3

FLORENCE BURNS AND
WALTER BROOKS

If Florence Burns’s parents were overly strict with their fractious daughter, Walter Brooks’s were prime enablers. Certainly, there was a double standard in play in societal expectations of the behavior of girls and that of boys, but an undoubted influence had to be Thomas and Mary Brooks’s loss of their first child, two-year-old Gertrude, who died of bronchitis in 1876.¹ They focused all their energies on their only living child, Walter, bailing him out of those “scrapes” Mr. Brooks had referred to when his son was dying in the Glen Island Hotel. Both parents denied any wrongdoing or less than model behavior on the part of their son and canonized him as the perfect and ideal young gentleman: he was a successful businessman; he was basically a stay-at-home young man, preferring the company of his parents and rarely going out at night; he had no serious love affairs and, in fact, wasn’t really very fond of girls; he preferred hanging out with other young men; he didn’t drink alcohol and was never drunk in his life until he met Florence Burns; he adored his parents. This last one was actually true.²

Walter S. Brooks was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 17, 1881, where his parents had moved from their native Virginia. His father was a compositor (typesetter) with one of the New York daily newspapers. Walter grew into a handsome, strapping young man a little over six feet tall and weighing 170 pounds. At Brooklyn Boys’ High School, he played football and hockey. With his outgoing personality and charm, on top of his good looks, he was an absolute magnet for young women. Unfortunately, Walter’s moral compass was not always pointed in the right direction.³

Walter’s affiliation with the Bedford Avenue Gang caused him to participate in its illegal activities. He was known in his neighborhood as something of a wild young man, “rather fast,” addicted to fine clothes, alcohol, and pretty women. Instead of going on to college, as many of his classmates did, he chose instead to go into business with two other young men: Thomas C. Wells and Henry L. “Harry” Cohen. They were commission merchants, acting as middlemen in purchasing wholesale goods for sale to small grocers.⁴

Walter S. Brooks (New York World, from a portrait)

Walter Brooks had earlier gotten into trouble with the Department of Agriculture when he and some previous partners had made a large purchase of spoiled condensed milk at a very low price, took off the old labels, put on new ones falsely stating that the milk was the product of the New Jersey Milk Company, and sold them at the regular price. When they got caught, Walter saved himself from a prison sentence by turning state’s evidence against the others. Spoiled condensed milk could have caused illness or death to young infants.5

Another time, he had a consignment of sour vinegar, valued at $500–$600, condemned by the Board of Health before he could sell it. At the time of his death, he owed money for five hundred pounds of raisins that he had received and neglected to pay for, despite several requests from the seller.⁶

Although Brooks enjoyed the company of young women, he was not as fond of making a commitment to them. His main goal at age twenty was to bed women but not to marry any of them. The year before he met Flo Burns, he had gotten himself engaged to a Brooklyn girl named Lottie Eaton, but she broke it off because of his Bedford Gang affiliation and for “moral lapses,” which she declined to enumerate. “The most charitable thing is to report that it was a mutual decision,” she said, although clearly it was not. Then, of course, there are those “several scrapes with women.” that indicate he had taken their virginity, maybe even got them pregnant or otherwise ruined their reputations, then refused to marry them. Neighbors of the Brookses asserted that Walter’s “attractive physical personality fascinated several girls who afterward had good reason to regret their acquaintance with him.”7

It is unclear exactly how much and in what way Walter’s parents bailed him out of all these problems. We do know that Mr. Brooks’s lawyer represented gang member Joseph Wilson at his forgery trial, so the elder Brooks must have been well aware of his son’s connection to this gang.⁸ And it may be that the Brookses paid for abortions or made payoffs to get Walter out of his “scrapes with women”

So, when Walter fell in love with the equally self-indulgent and entitled Florence Burns, it was a disaster waiting to happen. When “Handsome” Harry Casey (like Ed Watson, he, too, used the descriptive title) introduced Florence and Walter at Bader’s Road House in August 1901, they were immediately attracted to each other and from then on were very nearly inseparable. It is interesting to note that, of the six known boyfriends Florence had dated by 1902, three of them—Watson, Casey, and Brooks—had the reputation of being “lady-killers” who bragged about their ability to lead young women to their ruin.

