The Trial of Lizzie Borden

Sensational headlines, societal upheaval and a gruesome crime that shook Fall River, Massachusetts, to its core.

Turn off the lights and cozy up to the fireplace as we bring you the spookiest type of story we can — one straight from the history books. 

America's first trial of the century came from an unusual source: Lizzie Borden, a 32-year-old unmarried upper-class woman in 1892 New England. Borden's father and stepmother met their final moments in one of the most brutal of ways, at the hands of someone with an axe.

Did she do it? With the help of two writers, we bring you inside the courtroom for Borden's trial, a legal spectacle set against the backdrop of yellow journalism and a nation gripped by details of a crime among the affluent, complete with an all-star cast of attorneys. 

Special guests:

• Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden
• Mark Olshaker, co-author of The Cases That Haunt Us

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Transcript

Children singing: Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. 

(Intro music)

Amanda Pampuro: Welcome to Sidebar, a podcast from Courthouse News. I'm your host, Amanda Pampuro. 

Hillel Aron: And I'm Hillel Aron. 

AP: And that was an excellent rendition of the old nursery rhyme about Lizzie Borden, the most famous murderess of all time. 

HA: Technically it's a skipping rope rhyme. 

AP: Sorry, skipping rope rhyme. 

HA: Also alleged murderess. She was the defendant of what is probably America's first trial of the century, but you might say the jury's still out. 

AP: Alright, let's get into it. 

HA: Alright, the year is 1892. We are in Fall River, Massachusetts. It's actually the third largest city in the state, with a population of around 74,000 people. It's a center for textile production and there are a lot of immigrants, particularly Irish immigrants, but there's also a clique of wealthy bluebloods. 

AP: And the Borden family is among them. 

HA: Yeah, Lizzie's father was named Andrew, and here's Cara Robertson, she's a former attorney who wrote a wonderful book called “The Trial of Lizzie Borden,” describing Andrew and his family. 

Cara Robertson: Andrew Borden is a prominent local businessman. He was known to be a little bit of a miser but he's very well respected. The Bordens were one of the first families of Fall River at a time when that made a difference. But he's descended from a lesser branch and in fact was a self-made man and like a lot of men of his type, he seemed a lot more interested, as one of the columnists put it, in piling up dollars than in spending them. 

HA: Lizzie's mother died when she was three years old, and three years after that Andrew remarried a woman named Abby Gray. So, Abby really did raise Lizzie. 

AP: I was surprised to learn that Lizzie Borden was an adult at the time of the murders. 

HA: Yeah, she's 32 at the time and her sister, Emma, is 41. 

AP: Does that make them spinsters? 

HA: Well, I wouldn't call them that, but they are unmarried and they don't work, so they would have been called that at the time, and they all live together in this house, along with Bridget Sullivan, the live-in maid, who's from Ireland. Now, the layout of this house will play an important role in the murders. It’s a converted tenement and there's no central hallway, so to get to one room you have to go through another room. 

AP: Not very luxurious for such a rich family. 

HA: Yeah. So, the girls probably wanted a bigger house with modern things like electricity and indoor plumbing, but what they really wanted was to live in the more fashionable part of town on the hill. Here's Cara again. 

CR: Basically, the wealthier you are, the higher you live, and so that becomes of interest in the case, because one of the sources of the Borden daughters' dissatisfaction appeared to be that they weren't living in the Hill District, which is the elite district, but they were living in the flats, which is the business district and the place that middle-class Irish professionals lived. 

HA: All right. So, August 4, 1892. The Bordens’ neighbor, Adelaide Churchill, sees Bridget Sullivan, the live-in maid, running in and out of the house in a panic. She looks out and sees Lizzie standing outside the front door in sort of a daze. So, she calls out, “What's wrong?” and Lizzie says, “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over, someone has killed father.” They go inside the house and the neighbor Churchill says, “Where's your mother?” Lizzie says she doesn't know, maybe she's dead too. And then she says, “father must have an enemy, for we have all been sick and we think the milk has been poisoned.’”

AP: Very suspicious. 

HA: So, the doctor comes, the police come, some newspapermen come. It's one of those crime scenes that gets very crowded very quickly. 

AP: It must be a very gruesome scene if the rhyme is to be believed, anyway. 

