Forgotten News

by Jack Finney

  "Very well, Sir."

  "Mr. Wolcott wished me to take lodgings with him out of the St. Nicholas, as he wished to be away from the City considerably. I told him that if he would find a suitable floor in some respectable house near the hotel …" But we can cut short all that Connery, jury, and the reporters had to sit listening to now: Ullman's monologue ran over nine inches in the wide column and small type of the Tribune, its only apparent purpose to demonstrate his own respectability. His friend Wolcott had found a place in Bond Street, and had heard "a high character given of the persons who kept it…. I then told Mr. Wolcott that if he would make satisfactory inquiries as to the character of the house, the lady and the family … he came to me a few days after and said … that respectable persons have given him an excellent character of the lady and the family…." Etc. The many good reasons for Ullman's belief in the complete respectability of the house in which he rented his rooms took about half his monologue; the rest went to show how remote were his connections with anyone in this house. He had, however, been invited to the January 14 party—and went.

  "You came to the party?" said the coroner, sounding to me as surprised as I was.

  Well, yes; but just barely: "I came to the party, and passed half an hour at it. Saw some persons whom I recognized to be very respectable persons." In fact, this was the first time he'd ever had any conversation with anyone else in the house, "and then for not over two or three minutes." Didn't even know the daughters' names till the party. Saw someone whose name, he learned only later, "was John J. Eckel, so little notice did I take of him then, or have I since." Didn't think he'd recognize Eckel even now. He also met "a young man whose name I afterward learned was Snodgrass." Ullman didn't even know where anyone else slept; he'd been a kind of ghost, apparently, unseen and unseeing, hardly actually there at all.

  Connery finally got a question in, to which Ullman replied, and then, said the Tribune, "Mr. Ullman yawned, and looked ennuyé."

  Coming finally to more recent times: "… on Friday last I came to my room about 4 o'clock in the afternoon (yawn)," says the Trib. And that night "returned to the St. Nicholas Hotel," where he "took supper with Mr. Douglass, Colonel Looney and his family. On leaving the dinner I met my friends, Mr. Van Dusen, of Hudson, and Whiting of Kinder-hook…." Who sound to my ears like a pretty respectable bunch.

  In response to questioning, Ullman described events of the morning the murder was discovered, and of that evening, which is how we learn of such things as his conversation with Mrs. Cunningham about how the corpse was to be dressed. And then, pompous though Daniel Ullman may have been, and anxious to disassociate himself from the murder, which isn't hard to understand, I think he redeemed himself. He would not go along with suggestions of Connery's that Emma Cunningham and others had failed to exhibit proper grief; and he concluded by volunteering "that the conduct of all these persons impressed me with an idea that they could scarcely have had anything to do with this, and I have been pondering on it ever since." So maybe he deserved the "Honorable."

  "Mr. Ullman," Connery said, "that will do. Will you please sign this now?" referring to the written summary of his testimony.

  "I have made it a practice since I was Master in Chancery to read everything I sign. I made it a point to read the whole testimony over to a witness before he signed it."

  But Connery wasn't going to read all that back to Ullman. "Very well, Sir; I have not the time. You can read it if you like … I have only taken an epitome of your evidence. There's a number of matters you said that I didn't think worthy of…" He didn't finish.

  Ullman took the paper, the Times said, looked at it for a moment, and the notion of reading it may have seemed too much to him, too. "I believe I will sign it."

  "Yes, Sir," said Connery, "you may depend upon it as much as if it was verbatim et literatim. (Laughter) If you are hung, Mr. Ullman, I will be the executioner. (Laughter)"

  "Well, Sir, so pleasant a gentleman would perform an execution in an exceedingly gentle manner; no doubt of it, Sir. Do you want anything more with me, Mr. Coroner?"

  "I believe not, Sir."

  "I am very busy, Sir, but you know that I am at your call when you wish for me."

  "Yes, Sir," and not to be outdone in grace, "You have done the State some service, and the State knows it, Mr. Ullman. (Laughter)"

  "The witness withdrew," said the Times, and I was sorry to see him go.

