Fingy Conners & The New Century

by Richard Sullivan

  ...

  The day previous, Friday, Mrs. Seth Paine, whose home had been ransacked the previous Sunday by the police who’d found nothing, had nevertheless been placed under virtual house arrest. Her home was surrounded by patrolmen based on nonexistent evidence: a signed photograph of her that was present at the murdered man’s home and a short tuft of hair that was found on the couch where his body lay. The police positively attributed the hair to Mrs. Paine, announcing as much to the newspapers who ballyhooed this damning clue, despite the fact it was the wrong color and length. The hair, consisting of 20 strands just 2.5 inches long, would soon enough be proven to have been detached from the murdered man’s skull upon its being battered.

  It wasn’t just Hannah and Annie shaking their heads in dismay anymore. Jim too was deeply disturbed by the goings-on.

  Dr. Seth T. Paine, the accused’s husband, seething over the invasion of his home and the baseless accusations of the police, retained an attorney, W.N. Webster. Webster issued a statement to the newsmen regarding the actions of the Buffalo Police Department. This statement was reprinted nationwide:

  “They have broken more statutes than any officers I ever came across in conducting the investigation of a crime. They have intercepted telegrams and opened letters belonging to persons whom they dare not charge with any crime. They appear absolutely ignorant of constitutional law. How blunderingly they have gone to work to unravel this Burdick murder case!”

  As Jim sat that previous Friday getting an earful courtesy of Detective Boland in New York, Marian Hutchison was arrested and locked up based on little more than the fact that she had worked for a few weeks at Burdick’s Buffalo Envelope Company, a firm which employed 70 people. No other employee was arrested.

  Hutchison was dragged out of her rooms and away from her family on Tupper Street and tossed into a cell personally by Police Superintendent William S. Bull at Police Headquarters downtown, despite Bull knowing full well that Arthur Reed Pennell was the likely murderer.

  The aptly-named Bull swore to attorney Philip V. Fennelly—the same attorney not-so-coincidentally representing the outlandishly also-accused Mrs. Seth Paine— and to Marion Hutchison’s sister Florence, who accompanied the attorney to police headquarters, that he had no idea where Miss Hutchison was, when in fact she was languishing a few steps away in a locked cell.

  “She was kidnapped!” screamed Florence, lunging at the smirking Chief of the Buffalo Police Department. “You dare call this corrupted place America?” she shrieked. “Our family will have our retribution on you dirty coppers!”

  Attorney Fennelly was rightly appalled by this second outrage coming directly on the heels of the first.

  The Hutchisons, natives of London, Ontario, were horrified to discover that the promise of the slogan “Land of The Free” applied only to those who hadn’t as yet been singled out for random illegal kidnapping and debasement by rogue civil authorities.

  Marion Hutchison was a church choir singer; tall, refined, and attractive. She had been removed from her home by force, taken to police headquarters, stripped of her clothing and intimately searched and kept locked up in a prison cell against her will for five hours, then released only after much anguish and a writ of habeas corpus having been sued out by Attorney Fennelly.

  After Fennelly first arrived at police headquarters demanding to see his client, the police denying any knowledge of the whereabouts of Miss Hutchison, Mr. Fennelly then called on District Attorney Coatsworth. Coatsworth also denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of Marion Hutchison, further outraging Attorney Fennelly.

  It’s for this very reason I don’t trust myself to carry a pistol, he reminded himself as he stalked out.

  From the District Attorney’s office Fennelly proceeded to go before Supreme Court Justice White who issued a writ of habeas corpus, directing the police to bring Miss Hutchison before that court. With writ in hand, Fennelly went back to District Attorney Coatsworth’s office to serve it, but Coatsworth hid himself away from the attorney’s sight.

  “He’s gone for the day,” lied his assistant.

  Fennelly then called again at Superintendent Bull’s office.

  “I want to see Miss Hutchison,” Fennelly said.

  “Mr. Fennelly, you can’t see her,” responded Bull.

  “But I will see her,” demanded Fennelly, after producing the writ.

