An odd thing about famous crimes is what details enter pop culture and stay there.
People who know nothing about the circumstances surrounding the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, for instance, might well recognize the famous photos of her in full pageant regalia. Those who know little about Charles Manson's behaviors may still quickly think of the Manson Family when asked about cults. As for me, I've always known about Lizzie Borden, it seems, but only because of the grisly nursery rhyme I must have come across in some book years and years ago: Lizzie Borden took an ax, / Gave her mother forty whacks, / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.
In fact, whoever gave Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother those real whacks didn't commit quite the overkill the rhyme calls for — there were 10 or 11 hatchet wounds on her father, some 17 on her stepmother. Still, it was a gruesome murder, and one that has become a true-crime obsession much like England's Jack the Ripper who was active around the same time. But just as with the many theories surrounding the mysterious Ripper, Cara Robertson writes in her new book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden, that "[m]ost interpretations [of Lizzie Borden's case] tell us more about the preoccupations of its chroniclers than any essential truth about the mystery." All the more interesting, then, to see how little Robertson herself interprets in this book, which is heavily researched and uses as much contemporary information as it can gather.
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