The Devil's Gentleman (48 page)

Every paper in the city ran a worshipful obituary of the “great soldier and great man.” Nearly all limited themselves to a description of his brilliant military career and subsequent life in business and politics.

Only one editorialist, in referring to the crime that had riveted the nation fifteen years earlier, conveyed the sense of pity and consternation that so many people had felt throughout the General’s long ordeal. “That tragedy should have come to such a man in the struggle to save his son, Roland B. Molineux, from a charge of murder, was one of the freaks of fate.”
⁴¹

Just two and a half years later, on November 2, 1917, Roland B. Molineux, age fifty-one, followed his father to the grave.

At the time of his commitment to the insane asylum, newspapers had attributed his mental collapse to strains brought by “overwork on his play recently produced by David Belasco.”
⁴²
The autopsy told a far more sordid story.

Roland, according to his death certificate, had died of “syphilitic infection.” His descent into insanity had been a consequence of that insidious disease. Left untreated, syphilis leads to extreme neurological damage, known as general paresis. As the nerves of the brain deteriorate, the victim displays increasingly severe symptoms of abnormal mental functioning, including marked personality changes and impaired ethical judgment. Eventually, he (or she) succumbs to complete dementia.

Since paresis can take decades to develop after the initial infection, it is possible that the disease had already begun to work its devastating effects on Roland Molineux at the time of the murders of Henry Barnet and Katherine Adams. Certainly, the shattered health that his mother described to David Belasco—and that Belasco himself witnessed firsthand—was not, as she believed, the result of his imprisonment but of advanced untreated syphilis.
⁴³

Besides the “Molineux Rule”—still frequently invoked in New York State courtrooms—Roland’s case produced other changes in the law, from the abolition of private letter boxes to a bill mandating that all medications containing toxic ingredients be sold in specially designed bottles.
⁴⁴
But its most significant ramifications were cultural.

As the first media-driven crime circus of the twentieth century, it set the pattern for all the carnivalesque “trials of the century” to follow, from those of Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh baby kidnapper to that of O. J. Simpson. Hack works like
The Blind Goddess
and
The Great Poison Mystery
were precursors of the instant books and made-for-TV movies that rush to exploit the public’s fascination with the latest sensational crime. The general shamelessness that seems to characterize everyone associated with a notorious murderer nowadays—the former girlfriend who poses for
Playboy,
the sibling who quickly signs a contract for a tell-all book—was foreshadowed by Blanche’s attempts to turn her notoriety into a vaudeville career. Roland’s own efforts to cash in on his infamy—so strikingly at variance with his father’s fiercely maintained sense of dignity and family honor—was a sign of the coming new era, when cheap celebrity, often based on scandal, would supplant traditional concepts of glory and hard-won fame.

Even the unbridled litigiousness of contemporary America—where stranded motorists sue the Samaritans who stop to help them and the morbidly obese bring action against their favorite restaurants for making them fat—was presaged by the Molineux case. Immediately after the end of Roland’s first trial, Manheim Brown, the juror who had nearly derailed the proceedings after catching a cold, sued the city for fifty thousand dollars, claiming that his health had been ruined by the poor ventilation in the courtroom. For nearly thirty more years—long after Brown’s death in 1913—his family carried on the fight. It was not until 1928—when the state legislature turned down a bill that would have given Brown’s widow financial compensation—that the matter was finally dropped.
⁴⁵

Harry Cornish also sought redress through litigation. Not long after Roland’s acquittal, he sued
The New York Times
for $30,000, claiming that at the height of the Molineux investigation in 1899, the paper had libelously identified him as a man who had purchased cyanide of mercury from a druggist in New Haven, Connecticut, thus “branding him as the murderer of Mrs. Adams or an accessory to the crime.” In the end, however, Cornish was no more successful than Manheim Brown’s widow. At a trial held before Justice W. S. Andrews in March 1904, the jury agreed with the defense that the article was “a legitimate news publication, fair to the plaintiff, and not of the character set forth in the complaint.”
⁴⁶

Four years later, in May 1908, Cornish got remarried—not to Florence Rodgers, his alleged longtime lover, but to a thirty-six-year-old resident of Newark, New Jersey, named Mary M. Waite. At the time, Cornish gave his profession as “brass manufacturer.” The news of the wedding did not become public until the middle of July.

