The Devil's Gentleman (14 page)

29

D
r. Phillips had good reason to worry about his patient. Cornish spent half the night passing bloody mucus from his bowels. At one point, he stayed shut in the bathroom for three hours straight.
¹
A less able-bodied man might not have survived. Cornish’s years of athletic training, however, stood him in good stead. By the following morning—Thursday, December 29—he was sitting up in bed. That afternoon, he was strong enough to receive a visit from his friend Assistant DA John McIntyre, who showed up in the company of Captain George W. McCluskey, chief of detectives.

Apart from his imposing physique (he was nicknamed “Chesty” in tribute to his massive upper torso), McCluskey looked more like a Wall Street broker than a cop. A dapper dresser and bon vivant, he liked to mingle with the moneyed crowd and made Delmonico’s his unofficial headquarters. Despite his slick appearance, smooth manners, and expensive tastes, however, he was a shrewd, tough-minded lawman who had come up through the ranks and was touted by his admirers as the greatest detective of his time—New York City’s answer to Sherlock Holmes.
²

McCluskey and McIntyre remained with Cornish for several hours, questioning him about possible suspects. Try as he might, however, Cornish could think of no one who might want him dead.
³

That evening, McCluskey met with reporters in his office at police headquarters, where he displayed the small silver holder and medicine bottle received by Cornish. Despite its elegant packaging, the holder was not, McCluskey reported, “of Tiffany’s manufacture. It is marked ‘Sterling,’ but I don’t think it is real sterling. It looks like a dry goods store article.”

His examination of the holder, moreover, had convinced him that “it has been in use some time; it is not new”—a conclusion that casts serious doubts on McCluskey’s supposedly Holmes-like powers of observation, since it would prove to be utterly mistaken.

At a glance, the bottle itself—cobalt blue and labeled “Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer”—appeared to be no different from the ones sold in pharmacies. It would, McCluskey explained, be turned over to a state chemist for further analysis.

Though the case was only a day old, rumors were already circulating that the DA’s office and the detective bureau were working at cross purposes. McCluskey, however, was vehement in his denials, insisting that there was “absolute harmony” between the police and the district attorney. “This will be a record case in criminal history,” he told the reporters, “and we want to help make it memorable by capturing and then aiding in the conviction of the murderer.”
⁴

Coming just twenty-four hours after the story first broke, this is a remarkably prescient—and revealing—statement. Clearly, McCluskey already understood that the hunt for Mrs. Adams’s killer was about to turn into the hottest show in town—a sensational real-life melodrama in which he would play a starring role.

John McIntyre also spoke to reporters that evening. Ignoring the opinion of graphologist David Carvalho—who was certain that a male hand had inscribed the address on the poison package—the assistant DA declared his belief that the person who had mailed the doctored bromo-seltzer to Harry Cornish was a woman.

Reporters also solicited the comments of the coroner’s physician, Albert T. Weston. Weston had little to say, though he did make one important announcement. “I have seen the contents of the bottle, and am positive that it is cyanide of potassium,” he said. “I know this from the odor and from the peculiar appearance of the poison.”
⁵

Weston’s definite identification of the deadly ingredient as cyanide of potassium would be trumpeted in the next day’s papers. And like McIntyre’s remark about the sex of the killer and McCluskey’s comment on the secondhand condition of the silver holder, it would turn out to be wrong.

McIntyre, of course, was not alone in his opinion that Mrs. Adams had been killed by a member of her own sex. Apart from the truism that poison was the murder weapon of choice for women, the public was still keenly aware of the case of Cordelia Botkin, whose trial was under way even at that moment. Mrs. Botkin had dispatched her deadly candies after being spurned by her lover. It seemed entirely plausible that a similarly scorned and vengeful female had sent the poisoned remedy to Harry Cornish.

Reporters digging into Cornish’s life had already uncovered tales of his checkered past, details of which had emerged during his divorce trial. According to the
World,
Cornish had led a life “filled with exciting incidents” during his brief stint as athletic director of the Chicago Athletic Club.

