True Crime of the Century - Part Five - The Investigation
The Investigation:
A little before eight on February 27, 1903, Mrs. Hull (Allie’s mother) awoke to a quiet house.
Ed should have long since been up and about, but there was no sign of him. She peeked into his bedroom, but the bed appeared unslept-in. She found the cook, Maggie Murray, fixing breakfast in the kitchen downstairs.
Alice Burdick’s mother, Maria Hull, circa 1903. Public domain.
Miss Murray and Mrs. Hull called for Ed a few times, without response.
Then Mrs. Hull felt a draft, and noticed that the house’s front door was slightly ajar—and that the adjacent door to Ed’s den was tightly shut. Overcome by what she called ‘an unaccountable fear’, Mrs. Hull couldn’t bring herself to look inside the den—so she asked Miss Murray to do so.
The cook peered in, gasped, and said that something very terrible had happened. Mrs. Hull instructed her to run to Smither & Thurstone’s corner drugstore and telephone Dr. William Marcy, the Burdick family physician.
When Dr. Marcy arrived, he found the den still quite dark. The gas chandelier was off, and the heavy curtains were drawn. Instead of, say, turning on a light, though, Marcy instead tore the curtains off the wall—flooding the room with cold winter sunlight.
Burdick family doctor William Marcy. Public domain.
The den was a mess. Blood was everywhere: slung on the walls, splattered on the ceiling, and forming a large, rubbery pool beneath the long couch. On the couch lay the body of a man, mostly covered over with pillows and a rug pulled from the floor.
The head had been carefully wrapped—mummy style—with a small crazy quilt. The body was clad only in underpants and a long undershirt, though for some reason the underpants were around the ankles, exposing the genitals. There were bloody fingerprints on the corpse’s thighs, suggesting that someone had tugged the underpants down—and repositioned the body—after the murder.
Dr. Marcy gingerly pulled at the crazy quilt, and brain matter and bits of skull came away with it. Seeing that the dead man was Edwin Burdick, Dr. Marcy placed a call to Dr. John Howland, Buffalo’s deputy medical examiner.
(In one of the many strange elements of this crime, Dr. Marcy—who had hurried over to the Burdick house without having had his breakfast—then sat down in the dining room and had what seems to have been a pleasant meal with Mrs. Hull and the children.)
After breakfast, Drs. Marcy and Howland began a more careful examination of the den. The drawers to Ed’s desk had been forced open, and papers and photographs were strewn around the floor. Ed’s dark suit jacket was draped over a desk chair; in a pocket was his unfired revolver.
On a table near the body were the remains of a snack—nibbled crackers, some Neufchâtel cheese, a partly eaten cranberry tart, a nearly empty bottle of premixed alcoholic cocktails, and a sticky wine glass.
The domestics denied having prepared such a snack, and said that Ed wouldn’t have eaten it if they had—his sensitive digestion had caused him to swear off cheese, sweets, and alcohol. Furthermore, the staff agreed that Mr. Burdick himself, as the man of the house, would not even have known where to find such items in the butler’s pantry. (Times have changed.)
Dr. Howland’s preliminary exam revealed a single wound and abrasion on the right front forehead—a glancing blow, probably inflicted while the victim was still alive. There was a contusion at the base of the left thumb, and the third finger of the same hand was broken.
It would seem that Ed had been surprised by his killer and had thrown up a hand to ward off the first strike. Then he must have slumped over and lay still while ten or more additional blows rained down on the back of his unprotected head, turning it into mush.
Dr. Howland, Buffalo’s deputy medical examiner, 1903. Public domain.
“Any one of those wounds would have killed him deader than a doornail,” Dr. Howland mused.
“Can you make it out as a case of suicide?” the clearly flustered Dr. Marcy asked. “There has already been a good deal of scandal in the neighborhood concerning Mr. and Mrs. Burdick.”
Dr. Howland flatly denied his request, deadpanning that he had “never before seen a man bash in his own head and then cover himself over with rugs and pillows.”
But Dr. Marcy was not giving up so easily. “There are divorce proceedings underway,” he said urgently. “The co-respondent is a lawyer . . . and a former partner of Mr. Penney’s.” (Emphasis added.)
Intriguing. Among the first words exchanged by two senior doctors, standing over a freshly murdered man, are not about the gruesome scene, nor the body, nor whether the killer might still be hiding in the house. Instead what was most important to Dr. Marcy was ensuring that his colleague understood that ‘a former partner of Mr. Penney’s’ is somehow involved.