To an impetuous and reckless boy like Walter Brooks, the nineteen-year-old Florence Burns was absolutely irresistible. At five feet seven, with blue eyes and blonde hair (the latter with a little help from a bottle), the daring and rebellious Florence was not only stop-men-in-their-tracks beautiful but athletic as well. She was good at rowing and swimming—she was the first girl to swim across the Hudson from the Bowery⁹—and pistol shooting. Walter Brooks fell fast and hard for her. For her own part, Florence claimed she loved him “even more than my mother and father”¹⁰—although, for her, that was not exactly a high bar to get over. There is no doubt that they were infatuated with each other. Unlike many other girls, Flo was not put off by Walter’s reputation and his membership in the Bedford Avenue Gang. In fact, his “bad boy” image may have been part of what appealed to her.

Given the propensities of both of them, there is no doubt that Florence and Walter’s relationship became physically intimate very quickly. Just as quickly, though, things began to change between them. First of all, there was Walter’s wandering eye. By October, gossip was getting back to Florence that he was chasing another girl. When she saw her former boyfriend, Joe Wilson, at Bader’s, she told him that, if it were true, Walter would “suffer for it.”11 Second, Flo’s parents discovered that she was having sexual relations with Brooks and subsequently evicted her from their house—once again, their fallback position with her—and forbade her to return until she married him. Possibly, there was a pregnancy involved as it seems to have been a drastic action on their part and they had not taken the same marry-or-else stance over her relationship with Ed Watson. Or it might have been that the neighbors—whose negative comments, Florence asserted, were more to be dreaded by her mother than the bubonic plague—had gotten wind of it. The Burnses might have needed to demonstrate that they did not condone this behavior. Because of this, Florence began to agitate Walter about getting married. Walter, of course, was not in the least interested in this plan. Nor were his parents or those of his friends who knew of her reputation, which they said would destroy Walter’s own, and they all discouraged him from marrying her. Given Walter’s personal behavior, this is ironic in the extreme but illustrative of the double standard for men and for women.

FLORENCE FRIGHTENS THE BROOKSES

It wasn’t until Friday, November 1, 1901, that Walter got around to introducing Florence to his mother.¹² The three of them met for lunch at Walter’s favorite and most frequented restaurant, the Cosmopolitan Hotel on Chambers Street in Manhattan. That Sunday, November 3, she went to the Brookses’ home at 258 Decatur Street in Brooklyn, where she accompanied Walter and his mother to church. The following Sunday, November 10, Florence went to church with them again and then stayed to eat Sunday dinner with the family. She stopped in two or three times that week and accompanied them to church again on Sunday, November 17. She next visited on the evening of Wednesday, November 20. During this time, Florence was living in a boardinghouse on Ralph Avenue, the rent for which was being paid by Walter.

November 21 marked the beginning of a three-week saga that would later prompt a magistrate to remark, “It is enough to say that the situation in that house is a peculiar and doubtful one.” On that day, Walter brought a very sick Florence to the Brooks home and begged his parents to allow her to stay with them. He felt responsible for her illness, he said, which was later explained to mean that he had kept her out in bad weather and she had subsequently caught a cold. Her own parents would not let her back into their home, but she clearly needed medical attention.

Florence would remain ill for two weeks with what was variably presented as pneumonia, typhoid, malaria, or a cold, and the Brookses’ family doctor was called in to attend her. Her mother visited her only once in that time, her father not at all. In fact, Fred Burns had harsh words to say about Walter’s father—that he ought to be put in jail because of Thomas’s objection to a marriage that would save the reputations of Fred’s daughter and the Burns family.

At no time did Thomas Brooks attempt to get Fred Burns to pay for Florence’s medical attention or any other of their expenditures on her behalf during her three-week stay with them, which gives rise to the suspicion that the Brookses recognized that she had a “moral claim” on them. Was the illness really due to the effects of an abortion that Florence had had performed on herself? Or did the Brookses arrange for one? Since Walter and his mother also came down with something that sounds very much like a flu virus, that is likely the source of Flo’s illness as well.

