The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Just a few days after Roland took the stand, stories began to circulate that the defense was planning to call “an entirely new witness,” someone whose very existence had never been mentioned in the four years since the story broke, and whose testimony would provide a “sensationally dramatic ending” to the trial. The yellow papers even revealed her identity: Mrs. Anna C. Stephenson, the fifty-five-year-old wife of a veteran Brooklyn police officer, John Stephenson.

  Asked about these reports, Black initially waved them off as idle gossip—the “creation of newspapers.”1 When court opened on Thursday, November 6, however, all eyes were immediately drawn to a gaunt, gray-haired woman seated in the section reserved for witnesses. An excited buzz ran through the spectator section: it was Mrs. Stephenson!

  For hours, the spectators—some of whom had brought along picnic baskets—waited eagerly for the promised sensation. Her testimony, when she was finally called to the stand at 4:00 P.M., did not disappoint.

  Though clearly nervous under the gaze of the crowd, the soft-spoken, self-declared “good Christian woman” explained, with all apparent sincerity, that on December 23, 1898—the day the poison package had been mailed to Harry Cornish—she had traveled to Manhattan from her home in Brooklyn to shop at the Washington Market. She had brought along a Christmas package to mail to her sister in Illinois.

  At approximately 4:15 P.M., on her way to the general post office, she paused at the corner of Vesey Street and Broadway, waiting to cross the traffic-clogged thoroughfare. As she stood there, she felt “something pressing against me.”

  “Looking around,” Mrs. Stephenson recalled, “I saw a man very close to me with a package in his overcoat pocket. He seemed very nervous, and I wondered what was the matter with him. He took the package out of his pocket, and just out of curiosity, I glanced at it. I saw the words ‘Mr. Harry Cornish, Knickerbocker—’ That is all I remember.

  “In a moment, the man crossed the street,” she continued. “As I had a package to mail, I thought that I would follow him and mail my package where he mailed his. I did follow him and saw him mail his package, and I mailed mine immediately afterwards. The man then went out of the general post office, and I did not see him again.”

  When, in the days following Katherine Adams’s death, the newspapers published a facsimile of the poison package address, Mrs. Stephenson (so she claimed) had immediately realized the significance of what she had seen. She “discussed the matter with her husband,” but he advised her “not to get mixed in the case.”

  Black then turned to the defense table. “Molineux, stand up,” he commanded.

  Roland sprang to his feet and looked squarely at the witness.

  “Now, look at this defendant,” Black said to Mrs. Stephenson, “and tell me if he is the man who mailed the poison package.”

  “He is not,” came the unhesitating reply.

  “Are you sure?” asked Black.

  “Perfectly sure,” said Mrs. Stephenson.2

  As Black took his seat with a smile, James Osborne rose. He, too, was smiling, though far more grimly. Asking Harry Cornish to stand, he turned to Mrs. Stephenson and asked, “Is this the man who had the package?”

  Osborne’s move was clearly meant to confound the witness. But (as another young prosecutor would discover during the last great murder trial of the twentieth century, when he asked the defendant to try on the killer’s gloves in full view of the jury) such dramatic courtroom demonstrations sometimes backfire.

  “It looks very much like him,” said Mrs. Stephenson.

  Osborne, reddening, said, “Are you sure of that?”

  “Well, I am pretty sure he’s the man,” answered the witness.

  Osborne did his best to recover from this blunder. Under his polite but insistent cross-examination, Mrs. Stephenson revealed that she was unable to read without glasses, which by her own admission she hadn’t been wearing on the day in question; that she suffered from “nervous prostration” and that her decision to testify on Molineux’s behalf had been influenced by “divine guidance.” Osborne also called her policeman-husband to the stand, who testified that he “did not put much stock” in her story.3

  Afterward, when reporters asked for his opinion on Mrs. Stephenson, Osborne snorted and said, “I believe the woman thought she was telling the truth. But she is laboring under a delusion such as is common to women of her time of life. She says that she could read the poison address at about 4:30 o’clock on that day. Well, as a matter of fact, the sun set at around 4:30 that day. The street was already dark. It scarcely seems credible that this woman could have read the address at that time with her bad eyesight.”

