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For a free spirit like Blanche with her bottomless appetite for “gaiety and glamor,” the circumstances in which she now found herself were almost unbearably grim. Instead of the life she had envisioned when she finally accepted Roland’s proposal—the dinners at Delmonico’s, the evenings at the opera, the parties with “people of brilliance and clever ability”—she was trapped within the confines of her in-laws’ “staid and dull” Brooklyn home, whose heavy mid-Victorian furnishings and somber atmosphere made it feel less like a refuge than a mausoleum.¹

To keep the family safe from the prying eyes of reporters and curiosity seekers, the General saw to it that the draperies were drawn at all times. The wintry daylight never penetrated the house. The only illumination came from the elaborate, old-fashioned ceiling fixtures and the glowing coals in the black-onyx fireplaces.²

Intensifying the gloom of her surroundings was the dark mood of the people she shared them with. To be sure, the General did his best to maintain a cheerful demeanor. But at times, Blanche would see him sitting alone, looking heartsore and haggard—an old, careworn man. As for Roland—who now spent much of his time huddling with his attorneys—his assurances that the whole absurd affair would soon be resolved struck her as increasingly forced and brittle.³

Newspapers claimed that, after reading accounts of the investigation, Blanche had suffered a complete nervous collapse and was in such dire condition that her family feared for a “fatal termination of her illness.”⁴ But like so much of what passed for truth in the yellow press, this report was wildly exaggerated. In point of fact, Blanche had only the sketchiest idea of what was happening beyond Fort Greene Place, since at the General’s orders, newspapers were forbidden in the house. She had no way of knowing that, thanks to the ballyhoo whipped up by Pulitzer and Hearst, the Molineux case had already become the biggest crime story in years. Or that she herself had become the focus of intense—and decidedly prurient—fascination.

That the yellow papers intended to exploit the Molineux case for every last bit of entertainment value was made vividly clear in their splashy Sunday supplements, which—in addition to their usual mix of lurid adventure tales (WHITE WOMAN AMONG THE CANNIBALS!), pseudoscientific essays (ARE SEA SERPENTS REAL?), believe-it-or-not oddities (HE HICCOUGHED FOR FIVE DAYS!), mildly risqué features (PRETTY ANNETTE’S GAUZY SILK BATHING SUITS), and full-color comics—began running regular articles related to the Great Poison Mystery.⁵

In early January, for example, the World’s Sunday supplement featured a lengthy piece titled HISTORICAL POISONERS AND HOW THEY HAVE SLAIN THE VICTIMS OF THEIR HATE AND PASSION. In graphic and gruesome detail, the article recounted the “horrible crimes” of illustrious Old World poisoners, from Caligula to Louis XIV. The main focus of the piece, however, was Lucrezia Borgia, whose seductively posed portrait—reproduced from a painting by German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach—occupied the center of the page. So great was her notoriety, the article noted, that her very name had become a byword for female treachery. “Thus,” said the writer, “we hear that ‘Mrs. Botkin is a Borgia,’ or that ‘there may be a Lucrezia Borgia in the Adams-Cornish mystery.’”⁶

Hearst’s Journal, meanwhile, countered with a remarkable Sunday feature titled OLD SLEUTH’S DAUGHTER UNRAVELS THE MYSTERY OF NEW YORK’S GREAT POISON SECRET. A thinly fictionalized account of the Adams-Barnet affair, this story was written by one Rena I. Halsey, daughter of a popular dime novelist named Harlan P. Halsey, whose most famous creation was a detective known as “Old Sleuth.” The elder Halsey having died the previous year, Hearst had hired the daughter to “take up the facts as known to the public and work out a solution to the mystery.”