However, it is still possible that Florence was pregnant. In September, after only a month of dating Walter, she told her friend Mabel Cooper, as well as Mabel’s mother, that she was in “serious trouble” and that her father had found out and threw her out of the house. Walter was responsible for her predicament, and if she did not “regain her health” (this probably means through abortion or miscarriage), she would force him to marry her or she would “revenge herself against him.”13

After Florence had fully recovered from the flu or whatever else was ailing her, she continued to stay in the Brooks house and went on a campaign to force Walter to marry her, one that smacked more of desperation than affection. Thinking she could achieve this goal through his mother, she told Mrs. Brooks that, if Walter did not marry her, she would shoot him with her father’s pistol. Mrs. Brooks, stooping to trade taunts with a child, asked her why she did not shoot herself instead, to which Florence replied, “Because I love Walter too much.” Another time, the elder’s response to this oft-repeated threat was, “If you do, then I will shoot you.” “You will not have to,” Florence retorted. “I will kill myself.”

The Brookses took to eavesdropping on the two young people having conversations on the subject of marriage. The best place for this was in the dining room right beneath the parlor, where the ceiling was low and a heat register made it easy to hear. What Thomas Brooks heard on Sunday, December 8, sums up the gist of all these “discussions” between Flo and Walter:

FLO: What do you intend to do about marrying me? I think it is time to come to some understanding about this.

WALTER: Where do you intend to live if we marry? In the street?

FLO: Well, we must get married.

WALTER: The best thing you can do is to get employment. I will speak to a friend and try to get you a position as a cloak model.

FLO [angrily stamping her foot on the floor]: I won’t do any such thing. I don’t intend to ruin myself by going to work.

During one of these confrontations, Flo became so distraught that she passed out, although there was a strong suspicion that she might have faked it. When Walter said he could not bear to leave his mother and father, she called him a “big kid” for wanting to stay in the family nest.

Thomas Brooks asked Florence why she kept trying to get his son to marry her (as if he didn’t know!), especially since Walter could not afford to support a wife. He told her to go to her parents and ask them to take her back, but Florence insisted that she and Walter would get married and that her parents would not allow her to go home before then.

Without telling Florence, Thomas Brooks paid a visit to Fred Burns and practically begged him to take back his daughter, who was disrupting his household. But Fred was adamant: she was not welcome in their house until she became Mrs. Walter Brooks. Thomas told him he and his wife would never consent to this marriage. Florence must leave their house.

On Wednesday, December 11, before he went to work, Thomas Brooks went to Flo’s room and told her that she had to leave and that he had told her parents this. He had allowed her to stay with them while she was sick, but now she was well. “This must be your last day in my house,” he said, and gave her some money for streetcar fares. “I’m not going to leave,” was her reply.

Nevertheless, she did leave, only to return that night. And they let her in! It was, indeed, a “peculiar and doubtful” situation, especially when Florence claimed she had gone home to get her father’s pistol to shoot Walter but was unable to find it. The Brookses must have felt that they would never be rid of her, but it is also obvious that they felt some obligation toward her because of their son’s relations with her. Possibly they feared that this temperamental, occasionally reckless, and not terribly smart girl would cause a scandal for their family—even though it would for her as well.

Somewhere around this time, between December 13, when she—mercifully—left the Brooks home and December 23, when she moved to yet another boardinghouse, Florence convinced her parents to take her back in. She lied to them that she and Walter would be getting married after all. When no wedding was in the offing, the Burnses threatened eviction once again. Desperate, Florence sent an urgent note to Walter at his Jay Street office that she must see him. She instructed him to phone Speh’s Drug Store, two blocks away, to send someone to the Burns home to say that someone wanted to speak to Florence on the phone. (Unlike the Brookses, the Burnses had no telephone.)14

They subsequently met, and Florence’s arguments must have taken hold and caused Walter to relent. Or it may be that, if they got married, Walter felt he could deliver her back to the Burnses on a “temporary” basis until he could afford to support both of them, which would rid him of her at least for a while. If he never made arrangements for her to join him, well, it would be her parents’ responsibility to take care of her.

Thomas W. Brooks, Walter’s father (New York World)

Whatever the reason, Flo and Walter presented themselves to the current minister at the Brookses’ church, the Church of the Good Shepherd on McDonough Street in Brooklyn, and asked to be married right away. The Reverend Robert Rogers thought it was odd that they were in such a hurry and had no witnesses with them. He would later state different reasons for refusing to marry them, such as Walter’s parents had not given their consent or they were too young. Once, he simply declined to state his reason unless called to do so in a court of law, but it was most likely because he could sense that the prospective bridegroom was reluctant. It’s also possible that he was aware that his parishioners, Mr. and Mrs. Brooks, objected to Florence Burns.¹⁵ Whatever the reason, there was no wedding and, consequently, Florence was once again ordered out of her parents’ home and needed a place to live.

