Chester Burge Southern Scandal And The Dead Parrot

A parrot lies dead, a socialite is strangled, and a town that worships decorum can’t look away. We pull up a chair on the front porch and unpack one of Macon’s most confounding true crime stories—a case where respectability politics, race, and money twist every clue.

We trace Chester Burge from lightning-struck teenager and bootlegger to wealthy, abrasive landlord married to Mary Elizabeth Kennington Burge, a woman firmly seated in the city’s high society. When the Klan targets a property he rents to a Black family, public pressure spikes, and weeks later Mary is found dead in their Shirley Hills bedroom. No forced entry. Jewelry within reach. A dog locked in the basement. And the strangest detail of all: the silenced parrot. Police clear the staff, suspicion converges on Chester, and the courtroom becomes a stage where character stands trial alongside evidence.

What follows is a razor-edged examination of motive and proof. We explore the money locked in Mary’s name, testimony about violence, and a maintenance man’s claim that puts Chester’s fingerprints in the room the night of the killing. Jurors admit they dislike him but acquit for lack of proof—only for the story to swerve into an explosive second act: a 1960 Georgia sodomy charge involving his chauffeur. Power imbalances, racial dynamics, and midcentury morality collide as an appeal frees him, a late-life marriage raises eyebrows, and a Palm Beach house explosion writes a final, contested chapter.

Along the way, we ask what a community chooses to remember, what it tries to bury, and why certain mysteries refuse to stay quiet. If you’re drawn to Southern true crime, unsolved murders, and the social forces that shape a verdict, this one will stay with you. Listen, subscribe, and share your theory—who do you think the town got wrong?

Chapters

• 0:14 Two Roads To Southern Notoriety
• 1:37 A Front Porch For Dark Stories
• 4:17 Chester’s Early Life And Crimes
• 6:08 Marriage, Money, And Social Climbing
• 8:31 Klan Tensions And Rising Pressure
• 9:28 Mary Found Dead In Shirley Hills
• 12:58 Suspects, Odd Clues, And The Parrot
• 15:24 Town Gossip Turns On Chester
• 18:25 Motive, Madness, And Money Control
• 20:53 Acquittal And Tax Troubles
• 22:42 The Sodomy Charge And Appeal
• 24:16 Credits And Where To Find Us
• 24:27 A New Marriage And Fiery End

