As Blanche observed during her compulsory visits to the Tombs, Roland had adapted to his life behind bars with a tight-lipped stoicism, comporting himself in a manner that drew admiring words even from his persecutors in the yellow press. “Guilty or innocent, Roland Molineux is a fellow of spirit,” the Journal conceded. “There is plenty of backbone about this alleged poisoner.”1
Despite his precipitous comedown from pampered clubman to prison inmate, he showed no trace of self-pity. During the nine months he spent in the Tombs while awaiting the start of his trial, he kept to a meticulous routine. He paid minute attention to his appearance, sponge-bathing twice a day, shaving each morning, neatly combing his hair. He brushed his clothes and shined his shoes “as if he were his own valet.”2 He never failed to wear his necktie. By the time the guard came around with his breakfast, Roland looked, as one newspaper put it, “as if he were about to visit his club.”3
He always ate his catered meals with relish. Afterward, he would smoke a big cigar—partly to conceal the stink from the chamber pot.
To supplement his daily walks around the second tier, he would often strip off his coat and do whatever calisthenics he could manage in the constricted space of his cell. At other times, he would engage in a bout of shadowboxing.
Each afternoon, he received a visit from his father, who—despite the universal veneration in which he was held—was forced, like everyone else, to undergo the indignity of a search and to relinquish his pocketknife for the duration of his stay.4 Other family members came, too, particularly Roland’s younger brother, Cecil—who on one occasion was made to endure what the papers described as a “vicarious experience of his brother’s plight.” Receiving permission to see Roland in his cell (instead of the usual visitor’s room), Cecil found himself locked behind bars for more than an hour while his brother went off to consult with his lawyers and evidently forgot all about his younger sibling.5
The rest of Roland’s time was taken up with reading and writing. He was inundated with letters from what the papers referred to as the “morbid type” of woman—what would be known today as a “killer groupie.” Not content with merely writing to the dashing alleged poisoner, a number of these women—some bearing gifts of flowers or popular novels—showed up at the Tombs and “importuned the Warden for just one glimpse of Molineux.”6
Though Roland was not permitted to receive gifts from these female titillation seekers, he was kept well stocked with reading matter by his father. And, of course, he was able to purchase a half dozen different newspapers each day, which he pored over for hours. As a result, he would have been acutely aware of the story that dominated the headlines during the third week of March 1899: the death of Martha Place, the first woman ever executed in the electric chair.
Raised on a hardscrabble farm in rural New Jersey, Martha, whose maiden name was Garretson, knew nothing but endless drudgery and severe emotional deprivation during her early years. To escape the miseries of her home life, she wed a fellow named Wesley Savacool, but they fought bitterly from the start and she soon abandoned him, finding work as a seamstress in a New Brunswick sweatshop. In 1894, at the age of forty, she answered a classified ad placed by an insurance adjuster named William Place—a widower with a twelve-year-old daughter named Ida—who was looking for a housekeeper. Mrs. Savacool, as Martha was then known, was hired on the spot.
Accounts of what happened next vary. According to some reports, the miserly Place eventually proposed marriage so that he could keep Martha as a housekeeper without paying her salary. Others claim that it was Martha who coerced William into marriage by threatening to tell his friends that he had seduced her.7
Whatever the case, one thing is certain. In 1895, the two were married; whereupon Martha Place very quickly transformed into a wicked stepmother straight out of a Grimm brothers’ story. Venting her resentment of her husband’s emotional and financial stinginess on his beloved daughter, Martha began to mercilessly persecute the now teenaged girl.
The culminating horror occurred on Monday, February 7, 1898. Before William left for work that morning, Martha demanded a twenty-dollar household allowance. Place refused.
“I will make this cost you dearly,” Martha hissed.
Ignoring the threat, Place kissed his daughter and departed. He was hardly out the door when Martha turned on the girl, viciously berating her. Ida fled upstairs to her bedroom. A short time later, at approximately 8:15 A.M., the “warped, vengeful” woman (as the papers described her) went down to the basement where her husband kept a photographic darkroom. Filling a jar with acid, she carried it up to Ida’s bedroom, threw open the door, and hurled the contents into the girl’s eyes, blinding her. Then—as the Journalreported—“with bony hands which her long years of hard work had made strong and sinewy, she clutched the poor child by the throat and relentlessly strangled the life out of her.”8
Martha spent the remainder of the day at home. A visitor who arrived that afternoon found her seated calmly in the parlor.
Hours later, at around 6:30 P.M., William returned from work. As he made his way down the hallway to the kitchen, a closet door flew open. Out burst Martha, wielding an ax. She took a vicious swipe at William, who ducked reflexively. The blade buried itself in the woodwork. As William made for the door, Martha yanked the ax free, chased after her husband, and struck him in the arm, opening a savage gash. Bleeding profusely, he staggered into the street, shouting for help.
Several policemen came on the run. While William was taken to the hospital, they searched the house. They found the dead, disfigured girl in bed, clad only in her bloomers. Martha had retreated to her own bedroom, where she had turned on the gas jets in a halfhearted suicide attempt. She was tried and—despite the efforts of her lawyers to portray her as insane—found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair, the first woman so condemned.
That grim landmark took place on Monday, March 20, 1899, after Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute the sentence, explaining—in a perverse endorsement of equal rights—that “in the commission of a crime, a woman is deserving of the same blame as a man in a similar case.”9For days afterward, the newspapers were full of firsthand accounts of Mrs. Place’s death, a number of them accompanied by gruesome illustrations showing her strapped into the electric chair at Sing Sing.10 In the typically hypocritical way of the sensationalistic press, even those papers presumably opposed to her execution found ways to exploit it. While sanctimoniously decrying the state-sanctioned killing of female criminals as a relic of barbarism, for example, Hearst’s Journalmanaged to titillate its readers by running an illustrated strip headlined HOW MEN HAVE PUT WOMEN TO DEATH SINCE HISTORY BEGAN, each panel of which depicting a different method of execution, from burning at the stake to beheading to hanging.11 Hearst knew perfectly well that whatever their avowed attitudes toward capital punishment, giving his readers graphic accounts of a juicy execution was a surefire way to sell papers.
Certainly, it was a story that held great interest for Roland Molineux, whose lawyers were already working desperately to ensure that their client did not suffer the same fate.