Killer Colt (33 page)

Coleman, who became the first murderer ever executed in the Tombs
yard, had plotted his killing days before committing it. As Whiting had already pointed out, however, a crime did not have to be planned long in advance to qualify as a premeditated act. “No definite time is fixed by the law,” Kent explained. “Even if the design was formed after Adams came into the room,” the jury was entitled to find Colt guilty of murder.

If, however, the jury felt that there was no premeditation involved, the crime fell under one of several classes of manslaughter. “If Colt intended only to beat Adams and ended up killing him, it is manslaughter in the first degree,” Kent said. “If he killed him in the heat of passion, it is manslaughter in the second degree. Manslaughter in the third degree is killing a human being in the heat of passion with a dangerous weapon.”

Turning to the trial, Kent maintained that there was no need to review “the great mass of evidence in regard to the killing,” since Colt’s confession had rendered so much of it moot. “The case really lies in a nutshell,” he declared. To a significant extent, the jury’s ultimate judgment would hinge on their estimation of Colt’s character. As to that, said Kent, Colt’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the killing showed him “to be an uncommon man,” possessed of “the most wonderful coolness.”

In emphasizing Colt’s ostensibly cold-blooded temperament, Kent seemed to be siding with the prosecution. For the remainder of his speech, however, he went out of his way to offer John the benefit of every doubt.

Though “the District Attorney thinks the fact that Colt borrowed the saw is important,” said Kent, he himself did not attach any great significance to it. Likewise the presence of the hatchet and the packing crate. Having been in Colt’s possession months before his troubles with Adams, they could scarcely be regarded as proof of “preparatory design.” The locale of the crime also “seemed to preclude the supposition of design.” The Granite Building “is the most frequented house in the most populous city in the Union,” Kent pointed out. “The time was near midday, and separated only by a folding door was a schoolroom filled with scholars.” Under those circumstances, said Kent, “it is difficult to suppose that there had been a premeditated design to take life.”

“In regard to the salt,” Kent went on, “I do not consider it material.” Beyond “inflaming the public mind,” the notion that Colt “used salt to preserve Adams’s body” had no bearing on the case. “It only shows Colt’s foresight
in guarding against discovery”—“a talent for concealment rarely equaled in the annals of death.”

Indeed, continued Kent, the same could be said about every aspect of Colt’s efforts to dispose of the corpse. To be sure, the “conduct evinced by Colt in packing up poor Adams’s body” was shocking. But it hardly proved that he was guilty of murder.

Taking up each contested point in turn, Kent recapped the evidence in an eminently evenhanded way. As for Caroline Henshaw, Kent believed that the testimony of “that interesting young woman” was “worthy of confidence. Her manner was artless and childlike, unconscious of guile, and the impression on my mind was decidedly in her favor.”

Looking at the question of motive, Kent conceded that cold-blooded murders were sometimes committed for the flimsiest reasons. “Savages” had been known “to shoot a man just to see how he would fall from his horse.” Even so, said Kent, it was up to the jury to “think if there was any adequate motive” for the crime. Reviewing the possible causes—revenge, avarice, “the desire to protect reputation,” a simmering grudge—Kent found that none of those motives “appeared probable.”

As to “the character of the slayer and the slain,” said Kent, “the evidence is favorable to both. Adams was shown to have been amiable. Nevertheless, he was capable, as attested by several witnesses, of using language of an insulting character. As to Colt, he has also been shown to be mild and pleasing in his manner. But there is evidence to show that he, too, had his times of excitable feelings.” If the jurors were convinced that John’s extraordinary “coolness of character” proved that he was “capable of premeditation,” then they “must bring him in guilty of murder.” On the other hand, the “certainty that Adams was capable of showing temper” lent credence to the “idea that he might have come upon Colt in a feverish state of mind and a fracas occurred between them.” In that case, manslaughter was the appropriate verdict.

In bringing his charge to a close, Kent reminded the jurors that if “there is a reasonable doubt,” they must find “in favor of the prisoner. Give the lowest degree of punishment to which you feel the case belongs,” he instructed. “Consider the case fairly and mercifully, but do justice whatever may ensue. Resist everything like threats, and yield at the same time to nothing like morbid sympathy with anyone. Examine the subject and say
what you believe and you will do your duty to the prisoner, your country, and your God.”
⁷

•   •   •

It was nearly 6:00 p.m. when Judge Kent finished. Moments later, the jurors retired to begin their deliberations. His face blanched of color, John watched them file from the room, while—seated beside him at the defense table—Sam Colt laid a fortifying hand on his brother’s shoulder.

