The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  All of these cases and more—so many as to amount to a veritable “poison epidemic”—were directly inspired by the Adams-Barnet case, at least according to the yellow papers. The situation had grown so dire that, as a public service, Hearst’s Evening Journal began running a graphic front-page warning: a drawing of a box of bonbons with a death’s head superimposed on it and a caption reading: “Don’t Accept Presents of Candy Unless You Know Who Sent Them!”6

  Hearst’s attack on the police was, of course, perfectly in keeping with his self-appointed role as fearless defender of the common man. If the murderer of Katherine Adams and Henry Barnet had been a common criminal, the Journal maintained, he would have been arrested long ago. The man believed guilty of the crimes, however, had extraordinary advantages. Thanks to his family’s “financial resources,” he had the finest “legal and expert assistance” available. He was also being shielded by friends of his father, who were exerting “powerful influence of a political character” to keep the authorities from doing their job. “The Police Will Have to Be Unraveled Before They Can Unravel the Poison Mystery,” read the caption of one editorial cartoon, which showed a uniformed officer being trussed up and gagged by a pair of powerful hands labeled “Politician.”7

  That influential friends of General Edward Leslie Molineux had intervened in the case was not beyond the realm of possibility. A politician described as a “power in Tammany Hall” had reportedly paid a visit to police headquarters, where he “delivered an ultimatum from his superiors which has effectively tied the hands of the police.”8 And the district attorney, Colonel Asa Bird Gardiner, was known to be an old friend and battlefield comrade of the General’s who had socialized with him many times at the city’s innumerable veterans’ functions.9

  Confronted with such charges, Gardiner vehemently denied that the suspect was being shielded by powerful friends. The police, he asserted, were conducting their investigation in precisely “the right way.” “This will take time,” he stressed. “It is only proper that the police should proceed carefully and have matters in shape before any definite action is taken. There are still missing links in the chain of evidence that make it impossible to take a decisive step at this time.”10 McCluskey, too, scoffed at the notion that his men were “being held back by some potent influence.” “It is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous,” he replied when confronted by a group of reporters. “Since I have had charge of this office I’ve been permitted to investigate every case without the slightest interference. The statement that my hands are tied and that I’m being prevented from making an arrest is absolutely without foundation. It’s almost funny.”11

  And indeed, even as the yellow papers were accusing the detectives of deliberately dragging their feet, McCluskey’s men were pursuing a significant new clue—one that would cause Hearst himself to revise his low opinion of their efforts and lead to what his paper would call “a startling new chapter in the Great Poisoning Mystery.”12

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  It had been a difficult two weeks for Herman and Gustav Kutnow. Ever since the story of Henry Barnet’s death broke, their business had fallen off dramatically. To stem the damage, they had issued a string of reassuring statements, declaring that no toxic chemicals were used in the making of their product, an all-natural “pleasant-tasting effervescent salt” derived from the Carlsbad mineral springs. But their efforts had made little impression on a public exposed to daily graphic descriptions of a healthy thirty-two-year-old clubman who had suffered a miserable death after taking a dose of their medicine.

  “The fact that the murderer employed a bottle of our powder as an instrument in his design against Barnet has given our preparation the most undesirable kind of advertising,” Herman Kutnow told one reporter in mid-January. By then, sales of the once-popular patent medicine were essentially “at a standstill.”1

  Desperate to see the case resolved, the Kutnows posted a $500 reward “for the conviction of the poisoner.” “We make the offer,” Herman explained, “to stimulate the detectives to exercise their greatest efforts.”2 They also let it be known that they were eager to assist the investigation in any way possible. And so, when Arthur Carey showed up at the Kutnows’ Astor Place office, the brothers were ready to give the detective whatever help he needed.

  Carey had brought along the little tin from which Barnet had taken the fatal dose. Examining it, Gustav Kutnow confirmed that it was one of the company’s free samples. Stuck to the bottom was a label that warned: “Any person selling or exposing for sale this sample at any time will be liable to all the punishments and penalties of the law.”3 The company had only begun attaching this notice to its samples in July 1898, six months earlier.

