It’s difficult to overstate just how captivated Buffalo and the entire nation were by the news that a prominent businessman had been murdered in his own home—and of his wife’s spicy extracurricular activities.

Every major newspaper and wire service flocked to Buffalo, including the Hearst and Pulitzer papers. Not only did they want to be on the ground for the investigation, they also wanted to get ahead of any indictment(s) that might come out of the Police Court inquest.

The papers covered little else from the discovery of the murdered man’s body on the morning of February 27, though from the start the police and the people differed as to their favorite suspect. Most regular people thought that Arthur Pennell—who had been up to no good with the murdered man’s wife—had acted to remove his rival from the field of play. The police and district attorney? Not so much. From the start they peddled a theory that one of Ed Burdick’s purported love interests—or a jealous husband—had taken revenge on the little ladies’ man. For evidence they pointed to the snack of cheese, fruit tarts, and cocktails—hardly a ‘man’s luncheon’, but rather something a lady might enjoy.

After a flurry of initial interest, the Buffalo papers hemmed and hawed and then (dutifully, I might say) avoided Arthur Pennell almost entirely, and that’s how things might have gone were it not for William Randolph Hearst’s bulldog reporter from the New York American. This fellow hadn’t any local potentates to obey, only Hearst—who had himself coined the phrase ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. Hearst didn’t care about small-fry like Pennell or the Buffalo powerbrokers, and it’s clear that his papers printed things that the locals either didn’t know or elected to keep mum.

The masthead of the New York American, William Randolph Hearst’s powerful paper. 1903. Public domain.

As the days passed without so much as a credible (to police eyes) suspect, Arthur Pennell began granting interviews to a few newspapers—probably to squelch the rumors swirling around Buffalo about his potential involvement. Each time, Arthur genially denied having any knowledge about the crime, and the papers obligingly printed it up. But Hearst’s American reporter was different; he smelled a rat. He began following Arthur around, calling him at home and work, and dropping by his residence unannounced. Plainly rattled by this unwanted attention, Arthur began to resort to ‘copious amounts’ of spirits to settle his nerves.

Around one o’clock on the afternoon of March 10—not quite two weeks after the murder, and with the police inquest still in limbo—Arthur was at home when the American reporter stopped by. Arthur agreed to see him, and in their brief interview the reporter dropped a bombshell—that he had spoken with sources inside the police department . . . and had Arthur heard that the police were about to make not one but two arrests within the next day or two? Arthur didn’t reply, but the reporter said that his features grew tense and firm as he awaited the next question—which was ‘did you know that the police are planning to arrest a man and a woman’?

Without answering, Arthur stood and said: “You really must excuse me, but I cannot discuss this case any longer.” The reporter left, but about three hours later telephoned the Pennell residence. The maid picked up the phone and told Arthur that it was the American reporter again, who wanted to come by again and ask a few more questions. An exasperated Arthur asked if this conference were really necessary, and the reporter told the maid it was. After hesitating a long moment, Arthur agreed to meet, but that the reporter had best come later, perhaps around six or, even better, seven o’clock.

This call seems to have been the proverbial final straw. After he rang off, Arthur told the maid that he and Mrs. Pennell would be going out for a little spin in their Buffalo Electric automobile before the reporter was to come by. Arthur then retrieved the car from a garage on Utica Street, returned home, and collected Carrie for their little tour. The timing was curious, since by now daylight was failing and near-freezing rain had begun pelting down. Yet the two drove off anyway—without so much as erecting the car’s top or tonneau (convertible tops for the body and the legs and feet, respectively). Undeterred, the Pennells drove north out of Elmwood, skirted south of Forest Lawn Cemetery along Delavan Avenue, and then headed east on Kensington Avenue.

Arthur went inside and purchased a glass of whiskey. He took it out to Carrie, and Volk saw them share a laugh about something as Carrie drank—all in the driving rain. Arthur then came back inside, purchased a second glass of whiskey and a cigar, and asked what time the Erie Railroad train would be crossing at the Kensington grade. He seemed dismayed to find that his watch was slow, and then in haste downed his drink and returned to the auto.

This time Arthur put up the convertible top, and then he started back toward Buffalo.

What happened next is attested to by several witnesses who were watching the comings and goings along rainy Kensington Avenue.

At first, the Pennell auto loafed west on Kensington, toward Buffalo. At the Grider Street intersection, though, Arthur put the convertible top down again (in the rain) and gunned it.

The car was running at top speed as it approached the Jammerthal Quarry, a large pit in the earth on the south side of Kensington. Just as it drew alongside the quarry, Arthur swerved—straight toward the pit—without slackening his pace. Carrie was heard to scream as the Buffalo Electric jumped a low curb and launched itself into space. With a tremendous crash, the machine and its occupants hit the quarry floor some twenty-five feet below.

Two young men, walking home from work at Keim’s bicycle factory, witnessed the whole horrible spectacle, and scrambled down into the quarry to see if they could help. Arthur was way beyond aid; he’d been killed instantly when the Babcock Electric’s batteries—more than a thousand pounds of lead and acid—had broken free of their moorings and landed directly atop his head. His brain had spurted out of the cranium and was found sitting in an intact lump some six feet away, looking ‘like the yolk from a shattered egg’. Carrie seemed still to be clinging to life, though unconscious and moaning feebly.

The Pennells’ deaths raised the natural question: Had it been a terrible accident, a double suicide, or a murder/suicide? No record exists of Carrie having expressed any suicidal intention, though Arthur had spoken of suicide frequently. The year earlier he had confided in a friend that he’d missed his timing trying to throw himself in front of a locomotive at Peekskill, New York. Furthermore, Arthur had been spotted standing next to his parked car and looking down into the Jammerthal Quarry only a few weeks before, and had spoken of his fear that short of an impact with a locomotive, a suicide by automobile might leave him incapacitated but alive.

Surely by coincidence, the DA and the police immediately scheduled the long-awaited inquest into the murder of Edwin Burdick to begin.

Next time: The Inquest

This article is from Robert’s weekly non-fiction column on Buffalo Rising. Read more on Robert’s website about the case, and read The Unsealing, the fictional award-winning novel inspired by the Burdick murder.