Killer Colt (20 page)

The case was an instant sensation, the talk of the town—“the subject of conversation among all classes of the community,” as one newspaper put it.
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By Monday afternoon, the site of the “awful murder” had already become
the city’s hottest attraction. Two floors above Colt’s office, the Apollo Association’s fine arts gallery had drawn so few visitors in the first years of its existence that, at its third annual meeting, the membership talked of shutting it down.
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Now the same public that couldn’t be lured to the Granite Building for its cultural offerings came flocking there in droves for a glimpse of the crime scene. Throughout the day, the northwest corner of Broadway and Chambers was so packed with curiosity seekers that pedestrians had to detour around the crowds.
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Even as the gawkers blocked the foot traffic on Broadway, craning their necks for a better view of Colt’s second-story window, the man himself was being escorted from his cell to the office of Police Magistrate Taylor. There, attended by Dudley Selden and two other attorneys, Robert Emmett and John A. Morrill, he was examined by Taylor, who asked him his name, age, place of birth, and occupation. Colt replied firmly to these pro forma questions, hesitating only when asked if he was married. After a brief consultation with his lawyers, he replied, “I decline answering under the advice of my counsel.”

“What have you to say to in relation to the charge against you?” asked Taylor.

“I decline answering any further questions by advice of my counsel,” Colt repeated. “But I am innocent of the charge.”

Newspapers described Colt’s appearance and behavior during this examination in dramatically different, if not completely contradictory, ways. Most agreed that he was an “exceedingly prepossessing” man: about five feet nine inches tall and “very well made,” with curly, dark brown hair and full side whiskers. Some, however, found his good looks marred by his eyes, reported to be of that “brown-colored class that cannot easily be read, and that are generally found in the faces of all scoundrels, schemers, and plotters.”
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As for his mien, several accounts emphasized Colt’s “remarkable composure,” “singular coolness,” “peculiar nonchalance”—a trait presumably in keeping with the “calculating deliberation” he had exhibited in his attempts to hide the evidence. Indeed, in the view of more than one observer, it was the callous way that Colt had gone about trying to “conceal the deed,” even more than the murder itself, that made his crime an “enormity without parallel.”
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This picture of Colt as a cold-blooded creature was reinforced by a widely printed story that the only emotion he had displayed at the examination was a flash of self-pity. “I don’t think they treat me well with regard to my meals,” he reportedly complained to Taylor before being led back to his cell. “They don’t bring my dinner on a clean plate but on one that had been used before.”
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In sharp contrast to this image of Colt as a man of “extraordinary coolness of nerve,” other accounts depicted him as profoundly distraught during his brief appearance before Magistrate Taylor. “His face was of a ghastly paleness,” wrote the reporter for the
Commercial Advertiser
, “his eyes deeply sunk into his head and fearfully wild in their expression. The few hours since the verdict of the inquest had been rendered had evidently been those of intense suffering, of deep mental anguish. The prisoner made a strong effort to maintain his composure, but the effort was clearly visible.” Indeed, according to the same report, Colt was in such an “overwrought frame of mind” that “every means had been taken to prevent his committing self-destruction—a result he evidently contemplates.”
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Of all the journalists in the city, James Gordon Bennett lavished the most loving attention on the Colt-Adams story, perceiving it from the start as a potential circulation booster on the order of the Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers cases. In Tuesday’s issue of the
Herald
, for example, he ran a full-profile woodcut portrait of Colt—a highly unusual feature at a time when the typical newspaper page consisted of row upon row of eye-straining type, unrelieved by any illustrations. He was also the only journalist to describe Samuel Adams’s burial on Monday, and to run a remarkable (if highly suspect) story about Adams’s wife, Emeline. According to Bennett (who provides no source for his believe-it-or-not anecdote),

Bennett, moreover, lost no time in exploiting the public’s prurient interest in Colt’s unsanctified relationship with Caroline Henshaw. Picking up on John’s evasive replies to questions about his marital status, other papers had referred to “the female who has been kept by him for some time.”
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Bennett alone, however—resorting to proper French at a time when the word
pregnant
was considered too vulgar for public utterance—added a titillating detail. Colt’s female companion, Bennett revealed, “is by him
enciente
and the period of her
accouchement
is near.”
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It was Bennett who also provided the most extensive coverage of Colt’s arraignment, which took place in the Court of Oyer and Terminer on Tuesday afternoon. Standing before the bench, Colt appeared “firm, calm, and collected” as the clerk began reading the true bill indictment, a formulaic document combining tortured legalese with a Bible-steeped view of human motivation:

