The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Blanche reluctantly agreed. Within days, her apartment—where she had lived as a bride for less than a week—was “stripped and denuded…. My possessions were stored; my trunks packed. The doors of my honeymoon abode closed behind me.”

  Though she could not possibly have known it at the time, she would never go back there again. Her retreat to the Molineuxs’ stately dwelling would turn into a seemingly endless imprisonment.

  “The long siege,” as she described it many years later, “had begun.”8

  33

  In public, Captain McCluskey stuck to the story he had given the General. The police weren’t after Roland. “The amateur detectives of certain newspapers are not my detectives,” he told reporters on Tuesday afternoon. “Their suspects are not my suspects. If they know who the culprit is, they know more than I do. If I knew who he was, I’d arrest him.”

  The situation was different behind the scenes. In point of fact, Roland was still very much a person of interest to the police. Without solid evidence in hand, however, they weren’t about to make an arrest. Though the press had begun to complain about McCluskey’s performance—POLICE MAKING POOR PROGRESS IN THE ADAMS MURDER CASE, chided a headline in the New York Sun1—his men had, in fact, made significant headway. Indeed, the detectives who had been conferring with McCluskey at the time of the General’s early-morning visit—Arthur Carey and his partner, John Herlihy—were there to update him about a major discovery.

  They had not only identified the store where the silver match holder had been purchased but had located the person who sold it.

  It was the little oval smudge of mucilage—the vestige of the label glued onto the bottom of the holder—that proved to be the decisive clue. Checking the three jewelry shops in the metropolitan vicinity, the detectives had discovered that only one of the stores—C. J. Hartdegen of Newark—used stickers of that precise shape and dimension as price tags.

  At first, no one at the store could recall when the holder had been sold. The owner himself, Charles Hartdegen, believed that someone had bought it months earlier. One of his clerks, however, seemed sure that he had seen it in the display window as recently as two weeks before.

  Combing through the records, Carey came upon an entry for an item listed as a silver toothpick holder, priced at $5.75, which had been sold on December 21—a week before the death of Mrs. Adams and two days before the poison package was mailed at the general post office.2 The sale had been made by Miss Emma Miller, a recently hired stenographer who in the rush before Christmas had helped out at the counter.3

  Miss Miller having already left work for the day, Carey and Herlihy took the trolley to her home. She turned out to be a slender young woman, apparently in her early twenties, with sharp features and a correspondingly curt manner.

  When Carey showed her the holder, she recognized it at once, clearly recalling the circumstances of its sale. It had been purchased by a well-dressed man, perhaps in his early thirties, of medium build and height, who arrived late in the afternoon when the store was crowded with holiday shoppers. Despite his gentlemanly appearance, he had elbowed aside several other customers in his haste to reach the sales counter.

  He was looking, he said, for an item that would hold a bottle of bromo-seltzer. At first, she could think of nothing suitable. Then she remembered the silver holder in the display case. When she showed it to the gentleman and told him the price, he immediately said that he would take it.

  Having sat on a shelf for nearly two years, the holder was visibly tarnished, but when Miss Miller offered to polish it, the gentleman waved off the suggestion and told her to wrap it up as it was. She did as requested, and the transaction was quickly completed. The fellow then turned on his heel and hurried away. Altogether, he had been in the store for only a few minutes.

  “Can you remember anything else about this gentleman?” Detective Carey asked Miss Miller.

  “I believe he had a beard,” she replied. “A reddish beard.”4

  The news that the suspect in the poisoning case sported a reddish beard was quickly blazed across the front pages. Roland’s attorney, Bartow Weeks, immediately pounced on it as further evidence of his client’s innocence. “Mr. Molineux is clean shaven,” he proclaimed to reporters, adding with a chortle: “I have a yellow beard—some might call it reddish. Perhaps the police should be looking for me.”5

  It was certainly true that Roland was clean shaven. But that hadn’t been the case before Christmas, when he still wore the handlebar mustache he had grown the previous spring. The public got a good look at this impressive facial adornment when the Journal managed to obtain a series of photographic portraits of the mustachioed Molineux and plastered them across the top of page one.6

  Though Emma Miller insisted that “she could not have mistaken a mustache for a beard,” Detective Carey knew from long experience that “witnesses frequently transpose the two.”7 To test her reliability as an observer, he visited her again, this time at Hartdegen’s.