T
hroughout that frigid night, the crowd around City Hall grew larger by the hour. Knots of people huddled all about the park, debating every detail of the case and speculating on the possible outcome. Most of those gathered conversed in the solemn tones suitable to the occasion. Others, however—women as well as men—positioned themselves beneath the glowing windows of the courtroom and shouted their demand for Colt’s conviction, their “loud and menacing voices penetrating even the jury room.”
¹

Rumors swept through the crowd. Court officers stationed outside the jury room kept their ears to the keyhole and provided regular updates on the deliberations. After three hours, “the jury stood seven for murder, three for manslaughter, and two for excusable homicide.” An hour later, “they stood seven for murder and five for manslaughter. By 11:00 p.m., “they stood ten to two.” And there they appeared to be deadlocked.
²

Judge Kent, who had gone out for dinner following the completion of his charge, returned to the courtroom around 8:00 p.m. and stayed until midnight, when he finally went home to bed. Shortly after his departure, John, overcome by exhaustion, stretched out on a bench, covered his face with his handkerchief, and fell into a fitful sleep. He was awakened around 3:00 a.m. with the news that—after nine hours of deliberation—the jurors had reached a verdict.

Kent was immediately sent for. He arrived about an hour later and immediately took his place on the bench. At approximately 4:00 a.m., Sunday, January 30, John was told to stand and face the jury.

“How say you, gentlemen?” asked the clerk.

The foreman, grim faced, replied without hesitation: “Guilty of murder.”

Observers offered strikingly different accounts of John’s reaction. According to James Gordon Bennett, he “appeared horror stricken.” Another journalist, however, reported, “The prisoner did not seem to be much affected at the rendition of this verdict.” On one point everyone agreed: that “his brother, Samuel Colt, appeared much affected, as though, upon hearing the verdict, his heart died within him.”
³

John’s lawyer John Morrill ordered the jury polled, and as they gave their answers, several of the men burst into tears. Morrill, on behalf of the defense, then applied to the court for time to present their exceptions, and Judge Kent agreed to meet at 10:00 on Monday morning to hear them. After shaking hands with his lawyers and his stricken brother, John was led back to the Tombs.
⁴

•   •   •

The trial was over, but for James Gordon Bennett, “the most exciting part of the drama” was still to come. “Will Colt be hung, or will a new trial be granted?” he asked breathlessly, as though the conviction were the latest chapter of a serialized cliffhanger. “Will the Governor dare to pardon him?”

Bennett was inclined to think that a pardon was unlikely. Within recent memory, the perpetrators of two of the city’s most notorious murders had escaped the noose. Despite his manifest guilt, Richard Robinson, accused of the axe murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett, had been acquitted at his trial in June 1836. Four years later, after being sentenced to death for a brutal stabbing during a tavern brawl, the young Bowery tough Ezra White had his conviction overturned on a technicality. Retried, he got off with a four-year stint in Sing Sing Prison.
⁵

Now, Bennett believed, Colt was doomed to serve as a scapegoat. “The public have been cheated so often that Colt has to suffer for the sins of Ezra White, Robinson, and all who have escaped for the last ten years,” he editorialized on January 31. “Had the verdict not been ‘murder’ we don’t know what would the consequences have been. It is a very unjust thing. But so it is.”
⁶

THE NEW YORK TRAGEDY

A
s Bennett observed, Colt’s conviction was a gratifying outcome to the public at large, whose hunger for retributive justice had been repeatedly thwarted in recent years. To John’s friends and supporters, however, the verdict came as a devastating blow.

The reaction of Lewis Gaylord Clark was typical. Coeditor with his twin brother, Willis, of the
Knickerbocker Magazine
, the country’s leading literary periodical, Clark was a family friend of the Colts and, from the time of John’s arrest, had maintained “staunchly and publicly that the prisoner’s crime had simply been an unhappy accident.” When the jury handed down its decision, Clark was so distraught that—though he “adored Charles Dickens above all other authors”—he could not bring himself “to attend an important meeting that night to plan the great dinner in honor of Dickens,” who was then visiting America.
¹

Word of the verdict quickly spread throughout the country in newspapers from Milwaukee to Maine; in religious publications from the
Catholic Herald
to the
Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate;
and in popular journals ranging from the
United States Magazine and Democratic Review
to
The New World: A Weekly Compendium of Popular Literature and Knowledge
.
²
While many of these publications merely reported the facts, others used the verdict as an occasion to convey lessons tailored to their target audiences.