The Devil's Gentleman (29 page)

55

A
s Blanche observed during her compulsory visits to the Tombs, Roland had adapted to his life behind bars with a tight-lipped stoicism, comporting himself in a manner that drew admiring words even from his persecutors in the yellow press. “Guilty or innocent, Roland Molineux is a fellow of spirit,” the
Journal
conceded. “There is plenty of backbone about this alleged poisoner.”
¹

Despite his precipitous comedown from pampered clubman to prison inmate, he showed no trace of self-pity. During the nine months he spent in the Tombs while awaiting the start of his trial, he kept to a meticulous routine. He paid minute attention to his appearance, sponge-bathing twice a day, shaving each morning, neatly combing his hair. He brushed his clothes and shined his shoes “as if he were his own valet.”
²
He never failed to wear his necktie. By the time the guard came around with his breakfast, Roland looked, as one newspaper put it, “as if he were about to visit his club.”
³

He always ate his catered meals with relish. Afterward, he would smoke a big cigar—partly to conceal the stink from the chamber pot.

To supplement his daily walks around the second tier, he would often strip off his coat and do whatever calisthenics he could manage in the constricted space of his cell. At other times, he would engage in a bout of shadowboxing.

Each afternoon, he received a visit from his father, who—despite the universal veneration in which he was held—was forced, like everyone else, to undergo the indignity of a search and to relinquish his pocketknife for the duration of his stay.
⁴
Other family members came, too, particularly Roland’s younger brother, Cecil—who on one occasion was made to endure what the papers described as a “vicarious experience of his brother’s plight.” Receiving permission to see Roland in his cell (instead of the usual visitor’s room), Cecil found himself locked behind bars for more than an hour while his brother went off to consult with his lawyers and evidently forgot all about his younger sibling.
⁵

The rest of Roland’s time was taken up with reading and writing. He was inundated with letters from what the papers referred to as the “morbid type” of woman—what would be known today as a “killer groupie.” Not content with merely writing to the dashing alleged poisoner, a number of these women—some bearing gifts of flowers or popular novels—showed up at the Tombs and “importuned the Warden for just one glimpse of Molineux.”
⁶

Though Roland was not permitted to receive gifts from these female titillation seekers, he was kept well stocked with reading matter by his father. And, of course, he was able to purchase a half dozen different newspapers each day, which he pored over for hours. As a result, he would have been acutely aware of the story that dominated the headlines during the third week of March 1899: the death of Martha Place, the first woman ever executed in the electric chair.

Raised on a hardscrabble farm in rural New Jersey, Martha, whose maiden name was Garretson, knew nothing but endless drudgery and severe emotional deprivation during her early years. To escape the miseries of her home life, she wed a fellow named Wesley Savacool, but they fought bitterly from the start and she soon abandoned him, finding work as a seamstress in a New Brunswick sweatshop. In 1894, at the age of forty, she answered a classified ad placed by an insurance adjuster named William Place—a widower with a twelve-year-old daughter named Ida—who was looking for a housekeeper. Mrs. Savacool, as Martha was then known, was hired on the spot.

Accounts of what happened next vary. According to some reports, the miserly Place eventually proposed marriage so that he could keep Martha as a housekeeper without paying her salary. Others claim that it was Martha who coerced William into marriage by threatening to tell his friends that he had seduced her.
⁷

Whatever the case, one thing is certain. In 1895, the two were married; whereupon Martha Place very quickly transformed into a wicked stepmother straight out of a Grimm brothers’ story. Venting her resentment of her husband’s emotional and financial stinginess on his beloved daughter, Martha began to mercilessly persecute the now teenaged girl.

The culminating horror occurred on Monday, February 7, 1898. Before William left for work that morning, Martha demanded a twenty-dollar household allowance. Place refused.

“I will make this cost you dearly,” Martha hissed.

Ignoring the threat, Place kissed his daughter and departed. He was hardly out the door when Martha turned on the girl, viciously berating her. Ida fled upstairs to her bedroom. A short time later, at approximately 8:15
A.M.
, the “warped, vengeful” woman (as the papers described her) went down to the basement where her husband kept a photographic darkroom. Filling a jar with acid, she carried it up to Ida’s bedroom, threw open the door, and hurled the contents into the girl’s eyes, blinding her. Then—as the
Journal
reported—“with bony hands which her long years of hard work had made strong and sinewy, she clutched the poor child by the throat and relentlessly strangled the life out of her.”
⁸

Martha spent the remainder of the day at home. A visitor who arrived that afternoon found her seated calmly in the parlor.

Hours later, at around 6:30
P.M.
, William returned from work. As he made his way down the hallway to the kitchen, a closet door flew open. Out burst Martha, wielding an ax. She took a vicious swipe at William, who ducked reflexively. The blade buried itself in the woodwork. As William made for the door, Martha yanked the ax free, chased after her husband, and struck him in the arm, opening a savage gash. Bleeding profusely, he staggered into the street, shouting for help.

