The Devil's Gentleman (27 page)

The implication of this remark—that Blanche had been Barnet’s mistress—brought a shout of protest from Roland’s father. The “gallant old soldier” (as the newspapers called him) became even more agitated when Gardiner, after reading aloud the infamous “Blanche letter,” sneered, “I ask you, gentlemen of the jury. Is that the sort of letter a woman who is about to marry one man would write to another?”

“Yes,” shouted the General.

“No!” came Gardiner’s retort.

“I say, yes!” the General repeated.

“Again I say no,” Gardiner exclaimed. He then turned to Hart and said, “Mr. Coroner, I ask you to order the removal of the persons who are interrupting me if they do so again.”

“I shall so order, unless they desist,” Hart said.

This time, it was Roland’s turn to play pacifier. Leaning toward his father, he took the old man’s hand and whispered something in his ear until the General calmed down.

Proceeding with his summation, Gardiner finally said a few words about the attempted murder of Harry Cornish, which had led to the inadvertent poisoning of Katherine Adams. That Molineux was responsible for sending the cyanide-laced bromo-seltzer, said Gardiner, was clear not only from his implacable hatred of Cornish but from the very nature of the crime. No red-blooded male would stoop to such a cowardly, furtive form of murder.

“Poisoning,” Gardiner solemnly intoned, “is not a crime that the robust, Anglo-Saxon nature turns to. Poison crimes have been committed almost invariably by women and by men who were degenerates.”

There could be little doubt about Roland’s degeneracy. The many impotence cures he had sent for proved that he “was a man who had lost his virility.” His effeminate character was further shown by his behavior at the time of his final confrontation with Cornish.

“You remember the remark which Cornish made to Molineux on the stairs of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club the night that Molineux resigned from the club?” said Gardiner to the jurors. “The two met on the stairs. Cornish applied that vile epithet to him. What was Molineux’s reply? He simply said, ‘You win.’ Who but a degenerate would not have shown greater resentment to a remark like that?

“This man was also a frequenter of Chinatown,” the DA continued. “He went down there and smoked opium. He was an intimate friend of Chuck Connors and men of that character. Besides all this, you have the testimony of the experts. They have told you that all the writing on the letters was in the hand of Roland Burnham Molineux, and they have told you that no one but he could have written the address on the poison package.

“Gentlemen,” Gardiner concluded in a thunderous voice, “the case is in your hands. If we have given you enough evidence to create a reasonable belief that Roland B. Molineux is the man who committed this crime, we demand in the name of the People of the State that you shall put the responsibility upon him.”
⁶

51

A
s Gardiner took his seat, a “painful silence” fell over the courtroom.
¹
Roland, arms still folded over his chest, betrayed no emotion, though his father, seated at his side, wore a stricken expression.

A few moments later, Coroner Hart delivered a brief charge to the jury. It was precisely 6:15
P.M.
when the twelve men filed from the room to begin their deliberations.

Expecting a quick verdict, many of the spectators remained in their places. Roland, his father, and their attorneys, however, gathered up their coats and repaired to a nearby restaurant, Holtz’s, on Franklin Street and Broadway. They were tailed by Detectives Carey and McCafferty, who were under orders to keep Roland in sight and who took a table near the entrance.

The presence of the detectives did not appear to faze Roland. He calmly studied the menu before ordering a hearty meal, then perused the evening papers while his father and the lawyers conferred. Nor did he react when, ten or fifteen minutes later, Harry Cornish and his parents—accompanied by Colonel Gardiner and Assistant DA Osborne—entered the restaurant and seated themselves a short distance away. The two parties studiously ignored each other. Only once did Molineux and Cornish exchange a look. Roland maintained his usual blasé expression, while Cornish’s face, which had seemed fixed in a scowl for the past two weeks, was “wreathed in smiles.”
²

By 8:00
P.M.
, the two Molineuxs and their counsel were back in the courtroom. Roland was just finishing a cigar when the jury returned.

“Gentlemen, have you agreed upon a verdict?” asked Coroner Hart when the twelve men had reseated themselves.

“We have,” replied the foreman, Otto P. Amend.

“What is the verdict?” asked Hart.

Foreman Amend handed the written verdict to the stenographer, but Hart directed him to read it himself. In a voice that resounded in the tense silence of the little courtroom, Amend read, “We find that the said Mrs. Katherine Adams came to her death on the twenty-eighth day of December 1898 by poisoning by mercuric cyanide administered to her by Harry S. Cornish, said poison having been sent in a bottle of bromo-seltzer through the mails by Roland B. Molineux.”

