Buried Bones - a historical true crime podcast with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul HolesIn this second part of a two-part episode, Kate and Paul return to early 1900s Buffalo, and an investigation to find the killer of a man whose wife was cheating on him with his best friend. The authorities build a case based on blood work technology, but is it enough to convict?
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I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
This is buried Bones. Hi, Kate, Hi, Paul. Were you thinking about this story of Ed Burdick and what happened to this guy for the last week? I hope you've come up with a really, really strong theory and this will be the shortest episode we've ever done if you have the best theory.
I have so many questions. Oh gosh, I have been thinking about it. Yeah, no, I'm as I said. It's going to be a Bourbon episode, but sort of not bourbon. It's a hard Seltzer episode. How's that our Seltzer?
Do you know? That if I drank hard Seltzer during our episodes, I would be curled up in a ball in a sleep by the end of So. I don't know how you do this.
It's called tolerance.
I guess I respect it. I guess I don't know if I respect. I guess I respect it. Anyway, I'll be just sipping my peach ginger herbal tea at the same war word different, aren't we? Aren't you and I? Really different? Stuff like this?
Hey, that's what allows us to mesh so well.
Toget opposites a tract. Absolutely, there you go. Well, let's do a summary. I've made you do your summaries in the past, but I'll go ahead and just rip this one out. So our summary is We're in Buffalo in nineteen oh three. There is a very successful businessman named Ed Burdick. He is found murdered on his fainting couch in his big home by housekeeper and his mother in law. He is separated, it sounds like, and going through divorce with his wife Alice. She has been having an affair with his closest friend for it sounds like about five years, and the friend has Arthur, has threatened him is kind of the big thing right now. Had threatened him that if you go through this divorce, it will expose all of my private business. I do not want that. Don't do it. I will kill you and then I will take my own life. And Ed responded with, listen, you know, divorce your wife. I'll divorce mine. You two get married, and you can have the our kids that half the time, and I'll take the kids half the time, and everything will be okay. But he seemed to be the only one okay with this arrangement. And now we are all on the day that he was discovered and police are arriving to find Ed face down, no clothes except an undershirt on beaten to death. Autopsy shows at least ten blows to the head. We will have a murder weapon soon. And now they are trying to figure out what happened to this very successful man. Is that good? Is that your understanding of what happened?
That is my understanding? So yes, I need more details, okay.
So the police come after the cook Maggie had run to the pharmacy and phoned the doctor and then they phoned the police. The police show up and they immediately think robbery, gone wrong, even though he's not wearing any pants. Even though you know, it looks like nothing's been taken, it sounds like it looks it's like, according to the police, someone came into the house through the window, ran into ed unexpectedly. They must have assumed that he was upstairs where bedrooms would traditionally be. They killed them, and then they ran out the front door. So that's where police see things going. There are a lot of details about the room, but I can also show you the diagram, which I will say is rough, to say the least of what police say the room was. Like, what do you think we should do first? I mean, there's like weird stuff throughout the room that people have theories about, but there's also this diagram.
Yeah, let me see the diagram.
Okay, So take a look at the diagram that I sent you. It's kind of hard to read. You describe what you see, and if you need help translating some of this stuff, let me know.
Yeah. So what I'm looking at is what would be considered a hand drawn diagram. It's actually technically what we would call a bird's eye sketch or crime scene sketch. So this is literally looking right down on the den where Ed was found killed. The outer walls of the diagram have obviously been drawn with a straight edge, showing two windows on the left side of the diagram and the door going into the room or you know, the door to the room on the kind of the bottom right wall of the diagram. The prominent feature, of course, is what they're calling a couch, which you had previously referred to as a divan, and it's indicating it's it looks like it's somewhat at just a slight diagonal inside the you know, the center part of this room, and it's indicating it's about eight and a half feet long. They're noting there's a chair that's just inside the door to the room, there's a bookcase, there's a table that's to the left of the door into the room, and there they write table from which letters were taken above the couch, and there's an X that is marked right sort of at the right hand head of this couch is a what appears to be a location that is described as underwear trousers and stockings, and an arrow pointing to that X. Then just inside the door, it says two golf sticks, which I'm assuming that's their terminology for golf clubs. You're right, yep, Okay, so that's that is what this diagram is depicting, and it's a simple diagram. What I really like is are showing where Ashland Avenue is, which is on the bottom of the diagram. It's on the side of the den in which the door is in, and they actually have a north and south arrow so it helps orient this is. You know, as simple as this is, this is a reasonable bird's eye crime scene sketch that gives me at least a spatial layout of the room as well as where some what they've determined to be prominent items of evidence are located within the room.
Yes, there are a couple things that I wanted to sort of point out because I'm sure you'll have questions about the stockings. It looks like on the other side of the couch they found what did they say, trousers, underwear and stockings. I just wanted to clarify stockings were socks for men essentially in the early nineteen hundreds. This is not women's stockings. These are men's stockings. So it's not like some random woman was there. This is all his stuff. His underclothing or the trousers are kind of piled up.
It sounds like, yeah, and do we have any information would Ed sleep in the den.