HA: Yeah, it really is. There is blood everywhere. Andrew Borden has received about 10 or 11 blows to the face with what could only have been an axe. One of the witnesses says his face looks like raw meat. 

AP: Yeesh.

HA: The body of Abby Borden is upstairs. She received about 19 wounds. 

AP: Not 41?

HA: No, which really calls into question the accuracy of that skipping rope line. Anyway, it's a horrific scene. The doctor is shocked. One columnist writes that it looks like “a gorilla has been let loose.” Another speculates that perhaps Jack the Ripper has come to town. 

AP: This is just four years after the Jack the Ripper killings in London. 

HA: Yeah, and it's an interesting time, 1892. In America, there's still the Wild West, where violence is an everyday occurrence, but in Fall River, in high society, this was not normal. I spoke with another writer, Mark Olshaker. He's written several books with a pioneering criminal profiler named John Douglas. Their book, “Mindhunter,” inspired the Netflix TV show. Have you seen that one? 

AP: No, I get enough true crime in court. 

HA: It's really great. They have this other book called “The Cases That Haunt Us,” which has a chapter on the Borden murders. Here's Mark Olshaker. 

Mark Olshaker: This was an extremely unusual situation. Well-to-do people didn't usually get killed by people, presumably inside their own house. Murder was thought of as something that was sort of lower classes did, Jack the Ripper, people like that. Proper people did not commit murders, which is why that this case really galvanized the country and became such a news phenomenon really. 

AP: Like the O.J. murders? 

HA: Yeah, I think this case has a lot of echoes in more modern true crime. Stories like O.J. and also the Menendez brothers, which I think shows rich people committing violence or being accused of violence will always be fascinating to us. Anyway, police arrive at the scene and they notice exactly what investigators today would have noticed. What anyone who's watched a few episodes of “Law & Order” would notice: there is no sign of forced entry. Nothing has been stolen and there's no sign that Abby has been sexually assaulted. It was just this brutal murder with no discernible reason. Here's Cara Robertson again. 

CR: It was such a gruesome scene that the police really thought that it must have been the work of a madman, because they just couldn't imagine these elderly people inspiring that kind of hatred in anyone. But the odd thing was that the house itself was, as another witness put it, in “apple pie order,” which means that you know that it really was directed. It wasn't just a frenzy where someone was destroying everything inside and swinging the axe or hatchet around, but was really going after you know, Andrew. 

HA: And here's the weirdest part about the murder scene. Investigators believe that Andrew was killed between an hour and an hour and a half after Abby, meaning that if it was an outside intruder, he would have killed Abby and then either stayed in the house, hiding in a closet or something, for an hour and a half before going downstairs and murdering Andrew. 

AP: How sure are we about that timeline? 

HA: Well, sort of sure. Lizzie calls out for Bridget just a little after 11 a.m. and he's only just gotten home. We know that because Bridget actually let him into the house and when police come, they say his wounds are very fresh. So, we know Andrew was killed a little before 11 a.m. We are less sure about Abby. When police find her body, they determine that she was killed at least an hour before, based on her comparative body temperature and the blood around her, which has coagulated a bit. But it is possible that the gap between the murders was as little as 30 minutes or as long as two hours. 

AP: So, if it was that long, the murderer could have left and come back. 

HA: That's possible but not likely since, again, there's no sign of forced entry and no witnesses saying that they saw anyone strange going in and out of the house. 

AP: Okay, so the evidence points to someone within the house. 

HA: Exactly. Now, the older sister, Emma, was out of town that day. She's in Fairhaven. Bridget, the maid, was out for a while and then she was washing windows outside, so they both have pretty airtight alibis. 

AP: Unlike Lizzie. 

HA: Yeah, Lizzie is home the whole time. Suspicion falls on Lizzie, largely because there's no other suspect that would have had the opportunity to kill Andrew and Abby. 

AP: So, she's questioned. 

HA: Right. The police talk to her first on the day of the murders, but she's with the family doctor and she's still in shock. Then they interview her at the inquest, which is sort of like a pre-grand jury hearing. It's done before a judge and this interview goes disastrously for Lizzie Borden. Here's Cara. 

