The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  As for the scandalous insinuations about Cornish’s relationship with Mrs. Rodgers, Osborne pointed out that the two were “cousins, first cousins,” and that while they did indeed live under the same roof in a Manhattan boardinghouse, Cornish actually shared a room there with Florence Rodgers’s older brother, Howard.

  His ultimate argument, however—hardly flattering to the man he sought to defend—was that Cornish simply wasn’t clever enough to be the killer. To concoct such a diabolical scheme required “a man of intellectuality, of cunning,” said Osborne. “Now I ask you, can you make a poisoner out of that material such as Cornish?”

  No, Osborne said to the jurors, the accusations hurled against Cornish were simply Black’s desperate effort “to cloud your minds.” The proof was overwhelming that Molineux—here he turned and jabbed a finger in Roland’s direction—was the guilty man.

  Hamstrung by his inability to refer to the Barnet murder, Osborne did his best to address the issue of motive, insisting that—far from having put his quarrels with Cornish behind him—Molineux, as the evidence proved, continued to brood about the athletic director, until his “jealousy and bitterness crystallized into action.” He refuted Black’s assertion about the easy availability of cyanide of mercury, insisting that no one but a chemist would know how to obtain, or concoct, such an uncommon poison. He dwelt on the testimony of several cashiers at Roland’s bank, who had identified the handwriting on the poison wrapper as consistent with Molineux’s signature.

  “I say to you,” Osborne concluded, “that the prosecution bears no malice toward this defendant. But it asks you not to swerve from your duty. You are compelled to give the defendant the benefit of your doubt. But we ask you not to be timid, not to shrink because of your natural indisposition to cause harm to a fellow being.

  “If you do,” he said, his voice rising to a thunderous level, “all through your life you will hear that still small voice of conscience taunting you: ‘Coward, coward, coward!’”4

  It was a few minutes past noon, Tuesday, November 11, when an exhausted Osborne sat down. Judge Lambert then called a lunch recess. When court resumed at one-fifteen, Lambert immediately launched into his charge, which lasted two hours. At 3:14 P.M., the jury retired.

  Thirteen minutes later, they were back.

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  Seated between his youngest and eldest sons, Cecil and Leslie, General Molineux nervously scanned the faces of the jurors as the twelve men resumed their places. For the first time, the stoic old soldier seemed overcome with anxiety. His face twitched, he tugged at his white goatee and rubbed his balding dome. He could not remain still for an instant.

  To judge from their grave expressions, there was cause for concern. Not one of the jurors would meet Roland’s eyes. All kept their gazes on the floor.

  The excited buzz that had filled the courtroom when the jurors reentered had subsided into a tense, protracted silence, which was finally broken by Judge Lambert.

  “Upon rendition of this verdict,” he cautioned, “every person is forbidden to make any demonstration of approval or disapproval. Any person disregarding this admonition will be promptly brought to this bar and punished. When this verdict is rendered, I wish every person to disperse quietly.”

  At that, the clerk addressed the jurors.

  “Please rise, gentlemen,” he said, then turned to Roland. “The defendant will rise. Jurors, look upon the prisoner. Prisoner, look upon the jurors.”

  Molineux shot to his feet and stood so rigidly erect that he appeared to be “almost on tiptoe.”1 He stared hard at the jurors, but though all twelve men had turned in his direction, they seemed to be looking past him.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?” asked the clerk.

  “We have,” replied the foreman, gazing down at the floor.

  “What say you, guilty or not guilty as charged in the indictment?”

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment before answering: “Not guilty.”

  Seated beside General Molineux, his business partner, Mr. Devoe, let out an excited yelp and threw out his hands so wildly that he struck the General in the face. But the old man never noticed. Leaping from his chair, he grabbed his boy’s hand and held it tightly, while Bartow Weeks leaned forward from his seat and seized Roland’s other hand.2

  Roland—still standing as “erect as a West Point cadet on parade”—showed no reaction at first. All at once, a radiant smile “broadened his prison-pale cheeks and deepened the dimple in his chin,” and his eyes danced with happiness.

  Intent upon obeying the formalities, the clerk addressed the jurors. “So say you all?” he asked.

  The twelve men nodded gravely, then resumed their seats while—in defiance of Judge Lambert’s warning—the crowd went wild.

  Men cheered and tossed their hats in the air, women clapped and squealed, and a small mob of both sexes surged toward Roland, who was already surrounded by his lawyers, brothers, friends, and other well-wishers. The scene, wrote one reporter, “resembled a football rush.” Everyone wanted to shake his hand or (in the case of more than one of his fashionably attired female fans) embrace him.

  The heartiest congratulations, however, were reserved for the General; “the old warrior had spent all the savings of a lifetime, given all the energy of the last years of a long and honorable career to the defense of his son.” For every handshake Roland received, his father seemed to receive three or four.

  The celebration went on for five full minutes before the pounding of Judge Lambert’s gavel and the shouts of the court officers restored order to the chaotic scene.

  Addressing the district attorney, Lambert asked if there was “any further charge against this defendant.”

  “There is not,” said the DA.

