Minutes after dropping his bombshell, Weeks was back on his feet, beginning his final argument. Altogether, he would spend eight hours delivering his summation over the course of two days.
Weeks was not an especially compelling speaker. He refrained from oratorical flourishes; used few, if any, gestures; and, with his thick shoulders, bull neck, and heavy limbs, cut a somewhat lumbering figure. His voice, lacking sonority under the best of circumstances, was rendered even less melodious than usual by a slight case of laryngitis. Nevertheless, his climactic plea was regarded by most observers as a powerful, at times even brilliant, effort.1
After apologizing for the “harsh and disagreeable” sound of his voice, he reminded the jurors of the charge against his client—that Molineux had mailed a bottle of poisoned bromo-seltzer along with a silver holder to Harry Cornish, who then gave some of the lethal powder to Mrs. Katherine Adams, killing her more or less instantly. Thus, the entire case really boiled down to a single question: “Whether this defendant sent that package to Harry S. Cornish on the twenty-third of December 1898. As you determine that issue, you determine this case.”
He began by insisting that the state had offered “not a syllable” of proof connecting his client to any of the items employed in the crime—not the Tiffany box nor the bromo-seltzer nor the manila paper the pack-age was wrapped in. As for the silver toothpick holder, there was the positive statement of the Hartdegen bookkeeper, Emma Miller, who testified that it had been purchased, not by Molineux, but by a man with a reddish “Van Dyke beard.” Weeks scoffed at the notion that Molineux might have relied on an accomplice. “Men who are secretive, men of the sort who will commit murder by poison, do not take others into their confidence.”
Nor had the prosecution established that Molineux had ever been in possession of cyanide of mercury. The claim that as a chemist he could have concocted the poison himself was undercut by evidence which showed that of the two key ingredients needed to produce the deadly substance, Roland kept only one in his private laboratory at the Morris Herrmann factory.
Since “not one of the articles” in the poison package had been convincingly tied to the defendant, the state had been forced to rely on the testimony of its penmanship experts. Here, Weeks appealed to the common sense of the jurors. If the handwriting on the wrapper really were Molineux’s, wouldn’t an intelligent person have been able to discern the similarities? Would Osborne have needed “an army of experts” brought in “from as far away as California,” put up “at the Waldorf-Astoria,” and paid “thousands of dollars” to “convince you of it?” Were the jurors prepared to find the defendant guilty and “send him to the electric chair” strictly “on the testimony of these experts?” asked Weeks, placing a particularly sardonic emphasis on the final word.
Weeks paused for a sip of water. When he resumed, he cast a pointed look at Harry Cornish, who was seated near the front of the courtroom, chewing ruminatively on the point of a pencil, his chair tilted back on its rear legs.
After insisting that he had “no wish to accuse any person of the commission of these crimes,” Weeks, in his lawyerly way, proceeded to do just that by deflecting suspicion onto Roland’s archenemy. Apart from Cornish’s testimony, Weeks pointed out, there was not a shred of evidence that the poison package had actually arrived by post. Perhaps, he implied, the athletic director had lied about receiving it from an anonymous source and had actually planted it in his club mailbox himself. And wasn’t it odd that Cornish had been able to travel around the city for several hours after supposedly taking a drink of the lethal mixture? And how to explain the peculiar coincidence that the toothpick holder purchased at Hartdegen’s bore a design almost identical to the one on the silver toiletry articles on Florence Rodgers’s dresser? Was it possible that Cornish had been the mysterious red-bearded man who had bought the holder?
“Why,” Weeks wondered, “wasn’t Cornish investigated?” After all, he was “the man who had administered the dose that killed Mrs. Adams.” And what about Cornish’s rumored affair with Florence Rodgers—his “role in her separation and divorce”?
“Do you believe that Mrs. Adams approved of Cornish’s relationship with her daughter?” asked Weeks, suggesting a reason why Cornish might have wanted the older woman out of the way.
By this point, Weeks’s voice had grown so hoarse that he was barely able to make himself heard. After heaping scorn on the two letter box men, Heckmann and Koch—rank opportunists, he charged, who had tried to cash in by peddling their testimony to the yellow papers—Weeks “begged leave to discontinue.” The request was promptly granted and the trial was adjourned for the day.2
Among his professional peers, the consensus seemed to be that Weeks had done the right thing in making no defense.
It was true, said a prominent Manhattan attorney named Emanuel Friend, that the prosecution had “introduced a mass of evidence.” But “it was not the kind upon which an intelligent juror will send a man to the chair. It lacked directness, and the motive was never at any time brought out with sufficient strength and clearness.” From a strictly legal point of view, moreover, Friend did “not think that the corpus delicti was proved—at least, there was not sufficient evidence to show that Mrs. Adams died from the poison alleged.”
Other lawyers polled by the papers agreed that “the people had not made out a case against Molineux,” and that Weeks had “acted wisely in resting his case without the introduction of evidence.”
There were a few dissenters. While conceding that Weeks had made “a bold move indeed,” William Howe—the oldest criminal lawyer then practicing at the New York City bar—expressed his belief “that it would have been more satisfactory to have had Mr. Molineux take the stand and personally deny having written those letters the experts place at his door.”
In the end, of course, as Howe very sensibly noted, the wisdom of Weeks’s strategy would be judged by the outcome of the trial. “It is one of those cases where, should the lawyer succeed in securing an acquittal or hanging the jury, his friends will unite in saying it was a clever defense.
“If, on the other hand, the jury should find the defendant guilty,” said Howe, “the condemnation of Mr. Weeks will be long and loud.”3