Lizzie Borden's Acquittal 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 (who tortured and murdered slaves in her household), 

Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh (who poisoned her husbands), 

Hélène Jégado (who killed 36 people with arsenic), 

Hannah Hanson Kinney (who also poisoned her husbands), 

Sarah Dazley (who also poisoned her husbands), 

Mary Ann Cotton (who also poisoned her husbands), 

Catherine Wilson (a nurse who poisoned her patients), 

Lydia Sherman (who poisoned her husbands and eight children), 

Margaret Waters (killed 19 children), 

Amelia Dyer (who also killed the children in her care), 

Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins (they poisoned five people), 

Maria Swanenburg (suspected of killing more than 90 people with poison), 

Mary Bateman (aka the Yorkshire Witch, who was responsible for countless deaths), 

Anna Maria Zwanziger (killed four people with poison), 

Jane Toppan (poisoned 31 people), 

Mary Ann Britland (killed three people with poison), 

Lizzie Halliday (killed four people), 

Louise Vermilya (poisoned nine people),

and Frances Knorr (known as the Baby Farming Murderess, was a nanny who strangled babies in her care).

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

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