“Death’s secret,” as one headline put it, was “to be wrested from the grave.”5
44
Snow was pelting from a leaden sky when the three carriages reached the gate of Green-Wood Cemetery late on the morning of Wednesday, February 8. The vehicles carried a party of eight officials whose solemn miens matched the grimness of the weather. Among them were Coroner Edward Hart and the coroner’s physician, Dr. A. T. Weston; the chemical expert Professor Rudolph Witthaus; Dr. Henry Beaman Douglass; and a representative from the district attorney’s office, Colonel Gardiner’s assistant, A. E. Bryan.
They were met at the entrance by Eugene Cushman, superintendent of the cemetery. Having been informed in advance of the party’s arrival, Cushman had already dispatched a crew of six gravediggers to Henry Barnet’s burial site.
Disembarking from their carriages, the men trudged through the snow, with Cushman in the lead. By the time they reached Barnet’s grave, the six workmen, wielding mattocks and spades, had already dug halfway down to the coffin. A mound of earth was heaped beside the freshly made hole, the reddish-brown dirt contrasting starkly with the surrounding whiteness.
The excavation took another hour. Coat collars pulled high, hats drawn low, shoulders hunched against the cold, the observers watched in silence. The only sounds were the grunts of the workmen, the crunching of their blades in the frozen ground, the wind whipping the snow through the naked trees.
At last, there was another sound, of metal scraping against wood. The tools were exchanged for heavy ropes and the earth-stained oak coffin was heaved to the surface. It was loaded on a wagon and transported to the premises of a local undertaker named Frank Selle. When the lid was removed, Dr. Douglass was the first to peer inside. The body, he confirmed, was that of his former patient, Barnet. After three months in the wintry earth, the dead man’s features were still perfectly recognizable.
The corpse was removed and laid out upon a table. As the rest of the party observed—Dr. Douglass taking copious notes in a little pad—Weston opened up the body and removed the stomach, liver, kidneys, brain, throat, and a portion of the lungs. These organs were placed in jars, sealed, and turned over to Professor Witthaus for chemical analysis.
Gently returned to its coffin, Barnet’s hollowed body was then driven back to the cemetery and replaced in its grave. By nightfall, it was hidden by the same spotless white blanket that covered the countless other sleepers all around.1
Though the snow had stopped by the following day, the city was in the grip of a brutal cold spell. Even the arctic weather, however, could not deter the curiosity seekers. Hundreds of them, male and female alike, thronged the hallways of the Criminal Court Building on Center Street, hoping to secure a seat at what the papers were already trumpeting as “the Great Inquest.”
Their efforts would prove to be futile. Coroner Hart had announced that only those “who have official business there” would be granted admission. And, in truth, the chamber reserved for the inquest offered scant space for superfluous spectators.
Located on the third floor of the building, the room measured just thirty by sixty feet. Its walls, devoid of all adornment, were of rough, naked plaster. At the front stood the coroner’s raised desk and, beside it, a little platform holding the witness chair. The jury box—a dozen bow-back chairs surrounded by a wooden railing—occupied the right side of the room beneath a row of tall, narrow windows. There was a plain oak table for the district attorney and another for the representatives of the press. The rest of the chamber was filled with several rows of pewlike benches. Altogether, as one observer put it, it “offered but a bare-looking stage for the first act of one of the most remarkable dramas of modern times.”2
A uniformed officer stood at the doorway, admitting only those with signed passes from Coroner Hart. By 10:00 A.M.—the hour scheduled for the start of the proceedings—the chamber was full. In addition to the lawyers, witnesses, and newsmen, a few “privileged persons” had been given permission to attend. One of these was J. Herbert Ballantine, owner of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club facilities. Another was his friend, Albert J. Morgan, heir to the Sapolio soap-making fortune.
