Crime of the Century (Part One)
Part 1: Love & Marriage
Today we will begin to confront what is arguably Buffalo’s greatest unsolved mystery—the February 1903 murder of businessman Edwin Burdick in the private ‘den’ of his home at 101 Ashland Avenue.
The Burdick murder was for a number of years a personal white whale, mainly because the more I dug into it, the more the usual solutions seemed either feeble, tendentious, or misogynistic. Instead, I believe that the key to this 100+ year old murder has been hiding in plain sight all along, if we have the eyes to see it. (My first novel, The Unsealing, was inspired by this case.) In this series of posts–to coincide with the 122nd anniversary of the crime–I hope to share some of what I have learned.
Let us first examine what facts we have at our disposal. Since most primary source material (e.g., police reports, crime scene photographs, etc.) have long since been consigned to the landfill, we have to turn mainly to contemporary newspaper accounts, both before and after the crime.
But can we trust newspaper reporting? It’s a question I always ask myself while doing research, and sometimes the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. In this case, however, I will give it a qualified ‘yes’. Why in the world would I trust a newspaper, you may ask? For one thing, in 1903 there were at least five major daily newspapers in Buffalo—the News, the Courier, the Enquirer, the Times, and the Commercial. Since each of these papers approached the news from a different political and social point of view, the researcher can create a kind of mosaic picture of events and dilute or offset any individual paper’s bias or poor reporting.
I have read every word of every available article on this case, and not only in the Buffalo papers. In fact, the Buffalo papers sometimes took pains to soft-peddle or omit inconvenient details, since in those days too newsmen were happy to keep official secrets in exchange for access to juicy tips and pithy quotes. So I always augment my multiple-paper approach with a comparison to other major national dailies. The best coverage of Buffalo’s ‘crime of the century’, I have come to believe, is in the Journal-American, William Randolph Hearst’s New York City paper. Hearst, who pioneered the so-called yellow journalism of the early 1900s, was perhaps also the inventor of what we might call today ‘clickbait’. With his White House ties, Hearst certainly did not give a ripe apple for what Buffalo potentates might think of him. Thus the Journal-American’s coverage pulls no punches.
As with any drama, we must first introduce our players. Meet Mr. Edwin Lewis Burdick (Ed or Eddie) from Lenox, New York. Ed came to Buffalo as a young man fresh out of stenography school and found lodging on Carolina Street in the home of Mr. and Mrs. James D. Hull, a dealer in harnesses and tack.
Ed Burdick was a diminutive, frail man, standing about 5’ 4” and weighing in at 120 pounds soaking wet. (The average man in 1903 stood about 5’ 7” and weighed 145 pounds. Today, the average American male is about 5’ 9” and 197 pounds.) Never blessed with a robust constitution, soon after arriving in Buffalo Edwin contracted typhoid fever—not uncommon in Western New York in the 1880s—and was hovering near death when the Hulls’ only child, his daughter Alice Marie (or Allie as friends and intimates called her), took pity on the family’s lodger and volunteered to nurse him back to health, if possible. She succeeded, and in the process the pair fell either in love or into a reasonable facsimile thereof. They were married in 1886; Alice was twenty-four, and Ed twenty-three.
Edwin Lewis Burdick, circa 1902. Public domain.
I won’t bury the lead here. I happen to find Alice Marie Hull Burdick one of the most compelling individuals, not only in Buffalo history, but in all of history—period. In fact I might go so far, since we are among friends here, to acknowledge her as a kind of muse. It would take a very long time to explain why this is (which I will do if asked, you have a few hours to spare, and you buy my drinks). For the present let us say that I consider her both a most unusual person in general and, more specifically, one of the most remarkable and ‘modern’ women of her day.
Well-educated, likable—she was known as ‘Sweet Alice’ by her classmates—and from a prosperous if not wealthy family, Alice was a good catch for Ed. But there was much more to Alice Hull Burdick than her educational attainments or prosperous upbringing. Men, women, friends, and enemies alike agreed that Allie possessed a powerful personal magnetism tantamount to a gravitational field. (She’s still stringing me along, after all, eighty years after her death.)
