The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Hearing his cousin’s cry for help, Cornish rose from his chair. His legs felt oddly weak. By the time he made it into the bathroom, he was afraid he might throw up. Fighting back the nausea, he knelt beside Mrs. Adams’s body and attempted to raise her. Though he normally could have carried her “as easily as a child,” he found that he did not have the strength to lift her from the floor.5

  With the assistance of a house guest, Fred Hovey—an old family friend who had spent the night at the Adams apartment—Florence and Harry managed to carry Mrs. Adams into the dining room and set her down on the sofa. Cornish then made for the front door and shouted for the hallboy.

  “Get the doctor at once,” he said. “Tell him that Mrs. Adams collapsed after taking some medication. Run!”

  A few minutes later, at approximately 9:35 A.M., Dr. Edwin F. Hitchcock was seated in his office at 72 West Eighty-seventh Street when the hallboy burst in and conveyed the message. Quickly gathering up his emergency kit—which included a pair of hypodermic needles, a stomach siphon, and three tablet cases—he strode to 61 West Eighty-sixth Street and proceeded upstairs to the second floor. At the top of the landing, he saw a small group of people clustered outside the Adams apartment. They parted to make way for the doctor as he hurried inside.

  Mrs. Adams lay unconscious on the sofa, drawing harsh, agonized breaths. Her complexion was blue, her features contorted with pain. At his first glance of the stricken woman, Dr. Hitchcock assumed that she had ingested some variety of irritant poison. Bending to the body, he made a quick examination. Her pulse was barely detectable, her forehead cold and clammy. He could see that she was near death.

  Immediately, he went into action. He loosened her clothing, applied warm compresses to her chest, held ammonia to her nose, slapped her on the face, injected her with stimulants—whiskey and a small dose of sulphate of strychnine—and gave her artificial respiration.

  While he worked, he put some questions to her daughter, who sat at one end of the sofa, cradling her mother’s head in her lap. Florence explained what had happened—how her mother had gotten terribly ill after taking a dose of the bromo-seltzer that her cousin Harry had received in the mail a few days earlier. As Hitchcock kept up his hopeless efforts, Florence clung to the desperate belief that her mother was simply “in a faint.” Even when Mrs. Adams’s jaw went slack and her bosom ceased its convulsive heaving, she wouldn’t accept the truth. She continued to wave an open phial of ammonia beneath her mother’s nose, trying to revive her.

  From somewhere else in the apartment, Dr. Hitchcock could hear the sound of violent retching. “Who’s that?” he asked Florence.

  Explaining that it was Harry—who had taken the same medication that had sickened her mother—Florence urged Hitchcock to run in and help him. She would stay there with her mother.

  Hitchcock found Cornish in the bathroom, bent nearly double over the toilet bowl, retching violently. Fred Hovey was holding Cornish’s head. Hitchcock turned up the light from the gas jet and peered into the bowl to see if he could tell anything about the poison from the look of Cornish’s ejecta. But the bowl was empty, Cornish having long since emptied the contents of his stomach.

  When Cornish asked for something to quell the retching, Hitchcock refused. Though not an expert on poisons, he knew that copious vomiting was recommended for such cases.

  Leaving Cornish with Hovey, Hitchcock returned to the dining room and resumed his efforts. He knew, of course, that they were futile. Mrs. Adams was already dead. But he wanted Florence to feel that everything humanly possible had been done for her mother.

  Several minutes later, Cornish entered the dining room on wobbly legs, his normally ruddy complexion replaced by a blue-tinged pallor. Shakily, he lowered himself onto one of the chairs. The bottle labeled bromo-seltzer still sat on the table. Cornish picked it up and passed it to Hitchcock.

  “Do you have any idea what this might be?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Well, it’s evidently not bromo-seltzer,” said Hitchcock, examining the bottle.

  Licking the tip of his pinky, he stuck his finger into the bottle and extracted a small quantity of the substance. He then brushed his fingertip lightly across the lapel of his jacket, knocking away all but a small particle, which he placed on the tip of his tongue.

