By then, however, the failure of his play was the least of his problems.
Even while The Man Inside was in rehearsal, Belasco had noticed alarming changes in Roland’s behavior. From a willing collaborator, he suddenly “turned sullen and very ugly,” the producer wrote in his memoirs. “Sometimes, instead of working, he would sit and roll his eyes or glare at me; and, what was very dreadful, he gave off a horrible, sickening odor like that of a wild beast.”
There soon came a point where Belasco began to fear for his safety:
I shall never forget the last night I ever had with him. He was furious because of the changes I was making, and I am sure he was going to attack me. Suddenly, I stopped arguing with him and, picking up a heavy walking stick, I said: “See here, Molineux, stop looking at me like that; I’m not afraid of you. If you had brought me a finished play instead of a lot of words, I wouldn’t have had to change your manuscript. Now it’s hot and I’m tired, so we’ll call the whole thing off for tonight, and you can go home and think it over.” He pulled himself together then and tried to apologize and say how much he appreciated all I was doing, but I wouldn’t have it and just showed him out of my studio as quickly as I could—and I took care he should walk in front of me all the way. There wasn’t another soul in the place, except the night watchman, away down at the stagedoor. I never let him come near me again.33
Roland continued to deteriorate. During a dress rehearsal he was allowed to attend, he sat quietly and attentively through the first act. As soon as the curtain came down for intermission, however, Roland “became so violently excited and created so much disturbance” that Belasco had him forcibly ejected from the theater. “It was hard to do,” the producer recalled, “but it had to be done. I really expected the man would break out and kill somebody.”
By the time the play premiered in November 1913, Roland had been shipped off to a “rest farm” in Babylon, Long Island. According to a statement released by his family, he had suffered a nervous breakdown.
Ten months later, in the early morning hours of Sunday, September 6, 1914, Roland—still residing in the sanitarium—escaped into town. He was clad in a bathrobe and shirt but no trousers. As he ran madly down the main street of Babylon, several people stopped to watch him. Roland rushed up to one man, seized him by the arm, and began to shriek incoherently.
The man was so badly frightened that he shouted for help. His cries brought Constable Luke Devin running. At first, Roland appeared to calm down. Suddenly, “he flew into a screaming rage and struck out right and left.” It took several men, including Devin and a burly youth named Ray De Garmo, to subdue him. Roland was finally bundled into a car, driven to the Babylon police station, and locked in a cell, where he hurled himself against the bars and jabbered wildly about lending money to the federal government. A few hours later he was arraigned on a charge of disorderly conduct.34
By Sunday afternoon, Dr. W. J. Cruikshank, the Molineux family physician, and a Brooklyn psychiatrist (or “alienist,” in the jargon of the day) named Arthur C. Brush had been dispatched to Babylon. After interviewing Roland in his cell, they pronounced him insane. “Roland Molineux, defendant in one of the most sensational murder cases this country has ever known,” reported the World, “is a raving maniac.”35
The following morning, Roland’s father, older brother, and new wife, Margaret, traveled out to Babylon, where—along with doctors Cruikshank and Brush and the family lawyer, Hugo Hirsh—they met with a judge named Nicoll. The disorderly conduct charge was dropped, and—deemed “a person dangerous to be at large”—Roland was committed to the State Hospital for the Insane at King’s Park, Long Island.
As Roland—still raving about his stupendous wealth—was placed in a motorcar and driven off to the asylum, General Molineux wept openly. For the first time in his life, the old man, according to one observer, seemed “broken.”36
Less than one year later, on the evening of Thursday, June 10, 1915, General E. L. Molineux—just a few months shy of his eighty-second birthday—died of complications following surgery at the Roosevelt Hospital. Until he went into the hospital, he was at his office every day, actively attending to business. “So he may be said to have died in the harness of daily duty,” wrote one of his many eulogists, “a departure doubtless suited to his indomitable military spirit.”37
His will, like every other document he put his hand to, speaks loudly of the man’s fundamental decency—of that unwavering sense of rectitude that, with the advent of the modern era, was already an anachronism.
