Forgotten News

by Jack Finney

  He was never connected with the American Society of Dental Surgeons, having been proposed for membership but not elected. He had been president of "the New-York Society of Dental Surgeons—more popularly known as the Amalgum [sic] Society because they were in favor of using [a compound of mercury and silver] to fill the teeth with …" but: "It was under his Presidency that the Society collapsed…."

  And now for Mrs. Cunningham's mother. "A leading physician of Brooklyn yesterday gave a correspondent the following facts in elucidation of the antecedents of Mrs. Cunningham." Her late sister, "known as Mrs. Williams, understood to be the kept mistress of a Wall Street lawyer of that name," had been very sick a dozen years before. "A male relative expressed great anxiety for her recovery; 'for,' said he, 'she has been a very bad woman, and is not fit to die.' " She did die, though, "of disease of the heart, attended with such peculiar symptoms that [the doctor] was very desirous to make a post mortem examination of that organ." Her mother okayed this, and: "The doctor being unattended by any professional friend, and no one else being willing to aid or be present at the operation, the mother held a candle while he took out her daughter's heart, without exhibiting the least tremor or emotion." The doctor had kept, and he showed the reporter, that very heart, by now "partially ossified. The doctor became acquainted with Mrs. Cunningham as well as her sisters, and was fully convinced that from example and training they grew up wholly destitute of character or principle."

  Well, I'm not convinced; that mother had all the character she could use. And so did daughter Emma, I think. To me the doctor sounds a little ungrateful for that unwavering candle.

  "It appears, gentlemen," Coroner Connery said to his jury before adjourning for lunch, that "I have received a castigation … from some of the papers." He then made a heartfelt speech in rebuttal and a speech is what it was: it took the Times fifteen column inches to report it.

  About half his speech looks like a buildup to producing a paper refuting the Tribune's criticism of him for having Mrs. Cunningham stripped. Now he read it aloud: "This is to certify that the examination of my person by Dr. Woodward was conducted in the most delicate manner. There was no indecent exposure…." Mrs. Cunningham had signed this, however, in a way Connery was now obliged to repeat: "E. A. Burdell." But he added, "This is Mrs. Cunningham, who signs her name 'E. A. Burdell.' "

  Uptown from the inquest, at Grace Church, a little later: "Shortly after two o'clock, Rev. Dr. Taylor, Rector … took his place in the chancel." Relatives and friends of Harvey Burdell had already been seated, and now the doors were unlocked and opened for the waiting crowd.

  "The somewhat corpulent sexton … did not like the idea of his carpet and the mattings being used in so common a manner as was likely to be the case by a promiscuous congregation such as now presented itself to him," and he tried announcing that no women would be admitted. But "the denunciations which were then poured out upon the Sexton's head were of every variety. One lady, in particular, said that 'his boiler ought to be bursted.' " He had to let the ladies in, but did his best to filter out "pickpockets and other low characters." As the ladies pushed in, some of them "expressed anxiety as to whether they should occupy a seat in the 'pit' or in the 'dress circle' [terminology of the day for certain theater seats]. The preference was given to the pit, for, as they remarked, the church was 'all pit.' "

  Every seat in the church was quickly filled, and the aisles filled with standers, "ladies as well as gentlemen. On no occasion do we remember an equal excitement attendant upon any funeral occasion."

  The funeral began with the reading of the burial service. This was to be followed by the choir … a reading of the epistle … the choir again….

  While this was going on, the jury reassembled down at 31 Bond. Connery, having apparently learned nothing at all from the intense newspaper criticism, now produced two remarkable letters, leaving to the jury whether they should be given to the press, although he himself was always in favor, he said, of doing "anything in the world to aid the press."

