The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  If Gabler is right—that the obliteration of the boundaries between real life and show business is the hallmark of our age—then the twentieth century can be said to have begun not on New Year’s Day 1900, but a month earlier: on December 4, 1899, when one of New York City’s leading newspapers, the Herald, assigned its renowned theater critic, Clement Scott, to cover the murder trial of Roland Molineux.

  Before coming to America in 1898, Scott was, for thirty years, an enormously influential figure on the English theatrical scene, first as a writer for the London Sunday Times, then as chief theater critic of the Daily Telegraph, where, among other achievements, he pioneered the publication of opening-night reviews.5 Brought to New York with great fanfare in 1898, he became the city’s most celebrated drama critic at a time—before movies, radio, and TV—when the stage was a major medium of popular entertainment.

  The Herald’s assignment of Scott to cover the Molineux trial drew a sharp rebuke from at least one rival publication, which bitterly denounced the move as a tasteless stunt:

  Freak journalism has done many curious things in New York, in its enthusiasm to be different. But few of them have been more utterly inappropriate than the action of the Herald in sending Clement Scott, its imported dramatic critic, to write up the Molineux trial as a dramatic spectacle…. The trial is dramatic but it is not a dramatic spectacle. An admission fee is not charged and there is no occasion for a self-confessed “judge of art” to tout the merits of the trial as a “show.” Publicity it must and should have, but appreciation of the issues at stake and familiarity with the other great trials in American courts are better qualifications for writing it than are years spent in describing the tawdry first nights of the make-believe woes of the theater. A murder trial should not be made to wear the aspect of a public diversion.6

  Though he couldn’t know it, of course, the writer of this high-minded editorial was whistling in the wind. To a modern-day reader, his insistence that “a murder trial should not be made to wear the aspect of a public diversion” seems as quaint as the notion that, when escorting a lady down the street, a gentleman should always walk closer to the curb to protect his companion from the mud of passing coaches. In the coming decades, America would witness one judicial extravaganza after another, each generating more media hysteria than the last and bestowing national (at times worldwide) notoriety on its protagonists, from Harry Thaw to Leopold and Loeb, Bruno Richard Hauptmann to O. J. Simpson. And the first of these “trials of the century,” coinciding with the start of the century itself, would be that of Roland Molineux.

  The scene outside the courtroom was even more clamorous than usual on the morning of Monday, December 4. According to one estimate, fully a thousand men and women crammed the gloomy marble corridor, pressing for admission. “Men of wealth tried to bribe their way in,” one newsman reported. “Men about town tried to get in by pull. The women used every art of persuasion they knew. A man with long hair wanted to get in to collect material for a tragedy he was writing. An elderly man in the garb of a clergyman wanted material for a sermon.”7 Apart from those authorized to enter, however—expert witnesses, government officials, members of the press, and various visiting attorneys (including Miss Alice Gerber, one of the city’s few female lawyers and the only woman permitted inside)—everyone was turned away.

  By 10:30 A.M., when Recorder Goff entered in his billowing black gown, every seat in the spectator section was occupied. Unfortunately, this was not the case in the jury box, where one of the chairs remained conspicuously empty. Word flew around the courtroom: one of the jurors appeared to be out sick. Goff’s disbelieving expression as he stared at the vacant chair seemed to mirror the feelings of everyone present. Was it possible that after the torturous delay of the last few weeks the proceedings would have to be postponed yet again? After a few tense minutes, however, Juror Number 9, Frederick Billings, came hurrying into the courtroom, muttering apologies for his tardiness.

  As soon as he was seated, the crier called out, “Roland B. Molineux to the bar!”

  There was a bustle among the spectators and a collective craning of necks as the door at the rear courtroom opened and Roland entered, escorted by a police captain. He wore a broad grin and walked with such a jaunty step that, as one observer put it, he virtually “danced down the aisle, as he used to into the glare of lights at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club amateur circus, when his trapeze performance was the star feature of the evening.”8 Seating himself at the defense table, he chatted merrily with his father and lawyers. Even when ordered to stand for the reading of the indictment, his smile never left his face.

