Having followed the link to your earlier post on The Franchise Affair and from there gone to Sarah Waters' article about it, I'm now really interested in the original 18th century case, especially since all parties involved apparently went to their graves insisting their version was the truth and there's no consensus on who was lying; I suppose it's even possible nobody was, that the girl was abused by an entirely different pair and just had a bad memory for faces or something.
ETA -- just skimmed the wiki entry on the case and oh hell yes, it could have been truthful but confused witness and mistaken identity: girl with a head injury, kept in a boarded-up (and therefore probably dark) hayloft for a month, and then the authorities show her a widow who owns a hayloft and say "this is the woman who did it, right?" Then various groups take up the case for their own various political reasons, and just to add to the confusion, this was right around the time the calendar changed, so some witnesses as to the whereabouts of the accused at the time were eleven days off.....
no subject
ETA -- just skimmed the wiki entry on the case and oh hell yes, it could have been truthful but confused witness and mistaken identity: girl with a head injury, kept in a boarded-up (and therefore probably dark) hayloft for a month, and then the authorities show her a widow who owns a hayloft and say "this is the woman who did it, right?" Then various groups take up the case for their own various political reasons, and just to add to the confusion, this was right around the time the calendar changed, so some witnesses as to the whereabouts of the accused at the time were eleven days off.....