The House on Second Street
Lizzie Borden and the 1892 Fall River Axe Murders

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Thursday, August 4, 1892. It is already warm in Fall River, Massachusetts, when a maid resting in her attic room hears the City Hall bell strike eleven. A few minutes later a voice calls up the stairwell: "Maggie, come down!"

Downstairs in the sitting room lies Andrew Borden, a wealthy retired banker, killed with a hatchet. Upstairs, his wife Abby has been dead far longer. Ninety minutes separate the two murders. The doors of the house at 92 Second Street were locked and bolted, and only two people were known to be inside: the maid, and Andrew's younger daughter, Lizzie, who says she was out in the barn.

The House on Second Street is a documentary-style historical true crime account of the Lizzie Borden axe murders, told in order from the tense Borden household to the inquest, the arrest and the thirteen-day trial in New Bedford that the newspapers called the trial of the century. Drawing on the inquest, the trial record and the newspapers of the day, it sets the testimony of the witnesses side by side, contradictions included, and separates the documented facts from the legends, beginning with the famous rhyme.

More than a century later, the Borden murders remain one of the great unsolved cases in American history. Who had the time, the reason and the chance? Theories are marked as theories, and this book does not decide for you.