Rare 'Lizzie Borden bible' author Len Rebello was driven to find the truth about her case

FALL RIVER — Len Rebello was young and fascinated by Fall River history, both its darkness and light. And in his youth, he wasn’t far removed from this history. One of the women who went to his church was Ellen B. Miller, known as Nellie to her friends and her former employer: the late Lizzie Borden.

Rebello had a depthless curiosity about the past that could only be satisfied by a never-ending stream of knowledge — by asking questions, learning, finding that there were still more questions to ask. He knew Nellie had spent years as Lizzie's housekeeper at her Maplecroft home, was her friend and protector. He needed to know more.

As his friend Bill Pavao tells it, “He got the nerve one day to go up to her and say, 'Miss Miller, could you tell me about Lizzie Borden?' She was very polite and said, 'Leonard, you need to mind your own business.’”

Rebello did at the time, but he wasn't satisfied. Whenever there was something he didn’t know, he needed to find the answers — and the history of Fall River’s most infamous unsolved crime compelled him to devote decades of his life to researching that case more thoroughly than anyone ever had before. What he found, he shared, in a 1999 book he published called “Lizzie Borden: Past & Present.”

It’s not a mystery novel, nor does it attempt to solve the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden. Instead, it compiles an astonishing amount of facts about the case and about the lives of everyone involved, down to the smallest detail or most insignificant figure, derived from all the original primary sources. To read it is the closest thing we have to stepping back in time to 1892.

Rebello's book is now rare, fetching hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. It’s also one of the most indispensable books on the Lizzie Borden case ever written — what author and Borden historian Stefani Koorey called "the Borden bible.”

It was the only book he published about the Borden case. But in his spare time, he never stopped researching and writing about the case, for his own knowledge — even up until his death last month.

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'A teacher first and foremost'

Rebello was born in 1946, a Fall River boy born and bred. He graduated from B.M.C. Durfee High School in 1964, and discovered he had a passion for learning and teaching. He continued his education at Curry College and Lesley University in 1972 and 1974, eventually earning a master’s degree in special education. He would go on to have decades of experience teaching students with special needs and learning disabilities how to read.

“He was a teacher first and foremost,” Koorey said.

And one of his favorite subjects was the one closest to his heart: Fall River history. Koorey is originally from Florida, Pavao from Townsend on the New Hampshire border. Rebello loved driving them around and giving them lessons in history from his ground-level perspective, taking them on trips to the city's past.

When Pavao moved to Fall River to become curator of what was then called the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in the mid-1990s, he knew no one — Rebello, a regular at the house, became a fast friend and showed him his home and everyone in it. To Rebello, Pavao said, “Fall River was everything.”

“He was one of those guys, if you came to town, he would show you around," Koorey said. “He would just share his time and his knowledge with anybody who asked for it.”

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Doing old-school research into Lizzie Borden

Around the time Pavao and Rebello met and bonded over their mutual interest in the Borden case, Rebello told him he was working on a book about it. Rebello had been a volunteer at the Fall River Historical Society, and people called him up so frequently asking about Lizzie Borden information that Rebello decided to put everything he could find about the case in one place.

“He spent decades doing this work,” said Michael Martins, curator of the Fall River Historical Society, a friend of Rebello’s and admirer of his work. “He spent years poring thru really obscure documents and looking at various newspapers, and put a terrific amount of time doing this research.”

Pavao said Rebello invited him to his house to see his book. “When I got up there,” Pavao said, “the book was sitting on the table — but it was just a pile of papers that he had printed, and it was about a foot and a half thick.”

Pavao said Rebello’s original idea was to fill the book with just newspaper sketches, to give readers a sense of what the world was like in 1892. But as Rebello found more information, more questions presented themselves, and he needed to know the answers. Did Lizzie Borden really buy prussic acid? Who sold it? What did prussic acid do? How long would it have taken her to walk from her house to the drugstore? Who were Lizzie’s jurors, and what happened to them? Where were Lizzie’s dogs buried? Where did Emma live after leaving Maplecroft? The case has fascinated millions of people worldwide, and Rebello's goal was to help anyone interested in the Borden case find any detail they could ever want, to give them as complete a picture of it as possible — none of it the sort of speculation or gossip that dogged Lizzie in her post-trial life, but verifiable facts. It required a ton of footwork.

“A lot of this work, he did before Ancestry and the tremendous amount of material that’s on the internet today," Martins said. “When Len was originally doing this work, he didn’t have that ability. So he spent an enormous amount of time poring over microfilm and microfiche to try to uncover this material. An amazing feat, really.”

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With no internet, Rebello spent years in library stacks, sifting through city directories, newspapers, deeds records, walking through cemeteries in search of headstones. A century after the crime, he reassembled the world around it by hand, detail after detail.

