Nude ^(Myth)

One of the more indelible images of the 1975 TV movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, was Elizabeth Montgomery’s bare legs as she sneaked up on her victims, gleaming hatchet swinging beside her. The movie shocked its audience when it portrayed Lizzie as stripping off her clothes before committing the murders. By 2018, the movie Lizzie didn’t play quite so coy with the idea that Lizzie killed her parents in the buff, with a fearless Chloe Sevigny swinging her hatchet full-on nude, her naked breasts heaving and blood-spattered.

This notion that Lizzie avoided getting blood on her dress by forgoing clothing altogether was first hinted at sarcastically by Lizzie’s own attorney at her trial. Governor George Robinson, in chiding the prosecution for not recognizing that a lack of blood on Lizzie or any of her clothing was a sign of her innocence, tossed off the tongue-in-cheek remark, “I would not wonder if they are not going to claim that this woman denuded herself and did not have any dress on at all when she committed either murder.” Little did he know that writers on the case would soon be suggesting that very thing.

By 1933, the myth had become pervasive enough that crime journalist Edmund Pearson, writing for The New Yorker, commented on it with his usual dry wit, first saying how delightful he found the “notion of a secretary of the Christian Endeavor Society prancing through the house like a blood-drunken nymph at the Witches’ Sabbath.” He then described how often the story had been rejected by certain writers “only on the ground that Miss Lizzie, as an inhibited Puritan … would have been too ‘prudish’ to adopt such a sensible working costume. I can tell these gentlemen that they are right; the maidens of Massachusetts are not accustomed to undress before committing homicide. In fact, so rigid are their notions of propriety that a good many of them do not slaughter their parents at all, even when fully clothed.”

The salacious myth of Lizzie Borden killing in the nude is indeed delightful; it also reveals how much speculation is required to fill in the gaps in the evidence gathered in the case against Lizzie for murder. There are few good ways to explain how Lizzie managed to hack into the heads of two people and spray blood around their bodies without getting at least a few drops on herself. Also illuminating is that so many people are more willing to accept that she killed her parents in a nude frenzy than to simply believe her innocent.

Still, even if Lizzie did do the deed, it is almost certain she didn’t commit those murders in the nude.