It was not idle curiosity that had brought Morgan to the inquest. In digging into the rumored love triangle involving Molineux, Blanche, and Henry Barnet, reporters for the yellow papers had learned about the party on board Morgan’s yacht, the Viator, during which Roland had first met his future wife. Among Morgan’s other guests on that fateful August day in 1897 was Walter Sherman Baldwin. Son of a wealthy manufacturer of paper boxes, Baldwin—a handsome, forty-three-year-old bachelor and man about town—was a longtime member of the New York Athletic Club and an old friend of Roland Molineux’s. According to rumor, Baldwin had flirted openly with Blanche on that sparkling summer day in the Portland harbor—as, reportedly, had Morgan himself.
Shortly after the Viator returned from its cruise along the coast of Maine, Baldwin—who had seemed to be in robust health—suddenly died. Not long afterward, Morgan himself was stricken and came dangerously close to death. The official diagnosis in both cases was typhoid.
In light of subsequent events, it now seemed extremely peculiar to many observers that of the three men on board the Viator who had vied for Blanche Chesebrough’s attention, only Roland Molineux had escaped the sudden, devastating illness that had struck his two friends.3
The star attractions, Roland and Blanche, did not put in an appearance on opening day. But a stir went through the crowd when a distinguished white-haired figure made his way to the front of the room. The elderly gentleman—who still bore himself with an erect, military posture that made him seem much taller than his diminutive height—was, of course, General E. L. Molineux: the “venerable old soldier,” as the papers invariably referred to him. He took a seat beside his son’s attorneys, Bartow Weeks and George Gordon Battle.
A few minutes later, the “Great Inquest” got under way.
The day’s business proceeded so efficiently that, according to one observer, “it was as if the entire action had been carefully rehearsed and its ‘playing time’ measured with a stage manager’s accuracy.”4 Jury selection took less than forty-five minutes. As soon as the twelve men were seated, District Attorney Asa Bird Gardiner rose to address them.
His speech was brief and to the point. The district attorney’s office, he explained, was “not a detective bureau. All we can do is present the evidence gathered by the police and all evidence from outside sources, including such as may be furnished by some of our enterprising newspapers.” “Anybody who can throw light” on the investigation “will be welcome.”
He pointed out that, while the inquiry would focus on the death of Mrs. Adams, it would “necessarily have much bearing on the Barnet case as well.” The two, he declared, were completely intertwined. This was a somewhat premature statement for Gardiner to make. Professor Witthaus, after all, had already made it known that he would need at least three weeks to analyze the organs removed from Barnet’s exhumed body.
Nevertheless, Gardiner now stated unequivocally that “the same poison was sent to both Cornish and Henry C. Barnet at the Knickerbocker Club, and that poison was cyanide of mercury. It is a very significant fact that this particular poison, which has practically gone out of the pharmacopeia since 1870 or 1871, should be used to kill two persons within a month. Evidently there was deep deliberation on the part of the person who prepared these poisons.”
Gardiner himself did not intend to point an accusatory finger at anyone, and he urged the jurors to banish any preconceived notions from their minds. “Nobody has been arrested,” he said, “and consequently there is no defendant before you.”
By the end of the inquest, however, he expected the “full and complete” truth to emerge. The killer of Mrs. Adams and Henry Barnet must not escape punishment, since poisoning, as Gardiner solemnly declared, was “a form of death that is abhorrent to the American mind” (a somewhat peculiar observation, which seemed
to suggest that, along with its other objectionable qualities, there was something effetely European about poison-murder).
