The Devil's Gentleman (22 page)

41

E
arly in the investigation, the police had retained the services of a pair of well-known handwriting experts: William J. Kinsley, editor of the venerable
Penman’s Art Journal,
and David Carvalho, who had been much in the news before Christmas for his role in a sensational blackmail trial involving robber baron Jay Gould.
¹
All penmanship samples relevant to the Adams-Barnet murders, beginning with the address scissored from the infamous poison package, were immediately turned over to these specialists. By Tuesday, January 17, they had already received the fake Cornish request found by Elsie Gray.

Now, having completed his own examination of the latest “Cornish” letter sent to Von Mohl Company, McCluskey planned to forward it to Kinsley and Carvalho. Even as he prepared to do so, another startling discovery was taking place in Cincinnati.

Up until that point, the newshounds in the pay of Pulitzer and Hearst had played a leading role in the investigation, not only goading the police into action but often beating them to important clues. This time, though, it was another paper—the
New York Herald
—that was ahead of the pack.

No sooner had its editors learned about the letter found among the files of Von Mohl Company than a telegram went out to the
Herald
’s Cincinnati stringer. Quickly repairing to the offices of the patent medicine firm, the reporter spoke to the manager, Joseph Brewster. Was it possible, he asked, that other correspondence signed with Cornish’s name might exist in the company’s records?

With the newsman looking on, Brewster began searching through the files. It wasn’t long before he came upon a piece of mail—still in its original envelope—whose handwriting bore a marked resemblance to that on the earlier “Cornish” letter. It, too, was a request for a five-day trial sample of the company’s widely advertised impotence cure, Calthos. Only this time, the sender had supplied a different address: 257 West Forty-second Street. And the signature on the letter—much to the astonishment of both the reporter and Brewster—wasn’t “H. Cornish.” It was “H. C. Barnet.”
²

Though less given to blowing its own horn than its more shameless rivals, the
Herald
couldn’t keep from trumpeting the news of its “important and sensational discovery” in its morning edition. By the time its readers were learning of this stunning new development, a reporter for the
Herald
was already at the address given on the fake Barnet letter.

Number 257 West Forty-second Street turned out to be a shabby little “advertising agency” run by one Nicholas Heckmann, whose office, like Joseph Koch’s, was furnished with a rack of wooden pigeonholes that were rented out as private letter boxes. Questioned by the reporter, Heckmann recalled that the previous May, a well-dressed gentleman had come into his office, inquiring about a letter box. Heckmann knew the man by sight, having seen him around the neighborhood for years. When Heckmann quoted his fees, the man opted for the quarterly rate—$1.50. He then paid the money in advance and gave his name as Mr. H. C. Barnet, correcting Heckmann’s spelling when the latter added an extra
t
to the end of the name.

For the next few weeks, the gentleman picked up his mail every other day, generally in the late afternoon or early evening. Most of what he received appeared to come from various patent medicine concerns, including Von Mohl of Cincinnati, a firm that had stuck in Heckmann’s mind because the return address—Lincoln’s Inn Place—sounded so unusual.

Then, a month after renting the letter box, “Mr. Barnet” had abruptly ceased to show up. Heckmann had never seem him again, though various small packages and letters continued to arrive in his name. Heckmann—who generally held on to his customers’ uncollected mail for several months—still had a number of items addressed to “Barnet” in his possession and let the reporter examine them. There were letters from patent medicine firms in New York City, Detroit, and Ohio. Checking the postmarks, the reporter noticed that the most recent was dated November 29, 1898.

Or so he initially thought. Heckmann, however, drew his attention to an item that, by a strange coincidence, had arrived for “Barnet” just the previous morning—an advertising circular for a concoction called Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy, sold by a Professor F. C. Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut.

The
Herald
’s man had just finished studying this advertisement when the office door banged open and in strode two plainclothes detectives, Arthur Carey and his partner, William McCafferty. They had been dispatched to Heckmann’s place by Captain McCluskey, who had learned of the discovery of the fake Barnet letter only a short time earlier, when he’d seen that morning’s
Herald.
Taking Heckmann aside, the detectives began to question him in hushed, urgent tones. About twenty minutes later, after taking possession of all the Barnet material, they left.