A reporter, keeping his eyes on Molineux’s face as the judgment was delivered, saw his “lips tremble.” Otherwise, Roland remained as stolid as ever.

“The coroner’s jury having found that Katherine J. Adams came to her death by poison sent through the mails by Roland Burnham Molineux, it becomes my duty to order his arrest and direct that he be arraigned before me,” said Hart, looking and sounding far more nervous than Roland. Though the New York State Code of Criminal Procedure allowed the coroner to issue an arrest warrant, it was a power he rarely had to exercise, and Hart seemed slightly overwhelmed by the gravity of the occasion.
³

Detectives Carey and McCafferty, who had followed Roland back from the restaurant, sprang from their seats and hurried over to his side. The accused man never winced as the officers placed their hands on his shoulders and ordered him to rise. Spectators at the rear of the courtroom surged forward or stood on their seats, craning their necks for a clearer view.

Coat and derby in hand, Roland was escorted from the courtroom. “They had to settle on someone, so they settled on me,” he said to the reporters who thronged around him. “I am innocent. They have no evidence to hold me.” In the din that had erupted in the cramped little chamber, the newsmen had to strain to make out the words.

Men who have been charged with sensational murders rarely lack for female admirers. This is true even when the accused is significantly less handsome than Roland Burnham Molineux. As the prisoner disappeared into Coroner Hart’s office, a gaggle of young women attempted to push their way inside and had to be forcibly barred by a police officer stationed at the doorway.

Inside the office, while Hart signed the commitment papers, Roland exchanged a few words with his father, who was visibly moved. The prisoner was then taken down one of the elevator cars to the second floor of the building. The General and his lawyers followed in the next car. At the threshold of the doorway leading to the “Bridge of Sighs”—the enclosed walkway that connected the Criminal Court Building to the Tombs—Roland shook his father’s hand and said, “Good-bye, Governor.”

“Good-bye, boy,” said the General, tears welling in his eyes. Then, as his son was led away by the detectives, the old man turned to Bartow Weeks and said, “I wish I was going in there instead.” Weeks gave him a consoling pat on the shoulder, and the two men left the building.

The evening papers had lost no time in rushing out special editions. Outside, on the snow-covered streets, newsboys were shouting the headlines: “Molineux arrested!” “Molineux the Poisoner!”
⁴

By the time the General arrived home, the news had reached Brooklyn. He found his wife in a state of near collapse. As for Blanche, she had shut herself in her upstairs room, where she lay facedown on her bed, sobbing into her pillow. Anyone overhearing those anguished sounds would have naturally (if mistakenly) assumed that she was weeping for her husband.

After bidding farewell to his father, Roland had spent a few minutes consulting with his attorneys in the office of Warden Hagen. He seemed perfectly composed and not the least bit downhearted. Before being led away, he asked for permission to smoke in his cell, a request Hagen readily granted. Escorted by a guard, Roland was then taken up an iron staircase to “Murderers’ Row” on the second tier of the old prison, where he was locked in cell 36.

By the feeble light entering through a narrow barred window set high in one stone wall, Roland inspected his surroundings. This did not require much time. Measuring six feet wide by eight feet long, the cell was just large enough to accommodate a steel-framed bunk bed, a small wooden bench holding a washbasin, and a chamber pot. In the remaining space, a standing man had barely enough room to dress and undress himself.

Extracting a big Havana from the inside pocket of his double-breasted coat, he bit off one end and lit the other with a phosphorous match. But after only a few puffs, he plucked the cigar from his mouth and hurled it onto the cold stone floor.

Then, seating himself on the edge of the bottom cot, he leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands.
⁵

52

A
t 5:00
P.M.
on Wednesday, March 1, 1899, a grand jury indicted Roland Burnham Molineux on the charge of murder in the first degree for killing Mrs. Katherine J. Adams with twenty grains of cyanide of mercury. Roland learned the news from the evening papers, which he read while standing near the door of his cell, where the gaslight filtering in from the corridor was strongest.

If he had succumbed to a moment of despair two nights earlier when the iron-grated door first clanged shut behind him, he had quickly recovered his composure. By the following morning, he seemed his usual unruffled self. He rose early, performed his ablutions, then dressed in the clothing he had neatly laid out on the unused upper bunk. Inmates of the Tombs were allowed to hold on to their money and purchase special meals from the prison restaurant. For thirty cents, Roland was able to breakfast on a chop, bread, butter, and coffee.

