John White Webster was born to Redford and Hannah (White) Webster in Boston, Massachusetts on May 20, 1793. He was educated at Harvard University, where he earned both his MA (1811) and MD (1815). He went on to study medicine in London and returned to Harvard to teach chemistry in 1824. He was never financially well off, and borrowed the considerable sum of $400 from colleague Dr. George Parkman, a member of one of Boston's wealthiest families, in the 1840s. When Webster failed to repay the debt by the fall of 1849, Parkman began to badger him for the money. Parkman finally confronted Webster in his laboratory shortly before Thanksgiving and went so far as to threaten to use his influence to have Webster removed from the faculty if he failed to repay his debt. Webster, supposedly furious, struck Parkman over the head with a piece of firewood, killing him. When he could not revive Parkman, Webster dismembered his body and burnt most of it in the laboratory furnace. After Parkman's family began advertising a reward for information about his location, the Medical College's janitor broke into Webster's lab and found Parkman's remains. Webster was arrested and, after a failed suicide attempt, tried for murder. Although Webster's attorneys claimed that the prosecution had not proved corpus delicti (the existence of a crime) because they had not produced the victim's body, Webster was convicted. He finally confessed to the crime before he was hanged in Boston on August 30, 1850.

Lizzie Andrew Borden was born to Andrew Jackson and Sarah (Morse) Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts on July 19, 1860. Her father and stepmother (Abby Durfee Gray) were murdered with an axe on August 4, 1892 and Lizzie was accused of committing the crime. She, however, claimed that she had been in the hayloft in the barn when the crime took place and found the victims dead when she returned to the house. Her story was unlikely: a police officer saw no evidence of her presence in the thick dust in the hayloft, the local druggist confirmed that she had attempted to buy fast-acting poison the day before the murders, and a friend later revealed that she had witnessed Lizzie burning a dress (presumably the one she had committed the murders in). Lizzie also had a compelling motive: she and her stepmother had a longstanding disagreement about her father's fortune, and Lizzie suspected that he was rewriting his will in her stepmother's favor. She was tried for the murders in 1893 and acquitted. She died on June 1, 1927 and is still widely suspected of having committed the crimes she was accused of.

Duncan Brown Cooper was born to Matthew Delamere and Marian Witherspoon (Brown) Cooper in Maury County, Tennessee in 1844. He served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and went on to become a politician and the publisher of the Nashville American. Cooper had previously been friendly with Senator and fellow publisher Edward Ward Carmack, but the relationship had soured and was openly hostile by the time Carmack ran for Governor against Malcolm Patterson in 1908. Cooper acted as an advisor to Patterson's campaign and helped Patterson to achieve his narrow victory. Carmack, incensed, used his newspaper, the Nashville Tenneseean, to attack Cooper. The conflict escalated, and when Cooper and his son, Robin Jones Cooper, encountered Carmack on a Nashville street on November 9, 1908, Carmack feared for his safety and fired at the pair. He wounded Robin Cooper, who returned fire and killed him. Both father and son were convicted of murder, even though Duncan Cooper had not fired at Carmack. Governor Patterson pardoned Duncan Cooper, and Robin Cooper was granted a new trial before the charges against him were dropped outright. Robin Cooper was murdered in 1919 by persons unknown, although Carmack's son, Edward Ward Ned Carmack Jr., was initially suspected. Duncan Cooper died of natural causes in 1922.

Donald Franklin Paine was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1939. He earned his B.A. (1961), M.A. (1963), and LL.B. (1963) from the University of Tennessee. Immediately after graduation, Paine served in the Army as a Captain in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. He was discharged in 1966 and returned to Tennessee, where he authored the Tennessee Law of Evidence (1974). Paine practiced law with Paine, Tarwater, and Bickers in addition to researching Tennessee's legal history. He was a Reporter to the Supreme Court Advisory Commission on Rules of Practice and Procedure, wrote a monthly column for the Tennessee Bar Journal, and lectured for the Tennessee Law Institute, the University of Tennessee College of Law, and the Tennessee Judicial Conference. Paine also served as President of the Knoxville Bar Association (1983) and of the Tennessee Bar Association (1986-1987). He died on November 18th, 2013.