The Devil's Gentleman (20 page)

36

T
hough cloaking themselves in the guise of selfless crusaders for justice, Pulitzer and Hearst were, of course, primarily interested in whipping up public excitement and selling as many newspapers as possible. Nevertheless, however self-serving their motives, their reporters were, in fact, in the forefront of the investigation. Even Captain McCluskey was forced to acknowledge the contributions of the yellow papers. Early in the investigation he publicly praised the
World
for the “remarkable collection of evidence” it had assembled and conceded that he and his men were unaware of certain facts “until we saw them in the
World.”
¹

The
World,
of course, had been the first to reveal the fact that another member of Roland Molineux’s club—Henry C. Barnet—had died under mysterious circumstances. Now, having learned that Professor Witthaus had found cyanide of mercury in the powder that killed Katherine Adams, Pulitzer’s men took the lead again, uncovering an even more direct link between the two cases.

HENRY C. BARNET
DID
RECEIVE POISON BY MAIL AND
DID
TAKE IT
, proclaimed the headline on Wednesday, January 4.
ANALYSIS SHOWS THE BOTTLE SENT HIM HELD CYANIDE OF MERCURY.
Crowing that it had once again outscooped its archrival with an “exclusive” revelation, the
World
presented “conclusive” proof that “the person who sent the deadly dose to Mr. Barnet” was “identical with the person who sent the vial of poison to Harry Cornish at the same club.”

The “proof” offered by the
World
was the formal statement made to the police by Dr. Henry Beaman Douglass, the man who had attended Barnet during the latter’s final days. Dr. Douglass’s testimony was printed in its entirety under the blaring headline
BARNET POISONED, DECLARES HIS PHYSICIAN.

Anyone who bothered to read the accompanying text from start to finish would have discovered something interesting. Far from believing that his patient was poisoned, Dr. Douglass continued to cling stubbornly to his original diagnosis. “I believe that Mr. Barnet died of heart failure following diphtheria, which heart failure was brought on by undue exertion,” he declared. “I do not believe that any mercurial poisoning contributed in the least to cause his death.”
²

That Pulitzer’s paper would so completely distort the facts was, of course, consistent with the journalistic ethics of the yellow papers, which never let anything as trivial as mere accuracy get in the way of a good story. In this case, however, the
World
could be forgiven. Guy Ellison—the Park Avenue chemist who, at Douglass’s request, analyzed the Kutnow’s Powder sent to Barnet—
had
found cyanide of mercury in the medicine. Douglass’s refusal to admit that Barnet had been murdered, even in the teeth of this evidence, was a matter of sheer self-interest: a desperate attempt to preserve his professional reputation and avoid any charges of incompetence.

Having learned of Ellison’s findings—and thwarted in his efforts to trace the items sent to Cornish—Captain McCluskey now shifted his focus to the death of Henry Barnet. “I’m convinced,” he announced a day after the
World
ran its story, “that the same mind sent the two poisons.”
³

McCluskey began by speaking to the people who had spent time with Barnet at the end of his life. Dr. Douglass, who bridled at any suggestion that he might have misdiagnosed his patient, had nothing helpful to say.
⁴
On the other hand, Joseph Moore—the night watchman of the Knickerbocker who doubled as a valet—offered a vivid, often poignant account of Barnet’s dying days.

According to Moore, who had been summoned to the sick man’s room soon after Barnet was first stricken, the clubman suspected from the first that he had been poisoned.

“Why, what have you taken?” Moore had asked, alarmed at Barnet’s condition.

“There’s the damned stuff in the wastebasket,” said the ashen-faced man between groans.

Moore dug through the trash but could find nothing. Heaving himself from the bed, Barnet staggered over to the basket and fished out a small tin of Kutnow’s Powder, which he handed to Moore before being overcome with a spasm of nausea.

As Barnet made for the bathroom, Moore undid the lid, dipped the end of his first finger into the powder, then touched it to his tongue. It had, he told McCluskey, “a bitter, metallic taste, not like any medicine I’ve ever tasted. It was as though I had a mouthful of copper pennies.”