Let's get into some more details and I'll kind of give you that information. So first, let's start with the items that are in this room will inform us of Ed's habits and things that were not his habits. And this is the stuff that the domestic staff was very helpful because they were the ones who really flagged some weird things. There's a tray of cheese and crackers on the table. There's a bottle of liquor, and there's another bottle of liquor, the one the pre mixed cocktail that he bought. It sounds like there's one glass someone had been drinking out of it. But the household staff say, all of them say, this is not something this man would have done for himself in the middle of the night. Ever, he did not eat in this din He only smoked in the den after dinner. And that is it. This is weird. This is not the right set up for Ed Burdick at home, you know, hanging out after everybody went to sleep. There's a tart that the cook knows ed hated, he refused to eat it when she made it for him, and the tart is there. It looks like he had someone else in that den at some point, So no one understands if he is hosting somebody why the kitchen window was open, and it sounds like because there's food on the table and somebody opened the window. It just it all seems like somebody is staging something, either staging the food, which I don't know why somebody breaking into the house would stage somebody in the house doing it, or the other way around, somebody who had been hosted by him or who lived there at one point was then trying to make it look like someone broke in. So staging is that the right word?
Well, yeah, you're describing the right term staging, but I kind of want to dig into that a little bit. No earlier, you said the kitchen window was open. Did you mean the den window?
Now the kitchen window, which is very close to the den. Okay, this is when Maggie came downstairs, the front door was open and the kitchen window was open. They looked outside. It looked like some of the snow had been brushed away from the outer window. Sill of the kitchen, the one that was open. But there are no footprints in the snow underneath the window or several feet around it, and there's not fresh snow. It had not snowed that night. So they said, listen, if somebody broke in, there would be footprints right underneath the sill. And that's not what this looks like. But I don't know if that's solid evidence or not.
Now, so you know, the victimology is always so important, and so what I'm hearing is is that Ed changed his pattern and that was directly witnessed by the domestic staff. He's bringing alcohol, he's got the pre mixed cocktail, and then of course what you're seeing inside the den is supporting the possibility that someone else was present. Is this a staged crime scene where somebody setting it up to make it look like Ed was entertaining somebody. I'm not convinced of that, because Ed's change behavior that was directly witnessed. It's almost as if Ed was expecting somebody to come over, and maybe somebody did come over. Now that could be the killer, or that could be the reason Ed was killed by whoever came after the person he was entertaining the open window. You know, this is where the presumption is is that that open window is a point of entry. That open window may be merely a portal to look out. You know. Let's say you're an offender. You've killed Ed. Now you're trying to figure out how am I going to get out of this house without being seen. You've got a window, this kitchen window that maybe gives you the best view of the escape route you want to take. So you open the window up so you can lean out a little bit to see is it safe to go. Due to the post offense behavior, people are often in a rush to escape. The offender doesn't close the wind, goes out the front door, leaves the front door open. That is a possibility here. The original investigator, saying this must have been a robbery gone bad, tells me they did not know what they were looking at. You know, so that this is by any any measure, you know, seeing Ed's body covered, his head wrapped in a quilt, you know, this bludgeting everything else. There's nothing about this that is would be typical of a kind of a robber going in going oh shit, kills Ed and then runs out. You know that would be more of a blitz style attack, and there wouldn't be the interactions between the offender and Ed in that scenario. So you know, of course Ed's state address is important. You're going to tell me what the murder weapon is.
Uh.
The offender taking the time to cover it up still is very significant.
Let's first talk about robbery. Investigators start looking around. They're trying to figure out if anything was taken, so as wallets and his pants. The pants are folded up in a neat pile by the couch, and there's about forty dollars in his wallet, which is about one thousand dollars today, and the clothes in the pile are clean, no blood, so it sounds like Ed was the one who took his own clothes off, maybe before he was killed. There are valuable objects left in the din and he had a gun with him, a small revolver, but it's been untouched. It's in the pocket of a smoking jacket that he had been wearing earlier in the evening and he had hung on a chair. Also, one of Ed's desk doors is open. It's been rifled through, so they are saying, okay, we get it. This doesn't seem to be a robbery. And then I want to talk to you about blood, because there's blood in different places. I know that I had initially said that there was splatter on the walls, which is true, but there's also some pools of blood that I think are probably pretty interesting. So I would say, take robbery off the table here, because the common things that people would snatch, the real easy things that you could just throw in, you know, your pants, money, anything, none of that stuff was taken. None of the valuables were taken.
Yeah. No, I agree, there's nothing about this crime scene that speaks robbery to me.
Okay, so there's a bunch of stuff, so keep up with me because it changes a little bit here. Okay. So the corner looks and after they turn him over, you know, you could see that his skull has been crushed. The corner notes that he has later on that he has a very thin skull. And what they're trying to say is that it would have been very easy to beat him to death. Is that a thing? Is it really going to be easier for somebody who has a thinner skull?
So I have personally witnessed kind of the differences in victim's skulls. In fact, I recently consulted on a case out of Texas in which a male victim had been beaten many times on his head with a claw hammer, and yet none of the blows cause any depressed fractures in this man's skull. And at autopsy, I'm taking a look at the skull and it was like an inch thick. I've never seen a skull this thick. So, you know, the physical attributes of that skull, you know, potentially, you know, might allow for lesser blows to cause damage. You know, but human skulls, when they're intact, are quite hardy. You know, it does take a fair amount. But once the skull is compromised, and let's say it's fractured, then subsequent blows, particularly from a more massive object, can easily start crushing the head. It's interesting that they're noting that Ed has a thinner skull, but I don't necessarily think that that's going to inform me anything about the force of the blows or any of the physical attributes of the offender.