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:14

In nineteen sixties, Macon, Georgia, there were two ways a person or an entire family could rise to prominence. One, they could be a generous, old-moneyed family who doled out charity and favors like so much birdseed to the flocks in the city. That's the goal those in high society used to strive for in the South. Having money so plentiful and so old that you were both envied and courted for it. But there was another path to prominence, you know, a shortcut. It's simple, really. Do something outrageous, something disgraceful, do the unthinkable, and then do something even more shocking. In other words, scandalize the community. In the Deep South, a scandal is both whispered about and paraded around town. It's called a crying shame, and at the same time, it's the topic of salacious gossip. Yes, a good old-fashioned disgrace could assure one generations of notoriety. Every now and then, a family or a person comes along that the fine upstanding citizens of an old southern town would rather forget. Chester Burge was one of Macon's such wayward children. His story involves murder, a dead parrot, and forbidden sex, and all the cockamami insanity and loopy legality that one might expect from a long-ago court drama set in the Deep South. It's more mesmerizing than a really good story. I mean a story told by a friend among friends. An engaging tale, told in the right place at the right time, captures us. It captures our imagination. It takes us away from the here and now and carries us to the world of what if. When we were children, we'd hide under the covers, the light from our flashlights holding back the dark as we listened to the whispered tales of brave knights, or beautiful princesses, or scary monsters. Those days are long past for us as adults. We do, however, still spin our tails. The characters in our stories are no longer dragons and brave knights, rather, they're actual people who are our neighbors, perhaps our co-workers. Maybe we even go to church with them. And we don't huddle close under the covers anymore, holding flickering flashlights as our tales unfold. We meet on a wide, welcoming front porch, a place that cloaks us in safety and familiarity. We sit in swings or rocking chairs or rickety woven lawn chairs as we gather with friends. At the end of the day, when the soft light of dusk opens its arms to embrace nightfall, we're taken back to a time when the story is real. It's possible. So join me tonight, here on my front porch, won't you? As we slip into another tale that's rooted in both truth and in myth. And as night swallows the soft dusk, I'll turn on the light. You're gonna want that. The following podcast contains material that may be disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. Esther Burge was born in Macon, Georgia in 1904. His father, Charlie, was a plumber by trade. By all accounts, he was a decent man, though he wouldn't get much of a chance to be a dad to Chester. In 1912, Charlie was hit by a car when he was walking home from work one day. And tragically, the accident killed him. And in another rather freak occurrence, just a few years later, 17-year-old Chester was struck by lightning while milking a cow on his stepfather's farm. The strike killed the cow, and it very nearly killed Chester. Ten years later, trouble struck again, only this time it was because Chester was selling whiskey illegally. He was arrested twice on state prohibition charges, but when he was charged and convicted at the federal level, he was sentenced to serve a year and a day in federal prison. Esther's life must have taken a turn for the normal, and eventually he met and married a woman named Laureen, maiden named Dupriest. She was five years older than the groom, though she later claimed she had been told he was older than he really was. Their marriage hit the rocks within weeks as Lorreen discovered that her new husband's primary employment was as a local loan shark. The marriage lasted barely two months, but we'll get into that in a bit. She was attractive with a slender build and a regal appearance. Mary Elizabeth Kennington Burge was a wealthy socialite, and when she and Chester married, they began building their own wealth in real estate. Some might have called Chester a slumlord, but nonetheless, their business thrived and in no time at all, they became rich in their own right. While Chester and Mary made a good pair in business, their relationship was rocky and contentious at best. They were oil and water, and sometimes they were gasoline and fire. But this was 1960, and divorce for many was still an abomination, strictly forbidden. It was very likely that the couple had resolved to stay in their loveless marriage because to do otherwise would bring shame on them and on their families. So they stayed. In May 1960, Chester entered the hospital in Macon for a routine hernia surgery. He welcomed the rest. Just a month earlier, Ku Klux Klansmen had rallied outside a house in a white neighborhood, a house that Chester had rented to a black family, despite the fact that he was an outspoken racist. It's rather comical to note here that the clan also intended to light a cross on the lawn, but instead of a flaming cross, they brought an electric one. They couldn't find a place to plug it in, though, so the rally continued in the dark and fell rather flat as a result. Still, the unlit rally made newspaper headlines. As Chester laid in that hospital bed, he mulled the events of the past few months. The clan rally had rattled Mary, along with the rest of the homeowners in that white neighborhood, but Mary had been especially upset. She had warned her husband against renting that house to the family, and she'd been right, there was trouble. There were headlines. But Chester didn't care about the Klan, their demands, or their plug-in cross. He cared about the money. Period. You see, Chester preferred renting and lending to