Arecent encounter with the first half-hour or so of Jane Eyre, The Musical put me in mind of the 1857 murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell. (The connection won’t immediately be apparent.) A friend with a professional interest in seeing the show had asked me along, and since she’d paid for the tickets and wanted to leave, we did—well before the act break—driven out by the inexorable staccato of the leading lady’s enunciation.
The show had not been exceptionally or unexpectedly appalling, but it made you realize that it’s possible to get anything produced on Broadway these days, provided it has a child in it. Absolutely anything. People are desperate to get their offspring out of the house, and anything with a kid in it is considered family fare.
This re-emergence of the child as live attraction may be a by-product of the current baby boom. But it has its roots, I think, in the Burdell affair and its aftermath. That’s really where the great show-business tradition of exploiting children for profit begins. The Burdell case is one of my very favorite New York murder stories—about a woman who, having killed a man in cold blood, had the audacity to lay claim to his estate as his wife. She was not his wife. But having been arrested, imprisoned, and charged with his murder, she purported to be pregnant with his child. She was not pregnant with his child—or anyone’s. But having been tried and acquitted, she carried on with the charade, trying to persuade even her own doctor that she was soon to give birth to the murdered man’s heir.
The best account of the Burdell affair is to be found in Murder Won’t Out, Russel Crouse’s wonderful 1932 anthology of unsolved New York homicides, but I first stumbled on it in a book by Jack Finney (of Time and Again) called Forgotten News, which said that on a cold winter’s morning in 1857 a rather unlikable dentist named Burdell had been found murdered in his home at 31 Bond Street. It was not possible to determine the precise cause of death (Burdell had been strangled first and then stabbed fifteen times, apparently in places where it counted) but suspicion fell on Emma Cunningham, a young widow who had been residing in his house for more than a year.
Mrs. Cunningham, to whom Dr. Burdell actually leased the premises at 31 Bond, had for some time been carrying on a not-very-clandestine affair with the doctor. It was a volatile romp, now on, now off. She had marital designs. The two had met at a resort and formed an acquaintance that, back in New York, Mrs. Cunningham had strengthened along with her teeth by going to see him in a professional capacity. She had five children, two boys around eight and nine, and three teenage girls. The whole passel of them wound up moving in with Dr. Burdell, with Mrs. Cunningham eventually taking over the lease from a previous landlady.
The Cunninghams and Dr. Burdell never lived as a family, exactly, though now and then he seems to have shared the widow’s board as well as her bed. At a certain point, though, relations seem to have gone awry. There was an incident with a fetus that either miscarried or, as Cunningham later claimed, was aborted (a procedure she said Burdell had both demanded and performed) and a couple of lawsuits. Burdell began to be heard vilifying Mrs. Cunningham, saying he wished she didn’t live at 31 Bond Street and that he feared for his life.
She seems to have been a piece of work, a creature in whom a seemingly endless capacity for guile was mingled with chronic ineptitude. In various unsubtle ways she set about alienating Burdell from his friends and acquaintances, particularly other women, moved a number of longtime boarders out and a couple of her own associates in, had him arrested for breach of promise and—when he countersued, claiming she had stolen back her promissory note for the year’s rent—for slander; all of which led to a settlement and an uneasy truce, broken only by the murder. Now Mrs. Cunningham came forward with the announcement that she and the doctor had been secretly wed some months before.
She had, in fact, been secretly married to someone. In late October of the previous year a man with a beard and a tendency not to meet one’s eye had shown up at 623 Greenwich Street, home of the Rev. Uriah Marvin, and arranged a wedding for the following day. The ceremony had been performed, Dr. Marvin officiating and one of the daughters bearing witness, but whether Mrs. Cunningham had married Dr. Burdell or another occupant of 31 Bond posing as Dr. Burdell was a matter that the minister would later keep changing his mind about. Mrs. Cunningham’s claim on Dr. Burdell’s $100,000 estate was turned over to the Surrogate. Meanwhile, she was arrested and tried for murder. She got off, owing largely to the fact that the coroner had gathered too much (i.e., conflicting) information.
The likelihood that Mrs. Cunningham was Burdell’s widow had been somewhat undercut by the groom’s failure to point out the misspelling of his name on the marriage license. (It appeared as “Berdell.”) Possibly it was with a view to improving the Surrogate’s opinion of her that Mrs. Cunningham embarked on the pregnancy ploy. But Mrs. Cunningham’s doctor ratted her out to the district attorney, a man named A. Oakey Hall, who was to become a member of the infamous Tweed ring and mayor of New York.
He was, it appears, no ordinary prosecutor but something of an impresario manqué, a man who today might have made a name for himself as a minor auteur, producing straight-to-video movies, say, or reality television. “A lifelong lover of the arts,” according to American National Biography, Hall had moved to New York in 1848 “to take advantage of Gotham’s cultural opportunities.” By 1851, he was contributing whimsical little pieces to something called The International Magazine of Literature, Art, and Science. One of these, a work of dramatic criticism, is entirely written in the voice of a lorgnette.
Hall proposed to Mrs. Cunningham’s physician, one Dr. David Uhl, that they collaborate on a complicated sting operation. He suggested that the doctor play along with Mrs. Cunningham, pretending to be in league with her, all the while reporting back to him. Mrs. Cunningham had asked Uhl to help her procure an infant that she might pass off as her own. She had, she said, $2000 to spend—half for him and half for the baby’s family. Hall told the doctor to go ahead and locate a suitable baby. In the charity wards at Bellevue a woman was found who was willing to be separated from her newborn child for a single night in exchange for a thousand dollars.
Hall’s plan involved stringing along Mrs. Cunningham—who at that point was claiming the birth to be almost imminent—for several weeks. While she strove to build up an illusion of gravidity (simulating cravings and nausea, expressing anxiety about whether she would go to term) Hall invented an elaborate cover story to explain how a complaisant mother had been found so easily: she could be a “California widow”—a woman anxious to remove the evidence of an ill-timed pregnancy achieved while her husband had been off panning for gold.
Hall also hired his brother-in-law from upstate, another doctor, whose role in the masquerade would be to transport the baby to 31 Bond. At Hall’s instigation, the two physicians scoured the Lower East Side for an apartment in which they might pretend this fictional mother was about to give birth. On Elm Street (now Elk Street) they found a wine-and-beer merchant with a set of rooms to let. Hall not only rented the rooms on Elm Street, he had them furnished and filled with props. He even brought in a Spring Street pharmacist to play the mother, when Mrs. Cunningham came by Elm Street at one point, and the fellow put on a frilly cap and simulated birth pangs heroically from the bed.
To make a long story short, the police totally nailed it, and everything went off like clockwork. They let the baby arrive and be admitted to the house. Then before you could say “fallopian tube” they were up the front steps of No. 31 and in the door. Hall’s brother-in-law later claimed that on confronting Mrs. Cunningham he even remembered to say, “Do you claim this child as the child of Harvey Burdell?” to which he said she replied, “Of course—whose else should it be?” And that was it—busted.
Mrs. Cunningham, though arrested that night, was apparently never prosecuted for the Bogus Baby escapade. So it seems as if all that Hall had wanted was to put on a big show. In later years Hall himself would be accused of fraud, but like Mrs. Cunningham would be acquitted. And though he would end his career in disgrace, he shares a biographer with Eugene O’Neill, which would no doubt have pleased him.
The baby in the case (and here is my point) wound up in Barnum’s American Museum, where it had a nice little run earning its mother $25 a week—Broadway’s first child star.
Incidentally, a No. 31 Bond Street still exists. Inside is a pretty little auditorium.
New York Press, March 20, 2001