In the wake of the threats made by Roland’s lawyers, the yellow papers were careful not to make direct accusations against him. Still, the blaring, lavishly illustrated stories that dominated the front pages day after day left little doubt in the public’s mind that Molineux continued to be the prime, if not the only, suspect.
Even while piously declaring that it in no way intended to incriminate him, for example, Hearst’s Journal ran a prominent item headlined THE MOLINEUX COINCIDENCE, listing a string of “strange facts” that made Roland “worthy of official attention”:
1. YOUNG MR. MOLINEUX IS A MANUFACTURER WHOSE PLACE OF BUSINESS IS NEWARK, TO WHICH HE GOES DAILY. THE SILVER MATCH HOLDER, THE GIFT THAT ACCOMPANIED THE FATAL BOTTLE MARKED “BROMO-SELTZER,” WAS BOUGHT IN NEWARK.
2. IT HAS BEEN EVIDENT FROM THE FIRST THAT THE POISONER MUST HAVE BEEN A CHEMIST. MR. MOLINEUX IS A CHEMIST.
3. THE DEADLY POISON SENT TO CORNISH WAS CYANIDE OF POTASSIUM. MR. MOLINEUX’S BUSINESS, THE MAKING AND MIXING OF DRY COLORS, NECESSITATED THE KEEPING ON HAND OF MANY CHEMICALS, AMONG THEM CYANIDE OF POTASSIUM.
4. MR. MOLINEUX HAD BEEN A MEMBER OF THE KNICKERBOCKER ATHLETIC CLUB, OF WHICH CORNISH WAS ATHLETIC DIRECTOR. MR. MOLINEUX ADMITTED TO A PERSONAL QUARREL WITH CORNISH, TO WHOM THE POISON WAS SENT.1
In a similar vein, Pulitzer’s World, without invoking Molineux’s name, described him to a tee in a page-one description of the “degenerate suspect” as a man who “worked as a chemist in a Newark factory” resigned from the KAC as “an enemy of Mr. Cornish” belonged to various “organizations devoted to the study of chemistry” and had intimate “knowledge of the properties of many poisons.”
To these familiar facts, the paper added two previously undisclosed details. First, that the suspect was a regular “customer of Tiffany’s”—a significant point, since the silver holder and poison bottle had been enclosed in a robin’s-egg-blue Tiffany’s box. Second, that “among other evil habits tending to destroy all sense of moral responsibility, the suspected person is an opium smoker and has frequented low Mott Street dives.”2
To the tongue-clucking critics of the yellow press, the latter revelation was simply another deplorable example of cheap “reputation-destroying” sensationalism. But it was a mark of the extraordinary detective work performed by Hearst and Pulitzer’s men—who were generally several steps ahead of the police—that it turned out to be true.
That the socialite son of the unimpeachable General Molineux was a habitué of Chinatown opium dens seemed easier to believe after the Herald ran an item headlined KNOWS ’CHUCK’ CONNORS, which revealed that Roland was an intimate of the colorful Bowery character. Interviewed on Tuesday, January 3, Connors—employing the swaggering street dialect that his role demanded—leapt to Roland’s defense and violently denounced the person who had stirred up such trouble for his chum. “Say, the man that mixed that muss for Roland ought to be killed,” he growled. “I haven’t got a better friend in the world than Roland.”3
Well-meant as it may have been, this was not the sort of endorsement likely to create a flattering impression of Roland in the minds of the public. Under pressure from the General—not a man to take slurs against the Molineux name lying down—Bartow Weeks began an aggressive campaign to counter the insinuations of the yellow press.
A key part of Weeks’s strategy was to demonstrate that his client had nothing to hide and was eager to assist the investigation in any way possible. To that end, on the morning of January 3, the two men traveled to Newark, where—after a brief stop at police headquarters for a consultation with Chief Hopper—they proceeded to Hartdegen’s jewelry shop.
Introducing himself and his client to the owner, Weeks asked to see Miss Miller, who was at her desk in the rear office. Leaving Roland in the front of the store, the attorney entered the little back room, where he found the young stenographer working at her books. Apologizing for the intrusion, Weeks questioned her about the man who had purchased the silver holder.
“Would you know him if you saw him again?” asked Weeks when Miss Miller had finished describing the fellow.
Miss Miller thought she would.
“Let me bring a gentleman to you and see if you remember him,” said Weeks, stepping from the office.
Moments later, he returned with Roland, who was swaddled in a long woolen overcoat and wearing a tall hat. He had shaved only hours before and his handsome face was perfectly smooth.
“Is this the gentleman to whom you sold the holder?” asked Weeks.
After studying Roland intently for a moment, Miss Miller shook her head. “No. I have never seen him before.”
