The jury took ninety minutes. Not guilty, on both counts, and the murders are still officially unsolved to this day. None of that mattered to the rhyme. My daughter said something at dinner one night that had nothing to do with any of it, and I improvised it, on the spot, into a parody of the same four lines everyone already knows - the ones that convicted a woman a jury acquitted.
Start with the audit → Email Russell See ServicesOne of these is the actual outcome of a criminal trial. The other is a nursery rhyme a child could recite before she could read. Only one of them is what people mean when they say the name.
Ninety minutes of deliberation, an acquittal on both counts, and a case that's never been solved by anyone, then or since. As far as the legal system is concerned, that's the entire, final answer.
What it teaches: a verdict is a fact. It is not, by itself, a story - and a fact with no story attached loses to a story with no fact attached, every time.
"Lizzie Borden took an axe" doesn't mention a trial, a jury, or an acquittal, because it isn't reporting the case. It's a four-line, unkillable piece of content that's outlasted the transcript by well over a century. It doesn't need to be true. It just needs to be easy to say.
What it teaches: the internet doesn't preserve outcomes. It preserves whatever's most repeatable, and repeatable beats true almost every time nobody's checking.
My daughter said "we seriously need more snacks," completely unrelated to any of this, and I riffed the rest live - the same reflex I use on a bad-faith pitch or a hostile witness: take the real thing you're handed, build on it without a script.
What it teaches: the raw material for a good story is almost never invented. It's a real line, at a real dinner table, worth noticing before it's gone.
Every criminal defense lawyer eventually runs into a version of this problem, usually on a much smaller stage than Fall River's. You win the case - dismissal, not guilty, charges dropped, whatever the actual legal outcome is - and the story that circulates afterward isn't the outcome. It's whatever version was easiest to repeat before the outcome landed: the arrest, the accusation, the headline that ran the day someone got charged and never got corrected the day they were cleared. Lizzie Borden is the extreme case, but the mechanism is completely ordinary. A jury doesn't control what gets remembered. Nobody does, by default - which is exactly the problem.
A verdict is a fact. A rhyme is distribution. If you don't control the second one, the first one doesn't matter nearly as much as it should.
That's the actual argument for a firm publishing its own account of its own wins, in its own words, instead of assuming the correct outcome will speak for itself. It won't. It never has. The Borden case is the proof: a full acquittal, an unsolved crime, a hundred and thirty years of "took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks" anyway. Nobody's out there defending the rhyme's accuracy. It doesn't need defending. It already won the only contest that was ever actually being run, which was never "what's true" - it was "what gets said."
The song below isn't trying to correct the record. It's the opposite instinct, used on purpose: my daughter handed me four unrelated words at dinner, and instead of letting the moment evaporate, I built something out of it immediately, the same way I'd build a cross-examination out of whatever a witness just handed me on the stand. Most of what gets remembered - a case, a rhyme, a dinner-table joke - started as something small that somebody bothered to catch.
Case facts verified against Wikipedia's Lizzie Borden House entry and Famous Trials' account of the 1893 trial: 230 Second Street, Fall River; murders August 4, 1892; trial at the New Bedford Courthouse; jury deliberation approximately 90 minutes; verdict not guilty; case unsolved.
A correct legal outcome doesn't publish itself. If your firm isn't telling its own wins in its own words, something else fills the silence - and it usually isn't accurate.
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