Even after he was diagnosed with diphtheria, Barnet continued to believe that, as he told Moore, he had “taken enough poison to kill fifty men.” He seemed to know, despite his doctors’ reassurances, that he would never recover. At one point, Moore found him sitting up in bed, gazing out the nearby window with a look of infinite sadness.

“Moore,” said Barnet, coming out of his reverie, “I owe a tailor some money.” He then instructed the valet to telephone his banker and have fifty dollars sent up to the room. Moore obeyed, and a short while later, a messenger arrived with the cash. Barnet then instructed Moore to take eight dollars to the tailor.

Even at the time, Moore had been struck by this seemingly minor request. It was as though Barnet were settling up his debts before his final leave-taking.

“And what happened then?” McCluskey inquired.

“I paid the tailor,” Moore replied, “and kept the receipt and a few days afterward gave it to Mr. Barnet’s brother.” By then, Barnet was dead.

McCluskey was curious about the timing of certain incidents in Moore’s account. Exactly when, he asked, had Barnet remarked that he had taken enough poison to kill fifty men?

“I think it was three days before he died,” said Moore. “I could fix the time more accurately if Miss Bates was here. She overheard the conversation.”
⁵

“And who is Miss Bates?” asked McCluskey, scribbling the name in his notepad.

She was one of the two private nurses hired to be with Barnet around the clock, explained Moore. Her first name was Addie. She lived at a rooming house at 12 West Twenty-second Street.

Detective Arthur Carey was sent in a coupe to pick up Miss Bates and bring her back to police headquarters for questioning. Her testimony, when reported by the yellow press, would add a sensational new element to the case, and help throw a circumstantial net around Roland Molineux that he would have an increasingly hard time wriggling out of.

On the first of November, as Miss Bates explained to her interrogators, Dr. Douglass had summoned her to his home, where he told her of a man named Barnet, a member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, who was suffering from a case of diphtheria. Agreeing to accept the case, she proceeded to the club, where she found the patient suffering from a “very sore throat.”

Later that same afternoon, Dr. Douglass arrived and gave her instructions. For the next nine days, until Barnet’s death, she remained at his side for twelve-hour stretches, administering his medicine, spraying his throat, and feeding him whatever small amounts of nourishment he was capable of taking.

It was clear to the nurse that Barnet was a very popular man. “Many messages of sympathy came for him over the telephone.” Miss Bates spoke to each of the well-wishers, explaining that the patient was too weak to take the call. Several of Barnet’s club members also came to his door, hoping to be let in to see him, though at Douglass’s orders none was admitted. One gentleman who lived down the hall made daily inquiries about Barnet’s health and had flowers sent to the room on several occasions.

Barnet, in his failing condition, seemed utterly indifferent to these gestures. Only once did he display a spark of interest. It happened a few days before his death, when he awoke from a troubled sleep to find that a big bouquet of chrysanthemums had been delivered to his room. It was accompanied by a note, which, at Barnet’s request, Miss Bates read aloud to the stricken man. The “affectionate nature” of the message left little doubt in her mind that the writer, a woman, “had a deep regard” for Barnet.

“I wonder how she knew I was ill?” was all Barnet said when Miss Bates finished reading the note.

And who, exactly, sent this affectionate message? McCluskey now asked.

The nurse could not say. The writer had not used her full name. Miss Bates did, however, clearly recall the signature on the note: “Yours, Blanche.”
⁶

37

F
or a free spirit like Blanche with her bottomless appetite for “gaiety and glamor,” the circumstances in which she now found herself were almost unbearably grim. Instead of the life she had envisioned when she finally accepted Roland’s proposal—the dinners at Delmonico’s, the evenings at the opera, the parties with “people of brilliance and clever ability”—she was trapped within the confines of her in-laws’ “staid and dull” Brooklyn home, whose heavy mid-Victorian furnishings and somber atmosphere made it feel less like a refuge than a mausoleum.
¹

