Cartoonist Rick Geary has made a nice little side career of illustrating Victorian (and now 20th century) murder cases in his inimitable style and The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass., 1892 is one of his best. And what's more horrifying - that a unruly/put-upon daughter would savagely bash in her father and stepmother's heads? Or that a random traveling stranger could wander into a house at exactly the right moment, seen by no one, and commit the same savage deed for no logical reason, and then walk away free as a bird? (or, for that matter, that a disgruntled Irish maid could plan and pull off such an act and successfully pin suspicion on her master's daughter?). I think the Borden murders hold a lot of fascination because they're almost a real-life locked room mystery - the events happen over a short span of time in one place, all the likely suspects whereabouts are known (or at least stated), corroborating statements exist to back up various people's claims - all this minutiae is known and verified, and this, combined with the sheer savagery of the crimes, makes it a tantalizing mystery which (short of the invention of time travel) will never be solved for certain.
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