  “Do you think the jury will agree with you?” someone asked.

  “Oh, I don’t believe she made much of an impression on the jury,” replied Osborne—a remark that struck more than one observer as a case of wishful thinking.4

  Mrs. Stephenson wasn’t Black’s only surprise witness. Barton Huff, a traveling salesman from Battle Creek, Michigan, swore that, a few days before Christmas 1898, he had gone into Hartdegen’s jewelry store to inquire about a watch fob he had seen in the window. As he approached the counter, a man rushed into the shop, pushed his way to the front, and told the saleswoman that “he wanted to buy a silver bottle holder to match some dresser articles that a woman friend of his had.” The man was about five feet ten inches tall, weighed approximately 175 pounds, and wore “a pointed sandy beard.” He bore no resemblance at all, said Huff, to Roland Molineux.5

  Professor Herman Vulte of Columbia Medical College, another defense witness never heard from before, testified that on the afternoon of December 23, 1898—the time when the poison package was mailed from the general post office in lower Manhattan—Roland had been in his company the entire afternoon. They did not part until 4:45 P.M. Even if Roland had caught the nearest trolley, then transferred to an elevated car and proceeded directly downtown, he could not possibly have arrived at the general post office before it closed.6 Vulte was one of nineteen witnesses to take the stand on Friday, November 7. Their testimony marked the end of the defense case. Final arguments would begin the following Monday, after which Roland’s fate would be in the hands of the jury.

  On the following afternoon, Saturday, November 8, a reporter for Pulitzer’s World wangled an interview with Blanche at her suite in the Murray Hill Hotel. Why, he wondered, had she not attended a single minute of the trial?

  Blanche would only say that she didn’t “think a courtroom is the proper place for a woman.” Of course, things would have been different if her husband—“Mr. Molineux,” as she referred to him—had “nobody else in the world to cheer him up.” But with his “dear old father at his side,” she didn’t see any pressing reason to be there.

  Asked her opinion of the trial, she declared that “Mr. Molineux” was bound to be acquitted. But the prospect seemed to fill her with little joy. It was her own long ordeal that she harped on. “You cannot know what a woman suffers when she sees her good name dragged into the gutter by cruel heartless creatures who do not care what lies they tell about a defenseless person,” she said bitterly. “I often wonder how I have borne it all.”

  When the reporter asked about her future with her husband, Blanche gave a strikingly evasive reply. “The future? No matter what the future may be, nothing can repay me for all that I, an innocent woman, have suffered.”

  It was, of course, a disingenuous reply. Blanche knew very clearly what her future held. She hinted at it in her next remark.

  “For four long years,” she said, “I have felt like an inhabitant of the infernal regions. At last, I feel as though I can see the first gleam of light—as though the gates of the inferno were about to open, permitting me to escape.”7

  86

  The size of the crowd that showed up at the courthouse on Monday, November 10, 1902—the penultimate day of the Molineux trial—was difficult to measure, though a conservative estimate put the number at nearly two thousan
d.1 It required fifty policemen to impose a semblance of order on the clamorous mob in the hallway. No sooner did the doors open at 9:30 A.M. than “every seat was occupied, the reporters’ tables were overwhelmed, chairs blocked the aisles, and the passageway from the justice’s chambers to the bench behind the jury box was packed solidly with spectators.”

  Unable to find seats, “a solid mass of more than two hundred people stood in the rear of the room.” When Molineux entered at ten o’clock, “smiling and unconcerned,” court officers could not find a seat for him. The problem “was settled by General Molineux, who gave up his seat to his son,” then perched on a chair beside the reporter for the Times.2

  Nearly the entirety of the day was given over to Black’s summation. He began in a voice so low that it was “barely audible a few feet away,” though it grew in both volume and intensity as he proceeded.

  He began by insisting that it was “one of the duties of society to punish the guilty, but even greater is the duty of society to protect the innocent. If there is one innocent hair on the head of the man who stands before you accused of this crime, then you must acquit him.”