  When Susan Maine, the doctor's wife, was recalled, and gave her name, Connery said, "This is a main chance of making a conquest, anyway. (Laughter)," the Times reported.

  They adjourned presently, and now another cluster of doctors climbed the inside stairs of number 31: this included Dr. David Uhl, a man who in time would wish he had never heard of this case. The group walked on into the bedroom where Harvey Burdell lay in his coffin, for tomorrow was to be the funeral, and this was the last chance to make certain they had complete descriptions of the wounds—and to perform an autopsy.

  With the group was Mr. A. Berghaus, a Leslie's artist, here to make drawings that might be needed after the burial and after the murder room had been cleaned up. I suspect—Leslie's was a pretty hustling paper—that it had volunteered his services, because not long afterward they selected from Berghaus's works of this afternoon (as I've done also) those they felt their readers would most appreciate. These included drawings (the captions are theirs) of:

  "Handle of the door of attic room with the spots of blood."

  "Appearance of some of the holes in the Doctor's shirt."

  "Shirt sleeve showing the spots of blood."

  "Doctor Burdell's heart showing the two wounds."

  6

  A cold nasty day, said the Times, speaking of Wednesday, February 4, but soon after daybreak a crowd began to gather on Bond Street, and presently it "far exceeded that of previous days," for today was the funeral, and they were waiting for the hearse.

  All morning the crowd continued to grow until: "It gathered as a huge black spot around the door of the house," 31 Bond. "… The street … so blockaded that vehicles could scarcely pass." "In Broadway another crowd was … watching for the funeral cortege."

  About noon the hearse turned into Bond Street, "drawn by four white horses caparisoned in black," the street now "a complete mass of human beings, almost every window … filled by the inmates of the … houses on both sides of the street." Inside number 31 "the Coroner's investigation was going on," the street "lined with spectators all anxious to see the coffin…."

  The hearse stopped at the curb, the undertaker and his assistant climbed down, made their way across the crowded walk, up the steps of 31, in past the cop at the door. I see them then as tiptoeing by the downstairs parlor, from which, very possibly, the voice of the coroner or a witness could be heard; then moving quietly up the stairs.

  In her room Mrs. Cunningham, "learning that the funeral was about to take place, and that the coffin was about to be taken from the house, requested that she might be permitted to pay her last respects to the deceased. This having been granted, she was conducted to the room where the coffin was, and having clipped a lock from Dr. Burdell's hair, kissed his lips with a more than ordinary impress, and exclaimed, 'Oh, Doctor! Oh, Doctor!' and wept. She was conducted from the apartment…."

  The undertaker and his assistant fitted the lid over the dead man's face. I believe coffin lids were screwed down then, though this isn't mentioned. Then each picked up an end of the box, and carried it down the stairs, working it around the turn. Past the parlor door and the voices of those futilely trying to discover who had put the Doctor here. Then out the door, and: "Immediately the coffin was removed from the house … a violent rush took place from all directions, each individual of the crowd being anxious to get a sight of the coffin. The undertaker and his aide quickly placed it in [the] neat hearse…."

  The reins flicked, the four horses in their black draperies pressed into their collars, and "at a quick pace" the loaded hearse rolled ahead t
oward Broadway. The crowd moved with it, looking in at the coffin—standing high and visible, I believe, behind the etched glass panels of a hearse of the time. "The multitude moved on and into Broadway, where they were preceded by a strong force of police…."

  Practical cameras had been around for eighteen years as that hearse moved slowly up Broadway; and Anthony, Meade, Brady, and others had their studios right on Broadway. Did anyone trundle a big camera over to a Broadway window, aim it down at that thronged street, bring it to focus, and get an actual photograph of the black rooftop of Harvey Burdell's hearse, the white heads of its horses, the flat caps of the police, and the shawled heads and shoulders, the fur caps and stovepipe-hatted heads, of the crowd swarming around them? It seems possible, the kind of impulse that should come to a photographer looking down at Broadway that day. If it did, his photo may be around: daguerreotypes were metal, and survive. I won't find it, of course, in the kind of semi-antique, semi-junk store where such things are sometimes discovered. But you might.