To keep the family safe from the prying eyes of reporters and curiosity seekers, the General saw to it that the draperies were drawn at all times. The wintry daylight never penetrated the house. The only illumination came from the elaborate, old-fashioned ceiling fixtures and the glowing coals in the black-onyx fireplaces.
²

Intensifying the gloom of her surroundings was the dark mood of the people she shared them with. To be sure, the General did his best to maintain a cheerful demeanor. But at times, Blanche would see him sitting alone, looking heartsore and haggard—an old, careworn man. As for Roland—who now spent much of his time huddling with his attorneys—his assurances that the whole absurd affair would soon be resolved struck her as increasingly forced and brittle.
³

Newspapers claimed that, after reading accounts of the investigation, Blanche had suffered a complete nervous collapse and was in such dire condition that her family feared for a “fatal termination of her illness.”
⁴
But like so much of what passed for truth in the yellow press, this report was wildly exaggerated. In point of fact, Blanche had only the sketchiest idea of what was happening beyond Fort Greene Place, since at the General’s orders, newspapers were forbidden in the house. She had no way of knowing that, thanks to the ballyhoo whipped up by Pulitzer and Hearst, the Molineux case had already become the biggest crime story in years. Or that she herself had become the focus of intense—and decidedly prurient—fascination.

That the yellow papers intended to exploit the Molineux case for every last bit of entertainment value was made vividly clear in their splashy Sunday supplements, which—in addition to their usual mix of lurid adventure tales (
WHITE WOMAN AMONG THE CANNIBALS
!), pseudoscientific essays (
ARE SEA SERPENTS REAL
?), believe-it-or-not oddities (
HE HICCOUGHED FOR FIVE DAYS
!), mildly risqué features (
PRETTY ANNETTE’S GAUZY SILK BATHING SUITS
), and full-color comics—began running regular articles related to the Great Poison Mystery.
⁵

In early January, for example, the
World
’s Sunday supplement featured a lengthy piece titled
HISTORICAL POISONERS AND HOW THEY HAVE SLAIN THE VICTIMS OF THEIR HATE AND PASSION.
In graphic and gruesome detail, the article recounted the “horrible crimes” of illustrious Old World poisoners, from Caligula to Louis XIV. The main focus of the piece, however, was Lucrezia Borgia, whose seductively posed portrait—reproduced from a painting by German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach—occupied the center of the page. So great was her notoriety, the article noted, that her very name had become a byword for female treachery. “Thus,” said the writer, “we hear that ‘Mrs. Botkin is a Borgia,’ or that ‘there may be a Lucrezia Borgia in the Adams-Cornish mystery.’”
⁶

Hearst’s
Journal,
meanwhile, countered with a remarkable Sunday feature titled
OLD SLEUTH’S DAUGHTER UNRAVELS THE MYSTERY OF NEW YORK’S GREAT POISON SECRET.
A thinly fictionalized account of the Adams-Barnet affair, this story was written by one Rena I. Halsey, daughter of a popular dime novelist named Harlan P. Halsey, whose most famous creation was a detective known as “Old Sleuth.” The elder Halsey having died the previous year, Hearst had hired the daughter to “take up the facts as known to the public and work out a solution to the mystery.”

In the resulting story, “Old Sleuth” encounters barely disguised versions of Roland B. Molineux, Blanche Chesebrough, Henry Barnet, Harry Cornish, and Katherine Adams (here renamed Reginald B. Martineau, Bertha Chesney, Robert Bennett, Harold Cornell, and Mrs. Albro). Inevitably, the ace detective cracks the case, though readers expecting anything like a plausible solution to the actual crime were in for a disappointment, since the killer in Miss Halsey’s tale turns out to be a wholly fictitious creation named Florence Applegate—an aging beauty with “strange, weird” eyes who murders out of jealousy.
⁷

