Burke Devore—Edward G. Ricks

Burke Devore’s relationship with Edward George Ricks is an employment rivalry manufactured from a résumé: Burke identifies Ricks as one of the few applicants whose qualifications could threaten him, then makes that competition fatal. Ricks is not a personal enemy, but Burke’s pursuit of a job converts professional comparison into murder.

Identification and Professional Profile

Ricks enters Burke’s account as a genuine contender for a specialized position in the paper industry. His résumé presents a chemical-engineering degree from Henley Technical College, Navy service as a printing technician aboard the aircraft carrier Wilkes-Barre, and subsequent work in product development and management at Northern Pine Pulp Mills and Graylock Paper. At Graylock, he led the polymer paper film product line from 1991 until military cutbacks caused the company to drop it in 1996. By 1997 he was available to bring that experience to another specialized paper company, with no objection to relocating. Those details place him squarely within the professional field Burke considers his own, making him a more threatening rival than applicants whose expertise lies elsewhere.

Rivalry, Misrecognition, and Murder

Burke’s selection of Edward George Ricks as a target rests on professional comparison, not personal acquaintance. Reviewing the résumés, he reduces a larger pool to six applicants he judges to be genuine competition, factoring in where each lives because employers may prefer candidates within commuting distance rather than pay relocation costs. Ricks’s combination of paper-industry experience and availability makes him precisely the kind of rival Burke fears. Yet Burke recognizes the contradiction in his plan: Ricks and the other candidates are not, in his view, the underlying enemy. He directs his anger instead at corporate executives and stockholders, whose demand for returns encourages profitable companies to cut jobs. That analysis does not spare the applicants; Burke turns the people caught in the same employment crisis into targets in a contest they did not know they were in.

The attack on the Ricks household becomes more chaotic than Burke’s imagined campaign of calculated elimination. Mrs. Ricks sees him, recognizes his face, and sees the Luger pistol. As she runs toward the house, she cries out for Ed, and Burke catches up and shoots her on the lawn. Ricks appears in the doorway; Burke fires but misses, striking the aluminum beside the doorframe. When Ricks retreats inside, Burke forces his way around through the open garage, still intent on preventing him from calling for help. Ricks runs out through an interior doorway, and Burke shoots him in the face. The killing leaves Ricks’s body sprawled across the garage floor, one arm extending through the doorway into the house—a disordered scene sharply at odds with Burke’s language of efficiency and impersonality.

In his later confession, Burke distinguishes the intended murder from the killing that followed: he meant to kill Ricks, but Mrs. Ricks mistook him for an older man involved with her young daughter, and the resulting confusion led him to kill her as well. The account reveals how the imagined neatness of his résumé-driven scheme collapses when it encounters other people’s lives and interpretations. Ricks had been selected as a competitor on paper; at his home, the encounter produces a second victim and a failed attempt to stop him from escaping or seeking help.

The Person Behind the Résumé

Ricks’s résumé contains the outline of a life that Burke’s calculations reduce to a professional threat. Born in Bridgeport on April 17, 1946, he had been based in Massachusetts since 1978; by 1997, he was married, and his three daughters were all at university. His willingness to relocate made him available to employers beyond the region, while his specialized experience placed him inside the narrow field Burke feared losing. These details establish that the supposed rival was not merely a credential set competing for one opening, but a person with a family and a career shaped across decades.

The attack exposes how little Burke knows of that life. At the house, Mrs. Ricks mistakes him for an older man connected to her young daughter, and that mistaken identity becomes part of the confusion Burke later cites to explain why the encounter turned into two murders. His own account records the daughters’ absence as a question—whether they were away at university or elsewhere—then turns uncertainty into resentment, blaming them for the confusion. The gap is stark: the résumé had presented their university attendance as a settled biographical fact, but at the scene Burke knows nothing about where they are. Ricks’s family enters Burke’s consciousness only when it disrupts his plan, revealing the limits of a rivalry built from documents rather than any actual relationship.

A Rivalry Burke Knows Is False

Burke’s own analysis exposes the fracture at the center of his relationship with Edward George Ricks. He recognizes that Ricks and the other five applicants are not his true enemies; he identifies corporate executives and stockholders as the forces behind layoffs, arguing that the demand for returns can drive even profitable companies to shed workers. Yet that diagnosis does not restrain him. The résumé comparison turns people facing the same insecure job market into obstacles to be removed, while the corporate system Burke condemns remains beyond his reach. Ricks becomes the immediate target precisely because Burke can act against an individual more readily than against the institutions he blames.

The relationship is therefore built on a severe imbalance of knowledge. Burke studies Ricks’s qualifications and circumstances as evidence in a hiring contest, but the evidence offers no personal acquaintance or reciprocal conflict between them. The false advertisement draws in unemployed specialists, and Burke’s private ranking gives Ricks a role he has never knowingly accepted: competitor in a deadly selection process. Burke’s stated opposition to corporate greed sits beside his decision to make another job seeker bear its consequences. The distance between those positions makes the rivalry less a contest between two men than a moral contradiction in Burke’s account of his own actions.