Less than two weeks later, a sensational item appeared in papers on both coasts.
CORNISH’S BODY FOUND IN BAY,
read the headline. According to the story, the remains of a man had been found floating in the waters off Coney Island on the evening of July 27, 1908. The victim had a large gash in his head, apparently made with an ax. While “there was some conflicting evidence as to the identification of the body,” the coroner was convinced that it was Harry Cornish. “It is thought,” read the article, “that Cornish went on the bay in a yacht with a party and that while on the yacht the murder was committed.”
⁴⁷

The coroner, however, was wrong. Though Cornish would vanish from public view, he wouldn’t die for many years to come. He and his wife eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. He died of acute congestive failure in the Los Angeles County General Hospital on the afternoon of January 11, 1947, at the age of eighty-four.
⁴⁸

Blanche would outlive them all.

In 1905, after another unsuccessful stab at a singing career (this time under the name Blanche Chesebrough Scott), she and her husband, Wallace, moved to New York City.
⁴⁹
Apart from an eighteen-month hiatus during which Blanche finally achieved her dream of traveling through Europe, they spent the next eight years in Manhattan before returning to Sioux Falls in 1913. By then, they had a son named Roger, whom Blanche—a decidedly indifferent mother—consistently referred to as “Boy.”

In 1915, Wallace journeyed to Minneapolis to try a case and liked the city so well that he decided to stay. Shortly thereafter, Blanche sued him for divorce on the grounds of nonsupport. Their split, however, didn’t last. In 1916, the divorce was legally vacated. For the next five years, Blanche and Wallace lived together in a big house on Minneapolis’s Park Avenue, while “Boy” was shipped off to a boarding school on the East Coast.

Blanche’s marriage to Wallace continued to be as tumultuous as ever, and in January 1921 she filed another petition for divorce. The papers claimed that he “struck, bruised, and choked [her], and that he has used towards her profane, indecent language, and called her many disreputable names…as a result thereof, her health has become affected, and her nervous system has been impaired, and to longer live with the defendant would endanger her life.” Blanche sought monthly alimony payments of $250, a share of the household furnishings, and custody of their son. Before the divorce could be finalized, however, “Boy,” then fifteen years old, contracted rheumatic fever and died.
⁵⁰

Blanche and Wallace were divorced for a second time in December 1921. Wallace briefly remarried, while Blanche decamped for New York City, where she lived with her older sister, Izcennia, by then also divorced. In 1926, however, Blanche and Wallace were reconciled once again. She returned to the big house in Minneapolis. For the next four years, they lived together in apparent harmony. In 1930, while returning from a business trip in St. Joseph, Missouri, Wallace was killed in an automobile accident in Iowa. “It may perhaps be said,” a newspaper article commented at the time of her husband’s death, “that Mrs. Scott has drained life’s cup to the last bitter dreg.”
⁵¹

She would survive for nearly another quarter century—an increasingly grotesque-looking old woman who dyed her hair a garish red, wore clownish amounts of mascara and rouge, dressed in outlandishly youthful garments, and affected a flamboyantly “cultured” conversational style, heavily peppered with French phrases. Living in a succession of progressively shabby rented rooms, she relied for sustenance on welfare and a dwindling number of friends. She died alone in 1954 at the age of eighty—a relic of an age that, even for her, had long since passed into myth.

NOTES

So many newspapers covered the Molineux story (not only in New York but around the country), and the case went on for so long (four years from Katherine Adams’s murder to Roland’s acquittal), that, for the sake of completing my research and actually writing the book, I limited myself to five of the city’s principal dailies—the
World,
the
Journal,
the
Herald,
the
Sun,
and the
Times
—plus the
Brooklyn Eagle,
which, because of the Molineux family’s long association with Brooklyn, covered the case in great detail. Even so, I ended up with several thousand Xeroxed pages, most copied from microfilm machines at the main branch of the New York Public Library. (Thankfully, both the
Times
and the
Brooklyn Eagle
are available online.)

