The Devil's Gentleman (30 page)

57

O
n Monday, May 1, Justice Bookstaver handed down his decision. Bartow Weeks’s motion to obtain the immediate release of his client was denied. Roland would have to remain in jail.
¹

Even as Molineux received this disappointing news, however, powerful backstairs forces were at work to set him free.

Just two days after Bookstaver issued his ruling, Roland’s case was resubmitted to a new grand jury. The justice in charge was a gentleman named MacMahon, a former battlefield comrade of Roland’s father and, like the General, a longtime member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. Six of the jurors belonged to the same patriotic organization, including the foreman, Colonel William C. Church, who like Justice MacMahon was an old friend of General Molineux’s.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 10—a week to the day after beginning its deliberations—the grand jury refused to reindict Roland. While the men from the DA’s office—James Osborne and Maurice Blumenthal—looked on grimly, Roland was brought to the bar. He was dressed in a black double-breasted sack coat that made the prison pallor of his face stand out in even sharper relief. Despite his somewhat unwholesome appearance, however, he carried his head erect and wore a look of supreme confidence. He permitted himself only the faintest of smiles when—acting on the jury’s decision—his father’s crony, Justice MacMahon, immediately discharged the prisoner from custody.

Hurrying up to Roland, a beaming Bartow Weeks threw an arm around his shoulder and exclaimed, “I congratulate you!”

Roland seized his lawyer’s hand and shook it vigorously before turning to the seated grand jurors. “I thank you, gentlemen,” he said with a grave little bow. Then, with Weeks at his side and a mob of reporters at his heels, he headed for the exit.

His freedom lasted only as long as it took him to reach the door.

Hardly had he set foot in the corridor when he was confronted by two burly figures with badges pinned to their coats—his longtime nemeses, Detectives Carey and McCafferty. Holding up one beefy hand, McCafferty ordered Molineux to stop. “You are under arrest,” he declared.

Roland, looking startled, halted in his tracks.

“What’s going on here?” cried Weeks. “This man has just been discharged!”

Ignoring the lawyer, McCafferty took Roland by the arm. “Come along with me,” he said.

“Hold on,” demanded Weeks. “Where’s your warrant?”

Reaching into a pocket, McCafferty removed a paper and handed it to Weeks, whose face had gone red with anger. He examined it for a moment before emitting a derisive snort. “It is a charge of assault,” he explained to Roland. “Against Cornish. Well, we’ll see about
that.
”

By then, the corridor was jammed with “a hundred or so of men, reporters, witnesses, clerks, and hangers-on about the building,” the whole surging mob buzzing with excitement. “Make room here,” bawled McCafferty as he and Carey elbowed their way through the crowd.

With a horde of newsmen “tumbling one over another in pursuit,” Roland was led down one flight of stairs to the chambers of Police Justice William Travers Jerome. After an hour or so of legal wrangling between Weeks and Osborne, Roland—who had enjoyed approximately three minutes of liberty—was returned to his cell in the Tombs, his bail set at $10,000.
²

The rearrest of his son did little to dampen the happiness of Roland’s father, who, like Bartow Weeks, was confident that the “charge of assault won’t amount to anything.” His son, he predicted, would soon be a free man. After all, if the grand jurors had refused to indict Roland for murder, they were hardly likely to do so for the lesser charge of assault.
³

The yellow papers, in the meantime, fumed at this latest turn of events.
ACTION IN THE MOLINEUX CASE A PUZZLE
, read the headline of Tuesday’s
Journal.
WHAT MYSTERIOUS INFLUENCE WORKED TO PREVENT HIS FACING A TRIAL JURY
? Hearst himself provided the answer on his editorial page. That the grand jury—stacked with General Molineux’s friends and sympathizers—had dismissed the charges against Roland was a flagrant instance of what Hearst decried as “the Triumph of the Pull”:

The most corroding evil in American life today is the power of pulls. In this republic, by the theory of whose government one man is as good as another and has all the rights of any other, there is a discrimination among citizens that can hardly be matched anywhere in the world outside of Turkey. If the schools are overcrowded and some children must be shut out, the parents with influence secure the places. Pulls obtain positions in every branch of the public service; they gain favor in assessments for taxation; they relieve their possessors from jury duty; they secure contracts; they give desirable assignments to officers of the army and navy; and they enable one firm to sell poisonous beef to the Government when another would not be allowed to dispose of goods of the first quality. The pull is rampant in private business, and it has now invaded the courts…. When the power of pull can accomplish that much, the plain American citizen may be thankful that he is allowed to live.
⁴

The same “mysterious influence” appeared to be at work when, several weeks later, Roland’s bail was cut in half. On the afternoon of Friday, June 9, he was taken from the Tombs and escorted to the chief clerk’s office, where he received an affectionate greeting and a celebratory cigar from his father, who had just posted the $5,000 cash bail with the city chamberlain.

