At 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, March 1, 1899, a grand jury indicted Roland Burnham Molineux on the charge of murder in the first degree for killing Mrs. Katherine J. Adams with twenty grains of cyanide of mercury. Roland learned the news from the evening papers, which he read while standing near the door of his cell, where the gaslight filtering in from the corridor was strongest.
If he had succumbed to a moment of despair two nights earlier when the iron-grated door first clanged shut behind him, he had quickly recovered his composure. By the following morning, he seemed his usual unruffled self. He rose early, performed his ablutions, then dressed in the clothing he had neatly laid out on the unused upper bunk. Inmates of the Tombs were allowed to hold on to their money and purchase special meals from the prison restaurant. For thirty cents, Roland was able to breakfast on a chop, bread, butter, and coffee.
Afterward, he took an hour’s exercise with the other prisoners, who strode around and around the second tier of the jail in single file. If Roland—the champion athlete accustomed to working out in the city’s most exclusive gymnasiums—felt uncomfortable among the “shambling, shuffling, heel-dragging” crew of pickpockets, thieves, and murderers, he showed no sign of it.1 By the time Bartow Weeks arrived later that day for a brief consultation, Roland seemed positively chipper. “Brace up, old fellow,” he told his worried-looking lawyer, giving Weeks a companionable slap on the back. “Don’t look so down in the mouth.”2
Now, as he stood reading the evening papers, Roland’s expression remained impassive, though every now and then his finely molded upper lip would curl into a sneer and a soft, derisive snort would issue from his nostrils. There were dozens of articles about him, ranging from hour-by-hour descriptions of his prison routine to accounts of his courtroom appearances. Many were illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, depicting him pacing his cell, making up his cot, or taking his daily exercise under the watchful gaze of his jailers. Some were reported with scrupulous accuracy, down to the precise ingredients of his meals. Others were pure fabrications, such as the sensational (and wholly fictitious) report that “extraordinary precautions” were “being taken by the Warden of the Tombs to prevent Roland Molineux from committing suicide in order to escape the threatened ignominy of death in the electric chair.”3
Editorial opinion was divided along strict class lines on the issue of his arrest and indictment. The yellow papers—each one of which claimed exclusive credit for having fingered Roland from the start—expressed unalloyed satisfaction that this son of wealth and privilege, protected for so long by his father’s political influence and the best legal advice money could buy, was finally behind bars. Papers like the Times, the Tribune, and the Telegraph, on the other hand—whose readership belonged to the same social class as the Molineuxs—attacked the district attorney for failing to pursue “other theories of guilt” and, in particular, for not demanding the arrest of Harry Cornish, who was, after all, the person who gave Mrs. Adams the poison.4
As Roland continued to leaf through the evening papers, he was astonished by some of the stories. There were several articles about young people who had become so “crazed” by all the publicity surrounding his case that they had been driven to commit horrible crimes themselves. On the last day of February, for example, Frederick Norton of Torrington, Connecticut—a twenty-five-year-old employee of the Excelsior Needle Works, married just eight months—delivered a fatal head blow to his young wife with the butt of his rifle before turning the firearm on himself. He was found dead on his bedroom floor, surrounded by “New York newspapers opened at the pages containing accounts of the inquest into Mrs. Adams’s death.” According to his grieving mother, Frederick had “never showed any symptoms of insanity until he began reading about the murder of Kate Adams and Henry Barnet.”5
Equally startling was the case of fourteen-year-old Adeline Harvey of Providence, Rhode Island, who attempted to poison her father by sprinkling creosote over the food in his lunch pail. According to those who knew her, young Adeline “had never shown any sign of degeneracy” until “a misguided interest in the Adams poison mystery temporarily unsettled her mind.”6
These and similar stories about seemingly ordinary people made mad by the frenzied coverage of his case caused Roland to shake his head in wonder. It was as though the public were in the grip of one of those mass manias Charles Mackay had written about in his famous book on extraordinary popular delusions. To be sure, Roland had been an object of intense fascination since the story first broke two months earlier. But with his arrest and incarceration for what the papers were now calling “the most atrocious crime of the century,” a change had occured.7 He had become something more than a mere curiosity, something for which no phrase had as yet been invented: a media celebrity.
Signs of that change were everywhere—in the bouquets of flowers and gushing letters that arrived daily from female admirers; in the stares he drew from other prisoners whenever he stepped out of his cell; in the jostling mob that showed up when he appeared for a magistrate’s hearing, a crowd so large and unruly that the proceedings had to be moved to a different location.8
That hearing had produced one of the most remarkable pieces of journalism so far generated by the case, an article headlined GENERAL MOLINEUX, GENTLEMAN. Written by Hearst’s famed “sob sister,” Annie Laurie (the pen name of chorus-girl-turned-reporter Winifred Black), it was a shamelessly sentimental tribute to Roland’s father, who was treated with unqualified reverence even by those papers most antagonistic to his son.
