Proceeding to the legal phase of the appeal, Milburn argued strenuously that Henry Barnet’s death should never have been brought up in the trial, the two cases having no connection. It was the admission of evidence relating to Blanche Molineux’s moral character, however, that drew Milburn’s bitterest words. His voice ringing with outrage, he excoriated Recorder Goff for allowing Rachel Greene, the former chambermaid at Mary Bell’s boardinghouse, to testify that Blanche and Roland had lived together as husband and wife months before their marriage.
“No incident in this trial,” he cried, “dealt such a blow to this defendant as this, which went straight at the woman he had married and blasted her reputation for the purposes of this case. On what ground was it admissible? This—this is on the verge of the horrible!
“This defendant,” said Milburn, “had not a fair trial.”4
Altogether, Milburn would address the judges for slightly more than five hours. It was nearly noon on Tuesday, June 18, before ex-senator David Hill rose to speak.
Like Milburn, he began by acknowledging General Molineux’s presence in the courtroom. Instead of paying the usual tribute to the old soldier’s gallantry, however, Hill insisted that the father’s eminence should have no bearing on the case. “This court, we know, is a court of justice,” he said, “in which the meanest pauper in the land stands just as high and has just as many rights as the son of a general or the son of a judge.”
The thrust of Hill’s argument was that the conviction should not be overturned because of technicalities. The key issue was Molineux’s guilt, which had been established during the trial by “overwhelming evidence.” Even John Milburn had not claimed “that his client is innocent.” During the five hours he had addressed the court, “the word innocent never once passed his lips.”
Recognizing that the appeal would hinge, to a large extent, on the issue of the Barnet evidence, Hill insisted that the state “had a perfect legal right to show the facts connected with the death of Barnet. Here was a man who was a member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, where Cornish was employed. The poison that killed him was sent through the mails, just as it was sent to Cornish. It was the same poison in both cases. All the circumstances were alike. The lives of both men were plotted against by the same assassin. Who was it who desired to destroy them? Someone who was jealous of them. Someone who had quarreled with them. And who was that man? This defendant. He was jealous of Barnet; he had quarreled with Cornish.”
As for the testimony related to Blanche that had elicited such outrage from Milburn, Hill declared that the state had every right to introduce it during the trial. In scathing tones, Hill read aloud the notorious letter Blanche had written to Barnet on his deathbed and declared it to be the communication of “a lover.” He then read portions of a note that Roland had sent to a friend shortly after Barnet’s death, announcing his engagement to Blanche. “It is all so sudden a romance,” Roland had written. “I am so happy.”
“Romance,” snorted Hill, tossing the letter onto the table. “It was no romance. It was a tragedy. His rival had been removed.”
At that moment, General Molineux abruptly rose from his seat. The relentless attack on his son’s character by a man as prominent as David Hill had shaken him badly. Tears streaming down his face, the old man made his way out of the courtroom.
Hill, however, was unmoved by the piteous spectacle. Addressing a question that Milburn had raised—why would Roland have tried to murder Cornish over some petty “club squabbles”?—Hill offered a psychological explanation, suggesting that Roland’s “malady,” sexual impotence, had driven him into a state of “melancholia” that had mentally unbalanced him.
Despite the defense’s efforts to “avert suspicion from their client” by casting it onto Cornish, there was no mistaking the true culprit.
“If it was not Molineux,” Hill declared, “it was nobody.”5
Hill ended his argument at 1:35 P.M. on Wednesday. After a fifteen-minute reply by Milburn, the appeal was formally submitted. The court’s decision would be handed down during its fall session.
Afterward, General Molineux—who refused to speak to ex-senator Hill when the two encountered each other as they were leaving the building—made a statement to the press. For the first time, there seemed to be a heartbreaking vulnerability about the old soldier, “whose loyalty to his son,” wrote one observer, “has been pathetic.”6 “I must be patient,” said the General softly, as though addressing himself. “It will come out all right. I must get my boy back.”7 A few minutes later, he boarded the train back to Manhattan, while John G. Milburn returned to his duties as president of the Pan-American Exposition, the great world’s fair designed to showcase Buffalo as one of the nation’s leading cities.
