The nursery rhyme says Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, but almost every detail of that famous chant is wrong. This episode strips away the folklore to examine the real 1892 Fall River axe murders, a case often called the O.J. Simpson trial of the 19th century and a story far weirder and more unsettling than the myth.

Inside a claustrophobic, resentment-filled household ruled by a staggeringly wealthy yet miserly father, tensions over money, property, and privacy reached a breaking point. The discussion covers the narrow window of the killings, a botched investigation shaped by Victorian prudishness, a media-circus trial, and an acquittal driven by gender and class bias, alongside the alternate theories that still captivate audiences today.

• The penny-pinching household with no plumbing despite a fortune ...