Jane Eyre and an Olde New York Murder

A recent 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 plain. A friend with a professional interest in seeing the show had asked me along, and since she'd paid for the tickets ($90 apiece) and wanted to leave, we did?well before the act break, driven out by the ferocious savagery of the leading lady's enunciation. The show had not been exceptionally or unexpectedly appalling, but it made you realize it's possible to get absolutely anything produced on Broadway these days, provided it has a child in it. Anything. Lord of the Flies. A High Wind in Jamaica. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. People are desperate for stuff to take their children to, and anything with a kid in it is considered family fare.

The reemergence of this idea of the child as live attraction may be a cultural by-product of the current baby boom, but it has its roots, I think, in the Cunningham-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 step forward and claim to be his wife. She was not his wife. But having been arrested and imprisoned and charged with his murder, she claimed 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 Cunningham-Burdell affair is to be found in Murder Won't Out, Russel Crouse's wonderful 1932 anthology of New York murders, 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 St. It was not possible to determine the precise cause of death (Burdell had been strangled first and then stabbed 15 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 St. 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 in turn accused her of having 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.

No sooner was Burdell dead than 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 bearded man with a tendency not to meet a person's eye had shown up at 623 Greenwich St., home of the Rev. Uriah Marvin, and arranged a wedding for the following day. This ceremony had duly taken place, Dr. Marvin officiating and one of the daughters bearing witness, but whether Mrs. Cunningham had married Dr. Burdell or another of the inhabitants of 31 Bond posing as Dr. Burdell was a matter that the minister was later to go back and forth 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 in fact Burdell's widow had been somewhat undercut by the groom's failure?on going around to inspect the marriage certificate the day after the ceremony?to point out that his name had been misspelled. (On the license it appeared as "Berdell.") Possibly it was with a view to improving the Surrogate's image 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 manque, a man who today might have made a name for himself as a fourth-rate movie director or producer. A "lifelong lover of the arts," according to American National Biography, he 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, a work of dramatic criticism, is written all the way through 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 a baby she might pass off as her own. She had, she said, $2000 to spend?half for him and half for the baby. Hall told the doctor to go ahead and locate a suitable baby. In the charity wards at Bellevue a woman was found, Elizabeth Ann Anderson, who was willing to give up her newborn for the space of a night in exchange for a thousand dollars.

Hall's plan involved stringing Mrs. Cunningham along for several weeks (she was at that point claiming to be eight months gone). While she strove to build up an illusion of gravidity (simulating cravings and nausea, expressing the hope that she would go to term) Hall now invented an elaborate cover story to explain how a complaisant mother had been found so easily. She could be a "California widow"?a woman whose husband had been off panning for gold and who wanted to remove the evidence of an inconveniently timed pregnancy now that they were to be reunited. Hall also hired another doctor, his brother-in-law from upstate, 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 St. (now Elk St.) they found a wine-and-beer merchant with a set of rooms to let. Hall not only rented the rooms on Elm St., he had them furnished and filled with props. He even brought in a Spring St. pharmacist to play the mother at one point, when Mrs. Cunningham came by Elm St., and the fellow put on a frilly cap and simulated birth pangs from the bed.

To make a long story short, the police totally nailed it. Timing, presentation, delivery?all were perfect. They let the baby arrive and be admitted to the house, and before you could say "fallopian tube" they were up the 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 though all that Hall wanted was to put on a big show. Hall himself would in later years be accused of fraud, and though, like Mrs. Cunningham, he was acquitted, he would end his career in disgrace. He shares a biographer with Eugene O'Neill.

The Anderson baby?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 St. still exists. It's home to something called the Kampo Cultural Center. Inside is a pretty little auditorium where the Signature Theater Company used to perform when they first started up.