Sometimes fate helped out. Pavao said that one day Rebello was determined to find the name of the ship Lizzie Borden took on her Grand Tour of Europe in 1890. Rebello was at a microfilm reader, scrolling through pages by hand, growing frustrated. He wound the film too tightly, and it began to roll backward on its own until it stopped. When he looked up at the screen, “the name of the ship was right there on the page,” Pavao said. “So it was just meant for him to find it.”

He made unique rediscoveries of information no one had known in decades. Rebello identified the picture hanging above the Bordens’ sofa where Andrew was found murdered: “The Village Elms – Sunday Morning in New England,” by artist Albert Fitch Bellows. He tracked down the original color of the Borden home on Second Street – in the 1990s painted tan with brown trim, Rebello discovered through research that it was in Lizzie’s time a drab green.

“Sure enough, when you scrape down, that’s what was there,” Pavao said — and Rebello took a scraper to the siding to prove it.

'One of those books that everybody had to have'

In 1999, Rebello finally assembled "Lizzie Borden: Past & Present.” He published it himself, a sturdy hardcover of just under 650 pages, packed with news clippings, maps, biographical sketches, photos — an encyclopedia of information about the Bordens.

He printed only 1,800 copies, and according to Pavao sold nearly all. He often met visitors to the Second Street home and signed copies for them at the scene of the crime.

“It was one of those books that everybody had to have," Koorey said. “When you want to look stuff up, you go to that book. The book was and is one of a kind for those interested in studying the case.”

His book was rare in Borden studies, Pavao said, in that Rebello was a stickler for citing his sources and relying entirely on provable facts. Nonfiction books like Victoria Lincoln’s “A Private Disgrace” (1967), Charles and Louise Samuels’ “The Girl in the House of Hate” (1953), Robert Sullivan’s “Goodbye Lizzie Borden” (1974), and films like “The Legend of Lizzie Borden” from 1975 tended to speculate, sometimes wildly. They were whodunits. Rebello’s book was a work of history.

“There are a lot of books out there for sensationalism,” Pavao said. “All of a sudden this one’s the killer, then that one’s the killer — just based on gut instinct, almost.”

It was important to Rebello not to write about the story in a lurid way, and he didn't think of the Lizzie Borden story in that way. A gentle man, he remembered always that real people were victims of a tragic crime, and they deserved respect.

“He wasn’t interested in the blood and gore,” Koorey said. “People dressing up and stuff was not his thing. … Eating a cake with hatchets on it and bloody cupcakes, that was not his thing. He thought it was bad taste. ... It wasn’t a parlor game for him.”

Even decades after his book was published, Rebello kept digging for Lizzie Borden facts and wrote articles that lived on his home computer, if only to satisfy himself and his own bottomless curiosity — Martins suggested that Rebello’s "happiest times were in archives and libraries and just working on research.” And in the internet age, Rebello's serious approach to that research collided with the unearned confidence of Facebook commenters. Pavao once set up a page for Rebello to share new findings he’d discovered, but took it down when Rebello became frustrated by seeing people speculate about the case without enough evidence.

“Rather than say, ‘You’re wrong,’ he would look it up for himself and try to build the case,” Pavao said. “So he was still researching."

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Seeking out the truth

Rebello wasn’t only interested in Fall River’s tragedies but also its glory. In recent years Rebello had been researching artists from what's known as the Fall River School, a group of painters who were active from the mid-19th century to the early 20th known for their lush still lives and portraits. What started out as his own personal interest grew into enough research for another book, and Pavao tried to convince him to publish it — in the end, without success.

“He felt that the book would be so expensive to manufacture, because he would want the pictures to be in full color in order for people to really see them," Pavao said.

Rebello died on Feb. 13 after a long illness. His compassion for the Bordens and love of beauty were reflections of the grace Rebello extended to family, friends and those around him. Koorey called him her “events coordinator,” a spontaneous friend always ready for an antiquing adventure. To Pavao, he was a surrogate father, a man he connected with nearly every day for almost 30 years. He never married or had children but had beloved godsons, Alexander and Zachary Sinkevich, whose names formed the company he published his book under: Al-Zach Press.

Rebello never issued a second printing of "Lizzie Borden: Past & Present," and even in the digital age he never published an e-book edition. It is an artifact of the pre-internet days. Since they're so rare, copies of Rebello’s book go for $300 or more on websites like Amazon, eBay and AbeBooks. Those with a thirst for facts but a limited budget can find a free copy in a place Rebello was intimately familiar with: the reference room at the library.

"He loved that he could give that knowledge to people,” Pavao said, "and make them seek out the truth and not the fantasy.”

Dan Medeiros can be reached at dmedeiros@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Len Rebello, Fall River author of rare Lizzie Borden book, dies at 76