It is a simple, straightforward document, barely three typed pages long. The first provisions are charitable bequests, offered in memory of his “beloved wife, Harriet,” who had died in February 1914: one to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church; one to the Brooklyn Home for Blind, Crippled, and Defective Children; the third—and largest—to the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn.38 There are also several donations, made in his own name, to his beloved veterans’ organizations “for the benefit of needy members.”
The bulk of his estate—or what was left of it after the financial toll exacted by his four-year defense of Roland—was divided equally among Leslie, Cecil, and Roland’s wife, Margaret, “by her to be used for the maintenance of herself, my said son Roland B. Molineux, and any child that may be born” to them.
The General left another, equally revealing document—a handwritten note, inscribed on Devoe & Raynolds Company letterhead, declaring his “personal desire that my funeral be very simple and without any ceremony except that of a Christian burial.” He gives two reasons for his wish, both reflecting his characteristic concern for the welfare of others. First, “funerals of a public character would take hard-earned wages from employees of all sorts by loss of time.” Second, such elaborate ceremonies often prove a strain on “feeble and aged persons”—like the General’s much-reduced band of Civil War brethren—leading to “subsequent illness and distress.”
“I believe I have quite a number of friends, faithful and true,” the letter ends, “and I want to remain where I am now—in their hearts—while my body will be resting under a simple and small Cross with the short inscription:
EDWARD L MOLINEUX
A VOLUNTEER OF 1861–5.
“PEACE & GOOD WILL TO ALL.”39
In accordance with his wishes, the General was given a funeral “of the simplest kind.” At 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, June 13, his casket was borne to the First Presbyterian Church on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, where the Reverend L. Mason Clarke read from the Scriptures and offered prayer. No eulogy was given. A quartet sang two of the General’s favorite hymns. Then a bugler blew taps.
Afterward, the casket was taken to Scarsdale, New York, for burial beside the grave of the General’s wife in the churchyard of St. James the Less.40
Every paper in the city ran a worshipful obituary of the “great soldier and great man.” Nearly all limited themselves to a description of his brilliant military career and subsequent life in business and politics.
Only one editorialist, in referring to the crime that had riveted the nation fifteen years earlier, conveyed the sense of pity and consternation that so many people had felt throughout the General’s long ordeal. “That tragedy should have come to such a man in the struggle to save his son, Roland B. Molineux, from a charge of murder, was one of the freaks of fate.”41
Just two and a half years later, on November 2, 1917, Roland B. Molineux, age fifty-one, followed his father to the grave.
At the time of his commitment to the insane asylum, newspapers had attributed his mental collapse to strains brought by “overwork on his play recently produced by David Belasco.”42 The autopsy told a far more sordid story.
Roland, according to his death certificate, had died of “syphilitic infection.” His descent into insanity had been a consequence of that insidious disease. Left untreated, syphilis leads to extreme neurological damage, known as general paresis. As the nerves of the brain deteriorate, the victim disp
lays increasingly severe symptoms of abnormal mental functioning, including marked personality changes and impaired ethical judgment. Eventually, he (or she) succumbs to complete dementia.
Since paresis can take decades to develop after the initial infection, it is possible that the disease had already begun to work its devastating effects on Roland Molineux at the time of the murders of Henry Barnet and Katherine Adams. Certainly, the shattered health that his mother described to David Belasco—and that Belasco himself witnessed firsthand—was not, as she believed, the result of his imprisonment but of advanced untreated syphilis.43
Besides the “Molineux Rule”—still frequently invoked in New York State courtrooms—Roland’s case produced other changes in the law, from the abolition of private letter boxes to a bill mandating that all medications containing toxic ingredients be sold in specially designed bottles.44 But its most significant ramifications were cultural.
