The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Still, the day came to a satisfactorily dramatic close. Cornish had just reached the point in his narrative when Mrs. Adams collapsed and was carried to the sofa. It was at this “truly tragic climax,” wrote Howard, that Goff announced an adjournment and “the curtain fell for the day,” leaving “the unfortunate Mrs. Adams dying on her couch.”9

  So many people showed up the next morning to hear Cornish complete his cliff-hanging testimony that extra chairs had to be set up in the aisles to accommodate the crowd. Even so, several hundred hopefuls had to be turned away at the door. It wasn’t until after lunch recess, however, that Cornish was called to the witness stand, where he mesmerized listeners with his account of Mrs. Adams’s death and his own sufferings after sampling the lethal bromo-seltzer.

  Cornish got to show off his skill at pantomime when, late in the afternoon, he was asked to demonstrate precisely how he had prepared the deadly potion for Mrs. Adams. Provided with a tumbler, a teaspoon, an empty bromo-seltzer bottle, and a goblet of water, he stood at a table set up near the witness chair and acted out the procedure. As the spectators watched in rapt silence, he removed the cork from the bottle, measured out a dose of the imaginary powder, placed it in the tumbler, then half filled the glass with water and stirred with the spoon.

  “Mrs. Adams picked up the mixture,” he explained, “and drank it until there was about this much left in the tumbler.” Holding the tumbler over the goblet, he poured out the contents until there was only about a half inch of liquid left.

  “Yes, there was about that much left,” he said, raising the tumbler to the light. “And then I took a fair-sized swallow myself.”

  “Show us how much you drank,” said Bartow Weeks, who had called for the demonstration.

  When Cornish appeared to hesitate for a moment, Osborne wryly interjected, “He doesn’t like to drink water”—suggesting, of course, that whiskey was the beverage of choice for the two-fisted athletic director. The comment brought a burst of appreciative laughter from the audience.10

  Though Osborne’s crack elicited a certain amount of tongue-clucking from the press—which decried it as a “cheap joke” that had turned an “intensely dramatic moment” into “horseplay”11—it was in keeping with the general perception of Cornish as a red-blooded, all-American male, whose virility was in stark contrast to the dubious masculinity of the defendant. “Molineux’s face is weak and effeminate, while Cornish’s is strong and manly,” declared one reporter, comparing the physiognomies of the two antagonists as they confronted each other in the courtroom. “Cornish’s face gives an impression of cruelty and brutality but there is no suggestion of craftiness. He does not look like a man who would send poison through the mail, but rather like a man who would love to feel his fists beat strong against the face of a man he hated. Neither does Molineux look like a crafty murderer, but he does not look like a cool, courageous man who would seek to arbitrate his differences in the open and without forbidden weapons.”12

  Even Weeks’s efforts to discredit Cornish during cross-examination only served to highlight the latter’s virile nature. In questioning the witness, Roland’s lawyer brought out that Cornish’s wife had sued him for divorce on the grounds of marital infidelity. Weeks also managed to invoke the name of Mrs. Small—Cornish’s longtime mistress who had reportedly died during an illegal abortion—and further suggested that the athletic director had moved into Mrs. Adams’s apartment because he was having an affair with her married daughter, Florence Rodgers.

  It was Goff who put a stop to these insinuations, declaring that Weeks was raising irrelevant issues of the witness’s “private life.” “Many a man is not living with his wife whose word is as good as that of any other man,” said the recorder. “That is not an act of moral turpitude or moral deformity that would attach any penalty to it whatever.”13

  In any case, it was doubtful that Weeks’s efforts to prove Cornish guilty of “moral turpitude” would have carried much weight with the twelve male jurors. From the beginning, the gruff, pugnacious Cornish had widely been seen as something of a cad. But at least he didn’t require mail-order remedies for impotence—the certain sign of the sort of “degeneracy” that would lead a man to resort to the effeminate weapon of poison.

