The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  “That is the dead image of the man,” she declared.11

  With the discovery of the two Newark wig sellers, the yellow papers lost no time in declaring that—thanks largely to the detective work of their own enterprising reporters—the “last and greatest obstacle which has prevented the police from arresting” the suspect had finally “been removed.”12 The “fake-beard theory” in which McCluskey had placed such faith appeared to have been confirmed. According to the papers, it was only a matter of days—perhaps even hours—before the poisoner was in custody.

  It wasn’t long, however, before McCluskey’s optimism had turned into “grave disappointment and even sorrow.”13

  For reasons he never explained—even when offered “good compensation” by representatives for Pulitzer and Hearst—William Fisher steadfastly refused to go to Manhattan to identify Molineux. With the cooperation of Roland’s attorney, the police therefore made alternate arrangements to have the two men come face-to-face.

  On Friday, January 6, Roland and Weeks traveled to Newark, where they met with a detective named Christie. The three spent about twenty minutes working out final details of the plan, which called for Molineux to be on the eastbound platform of the Newark railroad station at 2:00 P.M. Christie then proceeded to Fisher’s shop and persuaded the wig dealer to accompany him to the station.

  When the two men arrived, there were about twenty people waiting for the train to New York, including Roland and Weeks. Christie asked Fisher if any of the travelers resembled the man who had purchased the wig and beard from him. Fisher walked from one end of the platform to the other, studying the faces. Then he returned to Christie.

  “I don’t recognize anyone here,” he said.

  “Try again,” said Christie. Fisher made another round of the platform with equally fruitless results.

  Christie then led Fisher over to Molineux. “Ever see this gentleman before?”

  “No,” Fisher promptly replied.

  “Sure?”

  “Quite sure,” said Fisher.

  “He wasn’t the gentleman who came into your shop for a red beard and wig?” asked Christie.

  “No more than you are,” said Fisher, much to the delight of Roland and Weeks, who exchanged broad smiles.

  Fisher was then introduced to Molineux, and the two men spent several minutes chatting away before Roland and his lawyer boarded the 2:07 train back to the city.14

  Later that afternoon, Fisher was visited in his shop by a reporter from the Herald. Why, asked the newsman, was Fisher so confident that Molineux was not the man who had purchased the red beard and wig? After all, when Fisher had been shown the photograph of Molineux, he had “detected strong points of resemblance to the customer.”

  “I would never attempt to identify a man from a photograph,” Fisher insisted. “Especially not from a newspaper reproduction. Defects are inevitable. But I am certain that the man introduced to me today as Roland Molineux was not the fellow who visited my shop.”

  “What did you and Mr. Molineux talk about?” asked the reporter.

  “Oh, about the case,” Fisher said vaguely. “I tell you, that man is incapable of such a crime. My business makes me a student of faces and I should be able to judge,” he added—insisting, in effect, that he could tell if a person was guilty simply by looking at him.

  “But when you saw the photograph,” the reporter persisted, “you were not quite so positive. Could the fact that Mr. Molineux has since shaved off his mustache deceive even a person like you, who has made such a careful study of facial characteristics?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Fisher.15

  McCluskey’s hopes of proving that Molineux had worn a disguise to purchase the silver match holder now rested with the wig dealer, Oscar Zimmerman. But when Zimmerman was brought to New York to meet Molineux, he, too, failed to make a positive identification.16

  The hunt for the phony red beard having led nowhere, the papers began floating another theory. Perhaps the beard wasn’t fake at all, just as Emma Miller claimed. Perhaps the man who had bought the holder from her wasn’t Molineux in disguise but a red-bearded accomplice.

  Conducting a “vigilant search” of the barbershops of Newark, reporters for the World quickly turned up a barber named Valentine Kuhn who recalled having removed the “full reddish” beard from the face of a stranger just a few days before Christmas. Kuhn remembered the customer partly because he seemed “very nervous” and partly because it was highly unusual for a man to want his “beard shaved off in the middle of winter.”17

  Within twenty-four hours, sketches of the supposed red-bearded accomplice were plastered all over the papers. But no one came forth to identify him.

