The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Behind this actor’s mask, I can see the mind of the wretched man working. When he smiles, don’t think he is careless or indifferent. When he assumes a nonchalant air, don’t let it convey the idea that he is not weighing every word of Mr. Osborne’s tremendous indictment.

  He is for the moment two men—the man as he is, and the man in the mask!13

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  Osborne’s Frankenstein analogy proved to be an all-too-accurate description of the sloppily assembled case he would build in the coming weeks. Before the trial was over, he would put more than a hundred witnesses on the stand—doctors and detectives, chemists and clubmen, handwriting analysts and housemaids, postal workers, patent-medicine dealers, bank tellers, bookkeepers, and many more.

  There would be no apparent logic to his approach. The order in which the witnesses were called and their testimony taken was so unsystematic as to border on the haphazard. Even the worshipful Clement Scott saw Osborne’s case as something crudely “patched and joined,” if ultimately compelling: a creation (“like Mrs. Shelley’s bogeyman”) pieced together from ill-sorted fragments—though no less devastating in the end for its clumsy construction.1

  The prosecutor’s helter-skelter method was evident from the start of testimony. He began conventionally enough by calling a medical witness to prove the corpus delicti.2 Under Osborne’s questioning, Dr. Edwin Hitchcock recapped the graphic account of Katherine Adams’s death that he had previously delivered at the inquest.

  As everyone listened raptly (everyone, that is, except Roland, who wore a look of extreme ennui), Hitchcock described the grim scene that had greeted him upon his arrival. He had “found Mrs. Adams lying on the sofa in the dining room, with her right arm extended, breathing stertorously.” Her face had a ghastly pallor—“a kind of dark bluish color”—and her expression “indicated extreme pain.” Touching two fingers to the inside of her wrist, he realized at once that she was “near death.” Her skin had a “cold clammy feeling,” and he could barely detect a pulse.

  He immediately leapt into action, “loosening her clothes,” giving her “a hypodermic injection of a heart stimulant,” holding “a bottle of ammonia to her nose,” and performing “Sylvester’s artificial respiration.” All to no avail.

  “She died while I was working over her,” said Hitchcock. “Her lower jaw dropped, and I saw then that it was all over.”

  Hitchcock then went on to describe Cornish’s dire condition and his own sampling of the doctored bromo-seltzer. The instant he had put a “small particle” of the powder on his tongue, he “detected a mercurial taste” and “the odor of almonds” and realized at once that he “was in contact with the most deadly poison that I had ever heard of.”

  Fearing that he would soon be incapacitated, he had immediately sent for his colleague, Dr. E. Styles Potter. Then—after fortifying himself with some whiskey—he had “started right in again to work over Katherine Adams’s body.” He realized that his efforts were pointless, but her daughter, Florence Rodgers, “kept imploring me to do more.” And so for the next ten minutes, while he waited for Potter to arrive, Hitchcock continued to minister to Mrs. Adams, though he knew “she was perfectly dead.”3

  Hitchcock did not complete his testimony until late in the afternoon, at which point Goff ordered an adjournment. When the proceedings resumed the following morning, the court was in for a surprise.

  Normally, the prosecutor in a murder trial would call other witnesses to establish the corpus delicti. Osborne, however, did something unexpected. Instead of putting his other medical experts on the stand, as custom dictated, he called a former employee of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Rudolph Heiles. In what the papers would describe as a “crushing blow to the defense,” Heiles revealed the existence of yet another bogus letter authored by Roland and intended to embarrass Harry Cornish’s friend Alvin Harpster.4 Heiles—whose testimony underscored the depth of Roland’s malice toward Cornish—was then followed to the stand by the prosecution’s chief handwriting analyst, William Kinsley, who identified Roland as the writer of the many requests for impotence remedies mailed under the names of Barnet and Cornish.

  Caught off guard by the seemingly incoherent way his opponent was proceeding—with a lay witness sandwiched between a medical expert and a handwriting specialist—Bartow Weeks made a strenuous objection, claiming that Osborne was “flinging away precedent.” His objection, however, was overruled. Nor did Weeks succeed in his efforts to damage Kinsley’s credibility, though his cross-examination of the eminent chirographer did provide a moment of comic relief.

