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Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, was the sweetly mannered and demure daughter of Andrew's first marriage, Elizabeth. In an inkling of things to come, reporters rushed from all over the country to cover what headline writers trumpeted as "the trial of the century."
    Faced with a weak case put on by the prosecution, the jury deliberated for one hour and returned to court to declare Lizzie not guilty. Word of the acquittal spread like wildfire through Fall River and by telegraph to newspapers across the country and around the world. In another foreshadow of what such sensational trials in the next century would produce, many who had not been in the court during the trial, but had followed the case in press coverage, were shocked by the shortness of the jury's deliberations and so outraged by the verdict that Lizzie ultimately moved from Fall River to spend the rest of her life shunned by a public that gleefully recited:
            Lizzie Borden took an ax 
            And gave her mother forty whacks. 
            When she saw what she had done 
            She gave her father forty-one.
    A hundred years after her name got an enduring place in the annals of America's most famous criminal trials, another murder case was to end with the jury finding the defendant not guilty and a vast majority of the public in angry disagreement. Almost immediately, another piece of poetic public opinion went around:
            O.J. Simpson took a knife 
            And used it on his former wife; 
            And when he saw that she was dead, 
            He slashed Ron Goldman toe to head.
    In the hundred years between Lizzie Borden and O.J. Simpson thousands of men and women had been charged and put on trial for murder, with most convicted, but every now and then one of these cases of homicide was vaulted into such a state of intense public interest and insatiable curiosity that it, too, became "the trial of the century."
    In 1906, millionaire playboy Harry Thaw's troubled mind was obsessed with the beautiful twenty-year-old model who had become his wife, the former Evelyn Nesbitt. But neither could Harry rid his mind of Evelyn's former fatherly benefactor and lover, Stanford White. If the lurid stories she had whispered to Harry were to be believed, the country's most famous architect had been a sexual pervert. Consequently, when Thaw strode up to White while New fork's most celebrated people enjoyed late supper in White's magnificent restaurant atop Madison Square Garden, whipped out a pistol, and fired three bullets into the architect's body, then declared that he did it to save his wife's honor, defense lawyers claimed that such a deed could only be declared a justifiable act.
    With the best defense his riches could buy, Thaw pleaded not guilty, dined on sumptuous meals catered in his jail cell by the city's finest restaurants and lobster palaces, and calmly waited for the trial to begin and its star witness—Evelyn—to take the witness stand. He expected her to leave the jurors with no choice but to exonerate a man who had defended her honor.
    From shooting to verdict, the public doted on all the lurid details while viewing the drama as a lesson in morality. Unlike a morality play, however, the trial of Harry Thaw did not have a happy ending. The jurors proved incapable of reaching a verdict. With a mistrial declared, Harry faced a second trial at which the defense came to court with a fresh strategy. This time he pleaded temporary insanity and beat the rap.
    In the decade known as the Roaring Twenties excess seemed to be an American preoccupation. In 1926 Connecticut's murder trial of Gerald Chapman (the first man to be named Public Enemy Number One) set a style for raucus press coverage of a man who had come to be regarded by the public as a kind of folk hero.
    That same decade provided the press opportunity to tweak the public's passion for a sensational murder and a lively trial. Set against the