Okay, Ed is five foot six and he's a very slight man. So let me tell you about the blood. The blood has saturated the couch in a large puddle and has sprayed across the room and is on the door and the doorknob. It looks like there are bloody fingerprints on his body, but it doesn't sound like anybody ever tried to match them. That wouldn't be a very good sample doing old school fingerprinting anyway. I mean, how would you be able to get a decent sample off of somebody's body with clothes and stuff. I mean, is that possible?
Well, if there was ridge detail left in his blood and it dried, let's say, on his skin, yes, that's possible for sure. It all depends on it. Sounds like the offender ended up with blood on his or her hands, touched ed for whatever reason during the manipulation of his body. Usually what we see are smears versus a nice, you know, finger being left behind. But if they touched with the bloody fingers ed in a certain way and lifted those fingers up without any type of movement sideways movement, yes you could get identifiable fingerprints in the victim's blood left by the offender on his skin. That's probably the few one of the few examples of being able to get a fender fingerprints off of human skin.
Well, it didn't matter anyway, because fingerprinting was not a thing in America in nineteen oh three, and it was barely a thing in Europe where it originated from. So there's blood all over the place. That corner thinks that Ed was struck for the first time on the back of his head and then struck many more times after that. He puts his time of death at about two am. They think that Ed has been repositioned on the couch because there's blood and brain matter on a different part of the couch and there was no blood under his head on the spot where he was found. So would he have actually had to be repositioned or is there another explanation for that blood on one end and not on the end where's head was.
Well, the observation, let's say, blood spatter and brain matter at a location that is distinct from where he's found his position has found. That tells me yes, he's likely His head is likely in an area that would allow that blood spatter and brain matter from the blows. His head is at the other side of the couch, and then he's he's wrapped up because he's going to be bleeding. I mean, these these lacerations, these blows, He's going to be bleeding significantly from the head. So it sounds like the offender took this I think you described it as a quilt and wrapped it around his head, which, of course now is going to contain the blood. And they're manipulating Ed for some reason and then ultimately covering him up with the cushions. And why are they doing that? You know, that's again that's a significant action. It was there maybe a thought of transporting Ed away from the house, and they were starting to package him up and then abandon that effort. Or is this an offender that has some sort of connection to Ed And now it's just like I can't look at this and I want to cover him up.
Okay, well, let's keep going. I want to stick with blood. I was going to jump to another piece of forensic evidence, but I want to stick with blood because they are looking for the murder weapon. The police chief and the coroner find a pair of golf clubs in the room close to the doorway. Remember everybody, I mean, it's like a bad Agatha Christie. Everybody belongs to this golf club and there are these golf clubs there. At first they look and they say there's no blood. But about a week later, investigators find through chemical tests tiny specks of blood and bits of brain matter on the putter, and that would turn out to be they assume the murder weapon. Wanted to give you a little fun fact. In nineteen oh one, two years earlier, this is when researchers declared there are different blood types within the human body. They were recognized in nineteen oh one as ab AB and something called C which we now know as O and chemical testing have been around for decades. So they said, blood brain matter on the putter, this is the murder weapon and this was his putter.
Yeah, I'm having a problem with this. What's the problem? So ed has been has received at least ten blows, including a crushed skull. You have blood spatter and brain matter on the sofa. The murder weapon is going to have a significant amount of blood contact transfers from the blows. You're going to see possibly some droplets, you know, from each blow going into a pooled blood source. And they don't visually see any blood at the scene on either of these golf clubs, which to me is inconsistent with what was done to Ed. Additionally, something like this putter, you know, And again I'm having to rely on your description that a skull was crushed in. When I think of a skull crushed in, I'm thinking, Okay, the skull itself. Let's say the back of his skull. He's face down, he's receiving multiple blows. Is that indicative of a weapon that has some mass versus this putter? So this is where photos would be huge for me. I'm a little bit questioning, mostly because of the lack of blood on the putter, that it was the one that had inflicted all these blows, unless he received a blow or two and then he's covered up and the rest of the blows are inflicted while he's got the quilt wrapped around his head. The problem I'm having with that scenario is the observation of blood spatter and brain matter on the sofa itself. A single blow from a putter isn't going to do that. That's going to take multiple blows. So right now I have concerns about them ruling this putter as the murder.
Weapon and sticking it under the sink and turning the faucet on wouldn't have washed off the majority of that blood.
Well, if there's a thought that the offender did, let's say, go out to the kitchen and wash the putter off. That's completely changing what would be observed as evidence on the putter. Now why take the time to do that and then place it back into the den? Right now, I'm going to move forward with the presumption that the putter is the murder weapon. But I do have concerns about there, at least with the way it's been described to me, about their conclusion that it was used to inflict these blows and crush to skull in.
Yeah, and I mean as far as the chemical testing goes, it sounds pretty straightforward, at least from my research from American Sherlock. But who knows how consistent any of this is. But this is what they believe. They think that the this was his putter, it was used. There are some hairs that are the same color as Ed's hair, but you know they're on him. They think it came from a woman at first, and then they later on look under the microscope and say, okay, it came from Ed actually, But it's kind of too late. This is already fueling speculation that a woman was the one who did it. And of course because he's half naked and he has that thin skull, Remember, that's super easy to crack apart. Some weakling woman wouldn't have had a problem doing it. I know, I say that was some sarcasm. I can crack open anybody's skull if I'm angry enough with a putter.
