In her late-life memoirs, composed nearly forty years after the fact, Blanche describes herself as feeling so anxious and confused on the day of her testimony that her state of mind bordered on panic. Written in a breathless, fragmentary style, the passage is meant to convey both the dizzying unreality of the moment and her own tumultuous emotions:
There is a low confused murmur of voices. The wave of sound rises, grows louder. There is so much excitement it is confusing. I am in a daze. The coroner reaches over and pounds loudly with his gavel for silence. There before me is the prosecuting attorney; and there, back of him, a blurred sea of faces. How everybody stares! They sit forward in their seats. How crowded it is, and hot. I can hardly breathe. Mr. Osborne is asking me questions. They seem quite rude and impertinent. I wonder if I am coherent. I really don’t know in what manner I am replying to him. It becomes confusing, tiresome. I see no point to all the questions. To get away—out of that horrible stuffy courtroom, to escape that crowd. God, how inquisitive and curious they are, all those people! Sensation-seekers, watching to see if I will writhe under the dissecting knife of the State Prosecutor’s queries. How long will this inquisition last? What a fantastic, what a grotesque and impossible contretemps! O God! O my God! I am dreaming it—I must be dreaming it!1
It is a vivid (if characteristically overwrought) self-portrait of Blanche as a young woman teetering on the verge of a nervous collapse as she undergoes an agonizing public ordeal.
Eyewitness accounts of that day, however—Tuesday, February 21, 1899—present a very different picture. Those who saw her on the stand were unanimous in their depiction of Blanche as a person of exceptional poise, whose testimony, far from being tongue-tied or stammering, was so smooth and assured that it struck many observers as carefully rehearsed.
She was waiting in an anteroom with Roland and his parents when Bartow Weeks appeared at the doorway. “It is time, Mrs. Molineux,” he said.
Roland offered her his arm. Then, with her in-laws preceding her, she and her husband emerged from the room. The courtroom was only a few steps away, but the hallway was so crammed that a policeman had to clear a pathway through the crowd.
All eyes turned toward her as she entered the courtroom. Her appearance came as a surprise to those whose fantasies had been formed by the suggestive accounts in the yellow press, where she was invariably portrayed as a female of dark and irresistible allure. She was, to begin with, much larger than anyone expected—several inches taller, at five feet ten, than her husband. Though handsomely proportioned, she struck more than one observer as “not especially graceful in carriage or movement.” And with her somewhat long face, sharp nose, large mouth, and glass eye, she was by no means conventionally beautiful.2
Still, she was dressed in high style, in a fashionable black gown and an elegant black cloak lined with black Persian wool. Her black, turban-shaped hat was trimmed with violets. She wore white kid gloves and carried a large sable muff with several tails dangling from the front.3
Taking a seat at the front of the room, she seemed perfectly at ease. When Roland leaned close to whisper something in her ear, she smiled broadly, revealing a set of large, white, perfectly formed teeth. A few moments later, her name was called, and an expectant hush fell over the crowd as she rose from her place.
The image of Blanche as a Circe-like enchantress made for such good copy that some newsmen continued to foster it. According to one reporter, she “swept to the witness chair in a shimmer of silk.” And when James Osborne began to question her, she answered in a “voice as low and musical as a lyre.” Whether Blanche really possessed the vocal sorcery of a Siren is open to doubt. Still, everyone agreed that she spoke in a clear, well-modulated voice that carried the hint of an affected British accent.4
As he had done with her husband, Osborne prefaced his questions with elaborate apologies. It pained him, he said, to pry into such private matters, and he did so only with the greatest reluctance. Indeed, Osborne often seemed genuinely discomfited, resorting to prim circumlocutions that brought audible snickers from the spectators. Early on in his questioning, for example, he wanted to know when Roland “began paying addresses” to Blanche.
“I do not quite know what you mean,” Blanche said with a smile.
Osborne seemed slightly flustered. “I don’t know how to express myself in any other way,” he said.
“Do you mean,” Blanche asked, “when did we become engaged?”
