When Florence Burns Wildrick Finlay Rutledge left Auburn Women’s Prison in August 1924, she had obviously determined never to return, making a complete break with her past lifestyle. She had had enough of it and, with middle age and then old age facing her, she was forced to confront reality.
In 1924 or 1925, Florence got married for the fourth and last time to a man nine years younger. He was a high school shop teacher named John Vincent Stankevich, completely different from her previous husbands: Stankevich was steady and solidly middle class, with a respectable job.1
It was clear, though, that people had still not forgotten the Brooks case and the fact that Florence had probably gotten away with murder. In 1929, Florence was subjected to the angry rants of a woman on the street, who yelled “damned murderess” at her. Soon a crowd gathered to watch as the woman, Mary Mueller, shouted, “How did you feel when you murdered Walter Brooks?” Because of this scene, John Stankevich lost his teaching position at Brooklyn’s P.S. 45 and had to find a job with a machine shop.2 As a result, Flo went to court to swear out a summons against Mueller for “disorderly conduct,” but there was no follow-up report on the outcome.
In July 1937, Mrs. Burns died of cardiac renal disease at the age of seventy-five. What is astonishing is that she left everything to Florence Stankevich, who was also her executrix, with “confidence that [she] will look after her sister Gladys Caltoris [sic; probably Coultas].”3 This indicates two things: first, that Florence had fully reconciled with her mother and, second, that Gladys had some kind of problem (alcoholism?) that made it unwise to leave her any money of her own. It is not known whether Gladys was still married, or divorced, or widowed at this point, but she was in a position of vulnerability and in need of care at the age of fifty-three, an age when she should normally be able to look after herself.
Mrs. Burns’s estate was not large—about $5,000 in real property (possibly the building at 642 St. Mark’s Avenue) and $1,000 in personal property. Flo and John moved into the apartment on St. Mark’s Avenue after that.4
In March 1944, a near tragedy occurred in the Stankevich kitchen at 642 St. Mark’s Avenue. Two police officers noticed smoke coming from the window and forced their way into the second-story apartment, where they found the kitchen on fire and Florence unconscious on the floor. She was taken to a nearby hospital, where it was undoubtedly determined that she was all right, as there was no follow-up in the newspaper.5 Was it the result of an illness that caused Florence to faint? Had she slipped back into her habit of swigging gin throughout the day? Or was she merely overcome by the smoke? Although there was quite a bit of damage done to the apartment, Florence and John continued to live there.
What is notable about this article is that by 1944, apparently nobody was making the connection between Florence Stankevich and Florence Burns, as had been done in 1929. Nor was there a connection in August 1949, when a notice of her death described her only as the “loving wife of John.”6
Florence’s cremated remains were buried in the plot with her parents. She was sixty-seven. There are no markers for any of them in the Evergreens Cemetery, just a short walk away from the section where Walter Brooks is buried. Florence’s husband John died in 1971, but he is not buried in Evergreens. Nor is Gladys.7
So, after all the rebellion and all the self-indulgence and all the self-destruction for most of her life, Florence got it right in the end. After three short, disastrous marriages, her fourth lasted the rest of her life—about twenty-five years. After causing so much distress and humiliation to her family, she finally reconciled with her mother and maybe also her sister. It is not an ending that most people following her post-1902 “career” would have predicted for her, given the increasingly downward trend her life took, culminating in her second prison sentence in 1922—a pleasant surprise, indeed!
What about the other people in Flo’s story? On the whole, a disturbing number of people who touched her life in some way did not fare well, dying young or dying within a few years after or otherwise having their lives take disappointing turns.
The Von derBosches
Florence’s Uncle Oscar, who had footed the bill for her defense and provided her with a “hideout” during the inquest, remarried at the age of sixty-five, exactly a year and a day after his first wife died in 1922. In 1929, he had a fatal stroke while visiting Florida and is buried in Cortlandt, New York.
Oscar’s son, William Oscar “Willie” Von derBosch,8 who could have answered the question as to when Florence got home on February 14, 1902—if asked—lived with Mrs. Burns, his aunt, until at least 1930 and possibly longer. A year after she died in 1937, he shot himself with a .32-caliber pistol (the same caliber used in the shooting of Walter Brooks) in Westfield, Massachusetts, where he had moved six months earlier. Willie was deemed to be depressed at being alone as he had never married, and at having no money (several pawn tickets were found in his pocket). He was sixty years old.