“You are positive?” asked Weeks.
“Yes,” she said.
“So this is not the man who bought the holder?”
“No. It was a man of entirely different appearance. He had a red beard and was not like this gentleman at all.”
Thanking her for her help, Weeks and Roland left the store, “well gratified,” as one paper reported, “by this result.”4
To a casual observer, Roland was certainly not behaving like a guilty man. He had not gone into hiding or attempted to flee. He announced his willingness to cooperate with the authorities and did not shy away from facing witnesses, as his meeting with Emma Miller showed.
The police, however, were unimpressed by this behavior. Detective Carey, for example, acknowledged that “flight was the surest sign of guilt.” But he knew from experience that some criminals took a different tack. Instead of running away from the situation, they brazened it out. They stuck “close by the scene of their crime, trusting themselves to the enfolding embrace of their lawyers,” who did all the talking for their clients.5
That was certainly true of Roland. He continued to “appear much in public, unconcerned and gay,” comporting himself with the proud bearing expected of a son of General Edward Leslie Molineux.6 But he was rarely seen anymore without his legal mouthpiece, Bartow Weeks, at his side.
Indeed, the police had little doubt that Roland was their man. Rumors began to abound that an arrest was imminent. Emma Miller’s testimony, however, represented a serious stumbling block. Before he could proceed with a case against Roland, McCluskey felt he had to “reconcile Miss Miller’s description of the purchaser as a red-bearded man with the known fact that Molineux never in his life wore a beard.”7
There were several ways of explaining this disparity. The first, espoused by Detective Carey, was that the stenographer was simply an unreliable witness. Another—the one toward which McCluskey inclined—was that Roland had been wearing a disguise.
Proceeding on the latter assumption, McCluskey immediately dispatched several of his men to Newark with orders to canvas the city’s wig makers. Only a few blocks from Hartdegen’s jewelry shop, they located a store called Zimmerman’s Hair Emporium, whose owner—as The New York Times put it—“related a circumstance of great interest.”8
About ten days before Christmas, according to Mr. Zimmerman, a gentleman had come in and asked for a red beard. Zimmerman gave him a few to try on, but none seemed to fit. The wig dealer offered to order a larger one from Manhattan, but when the customer heard how long it would take to arrive, he thanked the proprietor and left.9
While the police were focusing on Oscar Zimmerman, the sleuth reporters of Hearst’s special “murder squad” were conducting an investigation of their own.10 Before long, they had turned up another, equally intriguing lead in the person of a “hair-goods man” named William A. Fisher. According to the Journal’s page-one account—published with great fanfare under the headline RED BEARD MYSTERY SOLVED!—Fisher owned an establishment, located “within three little blocks of Hartdegen’s,” whose “business was to provide hairpieces and beards to actors, both amateur and professional, along with people who are embarrassed at their capillary deficiencies.”
On the afternoon of December 2, a stranger sporting a well-groomed mustache appeared at Fisher’s store, looking for a wig and fake beard. Fisher showed him various items but the man was “exceptionally hard to please.” He “tried on outfit after outfit and found fault with them all. Some were too burly, others were too close cut. But the thing which condemned them all was that they were not of the color he wanted. He needed hair and beard light enough to conceal his natural darkness of hair and hue, and yet not light enough to attract notice to him.”
Eventually, after several visits, he purchased a wig and matching beard “of natural hair, and so fine in workmanship that, when he donned them in the store, they transformed him entirely, and his own barber would not have known him.” So pleased was the man that, though the price for both pieces came to nearly ten dollars, he declared that he “didn’t mind the cost of it,” since “it made him look perfectly natural.”
Asked by the Journal reporter about the precise color of the beard, Fisher described it as “grayish brown,” though “under the light it took on a tinge bordering upon auburn.” What made his account particularly compelling, however, was the description he gave of the stranger, which matched Roland Molineux’s appearance in every important detail, right down to his cleft chin and upturned nose.
The purchaser of the beard, said Fisher, was a “medium-built man,” perhaps five feet seven inches tall and 150 pounds, who “stood erect.” His complexion was fair, his nose “well-shaped, the end slightly tilted,” and “there was a dimple or dent in his chin.” He wore a dark mustache “of medium size,” the ends “straight and drawn down nicely.” His “forehead was high and the hair dark and thin on top as if he was beginning to lose it.”
It was clear that, unlike so many of Fisher’s customers, the stranger was “not a theatrical man. Invariably an actor announces his profession in making a purchase and always knows exactly what he wants,” Fisher explained. This man “made no reference to the purpose for which he intended the disguise.” Though not the easiest customer to satisfy, he was never less than a perfect gentleman. Everything about him, from his courteous manners to his “custom-made clothes,” bespoke good breeding.