  It was okay with the jury, and Connery handed to the reporters, to copy first, an astonishing example of his notions of proper procedure. "No. 4 Barclay Street, New York. Coroner Connery," it began; and then detailed a long argument in support of a fake groom and that John Eckel was the fake. None of Burdell's actions after the marriage was that of a husband, or of a man who even knew he was married; nor did Emma Cunningham behave as though married. So: "Might not [Eckel] be the person who represented" Burdell at the supposed marriage? And: "Why did the man that was married wear false whiskers as a disguise … ? If it was her motive to get Dr. Burdell's property, such a plan was well calculated to accomplish it … and then [the writer's speculations now surpassed anything anyone else had even imagined] getting in the family way … and then getting rid of the Doctor. If in the family way the child would be supposed to be his, and she and it would get all the property…. In respect of her former husband it would save a great deal of trouble to get a gouty old man out of the way, and especially if by doing so she would realize $10,000 on his life…."

  Incredibly, this long argument for the guilt of Eckel and Mrs. Cunningham, running nearly eight thousand words, was listened to by the entire coroner's jury, and then published for a city full of prospective trial jurors. Even more incredibly, the letter was anonymous: "Respectfully, OBSERVER," it concluded.

  That one out of the way, Connery handed over his second letter, also anonymous. "Sir: Wishing to assist in the ends of justice, I beg to state that a lady dreamed twice last night that Mrs. Cunningham had left the house early on the morning of the murder, met Mr. Eckel at a bath-house, and there washed off together some offensive marks on their body.

  "This is perhaps all nonsense, but it may lead to some opening." Signed, "JUSTICE."

  The next witness, a woman, took the oath and the operating chair, and Connery asked her business. "I am a clairvoyant," she replied, and the inquest was once more on its way.

  The clairvoyant neither knew nor divined anything useful, and Eckel's bookkeeper then testified in German, a juror translating; and I mention him only, since he has nothing new to tell us, to quote a reply he made because I think it gives us another momentary glimpse of how it was once in a vanished New York. Asked when something had happened, he said, "It was at candlelight, about 5 o'clock."

  At Grace Church the choir finished its final selection, and the organ pipes sounded the ponderous tones of the "Dead March" from Saul. Eight pallbearers, Drs. Stephen Maine and Samuel Parmly among them, then lifted the coffin together, and carried it down the aisle, and out to the waiting hearse. The watching crowd by now, said the Times, "could not have fallen short of 8,000 persons, of all colors, ages and sizes."

  Carriages stood waiting at the curb, many of them hired; people, some of whom would have been wearing full black mourning, came down the church steps, and climbed into them. The procession—hearse first, pallbearers next, then relatives—began moving down Broadway, "hearse and 50 carriages." Half the carriages were empty but "gave character to the affair."

  As the procession rolled south, "the crowd gathered along the sidewalk, and every window was filled with gazers anxious to behold the last trace of the deceased. Especially at the end of Broadway the crowd was very dense, and the carriages had great difficulty in making way…. It was not until nearly at Canal Street that the pressure of the crowd diminished—and even until it reached Hamilton Ferry the sidewalks were thronged with people….

  "The river at this point being free from ice no impediment prevented the speedy crossing of the water. It was generally understood in Brooklyn that the procession would cross at Fulton Ferry, and those who were drawn together by curiosity to witness the scene were thus disappointed. On arriving at Greenwood Cemetery, a lady named Williams and calling herself a relative of Dr. Burdell's joined the funeral party. She entered the reporters' carriage and stated that she herself had selected the lot in which the remains of the unfortunate man were to be inter
red. Not altogether the mourner did she appear there. Her excitement bore evidence of strong animosity toward Mrs. Cunningham. She said, in tones loud enough to be heard by all who were present, and with very impulsive gestures, that 'The doctor's sentiments toward Mrs. Cunningham were well known to his friends—that he always expressed the utmost aversion to her, and, to use his own words, would rather be torn in pieces with hot pincers than to marry her.'

  "This lady, after subduing her emotions," the Times continued, "inquired if any will had been found. She said that to her certain knowledge Dr. Burdell had made a will, and she thought it had been stolen or altered. The lady after this demonstration said no more, but simply subsided into grief."

  Surprisingly, the Tribune reporter seems either to have missed cousin Lucy Ann Williams or, more likely, I think—the Tribune having an afternoon edition—he did not go out to the cemetery. But the Trib man rarely let his readers down, and didn't now: he filled out with fine writing.

