The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Twenty-four-year-old William got a chance to put his theories into practice in March 1887 when—after spending a year as a reporter for the World—he persuaded his father to give him the Examiner. Emulating Pulitzer, he set about creating a paper that, as one of his first employees put it, would fill readers with the “gee-whiz emotion.”13 Like Hearst’s later publications, the Examiner was less a traditional newspaper than a “printed entertainment—the equivalent in newsprint of bombs exploding, bands blaring, firecrackers popping, victims screaming, flags waving, cannons roaring, houris dancing, and smoke rising from the singed flesh of executed criminals.”14

  Within a week of taking it over, Hearst was already trumpeting the Examiner in half-page advertisements such as THE MONARCH OF THE DAILIES! with THE MOST ELABORATE LOCAL NEWS, THE FRESHEST SOCIAL NEWS, THE LATEST AND MOST ORIGINAL SENSATIONS!15 Determined to “startle, amaze, or stupefy” readers on a daily basis, he served up the subjects that have always thrilled and titillated the public: scandal, sentimentality, sex, gossip, disaster, adventure.

  And always, of course, crime, depravity, and murder—the more shocking the better.

  24

  With his genius for journalistic showmanship, Hearst quickly turned the Examiner into a phenomenon. Within a few years, it had gone from albatross to cash cow, becoming the second most profitable newspaper in the United States.1

  In the meantime, Hearst had come into a fortune from his ever-indulgent mother, who sold her shares in the fabled Anaconda mine and gave the money to her son. Now a multimillionaire on his own, he set out to realize a long-cherished dream. In 1895, he laid out a pittance for a moribund paper, the New York Journal, bought an apartment in Manhattan, and proceeded to challenge his mentor, Joseph Pulitzer, for newsstand supremacy.

  Over the next few years, the two men engaged in a furious competition for readers. With his bottomless pockets, Hearst launched a raid on his rival’s workforce, at one point hiring away the entire staff of Pulitzer’s Sunday edition in a single piratical swoop.2 Determined not simply to entertain readers but to “convulse [them] with excitement,”3 he took the sensationalistic tactics pioneered by Pulitzer and raised them to a frenzied new level. HAD FOUR WIVES; FIENDISH PARENTS; ALIVE IN A COFFIN; and TOTS BURNED TO DEATH were just a few of the front-page headlines in the weeks after Hearst took control of the Journal.4

  His newly designed Sunday supplement offered even racier fare: lavishly illustrated features on sex, crime, and a dizzying array of oddities, all conveyed in a breathless, believe-it-or-not tone. Typical of these offerings was an article about the unspeakable rituals ostensibly performed by members of a Cuban serpent cult:

  SNAKES ARE THEIR GODS

  CUBAN DISCIPLES OF THE DEVIL HAVE HIDEOUS

  MIDNIGHT ORGIES

  ALONE IN THE MOONLIGHT

  SAVANNAHS THEY DISPORT

  THEMSELVES LIKE FIENDS

  BEAUTEOUS SINUOUS MULATTO GIRLS AT THE “DANCE OF THE ADDER” IN THE WITCH DOCTOR’S VILLAGE

  EATING SNAKES TO WARD OFF EVIL5

  Few things, of course, were better for circulation than a good, juicy homicide. Not content with merely describing murders in the most graphic possible detail, Hearst found ways to insert his paper into the investigations. He organized a “murder squad” of crime reporters to do their own detective work, ran regular articles taunting the police for their inefficiency, and enlisted the help of the public in solving crimes.

  When a dismembered male torso and a portion of thigh washed up in the East River in June 1897, for example, Hearst turned the atrocity into a contest, trumpeting a “$1,000 Reward for Solution.” He ran a page-one drawing of a man’s body—resembling one of those butcher charts that indicate the different cuts of beef—so that readers could more easily visualize which limbs were still missing. And he assigned thirty crack reporters to the case, who managed to track down the killers while the police were still groping for clues.6

  Mutilation-murder, however, wasn’t the emblematic crime of the Gilded Age. Our own fascination with serial killers reflects the obsessive anxieties of our particular era: issues having to do with moral breakdown, the dangers of sex, and the profound vulnerability of our bodies.7 In the age of Pulitzer and Hearst, the American public was afflicted with a different set of concerns. At a time when people could never be certain of what they were putting into their bodies—when medicines were made of strychnine and arsenic, bakers preserved their dough with sulfur of copper, babies consumed “swill milk” from cows fed on distillery waste, and soldiers received rations of “embalmed beef”—the knife-wielding psycho wasn’t the boogeyman that haunted the imagination of the American public.