Once again, however, Assistant District Attorney Osborne had planned for this contingency. As Bartow Weeks led Roland and his father from the office, he spotted Detectives Carey and McCafferty conferring in the corridor. Surmising at once that they were waiting for his client, Weeks motioned for Roland and the General to follow him. Slipping back into the office, the three men quickly crossed the room and filed rapidly up the narrow iron staircase at the rear.

It took a moment for the detectives to realize that Molineux was gone. When they did, they made a mad dash for the stairway. By then, Roland and the others had crossed to the opposite side of the building and gotten into the elevator, which was carrying them down to the lobby. Realizing what was happening, the detectives managed to intercept their quarry before he fled the building.

Grinning at the farcical little chase, Roland was served with another arrest warrant for the murder of Mrs. Adams and, after being taken again before Justice Jerome, returned to his cell in the Tombs.
⁵

This time, he had managed to remain free for nearly twice as long as on the previous occasion: just over five minutes.

In mid-July, by the order of Justice Edgar Fursman, the Molineux case was resubmitted to yet another grand jury—the third to take up the case. This time, however, there were no intimates of Roland’s father among the jurors. After a three-day investigation, they handed down their decision.

Roland Molineux was indicted on the charge of murder in the first degree for the killing of Katherine Adams. He was arraigned the following day, Friday, July 21, 1899.

Colonel Gardiner felt certain that, this time, the indictment would stick. “I am satisfied that we have sufficient evidence against Molineux to convict him of murder,” he declared.
⁶

Assistant District Attorney Osborne was positively jubilant. The moment he learned of the indictment, he called for a messenger boy and sent a message to his wife, who was summering upstate in the village of Pawling. The telegram consisted of a single terse but eloquent line: “The people won.”
⁷

58

W
ith Roland languishing in jail, awaiting the start of his trial, there was little to report about his case. Still, readers of the yellow papers did not lack for diversion. The papers were full of their usual mix of bizarre and sensational stories.

There was the tragic death of Little Aitmarhoke, a pretty ten-year-old “Esquimau girl” brought to New York City in 1895, who had recently died of consumption and whose body—if certain heartless “men of science” had their way—was to be mummified and exhibited at the Museum of Natural History. There was the trial of William G. Peckham of West-field, New Jersey, charged with one count of cat murder after shooting his neighbor’s marauding black tom, Bouncer. There was the arrest of “Jack the Cutter,” a young man with a “strange mania” for gashing the arms of female pedestrians on the streets of Manhattan. There was the controversy ignited at the Erster Neu Sandestzer Lodge on Houston Street, when one of its members, Lewis Lowensohn, decided to hold funeral rites for his amputated left leg. “How can he get the society to bury his leg?” protested fellow member Isaac Schmidt. “Suppose he gets well and falls down in front of a trolley car and gets an arm cut off. Will he get his arm buried free, too? He holds only one membership. That entitles him to be buried, but not by piecemeal. He must be buried all at once.”
¹

A number of divorces received particular attention, including the marital split between seventeen-year-old Jacob Schoerer and his sixteen-year-old wife, Clara, both of them barely four feet in height (
CHILD DWARFS IN DIVORCE SUIT,
read the headline), as well as a custody suit filed by Mr. Charles Lee, secretary of the Oriental Benevolent Labor Association, against his spouse, the former Esther Goldberger (
CHINAMAN SUES HIS JEW WIFE
).
²

As always, the extravagant doings among the social elite were followed with keen interest. One typical story told of a gala dinner held at the Hotel Marie Antoinette, the “piece de resistance” of which was an enormous pie, out of which emerged an actual one-year-old African-American infant—or, as
The New York Journal
described him, “a little pickanniny.” “The advent of the pickanniny was the crowning feature of the dinner,” the paper enthused. As the baby crawled out of the gigantic pastry, the celebrated Polish opera singer, Jean de Reszke—“the highest priced tenor in the world”—crooned him a lullaby, after which the hostess “placed a small American flag in the pickanniny’s hand” to the “applause of the gracious, brilliant throng.”
³

For several weeks, the city was riveted by the case of eighteen-month-old Marion Clarke, snatched by a kidnapper who signed his ransom notes “Mephisto, King of the American Mafia” and who threatened to “cut, saw, chop, and dismember” the baby “into bits the size of a walnut” unless he received prompt payment of $10,000. Ten days after her disappearance, “Baby Clarke” was found alive and well in an upstate farmhouse. Her abductor—a scoundrel named George Beauregard Barrows with a history of concocting kidnapping plots—was swiftly apprehended and, after a trial that began less than a week after his arrest, convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in Sing Sing.
⁴

