The officers began shouting loudly for Mrs. Burdick and the elderly Mrs. Hull to show their faces. When they appeared at the top of the stairs the police rushed up to grab them and drag them off to the No. 14 police station. Upon remonstrating, they were forced out the door in their nightclothes into the freezing cold.
Frantic, Mrs. Burdick screamed and cursed at the police. Ashland Avenue neighbors cowered behind window curtains, shocked and filled with fear and horror, disbelieving what they were seeing and hearing from their hiding places.
“We’ve just buried the father of these poor children,” Alice Burdick protested, “and we and they are exhausted and spent. Leave us alone! What on God’s earth is wrong with you?’
“You just come with us, now. Stop fighting, woman!” demanded Wright.
The grandmother too pleaded, asking that the police defer their arrest until morning, promising that the women would come in to the station of their own accord once they had arranged for the children to be cared for.
Wright was in a fit of adrenalin-fueled fervor at this point and unstoppable, the scene he was instigating clearly some panacea for the unresolved troubling circumstances clouding his own life.
At the police station, there in the early hours of the morning, Mrs. Hull and Mrs. Burdick were subjected to all the ingenuities of the “third degree.” Finally, after several hours of inquiries, and forbidden by the police under threat of incarceration from contacting their attorneys Hartzell & Hartzell, they were permitted to return to their violated home.
Without any apology whatsoever, their bizarre invasion, the police later justified, was intended to shock the inhabitants into revealing the truth of the matter, somehow it never dawning on the assaulting Neanderthals that quite the opposite effect, on both the women as well as the entire city, might well be the result.
The women were now all thoroughly mortified and hysterical, understandably so, and would be furthermore and lastingly untrusting and fearful of any and all authority for the duration of the entire investigation.
Somehow the press would not find out about this stunning attack for many weeks to come. The distant, oddly-paralyzed personalities displayed by the members of this family, outraged and irreversibly damaged at the hands of the Buffalo Police Dept., would from this point forward have the cruel light of public judgment and scrutiny unjustly shined upon them by a sensational press and an ignorant judgmental public, totally unaware of what absolute hell the police had visited upon this house that awful Sunday night.
Once the Burdicks had returned home from the police station, Alice tried to comfort Marion, her eldest daughter, age sixteen. Marion grunted as she violently pushed her mother away, causing her to stumble backwards and fall to one knee. Then she slapped her mother soundly across the face. As she stalked furiously out of the room she vomited just one single expletive without looking back.
“Whore!”
...
The March 1st and 2nd issues of the New York Times ran two unflinchingly resolute headlines based on the Buffalo police’s baseless conclusions: BURDICK MURDERED WITH A GOLF CLUB and BURDICK WAS KILLED BY A WOMAN, despite there being no proof whatsoever to support either determination.
Hannah Sullivan stood behind her drapes, watching and waiting. Once the Alderman had left for work and disappeared up the street, she walked next door to visit Annie. Devoting many pages to the murder, Hannah delighted in reading aloud from the newspapers to Annie as she readied herself and her children for their busy day. Hannah was enthused about helping out next door, lonely now that little David, her and Jim’s youngest, was now in school.
She began reading: “The finding of the steel-tipped golf stick with which it is almost certain that Mr. Burdick was killed and the fact that the bone in Burdick’s skull was found by the medical examiner to be remarkably thin, make it more reasonable to suppose that the crushing blows upon Burdick’s head could have been delivered by a woman.”
Hannah looked up from her newspaper with mouth comically agape. She was appalled.
“Are they joking, Annie? A woman? Jim told me that Burdick’s wife was having an affair with her attorney, and yet that particular suspect is being completely overlooked here? And how do they conclude the golf club was definitely the murder weapon at all? Based on what? And just because there’s cheese sitting there and the man’s skull bone is thin, that’s proof to them that a woman killed him? Makes me embarrassed for Jim to have to work with these tomfools, let me tell you. You and I could do a better job than these idiots.”
She went back to her reading.
“Oh, my heavens! Listen to this.”
Patrolman Meyers claims he saw a mysterious woman walking on the east side of Ashland Ave. at about one o’clock in the morning and concluded that her direction indicated she had come from or past the Burdick home. As she neared the corner where Meyers stood he said she turned out into the middle of the street staying in the middle of the road for some long distance past the policeman. He did not stop her, yet he claimed he got a good idea of her appearance.
“It’s the middle of the night, in the middle of the week, and this Meyers fool sees a woman out alone at that hour and doesn’t approach her to talk to her, to see if she might be alright? To ask if she could be lost or in trouble? To ask why she’s out in the freezing cold and dark all alone? Isn’t that the very reason we have patrolmen on the beat out on our streets at one o’clock in the morning in the first place, Annie? And because this woman looks…looks? …as if she might be coming from the general direction of the murder house, that’s conclusive proof to the police now that she’s Burdick’s murderer? There’s not a word printed in any of these newspapers about the attorney that Burdick’s wife was having her way with. My Lord! It’s all so idiotic that it sends me into deep despair, Annie, thinking we’re counting on these knuckleheads to be in charge of our city. To protect us. Instead, they’re obscuring the most obvious culprit, and as a diversion have invented from out of nowhere a chain of assumptions, each based entirely on the silly theory that preceded it, and the end result is absolute chaos.”