  Under direct questioning by Osborne, Kinsley had described himself as a full-time handwriting expert and editor of the respected trade publication The Penman’s Art Journal. Now, brandishing the most recent issue of that monthly, Weeks drew the jury’s attention to an advertisement Kinsley had placed in its pages. Under a headline touting his “prize-winning stock,” the ad offered various breeds of chicken for sale—Minorcas, Plymouth Rocks, and others, “mostly farm-raised and great layers of large white eggs!” It also recommended poultry breeding as a healthy and profitable pastime.

  As Weeks read the advertisement aloud in a sardonic tone (“Poultry raising is a pleasant recreation…and it pays, too!”), the audience, along with most of the jury, broke into titters. Even Recorder Goff shook with suppressed laughter.

  His cheeks burning, Kinsley insisted that chicken raising was “a mere recreation—a hobby.”

  “Is your work as a handwriting expert a hobby, too?” Weeks sneered.

  Weeks proceeded in the same sarcastic vein, at one point openly scoffing at Kinsley’s description of handwriting analysis as a “science.” In the end, however, his attempt to discredit the witness—who had testified in nearly 150 previous cases—came to nothing.5

  Of everyone present, Roland seemed the most amused by the revelation of Kinsley’s sideline. But then, Roland appeared to be tickled by much of what transpired. In contrast to his father—who sat with a grim expression on his face, clearly “pained by the charges of perversion and moral turpitude” leveled at his son6—Roland might have been attending a production of The Pirates of Penzance instead of a trial at which his life was at stake. He chuckled and guffawed and occasionally broke into such unconstrained laughter, even when nothing remotely funny was taking place, that the people around him turned to stare at him in bewilderment. But even Roland found nothing to laugh about on the following Monday, when his onetime child-mistress, Mamie Melando, was brought to the stand. Her testimony, though it had to be virtually dragged from her lips, would finally wipe the smile off the face of her former lover.

  Captain McCluskey and his men had known about Mamie for many months—almost from the start of their investigation. They had first heard about her from Harry Cornish, who told them of the telephone call Roland had received at the club back in April 1897, after Mamie’s arrest at the brothel in Newark.

  Traveling to New Jersey, Detectives Carey and McCafferty easily tracked down Mamie, who was residing in Paterson. During a lengthy interview with her, they learned a startling fact. As Carey would write in his memoirs, Mamie explained that “she liked fine stationery, and so one morning while in Molineux’s apartment she had picked up from his desk several sheets that caught her eye. It was robin’s-egg-blue note paper with three interclasped silver crescents.”

  Her disclosure was a bombshell. Here was a witness who could tie the defendant directly to some of the most important evidence in the case—who “could put the robin’s-egg-blue paper in Molineux’s hands,” as Carey said.7 Despite the shabby way Roland had treated her after he took up with Blanche, however, Mamie remained touchingly loyal to him and adamantly refused to go to New York to testify against him. As long as she remained in New Jersey—outside the jurisdiction of the New York City police—there was nothing the prosecution could do to get her on the witness stand.

  Or so Roland’s defense team believed.

  On Thursday, December 8,
Mamie and a friend named May Raymond met a pair of handsome young men “with money to burn,” who proposed that the four of them travel to New York City to see a show. When Mamie protested that she could not leave New Jersey, the two men—who were actually undercover detectives from Manhattan—suggested that they go to Newark instead.

  After a night on the town—which involved, as one news account put it, “opening many bottles”—the foursome boarded a train, presumably bound for Paterson. Mamie, drowsy from drink, placed her head upon the shoulder of her male companion and promptly dozed off.

  She was awakened sometime later by her date, who informed her that they had to get off at the next station. They were headed in the wrong direction, he explained, and had to switch trains. No sooner had they disembarked than they were approached by a pair of burly men whom Mamie—even in her bleary state—recognized at once as Detectives Carey and McCafferty, who had been waiting for them on the platform.