By then, the reporter from the
Herald
was already on his way to the train station.
³

He rode the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad to Connecticut, changing cars once at Valley Branch, then hiring a buggy to drive him five miles from Goodspeed Station to the little village of Moodus in the far eastern part of the state. When he arrived at the offices of Professor Fowler’s patent medicine operation, he spoke to the manager, George Hill, who began to look through the company’s files for any communication signed H. C. Barnet. Hill was still searching when Fowler himself showed up and took over the task. He combed his records for nearly two hours before he found what he was looking for.

It was a printed order sheet for the company’s ostensible impotency cure, Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy. The sender had enclosed the requisite fee—$3.12—and supplied some basic information, though he appeared to have filled in the blanks rather hastily. (In response to the question “Married or single?” for example, he had written “Yes.”) He indicated that he had been afflicted for ten years and that he suffered from an advanced stage of his condition. The name was given as H. C. Barnet and the return address as “Box #217, 257 West 42nd Street, NY City.”

In the judgment of the reporter—who had brought along a newspaper facsimile of the address from the poison package mailed to Harry Cornish—the handwriting was “exactly the same.”
⁴
He was also struck by the postmark on the envelope: May 31, 1898.

Captain McCluskey, in the meanwhile, had started his own man for Moodus—a detective named Tinker. Unfortunately, Detective Tinker had missed a connection and found himself stranded in central Connecticut overnight. When McCluskey received a message from Tinker, the chief immediately wired Fowler, directing him to “send without delay any document in his possession signed by H. C. Barnet.”

By then, however, it was too late. Fowler (for an undisclosed monetary consideration) had turned over the “Barnet” order form to the reporter, who was already on his way back to New York City.
⁵

The following day, the
Herald
ran a crowing headline,
POLICE FOLLOWING THE HERALD’S CLEWS
. The story described the “new and important clews” discovered by its intrepid reporter at Nicholas Heckmann’s letter box agency and Professor Fowler’s lab in Moodus, Connecticut. Noting that the order form sent to Fowler had been postmarked May 31, 1898, the newspaper concluded that the plot to murder Henry Barnet and Harry Cornish had been hatched as far back as the previous spring, then carried out with “fiendish deliberation.”

Fearing a libel suit, the paper refrained from naming a suspect. It did, however, mention a “strange coincidence.” Describing the uncollected letters that had arrived for “Barnet” at Heckmann’s place, the story noted that one of these had been postmarked November 19, 1898—“the very day that Blanche Chesebrough, who was said to be a close friend of H. C. Barnet, was married to Roland B. Molineux, who was known to be jealous of Miss Chesebrough because of Barnet’s admiration for her.”
⁶

There was another odd coincidence that the
Herald
failed to note, though it would not escape the attention of later commentators. Of all the letters requesting impotence cures and marriage manuals mailed out under the names H. C. Barnet and H. Cornish (and there would turn out to be many of them), all were postmarked either in the spring or fall of 1898. None had been mailed out in July or August—the months when Roland Molineux was out of the country on his summer trip to Europe.

While the
Herald
was claiming bragging rights for the latest discoveries in the case, Detective Carey was quietly pursuing another lead.

Among the uncollected “Barnet” mail that he and McCafferty had confiscated at Heckmann’s was a letter from the Marston Remedy Company of 19 Park Place, Manhattan. Proceeding to that address, Carey spoke to the owner, Dr. Vincent G. Hamill, who, in searching through his records, came upon the four-page “diagnosis blank” filled out by the man who signed himself H. C. Barnet.

Though the questionnaire required little more than one-or two-word answers, it was a revealing document. From it, Carey learned that the sender suffered from recurrent bouts of impotence, had contracted a case of gonorrhea three years earlier, and was “contemplating marriage.” Carey also discovered that there was at least one case of consumption—tuberculosis—in the man’s family. In the space marked “Age,” the applicant had written “31.”