Mr. and Mrs. Brooks
Mary Brooks lived only five years after the death of her son Walter. On January 12, 1907, she was taken to Cumberland Street Hospital in Brooklyn with a serious heart valve problem, where she died on February 22. She was only fifty years old. Mrs. Brooks is buried in the Evergreens Cemetery with her son Walter, her daughter Gertrude, her mother Hainza Williams, and her brother John Williams. As with the Burns family plot, there are no headstones marking that of the Brooks family.9
After his wife’s death, Thomas Brooks moved back to their native Petersburgh, Virginia. In 1923, he was involved in an automobile accident and was killed by a piece of glass from the windshield that severed an artery. An early version of safety glass for windshields was available in 1923 but not widely used at that time. Mr. Brooks was seventy years old. He is buried in Petersburgh’s Blandford Cemetery.10
Foster L. Backus
Florence’s attorney in the Brooks case was another person who did not live long afterward. Less than a month after the death of Mary Brooks, Backus died on March 10, 1907, at the age of fifty-eight. There is no mention in the New York Times obituary, but the one in the Tribune reported that Backus had “suffered a nervous breakdown” while he was representing Florence. It must have been an unbearable burden if he knew the truth as to whether she had shot Walter Brooks, which was another reason he could not put her on the stand to defend herself as he would be guilty of suborning perjury.11
Justice Julius M. Mayer
The justice who presided over Florence Burns’s hearing and dismissed the case against her became the state attorney general the following year. In 1912, President Taft appointed him to the Federal District Court, and from there he was appointed to the Circuit Court of Appeals by President Harding in 1921. One of Judge Mayer’s most famous cases was that of the sinking of the Lusitania, which he held to be an act of piracy.
Judge Mayer died suddenly of a heart attack on November 30, 1925, at the age of sixty.12
William Travers Jerome
Florence’s prosecutor went on to have a stellar career as district attorney, fighting both crime and political corruption until 1909, when he left for private practice. His most well-known case is one that raised the Unwritten Law: the trial of Harry Kendall Thaw for the 1906 murder of the architect Stanford White. Thaw’s wife, the famous “Gibson Girl,” Evelyn Nesbit, had related to her husband the sordid details of White’s alleged rape of her after he had drugged her in his home some years before she and Thaw were married. Thaw, who had been mentally unstable his entire life, was acquitted of the murder, which was committed in front of a roomful of diners, on the grounds of “temporary insanity.” His defense attorney, Delphin Delmas, had argued that it was a case of “Dementia Americana”:
And if Thaw is insane, it is with a species of insanity known from the Canadian border to the Gulf. If you expert gentlemen ask me to give it a name, I suggest that you label it Dementia Americana. It is that species of insanity that inspires of every American to believe his home is sacred. It is that species of insanity that persuades an American that whoever violates the sanctity of his home or the purity of his wife or daughter has forfeited the protection of the laws of this state or any other state.13
William Travers Jerome died of pneumonia on February 13, 1934, one day before the thirty-second anniversary of the shooting of another Unwritten Law victim, Walter Brooks.14
Life for the members of the Bedford Gang and their followers, as a whole, did not turn out well. Many of them died in their thirties and forties, much earlier than would have been normal for that era.
“Handsome Harry” Casey, the erstwhile leader of the gang and the one who introduced Walter to Florence, got married in 1907 at the age of twenty-five. In October 1922, his wife Margaret died, and Harry remarried eight months later, in June 1923, to Gertrude Harrison, fifteen years younger. They had been married only about two years when, one night in September 1925, Harry came home at dinnertime from his job as an insurance salesman and was so drunk he could barely stand up. His wife helped him up the stairs to his bedroom, which she obviously did not share with him as she did not check on him again until 6:45 the next morning. He was sprawled across the bed, partially dressed but deceased, and in full rigor mortis.
