The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Then, almost as an afterthought, he adds: “Unless, indeed, the murderer also happens to be a chemist himself.”

  The possibility that the culprit might be a chemist—off-handedly mentioned by Hawthorne—was raised far more seriously in another news item that ran on Friday morning. Interviewed by a reporter from The New York Times, a physician named W. H. Birchmore—described as “a recognized expert on cyanides”—asserted that “the person who sent the poison to Harry Cornish and which caused the death of Mrs. Adams was one who possessed a thorough knowledge of chemistry.”

  The interview took place at Birchmore’s home on Adelphi Street in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn—not far, as it happened, from the residence of General Edward Leslie Molineux. According to Dr. Birchmore, “the instances in criminal annals wherein hydrocyanic acid has been used as poison” were so rare as to be virtually unknown. The reason for this was the “the great danger in handling the poison, except in a large way and with the most complete facilities for doing so, and even then only with the utmost caution.” Producing it in small batches was such an “extremely risky piece of business,” said Birchmore, that “there is hardly a drug clerk in New York who would undertake to prepare the stuff.”

  Because of the sheer difficulty in obtaining the poison and the “expert knowledge necessary” to concoct it, Birchmore was certain that the killer was no ordinary person.

  “I am convinced,” he declared, “that none but a physician of understanding, a pharmacist above the average of understanding of such in chemical knowledge, or a person not necessarily in either of those professions but well versed in chemistry can be the poisoner in this case.”14

  That same Friday morning, forty-eight hours after he sampled the lethal glass of bromo-seltzer, Harry Cornish finally felt strong enough to leave his bed and venture downstairs. He was seated at his desk in the gymnasium when the club secretary, John Adams, came hurrying toward him, a sheaf of papers clutched in one hand. From the look on Adams’s face, Cornish could see that he had something urgent to convey.

  A trim, handsome man nearing forty, Adams had become friends with Herbert Ballantine when the two were classmates at Cornell. After graduation, he had worked as a journalist for nearly twenty years, spending the last four of those as assistant editor of Harper’s Magazine. In 1896, he had left publishing to become Ballantine’s private secretary. When the brewer bought the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, he had made Adams the club secretary.

  Though not a trained graphologist, Adams had read and answered so many letters over the years—first as an editor, then as Ballantine’s assistant—that he had developed a certain expertise in handwriting recognition. And so, when Hearst’s Journal had published a facsimile of the handwritten address from the poison package and asked for the public’s assistance in identifying the sender, Adams had studied the item with great care. The longer he examined it, the more familiar it seemed, though at first he could not recall where, exactly, he had seen such script before.

  All at once, he remembered.

  Hurrying to his files, he quickly found what he was looking for: a sheet of stationery with a brief, carefully inscribed message. Comparing it with the facsimile, he became more convinced than ever that the handwriting was the same. He dug out other letters written by the same hand and spent more than two hours examining them before seeking out Cornish.

  Explaining that he had made an important discovery, Adams placed the facsimile he had torn from the previous day’s Journal on the desk before Cornish. Beside it, he laid the first of the papers he had removed from the club files. Even Cornish could see the similarities in the handwriting. He made a little noise—a kind of snort—as he stared down at the piece of stationery.

  It was the resignation letter from a former member who also happened to be a professional chemist: Roland Burnham Molineux.15

  30

  By Saturday, December 31, the Adams murder had come to completely dominate the news. No other story drew a fraction of the coverage—not the conviction of Cordelia Botkin, who was found guilty on Friday afternoon and given a mandatory life sentence; not even the alarming case of Mrs. Mary Houley of Paterson, New Jersey, an inveterate gossip who cut off her own tongue with a butcher knife to cure herself of her vice.1 For many months to come, “the Great Poison Mystery,” as it had already been dubbed, would be the preoccupying topic of the New York City press—not only of the yellow papers but of their high-minded brethren such as the Times and the Telegraph, which regarded Hearst and Pulitzer’s brand of raucous, no-holds-barred journalism with lofty contempt.