  “You can’t touch me,” Mamie cried, as McCafferty reached out for her arm. “We’re in New Jersey.”

  “No,” said McCafferty. “This is Suffern, New York.”

  At that point, according to several accounts, Mamie fainted and her friend tried to stab the detectives with a hat pin. Despite this attempted assault, Miss Raymond was put on the train back to Paterson, while Mamie, placed under arrest, was taken to a hotel in Nyack.

  The next morning, she and the two detectives crossed over into Tarrytown, then took the train to the city, where after a long talk with McCluskey, she was placed in the House of Detention to await her courtroom appearance.8

  The news that Mamie Melando had been “lured to New York” (or “kidnapped,” as one paper put it) stirred up such intense excitement that five times the usual number of police officers had to be stationed at the courthouse to keep the mobs at bay on the morning of her scheduled appearance. The windows of the nearby buildings were crowded with people, many armed with field glasses, trying to peer into the courtroom. A member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Honorable John Raines, showed up to take in the drama. So did Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for her service as a Civil War surgeon and a feminist pioneer who agitated for women’s rights to wear pants. She arrived at the courtroom in her trademark outfit: trousers, frock coat, wing collar, cravat, and top hat.9

  Mamie made her entrance at a few minutes after 10:00 A.M., immediately after Goff convened the court. The reporters who studied her appearance as she moved down the central aisle were unanimous in their judgment. Though “she might have been pretty when Molineux first met her,” there were few apparent traces of whatever physical allure she may once have possessed.

  Short and stout (“inclined to embonpoint,” as the Times delicately put it), she had a heavy jaw, small eyes, “a very bad nose,” and a coarse complexion, creased with “the lines that come to a woman’s face when she reaches the age of twenty-eight.” She was simply dressed, as befitting her station in life, in a round black hat trimmed with white ruching, a black cloth jacket over a green skirt, brown gloves. A pair of cheap silver bangles dangled from one plump wrist.

  As she stood beside the jury box waiting to be called, Roland entered, stepping down the aisle with his usual bouncy gait. Spotting Mamie, he paused, smiled, gave her a courtly little bow, then took his place beside his father.

  Though Roland attempted to look unconcerned, his face wore an increasingly strained expression as Mamie, under Osborne’s questioning, haltingly—at times almost inaudibly—delivered a major blow to the defense. Shown several of the forged Cornish and Barnet letters that had been written on the fancy robin’s-egg-blue stationery, she admitted that she had seen a half dozen identical sheets of paper in Roland’s “sleeping apartment” in the Morris Herrmann factory. She had found them while looking through a drawer of his sideboard in October 1898. Attracted by their color, she had taken half the stationery, along with all the envelopes. She had subsequently used one of the sheets to write a letter to a plumber named Wilson in Trenton; the other two pieces were lost “in some way.”

  Before allowing Mamie to leave the stand, Goff himself subjected her to a searching cross-examination, delivered in what one observer described as the recorder’s “caustic, satirical style.”

  He began by asking about her background—her parents and friends, religious upbringing, and work life. Nervously plucking at the fabric of her skirt, Mamie offered a brief and not wholly forthcoming reply. Asked about her means of supporting herself, for example, she insisted that since leaving her job at the factory, she had received “no wages from anybody.” As for the occupation that had gotten her nabbed in the raid at the Newark “disorderly house,” she remained, understandably enough, mum.

  The subject then turned to her relationship with Roland. What, Goff wanted to know, was Mamie doing in his room in the first place? Why had she opened the drawer? Was she “in the habit of” going through his sideboard? Did Molineux know she had taken the paper?

  Mamie, growing increasingly agitated, would say only that she had gone to the factory “to see Mr. Molineux” that she had the “right” to be in his sleeping quarters, having visited him there many times before; that she had opened the unlocked drawer to look for “some books” and that she had not told Roland about the theft.

  As she spoke, she cast an anxious glance at Roland, who fixed her with a look that made her tremble.

  “Just look at me, Miss Melando,” said Goff. “You have done nothing to be ashamed of, have you?”

