On this day in ...... 1893, a headline-grabbing trial in New Bedford, Massachusetts, ended when jurors found Lizzie Borden not guilty of murdering her father and stepmother with a hatchet the previous summer. A never-married woman in her early 30s, Borden (left) was inconsistent in her accounts of what happened that day, and there were no other suspects. Thus she became "notorious," the subject of doggerel poetry and true-crime speculation, despite the acquittal. A recent study of the case may be found in The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (2009) by A. Cheree Carlson.
(Prior June 20 posts are here, here, and here.)
