BOSTON -- It's hard to believe there could be anything new about a 100-year-old double murder case, but researchers looking through a file stored in Swansea found the earliest known picture of Lizzie Borden.

NewsCenter 5's Pam Cross reported that it's one more piece in a very puzzling life.

"When you see it, they come alive to you. When you're doing historical research, you see people as a human being," said Lizzie Borden historian Len Rebello.

Rebello discovered the photo with another researcher, Stefani Koorey, who writes "Hatchet" magazine. In the picture, Lizzie is 8 or 9.

"The eyes tell a lot. She looked unhappy. She looked very unhappy, unsettling," Rebello said.

"She looks so cute in that little outfit she's wearing," Koorey said. "She seems very innocent and very pure, and in a way it's sort of ironic."

In 1892, Borden lived in the family's Fall River home. She was accused of murdering her stepmother in one bedroom and then using the same hatchet on her father downstairs in the parlor.

"It was a woman. It was the 1890s," Rebello said. "But this was so brutal in broad daylight -- a stepmother makes it more exciting. So I think that was the fascination, plus the Victorian times."

Borden was acquitted. She never spoke publicly and lived out her life in Fall River.

"If she didn't do it, she knew who did. She profited greatly from the crime. So the police were fairly certain they'd found their man, I guess you'd say, but there was no evidence to convict her," Koorey said.