The Trial of the Century

Emma arrives at the house, finds her father's body, and turns on Lizzie in front of the police, accusing her and Maggie. Lizzie goes to jail, where she settles into a room overlooking a garden. Ten months pass. Emma visits, reminds Lizzie of the promise she made their dying mother to protect her, points out how badly her inquest story changed, and begs her to blame Maggie. Lizzie refuses, and Emma tears up her cherry trees.

Help comes from an unexpected direction. Nance O'Neil, who has slept with the bailiff to learn about the case, coaches Lizzie to perform: a grand entrance in mourning, a faint when the evidence is shown, the look of a grieving daughter. At trial Emma becomes an asset, testifying about a strange man seen near the house and blaming Lizzie's inconsistencies on the morphine doctors gave her. The jury takes an hour so it will look as though they deliberated, then acquits. Outside, Lizzie spots Maggie in the crowd, who nods.

The trial was real and enormous news. It ran in New Bedford from June 5 to June 20, 1893. Lizzie was defended by George Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts, and prosecuted by Hosea Knowlton and William Moody, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Two rulings hurt the prosecution badly: Lizzie's contradictory inquest testimony was excluded, and so was the evidence that she had tried to buy prussic acid. The judge's charge to the jury was widely read as favorable to her. The jury acquitted after about ninety minutes.

Emma did testify for the defense, including about the dress Lizzie burned. Lizzie had spent the months before trial in the jail at Taunton, and a matron there, Hannah Reagan, claimed to have overheard Lizzie tell Emma during a visit, “you have given me away” — a story Reagan was pressured to retract, and one that is still disputed. Reports of a strange man near the house were part of the defense's case. Nance O'Neil's role is invented: she and Lizzie met years after the trial.

The episode's argument is that the trial was theater, and that Lizzie won because she played the part a jury of men expected from a respectable woman. Historians have made a version of that case too. What the series adds is certainty that the performance covered guilt — the record never gives that certainty. The finale, Carnival, picks up after the verdict.