The Kutnow brothers were sticklers for record keeping. Whenever a sample tin was sent out, a clerk stamped the mailing date on the letter of request. The date on the letter Elsie Gray had found was “Dec. 23, 1898.”
Carey was puzzled by this. He was sure that the letter he now held in his hands had come from the poisoner; there was no mistaking the handwriting. And yet, Henry Barnet had died on November 10—six full weeks before the date rubber-stamped on the robin’s-egg-blue stationery.
Carey could think of only one explanation: the killer had sent in a request for another sample tin of Kutnow’s Powder more than a month after murdering Barnet. And he had done so under the name of Harry Cornish.
Carey and his partners proceeded directly from the Kutnow brothers’ office to the address on the letter: 1620 Broadway. It turned out to be a small-time operation with the grandiose name of the Commercial Advertising Company. The proprietor was a man named Joseph Koch, who derived much of his income from renting private letter boxes—little pigeonholes built into a wall behind a wooden counter—for fifty cents a month or five dollars a year.
Shown the letter from Kutnow’s, Koch checked his ledger and confirmed that, on December 21, he had rented box Number 10 to a man calling himself Harry Cornish. Though “Cornish” had taken the box for two months, neither Koch nor his clerk had ever seen him again.
Carey, who was hoping to collect as much physical evidence as possible, asked Koch to check box Number 10. To the detective’s disappointment, the box was empty.1
Two days later, on January 14, Koch made a surprising discovery.
While distributing the morning mail, he noticed that two small packages addressed to “H. Cornish” had inadvertently been placed in the wrong letter box—Number 9. One was a manila clasp envelope, the other a small cardboard box. Koch put the packages aside, intending to bring them down to police headquarters later that afternoon, though he didn’t make the trip until the following day, when he turned them over to Captain McCluskey.2
Seated at his desk, McCluskey opened each package in turn. The first, from Von Mohl & Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, contained a small box labeled “Calthos.” Inside were five conical gelatin capsules, along with directions for their use. Studying these instructions, McCluskey saw that the pills were intended as a remedy for “male debility”—impotence. He immediately sent a telegram to the Cincinnati Police Department, asking them to check the records of the Von Mohl Company for any communication from “H. Cornish.”
The second package, postmarked December 23, contained a tin of Kutnow’s Powder—obviously the sample mailed out in response to the request turned up by Elsie Gray.
At McCluskey’s orders, Detective Carey sought out Harry Cornish and brought him down to Koch’s office. Though admittedly nearsighted, Koch had no trouble confirming what the detectives already believed: that Cornish was not the man who had rented letter box Number 10.3
Like Carey, McCluskey wondered why the poisoner had sent for another tin of Kutnow’s Powder more than a month after killing Henry Barnet—and why he had written the request and rented the letter box under Cornish’s name. Perhaps, McCluskey thought, it was all part of a diabolical plot to frame Cornish for Barnet’s murder if the attempt on Cornish’s own life failed. According to McCluskey’s theory, the poisoner “probably thought that, if Cornish didn’t take the deadly bromo-seltzer, the letter-box scheme would eventually become public and show that Cornish had written for the samples sent to Barnet. That would connect Cornish to Barnet’s death. And the next best thing to killing an enemy is to have him accused of murder.”4
Upon receipt of McCluskey’s telegram, Superintendent Detsch of the Cincinnati Police Department dispatched a detective named Herman Witte to the offices of Von Mohl Company at 506 Lincoln’s Inn Place. Witte spoke to the manager, Joseph Brewster, who referred him to a clerk named C. B. Pugh.
Within the hour, Pugh, searching through the company files, turned up a letter from “H. Cornish” requesting the free “5 day trial” offered in the company’s newspaper ads. Witte took the letter with him and, that afternoon, mailed it special delivery to Captain McCluskey.5
It arrived late the following afternoon, Tuesday, January 17. Seated at his desk, the “boss-sleuth” examined the letter. McCluskey was no graphologist, but to his eyes, the letter had clearly been inscribed by the same hand that had addressed the lethal package to the real Harry Cornish. And like the request that Elsie Gray had found among the files of the Kutnows’ firm, it was written on a robin’s-egg-blue sheet embossed with a little crest of three interlinked silver crescents—the kind of ostentatiously elegant stationery that was meant to proclaim the writer’s superior taste and that, to a man like “Chesty” McCluskey, seemed positively effeminate.6