Showing results for "Publishing Lives" in Murder

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England - for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly didn't commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before she was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison. In her opinion, a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name.

Once there was a wilderness: Australia's frontier, a dangerous and unforgiving place where outlaws ruled the roads and killers were hailed as heroes. It was here, in 1838, that one man's uncompromising sense of justice changed history and shocked the world. Denny Day was a vicar's son from Ireland. A member of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, as a young man Day joined the British army before resigning to seek his fortune in New South Wales. There he accepted the most challenging role in the young colony: keeping the peace on the frontier.

The Netflix series "Till murder do us part: Soering vs. Haysom" deals with the Haysom murders in detail, but the love affair between Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering comes up a little short. How could Jens have fallen so deeply in love with Elizabeth that he was willing to get involved in a double-murder? Jens wrote about this years ago in A far, far better thing (Lantern Books 2017). While the focus of that book is on the murders, seven chapters have almost nothing to do with the crime. Instead, they describe the passionate early months of Elizabeth's and Jens's affair.