Walkabout: There goes the neighborhood, Part 3

Roland Molineux was the eldest son of the well respected Civil War general, Edward L. Molineux, who lived at 117 Fort Greene Place, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. At the turn of the 20th century, Roland was a forty-something chemist, working at his father’s paint company, a color specialist, who mixed the chemicals and dyes that went into the pots of the F.W. Devoe and C.T. Reynolds Paint Company. He and his new wife, Blanche Chesebrough, lived in Manhattan, where Roland was a member of the elite Knickerbocker Athletic Club. The athletic director of the Club, Henry Cornish, and Roland did not get along, and in 1897, Roland quit the Knickerbocker Club because they would not fire Henry Cornish. A year later Cornish’s landlady would lie dead of cyanide poisoning, and Roland Molineux would be the police’s prime suspect. The evidence was circumstantial, but an investigation of Blanche Chesebrough Molineux would lead police to another suspicious death, and the two cases would catapult Roland Molineux and his Brooklyn family into a blockbuster trial, tragedy, and the history books.

To catch up on the details so far, please read Tuesday’s Walkabout. The police were eager to charge Roland Molineux for the murder of Mrs. Katherine Adams, poisoned by cyanide of mercury. The press was having a field day with this case, with the Manhattan daily papers, the notorious NY World and NY Daily, vying for the most sensational and lurid details to print. They began to look at Roland’s family, and found some juicy details regarding the new Mrs. Molineux. The former Blanche Chesebrough, an aspiring opera singer with little talent, 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, and fellow club member, 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, 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, traced back and learned that before his sudden death, Henry Barnet had received a package in the mail 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. One of these men murdered both of these people by lacing their medicine with a deadly, fast acting poison. It was either Henry Cornish, or it was Roland Molineux, dragging Cornish into the story in order to frame his enemy. 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, 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 the defense, whose expert witness, a member of the District Attorney’s own investigative team, who would testify that the handwriting was not that of Roland 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 was positive, because he was very familiar with former club member Molineux’s writing, as he had seen it enough on letters of complaint to the club. He also 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 at all, 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, up to that point. The case had also almost bankrupted Roland’s father, General Edward Molineux, who vowed to have an appeal launched, and the real murderer found. Roland Molineux was sentenced to death in the electric chair, and was taken to the death house at Sing Sing prison.

George 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.

Roland Molineux would be acquitted at the second trial, the jury only taking 12 minutes to deliberate. He had been incarcerated for over three years, and 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. The Eagle reported that his mother ran out of the house to throw her arms around him crying, My son, my son. His father had spent most of his fortune to clear his son. 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, where he had been a chemist. 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 would go to South Dakota and file for divorce in 1903, citing mental cruelty. Soon after, she married a NY lawyer, and in 1905, tried to launch a vaudeville act under the name Blanche Chesebrough Molineux, but when Roland threatened to sue for use of his name, she backed down, and soon disappeared from history.

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 would later write three other books and a play, called The Man Inside, about a reformed criminal. It was produced in 1913 by 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 sanitarium in 1913, in Babylon, Long Island. He escaped from there, 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 points in that direction. He had motive. During the first trial, for the murder of Katherine Adams, 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 earlier Barnet case was only investigated because of the later Adams case? The police had not even been investigating the Barnet case. Sounds like an episode of Law and Order. We’ll never know for sure.

Research for this series came from the Brooklyn Eagle, the NY Times, Wikipedia, and jimfisher.edinboro.edu, a blog about forensic science.