Several policemen came on the run. While William was taken to the hospital, they searched the house. They found the dead, disfigured girl in bed, clad only in her bloomers. Martha had retreated to her own bedroom, where she had turned on the gas jets in a halfhearted suicide attempt. She was tried and—despite the efforts of her lawyers to portray her as insane—found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair, the first woman so condemned.

That grim landmark took place on Monday, March 20, 1899, after Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute the sentence, explaining—in a perverse endorsement of equal rights—that “in the commission of a crime, a woman is deserving of the same blame as a man in a similar case.”
⁹
For days afterward, the newspapers were full of firsthand accounts of Mrs. Place’s death, a number of them accompanied by gruesome illustrations showing her strapped into the electric chair at Sing Sing.
¹⁰
In the typically hypocritical way of the sensationalistic press, even those papers presumably opposed to her execution found ways to exploit it. While sanctimoniously decrying the state-sanctioned killing of female criminals as a relic of barbarism, for example, Hearst’s
Journal
managed to titillate its readers by running an illustrated strip headlined
HOW MEN HAVE PUT WOMEN TO DEATH SINCE HISTORY BEGAN
, each panel of which depicting a different method of execution, from burning at the stake to beheading to hanging.
¹¹
Hearst knew perfectly well that whatever their avowed attitudes toward capital punishment, giving his readers graphic accounts of a juicy execution was a surefire way to sell papers.

Certainly, it was a story that held great interest for Roland Molineux, whose lawyers were already working desperately to ensure that their client did not suffer the same fate.

56

F
or a while, events seemed to turn in Roland’s favor.

On the last day of March, Bartow Weeks, appearing in the criminal branch of the New York City Supreme Court, moved to quash the indictment against his client. Arguing before a judge with the peculiarly apt name of Pardon C. Williams, Weeks maintained that the evidence presented to the grand jury had been “flimsy and inadequate.”

“The sole facts provided by the testimony are these,” he said with more than a hint of scorn in his voice. “First, the defendant had a slight difference over club affairs with Cornish a year before the crime charged. And second, three expert witnesses, without giving any reason for their belief and without being cross-examined, declared their opinion that the defendant wrote the superscription upon the package alleged to have contained the poison.

“Is it possible,” he exclaimed, “that the life of a human being shall be put in jeopardy and that he shall be subjected to the great expense, terrible disgrace and ignominy of a trial for his life upon such evidence? Would any court allow a jury to bring in a verdict upon such evidence?”
¹

Weeks’s argument fell on sympathetic ears. Two weeks later, Justice Williams granted Weeks’s motion “on the ground that improper evidence had been submitted to the Grand Jury.”
²

Specifically, Williams ruled that, since the crime in question was the murder of Mrs. Adams, the introduction of evidence related to the death of Henry Barnet had been unjustified. Williams therefore set aside the indictment and ordered the case resubmitted to a new grand jury.

Though Roland would remain in custody, he received the news with expressions of the “heartiest satisfaction.” At the Molineux home in Brooklyn, the reaction was much the same. Informed of Williams’s decision by a reporter for the
World,
Roland’s mother “clapped her hands to her bosom” and tearfully thanked heaven. As for the General, the strain of the preceding few months had finally taken its toll on the old soldier, who was bedridden with one of the incapacitating headaches he had suffered since the war.

After hearing that his son’s indictment had been dismissed, however, he was soon back on his feet. The news, he declared, was “the best medicine he could have had.”
³

At the very time that Justice Williams was handing down his decision, another, even more dramatic development occurred in the case. Wholly unexpected, it seemed at first like nothing less than a godsend for Roland.

On Monday, April 10, 1899, newspapers reported that in response to a formal request by his counterpart in Tennessee, Governor Roosevelt had issued a warrant for the arrest and extradition of a man named Percy E. Raymond, a petty thief and con man who had escaped from the Tennessee Penitentiary in April 1893 while serving two years at hard labor for larceny. According to the stories, Raymond had been aided by a young woman named Blanche M. Graham, the daughter of a prominent Southern politician, who had allowed herself to be seduced by the honey-tongued deceiver. After his arrest, she had pawned her jewelry and smuggled the cash to her lover, who had used it to bribe his way out of prison. Raymond had promised Blanche that once he was free, they would run off and get married. Instead, he had absconded to New York, leaving her heartbroken and “ruined.”

For years, no one had heard anything about Raymond. Then, in late February, his picture had been widely printed in the newspapers. Though he had adopted a new identity, he was recognized by a Nashville lawyer named A. S. Colyar, Jr., who had immediately notified the authorities. Colyar and Miss Graham had both traveled north to identify Raymond and were now ensconced in a hotel, awaiting his arrest.

Under normal circumstances, this story would not have been deemed particularly newsworthy. As a criminal, Raymond was extremely small fry. The reward for his return to Tennessee was $25. What propelled it into the headlines was the revelation that, for the past six years, he had been living in New York City, where he was passing himself off as a respectable businessman. The thief, pickpocket, and escaped convict, so it was claimed, was now the proprietor of a private letter box establishment at 257 West Forty-second Street.

