The Devil's Gentleman (36 page)

“You may continue.”
⁹

The testimony of the two chambermaids provided just the jolt of sensationalism the yellow papers were waiting for. It wasn’t Rachel Greene or Minnie Betts, however, whose image was blazoned on the front pages but Blanche Molineux—“the most fascinating and mysterious figure of all the case,” as the
Journal
described her. Under headlines such as
BARNET CROSSED ROLAND MOLINEUX IN LOVE
and
WIFE’S NAME DRAGGED IN AT MOLINEUX TRIAL
, the papers dished up the whole salacious story of Blanche’s scandalous living arrangement with Roland and her affair with another man in the months before her marriage.

Even while Hearst and Pulitzer were gleefully exploiting these lurid revelations, one newspaper was expressing concern over the chambermaids’ testimony. In an editorial published on Wednesday, January 17, the
Brooklyn Eagle
acknowledged that, in establishing the connections between Barnet’s death and the attempt on Cornish’s life, Osborne had managed to “show a plot outdoing Poe in its gruesomeness”—one that “quite justified the use of the term Frankenstein which has figured so largely in the case.” But by “admitting testimony tending to show a motive for the murder of Barnet,” Recorder Goff had almost guaranteed that the long-drawn-out case would not be resolved anytime soon.

Up until two days earlier, it seemed as if a verdict might be reached within the next few weeks. But Goff’s decision to allow evidence relating to another crime—one for which the defendant had never been charged—had opened up a “grave possibility”: that if Roland were convicted and the case went to the court of appeals, it would “have to be tried all over again.”
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65

O
n the afternoon of Thursday, January 18—to the great relief of everyone involved in the seemingly interminable trial—James Osborne declared that he would wrap up the state’s case on the following day after tying up a few “tag ends.”
¹

The announcement allowed trial-watchers to assess Osborne’s overall performance. There was general agreement that he had succeeded in establishing a number of crucial points: that the bogus Barnet and Cornish letters, as well as the address on the poison package, were all written by Molineux. That Roland, under the two assumed names, had rented a pair of private letter boxes, where he had received material from various patent-medicine dealers, including a sample tin of Kutnow’s Powder. That the description given on the “diagnosis blank” mailed to the Marston Remedy Company by the person who signed himself “H. C. Barnet” corresponded far more closely to Roland than to the ostensible sender. That Roland was familiar with Hartdegen’s jewelry store, where the silver toothpick holder sent to Cornish was purchased. That, as a chemist, Roland had both the means and the know-how to obtain or concoct cyanide of mercury.

Most observers agreed, however, that on one key point, Osborne had failed to make a particularly convincing case: Roland’s motive for wanting Harry Cornish dead. The assistant DA had certainly shown that there was no love lost between the two men. But the conflicts described by the witnesses—disputes over gym equipment and the state of the swimming pool and an insulting letter written about a member of a rival club—hardly seemed sufficient to explain such a dastardly crime. That darker, more malevolent impulses might have been operating in the depths of Roland’s mind—that the swaggering Cornish might, for example, have been an unconscious surrogate for another figure of formidable manhood whom Roland had spent a lifetime trying, and failing, to measure up to—would not have occurred to anyone in that pre-Freudian era.

Osborne had clearly recognized this problem and had sought to get around it by arguing that the man who tried to kill Cornish had also poisoned Barnet. It was much easier to prove motive in the Barnet case; sexual jealousy was something every male juror could understand. Everyone agreed that the assistant DA had been extremely “adroit in connecting the cases together so inseparably that evidence in one has been applied to the other as if the two were the same.” Indeed, as one newspaper put it, “if Molineux were on trial for the murder of Barnet, the case would be so strong that the jury almost certainly would return a verdict of guilty.”

There was only one problem: the murder of Henry Barnet was “a crime which was not charged against Molineux in the indictment.”
²

Osborne’s announcement turned out to be premature. As it happened, he would not be ready to conclude his case until the following Wednesday, January 24.