  “Then,” said the judge, “I declare the defendant discharged.”

  As the tumult around Roland resumed, jurors filed from the courtroom. Passing a dejected-looking James Osborne, several of them offered consoling remarks.

  “We had to go against you,” said Foreman Young, “but you went down with flying colors.”3

  Harry Cornish, on learning of the verdict, bitterly declared his belief that the outcome was inevitable, given Judge Lambert’s obvious bias. “I want to congratulate the judge on his defense of the accused,” he said with heavy sarcasm.4

  Meanwhile, at the front of the courtroom, the General was besieged by reporters. What were his emotions when he heard the verdict? “Here, give me a pencil and a slip of paper,” said the General, “and I will write down just what I feel.”

  Someone handed him the items and the old man, leaning down to the nearest table, quickly scribbled two lines. They appeared on the front pages the following day—a paraphrase of a famous hymn:

  The strife is o’er, the battle done,

  And Might has lost but Right has won.5

  As Roland, his father, and their supporters left the courtroom, they were greeted by a deafening yell. The upper floors of the building, which “looked down upon the main hall like so many balconies in the opera house,” were thronged with cheering people.

  Out on the street, an even more massive crowd burst into a “tremendous wave of applause” at their first glimpse of Roland and the General. People in passing trolley cars waved handkerchiefs from the windows, while, on the fire escapes of the nearby tenements, women and children joined in the general rejoicing.

  A few moments later, a closed carriage drew up before the courthouse, and Roland, his father, Bartow Weeks, and George Gordon Battle climbed aboard. Immediately, the crowd closed around it. People reached inside the open windows, attempting to grab Roland’s hand, and a few men actually tried to jump inside before the door was yanked shut and secured.

  As the driver applied his whip, a squad of several dozen policemen struggled to clear a way through the crowd. Several hundred men and boys pursued the carriage, cheering all the while. At every corner, more people joined the procession. By the time the carri
age reached the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, an estimated fifteen hundred people followed in its wake.

  On the Brooklyn side, the carriage clattered up Fulton Street and past Borough Hall, where another five hundred people had assembled. Roland leaned out the window and waved his hat in response to the cheering mob.

  By the time the carriage approached Roland’s home, the news had reached Fort Greene Place. Every stoop was lined with men, women, and children. Every open window seemed to frame an excited face. As the police cleared a path on the packed street, the carriage drew up in front of the Molineux residence. Roland was the first out, his father close behind him.

  “Three cheers for Roland Molineux!” someone shouted, and the crowd let out a roar.

  Roland took off his hat and bowed. Suddenly, the front door opened and his elderly mother, wearing a plain linen cap, stood in the entranceway.

  Bounding up the steps, Roland took her in his arms.

  “My boy!” she cried, hugging him.

  A reverential silence descended on the crowd, as Roland and his mother held their embrace for a full minute. By the time they parted, the General had joined them at the top of the stairs.

  “Well, Mother,” he said. “I have kept my word. I told you I would bring the boy home.”

  As Roland and his mother disappeared inside the house, the General turned to the crowd.

  “Three cheers for General Molineux, the best father that ever lived!” came another shout. The jubilation that erupted was “such as was never heard in quiet old-fashioned Fort Greene Place.” A street band suddenly materialized and struck up a rousing rendition of “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?”6

  Glowing with happiness—looking “as though he had grown twenty-five years younger in a day”—the General bowed right and left. The sheer intensity of the outpouring confirmed a belief that many commentators would assert for years to come: that “Roland Burnham Molineux was indicted and tried for murder and General Edward Leslie Molineux was acquitted.”7

  Little by little, the crowd dispersed, leaving the Molineuxs to enjoy their reunion in private. But at least one observer had noticed something odd. There appeared to be “one member of the family who was not there to greet Molineux upon his dramatic homecoming,” wrote the reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle.

  “It was his wife.”8

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  Though most of the crowd had long since dispersed, a dozen or so newsmen were still congregated outside the Molineux home when, at around 6:00 P.M., the front door opened and George Gordon Battle emerged. He was immediately surrounded by the reporters, who bombarded him with questions. The ever-gracious Battle took a moment to explain that, at the family’s request, he was on his way to the Murray Hill Hotel to escort Roland’s wife home. A moment later, he had boarded a waiting carriage and was gone.1

  By the time he arrived at the door of her suite, Blanche had already heard the news. Entering, he announced with a smile, “Roland is free.”

  From her seat in the parlor, Blanche merely looked at him, her face taut. Battle was no fool. He had known for a long time where matters stood between Blanche and her husband.

  “You needn’t tell me—I think I know,” he said as her silence continued. “I appreciate how hard it’s been for you. But you must go on a bit longer.”

  When Blanche finally spoke, there was such bitterness in her voice that even she felt “as though it came from another’s throat.” “Their son is returned to them. They have him. They don’t need me any longer.”

  Battle’s tone was pure gentle persuasion. “But you’re wrong. They do need you. It’s imperative that you should be in the General’s home at this time. You can see why. The newspapers will blow it into a tremendous sensation if they learn you have not rejoined the family.”