Less than ten minutes after he began, Gardiner made a little bow and excused himself, turning the proceedings over to his assistant, James Osborne.5
Born and raised on a plantation in North Carolina, the forty-year-old Osborne had attended school in both his home state and Virginia before coming North to earn a law degree at Columbia. After a few years of private practice, he had joined the district attorney’s office and quickly earned a reputation as an outstanding trial attorney. As a cross-examiner, he was known to be “sly, and he could be ferocious.” He also had a flair for courtroom theatrics—a great gift in the eyes of his superior, Colonel Gardiner, for whom “melodrama was an attribute of successful prosecution.”6
It was a few minutes after noon when the first witness, Harry Cornish, took the stand. By then, the room was thick with cigar smoke. With the outside temperature hovering around zero, opening a window was out of the question. The pleas of Coroner’s Clerk John Kelly—who stood up to announce that he did “not think smoking was nice or that it showed proper respect to the Court”—were unavailing. The atmosphere, lamented one reporter, “soon became positively vile.”7
Apart from a brief lunch recess, Cornish remained on the stand in that stuffy little room for more than four hours. His suit was of a conservative cut, his collar stiff and high, his cravat neatly tied. In the weeks that had elapsed since he sampled the poisoned bromo-seltzer, he had regained the weight he had lost during his subsequent illness. With his prognathous jaw, bullet-headed dome, and seemingly permanent scowl, he looked as forbidding as ever.
Osborne, however, was not the least bit intimidated. He began by asking Cornish to “tell what you know of the death of Mrs. Kate J. Adams and so much of the facts concerning your own life as is connected with the subject.” When Cornish hesitated, staring down at the floor as if collecting his thoughts, Osborne repeated the question so sharply that Cornish seemed taken aback.
“I don’t know just where to begin,” he said.
“Begin at the receipt of the poison,” Osborne replied, as if speaking to a child.
Leaning back in his chair, the athletic director launched into the now familiar story. He had told it so many times before—to the police, to Gardiner and his assistants, to reporters from a half dozen different papers—that he could recite it by rote.
He told of receiving the anonymous gift and assuming it was meant as a gag; of scissoring out and saving the address; of the close call experienced by his friend Harry King, who would have fixed himself a glass of the lethal bromo-seltzer if the water cooler hadn’t been empty; of bringing home the items to the flat he shared with Mrs. Adams and Florence Rodgers; of the older woman’s terrible death and his own devastating sickness, during which he had lost fifteen pounds in less than forty-eight hours.
At that point, Osborne interrupted and, speaking in an impatient tone, told Cornish not simply to repeat statements he had already made but to “tell the facts as you recall them now.”
Again, Cornish seemed nonplussed. He was having trouble responding to such open-ended instructions. He would rather answer specific questions.
Osborne, however, ignored him. “Now, Cornish,” he said, “can you suggest anything as a motive in this case?”
Cornish insisted that he had never done anything in his life that would “warrant a thing like this being done.”
Osborne seemed skeptical. “Tell me so much of your private affairs as would throw light on this case,” he said.
“I can say this much,” Cornish answered. “There is absolutely no possibility of there being any reason for a thing of this kind being done on account of my personal affairs, or on account of any woman, or on account of anyone having a reason to be jealous of me, or anything of that kind. If anybody has done anything, it is for some motive I can’t understand. I have told the police everything.”
“That is what you had better do here,” Osborne said in a warning tone.
For a moment, the two men glared at each other while Cornish played with one waxed tip of his mustache.
“Tell me, Cornish,” Osborne said, shifting tacks. “Did you know when Barnet died?”
“Why, yes,” said the other. “I knew he was dead. I was told he died of typhoid fever.”
“While you were superintendent of the club,” Osborne asked, “didn’t you and Barnet have a little trouble?”
Cornish shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
Osborne raised his eyebrows in an expression of mock surprise. “Do you mean to say that you don’t remember the time that Barnet complained because he had to walk from his room to the bathroom and the floor wasn’t being kept clean?”
“I never heard of that before,” Cornish growled.
Abruptly, as if deliberately trying to keep the witness off balance, Osborne reverted to a question about the poison package. “Now, Cornish,” he demanded, “tell me any evidence you have that would suggest a motive for sending you that bottle of powder.”
“I can’t think of anybody who would have a motive to do a thing of that kind,” responded Cornish, who seemed intent on establishing that he had led an utterly blameless life.
