That evening, a few hours after Bartow Weeks completed his impassioned plea, the Loyal Legion held a gala dinner in the cavernous banquet hall of Delmonico’s restaurant. Between four and five hundred people were present, having come to pay tribute to the nation’s most celebrated military figure, Admiral George Dewey.
The previous fall, Dewey—“the Hero of Manila”—had arrived back in the States to a tumultuous welcome. In New York City, a public holiday was declared in his honor. The Brooklyn Bridge was strung with several thousand electric lights spelling out his name in thirty-six-foot-high letters, a floating chorus of more than twelve hundred singers serenaded him aboard his flagship Olympia, a “Dewey Triumphal Arch” was erected in Madison Square Park, and—following a massive parade watched by nearly a million wildly cheering spectators—the mayor presented him with a solid gold loving cup on the steps of City Hall.1
The scene was the same in Washington, D.C., where he was marched to the Capitol building at the head of a grand parade, presented with a commemorative jeweled sword voted to him by Congress, and feted at the largest dinner party in the history of White House social functions.2 The whole country appeared to be in the grip of what was dubbed a “Dewey craze”—a frenzied adulation of the sort that would not be seen again until 1927, when Charles Lindbergh returned home following his transatlantic triumph. Dozens of the admiral’s closest associates urged him to run for president, and there was little doubt, as The New York Times wrote, that “Dewey would be elected no matter by what party he was nominated.”3
The hero worship remained just as intense five months later when the Loyal Legion held its dinner at Delmonico’s on Wednesday evening, February 7. Before the food was served the members conducted their regular meeting. It was still in progress when Dewey arrived to “a storm of applause.” Taking his place at the head of the banquet hall, the admiral sat and listened politely while General Horatio C. King read his paper, “The Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War.”
In the course of his speech, King made special mention of one of the notables present that evening: Brigadier General Edward Leslie Molineux, who had come to Delmonico’s straight from the courtroom where his son’s murder trial was in its final stages. As King described the “brilliant and daring work” General Molineux had performed during the Shenandoah Valley campaign, everyone present—not only the veterans in the main body of the hall but the ladies seated in the balcony—rose from their chairs and gave him an ovation that lasted five full minutes, considerably longer than the one accorded Dewey.
As the applause subsided, one of the listeners called out, “Repeat!” The cry was immediately taken up from table to table, until the entire hall was filled with the chant. Happy to comply, King reread the portion of his lecture dealing with the General’s contributions to the war. No sooner had he concluded than the crowd again burst into wild cheers, rose to its feet, and toasted “the long life and health of General Molineux.”4
It was an extraordinary demonstration of the high regard in which the elder Molineux was held by his peers. Indeed, the sight of the valiant old warrior maintaining his proud demeanor in the face of his dreadful ordeal moved more than one of the attendees to tears. The question of his son’s guilt or innocence—the possibility that the General’s middle child might be a degenerate killer—had no bearing at all on the profound admiration, even reverence, felt for the father.
Perhaps because it was the public’s last chance to attend the hottest show in town, the scene outside the courtroom was especially chaotic on the morning of Thursday, February 8. A jostling horde of several hundred people—“men who had evidently played football and women trained at the department store bargain counter,” cracked one writer—tried to elbow their way inside, many insisting that they were relatives of one or another of the principals. Twenty policemen struggled with the crowd, trying to clear a path for the arriving jurors. But it was a losing battle. As fast as the officers shoved people aside, the seething mob re-formed itself. In the end, the jurors were forced to enter the chamber through the anteroom used by the defendant.