  It was the poisoner.

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  Given the ubiquity of serial killers in our movies, TV shows, and paperback thrillers, a person might be forgiven for thinking that our country is crawling with homicidal psychopaths. In reality, the number of serial killers at large in the United States at any given time is, relative to the total population, infinitesimal: no more than fifty, according to the most reliable FBI estimates. The average citizen, in other words, is far less likely to be stabbed by a psycho while taking a shower than to slip in the bathtub and die.

  The same sort of disparity existed in the nineteenth century in regard to poisoners. According to one crime historian, “poisoning accounted for less than one percent of murder cases that entered the criminal justice system” in the 1800s.1 And yet, poison-murder was everywhere in the popular culture of the time. At least a hundred true-crime books were devoted to the subject, while writers of “sensation novels, detective stories, and other popular fiction turned frequently to poisoning as a plot device.”2

  Gilded age newspapers were quick to exploit the public’s fascination with poisoners. During one month-long span in the late 1800s, the New York City dailies ran no fewer than five poison-related headlines: POISONED COLOGNE SENT TO BROOKLYN GIRL; ARSENIC IN JELLY; HIRED TO POISON A CHILD; GRANDMOTHER ACCUSED OF POISONING NEIGHBOR’S WELL; and POISON IN WINE PRETTY GIRL INDUCED HER LOVER TO DRINK. Even an instance of alleged pet murder—DOG DEAD BY POISON, SAYS MASTER—made the front pages.3

  Several poisoning cases became bona fide media sensations. In 1891, for example, New York City was riveted by the story of Carlyle Harris, a medical student who murdered his young wife by putting a lethal dose of morphine in her sleeping pills. The following year, a Manhattan physician named Robert Buchanan used the same narcotic (mixed with some belladonna to conceal the symptoms of poisoning) to rid himself of his own wife, a former brothel keeper he had wed for her money. Shortly after Buchanan’s trial came to an end, yet another physician, Dr. Henry Meyer, was convicted of murdering an acquaintance with arsenic and antimony as part of an insurance scam.

  And then there was the irresistibly lurid case of the San Francisco femme fatale, Mrs. Cordelia Botkin.

  The estranged wife of a fellow with the unlikely name of Welcome A. Botkin, Cordelia was thirty-eight years old in 1892—already past her prime in an era when a woman of forty was considered to be “in the cold and constricting clutch of middle age.”4 “Time had laid upon her the unkind stigmata of full-blown maturity,” as one commentator puts it.5

  Despite her advanced years, however, she possessed a powerfully seductive charm and, in September of that year, embarked on an affair with a young cad named John P. Dunning, a journalist ten years her junior with a wife and children of his own in Delaware. Their liaison lasted for nearly six years, until Dunning, tired of his “maturely alluring” lover, broke off the relationship and decamped for Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War as a correspondent for the Associated Press.

  Not long afterward, on the afternoon of August 9, 1898, a package arrived at the Dover, Delaware, post office addressed to Dunning’s wife, Elizabeth. Inside was a box of chocolate bonbons, along with a handwritten note reading: “With love to yourself and baby. Mrs. C.”

  That evening, after a dinner of trout and fritters, Mrs. Dunning sat
on the porch and shared the treats with her older sister, her nephew and niece, and two young neighbors, Misses Bateman and Millington, who had stopped by for a visit. A few hours later, all six became violently ill. The children and the two young ladies eventually recovered, but Mrs. Dunning and her sister—who had devoured the lion’s share of the candies—died painfully a few days later. Autopsies revealed the presence of lethal doses of arsenic in the viscera of both women, a finding confirmed when the leftover bonbons were analyzed by chemists.