Wow. Yeah, don't piss kate off.
Opiss me off with a putter. So you know, the police spread out their search in the room. They find all kinds of weird stuff, like under the desk they find so this is his desk. So this is Ed's desk. Is it's sort of like a little work desk at home. It's his den, it's his man cave where he does his smoking and stuff. The police find a photo of Gertrude Pain, who is the woman who he loaned money to. But everybody, including her husband, said, Ed's a good guy. Nobody's having an affair in this couple. Nobody's having an affair. But it's not unusual for people to exchange photographs. I'm not sure why. In higher levels of society, it was just kind of commonplace. And again, no one goes down that road with Gertrude or her husband. There's a newspaper clipping that's announcing the Warren's divorce that is in his desk, which you know, people think could be a little bit odd. There are copies of Arthur's love letters that are found in Ed's wallet. Fun fact that I figured out Victorian era men's wallets were sometimes twelve inches by six inches, big big, And so he has these letters folded up in his wallet, and it's the ones that he transcribed. Ed transcribed himself that he had done a superspy steamed open and at the top of one of the letters that was in it Ed's wallet, Arthur says, when I think of how he has treated you, I feel I must kill Ed Burdick.
Do we know when that letter was written.
I believe it was nineteen oh two, so this would have been in the last six months when he threatened him to begin with. I mean, this has been these threats have been going on forever.
Well, it's all part of the lover's triangle, you know. And from an evident standpoint, I'd want to see the letters that were written by Arthur himself versus something that Ed has supposedly transcribed right right and actually have Arthur confronted with his own writing to Alice. But let's presume that Arthur actually did write that, you know, Arthur and Ed were best friends at one point, maintain some sort of facade of friendship even after the affair was revealed. You know, is it possible that Arthur could have come over later at night to kind of work things out with Ed and then things went sideways. Ed's state address suggests that that's not likely. The entertainment aspect of what's going on sounds like Ed probably had a woman over. Is it possible that a woman set it up, distracted him, and then somebody else came in and struck him with the hutter, which I'm skeptical about, Or could somebody, let's say, a woman under the ruse of you know, maybe a physical encounter at a certain point, grabs one of these golf clubs and hits head in the back of the head when he's not looking. You know, it's just a surprise attack. And then now he's rendered, he's incapacitated, and then you have the homicidal blows being inflicted. So there's you know, there's multiple possible scenarios that I'm kind of, you know, churning on, chewing on as you're telling me these details.
There are so many things I find confusing. So you know, he's half naked, which the police are saying, this must have been a meet up with a woman. Like you said, There's like cheese and crackers and tarts and stuff that did not fit with what he normally did. The housekeepers were not asked to prepare these things. Ed probably would not have done that himself, even if he were going to have a woman come over. But he did pick up pre mixed cocktail mix, which he had never done really before. So you're right, it's super confusing. And then you've got the open window, and so the police are befuddled is probably an understatement for what they are trying to figure out, trying to untangle all of this. He had co founded a magazine as a side business, very successful, and the magazine says this whole thing was staged to make it look like he had a liaison with a woman, but it's not true. He was absolutely murdered. And people are starting, of course to point to Alice and Arthur based on some of the stuff spilling out. So if any of these couples wanted to keep their dirty little secrets, killing Ed was not the way to do it, certainly, no, you.
Know, And part of let's say we were to investigate this case and during the modern era, it's possible that Ed was killed after a sexual encounter, and so we would be collecting evidence from his body and analyzing that and saying, oh, you know, yes, he has foreign DNA in various areas of his body that would suggest that he had been physical with somebody prior to being killed. Here, we don't have that information. All we are relying upon is his state of dress that coupled with the you know, the various other things within the room, the tart and the drinks and stuff, suggests that whatever encounter occurred, that it got to a point where you know, he's basically nate nude from the waist down, that there was potentially sexual activity going to occur or had occurred, and the net is killed.
Yeah, And you know, I think kind of as a police move forward, they're really trying to hold the list of suspects and we're getting really down to Arthur. So they talked to this guy named Charles Park who was Ed's business partner, and Charles Park says, Arthur is the one who did this. Arthur came to my office with Ed there and threatened to kill Ed and then kill himself if Ed went through with this divorce with Alice, which we know this is one of probably several conversations that Arthur was singing this tune, I will kill you, I will kill myself if you do this. But you know, of course, the police are saying, listen, if Arthur's goal was to keep his reputation intact and to keep these letters out of the limelight, then murdering Ed would not have supported that goal. Because now Arthur's names in the newspaper, the affair is out, people are quoting the letters. Arthur is having a very difficult time. He writes to a friend and says, it's not true. I wasn't having an affair. Ed was having an affair. It's not me. So he's trying to clear his name. In the meantime, police are trying to figure out if it was Arthur, how did he get in. You could make duplicate keys back in nineteen oh three, and they think that he made a duplicate key from Alice.
Well, this is a this is a common trap people fall into. You could have married a duplicate key. Was a duplicate key found? You know? This is this is where it's there's presumption. But you can't prove a case with presumption. You know, you need to have that hard evidence. So as an investigator, you go, oh, yeah, maybe a duplicate key was made. Now you try to find the duplicate key. You can't just all of a sudden ascribe on a suspect. Oh he must have done this, but we have no proof of it.