  How, Carey wanted to know, were the samples distributed?

  There were three ways, explained Kutnow. During the previous summer, he had spent a week in Asbury Park, New Jersey, handing them out from a booth on the boardwalk. People could also receive a sample by coming to the Kutnow brothers’ office and asking for one.

  The vast majority of the little tins, however, were distributed through the mail as the result of the company’s newspaper ads. Anyone sending in a letter with his name and address would receive a free sample by return mail.4

  Carey asked if the Kutnows kept records of the people who wrote in for samples.

  Indeed they did, said Gustav. In fact, they carefully preserved the actual letters in order to compile a mailing list of potential customers.

  This was good news to Carey, who was eager to find any piece of physical evidence that would link the suspect to the Barnet murder.

  The bad news was that, during the six-month period in question, the Kutnows had received approximately 100,000 of these letters.5

  Beginning that day, Carey—seated in his shirtsleeves at a desk in the Kutnow brothers’ office—methodically went through stack after stack of the letters. In this task he was assisted by two of his colleagues, Detectives Herlihy and McCafferty, along with the Kutnows’ bookkeeper, a young woman named Elsie Gray. To help her identify the letter he was looking for, Carey gave her a facsimile of the handwriting on the poison package received by Harry Cornish.

  Exactly one week after the search began, as the four of them were huddled at the desk, Miss Gray let out a little gasp. “I think I’ve found it,” she said. Feeling a jolt of excitement, Carey reached out and took the sheet of paper from her hands. Even at a glance, he could see that the penmanship bore a striking resemblance to the writing on the poison package. But as he read the letter, his excitement gave way to confusion.

  The one-line request for “a sample of salt” was written on a sheet of what was obviously expensive stationery. The paper was eggshell blue in color and embossed with a distinctive silver crest, consisting of three small interlinked crescents. Only a man of hopelessly snobbish habits, thought Carey, would use such fancy stationery for his everyday communications. A man like Roland Molineux.

  Like most of his colleagues on the force, Carey felt sure that Molineux was the poisoner. He’d been hoping that, once it turned up, the request for the Kutnow’s Powder would confirm that belief—that it would be signed with Molineux’s name, or have, as a return address, the Morris Herrmann factory or the New York Athletic Club or perhaps even the imposing house on Fort Greene Place.

  But the return address supplied by the sender was none of those places. It was 1620 Broadway in Manhattan. And the letter wasn’t signed “Roland Molineux.”

  It was signed “H. Cornish.”6

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  The Kutnow brothers were sticklers for record keeping. Whenever a sample tin was sent out, a clerk stamped the mailing date on the letter of request. The date on the letter Elsie Gray had found was “Dec. 23, 1898.”

  Carey was puzzled by this. He was sure that the letter he now held in his hands had come from the poisoner; there was no mistaking the handwriting. And yet, Henry Barnet had died on November 10—six full weeks before the date rubber-stamped on the robin’s-egg-blue statio
nery.

  Carey could think of only one explanation: the killer had sent in a request for another sample tin of Kutnow’s Powder more than a month after murdering Barnet. And he had done so under the name of Harry Cornish.

  Carey and his partners proceeded directly from the Kutnow brothers’ office to the address on the letter: 1620 Broadway. It turned out to be a small-time operation with the grandiose name of the Commercial Advertising Company. The proprietor was a man named Joseph Koch, who derived much of his income from renting private letter boxes—little pigeonholes built into a wall behind a wooden counter—for fifty cents a month or five dollars a year.

  Shown the letter from Kutnow’s, Koch checked his ledger and confirmed that, on December 21, he had rented box Number 10 to a man calling himself Harry Cornish. Though “Cornish” had taken the box for two months, neither Koch nor his clerk had ever seen him again.

