The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Connaughton marched the baffled man into the reception room, where a state detective named Jackson was seated at his desk.

  “Here’s Molineux,” said the keeper, releasing his hold on Leslie.

  “That’s not Molineux,” said Jackson, who had seen Roland on several occasions. “Molineux’s a slim fellow, without a beard.”

  “I’m his brother,” said Leslie to Connaughton, whose face had gone instantly red.

  “Oh hell,” said the keeper, grabbing Leslie again and ushering him unceremoniously out of the room. Just as they approached the barred iron gate, Roland and his escort appeared on the opposite side. The gate was opened again, Roland and his warders were admitted, and the brothers enjoyed a laugh over the comedy of errors before Leslie was let outside.

  The gate had just banged to again when the General appeared. Peering through the bars, he called out, “Roland!”

  Roland, who had been freed from his handcuffs, stepped up to the gate and extended his right hand between the bars.

  “Good-bye, Governor,” he said, giving his father’s hand a hearty shake.

  “Good-bye, my boy,” said the General, his voice husky. “God bless you.”

  As Roland was led away, the old man turned and mounted the stone steps, shaking his head and saying softly, “Well, well, well.” With Leslie and Battle beside him, he returned to his coach and was driven back to the station, where he and his companions took the 4:41 train back to the city.

  By then, Roland Molineux—freshly bathed and dressed in his prison suit of black sackcloth—was already in his cell in the Death House.4

  74

  Later that day, after returning to Brooklyn from Sing Sing, General Molineux—who, on the advice of counsel, had refrained from making any public statements during the trial—released a letter to the press. Under various headlines—STIRRING PLEA OF THE OLD WARRIOR, GENERAL MOLINEUX DECLARES HIS SON’S INNOCENCE, FATHER MAKES PUBLIC APPEAL—it appeared the next morning on the front pages of virtually every newspaper in the city.1

  Stories had circulated that legal expenses had driven the General—a wealthy, self-made man, though hardly a member of Mrs. Astor’s 400—to near bankruptcy. Several morning newspapers had proposed setting up a fund to assist him in defending his son, and had already begun receiving contributions from scores of old soldiers, eager to help. After expressing his thanks for the outpouring of sympathy he had received “from all sections of the country,” the General hastened to assure the public that he required no financial aid.

  It was not pride, he insisted, that prevented him from “accepting such assistance, for the reason that I should not myself hesitate to offer it to any person who needed it, and I should never be ashamed to receive what I should not be ashamed to offer. But I owe no man a dollar, and I neither need nor desire any assistance of such a character. I feel, and am amply able in health, strength and in courage natural to a man, to sustain all the burdens that God has placed upon me until He wills otherwise.”

  But if the General had no need of monetary support, he did need—and appealed for—“the prayers of all those of every denomination and faith who, like myself, feel that my son is innocent and the victim of persecution.” He appealed, moreover, “to every man who is a man” to assist him in his struggle to “shield and protect” his “sorely afflicted” daughter-in-law “from unnecessary and intrusive curiosity.” Though he had no intention of addressing any legal questions raised by the trial, the General could not refrain from denouncing Assistant District Attorney James Osborne, whose “vile insinuations” against Blanche had been an assault upon the very “sanctity” of “noble American womanhood.” That a “sworn public prosecutor, a man educated in an American college and associating with American men,” could behave so shamefully toward the “wedded wife of a defendant” was beyond the General’s comprehension.

  If Blanche required the “heartfelt support” of “all who resent injustice and revere womanhood,” Roland himself required no “maudlin sympathy.” His son, said the General, was “a strong man, able to bear his own sorrow and responsible for his own acts”—a man “with the strength to live and die bravely.” But the charges made against his child had been so outrageous that the General could no longer remain silent on the subject.