The article cited a cabbie named P. J. Smith who had testified that, on one occasion, he had driven Cornish and an unnamed woman to the St. Bernard Hotel, when “the woman’s husband appeared and there was a row.” Not long afterward, Cornish and several other “convivial young men” were dining at the Schiller Café with “two or three women, one of them being the woman of the St. Bernard affair.” When “the wronged husband again appeared and suggested to his wife the propriety of going home,” Cornish and his chums “fell upon the husband and tossed him into the street.”
⁶

That Cornish had not abandoned his womanizing ways since coming to New York was confirmed, to some observers, by his unorthodox living arrangements. Rumors were already flying that he and Florence Rodgers—Mrs. Adams’s daughter—were more than mere housemates.

Florence Rodgers herself became the subject of dark suspicions when, on the afternoon of December 29, several detectives arrived at her home to whisk her off to police headquarters.

Like the sites of other sensational murders, the apartment building where Mrs. Adams was killed—the Elliott, as it was called—had quickly become a magnet for the morbidly curious. From morning until nightfall, the sidewalk on Eighty-sixth and Columbus was so thronged with onlookers that residents had trouble entering and leaving the building. The janitor, flanked by “two colored hall boys,” stood guard throughout the day, admitting only tenants and various officials, like Coroner Edward H. Hart and Dr. Weston, who showed up around four o’clock to perform the autopsy on Mrs. Adams.

An undertaker named Brown arrived shortly thereafter. It was Brown who got the crowd buzzing with excitement when he announced to the assembled reporters that Mrs. Rodgers was about to be arrested for her mother’s murder.
⁷

The scene that ensued—remarkable at the time—would be familiar in the coming century, when celebrities, attempting to get from one place to another, would be forced to rely on elaborate dodges to elude their pursuers. Not long after Brown made his stunning announcement, a carriage pulled up to the building. Guessing (correctly) that it had come to take Florence Rodgers downtown, the crowd swarmed around the vehicle. Seeing that he was about to be surrounded, the driver managed to maneuver the carriage halfway down the block. “The crowd,” one reporter wrote, “rushed wildly after him.”

Just then, a hand emerged from a window of Florence Rodgers’s third-floor apartment and waved frantically to the driver, who—following the signal—drove his carriage around the corner to 72 West Eighty-seventh Street, directly behind the Elliott. As the crowd ran to catch up with the vehicle, two women dressed in black—Florence Rodgers and her friend Edna Hovey—slipped through an alley connecting the two buildings, ran down some stairs, and hurried into the carriage, followed closely by a detective named Maher. Before the crowd could descend upon it, the carriage “sped rapidly away.”
⁸

A similar scene awaited them at police headquarters on Mulberry Street, where an even larger crowd had assembled. Spotting the mob, the driver pulled around to Mott Street. Surrounded by several officers, Mrs. Rodgers and Mrs. Hovey were then smuggled into the rear of the station house. No sooner had they pushed through the glass doors than “a large group of people waiting in the main corridor made a rush to see them.” As the crowd bore down upon her, Mrs. Rodgers was hustled into Captain McCluskey’s office and the door was slammed shut.
⁹

MRS. RODGERS A PRISONER IN ADAMS POISON CASE
, screamed the headline in the evening edition of Hearst’s
Journal.
Even before the paper hit the streets, however, the sensational claim had been discredited.

Florence Rodgers, it turned out, had come to headquarters at McCluskey’s request to give her own version of events. She had answered questions for an hour, then been sent home. “Published stories that Mrs. Rodgers had been arrested for poisoning her mother are absolutely false,” McCluskey declared. There was “not a particle of truth” to reports that she was a suspect.
¹⁰

If any woman had reason to feel betrayed by Cornish, it was his ex-wife, Addie—and reporters lost no time in tracking her down at her home in Boston. Any suspicions that she might have been the source of the fatal package, however, were quickly dispelled by her sheer graciousness and candor.

Despite having been bitterly wronged by her ex-husband, Mrs. Cornish retained only the kindliest feelings for him. He was, she continued to believe, a good and decent man who had “made a great mistake in taking a course that made it necessary for me to secure a divorce. I believe he will realize it someday.”