  There were several shoppers in the store when Carey arrived, and he waited until they were gone before speaking to Miss Miller. He began by asking her “about the other sales she had made on December 21.” Not only was she “unable to recall the face of any other customer she had waited on,” she could “not even give accurate descriptions of the people who were in the store” when Carey first entered.8

  Even more doubtful now about Emma Miller’s characterization of the purchaser of the silver holder as a red-bearded man, Carey began looking for other witnesses who might have seen the suspect enter or leave the store on December 21. He knew, of course, that “Christmas shopping was at its height on that day.” Reasoning that the Newark Police Department might have assigned “extra men to the shopping district,” Carey proceeded to headquarters. Asking around, he was pointed to a detective named Joseph Farrell.

  As it turned out, Farrell had an interesting tale to tell.

  On the afternoon of December 21, he had just come from a meeting with the mayor, who had asked him to perform a little errand in Irvington. Farrell was waiting for the trolley when Roland Molineux, dressed in a mackintosh and black derby hat, came striding up Market Street. Farrell—who had done some amateur boxing in his younger days—was an old acquaintance of Molineux’s, a longtime fan of prizefighting. Though seemingly in a great hurry, Roland paused to exchange greetings with the detective.

  “Did he have a beard?” Carey asked Farrell.

  Farrell shook his head.

  The two men had chatted only briefly. Roland, who was on his way back to the factory, made a point of telling Farrell that he had just come from a restaurant, where he’d dined with his boss, Morris Herrmann.

  Farrell, of course, had no reason to doubt that story, though Herrmann himself would later testify that no such dinner took place on that date. The detective had noticed one thing, however.

  When Carey asked if he recalled which direction Roland had been coming from, Farrell said, “Yes. He was walking up from the Hartdegen store.”9

  34

  In the wake of the threats made by Roland’s lawyers, the yellow papers were careful not to make direct accusations against him. Still, the blaring, lavishly illustrated stories that dominated the front pages day after day left little doubt in the public’s mind that Molineux continued to be the prime, if not the only, suspect.

  Even while piously declaring that it in no way intended to incriminate him, for example, Hearst’s Journal ran a prominent item headlined THE MOLINEUX COINCIDENCE, listing a string of “strange facts” that made Roland “worthy of official attention”:

  1. YOUNG MR. MOLINEUX IS A MANUFACTURER WHOSE PLACE OF BUSINESS IS NEWARK, TO WHICH HE GOES DAILY. THE SILVER MATCH HOLDER, THE GIFT THAT ACCOMPANIED THE FATAL BOTTLE MARKED “BROMO-SELTZER,” WAS BOUGHT IN NEWARK.

  2. IT HAS BEEN EVIDENT FROM THE FIRST THAT THE POISONER MUST HAVE BEEN A CHEMIST. MR. MOLINEUX IS A CHEMIST.

  3. THE DEADLY POISON SENT TO CORNISH WAS CYANIDE OF POTASSIUM.
MR. MOLINEUX’S BUSINESS, THE MAKING AND MIXING OF DRY COLORS, NECESSITATED THE KEEPING ON HAND OF MANY CHEMICALS, AMONG THEM CYANIDE OF POTASSIUM.

  4. MR. MOLINEUX HAD BEEN A MEMBER OF THE KNICKERBOCKER ATHLETIC CLUB, OF WHICH CORNISH WAS ATHLETIC DIRECTOR. MR. MOLINEUX ADMITTED TO A PERSONAL QUARREL WITH CORNISH, TO WHOM THE POISON WAS SENT.1

  In a similar vein, Pulitzer’s World, without invoking Molineux’s name, described him to a tee in a page-one description of the “degenerate suspect” as a man who “worked as a chemist in a Newark factory” resigned from the KAC as “an enemy of Mr. Cornish” belonged to various “organizations devoted to the study of chemistry” and had intimate “knowledge of the properties of many poisons.”