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President McKinley and his wife spent the summer of 1901 in their modest home in Canton, Ohio, where Ida enjoyed a steady recuperation, while her husband indulged in the simple relaxations of a placid Midwestern town—picnics, drives in the family buggy, excursions to nearby county fairs, and an occasional game of euchre. As the summer progressed and Ida continued to improve, his plans to visit Buffalo were renewed. By late August, newspapers around the country were announcing that President’s Day at the Pan-American Exposition had been officially rescheduled for Thursday, September 5.
At precisely 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September, 3, the president’s three-car private train pulled into Buffalo’s Terrace Railroad Station overlooking Lake Erie. The following day, McKinley toured the fair then, after a brief rest at the Milburn mansion, attended an evening concert by John Philip Sousa’s band.
Thursday began with an early sightseeing trip to Niagara Falls. Following lunch, McKinley returned to Buffalo for his final appearance at the exposition—a public reception held in the Temple of Music, a gaudy, byzantine structure on the north side of the fairgrounds, where he would personally greet the well-wishers who had lined up by the thousand to shake him by the hand.
In accordance with instructions given by McKinley’s fiercely devoted personal secretary, George Cortelyou, extra precautions had been taken to ensure the president’s safety. In addition to the three Secret Service men who routinely watched over him, a squad of exposition policemen had been stationed at the entrance and a contingent of Buffalo detectives posted in the aisle. Ten enlisted artillerymen and a corporal, all in full-dress uniform, had also been called in, with orders to prevent any suspicious-looking persons from approaching McKinley. Altogether, more than fifty guards were there to keep an eye on the crowd. For the handshaking, McKinley stood between Cortelyou and John Milburn. Four soldiers flanked them, two on each side.1
In spite of these heightened security measures, one cardinal rule for protecting the president was flagrantly disregarded. No visitor was supposed to get close to the chief executive unless both hands were plainly visible and completely empty. It was an unusually warm and humid day, however, and the crammed reception hall was sweltering—at least ninety degrees. Sweat poured from every brow, and so many handkerchiefs were in evidence that the guards simply paid no attention to them.
At 4:07 P.M.—just a few minutes after the reception began—a slender, mild-looking young man reached the front of the line. Like so many other people, he was clutching a big white handkerchief. Or so it appeared. In reality, the hankie was wrapped around his right hand, concealing a loaded .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver. As McKinley reached out to greet him, the young man—a self-professed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz—lunged forward and fired twice into the president’s body.
A moment of stunned silence followed the shots. Then pandemonium erupted. While the president staggered back into the arms of the men around him, Cszolgosz was pounced upon by the soldiers and guards, who knocked him to the floor and began to beat him with their rifle butts and fists. One tried to stab him with a bayonet.
“Go easy on him, boys,” cried McKinley, now seated in a chair, his face drained of color and a spreading red stain on his shir
tfront.
While Cszolgosz was hauled to his feet and dragged to an inner office, the Temple was cleared. A few minutes later, an ambulance clanged up to the entrance and the desperately wounded president was carried out on a litter, loaded into the vehicle, and driven to the exposition hospital.
Housed in a small gray building a quarter mile from the Temple of Music, the hospital was, in actuality, little more than an emergency first-aid center. Exactly eighteen minutes after the shooting, McKinley—fully conscious, though in severe shock—was carried into the rudimentary operating room and laid on the table.
As the nurses began to undress him, one of the bullets, which had glanced off his breastbone, causing only a scratch, fell from his underclothing. Even at a glance, however, it was clear that the other wound was far more serious, perhaps even fatal. It had torn through McKinley’s abdomen, approximately five inches below his left nipple.
