For a while, events seemed to turn in Roland’s favor.
On the last day of March, Bartow Weeks, appearing in the criminal branch of the New York City Supreme Court, moved to quash the indictment against his client. Arguing before a judge with the peculiarly apt name of Pardon C. Williams, Weeks maintained that the evidence presented to the grand jury had been “flimsy and inadequate.”
“The sole facts provided by the testimony are these,” he said with more than a hint of scorn in his voice. “First, the defendant had a slight difference over club affairs with Cornish a year before the crime charged. And second, three expert witnesses, without giving any reason for their belief and without being cross-examined, declared their opinion that the defendant wrote the superscription upon the package alleged to have contained the poison.
“Is it possible,” he exclaimed, “that the life of a human being shall be put in jeopardy and that he shall be subjected to the great expense, terrible disgrace and ignominy of a trial for his life upon such evidence? Would any court allow a jury to bring in a verdict upon such evidence?”1
Weeks’s argument fell on sympathetic ears. Two weeks later, Justice Williams granted Weeks’s motion “on the ground that improper evidence had been submitted to the Grand Jury.”2
Specifically, Williams ruled that, since the crime in question was the murder of Mrs. Adams, the introduction of evidence related to the death of Henry Barnet had been unjustified. Williams therefore set aside the indictment and ordered the case resubmitted to a new grand jury.
Though Roland would remain in custody, he received the news with expressions of the “heartiest satisfaction.” At the Molineux home in Brooklyn, the reaction was much the same. Informed of Williams’s decision by a reporter for the World, Roland’s mother “clapped her hands to her bosom” and tearfully thanked heaven. As for the General, the strain of the preceding few months had finally taken its toll on the old soldier, who was bedridden with one of the incapacitating headaches he had suffered since the war.
After hearing that his son’s indictment had been dismissed, however, he was soon back on his feet. The news, he declared, was “the best medicine he could have had.”3
At the very time that Justice Williams was handing down his decision, another, even more dramatic development occurred in the case. Wholly unexpected, it seemed at first like nothing less than a godsend for Roland.
On Monday, April 10, 1899, newspapers reported that in response to a formal request by his counterpart in Tennessee, Governor Roosevelt had issued a warrant for the arrest and extradition of a man named Percy E. Raymond, a petty thief and con man who had escaped from the Tennessee Penitentiary in April 1893 while serving two years at hard labor for larceny. According to the stories, Raymond had been aided by a young woman named Blanche M. Graham, the daughter of a prominent Southern politician, who had allowed herself to be seduced by the honey-tongued deceiver. After his arrest, she had pawned her jewelry and smuggled the cash to her lover, who had used it to bribe his way out of prison. Raymond had promised Blanche that once he was free, they would run off and get married. Instead, he had absconded to New York, leaving her heartbroken and “ruined.”
For years, no one had heard anything about Raymond. Then, in late February, his picture had been widely printed in the newspapers. Though he had adopted a new identity, he was recognized by a Nashville lawyer named A. S. Colyar, Jr., who had immediately notified the authorities. Colyar and Miss Graham had both traveled north to identify Raymond and were now ensconced in a hotel, awaiting his arrest.
Under normal circumstances, this story would not have been deemed particularly newsworthy. As a criminal, Raymond was extremely small fry. The reward for his return to Tennessee was $25. What propelled it into the headlines was the revelation that, for the past six years, he had been living in New York City, where he was passing himself off as a respectable businessman. The thief, pickpocket, and escaped convict, so it was claimed, was now the proprietor of a private letter box establishment at 257 West Forty-second Street.
The name he went by was Nicholas Heckmann.4
Heckmann, of course, had been the single most devastating witness at the coroner’s inquest. His identification of Roland as the man who rented box 217 under the name H. C. Barnet had been a moment of high drama. For Molineux and his lawyers, therefore, the news about Heckmann’s true identity couldn’t have been more welcome. With the principal witness against him exposed as a fugitive, fraud, and inveterate criminal, Roland’s prospects seemed brighter than ever.