  To these familiar facts, the paper added two previously undisclosed details. First, that the suspect was a regular “customer of Tiffany’s”—a significant point, since the silver holder and poison bottle had been enclosed in a robin’s-egg-blue Tiffany’s box. Second, that “among other evil habits tending to destroy all sense of moral responsibility, the suspected person is an opium smoker and has frequented low Mott Street dives.”2

  To the tongue-clucking critics of the yellow press, the latter revelation was simply another deplorable example of cheap “reputation-destroying” sensationalism. But it was a mark of the extraordinary detective work performed by Hearst and Pulitzer’s men—who were generally several steps ahead of the police—that it turned out to be true.

  That the socialite son of the unimpeachable General Molineux was a habitué of Chinatown opium dens seemed easier to believe after the Herald ran an item headlined KNOWS ’CHUCK’ CONNORS, which revealed that Roland was an intimate of the colorful Bowery character. Interviewed on Tuesday, January 3, Connors—employing the swaggering street dialect that his role demanded—leapt to Roland’s defense and violently denounced the person who had stirred up such trouble for his chum. “Say, the man that mixed that muss for Roland ought to be killed,” he growled. “I haven’t got a better friend in the world than Roland.”3

  Well-meant as it may have been, this was not the sort of endorsement likely to create a flattering impression of Roland in the minds of the public. Under pressure from the General—not a man to take slurs against the Molineux name lying down—Bartow Weeks began an aggressive campaign to counter the insinuations of the yellow press.

  A key part of Weeks’s strategy was to demonstrate that his client had nothing to hide and was eager to assist the investigation in any way possible. To that end, on the morning of January 3, the two men traveled to Newark, where—after a brief stop at police headquarters for a consultation with Chief Hopper—they proceeded to Hartdegen’s jewelry shop.

  Introducing himself and his client to the owner, Weeks asked to see Miss Miller, who was at her desk in the rear office. Leaving Roland in the front of the store, the attorney entered the little back room, where he found the young stenographer working at her books. Apologizing for the intrusion, Weeks questioned her about the man who had purchased the silver holder.

  “Would you know him if you saw him again?” asked Weeks when Miss Miller had finished describing the fellow.

  Miss Miller thought she would.

  “Let me bring a gentleman to you and see if you remember him,” said Weeks, stepping from the office.

  Moments later, he returned with Roland, who was swaddled in a long woolen overcoat and wearing a tall hat. He had shaved only hours before and his handsome face was perfectly smooth.

  “Is this the gentleman to whom you sold the holder?” asked Weeks.

  After studying Roland intently for a moment, Miss Miller shook her head. “No. I have never seen him before.”

  “You are positive?” asked Weeks.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So this is not the man who bought the holder?”

  “No. It was a man of entirely different appearance. He had a red beard and was not like this gentleman at all.”

  Thanking her for her help, Weeks and Roland left the store, “well gratified,” as one paper reported, “by this result.”4

  To a casual observer, Roland was certainly not behaving like a guilty man. He had not gone into hiding or attempted to flee. He announced his willingness to cooperate with the authorities and did not shy away from facing witnesses, as his meeting with Emma Miller showed.

  The police, however, were unimpressed by this behavior. Detective Carey, for example, acknowledged that “flight was the surest sign of guilt.” But he knew from experience that some criminals took a different tack. Instead of running away from the situation, they brazened it out. They stuck “close by the scene of their crime, trusting themselves to the enfolding embrace of their lawyers,” who did all the talking for their clients.5

  That was certainly true of Roland. He continued to “appear much in public, unconcerned and gay,” comporting himself with the proud bearing expected of a son of General Edward Leslie Molineux.6 But he was rarely seen anymore without his legal mouthpiece, Bartow Weeks, at his side.