  For the next half hour, both he and the audience were subjected to the clerk’s droning recitation of the numbingly repetitive six-count indictment: “And the Grand Jury aforesaid by this indictment further accuse the said Roland Burnham Molineux of the same crime of murder in the first degree, committed as follows: The said Roland Burnham Molineux, late of the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York in the county of New York aforesaid, on the twenty-eighth day of December in the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight, at the borough and county aforesaid, willfully, feloniously, and with a deliberate and premeditated design to effect the death of one Harry Cornish, in and upon one Katherine J. Adams did give and administer to and cause to be taken and swallowed by her, the said Katherine J. Adams, a large quantity, to wit, twenty grains weight, of a certain deadly poison called cyanide of mercury….” And on and on.

  When the clerk reached the point at which the indictment described, in its tortured legalese, the death of Mrs. Adams (“she, the said Katherine J. Adams, then and there became and was mortally sick and distempered in her body and of which said mortal sickness and distemper, she, the said Katherine J. Adams, did then and there die”), Roland could no longer contain his amusement. As his laughter rose up in his throat, he clamped a hand over his mouth, then coughed several times before pulling himself together. It was just the first glimpse of the wildly inappropriate demeanor Roland would display throughout the trial, when he would often be seen throwing back his head and laughing uproariously or whiling away the time playing tic-tac-toe.9

  It was ten minutes after eleven when Assistant DA Osborne rose to make his opening remarks. He would speak until lunch recess at one, then resume an hour later and continue uninterrupted until nearly four-thirty.

  His nearly four-and-a-half-hour address would send Clement Scott into rhapsodies of praise. The fifty-eight-year-old Englishman—sounding less like a distinguished theater critic than a starstruck adolescent—would describe Osborne’s statement as “a veritable masterpiece of sustained oratory,” “one of the very finest specimens of forensic eloquence and artistic strength that it has ever been my good lot to hear.” “Never,” Scott gushed, “have I listened to such a masterly exposition of a case, to an orator at once so splendidly virile, so superb in arraignment, such a consummate marshaller of facts, and advocate so good-tempered and so conspicuously fair. Simply with expressive face and speaking hands, Mr. Osborne kept us enthralled morning and noon by an outline of a drama that no actor living could attempt to interpret in such a masterly fashion.”10

  Scott himself would incur considerable ridicule for these effusions, which struck many readers as almost embarrassingly overdone. Still, few disagreed with his larger point: that on the whole, Osborne’s opening statement in the Molineux trial was remarkably effective.

  He began, in fairly melodramatic fashion, by reminding the jurors that the country was in the grip of a crisis: a life-or-death “fight between society and poisoners.” In this war, the poisoner was constantly devising new and ingenious means of destruction: methods of killing that “improved on their predecessors.” In the present case, the killer had come up with what “he thought was a particularly clever method.”

  Fortunately, society was more than capable of fighting back. Armed with only a “few elements of clews,” Captain McCluskey and his men had been able to piece togeth
er a perfect image of the suspect—“to put the elements together into a personality that is unmistakable, to fasten this crime upon one man.

  “And I want to say, gentleman of the jury,” Osborne continued, “that each of you in this case will become a judicial Frankenstein. Little by little, you, too, will build up a picture of the man who did the poisoning. We intend to put the evidence before you that will enable you to construct this man piece by piece.”

  This rather unfortunate analogy—which, in effect, likened the prosecution’s case to a lumbering, crudely stitched-together travesty—brought snickers from both Roland and his father. Even District Attorney Gardiner—who otherwise wore the look of a proud papa watching his child deliver a prizewinning performance at the elementary school talent show—seemed bewildered by Osborne’s extremely labored metaphor.

  Happily, Osborne eschewed figurative language for the remainder of his presentation, laying out the state’s case in a vigorous and straightforward manner.