illiterate people because they couldn't read the predatory lending conditions in the contracts he provided them. He got rich off those people, but his unscrupulous practices didn't endear him to the upper crust. Mary had called him an uneducated boar, and maybe he was, but he was an uneducated boar who got chauffeured around in a Cadillac. He could afford to pay for his wife's upkeep, the clothes, the beauty parlor, the jewelry, and the endless charities. And he could afford the fine house in Shirley Hills. Nothing else mattered. At any rate, Chester lay there in that hospital bed, getting bathed by a rather attractive nurse and listening to the radio. Mary had visited him just the night before, and their exchanges were pleasant enough, but he was glad for her to leave. Imagine his surprise then when he heard on the radio news the morning after her visit that his wife Mary had been found dead in their Shirley Hills home. She had been strangled, the announcer said, right there in their bedroom. Police had found no evidence of forced entry. Investigators told the newspaper that Mary's killer apparently caught her with both hands by the throat from behind. A bone in her throat was fractured, and deep pressure damage was found in the tissues. She had a cut on her left hand, bruises and a cut on her face, bruises on her back, and fingernail marks on her throat that were apparently made by Mary Birge herself, trying to loosen the hands squeezing her neck. To make the mystery even darker, the Birge's pet parrot was also found dead in its cage right next to the bed. A dead wife, a dead parrot, and$250,000 worth of jewels that could have been easily found by an intruder if he had just opened the bedside drawer. Who could have committed such a dreadful act in such a nice neighborhood and to such a lovely woman? And why on earth did the murderer also kill a bird? Chester was stunned by the news of his wife's murder. So stunned, in fact, that he demanded to be taken by ambulance to his home to survey the scene himself. His doctors and the police obliged, and that same day, Chester Burge was carried by stretcher into his house and the scene of the crime. Nothing was missing, as far as he could tell, not even the$250,000 worth of jewels. As for the sight of his wife lying there in bed, dead at the age of 55 and lifeless in her nightgown, he said it was hideous to look at. Brutal. I never saw anything so horrible. The fiends almost tore her finger off, trying to get a ring. Detectives watched Chester closely as he was carried through the large house, up the staircase, and past several bedrooms, before turning right into the bedroom he shared with his wife. They watched his face and his mannerisms as he looked at Mary's brutalized body, and at the room and furnishings that had otherwise been left untouched. There were certainly no signs of forced entry, though Chester did tell police that$5,000 and some diamonds were missing. Otherwise, there was just this poor woman, her hyoid bone broken, her neck badly bruised, and her ring finger nearly severed, lying dead in their big four-poster bed. Oh, their parrot was also found dead in the room, and their dog had been locked in the basement. Very odd indeed. Right away, police arrested the Burgess chauffeur and their maid, as they seemed to be obvious suspects. But as bizarre evidence kept surfacing, there were murmurs of Ku Klux Klan involvement in Mary's murder. After all, the clan had made their displeasure with the Burgess known when they rallied just days earlier on the front lawn of a house. That suspicion soon led to a dead end, as did the maid who had been arrested on the charges of murder and burglary. Detectives soon learned that while the chauffeur seemed to be innocent of the charges, he would prove to be a key part of a bigger story of the marriage of Chester and Mary Burge. Well, people in Macon felt that they knew right away who killed Mary. They believed it had to be Chester, but why? Well, around town Chester had quite a reputation and not a good one. Townspeople called him a bootlegger and a slumlord, and they knew him to be arrogant, demanding, and pretentious. Burge was always trying to insert himself into the high society into which his wife was accepted, and he constantly sought favorable publicity. He failed at both. No, Chester Burge didn't have many friends in the town of Macon. Like at our murder scene, Chester finished touring his home in his pajamas and bathrobe, and he returned to the hospital to continue his convalescence. That same afternoon, he actually entertained the questions of a local reporter right there in his hospital room as he continued to listen to radio news of his wife's murder. And all the while, the police watched. Once the chauffeur, the maid, and the clan were cleared, investigators took Chester into custody, and a Bibb County grand jury indicted him for his wife's murder. But why would he have done it? Well, even though Chester Burge was considered to be a wealthy man, all of the wealth was in his wife's name. And that's because Chester had been declared legally incompetent years earlier. You see, strangely enough, Chester's own mother had checked him into Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, years before. Why did she do that, you might ask? Well, when Chester's first wife divorced him, she claimed that in addition to his being an unscrupulous loan shark, he forced her to have sex with him several times a day, and it was always against her will. So even though at the time marital rape was not considered a crime, he was committed to Central State Hospital or the Lunatic Asylum, as Maconites referred to the place. This was the same mental hospital to which Anjette Lyles was committed just a few years earlier. You might remember Anjette from our last meeting. Miss Lyles served up some dangerous southern cuisine to those closest to her, and instead of finding her guilty of murder and sending her to the