  Carey, who was hoping to collect as much physical evidence as possible, asked Koch to check box Number 10. To the detective’s disappointment, the box was empty.1

  Two days later, on January 14, Koch made a surprising discovery.

  While distributing the morning mail, he noticed that two small packages addressed to “H. Cornish” had inadvertently been placed in the wrong letter box—Number 9. One was a manila clasp envelope, the other a small cardboard box. Koch put the packages aside, intending to bring them down to police headquarters later that afternoon, though he didn’t make the trip until the following day, when he turned them over to Captain McCluskey.2

  Seated at his desk, McCluskey opened each package in turn. The first, from Von Mohl & Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, contained a small box labeled “Calthos.” Inside were five conical gelatin capsules, along with directions for their use. Studying these instructions, McCluskey saw that the pills were intended as a remedy for “male debility”—impotence. He immediately sent a telegram to the Cincinnati Police Department, asking them to check the records of the Von Mohl Company for any communication from “H. Cornish.”

  The second package, postmarked December 23, contained a tin of Kutnow’s Powder—obviously the sample mailed out in response to the request turned up by Elsie Gray.

  At McCluskey’s orders, Detective Carey sought out Harry Cornish and brought him down to Koch’s office. Though admittedly nearsighted, Koch had no trouble confirming what the detectives already believed: that Cornish was not the man who had rented letter box Number 10.3

  Like Carey, McCluskey wondered why the poisoner had sent for another tin of Kutnow’s Powder more than a month after killing Henry Barnet—and why he had written the request and rented the letter box under Cornish’s name. Perhaps, McCluskey thought, it was all part of a diabolical plot to frame Cornish for Barnet’s murder if the attempt on Cornish’s own life failed. According to McCluskey’s theory, the poisoner “probably thought that, if Cornish didn’t take the deadly bromo-seltzer, the letter-box scheme would eventually become public and show that Cornish had written for the samples sent to Barnet. That would connect Cornish to Barnet’s death. And the next best thing to killing an enemy is to have him accused of murder.”4

  Upon receipt of McCluskey’s telegram, Superintendent Detsch of the Cincinnati Police Department dispatched a detective named Herman Witte to the offices of Von Mohl Company at 506 Lincoln’s Inn Place. Witte spoke to the manager, Joseph Brewster, who referred him to a clerk named C. B. Pugh.

  Within the hour, Pugh, searching through the company files, turned up a letter from “H. Cornish” requesting the free “5 day trial” offered in the company’s newspaper ads. Witte took the letter with him and, that afternoon, mailed it special delivery to Captain McCluskey.5

  It arrived late the following afternoon, Tuesday, January 17. Seated at his desk, the “boss-sleuth” examined the letter. McCluskey was no graphologist, but to his eyes, the letter had clearly been inscribed by the same hand that had addressed the lethal package to the real Harry Cornish. And like the request that Elsie Gray had found among the files of the Kutnows’ firm, it was written on a robin’s-egg-blue sheet embossed with a little crest of three interlinked silver crescents—the kind of ostentatiously elegant stationery that was meant to proclaim the writer’s superior taste and that, to a man like “Chesty” McCluskey, seemed positively effeminate.6

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  Early in the investigation, the police had retained the services of a pair of well-known handwriting experts: William J. Kinsley, editor of the venerable Penman’s Art Journal, and David Carvalho, who had been much in the news before Christmas for his role in a sensational blackmail trial involving robber baron Jay Gould.1 All penmanship samples relevant to the Adams-Barnet murders, beginning with the address scissored from the infamous poison package, were immediately turned over to these specialists. By Tuesday, January 17, they had already received the fake Cornish request found by Elsie Gray.

  Now, having completed his own examination of the latest “Cornish” letter sent to Von Mohl Company, McCluskey planned to forward it to Kinsley and Carvalho. Even as he prepared to do so, another startling discovery was taking place in Cincinnati.

