After many delays, Roland’s retrial finally got under way on Monday, October 13, 1902. By then, almost four years had elapsed since the deaths of Henry Barnet and Katherine Adams.
New York had not lacked for lurid crimes during that time. Only recently, in fact, the city had been riveted by a particularly sensational murder. Less than a month before the start of Roland’s second trial, the mutilated body of a young Manhattan woman named Anna Pulitzer had been found in a canal near Jersey City. What made the murder so newsworthy, beyond its sheer grisliness, was the pedigree of the killer: Brigham Young’s grandson, William Hooper Young, who—so the papers claimed—had committed the crime in accordance with the doctrine of “blood atonement” preached by the Mormon leader.1
Even with such titillating fare to distract them, the public remained fascinated by the Great Poison Mystery. The crowds who turned out for Molineux’s second trial were nearly as large as those who had flocked to the first. What they ended up seeing was a mix of the deeply familiar and the dramatically new.
The cast of characters had changed in certain notable ways. Though Bartow Weeks was present throughout the proceedings, former New York governor Frank S. Black was brought in to serve as lead counsel for the defense. And in place of Recorder Goff (whose rulings had generally favored the prosecution), a judge named John A. Lambert (who turned out to be far more sympathetic to the defense) was called in to preside.
It was largely owing to Lambert’s businesslike approach—his “insistence upon cutting out every superfluous word or gesture”2—that the second trial moved with such impressive speed. Jury selection, which had originally required more than two weeks, was now completed within twelve hours. James Osborne’s opening address lasted only ninety minutes instead of four and a half hours (and was mercifully free of any labored analogies to the Frankenstein monster). And on the first day of testimony, no fewer than thirteen witnesses were examined. As one headline proclaimed, it was ALL HUSTLE, NO NONSENSE IN MOLINEUX CASE.3
Though the prosecution witnesses were, by and large, a familiar crew, a number of key figures were missing. Elsie Gray, the bookkeeper for the Kutnow brothers who had discovered one of the bogus Cornish letters, had died shortly after the first trial. And Roland’s former child-mistress, Mamie Melando—still smarting from her virtual abduction by Detectives Carey and McCafferty three years earlier—refused to leave New Jersey.4
The intervening years had not been kind to other witnesses, including Harry Cornish. Gaunt and hollow-cheeked, his few remaining strands of hair having gone prematurely gray, Cornish no longer made his living as a sportsman. His onetime employer, the Knickerbocker Athletic Club—where the lives of Roland Molineux and Henry Barnet and Cornish himself had so fatefully collided—had recently gone out of business, brought down by the financial troubles of its owner, J. Herbert Ballantine. Cornish, once a celebrity in the city’s amateur sporting world, now worked for a bakery.5
Still, his manner remained as gruff and uningratiating as ever. He alternately snarled and shouted at ex-governor Black, who subjected him to a ferocious cross-examination. Over Osborne’s objections, Black was allowed to interrogate the witness about his marital infidelities, as well as his current relationship with Florence Rodgers, who—so the lawyer intimated—had become Cornish’s mistress since her mother’s death.
Black also asked pointed questions about the classes Cornish had attended at Columbia Medical College. Cornish explained that he had gone there strictly to “study anatomy,” so that he could learn more about the muscular system and improve his performance as a coach. Black, however, insisted that Cornish had “studied medicine”—thus implying that Roland Molineux wasn’t the only one with a technical background in chemistry.6
When Cornish finally left the stand, he “heaved a deep sigh,” as though relieved to be done with the ordeal. At the defense table, Roland—dapper in a double-breasted black sack coat, high collar, silk four-in-hand necktie, and pearl stickpin—watched his rival’s discomfiture with a smirk.7
In the aftermath of the first trial, Bartow Weeks had been roundly criticized for not putting Roland on the stand. Frank S. Black was not about to repeat that error. When the defense opened its case on Friday, October 31, Roland B. Molineux was the first witness called.
It had taken a contingent of twenty police officers to control the crowd that showed up that morning. When the courtroom doors opened at 9:30 A.M., more than three hundred people—many of them women—managed to fight their way inside. Within minutes, all the seats had been taken, including the two usually reserved for Roland and his father, who upon their arrival a half hour later had to stand until extra chairs could be brought in from another room.8
After an opening address that lasted less than five minutes—a “record-breaker in brevity for a case of such importance and scope”9—Black launched into his direct examination of the star witness. Roland’s voice, which had not been heard in court since the coroner’s inquest three years before, was strong and steady. It had, observers felt, “the ring of sincerity in it.”10
Indeed, everyone who saw him on the stand that day agreed that Roland turned in a remarkable performance. Calmly, clearly, courteously, with no discernible hesitation and a demeanor that struck spectators as perfectly frank and forthcoming, he gave a detailed account of his quarrels with Harry Cornish but insisted that, angry as he was at the time, he had gotten over his animosity long before his marriage.
He emphatically denied that he had bought the silver toothpick holder, rented a private letter box, written the bogus letters, or mailed the poison package. He claimed that he did not know how to make cyanide of mercury and, indeed, had never even heard of the poison until charges were brought against him. He acknowledged that he had sent away for Dr. Burns’s Marvelous Giant Indian Salve but insisted that he had used the ointment not for impotence, but for a knee injury sustained in a bicycling accident. He described his relationship with Mamie Melando as that of “employer and employee, solely.” He swore that he was “absolutely innocent of any part in or knowledge of” Mrs. Adams’s murder.
Black ended his direct examination at 11:55 A.M. It had lasted just sixty-five minutes. By contrast, James Osborne would grill the witness for five hours. In the end, the cross-examination would be a “complete victory” for Roland.11
“A marvel of alertness and skill,” he calmly parried every attack the prosecutor aimed at him, never seemed rattled or evasive, projected an air of absolute confidence and candor. “To every question he had an easy, ready answer. He smiled and waved his hand, and exhibited complete suavity and ease.”12
At four-thirty, having utterly failed to extract any damaging admissions from the witness, an exhausted James Osborne begged the judge for an adjournment. “If Your Honor please. I believe I am tired to death, and I would like to say, this being rather, you know, an important matter to both Mr. Molineux and myself, and he is probably tired, too—”
“I am not tired,” Roland broke in. “I would just as soon stay here.”
Judge Lambert ordered Osborne to continue. He managed to go on for another hour before he “gave out entirely” and collapsed into his chair. Roland, looking as fresh and chipper as ever, left the stand with a smile and returned to his seat, where his father patted him on the back and said, “Good boy.”13
Speaking to reporters when the day’s session was over, Osborne tried to put the best face on the matter, insisting that he “was perfectly satisfied with the cross-examination of Molineux.” Nevertheless, even he was forced to concede that Roland was “one of the most wonderful men I ever examined—of more than ordinary intellectual power, quick, resourceful, alert, with an able and flexible mind.”
The General gave Roland the ultimate accolade: his son, he proudly told reporters, had borne “himself under fire like a true Molineux.”14
One person was not there to witness Roland’s triumph: his ostensibly devoted wife, Blanche.
When the trial had opened on October 13, the General, in response to a query from reporters, had explained that, while his daughter-in-law would undoubtedly not sit through the entire proceedings, he expected her to be there for the start of each day’s session.15Since he made that remark, the trial had been going on for more than two weeks. And Blanche had yet to put in a single appearance.