The
Eagle
also ran many articles on Edward Molineux’s civic, political, and military activities, extending back to the 1860s. For information about his earlier years I relied entirely on documents—his journals, letters, etc.—in the possession of his great-grandson, Will Molineux.

Throughout the writing of the book I scrupulously avoided the New Journalistic techniques pioneered by Capote
et al
—inventing dialogue, imagining what people were thinking, fleshing out scenes with atmospheric touches, etc. The most novelistic portions of the book are those dealing with Blanche, but everything in them comes directly from her memoirs, provided to me by Jane Pejsa, whose mother, Irene Hauser, befriended Blanche in the last years of her life.

I have also refrained, in the body of the book, from offering a tidy answer to the question of Roland’s innocence or guilt. Like the Lizzie Borden and O. J. Simpson cases, the Molineux affair will forever be marked by a degree of ambiguity. Crime buffs have been debating the matter for a century. Entries on Roland are routinely found in crime encyclopedias such as
The Mammoth Book of Murder
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989) and
The Greatest Criminals of All Time
(New York: Stein and Day, 1982), whose authors do not hesitate to rank him with the country’s most notorious homicidal maniacs. On the other hand, there are those like George P. LeBrun—former New York City coroner and author of
It’s Time to Tell
(New York: William Morrow, 1962)—who unequivocally assert Roland’s innocence.

As for me, I’ve always been struck by the fact that, in the century following the slaughter of Andrew and Abby Borden, there were a number of highly sensational murder trials in the United States involving wealthy and prominent citizens accused of committing spectacularly savage acts of violence that were totally anomalous in their otherwise law-abiding lives (the Hall-Mills case of the 1920s is another instance). In each of these cases—owing partly to the skills of the high-powered legal “dream teams” retained by the defendants and partly, perhaps, to the reluctance of jurors to attribute such barbarity to admired, respectable individuals with no criminal backgrounds—the defendants ultimately went free.

My own opinion, based on my long immersion in the details of the Molineux affair, as well as my beliefs about the dark potentialities of human nature, is that the jury at Roland’s first trial rendered the correct verdict.

PROLOGUE

1. Mark Essig,
Edison & the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death
(New York: Walker & Company, 2003), p. 253.

2. Daniel Allen Hearn,
Legal Executions in New York State, 1639–1963
(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1997), pp. 81–92;
New York World,
March 21, 1899, p. 1.

3. Hearn, p. 94.

4.
New York World,
February 24, 1900, p. 12.

5. Roland Molineux,
The Room with the Little Door
(New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1902), pp. 26–32;
New York Times,
February 27, 1900, p. 14.

CHAPTER ONE

1. Edward Molineux’s scrapbooks are owned by his great-grandson, Will Molineux.

2. From an unsigned note among the Molineux family papers.

3. The source of this legend is Nellie Zada Rice Molyneux,
History, genealogical and biographical, of the Molyneux families
(Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1904), pp. 17–18.

4. All information regarding Edward Molineux and the Tiemanns comes from the unpublished reminiscences of William Tiemann, a copy of which is owned by Will Molineux.

5. Even before the formation of the 159th Brigade, Edward had already taken part in the war, having been a volunteer member of the storied Seventh Regiment New York State Militia that hurried to the defense of Washington, D.C., immediately after the fall of Fort Sumter.

6. Among them, Port Hudson, Donaldsonville, Martinsville, New Iberia, Pine Mill, Marksville, Halltown, Winchester, Markettown, Cedar Creek, Fisher Hill, Charlestown, and Berryville.

7. “The New Major General,”
Brooklyn Eagle,
March 25, 1869, p. 2.

8. From a speech made by William F. Tiemann on October 19, 1896, on the thirty-second anniversary of the Battle of Cedar Creek. A typed transcript is among the ELM papers.

