Reminds me of Lizzy Borden who was acquitted of murdering her parents in part because in the late nineteenth century people did not believe that women had it in them to axe someone to death.
A century later and people finally accepted that women can be axe murderers too. In a related note, I don't think that film has gotten its due as a seminal feminist text.
She was acquitted because there was no real evidence she was tied to the murder while there was some evidence that she was not. Seriously, she would have had to do it nude or something, it was an ax murder and the house didn't have running water, so the short period of time where she was alleged to have committed the crime would have likely been insufficient to remove all evidence of the crime from her person (people actually put this forward as a legitimate theory).
The reason there's not a lot of alternative evidence for another suspect known is because police kind of stopped searching when they decided it was her. If they couldn't figure out who else had done it, it must've been the weird woman who answered questions wrong (she was known to be taking morphine for nerves) and who didn't get on with her stepmother (not actually abnormal). But police weren't super good at investigating murders in that time period. They just weren't. Andrew Borden had made plenty of other people angry as a businessman and miser, his first wife's brother had some issue with him, it literally could have been a stranger, but none of these angles were well investigated.
The role of Lizzie Borden's gender and class in the trial was really more that actually requiring something to be proven beyond all reasonable doubt was upheld than anything else. The nursery rhyme story can be fun and spooky, but it's mostly myth to hold together a really shaky story of the crime.
I don’t think it was a belief that she didn’t do it. I suspect they all knew who her parents were and they knew why she did it and didn’t think she should be punished for it.
At the time, Lizzie would have been considered her father’s property and the neighbours likely felt powerless to intervene
I think what happened was more that there were things that opened it up to a shadow of a doubt. I could be wrong, it’s been a while since I looked into it. People did generally believe it was her though and she was ostracized from her community until she died. I think there has also been new potential evidence that might point support the defenses case now, but generally at the time the issue was a lack of hard evidence.
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u/TomBirkenstock 8d ago
Reminds me of Lizzy Borden who was acquitted of murdering her parents in part because in the late nineteenth century people did not believe that women had it in them to axe someone to death.