31 Bond Street (17 page)

Harper’s Weekly
, May 9, 1857.

May 5, 1857

T
he May morning was shot through with a blast of chilled air. Henry Clinton had spent the hours before sunrise at home studying his speech, and then at seven had gone to the jail to visit
with Emma and then to his office to review his speech again while the officers brought Emma and her daughters over to the courthouse for the first day of the trial.

He was now heading back to the courthouse. At the courthouse plaza, a congestion of wagons and skittish horses were reined to the hitching posts. It was nearing nine, and from around each corner, pedestrians were streaming toward the building, heading toward the steps in a frantic commotion, some breaking into a run, anxious to get inside—it was like passing through Rome on the morning of a gladiator game.

The plaza emptied except for the last stragglers, and the courthouse was full. From inside the outer rotunda, Clinton could see into the open doors that the courtroom was packed. At the distant end of a corridor, a mob was pushing and jockeying, and the prison officers were leading Emma from the room where she had been held. A group of newspapermen, with bulging eyes and thrusting chins, had somehow gotten into the restricted area. From Clinton’s vantage, Emma appeared to be moving with perfect posture and purpose amid the preying scribes, inches from her face, hissing her name. Helen twisted against the horde, her skirts thrashing like the feathers of a bird being toyed with by a cat. Augusta’s head flowed along passively in the slipstream. The officers muscled back the reporters, ushering the women into a rear door nearest the defendant’s box.

Clinton rounded the corridor to another discreet entrance that the marshals used, and he paused at the doorway to the courtroom before entering. Two tiers of raised balconies curved in a semicircle. The spectators’ seating on the upper level was full, with bodies crushed together and hands and arms dangling forward over the rails. Heads bobbed in the back, where there was standing room only. On the bottom level, seats with paneled railings and small swinging gates, led to the prosecution and defense tables. Legal
aides darted back and forth among the lawyers, delivering papers and carrying the documents.

Clinton entered and headed to the defense table. No one paid him notice, for all eyes were on Emma and her daughters, now being led in through the opposite entrance. The women were taken to the defendant’s box, which was on the right side of the judge, slightly raised, as was the jury box. There was a loud buzz. The spectators whispered and gasped at the sight of her. Clinton’s worst fears were confirmed—it was the sound that accompanies a public hanging.

Clinton slipped into his place next to Thayer, who nodded with a glance that said: “Have faith,” but there was also a twitch of concern. Clinton kept his facial muscles inscrutably still.

The prosecution’s table was across from that of the defense. Hall was seated, scribbling notes, intent on the page. Clinton could tell by his posture that he was deep in the study of his speech. Hall would deliver his opening statement first.

The door behind the judge’s dais opened, and the jury stumbled in, as if stunned by the impact of a full courtroom. Clinton made sure not to watch them but kept his eyes on the jury list. By following the sound of their footfalls and placement, he could tell who was moving into which place as they shifted into their arranged seats. The tobacconist wheezed, depositing his body heavily into his chair; he was farthest on the right.

Soon all twelve were seated, and Clinton ventured a glance, not letting his gaze linger for more than a few seconds. He had studied the jury carefully when each man was chosen during the voir dire, and now he burned a picture of them in his mind, lined up in their seats, the way acid burns a quicksilver image on a daguerreotype glass. They sat in two rows of six. The fancy goods merchant was tall and wiry. The bank president sprouted wild whiskers. The pickler looked a little green. From experience, Clinton knew that no
matter how swiftly he glanced at a jury, several always caught his eye, reminding him to keep his study of them short.