  According to family lore, Arthur Carey was destined to be a lawman from the moment he was born. As he lay in his cradle, his father, Henry—himself a sergeant on the New York City force—looked down at the newborn and said, “He’s a strapping youngster. Set up like a policeman. I think he’ll make one.”2

  To prepare him for his preordained career, the elder Carey began bringing his son to work with him when the boy was only seven. While other children were out playing blindman’s buff and ring-a-levio, Arthur was passing his time at the Chambers Street station house, watching the prisoners being processed at the sergeant’s desk, listening to the patrolmen discuss their latest “collars,” but mostly hanging around the basement office of the plainclothes detectives, who certified his status as their unofficial mascot by presenting him with a miniature billy club.

  Within a short time, young Arthur had fallen utterly under the spell of these “tall, square-shouldered men in civilian clothes,” who stood “aloof and apart” from their uniformed colleagues, spoke their own special lingo, and fearlessly penetrated the most notorious underworld hangouts, hellish dives “where a man was supposed to take his life in his hands whenever he entered”: the Burnt Rag, Satan’s Circus, the Slide, Cockran’s Roost, McGuirk’s Suicide Hall, and the Bucket of Blood.

  The very names of their criminal adversaries—Shang Draper, Marm Mandelbaum, Funeral Wells, Deafy Hunt, Jersey Jimmy, Banjo Pete Emerson, Paper Collar Joe, Grand Central Pete—had a magical ring to young Arthur. In his eyes, the plainclothes detectives seemed possessed of a “magic power,” a “glamour which uniformed men never had.” By the time he was ten, he had resolved to become one of them, not merely a police officer but a plainclothes homicide inspector—a “murder man.”3

  Passing his civil-service exam at eighteen, Carey spent a few years walking a beat in lower Manhattan before being appointed to the detective bureau by its legendary chief, Thomas Byrnes (whose 1886 book, Professional Criminals of America, is still regarded as a classic text). Just a few months later, he played a key role in the city’s most sensational poisoning case prior to the Adams affair: the killing of Mrs. Anna Buchanan, onetime madam of a Newark whorehouse, by her physician-husband, Robert. It was Carey, in fact, who arrested Dr. Buchanan after shadowing him for several days.4

  In 1897, Byrnes was succeeded by Captain McCluskey, who immediately promoted Carey to detective sergeant. By then, Carey was an eight-year veteran, with dozens of murder cases under his belt. He had already built a reputation as the bureau’s top homicide inspector. His father’s prophecy—and his own boyhood dream—had been fulfilled.

  And so it was only natural that when the Adams case exploded in the news, Arthur Carey was tapped by McCluskey to take a leading part in the investigation.

  The most promising clue in the case was the small silver item now routinely described in the papers as a “vial holder.” This was immediately turned over to Carey, who proceeded to study it with a magnifying glass. Under the lens, he clearly saw a small oval-shaped area where a gummed label—evidently a price tag—had been affixed to the underside of the base. Someone had scraped off the sticker with a knife, leaving the scratch marks that had led Captain McCluskey to assume, mistakenly, that the holder was not new.

  It seemed clear that the sticker had been removed in an attempt to conceal the place of purchase. But there was another marking on the bottom of the holder that t
he buyer had made no effort to efface. Stamped into the silver was a tiny crescent with the letter L snuggled inside the curve. The word Sterling appeared above it; below it, the number 814.

  Accompanied by a colleague, Detective John Herlihy, Carey made the rounds of local jewelers until he found one who could identify the mysterious insignia. It was, he learned, the manufacturer’s hallmark of a silverware firm called Lebkuecher & Company, located on Ferry Street in Newark. Within the hour, Carey and his partner were on a train to New Jersey, the holder in Herlihy’s coat pocket.

  Proceeding directly to the silverware factory, they sought out the owner, Frank A. Lebkuecher, who after glancing at the holder confirmed that it had been made by his firm. Indeed, it was one of the first articles produced by his company, which had been founded only a few years earlier, in 1896. The crescent-flanked L was the company’s trademark. The numeral below it—814—was the catalog number.