Because Harry had been healthy and not under a physician’s care, the medical examiner took charge of the body to conduct an autopsy and to have a toxicology report done for the presence of alcohol. There were no signs of violence. The cause of death was initially listed as “congestion of viscera,” which was a code phrase for “we have no idea what happened here.” The autopsy, conducted by Dr. Thomas Gonzalez, assistant medical examiner, found nothing unusual except for congestion in the lungs, kidney, liver, stomach, and brain—so the “congestion of viscera” conclusion turned out to be correct! But what really killed Harry Casey was chronic alcoholism. He was forty-three. He had no children with either wife.15
The other self-designated “handsome” member of the gang, Edward Cole “Handsome Ed” Watson, Florence’s former boyfriend, who had been divorced in 1899, married again in 1903. His new wife’s maiden name was Brooks (no relation to either of the Brooks families in this narrative). They had a daughter, Ruth Emily, the following year, who died in 1907. In 1913, Ed’s wife served him with divorce papers, alleging that he had been drinking heavily and was also living with a stenographer. He wasted no time in acquiring Wife Number 3, which he did in 1915, a woman whose middle name was Florence.
“Handsome Ed” Watson died in the 1950s. His lifelong career was in advertising, the career of choice, along with insurance or stocks, of so many of the Bedford Avenue Gang.16
Theodore Burris, who, along with Harry Casey, was one of Walter Brooks’s best friends, made his way to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in May 1911. Given his previous activities, he possibly had some get-rich-quick scheme in mind, maybe concerning mining. But Burris’s life of decadence had caught up with him: he was suffering from syphilis, which he had contracted at the approximate age of eighteen to twenty. It was obviously causing him some distress as he had consulted a Colorado Springs doctor in May, but by September, his brain was infected. He was admitted to the hospital on September 13 and died the following day.
Theodore Burris’s family had evidently had enough of him. Although they told authorities in Colorado that a family member would be arriving to bring back the body, they sent his brother-in-law’s younger brother to arrange for burial in Colorado Springs. He is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery there, almost the same name as that of the Brooklyn burial ground where his friend Walter Brooks is interred, and where he might have been buried himself had his life turned out differently. Burris was thirty-one years old.17
William Maxwell “Max” Finck continued plying his confidence games. In 1905, he was arrested on a charge of petit larceny when he was caught selling letters for job recommendations for $15 each to men who were looking for employment with the Union Railway. Finck was passing himself off as a Tammany captain who could arrange to use his influence for the purchaser to get consideration for a job. When the real captain discovered that money was being collected in his name, he pressed charges.18
In 1910, Max was in Dannemora State Prison in upstate New York for unknown crimes.19
In November 1912, there was a report of a William M. Fink [sic], the superintendent of a mine in Mexico, being held for a $5,000 ransom by rebels in Santa Eulalia. Was this “our” Max? Probably not, but, if so, was it a real kidnapping or a hoax? There was no follow-up as to whether the ransom was paid.20
In 1915, Max filed for bankruptcy, so his financial life was not going well—no surprise there.21 And after this, he drops from the available records. Significantly, he did not fill out the required draft registration card for either World War I or World War II. Of course, with a wooden leg, he would have been exempt from the draft but probably not from registration. The “Old Man’s Draft” in 1942 for World War II, for example, required everyone up to age sixty-four to register, even if they would have been too old, so Max—while he might have been safe from the draft—would still have been required to fill out the forms for both wars. His previous felony conviction would not have made him exempt from registering, as Eddie Brooks also registered in 1918 after his release from Sing Sing Prison.
Max Finck’s mother, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and brother-in-law’s parents all relocated to the West, but Max did not show up there. Based on his life’s pattern to 1915, with no signs of turning it around, it’s a safe bet that he was in prison during some of this time. It is entirely likely that he was dead by 1918 when he would have been required to fill out the draft card.