Jamming the courtroom for the proceedings were more than two dozen of the city’s most eminent lawyers, a reflection (in Bennett’s words) of the “intense excitement that this most extraordinary and unparalleled case has occasioned, even among the legal fraternity.”
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It wasn’t just the gruesomeness of the killing, the macabre method of body disposal, or the spicy hints of illicit sex that made the case so riveting. Another tantalizing ingredient was the same one that, in future years, would help turn figures like Professor John Webster, Lizzie Borden, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, O. J. Simpson, and others into media celebrities: namely, their social prominence. However much Bennett and his competitors differed in their initial depictions of John Colt’s demeanor, all agreed on one point: that the accused was “descended from one of the most eminent families of the state of Connecticut,” being “the grandson of the Hon. John Caldwell of Hartford and son of Christopher Colt, a respected textile manufacturer of that place.” And none failed to mention that his brother, Samuel, was the “well known inventor of Colt’s celebrated firearms.”
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F
rom the moment he embarked on his firearms business, Sam Colt had been forced to deal with a virtually uninterrupted series of crises. His brother’s arrest for murder, however, was, by a considerable measure, the worst. And for Sam, it couldn’t have come at a less opportune time.

Since his meeting in June with Secretary of the Navy George Badger, Sam had been awaiting the passage of the naval appropriation bill with its promised allocation for the development of his harbor defense system. As late as September 5, he had received word from a Washington friend that the bill would most likely be “taken up and passed” within a matter of days. By then, Sam, brimming with confidence, had already drafted a prospectus for his Submarine Battery Company, approached a small group of investors, and sold five hundred shares at fifty dollars each.
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Less than a week after he received his friend’s encouraging news, however, Washington was shaken by a political upheaval. On September 11, Naval Secretary Badger—along with the rest of the Cabinet, excepting Secretary of State Daniel Webster—resigned in protest over President Tyler’s fiscal policies.
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Badger’s replacement, a Virginia judge named Abel P. Upshur, knew nothing of the agreement struck between his predecessor and Colt. Suddenly Sam found himself without a governmental sponsor.

It was at this very moment, when the federal funding he was counting on seemed about to fall through, that Sam returned from an out-of-town business trip to find the city abuzz with news of his brother’s arrest.

From the start, Sam was his brother’s most stalwart defender. Despite the
precarious state of his own finances, he assumed responsibility for John’s legal fees, offering each of the attorneys a thousand-dollar retainer—“five hundred in cash and ten shares par value in the Submarine Battery Company.”
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At the same time, Sam never lost sight of his own business interests. Throughout John’s ordeal, he pursued his current project with the tireless drive that, to his later hagiographers, exemplified his “unconquerable spirit”—the “indomitable energy and perseverance” that, “when the dark clouds of adversity rested upon him,” allowed him to “overcome all obstacles and emerge triumphantly into the light of day.”
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Even while providing moral and material support to his brother, Sam bent his efforts “towards getting an early action by the Navy Department on his submarine battery appropriation.”
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To one influential friend in Washington, he sent a letter expressing the urgency of the situation: “Circumstances of a nature too painful to relate have rendered it of vital importance that I should raise a som
[sic]
of money at once,” he wrote, urging the recipient to do everything possible to expedite the bill. He also wrote directly to the new secretary of the navy, Abel Upshur, describing the harbor defense system, suggesting “that the Naval ordinance appropriation was his by right and intent,” and conveying his “hope that matters would be permitted to continue in their original course.”
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While Sam, however rattled by the crisis, remained characteristically dogged in pursuit of his goal, newspapers reported that the scandal of John’s arrest had produced a devastating effect on the family patriarch. According to a widely disseminated story, originally published in the
Hartford Review
, Christopher Colt, Sr., “the father of J. C. Colt, the supposed murderer of Samuel Adams,” had “become insane.” Pulling out the sentimental stops, the article described Christopher as “an aged man, whose years have been embittered by the folly of his son, and this last horrible act has ‘filled up the measure of sorrow’ which will soon lay him in his grave.”
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As affecting as it is, the story is nothing more than empty rumor, typical of an era when the penny papers did not scruple to print colorful gossip as sober fact. However distressed Christopher undoubtedly was over his eldest son’s plight, he retained his sanity and lived another nine years, dying at the respectable age of seventy. What is perhaps most striking about this article is the fact that it was reprinted as far away as Wisconsin: testimony to
the fascinated interest—the “excited curiosity,” as one newspaper put it—that, by early October, the Colt-Adams case had already generated.
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