The Rise of Detective and True Crime Mysteries
When the Ratcliffe Highway murders took place in 1811, London, like every city in Europe and North America, lacked a formal police department. It wasn’t until 1829 that the first centrally organized force, the Metropolitan Police, was established. Perhaps not coincidentally, that same year, François Vidocq, a French criminal-turned-investigator, published his highly influential Memoirs. Vidocq was a self-promoting pioneer of criminal investigation whose techniques influenced not only real-world police work, but also several literary giants of deduction, notably Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin (who, in turn, influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes). More police forces cropped up in the coming years, as Boston formed its own unified department in 1838, and New York in 1845. Throughout the century, criminology—a science reliant on investigative methods and forensic analysis—developed, including the advent of fingerprinting and ballistics.
Along with the rising popularity of detective fiction, these scientific advances shaped the public’s interest in true crime mysteries. By the end of the century, Americans were comfortable with the concept of forensic science and, perhaps more significantly, with the notion of the inspector. Decisions about innocence and guilt were no longer reliant on divine justice, but rather on human intelligence. It is in this environment that the Lizzie Borden case, one of the greatest mysteries in true crime history, became the biggest news story of its age.
On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were hacked to death in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew’s daughter, Lizzie, a church-going, temperance-supporting spinster, allegedly swung the axe. The sheer breadth of literature and art produced in its wake speaks to an enduring fascination with a story that was, in its day, nothing short of a media phenomenon. Lizzie’s arrest and prosecution led to the original “trial of the century” and garnered as much, if not more, press than O.J.’s proceedings a century later.
Readers across the country were treated to daily reports from Massachusetts and routinely discussed their own verdicts based on the week’s dispatches. Examining the trial reports, Karen Roggenkamp has demonstrated how different media outlets covered the case. The New York Times provided factual, emotionless information, while the Boston Globe sensationalized the case with frequent references to “bloody hatchets and crushed skulls.” Both reporting methods, Roggenkamp notes, distanced readers from the reality of the case.