  “I have seen my son Roland asleep as a child by his mother’s side,” wrote the General, conjuring up an image guaranteed to tug at the heartstrings of all but the most callous of readers. “I have seen him asleep in his cell after the verdict of death had been pronounced. Who better able than I, his father, to judge whether that sleep was the natural sleep of innocence?” He was not alone, moreover, in these feelings. Everyone who had come into contact with Roland during his incarceration would attest to his innocence. “Ask the prison attendants,” wrote the General. “Ask those ministers of religion and of charity who serve the wants of those poor prisoners whether the behavior of Roland Burnham Molineux has been that of a brave and innocent man rather than that of a dastardly poisoner. They will, I know, speak for him.”

  The very idea that his son might commit a crime as heinous as poisoning was too outlandish to entertain. Roland had “never done a despicable or a cowardly thing. It is not in him. He has always been ready to take his punishment like a man. If whipped, he has acknowledged the fact and has been ready to meet his foe face to face, without malice. Like his father he is not faultless. But he also has much of the better and kindlier nature of his mother. He a pervert, a degenerate, and a vicious poisoner? It is impossible and absurd!”2 Eloquent and moving—infused with the sense of decency, justice, and faith that had made Edward Molineux such a beloved figure—the General’s open letter was a release of long-suppressed feelings. But it was also something more: an assertion of his fighting spirit, of his refusal to surrender—the opening salvo in the old warrior’s last and most desperate battle.

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  Besides Roland, there were eight condemned men in the death house at Sing Sing. Of these the most notorious was Dr. Samuel Kennedy, whose case—thanks to its irresistible mix of sex, scandal, and gruesome violence—had generated intense lip-smacking coverage in the New York City press. A darkly handsome young dentist with a thriving practice, a loving wife, and a newborn son, Kennedy had been convicted of killing his twenty-one-year-old mistress, Emeline “Dolly” Reynolds, whose brutalized corpse, the skull crushed with an iron bludgeon, was found in a Manhattan hotel room in August 1898.1

  The other death row cells were occupied by a motley assortment of killers, awaiting execution for the kind of small-time savageries that make the headlines for a day or two, then disappear from the news: stabbing a man in a bar fight, strangling a jealous wife, shooting a dry goods clerk during a holdup. A convict named Fritz Meyer—a denizen of the Bowery slums who had gunned down a policeman while robbing a church poor box—had been there the longest, slightly more than two years, while his appeal made its way through the courts. The others—Edward Wise, William Neufeld, Joseph Mullen, Benjamin Pugh, and two recent emigrants from Italy, Lorenzo “Larry” Priori and Antonio Ferraro, nicknamed “Shorty”—had been languishing in their solitary steel cages for periods ranging from three to twenty-one months.

  Though conditions at Sing Sing had improved considerably since its earliest days—when prisoners were forced to march in lockstep, forbidden from making eye contact or uttering a sound in each other’s presence, and routinely subjected to such medieval tortures as the “Chinese water cure” and the “crucifix”2—life in the Death House remained unrelievedly grim. Each man was confined to a tiny, windowless cell—three stone walls and an iron-barred door—barely large enough to accommodate a cot, a table, a hard wooden chair, and a chamber pot. Outside the bars hung a net of steel to ensure that no visitor could make physical contact with the prisoner.

  It was always light in the Death House. Glass skylights provided illumination by day. At night, gas and electric lights burned continuously, throwing their beams into every corner of the c
ell. A pair of keepers, wearing felt-soled shoes to maintain a sepulchral silence, patrolled the corridor day and night. Privacy was impossible, even for a moment. It was, as Roland put it, like living, eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom “in a searchlight.”3

  The monotony was crushing. No newspapers were allowed. Mail, both incoming and outgoing, was inspected by an official and strictly censored. Once a day, for a half hour, each man was allowed to walk up and down the narrow corridor, while curtains were drawn in front of the other cells to prevent the inmates from setting eyes on one another. Meals were barely palatable—some tasteless hash or glutinous stew or unidentifiable meat, precut so that it could be eaten with the only utensil permitted to inmates, a pewter spoon. Cigarettes and cigars were prohibited, though the men were provided with coarse “State” tobacco and corncob pipes in which to smoke it. For excitement, there was the weekly bath and shave.

