Burt Murders

Not long after the Servant Girl Annihilator slayings, the citizens of Austin would confront yet another murderer.  In fact, the same police chief who took over during the 1885 investigations, James Lucy, still headed the department when terror struck again in 1896 — this time at the hand of a real-life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Family members of Mrs. William E. Burt, of 207 E. Ninth, had a vague idea that trouble was brewing in the house that summer of 1896. Mrs. Burt had told them that once in the dead of night she had awakened to find her husband, William, silently staring down at her, and she had premonitions that her girls, aged two and four, were not safe. Mrs. Burt had seemed happy by her husband’s proposal to move into a smaller house while he tried to get back on his feet financially. William had fallen into some trouble for cheating his brothers, with whom he was a partner in a cigar store. William had once fled to New Orleans when he was caught at theft and forgery. William had exhibited a total disregard to moral and legal obligations in his business relation and was regarded as “dull to a sense of business honor.” But no one even thought that in the heart of this weak-willed, unsuccessful businessman a devil was raging, plotting a murder so horrible as to draw some of the most renowned physicians in the nation to the tiny Texas capital to try and explain how such a thing could happen. Almost everyone who spoke to Burt on Saturday, July 25, thought he acted normally. That morning he finished packing up his household goods, sold his carpets, and later announced to his brothers that he was leaving for Dallas on the midnight train. He ate dinner at the Capitol Hotel, where he sought out theowner for a few games of checkers.  On the train, he encountered an old friend and schoolmate, who he talked with cheerily. He told everyone that his wife and children had gone to San Antonio and that he would send for them soon from Dallas. The only person who saw him behave strangely was his cook, Minnie Simms.  He told her that there had been trouble the night before, Friday, and Mrs. Burt and the children had left suddenly for San Antonio. He asked Minnie to make breakfast,just don’t use the water in the cistern,  he told her, because a cat had fallen in and died the night before. Mrs. Burt’s mother came calling on Sunday and was astonished when the cook told her that her daughter and grandchildren had left town. She didn’t believe the story, and called the police, asking that they search the house. They found nothing. But the woman insisted they go back in the next day. Some neighborhood boys said that a strange smell was coming from the basement, which had an outdoor entrance. By the time William Burt’s brother, Roscoe, finally entered the house on Wednesday morning, he was met with a terrible stench in the kitchen. Mrs. Burt and the two children were found a few minutes later floating in the cistern, their heads crushed by blows to the head. Handkerchiefs were tightly knotted around the necks of all three, leading the coroner at first to presume the victims had been strangled, though later it was decided that Burt had tied the cloths to reduce the flow of blood after he struck the fatal head wounds — the first inkling given of just how coldly and deliberately Burt had planned the murders. Upstairs in the bedroom, no blood was found until the floorboards were thoroughly checked. Meanwhile, it was discovered that Burt had mailed two large boxes to Houston, and when police officers there confiscated and opened the containers, they found the grisly remains of Burt’s crime. A bloody hatchet lay alongside blankets, sheets, and clothing sopped in blood and spattered with brains. Burt had carefully mopped up all the stain of his murder and then thrown the garments into a shipping box already packed with his wife’s clothes. But the most devious part of the crime was the way Burt got rid of the bodies, first cutting off the blood flow to the head with the handkerchiefs, washing the bodies thoroughly, and wrapping them tightly in blankets. It was suspected that Burt had planned for it to appear that he was merely carrying  rolls of carpet. Burt was convicted and sentenced to die in October of that year, but just before he went to the gallows the governor ordered that Burt be given a new trial to determine if he was insane. That trial, in 1898, shared headlines with the rumblings of America’s impending war with Spain. Physicians argued  about the nature of Burt’s mental health. His skull was measured, but nothing found amiss. Letters he had written in prison were examined and found perfectly sane. Jailers testified that they had spied on him and observed no unusual behavior. On the witness stand, doctors fumbled around with the term “moral insanity,” but could not explain how a person could seemingly have all his faculties in order save the one that guarded against evil thoughts and deeds. One argued that there must be such a thing as temporary insanity, as everyone knew that a person might strike a dog or a horse when there was no rational reason for doing so. Burt’s brothers testified that Burt had suffered major trauma when his father died while he was still a teenager. The boy who had once had a sunny attitude  became withdrawn and ill-tempered after that.  William  Burt had been emotionally cut off from friends and family for many years, but no one knew the ravages the condition had  on his psyche. A letter he wrote, printed in the newspaper shortly before he was hanged in 1898, shows the depth of his schizophrenia. “The outraged law is still outraged,” Burt wrote, because the real perpetrator of his wife’s murder was “already punished by forces not of the law. “Great God be thanked,” he wrote, “the hellish brute that took from me the sweets of life, that snapped the human cords of my heart, that took from me and sent to heaven my loved ones, will never see the fulfillment of the ends of lawful justice. … How happy to lay and dream … to hear the howls and shrieks and screams of his tortured soul.”