Although Samuel Thomas Maddox Jr., did not figure in any specifically named activities of the Bedford Avenue Gang, some of the members claimed that he was one of them. Moreover, he was a close friend of Harry Casey’s and a frequent guest at the Caseys’ summer estate in the Catskills. The son of a judge whose father had presided over Martin Thorn’s trial for the murder of Willie Guldensuppe (see p. 112), Sam Maddox became a lawyer as well, was married by 1902, and had two daughters. In 1911, he had to be forcibly removed from his home and placed in a hospital ward for alcoholics and the mentally ill. A doctor declared that Sam was not alcoholic but had had a “nervous breakdown” from working too hard. When he got out of the hospital, he went to live with his parents and not with his wife and daughters. Although he and his wife did not formally divorce, he never lived with her again. In 1916, Sam died at his parents’ home, reportedly of pneumonia, just before his thirty-eighth birthday, and exactly one month before the death of his father, Samuel T. Maddox Sr.22
Ruth Dunne was one of the many female followers of the Bedford Avenue Gang and also Walter Brooks’s last girlfriend. During and after the hearing, she was tagged as “of Florence Burns case fame” and thoroughly enjoyed her time in the spotlight—when it was positive. Between the two hearings, she visited a young woman whose family lived in New Haven, Connecticut, and the two were—to hear them talk about it—wined and dined and “rushed” by several Yale undergraduates, who escorted them to dances, dinners, and the theater. Ruth bragged about maybe going on the stage or taking a trip to Canada, but “I don’t know if we shall go while Yale is in session. We are just enjoying ourselves here.” She asserted that she did not know where Florence Burns was, but she sure wasn’t in New Haven. “No one city would be big enough to hold us both,” she boasted.23
However, the day before Ruth was interviewed in New Haven, her parents were frantic with worry because she had been missing from home for two weeks and had not contacted her family. Her mother was afraid she might have committed suicide over the death of Walter Brooks. Finally, Ruth telephoned her uncle (but not her parents), ostensibly from Manhattan, to say that she was staying with a girlfriend who had gotten her a job as a stenographer, where she had been working for the past two weeks.24 An odd story, surely, especially given the fact that she was most likely in New Haven sporting with the Yalies and not working in Manhattan. If the reason for her absence from home was so benign, why not let her parents know instead of making them worry for two weeks?
Equally odd was that the parents waited for two weeks before informing the police of their daughter’s disappearance, especially when suicide was suspected. But, as pointed out tongue in cheek by the Eagle, there was no need to fear suicide as Ruth was “of a light hearted disposition and the death of Brooks apparently had no serious effect upon her, despite the stories that it undermined her health.”25
Ruth was not enjoying publicity so much in September 1902, when a friend of hers, sixteen-year-old Ethel Kahl, was arrested at the request of her widowed mother for being “disobedient and wayward,” then placed in a home for “wayward girls” for a month. Ethel had left her home for about a week, reportedly at Ruth Dunne’s urging, and was seen in theaters and at Coney Island in the presence of “gilded youths” with money to spend. Asked to reveal the names of the young men and women she had been spending time with, Ethel refused to “peach” on her friends.26
The day after Christmas that same year, Ethel Kahl attempted suicide by taking oxalic acid, albeit a very weakened dose, because she had stayed out all night with a friend on Christmas and was afraid to go home and face her mother. Once again, Ruth Dunne was tagged in the article as a friend of Ethel’s.27
A more serious event occurred for Ruth in October 1902, when she, along with four other women and three men, were arrested for being “disorderly persons” in a “disorderly house.” A man who lived in the apartment building had gone to the police to complain that when he greeted his young daughter in the hallway on her return home from a convent school, two of the arrested women made “annoying” and “insulting” (in other words, lewd) remarks when he kissed her. The five women had moved into the apartment about ten days previously and the leaseholders were two sisters, ages nineteen and twenty-one. The other women were seventeen (Ruth and one other) and eighteen. The three men, who did not live in the apartment building, were twenty-eight and thirty-one. Although everyone arrested was discharged because the complainant did not appear for the hearing, the mother of the other seventeen-year-old girl insisted that she be arrested for “waywardness” and sent to the House of the Good Shepherd. The mother later relented and decided to give her daughter another chance.28
Ruth Dunne eventually outgrew her rebellion and, in 1915, at the age of thirty, she married a twenty-three-year-old machinist named John William Murphy. They followed her sisters, their families, and her mother to California, where Ruth died in 1961 at the age of seventy-seven.29
Harry Cohen
Harry Cohen, Walter Brooks’s silent partner in the grocery commission company, never married. He died in April 1908 of pulmonary thrombosis at the age of thirty-three. He was single and not working at the time, having been under a doctor’s care since October 1907.30
William Armit “Fatty” Eyre
William Eyre moved into the St. Mark’s Avenue Hotel in Brooklyn, which was across the street from where Florence’s family—and, later, Florence and her husband—lived for many years. Along with his bar-glass-eating trick, Eyre may have had a problem with alcohol: in 1905, when he was twenty-two, he was charged with disorderly conduct by the manager of the Consumers Park Brewery in Flatbush for causing a disturbance in the dining room of the establishment. He had to sign a $100 bond to keep the peace for six months.