The seventh anniversary of the ax-murder of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew J. Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, was commemorated with lengthy features about the current life of the central figure in the case (
TODAY, LIZZIE BORDEN IS THE SAME QUIET UNASSUMING PERSON,
one headline proclaimed). And there were plenty of other, more recent homicides to satisfy the public’s unquenchable appetite for grisly crimes. In the second week of June, various chunks of a male body were found floating in the harbor—the remains, it turned out, of a Swedish sailor named Peterson, murdered after a “row” in a Bowery tenement house, then butchered and dumped in the river. At around the same time, a man named William McCormick, discovering that his sweetheart was cheating on him, found his way to her parlor and managed not only to slit the young woman’s throat but to kill her mother as well—a particularly remarkable crime since, as the papers marveled, McCormick was totally blind. There was also the shocking case of nine-year-old Charles Hughes, who stabbed a juvenile playmate to death while playing the battle of San Juan Hill with a bunch of other boys.
⁵

And then, of course, there was the usual spate of poisonings: an attempt to kill two Jersey City families by means of deadly dinner rolls; the murder of little Leon Glassburg of Brooklyn by a stranger who gave him lethal candy; the near-fatal illnesses of two private nurses after they shared a pot of poisoned coffee. And more.
⁶

Not that Roland ever disappeared completely from the news. From time to time throughout the summer and fall, stories about him would appear in the papers. In late July, the
World
reported that Molineux’s months of close confinement in his dimly lit cell had so damaged his eyes that he “must now give up reading entirely or run the risk of permanently defective sight—a sore trial to the prisoner, as his books have been his chief entertainers since his confinement.” The following month brought tales of an attempt by a young man named Darwin Messerole—an accused killer who’d undergone a jailhouse conversion—to bring “religion’s comfort” to the decidedly secular Molineux. And then there was the day in mid-September when an inmate named Joseph Limberg attempted to hang himself with a rope made from his bedsheet and would surely have succeeded in doing so had not Roland, hearing the “sounds of choking from the cell opposite his own,” shouted for a guard.
⁷

On the very day that he saved Limberg’s life, another newsworthy event happened to Roland. He received a visit from Blanche—the second time she had come to see him since his incarceration six months before.

As far as Blanche was concerned, her forced confinement in the Molineuxs’ imposing Brooklyn home was every bit as onerous as Roland’s imprisonment in his six-by-eight-foot cell—perhaps even more so, since she had done nothing to deserve it. Thanks to a married friend named Jeanne, however, who owned an estate on the Long Island coast, Blanche was able to enjoy a brief respite.

For several weeks in the summer, she “swam daily in blue waters,” “raced on the beach like a child,” lunched on the “pleasure boat owned by Jeanne’s husband,” and basked in the company of a dashing neighbor—a “tall, blond young man” with “hair and skin of the same bronze hue.” Possessed of “magnificent horsemanship skills,” this captivating figure, who “rode like a centaur,” would frequently “arrive in the saddle and stay to dine,” lavishing most of his attentions on Blanche, who did nothing to discourage his interest.

As the sun set, Blanche, her friends, and her new conquest would sit “in the half-lighted rooms where the burning candles on the long carved refectory table wavered and flared fitfully in the faint wind from open casements and doors. We lounged over our after dinner coffee, and the men smoked. Before complete darkness came, we would walk the narrow path to the low cliffs, where we could glimpse the full sweep of the ocean. The twilights were long, those summer nights, and they always had a song for me.”

By the time she returned to Brooklyn, Blanche’s spirits had been much restored. But her tranquil mood quickly evaporated. With each new day, her idyll on Long Island seemed more and more like a sweet but fading dream. By the time she paid her visit to Roland in mid-September, she felt thoroughly “encompassed” again by a nightmare.
⁸

On Wednesday, November 1, 1899, Roland Molineux was led into a courtroom crowded with spectators. More than three months had passed since the third grand jury to take up his case had submitted its findings. During that time, Roland’s lawyers had made one last, futile attempt to quash the indictment. Now, as Bartow Weeks conceded, there was “nothing left for us to do but go to trial.”
⁹

Roland looked almost shockingly pale as he entered the courtroom, flanked by two guards. But his mood appeared to be upbeat. He smiled at his father, who was seated at the front of the room and whose eyes shone with pleasure at the sight of his boy.

The business of the day—the setting of a date for Roland’s trial—was quickly disposed of. Assistant DA John McIntyre told the court that the people would be “ready to proceed on November 14.” Weeks made no objection. “All we want,” he declared, “is a speedy trial.” Justice Fursman then directed that the “trial be commenced on the date proposed.”

The matter having been settled, Roland was allowed to converse with his father. They talked together cheerfully for several minutes before walking out of the courtroom arm in arm.

Afterward, most observers agreed that, in foreseeing a “speedy trial,” Weeks was being overly sanguine. The consensus among legal experts was that, given the importance and complexity of the case, the proceedings were bound to be protracted.

Indeed, as one newspaper reported, “it is thought that the trial may last as long as three weeks.”
¹⁰