Certainly the Burdicks’ three daughters—Marion, Carol, and Alice Jr.—were a primary consideration, and the evidence suggests that Ed Burdick was a devoted and doting father. Based on comments to friends, he expressed greater concern for Allie’s reputation than for his own. In 1902, a woman who committed adultery, divorced, and subsequently married to her lover was bad enough, but a divorced woman whose beau decided not to marry her was, in the parlance of the day, ruined. What ‘ruined’ meant then is about what ‘cancelled’ means today, socially speaking—a kind of banishment from ‘decent’ society. A man could survive such ostracism, but not a woman.

Or there may have been something else going on. Ed could not file suit for divorce without hard evidence of adultery, which can be difficult to obtain. Incriminating photographs or love letters were the gold standard, and Ed had neither. If he sued his wife for divorce and lost, he would have gone through Hell only to take up permanent residence there.

To make his case airtight, Ed hired private detectives to tail the pair around Buffalo. As soon as Allie discovered that they were being shadowed by hired guns, she informed Arthur—who was so livid at being treated like a ‘common criminal’ (hypocrisy is not a 21^st century invention) that he hired detectives of his own to find and expose what skeletons Ed Burdick might have in his own closet. Something had to give, and under the strain Allie and Ed decided on a trial separation.

There was something about this step, however, that threw Arthur into a tailspin. He requested, and was granted, an audience with Edwin in the latter’s office at the envelope factory. Present were Ed’s attorney and friend, Charles Parke, who told friends (and later testified) that at this parley Arthur had surprised everyone by demanding that Ed ‘take Allie back, for the sake of the children’. Arthur also agreed to have no further contact with Mrs. Burdick and even to leave Buffalo for good—he and Allie had discussed it, he said, and they were fully prepared to swear off of each other forever.

After the meeting, Alice Burdick and Carrie Pennell piled on, each pleading with Edwin to reconcile with his straying-but-apparently-repentant wife—in almost the same words as Arthur had used. Under siege from all three, and now convinced that Arthur would cast Allie aside after a divorce, Ed yielded–and agreed to give Allie another chance.

‘The Weaker Sex’. Pen & ink drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, 1903. Author’s collection.

What their reunion was like can probably be inferred from the fact that Arthur and Allie’s vow to give each other up forever lasted less than a month. Soon they were again meeting clandestinely–in Buffalo and further afield–and Arthur most certainly did not go into exile.

This latest betrayal seems to have sent Ed over a precipice. To his mind, he’d been long-suffering. He had been open-minded. But now he had been played for a fool, and his pride had sustained an unpardonable injury. He re-engaged his detectives. In response, Arthur pressed his own detectives to follow Ed everywhere, even on business trips to cities where the businessman’s girlfriends were said to reside.

The constant surveillance seems to have unhinged Ed—friends said that he was nervous, paranoid, and unable to eat or sleep. Ed went so far as to purchase a revolver from Walbridge’s department store and was seen practicing with it in vacant lots. Not to be outdone, Arthur went and bought one—a better model, too—from the same salesman.

Armed with his fraudulently obtained permission, Ed—masquerading as Allie’s nonexistent brother—strolled into the Buffalo Savings Bank one afternoon and strolled back out again with the contents of Allie’s safe-deposit box in his possession, both letters and documents. Everything that Allie had accumulated over more than four years of her affair with Arthur.

Ed went through it all, and found that while most of the contents were merely embarrassing—classic lovey-dovey letters about the beauty of Allie’s eyes, lips, and what-have-you—other documents were something else entirely.

They revealed that Arthur (not quite 36 years of age and in apparently fine health) had, over the past several years, amassed in excess of $370,000 in a variety of life and accident insurance policies (about $18.5 million today). One of these policies detailed that, in the event of Arthur’s death, $25,000 ($1.25 million) would go to Mrs. Burdick; the rest of the money was earmarked to settle Arthur’s debts. This was odd: How could a man of Arthur Pennell’s apparent wealth have debts? 

Ed Burdick had now turned one implacable enemy into dozens, and while Allie had signed a phony permission slip, Ed—in my opinion—had signed his own death warrant.

In searching for a motive for what was soon to become a gruesome murder, most suggest that someone might kill Edwin Burdick to prevent the public embarrassment of having his smoochy love letters read aloud in open court. But after five years, there couldn’t have been many in Buffalo’s bourgeoisie—and certainly not within the Elmwood Set—who did not already know what Allie Burdick was getting up to with Arthur Pennell. Their spouses knew, the Burdick children knew, and shame had already blanketed all involved. Nope . . . mere embarrassment was not the motive for this murder.

So what had changed, almost overnight, a more-or-less typically acrimonious divorce into a pretext for murder? It had to be something about the stolen documents: either outrage over their theft or, more likely, fear that what was contained in them—or thought was contained, beyond their florid romanticism, that is–would be revealed. Desperate to keep his stolen documents from becoming public, Arthur again met with Ed, again with Charles Parke as witness. This time, though, Arthur gave Ed a strange and searing ultimatum: “Give me back my papers, take Allie back, or I swear I will kill her and then kill myself.”

Charles Parke was stunned, but not Edwin Burdick. Having been repeatedly humiliated by his wife and, worse, by his nemesis–an Ivy League Dapper Dan–the man had crossed a personal Rubicon and there would be no turning back, come what may. Arthur repeated his threat, and this time Ed did reply.

“Go ahead, then,” Burdick said. “Kill.”

Next time: Murder

This article is from Robert’s weekly non-fiction column on Buffalo Rising. Read more on Robert’s website about the case, and read The Unsealing, the award-winning novel inspired by the Burdick murder.