With Roland languishing in jail, awaiting the start of his trial, there was little to report about his case. Still, readers of the yellow papers did not lack for diversion. The papers were full of their usual mix of bizarre and sensational stories.
There was the tragic death of Little Aitmarhoke, a pretty ten-year-old “Esquimau girl” brought to New York City in 1895, who had recently died of consumption and whose body—if certain heartless “men of science” had their way—was to be mummified and exhibited at the Museum of Natural History. There was the trial of William G. Peckham of West-field, New Jersey, charged with one count of cat murder after shooting his neighbor’s marauding black tom, Bouncer. There was the arrest of “Jack the Cutter,” a young man with a “strange mania” for gashing the arms of female pedestrians on the streets of Manhattan. There was the controversy ignited at the Erster Neu Sandestzer Lodge on Houston Street, when one of its members, Lewis Lowensohn, decided to hold funeral rites for his amputated left leg. “How can he get the society to bury his leg?” protested fellow member Isaac Schmidt. “Suppose he gets well and falls down in front of a trolley car and gets an arm cut off. Will he get his arm buried free, too? He holds only one membership. That entitles him to be buried, but not by piecemeal. He must be buried all at once.”1
A number of divorces received particular attention, including the marital split between seventeen-year-old Jacob Schoerer and his sixteen-year-old wife, Clara, both of them barely four feet in height (CHILD DWARFS IN DIVORCE SUIT, read the headline), as well as a custody suit filed by Mr. Charles Lee, secretary of the Oriental Benevolent Labor Association, against his spouse, the former Esther Goldberger (CHINAMAN SUES HIS JEW WIFE).2
As always, the extravagant doings among the social elite were followed with keen interest. One typical story told of a gala dinner held at the Hotel Marie Antoinette, the “piece de resistance” of which was an enormous pie, out of which emerged an actual one-year-old African-American infant—or, as The New York Journal described him, “a little pickanniny.” “The advent of the pickanniny was the crowning feature of the dinner,” the paper enthused. As the baby crawled out of the gigantic pastry, the celebrated Polish opera singer, Jean de Reszke—“the highest priced tenor in the world”—crooned him a lullaby, after which the hostess “placed a small American flag in the pickanniny’s hand” to the “applause of the gracious, brilliant throng.”3
For several weeks, the city was riveted by the case of eighteen-month-old Marion Clarke, snatched by a kidnapper who signed his ransom notes “Mephisto, King of the American Mafia” and who threatened to “cut, saw, chop, and dismember” the baby “into bits the size of a walnut” unless he received prompt payment of $10,000. Ten days after her disappearance, “Baby Clarke” was found alive and well in an upstate farmhouse. Her abductor—a scoundrel named George Beauregard Barrows with a history of concocting kidnapping plots—was swiftly apprehended and, after a trial that began less than a week after his arrest, convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in Sing Sing.4
The seventh anniversary of the ax-murder of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew J. Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, was commemorated with lengthy features about the current life of the central figure in the case (TODAY, LIZZIE BORDEN IS THE SAME QUIET UNASSUMING PERSON, one headline proclaimed). And there were plenty of other, more recent homicides to satisfy the public’s unquenchable appetite for grisly crimes. In the second week of June, various chunks of a male body were found floating in the harbor—the remains, it turned out, of a Swedish sailor named Peterson, murdered after a “row” in a Bowery tenement house, then butchered and dumped in the river. At around the same time, a man named William McCormick, discovering that his sweetheart was cheating on him, found his way to her parlor and managed not only to slit the young woman’s throat but to kill her mother as well—a particularly remarkable crime since, as the papers marveled, McCormick was totally blind. There was also the shocking case of nine-year-old Charles Hughes, who stabbed a juvenile playmate to death while playing the battle of San Juan Hill with a bunch of other boys.5
And then, of course, there was the usual spate of poisonings: an attempt to kill two Jersey City families by means of deadly dinner rolls; the murder of little Leon Glassburg of Brooklyn by a stranger who gave him lethal candy; the near-fatal illnesses of two private nurses after they shared a pot of poisoned coffee. And more.6
Not that Roland ever disappeared completely from the news. From time to time throughout the summer and fall, stories about him would appear in the papers. In late July, the World reported that Molineux’s months of close confinement in his dimly lit cell had so damaged his eyes that he “must now give up reading entirely or run the risk of permanently defective sight—a sore trial to the prisoner, as his books have been his chief entertainers since his confinement.” The following month brought tales of an attempt by a young man named Darwin Messerole—an accused killer who’d undergone a jailhouse conversion—to bring “religion’s comfort” to the decidedly secular Molineux. And then there was the day in mid-September when an inmate named Joseph Limberg attempted to hang himself with a rope made from his bedsheet and would surely have succeeded in doing so had not Roland, hearing the “sounds of choking from the cell opposite his own,” shouted for a guard.7
On the very day that he saved Limberg’s life, another newsworthy event happened to Roland. He received a visit from Blanche—the second time she had come to see him since his incarceration six months before.
