On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ten months later, Andrew's daughter Lizzie was tried for both murders and acquitted in about ninety minutes. Nobody else was ever charged.

Everyone knows the rhyme. Almost none of it is true. The weapon was a hatchet. Abby was Lizzie's stepmother. And the autopsy records eighteen wounds to Abby and ten to Andrew, not forty and forty-one.

This episode isn't an attempt to solve it. The case can't be solved. The volume of the inquest transcript holding Lizzie's first day of testimony is lost, and Bridget Sullivan's inquest testimony is gone entirely.

What we do instead is sort every claim into four buckets and say out loud which one we're standing in: primary documents, 1892 newspapers, modern scholarship, and folklore. Then we go thro ...