Mortician ^(Myth)

One of the more indelible scenes in the 1975 TV movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, was a flashback “memory” of Lizzie as a young girl in which she went downstairs to the cellar and discovered her father, Andrew, in the midst of embalming a dead body. It was especially creepy because her father forced young Lizzie to touch the body. The scene helped establish how Lizzie could have become so unbalanced as to commit murder.

Of course, this imagined scene never happened in reality, because Andrew was never a mortician. He was an undertaker, yes, but not in the sense that we understand the term today. As the Fall River Historical Society explained in a myth-busting newspaper article:

Andrew Borden never embalmed bodies; in fact, there were no embalmers listed in the Fall River city directories until the 1880s, well after he had retired. As many furniture dealers did, Borden served as an undertaker. In the 19th century, many dealers sold burial furnishings and “undertook” the arrangements for funerals and provided supplies—rented chairs, shrouds, coffins, and transportation from the home to the cemetery. Existing receipts in the collection of the Historical Society clearly detail the services provided by Borden, Almy & Co., and embalming was not among them.

An odd corollary to this myth was a rumor that circulated in the weeks and months after his death that if the coffin he provided for burial was too small for the body for which it was purchased, he would saw the feet off the corpse to make it fit. The penny-pinching Andrew did this, it was said, because it allowed him to save money on wood. This is also pure nonsense, as he did not handle bodies at all, simply built the coffins. But it is yet another entertaining example of some of the colorful mythology that has developed around the Borden murders over the decades.