An unhinged politician. A room full of reporters and photographers. And a .357 magnum tucked in a manila envelope.

These three volatile elements combusted on Jan. 22, 1987, into one of the most enduring and shocking episodes in Pennsylvania history.

It began as a press conference in which everyone expected state Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, convicted of corruption, to announce his resignation.

But as a sweaty, rambling Dwyer railed against his perceived political enemies, including the press, sudden fear swept the room crowded with nearly three-dozen journalists. Dwyer, finally ceasing his long diatribe, had reached into a yellow envelope, revealing his long-barreled handgun.

“One of the things I most remember is when Mr. Dwyer pulled out his revolver, at first people in the press thought he was going to shoot them,” said R. Thomas Berner, then journalism and American studies professor at Penn State, where the Dwyer case became a subject of study.

“Part of his rambling speech was that he was crucified in the press,” Berner added. “I think journalists are and have always been under some kind of assault, regardless.”

Fear among the assembled press was palpable, said Greg Penny, who was then Dwyer’s deputy press secretary.

“A lot of reporters were concerned for their safety,” Penny said. “Budd had been very critical of a lot of news coverage. Initially, a number of the reporters were worried he might shoot them.”

Among them was Kenn Marshall, then a capitol reporter for the Patriot-News. He was standing by the office door, ready to bolt. But not because he expected Dwyer to pull out a gun.

Rather, Marshall’s assignment that morning was to call in a report to the newspaper desk just as soon as the disgraced public servant announced his resignation.

“We were there to see him resign,” Marshall said. Dwyer’s federal sentencing in a high-profile bribery case was scheduled for the following day.

In the age before cellphones, Marshall would need to dash off to the nearest public pay phone at the capitol complex. He mapped out his route. He’d run from the Finance Building, where the press conference was being held in the Treasurer’s office, to the North Office Building. There, Marshall would dial the City Desk and dictate the lead paragraphs for the much-anticipated Dwyer resignation story. Then, presses would roll with a banner headline in that day’s Evening News.

This is what was supposed to happen. Marshall had even pre-written 90% of the story. Another Patriot-News reporter, Eric Conrad, was sitting with the rest of the nearly three-dozen media members and would remain to cover the entire press conference.

Needless to say, nothing went as expected.

As the press conference commenced, Dwyer’s press aides handed out printed copies of the speech the Treasurer had written and typed on his own. There were typos throughout the text.

Marshall rifled through the 20-plus pages looking for the key passages where Dwyer would announce his resignation. It wasn’t there. What’s more, the final page of Dwyer’s remarks was missing.

“He was saving that last page,” Marshall said. “He didn’t want anybody to know what he was doing. He had planned it out very well.”

As angry and accusatory as Dwyer’s written words were, his delivery was even more unhinged.

“It was a very rambling, disjointed speech,” Marshall recalled. “He was pretty much railing against everyone in Harrisburg, from (then) Gov. Thornburgh to the judicial system to the media.”

Marshall described Dwyer’s increasingly troubling demeanor that morning as, “Upset. Agitated. Sweating.”

The longer Dwyer droned on, it became clear he was losing the room.

“I think everyone on the room was thinking, ‘What the heck is going on?’” Marshall said. “One of the TV crews started breaking down their equipment. At that point, he said, ‘you don’t want to leave.’”

That’s when Dwyer cut short his angry rants and impassioned protestations of innocence. He leaned from the podium to an adjacent table, pulling out three letter-sized envelopes from the briefcase. He handed one each to three of his aides. It was later revealed that one contained Dwyer’s organ donation card. Another was a letter asking Gov. Thornburgh to appoint Dwyer’s wife to fill out his term. (He did not.)

The next item Dwyer reached for was the .357 magnum.

“That’s when it really got hairy,” Marshall said.

What transpired next happened in mere moments. But the shocked mind has a way of slowing down time. Marshall recalled a collective gasp at the sight of the large revolver in Dwyer’s right hand.

“In this situation we were in, it looked like a cannon,” Marshall said. “All I could see was the gun.”

The room of reporters seemed to shrink away from the weapon, he added.

“My immediate thought was he was going to turn that gun on people in the room. There were other journalists who thought that too,” Marshall said. “Initially, it was just pure panic. No one knew for sure what was going to happen.”

Standing near the door, Marshall considered bolting right then and there.

“My thought was, ‘I am at the door, I can get out of here’,” he recalled. “I honestly thought, I’m going to get out of here. Yeah, I was scared!”

Yet, for some reason still unknown to Marshall, he didn’t act on his instinct for flight.

“A lot of other people were ducking,” he added. “A lot of people were scared to death. He had really torn into the media. A lot of us felt he was going to turn that gun on some of the people in that room.”

But Dwyer never did aim his weapon at the press. He held the gun with its barrel pointed at the ceiling and backed toward the wall behind him.

“Please, please leave the room if this will … if this will affect you,” Dwyer announced.

In this instant, Dwyer’s true intent became clear.

