Investigation Discovery will premiere their 8th season at 9 pm on Friday, August 1, 2014, with an entire hour-long episode devoted to the Lizzie Borden case.
The production company came to Fall River in October of last year to interview myself, Michael Martins, Dennis Binette, and Lee-Ann Wilbur about this unsolved case.
The research team had certainly done their homework, as they came armed with dozens of questions and had read the primary sources and even the mammoth book by the Fall River Historical Society, Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River.
From personal experience of being a “talking head” on Lizzie documentaries, I can tell you that it is a rare thing indeed to have a conversation about this case with a TV production company that has actually done their homework and read the truth of the story. Because of their care in tracking down historical truth, I have high hopes that this documentary will be an important contribution to the case. Of course, I could be wrong…..
This group intervened me for 10 hours in my home, they stayed the night at the Lizzie Borden B&B, and spent time with Michael Martins and Dennis Binette and toured the extraordinary exhibit they have at the Historical Society on Lizzie Borden.
This clip was posted on their site and it does contain some questionable “facts,” leading me to be a tiny bit leery. A woman who is unidentified here discusses Lizzie’s “need” for money and that could be the reason why she killed her father and stepmother. As those who study this case know, there was no evidence that Lizzie or Emma were in any kind of financial difficulties, and, in fact, both had received a rather large sum of money from their father Andrew on July 15 of 1892, when he paid them for the Ferry Street property he had given them on October 1, 1887. The sisters split $5,000 just 20 days prior to the murders. Neither one of the ladies were desperate for funds.
But perhaps this little segment is being taken out of a larger context and the woman being interviewed is merely rehashing the rumor that has persisted that the night before the murders Lizzie overheard Andrew and John Morse discussing a possible will and a division of the fortune that Andrew had amassed in this own lifetime. There is no evidence that this subject was discussed, and John Morse denied that they talked about this topic that night.
So we shall see.
I do like the look of this Lizzie. She is not the redheaded beauty of other documentaries, but a substantial person who is attractive without all the sensationalized unnecessary sexualization.
An article on the show was recently published in the Fall River Herald News. You can read that here.
Stefani Koorey, PhD