Annie did what she always did whenever Hannah got this worked up over something. She tilted her head and reprimanded her by contorting her mouth into a shape that conveyed, are you listening to yourself?
“Hannah, Jim’s your husband—not mine. Why not tell him how stupid Buffalo’s police detectives are? Go ahead. See where that lands you.”
Their laughter was as much about the unlikelihood of such a provocation as it was regarding the foolishness of the male gender.
“Female detectives, that’s what this city needs!” declared the budding suffragette.
“Men are idiots,” summed up Annie, categorically.
Female Trouble
March 4, 1903
The New York Times printed “It is still believed by many laymen that the police as of yet are utterly at sea in the case, although Superintendent Bull is quoted as saying an arrest—the arrest of a woman—may occur at any moment.”
Sixteen-year-old Marion Burdick had not spoken ten words to her mother for over a year now, not since that dreadful day she had secretly followed her to the house at No. 123 Seventh Street.
There, Arthur Pennell awaited to throw her mother down and lustily ravage her. It was right after the new year, when her mother, vainly attempting to make up for her many long absences from the household, had just hosted a dance in Marion’s honor the day after Christmas, 1901. Alice made sure that her extraordinary gesture toward her daughter was noted prominently on the Buffalo Express’ Society Page for all to see.
Marion suspected that her mother had been betraying her beloved father for quite some time, but never expected it to go on for as long as it did. She had hoped her mother would tire of the dangerous adventure and return home so that they might all become a real family once again. Marion was biting her nails to the quick and the younger girls wetting their beds. Only Marion was old enough to recall when there existed true ha
ppiness in this house, when she often saw her father and mother kiss each other longingly. She could not recall the last time her stomach was not tied in knots as she walked up the front sidewalk, home from school.
Nevertheless, Marion was not prepared under any circumstance for what her young eyes would witness when she peeked through the window that day at No. 123.
She had grown angry in light of her mother’s increasing disrespect and heartlessness toward her father, whom Marion worshiped. At the same time, her mother was removing herself from the entire family, from her own mother, her own daughters, abdicating the entire care of her children and the household. Marion’s mother was never home anymore when her daughters returned from school. On weekends she would disappear from the family house in the morning and not reappear until evening, or sometimes not until Monday. She disappeared on Thanksgiving, her empty chair at the dinner table a painful reminder. She would disappear often for a week or more at a time to travel to New York, New England and other destinations.
To the girls it seemed almost as if their mother had died.
Marion observed her father closely during her mother’s demoralizing absences, waiting for him to do something about the situation. She was both mystified and enraged that he seemed not to even take notice. He never commented or wondered aloud where his wife might be. Both he and Grandmother acted as if it wasn’t happening, despite the obvious bleak moods being suffered by Marion and her sisters. Perhaps in compensation during this unsettling time Father became even more loving and attentive toward his daughters as too did Grandmother toward her son-in-law.
Marion’s father these days spent much time in solitude and contemplation when he was in the house, sending the girls off to do their homework after dinner, when all his daughters really wanted and longed for was the comfort of a caring parent’s interest and company.
A few times Marion had sneaked up when she saw the pocket door to his den not fully slid closed and peeked through the gap. There she watched him for many long minutes, smoking, staring into space, sipping his drink, drumming his fingers, the veins in his forehead bulging, his pale white face contorted into a morose frown mirroring his unspoken loss and resignation.
She hated her mother for doing this to him. For doing this to all of them.
One day, when her father had gone to Indianapolis on business, Mother had the brazen audacity to invite Arthur Reed Pennell into the house for dinner with the family. Outrageously, she sat him at the head of the table in Father’s customary place. Grandmother was furious, hardly taking a bite throughout dinner. After the meal was finished, Grandmother told the servants to take the girls up to their rooms to do their homework. Then Grandmother laid into her daughter with a fury over her having become so extravagantly reckless.
“What sort of example do you think you are setting for your girls, Allie, might I ask? You bring this strange man here into their father’s own house and introduce him to the girls as if this were not the most immoral, improper, heinous thing imaginable for a mother to do? I am warning you, my daughter. You are destroying your family. You have betrayed your children tonight even more terribly than you have double-crossed your own husband. You have brought your sin into the only safe haven these girls have ever known, ruining it. Rubbing their innocent young faces in it. And mine as well.
“I don’t know you anymore, my Alice. What kind of daughter does such a thing to her own mother? Your kind, sweet Ed takes care of me. I am getting old. Ed has taken me generously into his home and treats me as if I were his own mother. He provides a home for me here with my grandchildren. He has been a profound blessing to me. I should be the happiest woman in the world, and I would be if not for your shameful obsession. Yet this is how you have chosen to go about living your life, with no regard at all for any of us. Your selfishness is appalling. I fear that Marion will actually come to hate you, if she does not do so already. You are the very embodiment of a narcissist, my child.”
