January 28 was a grim anniversary—one month to the day since Katherine Adams had swallowed the cyanide-laced bromo-seltzer and, in the vivid phrase of Harry Cornish, dropped to the floor “like six foot of chain.”1 In the intervening weeks, McCluskey and his men had come under increasingly furious fire for their failure to make an arrest. Now, with the discovery of the letters mailed to the various patent-medicine concerns, a breakthrough appeared to be imminent. As C. B. Pugh—the clerk for Von Mohl Company—remarked to a reporter, “If the New York officials will but locate the man who rented the letter boxes at No. 1620 Broadway under the name of Cornish and at No. 257 West Forty-second Street under Barnet’s name, they will have no trouble in clearing up the mystery.”2
Captain McCluskey, of course—along with Arthur Carey and every other member of the detective bureau—had no doubt who that man was. But they required confirmation. Their hopes were now pinned on the two letter box men, Koch and Heckmann. Both had viewed the suspect up close and could presumably identify him with little trouble. Indeed, Heckmann had assured a reporter that he could pick the fake Mr. Barnet “out of a million.”3
Once again, however, the police were in for a painful disappointment. After being publicly identified as a key witness in the case, Koch became afraid that the murderer might try to eliminate him and began to carry a revolver. Soon afterward—pleading poor eyesight—he told McCluskey that he would be unable to identify the mysterious “Mr. Barnet.”4
As for Heckmann, he proved to be a highly problematic witness. Taken to a midtown hotel where Roland and his lawyers had gone for a meeting, Heckmann failed to make a positive identification, claiming that he had not been able to get a good enough look at Molineux. A few days later, a reporter for the World named Buchignani brought Heckmann to Roland’s workplace in Newark and contrived a face-to-face confrontation between the two men.
“That’s Mr. Barnet, all right,” Heckmann exclaimed afterward. “He’s my customer.”
It soon became clear, however, that Heckmann expected to receive a substantial payment for his testimony. When Pulitzer’s representatives balked, Heckmann began to waffle. In the end, he refused to cooperate, informing Buchignani that he “would not swear to his identification of Molineux.”5
HECKMANN THE LAST ’IDENTIFIER’ TO FAIL, read a headline in the next morning’s World. The story—which focused on the two letter box men as well as Emma Miller, the jewelry shop clerk who continued to stick to her “red-bearded man” story—began with a lead that accurately conveyed the disheartened mood of the authorities: “Hope of an identification that will ever be of any value is rapidly fading away. In fact, so far as it depends on any of the persons known to have seen the false Barnet and Cornish and the purchaser of the silver holder, it is already hopeless.”6
By then—as if matters weren’t already complicated enough—another forged letter had turned up.
Written on the familiar robin’s-egg-blue, crescent-embossed stationery, it, too, had been sent to a drug firm, Frederick Stearns & Company of Detroit. This time, however, it was not an order for an impotence cure or a sex manual. Rather, it was a note requesting information about a former employee of the firm, a man named Alvin A. Harpster.
A portly, affable fellow with a pronounced fondness for drink, Harpster had worked for Frederick Stearns & Company in the early 1890s. Though hardly an athlete himself, he was an avid sports fan who was eventually fired from his job for being “more interested in the prize fights than the drug business,” as his employer put it.7 Taking a position as clerk in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, he became friends with Harry Cornish, who, as it happened, was himself an acquaintance of Harpster’s former boss, Frederick Stearns. In January 1898, Harpster had left the athletic club and gone to work as a salesman for the Ballantine Brewery.
The letter mailed to the Stearns company read: “Gentlemen—Mr. A. A. Harpster has applied to me for a position as collector. He did not refer to you but mentioned having been in your employ. A line from you would be considered confidential and greatly appreciated.” It was signed “Very truly yours, H. C. Cornish” and gave as a return address “1620 Broadway, NYC.”
Everything about this letter struck Frederick Stearns as peculiar, beginning with the stationery itself, which seemed far too pretentious for the bluff and down-to-earth athletic director. Since Stearns knew Cornish personally, he was also puzzled by the stiffly formal tone. And why, Stearns wondered, would Cornish be asking for a letter of recommendation? Harpster had already worked at the Knickerbocker Club and his employment record was well known to his friend Cornish.
When Stearns compared the letter with other communications he had received from Harry Cornish, he saw right away that the handwriting was completely different.
Within a day of its discovery in the company files, the “Harpster letter,” as it came to be known, was in the possession of Captain McCluskey, who—like Frederick Stearns—believed that it had been mailed by the poisoner for the express purpose of introducing Harpster’s name into the case and thus “casting suspicion on an innocent man.”8 It was clear to McCluskey that the fat, easygoing beer salesman had nothing whatsoever to do with the killings. That the authorities never regarded Harpster as a serious suspect, however, did not prevent the yellow papers from plastering his name across the front pages in the most insinuating way—a situation that persisted until Harpster sued Pulitzer for libel and settled for an undisclosed sum.9
Harpster wasn’t the only one to find himself in the media spotlight in the waning days of January 1899. Felix Gallagher—another former member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and a close friend of Roland Molineux’s—fell under suspicion after a bartender named Charley White overheard him bad-mouthing Harry Cornish in Jim Wakeley’s saloon. And then there was the usual assortment of highly colorful cranks: the mind reader who, in a trance, saw the suspect; the “demented man” from Baltimore who confessed to the murders; the “well-dressed woman” who told police of a sinister “secret society” whose members bore a grudge against Cornish; the “erratic” young fellow named William Koutnik, who claimed that, on the day before Christmas, he had been accosted by a “strange man” on Madison Avenue who asked him to mail a package to Harry Cornish.10
Most titillating of all were the allegations by the World, which announced that it had unearthed “a startling, almost incredible scandal” involving a group of homosexuals—or, as the paper put it, a “coterie of vicious degenerates”—within the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Though “supposedly of good social standing,” these men existed “in a condition of moral degeneracy so horrible that it can hardly be referred to.” For years, “under cover of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club,” they had “carried on their vile practices,” creating “a noxious state of affairs unparalleled in the history of this city.” Fearing that the “terrible truth” was about to be exposed by Henry Barnet and Harry Cornish, they had conspired to poison both men.11
All of these claims, accusations, and innuendos, however, proved to be mere sideshows in what was already the greatest media circus of the day. In the end, the police and the press invariably ended up where they began. As the Herald put it: “One peculiarity about the Adams case and the Henry C. Barnet case also is that, no matter in what direction newly discovered clews lead, they almost always eventually turn toward a person whose name has been connected with the case very prominently for several weeks.”
Once again, the Herald judiciously refrained from identifying that person. In the very next paragraph, however, the article noted that the paper had “engaged a handwriting expert of repute to compare specimens of handwriting in its possession with the writing on the poison package sent to Cornish.” After completing his analysis, the expert announced that he “had found much similarity between the writing on the various specimens and the writing of Roland B. Molineux.”12