To the profound relief of Osborne and his associates, Manheim Brown was sufficiently recuperated by the next morning to make it to court. To ensure that he would suffer no discomfort, his regular straight-backed wooden seat had been replaced with a big leather armchair. Lowering himself onto the thickly padded cushion, he arranged a heavy worsted shawl around his body, then sank so far down in the chair that he was almost reclining. From the main body of the courtroom, only his face was visible.1
It was close to eleven-thirty by the time Osborne took the floor. He resumed where he had left off, insisting that it pained him deeply to prosecute the son of General Molineux. “I had hoped from my very soul,” he declared in earnest tones, “that Mr. Weeks might appear as a second Moses and smite the rock with his staff for the truth to gush forth. I had hoped that he might be able to write boldly in letters of fire, even as vivid as the writing on the wall, ‘Molineux is innocent.’ I had hoped that the finger of guilt might be turned away from the son of this heroic old soldier.” Here, he paused to emit a dramatic sigh. “But it was not to be.”
He then returned to Weeks’s failure to mount a defense. It was, proclaimed Osborne, “one of primeval principles of human nature to say, when you are accused of a crime: ‘I am not guilty! See, here are my witnesses!’” And yet, the defense had been unable to produce a single person to support its case.
“Why, if this defendant were innocent,” cried Osborne, “if the writing on that poison package and in the Barnet letters weren’t his handwriting, there would be such an army of witnesses at that door that the officer would call out: ‘Stand back! No room!’ And you would hear that crowd cry out: ‘What? The son of General Molineux accused of such a crime, and we who can clear him to be stopped at the door?’ And you would have seen that officer overpowered, and the door broken in!”
Osborne spent several hours reviewing the particulars of the state’s case against Molineux. There was nothing flat or perfunctory about his presentation. It was a characteristically riveting performance, delivered with the zeal of a revivalist preacher. At the defense table, Blanche and her in-laws watched with taut expressions—“the air of people who have bought seats for a show and are determined to sit through it.”2 Roland, on the other hand, spent much of the time smirking. When, at one point, he burst into outright laughter, Osborne turned on him fiercely.
Scoffing at Weeks’s attempts to incriminate Cornish, Osborne insisted that the bare-knuckled athletic director—a “rough, rugged man”—was hardly the type to “resort to poisoning” as a way of dealing with an adversary. “No,” said Osborne, in a voice heavy with scorn. “It is the furtive nature of the prisoner to which we must look—this laughing prisoner. Laughing when? Laughing here in open court while we described the death of his friend, Barnet. Laughing when we described the death agonies of Mrs. Adams. Laughing and smiling when he knows that, come what may, he has broken the heart of his father and mother. It is this attitude, gentlemen, which shows that the defendant has an entire absence of soul.”
Roland’s ridiculing manner—his tendency to treat the trial as a lark—was, Osborne suggested, just one sign of his “warped” nature. For the first time, the assistant DA suggested that at the root of Molineux’s obsession with Cornish there lay dark, “perverted” impulses.
“What sort of a man must we look for as the person to commit this crime?” he asked. “Truly, it is an outré, strange, abnormal crime. We must therefore look for a man who is outré, strange, abnormal. Somebody who looked on life with warped eyes. There was something psychologically queer about this man’s hatred of Cornish. It was a controlling thing in his life.” Though Osborne could not have known the term—which had only been coined a few years earlier—he was, in effect, describing Roland as a psychopath: a conscienceless killer driven by vicious compulsions.
For sheer sensationalism, the high point of Osborne’s summation came when he turned his attention to the murder of Henry Barnet. “It is practically conceded,” he declared, “that the man who tried to poison Cornish was the same man who sent the Kutnow Powders to Barnet. How can anyone have knowledge of the two crimes and not be convinced that they were conceived by the same brain? Look at it—effervescent salts, cyanide of mercury, letters, poison sent through the mails. Can you separate them?
“Now, what sort of man was this Barnet?” Osborne continued. “Handsome, gentlemanly, fond of the ladies. He gets sick. He receives a bouquet from a lady, accompanied by a note. The note is signed Blanche. And who is Blanche? The defendant’s wife.
“Now, you must remember, gentlemen, that the defendant was married on November 19, 1898. Barnet died on November 10, 1898. The defendant has testified before the coroner’s jury that he had wanted to marry Blanche Chesebrough since January of that year. She refuses to marry him. The plain, cold facts are that she would not marry him while Barnet was alive. But when Barnet was cold in his grave, she marries the defendant, and marries him immediately.
“Gentlemen,” Osborne said with great solemnity, “it is not often that a motive assumes a real, concrete personality. This one is endowed with flesh and blood. It has the form of a human being. And there,” he suddenly cried, swiveling toward the defense table and leveling an accusing finger at Blanche, who was flanked by her husband and the General—“there the motive sits!”
Weeks was on his feet in an instant, offering a strenuous objection.
“Let the galled jade wince,” sneered Osborne, waxing Shakespearean. “I don’t blame Mr. Weeks for not wanting to hear those remarks. God knows, I didn’t want to bring this woman’s name out in court. I have the feelings of an American gentleman. But I was duty bound to do so. If anyone should feel ashamed, it is Mr. Weeks, for bringing this lady into court while I am making this speech.”
Refusing to cower under Osborne’s assault, Blanche raised a hand to her mouth and pretended to stifle a yawn. The gesture, so fraught with contempt, unleashed “a flood of passion” in Osborne, who ended his peroration on a particularly lurid note, invoking an image straight out of a Gothic potboiler.
“Like a bloated spider in his web,” he thundered, “the poisoner spun out his filaments to the outer world. We must trace from the end of these filaments back to the center. Here’s a line running out to Barnet; we trace it back, and at the other end is the mind of Molineux. A line running out to Cornish, and tracing it back to the web’s center, we find the mind of Molineux. At the end of another line, we find the blue crested paper, and in the center connected with it, the mind of Molineux. A line terminating in the remedy for impotence, the mind of Molineux at the other end. A line stretching to 1620 Broadway, a line stretching to Heckmann’s letter box, a line stretching to the diagnosis blank’s description, and at the center of the web to which all these lines extend we find, spinning its deadly plots, the mind of Molineux.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” he continued in the same melodramatic vein, “in your hands are the lives of our wives and children, of the people of this community. It is your duty and mine to protect them. Suppose that on this evidence you refuse to convict. You thereby say to the defendant: ‘Go forth and do it again as often as you please. Kill! Kill! Kill!’”
By this point Osborne’s voice had risen to a shout. “I say that this defendant has degraded his race. I say that he is chargeable with the death of Mrs. Adams and the death of Barnet. I say that the evidence from every direction points to that conclusion, and I leave this case in your hands, knowing that you will find your verdict in the sight of God, in the sight of man, without fear and without favor.”
Altogether—excluding a ninety-minute lunch recess and a midafternoon break—the day’s session had lasted nearly six hours. It was almost seven-thirty by the time Osborne finished, at which point Goff ordered an adjournment.
At ten-thirty the next morning, when the proceedings resumed, the recorder would deliver his charge, and the fate of Roland Burnham Molineux would be placed in the hands of the jury.3