In the Death House, time crawled. Roland busied himself as best he could. For the past year, he had been making notes about his experiences, first in the Tombs and now in Sing Sing—observations about life behind bars, anecdotes about the colorful characters he had encountered, ruminations on the justice system, even bits of doggerel, such as a satirical verse about the handwriting analyst/poultry farmer William Kinsley, whose testimony had been so instrumental in his conviction:
I’m an expert. I raise chickens, so I know about a “quill.”
How it writes and what you think of when you sign a note or bill.
I’ll appear against or for you; either side without regard,
I can tell my favorite rooster by his claw marks in the yard.
Like him, I love to scratch in dirt. I’m crooked as his walk,
I plume myself, and like my hens I cackle when I talk.
I’m hatching out a plot just now, really it’s very funny,
It’s all a guess—ridiculous—but then, I need the money.1
When he wasn’t jotting notes or composing letters, he was availing himself of the offerings in the prison library. After finishing Les Misérables, he plunged into Paradise Lost, then made his way through Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, and a novel called His Father’s Son by the critic, playwright, and Columbia University English professor Brander Matthews. Though published in 1896, two years before Roland Molineux became a household name, Matthews’s book prefigures certain aspects of the Molineux affair in almost uncanny ways. Its protagonist is a powerful elderly man named Ezra Pierce who has made a fortune on Wall Street and whose handsome, ne’er-do-well son, Winslow, winds up in trouble that threatens to land him in Sing Sing.
“Father,” pleads Winslow when the police first get wind of his activities. “I’ve got something to tell you—something you won’t like either. I’m in a scrape—a very bad scrape, indeed—and you’ve got to help me out…. If you don’t want me to go to Sing Sing, you must help me!”2
Reading and writing, of course, were a pitiful defense against the miseries of the Death House. Like other condemned men, Roland found it hard to keep thoughts of suicide at bay. In Sing Sing, extraordinary measures were taken to keep the inmates from “cheating the chair.” Their clothing was “of such quality” that it could not be turned into a rope, and they were permitted to wear only felt slippers, “as all other shoes have a small piece of steel under the instep which can be taken out and used in a suicide attempt.”
Their weekly shaves were administered “by a prison trusty under the watchful eye of a keeper,” and their fingernails frequently trimmed “as long nails could be used to cut the arteries of the wrist.” Matches, of course, were not allowed—the inmates’ corncob pipes were lit upon request by the guards—and all electric lights were located outside the cells “to prevent their being broken and used with suicidal intentions.”3
Despite these and other precautions, the occasional inmate found some ingenious way to do himself in. One “prisoner saved bits of cotton used in applying medicine to his eyes and made a short rope” with which he succeeded in hanging himself.4 And another, “under the very eyes of his keepers, without any privacy or apparatus, manufactured the poison with which he ended his life.” That, at any rate, was the story Roland heard during his first few weeks in Sing Sing.
According to this tale, a quiet, seemingly gentle convict—German by nationality and nicknamed the Professor because of his thick-lensed eyeglasses—had managed, after months of patient effort, to trap a mouse in his cell. He then proceeded to teach his new pet all manner of tricks—to eat from his hand, to come when it was called, to sleep cuddled under his chin.
Six or eight months went by. Then, one summer day, the Professor heard that his appeal had been denied and the date for his execution set. That very night, his pet mouse died. Shortly thereafter, the Professor himself fell ill and took to his bed. The prison doctor came, took one look at the ailing man, and decided that he was simply prostrate with fear. “Let him alone,” he told the keeper.
A few days later, before his execution could be carried out, the Professor died in his cell. The cause was discovered when his corpse was stripped bare for an autopsy.
After receiving the bad news about his appeal, the Professor, it seems, had snapped the neck of his pet mouse and used the creatures’ needle-like incisors to inflict several long scratches on his own chest. Then, he had pressed the dead rodent’s corpse to the open wound and left it there to putrefy, leading to the blood poisoning that killed him.5
As Roland’s confinement stretched on, he grew increasingly morbid—obsessed with “the story of the little dead mouse.” Whether that story was true or apocryphal he could not say. In either case, he resolved to try the same method on himself should his own appeal fail.6
His suicidal fantasies became particularly intense on those awful occasions when an execution loomed. For Roland, as for all the condemned, sharing in the final hours of a fellow inmate whose time had run out was “the greatest horror we are called upon to bear.” Isolated in their cages, curtains blocking the bars, the prisoners could only hear what was happening. But the sounds were appalling enough: the shuffling of the doomed man’s slippered feet as he was transferred to the cell adjacent to the execution chamber; the tearful farewells to loved ones; the murmuring of prayers as the last rites were administered; the hum of the dynamo as the electric chair was readied; the rapid march of the procession into the death chamber; the clang of “the hungry little door as it closed”—“even the noise made by the drills and saws used in the autopsy immediately following the execution.”7
Seven times during his incarceration in Sing Sing, Roland lived through this experience.8
The fall of 1900 brought one encouraging development. A week before Thanksgiving, Dr. Samuel Kennedy—the New York City dentist convicted of killing his pretty blond mistress, Dolly Reynolds—was granted a new trial. The Court of Appeals had found that certain testimony offered at Kennedy’s first trial “should have been excluded as hearsay evidence.”
To many legal observers, the ruling—coming in the wake of other, similar decisions—seemed to evince “a disposition on the part of the present Court of Appeals to do away entirely with the death penalty.” One prominent criminal lawyer, cited in The New York Times, declared that, in reversing Dr. Kennedy’s conviction, the Court of Appeals had established a precedent which would have direct bearing on the Molineux case: “The evidence in the Kennedy case, though circumstantial, tended to establish guilt to the exclusion of any other hypothesis,” said this gentleman. “In the Molineux case, the evidence is not so strong. If the Court of Appeals is willing to set aside the Kennedy verdict, it is fair to assume that it will perhaps reach the same conclusion in the Molineux case.”9It is little wonder that, when news of the decision spread through the condemned cells, Roland was jubilant. Or that, as the newspapers reported, he devoured his Thanksgiving dinner one week later—mince pie, cheese, apples, bread, and tea with milk and sugar—with renewed gusto.10
Still, his case dragged on. By January 1901—nearly a year after he entered the Death House—the Court of Appeals in Buffalo had still not received the papers submitted by his attorneys. The delay brought outraged protests from the public, the press, and—most heatedly of all, of course—from Roland’s father.
In a newspaper interview conducted a few days after the start of the new year, “the old fighter” charged Recorder Goff with professional negligence, cried out against the “barbarism” of his son’s protracted confinement, and suggested that there was a deliberate conspiracy to “drive Roland mad before we can set him free.” His voice quaking with fury, he announced his intention to go directly to the state legislature and demand an investigation into the “unconscionable delay.”11
As always, General Molineux received widespread support. Editorial writers joined him in condemning the situation as a “public scandal,” while ordinary citizens bombarded the newspapers with sympathetic letters. One writer declared that Molineux would have received more humane treatment among the ancient Aztecs, whose legal code required that appeals be submitted to the “higher judicature” within eighty days.12
The outcry, however, did little to expedite matters. Another half year would pass before the appeal was finally heard.
By then—mid-June 1901—Roland had spent fifteen seemingly endless months among the condemned.