electric chair, a judge sent her to this same hospital, where, ironically, she eventually became a cook for the women inmates there. But back to the mystery of Mary's murder. Police knew that Chester was the only person, besides Mary and the maid, of course, who knew that Mary's beloved parrot squawked loud and incessantly when anything at all happened in the bedroom. And who else would know about the family dog and care enough to lock it in the basement? Someone who could so brutally kill a slight woman, who had probably been asleep at the time of the attack, would surely kill a dog also, wouldn't he? Chester's fingerprints were found on a closet door in the bedroom he shared with Mary. Of course, that could be expected since he lived there, but a maintenance man swore in court that he had scrubbed that door thoroughly the day before Mary's murder. If Chester's fingerprints were on that door, then he must have been in that room the night Mary was murdered, states attorneys concluded. Chester's own mother testified to having seen him beat Mary on more than one occasion, anytime she tried to block some of his unscrupulous business practices. It seemed clear to prosecutors that the circumstances, the Burge's unhappy marriage, Chester's cantankerous personality, and the money that his wife controlled were all clear motives for murder. Besides, who else stood to gain financially from her death? Well, even though the circumstantial evidence mounted high, and even though Chesterburge seemed to be the equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard to jurors, he was acquitted of Mary's murder. The prosecution, according to the judge, just did not meet the burden of proof. After the murder trial was over, one juror said that he didn't like Chester and even wanted to convict him. But Burge's defense attorneys, again, the very same team that defended on Jet Lyles just two years earlier, said that while Chester was not likable, he didn't murder his wife. A man could be highly unlikable, they contended, and still not be a murderer. A repulsive man wasn't necessarily a murdering man. The jurors agreed, and Chester Burge walked away a free man. Trial took its toll on Chester, no doubt. He received another blow when he found out that Mary's will had prompted an IRS investigation, and her estate, which is to say his entire company, owed over$342,000 in back taxes. And even though Chester was not convicted of murdering his wife, he was only free of public scrutiny for a moment. You see, during the course of the trial, another piece of evidence was presented to the grand jury. The media was having a field day with the shock and the scandal of the murder, but the real shock was the second charge presented against Chester. He was said to have had unlawful carnal knowledge of his chauffeur, Lewis Roosevelt. Yes, Chester and Lewis, it seems, had committed sodomy, and in Georgia in 1960, that was a serious offense. The prosecution's case was simple. Chester had begun having inappropriate relations with Lewis shortly after he hired him in 1957, and these acts had continued throughout Lewis's employment. According to police evidence, Chester had deliberately hired a man on parole from jail so that he could threaten him with having it revoked if he didn't go along. Lewis was the state star witness, clearly cooperating in the hope of avoiding prosecution himself. Other witnesses included Chester's previous chauffeur, who claimed he'd also been propositioned but had turned his employer down. The defense ferociously defended their client, presenting no testimony but calling into question the believability of such outlandish claims, and from Negroes no less. Jester Burge was convicted of sodomy, but he then claimed that he had tuberculosis. Based on medical confirmation, he was freed on bail pending appeal. While the appeals process was working its way through the courts, he beat a fast retreat to Camden, South Carolina. There he met up with an old friend named Anna Dicky Olson, a former politician and the widow of a lifelong friend of Chester's. Anna was 75 years old, 18 years Chester's senior, so a few eyebrows were raised when the pair were married in April 1961. In the meantime, Chester's appeal of the sodomy conviction was successful. The state chose not to retry Chester, and again, he was a free man. Chester and Anna celebrated with a honeymoon cruise, after which they decided to move to Palm Beach, Florida. The marital bliss didn't last long. Anna's daughter had been opposed to the marriage from the start, and she was convinced that her mother was going to be Chester's next victim. In August 1963, Anna Birge made a trip to Macon, and her friends and family advised her not to go back to Florida. She didn't, and she would never see Chester alive again. On October 7, 1963, Chester Burge's house in Palm Beach exploded. He survived the initial blast and with his hair and clothes aflame, ran out into the street in front of the house. He later died of his burns in the hospital. There was no one else in the house at the time. It was reported in the Florida papers as a gas explosion, though the Macon papers were convinced it was either suicide or murder. The official verdict ruled the tragedy an accidental explosion. Chester Burge was buried in an unmarked grave in Macon, Georgia. The graves of such villainous characters are often vandalized, so perhaps the sextons of the cemetery simply didn't want to deal with that kind of activity. Or it could be that the town of Macon did its best to forget that he ever existed. No one was ever convicted of killing Mary Birch. You can find me on social media and check out my website at Carol Townsend.com. As always, thanks for listening, and if you're enjoying these tales of Southern history and lore, I hope you'll tell your friends. Subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Play, iHeart, and anywhere you listen. The book A Peculiar Tribe of People by J Hutto.