| Friday marks a grisly anniversary in Fall River, Massachusetts, the date that heralded the start of one of the most infamous criminal cases in American history. On August 4,1892, a wealthy man named Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were murdered in their home, bludgeoned dozens of times with a sharp object. The killings became national news and led to the sensational trial of Andrew’s daughter Lizzie, a Sunday-school teacher who inherited a significant sum after his death. Lizzie Borden was acquitted in court but convicted in the public consciousness; a popular “children’s rhyme” declared, “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her Mother forty whacks.” In 1933, a Broadway play about Borden inspired the New Yorker crime writer Edmund Pearson to publish a defense of the maligned protagonist. Borden, he wrote, had fallen victim to headline-seeking journalists and “amateur Sherlocks,” who had falsely suggested that she carried out the killings while naked—for a dubious forensic reason—and had mischaracterized the weapon. (Some of their reporting, you might say, was a hatchet job.) Borden’s guilt or innocence continues to fuel a spirited debate, but one of Pearson’s claims, relating to the theatrical production, seems indisputable. “The real Miss Lizzie Borden can hardly be dramatized,” he wrote. “She is incredible.” | 
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