The Devil's Gentleman (28 page)

53

R
oland wasn’t the only principal in the Great Poison Mystery to find himself more famous than ever when the coroner’s inquest came to an end.

On Thursday, March 2, the Fifth Annual Sportsman’s Show opened in Madison Square Garden. This weeklong extravaganza, which combined Barnumesque spectacle with serious athletic competition, drew enormous crowds to the famous arena, whose interior had been transformed into a stunningly realistic replica of a frontier wilderness.

A panoramic backdrop depicting a snowcapped Rocky Mountain range hung from the ceiling. At its foot stood an actual Indian encampment, surrounded by real trees—spruce, fir, cedar, and pine—and inhabited by several Native American families. A sparkling brook ran through the encampment and terminated in an enormous pool—seventy-five feet long by forty feet wide—disguised to resemble a mountain lake, its sides concealed by sandy beaches and banks of high grass. A game park populated with live elk, deer, and moose occupied one side of the pool, along with a menagerie featuring a pair of mountain lions, several gray wolves, three opossums, five raccoons, and a black bear named Pete. There were taxidermy exhibits and shooting galleries, basket-weaving demonstrations and an aquarium stocked with a vast collection of rare fish, including a thirty-six-pound rainbow trout.

And, of course, there were the thrilling athletic events, among them the National Water Polo Championships, log-rolling contests, and a “clothes race,” in which swimmers competed while fully garbed in shoes, trousers, shirts, jackets, and top hats.

Nothing in the show, however—not Nassadao, the six-foot Algonquin Indian and former Rough Rider who paddled a bark canoe around the artificial lake between swimming events, not even the famed female sharpshooter Annie Oakley, there to compete in the clay-pigeon contests held on the rooftop range—generated as much excitement among spectators as the man responsible for managing the show’s athletic events: Harry Cornish.

Fresh from his triumphant vindication at the coroner’s inquest, Cornish, never averse to publicity, basked in his new notoriety. Wearing a top hat and full evening dress, he stationed himself in a conspicuous place during the aquatic events, drawing more attention than the swimmers themselves. He insisted on starting most of the races, firing the pistol with an extra flourish that delighted the crowds, who rewarded him with thunderous applause.
¹

It was Cornish who came up with one of the most sensational events of the show. Noticing that there was a steel roof girder directly above the pool, he hired a friend—a fearless forty-five-year-old Englishman named Tom Donaldson—to perform a nightly high dive. For fifteen dollars a dive, Donaldson would take a spectacular headfirst plunge into the pool. The distance was fifty-two feet. The pool was eight feet deep. The feat was advertised, not hyperbolically, as the “Drop of Death.”

For nearly a week, Donaldson performed the stunt twice a day without sustaining anything more serious than a nosebleed. When he climbed out onto the girder on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 8, however, he appeared a little shaky.

Standing beside Harry Cornish at poolside, the announcer, Peter Prunty, directed the audience’s attention to the little figure balanced high above their heads on the narrow girder. Dressed in a pair of loose-fitting American-flag pantaloons and a white jersey, Donaldson acknowledged their applause with a bow.

“Donaldson, are you ready?” called Prunty.

“Yes,” came the high-pitched reply.

Prunty looked at Cornish, who cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Go!”

Donaldson seemed to hesitate a moment before raising his hands above his head, leaning down, and plunging forward. Three thousand people held their breath, then broke into a wild ovation as he hit the water. The excitement turned to consternation, however, as Donaldson failed to reappear.

All at once, a shout broke the tense silence that had descended over the arena: “Get him out! He must be hurt!”

Tearing off his coat, Frank Spohn, a Garden employee, jumped into the pool, while Nassadao and another Algonquin leapt into a birch canoe and paddled to the spot where Donaldson had vanished. At almost the same time, Harry Reeder, captain of the Knickerbocker water polo team, dove into the water.

After several attempts, Reeder came up with Donaldson in his arms. With Spohn’s help, he swam the unconscious man to the side of the pool, where a hundred hands were waiting to help pull Donaldson from the water. There was an ugly wound on his head where it had struck the bottom of the pool, and blood gushed from his nostrils, mouth, and ears. He was rushed to New York Hospital, where he died of a severe skull fracture the next day.
²

In the wake of this tragedy, Garden officials decided that they had seen enough of Harry Cornish. Not only was he responsible for the ill-advised stunt; his insistence on making himself such a conspicuous feature of the show was, they felt, “in bad taste, in view of the recent notoriety he had attained” in the Molineux case. From that point on, he was banished to a little office near the Garden entrance.
³

Once again, Cornish found himself on the defensive, vehemently denying that he had “sought notoriety by exhibiting myself to the crowds” and insisting that Donaldson—who had been making even riskier dives at Manhattan Beach—“had personally superintended” every aspect of the stunt.
⁴

Cornish still had plenty of supporters in the athletic world, and few held him to blame for the accident. Still, the more superstitious of his friends began to wonder if some terrible curse had suddenly attached itself to him.

Wherever Cornish went lately, death seemed to follow.

54

F
ollowing her appearance at the inquest—and the scandalous picture Gardiner had painted of her in his closing remarks—Blanche could not appear in public without attracting crowds of the morbidly curious. More than ever, she became a prisoner inside the Molineuxs’ cheerless home, with its dark paneling, its ponderous furnishings, its heavy draperies perpetually drawn against the prying eyes of passersby.