As the first media-driven crime circus of the twentieth century, it set the pattern for all the carnivalesque “trials of the century” to follow, from those of Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh baby kidnapper to that of O. J. Simpson. Hack works like The Blind Goddess and The Great Poison Mystery were precursors of the instant books and made-for-TV movies that rush to exploit the public’s fascination with the latest sensational crime. The general shamelessness that seems to characterize everyone associated with a notorious murderer nowadays—the former girlfriend who poses for Playboy, the sibling who quickly signs a contract for a tell-all book—was foreshadowed by Blanche’s attempts to turn her notoriety into a vaudeville career. Roland’s own efforts to cash in on his infamy—so strikingly at variance with his father’s fiercely maintained sense of dignity and family honor—was a sign of the coming new era, when cheap celebrity, often based on scandal, would supplant traditional concepts of glory and hard-won fame.
Even the unbridled litigiousness of contemporary America—where stranded motorists sue the Samaritans who stop to help them and the morbidly obese bring action against their favorite restaurants for making them fat—was presaged by the Molineux case. Immediately after the end of Roland’s first trial, Manheim Brown, the juror who had nearly derailed the proceedings after catching a cold, sued the city for fifty thousand dollars, claiming that his health had been ruined by the poor ventilation in the courtroom. For nearly thirty more years—long after Brown’s death in 1913—his family carried on the fight. It was not until 1928—when the state legislature turned down a bill that would have given Brown’s widow financial compensation—that the matter was finally dropped.45
Harry Cornish also sought redress through litigation. Not long after Roland’s acquittal, he sued The New York Times for $30,000, claiming that at the height of the Molineux investigation in 1899, the paper had libelously identified him as a man who had purchased cyanide of mercury from a druggist in New Haven, Connecticut, thus “branding him as the murderer of Mrs. Adams or an accessory to the crime.” In the end, however, Cornish was no more successful than Manheim Brown’s widow. At a trial held before Justice W. S. Andrews in March 1904, the jury agreed with the defense that the article was “a legitimate news publication, fair to the plaintiff, and not of the character set forth in the complaint.”46
Four years later, in May 1908, Cornish got remarried—not to Florence Rodgers, his alleged longtime lover, but to a thirty-six-year-old resident of Newark, New Jersey, named Mary M. Waite. At the time, Cornish gave his profession as “brass manufacturer.” The news of the wedding did not become public until the middle of July.
Less than two weeks later, a sensational item appeared in papers on both coasts. CORNISH’S BODY FOUND IN BAY, read the headline. According to the story, the remains of a man had been found floating in the waters off Coney Island on the evening of July 27, 1908. The victim had a large gash in his head, apparently made with an ax. While “there was some conflicting evidence as to the identification of the body,” the coroner was convinced that it was Harry Cornish. “It is thought,” read the article, “that Cornish went on the bay in a yacht with a party and that while on the yacht the murder was committed.”47
The coroner, however, was wrong. Though Cornish would vanish from public view, he wouldn’t die for many years to come. He and his wife eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. He died of acute congestive failure in the Los Angeles County General Hospital on the afternoon of January 11, 1947, at the age of eighty-four.48
Blanche would outlive them all.
In 1905, after another unsuccessful stab at a singing career (this time under the name Blanche Chesebrough Scott), she and her husband, Wallace, moved to New York City.49 Apart from an eighteen-month hiatus during which Blanche finally achieved her dream of traveling through Europe, they spent the next eight years in Manhattan before returning to Sioux Falls in 1913. By then, they had a son named Roger, whom Blanche—a decidedly indifferent mother—consistently referred to as “Boy.”
In 1915, Wallace journeyed to Minneapolis to try a case and liked the city so well that he decided to stay. Shortly thereafter, Blanche sued him for divorce on the grounds of nonsupport. Their split, however, didn’t last. In 1916, the divorce was legally vacated. For the next five years, Blanche and Wallace lived together in a big house on Minneapolis’s Park Avenue, while “Boy” was shipped off to a boarding school on the East Coast.