Why bring up Mr. Penney? In connection with his suggestion to classify a brutal murder as a suicide, I think it suggests that, from the very beginning, anyone within the orbit of Buffalo’s powerful knew that there was something frightfully not normal about Ed Burdick’s death.
Next to arrive were Buffalo Police detectives Holmlund and Sullivan, accompanied by a few patrolmen. Fresh snow had fallen overnight, and immediately the eager cops began tramping around the perimeter of the house, heedless of any footprints that may have been left by Ed’s killer. Then they traipsed into the house and the den itself in their wet and muddy boots, moving things, looking through the papers scattered on the floor, and generally making a mess.
In fairness, it should be observed that in 1903 crime scene integrity and analysis were in a much earlier stage of evolution. Fingerprint technology was still new (it had been officially adopted by Scotland Yard only the year before), and thus there was no systematic collection of fingerprint evidence. Not that it would have mattered: By the time the police photographer arrived, there wasn’t much in its original state. Worse, some of the items initially found in the den—including Ed’s fine gold pocket watch and the mysterious bottle of cocktails—had vanished.
In the midst of all this pandemonium, Mrs. Hull fired off a telegram to Atlantic City, notifying Alice of Ed’s death and urging her to return home at once. Allie arranged to return to Buffalo on the overnight train and sent a telegram of her own to Arthur Pennell’s office, asking him to meet her at the station the next morning.
The Traymore, Allie’s Atlantic City sanctuary, circa 1903. Author’s collection.
Arthur’s second revolver, an inexpensive Iver Johnson. The salesman also sold a similar one to Leon Czolgosz. Author’s collection.
Arthur never received her telegram, though, because he had skipped work on the morning Ed’s body was discovered. He had left for downtown early, toting a large satchel. On his way out, he told Carrie that he was going up to Niagara Falls and that she should meet him there for lunch—and bring the Buffalo morning papers with her.
But before setting out for the Falls, Arthur made two other stops—one for a shave at the Iroquois Hotel, and another at Walbridge’s department store, where he bought a second revolver from the same salesman who had sold him his first one not long before.
Erie County District Attorney Edward Coatsworth, 1903. Public domain.
Arthur took the trolley to Niagara Falls to wait for Carrie. What he and they did in the intervening hours isn’t known, but when they returned to 208 Cleveland that evening, they found District Attorney Coatsworth and his detectives waiting.
Carrie and Arthur explained that they had been together the entire previous evening, and that while lately relations had been somewhat ‘strained’ between them and the Burdicks, there had been no animosity. They had gone off to frigid Niagara Falls purely on a lark.
And Alice Burdick? Just a friend, Arthur asserted, on whom he and his wife had taken pity, only to be horribly maligned for having done so. Satisfied with the Pennells’ alibi, the DA and the detectives left the house around midnight—never to return.
Rubberneckers in Elmwood at the time of the crime. Author’s collection.
When Alice arrived at the train station early the next morning, she spent a bewildered half-hour looking for Arthur and fending off reporters. She told them that she hadn’t any idea about her husband’s murderer, but that if necessary she would spend the remainder of her life hunting him down.
But mostly it seems the papers were eager to report on her trim, dancer’s physique and her ‘stunner’ of an outfit: a tailor-made grey suit and a floral-motif purse in Russia leather. (By the way, it is properly ‘Russia’, not ‘Russian’, leather. I’ll do a post on this fascinating Gilded Age material in the near future.)
Having concluded that Arthur was not coming, Allie hired a cab to take her back to the house she’d left in December.
This brings up perhaps one of the oddest things in this very odd case. When Allie arrived home that morning, no suspect had been apprehended or named. No one could even say for sure that Ed Burdick’s killer or killers might not be hiding nearby—in one of the many garages and outbuildings behind the houses fronting Ashland Avenue, or even in the labyrinthine Burdick house itself. Yet only eighteen hours after her husband had been brutally murdered one floor below her own bedroom, Alice Burdick coolly moved right back in. Mrs. Hull, the children, and the two domestics had never left.
The police would continue to bungle the investigation for two more weeks—when Fate would intervene and change everything.
Next: The Double Event
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 fictional award-winning novel inspired by the Burdick murder.