  “No, sir,” came the whispered reply.

  “You have always been a good girl, haven’t you?” asked Goff.

  “I have always tried to be,” sniffled Mamie.

  “Yes, well, then there is no reason why you should be afraid to speak the truth, is there?”

  “No,” said Mamie in a voice so low that the jurors had to strain forward in their seats.

  “Speak up, please,” said Goff, gesturing toward the jury box. “We want all those gentlemen to hear you. Now,” he continued, “you were very friendly to Mr. Molineux, were you not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mamie answered in a tremulous voice.

  “And you still feel very friendly towards him today?”

  Fighting back tears, Mamie managed to stammer a yes.

  Before Goff could pose his next question, she was overcome with emotion and, burying her face in an embroidered handkerchief, broke into convulsive sobs.

  Goff urged her to get hold of herself, but his admonition only made matters worse. Mamie continued to weep for a full two minutes before she regained sufficient control to drink a glass of water. Even then, her hands trembled so badly that she spilled some of the liquid onto her lap.

  At length, she was able to resume her testimony, though her voice continued to quake with emotion. She remained on the stand for another half hour before Goff finally told her she was free to go. Rising unsteadily, she slowly made her way to the door in the back of the courtroom, keeping her head bowed and her damp eyes averted from Roland.10

  Mamie’s testimony about the robin’s-egg-blue paper was the big story of the day. But her breakdown under Goff’s questioning made for even juicier copy, and Hearst in particular proceeded to milk it for every last drop of rank sentimentality. In a Sunday supplement feature titled “Between Love and Duty,” the Journal described the episode in the overheated style of a Victorian tearjerker. Indeed, according to the paper, the exchange between Goff and Mamie was a scene “worthy of Ouida”—the pen name of Maria Louise de la Ramée, a best-selling English novelist known for her flamboyantly melodramatic tales.

  In the Journal’s telling, Mamie—a simple young woman “whose sphere was bounded by the caste of her position and the confines of her factory life”—fell hopelessly in love with the dashing Molineux, “the only gentleman who had ever come into her life.” Though occupying an infinitely superior station in life, Roland had never treated her with condescension. He “had been good to
her,” had “never considered her beneath him.” At first, she had merely “been grateful to him. Then—it is a way women have—she had adored him.” In her worshipful eyes, he became “a god who could do no wrong.”

  When she discovered that the police wished to question her about “her dear master,” she found herself in a terrible dilemma. “Think how she must have felt when she knew that she—who had been almost his slave by her veneration—held in her power the ability to harm or benefit him, this man she most admired in the world!”

  In the end, after agonizing over her predicament, she “had sworn to herself not to let out one word that might incriminate her dear, dear Roland.

  “‘Let them torture me,’ she thought. ‘I will not confess!’”

  As she entered the courtroom—“her heart bleeding with pity for the white-haired father of her hero and for the hero himself”—her resolve remained firm. Taking the oath, she glanced over at Roland “with such a look as a dumb animal might give his dear master.”

  On the stand, “she was ready to swear away her soul if need be to protect her master.” “At her elbow stood the God of Love, aiming his shafts of devotion at her heart.” But in the end, “it was Goff who blunted his arrows.”

  Under the recorder’s “tender and fatherly probing,” Mamie’s resolve faltered. Finally, her “conscience was awakened and she broke down and wept.”

  “Before she left the witness stand,” the article concluded, “she who was willing to jeopardize her very soul by perjury confessed everything, and in so doing endangered the life of the man she loved—Molineux!”11

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  Not to be outdone by his archrival Hearst—who continued to run periodic pieces on the trial by Clement Scott—Joseph Pulitzer brought in his own celebrity commentator from the theatrical world: famed American playwright Bronson Howard, author, among other hits, of the enormously successful Civil War drama Shenandoah. In his first article for the World—headlined BRONSON HOWARD ON THE DRAMATIC SIDE OF THE MOLINEUX TRIAL—the writer focused on the performances of the principal figures in the case, with particular attention to James Osborne.