"The Trial of the Century," A Tale of Jealousy and Privilege
More accurately, the first of many "Trials of the Century" in 20th century America. This one gave us the "Molineux Rule."
(General George Molineux, center, with some of his Civil War unit in front of his home on Fort Greene Place, 1884)
In 1894, a very successful African American restaurant owner and host named Hiram S. Thomas bought a house on a quiet stretch of Fort Greene Place in Brooklyn. He announced the purchase of his new house to a man who was dining at the Lake House, his restaurant in Saratoga Springs.
This innocent announcement that “I'm going to be your neighbor”, would catapult the quiet, upper middle-class enclave into the harsh light of the media, when that same dinner guest told his family back home, and word got around that they all would be living on the same block as a black man and his family.
That story was told in last week’s post. Perhaps the neighbors should have been more worried about the people who already called the block home. Perhaps that dinner guest, the distinguished Brevet Major-General Edward Leslie Molineux, should have been looking at his own family, as the furor over Hiram Thomas was a gentle breeze compared to the level-five hurricane that was the case of his own wayward son, Roland B. Molineux, the defendant in the 20th century's first “Murder Trial of the Century”.
Edward Leslie Molineux was born in 1833, in London, England, and came to America as a child. From all accounts, young Molineux was a model student, a go-getter, and a handsome lad with an aristocratic carriage, despite being only 5'3” tall. His father had been a printer, so it was not too surprising that after his schooling he began working for a large paint company in Manhattan called the Daniel F. Tiemann Company, where he quickly rose to the top of the front office, and eventually became a partner. When the Civil War broke out, he was a Lt. Colonel in the elite 23rd Regiment of the NY National Guard, which had its headquarters at the old Clermont St. Armory. He had just gotten married to Hattie Davis Clark.
(General Leslie Molineux)
He went to war as a colonel commanding the 159th New York Volunteers, engaged in fierce battle, and was wounded leading a charge through a cane field in Louisiana in 1863. A bullet crashed through his mouth, destroying his teeth and jaw on the left side, exiting through his cheek, leaving him with headaches and pain for the rest of his life. After the war, was promoted to general, and again took command of different divisions of the NY Guard, retiring as a major-general.
Back in civilian life, he became a director of the F.W. Devoe and C.T. Reynolds Company, a major paint manufacturer, and rival of his old boss and partner, Daniel Tiemann, with whom he had fallen out. He would make the paint company the largest in the country at that time, giving him comfortable wealth, and the ability to indulge his family in the quiet comforts and privileges of late 19th century life. He and Hattie had three sons, Roland Burnham, Leslie Edward and Cecil Sefton, and a good, quiet life on Fort Greene Place. Roland would change all that.
From many accounts, as a young man, Roland was his father's son. He was handsome, athletic and popular. He attended the elite Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and was also a champion gymnast, praised for his graceful and daring work on the flying trapeze, a skill for which he had won amateur awards. He became a chemist and worked as a colorist for his father's paint company, in a dye factory in New Jersey. He was also quite the man about town, and had gotten married to the former Miss Blanche Chesebrough, whom he had met in a whirlwind romance. The couple lived in Manhattan.
(Roland B. Molineux)
Because this case became so well known, and so much was written about Roland and his life, there are conflicting accounts of his actions and his personality. This case was one of the events that gave great popularity to “yellow journalism”; lurid headlines and copy by rivaling newspapers that were long on drama and shock, and short on facts and solid journalism; “news” that makes anything in today's dailies pale in comparison.
The Brooklyn Eagle portrayed him as a popular and hardworking man, accomplished in his athletic pursuits during his leisure time at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, while working hard as a chemist by day. The two leading dailies, the New York World and the New York Daily said differently. They portrayed him as a vain, arrogant man, disliked by his peers, especially those at the Club, a second rate athlete who thought more of himself than others did, a prig, a bounder, and a cad. All this unwanted media attention happened to Roland Molineux and his family because of the murder of Katherine J. Adams, a Manhattan landlady.
As a member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Roland Molineux, now in his forties, had run afoul of the club's physical director, Henry Cornish. Cornish was well known in club circles for his managing of athletics during the 1893 Chicago World's Exposition, and his management of swanky athletic clubs in Chicago and his native Boston. He was quite good at what he did, very self-assured, and because of it, not especially popular with his well-off clientele.
In April of 1897, Cornish had just beaten Molineux at a weight lifting contest at the club, and Roland was said to be incensed, and tried to have Cornish fired. He wrote several letters to the front office of the club, to that affect, but because Roland wasn't the most popular person in the club either, management declined to do anything about it. Henry Cornish didn't take the slander lying down and proceeded to write letters to club members complaining about Roland, calling him a third-rate athlete who sold rum and visited prostitutes.
(Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Photo: NY Public Library)
Roland went to the board of directors and told them to fire Cornish, or he would quit, but the board decided to retain Cornish. Roland quit the prestigious Knickerbocker Athletic Club in December of 1897, loudly professing his hatred of Henry Cornish as he left.
A year later, on Christmas Eve of 1898, Cornish received a small box in the mail containing a silver toothpick holder with a small blue bottle of Bromo Seltzer crystals inside. There was no note with the package, but Cornish kept the address paper, in which the word “forty” in the street address was spelled “fourty”. A couple of days later, his landlady, Katherine Adams, complained of a headache. Cornish took the Bromo Seltzer, mixed up a dose with water, gave it to his landlady, and a few minutes later, she was violently stricken and moments later, dead.
Investigators immediately thought Mrs. Adams had been poisoned, an autopsy was called for, the Bromo Seltzer bottle confiscated for examination, and the press caught wind of an interesting case, which soon made the front pages of the dailies and papers across the country. The autopsy determined that Mrs. Adams had indeed been poisoned, and that poison was not potassium cyanide, as first thought, but cyanide of mercury, an ingredient used most often in blending dry colors in a dye factory.
The newspapers ran a photograph of the address paper from the fatal package, and the secretary of the Knickerbocker Club told police that he recognized the handwriting as belonging to Roland Molineaux. The club man had received so many letters regarding Henry Cornish, that he knew Roland’s penmanship and writing habits. He also stated that Roland often misspelled “forty” in these letters. The police started to look at Roland Molineaux, and as soon as that happened, so did the press.
In the meantime, a trace of the silver case led to a jewelry store in Newark where the sales clerk said that the red-bearded man who purchased the case did not match the description of Roland Molineux. Nonetheless, the detectives had begun to hone their case in on Roland. He had motive - he hated the intended victim. He was a chemist who would have known what chemicals could be used as poison, and he had access to those special chemicals at his job. The confirmation that the note on the package matched Roland’s own handwriting was the last piece of the puzzle.
Roland had also been seen in Newark, near the jewelry store the same day the silver case was purchased. He had not been positively identified by the sales clerk, but that was the only negative in their case, so far. There was not enough evidence to arrest Roland Molineaux, until police looked at the suspicious death of a former suitor of Roland's wife, Blanche Chesebrough. The pieces were falling into place.
(Katherine Adams, the murdered landlady via the New York Journal)
The former Blanche Chesebrough, an aspiring opera singer, had met Roland in 1897 at a yachting party in Maine. Back in NYC, she was his guest at several events at the Knickerbocker Club, where he introduced her to his friend, stockbroker Henry Barnet. Henry was smitten, and asked her out, much to Roland's displeasure. In October of 1898, Roland asked Blanche to marry him, but she turned him down, saying she was in love with Henry Barnet. A month later, Barnet was dead. The official cause was cardiac arrest due to diptheric poisoning. A month later, Roland proposed again, and the couple was married, only a month before the death of Mrs. Adams.
Detective Arthur Carey, the experienced lead detective in the case, learned that before his sudden death, Henry Barnet had received in the mail, a package from an anonymous sender, which contained a patent medicine called Kutnow Powder, which was a popular treatment for stomach problems. The package was found next to Barnet's bed. An analysis of the power found that it was laced with cyanide of mercury, the same poison that killed Katherine Adams.
Further investigation led to a note requesting the medicine, signed by Henry Cornish, the Knickerbocker Club director, and tenant of poor Mrs. Adams. Here was another Cornish/Molineux connection. The top handwriting expert of the day was brought in who would later testify at the grand jury that the handwriting on the package of poisoned Bromo Seltzer that killed Katherine Adams, as well as the handwriting on the notes and packaging connected to the Kutnow Powder that killed Henry Barnet, were all written by Roland Molineux. Roland was arrested and jailed in February of 1899 for the murder of Katherine Adams.
After three tries to get a grand jury to indict Roland, the prosecutor finally succeeded, and the murder trial began in November of 1899. The initial indictments were overturned because the prosecution tried to use facts from the Barnet case, which Roland had not been charged for, to prove the Adams case, but eventually the grand jury found the evidence compelling enough to go to trial.
Basically, it would come down to whose handwriting expert the jury would believe. Would it be the prosecution, who had one of the foremost handwriting experts of the day, who would testify to Roland being the person who had sent the package of poison to Henry Cornish, which would kill Mrs. Adams? Or would it be the defense, whose expert witness, a member of the District Attorney's own investigative team, would testify that the handwriting was not that of Molineux, and that he was being railroaded.
