Murder. Sexuality. Gossip ...

Was Lizzie Borden guilty of murder? What's your verdict?

A 90-minute standalone full-cast audio-drama. Available as an audiobook, it draws on the DNA of radio plays and documentary dramas.

In 1893, Lizzie Borden entered a Massachusetts courtroom accused of one of the most notorious double murders in American history. Her father and stepmother had been found brutally hacked to death in their family home in Fall River. The principal suspect was their own daughter: a respectable, churchgoing woman of 32, from a prosperous New England family.

Her trial gripped the nation: was Lizzie a cold-blooded killer, the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice, or something far harder to explain?

This immersive courtroom production revisits one of the most sensational and enduring murder mysteries of the nineteenth century.

Drawn from the original trial transcripts and contemporary reporting, this full-cast audio drama recreates the key courtroom exchanges between prosecution and defence as they wrestle with conflicting testimony, circumstantial evidence, family tensions, and the shocking possibility that a seemingly respectable young woman could have committed such savage crimes.

The prosecution had no eyewitness, no confession, and no murder weapon conclusively linked to Lizzie. Yet her behaviour before and after the killings raised troubling questions. Her changing accounts, a mysterious burned dress, and the bitter divisions within the Borden household all became part of a case that fascinated and divided the American public.

Her trial became not merely a criminal proceeding, but a wider cultural argument about class, respectability, gender, and the assumptions that shaped Victorian ideas of innocence and guilt. Could a woman of Lizzie Borden's social standing really have committed such a monstrous act? Or did those very assumptions make it harder to discover the truth?

More than 130 years later, the question remains unanswered.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden is the fourth title in the Trials of the Century audiobook series, following The Trial of Leopold and Loeb, The Trial of Dr Crippen, and The Trial of Patty Hearst. All available on Audible.