Eyre got married and worked as a clerk in an office building at the Old Ship pier area in Manhattan. There, on September 16, 1909, at the age of twenty-six, he collapsed and died of what was determined to be chronic endocarditis. Could this have resulted from his old bar habit of eating glass?31
Joseph Cribbins
Joe Cribbins, the sixteen-year-old office clerk at Brooks and Wells, who delivered messages from Florence to Walter Brooks, was inducted into the US Army in September 1918, just before turning thirty-two, but he was not sent “over there.” Instead, his clerking skills were put to use at Camp Greenleaf, Georgia, where he served until his honorable discharge in December 1918, with the rank of private. Joe never married. He died in 1951 at the age of sixty-five in a facility for terminal cancer patients.32
Arthur Cleveland Wible
Arthur Wible, the nineteen-year-old who lied about his age so he could get a conductor’s job with the Brooklyn Elevated Railway, turned out to be the source of the most solidly reliable evidence against Florence Burns, placing her near the scene of the crime at a critical time and showing that her own statement of when she arrived home had been a lie. After his job with the railroad, Wible managed a dairy and then, for most of his life, was a furniture dealer. He married and had three children, the first two of whom died in their first year of life. Arthur himself died in 1950 at age sixty-seven.33
Harold Leon Theall
Florence Burns’s first “beau,” Harry Theall, had been sent to a prep school in Wisconsin to escape her clutches and her stalking. When he finished there, he was admitted to Yale Law School as a special student, but he did not graduate. Like so many young men of his circle, he worked in advertising. He and his first wife, Canadian-born Lillian Langdon, moved to Canada around 1911 with her parents, but Lillian either died there or she and Harry divorced. He returned to New York and married Edith Maude Hancock. On February 9, 1918, he died of pneumonia at age thirty-seven.34
Thomas C. Wells
T. C. Wells, Walter Brooks’s partner in the Brooks and Wells grocery commission brokerage, became a traveling salesman after Brooks’s death and eventually moved to Baltimore. In June 1903, a year after his former partner’s death, Wells drowned in a flood in Galveston, Texas (not the famous flood, which was in 1900, but also the result of a hurricane). He was twenty-three and engaged to be married soon.35
Dr. John Vincent Sweeney
Dr. Sweeney, who had attended the dying Walter Brooks in the Glen Island Hotel, never married. He died in 1924 at the age of sixty-six, still working as a physician.36
George Bader
The genial proprietor of the Bader’s Road House at Coney Island had a bad fall from a porch rocker at his hotel in August 1905, incurring a compound fracture of his arm. It was not healing well and gave him a great deal of pain so that it had to be reset in September. But just a few days after that, on September 19, 1905, while his wife was out shopping, Bader committed suicide in his bathroom by sticking a rubber tube onto a gas jet and putting the other end in his mouth. He was fifty years old.37
Charles White Wildrick
Florence’s first husband, Tad Wildrick, married Caryl Bensel in 1912 and stayed married to her until his death in 1964. They had no children but gladly spoiled their nephews and grandnephews. Often, they would show up at the prep boarding school the boys all attended, which was in the area where Tad and Caryl lived, to take them out to dinner—a special treat. Caryl usually drove and, even when she was in her eighties, did so “like a bat out of hell” on winding back roads! One particular memory stands out for a grandnephew who, with his cousin, had occasion to ride with Tad and Caryl down that “narrow hilly twisting road.” His cousin literally had his fingers crossed, and after an especially hairy moment going around a dangerous curve, “Uncle Tad turned around and said jauntily, ‘She usually takes that one on two wheels!’”
