Edward Leslie Molineux’s children left few accounts of their upbringing. He appears (as one would expect of so strictly disciplined a man) to have been a stern and exacting but affectionate father—the type who would insist on the precise performance of household chores before allowing his boys to dip into the candy jar; who might bestow a handsome new pocketknife on one of his sons, then dock him a dime if he failed to keep it clean; who saw to it that his children knew the correct way to fold an American flag, administer emergency first aid, and escape from a burning building. He was also a deeply pious man, whose faith had sustained him during many a dark hour in the Civil War and who raised his sons as devout Episcopalians.1 Certainly, his loyalty as a father was unfaltering.
It is one of the great mysteries of parenthood that two children brought up in the identical way can grow up to be radically, if not diametrically, different human beings. And so it was in the Molineux household. The General’s oldest son, Leslie Edward, turned out to be straitlaced to the point of priggishness. A staunch advocate of Prohibition, he never permitted a drop of alcohol to cross his lips. He stopped his car to bury roadkill and swept debris from the road with a special broom he kept in the trunk. Though obsessively punctual, he was once late for an important appointment because, just as he was about to leave the house, “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play on the radio and Leslie felt obliged to remain standing at attention until the anthem stopped. He rarely missed Sunday service at St. Luke’s Church, actively supported the American Red Cross, and enjoyed nothing better than spending an evening poring over the latest issue of National Geographic magazine.2
By contrast, Leslie’s younger brother, Roland—born only four years later and raised in precisely the same way—grew up to be a libertine.
Her name was Mary Melando, though everyone called her Mamie. She grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, a grim, smoky city of oil refineries, industrial plants, and railroad lines—a place, as one writer puts it, “short on greenery and long on fumes.”3 Before quitting to become a cop, her father worked for nearly twenty years at the Bayonne paint factory owned by the C. T. Raynolds Company, and in 1887, Mary went to work there, too.
It was shortly thereafter that she met Roland Molineux, the debonair son of the company’s co-owner, who had just gone to work for his father. Within a few months of his arrival, Roland, twenty-one at the time, had seduced her.
With her small eyes, long nose, and heavy jaw, Mamie was not an especially attractive girl. She did, however, possess the vibrancy—and extreme vulnerability—of youth.
At the time their affair commenced, Mamie Melando had just turned thirteen.
Roland spent six years at the Raynolds factory in Bayonne, producing pigments for his father’s company. Then, in March 1893, two New York City businessmen, Morris Herrmann and Leonard Levi, opened a paint factory in Newark and hired him as superintendent and chief chemist.4
Besides his salary, he was given a two-room apartment on the second floor of the big wooden factory building. Roland proceeded to furnish it in style, with Oriental rugs, a mahogany bed and matching bureau, a leather-upholstered settee and easy chair, and a handsome sideboard.
There was a large, well-equipped chemical lab in the factory, stocked with the various “dry colors” needed to concoct paint: kegs of Prussian blue, Paris green, chrome yellow, English vermilion, Tuscan red, and more, along with arsenic, mercury, and other poisonous substances. Roland also installed a big glass-paneled medicine chest in his apartment and filled it with an assortment of chemicals. He took his work seriously. He kept up with the major trade publications—The Oil and Color Man’s Journal, The Textile Colorist, The Paint, Oil and Drug Reporter—and frequently stayed up late into the night, experimenting with various recipes.5
A number of Raynolds employees followed Roland to the new company. Among them was his lover Mamie Melando, by then all of eighteen. Roland made her a foreman, putting her in charge of a half dozen female workers. She also continued to perform other, more private, services for Roland. Under the euphemistic title of “housekeeper,” she paid regular visits to his living quarters.
Neither Mr. Herrmann nor his partner Mr. Levi knew the slightest thing about paint pigments; they were strictly businessmen with offices on Pearl Street in Manhattan. In his capacity as chief chemist, Roland proved indispensable to the firm—so much so that there was talk of making him a full-fledged partner.
Roland bragged to his acquaintances about his importance to the firm. Still, he doubted that he would ever accept such an offer. After all, as a man who viewed himself as a member of the city’s WASP aristocracy, he had certain standards to maintain.
Seducing a child was one thing; becoming the business partner of Jews was quite another.6