  John Dunning was immediately summoned home. He needed only a glance at the handwritten note to know who had sent the package. “Cordelia!” he gasped, then—“broken with grief and abased with shame”6—he proceeded to spill out the story of his affair with Mrs. Botkin.

  The San Francisco papers quickly got wind of the investigation, and Hearst’s Examiner turned the case into a full-fledged media circus. His “murder squad” located the confectionery store where the bonbons had been purchased, traced the arsenic to a local drugstore, and tracked down Cordelia Botkin herself, who had taken refuge at her sister’s house in St. Helena. One of Hearst’s ace women reporters, Lizzie Livernash, immediately sped to Mrs. Botkin’s side and, ingratiating herself with the fugitive, wangled a series of interviews that were splashed across the Examiner’s front pages.

  The frenzied coverage of Mrs. Botkin’s trial, which began in early December 1898, boosted the already sky-high circulation of the Examiner to stratospheric new heights, proving that few stories could sell more papers in that era than a poisoning case with the right sensational ingredients. Hearst, then in the thick of his newspaper war with Joseph Pulitzer, could only hope that fate would supply him with an East Coast version of the Botkin affair, which he could exploit to equally dramatic effect in the Journal.

  And then—even before Mrs. Botkin’s inevitable conviction was handed down—fate obliged.

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  On Saturday, December 24, 1898—one year almost to the day since his gloating triumph over Roland Molineux—Harry Cornish arrived for work at his customary time, shortly after ten in the morning. As usual, he first checked his mailbox. Along with several letters, the box contained a surprise: a small package, wrapped in manila paper and tied with string. The wrapping bore several canceled postage stamps and a handwritten inscription:

  MR. HARRY CORNISH

  KNICKERBOCKER ATHLETIC CLUB

  MADISON AVENUE AND FOURTY FIFTH STREET

  NEW YORK CITY.

  There was no return address.

  Curious, he carried the package upstairs to the gymnasium and settled himself at his desk. When he tore off the wrapping, he discovered a pale blue gift box from Tiffany’s. Removing the lid of the box, he found, at one end, a small receptacle resembling a silver candlestick, its lip and the rim of its base adorned with a beaded design.

  At the other end of the box, separated by some crumpled tissue paper, was a small bottle labeled “Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer.” With the manufacturer’s wrapper removed, the bottle fit perfectly into the silver holder. Cornish did not examine the bottle very carefully. Had he done so, he might have observed some odd features. The bottle appeared to be used, its label badly soiled as though from repeated handling. It was also smaller than the average bromo-seltzer bottle, and of a darker shade of blue.

  Cornish’s assistant, Patrick Fineran, and a club member named Harry A. King were standing beside the desk when Cornish opened the package. The three men chuckled. Clearly the gift was a practical joke—an amusing warning for Cornish not to overindulge during the upcoming holidays.

  At Fineran’s suggestion, Cornish—who had tossed the wrapping paper into his wastebasket—fetched it out and scissored off the address. Perhaps he might be able to identify the anonymous sender at some later time by the handwriting. Cornish stuck the scrap of paper into his desk drawer and turned his attention to other matters.

  King, who was suffering from a mild headache, picked up the bromo-seltzer bottle in its sterling silver holder and carried it to the water cooler, just outside the gymnasium door. Somewhat to his annoyance, the cooler was empty. He returned the bottle, unopened, to Cornish’s desk—unaware that he had just been the beneficiary of an extraordinary stroke of good luck.1

  For the past two months, Cornish had been boarding with his distant cousins, Mrs. Katherine Adams—a sturdily built widow of sixty-two—and her grown daughter, Florence Rodgers, who was then separated from her husband.2 When Cornish returned from work that evening and told the two women about his gift, they teased him about it, joking that it must have been sent by an unknown lady admirer.

  Three days later, on Tuesday, December 27, Cornish brought the silver holder and the medicine bottle back to the apartment. As it happened, the design on the holder closely matched the pattern on Florence’s toiletry items—her silver-handled brush, comb, and mirror. Cornish told her to keep the holder; he placed the bromo-seltzer bottle on the dresser in his bedroom.