Clinton stared at the notes on the table in front of him, yet his attention was focused on every sound. A good trial attorney perceives the courtroom through its sounds and never relies on his eyes—coughs and rustles of fabric are cues and signposts in the course of a trial. The scrape of the large chair on the dais meant that the courtroom guard was adjusting the judge’s pulpit. Clinton glanced again at Oakey Hall. He was sitting upright with his long legs still crossed, watching Emma and her daughters with a defiant look, as if by their very presence in the defendant’s box, he had won the case. Hall’s coat was tapered, and the handkerchief that fanned out of his breast pocket was peacock blue. With the gaze of the entire courtroom upon Emma, Clinton studied the jury again. Then he ventured to look at the Cunningham women, seated. Emma was entirely in black, hidden behind an elaborate lace veil that covered her face all the way down to her waist. Augusta wore a modest dress, but her blond hair flowed all around, a little wildly, attracting attention to her like a beacon. She grasped a fan, folded demurely, and fingered it anxiously in her lap. Helen was coiffed with bits of jewelry and bows. Her rosy lips were flushed and defiant. Clinton had told the girls to dress plainly—he had wanted them to look like parish ladies, but Augusta had a strange unearthly glow, and Helen could not help but primp for the crowd.

The clerk issued the sonorous “All rise” as Judge Davies climbed onto the dais, his bony hands grasping for support as he climbed into his pulpit. There was a milling of fabric as the judge adjusted his robes, and the scrape of wood settling against wood. The gavel dropped. All sounds intensified briefly before they began to ripple toward silence.

“Members of the jury, learned counsel, defendant, I bring this court to order.” He nodded in each direction. “I hereby commence
the Case of the
People versus Emma Hempstead Cunningham
, otherwise called Burdell. I shall call Mr. Abraham Oakey Hall to make the opening statements for the State.”

The shuffling in the room raised to a high pitch, then fell silent almost as quickly, for the faster they were silent, the faster the spectacle would begin. Hall stood and sauntered forward, then positioned himself a little off center, keeping his eyes fixed at a point in front of his feet. He scratched his chin and pulled his tie, waiting for the spectators to turn their full attention upon him. The courtroom rippled and flurried with the last twitches of anticipation, and then the last phlegmatic cough came from the far corner of the room. It was a prosecutor’s drum roll. Hall began:

“May it please the court.” He turned and nodded at the jury box. “Gentlemen of the jury. It is my honorable duty to serve you in this most grave, but important matter.

“My duty today is to prepare your minds to receive the evidence that will be presented to you. You already know that one of your fellow citizens, Dr. Harvey Burdell, was murdered in this very city, in his own house, and it is my role to prove to you that the deed was premeditated, and that someone in his own house did the deed. I propose to prove by the evidence that among the inmates of that house there was one, greater than any other, who had a motive to perpetrate that horrible deed. And that person was a woman, and that woman is this defendant.”

His voice had risen to a pitch and he pointed theatrically to Emma, who was covered in the black lace veil. Her fingers gripped the rail, her knuckles white.

“She alone,” he continued, “committed as bold, as daring and desperate a crime as we in this city, have ever seen.

“Who was the victim? He was an upright member of the medical profession, a dentist and a man of the Episcopal faith. He was said to have enemies—but, so far as the prosecution has been able
to discover, he had no enemy as great as this woman,” he said, again pointing. “Dr. Burdell is dead, but the woman who was his deadly enemy sits before you, a veiled picture of sorrow. But I ask the jurors to remember one thing: crime has no sex. A crime is not different whether it strikes from the hand of a man or the hand of a woman.”

At this pause, Clinton heard a grunt from the jury box, a reflexive noise indicating assent, like that of a churchgoer responding to a sermon. Clinton did not turn to see who made it, but judging by the direction, it was the forge worker, a stump of a man named George Tugnot.

“You ask,” Hall continued, now moving toward Tugnot, “can it be possible that one of the fair sex, upon whom God has placed his seal of purity, should become a midnight assassin and embrace hate, revenge, and jealousy? I answer you, yes—it is possible. When we open the page of history, we perceive that crime knows no sex. In Ancient Rome we read of the daughter of Servius, who drove her chariot over the dead body of her father. And Jezebel and Fulvia, who, when the head of Cicero was brought to her, she spat upon it, and drawing from her bosom a deadly bodkin, thrust it again and again through his tongue. And history recounts to us how Queen Agnes of Hungary bathed her feet in the blood of sixty-three knights, exclaiming, as she did, ‘It seems as if I were wading in May dew.’

