“Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father.”
With those words — called across a yard to a neighbor, on a summer day in 1892 — a woman named Lizzie Borden entered history as villain, victim, punch line and the media sensation of the Gilded Age.
By the next morning, 1,500 gawkers had gathered outside the Borden house in Fall River, Mass. There was soon speculation that Jack the Ripper had come to America.
Someone had killed father — and stepmother, too. Their bodies were discovered hacked to death; his, lying on the couch where he had been napping; hers, facedown in the spare room, bludgeoned almost twice as many times.
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