There was an air of expectancy in the courtroom that morning. The previous afternoon, Osborne had let it be known that the state would require only a half hour more to complete the questioning of its final witness, yet another handwriting expert, this one a Philadelphian named Percival Fraser. The “long-heralded end” of the prosecution’s case appeared to be at hand.

Before the proceedings could begin on Wednesday morning, however, Recorder Goff was handed a message informing him that one of the jurors, a gentleman named Manheim Brown, had “taken sick” and was confined to bed. According to the sender—Brown’s physician, Dr. Sigmund Tynberg—the patient’s “indisposition was not of a serious nature and a prolonged delay on his account was unlikely.” Goff had no choice but to adjourn the case until the morrow.

Audible groans of disappointment arose from the spectator section. Still, given the ungodly length of the trial, the severity of the weather, and the terrible ventilation in the courtroom, most observers agreed that it was “remarkable that none of those concerned in the case had succumbed before this.”
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Dr. Tynberg’s prognosis, as it turned out, was overly sanguine. By the following Monday, January 29, Brown had still not returned to the trial. His condition, claimed the doctor, could be blamed directly on the conditions in the courtroom.

“It is a wonder to me that Mr. Brown did not give way sooner,” Tynberg told a reporter for the
Journal.
“The morning that he took to his bed, he stopped in my office on his way to court. He was then suffering from bronchitis, grippe, and rheumatism. It was with difficulty that he managed to return to his home, and when I saw him an hour later, he was in a high fever and great pain.”

Tynberg went on to blame Brown’s illness on the “drafts from the partly opened window in the courtroom behind the jury box.” Brown had “frequently complained to the Court of the danger in which he was placed” but was told that “there was no remedy,” since “there were no adequate means of ventilating the room without having the window open.”

“It occurs to me,” the doctor concluded, “that the city is liable to Mr. Brown for damages.”
⁴

It was not until Monday, February 5—after a nearly two-week delay in the trial—that Brown was able to return to the courtroom. Looking exceedingly frail and supporting himself with a crutch, he was the last juror to take his seat. Throughout the day, he kept a woolen shawl wrapped around his body, while his wife, who had accompanied him to court in a closed carriage, kept a watchful eye on him from the front row of the spectator section.

The final thirty minutes of expert testimony that Osborne claimed he would require stretched into three hours. Finally, at 2:00
P.M
., the prosecution rested its case.

At that point, the Molineux trial had been going on for nearly twice as long as the previous record holder. Since the start of the proceedings on November 14, eighty-three days had elapsed.

And—as one observer somewhat ruefully noted—the defense was “yet to be heard from.”
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66

A
nticipation ran high on the morning of Tuesday, February 6. Once again, extra chairs had to be set up in the aisles to accommodate the crowd, which included an unusually large number of lawyers who had come to see what sort of defense Roland’s highly paid attorneys would mount.

There had already been much speculation on that subject in the press. Citing an anonymous informant, the
World
confidently predicted that the defense would last between six and eight weeks. In what promised to be a “savage assault” upon the prosecution’s case—and particularly its star toxicologist, Dr. Rudolph Witthaus—a “long list of experts” would be called to testify that Mrs. Adams’s death had not been caused by cyanide of mercury at all. Instead, the defense intended to prove that the bromo-seltzer alone, if allowed to go stale, could degrade into a noxious substance capable of producing “very serious and possible fatal results.”

To bolster this argument, Roland’s defense team intended to call a “fifteen-year-old girl of good family,” one Ida Halporn of East Fifty-fifth Street. The previous March, this “healthy and full-blooded girl” had taken a dose of bromo-seltzer from a bottle that had been sitting on a shelf for more than a year. Within minutes of drinking the effervescent mixture, she had fallen so seriously ill that even now, nearly twelve months later, she remained “frail and weak in comparison with her former self.” A $50,000 lawsuit brought by her parents against the Emerson Drug Company was presently pending in the United States District Court.

