THE DOWNFALL OF GALVESTON’S MAY WALKER BURLESON

Texas Society Marriage & Carolina Murder Scandal

by T. Felder Dorn

Genre: True Crime

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing / The History Press

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Date of Publication: April 2, 2018

Number of Pages: 192 pages, 30 b&w images

Jennie May Walker Burleson was envied for having everything a woman of her time could want—the privileged upbringing, the dazzling good looks, the dashing war hero husband. She was admired for demonstrating that a woman could want more, from the front of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession to the bottom of a Mesoamerican archaeological dig. But as she stood over the body of her husband’s second wife, gun in hand, society’s envy and admiration quickly hardened into pity and scorn. T. Felder Dorn examines the complicated trajectory of her life as socialite, suffragist, and shooter. 

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Excerpt from The Downfall of Galveston’s May Walker Burleson

by T. Felder Dorn

Preface

Glenwood Cemetery

Established in 1871 in a then rural Houston, Texas, Glenwood Cemetery quickly became the burial site of choice for the wealthy, for the social elite and for people prominent in their fields of endeavor. William P. Hobby, governor of Texas (1917–19) and publisher of the Houston Post, and his wife, Oveta Culp Hobby, who held the rank of colonel while she was the first commander of the Woman’s Army Corps (WAC) in World War II and who became secretary of health, education and welfare under President

Eisenhower, are buried there, along with James Anson, the last president of the Republic of Texas; as well as Edward Mandell House, an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson who helped negotiate the acceptance of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and many businessmen of great wealth in fields such as banking and the petroleum industry.

About one-tenth of a mile from the grave site of billionaire Howard Hughes, known for his contributions to the movie industry and aviation, but who became reclusive near the end of his life, is the Walker family plot. At rest there, near the graves of her prominent Galveston parents John Caffery and Clara Wilson Walker, is May Walker Burleson. Mrs. Burleson had a brief period of national fame in 1913 when she served as grand marshal for a parade in the nation’s capital on behalf of woman suffrage. Riding a

black horse, she led a huge procession, with floats, bands and an estimated eight thousand persons, mostly women, down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House grounds. She continued to work for woman suffrage, and after the Nineteenth Amendment was approved, she was active in the Democratic Party. These accomplishments later were eclipsed, however, by the sensation that resulted when May Burleson fatally shot her ex-husband’s second wife during lunchtime in a hotel cafeteria.

This work covers the roles of both Mrs. Burleson and her husband in their unusual marriage and recounts the bitter divorce proceedings that terminated that union. The narrative then moves to the homicide, to her trial and incarceration and finally to her post-prison years. An “Aftermath” section includes reflections on the lives of both May Walker and Richard Coke Burleson.

This book is the third volume in a trilogy about three women who were convicted of crimes involving homicide in South Carolina. For most of the year 1942, these women, one of whom was Mrs. Burleson, occupied adjacent cells in the Woman’s Prison of the South Carolina State Penitentiary. One of the other two women was Beatrice Snipes, who had been convicted in 1933 of killing a rural policeman by pistol fire the prior year. The third member of the trio was Sue Logue, who was electrocuted in January 1943 for being part of a conspiracy to have killed the man who had killed her husband in self-defense during an altercation. Mrs. Snipes’s story was told in Death of a Policeman; Birth of a Baby: A Crime and Its Aftermath. Mrs. Logue’s story was the subject of The Guns of Meeting Street: A Southern Tragedy.

T. Felder Dorn graduated from Duke University in 1954 with a BS in chemistry and was awarded a Ph.D. in that discipline in 1958 by the University of Washington. He was a member of the chemistry faculty at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1958–69 and then served four years on the program staff of the College Board in New York. From 1973 to 1991, he held administrative positions at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, serving as associate dean, dean, and vice-president for academic affairs. His last ten years at Kean were spent as a professor of chemistry. He retired in 2001. Felder Dorn and his wife, Sara Ruth, have resided in Millburn, New Jersey, since 1973. They have three children and three grandchildren. Dorn has previously published four books: Challenges on the Emmaus Road: Episcopal Bishops Confront Slavery, Civil War, and Emancipation (University of South Carolina Press, 2013); Death of a Policeman, Birth of a Baby: A Crime and Its Aftermath (Xlibris, 2012); The Guns of Meeting Street: A Southern Tragedy (University of South Carolina Press, 2001); and The Tompkins School, 1925–1953: A Community Institution (Attic Press, 1994).

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