  64

  In the debate over “the century question”—whether 1900 signified the last year of the nineteenth century or the first of the twentieth—almost all the city’s dailies took the former position. Even so, there was general agreement that January 1 marked the start of an epoch. “The 1800s are gone forever,” exclaimed the World, “and the brisk, bright, fresh, altogether new 1900 greets everybody today—good for a clean hundred years before 2000 comes around and you and everybody else now alive are gone.”1

  Certainly, the public pulled out all the stops for the occasion, celebrating the arrival of 1900 with such “noise and jollification that you might have believed it was the new century after all.”2 Though thousands of sober-minded citizens spent New Year’s Eve at church—most notably at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Archbishop Corrigan himself conducted a special midnight mass—most of the celebrants took to the streets.

  The scene was especially raucous in lower Manhattan, where an estimated fifteen thousand people gathered around Trinity Church. Armed with tin horns, ratchet rattles, and pistols loaded with blanks (to say nothing of their own whooping, shouting, and bellowing voices), they set up such a racket as the clock approached midnight that the bells ringing in the new year were inaudible over the din. At the height of the festivities, two young men were arrested after getting into a fight and assaulting each other with their five-cent noisemakers. Otherwise, for all its exuberance, the crowd was exceptionally well behaved. When the police announced that the party was over and told everyone to go home, there was an orderly rush for the various lines of transportation. By one o’clock, “lower Broadway was as it always is at that hour of the morning.”3

  The inmates of the Tombs had to wait until New Year’s Day itself to enjoy a celebration. On the afternoon of January 1, the famed orchestra leader Frank Banta paid a visit to the prison, accompanied by a crew of his musicians and the singer Annie Hart, star of the vaudeville show The Bowery Girl, in which she had introduced the ballad “Little Annie Rooney” to American audiences.

  Roland was seated on his bunk reading the papers by candlelight when the performers arrived. Setting up their stands directly across from his cell, they proceeded to delight their listeners with a selection of standards—“The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Bonnie Doon,” “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” “Unfurl the Banner,” and more. Some of the players were so curious about the city’s most infamous prisoner that, on several occasions, they hit the wrong notes as they glanced up from their music to sneak looks at him. Still, the concert was deemed a smashing success.

  Afterward, Miss Hart stood by Roland’s door and exchanged a few words with him through the iron grating. Ever the gentleman, Roland offered his heartfelt thanks for the afternoon’s entertainment. She, in turn, wished him well and expressed her ardent prayers for his “speedy deliverance.”4

  Harry Cornish completed his testimony when the trial resumed on the following day. He was followed to the stand by several other members of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, including the “thrice lucky” Harry King, who had escaped certain death only because the custodian had neglected to refill the gymnasium watercooler, and Patrick Fineran, who had suggested that Cornish save the wrapper from the anonymous package in the hope of identifying the sender.

  The last witness of the day was the coroner’s physician, Albert T. Weston, who gave a concise but graphic account of the autopsy he had performed on Katherine Adams the day after her death, and confirmed his belief that the victim had been poisoned with cyanide of mercury.

  “Did you see the body of Mrs. Adams on December 28, 1898?” asked Osborne.

  “I did,” said Weston.

  “And was the body of Mrs. Katherine J. Adams, on which you performed
an autopsy on the twenty-ninth, the same body you saw on the twenty-eighth which was identified by Mr. McIntyre as the body of Katherine J. Adams?”

  “It was,” said Weston.

  This brief, seemingly perfunctory exchange was, in fact, a significant moment in the trial. After forty-nine days, the prosecution had finally, as one observer pointed out, “proved the corpus delicti in the case.”5

  Over the next few weeks, Osborne put scores of witnesses on the stand, sometimes as many as a dozen in a single day. By and large, they were a familiar bunch, repeating information that had been conveyed countless times in the press.

