Lizzie Borden: Forty Whacks

On a suffocating August morning in 1892, the wealthy but notoriously frugal Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were hacked to death with an axe inside their locked home in Fall River, Massachusetts. While popular history remembers this horror through a macabre children's nursery rhyme, the true story has remained buried under a century of folklore. 

Lizzie Borden: Forty Whacks strips away the legend to deliver a gripping psychological thriller built directly upon the raw, contradictory, and deeply unsettling transcripts of the original, rediscovered police interrogation files. These forgotten inquest records serve as our gateway into the story, exposing the verbal chess match between District Attorney Hosea Knowlton and the chillingly self-possessed 32-year-old Sunday school teacher, Lizzie Borden.

The case triggered a massive media spectacle across Victorian America. During the trial, the all-male jury struggled to reconcile standard Victorian expectations of a female Sunday school teacher with such extreme violence.