While by the standards of the day not a classic beauty, Allie was trim and petite—barely five feet tall and weighing less than a hundred pounds—poised, an exceptional dancer, and possessed of two large, black eyes that were described as ‘captivating’, ‘beguiling’, ‘mysterious’, and ‘irresistible’. I concur in their assessments—and I would add to Allie’s physical charms a potent intellect, a high degree of natural cunning, and a soft, seductive contralto voice. Allie was, to use a modern term, dead sexy.
Alice Hull Burdick, circa 1898. Public domain.
Mr. Hull helped his new son-in-law make a start in business, first in finding him a job as co-publisher of The Roller Mill, a trade journal for flour millers, and thereafter bankrolling a fledgling envelope manufacturing business. The trade rag did well enough, but the Burdick Envelope Company struggled, and at last Ed had to declare bankruptcy.
During the bankruptcy process, though, a Truly Wondrous Thing happened: there was a fire at Ed’s envelope factory in the Caxton Building, and between smoke and the sprinkler system, the intricate and expensive envelope-making machinery and many tons of finished and unfinished stock were a total loss. Thankfully either Ed, Mr. & Mrs. Hull, or Alice had been smart enough to take out plenty of insurance, and Ed’s losses were fully covered and then some. For a second time Ed Burdick had been resurrected; he rebuilt the envelope factory and soon was making money hand over fist.
101 (now 99) Ashland Avenue, 1903.
Now flush with cash, Allie and Ed moved into an almost-new home in the upscale Elmwood section, which a large number of up-and-coming professionals (doctors, attorneys, business owners) called home. Elmwood was not Delaware Avenue, certainly, but it was seen as a way-station for those aspiring to that most desirable of addresses.
The Elmwood Set: New Year’s Eve masquerade ball, December 31, 1900. Author’s collection.
Around 1897, thirty of the most with-it Elmwood couples—including the Burdicks—established the Elmwood Social Club, which hosted dance parties every other week in the local high school gymnasium.
Dancing was not all that some of the couples in the ‘Elmwood Set’ got up to, though, if the rumors (and subsequent court testimony) are to be believed.
Members of the Set were said to drink too much, dance too closely, and take too many liberties with the marital bond. But rumor frequently has its roots in envy, and certainly a broad swath of Buffalo’s upper-middle-class would have given their eyeteeth to be invited to join the Set. For those fortunate enough to make the grade, there would be nonstop indulgence in all the latest crazes: photography, card parties, masquerade balls, bicycling, golf, tennis, and leisure travel to Atlantic City and New York.
Naturally this brought the men and women of the Set into close and frequent personal contact—creating an environment in which flirtation and attraction could flourish.
Edwin Burdick was known within the Set both as a snappy dresser and something of a ‘ladies’ man.’ In 1900, that term meant only partially what it suggests today—a man with a particular affinity for women. At the turn of the last century, the epithet implied something much worse—it meant a man who didn’t ‘fit in’ with other men, but instead preferred to seek out the society, friendship, conversation—and sometimes the affections—of women. This was at the time considered unseemly, but for a man it was socially survivable, especially if he had money. For women, however, things were different. Women had precious little privacy, but rather existed in a somewhat costive ecosystem where their comings and goings were monitored or chaperoned by friends or family. A woman who took more than modest pleasure in the company of men other than her husband would have had to do so openly, and this would have set off klaxons of disapproval. If, heaven forbid, a romance developed, it spelled reputational ruin both for wife and husband.
The point is this: No typical 1903-model man would tolerate his wife spending quality time with another man, even if they professed to be ‘just friends’. Yet, sometime around 1898, Edwin Burdick began pushing his wife–hard–into just such a relationship, and with fatal consequences.
NEXT TIME: THE AFFAIR
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.