Cordelia Botkin - Background To The Murders

Background To The Murders

In 1895, Cordelia Botkin met John Preston Dunning while he was bicycling in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Although she was then 41, nine years his senior, and both of them were married, John Dunning was smitten with her. Dunning was a highly-regarded reporter for the Associated Press, having completed overseas assignments in Samoa and Chile. He had been promoted to superintendent of the Associated Press's Western Division bureau in San Francisco. Dunning had been stationed in Samoa in 1889, when the island had been the scene of a naval confrontation between the United States, Great Britain, and the Imperial Germany over the reigning monarch in Samoa. There was a division of sentiment by the local chiefs between at least three possible successors. There was a strong possibility of a war breaking out, but typhoon hit the island, sinking most of the German and American warships. The sole British ship, H.M.S. Calliope, managed to get to sea and ride out the storm.

Dunning's account of the naval disaster and its consequences was considered first rate reporting at that time and was frequently reprinted.

In 1896, Dunning's religious wife, Mary Elizabeth (Penington) Dunning, obviously upset by her husband's marital indiscretions, left him and returned with their little daughter to Dover, Delaware, to the home of her father, former Congressman John B. Penington. By then Botkin had become Dunning's lover and constant companion. Botkin was estranged from her own husband, a grain broker in Stockton, California, but he supported her with regular remittances. Dunning, a heavy drinker, was fired by the Associated Press when it was discovered he had embezzled $4,000 in office funds to pay his gambling debts. He was next let go by newspapers in Salt Lake City and San Francisco because of his habitual drunkenness, and moved into Botkin's hotel.

The affair lasted almost three years, but ended when Dunning was re-hired in March 1898 as the agency's lead reporter for what would become the Spanish-American War. When he left San Francisco, he told the weeping Botkin that he would not return. He reconciled with his wife before leaving for Cuba, where he helped save survivors of the Spanish battleships that were sunk at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba on 2 July 1898. Unfortunately for him, his own work as a reporter was overshadowed by the more impressive reports sent from Cuba by Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis.