Walkabout: There goes the neighborhood, Part 2

In 1894, a very successful restaurant owner and chef named Hiram S. Thomas bought a house on a quiet stretch of Fort Greene Place, near Hanson Place. He announced the purchase of his new house to a man who was dining in his restaurant, called the Lake House, upstate, 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. Yes, Hiram Thomas, restauranteur to the rich and powerful, was a man of color. 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. 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 teeth and jaw on his left side, exiting through his cheek, leaving him with headaches and pain for the rest of his life. After the war, he 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 at least 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”, the 19th century term for the parallel and uneven bars, 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, and the couple lived in Manhattan. 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, as an adult. 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 portrays 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 of 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 a number of 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. 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, a full year before the death of Mrs. Adams, professing his hatred of Henry Cornish.

A year later, on Christmas Eve of 1898, Henry 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 all 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, because he had received so many letters from him, complaining about Henry Cornish. 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, who hounded him, asking why he hadn’t cooperated with the police, and what did he have to hide? In the meantime, a trace of the silver case led to a jewelery 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 focus their attention in on Roland. He had motive to kill Henry Cornish, the intended victim he hated him from their Knickerbocker Club encounters. 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 secretary of the Club had remembered Roland’s handwriting and his misspelling of the word forty, just like the address written on the paper wrapped around the box containing the silver case and blue bottle containing the Bromo Seltzer. 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.

Next time the conclusion. Anyone interested in this case might want to read The Devil’s Gentleman, by Harold Schechter, a true-crime writer. I did not have time to do so, but the many reviews of this book were all positive, and some of the biographical information about General Molineux came from a small excerpted portion of the book. It looks like a fascinating read, which I plan to do.

Photo: NY State Military Museum. General Molineux, with saber, in front of his house at 117 Fort Greene Place, with veterans of his 159th NY State Guardsmen, at the 15th reunion after the Civil War. His sons Leslie and Cecil are on the steps of the house.