By the summer of 1893, the Borden murders had already become a national obsession. Andrew and Abby Borden had been killed inside their Fall River home the previous August, and Lizzie—Andrew’s daughter and Abby’s stepdaughter—stood accused. The trial opened on June 5, 1893, not in Fall River but at New Bedford Superior Court, where spectators, reporters, lawyers and twelve jurors entered one of the most sensational courtrooms of the nineteenth century.

The prosecution had a story heavy with suspicion: opportunity, contradictory statements, a burned dress and a hatchet-shaped shadow hanging over the Borden household. But suspicion is not the same thing as proof. Important portions of Lizzie’s inquest testimony were excluded, and the prosecution’s effort to introduce testimony that she had tried to buy prussic acid also failed. The defense—led in part by former Massachusetts governor George D. Robinson—pressed hard on the gaps.

Then came June 20. After the arguments ended and the jurors withdrew, the suspense did not last long. The verdict was not guilty. Lizzie walked free, the murders remained officially unsolved, and the public received something even more durable than a conviction: a mystery people could argue about for generations.