  The renowned toxicologist Dr. Rudolph Witthaus confirmed that Mrs. Adams had been poisoned with cyanide of mercury. Detectives Herlihy and Carey described the tracing of the silver toothpick holder to Hartdegen’s jewelry store. Club members John Yocum and John Adams recalled the bad blood that had existed between Cornish and Molineux. The letter box men, Joseph Koch and Nicholas Heckmann, both identified Roland as the person who had rented private boxes from them under assumed names.6

  And there were others—Florence Rodgers, who corroborated Cornish’s account of her mother’s death; Joseph Farrell, the Newark police officer who recounted the time he had run into Roland not far from Hartdegen’s; Elsie Gray, the bookkeeper for the Kutnow Brothers Drug Company, who told of discovering the fake Cornish letter written on the distinctive robin’s-egg-blue stationery; Carl Trommer, a salesman for a chemical supply company who testified that Roland kept the raw materials for making cyanide of mercury in his lab at the Morris Herrmann factory; and more.

  Though each of these witnesses represented an important link in the chain of circumstantial evidence Osborne was attempting to forge, there was nothing new or surprising about their testimony. To the crowds that continued to flock to the courtroom—and to the millions of newspaper readers who had been following the case since its inception—the Great Poison Trial was turning out to be a distinct disappointment, a mere rehash of the widely known facts. Roland himself had reached a point of such supreme boredom that he now spent much of his time playing tic-tac-toe with one of the expert defense witnesses seated at his table.7 As the prosecution began to wind up its case, it seemed as if the much-ballyhooed trial would end without a single sensational revelation.

  And then, nearly ten weeks into the trial, the public finally got the titillation it was itching for.

  The session had just opened on Monday morning, January 15, when two African-American women—variously referred to in the papers as “negresses,” “colored servants,” and “sable-colored witnesses”—were escorted into the courtroom by a pair of detectives. Shortly afterward, Osborne called out the name Rachel Greene. One of the women—a slender figure neatly garbed in a black dress and a large feathered hat—stepped to the front of the room. No one knew who she was—even Roland looked at her idly, “as if she didn’t remind him of anything.” Still, there was a buzz in the courtroom as she took the stand, as though the audience sensed that they were about to hear “a witness of unusual interest.”8

  After identifying herself, the young woman explained that she was a native of Washington, D.C., and still lived there, at 1633 Sixth Street, N.W. Several years before, however—from the fall of 1897 until early 1898—she had resided in New York City, at a boardinghouse owned by Mrs. Mary Bell on West Seventy-second Street, where she had worked as a chambermaid. “I kept the rooms clean,” Miss Greene explained, “and answered the doorbell.”

  “Did you know the defendant there at the time?” asked Osborne.

  The witness paused a moment before replying, “I knew Mr. and Mrs. Chesebrough.”

  This unexpected answer produced an immediate effect. Everyone in the courtroom—the jurors, the spectators, Roland’s attorneys—seemed to snap to attention. Even Roland seemed roused from his usual apathy. He tightened his lips and “looked at the witness intently, as if he knew what was coming.”

  “Do you see this Mr. Chesebrough in the courtroom?” asked Osborne.

  There was absolute silence in the courtroom as the young woman rose from her seat and began scanning the faces of the jurors, the lawyers, the reporters. As it happened, Osborne was blocking her view of the defendant.

  “You’re in the way,” whispered an assistant district attorney named Collins, reaching up to tug at Osborne’s sleeve.

  As Osborne stepped aside, Rachel Greene’s eyes fixed on Roland, who leaned back, looked straight at her, and arranged his mouth into a smile of chilly amusement.

  “I think that’s the gentleman there,” said the witness. “Beside the one with the white hair. Only he don’t have any mustache now.”

  “So he wore a mustache then?” asked Osborne.

  “Yes, sir,” said Miss Greene.

  Suddenly, Goff interrupted. “This won’t do,” he said. “To say ‘that gentleman there’ is not a proper identification in a trial of this importance.”

  Acknowledging Goff’s admonition, Osborne instructed the witness to come down from the stand and point out the man she knew as “Mr. Chesebrough.”