  The police "marched up to Grace Church and opened up a passage through the crowd …" and at twelve-thirty the hearse stopped at the curb before the church, and "notwithstanding the unpleasant state of the weather, a larger crowd than was ever known was gathered around the church, and blockaded Broadway from Union-square on one side nearly to Bond-street on the other. One half of the crowd was composed of the best-dressed ladies known to Fifth Avenue and its circumjacent localities. Since the funeral of Poole, nothing has been in the way of a funeral cortege like that…." (Poole was a famous pugilist, shot down a couple years earlier in the Stanwix Hotel on Broadway, across the street from the Metropolitan. His last words a few days later were, "I die a true American." His funeral, attended by sports, toughs, and thousands of members of the "Native American" party, the coffin wrapped in an American flag, was enormous. Plays were produced in New York, says one account of the murder, "in which the hero, encircling his limbs with the star-spangled banner, departed this life to slow music and red fire, exclaiming: 'I die a true American!' ")

  At the church door, waiting for Harvey Burdell's coffin, stood: "A strong detachment of police … detailed by Captain Dilk—the enterprising Captain of the Fifteenth Ward—to prevent the incursion of unauthorized parties." The coffin was carried in past them, then the doors were locked against the crowd.

  At the curb the hearse and four horses stood waiting, as they must now for hours. The horses, I feel sure, would be covered by blankets over their black drapings; and would be fed, canvas or leather feed bags strapped to the long, munching faces. Around them the great crowd would move slowly, overflowing the walks and filling the streets, waiting. Well-dressed ladies, many in hoopskirts, many carrying muffs—the "fair multitude," the Tribune called them—waited in the crowd, too, out here in the cold before the church, for the next hour and a half.

  At 31 Bond the witnesses came and went, nothing much being learned. A cop walked in with a scuttle of fresh coal for the fire, and made considerable noise pouring it on. Connery spoke up "grandiloquently, as if reading from a newspaper," the Tribune reported, saying, "Here a terrible confusion arose from a box of coal being put on the fire. Put that in, gentlemen of the press," and they did.

  I take Connery's remark as a reference to the editorials in today's papers; I think he was hurt and possibly shocked by them. They are, in fact, the most outspoken attack I can recall seeing in print anywhere: no paper ever referred to Nixon at his worst the way they did this morning to Coroner Connery.

  The Times referred to his "most extraordinary unfitness …" and said: "If anything ever occurred in a Court of Justice more shocking than" Connery's jokes and his "obvious attempts to pin the crime" on Mrs. Cunningham and Eckel "it has not fallen under our notice…." Only yesterday the Times had referred to Emma Cunningham's "voluptuous form, and more than ordinary powers of fascination. She drew within her toils Mr. George D. Cunningham…." Today, not hesitating to heave a stone through the open window of their own glass house, they spoke of Connery's "low chuckling over the disclosure of everything throwing doubt upon the relations of the parties … ," and they had a stone left for the Tribune, which, the Times said sanctimoniously, had a "remarkably free and easy style of dealing with private character…."

  The Tribune couldn't "understand why … the office of Coroner … should so often be bestowed upon silly, ignorant and otherwise incompetent persons…." Connery, they said, had "the knowledge of a hedge-school-master and the perspicacity of a beadle … a bad heart, a loose tongue, a limited intellect and a coarse nature."

  The Tribune today was remarkable; at two cents, this issue of Wednesday, February 4, was a steal. Yesterday they had quoted unnamed friends of Harvey Burdell who were "very emphatic in their declarations that he never could have married Mrs. Cunningham, and that the whole affair was a fraud—a plot…." Today it seemed unlikely to the Trib that anyone living in the house had done the murder, for: "How bold the act, if done by an inmate of the house, at an hour when [Ullman] might walk in and find him in the very midst of the struggle!" It seemed, the Trib thought now, "altogether possible that [the inmates of the house] are guiltless…."