  Black branded as “preposterous” the notion that Molineux would buy the silver holder at a store where he was sure to be recognized, and reminded the jurors that both the Hartdegen clerk, Emma Miller, and the traveling salesman, Barton Huff, had sworn that Roland was not the purchaser. He castigated the letter box man Joseph Koch as someone who “peddled his story and his eternal soul at the same time” denounced the handwriting experts as “stupendous frauds” and insisted that, far from being a substance that only a chemist could acquire, cyanide of mercury was commonly available to anyone.

  He acknowledged the scandal that had caused Roland’s banishment to the West at the age of fifteen. But he asked the jurors “as experienced men, men who have lived in the world, to consider whether in such a case it is the boy of fifteen years or the married woman who is the betrayer.” In any event, Black continued, “since that time, you have seen him as a successful businessman with not one blemish against his character until this unfortunate occurrence. He has never done anything since he was fifteen years old to make him unworthy of the affection of the worthiest and bravest, the kindest, most honorable and loyal old man that I have ever known.”

  At this invocation of the sacred person of General Molineux, a number of spectators burst into applause but were quickly silenced by the court officers.

  The bulk of Black’s summation dealt with the issue of motive, and here he was helped immeasurably by the exclusion of all evidence relating to the death of Henry Barnet. He was “almost ashamed,” said Black, to waste the juror’s time in reviewing “the flimsy thing which is considered to be the motive that prompted this dastardly crime.

  “Mr. Molineux was a member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club,” Black continued. “Cornish was athletic director there. Molineux had a host of friends there. And you are asked to believe that into the midst of these friends, with no way of knowing whom it would reach, he sent a poisonous drug. And on what grounds are you asked to believe this?

  “Because,” said Black in an incredulous tone, “Molineux didn’t like Cornish. This is all that you have as a motive for this frightful crime.”

  Here, Black shook his head, as though in amazement. “Between every man on this jury and a hundred other men,” he said, “there are greater motives than this for a crime. In every church, in every family, a more serious motive for a crime could be found than this one. Yet on this and this alone, you are asked to single out this one man and say that he is a murderer.”

  Leaning so far over the jury box that his extended forefinger was within an inch of the foreman’s nose, Black declared, “When a man is bent on murdering his enemy does he shoot into a crowd? Does he wreck a train because the object of his hatred is on that train? Would Molineux, to kill Cornish, send into a club where any man might taste it, where many of his friends might be endangered, a poisonous drug? No, gentlemen. I say that Molineux never did it.”

  Here, Black stepped back from the jury box and paused for a moment, as though for dramatic effect.

  “But there was a murder here,” he continued at length. “And there was a motive. All the evidence in this case points away from Molineux and to another man. It points to that man just as surely as the needle points to the North Star. Gentlemen, I am not here to brand any man, to open any sore. But a crime has been committed here, and my plain duty is before me.”

  There seemed to be a collective intake of breath at this sudden shift in Black’s speech. Everyone knew, of course, that he was referring to Harry Cornish, who—as the newspapers wrote—had been “put on the rack” during his examination by Black. Even so, there was surprise, even shock, that the ex-governor’s closing remarks would turn into an open accusation of Roland’s old foe.

  In a voice heavy with disdain, Black began with a description of Cornish’s checkered past: the adulteries that had led his wife to divorce him, and his affair with the Chicago woman, Mrs. Small, which ended in her reported death from an abortion.

  “And what does Cornish do then?” asked Black. “He comes to New York and immediately hunts up Mrs. Rodgers. He says in his testimony that Mrs. Rodgers was then living with her husband. But what happens? Why, Mr. Rodgers suddenly disappears and institutes divorce proceedings, and Cornish goes to live on Eighty-fourth Street, on one side of Columbus Avenue, while on the other side Mrs. Rodgers resides. After that, they moved to the flat at Sixty-sixth Street and Park Avenue, and there Mrs. Rodgers and Cornish were in the same house, the same flat. From that minute in September 1898, until last September, fifteen days before this trial was begun, Mrs. Rodgers and Cornish have always lived in the same house.”