Tad’s remaining family remembers him fondly as a gregarious man (“a very warm pleasant man, obviously easy to like and trust”) who loved to have a good time. At a grandnephew’s wedding in 1964, not long before his death at the age of ninety-two, Tad danced with the bride and enjoyed himself immensely. Despite his early brushes with the law and his less-than-honorable dealings with friends and family, it is clear that Tad—possibly “scared straight” by his disastrous marriage to Florence Burns—managed to reset his life’s course to become a faithful husband and a beloved family member. (One of the grandnephews named his own son after him, even down to the nickname “Tad.”) Although he had no official military career of his own, he honored his family’s significant involvement in the armed forces by taking leadership roles with the Army-Navy Club and similar organizations. The fast-driving Caryl died five years after her husband, at age ninety-three.38
Eldridge Hildreth Brooks III
Eddie Brooks got out of Sing Sing in August 1918 and relocated to New Jersey to live with his mother. In September of that year, he registered for the draft and listed his occupation as employment manager with the Duesenberg Motor Corporation in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Although Duesenberg was primarily a manufacturer of luxury and racing cars, in 1916, the company moved its operations from Minnesota to Elizabeth under a government contract to build airplane engines for the military, which was soon to be involved in World War I—and just in time for Eddie upon his release from Sing Sing. One year after leaving prison, he married twenty-nine-year-old Edna Mabel (known as Mabel) Atwater, seven years his junior.39
In 1920, Eddie applied for his first passport and traveled to Cuba on behalf of his employer, the Sugar Factories Construction Company, where he worked as a manager. Sugar Factories was a Cuban company with its main office in Havana and a branch office on Broadway in New York City. He made another trip to Cuba in 1922, probably to oversee his company’s contract for a new factory in San Cristobal.40
In 1926, Eddie was one of several investors in a new corporation for the teaching of “beauty culture” in Newark, and for the 1930 census, he listed himself as an advertising executive. By 1942, he and his wife were living in the Hotel Breslin in New York City. He was fifty-eight years old, had no occupation, and, along the way, had acquired a scar behind his right ear.
Eddie and Mabel most likely died in the 1950s. They had no children.41
Eddie’s sister Miriam had married in 1908, but at some point in the 1920s, she was committed to an institution for the mentally ill, where she remained for the rest of her life.42
The houses where the Brooks and Burns families lived at the time of the murder in 1902 are still standing in Brooklyn. (The Brooks house is at 258 Decatur Street; the Burns house is at 249 Marlborough Road.) Today’s subway from Manhattan to Flatbush stops at the same place as the elevated railroad when Arthur Wible dropped off his passenger that February night and nodded to her. From there, it is just a short walk to the quiet, attractive, tree-lined street she hurried to back then, probably hoping that her parents were not yet home from the theater. The little house on Decatur Street, where the Brookses lived and where Walter’s funeral was held, is set back from its neighbors, a distinction those long-ago neighbors thought was an apt metaphor for the aloofness of Mr. and Mrs. Brooks.43
The lack of headstones or any markers for the two principal families in the Evergreens Cemetery is puzzling, especially for the Brookses, who had previously buried a little daughter long before the tragedy and shame of their son’s murder. For the Burnses, it is perhaps understandable as the ignominy Florence brought to their name lasted at least until 1930 before it faded from memory.
The site of the Glen Island Hotel today marks the inspirational, tasteful, and sobering tribute to those who died on September 11, 2001. The names of the fallen are etched on panels surrounding a waterfall, etchings so deep that visitors stick flowers in them. Busloads of tourists arrive all day, every day to take pictures and say prayers.
It is but a short walk from there, as it was in 1902, to the Brooklyn Bridge with its walkway to the other side and its magnificent views of the New York skyline. New today are the many vendors hawking bottled water, soft drinks, and paintings, as well as the presence of far more pedestrians than at the turn of the century—all of them tourists looking for an experience, rather than city dwellers who need to get back to Brooklyn after a day’s work or a night out on the town in Manhattan.