The first and most urgent order of business was to round up the best physicians available. Dr. Roswell Park, the exposition’s medical director and a man with long experience in the treatment of gunshot wounds, was the obvious choice to take charge. But Park was in Niagara Falls, operating on a lymphoma patient. Arrangements were quickly made to rush him back to Buffalo at the earliest possible moment. In the meantime, John Milburn took command. Upon his orders, the president’s life was put into the hands of another prominent Buffalo physician, Dr. Matthew Mann.
A short, gray-bearded fifty-six-year-old, Mann had a worldwide reputation. He had trained in the United States and Europe, served on the staff of the Yale Medical School, and authored a standard textbook. Unfortunately, his specialty was gynecology, not abdominal surgery. Nevertheless, he was deemed the most qualified surgeon available at that moment of crisis.
Though the city of Buffalo had recently opened a state-of-the-art general hospital, Mann chose to operate without delay. At 5:20 P.M., the life-and-death procedure began under the least favorable conditions imaginable. Mann, who had arrived without his surgical case, had to work with borrowed instruments. No one wore a cap or gauze mask. Though the fairgrounds blazed each evening with the brilliance of countless incandescent bulbs, there were no electric lights in the operating room. As the daylight waned, the doctors were reduced to using a mirror to reflect the light of the setting sun onto the incision in McKinley’s abdominal wall.
Exploring the president’s wound, Mann discovered that the bullet had gone straight through the stomach, puncturing both the front and rear walls. He couldn’t find the bullet itself, though. An X-ray machine was on display at the fair, but Mann declined to use it. The two holes in the stomach were sutured, the abdominal cavity was flushed with saline solution, and McKinley was stitched back up with the missing bullet still inside him.
At 7:20 P.M.—two hours after the operation began—the groaning, corpse-pale president was taken from the hospital and transported back to John Milburn’s residence.
Over the course of the next week, a steady stream of increasingly hopeful communiqués issued from Buffalo. On Friday, September 6, the doctors reported that McKinley was “rallying satisfactorily and resting comfortably.” On Saturday, a bulletin described his condition as “quite encouraging.” On Sunday, one of his physicians characterized the president as “first rate.” The official word on Monday was that his “condition was becoming more and more satisfactory.” By Tuesday, newspapers across the country were proclaiming that the president was “on the high road to recovery.” The following day, September 11, Dr. Charles McBurney, a prominent New York surgeon, paid lavish tribute to his colleague, Matthew Mann, telling reporters that “the judgment of Dr. Mann in operating as he did within an hour of the shooting in all probability saved the President’s life.”
But the president’s life had not been saved. At 5:00 P.M. on Friday, September 13, the venerated leader suffered a heart attack.
Nine hours later—his stomach, pancreas, and one kidney poisoned by the gangrene that had spread along the path of the unfound bullet—William McKinley died in John Milburn’s home after gasping out his final words: “Good-bye all, good-bye. It is God’s way. His will be done.”2
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The Pan-American Exposition came to an official end on Saturday, November 2. At the stroke of midnight, while ten buglers sounded taps from the Electric Tower, John Milburn threw a switch, and the sprawling fairgrounds—illuminated by 160,000 incandescent lights—went dark forever. To some observers, however, the ceremony seemed slightly redundant. The murder of the president two months earlier had already cast a deep shadow over the “Rainbow City” from which it had never fully emerged.1
By then, Leon Czolgosz was dead, electrocuted four days earlier at the state prison in Auburn, New York. Immediately after his execution, the top of his skull had been sawed off and his brain examined for signs of mental impairment. His corpse was then stuck inside a black-stained pine box, doused with sulfuric acid (to obliterate his identity), and buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.2
From the moment of the assassin’s capture to the day of his death and ignominious disposal, less than two months had elapsed—a striking contrast to the situation of Roland Molineux, who, at the time of Czolgosz’s execution, had been behind bars for more than two years, awaiting a final disposition of his case.