“No, not exactly,” said Osborne. “I mean, when did he begin paying addresses to you that in your mind led you to think that he might propose to you?”
“We were always very good friends from the time we first met,” Blanche said pleasantly.
“Well, when did Mr. Molineux first propose to you?” Osborne asked.
“I think it was on Thanksgiving, 1897.”
“Was Mr. Barnet paying you attentions at that time?” said Osborne.
“Why, we were all very good friends,” Blanche said with a little laugh.
“Yes, I know,” said Osborne. “But was Barnet paying you, let us say, heavy attentions?”
Osborne’s priggish diction brought another burst of laughter from the spectators, while Blanche raised her sable muff to her lips to conceal her own giggles.
“Now, Mrs. Molineux,” said Osborne after a moment. “These questions embarrass me just as much as they do you. Please tell me whether or not, in any sense of the word, Barnet and Molineux were rivals.”
“Never,” Blanche said.5
Throughout her time on the witness stand, Blanche remained utterly self-composed. She spoke easily, without the slightest hesitation, giving replies that completely supported her husband’s testimony. Indeed, as more than one observer noted, her answers so closely matched Roland’s that she appeared to have been coached. She did not falter even when Osborne turned to the most potentially damaging piece of evidence—the emotional note she had written to Barnet during his final illness.
Osborne began by reading the letter aloud: “‘I am distressed to learn of your illness. I arrived home Saturday. I am so exceedingly sorry to know that you have been indisposed. Won’t you let me know when you are able to be about? I want so much to see you. Is it that you do not believe me? If you would but let me prove to you my sincerity. Do not be cross any more and accept, I pray you, my very best wishes. Yours, Blanche.’”
Since this letter had been blazoned on the front pages of virtually every newspaper in the city, its contents came as no surprise to the listeners in the courtroom. Nevertheless, in her memoirs, Blanche claims to have been caught completely off guard by Osborne’s introduction of this document:
And now—Good God!—they are questioning me about Barnet! Mr. Osborne has a letter in his hand. It is the letter I wrote Barney while he was ill. A letter written to Barney—what has that to do with this, this inquiry into the death of the Adams woman? What possible bearing on all this was my friendship with Henry Barnet? Wait! They are hinting at a love affair between myself and the man who had been Roland’s friend! What does it mean? How bewildering it is. I cannot understand.6
Again, Blanche’s melodramatic account is in striking contrast to the official record. Far from being flustered and confused by Osborne’s reading of the letter, she was clearly prepared for it, and parried every question he posed with remarkable finesse.
“What did you mean by writing, ‘Is it that you do not believe me?’” asked Osborne when he finished reciting the letter.
“I had no especial meaning,” came the breezy reply. “It was simply a form of speech.”
“And ‘Don’t be cross with me anymore’?—what did you mean by that?”
“I had written to him last June and he never sent me a reply,” Blanche said in the same offhanded tone. “I did not know whether he was piqued at something or not, but I concluded that there must be something the matter, so I just wrote, ‘Don’t be cross with me.’”
“Then what does this mean?—‘If you would but let me prove my sincerity?’”
“It was just a form of expression, rather awkwardly put,” Blanche said.
“You signed yourself ‘Blanche,’” said Osborne, as though to imply that such informality indicated an unusual degree of intimacy between the two.
“Yes,” Blanche said with a smile. “All three of us—my husband, Barney, and I—called each other by our first names.”
After another twenty minutes of similarly unenlightening testimony, Blanche was dismissed and the proceedings adjourned for the day.
For her performance, Blanche received high praise from Roland, his parents, and his attorneys. The press reviews were decidedly more mixed. Everyone agreed that she had comported herself with admirable aplomb. But there was a general consensus that she had done nothing to help clear up the mystery. If anything, her testimony reinforced the popular perception of her as a dangerously cunning female, capable of twisting any susceptible male—in this case, the public prosecutor, James Osborne—around her little finger.
As one reporter, reflecting the casual misogyny of the era, put it, Mrs. Blanche Molineux had shown herself to be “clever beyond the ordinary run of her sex.”7