Blanche’s marriage to Wallace continued to be as tumultuous as ever, and in January 1921 she filed another petition for divorce. The papers claimed that he “struck, bruised, and choked [her], and that he has used towards her profane, indecent language, and called her many disreputable names…as a result thereof, her health has become affected, and her nervous system has been impaired, and to longer live with the defendant would endanger her life.” Blanche sought monthly alimony payments of $250, a share of the household furnishings, and custody of their son. Before the divorce could be finalized, however, “Boy,” then fifteen years old, contracted rheumatic fever and died.50
Blanche and Wallace were divorced for a second time in December 1921. Wallace briefly remarried, while Blanche decamped for New York City, where she lived with her older sister, Izcennia, by then also divorced. In 1926, however, Blanche and Wallace were reconciled once again. She returned to the big house in Minneapolis. For the next four years, they lived together in apparent harmony. In 1930, while returning from a business trip in St. Joseph, Missouri, Wallace was killed in an automobile accident in Iowa. “It may perhaps be said,” a newspaper article commented at the time of her husband’s death, “that Mrs. Scott has drained life’s cup to the last bitter dreg.”51
She would survive for nearly another quarter century—an increasingly grotesque-looking old woman who dyed her hair a garish red, wore clownish amounts of mascara and rouge, dressed in outlandishly youthful garments, and affected a flamboyantly “cultured” conversational style, heavily peppered with French phrases. Living in a succession of progressively shabby rented rooms, she relied for sustenance on welfare and a dwindling number of friends. She died alone in 1954 at the age of eighty—a relic of an age that, even for her, had long since passed into myth.
NOTES
So many newspapers covered the Molineux story (not only in New York but around the country), and the case went on for so long (four years from Katherine Adams’s murder to Roland’s acquittal), that, for the sake of completing my research and actually writing the book, I limited myself to five of the city’s principal dailies—the World, the Journal, the Herald, the Sun, and the Times—plus the Brooklyn Eagle, which, because of the Molineux family’s long association with Brooklyn, covered the case in great detail. Even so, I ended up with several thousand Xeroxed pages, most copied from microfilm machines at the main branch of the New York Public Library. (Thankfully, both the Times and the Brooklyn Eagle are available online.)
The Eagle also ran many articles on Edward Molineux’s civic, political, and military activities, extending back to the 1860s. For i
nformation about his earlier years I relied entirely on documents—his journals, letters, etc.—in the possession of his great-grandson, Will Molineux.
Throughout the writing of the book I scrupulously avoided the New Journalistic techniques pioneered by Capote et al—inventing dialogue, imagining what people were thinking, fleshing out scenes with atmospheric touches, etc. The most novelistic portions of the book are those dealing with Blanche, but everything in them comes directly from her memoirs, provided to me by Jane Pejsa, whose mother, Irene Hauser, befriended Blanche in the last years of her life.
I have also refrained, in the body of the book, from offering a tidy answer to the question of Roland’s innocence or guilt. Like the Lizzie Borden and O. J. Simpson cases, the Molineux affair will forever be marked by a degree of ambiguity. Crime buffs have been debating the matter for a century. Entries on Roland are routinely found in crime encyclopedias such as The Mammoth Book of Murder (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989) and The Greatest Criminals of All Time (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), whose authors do not hesitate to rank him with the country’s most notorious homicidal maniacs. On the other hand, there are those like George P. LeBrun—former New York City coroner and author of It’s Time to Tell (New York: William Morrow, 1962)—who unequivocally assert Roland’s innocence.
As for me, I’ve always been struck by the fact that, in the century following the slaughter of Andrew and Abby Borden, there were a number of highly sensational murder trials in the United States involving wealthy and prominent citizens accused of committing spectacularly savage acts of violence that were totally anomalous in their otherwise law-abiding lives (the Hall-Mills case of the 1920s is another instance). In each of these cases—owing partly to the skills of the high-powered legal “dream teams” retained by the defendants and partly, perhaps, to the reluctance of jurors to attribute such barbarity to admired, respectable individuals with no criminal backgrounds—the defendants ultimately went free.
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