Diaries Trigger Fresh Look at Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden is back in the spotlight, more than a century after her murder trial, thanks to her attorney's diaries. The two 100-page handwritten journals, which Andrew Jackson Jennings kept in a Victorian bathtub, were left to the Fall River Historical Society after Jennings' grandson died, ABC News reports. One journal contains newspaper clippings about the 1892 case, in which Borden was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother with an ax, and the other journal contains Jennings' notes from interviews he conducted during the case.

The fragile journals will be exhibited after being properly preserved, says curator Michael Martins, who, along with another curator, published a book about Borden last year that included letters and other documents never before published. The journals and those letters paint Borden's father much more sympathetically than the "villain" he was portrayed as who did not provide for his children, Martins says. The letters also show a more sensitive side of Borden, who was portrayed as cold and emotionless. (More murder stories.)