On Thursday, February 23—exactly two weeks after his first appearance at the inquest—Harry Cornish finally got his chance to take the witness stand again. This time, in stark contrast to the previous occasion, there was nothing tentative or evasive about his testimony. From the moment he began to speak, it was clear that he had come with only one purpose in mind: to deliver what the newspapers would call a “savage assault” on Roland Molineux.
It was close to eleven before the proceedings got under way. Seated near the front of the room, Cornish could be seen tapping one foot impatiently. Assistant District Attorney Osborne, however, appeared to be in no great hurry to begin. For at least ten minutes, he sat at the lawyers’ table, leisurely reviewing a stack of memoranda. Finally, he turned to the athletic director, and addressing him as discourteously as ever, said, “Now, Cornish, you can take the stand.”
Clutching several sheets of notes in one beefy fist, Cornish strode to the witness chair, then looked at the jury eagerly. Osborne, however, seemed intent on making him wait. Another six or seven minutes elapsed while Osborne held a whispered consultation with his colleague, Assistant DA Maurice Blumenthal. Only then did he turn to the witness and say, “Now, Cornish, can you suggest anything as to a motive in this case by any human being?”
“Yes,” said Cornish. “I think I can.”
For the next thirty minutes or so—pausing only intermittently to consult his notes—Cornish offered a long, somewhat rambling but unrelievedly bitter denunciation of Roland Molineux. So severe were the aspersions he cast on the latter’s moral character that, at several points, General Molineux seemed ready to spring from his chair and set upon his son’s accuser.1
It was only natural, said Cornish, that he would suspect Molineux of having sent him the poison. No one else had ever harbored such intense and inexplicable animosity toward him. Molineux had “tried to take the bread and butter out of my mouth, and a man who would do that would do anything.”2
Besides, Cornish was far from alone in suspecting Roland. “There were fifty men in the club who thought the same thing.” Indeed, it was general knowledge at the Knickerbocker that Roland was a man of questionable character. He was known, for example, to keep a library of “immoral books” in his room. Among these works was Alexander Dumas’s Celebrated Crimes (a collection of nonfiction accounts of notorious criminals, including several legendary poisoners), as well as a medical text meant only “for physicians who study the abnormal” and “not intended for laymen.” Though Cornish had not seen this volume himself, he had heard from others that it was “obscene.” The author’s name, he said, sounded something like “Craft Eby”3—an obvious reference to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis, a pioneering study of sexual aberration that compiles hundreds of case histories of every known perversion, from fetishism to lust-murder, bestiality to necrophilia. Roland was also rumored to have a collection of pornographic pictures—“photographs of an indescribable character”—that he showed to select friends.4
And there were other indications of Roland’s “bad mind.” According to Cornish, it was Molineux who had originated the stories about the supposed “coterie of degenerates” at the club. Molineux had also spread scurrilous rumors about John Adams, claiming, among other things, that Adams and Herbert Ballantine had been “unusually friendly” while classmates at Cornell.5
And why, asked Cornish, had Molineux thought it necessary to hire a lawyer the instant the story broke in the newspapers? “I do not see why anyone who had nothing to fear should do anything of that kind.”
There was also the matter of the tangled ties among Roland, Blanche, and Barnet. Cornish had it on good authority that—contrary to Blanche’s assertions—her relationship with Barnet had been much more than a mere friendship. It was widely known in the club, for example, that Barnet had made remarks about “kissing her,” and that, on at least one occasion, the two had been alone in his room, sharing a bottle of wine.
Roland, moreover, was not nearly as friendly with Barnet as he had claimed. Cornish recounted an incident in the summer of 1898, when Barnet had left for the Atlantic Yacht Club, “ostensibly for a cruise. He came back shortly afterward. A friend said: ‘Thought you were going on a cruise.’ Barnet said: ‘I went to the boat but found that fellow Molineux there, and I would not go.’”
Given the obvious enmity between Molineux and Barnet, it struck Cornish as “very queer” when he heard that Roland “had married Miss Chesebrough.”6
Cornish was allowed to speak uninterruptedly for nearly a half hour. Reporters covering the inquest agreed that he presented a forceful argument—“like a lawyer summing up a case.”7 The moment he was finished, however, James Osborne—employing the same openly hostile manner as before—began to barrage him with questions whose only apparent purpose was to rattle the witness and subvert his testimony.
His voice raised to a near-shout, Osborne treated the witness (as one reporter put it) “exactly as if Cornish were on trial for poisoning Mrs. Adams.” His questions were peppered with sneering remarks: “Oh, come, do you really mean to tell this jury—?” “Do you actually expect this jury to believe—?” “Is that the best explanation you can come up with?” Every small discrepancy and contradiction in Cornish’s testimony was flung back in his face. By the end of the day, it seemed to many observers that Osborne had not merely cross-examined Cornish but “pilloried him.”8
Osborne’s demeanor couldn’t have been more different the following day, when Roland was called back to the witness stand to answer Cornish’s charges. Once again, the assistant district attorney treated Molineux with an almost fawning deference. “Mr. Molineux, I am very sorry to ask you to testify again, but I cannot help it,” he began, then proceeded to preface many of his questions with equally abject apologies: “I am sorry to trouble you, Mr. Molineux,” “Forgive me for bothering you, Mr. Molineux,” and so on. His tone, as one reporter noted, was consistently “helpful, conciliatory, friendly. The one distinct purpose of the examination seemed to be to protect Molineux.”9
When Osborne asked about the “obscene” books Cornish had referred to, for example, Roland admitted that he owned a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Far from treating this admission as a vindication of Cornish’s testimony, however, Osborne brushed the whole business off with a joke. “As a matter of fact,” he said with a laugh, “I believe everyone in the district attorney’s office has a copy. Except me, of course. I understand that Mr. Weeks owns one, too,” he added with a wink at Roland’s attorney. “I heard he bought it on the day it was published.”10
By the time the inquest adjourned for the weekend, the audience was “buzzing and speculating upon the curious difference between Osborne’s treatment” of the two witnesses. That difference was captured in an acerbic little cartoon that ran in Saturday’s Evening Journal. It showed two images of Osborne. In one, he is throttling a miniature Cornish while grimacing angrily at the frightened and helpless little figure clutched in his mitts. In the other, he is dandling a doll-size Molineux on his lap while cooing sweetly to the smiling little man.11
There was one part of Osborne’s examination of Molineux to which the press, while noting, attached little importance. It happened soon after Roland took the stand. After apologizing for troubling him with so trivial a matter, Osborne handed the witness a sheaf of papers and asked if he would mind identifying them for the record. Roland studied them for a moment before confirming that they were, in fact, specimens of his handwriting. Thanking him, Osborne took the papers from his hand and passed them to Coroner Hart.
They were the penmanship samples Roland had produced the previous week in Osborne’s office under the supervision of handwriting expert William Kinsley.12