Press from all over the country attended the trial. The World and the Journal, as well as the Times and the Brooklyn Eagle all covered the trial daily. The prosecution put up expert witness after expert witness, all of whom testified that the handwriting on the packages belonged to Roland Molineux. The secretary from the Knickerbocker Club also testified that Molineux had written the address on the Cornish box. He pointed out that Molineux never spelled “forty” right, and that the package addressed to Cornish had the word “fourty” spelled there, as Roland was wont to do.
Others testified as to Roland's job as a chemist in a paint factory, where he would have had easy access to cyanide of mercury, an agent used in paint dye. Throughout the trial Roland didn't help himself, appearing bored and above it all, playing tic tac toe on the back of envelopes and smiling at his wife. He didn't confer with his lawyer during the trial and did not listen to the testimony. After the prosecution had rested, the defense attorney, George Gordon Battle, whose only witness was their one handwriting expert, rested without calling a single witness, saying only that the prosecution had not proved their case.
On Feb. 11th, 1900, the jury came back with a verdict of guilty. The trial had lasted three months, cost the state $200,000, and was the longest and most expensive case in history. The case had also almost bankrupted Roland's father, General Edward Molineux, who vowed to have an appeal launched, and the real murder found. Roland Molineux was sentenced to death in the electric chair and was taken to the death house at Sing Sing prison.
Attorney Battle immediately filed for an appeal. The NY Court of Appeals overturned the case and ordered a new trial in 1901. This was obviously important to Roland, but more significantly, was an important decision that would change trial law to this day. The Court of Appeals found that the prosecution had entered into evidence suggestions that Molineux was guilty of killing Mrs. Adams, because he may have been guilty of poisoning Henry Barnet. But he had never been tried or even indicted for the Barnet death, and therefore, had been denied the presumption of innocence.
A hundred years later, the Appeals Court cited the Molineux decision as a landmark case which led to the precedent that “a criminal case should be tried on the facts and not on the basis of a defendant's propensity to commit the crime charged. It is axiomatic that propensity evidence invites a jury to misfocus, if not base its verdict, on a defendant's prior crimes rather than on the evidence, or lack of evidence, relating to the case before it.” This is referred to in criminal law as the “Molineux Rule.”
Roland Molineux would be acquitted at the second trial, the jury only taking 12 minutes to deliberate. He had been in the death house at Sing Sing for over two years. His wife was notably absent at the second trial, as was the press, who barely reported the new verdict. Roland came back to 117 Fort Greene Place in 1902, to a party on his block, and the welcoming arms of his family. His mother threw her arms around him crying, “My son, my son.” His father had spent most of his fortune to clear his son.
(General Molineux and son Roland, sans moustache)
For several days afterward, the block was guarded by police patrols, but only a few press reporters came to the door, the Eagle being one of them. The General said that Roland had been offered several jobs and could also join his brothers back at the Devoe and Reynolds Paint Factory. Reporters also learned that Roland and his wife, who had never really had a relationship of any length, were arguing, and Blanche stormed out of the house, and did not return.
She traveled to South Dakota and filed for divorce in 1903, citing mental cruelty. The state had a thriving industry granting quickie divorces to wealthy people who stayed in the state only as long as it took to get a divorce. The Molineaux/Chesbrough case brought the state national notority and legal scrutiny as to the legality of a “South Dakota Divorce.” After she returned to NY, Blanche married a NY lawyer, and in 1905, tried to launch a vaudeville act under the name Blanche Chesebrough Molineux, When Roland threatened to sue for use of his name, she backed down, and soon disappeared from history.
(Blanche Chesbrough, Mrs. Roland Molineux)
During his incarceration, Roland wrote a book of fiction called “The Room with a Little Door,” set in a prison cell. After his release, he wrote three other novels and a play called “The Man Inside,” about a reformed criminal. It was produced in 1913 by impresario David Belasco and had a short run. He remarried, that year, but his life went downhill from there. Throwing himself into his work, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and was committed to a Babylon, Long Island sanitarium in 1913.
He escaped and was found running around town naked. He was judged insane, due to syphilitic dementia, and was committed to the Kings Park State Hospital, where he died in 1917, at the age of fifty-one. The General, who had devoted the latter part of his life, and his family's fortune, to the defense of his eldest son, had died at the age of 83, two years earlier, in 1915.
Did Roland Molineux kill Henry Barnet and Katherine Adams? Circumstantial evidence and public opinion certainly point in that direction. During the first trial, if the prosecutor had not tainted his case by pulling in Henry Barnet's death, would the jury have been as convinced by the handwriting evidence and the other witnesses? Should they have charged Molineux for the Barnet death first, and then added the Adams death? Would they have been able to, as one led to the other, but the second was only investigated because of the first? Sounds like an episode of Law and Order. We'll never know for sure.
Anyone interested in this case might want to read “The Devil's Gentleman,” by Harold Schechter, a true-crime writer. Some of the biographical information about General Molineux came from a small, excerpted portion of the book found online.