  The man who had unintentionally murdered Mrs. Adams, explained Osborne, had concocted a particularly diabolical scheme for striking at his actual target, Harry Cornish. He had “sent his enemy a holiday present, a beautiful silver bottle holder, and in it a joking allusion to the need for something like bromo-seltzer some men have on the morning after a convivial night. There was nothing suspicious in that, nothing at all—just a nice holiday gift.”

  Inside this seemingly innocuous package, however, was a rare and especially deadly poison, cyanide of mercury—“a poison that some of our greatest druggists live all their lives without ever seeing. Why, gentlemen, this is only the third case of poisoning by cyanide of mercury on record. The largest chemical firm in the world handled in one year only thirty ounces of the poison.

  “Let me tell you something about cyanide of mercury,” Osborne went on, emphasizing the level of technical expertise required to procure the lethal substance. “It was discovered by a German chemist named Schuele, while he was experimenting with a color called Prussian blue, a color of which cyanide of mercury is a part. Now, one of the first conclusions Captain McCluskey arrived at was that the man who sent that bottle to Harry S. Cornish must be a man who was engaged in the manufacture of, or who knew something about, Prussian blue. No other person, except a chemist or a color-maker, would have used such a poison.”

  Osborne next turned his attention to the silver bottle holder. McCluskey’s men, he said, had easily “traced it to the store where it was sold to the murderer. Now, where was this store? Where was this holder purchased? Was it bought in Brooklyn or New York? No. It was bought in Hartdegen and Company of Newark, New Jersey. Now who would likely know that Hartdegen and Company of Newark kept silver bottle holders such as this except a man who knew all about that town? But the man must also have lived for part of his life in New York. So we began to look for a man who lived partly in Newark and partly in New York.”

  Beside the poisoned bromo-seltzer and the telltale bottle holder, the package sent to Cornish had offered another important clue: the handwritten address on the wrapper.

  “I want to state to you, gentlemen of the jury, that no handwriting is alike,” said Osborne. “Every man’s writing has characteristics that belong to no other writing. This man tried to disguise his writing. He tried to write unlike himself or anyone else. But that is where he made a mistake. He tried to write this address in a hand that could not be recognized as his own. But I shall prove to you that the address on that box has the same characteristic as the other handwriting by the man who has been built up from the evidence. I will prove that he wrote the address on the poison package and, though he tried to disguise the writing, the man’s characteristics still cling to it.”

  As Osborne warmed to his subject, his manner became increasingly intense. He jabbed his right forefinger at the jurors, thrust out his combative chin, fixed each of them in turn with a look that seemed to mesmerize them. His voice—never less than “a bellowing, even in its mild and conversational tones”11—rose, at points, to thunderous levels.

  Having dispensed with the subject of method, he now turned to the question of motive. “Now what is the old motto the Romans applied in all their murder mysteries?” he asked. “It was Cui bono. That means, ‘For whose good, or to whose advantage?’ This was the question the chief detective had to ask himself. Who benefited by the death of Cornish? We looked for motives—who would like Cornish dead? We looked for a man who hated Cornish—not with a hate like a burning house but with a quiet, hidden hate. And, gentlemen of the jury, we found this man.”

  It was at this moment that the trial took what would prove to be a fateful turn. “Now I am simply painting a picture of this man,” said Osborne, placing his palms flat on the table and leaning toward the jurors. “He is, first, a man who lives partly in Newark and partly in New York. He is either a chemist or a color-maker. He is a man who had a motive for killing Harry Cornish. He is a man who knew that Hartdegen and Company kept silver bottle holders. And he is a man with a peculiar style of handwriting.

  “But there is another name,” he continued. “Another man who figures more largely in this case than almost any other. Even if we were to fail to complete this picture with the evidence I have already mentioned, we could make it perfect by showing you the connection to this other man.” That man, of course, was Henry C. Barnet.

