Who knew? My take on the story focuses on the fact that as a "nice" woman from a "good" family, (read white and upper middle class) Lizzie Borden was considered incapable of a brutal double murder. Nice women from good families just don't hack people to death with a hatchet and then calmly send the maid out to fetch the police. The hunt was immediately on for someone more in line with the public perception of brutal murderer -- black, of course, although Irish or that old stand-by, "foreign" would do in a pinch, vagrant, maybe mentally deranged. Any suspect would be better than Miss Elizabeth Borden! The entire fabric of society might crumble to dust if we believed such things might be possible!Has society changed since 1892? We are still very quick to point the finger away from "nice" women of "good" families, even when they still have blood on their hands...
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