  And what about the murder victim herself, the “good, kind, honest old woman,” Mrs. Adams? “Do you believe this old mother would sit by complacent while these things were happening under her eyes?” asked Black. “That she looked upon Cornish’s relations with her daughter with favor? No! From the moment Cornish came to New York, the trail of this creature was on the track of Mrs. Adams and her daughter. Would she let that viper into her home without protest? Would she let them be together if she could prevent them?”

  Here at last—in Mrs. Adams’s ostensible objection to Cornish’s affair with her daughter—Black had come to the “secret, stealthy motive for this crime—the secret, consuming fire that burned into murderous hate.”

  “Remember, gentlemen,” said Black, his voice ringing with indignation, his language growing increasingly colorful, if not positively lurid. “Passion of this kind is the thing that has disrupted kingdoms. It is the greatest force in all the things of this world. Trouble with the management of a circus? Trouble with a horizontal bar? Hah! Here is a motive which compared with these is as the vomiting of the volcano of St. Martinique compared with the soft rising of the tide at the base of the Statue of Liberty! The passion that actuated Cornish is stronger than any other motive that could be assigned for murder. When that passion rages, it violates all vows! It burns virtue and honesty like the raging fire that destroys the grass of the prairie! Not a motive to kill this old lady? Why, it was she who sought to protect her daughter. She watched over her until this man, spotted with the slime of immorality, crept into her home. No motive, you say? There is your motive!”

  While Cornish himself, seated up front between his elderly parents, barked out a contemptuous laugh, Black continued with his assault. Had the prosecution been allowed to introduce testimony relating to Henry Barnet’s death, of course, his argument would have seemed far less persuasive. Only one man, after all, had a motive for killing Barnet, and it wasn’t Harry Cornish. As matters stood, however, there was a superficial plausibility to Black’s accusations.

  He cited Emma Miller’s claim that the man who purchased the toothpick holder had asked for one “that matched the silver toiletry articles on a lady’s dresser.” The holder, as the jurors had seen for themselve
s during the trial, had a “peculiar beaded pattern” that did, in fact, resemble the design on Mrs. Rodgers’s toilet articles.

  “Where is the living man except Cornish who knew it would match?” thundered Black.

  And why, he asked, had Cornish brought the bottle of bromo-seltzer back to the apartment at all? “He testified that he never used bromo himself. Mrs. Rodgers said on the stand that she had never tasted bromo. And yet, he was so anxious to get it home that he broke open his desk to get it. Oh, yes, he got it home just in time. He knew that Mrs. Adams was subject to headaches, and twelve hours after the bromo reached the flat, Mrs. Adams had taken it. She was gone.

  “Now there was nothing to stand in the way of that unlimited passion which burns cities and destroys empires!” Black said, his lip curled in disgust.

  By this point, he had been speaking for more than four hours. It was nearly 3:00 P.M. before he brought his assault on Harry Cornish to an end.

  “With all these circumstances pointing at Mr. Cornish, with every damning fact pointing at Mr. Cornish,” said Black, “he has never up to this hour felt the tap of a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, nor has he been for one single hour deprived of his liberty. Every single fact in this case points towards Cornish, and not a single fact connects Molineux with this case. It is not for you to say whether Cornish is guilty or not. I ask you only to say that Molineux is not guilty. The character and life of Roland B. Molineux must prevail against the weak and unworthy picture we have been shown of Harry S. Cornish.”3

  No sooner had Black taken his seat than prosecutor James Osborne arose and launched into his own closing statement. It would continue until adjournment and resume the following morning.

  Black’s blistering attack forced Osborne to devote much of his summation to a defense of Harry Cornish. He pointed out the absurdities and distortions in Black’s accusations. Why, for example, would Cornish have concocted such an elaborate plan to do away with Mrs. Adams when “he had every day, hourly, opportunities to slip poison in her coffee?” Why, after tossing it in the wastebasket, would he have “let his friend Fineran persuade him to preserve the wrapper” with the potentially incriminating handwriting? Nothing in Cornish’s actions—from his own sampling of the poison, to his immediate summoning of a physician, to his complete cooperation with investigators—was consistent with the behavior of a guilty man.