The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Like Scott, Howard was deeply impressed by Osborne’s forensic skills, praising him as “a naturally great criminal lawyer.” Still, the playwright made it clear that if he were directing the show, he would have Osborne tone down his act. The assistant DA had the “wrong conception” of his part. In Howard’s view, a prosecuting attorney should feel—or at least convincingly project—a perfect impartiality. As “an officer representing the state,” he “should appear deeply anxious that the accused man be proven innocent if the facts in the case warrant it…for the state wants no man found guilty. It wants only justice.” Osborne, on the other hand, left no doubt of his desire “to prove the guilt of the prisoner.”1

  Howard’s criticism—that the prosecutor seemed overly eager to win a conviction—would have been odd in any circumstance. But it seemed especially paradoxical in the case of Osborne, who during the inquest had been attacked on the opposite grounds—for being too soft on Roland. Certainly, few people in the courtroom would have agreed with the playwright. For all of Osborne’s “scorn for courtroom conventionalities”—his refusal “to present the evidence in the acceptably logical order”—the intensity, even ferocity, he brought to his task added a welcome jolt of energy to the proceedings.2

  In his eagerness to put Mamie Melando on the stand, Osborne had broken off his questioning of the state’s chief handwriting witness, William Kinsley. Now the assistant DA resumed his examination of the expert chirographer, whose testimony would drag on for another full week.

  Day after day, spending much of his time illustrating his points at a blackboard, Kinsley would drone on about the minutiae of lowercase letters, punctuation marks, and word spacing. As he lectured, the fifty-odd reporters covering the trial would scribble away in their notebooks like obedient pupils. To more than one observer, the highly touted Great Poison Trial had rapidly degenerated into pure tedium, with all the drama and excitement of a high school penmanship class.

  So soporific was the atmosphere that spectators and court officials alike could be seen snoozing in their seats, while the yellow papers began running satirical pieces recommending a visit to the courtroom as a surefire cure for insomnia.3

  The most wakeful people in the courtroom were a contingent of Roland’s female admirers, who had managed to wangle their way inside. Fifteen or twenty of them occupied the first two rows of the spectator benches, those in front—like considerate theatergoers—removing their bonnets so as not to obstruct the view of the women behind them. Ignoring the witness, they kept their eyes fixed on Roland, who as usual seemed to regard the proceedings as the height of hilarity, “laughing loud and long and very contemptuously” throughout Kinsley’s testimony.4

  His demeanor turned noticeably grimmer when Osborne—interrupting his examination of Kinsley yet again—called Robert S. Holt, Jr., to the stand. The son of Henry Barnet’s employer, Holt was asked to authenticate a letter written by Barnet, which Kinsley intended to compare with one of the forgeries. It was a purely perfunctory matter. In the course of the questioning, however, Holt made an unexpected admission.

  He revealed that he had once seen Blanche alone with Barnet in the latter’s room at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, a half-empty bottle of champagne on the table between them. It was the first time during the trial that Blanche’s name had been invoked, and it offered, as the Journal put it, a “startling glimpse of that life of gayety, revelry, wine, love and jealousy in which the prosecutor believes the poison plot had its birth.”5

  Roland’s defense team responded with the same tactic they had employed earlier. To demonstrate that Roland had not the slightest cause for jealousy, they immediately trotted out Blanche for another public display of wifely devotion.

  She arrived on the morning of December 18 in the company of her mother-in-law. As the audience buzzed with excitement, the two women strolled to the front of the courtroom and took seats at the defense table. When, a few minutes later, Roland crossed over the Bridge of Sighs and entered the chamber, he put on a convincing show of surprise, widening his eyes and smiling brightly. Bounding down the central aisle, he bent low, put one hand behind Blanche’s head, and “kissed her fair and square on the lips.” Then, after embracing his mother, he seated himself beside his wife.