All throughout the grandmother’s tirade Arthur Reed Pennell just sat there at the head of the table where Ed Burdick rightly should have been, sipping his wine, gloating, enjoying immensely the turmoil his wildly inappropriate presence had instigated.
Mrs. Hull had long recognized in her daughter Alice, even as a very young girl, disturbing traits of egoism.
The grandmother had been intrigued by the story of Narcissus ever since she herself was a little girl. Narcissus disdained those who loved him, instead devoting himself to his own reflected beauty in a still pool, dying there rather than abandon it. The story made no sense to her at the time. It seemed to her, back then, to be just another inscrutable fable.
But increasingly, as she watched her own little Alice grow from childhood, Marie Hull recalled and revisited that tale, it causing her to diagnose a terrible selfish isolation in her daughter wherein Alice excluded those who loved her the most.
In full adulthood, after marrying and birthing three beautiful daughters of her own, Alice Burdick found herself unhappily imprisoned at mid-life, feeling less appreciated than she thought a woman of her magnificent assets deserved. Her youth and beauty had begun to fade. She became increasingly panicked by this. Unable to fathom any better reason, certainly none within herself, she’d concluded that her husband was chiefly to blame for her deterioration.
Alice’s roving eye was attracted to a brooding man at the Red Jacket Club, a handsome attorney ensconced in a marriage of convenience to a very plain yet well-to-do New England woman who stood to inherit her family’s fortune. Being with Arthur Reed Pennell made Alice Burdick once more feel young and beautiful. Her spirits lifted, she yearned for his company more and more, and began to dress younger and adopt a more modern hairstyle to attract his eye.
Alice Burdick and Arthur Reed Pennell gravitated toward each other, both having grown disillusioned and unsatisfied with their respective marriage partners. Together they embarked down a terrible path that would at its end leave three people dead and two families devastated.
Marion wished her father would beat Arthur Pennell to a pulp, then take her childish mother over his knee and strap the life out of her, whipping her backside bloody. Why does Father not do something? she screamed to herself inside her head. Why does he allow her to do this to all of us? Why won’t he stop her?
She became confused by her feelings, the great love she felt for her father being at odds with her anger with him for not being a man and fighting for his family.
Marion was of a tender age when as yet it had not been fully impressed upon her that she and her sisters had already lost their mother, and that Grandmother had lost her only daughter as well. Marion had not been made aware of the extremes to which her father had gone previously to win his wife back, or the terrible lies the scheming Alice Burdick had told while conniving to have it both ways, or the humiliation she had caused her husband and mother, flaunting herself so publicly as she did with her paramour.
These truths had repeated themselves many times previous in fact. Marion’s mother was, as Grandmother feared, a true narcissist whose own happiness took precedence over the welfare and survival of her entire family. She had often boldly demonstrated this in recent years by deserting her children for weeks at a stretch with no remorse or care. She made it clear that she was more than willing to discard her own three daughters for the far more gratifying pleasures of passion and fulfillment of the flesh.
...
Edwin Burdick hugged his sobbing teenage daughter and tried to comfort her, remaining outwardly serene while boiling inside.
“And do you recall the address of that house, Marion?” he asked, swallowing hard.
“Yes, Father. It’s 123 Seventh Street.”
Ed Burdick had for some time confided in his business partner Mr. Parke his findings concerning the sordid activities of his wife and Arthur Reed Pennell. One day after Mr. Parke inquired about a large man who had come to their office on a number of occasions, Ed flat-out told him that the man’s name was James
Boland of the Mooney-Boland Detective Agency of New York City. He had hired Boland to tail his wife and her lover on their trysts to New England, Atlantic City and New York’s Waldorf Astoria and other Manhattan hotels.
On one particular day the previous November, Burdick revealed to Mr. Parke the anguished details of his much-loved daughter having witnessed with her own innocent eyes the two adulterous beasts fornicating together. He related with much emotion how little Marion had agonized all by herself with no one to talk to concerning that devastating scene, holding inside her the terrible secret for almost a year. Parke was horrified and incensed.
“That was injuriously, cruelly indiscreet of your wife,” Parke proclaimed. “No child should ever have to witness something so treasonous, so wounding. A young girl’s mind cannot possibly recover from such a dastardly thing, much less her heart. Not ever!”
The accommodating Mr. Parke then proposed that he just so happened to have a few friends of his own who would themselves be very agitated by the story of Alice Burdick and Arthur Reed Pennell, friends who might wish to help Ed Burdick exact his retribution.
Soon thereafter one Wednesday Alice Burdick informed her husband through the servant girl that she would be gone for most of the afternoon. He knew now exactly where she was headed. Ed Burdick gathered Mr. Parke and friends together to drive his automobile to Seventh Street. They parked the auto down the street in the shadow of a towering elm and waited. Soon Arthur Reed Pennell’s Baker Electric glided silently by, coming to a stop in front of No. 123. He alighted and went quickly inside, using a key to unlock the door. Ten minutes after, Alice Burdick arrived in a hired coach, and she too went inside. She also had a key.
After some fifteen minutes had passed, the men believing that the couple would most likely by this time be distracted within their coital exuberances, they sneaked quietly up to the house and broke in.
Fingy Conners & The New Century Page 30