In the resulting story, “Old Sleuth” encounters barely disguised versions of Roland B. Molineux, Blanche Chesebrough, Henry Barnet, Harry Cornish, and Katherine Adams (here renamed Reginald B. Martineau, Bertha Chesney, Robert Bennett, Harold Cornell, and Mrs. Albro). Inevitably, the ace detective cracks the case, though readers expecting anything like a plausible solution to the actual crime were in for a disappointment, since the killer in Miss Halsey’s tale turns out to be a wholly fictitious creation named Florence Applegate—an aging beauty with “strange, weird” eyes who murders out of jealousy.⁷

Hearst’s recasting of the Adams-Barnet case as a cheesy whodunit was a pioneering instance of a phenomenon that would define the coming century, when the boundary between news and entertainment became increasingly blurred. On another day, the Journalran a feature on the death of Henry Barnet in the form of a “graphic story”: an eight-panel comic strip illustrating the fate of the “first victim of the poisoner” from his drinking of the Kutnow Powder to his final illness.⁸

Not to be outdone, Pulitzer’s paper presented a summary of the case in the form of a stage play, complete with a “Cast of Characters” a synopsis of the “Great Double Poisoning Drama” divided into acts and scenes (“ACT I—Death of Barnet. SCENE I—Barnet’s apartment in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Barnet and Dr. Beaman Douglass in consultation”); and the kind of cliff-hanging conclusion that, a few decades later, would become a staple of Saturday matinee movie serials (“ACT IV—The Audience Waits for the Arrest. But of whom? And when, if ever? What dramatist’s imagination has set the stage for such a play as this?”)⁹

In keeping with the increasingly melodramatic coverage of the story, Blanche was first introduced to the public in the stock role of the Dark Lady, a mysterious seductress whose entrance was heralded with teasing hints and (quite literal) foreshadowings.

ENTER THE INEVITABLE WOMAN, announced the Journal on January 6, reporting the discovery of a “mysterious letter, signed with a woman’s first name” that had been “sent to Henry Barnet during the illness that preceded his death.”¹⁰

WHO IS BLANCHE? blared the paper on the following day, publicly identifying for the first time the signature on the “affectionate” missive that Barnet had supposedly “read and reread…up to the very time of his death.”¹¹

On that same day, the World featured a lurid, attention-grabbing drawing on its front page. The illustration shows a gloved hand labeled “Police” pulling back a dark curtain to expose a bottle of cyanide of mercury. In the glaring light, the bottle casts the shadow of a young woman’s profile. The caption reads: “A Qualitative Analysis.”

For anyone following the Adams-Barnet case—which, by that point, would have been much of the city’s population—the meaning of this cartoon was unmistakable. As the police investigation brought more facts to light, it was increasingly clear that behind the death of Henry Barnet loomed a beautiful woman.

The face of that shadowy figure was first revealed to the public a few days later. FIRST PUBLISHED PORTRAIT OF MRS. ROLAND B. MOLINEUX, trumpeted a headline in the World. The accompanying picture—a handsome pen-and-ink sketch apparently copied from a group photograph of a choral society Blanche once belonged to—showed a smiling young woman with the radiant all-American charm of one of Charles Dana Gibson’s idealized beauties.

By then, reporters had not only identified the mysterious sender of the Barnet letter as Roland Molineux’s wife but had dug up a wealth of information on the former Blanche Chesebrough. LIFE OF MRS. MOLINEUX READS LIKE A ROMANCE, proclaimed a lengthy article in the World, which offered a surprisingly detailed—if not wholly accurate—account of her life, from her peripatetic childhood through her early musical studies to her marriage to Roland Molineux. The picture that emerged in the paper was of a young woman whose beauty, grace, and exceptional singing talent made her irresistibly alluring to both Roland and Henry Barnet, turning the two men into bitter rivals for her affection. “Molineux is said by his friends to be of a very jealous disposition,” the paper reported, “and it was not long before he and Barnet became engaged in a quarrel about the handsome girl. Their mutual dislike grew into hatred and it soon became known among their friends that they were avowed enemies on account of Miss Chesebrough.”¹²

Immured in the Molineuxs’ fortress-like home, where (as she writes in her memoirs) “the news sheets were not even unfolded in my presence,”¹³ Blanche was unaware of her new notoriety. Up until that point, the Adams-Barnet case already had the makings of a major media sensation: scandalous doings in the upper-crust world of Manhattan’s elite athletic clubs; the scapegrace son of a Civil War hero; deadly poisons sent through the mail; dark hints of drugs and strange disguises and unspecified “degeneracy.”

Now, with the introduction of a romantic triangle involving a beautiful young woman and her two vying lovers, the last lip-smacking ingredient was added to the mix: a generous dollop of sexual titillation.