The rejoicing in Molineux’s camp, however, proved to be exceptionally short-lived. Just days after the story broke, the truth came to light. The whole thing turned out to be a bizarre plot concocted by the Nashville attorney, A. S. Colyar. A mentally unstable young man who, it emerged, had done at least two stints in a Knoxville insane asylum, Colyar had seen Heckmann’s picture in the papers and—noting a resemblance between the letter box man and the fugitive Raymond—had cooked up a scheme to keep Heckmann from testifying at the trial by having him arrested and shipped to Tennessee. His apparent hope was to earn the gratitude (presumably in pecuniary form) of Roland’s wealthy father.
To assist in what District Attorney Gardiner termed “this vile conspiracy,” Colyar had enlisted a female acquaintance named Ida Cole to play the role of the betrayed Southern belle Blanche Graham. When Colyar’s ruse was exposed, Miss Cole promptly (and more or less literally) bailed out, eluding police officials by jumping off a Manhattan-bound train as it pulled out of the Newark station and vanishing into the night. Colyar was arrested by Detective Sergeant Carey, while to the great relief of the DA and his men, who were busily preparing for the trial, their star witness, Nicholas Heckmann, was fully exonerated.5
Though the “Heckmann Plot” (as the newspapers called it) did nothing to help Roland’s cause, he seemed chipper enough when he was next seen in public. On the morning of Tuesday, April 25, he was taken in handcuffs from the Tombs and escorted to the county courthouse—a short stroll that led him down Centre Street and through the little park near City Hall. It was the first time that he had been outdoors since his incarceration nearly two months earlier.
Inside the crowded courtroom, he was warmly greeted by his father, who looked, to several observers, perceptibly older than before—haggard and careworn, with hollowed cheeks and dark rings under his eyes. Roland, by contrast, had grown somewhat plump from his purchased prison meals. Dressed in a black diagonal suit, standing collar, and white tie—and holding his tan gloves, as usual, in his left hand—he sat back in his chair and paid close attention to the proceedings.
At issue was Roland’s continued detention in the Tombs. Arguing before a judge named Bookstaver, Bartow Weeks insisted that there was no legal justification for keeping his client behind bars, the original indictment for murder having been set aside by Justice Williams. District Attorney Gardiner vehemently disagreed, maintaining that there was nothing in Williams’s ruling that authorized Roland’s release. Bookstaver ordered both sides to submit briefs, then adjourned the hearing until May 1, when he would render his decision.
Before being led away, Roland conferred briefly with Weeks, who, according to several observers, wore a worried look. And for good reason. For more than a week, the papers had been trumpeting a new and startling discovery related to the case—one that boded very ill for Roland.6
At the time of the Molineux affair, dealers in mail-order patent medicine brought in extra income by saving the correspondence they received from customers, then selling these letters to other mail-order firms. In mid-February 1899, Professor F. C. Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut—maker of Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy for Impotence—purchased such a batch of letters from a fellow nostrum peddler, Dr. James Burns, who was giving up his Manhattan-based business and relocating to Detroit.
The job of sorting through the nearly ten thousand letters acquired from Burns and compiling a mailing list of prospective customers for Professor Fowler’s snake oil fell to his adult daughter. Ever since one of the fake Barnet orders had turned up in her father’s files, this young woman had been paying particularly close attention to the Molineux case. And so she instantly recognized the significance of the one-sentence note she came across as she sat at her worktable on Monday, April 10.
She lost no time in showing the note to her father, who immediately mailed it to Captain McCluskey at the Manhattan Detective Bureau.
The moment McCluskey received it, he fairly leapt to his feet with excitement. He saw at once that he had just come into possession of the single most important piece of evidence that the investigation had yet turned up—“the strongest link in the circumstantial chain being woven about” young Molineux, as The New York Times put it.7
The letter, mailed to Dr. Burns’s offices on Columbus Avenue, consisted of a single line that read: “Please find enclosed 25 cents, for which send remedy, and oblige.” It was a request for a sample of Burns’s Marvelous Giant Indian Salve, his supposed cure for male “atrophy.” The letter was signed Roland Molineux and the return address given as “No. 6 Jersey Street, Newark, New Jersey”—the Morris Herrmann factory, where Roland kept an apartment.
What made the letter so significant, however, wasn’t just the signature and return address. It was the stationery itself: robin’s-egg blue with an embossed crest of three interlinked silver crescents. The same paper that several of the fake Cornish and Barnet letters had been written on—and that Roland, at the coroner’s inquest, had sworn he’d never seen.8