  That evening, Cornish and the two women attended the theater, then went for a late supper at the Colonial Cafe on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-second Street, where Mrs. Adams imbibed one too many glasses of wine.3

  The next morning, December 28, Florence arose at her usual time, around 9:00 A.M. Emerging from her bedroom, she found her mother seated at the dining room table, looking very pale and pressing a moist compress to her forehead.

  “Are you all right, Mother?” she asked.

  Mrs. Adams replied that she had awakened with a bad headache. She had been up for an hour or so, puttering around the apartment in an effort to “work off” the pain. But the headache had only gotten worse. Was there anything in the house for her to take?

  Florence was about to answer no when she remembered the bromo-seltzer her cousin had brought home the previous evening. Stepping to Harry’s bedroom, she knocked on the door.

  Cornish had been awake for the past half hour. He had washed up, dressed, and was now seated in his room, reading the newspaper, which was left outside the apartment door each morning by the building hallboy.

  When Florence asked for the bromo-seltzer, explaining that her mother was feeling ill, he handed her the bottle and returned to the paper.

  A few minutes later, he heard her call his name. Responding to her summons, he carried his paper into the dining room, where he found her seated beside her mother at the table.

  “I can’t get it open, Harry,” she said. “Can you try?” She passed him the bottle and went off to use the bathroom.

  Taking her seat, Cornish examined the mouth of the bottle. It was sealed with wax and tightly stoppered with a cork. With no corkscrew in the apartment, he was forced to make do with the tines of a dinner fork. After several minutes of concentrated struggle, he finally managed to work the bottle open.

  “You’ll need half a glass of water,” he said, reading the directions on the label.

  Mrs. Adams rose and repaired to the kitchen, returning a few moments later with two glasses, one empty, the other half full.

  The directions specified a heaping teaspoonful of the bromo-seltzer. After banging on the bottle to dislodge some of the powder, Cornish poured it into the empty glass. Mrs. Adams then added the water from the other glass, stirred the mixture with a spoon, raised the glass to her lips, and sipped.

  “Awful,” she said with a grimace, setting the glass down on the table. Indeed, the taste was so disagreeable that she’d been unable to finish the dose. A small amount remained at the bottom of the glass.

  Cornish picked it up and took a swallow. “Tastes all right to me,” he said. “It’s supposed to be bitter—it’s medicine.” Then, he took up his paper and went back to his reading, while Mrs. Adams turned and left the room.

  In view of our contemporary concerns about product tampering, it seems almost unbelievable that anyone would casually ingest medication received through the mail from an anonymous sender. That both Mrs. Adams and Harry Cornish (and others, too, as events would prove) did so without a secon
d thought reveals something about their era, though exactly what is hard to say. Perhaps people were simply more trusting back then. Certainly, they paid little heed to the ingredients of the Kilmer’s Acid Phosphate, Carlsbad Sprudel Salt, Cascarets Candy Cathartic, Peruna Catarrh Tablets, and countless other nostrums they routinely put into their bodies.

  It was also true that the person who had mailed Cornish the bottle had taken care to make it appear unopened, sealing it with paraffin and enclosing it in its original manufacturer’s wrapper.

  Precisely how long it took for the potion to do its work is unclear—two minutes, three minutes, perhaps as many as five. Florence Rodgers was still in the bathroom when the door suddenly flew open and her mother burst inside, her face a sickly color. Staggering across the floor, she bent over the bowl and began to vomit loudly.

  The window opened onto an air shaft, and Florence—embarrassed that the neighbors might hear her mother retching—asked her not to make so much noise. She then left the bathroom, assuming that her mother was having a bad reaction to the bromo-seltzer.

  No sooner had Florence reached the dining room, however, than she heard her mother emit a “peculiar cry” (as she later described it). She immediately dashed back into the bathroom. Raising her head from the bowl, Mrs. Adams—whose complexion was now a ghastly blue—lifted her hands toward her daughter, then collapsed onto the tiled floor. Florence sprang to her mother’s side and tried to raise her, but to no avail. “She was a dead weight,” Florence later said, recalling the horror of the moment. Terrified, she shouted for Harry.4