Kalamazoo — In 1929, the Burgess family invited 75-year-old Etta L. Fairchild over for dinner. They bludgeoned her to death, wrapped up her body in a rug, and hid it in the cistern behind the house, claiming she was a witch who had cursed them and killed many others. They believed they were her next victims.
To this day, ghostly footprints lay in the sidewalk, even though the house they dined in was demolished years ago. Screams still echo on the spot through the night, a neighbor told me, although these days they come from the homeless camped nearby.
When police showed up at 439 Ransom St. around midnight on July 19, 1929, they found blood on a rug and on the walls. While Eugene Burgess initially denied they had done anything, they eventually confessed to police.
Burgess coolly told police that he’d done the city a favor with a lead pipe and a hammer. He said Fairchild was a witch who had cast an “evil mental influence” over his family.
His confession sounded like something out of “The Crucible”— not what you typically find in a police report.
“She could kill people through her mental processes, and she had caused my daughter, Eugenia, to become ill,” Burgess said, according to the New York Times.
“Mrs. Fairchild has caused the death of hundreds of people. She killed my father and mother. She killed Mrs. Irene Loveland, who was a Christian Science practitioner. It was through her evil mental influence that many people were made ill.”
“I have done the right thing,” Burgess exclaimed. “That woman could make you have any kind of disease. I stagger lots of times, and there are times when I can’t see. I have aches and pains in my head and arms and I have trouble breathing.”
“She’s to blame for it all,” he continued. “If you men felt like me you wouldn’t blame me. I know you wouldn’t feel sorry. It was either Mrs. Fairchild’s life or the lives of my family.”
Burgess told police that he walked up behind her and hit her with a lead pipe and then dragged her to the living room where he took her life with a hammer.
The family then tied her up in a rug, attached a 75-pound cement block to her feet, and placed her body in a cistern behind the house, according to the Associated Press account of the murder.
Pearl Burgess said Fairchild had shown her a list of victims and provided some of the names to police. Newspapers report the people on the list had all died of natural causes. The Burgesses were convinced their 17-year-old daughter, Eugenia, was next.
“She cast a spell over Eugenia, our daughter,” Burgess told police. “She became ill the first time she met Mrs. Fairchild. Then she kept coming back and cast more spells over Eugenia. I just couldn’t stand it any longer.”
The Burgesses and Etta Fairchild were both Christian Scientists, but the Burgesses had been attending meetings for a “Higher Thought” assembly, which focused on connecting to the metaphysical world.
Fairchild told the Burgesses stories of witchcraft and “invisible power” which she possessed, according to the Detroit Free Press account. The Burgesses believed every word.
“She was getting ready to kill us,” Pearl Burgess told the prosecutor. “She was working on my husband, making his heart beat unnaturally and we had to kill her or be killed ourselves.”
Fairchild’s death wasn’t the last one the family had to endure. A week before he was scheduled to stand trial, Eugene Burgess hung himself in the middle of the night from a pipe in the prison bathroom.
Upon hearing of her husband’s death, Pearl was reportedly on the “verge of a nervous breakdown” and was “too hysterical to comment at all upon the murder which led to the arrest of the Burgesses.”
The Burgess children, Burnett and Eugenia, were not charged and were released within a week of the murder.
Pearl was deemed unsound of mind and sent to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There are reports she may have eventually been able to live with Eugenia, but the family’s history faded in obscurity as they stayed away from the media.
The house where Etta Fairchild was murdered has since been destroyed, but you can see where it stood on West Ransom Street.
A neighbor says there’s still no peace here on the 400-block. He says he hears the transient crying out through the night. He said men can be heard laying hands on each other or using drugs.
There’s a set of footprints in the cement sidewalk in front of the property that lead nowhere, and it’s not hard to imagine where the cistern would have been, back behind the house going deep into the earth.
The years have all but buried the hex killing of Etta Fairchild in the city’s history. It’s the stuff of Salem set right here in Southwest Michigan, and it’s haunting to this day.
Brendan Clarey is deputy editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