  In yesterday's Trib, Harvey Burdell had been a member of various important societies, a bank director, coauthor of a book, "prominent and well-to-do…." Today the Trib threw its readers another curve by reprinting from the Herald that, while living in his brother's house, Harvey Burdell "began to manifest a very licentious and loose character. At last he had a quarrel with his brother, during which they had a severe fight, John [Burdell] alleging that Harvey was too intimate with his wife." With Harvey's help she got a divorce, Harvey then cheated John out of a lot of property, and during John's "last illness, and just before his death, Harvey Burdell got out an attachment against him … and with it and a Sheriff went to John's room and took possession of everything he had, even the furniture of his death chamber, leaving him to die on a sofa." Not even a little embarrassed, "Harvey Burdell frequently told of this deed among his acquaintances." He also got his brother to sign a will, presumably before yanking his deathbed from under him, making Harvey his executor. Harvey then gave the ex-wife nothing. "Honesty was by no means a characteristic of his dealings, and his moral character was far from being above reproach. His reputation among good men was bad, very bad." It's true he had "considerable talents and spent most of his time in reading, the pursuit of his profession, and money-getting." But: "He had been a very licentious man, and had a great many difficulties in consequence of it; his name is found in the books at the Tombs, in the law courts, and he has been known to the head of the police for many years…."

  And that's not all. When a young man, he'd been engaged "to a respectable young lady, but her father peremptorily refused to permit the marriage; at which Burdell got angry, struck the father and gave him a black eye." Engaged to still another girl, "the day and hour was set for the wedding, the wedding party assembled, the bridesmaids and the bridegroom were present, the clergyman was ready to perform the ceremony, when Dr. Harvey Burdell entered the room of the old man and told him that before he married the girl he wanted a check for $20,000." The father refused, the wedding broke up, and later "the young lady married the person who was to be groomsman on the former occasion, [and] he received the check for $20,000. The check on the previous occasion was made out for Burdell, and would have been given him immediately after the marriage ceremony was performed; and when he heard about it, he is said to have become greatly excited, and declared that he would never get married."

  That wasn't the half of it, either. "Dr. Burdell had a very curious servant girl, called Biddy, who was with him for five years," two of them "at No. 31 Bond Street, during the whole of which time she never went to bed. He never furnished her with a bed, or anything to sleep upon. She was poorly clad, and hardly ever had anything to wear on her feet. He never provided her with anything to eat, but gave her a small weekly salary, upon which she supported herself, buying her food at the gr
oceries. This is an example of the doctor's penuriousness. The girl could speak four languages fluently—namely, the English, French, German and Spanish. She had a great passion for studying and learning languages. She was an Irish girl, and a most faithful servant. She frequently saved the doctor from being beaten, for if a fight occurred, she would run between him and his assailant, and stand there till she stopped the fighting. She slept on a stool below the hall door…."

  And besides that: "There was a wealthy widow lady of this city who used to visit Dr. Burdell every day for two years. On occasion she called on him in the afternoon to go to the theater with him in the evening. On the way to the theater, she said she would like something to eat, and entered Thompson's saloon and called for what she wanted. Dr. Burdell refused to call for anything for himself, saying that he had been to tea. She told him to call and be decent. He refused—when she called for him. He would not eat; and on coming back for her would neither pay for himself nor her. The Doctor is represented by those intimately acquainted with him to have been a very peculiar man. He hates children, and never had any pets except some Guinea pigs. His brother, Lewis Burdell, is now in the Lunatic Asylum, on Blackwell's Island, having gone mad from the effects of a nameless habit…."

  What's more: "The dentists represent that Harvey Burdell never held a high position in the dental profession; that the most respectable portion of that profession would have nothing to do with him, that he was dishonest in his practice, that he has filled twelve teeth in an hour, when an honest dentist could not do that amount of work in less than twelve hours, that he was willing to do anything for money, that the greatest portion of his patients while [his office was] in Broadway were disreputable characters…." He hadn't even written any of the book he signed as coauthor; the work was really done entirely by a brother, and a medical work Burdell claimed to have translated from the French was translated by someone else.