The sensational possibility had also been raised that Molineux himself might be put on the stand. In any event, there seemed little doubt that, after two months of remaining “supine”—of “awaiting attack and repelling it as best it could”—Roland’s defense team was now ready to launch a fierce attack of its own.
¹

Given the lurid picture the prosecution had been allowed to paint of Blanche’s relationship with Barnet, it was hardly surprising that, once again, she was dragged into court for another conspicuous show of conjugal devotion. She and her mother-in-law arrived with the General at 9:30
A.M.
on Tuesday. A half hour later, Roland entered, eyes “dancing with merriment” and “lips quivering,” as though he were struggling to suppress his amusement at some private joke.

Spotting his wife and mother at the defense table, he made his way down the aisle with a “quick, springy stride,” then threw himself into Blanche’s welcoming arms. As he bent his face to hers, she kissed him repeatedly on the mouth—a charade intended to make a mockery of the state’s contention that sexual rivalry had driven Roland to poison Barnet. Clearly, no woman so passionately in love with her husband could ever have given him the slightest cause for jealousy.
²

Goff appeared a few moments later. Everyone rose and remained standing until the recorder bowed and took his seat on the bench. The jurors were then polled. All were in attendance, including Manheim Brown, who sat with his lower body swaddled in a woolen lap robe.

Then, clutching a sheaf of papers in one hand, Roland’s chief counsel, Bartow Weeks, got slowly to his feet.

His eyes were bloodshot and his face unusually pale. Afterward, he would confess that he had spent a sleepless night debating the wisdom of the startling course of action he was about to take.

In a solemn voice that betrayed the slightest hint of a tremor, Weeks looked at Goff and said, “If Your Honor please, after making a thorough study of the evidence in this case, I am convinced that the prosecution has utterly failed to prove its charge against the defendant. Therefore, we are content to rest the case of the defense upon the evidence offered by the state.”

He then stepped back to the defense table and reseated himself.

There was a stunned silence in the courtroom that lasted for more than a minute. When the full import of this statement finally sank in, an excited murmur erupted from the spectator section. Goff rapped his gavel for order, while Roland, arms folded across his chest, looked on with a satisfied smile. At the prosecution table, Osborne exchanged astonished looks with his associates.

Roland’s counsel had sprung the most shocking surprise of the trial.

After all the speculation about their intended strategy, Weeks and his partner—with the full approval of the General—had opted for a tactic that no one had foreseen. Not a single witness would be called to testify on their client’s behalf. Roland Molineux’s lawyers had chosen to rest their case without offering a defense.
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67

M
inutes after dropping his bombshell, Weeks was back on his feet, beginning his final argument. Altogether, he would spend eight hours delivering his summation over the course of two days.

Weeks was not an especially compelling speaker. He refrained from oratorical flourishes; used few, if any, gestures; and, with his thick shoulders, bull neck, and heavy limbs, cut a somewhat lumbering figure. His voice, lacking sonority under the best of circumstances, was rendered even less melodious than usual by a slight case of laryngitis. Nevertheless, his climactic plea was regarded by most observers as a powerful, at times even brilliant, effort.
¹

After apologizing for the “harsh and disagreeable” sound of his voice, he reminded the jurors of the charge against his client—that Molineux had mailed a bottle of poisoned bromo-seltzer along with a silver holder to Harry Cornish, who then gave some of the lethal powder to Mrs. Katherine Adams, killing her more or less instantly. Thus, the entire case really boiled down to a single question: “Whether this defendant sent that package to Harry S. Cornish on the twenty-third of December 1898. As you determine that issue, you determine this case.”

He began by insisting that the state had offered “not a syllable” of proof connecting his client to any of the items employed in the crime—not the Tiffany box nor the bromo-seltzer nor the manila paper the pack-age was wrapped in. As for the silver toothpick holder, there was the positive statement of the Hartdegen bookkeeper, Emma Miller, who testified that it had been purchased, not by Molineux, but by a man with a reddish “Van Dyke beard.” Weeks scoffed at the notion that Molineux might have relied on an accomplice. “Men who are secretive, men of the sort who will commit murder by poison, do not take others into their confidence.”