9. As he did in a speech to surviving veterans of the 159th in April, 1902. See “Gathering of Veterans,”
Brooklyn Eagle,
April 15, 1902, p. 5.

CHAPTER TWO

1. In June 1884—during a controversy over Governor Grover Cleveland’s appointment of ELM as major general of the Second Division of National Guard—the
Brooklyn Eagle
noted that “General Molineux has been in the West for some time.” The reasons for ELM’s trip—i.e., to bring Roland home after his two-year exile—were, of course, unknown to the public. See
Brooklyn Eagle,
June 6, 1884, p. 4.

2. Edward Leslie Molineux,
Physical and Military Exercise in Public Schools: A National Necessity,
p. 9.

3. Quoted in John Rickards Betts,
America’s Sporting Heritage: 1850–1950
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1974), p. 52.

4. J. Willis and R. Wettan. “Social Stratification in New York City Athletic Clubs, 1865–1915,”
Journal of Sports History,
24 (Spring 1997), p. 54.

5. Willis and Wettan, p. 54. See also Malcolm W. Ford, “The New York Athletic Club,”
Outing
(Vol. XXXIII), December 1898, pp. 248 ff., and Bob Considine and Fred G. Jarvis,
The First Hundred Years: A Portrait of the NYAC
(London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969).

6. Eric Homberger,
Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 212.

7. Theodore Dreiser,
The “Rake”, Papers on Language & Literature,
27 (spring 1991), 148–49.

8. There were two very different versions of this scandalous incident, one told by Mr. Edward O. Kindberg, the other by his wife, Eleanor. According to the former, his wife had been involved in an adulterous affair with the rakish, fifteen-year-old Molineux. Mrs. Kindberg, on the other hand, claimed that her husband had set her up. According to an affidavit she filed during their exceptionally ugly divorce, on the evening of February 24, 1883, the teenaged Molineux—“a friend and companion of her husband”—called upon her at her apartment at 292 Henry Street, Brooklyn, and “remained in the house until 10
P.M.
,” innocently chatting with her. About fifteen minutes after his departure, “her husband and several men broke into her room while she was in bed, lighted the gas, and her husband said, ‘Now, we’ve got you, you must sign this paper. We will write for you.’” With one man seated on each side of the bed, she was threatened and “compelled to sign a blank piece of paper,” which was later filled in with a fake confession of her own supposed adulterous behavior, to be used as evidence in denying her alimony. See
New York World,
January 12, 1899, p. 12.

9. See
Brooklyn Eagle,
April 7, 1889, p. 1, and February 17, 1891, p. 6.

CHAPTER THREE

1. See Jane Pejsa,
The Molineux Affair
(Minneapolis: Kenwood Publishing, 1983), p. 86. The description of ELM’s parenting style is an extrapolation, based on Will Molineux’s written memories of his own grandfather, Leslie Edward, the General’s oldest son. This seems to me a valid approach, since—as Will Molineux notes—“men are apt to be like their fathers.”

2. The information about Leslie Edward comes from Will Molineux’s written “Remembrances of my grandfather.”

3. Pejsa, p. 29.

4. Samuel Klaus, ed.,
The Molineux Case
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), p. 230.

5. Klaus, p. 223.

6. Pejsa, p. 30.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Joseph E. Cornish,
The History and Genealogy of the Cornish Families in America
(Boston: Geo. H. Ellis Co., 1907), p. 128.

2. Klaus,
The Molineux Case,
p. 3.

3.
Brooklyn Eagle,
February 10, 1899, p. 1.

4.
New York Times,
December 18, 1895, p. 15.

CHAPTER FIVE

1.
Brooklyn Eagle,
April 7, 1889, p. 1.

2. Klaus, p. 11.

3.
New York Journal,
February 15, 1899, p. 2;
New York World,
February 15, 1899, p. 2.

4.
New York Journal,
February 15, 1899, p. 2.

5. Ibid.

6.
New York World,
February 12, 1899, p. 2; Klaus, p. 8.

CHAPTER SIX

1. Lloyd Morris,
Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years
(New York: Random House, 1951), p. 208.

2. Pejsa, p. 31; Klaus, p. 19.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1.
New York World,
March 5, 1899, p. 1.

