“You wouldn’t do this for such a little thing, would you?” The Murder of Walter Raleigh Robins, 1926.

It was Saturday morning, October 16, 1926, and unusually early for callers.  Ruth Hobson, a maid at a house across the street, glanced out the window and noticed a man on the porch of 1603 West Grace Street as did William Lyons, who was making a delivery to a nearby address for the City Ice Company. The house at 1603 was that of Walter Raleigh Robins, a dignified and bespectacled 66-year-old Richmond real estate broker, and his family.  Robins went to his foyer and saw there was young man outside, opened the door, and had a brief conversation with him. 

Walter Raleigh Robins, Sr., 1860-1926.  From the Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 17, 1926.

Robins’ wife, Clara, overheard the two men talking but only caught one phrase spoken by her husband, apparently in disbelief when a gun was produced by the caller: “You wouldn’t do this for such a little thing, would you?”  Before she could react to what sounded like a threat to Walter, two gunshots were heard, a sound that blasted through the Robins home and brought the entire household streaming down the stairs.  At the bottom they found a light gray haze of gun smoke in the air and Walter Robins on his back in the entryway, bright arterial blood streaming across the tile floor and puddling around a five-shot revolver. 

The door still hung open and Clara Robins rushed out onto the front porch only to see the assailant turning south at the corner at Grace and Lombardy and disappearing.  As family members telephoned for an ambulance, Clara knelt on the floor beside her husband and asked who did this to him, but one of the shots had hit him in the neck and all Robins could do was sputter and cough up more blood before becoming unconscious.  Ambulance attendants arrived at the blood-soaked hysterical scene and took Robins to Stuart Circle Hospital where he died that afternoon without making a statement or identifying the man who shot him.

 

The home of Walter and Clara Robins at 1603 West Grace Street.  Images like this of long-gone Richmond buildings can sometimes be found in the City’s Real Estate records as scans of the old, paper archives are often linked to the modern record for a particular property.

 

The site of the now demolished Robins house today.

 

The front-page article that trumpeted the shocking news of a respected Richmond businessman shot down in his own home also announced the authorities expected an arrest in the case “in a few hours.”  The police had a description of a slight young White man from the maid and the iceman who saw him on the Robins’ porch, and there was the chilling phrase overheard by Clara Robins just before the sound of the gunshots.  Walter Robins was involved with many real estate transactions and loans across the city, and his last words seemed to indicate his murder was somehow linked to his business dealings.

The police began working on the theory that the young man seen leaving after the shooting was a business associate or perhaps a disgruntled debtor.  Robins was involved with multiple Richmond real estate transactions and loans as evidenced by his many appearances in the Legal Notices in local newspapers. The overheard fateful phrase seemed to reflect an irrational rage on the part of a borrower.  “Reasons for such a bitter feeling toward the real-estate operator, police said, could not be believed, other than through such a transaction,” opined the Times-Dispatch.  In the meantime, the police had the murder weapon and began the task of tracing its ownership.

The funeral for Walter Raleigh Robins was held in the parlor of his home at 1603 West Grace on October 18, two days after his murder just feet away in his foyer.  The funeral cortege left the home and wound its way through the city to the Robins plot in Riverview Cemetery.

 

The grave marker of Walter Raleigh Robins and his wife, Clara, in Richmond’s Riverview Cemetery.  Photo by Delane Randolph on Find a Grave.com.

 

At first the murder investigation moved quickly as the Richmond police announced the day after Robins’ funeral that they had both a suspect and a motive.  Edward C. Burnett was a young man who worked for the Richmond Street Cleaning Department and who lived with his wife and young daughter at 1219 North Twenty-Seventh Street in North Church Hill.  Burnett matched the description of the assailant given by the two witnesses, and the R.P.D. traced the revolver used in the killing to him.  Even more damning, though, was the history of business dealings between the suspect and Robins.