Hearst’s recasting of the Adams-Barnet case as a cheesy whodunit was a pioneering instance of a phenomenon that would define the coming century, when the boundary between news and entertainment became increasingly blurred. On another day, the
Journal
ran a feature on the death of Henry Barnet in the form of a “graphic story”: an eight-panel comic strip illustrating the fate of the “first victim of the poisoner” from his drinking of the Kutnow Powder to his final illness.
⁸

Not to be outdone, Pulitzer’s paper presented a summary of the case in the form of a stage play, complete with a “Cast of Characters” a synopsis of the “Great Double Poisoning Drama” divided into acts and scenes (“ACT I—Death of Barnet. SCENE I—Barnet’s apartment in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Barnet and Dr. Beaman Douglass in consultation”); and the kind of cliff-hanging conclusion that, a few decades later, would become a staple of Saturday matinee movie serials (“ACT IV—The Audience Waits for the Arrest. But of whom? And when, if ever? What dramatist’s imagination has set the stage for such a play as this?”)
⁹

In keeping with the increasingly melodramatic coverage of the story, Blanche was first introduced to the public in the stock role of the Dark Lady, a mysterious seductress whose entrance was heralded with teasing hints and (quite literal) foreshadowings.

ENTER THE INEVITABLE WOMAN,
announced the
Journal
on January 6, reporting the discovery of a “mysterious letter, signed with a woman’s first name” that had been “sent to Henry Barnet during the illness that preceded his death.”
¹⁰

WHO IS BLANCHE
? blared the paper on the following day, publicly identifying for the first time the signature on the “affectionate” missive that Barnet had supposedly “read and reread…up to the very time of his death.”
¹¹

On that same day, the
World
featured a lurid, attention-grabbing drawing on its front page. The illustration shows a gloved hand labeled “Police” pulling back a dark curtain to expose a bottle of cyanide of mercury. In the glaring light, the bottle casts the shadow of a young woman’s profile. The caption reads: “A Qualitative Analysis.”

For anyone following the Adams-Barnet case—which, by that point, would have been much of the city’s population—the meaning of this cartoon was unmistakable. As the police investigation brought more facts to light, it was increasingly clear that behind the death of Henry Barnet loomed a beautiful woman.

The face of that shadowy figure was first revealed to the public a few days later.
FIRST PUBLISHED PORTRAIT OF MRS. ROLAND B. MOLINEUX
, trumpeted a headline in the
World.
The accompanying picture—a handsome pen-and-ink sketch apparently copied from a group photograph of a choral society Blanche once belonged to—showed a smiling young woman with the radiant all-American charm of one of Charles Dana Gibson’s idealized beauties.

By then, reporters had not only identified the mysterious sender of the Barnet letter as Roland Molineux’s wife but had dug up a wealth of information on the former Blanche Chesebrough.
LIFE OF MRS. MOLINEUX READS LIKE A ROMANCE,
proclaimed a lengthy article in the
World,
which offered a surprisingly detailed—if not wholly accurate—account of her life, from her peripatetic childhood through her early musical studies to her marriage to Roland Molineux. The picture that emerged in the paper was of a young woman whose beauty, grace, and exceptional singing talent made her irresistibly alluring to both Roland and Henry Barnet, turning the two men into bitter rivals for her affection. “Molineux is said by his friends to be of a very jealous disposition,” the paper reported, “and it was not long before he and Barnet became engaged in a quarrel about the handsome girl. Their mutual dislike grew into hatred and it soon became known among their friends that they were avowed enemies on account of Miss Chesebrough.”
¹²

Immured in the Molineuxs’ fortress-like home, where (as she writes in her memoirs) “the news sheets were not even unfolded in my presence,”
¹³
Blanche was unaware of her new notoriety. Up until that point, the Adams-Barnet case already had the makings of a major media sensation: scandalous doings in the upper-crust world of Manhattan’s elite athletic clubs; the scapegrace son of a Civil War hero; deadly poisons sent through the mail; dark hints of drugs and strange disguises and unspecified “degeneracy.”

Now, with the introduction of a romantic triangle involving a beautiful young woman and her two vying lovers, the last lip-smacking ingredient was added to the mix: a generous dollop of sexual titillation.