Evil Emma, Down Mexico Way

In 2007, my first book, Butchery on Bond Street: Sexual Politics and the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-Bellum New York, appeared.1 The volume is the dispositive history of one of the most infamous 19th-century crimes in New York City, dominating the attention of the local and national press and public in much the same way as did O. J. Simpson in the late 20th century. Dr. Burdell was a well-to-do dentist living and working in lower Manhattan, and also a member of the demimonde of gambling, prostitution and drug use that pervaded the streets adjacent to his living quarters and clinic on Bond Street. After making the acquaintance of Emma Hempstead Cunningham, a comely widow with five children who was desperately seeking a new husband and provider, Dr. Burdell seduced her, raped her, impregnated her and then aborted her pregnancy without her consent. Emma moved into his home with her five children and became the landlady of a boardinghouse there in settlement of a breach of promise suit she maintained against Burdell in 1856. Despite settlement of the lawsuit, Emma continued to press Burdell to marry her, and was witness to an unending stream of women whom Burdell welcomed, exchanging sex for dentistry and other shenanigans. Eavesdropping under a stairwell one day, Emma overheard Burdell arranging for her replacement as landlady—which would have rendered her and her family homeless. Within two weeks, Dr. Burdell was found on the floor of his second-floor dentistry clinic, garroted, stabbed 15 times with a dirk, and very dead. Emma was immediately placed under house arrest on suspicion of murder. A coroner’s jury was convened on the premises and after two weeks, the verdict held that Burdell had been murdered by Emma and a co-conspirator, both of whom were promptly indicted and jailed. Remarkably, with the aid of expert defense counsel, Emma was ac– 8 – quitted in early May 1857. Her contemporaneous suit in Surrogate’s Court to take control of Dr. Burdell’s fortune as a result of her alleged marriage to him during the previous year failed, and after having been caught in a sting by the District Attorney when she tried to fake a pregnancy of Dr. Burdell’s unborn child to influence the civil lawsuit, Emma was jailed again in August 1857 but released for lack of sufficient proof of fraudulent criminal intent. My first book ends with that chapter, noting only in the epilogue that Emma decamped to Baja California to go into the mining business and remarry, returning to New York City, widowed and pauperized, in the late 1880s. Thanks to the magic of the internet and search engines, and much to my chagrin, Emma’s Baja story was much greater than I knew. This slender volume tells of Emma’s further heinous career of swindling, treachery and murder in Baja California Sur. Harvey Burdell was hardly her last victim and perhaps not the unluckiest.