  Instantly, he tasted bitter almonds and knew that he had just ingested half a grain of one of the deadliest poisons in existence—cyanide.

  Almost immediately, he began to feel sick. Taking a swig of whiskey to revive himself, he asked if Cornish felt strong enough to go for help.

  Cornish rose to his feet and nodded.

  Hitchcock asked him to go fetch Dr. E. Styles Potter, a colleague who lived two blocks away. In sending Cornish on this errand, Hitchcock had several motives. He wanted to keep Cornish moving and get him out in the open air. He also feared that he himself might soon be incapacitated (if not killed) by the poison he had just sampled.

  While Cornish was gone, Hitchcock continued to work on Mrs. Adams’s body, partly to keep himself active, partly to satisfy Florence Rodgers, who still begged him to help her mother. About ten minutes later, Cornish returned with Dr. Potter, who needed just a quick look at Mrs. Adams to see that she was (as Hitchcock later put it) “perfectly dead.”6

  Potter then turned his attention to the two poisoned men. After satisfying himself that they were in no danger of dying, he took a linen napkin from the dining room table and gently covered Mrs. Adams’s face, while Florence Rodgers—unable to deny the truth any longer—buried her own face in her hands and wept.

  27

  By then, Cornish’s nausea had subsided, though he’d begun to suffer from severe abdominal pain. A lesser man would have taken to his bed. Cornish, however, had no patience for any display of male weakness, particularly in a crisis.

  Dr. Hitchcock had informed him that, in all likelihood, the coroner wouldn’t arrive until nightfall—an intolerable delay as far as Cornish was concerned, since it meant that Mrs. Adams’s corpse would remain in the apartment all day, in full view of her daughter. It was, as Cornish later put it, a most “unpleasant” prospect.1

  Cornish had an acquaintance in the district attorney’s office, a fellow named McIntyre, who might be able to expedite matters. Throwing on his overcoat, he left the apartment and made his way to the elevated train at Eighty-first Street.

  No sooner had he boarded the car than he was seized by an intestinal spasm so acute that he was forced to hurry off at the next station and find the nearest bathroom. After relieving himself, he continued on his journey, though he had to leave the train four more times in frantic search of a toilet.

  It was nearly 2:00 P.M. by the time Cornish made it to the DA’s office. After a brief conversation with McIntyre, who agreed to telephone the coroner, Cornish took the trolley to the office of his closest friend, John Yocum, a chemist working for the United States Leather Company and a fellow KAC member. Yocum, who had boarded at the Adams residence before taking a room at the club, was shocked by the news and alarmed at Cornish’s dreadful appearance. Perhaps a drink, he suggested, would help settle his friend’s stomach. They repaired to a nearby saloon, where Cornish had a glass of whiskey and milk, which he immediately threw up. Giving Cornish his room key, Yocum urged him to go straight to the club and lie down.2

  Ignoring this advice, Cornish first traveled to the Rose Street office of his cousin, Lewis, to deliver the unhappy news. Only then did he head for the club. Once again, the trip turned into an ordeal. He had just boarded the trolley when an explosion seemed to detonate deep in his bowels. Quickly disembarking, he made for the nearest saloon, where he shut himself in the bathroom for more than an hour. When he finally emerged, his legs were so wobbly he could barely walk. Eventually, he managed to make it to the club, where he dragged himself upstairs and collapsed onto Yocum’s bed.

  Cornish had never felt worse in his life. He summoned an errand boy, who ran to fetch Dr. Wendell Phillips, but Phillips wasn’t ho
me. Fortunately, another physician, Dr. Lewis Coffin, was visiting the club at the time. Hearing that Cornish was unwell, he proceeded to the room.3

  He found Cornish shivering under the bedclothes, his face a ghastly gray and dark circles under his eyes. He looked as though he’d been sick for a month. Turning down the blankets and sheet, Coffin saw that the patient was tympanitic: his stomach was so grotesquely distended that he appeared to be pregnant, and he was belching intestinal gas. His pulse was weak and intermittent.

