With Florence in prison and, in her trial testimony, having admitted to adultery, Tad Wildrick was able to get a divorce decree in his own right and have her right to alimony revoked. In October 1912, he married Caryl Bensel, a marriage that lasted over fifty years.1
Despite their deep humiliation over Florence’s latest run-in with the law, her parents stuck by her. In December 1915, when she had been in Auburn for five years, her mother applied to New York’s Gov. Charles S. Whitman for a Christmastime pardon for Florence, but Whitman declined to act, calling the case “not worthy.”2
In August 1918, after seven years and ten months in prison, both Florence and Eddie were paroled from their respective institutions. That same year, using the surname Wallace (her middle name), Florence was arrested for a serious but unnamed charge that was probably solicitation. In the spring of 1919, she married a man named Finlay, a man who—like Eddie Brooks—beat her.3
Florence continued her downward spiral with alcohol and an abusive marriage. At 2:00 A.M. on July 9, 1919, she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly with an African American musician named William Washington. Florence was extremely intoxicated at the time, and the musician was trying to drag her into a hallway. She was bleeding from a gash in her arm and had two black eyes and a cut lip. She said her husband had beaten her and she was on her way to a drugstore to get something for her wounds. Florence denied being very drunk but claimed she was weak from loss of blood.4
Washington said he had been on his way home from performing at a nearby music venue when the woman had approached him and asked him to take her to a drugstore, which he commenced to do. Another man came by and told him the drugstore they were headed for—on Fulton Street—was closed and directed them to a twenty-four-hour place on Atlantic Avenue. The scene sounded contrived and the magistrate did not believe it. He fined Washington ten dollars, which the musician paid. As for Florence, who admitted to having been arrested “several times,” the magistrate intended to check with the probation office to see if she had been a good citizen since leaving Auburn Prison.
The fingerprint expert who was processing Florence’s booking was a man named Gerard Horn, who had been in elementary school with her, but her appearance had changed so much from the “pretty rosy-cheeked girl” he had played with in the schoolyard that he did not recognize her at first. He was shocked when he saw that her fingerprints matched those of Florence Burns.5
This entire event is very strange indeed. Why was Florence “dressed stylishly in a modish gown of blue voile” at 2:00 A.M.? If she was headed to the drugstore on her own, why did she need to accost the musician to help her get there? If he was helping her get to a drugstore, like a Good Samaritan, why was he dragging her into a hallway? It sounds very much as if Florence was soliciting the musician for some quick money in exchange for sex, which was going to transpire in the hallway. Like Eddie Brooks, her husband might have forced her to “go out on the street” and beat her up because she objected to it. Or it could have been that the musician saw her as so intoxicated and unable to help herself that he decided to take advantage of her and beat her up in the process. But as she did not accuse him of this (and, as a white woman accusing a black man of assault, she would have been believed), that is probably not what happened.
Florence was put in a cell until her hearing on July 12. That day, she, along with her husband, her parents, and her parole officer, appeared before the magistrate, where the parole officer assured the court that Florence was “tired of the ‘broad way’” and only wanted to go home—not to her husband, who said he wanted her with him, but to her parents, who declared a willingness to help her reform. The magistrate gave her a suspended sentence and put her on probation.6
Florence probably did not go back to Finlay ever again because later that year she married a man named Alonzo Frederick Rutledge, although it is possible that she did not officially marry either of these men. It would not have been possible for her to get a divorce quickly enough to have married Rutledge, and Rutledge took off just two years later in April 1921. There is no record of these marriages anywhere in New York State. Rutledge himself has not left a paper trail, either, so maybe that was not his real name.7
So far, Florence had not learned anything from her destructive lifestyle and her brushes with the law. Despite whatever help she might have received from her parents to turn her life around, by 1922, she was living in a Manhattan tenement house on East 32nd Street. In late January of that year, she was arrested yet again in a dime novel–esque scene that easily could have taken place in a vaudeville skit.
Florence was “visiting” an apartment on East 31st Street with a man and three other women, a residence the police called “a disorderly house,”8 which meant that prostitution was taking place there. Detectives Drake and Sheridan went to the apartment to conduct a raid. Immediately, Florence drew a revolver and pointed it at the policemen, then told the three other women to get dressed and “beat it” while she covered for them. She told Drake, “One false move and there’ll be one less cop,” whereupon one of the other women (who identified herself as “Jane Doe”) panicked: “My God! Don’t kill him, he’s a cop and we’ll get into an awful scrape.” Florence told her to keep dressing, that she had him covered. Detective Sheridan quickly left to get reinforcements.9
One of the women, who was quite large, went to leave the apartment, but Drake grabbed her to use as a shield, then pulled out his own gun and maneuvered the woman and himself to the middle of the room, toward Flo, who challenged him: “Come on, you coward, from behind that woman. Get her out of the way and it will be you or me.” Instead, Drake pushed the fat woman against Flo, causing Flo to fall into a chair. Drake then took her gun away. By that time, the reinforcements had arrived to arrest the four women and the man.