Afterward, he took an hour’s exercise with the other prisoners, who strode around and around the second tier of the jail in single file. If Roland—the champion athlete accustomed to working out in the city’s most exclusive gymnasiums—felt uncomfortable among the “shambling, shuffling, heel-dragging” crew of pickpockets, thieves, and murderers, he showed no sign of it.
¹
By the time Bartow Weeks arrived later that day for a brief consultation, Roland seemed positively chipper. “Brace up, old fellow,” he told his worried-looking lawyer, giving Weeks a companionable slap on the back. “Don’t look so down in the mouth.”
²

Now, as he stood reading the evening papers, Roland’s expression remained impassive, though every now and then his finely molded upper lip would curl into a sneer and a soft, derisive snort would issue from his nostrils. There were dozens of articles about him, ranging from hour-by-hour descriptions of his prison routine to accounts of his courtroom appearances. Many were illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, depicting him pacing his cell, making up his cot, or taking his daily exercise under the watchful gaze of his jailers. Some were reported with scrupulous accuracy, down to the precise ingredients of his meals. Others were pure fabrications, such as the sensational (and wholly fictitious) report that “extraordinary precautions” were “being taken by the Warden of the Tombs to prevent Roland Molineux from committing suicide in order to escape the threatened ignominy of death in the electric chair.”
³

Editorial opinion was divided along strict class lines on the issue of his arrest and indictment. The yellow papers—each one of which claimed exclusive credit for having fingered Roland from the start—expressed unalloyed satisfaction that this son of wealth and privilege, protected for so long by his father’s political influence and the best legal advice money could buy, was finally behind bars. Papers like the
Times,
the
Tribune,
and the
Telegraph,
on the other hand—whose readership belonged to the same social class as the Molineuxs—attacked the district attorney for failing to pursue “other theories of guilt” and, in particular, for not demanding the arrest of Harry Cornish, who was, after all, the person who gave Mrs. Adams the poison.
⁴

As Roland continued to leaf through the evening papers, he was astonished by some of the stories. There were several articles about young people who had become so “crazed” by all the publicity surrounding his case that they had been driven to commit horrible crimes themselves. On the last day of February, for example, Frederick Norton of Torrington, Connecticut—a twenty-five-year-old employee of the Excelsior Needle Works, married just eight months—delivered a fatal head blow to his young wife with the butt of his rifle before turning the firearm on himself. He was found dead on his bedroom floor, surrounded by “New York newspapers opened at the pages containing accounts of the inquest into Mrs. Adams’s death.” According to his grieving mother, Frederick had “never showed any symptoms of insanity until he began reading about the murder of Kate Adams and Henry Barnet.”
⁵

Equally startling was the case of fourteen-year-old Adeline Harvey of Providence, Rhode Island, who attempted to poison her father by sprinkling creosote over the food in his lunch pail. According to those who knew her, young Adeline “had never shown any sign of degeneracy” until “a misguided interest in the Adams poison mystery temporarily unsettled her mind.”
⁶

These and similar stories about seemingly ordinary people made mad by the frenzied coverage of his case caused Roland to shake his head in wonder. It was as though the public were in the grip of one of those mass manias Charles Mackay had written about in his famous book on extraordinary popular delusions. To be sure, Roland had been an object of intense fascination since the story first broke two months earlier. But with his arrest and incarceration for what the papers were now calling “the most atrocious crime of the century,” a change had occured.
⁷
He had become something more than a mere curiosity, something for which no phrase had as yet been invented: a media celebrity.

Signs of that change were everywhere—in the bouquets of flowers and gushing letters that arrived daily from female admirers; in the stares he drew from other prisoners whenever he stepped out of his cell; in the jostling mob that showed up when he appeared for a magistrate’s hearing, a crowd so large and unruly that the proceedings had to be moved to a different location.
⁸

That hearing had produced one of the most remarkable pieces of journalism so far generated by the case, an article headlined
GENERAL MOLINEUX, GENTLEMAN.
Written by Hearst’s famed “sob sister,” Annie Laurie (the pen name of chorus-girl-turned-reporter Winifred Black), it was a shamelessly sentimental tribute to Roland’s father, who was treated with unqualified reverence even by those papers most antagonistic to his son.

In the article, Laurie described herself as standing in the corridor beside an “old colored woman,” waiting for the hearing to begin. Suddenly, General Molineux walked by. Drawing “herself up very straight,” the old woman, “eyes shining,” turned to the writer and—speaking in the broad Negro dialect popular in the regionalist literature of the time (though it strikes a modern ear as an Amos ’n’ Andy travesty)—proceeded to deliver a long speech about the noble old soldier.

“Chile,” she began, “we’s been lookin’ at the quality.”