CR: Lizzie Borden gives a shifting account of her whereabouts at the time of the murders. You know, she says she's upstairs, she says she's downstairs. She says she's out in a barn, she's looking for a sinker. No, she's looking for a piece of lead to fix the screen. She's eating pears. And it also becomes clear that you know there is this real ill feeling in the house as well. 

HA: Is Bridget sort of the key witness to that? 

CR: Well, the oddity is that most of the worst testimony comes from Lizzie Borden herself, both directly at the time of the inquest, where she's describing the property dispute in which Andrew transferred a piece of property to his wife's name. Basically, he was just trying to help out Abby's half-sister, but this was something that was just considered, you know, inflammatory by the daughters that they thought this was like transferring property out of the Bordens to Abby's family, and although he tried to, you know, heal the rift by giving them equivalent property in their own name that they could rent out and have some extra income, it just didn’t heal the rift.

HA: Remember, Abby raised Lizzie, since Lizzie was about six years old. Nevertheless, Lizzie tells the police that after this property dispute, she stops calling her mother and starts calling her Mrs. Borden. 

AP: Cold. But Lizzie got along with her father, right? 

HA: Yeah, they were very close and one indication of that was Lizzie had given her father a ring which he wore on his finger at all times. He didn't even wear a wedding ring, but he wore that. And even though he was pretty stingy, he did pay for Lizzie to go on what was called a grand tour where she sailed to Europe and stayed for like four months, went to all these different countries. That was in 1890, just two years before the murder, and he also bought her this very expensive seal skin cape which will play a key role in our story later. 

AP: So, after the inquest, Lizzie is arrested, and this sets off a media firestorm, does it not? 

HA: Yeah, this is the heyday of yellow journalism. Cities have multiple newspapers, and newspapers put out two, sometimes even three daily editions. Again, the author Cara. 

CR: It seems so unbelievable that a woman who's, you know, who's otherwise, seems to tick all the boxes of middle-class respectability, who's a club woman, who is a stalwart of her local church, that she would be accused of something so gruesome. And so, there's a lot of interest in, you know, what does she really look like? Is she some sort of Amazonian character who you could imagine maybe doing this? Or is she, you know, like this petite demure you know little slip of a thing? And she's neither. She's just very average. 

HA: Julian Ralph, a columnist for the New York Sun, had this description of Lizzie Borden. “She is, in truth, a very plain, old-looking maid. She may be likened to a typical school mare: plain, practical and with a face that shows the deep lines of either care or habitual low spirits.”

AP: Very harsh. 

HA: The trial of Lizzie Borden begins on June 5, 1893, and each day the court is packed with spectators and reporters. It's hot, air conditioning hasn't been invented yet and everyone's sweating and fanning themselves. Other than that, however, the trial is a lot like trials today, with a few notable differences. There are three judges instead of one. There are 12 jurors, but they're all men. 

AP: I read that women didn't serve on juries in Massachusetts until 1950. 

HA: Here's another fun fact: All 12 jurors in the Lizzie Borden trial had mustaches. 

AP: Huh.

HA: And during the trial they were all sequestered at a hotel. 

AP: Just like the O.J. trial. 

HA: Right, and also like the O.J. trial, each side has a star-studded team of lawyers. Let's let Cara take us through the main players because she does that really well. 

CR: The chief prosecutor is a man named Hosea Knowlton and he's a man out of a Teddy Roosevelt manual of manly men. He's big, he's bearish, he's extremely decent and trustworthy. His co-counsel, William Moody, is someone who's described as being slim, blonde, blue-eyed and dressing like a New Yorker. 

AP: What about the defense?

HA: I'll let Cara continue here. 

CR: Lizzie Borden starts out with her, with just the family lawyer, who's a very well-regarded local business lawyer, but he's not, he’s probably not the person you want defending you if you're facing a capital murder charge. So, he hires an extremely well-known Boston lawyer whose name is Melvin Adams, who was sort of known as much for his dapper clothes and his mustache as he was for his trial skills, which were considerable. And then, even more notably, he goes out and he hires the former governor of Massachusetts. You know, if you see the joke about the lawyer who says something like, you know, “I'm just a simple country lawyer.” You know, with the suspenders. That's Governor George Robinson, you know, he is not at all good with what we call black letter law when he's making arguments about evidence. I mean, the prosecution really is so much better and so much clearer. But he's very good at spinning a story and seeming like a sensible, reasonable man who you can trust. 