  Concluding that Cornish was suffering from acute gastric enteritis, Coffin went downstairs to the telephone and ordered stomach and rectal tubes from a local pharmacy. They had just been delivered when Dr. Phillips—who had returned home to find an urgent message waiting—showed up at the club.

  Working side by side, the two physicians threaded a tube down Cornish’s throat and flushed his stomach with a solution. The “return matter” was (as Phillips later testified) “a thick, ropy mucus, so thick and ropy that when Dr. Coffin put his hand into the vessel and then lifted the matter up, it would string out all the way down.”4

  Another tube was then inserted into Cornish’s rectum and his bowels were washed out. Like the previous procedure, this operation produced a “most inordinate amount of mucus, almost exactly the same as the return flow from the stomach, with the exception that it contained some blood.”5

  From the symptoms, Phillips was convinced that the patient was suffering from “irritant poisoning.” Cornish’s pulse was so weak that the doctors were afraid to let him get up to use the bathroom. Going home was out of the question. Coffin prescribed strychnine and caffeine to stimulate his heart, along with bismuth and salol to soothe the inflammation of his stomach and bowels.

  The two doctors remained at Cornish’s bedside for about an hour and a half. Before returning home, Phillips took Coffin aside. Something seemed to be troubling him.

  It was odd, he said. This was the second time he’d been called to the club to treat a case like this. He mentioned no names, but Coffin—a frequent guest at the KAC—knew he was referring to Henry Barnet.6

  28

  The story broke in the papers on the very day of the murder, when the Evening Journal ran half a column on its second page. KILLED BY POISON SENT AS GIFT, read the headline. The article went on to relate the principal features of the case: Cornish’s receipt of the Tiffany box containing a bottle labeled “bromo-seltzer” along with a small “silver stand” Mrs. Adams’s agonizing death upon “taking a dose from the phial” Dr. Hitchcock’s fruitless attempt to revive her “by the Silvester artificial respiration process” Cornish’s own terrible illness after sampling the remedy. Hitchcock was quoted as saying that, in his opinion, “the powder in the phial was cyanide of potassium.” The article concluded by noting that “A peculiarity of the address on the package sent to Mr. Cornish was that the street name Forty-fifth Street was spelled ‘Fourty fifth Street.’”1

  Shocking as it was, there was little in this story to differentiate it from a dozen other recent poison-murders. Indeed, just the day before, the Journal had printed a page-one article about a still-unknown culprit who had poisoned the pancakes at a Paterson, New Jersey, rooming house, “putting the lives of the entire household in jeopardy” in order to kill his intended victim, a boarder named George Naef.2 Certainly, the public had no reason to suspect that they were about to be treated to one of the most rabidly covered stories in the annals of American crime.

  All of that changed on the following day, when, having sicced their newshounds on the story, the masters of the yellow press plastered their front pages with competing accounts of the crime. For William Randolph Hearst, the murder of Katherine Adams was a sensation-monger’s dream come true: New York City’s very own equivalent of the Cordelia Botkin case. The Journal’s headline on the morning of December 29 played up the similarity by comparing Mrs. Adams to Mrs. Botkin’s intended target: MRS. KATE ADAMS KILLED LIKE MRS. DUNNING, BY POISON SENT THROUGH THE MAILS.3

  Pulitzer’s World, meanwhile, managed to best its bitter rival with a sensational scoop: DOUBLE MURDER MYSTERY IN A NEW YORK CLUB, screamed the headline. Crowing that it had “unearthed a chain of circumstances that may greatly assist the police in unraveling one of the most mysterious crimes of recent occurrence in New York City,” the paper detailed the “strangely similar circumstances” surrounding the death of Henry Barnet, another member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club who had recently “received a bottle containing what appeared to be a harmless remedy.”4

  There were significant discrepancies between the Hearst and Pulitzer accounts. According to the Journal, for example, Assistant DA John McIntyre believed that “the party suspected of sending the package to Mr. Cornish is at present out of…state.” The World, on the other hand, quoted McIntyre as stating that “clues…point to certain persons who are not far away.”5 Both papers agreed, however, that there was only one “direct clue” that might lead to a break in the case: “the handwriting on the package that…was received by Mr. Cornish through the mail at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club.”