Well, let's talk about Arthur's alibi. So when he was questioned the night following the discovery of the body, he said that that night before he was at dinner with his wife, dropped off at home. He took his automobile to a mechanic nearby. He came back home and read for a while with his wife, and the two of them went to bed between ten and ten thirty. The Panel's house, as well as Alice and Ed's house are all very close to one another, and so's the mechanic. So Carrie Pronell says, my husband was at home. You guys are crazy. He is a rock solid alibi. And of course the police search the panel house and they don't find anything. So Carrie is an alibi. Doesn't sound so great as far as I'm concerned, But who knows.
No, you know, especially considering several years of Carrie in essence trying to preserve the marriage, her social status, She's likely going to feed up an alibi once she finds out that Arthur is potentially a suspect in Ed's homicide. So I wouldn't put a lot of weight on Carrie saying he was home with me. You know, you've got other information, you know, with the mechanic, you know, what is the mechanics relationship? You know, you're dealing with a very wealthy man who has a lot of influence. Is that going to influence a mechanic making certain statements to keep Arthur's physical presence away from the house around the time of Ed's homicide? Right now, I'm not blown away by the veracity of this alibi, but we'll see where this goes.
Okay, So the police as of right now do not think Arthur was the one who did it. They are saying, why were his pants down, and why would someone serve cheese and crackers and a tart and have a cocktail if Arthur and Ed hated each other at this point, and on top of that, this had to be either someone who was already inside the house or a pre arranged meeting, because it sounds like their doorbell was very, very loud, unusually loud and would have woken everybody up in the house. And this is a full house, three kids, a mother in law, and two domestic workers. So you know, they just don't think that this cheese and cracker and cocktail, which was unusual for him to buy, and tart were something that he would have done for Arthur certainly, right you know, we can talk a little bit more about that now, but then we can also talk about the other couples and how they play into it.
I kind of really lean that Ed knew and had arranged that somebody's coming over that night, and somebody that he wanted to inter you know, spend some time with alone, and short of the offender taking Ed's you know, lower garments off after he's been killed, which potentially, you know, blood patterns, blood spatter would be able to sequence the events. Right now, I really leaned strongly towards Ed had pre arranged a meeting with somebody that he was going to enjoy the encounter with This isn't the man who's having an affair with his wife and hey, let's come over and have tarts and cocktails together. I no, you know, and something went sideways, either with that person he's with or somebody else comes in. Well Ed is distracted, which possibly indicates that he was set up.
Well, let's talk about the supposed affairs he had, Gertrude Pain and Missus Warren. So you know, in theory, both husbands would have been suspects, and both husbands were out of town and had rock solid alibis. Now JB. Warren, who's in the middle of a divorce, and it sounds like Edon Helen might his wife might have been involved. JB. Warren says, I'm glad that guy's dead. I didn't do it, but he can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. So there are suspects here, and they are just grasping. They're trying to figure out anybody who would have had a likely motive. They rule out the kids, They rule out Missus Hull because she's a weakling at sixty four, which we know is not true, Go ahead, Paul, I know you want to interrupt.
Well, no, I mean with everything, It's like, where is Alice in this whole thing at this time? I know because I see Ed. You know. Let's say Alice is letting Ed know, Hey, I want to try to make things work out. She's not living in the house at the time. Can I come over? Ed is hoping to rekindle things. Alice and Ed end up in the den and then Alice picks up the putter and wax him and then beats him to death, covers him up, which I could see Alice doing, you know, and then takes off. That's just a one of multiple theories. But investigating this case, I want to know about Alice and her alibi for this evening.
Well, it sounds like Alice actually has a pretty good alibi. She was in Atlantic City.
And that was verified.
Well, this is what happens. Yes, So when he is found, her mom sends Alice a telegram at the hotel where she's staying and it says, come home, mister Burdick is dead. She gets on the train with the train ticket verified. Okay, She goes from Atlantic City to Buffalo. She arrives early the next morning. And I'm telling you this now because investigators. Of course, it took a couple of days for them to even meet up with her, and they had thought it was a woman because of the weird hair, which turned out to be his hair. The reporters are at the train station when she gets there from Atlantic City. The story had run on the front page of the evening edition the day that he was found. She's there the next day. She's very calm. She wants to know what happened. She asks reporters a lot of questions because she doesn't know anything. She says, all she knows is what was in that telegram from her mom. They say your husband was bludgeoned to death, and your boyfriend is a suspect. She told reporters that Arthur and Ed have always gotten along. They never quarreled as far as she knows, and obviously that's not true. She's lying. She moves back into the house with the kids and the mom and the servants. People start to drop by and give her condolences, and she doesn't take any visitors for the next couple of days, and an inquest is coming. They're calling for an inquest here, of course, so what do you think about that? So she is in Atlantic City, they meet her at the train station. It doesn't mean necessarily that she didn't secretly come in, I guess, but police are saying it sounds pretty rock solid.