The records in the now-defunct office of the City of Richmond High Sheriff revealed that Robins loaned Burnett sixty dollars in July 1920.  Years later, Robins’ son W. R. Robins, Jr. recalled, “The money had been loaned to Burnett when he came to his father, then his employer, and informed him that unless he had the money he would go to prison.  Mr. Robins loaned Burnett the $60.00 with a promissory note as security.” Although it was supposed to be paid back within sixty days, it was more than four years later that Robins finally acted to collect the money as Burnett had not made any payment on the debt.  In November 1924 Robins went to court and sued Burnett for the amount which had grown to $70.40 with court costs and interest.

No explanation is given for Robins’ intentional delay in acting against Burnett, but when Burnett went to the Street Cleaning Department office to get his paycheck November 15, 1926, he found it had finally been attached by Walter Robins and his wages garnisheed to pay his debt.  “Police allege that this situation facing the young man caused him to lose control of himself.  They go further, for they said that he planned the trip to the home of Robins, and after threatening the aged man, shot him down.”

The headline on the front page of the Times-Dispatch on October 19 announced “Police Seeking Burnett on a Warrant Charging He Killed W. R. Robins,” and, the newspaper assured its readers, that “Officers Sure of Finding Man in Short Time.”  The Newport News Daily Press said the authorities in Richmond “Expect Arrest in a Few Hours of Slayer of Aged Realtor; Think Hiding Place Known.”  When interviewed, Richmond Lieutenant of Detective R. L. Bryant said he was “still sanguine of success in the man-hunt.”  In fact, the Richmond police were completely frustrated in their search for Edward C. Burnett, and he was never seen again after that last glimpse of the murderer hustling around the corner as he fled down Lombardy Street.

 

Edward C. Burnett rounded this corner at Lombardy and West Grace after fleeing the Robins house and was never seen again.

 

A reporter went to Burnett’s home to interview his wife, Lottie, on North Twenty-Seventh Street and produced an account of a young, terrified woman with a child, both of whose lives were completely derailed by the actions of Burnett,  Although incomprehensible today, the records of the Bureau of Vital Statistics show that Lottie and Edward Burnett were married when she was 13 years old, and after only a year of marriage they divorced in 1921 with Lottie specifying “adultery” as the reason for her divorce application.  Apparently, the couple reconciled, considered themselves still married, and later had a child.

The reporter noticed the young age of Lottie Burnett: “She had not seen the husband, this frail girl-wife – for she appears to be but a little girl herself – since Friday night.  The very night when Burnett learned that his wages as an employee of the City Street Cleaning Department had been attached for an old debt.”  Lottie Burnett was pictured as “Pacing restlessly up and down the short, bare hallway of her home, her 14-months-old daughter tightly in her arms” and repeating, “I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.”

Burnett’s wife was pressed about what she knew about her husband’s dealings with Robins: “’Do you remember when this trouble first started with Robins?’ she was asked – ‘when he borrowed the sixty dollars?’  ‘That was before I knew my husband,’ she responded.  Did he ever talk to you about the suit Robins had brought against him – about the attachment of his salary?’  Her big eyes widened and her jaws clenched.  ‘I don’t remember.’”  The interview concludes with the poignant passage: “But the little wife, nervous and anxious – and with that peculiar feminine understanding few understand – paces and paces the floor of her home, waiting and waiting for something.”

 

 

The house on the right at 1219 North Twenty-Seventh Street was the home of Lottie and Edward Burnett and their young daughter in 1926.

 

Richmond police found Burnett’s mother and sister living in a “lonely cabin” on the edge of Bow Swamp in eastern Henrico County.  They searched the swamp for the fugitive but found no trace of him. Police were told by his family they hadn’t seen him since before the Robins murder.  Mrs. Louise Burnett, the wanted man’s mother, volunteered to the police that her husband, Edward’s father, was insane when he died, and that Edward’s other sister died while an inmate in Eastern State mental hospital in Williamsburg.

 

An article about the plight of Lottie Burnett, wife of the murderer of W.R. Robins.

