After a quarter century behind bars, convicted killer James Lowell discovered a changed world.

Arguing he was only guilty of manslaughter, convicted killer James Lowell begged for a pardon that would free him.

In 1885, James Lowell confessed, but insists he didn’t mean for Lizzie to die.

The Lewiston Evening Journal looked into the issues surrounding the claims and concluded the Michigan woman probably looked something like Lizzie and likely had the same name. In other words, it said, it appeared to be a case of “mistaken identity.”

James M. “Jim” Lowell was a quiet, orderly prisoner in Maine’s well-regulated prison.

The gory tumult of the hanging of convicted murderer John Gordon caused then-Gov. Nelson Dingley Jr.’s Executive Board on July 6, 1875, to vote 4-3 to commute Lowell’s sentence to life in prison. With that, Lowell no longer faced the gallows.

The public “betook themselves to the courthouse to hear one of the last, and most solemn, of the many scenes which the Switzerland road tragedy has afforded,” the Journal reported an hour later. “There they were, promptly on hand to hear the doom which the law should affix to the guilt it had already decided.”

One of the many newspapers around the country following the trial, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, said after all the evidence had been heard — but before the jury’s decision — “there is not, probably, a single trial to be found on the criminal records of this country so marked by dramatic sensationalism as that of James M. Lowell for the murder of his wife, the evidence for which was all completed in the Supreme Court at Auburn, Maine on Monday last.”

The eagerly awaited moment came Monday, Feb. 16, 1874, when Lowell rose from his chair, walked to the witness stand beside Judge Charles Walton and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.