An intensely social creature, she now found herself in a state of almost total isolation—cut off not only from the outside world, but even from the few other members of the besieged little household. “On Fort Greene Place,” she would recall in her memoirs, “we were bound together by a mutual grief; but each of us had to face it alone. We retreated, each in his own way, farther within ourselves. We talked but little. The days became an endless chain, each one linked to the other, drab and colorless.”
¹

Her in-laws could offer no comfort. They both put on brave faces, though Mrs. Molineux’s hair had turned noticeably whiter in the few months since her son was first implicated in the crimes. As for the General, he did his best to keep up their spirits. “Vindication will come,” he would declare. “And when this is ended, we will shake off this strange dream, and with God’s help forget it.”
²

But even as he spoke these hopeful words, Blanche observed, his voice would crack and he would turn away and gaze “into the glowing coals of the open fire. I knew it was so we should not see the tears that were in his eyes. He cleared his throat and briskly knocked the ashes from his pipe.”
³

Blanche’s only outings were the occasional visits she paid to her husband. These were not made willingly but were done, at the General’s insistence, for the sake of appearances. By this point, Blanche had developed a deep resentment of her husband. Decades later, in describing these occasions, her distaste for him was palpable. “There was the necessity for those visits to the Tombs, and one was compelled to see this son of General Molineux there, behind those bars.”
⁴

What had turned her so violently against Roland was not a sudden loss of faith in his innocence (though by this time she was, in fact, wracked with doubts). Her bitterness toward him stemmed largely from her sense that, after seducing her into marriage with promises of glamorous living—evenings at the opera, summers in Europe, parties with the social elite—he had condemned her to an existence of crushing tedium, public disgrace, and virtual imprisonment.

Making the situation even more galling was his attitude toward his own incarceration. While Blanche experienced her forced seclusion as unremitting torture, Roland seemed to view his life behind bars as an irksome, though temporary, inconvenience. “He was quite stoical,” writes Blanche in her memoirs. “There was no betrayal of what lay beneath the surface, his lips taut and hard, and his eyes inscrutable. There was about him a supercilious air of patronizing tolerance, as though he were extremely annoyed, as though he hoped they would hurry up and get done with the whole business so that he might resume normal living.”
⁵

Blanche’s efforts to protect her privacy were, of course, futile, given the relentless sensation-mongering of the yellow press. In early spring, the
Journal
made an explosive charge, claiming that on at least a half dozen occasions between May 1897 and August 1898, Henry Barnet and an unidentified female friend paid periodic visits to a hotel in Jersey City. The couple, who always registered as husband and wife, occupied “the best suite in the house.” Generally, “they remained there just one night, though on at least one occasion they lived at the hotel for a week.”

Employees of the hotel described Barnet’s companion as “a tall, stylish woman, one of whose eyes was faulty.” No one knew who she really was, though as the
Journal
was quick to point out, the description “tallies with that of Mrs. Roland B. Molineux, the former Blanche Chesebrough.”

During their last overnight stay, the fake Mrs. Barnet had accidentally left behind her parasol, “a dainty, expensive Parisian thing of green plaid, white silk, and lace.” The hotel proprietor, Mr. J. B. Hamlin, had placed it for safekeeping in a storage room. Regarding it as a potentially important clue, Captain McCluskey had dispatched Detective McCafferty to Jersey City to retrieve the parasol, along with the register containing the signatures of Barnet and his lover.
⁶

One day after Hearst’s paper carried this story, Pulitzer’s
World
featured a front-page denial signed by Blanche, “her first statement for publication,” as the headline trumpeted. The statement read:

Since the terrible tragedy culminating in the death of Mrs. Adams and throughout the inexpressibly painful scenes that have followed, I have felt it to be my duty to bear in silence the cruel attacks that have been made upon me in the newspapers. I have made no answers to these attacks, nor have I made any effort to set myself right before the world, under the advice of the counsel for my husband, who has been subjected to this infamous and unfounded charge, and whose interests are, of course, next to my heart.

But the statements in the newspapers of today, charging me, by implication, with having visited a hotel in Jersey City with Mr. Barnet are so grossly and atrociously false, that I feel in justice to myself, my husband, and my friends I must now make some statement.

I may say, in the beginning, that the cruel slander uttered by the District Attorney in his address to the Coroner’s jury is, I believe, largely responsible for the subsequent attacks upon me. His official position gave his statements a weight that they did not deserve. The public has been slow to believe that a sworn public officer could, without a shadow of proof, vilify and slander the reputation of a woman. But this was done by the District Attorney, and I have suffered in consequence.

There has never been any mystery about my life or movements, nor has there been anything in my life different from that of any other self-respecting woman.

My acquaintance with Mr. Barnet was through the introduction of Mr. Molineux, and my associations with him were merely those of friendship. I was never in Jersey City in my life, except in passing through to take a train.

At the time stated in the newspapers when Mr. Barnet first visited the hotel, May, 1897, I had never met him.

This slander is as baseless as the many others which have been published concerning me.

In simple justice to myself, my family, and my friends, I ask the public press to refrain from printing such wicked accusations, which the slightest investigation would show to be unfounded.
⁷

Though Blanche’s signature was affixed to this statement, she was not, in fact, its sole author. The General, along with Roland’s attorneys, had not only vetted her first draft but made sure to add the line denouncing the “infamous and unfounded charge” that had been leveled against her husband, “whose interests are, of course, next to my heart.”

However deeply she resented Roland for entangling her in such a nightmare, it was made abundantly clear to Blanche that for as long as the ordeal lasted, she was expected to play the part of the loyal, loving wife.