On Thursday, Jill Lepore, Harvard University professor and staff writer for the New Yorker, delivered a lecture called “Bodies of Evidence: The Rise and Fall of the Fact” at Brandeis. The lecture was sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities.

Lepore’s lecture, one of two she delivered at the University on Thursday, centered on the investigation of the 1919 murder of Lucina Broadwell, whose body was found in a field in Barre, Vt. During the lecture, Lepore argued that the history of investigators searching for facts created the idea of the need for privacy. Facts are presented through the use of evidence, like photographs and clues, which discount context, she explained. She used historical articles; statements from historians, writers and journalists; photographs and a short film. In particular, Lepore discussed the ongoing debate on the reliability of photographic evidence.

Lepore said she used the case in her lecture “because I like to make an argument through the vehicle of a story.” According to Lepore, the case set the precedent that investigators could use evidence in a trial that could not appear in print due to laws of censorship and public decency. Lepore juxtaposed the forensic science practices that were new in the early 20th century, including crime-scene photography and putting greater emphasis on looking for clues, with examples of past ways to acquire evidence of guilt.

For instance, Lepore mentioned the ordeal of the bier, a medieval belief that an accused murderer was guilty if the corpse began to bleed when the accused was in close proximity. According to Lepore, the bier was an early method of gathering evidence that led to fallacious conclusions, yet it was the “only way for years to gain judicial proof [of guilt] across Europe.”

Lepore mentioned that the trial by bier became outdated by the time of the Broadwell case. Instead, she explained, finding facts became necessary. In the case of the Broadwell murder, she said, the investigators had to use the relatively new practices of forensic photography and clue-finding. In the process of the investigation, the detectives located several pieces of evidence, including a “gold watch cached with the initials LPC” and tire tracks belonging to lead suspect George Long’s car, both of which played large roles in both the media coverage of the case and the subsequent trial. The emphasis investigators put on this evidence, Lepore argued, represented the type of “scientific facts, journalistic facts” that create circumstantial cases that were not based enough on motive .

Lepore also argued that the growing emphasis on searching for evidence created invasions in privacy through the rise of detectives. According to Lepore, the nature of privacy changed due to the rise of media coverage and photographic investigation, where witnesses and victims became the subject of media sensationalism. Lepore said she realized through her research that “privacy had become necessary because of the rise of the public eye. The eye of the detective, the eye of the camera.”

The challenges to privacy are represented in the Broadwell case, Lepore argued, because the public press was unable to share facts due to privacy concerns. Broadwell, according to Vermont historian Patricia Belding’s written account of the murder, was a prostitute who operated out of the same boarding house where Long resided. During Long’s trial for the murder, according to Lepore, the press was unable to share a “blue pill bottle”—likely a bottle of birth control pills—as evidence because the Comstock Law of 1873 prevented the printing of anything considered obscene or immoral, which then included contraception. However, the “blue pill bottle” was important evidence that led to Long’s conviction. This duality, Lepore said, showed that “conventions of journalism were defeated by the bailing of women’s bodies that lies behind arguments about the rights to privacy.” Lepore then explained how the case played out in the media and the courtroom, stating that, according to Detective James Wood, who was hired to investigate the murder, the trial came down to a question of “who is easier to find contemptible, Broadwell, [a prostitute], or Long, [an alleged murderer]?”

Lepore also summarized how these controversies of facts arose from new techniques to locate evidence. Early photography, she said, had the benefits of showing “what the human eye can’t see” but also the drawback of the “taint of deception in photography,” essentially meaning that reality is not always as it appears in a photograph.

This potential deception, she said, becomes especially significant in the era of Internet accessibility. Were Broadwell to have been murdered in the present day, Lepore concluded, crime scene evidence would be more abundant in the media and online and subject to more interpretation, which would put less emphasis on the importance of context, thus creating circumstantial trials.

“[Broadwell] would be ripped from her context and stripped bare of her meaning. She would be faceless and factless. She would be evidence.”

Lepore has written nine books. Her most recent is The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which was published in October 2014.