When the doors opened at ten-thirty to admit the press corps, the crowd surged forward with a roar, nearly knocking down and trampling the policemen. Infuriated, the officers formed a cordon in front of the entrance and refused to let anyone enter without official authorization. As a result, when the proceedings got under way at eleven, the spectator section was emptier than at any time since the trial began.5
Unlike Bartow Weeks—who had delivered his closing remarks in a subdued, deliberate manner, standing in one spot and using few gestures—Assistant DA Osborne prowled the floor with a “tigerish mien” during his summation, gesticulating dramatically and attacking the defense in a voice that often rose to an angry shout.6
He bitterly denounced the defense for attempting to shift the blame onto Harry Cornish. “Consider, gentlemen, the circumstances of the murder,” he said, leaning forward on the railing of the jury box and looking at each of the twelve men in turn. “Mrs. Adams takes the poison administered to her by Cornish. It is administered openly, in the presence of her daughter. Cornish then runs for a doctor and turns over to him all the evidence. Is such a course consistent with guilt on the part of Cornish? And yet, Mr. Weeks tries to bring a charge against him that would lead to his death. My God! Isn’t it enough that the defendant tried to poison him with cyanide of mercury? Isn’t it enough that he was made the unwitting instrument in one of the greatest crimes in history?”
At this last, hyperbolic statement, Osborne threw a savage look at Molineux, who responded with a mocking smile.
Osborne’s most scathing remarks were directed at Weeks’s failure to mount a defense. “Do you realize, gentlemen, that not one word has been said by the defendant in his own behalf? What would you do if you were innocent? You would say, ‘My reputation is ruined. The brand of Cain has been put on my brow. I must defend myself.’ Think of all the witnesses Mr. Weeks could have called if his client were innocent. There must be two or three hundred people in New York City who know the defendant’s handwriting. He is a prolific writer of letters. And yet, in the great city of New York, not a solitary human being could be brought down here who would testify that the defendant did not write those letters. That is the fact. That is the cold, undisguised, naked fact. Why, if he were innocent, a troop of soldiers with Gatling guns could not have kept those witnesses away from the courtroom.”
Turning toward the defense table, Osborne fairly shouted at Weeks, “If you knew of a single witness who could have aided the theory of the defendant’s innocence and did not call him, you have violated your oath as a counselor. Your action is a plea of guilty!”
His cheeks flushing, Weeks made a strenuous objection, but Goff refused to instruct the jury to disregard the remark.
Gesturing toward the General and his wife, who were watching him grimly, Osborne sneered that Weeks’s only defense was to put “that old gray-haired father and that sweet-faced mother” on display in an effort to elicit the sympathy of the jury. He acknowledged that he himself had initially been reluctant to suspect Roland “because he was General Edward Leslie Molineux’s son.” The same was true of Captain McCluskey and everyone else involved in Roland’s arrest. “We were all sorry to think that a son of General Molineux’s should have turned out bad,” Osborne said. “But what could we do?” The chain of circumstantial evidence put together by the investigators was “the strongest ever forged against one man.”7
Osborne spoke until 1:00 P.M., at which point Goff ordered a ninety-minute lunch recess. It seemed likely that the prosecutor would complete his summation when the proceedings resumed and that the case would be in the hands of the jury by the end of the day.
When the court reconvened at two-thirty, however, something was conspicuously absent—the entire jury. Rumors quickly spread that juror number 10—Manheim Brown—had suffered a relapse during lunch and had retreated to his room in the Astor House. Since, by Goff’s order, all of the jurors had to be sequestered together, none could return until Brown was back on his feet.
At 4:30 P.M., with the jury still absent, the courtroom was cleared. By then, Goff had received a telephone message informing him that Brown had been stricken with an attack of sciatica. How long he might be bedridden no one could say. Given his fragile condition, it seemed conceivable that he might not recover for days, possibly longer.
The idea of another protracted delay was almost too distressing to contemplate, though it wasn’t the worst possibility. If Brown were unable to return at all, Goff would be forced to declare a mistrial. After eighty-five days and a cost to New York County of $200,000—a sum that translates into more than $4,000,000 today—the trial would have to be “started all over again as if it has never once begun.”
It was a prospect that filled the prosecution with “feelings of unmingled horror.”8