The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  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

  January 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

  43

  As self-appointed spokesman for the oppressed masses, the multimillionaire William Randolph Hearst never missed an opportunity to attack the high and mighty on behalf of his readers. The official mismanagement of the Adams-Barnet case afforded him a perfect soapbox.

  “Imagine a murder committed in a tenement house on the East Side,” he thundered in an editorial published in early February, “and the persons believed to have committed it walking about town for six weeks under the eyes of the police without an arrest! If this had happened among people without influence, every person suspected of knowing anything about it would have been locked up before morning and the ‘third degree’ would have been vigorously applied…. But when two deliberate, premeditated murders have been committed by persons with financial and political pull, the whole machinery of justice has been paralyzed.”

  The time had come, Hearst cried, for the authorities to get to the bottom of the whole “loathsome affair.” “Let in the light!” he demanded.1

  It was a call that District Attorney Asa Bird Gardiner was finally prepared to heed. Already feeling the heat from a reform movement that would soon drive him and the rest of the Tammany crowd from office, Gardiner had suddenly decided to take matters out of the hands of the police. If McCluskey and his men couldn’t uncover enough evidence to produce an arrest, there was someone else who could: the Manhattan coroner, Edward H. Hart.

  The position of coroner no longer exists in New York City, having been replaced in 1915 by the medical examiner’s office. At the time of the Adams-Barnet case, however, it was a centuries-old institution, transported from England during colonial times.

  Whenever a suspicious death occurred, it was the coroner’s duty to assemble a jury and hold an inquest to determine if a murder had been committed. Though he could find probable cause for an arrest, he was not, as a rule, expected to identify the killer. In almost all instances, his job was limited to establishing whether a sudden death was an accident, a suicide, or the result of foul play. In the latter event, it was left to the police to investigate the crime, track down the suspects, and take them into custody. Since Captain McCluskey’s detectives had come up short in the present case, however, it would now be up to Coroner Hart to supply the evidence that would finally bring the perpetrator to justice.

  It was a responsibility that Hart took seriously. Aside from his sense of professional duty, he had strong personal feelings on the subject. “Murder by poison must stop,” he told reporters. “To me, the crime is cowardly, detestable, abominable.”2 The inquest, he announced, would begin on the first available date on his calendar—Thursday, February 9.

  So intense was public fascination with the case that Hart—who generally had trouble finding willing volunteers for his juries—was immediately deluged with applicants. Some hinted that they were in possession of secrets that would “flood with light all the darkness surrounding the case.” Others claimed to have “wonderful powers of discernment” that “would do much toward assisting the ferreting out” of the truth. One man wrote that his “great ability to fathom motives” made human psychology seem “as simple as a problem in geometry to a school mathematics teacher.” Another sought to demonstrate his qualifications by citing scripture: “Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.”3

  While Hart attended to the jury selection, his assistants were busy drawing up subpoenas. Though the coro
ner refused to identify all the witnesses he intended to call, the papers quickly published a partial list, which included Mrs. Adams’s daughter, Florence Rodgers; the physicians who attended the poisoned woman; the letter box men, Heckmann and Koch; Harry Cornish; and, of course, Roland Molineux, who was immediately placed under police surveillance to ensure that he didn’t skip town.4

  Speculation ran high about one name not immediately mentioned by Hart—the witness that both the public and the press were most eager to get a look at. It was not until February 6—just three days before the inquest was slated to begin—that the World trumpeted the exciting news: MRS. ROLAND MOLINEUX TO BE CALLED IN POISON CASE.

  From her girlhood days, when she first dreamed of becoming a famous singer, Blanche had always hungered for the limelight. Now, she was about to occupy it in a way that she could never have imagined.

  Besides demanding an immediate inquest, District Attorney Gardiner made another decision that produced a sensation in the press. Officially, the cause of Henry Barnet’s death remained an open question. Though all the evidence pointed to the poisoned Kutnow’s Powder, Barnet’s physician, Dr. Douglass, continued to insist that the patient had died of diphtheria. With Barnet in the grave, there was only one way to settle the issue.

  On Monday, February 6—after receiving a sworn affidavit from undertaker Herbert H. Jackson that no mercury had been used in preparing Barnet’s corpse for burial—Gardiner submitted an application to Justice Gildersleeve of the New York State Supreme Court. His request was granted at once.

  On Wednesday, February 8—one day before the scheduled start of the coroner’s inquest—the body of Henry Crossman Barnet would be exhumed from its resting place in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. The corpse would then be dissected and its organs examined for the presence of cyanide of mercury.