Burke Devore writes a confession in the early hours at Dawson’s Motel, briefly naming his unemployment, his false job advertisement, and four murders as parts of one crime. He ends the night resolved to surrender, but by morning has taken the confession away to destroy it. The episode makes the document both a clear account of what he has done and a measure of how quickly he retreats from the consequences he claims to accept.

The decision to confess

The confession begins after Burke lies awake, repeatedly seeing the event on Nether Street and watching the clock-radio’s red numbers advance. At 5:19, he decides that the killing has to stop and that he must make a clean breast of what he has done. His exhaustion gives way to alert calm. The decision is presented not as a plan formed over time, but as a sharp turn in a sleepless night: he will atone, do no more, and put his actions into writing.

There is no stationery at the motel, so Burke searches the old dark-wood dresser. Its drawers are lined with paper; the sheet he chooses is stiff and thick, smoother on one side. He notices its simple manufacture, a detail that briefly brings him close to tears because even in crisis his attention still registers the material qualities of paper. He writes on the rougher side at the table. That modest surface becomes the place where he sets out, in orderly form, acts that have otherwise been driven by calculation, panic, and violence.

What the document admits

Burke identifies himself as fifty-one, gives his address in Fairbourne, and describes nearly two years of unemployment after a working life that had continued since his service in the U.S. Army. He presents the loss of work as the condition that changed him, while also making the causal chain explicit: he placed a false advertisement in a trade journal, received résumés from other unemployed people in his field, and chose to kill those he feared were better qualified for a particular job. He wanted employment again, and says that desire led him to do things he would once have thought impossible. His confession therefore records both the crime and the contestable explanation he gives himself for it.

He then accounts for four victims, distinguishing intention from what happened. Two weeks earlier, on Thursday, May 8, he shot Herbert Everly outside his house on Churchwarden Lane in Fall City. His second intended victim was Edward Ricks, whom he shot at home in Longholme the previous Thursday. Edward’s wife was also killed: Burke says she mistook him for an older man who had been having an affair with her young daughter, and that the confusion led him to kill her too. The account does not make the second death deliberate in the same way as the first; it records how an encounter that went wrong widened the violence.

The final murder in the document is that of Everett Dynes, whom Burke deliberately ran down with his automobile the night before, in Lichgate. He apologizes to the victims and their families, expresses self-hatred, and says he does not know how he can go on. He signs the confession but leaves it undated. Calling it his last résumé gives the document a grim double meaning: it is an account of his crimes, but also one more piece of paper produced by a man whose life has become organized around employment and the competition for it.

A resolution with an escape route

Even as he finishes writing, Burke has not settled what he will do the next day. He considers shooting himself with the Luger pistol in the pocket of his raincoat, which hangs from the closet rod, or driving back to Lichgate to give the statement to a police officer. He rejects suicide as something he does not think he can do, and concludes that he must atone and pay for his crimes by turning himself in. He leaves the page on the table, switches off the lights, and returns to bed calm enough to believe he will sleep.

The morning changes the meaning of that calm. Before leaving, Burke goes back into the room and sees the confession on the table; he had forgotten it in the hysterical exhaustion of the night. Reading it brings back the dread and terror he had felt, but he also treats the page as evidence of a weak moment. He says he meant what he wrote, yet focuses on how badly the two most recent killings went: after Herbert Everly’s murder, which had gone smoothly, the next two had become disasters. His response is not to reaffirm the surrender decision. Instead, he decides he must be more careful and patient before making another move.

Burke folds the confession and puts it in his pocket, intending to burn it elsewhere. The following day, while Marjorie is away at her movie-house job, he burns it in the backyard. He later fears that tension and despair might bring another weak moment in which he calls the authorities and destroys himself. This fear makes the confession’s destruction more than a change of mind: he treats his own impulse to confess as a danger to the campaign he still wants to finish. The document’s precise admissions do not lead to police, restitution, or an end to the scheme. They are converted into ashes, while Burke turns his attention back to the remaining résumés and the conspicuous damage to his car.

Significance of the abandoned statement

The episode hinges on the difference between telling the truth and accepting its consequences. On the page, Burke names his victims, identifies how he selected them, and acknowledges his guilt; away from the immediate pressure of the night, he returns to his plan and destroys the written record. His account is not simply false: he says he meant what he wrote. But sincerity at 5:19 proves temporary, and the confession becomes another object he can manage, fold away, and remove.

The paper also draws together the two forms of work that dominate his thinking. He first attends to its manufacture, then fills it with the history of his crimes, and finally labels it, in effect, as one last résumé. Its orderly lines impose a momentary structure on the killings, but cannot make Burke accountable to anyone beyond himself. By taking the confession rather than leaving it for discovery, he turns a declared intention to surrender into concealment and resumes the logic that had made other jobseekers appear to him as obstacles.