  “When is this returnable?” asked Bull.

  “Forthwith,” answered Fennelly.

  Fennelly returned then to Justice White’s chamber at City Hall with Marion’s sister Florence. Concurrently, Marion Hutchison was taken there as well from her cell at police headquarters by Detective Coughlin. Marion was not handcuffed, for that would confirm to any onlookers that she was under arrest, but Coughlin sternly warned her about the terrible consequences of her trying to escape. He sneaked her into a back entrance at the City Hall to minimize there being any witnesses to the trouncing of the young woman’s civil rights, and made his way to Justice White’s chambers. There Attorney Fennelly and Florence Hutchison awaited, only to find that Justice White had since departed to the Ellicott Square to attend a luncheon.

  Fennelly telephoned White at the Ellicott Square and asked if Marion could be brought before him there.

  “Is the young woman under arrest?” asked White.

  “I don’t know that,” replied Fennelly, “but I will go ask the officials that question.”

  Fennelly laid the ear piece down on the desk and went into Justice White’s private office where Marion Hutchison was being guarded by Detective Coughlin and five other policemen.

  “Justice White is at this very moment waiting on the other end of the telephone line to hear the answer to this question, so hear it well: Is Miss Marion Hutchison under arrest?”

  Fennelly returned to the telephone saying the officers had stated the girl was not under arrest.

  “Then tell them to release her at once,” said Justice White.

  When he did so, Fennelly was told by the fiendishly grinning officers that Marion Hutchison was not under arrest at all; that as a matter of fact she had never been under arrest and that she had been at complete liberty to leave whenever she so pleased.

  “You had me locked in a cage naked, like an animal! You took my clothes away! I was not allowed to leave, you damned liars!” she screamed, infuriated.

  As the attorney quickly hurried from the room with a vengeful Hutchison sister at each elbow, Florence seethed, “If I only had my revolver with me these dirty scum would all be lyin’ dead.”

  Fennelly didn’t try to shush her, as he might anyone else promulgating something so provocative, for he knew at this point the cops would be foolish to drive this debacle any further off the cliff than they already had.

  The Syracuse Journal wrote, “It was admitted that there was absolutely nothing against her. The police brazenly denied that she was under arrest, despite admitting they had her locked in a cell against her will.”

  The Rochester Democrat Chronicle ridiculed the Buffalo Police, beginning its front page headlined account of the latest fiasco with the mocking “Exploding theories and vanishing clews do not at all discourage the Buffalo police authorities working on the Burdick murder case.”

  The New York Times published a bizarrely elaborate statement furnished to them by the Buffalo Police Department that went far beyond merely suspecting that some unrealized mystery woman murdered Ed Burdick. They now claimed a full profile of the “murderess.”:

  The suspected woman was in severe straits for money. Her necessity was such that when she wished to do some house furnishing she bought her goods on the installment plan. She also borrowed money from a money lender. It was quite a large sum, and she gave security. One of the payments on the mortgage was due just before Burdick was murdered. A lawyer, who acts for the money lender, received money in payment. The police suspect that the payment left the woman penniless, and that she appealed to Burdick for more funds. When he refused, she
killed him. In any event the police believe her straitened condition is established, and they are giving it great importance.

  At his job at the Biograph Company in New York, after weeks of reading of the bumbling absurdities committed by the Buffalo Police Department in the Sun, the World and the Times, actor, singer, clown and set designer, Michael Sinnott got an idea that he soon enough would take with him out west. Rechristening himself Mack Sennett, and with the financial backing of the New York Motion Picture Company, he founded Keystone Movie Studios in hilly Edendale, California. Putting his idea to work he came to enjoy great success in the movies directing the hilarious antics of the fumbling, blundering Keystone Cops.

  The Culprit

  Finally, having had both of their two favorite female suspects begrudgingly disallowed them, police attentions and those of the newspaper vultures at long last turned toward the only logical suspect from the very outset, Attorney Arthur Reed Pennell.

