On the afternoon of Thursday, January 18—to the great relief of everyone involved in the seemingly interminable trial—James Osborne declared that he would wrap up the state’s case on the following day after tying up a few “tag ends.”1
The announcement allowed trial-watchers to assess Osborne’s overall performance. There was general agreement that he had succeeded in establishing a number of crucial points: that the bogus Barnet and Cornish letters, as well as the address on the poison package, were all written by Molineux. That Roland, under the two assumed names, had rented a pair of private letter boxes, where he had received material from various patent-medicine dealers, including a sample tin of Kutnow’s Powder. That the description given on the “diagnosis blank” mailed to the Marston Remedy Company by the person who signed himself “H. C. Barnet” corresponded far more closely to Roland than to the ostensible sender. That Roland was familiar with Hartdegen’s jewelry store, where the silver toothpick holder sent to Cornish was purchased. That, as a chemist, Roland had both the means and the know-how to obtain or concoct cyanide of mercury.
Most observers agreed, however, that on one key point, Osborne had failed to make a particularly convincing case: Roland’s motive for wanting Harry Cornish dead. The assistant DA had certainly shown that there was no love lost between the two men. But the conflicts described by the witnesses—disputes over gym equipment and the state of the swimming pool and an insulting letter written about a member of a rival club—hardly seemed sufficient to explain such a dastardly crime. That darker, more malevolent impulses might have been operating in the depths of Roland’s mind—that the swaggering Cornish might, for example, have been an unconscious surrogate for another figure of formidable manhood whom Roland had spent a lifetime trying, and failing, to measure up to—would not have occurred to anyone in that pre-Freudian era.
Osborne had clearly recognized this problem and had sought to get around it by arguing that the man who tried to kill Cornish had also poisoned Barnet. It was much easier to prove motive in the Barnet case; sexual jealousy was something every male juror could understand. Everyone agreed that the assistant DA had been extremely “adroit in connecting the cases together so inseparably that evidence in one has been applied to the other as if the two were the same.” Indeed, as one newspaper put it, “if Molineux were on trial for the murder of Barnet, the case would be so strong that the jury almost certainly would return a verdict of guilty.”
There was only one problem: the murder of Henry Barnet was “a crime which was not charged against Molineux in the indictment.”2
Osborne’s announcement turned out to be premature. As it happened, he would not be ready to conclude his case until the following Wednesday, January 24.
There was an air of expectancy in the courtroom that morning. The previous afternoon, Osborne had let it be known that the state would require only a half hour more to complete the questioning of its final witness, yet another handwriting expert, this one a Philadelphian named Percival Fraser. The “long-heralded end” of the prosecution’s case appeared to be at hand.
Before the proceedings could begin on Wednesday morning, however, Recorder Goff was handed a message informing him that one of the jurors, a gentleman named Manheim Brown, had “taken sick” and was confined to bed. According to the sender—Brown’s physician, Dr. Sigmund Tynberg—the patient’s “indisposition was not of a serious nature and a prolonged delay on his account was unlikely.” Goff had no choice but to adjourn the case until the morrow.
Audible groans of disappointment arose from the spectator section. Still, given the ungodly length of the trial, the severity of the weather, and the terrible ventilation in the courtroom, most observers agreed that it was “remarkable that none of those concerned in the case had succumbed before this.”3
Dr. Tynberg’s prognosis, as it turned out, was overly sanguine. By the following Monday, January 29, Brown had still not returned to the trial. His condition, claimed the doctor, could be blamed directly on the conditions in the courtroom.
“It is a wonder to me that Mr. Brown did not give way sooner,” Tynberg told a reporter for the Journal. “The morning that he took to his bed, he stopped in my office on his way to court. He was then suffering from bronchitis, grippe, and rheumatism. It was with difficulty that he managed to return to his home, and when I saw him an hour later, he was in a high fever and great pain.”
Tynberg went on to blame Brown’s illness on the “drafts from the partly opened window in the courtroom behind the jury box.” Brown had “frequently complained to the Court of the danger in which he was placed” but was told that “there was no remedy,” since “there were no adequate means of ventilating the room without having the window open.”
“It occurs to me,” the doctor concluded, “that the city is liable to Mr. Brown for damages.”4
It was not until Monday, February 5—after a nearly two-week delay in the trial—that Brown was able to return to the courtroom. Looking exceedingly frail and supporting himself with a crutch, he was the last juror to take his seat. Throughout the day, he kept a woolen shawl wrapped around his body, while his wife, who had accompanied him to court in a closed carriage, kept a watchful eye on him from the front row of the spectator section.
The final thirty minutes of expert testimony that Osborne claimed he would require stretched into three hours. Finally, at 2:00 P.M., the prosecution rested its case.
At that point, the Molineux trial had been going on for nearly twice as long as the previous record holder. Since the start of the proceedings on November 14, eighty-three days had elapsed.
And—as one observer somewhat ruefully noted—the defense was “yet to be heard from.”5