Yeah, you know, I think I agree with that. With that set of circumstances, I wouldn't eliminate Alice of having prior knowledge that this was going to occur. But how you know, because it's Alice and Arthur, and I don't think the way, you know, the entertainment aspect of what's going on, and potentially the sexual aspect of what's going on with Ed and whoever he's with that night, just doesn't seem like Ed is planning on entertaining Arthur to come over, you know. So this is where I think, in all likelihood Ed was expecting a woman to come over that night, and whether that woman actually showed, we don't know, but I would say likely because of Ed's state address. And then whether that woman is his killer or somebody associated with that woman is his killer right now, I just don't I can't say.
Yeah, And I had wondered what if Arthur and Alice had a conversation and she called Ed and said, listen, you know, I need to talk to you. I don't know if she said something about reconciling, but over the phone ranged, I will be there at eleven o'clock. Leave the door open, and then it's Arthur. It's not Alice, and she's safe in Atlantic City.
Yeah, but then Ed is opening the door and inviting Arthur in and pulling his pants down.
Yeah, doesn't say.
I mean see their scenarios where that does occur, but I don't think in this relationship that that's what's happening.
No, But I mean, why can't Arthur after he's dead pull his pants down. I guess because blood would have gotten on his pants.
That's that's again where there'd have to be an assessment of the blood patterns and everything. Yeah, you know, and we don't know right now. Obviously, it is fully expecting somebody that he is. He is planning on having an enjoyable evening. He's got the cocktail, the other alcohol that was present, the tarts, et cetera. I want to eliminate the idea of Ed setting things up and expecting let's say some woman coming in and Arthur's the one that shows up. But to me I think that's less likely than a woman actually did show up. And what I don't know is whether or not that woman could be his killer or somebody associated with that woman is the killer. At this point, well.
Let's talk about the inquest. The prosecutor's official inquest begins about two weeks after Ed dies. So the coroner testifies. First, he talks about the positioning of Ed's body and the fact that his pants had been off when he was killed, and the fact that it looked like he had been repositioned on the couch after he had been killed. And then the detective testifies about the state of the den, where there were photographs found under the desk. Somebody had gone through the desk. Clearly it sounds like some letters, some of Arthur's letters, might have been taken, and the fact that doctor Marcy kept trying to interfere with this investigation. There was a furnace repair guy who came the mourning of the discovery of Ed's body. One of the housekeepers said, can you come in here because we cannot get this house warm because the window and a door was open all night. And he came in and he heard the mom talking to in hush tones with the doctor, and they were very startled when the furnace guy showed up. And it sounds like the police were saying it could either be that they were trying to look out for somebody's reputation or for the kids, or there's some conspiracy involving Alice and her mother and maybe this doctor. But it didn't get very far. I will just say that they're trying to in the inquest really show the scene as odd, and there's so much conflicting information. I think it's hard to know where they're actually going. Because they have Missus Hull come, who is the mother in law, Marie Hull, and she lies on the stand. She said that she and Alice had last exchanged telegrams a few weeks before the murderers, But the investigators know that's not clear because they learned that Arthur was on a business trip in New York City two days before the murder, and you know there were telegrams exchanged between the mom and Alice about this trip. So the mom's lying on the stand. I mean, I don't know if it's anything that's significant, but there's just different sort of thing where it looks like Missus hall is covering up some information.
I do want to interject a little bit, and I should have caught onto this earlier in which you have this desk slash table. Photographs are found underneath the table. You have these letters that were taken from the table. When I've worked crime scenes, and let's say it's like a Ransack burglary, you see the offenders just searching everywhere looking for something. Right. They're pulling out drawers or opening up cabinets or tossing things because they know they know kind of where people typically store valuables and they kind of go to those areas. But also they just kind of make a huge mess. I've had homicide cases and sometimes in fact, I can think of one case in which it was staged to look like a burglary. But you also see a focus on an area that doesn't contain valuables but contains personal information that's very informative about who the offender is relative to the victim. Here, this is that type of scenario. This offender is focusing in on a very distinct area within this den where letters from Arthur to Alice, or at least a transcription of those letters are located, and those letters are taken. This is very informative. The offender knew where those letters were, and those letters are significant to the offender. Why has the offender taken them? Probably because there's aspects in those letters that could harm the offender, and now he or she needs to hide to those to make them disappear.
I think that's interesting, and I'm glad you brought up familiarity because Maggie the cook says the same thing, not about the letters, but about the little scene that was set up with the cheese and the crackers and everything. She said, you know, the tart was weird because he didn't like that tart. Missus Hull and the kids would have known where to find the stored tart, but some stranger wouldn't have. And she said, you know, maybe a stranger or someone less familiar with the house would have stumbled upon it. But everything else that was as symbol the cocktail said. Sheese, the crackers, the tart, all of that stuff were all over the kitchen. She said, you had to have known where those things were. And that's when people look at Missus Hull a little bit. The mother in law was she trying to cover something up because there were just so many things happening. Maggie said, I don't even think Ed knew where any of that stuff was. He never went into the kitchen, So this was not Ed setting this up.
