The Preliminary Hearing in the Lizzie Borden Case

The Preliminary Hearing in the Lizzie Borden Case (PearTree Press, 2005), by Harry Widdows, Stefani Koorey, Ph.D., and Kat Koorey, is now available for sale through the Fall River Historical Society.

You can purchase it when you visit or by phone at 508-679-1071.

From the Foreword:

The Preliminary Hearing phase of the Commonwealth vs. Lizzie A. Borden began on Thursday, August 25 and lasted seven days, through Thursday, September 1, 1892. The judge who presided over this “probable cause hearing” was Josiah Coleman Blaisdell, the same judge that had officiated at the Inquest into the deaths of Andrew J. and Abby Borden.

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.