Lizzie Borden on This Day in History

Lizzie Borden by the Chad Mitchell Trio 1962

This Day In History: Lizzie Borden was acquitted on this day in 1893 of the murders of her father and stepmother. You may have heard the poem:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

In reality, her mother received 19 whacks, and her father only 11.

Lizzie is quite popular, but another woman who was born only a few months before Borden, Belle Gunness, killed anywhere up to 40 people in Illinois and Indiana. The 1800's actually had its fair share of female serial killers: Delphine LaLaurie, Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh, Hélène Jégado, Hannah Hanson Kinney, Sarah Dazley, Mary Ann Cotton, Catherine Wilson, Lydia Sherman, Margaret Waters, Amelia Dyer, Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins, Maria Swanenburg, Mary Bateman, Anna Maria Zwanziger, Jane Toppan, Mary Ann Britland, Lizzie Halliday, Louise Vermilya and Frances Knorr, and most of these were poisoners.

See also Poison Mysteries in History by C.J.S. Thompson 1899
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2018/06/poison-mysteries-in-history-by-cjs.html