That’s when cries of “No, Budd don’t!” and “Stop!” echoed in the room. A few reporters even made a move to try and stop Dwyer, both Marshall and Penny said.

Among them was former WGAL News 8 reporter Gene Schenck, an ex-Army Ranger, who attempted to hop the large table that formed a barricade between Dwyer and rest of the room.

Professor Emeritus Berner said the transformation of some of the media from observers to would-be rescuers was the appropriate response.

“Reporters get into situations where they’re no longer journalists, they are humans. They try to help,” said Berner, who added that he always carried a first aid kit back when he was a reporter.

If anything, however, the physical attempts to stop Dwyer only quickened the end, Penny and Marshall said.

“If anybody was going to be able to stop (Dwyer), it was him,” Marshall said of Schenck. “But nobody was going to stop him from doing what he set out to do that day. He obviously put thought into it.”

Dwyer even had a fail-safe, Penny said.

“I learned later that at the autopsy they found a second gun on Budd that was strapped to his ankle. He had a backup,” Penny said. “You talk about a level of detail and preparation.”

Dwyer was determined to end things on his terms. The speed of what happened next was startling, witnesses said.

“When he backed himself against the wall, he held his hand out and warned people to stay back,” Marshall said. “Then he put the gun in his mouth.”

As soon as the gun barrel slipped behind Dwyer’s lips, there was a single shot muffled by his mouth. With that, the tall, bear-like politician collapsed in a heap to the floor. He went down like a marionette whose strings have been cut, witnesses said.

In the immediate aftermath, those who were there often speak of operating on autopilot.

Marshall dashed to the phone, taking his pre-mapped route to the North Office Building.

“I did exactly what I planned to do when I entered the room,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess it was instinct. I was just doing my job. I probably wasn’t thinking.”

Marshall dialed the Evening News desk. To his surprise, the editor who answered already knew of the shooting. Long before the instantaneous nature of the Internet, news that Dwyer shot himself traveled with surprising speed, even in the old-world of broadcast media.

There was only one question for Marshall to answer: “Is he dead?” the editor asked.

In journalism, there’s no bigger deal than reporting someone’s death. Marshall had no official word that Dwyer was deceased. All he had was what he witnessed in that room.

It was more than enough.

“I remember saying, ‘He had to be’,” Marshall said. “There was no question when he pulled the trigger. There was no question in anybody’s mind he accomplished what he intended to do in terms of committing suicide.”

By killing himself before his federal sentence could be handed down, Dwyer also preserved his $1.28 million pension for his wife and two children. From a legal standpoint, Dwyer’s conviction was never final because he killed himself before his sentencing.

What the embattled politician didn’t accomplish was a full re-examination of the corruption case that had destroyed him.

The month before his suicide, Dwyer and former GOP state Chairman Robert Asher were convicted by a jury of 11 counts each, stemming from an agreement to award a $4.6 million Treasury Department data processing contract to Computer Technology Associates, a California computer firm, in return for campaign contributions. Each faced up to 55 years in prison.

The case revolved around a conspiracy under which Dwyer and the state GOP was to accept a $300,000 kickback on the sole-source contract. But no money ever changed hands; the prosecution hinged on testimony of others involved who took plea deals.

A Patriot-News editorial published the day after Dwyer’s suicide read in part:

“In his rambling remarks before he pulled a gun and shot himself at his own press conference, state Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer spoke of his ‘unpublished story.’ He seemed to believe that if the truth, as he saw it, got out it would exculpate his recent conviction by a jury on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, interstate travel in aid of racketeering and perjury. And he hoped that the shock of his suicide would spur an investigation of the nation’s justice system, which he thought had wronged him and many others.

“Dwyer had the opportunity to present his side of the story at his trial and yet, in a move we still find baffling, he did not take the witness stand in his own defense. His failure to convince a jury of his innocence was not erased by his public self-execution. He did not become innocent by virtue of killing himself.”

In committing suicide, Dwyer stepped on his own message, Marshall said.

“I don’t think anybody remembers what he said. He was hoping it would bring about these major reforms,” Marshall said. “There wasn’t much follow-up on what he was hoping would happen.”

Instead, Dwyer’s enduring legacy is that of a disgraced, desperate politician who took his life in the most shocking way possible, Marshall said.

“I think it’s pretty close to the top in Pennsylvania political history — unfortunately,” he said.

So much so, Dwyer’s elected successor to the office, Democrat Catherine Baker Knoll, delighted in showing her guests the bullet hole Dwyer’s suicide shot had bored into the ceiling, Penny said.

“When people would go visit, that was one thing she would point out,” he said. ” ‘You are in that room where it happened’,” Knoll would announce, according to Penny. “She liked to point out where the bullet ended up in the ceiling. I never looked for a bullet hole.”

The hole remains to this day.

So do the memories, especially among those who witnessed it.

“Thirty-five years later, they’ll still remembering it,” Marshall said. “Pennsylvania has had more than its share of political corruption, but those names come and go. A lot of people remember Budd Dwyer. He’s the guy who shot himself at a press conference.”

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