Pearson’s important contribution to the genre of True Crime recounts what was known in 1924 of five murder cases, using court records, newspaper accounts, and other nonfiction sources to recreate crimes and subsequent trials from 1812 to 1904.
Pearson spends the most time with the Borden case: the trail and acquittal of Lizzie Borden for the ax murder of her father Andrew Borden and her mother Abby on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. The jury took only an hour and a half to acquit her. Although she made conflicting and implausible statements about where she was during the killings, she was probably acquitted because of the lack of physical evidence, especially no proved murder weapon and no blood on her clothes seen by anyone who encountered her shortly after the murders.
Then he takes up “The Twenty-third Street Murder” of Benjamin Nathan, a rich Manhattan stockbroker who was bludgeoned to death in 1870. No one was tried for Nathan’s murder, though his playboy son Washington Nathan was suspected. Later reports from convicts pointed toward a robbery planned by several people.
There was a conviction in the 1896 killings aboard the barkentine Herbert Fuller of the captain, his wife, and the second officer. The first mate, Thomas Bram, was convicted, retried, and convicted again, serving fifteen years for the murders.
In the last two cases Pearson treats, Charles Tucker was electrocuted for the 1904 murder of Mabel Page in Weston, Vermont, and Stephen Boorns was about to be executed for the murder of his brother-in-law Russell Colvin when Russell Colvin was found and brought to the court in Manchester, Vermont, where the murder was supposed to have taken place.
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