“Do you think you can identify the stranger?” the reporter asked Fisher. “Could you pick him out from any considerable number of men?”
“Yes,” Fisher answered without hesitation. “I could pick him out among a hundred.”
With that, the reporter reached into his coat pocket and removed one of the photographs of Roland with his handlebar mustache that had been printed that week in the Journal. “What do you say about his resemblance to this?” he asked, showing it to Fisher.
Fisher looked at the picture for only a moment before saying, “There’s a remarkable resemblance.” His wife, who worked beside him at the store and claimed to have a clear memory of the stranger, was even more emphatic.
“That is the dead image of the man,” she declared.11
With the discovery of the two Newark wig sellers, the yellow papers lost no time in declaring that—thanks largely to the detective work of their own enterprising reporters—the “last and greatest obstacle which has prevented the police from arresting” the suspect had finally “been removed.”12The “fake-beard theory” in which McCluskey had placed such faith appeared to have been confirmed. According to the papers, it was only a matter of days—perhaps even hours—before the poisoner was in custody.
It wasn’t long, however, before McCluskey’s optimism had turned into “grave disappointment and even sorrow.”13
For reasons he never explained—even when offered “good compensation” by representatives for Pulitzer and Hearst—William Fisher steadfastly refused to go to Manhattan to identify Molineux. With the cooperation of Roland’s attorney, the police therefore made alternate arrangements to have the two men come face-to-face.
On Friday, January 6, Roland and Weeks traveled to Newark, where they met with a detective named Christie. The three spent about twenty minutes working out final details of the plan, which called for Molineux to be on the eastbound platform of the Newark railroad station at 2:00 P.M.Christie then proceeded to Fisher’s shop and persuaded the wig dealer to accompany him to the station.
When the two men arrived, there were about twenty people waiting for the train to New York, including Roland and Weeks. Christie asked Fisher if any of the travelers resembled the man who had purchased the wig and beard from him. Fisher walked from one end of the platform to the other, studying the faces. Then he returned to Christie.
“I don’t recognize anyone here,” he said.
“Try again,” said Christie. Fisher made another round of the platform with equally fruitless results.
Christie then led Fisher over to Molineux. “Ever see this gentleman before?”
“No,” Fisher promptly replied.
“Sure?”
“Quite sure,” said Fisher.
“He wasn’t the gentleman who came into your shop for a red beard and wig?” asked Christie.
“No more than you are,” said Fisher, much to the delight of Roland and Weeks, who exchanged broad smiles.
Fisher was then introduced to Molineux, and the two men spent several minutes chatting away before Roland and his lawyer boarded the 2:07 train back to the city.14
Later that afternoon, Fisher was visited in his shop by a reporter from the Herald. Why, asked the newsman, was Fisher so confident that Molineux was not the man who had purchased the red beard and wig? After all, when Fisher had been shown the photograph of Molineux, he had “detected strong points of resemblance to the customer.”
“I would never attempt to identify a man from a photograph,” Fisher insisted. “Especially not from a newspaper reproduction. Defects are inevitable. But I am certain that the man introduced to me today as Roland Molineux was not the fellow who visited my shop.”
“What did you and Mr. Molineux talk about?” asked the reporter.
“Oh, about the case,” Fisher said vaguely. “I tell you, that man is incapable of such a crime. My business makes me a student of faces and I should be able to judge,” he added—insisting, in effect, that he could tell if a person was guilty simply by looking at him.
“But when you saw the photograph,” the reporter persisted, “you were not quite so positive. Could the fact that Mr. Molineux has since shaved off his mustache deceive even a person like you, who has made such a careful study of facial characteristics?”
“Absolutely not,” said Fisher.15
McCluskey’s hopes of proving that Molineux had worn a disguise to purchase the silver match holder now rested with the wig dealer, Oscar Zimmerman. But when Zimmerman was brought to New York to meet Molineux, he, too, failed to make a positive identification.16
The hunt for the phony red beard having led nowhere, the papers began floating another theory. Perhaps the beard wasn’t fake at all, just as Emma Miller claimed. Perhaps the man who had bought the holder from her wasn’t Molineux in disguise but a red-bearded accomplice.
Conducting a “vigilant search” of the barbershops of Newark, reporters for the World quickly turned up a barber named Valentine Kuhn who recalled having removed the “full reddish” beard from the face of a stranger just a few days before Christmas. Kuhn remembered the customer partly because he seemed “very nervous” and partly because it was highly unusual for a man to want his “beard shaved off in the middle of winter.”17
Within twenty-four hours, sketches of the supposed red-bearded accomplice were plastered all over the papers. But no one came forth to identify him.
The red-bearded man would remain forever a phantom.