The name he went by was Nicholas Heckmann.
⁴

Heckmann, of course, had been the single most devastating witness at the coroner’s inquest. His identification of Roland as the man who rented box 217 under the name H. C. Barnet had been a moment of high drama. For Molineux and his lawyers, therefore, the news about Heckmann’s true identity couldn’t have been more welcome. With the principal witness against him exposed as a fugitive, fraud, and inveterate criminal, Roland’s prospects seemed brighter than ever.

The rejoicing in Molineux’s camp, however, proved to be exceptionally short-lived. Just days after the story broke, the truth came to light. The whole thing turned out to be a bizarre plot concocted by the Nashville attorney, A. S. Colyar. A mentally unstable young man who, it emerged, had done at least two stints in a Knoxville insane asylum, Colyar had seen Heckmann’s picture in the papers and—noting a resemblance between the letter box man and the fugitive Raymond—had cooked up a scheme to keep Heckmann from testifying at the trial by having him arrested and shipped to Tennessee. His apparent hope was to earn the gratitude (presumably in pecuniary form) of Roland’s wealthy father.

To assist in what District Attorney Gardiner termed “this vile conspiracy,” Colyar had enlisted a female acquaintance named Ida Cole to play the role of the betrayed Southern belle Blanche Graham. When Colyar’s ruse was exposed, Miss Cole promptly (and more or less literally) bailed out, eluding police officials by jumping off a Manhattan-bound train as it pulled out of the Newark station and vanishing into the night. Colyar was arrested by Detective Sergeant Carey, while to the great relief of the DA and his men, who were busily preparing for the trial, their star witness, Nicholas Heckmann, was fully exonerated.
⁵

Though the “Heckmann Plot” (as the newspapers called it) did nothing to help Roland’s cause, he seemed chipper enough when he was next seen in public. On the morning of Tuesday, April 25, he was taken in handcuffs from the Tombs and escorted to the county courthouse—a short stroll that led him down Centre Street and through the little park near City Hall. It was the first time that he had been outdoors since his incarceration nearly two months earlier.

Inside the crowded courtroom, he was warmly greeted by his father, who looked, to several observers, perceptibly older than before—haggard and careworn, with hollowed cheeks and dark rings under his eyes. Roland, by contrast, had grown somewhat plump from his purchased prison meals. Dressed in a black diagonal suit, standing collar, and white tie—and holding his tan gloves, as usual, in his left hand—he sat back in his chair and paid close attention to the proceedings.

At issue was Roland’s continued detention in the Tombs. Arguing before a judge named Bookstaver, Bartow Weeks insisted that there was no legal justification for keeping his client behind bars, the original indictment for murder having been set aside by Justice Williams. District Attorney Gardiner vehemently disagreed, maintaining that there was nothing in Williams’s ruling that authorized Roland’s release. Bookstaver ordered both sides to submit briefs, then adjourned the hearing until May 1, when he would render his decision.

Before being led away, Roland conferred briefly with Weeks, who, according to several observers, wore a worried look. And for good reason. For more than a week, the papers had been trumpeting a new and startling discovery related to the case—one that boded very ill for Roland.
⁶

At the time of the Molineux affair, dealers in mail-order patent medicine brought in extra income by saving the correspondence they received from customers, then selling these letters to other mail-order firms. In mid-February 1899, Professor F. C. Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut—maker of Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy for Impotence—purchased such a batch of letters from a fellow nostrum peddler, Dr. James Burns, who was giving up his Manhattan-based business and relocating to Detroit.

The job of sorting through the nearly ten thousand letters acquired from Burns and compiling a mailing list of prospective customers for Professor Fowler’s snake oil fell to his adult daughter. Ever since one of the fake Barnet orders had turned up in her father’s files, this young woman had been paying particularly close attention to the Molineux case. And so she instantly recognized the significance of the one-sentence note she came across as she sat at her worktable on Monday, April 10.

She lost no time in showing the note to her father, who immediately mailed it to Captain McCluskey at the Manhattan Detective Bureau.

The moment McCluskey received it, he fairly leapt to his feet with excitement. He saw at once that he had just come into possession of the single most important piece of evidence that the investigation had yet turned up—“the strongest link in the circumstantial chain being woven about” young Molineux, as
The New York Times
put it.
⁷

The letter, mailed to Dr. Burns’s offices on Columbus Avenue, consisted of a single line that read: “Please find enclosed 25 cents, for which send remedy, and oblige.” It was a request for a sample of Burns’s Marvelous Giant Indian Salve, his supposed cure for male “atrophy.” The letter was signed Roland Molineux and the return address given as “No. 6 Jersey Street, Newark, New Jersey”—the Morris Herrmann factory, where Roland kept an apartment.

What made the letter so significant, however, wasn’t just the signature and return address. It was the stationery itself: robin’s-egg blue with an embossed crest of three interlinked silver crescents. The same paper that several of the fake Cornish and Barnet letters had been written on—and that Roland, at the coroner’s inquest, had sworn he’d never seen.
⁸