  The red-bearded man would remain forever a phantom.

  35

  Less than a week after his men traced the silver match holder to Hartdegen’s, it was clear to Chief Detective McCluskey that he would need a different way to link Roland Molineux to the crime. Fortunately, the police were in possession of other key pieces of physical evidence. The holder had been only half of the diabolical “gift” sent to Harry Cornish. The other was the cobalt blue bottle labeled “Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer” and the deadly powder it contained.

  By the first of January, the bottle was already in the hands of the renowned toxicologist Dr. Rudolph A. Witthaus.1 A professor of chemistry at both the University of Vermont and Cornell, Witthaus was a pioneering figure in American medical jurisprudence, whose four-volume text, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, would become a classic in the field. He had long experience with criminal cases, having helped convict both Carlyle Harris and Dr. Robert Buchanan, the perpetrators of the two most sensational New York City poison-murders prior to the death of Katherine Adams.

  In early 1898, Witthaus himself was at the center of a highly publicized scandal, when, during a bitter dispute over alimony payments, his former wife accused him of attempted murder. According to the affidavit, Witthaus—who had been carrying on an affair with another woman prior to his divorce—tried to rid himself of his wife in 1896 by giving her poisoned quinine after she came down with a case of malaria. The charges were withdrawn when Witthaus sought an indictment against his ex-wife for criminal libel.2 By the time he was enlisted to work on the Adams poisoning case, his good name had been restored and he was universally recognized as America’s foremost expert in the nascent field of forensic toxicology.

  Within days of Mrs. Adams’s death, Detective Carey had delivered to Witthaus’s private lab on East Forty-second Street the blue bromo-seltzer bottle, still about half full of the lethal powder. Carey also brought along the empty glass from which Mrs. Adams had drunk the potion and the teaspoon with which she had measured out and mixed the fatal dose.

  It would be nearly two weeks before Witthaus completed his work on this evidence and submitted his formal report. But as early as Wednesday, January 4—just a few days after he began his analysis—word had already leaked to the press that he had made two significant discoveries.3

  First, the substance that killed Katherine Adams wasn’t, as initially reported, cyanide of potassium but cyanide of mercury. Though the two produced equally nasty effects on the human body—excessive salivation, constriction of the throat, nausea, uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea, violent convulsions, and death—cyanide of potassium was much easier to obtain. It was used, among other things, as a fixative by professional photographers and was available in most drugstores.

  Once upon a time, cyanide of mercury could also be purchased in almost any pharmacy. Up until the Civil War, it was commonly used as an antiseptic and gargle. Since then, however—though it continued to show up as an ingredient in certain patent medicines—few responsible physicians prescribed it. Even in an age when family doctors routinely dispensed strychnine and arsenic to infants, the American medical establishment had concluded that cyanide of mercury was more dangerous than the ailments it purportedly cured.

  As a result, it was no longer stocked by
most druggists. Even killers shunned it. Witthaus, who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of poison-murders, knew of only five recorded cases involving cyanide of mercury, none more recent than the mid-1870s.4

  To Chief Detective McCluskey and his colleagues, Witthaus’s discovery was a heartening development. Clearly, there were very few places where the killer could have acquired cyanide of mercury. It should be a relatively simple matter—so the detectives believed—to locate the seller, who could then supply them with a solid description of the man who had purchased the poison.

  Once again, however, McCluskey’s hopes were quickly deflated. His men spent several days going from one Manhattan apothecary to the next with fruitless results. The demand for cyanide of mercury was so negligible that most pharmacists didn’t bother to carry it. Of the few who did, two couldn’t remember the last time they had sold any. Only one Fifth Avenue druggist recalled selling an ounce of the poison—and that had been twenty-five years before.5 Investigators had no better luck in Newark, where they canvassed 120 pharmacies. Just two druggists, Arthur B. Crooks and a man named Guenther, had sold any cyanide of mercury in recent years—Crooks to his son Harry, also a druggist, and Guenther to another retail pharmacist who still had the poison in stock.6

  Having come up empty in their attempt to locate the source of the poison, the police turned their attention to the second of Witthaus’s findings. In examining the little blue bottle that had been mailed to Cornish, Witthaus had discovered that—despite its label—it wasn’t a bromo-seltzer bottle at all. For one thing, genuine bottles of Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer had the manufacturer’s name embossed prominently in the glass. The one sent to Cornish bore no such marking.

