As self-appointed spokesman for the oppressed masses, the multimillionaire William Randolph Hearst never missed an opportunity to attack the high and mighty on behalf of his readers. The official mismanagement of the Adams-Barnet case afforded him a perfect soapbox.
“Imagine a murder committed in a tenement house on the East Side,” he thundered in an editorial published in early February, “and the persons believed to have committed it walking about town for six weeks under the eyes of the police without an arrest! If this had happened among people without influence, every person suspected of knowing anything about it would have been locked up before morning and the ‘third degree’ would have been vigorously applied…. But when two deliberate, premeditated murders have been committed by persons with financial and political pull, the whole machinery of justice has been paralyzed.”
The time had come, Hearst cried, for the authorities to get to the bottom of the whole “loathsome affair.” “Let in the light!” he demanded.1
It was a call that District Attorney Asa Bird Gardiner was finally prepared to heed. Already feeling the heat from a reform movement that would soon drive him and the rest of the Tammany crowd from office, Gardiner had suddenly decided to take matters out of the hands of the police. If McCluskey and his men couldn’t uncover enough evidence to produce an arrest, there was someone else who could: the Manhattan coroner, Edward H. Hart.
The position of coroner no longer exists in New York City, having been replaced in 1915 by the medical examiner’s office. At the time of the Adams-Barnet case, however, it was a centuries-old institution, transported from England during colonial times.
Whenever a suspicious death occurred, it was the coroner’s duty to assemble a jury and hold an inquest to determine if a murder had been committed. Though he could find probable cause for an arrest, he was not, as a rule, expected to identify the killer. In almost all instances, his job was limited to establishing whether a sudden death was an accident, a suicide, or the result of foul play. In the latter event, it was left to the police to investigate the crime, track down the suspects, and take them into custody. Since Captain McCluskey’s detectives had come up short in the present case, however, it would now be up to Coroner Hart to supply the evidence that would finally bring the perpetrator to justice.
It was a responsibility that Hart took seriously. Aside from his sense of professional duty, he had strong personal feelings on the subject. “Murder by poison must stop,” he told reporters. “To me, the crime is cowardly, detestable, abominable.”2 The inquest, he announced, would begin on the first available date on his calendar—Thursday, February 9.
So intense was public fascination with the case that Hart—who generally had trouble finding willing volunteers for his juries—was immediately deluged with applicants. Some hinted that they were in possession of secrets that would “flood with light all the darkness surrounding the case.” Others claimed to have “wonderful powers of discernment” that “would do much toward assisting the ferreting out” of the truth. One man wrote that his “great ability to fathom motives” made human psychology seem “as simple as a problem in geometry to a school mathematics teacher.” Another sought to demonstrate his qualifications by citing scripture: “Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.”3
While Hart attended to the jury selection, his assistants were busy drawing up subpoenas. Though the coroner refused to identify all the witnesses he intended to call, the papers quickly published a partial list, which included Mrs. Adams’s daughter, Florence Rodgers; the physicians who attended the poisoned woman; the letter box men, Heckmann and Koch; Harry Cornish; and, of course, Roland Molineux, who was immediately placed under police surveillance to ensure that he didn’t skip town.4
Speculation ran high about one name not immediately mentioned by Hart—the witness that both the public and the press were most eager to get a look at. It was not until February 6—just three days before the inquest was slated to begin—that the Worldtrumpeted the exciting news: MRS. ROLAND MOLINEUX TO BE CALLED IN POISON CASE.
From her girlhood days, when she first dreamed of becoming a famous singer, Blanche had always hungered for the limelight. Now, she was about to occupy it in a way that she could never have imagined.
Besides demanding an immediate inquest, District Attorney Gardiner made another decision that produced a sensation in the press. Officially, the cause of Henry Barnet’s death remained an open question. Though all the evidence pointed to the poisoned Kutnow’s Powder, Barnet’s physician, Dr. Douglass, continued to insist that the patient had died of diphtheria. With Barnet in the grave, there was only one way to settle the issue.
On Monday, February 6—after receiving a sworn affidavit from undertaker Herbert H. Jackson that no mercury had been used in preparing Barnet’s corpse for burial—Gardiner submitted an application to Justice Gildersleeve of the New York State Supreme Court. His request was granted at once.
On Wednesday, February 8—one day before the scheduled start of the coroner’s inquest—the body of Henry Crossman Barnet would be exhumed from its resting place in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. The corpse would then be dissected and its organs examined for the presence of cyanide of mercury.
“Death’s secret,” as one headline put it, was “to be wrested from the grave.”5