  At the mention of Barnet’s name, Bartow Weeks leapt to his feet and offered a vehement objection, pointing out, quite accurately, that the first indictment against his client had been dismissed precisely because of “the illegality of evidence touching the Barnet case.”

  “The Barnet murder,” he protested, “is another crime.”

  Goff, however, overruled him. “If it is apparent that circumstances of one crime are relevant to the other,” said the recorder, “they are admissible.”

  Goff’s decision was widely regarded at the time as “the greatest blow the defense could possibly receive.” In the end, however, it would prove to be quite the opposite.

  As Weeks, looking deeply disgruntled, sank back in his chair, Osborne proceeded to describe Barnet’s murder and its unmistakable similarities to the poisoning of Katherine Adams. “There is not a man under the sun so stupid,” he growled, “who would not know that the same man who perpetrated one crime committed the other.”

  He then went on to detail other evidence that would be presented in the course of trial: the letter boxes rented under the names of Barnet and Cornish, the robin’s-egg-blue stationery with the distinctive silver crest, the various requests for impotence cures.

  “Experience of mankind teaches us how a man who writes for such remedies, because he believes himself to be in the condition named, how such a man broods and thinks and plots,” said Osborne, suggesting that only a man who had “lost his virility” would resort to a crime as “effeminate” as poison-murder. “If you find that man, gentlemen of the jury, I say that you have found the poisoner.”

  Thus far, Osborne had not mentioned the defendant by name. Now nearing exhaustion from his three-hour speech, he mustered his strength and, raising his hoarse voice to a near-shout, concluded in a “blaze of passion.”

  “Who,” he thundered, “had in his possession the means of making cyanide of mercury? Roland B. Molineux!

  “Who had a hatred of Cornish—not that sudden flaring-up I mentioned but a long, slow-burning hatred? Roland B. Molineux!

  “Who lived at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club at the same time that Cornish and Barnet lived there? Roland B. Molineux!

  “Whose business was kept partly in New York and partly in Newark? Roland B. Molineux!

  “Who knew that Hartdegen and Company had silverware and bottle holders for sale? Roland B. Molineux!

  “Who hired the letter boxes in the names of H. C. Barnet and Harry Cornish? Roland B. Molineux!

  “Who, in June 1898, wrote to dealers in patent medicines for remedies for the loss of manhood? Roland B. Molineux!

  �
�Who used the peculiar egg-blue paper in writing those letters? Roland B. Molineux!”

  On and on went this litany of condemnation until—his voice ragged—Osborne brought his oration to a dramatic close.

  “Who in every conceivable way—residence, business, environment, hatred, handwriting—complies with the absolute description of the poisoner? I say to you, gentlemen of the jury, that of all mankind—of all men on earth—there is but one who can fill the bill, who fits into every circumstance of this crime. And that man,” said Osborne, leveling a forefinger at Roland, “is the defendant at the bar!”12

  As Osborne, completely spent, returned to his seat, the spectators closest to Roland studied his face, trying to gauge his reaction. Throughout most of the day, he had worn a supercilious smile that had sometimes turned into a sneer of cold contempt. Now, as Osborne asked the court “out of mercy” for an immediate adjournment, Roland sat there impassively, arms folded across his chest, his emotions impossible to read.

  It was Clement Scott—with his highly trained eye for the nuances of facial expression—who offered the most penetrating assessment. Looking Roland “full in the face,” the famed theater critic saw “not nonchalance or carelessness or disrespect or contempt.” “This wretched young man—and God knows he ought to be wretched after a year of anxiety and horror—is not indifferent or supercilious,” Scott would write in his inaugural piece on the trial. “But he wears a mask”:

  It is a mask as well defined as that of Comedy or Tragedy assumed by the Greek actors of old. There never was such a mask.

  It is not Roland B. Molineux. It is a false, unnatural man. The mask he assumes bulges the forehead, makes the eyes small, inert and insignificant, sharpens the nose and gives a great indented dimple to the hard and somewhat vindictive chin.