I mean, Ed most certainly could spend some time in the kitchen and find things he lives there. Right, It's very different than a stranger coming in under pressure to move fast. This is where we talked about earlier. You brought it up. You know, the idea is this a staged crime scene? You know, if this is Maria Hall setting this up to make it look scandalous that Ed, you know, he was killed because he had some affair going on with some woman, you know, and she's trying to protect her daughter, and so she's making things look like Ed was entertaining a woman. Right. The problem is is that we have the unusual aspect that the domestic worker said Ed came home with this pre mixed cocktail. He never did that. You know. This is where there's a change in the victimology that day, which suggests to me that Ed was expecting somebody to come over. He's going to you know, he's bringing alcohol home. He's expecting somebody to come over. So there's something in Ed's mind at least, that there's somebody that he's going to be interacting with. Now, maybe there's you know, Maria's setting him up, you know, after the fact, But right now, I don't have a problem with the idea. Even though Ed was not somebody who was real familiar with things in the kitchen, he lives there, he can go and find things, going, oh, I want to make this woman really feel like she's special to me. I'm going to have the tart set up and everything else. And he's opening up cabinets and the refrigerator and going, oh, here it is, And that to me is not outside the realm of possibilities. And I think that's more likely than the idea that now Maria is the one that's trying to set this up to make it look like, you know, the scandalous affair of Ed entertaining some unknown woman and that's why he was killed.
I don't want to get graphic, and I certainly don't want you to get graphic about this, But isn't it possible that he was just spending.
Some alone time. That aspect, you know, did cross my mind, Ed spending alone time with him? I don't see him setting it up like he's got some sort of like kids have their you know, their mystery friend and they talked to an empty chair and stuff like that. I don't see ed doing that in order to have some quality alone time. That's just let's just say, that's not how men think.
Alice takes the stand in this inquest. She says, I would have divorced that guy so fast. I wanted to divorce him. I had no reason to stay. And she denies really having a big affair with Arthur and all of this stuff. You know, it's so interesting with history. On the one hand, you look at this and say, all these people are lying, there's got to be a guilt there. On the other hand, they're lying because they still want to protect their reputations despite all of this. The reputation is the most important thing. There is a man, an insurance salesman in a bartender. Both come forward in New York and they say that in the weeks before the murder, Arthur told them that he wanted to kill a guy. Some people think it's inconsequential that, you know, he was just kind of spouting off, And some people think that this is a big He's threatened it directly to Ed's face. He's told other people that he's going to do this, and he you know, wrote it in that letter to Alice. So Arthur is not somebody who's kind of protecting his feelings here. He's expressing himself pretty clearly.
Yeah, and of course God to pay attention to that. You know, you take a look at this ongoing affair between Arthur and Alice. Ed is, you know, wanting to divorce Arthur does not. You know, it's such weird setup. Arthur doesn't want Ed to divorce Alice because of the whole stigma and social aspects, but it's continuing to have an affair with Aus. There's so much there, you know, from the emotional aspect, you could see where Arthur absolutely has motive to kill Ed. Ed has just as much motive, if not more, to kill Arthur or Alice. You know, that's all part of it. It's just that now the crime scene itself is not what I would expect. If Arthur is the one that is actually physically coming in and killing Ed, doesn't mean that Arthur couldn't have done this. I'm just going there's sort of contradiction of Arthur being the one coming over. And I always say, whether you're a crime scene investigator or you're an investigator, if you see contradiction, you have to stop and reassess what you think is going on here. And that's where we are at, is there is contradiction. We know who has motive to kill Ed, and it's Arthur, and Arthur's alibi, from my perspective, is not good. But there's the rumors of Ed having affairs with other women, yep. And this is now okay, So how robust was the investigation into this Elmwood Avenue Society or this Red Jacket Club where now you've it appears that there's a lot of churn and a lot of potential side relationships occurring within this small group. And now this is where from my perspective, the investigation is really leaning on the people in this group and making them uncomfortable, making them think that they're being looked at. Somebody's going to crack, you know. That's what I would think, is somebody's going to go, Okay, this is what I heard, you know, and this is what was going on and everything else, and there probably would be a lot of good information coming out of doing some very intensive interviews of everybody, kind of almost I mean, you couldn't do it simultaneously with you know, twenty couples or whatever it was. But you want to try to get this group, each of these groups kind of as isolated and as wondering, well, what is the other person saying? You know, I better let you know, let law enforcement know what I know before people start pointing the finger at me.
This story moves so quickly, so I did withhold a little tiny bit of information from you.
Of course you did, I know.
So he dies at the end of February, and there is an inquest about two weeks later. I would love to be able to tell you what Arthur Panell and Carrie Panell say at the inquest, but I can't because the two of them were involved in a car accident a few days after Ed was murdered and they both died.
Okay, was this truly an accident?
Okay, let me tell you about it. Okay, the news This happens March fifth, This is about a week later. Sounds like Arthur is under a huge amount of mental stress, nervous. He is doing his best to maintain calmness, but he's a lawyer, and he at work his cases are suffering. This is becoming like a Buffalo's modern day celebrity scandal, and Arthur's miserable. So on March ninth, he tells Carrie, his wife, that he's going to go for a drive in his electric carriage. Carrie says, I'm going to go with you. It's late in the afternoon and it starts to rain. A lot of witnesses are seeing them on this drive, and they say that both of them are behaving in an odd way. Arthur drives slowly up and down a country road, and it's so slow that people are walking past them. The two of them stop at a saloon and Carrie waits outside while Arthur buys some cigars. They get back into the car. They drive to the edge of Buffalo and they stop. They get out in the rain and then take the removable roof off of this carriage. They get back in and they drive getting wet. So it is pouring down rain and they are in like a convertible. Two boys are seeing them do that and think they're nuts. They're driving along a quarry and the wind is blowing Arthur's hat off his head. He reaches to grab the hat, the car swerves and falls thirty feet over the edge of the quarry. Arthur dies there, carries alive, but when they finally get her out, she dies at the hospital. So the boys with this rain and the swerving convinced the police essentially that this was an accident, even though the papers say there's no way this is not a coincidence, this is suicide. The police were closing in on this guy, but the investigators later find that Arthur had engaged the breaks of the car he tried to stop it. So people do believe this was an accident, So I don't We're not going to get an answer on that. It's weird that this happened, you know, about a week before the inquest starts, and it's both of them, he and his wife, and they both died.