  Blanche struggled to control the emotions that threatened to engulf her: anger, resentment, despair. Nowhere among them was the slightest pleasure or relief at Roland’s acquittal.

  “Oh, can’t I have my own life now?” she cried. “Or what’s left of it?”

  “But think of the old General,” Battle urged.

  Blanche was sobbing now. “I don’t want to hurt him,” she managed to say. “Only please, don’t ask me to go back. Let me go away!”2

  But Battle persisted until, regaining a measure of control, Blanche made herself ready and allowed herself to be led down to the carriage. Throughout the drive to Brooklyn, she stared blankly out the window. She felt, as she would record in her memoirs, “quite dead.”

  Beside her on the cushion lay a large bouquet of American Beauty roses. Battle had purchased them from a florist’s shop, so that Blanche would have something to present to Roland when she saw him—a token of her joy at their reunion.3

  When the coach drew up at 117 Fort Greene Place, Blanche—handsomely dressed in a big feathered hat, dove-colored shirtwaist, black skirt, with a boa around her neck4—stepped onto the sidewalk and, ignoring the shouted questions of the newsmen, ran up the high stoop. Battle followed at her heels. In the excitement of the moment, he did not see that, either by accident or design, she had left the roses behind. By the time he noticed, the coach had already driven away.5

  The front door was opened by the General, who held out his arms in welcome. Blanche, however, was so eager to see her husband that she rushed past her father-in-law and into the front parlor. At the sight of her, Roland—who had been seated in a chair reading congratulatory telegrams—sprang to his feet and the pair flew into each other’s arms. They spent the next several hours in loving communion behind the closed doors of the parlor, while the rest of the family left them discreetly alone.

  That, at any rate, was the account that appeared in the next day’s newspapers.6 Blanche’s memoirs tell a different story.

  Upon entering the Molineux home—her “dead heart carried inside me”—she strode directly “through the high ceilinged and paneled halls” and, without so much as a word to Roland or any other member of the family, proceeded straight “upstairs to my former sleeping chamber.”

  Removing her wraps and hat but otherwise remaining fully clothed, she sank into an easy chair beside a window. From below stairs, voices floated up to her. “Roland was there with his family. The world believed I was lying in his arms. Yet I sat in my room alone, all night.”

  By the time the “first faint streak of gray light” showed in the east, she had made her final decision. Moving to the desk, she took a sheet of stationery from a leather portfolio and began a letter.

  It was addressed, not to her husband, but to the General. In it, she described “the slow death that had left me numb and cold. I wrote him of my hopes for their happiness, of my love and respect for himself, and my prayer that God would bless him.”

  As for his son, “I left no word for him”—though she did not fail to deliver an eloquent message.

  After sealing the letter with wax, she placed it on the mahogany table. Then she pulled off her wedding ring and set it on top of her farewell note.7

  When the sun had fully risen, Blanche snuck downstairs and boarded a carriage that took her back to Manhattan.

  She never saw Roland Molineux again.

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  The story broke on Tuesday, November 18, exactly one week after Roland’s acquittal: MRS. MOLINEUX SEEKS A DAKOTA DIVORCE.

  The morning after absconding from the Molineux home, Blanche had boarded a train at Grand Central Station and decamped for Sioux Falls, South Dakota—in those days, the quickie-divorce capital of the USA (a position later assumed by Reno, Nevada). She took a room in the Cataract Hotel, the most luxurious lodging in town, though hardly princely in comparison with the accommodations she had enjoyed in Murray Hill. One newspaper described it as “a rather sordid habitation, filled with ill-mannered men and chemically complexioned women seeking the same end as Mrs. Molineux.”1

  Given the nationwide notoriety of the Molineux case, her presence generated a great deal of excitement in the little town. For the
most part, Blanche kept a low profile. Despite early reports that she planned to hire “an automobile and make extensive sightseeing trips throughout the surrounding country,” she spent most of her time “immured in her modest apartment, reading bundles of New York newspapers, writing, and glancing over the magazines.”2

  As soon as her whereabouts became known, reporters descended on Sioux Falls. For the first time, she openly admitted what many had long suspected: that “her apparent loyalty and love for her husband were all for appearances’ sake.”

  “For four years I have been waiting, living in an agony, to see what would be done with that man,” she declared in her first published interview. “Now it’s all over and I want to rest. I made myself a martyr for the sake of General Molineux. I love the General, and for his sake I buried myself for four years. There is not another member of his family that I would have done so much for. I promised him I would wait until he had done all possible to save that man.”3

  Her plan, she explained, was to remain in Sioux Falls for the six months required to establish legal residency. She would then promptly file for divorce. She had already engaged a local firm, Kittredge, Kinans & Scott, to represent her. The grounds for the suit would be extreme mental cruelty.4

  Informed of her statement by reporters back in Brooklyn, General Molineux—for the first time since the long ordeal had begun—became “speechless with rage.” It was not until the following morning that he could bring himself to speak about his daughter-in-law. Even then he had little to say, though his tone left no doubt that he viewed her desertion of Roland as an act of the rankest treachery.