HA: To get a sense of what the trial is like, William Moody gives the prosecution's opening statement and he's like, Lizzie Borden, she hated her stepmother, maybe wanted her father's money, too. She's the only one that could have done it. She's guilty. Then at the end he warns the jury you might see some evidence that will shock you. And he gestures toward this bag he has, and it falls open just a bit so the jury can see inside it. Do you know what they see? 

AP: What? 

HA: The skulls, the actual skulls of Andrew and Abby Borden. 

AP: No! 

HA: Yeah, and at the sight of this, Lizzie Borden faints. 

AP: Wow. 

HA: This actually earns her a bit of sympathy and humanizes her in a way that she hadn't been up till that point. The Fall River Daily Globe writes, “Lizzie Borden, the sphinx of coolness, who has so often been accused of never manifesting a feminine feeling had fainted.” And Julian Ralph, The Sun columnist writes, “Whatever she may have done, she is a woman, a being who for 32 years of her life pursued the quiet and sheltered routine of a maiden of good family.”

AP: So, the prosecution's case, it's a lot about motive, right?

HA: Motive and opportunity. But the prosecutors run into some problems presenting their evidence. Lizzie's inquest interview, which had gone so horribly wrong for her. The judges rule that inadmissible. Here's Cara. 

CR: This is long before Miranda, but there's something very similar in the Massachusetts Constitution that protects defendants against self-incrimination, and we know that the police really wanted to arrest her and were pretty much just waiting for her to testify, because the local chief of police was carrying the arrest warrant in his pocket all during the inquest. 

HA: And so that was why they said because you already viewed her as a suspect, you can't have her incriminating herself, right? 

CR: Right, that's the argument. I mean, I must say it is inconsistent with what they would have ruled, I think, in another case, you know, had it not been a woman. 

HA: They view her as being extra helpless, right? 

CR: The picture it conjures seems worse. That it's all these men scheming against this confused woman. 

AP: Now there's another key piece of evidence that the jury never gets to hear, which could also be very incriminating for Lizzie, right? 

HA: Yeah, the day before the murders, witnesses say that Lizzie goes into a drugstore and tries to buy a small amount of poison: hydrogen cyanide. 

AP: (gasp)

HA: Now she says she needs it for her seal skin cape which has become infested with bugs or something vermin. But the drugstore clerk refuses to sell it to her without a prescription and Lizzie sort of leaves in a huff. A bit earlier that morning Abby is visiting her doctor, telling him the whole family has been sick, and she says I think someone is trying to poison us. 

AP: Quite a coincidence. 

HA: Yeah, and you can go back and forth with this stuff all day. You can say well, it was hot, refrigerators hadn't been invented. People were always getting sick from something, milk going bad, whatever, and as far as the poison goes, the Bordens weren't actually poisoned, were they? And that's what the judges end up saying. This has nothing to do with the actual murder, it's prejudicial. It could be a complete coincidence. 

AP: So, a couple of friendly rulings from the judges. 

HA: Yeah, and there'll be one more later as well. Now, Cara explained to me that there was another big problem with the prosecutors’ case: Police never found the murder weapon. 

CR: Yeah, there's definitely a problem with the murder weapon. I mean, there are the Borden house is full of hatchets and axes. They were useful household items, so, you know, it wasn't unusual to find them. But there's a police officer who testifies that he sees this handle-less hatchet, you know, in other words just the blade with a little bit of wood sticking out of it in a box and covered with this kind of fine ash, you know, as if it's supposed to look like dust, but it didn't look like the dust on the other things, you know. So, this looks like, oh, okay, somebody's trying to hide something. And it turns out that that particular hatchet blade could have made all of the wounds on both Bordens. So, it seems like that's the murder weapon. The problem for the police is that, you know, at different times in the case earlier they had thought that there were different hatchets or axes had been the murder weapon, and then one of the police officers testifies about the finding of that particular hatchet in a way that contradicts the original testimony. So, it's a big mess. 

HA: Now, the prosecutors do score some points. There's the story that Lizzie had an old dress that supposedly had red paint spilled on it, and Lizzie burned it in a stove, you know on purpose, to destroy it about four days after the murders. 