  As always, Blanche was fashionably attired. She wore a black velvet toque trimmed with black tulle that sat far down on her forehead, a tippet and muff of sable, an elaborately embroidered black cloth coat, and white kid gloves. Though most observers conceded that her looks were far from perfect (“Probably Roland Molineux is the only man in the world who could call his wife beautiful,” sniffed one reporter), all agreed that she possessed a striking charm. “Altogether,” opined one newsman, who might have been describing Henry James’s Daisy Miller, “Mrs. Molineux seems to me to be a good, strong, healthy type of American girl: not too intellectual.”6

  Before the trial resumed, Goff had another piece of business to attend to: the case of a teenager named Jacob Berisham who had spent the past four years in the House of Refuge, having murdered a playmate at the age of twelve by bashing in his head with a shovel blade. Blanche appeared keenly interested in the matter, shuddering visibly as the “uncouth youth” was brought before Goff for sentencing.7

  Her interest—like that of most people in the courtroom—waned considerably when Kinsley returned to the stand for his tenth and final day of testimony. Throughout much of the morning session, she listened to his lecture on slants and curves and curlicues with a look of barely disguised boredom, occasionally holding a whispered exchange with Roland or placing a small cut-glass phial of perfume to her nostrils to offset the air of the packed and stuffy chamber, many of whose male occupants did not, evidently, observe the highest standards of personal hygiene (“the atmosphere,” one newsman dryly observed, “is not that of Araby the Blest”).8

  To most of the reporters who studied them, Roland and Blanche seemed the very picture of conjugal happiness. At one point, she placed an arm around her husband, who rested his head on her shoulder—a tender moment captured in a front-page illustration in the following day’s edition of Pulitzer’s World. At other times, Roland slipped his hand beneath the table and gave her knee an affectionate pat. When recess was called and it was time for her to leave, Blanche, in full view of the court, pulled Roland close and kissed him on the mouth.

  It was clear, wrote Hearst’s reporter, that the couple were “very much in love.” Neither he nor anyone else, of course, guessed the truth. As Blanche makes clear in her memoirs, every moment she spent in the courtroom was an agonizing ordeal. By that point, her resentment of Roland had reached such a pitch that she could barely bring herself to utter his name, coldly referring to him as “General Molineux’s son.” Only her sympathy for her in-laws—along with other pressures brought to bear on her by Roland’s family and legal defenders—compelled her to go through with the charade. Once again, as she had done several weeks earlier, Blanche managed to turn in a first-rate performance—one so persuasive that even the famous playwright Bronson Howard failed to realize he was watching an act.

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  Kinsley was followed to the stand by the same parade of handwriting analysts that had appeared at the inquest, among them Daniel T. Ames—recently returned from the Cordelia Botkin trial—and John Tyrell, who in the coming decades would figure in some of the most sensational cases of the twentieth century, including those of the Jazz Age “thrill killers,” Leopold and Loeb, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann, convicted kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby.1

  The highly technical testimony of these experts would prove to be so “slumberous” that, at one point, even Osborne could be seen burying his face in his hands and moaning, “How long, O Lord, how long.”2 All agreed with Kinsley’s findings that the fake Barnet and Cornish letters, along with the address on the package received by Harry Cornish, were written by Roland Molineux. Bartow Weeks’s cross-examination did little to cast doubt on their opinions, though—as with his gibes at Kinsle
y’s poultry-related pastime—he did manage to provide a bit of diversion in the otherwise dreary proceedings.

  It happened during the testimony of Daniel Ames, the oldest of the experts, whose luxuriant white beard endowed him (ironically enough) with the appearance of an Old Testament prophet. Ames, like every other witness, had sworn to the requisite oath before taking the stand, ending with the formulaic affirmation, “So help me God.” This purely perfunctory act provided Weeks with a pretext for launching a sneak attack on Ames’s credibility.

  Approaching the witness stand, Weeks brandished a small green-covered journal. “I have in my hand here, Mr. Ames, a pamphlet,” he said.

  The witness looked at it quizzically, then nodded. It was a publication called The Free Thought Magazine. The cover featured a photograph—clearly taken some years earlier—of its editor, Daniel T. Ames.