  Mr. Parke, the late Ed Burdick’s business partner, disgusted by the police department’s white-glove treatment of Pennell and appalled at their relentless harassment of completely innocent women, including one of his own employees, gladly gave his story to the press. Perhaps also, certain police personnel, insulted, disheartened and fed up with their superiors’ criminal shenanigans, also cooperated.

  Parke revealed to the New York World the Mooney-Boland Detective Agency’s findings as to the adulterous couple’s many activities including the addresses of their many love nests around town, the bartender at the Roland Hotel’s sworn statement attesting to Arthur Pennell vowing to “get” Ed Burdick even if he had to “go to the gallows” for it, and summed up by directly accusing Pennell as the obvious killer of Edwin Burdick. Every other newspaper picked up the story.

  Pennell was incensed, feigning grave insult to his sterling reputation. The injured party composed his own statement about the murdered Ed Burdick, intended for the press:

  “I did not like him and he did not like me, and we both knew it and I have told the police frankly that we were not on good terms. His death coming at this time was one of the worst things that could have happened to me. Some say that it comes with ill grace from me to abuse a dead man, but Burdick was no saint, and when the time comes that I must make a statement in the newspapers in defense of myself from what other newspapers are printing about me I intend to let people know just the kind of man he was, and then perhaps some of them will turn a little of their time to him that they now are devoting to prying into my affairs.”

  When asked by a reporter about a letter, recently produced, that he had written to Alice Burdick in his own hand in which he stated “I feel that I must kill Ed Burdick,” he stormed off in a rage.

  How did they even get their hands on that letter? he wondered. Did Allie willingly give it to them?

  The grounds around the Burdick house were not searched by police until three days after the murder. By that time, hundreds of footprints left by the milling-around of the city’s curious citizens had preceded their examination, obliterating whatever evidence or clue the snow might have preserved.

  In a garbage can in the rear of the house the police found a label from a bottle of cocktails that Burdick had purchased the day of his murder, but they found no bottle itself. Somehow this compelled the police to now decide that Burdick’s head wasn’t caved in a dozen times with a golf club after all, but rather with the mysterious missing cocktail bottle. The search was now on for the police department’s latest theoretical murder weapon.

  Ed Burdick had obtained irrefutable evidence that his wife had been having intimate relations with his once-close friend Arthur Reed Pennell. He reached his limit of tolerance on December 2nd and demanded she get out of the house for good.

  She did not protest, having already been tossed out twice before, each of those times forgiven by her husband, and each time taken back again by him upon his receiving false promises from her that she never intended to keep.

  Nor on December 2nd did Alice Burdick seem at all concerned about what might become of her daughters, for she was thrilled for the opportunity to celebrate Christmas with her paramour openly, away from all that other business, without having to concern herself with her family’s heartbreak or their agony over her betrayal of them.

  Clause four of Mr. Burdick’s will appointed his business partner Charles Parke and one Risely Tucker as guardians of the Burdick children, ignoring any claim of Mrs. Burdick, the surviving parent. Attorneys for Parke and Tucker raised the point that in view of Mrs. Burdick’s illicit relations with Pennell that she was morally not a fitting guardian for three impressionable daughters.

  March 10, 1903

  By Monday afternoon the Police Commissioner, crucified by the newspapers for his inaction regarding Arthur Reed Pennell, could delay the inevitable no longer and ordered Chief Cusak to arrest him. Pat Cusak and Jim Sullivan went immediately to the Austin Block where Pennell’s office was located but found no one there. Next, they visited his home on Cleveland Avenue but the servant, Lizzie Romance, said that the Pennells had gone out and did not know their destination.

  ...

  Arthur Reed Pennell seemed to his wife Carrie to be inappropriately jovial, considering. In light of the Burdick murder, with the condemning eyes of the whole nation increasingly focused intently upon him, his photograph featured prominently in the Sunday papers around the country, the attorney became agitated and depressed.

  But come Monday morning his demeanor indicated that the veil of gloom and doom was lifting.

  “Let’s go to the Falls and have us a lovely dinner again at the Prospect House,” he said brightly to his wife.