  "The body was conveyed to Greenwood Cemetery," he wrote, "where now lie the remains of one, who having worked assiduously to acquire a fortune, lost it; lost life, lost all the pleasures in which he was wont to indulge; lost them all in the twinkling of an eye. Surrounded by circumstances of his own choice, or at least arising out of the elements which he had once chosen as his social enhancers" (whatever that is intended to mean; he may simply have gotten carried away by the beauty of his own prose, which I can sympathize with) "he was involved in embarrassment by this course, and his life came to be in jeopardy every hour, at least so it is said in testimony of what he himself stated to different individuals at different times."

  Relieved, I suppose, to have made it alive out of that sentence, the Tribune man, pen dipping frequently, took off: "He dies! not as the patriot dies. He dies! not as the cherished husband, not as the fond father, not as the philanthropist, not as the benefactor of his race …" Etc.

  Finally he finished with a paragraph that I quote not only for its splendid prose but because we are the answers to his question: "Who will think of this funeral, now it is passed? Who will permit themselves to think of the why and wherefore of the occasion, and then [this may also apply to some of us] turning from diverse ways which lead to ruin and death, arrest their downward career, and turn to those associations which are developed in the true family circle, which is a sacred altar upon which are laid all that we hold dear in life, surrounded by hands ever ready to repel the assassin, push back the invader of social dignity and virtue, protect the public peace, and send out into the world men and women whose virtue is a tower of strength and whose moral courage is a terror to those who demand the right to luxury without the effort to obtain it honestly." This was immediately followed by a full reprint of the scurrilous account of Harvey Burdell's life that they had published yesterday.

  The Times man did go out to Greenwood, and there is the feel of eyewitness reality in the conclusion of his story: "The coffin enclosing the remains of Dr. Burdell was taken from the hearse and placed in a strong deal case. The grave was dug in a spot on Locust Hill, in section No. 44 —the number of the grave being 3,799."

  If cousin Lucy Ann Williams had indeed selected this lot, she had done so at least seven years earlier, for this was the Burdell family plot —a large circular area of the kind chosen then with the intention of erecting a tall center monument inscribed with the family name, and the whole encircled by a low wall on which individual names would from time to time be carved. There was no monument yet, no marker of any kind, but Dr. Burdell's brother John already lay here, buried in 1850.

  "There was no address from any individual," the Times man continued, "a few relatives stood mourning around—many strangers looked on with mere curiosity. The snow lay deep and untrodden in the vicinity of the grave, while the remains of him who five days before trod the streets of the City in health and strength, were lowered to their last resting place."

  There is no way of knowing it, but the dead man lying out in the blackness of Greenwood Cemetery that night surely touched the minds of Emma Cunningham and her daughters as they sat in their rooms in his house. And if so, it could explain their near-panic at a sudden sharp sound, an explosion on Broadway a short distance away. It was nothing: only a "salute" set off by exuberant friends of a man whose election as chief engineer of the Fire Department had been announced that evening. But "Mrs. Cunningham and her daughters were much alarmed. The elder one almost fainted, supposing it was the mob coming to pull down the house."

  7

  The coroner's case against Emma Cunningham was collapsing. A Times editorial writer spelled it out: "… with every successive step in the inquiry, one after another of the suspicious circumstances is explained." Emma Cunningham had sued Harvey Burdell, but the suits were "withdrawn, and … all their differences … amicably and finally settled." The supposed falsity of the wedding "is by no means proved…." The Cunningham girls' sleeping with their mother on the night of the murder "is absolutely incompatible with the supposition that she took any personal and premeditated part in that murder,—except on the incredible supposition that she voluntarily admitted those daughters to a knowledge of her share in that transaction, or the still more monstrous hypothesis that they also shared in her guilt…. Nothing that she has said or done since the murder… seems to us to furnish even presumptive evidence of her guilt."

  As for Eckel, "nothing whatever is shown that indicates him as the Doctor's assassin…."

  There was nothing left. "The bloody clothes found in the garret have been accounted for; the dagger found in one of the rooms … was not large enough to have inflicted the stabs;—the papers found in Eckel's room were in Mrs. Cunningham's desk, and they belonged properly to her…."