Carey was particularly struck by the chest and waist measurements given by the sender—thirty-seven and thirty-two inches respectively. Carey had never met Henry Barnet, but from what he had read and heard, he knew that the murdered clubman had been stout. He also knew that Barnet had been thirty-two years old at the time of his death.

Carey took possession of the questionnaire and left. Within twenty-fours hours—by asking around at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club—he had found out the name of Roland Molineux’s tailor. A trip to the shop confirmed what Carey already surmised. Molineux’s chest and waist measurements corresponded exactly to those given on the “diagnosis blank.”

A few days later, Carey was able to ascertain that Molineux’s maternal grandmother had died of consumption several years earlier in East Hartford, Connecticut. He also obtained a copy of Molineux’s birth certificate from the Board of Health. It showed that, at the time the questionnaire was submitted, Roland Molineux was thirty-one.
⁷

42

J
anuary 28 was a grim anniversary—one month to the day since Katherine Adams had swallowed the cyanide-laced bromo-seltzer and, in the vivid phrase of Harry Cornish, dropped to the floor “like six foot of chain.”
¹
In the intervening weeks, McCluskey and his men had come under increasingly furious fire for their failure to make an arrest. Now, with the discovery of the letters mailed to the various patent-medicine concerns, a breakthrough appeared to be imminent. As C. B. Pugh—the clerk for Von Mohl Company—remarked to a reporter, “If the New York officials will but locate the man who rented the letter boxes at No. 1620 Broadway under the name of Cornish and at No. 257 West Forty-second Street under Barnet’s name, they will have no trouble in clearing up the mystery.”
²

Captain McCluskey, of course—along with Arthur Carey and every other member of the detective bureau—had no doubt who that man was. But they required confirmation. Their hopes were now pinned on the two letter box men, Koch and Heckmann. Both had viewed the suspect up close and could presumably identify him with little trouble. Indeed, Heckmann had assured a reporter that he could pick the fake Mr. Barnet “out of a million.”
³

Once again, however, the police were in for a painful disappointment. After being publicly identified as a key witness in the case, Koch became afraid that the murderer might try to eliminate him and began to carry a revolver. Soon afterward—pleading poor eyesight—he told McCluskey that he would be unable to identify the mysterious “Mr. Barnet.”
⁴

As for Heckmann, he proved to be a highly problematic witness. Taken to a midtown hotel where Roland and his lawyers had gone for a meeting, Heckmann failed to make a positive identification, claiming that he had not been able to get a good enough look at Molineux. A few days later, a reporter for the
World
named Buchignani brought Heckmann to Roland’s workplace in Newark and contrived a face-to-face confrontation between the two men.

“That’s Mr. Barnet, all right,” Heckmann exclaimed afterward. “He’s my customer.”

It soon became clear, however, that Heckmann expected to receive a substantial payment for his testimony. When Pulitzer’s representatives balked, Heckmann began to waffle. In the end, he refused to cooperate, informing Buchignani that he “would not swear to his identification of Molineux.”
⁵

HECKMANN THE LAST ’IDENTIFIER’ TO FAIL,
read a headline in the next morning’s
World.
The story—which focused on the two letter box men as well as Emma Miller, the jewelry shop clerk who continued to stick to her “red-bearded man” story—began with a lead that accurately conveyed the disheartened mood of the authorities: “Hope of an identification that will ever be of any value is rapidly fading away. In fact, so far as it depends on any of the persons known to have seen the false Barnet and Cornish and the purchaser of the silver holder, it is already hopeless.”
⁶

By then—as if matters weren’t already complicated enough—another forged letter had turned up.

Written on the familiar robin’s-egg-blue, crescent-embossed stationery, it, too, had been sent to a drug firm, Frederick Stearns & Company of Detroit. This time, however, it was not an order for an impotence cure or a sex manual. Rather, it was a note requesting information about a former employee of the firm, a man named Alvin A. Harpster.