His voice rising to a near-shout, Osborne said, “I ask you, Cornish, to tell all the facts that may throw light on the case. Tell the jury without any more hemming and hawing about it.”
Cornish did not immediately reply. After studying the floor for several moments, he conceded that “charges had twice been preferred against him” by two members of the club.
“What were the names of the two men involved?” demanded Osborne.
“Mr. Molineux,” said Cornish, “and Mr. Barnet.”
After further prodding by Osborne, he described the incident in which Roland had demanded his resignation after learning that Cornish had been spreading “disparaging” rumors—namely, that Molineux owned buildings in Newark that were used as gambling dens and whorehouses.
As for Barnet, he had complained to the club’s Board of Governors after hearing that Cornish had accused him of “improper practices with women.”
At this point, the atmosphere in the room underwent an almost palpable change. Up until that point—despite Osborne’s efforts to inject some drama into the proceedings—the inquest had simply been a rehash of well-known facts. With the introduction of this “savory new element,” as one commentator put it, “the interest in Cornish’s testimony had grown in intensity.” Everyone seemed to be sitting forward in his seat, eager not to miss a word. For the first time, deliciously titillating revelations were emerging about the sordid secret lives of the upper-class clubmen—“the unpleasant substratum that is believed to underlie the whole awful case.”8
Hammering away at Cornish, Osborne got him to admit that he had accused Barnet of frequenting a brothel on East Forty-seventh Street run by a madam named Stern.
“Were you ever at that house?” demanded Osborne.
Cornish shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes,” he said after a brief pause. “I’ve been there.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t think more than once,” said Cornish, glaring at his inquisitor.
During the remainder of Cornish’s time on the witness stand, Osborne continued to hammer away at him, shouting at him, berating him, dispensing with all pretense of politeness and rudely addressing him by his last name alone. The quality of Osborne’s interrogation was conveyed in the headline of that evening’s Journal: CORNISH ON THE RACK!
Interviewed immediately after the inquest was adjourned for the day, District Attorney Gardiner had harsh words to say about the witness. Cornish, he felt, had been extremely evasive. It was clear, however, that he had reason to harbor ill feelings toward both Barnet and Molineux. Since Cornish, according to his own sworn statement, had been the one who gave Mrs. Adams the bottle of poisoned bromo-seltzer, “it behooves him to clear his own skirts. Unde
r the law,” Gardiner warned, “his admission of giving her the poison makes it possible to secure his indictment for murder.”9
During his opening address, Gardiner had made a point of not naming a suspect. Now, it appeared that he had one in mind. And to the astonishment of everyone who had been following the case, it wasn’t Roland Molineux.
45
In his usual Barnumesque way, William Randolph Hearst had once again, with great fanfare, assigned the popular writer Julian Hawthorne to cover the case. By an odd coincidence, an earlier and infinitely greater Hawthorne—Nathaniel—had written a famous short story titled “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Set in pre–Revolutionary War Boston, this tale concerns a naive country lad named Robin whose journey through the labyrinthine streets of the night-shrouded city leads to an unsettling discovery: that lurking beneath their civilized veneer, human beings possess dark and even frightful impulses. Or, as the story puts it, that a man may “have several voices…as well as two complexions.”
It was a lesson that the real-life Molineux case would illustrate in an especially vivid way.
Friday, February 10, was the coldest day on record in New York City, with the thermometer dropping to six degrees below zero—“Klondike weather,” as the papers described it. Frozen pipes left countless apartment dwellers without gaslight or heat, homeless people perished in the streets, and the rivers turned to solid ice, forming “perfect bridges from Jersey to Manhattan, from Manhattan to Long Island.”1
Once again, however, the little courtroom was filled to capacity when the inquest resumed that frigid morning. At a few minutes before eleven, an excited murmur ran through the crowd. People shifted in their seats and craned their necks for a better view. Some rose to their feet.
Walking beside his father, one hand resting lightly in the crook of the older man’s elbow, Roland Molineux had just entered the room.
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