  A real bottle of Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer, moreover, wouldn’t fit into the silver holder. It was slightly too large. Evidently, the killer had steamed off an Emerson’s label, then reglued it to a different chemical bottle of roughly the same appearance but small enough to slip inside the holder.

  There was clear evidence of tampering. With the help of a magnifying lens, Witthaus could see that the bottle had been opened, then resealed with paraffin, thickly applied and pressed into shape by hand.

  Turning the bottle over, he also noticed four small, hyphen-shaped protrusions, spaced at regular intervals around the periphery of the base.

  These markings, blown into the glass, turned out to be a vital clue. Within a few days of receiving Witthaus’s preliminary report, investigators had determined that the four little dashes were the private stamp of a chemical manufacturing firm called Powers & Weightman, located in Newark.7

  In short order, Carey and Detective Sergeant William McCafferty were on their way back to Newark, where they interviewed the manager of Powers & Weightman. A check of the ledgers revealed that the little blue bottle disguised as bromo-seltzer was, in reality, one of ten bottles of cyanide of mercury that had been sold to a Newark pharmaceutical supplier, C. B. Smith & Co, in early July.8

  Proceeding directly to Smith & Co, Carey and his partner spoke to the owner, Charles Smith, who informed them that six of the ten bottles were still in stock. Of the four that had been sold, two had gone to Professor George C. Sonn of the Newark High School for experimental use in his chemistry lab. Offhand, Smith couldn’t account for the other two. There was only one way to find out who had bought them: by checking the sales slips for the past six months.

  This, however, was no simple matter. For one thing, the firm averaged about eight thousand orders per month, meaning that there were nearly fifty thousand sales slips to go through, some listing as many as a hundred items. Even if the detectives were willing to undertake the job themselves, they would have had an impossible time of it, since the orders were full of Latin medical terms and abbreviations. Only people with pharmaceutical training could accomplish the task.

  Smith had clerks who were qualified for the job, but he couldn’t afford to loan them out for an indefinite period of time. At that point, however, the yellow papers, with their genius for self-promotion, insinuated themselves into the proceedings. The World—which never wearied of trumpeting its own invaluable contributions to the case—offered to reimburse Smith for his clerks’ time.

  Four of Smith’s men were immediately installed in a large second-story room in the warehouse, specially equipped with electric lights to make their job easier. Working round the clock, they pored over thousands of sales slips—without success. By the third day, Smith declared that the task was hopeless. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he declared, helpfully adding: “We know that the needle is there, but there is so much hay that we can’t find the needle.”9

  Then, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, January 17, one of the bleary-eyed clerks came running into Smith’s office, waving a little sheet of paper. Dated October 5, 1898, it was a sales receipt for two one-ounce bottles of cyanide of mercury, purchased for thirty cents each by an employee of a firm called Balbach & Co. Balbach, Smith explained to Detective Carey, was the country’s largest smelter of silver and gold.

  As it happened, it was also located only a few blocks from the Morris Herrmann factory, Roland Molineux’s workplace and part-time living quarters.

