s summation, and the verdict.

This version of the Preliminary Hearing is unique. It combines a number of transcriptions from various sources in an effort to reproduce, as accurately and authentically as possible, the day-by-day proceedings of this all-important legal event in the history of the Borden murders of 1892. Since the Jennings copy has sections out of sequence, as well as an error in numbering where the text jumps from page 34 to 45, this new print version has sought to rectify these discrepancies in the interest of providing researchers with a readable copy." (Koorey, Stefani, 2008. The Preliminary Hearing in the Lizzie Borden Case. Retrieved:https://lizzieandrewborden.com/MondoLiz ... rden-case/)

If you bought your ecopy on Amazon, it indeed includes the missing testimony by Kieran and White as quoted from the newspapers at the time. Not sure how the rest of it compares

[camgarsky4]

Thanks to you both......

The copy I have includes that gap between pages 34 to 45 (during Bridget's testimony), so I was wondering if I was missing part of her PH testimony. Sounds like that is not a concern?

I'll go ahead and order the book on Amazon that Steph edited.

[PossumPie]

Thanks to you both......

The copy I have includes that gap between pages 34 to 45 (during Bridget's testimony), so I was wondering if I was missing part of her PH testimony. Sounds like that is not a concern?

I'll go ahead and order the book on Amazon that Steph edited.

Only going by Stefani's reputation of being accurate in the research and printing of Lizzie stuff, I'd say anything done by her is as accurate as we currently have available. The amount of time they put into deciphering and editing the JJ book proves that point.