Unfortunately, there's nothing inherently scary about the idea of reincarnation. If you took THE EXORCIST, rated it PG and made it about reincarnation instead of possession, you'd get AUDREY ROSE. Thinking like that leads to dull crap like this. In the 70's, every major studio wanted to buy the next hit horror paperback and produce another blockbuster like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist or The Omen. Tressa, while I believe that Lizzie's gender certainly influenced the not guilty verdict, I do think the oft-unmentioned fact that a savage axe murder happened at a nearby farm house *just* before the jury went in for deliberations (juries weren't sequestered in those days) had a lot to do with it as well - they deliberated with sudden knowledge that a similar event (later proved unrelated) had just happened, Cartoonist Rick Geary has made a nice little side career of illustrating Victorian (and now 20th century) murder cases in his inimitable style and The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass., 1892 is one of his best. And what's more horrifying - that a unruly/put-upon daughter would savagely bash in her father and stepmother's heads? Or that a random traveling stranger could wander into a house at exactly the right moment, seen by no one, and commit the same savage deed for no logical reason, and then walk away free as a bird? (or, for that matter, that a disgruntled Irish maid could plan and pull off such an act and successfully pin suspicion on her master's daughter?). I think the Borden murders hold a lot of fascination because they're almost a real-life locked room mystery - the events happen over a short span of time in one place, all the likely suspects whereabouts are known (or at least stated), corroborating statements exist to back up various people's claims - all this minutiae is known and verified, and this, combined with the sheer savagery of the crimes, makes it a tantalizing mystery which (short of the invention of time travel) will never be solved for certain.
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