  The next morning, readers of the World found a front-page reproduction of the sales receipt beside a headline announcing: WORLD FINDS THE PURCHASER OF THE POISON BOTTLE. The first line of the article declared, with typical immodesty, that “The World made a most important discovery yesterday which should solve the poison mystery and enable the police to arrest the murderer.”10

  The self-congratulations, however, turned out to be premature. Indeed, by the time the newspaper appeared on the stand, Detective Carey and his partner had already visited the smelting concern and spoken to the person who had bought the cyanide of mercury, a chemist named Morton M. Liebschultz. Questioned closely by the detectives, Liebschultz explained that he had accidentally blown up one ounce of the cyanide while attempting to purify it with prussic acid. He had used the remainder in an experiment involving platinum. The two empty bottles had been disposed of in the trash.11

  As for Roland Molineux, Liebschultz had never met the man. Nor had he ever dealt with Molineux’s employer.

  It was another frustrating turn for the police. As Carey left the office of the smelting firm, he couldn’t fail to be galled at this latest setback. He was so close to his quarry that, standing on the street outside Balbach’s, he could see the hulking form of the Morris Herrmann factory over the rooftops of the intervening buildings.

  And yet, for all that, he was no nearer to getting his man.

  36

  Though cloaking themselves in the guise of selfless crusaders for justice, Pulitzer and Hearst were, of course, primarily interested in whipping up public excitement and selling as many newspapers as possible. Nevertheless, however self-serving their motives, their reporters were, in fact, in the forefront of the investigation. Even Captain McCluskey was forced to acknowledge the contributions of the yellow papers. Early in the investigation he publicly praised the World for the “remarkable collection of evidence” it had assembled and conceded that he and his men were unaware of certain facts “until we saw them in the World.”1

  The World, of course, had been the first to reveal the fact that another member of Roland Molineux’s club—Henry C. Barnet—had died under mysterious circumstances. Now, having learned that Professor Witthaus had found cyanide of mercury in the powder that killed Katherine Adams, Pulitzer’s men took the lead again, uncovering an even more direct link between the two cases.

  HENRY C. BARNET DID RECEIVE POISON BY MAIL AND DID TAKE IT, proclaimed the headline on Wednesday, January 4. ANALYSIS SHOWS THE BOTTLE SENT HIM HELD CYANIDE OF MERCURY. Crowing that it had once again outscooped its archrival with an “exclusive” revelation, the World presented “conclusive” proof that “the person who sent the deadly dose to Mr. Barnet” was “identical with the person who sent the vial of poison to Harry Cornish at the same club.”


  The “proof” offered by the World was the formal statement made to the police by Dr. Henry Beaman Douglass, the man who had attended Barnet during the latter’s final days. Dr. Douglass’s testimony was printed in its entirety under the blaring headline BARNET POISONED, DECLARES HIS PHYSICIAN.

  Anyone who bothered to read the accompanying text from start to finish would have discovered something interesting. Far from believing that his patient was poisoned, Dr. Douglass continued to cling stubbornly to his original diagnosis. “I believe that Mr. Barnet died of heart failure following diphtheria, which heart failure was brought on by undue exertion,” he declared. “I do not believe that any mercurial poisoning contributed in the least to cause his death.”2

  That Pulitzer’s paper would so completely distort the facts was, of course, consistent with the journalistic ethics of the yellow papers, which never let anything as trivial as mere accuracy get in the way of a good story. In this case, however, the World could be forgiven. Guy Ellison—the Park Avenue chemist who, at Douglass’s request, analyzed the Kutnow’s Powder sent to Barnet—had found cyanide of mercury in the medicine. Douglass’s refusal to admit that Barnet had been murdered, even in the teeth of this evidence, was a matter of sheer self-interest: a desperate attempt to preserve his professional reputation and avoid any charges of incompetence.

  Having learned of Ellison’s findings—and thwarted in his efforts to trace the items sent to Cornish—Captain McCluskey now shifted his focus to the death of Henry Barnet. “I’m convinced,” he announced a day after the World ran its story, “that the same mind sent the two poisons.”3

  McCluskey began by speaking to the people who had spent time with Barnet at the end of his life. Dr. Douglass, who bridled at any suggestion that he might have misdiagnosed his patient, had nothing helpful to say.4 On the other hand, Joseph Moore—the night watchman of the Knickerbocker who doubled as a valet—offered a vivid, often poignant account of Barnet’s dying days.