How do I know he’s de quality, de old General? Didn’t you see his haid? Carried it some like a mighty proud yearlin’ colt does. Not a tear in his eye, an’ not a wrinkle in his face, neither. De quality don’ cry where folks can see ’em. An’ when he met dat boy o’ his’n did you see his eye? Jist as proud an’ as lovin’ as if he was meetin’ him at his wedding day, or some big graduatin’ time, where all de folks are gettin’ mighty proud of him, an’ he war rememberin’ back when he was a little teeny baby chile. He don’ b’leeve no truck about dat boy of his’n an’ no poison. He couldn’t believe it if he see him droppin’ de stuff in a glass an’ killin’ a dozen folks. De quality don’ never b’leeve bad things easy.

Quality folks seems to have some kind o’ spirit dat makes ’em keep dey haids up when common folks would be bowed down to de yearth. Laws, chile, money don’ make quality, an’ not blood always, neither. Now, most always de real quality has good blood, but I’se seen mighty po’ trash wid er big name. Dis yer General dat’s passed us, he’d be quality even if he didn’t have nary a cent, an’ if his name war common as turkey tracks.
⁹

If Roland was gratified by this paean to his father, he was less pleased by other articles that appeared in the immediate aftermath of his arrest. One paper published an unsubstantiated rumor that he had fathered an illegitimate child. Another printed details of his scandalous adolescence, when at the tender age of fifteen he had been named as a corespondent in the nasty divorce case involving his neighbor, Mrs. Eleanor Kindberg.
¹⁰

Most worrisome of all to Roland, however, was a small piece that appeared in Pulitzer’s
World
under the headline
MOLINEUX WANTED TO GET RID OF SOMEONE.
The source of the story was a somewhat shady character named Joseph Wriggins, a onetime member of the Newark Police Department who had become a private detective after being dismissed from the force for conduct unbecoming an officer. In September 1898, according to Wriggins, he had heard through an acquaintance that “Molineux had a job for me.” Soon afterward, he had gone to the Morris Herrmann factory, where Roland had explained that “there was a party he wanted to get rid of.”

Wriggins would say no more about the matter, though he did reveal the name of the acquaintance who had contacted him about the “job.” This turned out to be Detective Joseph Farrell, Roland’s old friend on the Newark police force. Farrell’s story, as reported in the
World,
was that “a girl named Mamie Allen, the daughter of a Bayonne policeman, worked for Molineux for a long time. A short while ago, the Washington Hotel in Newark was raided and Farrell was engaged in the raid. Among the people arrested was Mamie Allen. She gave the name of Mamie Shields at the First Precinct Court. Molineux paid her fine and sent her home. It was then he tried to get Wriggins.”
¹¹

The implication of the article was impossible to miss: that Roland had attempted to hire the disgraced former police detective to dispose of a prostitute named Mamie Allen, a.k.a. “Mamie Shields.”

Her real name, of course, was neither Shields nor Allen, as
The New York Times
was the first to discover. “The young woman whom Roland Burnham Molineux is said to have befriended many times while she was in the employ of the Morris Herrmann company and whose whereabouts he was anxious to learn when he was contemplating hiring ex-detective Wriggins is Mary Milander,” read a small item in the following day’s edition of the
Times.
¹²

It was the first, though by no means the last, time that the name (slightly misspelled) of Roland’s former child-mistress, Mary Melando, would appear in the press.

So murky was the light that penetrated his cell from the gas jet in the corridor that even by leaning against the grated door and holding the pages close to his face, reading was a difficult task. After an hour, Roland’s eyes were burning. Tossing aside the last of his newspapers, he lay on his cot and waited for his dinner to arrive. When it came—a meal of roast chicken, potatoes, and applesauce that had cost him fifty cents—he ate it with gusto. Afterward, he smoked a cigar and contemplated the dreary months to come.

Of all the articles he had read that day, perhaps the most disheartening was the one that quoted District Attorney Gardiner, who had announced that the trial could not possibly be held “until the early fall.” That meant, at a minimum, another six or seven months in the Tombs. It was a grim enough prospect, but there was nothing to be done about it. Roland knew what was required of him. He must assume the air of manly stoicism expected of a Molineux. His father, after all, had endured far worse during the years of the war.

There was one hopeful note, at least. According to the same article, one of Gardiner’s underlings had insisted that “when the trial comes, it will be the shortest on record, considering its importance. The District Attorney can put in his entire case in two days.”
¹³

Neither Roland nor anyone else could possibly know that this remark would prove to be one of the least astute predictions in the annals of American jurisprudence.