“This woman, Emma Cunningham, pursued Dr. Burdell with a fiendish hate, jealousy, and revenge until her knife found repose in his heart. And yet should we, the prosecution, or you, the jury, labor under a disability called sympathy?”

Hall paced back and forth in his colorful garb, wound up in a Shakespearean lather.

“The domestics of the house will go upon the stand. We will
take the roof off that dwelling at 31 Bond Street and allow you to gaze into the depths of moral degradation. This woman, the mother of daughters, fastened her greedy, lustful eyes upon Dr. Burdell. We shall show you that Dr. Burdell had made up his mind that life to him was useless so long as he had this shadow at his side. He had made up his mind to put her out of the house of which he was the landlord. And she would have none of it and plotted her revenge.

“She had the motive to murder him: he had spurned her advances and showed interests in other females, fairer and more genteel than herself. He had money and a beautiful home, and she saw an opportunity to affix those for herself, and to that end, she engaged in murder.

“She had the opportunity to murder him. Why, gentlemen, in the whole annals of crime, wherever you place your finger upon a bloody and malicious murder, you will never find an opportunity so carefully provided as that contrived by this woman upon this night. The Doctor was a regular man. She knew his habits. When the cook comes upon the stand she will tell you that the prisoner came down into the kitchen and ordered her to bed, although there was only one servant in the house, with many duties left to perform.

“We shall show to you that the doors and windows of the house were shut tight; the facts utterly exclude the idea of intrusion or interference by any outside person. We shall show that when the errand boy came in the morning to the basement door, it was locked, as well as the back door. We shall prove that the street door had a lock of peculiar construction; that no key was missing. The learned counsel for the defense may argue that when Dr. Burdell came home, some enemy from the outside followed him at his heels upstairs, stabbed him to the heart, and then, bloodstained, rushed from the house. No, gentlemen, Dr. Burdell came in alone. His
room was secured and locked up. She had a passkey to his room and she was waiting there for him.

“She sits before you today, a veiled picture of sorrow, hiding behind a widow’s black lace, but it is a role, it is a disguise, for she has no sorrow at the death of this man. Was her revenge against him enough of a motive? What is it that she wanted above all? Why it was his property, the fruits of his labor, and most of all his beautiful home. She knew the house was worth a princely sum. She eyed his possessions with greed and set her sights upon him with a plan, not to serve him, but to enter that dwelling at 31 Bond Street and insinuate herself into it. She put him at her mercy. Instead of the mistress of his house, she became his shadow, his persecutor, and his tormentor.

“Now physicians may testify here to tell you that the mortal injury inflicted on that man happened in the briefest possible space of time. And wherever he was struck, the facts will prove that the blow was given by a left-handed person. And she, gentlemen, is a left-handed woman.

“The facts will show that even when the man was dead, and the life-tide flowing rapidly from his heart, that again and again the stabs were inflicted into the unconscious corpse, to make doubly sure that this victim was disposed of.

“Whoever did that deed was in all probability covered from head to foot with blood—blood upon the wall, upon the door, and blood upon the different articles of furniture—blood upon the carpet, drops that had fallen from the bloody dagger. She had the opportunity to burn the bloody clothing in that house that night and she had time before the discovery of the body in the morning to remove all clues. She is alone in the wee hours of the morning, taking her time, feeding her clothes into the stove, while her victim lies dead upon his carpet.

“You will hear from servants, who will testify to the questionable character of the woman before you. We will present a respectable witness, who will testify that she was to take a lease and that Dr. Burdell wanted this ‘housemistress’ out of his house, and was taking actions to evict her.