Just Like O.J.'s Trial, But Without Kato   

"The public was hungry for the gruesome details of the double murders, and the press was prepared to satisfy that hunger with saturation coverage."

Sounds like a critique of the O.J. Simpson trial, right? Wrong. It refers to a classic American criminal case – the 1893 trial of Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, for the murder of her father and stepmother.

Surprisingly, O.J. and Lizzie have much in common:

• The persons they were accused of killing were slashed and hacked to death in a most grisly way.

• Each hired high-priced lawyers and neither took the witness stand.

• Far-fetched alibis were presented on their behalf – O.J. practicing golf shots at night in his yard and Lizzie searching for fishing sinkers in a barn loft on an excruciatingly hot August day.

• Rogue detectives were involved in each case, inadvertently helping the accused by their improper actions.

• Sequestered juries acted with amazing speed to acquit both O.J. and Lizzie, stirring great national controversies.

Perhaps the most intriguing similarity was the way that advocates for O.J. and Lizzie were able to put police and prosecutors on the defensive.

Writing about the Borden case in a 1974 book, Massachusetts Judge Robert Sullivan said, "As the curtain rose on the trial of Lizzie Borden, it was police and prosecutors who wore the black hats. Lizzie's hat was white."

Major newspapers contributed to Lizzie's favorable ratings. The public apparently refused to believe that a socially prominent 32-year-old Sunday school teacher could kill both of her parents with an ax. It was a sensational story even in the pre-television era.

Radical feminists like "The Bloomer Girls" lined up with leaders of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in spirited defense of Lizzie. Clergy stayed by her side and berated the police for making the arrest.

Yet Sullivan wrote, after a careful review of the evidence, that Lizzie was the only person who had both motive and opportunity to commit the crimes and who showed consciousness of guilt by incredibly inconsistent answers at an inquest that were not allowed into evidence.

At the height of the Victorian era, however, Lizzie was a sympathetic figure. She even benefited from a major gaffe by the Boston Globe, which, at the peak of the story's hype, was devoting seven or eight pages a day to it.

A Globe reporter aptly named Henry G. Trickey cut a deal with a private detective, Edwin D. McHenry, who had been hired by the Fall River police. Trickey paid McHenry $500 for "affidavits" in one of the first, worst examples of checkbook journalism. The Globe rushed them into print, only to find that the witnesses and statements were totally phony – inventions of McHenry.

The Globe apologized, saying it had been "grievously misled." Trickey, indicted on charges of obstruction of justice, fled to Canada and was killed in a train accident. Like Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman's tape-recorded boasts of planting evidence and framing suspects, the phony Globe story helped Lizzie's cause.

Her chief attorney, former Massachusetts Gov. George D. Robinson, was the Johnnie Cochran of her team. Robinson proved to be a master at swaying a jury. "The defendant is a woman, one of a sex all high-minded men revere, all generous men love," Robinson told the jury of 12 men who were already reluctant to send a woman to the gallows. His fee was $25,000 – a pittance compared to O.J.'s $6 million legal bill but a small fortune then.

The jury in the Borden case, selected in only four hours, was sequestered for a 15-day trial, far less than the months of isolation the Simpson jury endured. But Lizzie's jury took only one hour to set her free, compared to three hours for O.J.'s panel.

At first, the public exulted to hear that Lizzie was spared death by hanging. But soon a backlash began and she became the target of cruel jokes and lampoons.

Lizzie, who inherited half of her father's wealth, bought a 14-room mansion in a fashionable neighborhood of Fall River. She had four servants, including a coachman. But she was ostracized. Former friends refused to speak with her. She never married and died of natural causes in 1927.

At least a dozen books, the "Fall River Legend" ballet and several stage plays have been written about Lizzie Borden. The same may become true for O.J. as well. She was found innocent, but not in the court of public opinion, as the enduring doggerel tells:

Lizzie Borden took an ax,

And gave her mother
forty whacks.

And when she saw
what she had done,

She gave her father
forty-one.