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Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous

killers in true crime history. True murder with your host journalist and author

Dan Zufanski.

Good evening. Before the sensational cases of Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony, before even Lizzie

Borden, there was Polly Bodine. The first American woman put on trial for capital murder in our nation's debut media circus.

On Christmas night, December 25, 1843.

In a serene village on Staten Island,

shocked neighbors discovered the burnt remains of 24-year-old mother

Emmelin House, and her infant daughter, Anne Eliza.

In a perverse nativity, someone bludgeoned to death a mother and child in their home and then covered up the crime with

hellfire. When an ambitious district attorney charges Polly Bodine, Emmelin's

sister-in-law with a double homicide. The new Penny Press explodes.

Polly is a perfect media villain. She's a separated wife who drinks gin, commits adultery, and has had multiple

abortions. Between June 1844 and April 1846 the nation was enthralled by her three trials in

Staten Island Manhattan and Newburgh for the Christmas murders.

After Polly's legal dream team entered the fray, the press and the public debated not only

her guilt, but her character and fate as a fallen woman in society.

Public opinion split into different camps over her case.

Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman covered her case as young newsman.

P.T. Barnum made a circus out of it. James Fenimore Cooper's last novel was inspired by her trials.

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