  Indeed, the police had little doubt that Roland was their man. Rumors began to abound that an arrest was imminent. Emma Miller’s testimony, however, represented a serious stumbling block. Before he could proceed with a case against Roland, McCluskey felt he had to “reconcile Miss Miller’s description of the purchaser as a red-bearded man with the known fact that Molineux never in his life wore a beard.”7

  There were several ways of explaining this disparity. The first, espoused by Detective Carey, was that the stenographer was simply an unreliable witness. Another—the one toward which McCluskey inclined—was that Roland had been wearing a disguise.

  Proceeding on the latter assumption, McCluskey immediately dispatched several of his men to Newark with orders to canvas the city’s wig makers. Only a few blocks from Hartdegen’s jewelry shop, they located a store called Zimmerman’s Hair Emporium, whose owner—as The New York Times put it—“related a circumstance of great interest.”8

  About ten days before Christmas, according to Mr. Zimmerman, a gentleman had come in and asked for a red beard. Zimmerman gave him a few to try on, but none seemed to fit. The wig dealer offered to order a larger one from Manhattan, but when the customer heard how long it would take to arrive, he thanked the proprietor and left.9

  While the police were focusing on Oscar Zimmerman, the sleuth reporters of Hearst’s special “murder squad” were conducting an investigation of their own.10 Before long, they had turned up another, equally intriguing lead in the person of a “hair-goods man” named William A. Fisher. According to the Journal’s page-one account—published with great fanfare under the headline RED BEARD MYSTERY SOLVED!—Fisher owned an establishment, located “within three little blocks of Hartdegen’s,” whose “business was to provide hairpieces and beards to actors, both amateur and professional, along with people who are embarrassed at their capillary deficiencies.”

  On the afternoon of December 2, a stranger sporting a well-groomed mustache appeared at Fisher’s store, looking for a wig and fake beard. Fisher showed him various items but the man was “exceptionally hard to please.” He “tried on outfit after outfit and found fault with them all. Some were too burly, others were too close cut. But the thing which condemned them all was that they were not of the color he wanted. He needed hair and beard light enough to conceal his natural darkness of hair and hue, and yet not light enough to attract notice to him.”

  Eventually, after several visits, he purchased a wig and matching beard “of natural hair, and so fine in workmanship that, when he donned them in the store, they transformed him entirely, and his own barber would not have known him.” So pleased was the man that, though the price for both pieces came to nearly ten dollars, he declared that he “didn’t mind the cost of it,” since “it made him look perfectly natural.”

  Asked by the Journal reporter about the precise color of the beard, Fisher described it as “grayish brown,” though “under the light it took on a tinge bordering upon auburn.” Wh
at made his account particularly compelling, however, was the description he gave of the stranger, which matched Roland Molineux’s appearance in every important detail, right down to his cleft chin and upturned nose.

  The purchaser of the beard, said Fisher, was a “medium-built man,” perhaps five feet seven inches tall and 150 pounds, who “stood erect.” His complexion was fair, his nose “well-shaped, the end slightly tilted,” and “there was a dimple or dent in his chin.” He wore a dark mustache “of medium size,” the ends “straight and drawn down nicely.” His “forehead was high and the hair dark and thin on top as if he was beginning to lose it.”

  It was clear that, unlike so many of Fisher’s customers, the stranger was “not a theatrical man. Invariably an actor announces his profession in making a purchase and always knows exactly what he wants,” Fisher explained. This man “made no reference to the purpose for which he intended the disguise.” Though not the easiest customer to satisfy, he was never less than a perfect gentleman. Everything about him, from his courteous manners to his “custom-made clothes,” bespoke good breeding.

  “Do you think you can identify the stranger?” the reporter asked Fisher. “Could you pick him out from any considerable number of men?”

  “Yes,” Fisher answered without hesitation. “I could pick him out among a hundred.”

  With that, the reporter reached into his coat pocket and removed one of the photographs of Roland with his handlebar mustache that had been printed that week in the Journal. “What do you say about his resemblance to this?” he asked, showing it to Fisher.

  Fisher looked at the picture for only a moment before saying, “There’s a remarkable resemblance.” His wife, who worked beside him at the store and claimed to have a clear memory of the stranger, was even more emphatic.