  Nowadays (at least if TV crime shows are to be believed), such a significant piece of evidence would be scanned with an electron microscope, studied with a fiber-optic fluorometer, tested for DNA, and checked against a national biometrics database, leading to the swift and sure identification of the culprit. In the late nineteenth century, however, forensic science was still in its infancy.

  The world’s first criminological lab had been established only fifteen years earlier by an employee of the Parisian police department named Alphonse Bertillon, who devised a way of keeping track of criminals by collecting detailed data about their distinctive physical traits, from the span of their arms to the length of their left middle fingers. Bertillon’s “anthropometric” method, however, was good for only one purpose—identifying repeat offenders—and required little more in the way of equipment than a camera and tape measure.

  Even a technique as basic today as fingerprinting (which would eventually render Bertillon’s cumbersome system obsolete) had not yet been widely adopted in the late 1800s, though its essential principles had been discovered decades earlier. In 1858, a British civil servant in India named William Herschel began insisting that the native businessmen he dealt with “sign” their contracts with inked handprints. Over the next two decades, as he collected thousands of these “hand-mark” specimens, he realized to his amazement that the ridged patterns on the ends of the fingertips always differed from person to person and could therefore be used (as he wrote in a letter) as an “infallible method of identification.”6

  Simultaneously—and independently of Herschel—a Scottish physician and amateur archaeologist named Henry Faulds, while working in Tokyo, was struck by the distinctive “finger-tip impressions” left in pieces of ancient Japanese pottery. Taking up the study of the different “skin-furrows in human fingers,” Faulds quickly concluded that these markings were not only unique to each individual but remained unchanged throughout a person’s lifetime. In 1879, when a neighbor’s home was burglarized, Faulds was able to identify the culprit by comparing the suspect’s fingerprints to a sooty smudge left on a whitewashed wall at the crime scene. Recognizing the forensic importance of his discovery, Faulds published a letter in the British science journal Nature in which he declared that “bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass etc.,…may lead to the scientific identification of criminals.”7

  When Herschel learned of Faulds’s piece, he wrote his own letter to Nature, asserting his claim to priority. In the meantime—while the two men launched a bitter dispute that would last for decades—the famed British anthropologist Sir Francis Galton turned his own attention to the subject and, in 1892, published a landmark book that set forth the first practical system for classifying fingerprints.

  It was a police official in Argentina named Juan Vucetich, however, who first demonstrated the full potential of fingerprinting for solving serious crimes. The
Croatian-born Vucetich (né Ivan Vucetic) immigrated to Buenos Aires in 1884 at the age of twenty-six. Within a year, he had gone to work for the La Plata police department and quickly rose through the ranks. Assigned the task of setting up a criminal identification bureau in 1891, he became intrigued by the technique of fingerprinting after reading an article about Galton’s work in a French science magazine.

  Armed with an ink pad and roller, Vucetich began collecting all the specimens he could, fingerprinting everyone from newly arrested prisoners to the mummies at the city museum. Before long, he had worked out a classification method that made small but significant improvements to Galton’s system, affording police an efficient way of matching crime scene prints with archived identification records. He called his technique dactyloscopy (Latin for “finger description”) and began to vigorously promote it in self-published pamphlets.

  His superiors, however, remained skeptical—until fate supplied a startling vindication. In July 1892, a ghastly crime occurred in the coastal town of Necochea. A young boy and girl, the illegitimate children of a twenty-five-year-old woman named Francisca Rojas, were found murdered in their blood-drenched bed, their heads caved in. The hysterical mother blamed a man named Velazquez, a middle-aged, somewhat simpleminded laborer on a nearby ranch.

  According to the story Rojas told the police, Velazquez was madly in love with her and had begged her to marry him. Rojas, however, was in love with someone else—a younger, far handsomer man. When she informed Velazquez of her feelings, he had flown into a rage and threatened to exact a terrible vengeance. A few days later, as she returned home from the marketplace, she saw to her surprise that her front door was open. As she drew closer, Velazquez burst from the house and fled. Inside, she found her two slaughtered babes.