  “I see here,” Weeks continued, “an article entitled ‘Biblical Myths—a Rational Exposition of the Same.’ Are you the author of that article?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Ames.

  “You are, eh?” Weeks sneered. “Let me read an excerpt from this article that you are the author of.”

  He then proceeded to read a passage in which Ames mockingly referred to “Moses, Jehovah & Co.,” and wondered how long “human progress was to be stayed throughout Christendom by the ancient barbaric tricks, myths, and frauds under the label of the holy Bible.”

  Before he had finished, Osborne—his face white with anger—was on his feet, shouting an objection. “This is done for the sole purpose of prejudicing the jury with a degree of unfairness I have never beheld in a courtroom,” he cried.

  Goff sustained the objection, pointing out to the jurors that, “Our law admits no religious test. The affirmation does not necessarily embrace a declaration of belief in God.”

  “But, Your Honor,” Weeks protested, “I want to show by this blasphemy that the witness—”

  “Blasphemy!” yelled Osborne. “You’re a nice one to talk about blasphemies!”

  “Stop this at once!” Goff admonished the lawyers. He then turned to the jurors again and reminded them that “Mohammedan, Buddhist, or atheist” [or even, as Pulitzer’s man couldn’t resist adding in the casually racist way of the era, “a Chinaman who makes a pass over the decapitated head of a chicken”] was “equally to be believed in an American court.”

  “Well, I think I have a right to emphasize this blasphemous utterance,” Weeks insisted.

  “You must not use such language,” said Goff, flushing with anger. He then instructed the jury “to disregard whatever counsel has said on the subject.”

  Roland, meanwhile, watched the scene with his usual merriment. Even the General—a deeply religious man whose faith had sustained him through the darkest days of the war—wore a satisfied smile, an expression rarely seen anymore on his gaunt and careworn face.3

  Though his accommodations were a far cry from those he had enjoyed a year earlier—when he and Blanche spent their honeymoon in the bridal suite of the Waldorf-Astoria—Christmas Day 1899 found Roland in high spirits.

  Rising early, he took an hour’s exercise in the prison yard before breakfasting on poached eggs, fried potatoes, and hot chocolate. He spent the next few hours stretched on the upper cot of his bunk bed, perusing the papers and reading a novel. For his holiday dinner, he treated himself to a veritable feast served up by the prison caterer: oysters on the half shell, roast turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, celery, sliced tomatoes, toasted Boston brown bread, ice-cold milk, and mince pie.

  Shortly before 3:00 P.M., a closed carriage drawn by two white horses pulled up before the entrance of the Tombs. Out climbed General Molineux, who proceeded to help his wife and daughter-in-law, both heavily veiled, from the vehicle. The trio were then ushered by Warden Hagen into the counsel room, where they spent more than an hour in a private conference with Roland while the sounds of the religious service conducted by the Reverend Charles C. Proffitt of the Episcopal City Mission Society drifted in from the room across the corridor.

  At around four, the prisoner—now sporting a small gold ring set with two diamonds and a crescent that he had not been wearing before—was escorted back to his cell. As his family members left the prison, they were accosted by a photographer who had been alerted to their visit.

  “You may take my picture as often as you please,” said the General, reaching out a gloved hand and pushing the camera aside. “But you must not take a picture of the ladies.”

  Ignoring the warning, the photographer again aimed his lens at the ladies. Face flushed, the General lashed out with his walking stick, knocking the camera onto the sidewalk, then striking it repeatedly with the silver handle of his cane until it lay in pieces on the pavement.4

  Even the yellow press—on whose behalf the cameraman was attempting to snap his pictures of Blanche and the elder Mrs. Molineux—applauded the General’s gallantry. No one, however, perceived the incident for what it truly was.