  For Roland, it was “like being alive, yet buried in a glass coffin.” Each newly condemned man would be brought into the Death House, exist for a year or so “in a noiseless purgatory,” and then—if his appeal failed—be led one morning through a door at the opposite end of the corridor from which he never emerged. The inmates, who passed and repassed that door each day during their thirty-minute exercise, did their best not to think about the terrors it concealed, and never referred to what lay on the other side by its proper name: the execution chamber.

  They called it “the room with the little door.”4

  There were some consolations. Though reading matter from the outside world was strictly forbidden, the condemned men had access to all the books in the prison’s extensive library. And while the wire nettings outside their cells kept their loved ones just beyond reach—“no hand clasps, no kisses,” sighed Roland—the prisoners could receive extended biweekly visits from their relatives.5

  Within twenty-four hours of Roland’s incarceration, his brothers, parents, and chief counsel, Bartow Weeks, had already come to see him. Several days later, General Molineux announced that he had “engaged quarters” at a house within sight of the prison, where his wife and daughter-in-law would live for the duration of Roland’s internment.

  It was Blanche, so the General intimated to the press, who had insisted on renting rooms in the village, so that she could visit her dear husband as often as possible and lend him her loving support during his darkest hours.6

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  It was only at the General’s urging that Blanche agreed to make the move to the village of Sing Sing.1

  He had confronted her on the day after Roland’s sentencing, as she sat in the parlor of the Molineux home on Fort Greene Place—“the house of gloom,” as she had taken to calling it.2

  She was seated on a horsehair divan, gazing dully into the fireplace, when he lowered himself onto the cushion beside her. “How are you feeling, my dear?” he asked.

  “Tired,” she said in a tremulous voice.

  Taking her hand in both of his, the General said, “I know how hard this must be for you, my child. But”—here, his own voice broke—“think how much worse it is for my boy.”

  He had never looked—or sounded—so tired, so worn. At the sight of the “fine and splendid and brave” old man reduced to “sudden helplessness,” Blanche felt a wrenching in her heart, and tears welled in her eyes.

  “I think,” said the General after a moment, “that your feelings for Roland have changed. I know they have. But you must promise me that you won’t do anything rash.”

  Gazing into his face, Blanche saw—along with his grief—something like real fear. It was a look she had never expected to see in the proud old warrior, and it shocked her.

  At that moment, he sprang to his feet and began pacing the floor.

  “Just because they’ve convicted him doesn’t mean that he’s guilty,” he said. “You know he’s innocent, don’t you?” There was, Blanche thought, a peculiar inflection in his voice—a note of uncertainty—as though he were addressing the question to himself.

  Blanche merely repeated, “I’m so tired. I feel it’s never going to end.”

  Pausing before her, fists clenched at his sides, the General cried, “We must not weaken! And so much depends on you. If you were to leave him—”

  Blanche buried her face in her hands. “I won’t,” she groaned, though her muffled words were audible only to herself.

  A few days later—her pity for the General bolstered by his assurances that, so long as she stuck by Roland, she would never lack for financial security—Blanche and her mother-in-law took the train up to Sing Sing, where they moved into the home of Mr. Henry G. Miller at 157 Spring Street, just a short carriage ride away from the prison.3

  Though it was still the dead of winter when she arrived in the upstate village of Sing Sing, Blanche felt a “stirring of new life” as she stepped from the train. Raw as it was, the fresh country air seemed to carry a foretaste of spring. As the coach carried her and Roland’s mother to their new quarters in town, Blanche could see—“through the bare branches of trees etched in inky black against the western sky”—a “lovely vista of the Hudson.” The sight made her spirits rise. Just being away from the suffocating gloom of the Molineux home felt wonderfully liberating.

