La Muselivre

Collins visited Albany, N.Y., in September of 1873, and someone there gave him a pamphlet that Leonard Sargeant, a Vermont politician who had been one of the Boorns' defense attorneys, had written about the case 50 years after the fact.
Collins, who had trained in the law himself, took only a few months to turn the plot of the pamphlet into a novel. He changed the names and locale, compressed the events of eight years into a few weeks, and - true to the sensibilities of his Victorian readers - added a chaste romantic subplot. But Collins preserved most of the legal details of the actual case - the lack of verified human remains, the use of coerced confessions, and testimony by the defendants' cellmates, who had hopes of having their own sentences reduced by cooperating with the prosecutors.
Collins made the narrator and hero of "The Dead Alive" a burned-out English barrister who was escaping the rigors of his London practice by visiting the American farm where the supposed murder occurred. The narrative device allowed him to comment on the American criminal justice system and explain to his British readers how that system differed from their own.