Still, Roland and his father no longer had cause for complaint. On Tuesday, October 15, the Court of Appeals had finally handed down its decision. In his battle against ex-senator Hill, John Milburn had triumphed. Had the great world’s fair he had helped shepherd into existence not climaxed in catastrophe, he, too, would have had every reason to celebrate.
The decision in the Molineux appeal—trumpeted on the front pages of newspapers across the country—would prove to be a judicial landmark, defining the conditions under which prosecutors could introduce evidence of previous crimes at a defendant’s trial. Generally speaking, wrote Justice William E. Werner in a formulation that even today is known as the “Molineux rule,” the state “cannot prove against a defendant any crime not alleged in the indictment.” This rule was intended as a constitutional safeguard, protecting a defendant from “the assumption that [he] was guilty of the crime charged because he had committed other, similar crimes in the past.”
To be sure, there were exceptions, instances where evidence of prior offenses might be admitted. For example, the prosecution could introduce “proof of another crime” if it helped to establish motive in “the specific crime charged.” In Roland’s case, however, neither this nor any other exception applied.
The motive for attempting to kill Cornish was, according to Werner, “hatred, engendered by quarrels between them.” The motive for poisoning Barnet, on the other hand, was “jealousy caused by the latter’s intervention in the love affair of the former.” Since the two motives had “no relation to each other,” evidence pertaining to the murder of Barnet threw “no light upon the motive which actuated the attempt upon the life of Cornish” and was therefore inadmissible.3
Based on this principle, the prevailing opinion held that Recorder Goff had erred in admitting testimony related to the death of Henry Barnet. The judgment of conviction against Roland Burnham Molineux was reversed and a new trial granted.4
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General Molineux was at his office at the Devoe and Raynolds paint factory when the news reached him. He was still beaming with joy a half hour later when a flock of newsmen arrived to hear his reaction.
“Just what I expected, but thank God the strain is over,” said the General, offering cigars all around. “I tell you, boys, this has added years to my life.”
And what about the rumors, asked one reporter, that the district attorney might decide to forego another trial and simply set Roland free?
“That wouldn’t please me at all,” said General Molineux. “This thing has gone too far. To let him off would brand him for life with suspicion. I’d rather see my son pass through the ordeal of another trial than have him set free without
a complete vindication.”
But what if he were to be convicted again? someone asked.
“Impossible,” snorted the General. “Why, even on the evidence that sent him to the death cell, he should have been acquitted.”
A short time later, he was on the train to Sing Sing. He arrived too late to see Roland, who received the happy news early the next morning from Warden Johnson.
Roland was awake and standing expectantly by the barred door of his cell when Johnson entered the Death House at 6:30 A.M., Wednesday, October 16. “Well, Roland, I have good news for you,” he said. “The Court of Appeals has granted you a new trial.”
For a moment, Roland made no reply, “as if he did not realize the full purport of the information.” Finally, he let out a laugh and said, “It seems too good to be true.” He then thanked Johnson for bringing him the news, while the inmates in the adjoining cells called out their congratulations.1
Just before noon the following day, word reached Warden Johnson that a police officer had left New York City with a requisition for Molineux. Preparations for the transfer were immediately begun. At 3:00 P.M., a rickety hack pulled up at the prison gate and discharged Detective Sergeant Robert McNaught, along with General Molineux and George Gordon Battle. The three were immediately ushered into the office of Keeper Connaughton.
A few minutes later, Roland—freshly shaved and wearing a new black serge suit and a pair of tan shoes in place of his prison slippers—was brought into the room. At the sight of his father, he broke into a broad grin, then threw himself into the old man’s arms. They embraced and kissed each other’s cheeks before stepping back and shaking hands.
“You don’t know how good it feels to get hold of you,” said Roland, eyes glistening.
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