“When was the divorce granted?” asked her interviewer.

“It was on my birthday, April 3, 1897, in Chicago,” she replied, then added with a rueful smile: “Not a very nice birthday present, was it?”

“Not unless one was anxious to be free,” said the reporter.

“Well, I wasn’t,” Mrs. Cornish said softly. “It was none of my doing. But sometimes, we can’t have things just the way we would like them, you know.”

Asked if she knew of anyone who might wish her ex-husband harm, Addie Cornish shook her head. “I did not know that he had any enemies. He is a very popular man.”

“But the popular man might excite the jealousy of a woman,” the reporter suggested.

“That is true,” said Mrs. Cornish. “But I am sure I can’t imagine who it could be. As I say, I have really known nothing about Mr. Cornish’s life, companions, or associates for three years. I am greatly relieved to know he is unharmed. When I heard there was bad news for me, I thought at once of my child and her father. I am glad both are well.”
¹¹

Over in Hartford, Connecticut, however, Addie’s former in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt C. Cornish—to whom she still paid an occasional visit—had suspicions of their own. On Thursday afternoon, they sent a telegram to the Manhattan DA’s office, where John McIntyre and a colleague, Maurice Blumenthal, were now working full-time on the case. In their message, Cornish’s parents revealed that, when Harry was just nineteen, he had been carrying on an affair with a married woman whose husband had been harboring a grudge against their son ever since. Perhaps, they suggested, the betrayed man was the source of the poison package.

This theory was, rightly, dismissed out of hand, since it seemed wildly improbable that a cuckolded husband would wait sixteen years before seeking revenge. Still, the telegram—whose contents were immediately trumpeted in the press—added weight to the growing belief that something in Cornish’s rakish past had come back to haunt him.
¹²

That the yellow papers had decided to turn the Adams case into a full-blown media sensation became unmistakably clear on the morning of Friday, December 30, when Hearst’s
Journal
plastered a three-column headline across its front page:

THE GREAT MURDER MYSTERY

Investigated by

Julian Hawthorne

The son of the great American novelist, Julian Hawthorne possessed none of his father’s genius, though he made up in sheer productivity what he lacked in ability. By the time of the Adams murder, he had already published nearly fifty volumes, along with countless book reviews, sketches, and short stories. He had a particular fascination with mystery, the occult, and crime (a subject he would come to know intimately in later years when he was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to a brief stint in a federal penitentiary).

Despite the slipshod quality of his writings (some of his novels were dashed off in a matter of weeks), Hawthorne enjoyed a solid commercial success, and the popularity of his books—combined with the eminence of his family name—made him a figure in turn-of-the-century America. In employing him as a commentator on the Adams case, Hearst was pioneering a practice familiar in our own time, when no media circus is complete without at least one celebrity author to report on the proceedings.

Hawthorne’s piece on the Adams murder proceeds in a leisurely, longwinded manner that suggests he was being paid by the word. In it, he considers the various theories then floating around—including the possibility Cornish himself was the murderer. Hawthorne pooh-poohs this notion. Apart from the fact that there was not a single shred of evidence to implicate Cornish, poisoning was hardly Harry’s style. The famed athletic director, writes Hawthorne, was “a masculine, brawny fellow who was far more likely to knock an enemy down than to buy cyanide of potassium to do away with him.”

On the other hand, Hawthorne acknowledges that—however innocent of murder—Cornish was no saint. He had evidently conducted “some affairs on the sly” while still married and had “not led a chaste life” since his divorce. In the end, Hawthorne concurs with the prevailing opinion that the culprit was probably “a woman scorned by her former lover,” and that “all the police have to do is
chercher la femme.
”
¹³

Despite Hawthorne’s reputation as a keen student of crime, his deductions would prove to be no more astute than those of any other armchair detective. In the course of his article, however, he does make one highly apt observation, though it appears as a casual aside. Noting that one disadvantage of employing poison as a murder weapon is the difficulty in obtaining it, he writes: “It is not always easy to get good poison; it has to be bought at a shop.”