Do they ever search Arthur's residence or anything he had connection to and do they find the letters that were taken from Ed's table slash desk.
Nope, not a thing, no key to the house, no letters, no evidence. He had just wiped everything about Alice and Ed clean if there was anything there to begin with.
And I'm assuming the investigation into Ed's homicide at this point just basically stops.
You're right, yeah, So you know, the ending with this here is that Arthur had left Alice a bond in the amount of twenty five thousand dollars that was in her safety deposit box, which is a million dollars today, almost a million today. And you know that doesn't have anything to do with the death. It just kind of I think it just shows, you know, his loyalty to her, his love for her, and you know, basically, at the end of the inquest, the judge said, I don't have enough to charge Alice. I don't think a woman physically could have done this anyway. She was in Atlantic City. He said, I don't think a stranger did this because of the the way the crime scene was set up. He said, I think that the mother in law was pretty weird that morning, but he doesn't think there's a plausible explanation for strange behavior or how it related to the crime. He didn't think there was a conspiracy there. He said, if Arthur were alive, he would have issued a warrant for his arrest. He said, Alice, you've been a bad girl and you shouldn't cheat on your husband and a lot of this has come down on you, But that is it. No one's charged, end of story.
And I think somebody got away with murder.
Oh yeah, somebody definitely got away with murder, for sure.
I'm not convinced about Arthur, even though motive is most certainly there. I see the conflict with the crime scene and Arthur being the offender that solely comes over. I think somebody else had knowledge minimally and was present for at least part of that evening, you know. And you know, we're talking about what we know about Ed's life. You know, we've got Arthur, their analysis in their affair, We've got Gertrude and Helen that Ed was rumored to have an affair with. What we don't know? Is there a secret life to Ed that wasn't revealed, you know. So that's where at this point, you know, I hate to be in this. I always like to have a conclusion, but I don't have a conclusion in this case. I'm looking at this and I think, Okay, Arthur is in play. I think it also could be other individuals that we either know about or we don't know about. So it's an unsolved case. I want to be able to say it was Arthur, and I just at this point there's too much contradiction for me to feel confident that it's Arthur. He's just he's I would say he's a suspect and nothing more than that.
Yeah, I agree, And I think that that's one of the difficult things about these cases, these really old cases. I was thinking, did they even look at his businesses? I mean, this could have been anything. We don't know. He owned a bunch of businesses we don't know, and you're right, I mean, you've got these other affairs, these other we there could have been other conflicts. Sure, you know, he he might have tried to attack Maggie and she the cook and she's been lying this whole time. She knew where all this stuff was. I mean, we don't know, but boy would a case because it seemed like in some ways, people were more concerned about this affair coming out than being connected to a murderer. You know, everyone's trying to protect themselves and their reputations, and sometimes I feel like that now you know, we're we're so we're very concerned. I mean, I think everybody is concerned about making sure that you know online that people interpret what you're saying correctly. And in nineteen oh three, it was just everything to stay out of the scandalous sections of the newspapers. Otherwise, you know, you would lose your business, you would lose your family. Women had no recourse, you know, men could divorce them. It just it was awful. So I think if this were a different family, then what would happen would be ed would accept this and they wouldn't get a divorce. They would just try to live separately, or maybe sneak around or something. They would figure out something, because that's often what happened. There would be an arrangement. And boy were they just everybody here was so concerned about what people thought of them. So I think it's just like we see that now people are killing other people because of things that they say to each other and embarrassments and hurt egos, and so obviously that's something that has happened with the honor code and everything else that has happened for generations.
Yeah, you know, and kind of in hindsight, you know, doctor Marcy might might actually be key. You know, he's try trying to convince the coroner to rule this a suicide, and obviously is a homicide, you know, so who is he trying to protect? You know, he may have had greater knowledge than what he told investigators, you know, and it really just underscores, you know, if you have you know, sort of this family doctor in the area who's putting his neck out to try to protect somebody in the society. It just shows how deep, you know, the social aspects of this case run.
Yep.
So yeah, right now, Yeah, wide open case. And unfortunately it's it's a you know, due to the age of the case, there will never be an answer unless somebody wrote in a diary somewhere that gets uncovered in an attic two hundred years from now and there's a confession.
What if it's a couple of years from now, that would be nice, and then we could have an update two hundred years from now.
Paul, Well, hey, I'm just dealing with the timeframes that you're typically dealing with.
So well, I will say, next week, I can almost guarantee we won't have this much husband wife drama. We may have a lot, but this was pretty next level even for us. So we will leave Buffalo and travel to another city in another time next week.
All right, I'm looking forward to it once again.
Me too, see you Okay bye. This has been an exactly right production for our sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried Bones Sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emosi.
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
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Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
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Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decote the criminal mind, is available
Now, and Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now