  Contrary to reports in the press, said Lebkuecher, the item was not a vial or bottle holder but a receptacle for wooden matches. The cuplike base on which it stood was intended as an ashtray. It was, he explained, “a man’s article, not a woman’s. A woman would only purchase it as a gift.”

  What the detectives were most eager to find out, of course, was where it had been purchased. Consulting his records, Lebkuecher discovered that, of the thirty holders manufactured by his firm, seven were still in stock in the factory. The others had been sold to jewelers in cities across the country: Chicago; Baltimore; Philadelphia; Syracuse; San Francisco; St. Louis; Washington, D.C.; Jacksonville, Florida; Salem, Massachusetts; and Middletown, Connecticut. More locally, three had been purchased by stores in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Newark.

  Copying down the names and addresses of the retailers, the detectives thanked Lebkuecher for his cooperation and returned to Manhattan.5

  Though Carey and Herlihy were the lead inspectors on the case, they were not the only ones. Altogether, McCluskey had assigned sixteen detectives to the investigation. Added to these authorized representatives of the law were the newshounds of the yellow papers, who in their rabid pursuit of scoops were in competition not only with one another but with the police.

  For his part, Captain McCluskey was happy to share certain information with the press when it suited his purposes. Within a day of Carey and Herlihy’s trip to Newark, he had distributed a list of all twenty-three retailers that had purchased holders from the Lebkuecher company. Correspondents employed by the Journal and the World were immediately put on the case, following the trail of the silver match holders in cities across the country.

  Unbeknownst to the newsmen, however, there was one key bit of information that the police had withheld from them. From examining the postal mark on the wrapping, authorities had determined that the poison package sent to Harry Cornish had been mailed from the general post office on Broadway.

  And so, while Hearst and Pulitzer’s men were running down leads from Baltimore to Jacksonville, San Francisco to St. Louis, Carey and his partner were focusing on the stores in the immediate vicinity: Black, Star & Frost on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan; M. Straus in Brooklyn; and C. J. Hartdegen, a jewelry shop located on Broad Street in Newark—just a short stroll from the Morris Herrmann company, where Roland Molineux was employed as head chemist.

  The news that the silver holder had been traced to its source was trumpeted by the yellow papers, which did not scruple to take the lion’s share of credit for the discovery. Declaring that its reporters were “working with indefatigable earnestness” to identify Mrs. Adams’s killer, the Journal declared that, thanks to the sleuthing of its newsmen, “the great murder mystery seems to be approaching a solution. It is possible that, with the information the Journal is now able to present, the murderer will, within a few hours, or at the most a few days, be known.”6

  Despite this optimistic claim, the theories being promulgated at this point by Hearst and his competitors would prove to be wildly off-base. According to Saturday’s Journal, the likeliest suspects were a couple who had acquired the holder from a jewelry store called J. R. Armitage & Co. in Baltimore. The Herald, meanwhile, proclaimed with equal confidence that the holder had been purchased by a woman in Hartford, then sent to Cornish by a male accomplice. In the pages of the World, a “medico-legal expert,” Dr. William J. O’Sullivan, asserted that the culprit was a “criminal maniac” whose “mind was excited by reading of the Botkin affair”—what we would nowadays call a copycat. O’Sullivan felt sure that the killer was a man.7

  Over at the DA’s office, however, authorities remained convinced that the culprit was female. Meeting with reporters on Saturday night—New Year’s Eve—District Attorney Asa Bird Gardiner issued a statement imbued with the casual misogyny of the time: “History shows that poisoning is essentially a woman’s method of action. Women acted thus in ancient times, and following down through the ages, we find the same traits of character, the same outcroppings of human nature. It is easy to surmise the reason for this trait. Woman’s nature is essentially subtle. From deeds of blood and violence she naturally shrinks because her nature steps in and prevents. What then follows? Her scheming brain begins to work. She turns to poison as the easiest and surest method, because if handled deftly and cleverly, it insures less suspicion and less possibility of detection.”8

