“How did you happen to kill Skelly?” I asked.
He glanced away and remained silent.
“You must have been pretty drunk, weren’t you?”
“Now, listen here,” Burke said earnestly, “if you think I’m going to open up and tell you my life history, you’re badly mistaken. They’ve got a tight case against me here and I’m not going to say a word. You can’t blame me for that, can you?”
He admitted that he had lived in St. Joseph as Fred Dane, and that Viola Brenneman had posed as his wife. But that was all.
“How about the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago?” I persisted.
“Why don’t you guys lay off that stuff?” he demanded in a tone of disgust. “I wasn’t in Chicago when that happened, and I don’t know anything about it. All this talk about me bumping off seven guys for Capone — that’s a lot of bunk. I don’t even know Capone.”
I asked him about a number of other crimes with which he had been directly charged — the slaying of Frankie Yale, the Brooklyn gang leader, and the Milaflores slayings in Detroit — but his answers were a few terse curse words.
The only gangsters he knew were dead ones, and he was a victim of newspaper sensationalism. That was his story.
I asked him how he had succeeded in slipping through the well organized manhunt on the night of the Skelly killing. But there was no answer.
“Where did you get all of your experience with machine guns, Burke?” I pressed.
“What do you mean ‘experience’?”
“You served with the United States forces as a machine gunner in France, didn’t you?”
“Another newspaper yarn. I was in the tank corps and that’s no training school for killers. That’s for suicides.”
“How about this plastic surgery operation you had performed on yourself to disguise your features?”
“That plastic surgery, as you call it, happened to be a little automobile accident near Kansas City last summer.”
I prepared to leave.
“Well, Burke, you’re one gangster that’s just as tough as the cops say, aren’t you?”
“I used to be, I guess,” Burke said, and smiled. It was the first time a smile had been seen on his face since the five police officers with drawn guns had awakened him at daybreak in the little Missouri farm house and placed him under arrest.
Burke remained in the cramped little cell under the constant watchfulness of the armed guard until the end of April, when he was led out by a cordon of fifteen heavily-armed deputies and taken across the street to the court room of Circuit Judge Charles E. White.
A troop of State police officers and special deputies surrounded the courthouse and the same two machine guns once owned by Burke were mounted in front of the jail as a reminder to the crowd of eight thousand curious townsfolk that order must be preserved. When the killer, immaculately dressed in a blue suit, entered the court room, his handcuffs were removed and he was led to a chair between Sheriff Cutler and a State policeman.
Every one who entered the court room was searched and nine guards with sawed-off shotguns stood at the entrances.
Charles W. Gore, of Benton Harbor, who had been hired as attorney for Burke two weeks before, came over and whispered to his client, and when judge White mounted the bench, the lawyer stepped up and conferred with him and Prosecutor Cunningham for several minutes. Then the bailiff called for quiet.
“The defendant pleads guilty to the State’s charge of murder without degree,” Gore said.
There was an audible gasp from the craning spectators. Rurke appeared unmoved.
After a brief hearing, during which Forrest Kool. the young Buchanan farmer, pointed his finger at Burke from the witness stand and said calmly, “He’s the man who killed Skelly,” Judge White announced that Burke, as notorious as he was in the field of crime, could not be sentenced for first degree murder inasmuch as no premeditation could be shown in the killing of the officer.
“I, therefore, sentence you to life imprisonment in Marquette prison under the Michigan statute providing the penalty for second degree murder,” he said after Burke had been called before him.
“Thank you,” Burke said in a low voice, and turned to hold his hands out to the officers who stood near by with the handcuffs.
On the way back to the jail Burke, apparently relieved, joked with Sheriff Cutler.
“Bring along some fishing tackle when we go up, sheriff,” he laughed. “They tell me the trout fishing is good up around Marquette and the season opens May 1. Maybe we can take time out to get a few.”
At four thirty-seven o’clock the next morning, Burke was again loaded into that same armored car bristling with machine guns and started on his last trip, a ride into exile.
“This life sentence doesn’t bother me much,” he said as he stepped into the car.
Before he left the jail, Burke autographed a book, “On the Up and Up,” written by Bruce Barton, and handed it to Sheriff Cutler. It was signed: “Optimistically, Fred R. Burke.”
“Barton’s my favorite author, you know,” he told the sheriff.
Twelve hours later the great iron gates of Marquette prison, known as “Siberia” to criminals in Michigan because of its location in the desolate wastes of the upper peninsula, swung open to admit “the most dangerous criminal in the United States.” He was the one thousand and first prisoner to enter the penitentiary, and the number 5293 was stenciled in large figures across the left breast of his blue denim shirt.
His remark that the life sentence didn’t bother him much took on a real significance the next day when Prosecutor Cunningham admitted that Burke, accused of the most ruthless slaughter of modern times, a dozen or more wanton killings and innumerable other crimes, will be eligible for a parole in twenty-five years, and that good behavior may reduce his term to eighteen or twenty years!
The armored car was almost in sight of the gray stone prison walls when Burke turned to Sheriff Cutler and said suddenly:
“You know, you fellows wouldn’t be bringing me up here if I hadn’t got drunker than a lord on grape wine that day I shot that copper.”