The Interrogation

(Please note that the police inquest into the murder of Edwin Burdick took more than two full weeks, and as such I regret that I must focus only on a few salient points. The full inquest transcripts are available to anyone who wishes to delve more deeply into the testimony.)

As the days since the murder had gone by, whispered rumors had developed into a hurricane of accusation against Arthur Pennell. At last, it had made its inevitable landfall—though most would not have guessed that it would destroy both Pennells.

After the dual event in the quarry, Police Justice Thomas Murphy and District Attorney Edward Coatsworth had been left with bupkis. No murder weapon, no publicly named suspects, no apparent clue, and three of the four principals dead. Worse, Mrs. Burdick—the woman everyone loved to hate—had an airtight alibi.

As the inquest opened, still the papers refused to abandon hope that Allie–even with her airtight alibi–had done him in. Public domain.

However incomplete the police’s case, public pressure was rising to hold the official inquest. What’s more, dozens of big-city newspapermen from all over the country had converged on Buffalo to hear the spicy story of infidelity and murder. Out of time and excuses, Judge Murphy and DA Coatsworth were faced with a Hobson’s choice: Either admit that they’d hopelessly flubbed the biggest case of both their lives, or put on a good show. And what could make for better theatre than the public shaming of the dragon lady who was to blame for it all?

Unless she had mastered the art of astral projection, Alice Burdick wasn’t guilty of anything other than having fallen in love with a man not her husband. But in 1903 that was more than enough to haul her into open court, where she would be subjected to two long days of pitiless interrogation. But what kind of interrogation? Surely not about the murder, given Alice’s alibi. No, instead the inquisitors were going to dissect her infidelity. In contemporary opinion, Allie’s moral turpitude had not only cost three lives—but worse, it also threatened to overturn the established social order.

On Saturday, March 14, the long-delayed inquest opened at police headquarters on The Terrace, with Judge Murphy presiding and DA Coatsworth handling the questioning. The courtroom was packed, of course, in view of such enticing headlines as this one:

When at first you don’t succeed. Public domain.

After the initial recitation of public facts about the crime, the spectators were treated to an appetizer in the form of Allie’s mother. At age 64, by today’s standards Maria Hull was hardly ancient (she would live another twenty years), but she must have seemed so to the reporters, who referred to her ‘aged’, ‘frail’, and ‘old’. This worked in Mrs. Hull’s favor, because no one thought for a moment that an old woman could have anything to do with such a vicious crime.

Coatsworth dismissed her without ever asking any truly probing questions. But before stepping down from the witness stand, Mrs. Hull delivered a parting shot by chucking Ed Burdick, who had been so loyal to her, into the wood-chipper. She described him as a ‘small’ man, narrow-minded, and—however entitled, given the circumstances—vindictive and cruel.

There followed a series of more-or-less humdrum witnesses—cab drivers who claimed to have seen shadowy figures on Ashland Avenue that night, the Burdicks’ furnace man, and so on. Then one by one the Burdick children—even little Alice Jr., aged only ten—were put on the stand to relate the details of the morning they learned that they no longer had a father.

The press ate it up, but Edward Coatsworth was only laying the table. Everyone knew that the main course—Alice Burdick herself—was soon to be served up.

The only known photograph of Alice Burdick’s interrogation, 1903. Coatsworth is to her right, and Judge Murphy is seated at the bench. Author’s collection.

And beginning on March 24, 1903, she was—and neither she nor Coatsworth disappointed. The district attorney seemed almost gleeful (or perhaps strangely aroused) in reading aloud the full text of Arthur’s many love letters, some from the very beginning of his affair with Allie. One of them recalled that first stolen kiss in the Phelps Gateway at Yale. Arthur writes:

‘Yesterday I went to that gateway where . . . more than two years ago, I drew you in, in the darkness. That place is a shrine to me.’

Another one related that Arthur had found, in the pocket of his tuxedo, a pair of Allie’s gloves:

‘I kissed them because they’d held your hands, and smoothed out the fingers and kissed each one. I loved them because they were yours.’

Cringey, maybe, but so are all love letters—when they’re not your own.

Undaunted, DA Coatsworth made Allie analyze, line by line, Arthur’s spooney missives and her own feelings about them and him. What this had to do with a murder no one knew, but the gallery and newspaper subscribers were thoroughly enjoying the good sport of flogging the faithless wife. All I can surmise is that, having failed utterly to bring a murderer to justice, Murphy and Coatsworth settled for the next best thing: to ensure that Alice Burdick felt the full weight of society’s scorn.

Eye-exam-worthy newspaper coverage of Allie’s examination, 1903. Public domain.

She refused to waver, and the show duly fizzled out. On March 31, Judge Murphy at last delivered his lengthy verdict, in which he conceded that Arthur Pennell would have been examined at the inquest, had he been alive—but since he was not, he must be considered forever innocent of any crime. No actual suspect had been identified, though; there would be no indictments. As his verdict droned to a close, however, Judge Murphy got around to what everyone was waiting for. While the lengthy investigation had come to nothing, it was, he said, the ‘duty of the court to censure’ . . . guess who? Burdick’s unknown killer? The bumbling cops? Arthur Pennell? Dr. Marcy, who had tried to convince the medical examiner to say that Ed Burdick had bashed in his own head?

Nope. Murphy censured only Alice Burdick—not for any crime, per se, but for being ‘shameless’ and ‘not worthy of the love of Mr. Burdick’. He said, in part:

“This is essentially a city . . . where the marriage contract is looked upon as the cornerstone of society, and is something that is sacredly regarded by all. To make little of it is to forfeit the goodwill and respect of our people, and to incite their most severe censure. It is our duty to censure Mrs. Burdick. But great as her wrong has been, great is her punishment.”

Take that, harlot!

Judge Murphy managed to skirt any mention of Ed’s probable philandering, glossed over the testimony detailing his theft of his wife’s private correspondence, and didn’t introduce into evidence the two letters found in the dead man’s jacket from the father of one of his purported lovers. Instead, Murphy canonized Edwin Burdick, solemnly concluding that Ed had been ‘a loving father, a magnanimous husband, and a man on whom the cloak of immorality did not rest’.

Nothing here ought to come as a surprise, if we accept that this case had always been about something other than murder. Instead, it had been from the start a great morality play in which Gilded Age society’s archetypes for respectable men and women, husbands and wives, were on trial. While Ed’s murderer was never punished, the thought went, at least there had been a kind of karmic justice—that horrid, cold-hearted wife of his had at last gotten what she had coming.

You can’t always get what you want . . .  (love the typeface, though).

And that is the way it has stayed for more than a hundred years, until (I hope) now. It’s long past time for a reassessment and reevaluation of Allie Burdick, whose only real known crime was to fall out of love with her husband. In my view, she was as much a pioneer of women’s rights as any of the much-better-known leaders of that movement.

So it ended, or so everyone thought. But there was one final surprise ahead—one that would have national repercussions–just as the Pennells’ death inquest was to open.

Next Time: Last Wishes