As far as Blanche was concerned, her forced confinement in the Molineuxs’ imposing Brooklyn home was every bit as onerous as Roland’s imprisonment in his six-by-eight-foot cell—perhaps even more so, since she had done nothing to deserve it. Thanks to a married friend named Jeanne, however, who owned an estate on the Long Island coast, Blanche was able to enjoy a brief respite.
For several weeks in the summer, she “swam daily in blue waters,” “raced on the beach like a child,” lunched on the “pleasure boat owned by Jeanne’s husband,” and basked in the company of a dashing neighbor—a “tall, blond young man” with “hair and skin of the same bronze hue.” Possessed of “magnificent horsemanship skills,” this captivating figure, who “rode like a centaur,” would frequently “arrive in the saddle and stay to dine,” lavishing most of his attentions on Blanche, who did nothing to discourage his interest.
As the sun set, Blanche, her friends, and her new conquest would sit “in the half-lighted rooms where the burning candles on the long carved refectory table wavered and flared fitfully in the faint wind from open casements and doors. We lounged over our after dinner coffee, and the men smoked. Before complete darkness came, we would walk the narrow path to the low cliffs, where we could glimpse the full sweep of the ocean. The twilights were long, those summer nights, and they always had a song for me.”
By the time she returned to Brooklyn, Blanche’s spirits had been much restored. But her tranquil mood quickly evaporated. With each new day, her idyll on Long Island seemed more and more like a sweet but fading dream. By the time she paid her visit to Roland in mid-September, she felt thoroughly “encompassed” again by a nightmare.8
On Wednesday, November 1, 1899, Roland Molineux was led into a courtroom crowded with spectators. More than three months had passed since the third grand jury to take up his case had submitted its findings. During that time, Roland’s lawyers had made one last, futile attempt to quash the indictment. Now, as Bartow Weeks conceded, there was “nothing left for us to do but go to trial.”9
Roland looked almost shockingly pale as he entered the courtroom, flanked by two guards. But his mood appeared to be upbeat. He smiled at his father, who was seated at the front of the room and whose eyes shone with pleasure at the sight of his boy.
The business of the day—the setting of a date for Roland’s trial—was quickly disposed of. Assistant DA John McIntyre told the court that the people would be “ready to proceed on November 14.” Weeks made no objection. “All we want,” he declared, “is a speedy trial.” Justice Fursman then directed that the “trial be commenced on the date proposed.”
The matter having been settled, Roland was allowed to converse with his father. They talked together cheerfully for several minutes before walking out of the courtroom arm in arm.
Afterward, most observers agreed that, in foreseeing a “speedy trial,” Weeks was being overly sanguine. The consensus among legal experts was that, given the importance and complexity of the case, the proceedings were bound to be protracted.
Indeed, as one newspaper reported, “it is thought that the trial may last as long as three weeks.”10