The Inspiration for the Movie "The Burning Bed"

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​On this day, March 9, 1977, Francine Moran Hughes set fire to the bed in which her live-in ex-husband Mickey Hughes was sleeping in Dansville, Michigan. Mickey was killed and the house was destroyed in the resulting fire. At trial, Hughes was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity in one of the first cases involving "battered-woman syndrome" as a defense.

Cultural Impact: Francine Hughes was the subject of a book titled The Burning Bed, which was the basis of a 1984 made-for-television movie with the same name, starring Farrah Fawcett.
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Television critic Matt Zoller Seitz in his 2016 book co-written with Alan Sepinwall titled TV (The Book) named The Burning Bed as the 7th greatest American TV-movie of all time, writing that "The film was a landmark in terms of content, depicting domestic violence as an unambiguous horror and a human rights violation." Seitz also praised the performance of Fawcett as "one of the finest in the history of TV-movies."