  Her pocketbook clasped in her right hand, Rachel walked slowly to the long defense table and halted directly opposite Roland. Then, as Molineux looked her squarely in the eye, she extended her left forefinger and said, “That’s the gentleman.”

  It was a moment of high drama, one of the very few the trial had offered. A flush of anger came to Roland’s cheeks, then quickly drained away, leaving his complexion more pallid than before. Turning to his father, he whispered something in the older man’s ear before barking out a bitter laugh.

  “Now, Miss Greene,” said Osborne, as the witness settled back in her chair, “how long were that man and Miss Chesebrough at the place where you worked?”

  “From November 2, 1897, to January of 1898,” answered Rachel.

  “And what room did they occupy?”

  “The front room,” said the witness. “One flight up.”

  “They did not have any other room in the house?”

  Miss Greene shook her head emphatically. “No, they lived there together.”

  “As man and wife?” asked Osborne.

  “Yes,” said Miss Greene.

  Her reply caused a stir among the spectators, who like everyone familiar with the case knew that Roland and Blanche had not been wed until the following November, a year after they began cohabiting in Mrs. Bell’s boardinghouse.

  “Did Mr. Chesebrough have any of his belongings there?” asked Osborne.

  Miss Greene replied that he had kept “his comb and toothbrush and that sort of thing” in the room.

  “Anything else?” asked Osborne.

  “A man used to bring a dress suitcase there,” said the witness.

  Turning to the spectator section, Osborne summoned a young man named Fisk, who worked as a valet in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, and asked him to stand near the witness box.

  “Is this the man who used to bring the suitcase?” asked Osborne.

  Rachel studied Fisk for a long moment before replying, “It looks like the gentleman, but it seems to me he’s got fatter.”

  The remark elicited some chuckles from the audience. Roland, however, was clearly not amused. Clenched fists thrust beneath his folded arms, he sat there in what one reporter described as a “sort of gray rage”—“powerless to interfere while the negro serving woman made statements about his wife, accusations which would warrant a husband in resorting to violence.”

  Before letting her go, Osborne asked the witness if she knew where Blanche had gone after moving out of Mary Bell’s boardinghouse at the beginning of January 1898.

  “I believe she moved on out to West End Avenue,” came the reply. “To Mrs. Bellinger’s.”

  Osborne then called the second of the African-American women, Minnie Betts, who picked up the story where Rachel Greene had left off—with Blanche’s move to the home of her friend Alice Bellinger. A tall, slender woman who had worked for years as Mrs. Bel
linger’s maid, Minnie offered testimony every bit as sensational as her predecessor’s.

  Asked when she had “first seen Molineux,” Minnie swore that she had never set eyes on him until he and Blanche were married. During the entire ten months between Blanche’s arrival at the Bellinger home in January 1898 and her wedding to Roland shortly before the following Thanksgiving, he had never paid a visit to the house.

  “Did someone else call on Miss Chesebrough during that time?” asked Osborne.

  “Yes, sir,” said Minnie. “There was a young man, but I didn’t know who he was.”

  Stepping to the defense table, Osborne picked up a photograph and handed it to Minnie.

  “I show you here a picture,” he said, “and I ask you if that is the man who visited Miss Chesebrough in 1898, prior to her marriage to the defendant.”

  The courtroom was hushed as Minnie studied the photograph.

  “Yes,” she said at length. “It looks like him.”

  A ripple of excitement ran through the spectator section. Even without seeing the picture, everyone knew that Minnie Betts had just identified Henry Barnet as Blanche Chesebrough’s gentleman caller.

  At that moment, Goff spoke up. “What do you propose to show by all this evidence?” he asked Osborne.

  “Why, Your Honor,” said Osborne, “I will establish the motive. First it’s Molineux and Blanche Chesebrough living as husband and wife. Then it is Barnet calling at the house and not Molineux. Then Barnet dies of poison. It’s clear that Barnet stepped in between Molineux and Miss Chesebrough. That was the motive for killing Barnet.”