In the years after the Brooks-Burns case and the subsequent citywide spotlight on the activities of the Bedford Avenue Gang (or the Hounds), any suspicious crime, even one with no obvious perpetrator, was attributed to it. A Brooklyn father struck his fifteen-year-old daughter and knocked her down to “chastise her” for being out of control and for going around with members of the Bedford Gang. “I don’t want another Florence Burns in my family,” he told the police court. She had accused him of assault, then withdrew the charge and was sent to the Convent of Mercy until she turned sixteen.44
The suspicious and decidedly odd July 1902 murder of the forty-six-year-old wealthy merchant Albert C. Latimer—unsolved to this day but most likely committed by his young wife’s lover or admirer—was thought to be the work of “the son of well-to-do Brooklyn parents … a member of an organization known as the ‘Bedford Avenue Hounds.’” Likewise, when a young man, son of a prominent Brooklyn resident, was found bleeding and unconscious on the street from stab wounds, it was quickly pointed out that the victim had friends in the Bedford Gang and also knew both Walter Brooks and Florence Burns. The “stabbing” turned out to be punctures caused by his falling on an ink eraser in his vest pocket (a small instrument, similar to an Exacto knife, for scraping off ink from paper).45
Or was it? Two years later, this same young man, Joseph Cabble, now twenty-four, claimed to have been knocked down and robbed of a gold watch and a stick pin at 1:00 A.M., supposedly by members of the Bedford Gang. The 1902 ink eraser incident was never discussed among his family, and the police always suspected it as false. However, as nothing had been taken from him in 1902, the matter was dropped. A detective reported that in 1903, he came across Cabble staggering about and complaining that his watch had been stolen from him. It was later found to be in his coat pocket.46 So, Joseph Cabble’s problems most likely came from an overindulgence in alcohol and needing an excuse for his family.
Two years after the Brooks murder, many of the old Bedford Gang began frequenting the places they used to visit, after having kept a low profile since 1902. Approximately eleven members, some old and some new, were “resorting to all sort of tricks to get money without working.” Now, however, there was a new wrinkle as most of them were carrying revolvers and brandishing them in stickups and extortion threats. Robbery and blackmail were the new crimes, whereas the “b’hoys” had previously relied primarily on elaborate confidence games. Their victims were primarily those men and young girls, like Joseph Cabble, who had drunk too much alcohol and were easily stripped of any money they were carrying. There was even a rumor that murder would not be beyond this new iteration of the Bedford Avenue Gang.47
The gang developed a plan to finance a trip to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. They would steal a new automobile from a Brooklyn resident, then sell it to a dealer in Manhattan. However, the plot was discovered before they could act on it—most likely through indiscriminate bragging to the wrong people.48
Another gang member informed a wealthy man that he wished to marry the man’s daughter, knowing full well that the father would object. “If you want to prevent this and also save your daughter’s reputation,” the youth told him, “you will have to pay me $5,000.” The father kicked him out of the house, whereupon the young man was back the next day with a reduced offer of $3,000 to prevent the smearing of the daughter’s—and the family’s—good name. The father called the gang member’s bluff and kicked him out again. The threat was not carried out.49
There was also a rumor that former Bedford Gang members were behind a sophisticated mining company swindle in 1904 that suckered in over one hundred Wall Street stock promoters. They would get themselves hired by mining companies by claiming to have access to investors in other large cities, which they would then pretend to contact. Then they wrote to their employer, exulting in a great success and asking for reimbursement of costs. One swindler got hundreds of dollars by falsely providing the name of the former New York State lieutenant governor as a reference.50
More distant from the 1902 murder was the suit brought in 1913 against William Sulzer, the governor of New York, by a shopgirl named Mignon Hopkins, who worked at Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia. She claimed that she and the governor had been lovers back in 1903, that he had asked her to marry him, and that he had presented her to others as his wife. According to Hopkins, Sulzer told her they had to keep their engagement quiet as he sought to establish his political career. Instead, in 1908, he married another woman, a nurse who had tended him while he was ill. When Hopkins sued him for $30,000 for breach of promise to marry, Sulzer was already embroiled in combat with Tammany Hall, and he—probably rightly—concluded that this was a put-up job by them, given the length of time between his marriage and her complaint. They succeeded in impeaching him later that year, and the breach of promise lawsuit does not seem to have gone anywhere or even been filed. The governor accused Mignon Hopkins of having been a member of the Bedford Avenue Gang, which she vehemently denied, but clearly it was seen as a nefarious connection.51
Today, there are hardly any references to the Brooks-Burns case or to Florence’s post-1902 career. You will not find any mention of them in a biography of William Travers Jerome or in any compilation of Gilded Age New York events. There are no plaques to the Bedford Avenue Gang at the sites of their usual haunts. By the 1930s, the murder case and those who played a part in it had faded from memory, with the occasional exception of an old-timer’s nostalgic musings in a distant era’s newspaper.
But, in its time, it served as a cautionary tale of the perils of the young in the New Century. And, for future centuries, it gives a perspective on the effects of rapidly changing technology on manners and mores as experienced by a group of people uniquely unprepared to deal with these changes maturely.