  To the two main theories being bandied about—that Mrs. Adams had been murdered by either a woman acting alone or in concert with a male accomplice—Julian Hawthorne contributed a third. After noting, somewhat bizarrely, that the three digits stamped on the bottom of the silver holder—814—added up to thirteen (a “pregnant fact” that supposedly portended ill luck for the perpetrator), Hawthorne raised a possibility that had not been mentioned before, at least publicly: “that the sender of the poison, if not a woman, might have been an effeminate man.”9

  Hawthorne had little to say on this subject, which, he suggested, was too scandalous to be discussed openly in a family newspaper. But his speculation turned out to be prophetic, for the question of the killer’s masculinity would, in fact, come to be a prominent feature of the case in the months ahead.

  While his colleagues in the DA’s office remained convinced that the killer was female, Captain McCluskey, who had also begun by suspecting a woman, had undergone a complete turnabout. And there was a good reason for this shift.

  He had spoken to Harry Cornish.

  After examining the handwriting samples provided by John Adams, Cornish had put in an immediate phone call to the chief of detectives, who arrived at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club late Saturday afternoon. McCluskey remained closeted with Cornish for several hours, comparing the newspaper facsimile with Roland Molineux’s letters and listening to the athletic director describe his problems with his nemesis.

  As McCluskey left the club that evening, he was accosted by reporters, who clamored for information. Though persuaded of Molineux’s involvement in the crime, he was not prepared to divulge the news—not until he had a chance to confer with his colleagues. He would only say that Cornish “had finally remembered something” which might well provide “a promising clew.”10

  Inside the clubhouse, however, word had already spread. The whole place was abuzz with news of John Adams’s discovery. Molineux’s name seemed to be on every lip.11

  Under the circumstances, it was only a matter of time before the press sniffed out the truth. Pulitzer’s men were the first to get hold of the story. On the morning of January 1, 1899, the public awoke to find a sensational headline blaring from the front page of the World:

  EVIDENCE GROWS THAT DEGENERATE WAS POISONER

  THOUGHT CORNISH WAS HIS ENEMY

  Had Been a Prominent Member of the Knickerbocker Club

  But Was Expelled for Serious Cause

  Capt. McCluskey Asserts He Will Arrest the Poisoner by or Before 9 o’Clock This Morning, and That He Cannot Escape

  The article that followed was wrong on a number of counts. It described the suspect as a man w
ho worked in a “large Broadway mercantile concern,” had married the “daughter of a well-known Wall Street operator,” was “not fond of any other form of athletics than bicycling,” and had been “ignominiously expelled” from the club because of his “immoral behavior.”

  For the most part, however, anyone privy to the goings-on inside the Knickerbocker would have had no trouble recognizing the person portrayed in the article: a former member who despite his “high social standing” was “unpopular” inside the club and who, following his departure, harbored “bitter resentment” toward certain other members, particularly Harry Cornish.12

  The World also made another explosive announcement, drawing an explicit connection between the deadly Kutnow’s Powder sent to Henry Barnet and the poisoned bromo-seltzer mailed to Harry Cornish: “Further investigation by The World has established that whereas this man had at one time been a warm friend of Henry C. Barnet, the relations between him and Mr. Barnet were so strained that Mr. Barnet did not speak to him. This was the more marked from the fact that both he and Mr. Barnet lived in the club house…. Thus two persons who were at enmity with this expelled club member received in the same manner poison which had fatal results.”13

  Most sensational of all, however, was the characterization of the suspect as a “degenerate.” The term itself had been popularized in the late 1800s by Cesare Lombroso, the foremost criminologist of his time (though nowadays regarded as a hopeless crackpot). In his enormously influential 1876 book L’Uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), Lombroso argued that violent criminals were not merely barbaric in their behavior but were literal atavisms: savage, apelike beings born, by some hereditary glitch, into the modern world. With their jutting brows, big jaws, thick necks, and other supposedly telltale features, violent criminals were evolutionary throwbacks: specimens of humanity in its most degenerate state.14