LIZZIE BORDEN’S SECRET, screamed a front-page headline in the Boston Daily Globe’s morning edition for Monday, October 10, 1892. The fourteen-column article that followed rolled out shocking new evidence about the axe murders of Borden’s parents in Fall River, Massachusetts, a crime that transfixed America that year.
There was, however, a problem with the blockbuster story. Hardly a word of it was true.
Welcome to a bizarre tale of fake news in the Gilded Age.
Published in Ellery Queen’s magazine.
Republished in CrimeReads.