 

Walter Robins’ family began the long process of trying to repair their shattered lives, daily crossing the spot inside their front door where Walter Robins had fallen, shot dead in his own home over $70.00.  On Church Hill, Lottie Burnett attempted to provide for her daughter in face of the inexplicable turn their lives had taken.  Weeks passed and the pursuit of Burnett went cold until November 17 when a body was found floating under a pier at the Newport News Shipbuilding docks.  Dr. Samuel Downing, the Newport News City Coroner, estimated the man had been dead for about a month, but the state of decay was such that it was impossible to identify it or even determine the corpse’s race.  The News Leader reported, “Efforts to identify the body of the man found floating under a pier at Newport News recently as that of E. C. Burnett…. have apparently ended in failure.  In response to a letter sent out by Chief of Police R. B. Jordan giving all available data as to Burnett, a communication was received today saying that it was impossible to go further with the identification because of the state of decomposition in which the body was found.”  

 

Richmond News-Leader, November 20, 1926.

 

The dead man was consigned to the Newport News potter’s field, (now Potter’s Field Historic Park), which was used to bury more than five hundred of the city’s poor or unknown dead between 1893 and 1961.  John Burnett, the murderer’s brother, said he thought the body in Newport News was Edward’s, but authorities refused to exhume it from its pauper’s grave for further examination.  If that was indeed Edward C. Burnett floating under the pier in Newport News, his self-obliteration was complete with his final resting place among the other unwanted dead marked only by a featureless expanse of grass.

A summary of crime in Richmond published in the Times-Dispatch at the end of December 1926 noted that Burnett was still at large.  “It is only a question of time, however, until the alleged murderer is caught or is known to be dead.”  The one-year anniversary of the Robins murder was marked by a small article in a Richmond newspaper on October 17, 1927, under the headline, “Young Murderer Still At Large – Years Efforts to Capture Slayer of Local Real Estate Dealer Fails.”  Burnett “has successfully eluded every effort of the Richmond Police Department to bring about his arrest… A considerable reward has been placed for his arrest, but without avail.”

Eight years passed, and things were very different in Depression-era Richmond compared to 1926.  Newspapers in the city in 1934 were packed with accounts of kidnappings and killings and the crime career of John Dillinger was closely followed in the press.  Richmond itself had been roiled by a series of spectacular heists on the streets of the city, one of which yielded $60,000 in cash.  The other gained nothing more than a Federal Reserve delivery truck driver being shot dead and a subsequent death sentence for members of the infamous Tri-State Gang.  In an incident that gained national attention, the two principals of that Philadelphia gang, Robert Mais and Walter Legenza, shot their way out of the Richmond jail and made a clean getaway in October 1934.  A series of stories by reporter John Daffron in the Times-Dispatch titled, “Men They Didn’t Get” criticized the ineptitude of the Richmond police and their lack of progress in the face of astonishing growth of crime in the city.  One article in the series cited the lack of resolution in the Robins murder and concluded glumly, “The case still stands as ‘unsolved.’”

 

The sidewalk steps that Edward Burnett walked up to confront Walter Robins are all that remains of the Robins home on West Grace Street.

 

Robins’ wife joined him in Riverside Cemetery seven years after her husband’s murder. Lottie Burnett never saw her husband again after he hurriedly left their house on that Friday afternoon in October 1926 and their renovated home is today probably a far cry from the blue-collar working man’s house the Burnetts knew in the 1920s.  The Robins house at 1603 West Grace was torn down in 1966, taking with it memories of that terrible Saturday morning of forty years before.  Today the site is a parking lot for the Stuart Circle Apartments, whose giant shadow falls like a pall over the site of the Robins family home.  The steps that Edward Burnett mounted seconds before confronting Walter Robins are all that remain of the house, and today appropriately lead….nowhere.

Because of the lack of resolution to the Robins murder, the story subsides into an overwhelming, implacable silence, pressed down and held in place by the weight of a century.  It is the stillness of an early Saturday morning in the Fan District, the silent breeze that blows through the granite memorials of Riverview Cemetery, and the quiet lapping of dark, oily water under a shipyard pier.

 

-Selden