Playwright Sasha Wilson on consuming true crime, audience expectations and whether Lizzie Borden did it

My name is Sasha Wilson and I love true crime.

Back in the heyday of Serial, when true crime podcasts still felt like a DIY feminist intervention, I devoured every case like it was homework for my personal safety. It felt empowering, even radical: women were finally at the centre of the narrative, not just as victims, but as researchers, narrators, experts.

We were learning the red flags, whispering warnings into each other’s ears through our headphones, our keys clenched between our fingers as we walked home.

But it would seem that true crime has always spoken to women. They thronged to Lizzie Borden’s courtroom in such numbers that the Fall River Daily Globe advised: “The New Bedford man who comes home and finds it deserted needn’t be alarmed. There has been no elopement. The dear creature is probably in the crowd of morbid females who are storming the door of the country courthouse trying to get admission to the Borden trial.”

Note the word “morbid.” At best, our interest in the subject matter belies something diseased within us. At worst, our fascination means we are a hop, skip and a jump away from becoming something monstrous and wielding the hatchet ourselves.

And yet, even as women were framed as dangerously drawn to the spectacle, Lizzie herself was cast as entirely other. The press had no shortage of vocabulary to describe her: strange, indifferent, unfeeling, abnormal. Her greatest crime, it seemed, was not her potential guilt, but her failure to behave as a woman should.

Even speculation around possible motives for the crime has a strain of Victorian pearl-clutching. Lizzie was 32 at the time of the crime, unmarried, with no prospects. Despite there not being a shred of evidence to suggest it, Ed McBain’s 1984 novel Lizzie poses the question: was she having an affair with the maid, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan? Were they discovered in flagrante, and did that precipitate the crime? There is a worrying level of sexual titillation underpinning the conjecture that lesbianism is a gateway drug to parricide. And indeed, presents this ‘deviant’ sexuality as yet another clue for why this seemingly well brought up woman became a monster.

Elizabeth Jordan was a journalist reporting on Lizzie’s trial for the New York World. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that it takes a woman to see the machinations of the media machine, red in tooth and claw: “Every picture which has been made of this woman either absurdly flatters her or grossly maligns her.”

Not much has changed in the intervening 132 years. Women in the public eye remain our favourite bloodsport. If there’s one thing more lucrative than elevating a woman to untouchable heights, it’s the inevitable feeding frenzy when we rip her to shreds. Look at how we package pop-culture icons who stop giving us a version of womanhood we desire.

Britney Spears was the poster child for unrealistic femininity. She was both a vixen and a virgin. She was the girl next door but also a star of staggering proportions. She was perfect. Until the pressure of being in the public eye drove her to what we identified as madness. She spat at photographers, she shaved her hair off. But what did she really do? She stopped behaving like daddy’s little girl. And we turned on her for it.

Of course, a pop-star going off the rails really isn’t the same as committing murder, but the unifying thread? Women who can’t – or won’t – be controlled.

Terry Wogan asked Eartha Kitt in a 1986 interview whether she frightened men. She replied, “You’d have to ask them,” the suggestion of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth as she pointed at Wogan. “I’m asking you,” she continued. “Yes,” an increasingly flustered Wogan spluttered. Just before he can finish his thought “I think you frighten men,” Kitt calmly slips off her red stilettos and places her bare feet in his lap. It’s not just violence that unsettles us. It’s the audacity to take up space.

After Lizzie’s acquittal, the Boston Globe published an article chronicling the moment the verdict came down: “If she were an ordinary woman, she would have cried and cried. Perhaps fainted. Then smiled and reasserted the habitudes of her sex. The difficulty is, she is not an ordinary woman. She is a puzzle psychologic.”

And that’s just it. Every murder mystery says as much about the people telling it as it does about the crime itself. We’re the puzzle, and Bury The Hatchet is simply my attempt to turn the lens back on us – the audience. After all, it’s not the story we’re after. It’s the thrill of the dissection.

Bury The Hatchet plays at Pleasance Dome Queen Dome at 15:50 until 25 August