Burke lures and murders Hauck Exman

Burke lures and murders Hauck Exman by turning the promise of employment into a trap. A fabricated interview draws Exman to a restaurant, but when that approach fails, Burke finds another way to gain his confidence: first as a shopper in a department store, then as a stranded motorist asking for help. Exman’s willingness to respond to an apparent job opportunity and later assist a stranger becomes the opening Burke uses to kill him.

Causes and Background

The attack grows out of the labor market that has kept Burke unemployed since he was laid off from the paper industry. He describes layoffs spreading across industries while the number of companies firing people exceeds the number hiring them. Employers can choose among many experienced applicants, often finding someone who already knows the precise job and will accept lower pay and fewer benefits. Burke believes his broad knowledge of paper could qualify him for many managerial positions, but sees employers’ abundance of candidates as removing any incentive to train him.

His search has offered little explanation or relief: he studies advertisements and sends résumés, usually receiving no response. In the résumé pool, he sees applicants with backgrounds like his and, in some cases, qualifications or education that appear stronger. They represent the competition he fears most—not because they are strangers to his trade, but because they might rank ahead of him for a scarce job. The pool has a specific history: Burke locates it in the wave of paper-industry downsizing around two years earlier, with the résumés in his files coming from people laid off between six or seven months before and six or seven months after his own dismissal.

Burke has already converted that competition into a killing scheme. He places a false advertisement in a trade journal to collect résumés, then selects people he fears are better qualified for a particular position. He recognizes that the applicants are not the true source of the economic pressure: he identifies corporate bosses and stockholders as the real enemy, even while directing violence at fellow managers. His reasoning makes the contradiction plain. The men are rivals for jobs, but they are also unemployed workers trapped in the same contest.

The False Interview

Burke’s plan for Hauck Exman begins with a letter addressed to Exman. It offers him a Friday, June 20 meeting with a personnel director, Ms. Laurie Kilpatrick, who is supposedly interviewing in the western New York region. Burke understands that the letter is dangerous because it creates a trail and could alert his intended victim that he is in danger. Yet he is desperate: he cannot use the gun and cannot get to, or even locate, Exman. He sends the letter from the mailbox outside the post office in Wildbury, frightened by the risk but unable to think of another approach.

The letter returns to Burke. On Tuesday, June 17, he sits in the Voyager outside the Wildbury post office and examines Exman’s writing along the bottom of the page. Burke had worried that Exman might detach and return only the portion requesting a response, keeping the invitation itself as evidence for the police. Instead, Exman has taken the bait. The returned letter confirms that he wants the job enough to participate in the supposed interview, giving Burke a meeting he can use to lure him into the open.

On Friday afternoon, Burke waits down the block from the Coach House. He has phoned the previous day to reserve a table for two under Kilpatrick’s name, arranging for Exman to be told that the reservation exists but the other party has not arrived. Burke expects Exman to wait in the restaurant’s reception area. At almost one o’clock, Exman comes outside, shorter than Burke expected but compact, stocky, and in good physical condition. He looks along the block, appears uncertain, then turns and walks toward Burke. The arrangement has brought him to the intended place, but it has not yet given Burke control of him.

Improvisation and Attack

The scheme shifts to Dolmen’s. Burke is among the menswear racks, deciding where to go, when Exman emerges from a doorway between the suits and coats. Exman smiles and approaches. For a moment Burke is bewildered and frightened, ready to run; then he notices Exman’s oval blue-and-white name tag, marked with the store’s name and Mr. Exman’s. Burke understands that Exman is working there. Rather than retreat, he returns the smile and pretends to need a summer sport jacket that he cannot choose without his wife. The excuse turns an encounter that threatens to expose him into a brief, ordinary exchange.

That evening, Burke sets up a roadside appeal. At five minutes to nine, he opens the driver’s door of the Voyager, letting the interior light shine, and leaves the hood open. Exman notices the signs of trouble and calls out to ask whether Burke needs help. When Exman asks about a flashlight, Burke offers to get one. As Exman reaches toward him for it, Burke sprays Mace into his face. Exman cries out and covers his eyes. Burke drops the can, takes up a hammer, and strikes Exman twice on the temple; the first blow cracks his skull.

Consequences and Significance

Burke carries the limp Exman around to the passenger side of the car, struggling under his weight as Exman’s feet drag between his own. He has spread a clear plastic tarp over the seat and floor. He heaves Exman onto it and pushes him fully inside, then joins the slow traffic leaving the area, turns onto Route 9 toward Kingston and the bridge, and heads home. The change from invitation to attack has been followed by the practical work of moving the body; the false interview has not ended at the restaurant but has expanded into a planned, mobile deception.

The killing sharpens the moral fracture in Burke’s campaign. Earlier, he could describe killing a competitor as self-defense on behalf of his family, mortgage, and future. Yet he also recognizes the irony of targeting the other laid-off managers: they are not his enemy, and even Ralph Fallon is not his enemy. After killing Exman, Burke names him as someone who should have been an ally against their common enemies, not a person to be clawed over scraps while those above remain untouched or indifferent. That recognition does not undo the act. Instead, the sequence shows how Burke’s language of survival and employment has made fellow victims of the same labor crisis into targets, while his own moments of moral clarity arrive alongside, rather than before, his violence.