Burke writes and abandons his statement confessing to the murders

Burke Devore writes and abandons his statement confessing to the murders after the killing of Everett Dynes, making a potential surrender briefly seem possible before converting the confession into another problem to manage. At 5:19 in the morning, exhausted and unable to sleep, he decides to admit what he has done and atone. The statement names his victims and describes how he killed them, but its apparent moral clarity does not last: by morning, Burke has folded it into his pocket to burn, and he later fears that despair might make him confess to the authorities after all.

The Decision and the Writing

Burke's decision follows a sleepless night in which he repeatedly sees the events on Nether Street and thinks of the people he has killed: Herbert Everly, Edward Ricks, Ricks's wife, and Everett Dynes. He regards Dynes as someone like himself, a potential ally against their common enemies, and recognizes the bleakness of men fighting one another for scarce opportunities while those above them either laugh or fail to notice. At 5:19, this reflection gives way to a decision that sounds final: he will make a clean breast of everything, atone, and kill no one else.

The physical circumstances of the confession give it an improvised, almost workmanlike form. Dawson's Motel has no stationery, and Burke has brought no paper. He finds lengths of paper lining the dresser drawers, notices their thickness and smoothness, and selects the rougher side for writing. Even in the middle of a moral crisis, he registers the paper's simple manufacture; noticing that detail nearly makes him cry again. He smooths the sheet on the table and writes by hand, turning the motel's drawer lining into the surface on which he records his crimes.

Burke identifies himself as 51 years old, living at 62 Pennery Woods Road in Fairbourne, Connecticut, and unemployed for close to two years. He links that unemployment to the crimes: after placing a false advertisement in a trade journal, he obtained the résumés of other unemployed people in his field and decided to kill those he feared were better qualified for one particular job. His account presents the desire to work again as the cause of his actions, while also acknowledging that the desire led him to do things he once could not have imagined.

What the Confession Admits

The statement describes four murders and sets out their different circumstances. Burke says he shot Herbert Everly outside his house on Churchwarden Lane in Fall City, Connecticut, on Thursday, May 8, two weeks earlier. He then admits that he intended to kill Edward Ricks but also shot Ricks's wife: she mistook him for an older man who had been having an affair with her young daughter, and the confusion led Burke to kill her as well. He places those deaths at the couple's home in Longholme, Massachusetts, the previous Thursday.

For the most recent killing, Burke names Everett Dynes and states that he deliberately ran him down with his automobile the previous night in Lichgate, New York. He closes by expressing sorrow for the victims and their families, self-hatred, and uncertainty about how to go on. The confession therefore does more than list names: it records Burke's distinction between the murder he intended and the additional killing that arose from the encounter with Ricks's wife, while making clear that he accepts responsibility for both.

He signs the statement but leaves it undated. Calling it his last résumé, Burke gives the document a pointed double meaning: it is an account of his past, but it is also framed in the language of the employment contest that drove his crimes. His confession is unusually explicit about motive and method, yet it remains a document Burke controls, composed in his own words and on his own timetable.

The Morning Reversal

Burke cannot decide that night what he will do the next day. A Luger in his raincoat pocket, hanging from the closet rod, gives him one possibility: suicide. The other is to drive back to Lichgate, find the police station, and show his statement to an officer. He rejects suicide as inconsistent with his sense of himself and instead concludes that he must atone and pay for his crimes. After leaving the paper on the table, he returns to bed calm and expecting to sleep.

In the morning, Burke nearly leaves the confession behind because he has forgotten it. Returning to the room to check for anything he has left, he sees the sheet on the table, sits down, and reads it. The words bring back the dread, tension, and terror of the night before, but he now interprets that despair as a temporary state. He says he meant the confession when he wrote it, yet focuses on how badly the killings of Ricks and his wife, and then Dynes, had gone after Everly's murder proceeded smoothly. Rather than treat the statement as a commitment, he draws a different lesson: he must be more careful and patient, and wait until circumstances are right before making another move.

That revision transforms the confession from a planned surrender into an object to conceal. Burke takes it folded in his pocket and intends to burn it elsewhere. Later, while Marjorie is away at her movie-house job, he burns it in the backyard. The confession's disappearance does not erase what it records, but it removes the written admission Burke had considered handing to the police.

Consequences and Significance

The episode's central reversal is not that Burke's remorse proves false. He recognizes the horror of the murders, sympathizes with the version of himself who wrote in despair, and says he would apologize to his victims and leave them alone if he could. But these recognitions coexist with his renewed determination to continue. He treats his remorse as a vulnerable mood that might expose him, not as a reason to abandon the murders. The same capacity for reflection that produces an admission also helps him plan how to avoid another collapse.

The confession also sharpens the practical danger surrounding Burke. The Voyager is damaged from the killing in Lichgate, and Burke knows the police may search for it even if they classify the incident as a hit-and-run rather than murder. He has to consider repairs, an insurance report, an explanation for Marjorie, and the possibility that the vehicle will be identified. In this context, destroying the confession belongs to a wider effort to contain evidence and keep his actions hidden.

Later, Burke worries that the strain could bring another weak moment in which he calls the authorities and destroys himself by revealing everything. That fear makes him want to finish his remaining killings sooner, not to surrender. The statement's movement—from a decision to confess, to a signed account, to a forgotten sheet, to a document marked for burning—thus gives concrete form to the conflict between conscience and self-preservation. Burke briefly writes an account that could end his campaign; then he turns its warning into a reason to proceed more cautiously.