  Her pleasant mood wasn’t destined to last. Through the windows of her second-story room the “massive gray pile of the old prison” was visible in the distance. The “feeling of uplift” she had experienced upon her arrival vanished as she gazed out at it.

  “There, challenging me, defying me,” she would recall in her memoirs, “were those dark frowning walls, and the knowledge of what they held.”

  She paid her first visit to Roland the next afternoon. She insisted on going alone. She “could not bear that anyone should witness that meeting.”

  Accompanied by the warden, she crossed the inner courtyard, then “passed through endless corridors, shut off from those we had first traversed by steel and iron-barred doors. As these clanged behind us, we went on into what seemed a vast fortress of solid stone.”

  Eventually, she stood at the entrance to the steel door that led into the Death House. The keeper released the “formidable bars” and let her into “the innermost vault.”

  For a long moment, she stood looking down that gaslit oblong chamber, with its row of cells on either side, and the metal screen barriers fronting the padlocked, iron-barred doors.

  “The third on this side, Mrs. Molineux,” said the guard, pointing to one of the cells.

  Blanche crossed the gray stone flagging in the direction he had indicated. Pausing, she tried to peer inside the cell, past the metal netting and the heavy grating of the door. Suddenly, from the shadows inside the cell, someone rose from his cot and pressed close to the bars to greet her. It was Roland. The sight of him gave her a start.

  “He was smiling, but he was ashen. His lips were very white—drained and bloodless. And his eyes—they were dead and expressionless, set in a stone mask that was immovable. The soul of him was dead—it had gone out of him.”

  Roland spoke and she tried to answer, but her voice “died in my throat.” The guard brought her a chair and a glass of water. Soon, she and Roland were chatting, but their words were “perfunctory,” “without meaning.” His entire existence, Blanche saw, had narrowed to a single “obsession”—“release from the predicament in which he found himself.”

  As for her, she knew “at that moment that the end of all things between us had come.” She felt nothing for her husband except pity. Still, she could “not tell him or anyone” her thoughts. Her “faith in Roland Molineux must appear unshakable.” She had promised the General that she would play the faithful wife, and until Roland’s fate was decided, she was bound and determined to keep up that “ghastly pretense.”4

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  Blanche’s move to the little white house in Sing Sing—calculated to impress the world with her selfless devotion to Roland—did nothing to stop the press from portraying her in the most scanda
lous light. Little more than a week after her arrival, a highly sensationalized story appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Written by Hearst’s popular sob sister Winifred Black, a.k.a. Annie Laurie, the article purported to be a biography of Blanche—“the great puzzle mystery of the Molineux case”—based on interviews conducted with the subject herself.

  Written in the floridly sentimental style Black was famous for, the article told of the “poor little one-eyed country girl” who “came to New York some ten years ago to earn an honest living by singing in a church choir,” and who had ended up leading a shocking double life: modest young lady by day, shameless voluptuary after dark:

  Blanche Molineux…the woman who wore the quietest little gowns and the plainest hats on Sunday, and who dressed in gorgeousness and diamonds on week days.

  The woman who thanked the Sunday school superintendent for a 10 cent bunch of wild flowers, and then went home to an apartment heavy with the perfume of hot house roses at $10 a dozen.

  The woman who drank lemonade at the Sunday school picnic at Williamsburg, and who served champagne in silver buckets at her home in New York.

  Even more inflammatory than this portrayal of Blanche as a woman of highly questionable morals—her luxurious life funded by wealthy male “friends”—were Black’s insinuations concerning Roland. Describing Blanche’s first encounter with her future husband on the yacht Viator, the article claimed that there were three men aboard the boat: Roland, Henry Barnet, and a “rich bachelor,” never identified by name. During that magically romantic excursion, “with its moonlight, its wealth of flowers, and its plenteous supply of champagne,” all three men fell “very much in love with Blanche Chesebrough.”