In the article, Laurie described herself as standing in the corridor beside an “old colored woman,” waiting for the hearing to begin. Suddenly, General Molineux walked by. Drawing “herself up very straight,” the old woman, “eyes shining,” turned to the writer and—speaking in the broad Negro dialect popular in the regionalist literature of the time (though it strikes a modern ear as an Amos ’n’ Andy travesty)—proceeded to deliver a long speech about the noble old soldier.
“Chile,” she began, “we’s been lookin’ at the quality.”
How do I know he’s de quality, de old General? Didn’t you see his haid? Carried it some like a mighty proud yearlin’ colt does. Not a tear in his eye, an’ not a wrinkle in his face, neither. De quality don’ cry where folks can see ’em. An’ when he met dat boy o’ his’n did you see his eye? Jist as proud an’ as lovin’ as if he was meetin’ him at his wedding day, or some big graduatin’ time, where all de folks are gettin’ mighty proud of him, an’ he war rememberin’ back when he was a little teeny baby chile. He don’ b’leeve no truck about dat boy of his’n an’ no poison. He couldn’t believe it if he see him droppin’ de stuff in a glass an’ killin’ a dozen folks. De quality don’ never b’leeve bad things easy.
Quality folks seems to have some kind o’ spirit dat makes ’em keep dey haids up when common folks would be bowed down to de yearth. Laws, chile, money don’ make quality, an’ not blood always, neither. Now, most always de real quality has good blood, but I’se seen mighty po’ trash wid er big name. Dis yer General dat’s passed us, he’d be quality even if he didn’t have nary a cent, an’ if his name war common as turkey tracks.9
If Roland was gratified by this paean to his father, he was less pleased by other articles that appeared in the immediate aftermath of his arrest. One paper published an unsubstantiated rumor that he had fathered an illegitimate child. Another printed details of his scandalous adolescence, when at the tender age of fifteen he had been named as a corespondent in the nasty divorce case involving his neighbor, Mrs. Eleanor Kindberg.10
Most worrisome of all to Roland, however, was a small piece that appeared in Pulitzer’s World under the headline MOLINEUX WANTED TO GET RID OF SOMEONE. The source of the story was a somewhat shady character named Joseph Wriggins, a onetime member of the Newark Police Department who had become a private detective after being dismissed from the force for conduct unbecoming an officer. In September 1898, according to Wriggins, he had heard through an acquaintance that “Molineux had a job for me.” Soon afterward, he had gone to the Morris Herrmann factory, where Roland had explained that “there was a party he wanted to get rid of.”
Wriggins would say no more about the matter, though he did reveal the name of the acquaintance who had contacted him about the “job.” This turned out to be Detective Joseph Farrell, Roland’s old friend on the Newark police force. Farrell’s story, as reported in the World, was that “a girl named Mamie Allen, the daughter of a Bayonne policeman, worked for Molineux for a long time. A short while ago, the Washington Hotel in Newark was raided and Farrell was engaged in the raid. Among the people arrested was Mamie Allen. She gave the name of Mamie Shields at the First Precinct Court. Molineux paid her fine and sent her home. It was then he tried to get Wriggins.”11
The implication of the article was impossible to miss: that Roland had attempted to hire the disgraced former police detective to dispose of a prostitute named Mamie Allen, a.k.a. “Mamie Shields.”
Her real name, of course, was neither Shields nor Allen, as The New York Times was the first to discover. “The young woman whom Roland Burnham Molineux is said to have befriended many times while she was in the employ of the Morris Herrmann company and whose whereabouts he was anxious to learn when he was contemplating hiring ex-detective Wriggins is Mary Milander,” read a small item in the following day’s edition of the Times.12
It was the first, though by no means the last, time that the name (slightly misspelled) of Roland’s former child-mistress, Mary Melando, would appear in the press.
So murky was the light that penetrated his cell from the gas jet in the corridor that even by leaning against the grated door and holding the pages close to his face, reading was a difficult task. After an hour, Roland’s eyes were burning. Tossing aside the last of his newspapers, he lay on his cot and waited for his dinner to arrive. When it came—a meal of roast chicken, potatoes, and applesauce that had cost him fifty cents—he ate it with gusto. Afterward, he smoked a cigar and contemplated the dreary months to come.
Of all the articles he had read that day, perhaps the most disheartening was the one that quoted District Attorney Gardiner, who had announced that the trial could not possibly be held “until the early fall.” That meant, at a minimum, another six or seven months in the Tombs. It was a grim enough prospect, but there was nothing to be done about it. Roland knew what was required of him. He must assume the air of manly stoicism expected of a Molineux. His father, after all, had endured far worse during the years of the war.
There was one hopeful note, at least. According to the same article, one of Gardiner’s underlings had insisted that “when the trial comes, it will be the shortest on record, considering its importance. The District Attorney can put in his entire case in two days.”13
Neither Roland nor anyone else could possibly know that this remark would prove to be one of the least astute predictions in the annals of American jurisprudence.