In public, Captain McCluskey stuck to the story he had given the General. The police weren’t after Roland. “The amateur detectives of certain newspapers are not my detectives,” he told reporters on Tuesday afternoon. “Their suspects are not my suspects. If they know who the culprit is, they know more than I do. If I knew who he was, I’d arrest him.”
The situation was different behind the scenes. In point of fact, Roland was still very much a person of interest to the police. Without solid evidence in hand, however, they weren’t about to make an arrest. Though the press had begun to complain about McCluskey’s performance—POLICE MAKING POOR PROGRESS IN THE ADAMS MURDER CASE, chided a headline in the New York Sun1—his men had, in fact, made significant headway. Indeed, the detectives who had been conferring with McCluskey at the time of the General’s early-morning visit—Arthur Carey and his partner, John Herlihy—were there to update him about a major discovery.
They had not only identified the store where the silver match holder had been purchased but had located the person who sold it.
It was the little oval smudge of mucilage—the vestige of the label glued onto the bottom of the holder—that proved to be the decisive clue. Checking the three jewelry shops in the metropolitan vicinity, the detectives had discovered that only one of the stores—C. J. Hartdegen of Newark—used stickers of that precise shape and dimension as price tags.
At first, no one at the store could recall when the holder had been sold. The owner himself, Charles Hartdegen, believed that someone had bought it months earlier. One of his clerks, however, seemed sure that he had seen it in the display window as recently as two weeks before.
Combing through the records, Carey came upon an entry for an item listed as a silver toothpick holder, priced at $5.75, which had been sold on December 21—a week before the death of Mrs. Adams and two days before the poison package was mailed at the general post office.2 The sale had been made by Miss Emma Miller, a recently hired stenographer who in the rush before Christmas had helped out at the counter.3
Miss Miller having already left work for the day, Carey and Herlihy took the trolley to her home. She turned out to be a slender young woman, apparently in her early twenties, with sharp features and a correspondingly curt manner.
When Carey showed her the holder, she recognized it at once, clearly recalling the circumstances of its sale. It had been purchased by a well-dressed man, perhaps in his early thirties, of medium build and height, who arrived late in the afternoon when the store was crowded with holiday shoppers. Despite his gentlemanly appearance, he had elbowed aside several other customers in his haste to reach the sales counter.
He was looking, he said, for an item that would hold a bottle of bromo-seltzer. At first, she could think of nothing suitable. Then she remembered the silver holder in the display case. When she showed it to the gentleman and told him the price, he immediately said that he would take it.
Having sat on a shelf for nearly two years, the holder was visibly tarnished, but when Miss Miller offered to polish it, the gentleman waved off the suggestion and told her to wrap it up as it was. She did as requested, and the transaction was quickly completed. The fellow then turned on his heel and hurried away. Altogether, he had been in the store for only a few minutes.
“Can you remember anything else about this gentleman?” Detective Carey asked Miss Miller.
“I believe he had a beard,” she replied. “A reddish beard.”4
The news that the suspect in the poisoning case sported a reddish beard was quickly blazed across the front pages. Roland’s attorney, Bartow Weeks, immediately pounced on it as further evidence of his client’s innocence. “Mr. Molineux is clean shaven,” he proclaimed to reporters, adding with a chortle: “I have a yellow beard—some might call it reddish. Perhaps the police should be looking for me.”5
It was certainly true that Roland was clean shaven. But that hadn’t been the case before Christmas, when he still wore the handlebar mustache he had grown the previous spring. The public got a good look at this impressive facial adornment when the Journalmanaged to obtain a series of photographic portraits of the mustachioed Molineux and plastered them across the top of page one.6
Though Emma Miller insisted that “she could not have mistaken a mustache for a beard,” Detective Carey knew from long experience that “witnesses frequently transpose the two.”7 To test her reliability as an observer, he visited her again, this time at Hartdegen’s.
There were several shoppers in the store when Carey arrived, and he waited until they were gone before speaking to Miss Miller. He began by asking her “about the other sales she had made on December 21.” Not only was she “unable to recall the face of any other customer she had waited on,” she could “not even give accurate descriptions of the people who were in the store” when Carey first entered.8
Even more doubtful now about Emma Miller’s characterization of the purchaser of the silver holder as a red-bearded man, Carey began looking for other witnesses who might have seen the suspect enter or leave the store on December 21. He knew, of course, that “Christmas shopping was at its height on that day.” Reasoning that the Newark Police Department might have assigned “extra men to the shopping district,” Carey proceeded to headquarters. Asking around, he was pointed to a detective named Joseph Farrell.
As it turned out, Farrell had an interesting tale to tell.
On the afternoon of December 21, he had just come from a meeting with the mayor, who had asked him to perform a little errand in Irvington. Farrell was waiting for the trolley when Roland Molineux, dressed in a mackintosh and black derby hat, came striding up Market Street. Farrell—who had done some amateur boxing in his younger days—was an old acquaintance of Molineux’s, a longtime fan of prizefighting. Though seemingly in a great hurry, Roland paused to exchange greetings with the detective.
“Did he have a beard?” Carey asked Farrell.
Farrell shook his head.
The two men had chatted only briefly. Roland, who was on his way back to the factory, made a point of telling Farrell that he had just come from a restaurant, where he’d dined with his boss, Morris Herrmann.
Farrell, of course, had no reason to doubt that story, though Herrmann himself would later testify that no such dinner took place on that date. The detective had noticed one thing, however.
When Carey asked if he recalled which direction Roland had been coming from, Farrell said, “Yes. He was walking up from the Hartdegen store.”9