According to the Madison, WI, Capital Times, the first-ever gavel-to-gavel TV coverage of a criminal trial was the Hoffman murder trial (1980), although Goldfarb’s TV or Not TV doesn’t refer to it. However, the newspaper article is a very interesting account of the high-profile trial of a gorgeous, young woman—the sort of criminal defendant that has since become de rigueur in tabloid news (think Casey Anthony).

I came across this long-forgotten case when searching for information about the effects of pretrial publicity, a topic that seems to have fallen by the wayside since the O.J. Simpson murder-trial circus. In his case, while pretrial publicity was enormous, we seem only to remember the televised trial itself. (You might also remember that the trial was broadcast on radio, too, so we wouldn’t miss a word while commuting to work.)

Apparently, a Madison reporter named Karl Harter wrote a true-crime account of the Hoffman murders and trial: Winter of Frozen Dreams, which might make interesting reading (though now out of print, it rates five stars on Amazon). The book was recently fictionalized and made into a movie of the same name—not well reviewed. The trailer rather says it all: I can’t figure out why the actress (Thora Birch) who plays Barbara Hoffman appears to be wearing a wig.

The trial verdict is interesting. Of the two murders charged, Hoffman was only convicted of one, presumably because of “reasonable doubt” about the way the second victim died. I suspect the jury was confused by the prosecution’s presentation.

Hoffman was accused of poisoning a man named Berge with cyanide and then asking a man named Davies to help her dispose of the body. Davies went to the police, but before the trial he was found dead in his bathtub, himself the victim of cyanide. However, he left behind letters recanting his testimony against Hoffman. The jury found her guilty of the first murder (Berge) but not the second (Davies).

Does this make sense? They must have felt that Davies’ death was suicide and his “deathbed” recantation of his accusations was false; therefore his accusations must have been true. But who commits suicide with cyanide? Besides, Hoffman was a biochemistry student at the UW-Madison—a student of chemicals like cyanide.