Джордж Энгланд: Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 62, No. 2, October 3, 1931

At four thirty-seven o’clock the next morning, Burke was again loaded into that same armored car bristling with machine guns and started on his last trip, a ride into exile.

“This life sentence doesn’t bother me much,” he said as he stepped into the car.

Before he left the jail, Burke autographed a book, “On the Up and Up,” written by Bruce Barton, and handed it to Sheriff Cutler. It was signed: “Optimistically, Fred R. Burke.”

“Barton’s my favorite author, you know,” he told the sheriff.

Twelve hours later the great iron gates of Marquette prison, known as “Siberia” to criminals in Michigan because of its location in the desolate wastes of the upper peninsula, swung open to admit “the most dangerous criminal in the United States.” He was the one thousand and first prisoner to enter the penitentiary, and the number 5293 was stenciled in large figures across the left breast of his blue denim shirt.

His remark that the life sentence didn’t bother him much took on a real significance the next day when Prosecutor Cunningham admitted that Burke, accused of the most ruthless slaughter of modern times, a dozen or more wanton killings and innumerable other crimes, will be eligible for a parole in twenty-five years, and that good behavior may reduce his term to eighteen or twenty years!

The armored car was almost in sight of the gray stone prison walls when Burke turned to Sheriff Cutler and said suddenly:

“You know, you fellows wouldn’t be bringing me up here if I hadn’t got drunker than a lord on grape wine that day I shot that copper.”

All the events narrated in “Spook Crooks” are true, and their details appear on police blotters and in the records of investigations made by the Society of American Magicians cooperating with police and prosecutors. Names and places are disguised, to spare the feelings of the victims. Detective Fiction Weekly, now aiding in the exposure of fortune tellers and fake mediums, wants readers who have been victimized by these charlatans to write to this magazine and describe their experiences. Your name will be held in strictest confidence, and the powerful Society of American Magicians will privately investigate.

This story began in Detective Fiction Weekly for September 12