On this date in 1786, Elizabeth Wilson was hanged in Chester, Pennsylvania for the murder of her infant twins. “One of the melodramas of the early American republic,” our Elizabeth (sometimes called “Harriot Wilson” in the accounts) was a farmer’s daughter of Chester County who got knocked up by a passing sailor. When this gentleman declined to make an honest woman of her after she had borne the bastards, the kids disappeared — later to be discovered dead in the woods by a hunter. The fallen woman denied having killed them directly, but “acknowledged having placed the children by the...