AP: Very suspicious. 

HA: Yeah, but her sister, Emma, later testifies that it was her idea that she said oh, why don't you burn that old dress that's been ruined? 

AP: And that was common back then, burning old dresses? 

HA: Totally. Now the defense team, one of its big arguments is about the blood. It's all over the house but it's not on Lizzie. According to the timeline, Bridget sees Lizzie in between the two murders and the neighbor sees Lizzie shortly after the second murder. In neither of those instances is Lizzie covered in blood. 

AP: Which you would think she would be given all the blood at the crime scene. 

HA: Right. So, she would have had to clean herself up twice and the second time do it very quickly and somehow get rid of the murder weapon as well. I want to read an excerpt from this book I really like by Bill James. He's well known in the world of baseball statistics, but he has this book called “Popular Crime” and a section in it on the Borden murders. He writes, “the murderous attack probably occurred between 10:55 and 10:58, and Lizzie probably yelled for help about three minutes later. That leaves her essentially three minutes to clean herself up, get her shoes and stockings back on, bundle herself back into her cumbersome Victorian outfit, dispose of the murder weapon and pull herself together. Make it six minutes, make it nine minutes, make it 12. You can't do it in an hour.” 

AP: Is it possible that she just didn't get much blood on her during the murders? 

HA: It is possible, but it's not likely. At the trial there's a Harvard chemistry professor who testifies that the blood, quote, “might spatter in any direction and might not spatter in every direction.” So, it is possible. 

AP: And she does have one drop of blood on her. 

HA: That's right. Police did find one tiny spot of blood on an inner skirt Lizzie was wearing, and they also found some bloody towels soaking in a pail somewhere in the house. The defense explanation for this is that Lizzie had her period at the time. 

AP: Except they don't say period. 

HA: No, they're way too squeamish to talk about it directly, so they employ a series of strange euphemisms. At the inquest, Lizzie says that she has been bitten by fleas, which was a term that people used back then, believe it or not. Other lawyers will say the blood is natural and leave it at that. And I think most people agree that the men running the investigation were so uncomfortable with the subject of menstruation they probably hurt the case against Borden. Here's Mark Olshaker. 

MO: Take yourself back to 1892. If you're a police officer and you're told, "Oh, well, this is menstrual blood and these are rags from your period,” the police would say, “OK fine, we don't have to go any further.” So, what was probably the critical piece of evidence was essentially ignored or overlooked by the police. 

HA: In short, there's a lot of evidence that, for one reason or another, doesn't get presented to the jury, which leaves behind a lot of unanswered questions. The trial lasts two and a half weeks and just before deliberation, Judge Justin Dewey gives the jury some instructions, and they're pretty crazy by today's standards. He reminds the jury of 12 mustachioed men, quote, “the defendant's character has been good, one of positive, of active benevolence in religious and charitable work.” And he goes further. He starts giving almost like a closing statement defending Borden. He says, “if you don't believe any one link in the chain of the prosecution's logic, then you must find her innocent.” And he says, quote, “is it reasonable and credible that she could have killed Mrs. Borden at or about the time claimed by the government and then, with the purpose in her mind to kill her father at a later hour, have gone about her household affairs with no change of manner to excite attention?” Even back then people remark on this, one columnist writes, “had he been the senior counsel for the defense, he could not have more absolutely pointed out the folly of depending on circumstantial evidence alone.” Here's Mark Olshaker again. 

MO: This was such an unusual case, and the defendant was such an unusual type of defendant that there was probably a preconceived bias going in, that proper young ladies just didn't do this kind of thing, didn't hack their own father and stepmother apart, and the judge seemed to have bought into this. He said if you can't prove this, if you can't prove that, if you can't prove this, or if you don't believe this, then you must find Lizzie Borden innocent. 

HA: So, the jury starts to deliberate, and they come out with their verdict less than an hour and a half later. 

AP: What? 

HA: Yeah, here's Cara Robertson. 

CR: It probably takes them, you know, less than 10 minutes to really make this decision. They decide to stay in for, I think they're in there for about an hour and a half, you know, so that they can look reasonably deliberative. 

HA: The jury files back out and the clerk asks them if they've reached a verdict. But before the clerk can even finish the question, the jury foreman cannot contain himself, so he interrupts and declares, “not guilty.” 