A portly, affable fellow with a pronounced fondness for drink, Harpster had worked for Frederick Stearns & Company in the early 1890s. Though hardly an athlete himself, he was an avid sports fan who was eventually fired from his job for being “more interested in the prize fights than the drug business,” as his employer put it.
⁷
Taking a position as clerk in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, he became friends with Harry Cornish, who, as it happened, was himself an acquaintance of Harpster’s former boss, Frederick Stearns. In January 1898, Harpster had left the athletic club and gone to work as a salesman for the Ballantine Brewery.

The letter mailed to the Stearns company read: “Gentlemen—Mr. A. A. Harpster has applied to me for a position as collector. He did not refer to you but mentioned having been in your employ. A line from you would be considered confidential and greatly appreciated.” It was signed “Very truly yours, H. C. Cornish” and gave as a return address “1620 Broadway, NYC.”

Everything about this letter struck Frederick Stearns as peculiar, beginning with the stationery itself, which seemed far too pretentious for the bluff and down-to-earth athletic director. Since Stearns knew Cornish personally, he was also puzzled by the stiffly formal tone. And why, Stearns wondered, would Cornish be asking for a letter of recommendation? Harpster had already worked at the Knickerbocker Club and his employment record was well known to his friend Cornish.

When Stearns compared the letter with other communications he had received from Harry Cornish, he saw right away that the handwriting was completely different.

Within a day of its discovery in the company files, the “Harpster letter,” as it came to be known, was in the possession of Captain McCluskey, who—like Frederick Stearns—believed that it had been mailed by the poisoner for the express purpose of introducing Harpster’s name into the case and thus “casting suspicion on an innocent man.”
⁸
It was clear to McCluskey that the fat, easygoing beer salesman had nothing whatsoever to do with the killings. That the authorities never regarded Harpster as a serious suspect, however, did not prevent the yellow papers from plastering his name across the front pages in the most insinuating way—a situation that persisted until Harpster sued Pulitzer for libel and settled for an undisclosed sum.
⁹

Harpster wasn’t the only one to find himself in the media spotlight in the waning days of January 1899. Felix Gallagher—another former member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and a close friend of Roland Molineux’s—fell under suspicion after a bartender named Charley White overheard him bad-mouthing Harry Cornish in Jim Wakeley’s saloon. And then there was the usual assortment of highly colorful cranks: the mind reader who, in a trance, saw the suspect; the “demented man” from Baltimore who confessed to the murders; the “well-dressed woman” who told police of a sinister “secret society” whose members bore a grudge against Cornish; the “erratic” young fellow named William Koutnik, who claimed that, on the day before Christmas, he had been accosted by a “strange man” on Madison Avenue who asked him to mail a package to Harry Cornish.
¹⁰

Most titillating of all were the allegations by the
World,
which announced that it had unearthed “a startling, almost incredible scandal” involving a group of homosexuals—or, as the paper put it, a “coterie of vicious degenerates”—within the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Though “supposedly of good social standing,” these men existed “in a condition of moral degeneracy so horrible that it can hardly be referred to.” For years, “under cover of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club,” they had “carried on their vile practices,” creating “a noxious state of affairs unparalleled in the history of this city.” Fearing that the “terrible truth” was about to be exposed by Henry Barnet and Harry Cornish, they had conspired to poison both men.
¹¹

All of these claims, accusations, and innuendos, however, proved to be mere sideshows in what was already the greatest media circus of the day. In the end, the police and the press invariably ended up where they began. As the
Herald
put it: “One peculiarity about the Adams case and the Henry C. Barnet case also is that, no matter in what direction newly discovered clews lead, they almost always eventually turn toward a person whose name has been connected with the case very prominently for several weeks.”

Once again, the
Herald
judiciously refrained from identifying that person. In the very next paragraph, however, the article noted that the paper had “engaged a handwriting expert of repute to compare specimens of handwriting in its possession with the writing on the poison package sent to Cornish.” After completing his analysis, the expert announced that he “had found much similarity between the writing on the various specimens and the writing of Roland B. Molineux.”
¹²