  Up until that point, the newshounds in the pay of Pulitzer and Hearst had played a leading role in the investigation, not only goading the police into action but often beating them to important clues. This time, though, it was another paper—the New York Herald—that was ahead of the pack.

  No sooner had its editors learned about the letter found among the files of Von Mohl Company than a telegram went out to the Herald’s Cincinnati stringer. Quickly repairing to the offices of the patent medicine firm, the reporter spoke to the manager, Joseph Brewster. Was it possible, he asked, that other correspondence signed with Cornish’s name might exist in the company’s records?

  With the newsman looking on, Brewster began searching through the files. It wasn’t long before he came upon a piece of mail—still in its original envelope—whose handwriting bore a marked resemblance to that on the earlier “Cornish” letter. It, too, was a request for a five-day trial sample of the company’s widely advertised impotence cure, Calthos. Only this time, the sender had supplied a different address: 257 West Forty-second Street. And the signature on the letter—much to the astonishment of both the reporter and Brewster—wasn’t “H. Cornish.” It was “H. C. Barnet.”2

  Though less given to blowing its own horn than its more shameless rivals, the Herald couldn’t keep from trumpeting the news of its “important and sensational discovery” in its morning edition. By the time its readers were learning of this stunning new development, a reporter for the Herald was already at the address given on the fake Barnet letter.

  Number 257 West Forty-second Street turned out to be a shabby little “advertising agency” run by one Nicholas Heckmann, whose office, like Joseph Koch’s, was furnished with a rack of wooden pigeonholes that were rented out as private letter boxes. Questioned by the reporter, Heckmann recalled that the previous May, a well-dressed gentleman had come into his office, inquiring about a letter box. Heckmann knew the man by sight, having seen him around the neighborhood for years. When Heckmann quoted his fees, the man opted for the quarterly rate—$1.50. He then paid the money in advance and gave his name as Mr. H. C. Barnet, correcting Heckmann’s spelling when the latter added an extra t to the end of the name.

  For the next few weeks, the gentleman picked up his mail every other day, generally in the late afternoon or early evening. Most of what he received appeared to come from various patent medicine concerns, including Von Mohl of Cincinnati, a firm that had stuck in Heckmann’s mind because the return address—Lincoln’s Inn Place—sounded so unusual.

  Then, a month after renting the letter box, “Mr. Barnet” had abruptly ceased to show up. Heckmann had never seem him again, though various small packages and letters continued to arrive in his name. Heckmann—who generally held on to his customers’ uncollected mail for several months—still had a number of items addressed to “Barnet” in his possession and let the reporter
examine them. There were letters from patent medicine firms in New York City, Detroit, and Ohio. Checking the postmarks, the reporter noticed that the most recent was dated November 29, 1898.

  Or so he initially thought. Heckmann, however, drew his attention to an item that, by a strange coincidence, had arrived for “Barnet” just the previous morning—an advertising circular for a concoction called Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy, sold by a Professor F. C. Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut.

  The Herald’s man had just finished studying this advertisement when the office door banged open and in strode two plainclothes detectives, Arthur Carey and his partner, William McCafferty. They had been dispatched to Heckmann’s place by Captain McCluskey, who had learned of the discovery of the fake Barnet letter only a short time earlier, when he’d seen that morning’s Herald. Taking Heckmann aside, the detectives began to question him in hushed, urgent tones. About twenty minutes later, after taking possession of all the Barnet material, they left.

  By then, the reporter from the Herald was already on his way to the train station.3

  He rode the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad to Connecticut, changing cars once at Valley Branch, then hiring a buggy to drive him five miles from Goodspeed Station to the little village of Moodus in the far eastern part of the state. When he arrived at the offices of Professor Fowler’s patent medicine operation, he spoke to the manager, George Hill, who began to look through the company’s files for any communication signed H. C. Barnet. Hill was still searching when Fowler himself showed up and took over the task. He combed his records for nearly two hours before he found what he was looking for.