The Brookses breathed a sigh of relief when a friend of Walter’s, who was not a gang member, suggested a reputable boardinghouse, run by Mrs. Ella B. Hitchcock on West 144th Street, and Florence moved in there on December 23. The agreement was for Florence to pay ten dollars a week, but she paid none of it during her monthlong stay, and by this time Walter had stopped supporting her.16

However, Walter frequently visited Flo at Mrs. Hitchcock’s, and Flo told the landlady they were engaged. Given the supposed engagement and the mores of that era, Mrs. Hitchcock felt that Florence was “indiscreet [in her] conduct in receiving men friends,” sometimes at “unseemly hours.” She did not hesitate to share her feelings with Flo, who resented the landlady’s interference and promptly packed up and left. She rewarded Mrs. Hitchcock’s monthlong sufferance of her nonpaying tenancy by stealing some clothing and a silver bag. Mrs. Hitchcock did not report the theft.¹⁷

After Florence left Mrs. Hitchcock’s, she moved into yet another boardinghouse, this one run by Mrs. Harriet Birdsall, and began dating Harry Gimpel, a twenty-three-year-old sales clerk who had escorted her to the Old Guard Ball, put on every January at the Hotel St. George. Mrs. Birdsall must have been a much more sympathetic landlady than the judgmental Mrs. Hitchcock because Flo confided in her quite a bit. She told her she was earning money by selling advertising subscriptions. This was one of the scams run by the Bedford Gang but was probably done legitimately by Florence, albeit with her customary indolence. And she gave Mrs. Birdsall the exact date when she lost her virginity (when she “went wrong”) to Ed Watson—February 15, 1901—exactly one year before the death of Walter Brooks. After that, she said, her family “treated her shamefully” because her disgrace was known to everyone in the neighborhood. Her parents would not even let her look out the windows for fear the neighbors would see her.¹⁸

For a while, Florence wore a ring given to her by Harry Gimpel, and some of her friends thought she was more in love with him than with Walter, but she told Mrs. Birdsall that she broke off her engagement to Harry for Walter. If this engagement was real and not something that existed only in her mind, it would seem that Flo’s problems—impending baby or not—could have been solved with a marriage to Harry Gimpel, who was not a gang member and who had a steady job.

Florence was not ready to let Walter Brooks go completely, however. She asked Mrs. Birdsall’s advice as to whether she should try to get her parents to take her back in, and Mrs. Birdsall told her it was the best place for her. Besides, Flo had yet to pay even a dime of rent for her ten-day stay and ultimately left without doing so. On February 5, 1902, Flo got permission to move back in with her parents, mainly because Walter talked with Fred Burns and dangled the possibility of an impending marriage. According to Harry Cohen, Walter was relieved to have her under the care of her father, so that she no longer relied on Walter or made him feel guilty about not supporting her. He felt this was the best way to be rid of her.19

Walter was somewhat in fear of Flo’s hot temper and her father’s righteous anger over the situation. Both of them were crack pistol shots. In the days leading up to his murder, Walter would joke with Harry Cohen that he was going over to the Burnses’ “to get shot.” About a week before the incident in the Glen Island Hotel, Walter told Harry that, if he didn’t come to work the next day by 9:30, he should go over to the Burns house and demand to know what they had done with him. Both Flo and Fred were constantly badgering him about the marriage. Fred told him, “If you don’t marry her, young man, I’m going to hell!” This could have meant that Fred would be condemned for having a fallen daughter or that Fred would be forced to kill Walter to avenge her honor.²⁰

Florence and her father’s desperation—and, presumably, Mrs. Burns’s as well—is another hint that there must have been a baby on the way. If Flo was in “serious trouble” in September and hoping to either “regain her health” or get married, as she told Mabel Cooper, then February would be the time when a pregnancy would begin to show. There would be no more need for speculation among the neighbors; the truth would be plainly visible to all.

All their pleading fell on Walter’s very deaf ears. While he still felt physically attracted to Florence, he had no intention of tying himself to her for the rest of his life. In marrying her, he would be going against the wishes of his parents, the warnings of his friends, and the self-indulgent lifestyle he had created for himself.