  The outraged old warrior’s efforts to shield his family’s privacy from the intrusions of the popular press—from this forebear of the paparazzi—was not just a dramatic moment but an emblematic one as well: the personification of Victorian propriety waging a brave if ultimately hopeless battle against those forces that were already beginning to turn American society into a nonstop media circus of scandal, gossip, and fifteen-minute fame.

  Two days after Christmas, the Molineux trial reached a legal milestone, becoming the longest-running murder trial in the history of New York State. The previous record had been held by the Fleming trial of 1896, which had lasted forty-three days and resulted in the acquittal of its defendant, a middle-aged woman accused of killing her elderly mother with poison-laced clam broth in order to get her hands on a sizable inheritance. As of December 27, 1899, the Molineux trial was already forty-four days old—and the end was nowhere in sight.

  What made the situation so disheartening in the view of many observers was how little had been accomplished in all that time. The Sun put the matter most forcefully. “In spite of the record being broken,” the paper marveled,

  the prosecution has up to the present time failed to prove that a murder was committed, that a package of poison was sent through the mail, or any other of the essentials in a murder trial that are usually proved within three or four days after the trial has begun. The entire time has been spent in getting up a jury and in listening to the testimony of expert handwriting witnesses who have sworn that three sets of letters were written by one person and that the person is Molineux. But in not a solitary one of any of these letters is there a word or pen scratch that has anything to do with the murder of Mrs. Adams; the attempted murder of Harry S. Cornish which ended in the murder of Mrs. Adams; with the death of H. C. Barnet, which the prosecution has in newspaper statements connected with the case; or with Mrs. Roland B. Molineux who, the prosecution has hinted, had something to do with the motive for the alleged crime.5

  One reporter calculated that 1,239,200 words had already been “uttered and recorded” at the trial—almost twice as many as contained in the Old and New Testaments combined.6 And yet, the state had still not even established that Katherine Adams had been the victim of a homicide.

  A turning point came on Thursday, December 28—one year to the day after Katherine Adams’s murder—when, in yet another deviation from standard procedure, Osborne called Harry Cornish to the stand.

  Rising from his place within the railing, Cornish strode to the rear of the courtroom, where he helped himself to a leisurely drink from the watercooler before proceeding to the witness chair. As he seated himself, he looked squarely at Roland, who gave him a sneer of such open contempt that Cornish grew visibly furious. Two spots of color appeared on his cheeks, his thin lips tightened beneath his stiff, black mustache, and his fingers clenched convulsively. His voice, however, remained cool and controlled as he began to respond to Osborne’s examination.

  He began by describing
his background and education, which included a degree from a business college in Pittsburgh, a stint at the summer school for physical instruction at Harvard, and several courses in anatomy at Columbia College in New York City, where he had participated in the dissection of several cadavers. His goal, he declared, was to “make myself perfect” in “all branches” of learning that related to “cultivating the human body through athletic exercise.”

  Shown several of the letters for impotence remedies signed with his name, Cornish flatly denied having written them. He also declared that he had never rented a private letter box or laid eyes on the robin’s-egg-blue stationery embossed with three interlaced silver crescents until “some time in the early part of this year,” when “this case arose.”

  Speaking in a loud, clear, and unhurried manner, Cornish then proceeded to relate the tale of the anonymous package he had received the previous Christmas, which had led to the death of Mrs. Adams. It was an entirely familiar story, having been repeated countless times in the press for the past twelve months, and Cornish had nothing new to add. Still, the audience sat spellbound throughout his narration, delivered in “straightforward and unvarnished” style and accompanied by an array of expressive hand gestures.7

  To the theater critics seated in the spectator section, it was Cornish’s very lack of polish—his gruff, no-nonsense manner—that made his testimony so compelling. Indeed, Bronson Howard could find only one flaw in his performance. It happened when Osborne handed Cornish the bromo-seltzer bottle and silver holder for identification. “Here,” Howard complained, “Cornish and his plain unvarnished story lost some of its effect. He scarcely looked at the bottle and holder before he identified them. It would have been much more theatric and therefore more impressive if he had most carefully examined the two things around which this tragedy turns.”8