Drawing on medieval forensic rhetoric on one hand and performance studies on the other, I argue that a complex murder mystery of 1474 rivals any modern-day tale of “true crime” that we might imagine. Here, the investigation and punishment of murder are aided and abetted – but also foiled and avenged – by the principles and practices of spectatorship in the ultimate foul play. In addition to shedding new light on the spectacular nature of police deception during interrogations, this case demonstrates that the theatrical underpinnings of any legal verdict suggest not the “truth-speaking” of a literal verdict but the “true-seeming” of dramatic verisimilitude. Most troubling of all: as the legally believable joins the theatrically persuasive, crime is interpreted through literary conventions of dramatic emplotment, only to culminate in a finding of guilt and spectacular death penalty which are based on a dispositive absence of evidence.