2. This story is impossible to verify. Indeed, it is not at all clear that Blanche really had an artificial eye. Some observers insisted that she did (see, for example, the
New York World,
February 22, 1899, p. 2). Others, however, claimed that her left eye simply had a peculiar cast which, in certain lights, made it look like glass (see Pejsa, pp. 137–38). It appears to be true, however, that whatever was wrong with her eye, Blanche was self-conscious about it. At the time of the first Molineux trial, despite relentless efforts by reporters, only one photograph of her could be found, a group portrait taken when she was a member of the Rubinstein Musical Society and in which she is hardly visible. In her only other surviving photograph—published in the August 27, 1905, issue of
The Chicago Tribune
—she sits with her left side turned away from the camera, as though deliberately concealing it from sight.

3. The unpublished memoirs of Blanche Molineux Scott were provided to me by Jane Pejsa, whose used them as the basis for her own book,
The Molineux Affair.
They will hereafter be referred to as “Scott.”

4. Scott, p. 16.

5. Ibid., p. 17.

6. Ibid., p. 18.

7. Ibid., pp. 21–22.

8. Ibid.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1.
New York World,
March 5, 1899, p. 1; Scott, p. 19.

2. Details in this passage—evoking the sights that Blanche would have seen on her strolls along Broadway—are taken from Theodore Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie
(New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 226–27.

3.
New York Journal,
February 11, 1900, p. 28;
New York Sun,
February 4, 1900, p. 2.

4. Lucius Beebe,
The Big Spenders
(New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 115–16, and M. H. Dunlop,
Gilded City
(New York: William Morrow, 2000), pp. 20f.

5. Scott, p. 25.

6. Ibid., pp. 24–25.

7. Ibid., pp. 30–32.

8. Ibid., p. 37.

CHAPTER NINE

1. Dunlop,
Gilded City,
p. 124.

2.
New York World,
February 22, 1899.

3. There is an extant portrait of Lois, done by one of Boston’s leading painters of society women, William M. Paxton. Titled
Portrait of a Woman in Black (Mrs. Howard Oakie).
It shows a quite beautiful woman, perhaps thirty years old, with lush deep-brown hair, large dark eyes, a strong nose, full mouth, and elegant throat. She wears no ornamentation beyond a lace scarf draped over the shoulders of her rich, black velvet gown. Despite her subdued garb, there is a physical vibrancy to Mrs. Oakie, a radiant sensuality that, by all accounts, all three Chesebrough sisters shared and that—in addition to their other attributes of intellect and charm—clearly accounted for the attraction they exerted on men.

4. Scott, p. 36.

5. Ibid., p. 37.

6. Ibid., 40–41.

7. Sidney Sutherland, “The Mystery of the Poison Christmas Gift,”
Liberty,
March 9, 1929, p 45.

8. Scott, p. 62.

9. Ibid., p. 42.

10. Ibid., p. 61.

11. Ibid., p. 62.

CHAPTER TEN

1. John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller,
The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America
(New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 108–10; S. Pancoast,
Pancoast’s Tokology and Ladies Medical Guide: A Complete Instructor in All the Delicate and Wonderful Matters Pertaining to Women
(Chicago: Thomas & Thomas, 1901), p. 35.

2. For a fascinating discussion of the class of single young women to which Blanche was perceived to belong, see Haller, pp. 246–47.

3. Scott, p. 60.

4.
New York World,
March 3, 1899, p. 1.

5. Scott, p. 44.

6. Ibid., pp. 45–46.

7. Ibid., p. 46.

8. Ibid., p. 47.

9. Ibid.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. Scott, p. 49.

2. Ibid., p. 48.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., pp. 49–50.

6. Klaus, p. 12.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1. Scott, p. 52.

2. Pejsa, p. 31.

3. Scott, p. 52.

4. In her memoir, Blanche mentions these as places she went to dine with Roland. My description of a typical night at these fashionable eateries derives from Lloyd Morris’s
Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years
(New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 260–61.