Nor had the prosecution established that Molineux had ever been in possession of cyanide of mercury. The claim that as a chemist he could have concocted the poison himself was undercut by evidence which showed that of the two key ingredients needed to produce the deadly substance, Roland kept only one in his private laboratory at the Morris Herrmann factory.

Since “not one of the articles” in the poison package had been convincingly tied to the defendant, the state had been forced to rely on the testimony of its penmanship experts. Here, Weeks appealed to the common sense of the jurors. If the handwriting on the wrapper really
were
Molineux’s, wouldn’t an intelligent person have been able to discern the similarities? Would Osborne have needed “an army of experts” brought in “from as far away as California,” put up “at the Waldorf-Astoria,” and paid “thousands of dollars” to “convince you of it?” Were the jurors prepared to find the defendant guilty and “send him to the electric chair” strictly “on the testimony of these
experts
?” asked Weeks, placing a particularly sardonic emphasis on the final word.

Weeks paused for a sip of water. When he resumed, he cast a pointed look at Harry Cornish, who was seated near the front of the courtroom, chewing ruminatively on the point of a pencil, his chair tilted back on its rear legs.

After insisting that he had “no wish to accuse any person of the commission of these crimes,” Weeks, in his lawyerly way, proceeded to do just that by deflecting suspicion onto Roland’s archenemy. Apart from Cornish’s testimony, Weeks pointed out, there was not a shred of evidence that the poison package had actually arrived by post. Perhaps, he implied, the athletic director had lied about receiving it from an anonymous source and had actually planted it in his club mailbox himself. And wasn’t it odd that Cornish had been able to travel around the city for several hours after supposedly taking a drink of the lethal mixture? And how to explain the peculiar coincidence that the toothpick holder purchased at Hartdegen’s bore a design almost identical to the one on the silver toiletry articles on Florence Rodgers’s dresser? Was it possible that
Cornish
had been the mysterious red-bearded man who had bought the holder?

“Why,” Weeks wondered, “wasn’t Cornish investigated?” After all, he was “the man who had administered the dose that killed Mrs. Adams.” And what about Cornish’s rumored affair with Florence Rodgers—his “role in her separation and divorce”?

“Do you believe that Mrs. Adams approved of Cornish’s relationship with her daughter?” asked Weeks, suggesting a reason why Cornish might have wanted the older woman out of the way.

By this point, Weeks’s voice had grown so hoarse that he was barely able to make himself heard. After heaping scorn on the two letter box men, Heckmann and Koch—rank opportunists, he charged, who had tried to cash in by peddling their testimony to the yellow papers—Weeks “begged leave to discontinue.” The request was promptly granted and the trial was adjourned for the day.
²

Among his professional peers, the consensus seemed to be that Weeks had done the right thing in making no defense.

It was true, said a prominent Manhattan attorney named Emanuel Friend, that the prosecution had “introduced a mass of evidence.” But “it was not the kind upon which an intelligent juror will send a man to the chair. It lacked directness, and the motive was never at any time brought out with sufficient strength and clearness.” From a strictly legal point of view, moreover, Friend did “not think that the corpus delicti was proved—at least, there was not sufficient evidence to show that Mrs. Adams died from the poison alleged.”

Other lawyers polled by the papers agreed that “the people had not made out a case against Molineux,” and that Weeks had “acted wisely in resting his case without the introduction of evidence.”

There were a few dissenters. While conceding that Weeks had made “a bold move indeed,” William Howe—the oldest criminal lawyer then practicing at the New York City bar—expressed his belief “that it would have been more satisfactory to have had Mr. Molineux take the stand and personally deny having written those letters the experts place at his door.”

In the end, of course, as Howe very sensibly noted, the wisdom of Weeks’s strategy would be judged by the outcome of the trial. “It is one of those cases where, should the lawyer succeed in securing an acquittal or hanging the jury, his friends will unite in saying it was a clever defense.

“If, on the other hand, the jury should find the defendant guilty,” said Howe, “the condemnation of Mr. Weeks will be long and loud.”
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