AP: Wow. 

HA: And just like that, the trial is over, although the verdict will continue to reverberate in the community for years. Here's Cara again. 

CR: The town of Fall River definitely splits along class lines in terms of the verdict. There's great excitement at the courthouse and a sense of relief when she is acquitted. But in Fall River, again, there is this sense that perhaps people like Lizzie Borden can just get away with murder. And then among the upper classes, the people who might have known a little bit more of the story, it's clear that they had just decided that they were going to exact their own kind of punishment. You know, Lizzie and her sister go back to the church that had provided the bulwark of their support during the trial, and they find that the pews around them are all deserted. And so, Lizzie Borden gets the message pretty quickly that she's going to be frozen out. 

AP: What does Lizzie do after the trial? Does she move somewhere? 

HA: No, incredibly, she stays in Fall River, where she's a pariah and where schoolchildren are already singing songs about her hacking her parents to death. She and Emma inherit their dad's fortune, and they buy that big house on the hill they always wanted. 

AP: In the fashionable part of town. 

HA: Yeah, and they live together until 1905, when they get into an argument, and they never speak again. Emma moves away to Providence, but Lizzie will live in Fall River for the rest of her life. She dies in 1927 from complications of gallbladder surgery. Here's Cara. 

CR: Lizzie Borden with her inheritance could have gone anywhere. You know, she might well have been, you know, still known for the crime, but she wouldn't have been notorious in quite the same way. And I think, you know, it shows you a little bit about her strength of character that you know she was just going to stay there and live where she wanted to live and it also, I think, points to the provincialism of the place that that was sort of the most she could imagine for herself. 

HA: All right, brass tacks. Did Lizzie Borden kill her parents? 

CR: Well, I think this is something we're just never going to know. 

HA: But you kind of think she did, right? 

CR: Well, I think that I come down where Julian Ralph did. One of the points he made is that it's just hard to believe that someone could have been in the house as those murders were being committed and not have at least known about it. 

HA: She mentioned Julian Ralph, the New York Sun columnist. He writes at one point early in the trial, quote, “Miss Lizzie Andrew Borden is by far the most interesting prisoner New England has ever had. She's either the most injured of innocents or the blackest of monsters. She either hacked her father and stepmother to pieces with the furious brutality of the ape in Poe's Rue Morgue, or some other person did it, and she suffers the double torture of losing her parents and being wrongfully accused of their murder. It is almost impossible to believe that she is guilty, and yet it is equally difficult to understand how anyone else could have worked such fearful havoc in the house in which she was stirring.” And I think that's what a lot of people believe today, that none of the possible explanations are all that convincing. 

AP: But someone did it. 

HA: Yeah, and that's a point that Mark Olshaker makes. 

MO: There was talk at the time that this was kind of an impossible crime, that Lizzie Borden couldn't have committed it and nobody else could have committed it. And yet clearly it was committed, and this is not an uncommon phenomenon in murder scenes. Generally, there'll be something that doesn't quite fit the scenario and you just have to look at the big picture and say, all right, there are always going to be anomalies. But where does the evidence lead us? What does it tell us? 

HA: Even though Lizzie Borden was acquitted, most people today think she's guilty, and that has nothing to do with the physical evidence of the crime scene. It's because of the rhyme. She is, like many people in history, remembered primarily for a cultural meme. 

MO: It has become part of American culture, like so many things do unexpectedly. We have the old folk rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.” Well, that's not exactly what happened, but that's what lives in the popular imagination. So, Lizzie Borden has become like Jesse James, if you will, not a folk hero, necessarily, but a folk avatar. She still remains this symbol of the conflict between proper society and mindless killing. 

AP: That wraps things up for the trial of Lizzie Borden and for this episode. 

HA: Thanks to Cara Robertson, Mark Olshaker and a very special thank you to Miss Tuthill's fifth grade music class at Elysian Heights Arts Magnet for their incredible rendition of the Lizzie Borden song, which we played at the beginning of the episode. 

AP: And thanks to you the listeners. If you liked today's episode, consider subscribing and giving us a rating or review. You can read more true crime stories by myself, Hillel and countless others on courthousenews.com. 

(Outro music)

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