  Carrie had not left the house in days because of the lingering crowds out front on the street. Curious pedestrians insisted on walking past the house at all hours on a street that normally saw little foot traffic and she was angry that the police had done nothing to prevent it.

  “Let’s just see if we can forget all this malarkey for a few hours and enjoy ourselves, darling. What do you say?” Arthur Pennell encouraged.

  “Oh, yes, Arthur! Let me just have fifteen minutes to freshen myself and change my frock!” responded the grateful Mrs. Pennell.

  The couple soon after entered the carriage house and climbed into their Baker Electric. Mrs. Pennell was bundled up in her fur coat and muffler and wore goggles against the chill breeze. Pennell was an expert at maneuvering the steering arm of his Brass Era Baker Electric, effortlessly guiding the compact car around tight corners just as adroitly as he did obstacles lying in the street. Carrie Pennell found it thrilling.

  “Why are we going this route? she asked, as he turned onto Kensington Ave. heading northeast.

  “Because I have a surprise for you, darling,” he said with a big smile beneath his handlebar moustache. He squeezed her gloved hand with his own.

  “What? Tell me, Arthur!”

  He laughed and shook his head no. “You’ll see soon enough, my love.”

  Kensington Avenue was paved straight as an arrow for as far ahead as the eye could see. There was no traffic to speak of. Arthur wanted to stop for a drink at Volk’s Saloon but Carrie did not want to be seen going in there.

  “You go, Have your whiskey. I’ll wait here in the auto.”

  He did. In ten minutes or so he returned.

  Rain began pouring down. As they passed Bailey Avenue, Carrie giggled and reached into her husband’s crotch to gently squeeze his genitals, so exhilarated was she by the mystery and the speed. She felt his area swell. Despite the deluge, Pennell threw back the top suddenly, fully exposing the couple to the elements, and accelerated to the car’s top speed, twenty five miles per hour. Carrie buried her hand even deeper into that warm nook as the rush of cold buffeted them.

  As the runabout approached the Hannah Gehres Stone Quarry, Pennell unexpectedly flipped the tiller steering mechanism, jumping the curb and sending the car sailing off the 30 foot precipice roadside. Carrie had no time at all to react
save for a truncated scream. The chasm speeded toward her face before she even had time to blink. She closed her eyes a split second before solid rock collided with her cranium.

  She was dreaming, wasn’t she?

  Carrie Lamb Pennell was vaguely aware that someone was picking her up and placing her on a litter. She could not see, and was only barely cognizant. She winced with pain at being roughly handled, bumped and jarred as her rescuers struggled to carry her up from the bottom of the quarry to the waiting ambulance above. She was driven quickly to the Sisters’ Hospital, but her awareness of any matters that might be of concern to her faded away just as they were carrying Carrie through the facility’s doors. Mrs. Pennell suffered a fractured skull, concussion of the brain, a compound fracture of the left elbow, a disfiguring scalp wound with flesh excised, and multiple cuts and bruises.

  Arthur Reed Pennell meanwhile remained crushed and broken exactly where he’d landed, pinned under the automobile, his brains spilling freely out of his gaping skullcap, the glistening grey mass cleansed of blood by the pelting of the incessant downpour. He had been left behind in position by the ambulance men for the time being, awaiting the arrival of the city Coroner Mr. Danser.

  Mr. Pennell suffered the fractures of all the facial and cranial bones, compound and comminuted fractures of the right thigh, left elbow, left shoulder, fractures of the third through fifth ribs at the spine, a compound fracture of the left knee and left wrist, and a deep yawning gash down his back between the shoulder blades.

  Carrie Lamb Pennell died the following day from shock.

  Besides recovering Arthur Pennell’s engraved gold pocket watch still ticking, in his snakeskin wallet were found eight visiting cards engraved with his name, an identification card issued by a life insurance company, $35 in greenbacks, sixty-nine cents in the change pocket-book, and in a separate compartment of the wallet was a mass of newspaper clippings with bits of poetry, the subjects of which were love and death.