At the station house, Flo gave her name as Florence Rutledge, age twenty-seven, but it was soon discovered that she was the thirty-nine-year-old former Florence Burns. She said she was only trying to get away because she knew her past record would work against her, then improbably claimed that she had no idea the intruders were policemen but thought they were robbers, despite her tough talk about “one less cop.” She was charged with assault and a violation of the Sullivan Act (carrying a concealed weapon without a permit). The man was charged with vagrancy and given a $500 fine, and all four women were to be arraigned with “another charge,” not stated, but probably prostitution.
On February 15, 1922, the twentieth anniversary of the death of Walter Brooks, Florence pleaded guilty to the Sullivan Act violation and the assault in exchange for the dropping of the other charges. This time, there would be no trial. At her sentencing the following week, once again she invoked the theme of “poor me, I’m being persecuted” by claiming that she had found several good jobs, but the police “hounded her” so much that she lost them. This is why she had to resort to illegal means to support herself.10
After only four years since her release from the Auburn Women’s Prison, Florence would be going back under a sentence of three years. Early in her second tenure there, she tried to pull a scam on the warden, fifty-one-year-old Col. Edgar S. Jennings, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I. When she heard his voice in the hall, she called to him to come and see her. She then walked to the opposite end of her cell and looked out through the bars, her back to the doorway. As soon as she could hear his steps approaching, she began to scream, but, as she turned around, she was dismayed to see that the warden, who had not been born the day before, had prudently brought the matron to accompany him.11
Flo took the failure philosophically: “You mustn’t think, warden, that I’ve anything against you personally. That’s my game, you know.” Jennings responded that he would not hold it against her, that being a warden was his game, and that he hoped she would not hold it against him either.
What was Flo’s endgame with this attempted frame of Colonel Jennings, by all reports a well-liked warden? She was obviously intending to set up an accusation of attempted rape, maybe to use it as blackmail against him for prison favors or even to threaten him with removal from office. Or, as the article reporting this cynically suggested, she was merely trying to make sure she didn’t lose her skill set while in prison.
By this time, the Burns family had moved to a multiunit building at 642 St. Mark’s Avenue in Brooklyn. On June 20, 1923, Fred, who was still working at his job as a broker at the Custom House in Manhattan, was rushed to Sea View Hospital in Richmond. He had a chronic valve disease and chronic nephritis, now complicated by pulmonary edema, all of which combined to cause his death the following day, just shy of his sixty-third birthday.12 It is not difficult to imagine that Fred’s health problems were exacerbated by the very real distress he felt at the disgrace his family’s name had suffered as a result of Florence’s many high-profile criminal arrests. And, of course, because of her incarceration, Florence was not allowed to attend her father’s funeral.
Gladys Burns had eloped to New Jersey with Harry Mettais in 1909, another event—because of the Brooks-Burns case—that was reported in the newspapers, embarrassing the Burnses and also Harry’s mother, none of whom had any idea of the marriage until contacted by reporters. The young couple claimed they were waiting for Harry to be able to afford a place for them to live, but in 1910, they were living with the Burnses, so that was obviously something made up for publication.13
The marriage did not go well. By 1915, Harry was back living with his mother, and in 1920 he reported himself as single instead of divorced or widowed. It is Fred Burns’s probate papers that reveal that Gladys (who spelled her name as Gladyss) had remarried somewhere along the way, now with the surname of Coultas. Both daughters had to sign off as potential legatees in the line of succession, but they would not be getting anything: Fred left it all to his wife.14
It’s obvious from what Florence revealed in the 1910 trial that there was friction between her and Gladys, but there also seems to have been some between Gladys and her parents. It sometimes happens that when parents focus much of their time, energy, and money on one child because of that child’s illness, disability, or bad behavior, the other children feel neglected and undervalued. Gladys might have resented her parents for all they did and tried to do for Florence, especially when it got them nothing but heartache, and that she herself received short shrift from them.
Fred Burns is buried in Brooklyn’s Evergreens Cemetery’s Tulip Grove Section, the first in what would be the Burns family plot.15
Florence was paroled from Auburn Women’s Prison in August 1924, having served two and a half years of her three-year sentence.16 She was forty-two years old and had spent approximately ten and a half of the span of years from 1902 to 1924 in a jail or prison cell.