  The Tribune also gave Connery unshirted hell. It was an outrage, they said, the way the coroner arbitrarily clapped witnesses, particularly women, into jail "who could not give bail in the sum of $1000 each for their appearance at the Court of Sessions to prove Mrs. Cunningham guilty … and this, too, before the Jury have found that there are any grounds for detaining her to stand such a trial…. Mrs. Seymour [the clairvoyant], whose testimony, our readers must judge after reading it, is not worth a thousand straws, and yet this woman was ordered to give $1000 bail or go to prison. She declared to the officer who took her to prison that she had been kept two days without a mouthful to eat, and now must go to jail of course, for she could not give bail.

  "… This course adopted by this stupidest of Dogberrys," the Tribune concluded, meant that anyone, especially a woman, who might come forward with useful information would now not do so lest she be put in jail for her trouble.

  Connery now seems to me simply to react to whatever the newspapers criticized as though he could get them off his back by complying. That same afternoon he ordered all witnesses except Mary Donaho and Hannah Conlon released from the Fifteenth Precinct station house jail. He also gave in to Henry L. Clinton, Mrs. Cunningham's formidable lawyer, and Eckel's counsel, William R. Stafford, who'd been fighting him about this, and allowed them to consult with Eckel, who had been moved to the Tombs.

  It didn't help. "A monomania seems to have seized the Coroner in regard to the inmates of the house," the Times said on Friday. "Even if they are the guilty parties, it is not at all essential that their guilt be established now … the main thing now is to discover what other parties are open to suspicion…. The Coroner will find this quite useful, if not so congenial a field for the exercise of his peculiar talents, as an inquiry into the antecedents of Mrs. Cunningham, Mr. Eckel's demeanor toward his mistress, or the feelings and opinions of Hannah, the cook."

  Almost obediently, Connery began the inquest that morning by telling the jury, in a kind of knee-jerk paraphrase of the Times's scolding, that they'd heard enough about what had gone on in the house before the murder, and "I trust that your questions will be confined solely to when Mr. Burdell left the house that evening, where he dined, who dined with him, when he left dinner, when he went to
dine, and every matter tracing him up to the period when we suppose the murder to have been done…. I am anxious… that nothing should be left undone in regard to finding out the perpetrators…."

  I feel a little sorry for Connery. And I miss his jokes. The trouble with his instructions to the jury was that they didn't have anybody to ask those questions of. Connery tried Alvah Blaisdell again, learning nothing much that they didn't already know. He tried the Reverend Uriah Marvine once more, and things went from bad to worse. Connery had sent Marvine to the Tombs yesterday to take a look at Eckel, with and without wig. Now he asked Marvine if he'd seen Eckel, and got a typically Uriah Marvine answer: "I went yesterday to see a man in prison whom they called Eckel," he said scrupulously.

  Did he recognize him as the man he'd married to Emma Cunningham? And this time got a remarkably positive answer. "I would say as far as this," the Reverend boldly replied, "that the body I saw upstairs resembles the man I married more than the man I saw yesterday, called Eckel," and that was the end of that.

  I think poor Edward Downes Connery hardly knew whom to call, or what to do next, and he didn't redeem himself with anyone but me by bringing out one more nutty letter for the reporters to copy:

  "to mister Conorery esq.

  coroner off new york city

  Mr. Croner it is with pleasure that i writes to you about mises Cunningham i noed wance a man that was kilt and the peple went and lef thre hands on him and wen the man the man that kilt ham put his hand on him he begun to blead and the man confesd and was hangd, if the same was dun wid the docktur it wud serve justis

  from your servent

  games donoly"

  At the noon recess the coroner had a cop go get a chimney sweep, who then swept all the chimneys of 31 for evidence of burnt cloth. He had the cesspool and privies searched; had the yard dug up and turned over; had the ashes in the cellar sifted. And all he found was a trunk of John Eckel's, some of whose clothes were packed inside it, but not a speck of blood in the lot. "It may have significance to some," the Times said mystifyingly, "that at the bottom of the trunk were found a quantity of capsules of balsam of copaiva." This reference was cleared up by my family doctor, John Lee, whom I asked about it: the stuff was once used to treat gonorrhea.