It is a cliché of courtroom melodramas: the surprise witness, appearing at the eleventh hour, who offers a startling revelation that settles the defendant’s fate. In real life, of course (as opposed to the typical Perry Mason mystery), such a thing rarely occurs. But it did at the second trial of Roland Molineux.
Just a few days after Roland took the stand, stories began to circulate that the defense was planning to call “an entirely new witness,” someone whose very existence had never been mentioned in the four years since the story broke, and whose testimony would provide a “sensationally dramatic ending” to the trial. The yellow papers even revealed her identity: Mrs. Anna C. Stephenson, the fifty-five-year-old wife of a veteran Brooklyn police officer, John Stephenson.
Asked about these reports, Black initially waved them off as idle gossip—the “creation of newspapers.”1 When court opened on Thursday, November 6, however, all eyes were immediately drawn to a gaunt, gray-haired woman seated in the section reserved for witnesses. An excited buzz ran through the spectator section: it was Mrs. Stephenson!
For hours, the spectators—some of whom had brought along picnic baskets—waited eagerly for the promised sensation. Her testimony, when she was finally called to the stand at 4:00 P.M., did not disappoint.
Though clearly nervous under the gaze of the crowd, the soft-spoken, self-declared “good Christian woman” explained, with all apparent sincerity, that on December 23, 1898—the day the poison package had been mailed to Harry Cornish—she had traveled to Manhattan from her home in Brooklyn to shop at the Washington Market. She had brought along a Christmas package to mail to her sister in Illinois.
At approximately 4:15 P.M., on her way to the general post office, she paused at the corner of Vesey Street and Broadway, waiting to cross the traffic-clogged thoroughfare. As she stood there, she felt “something pressing against me.”
“Looking around,” Mrs. Stephenson recalled, “I saw a man very close to me with a package in his overcoat pocket. He seemed very nervous, and I wondered what was the matter with him. He took the package out of his pocket, and just out of curiosity, I glanced at it. I saw the words ‘Mr. Harry Cornish, Knickerbocker—’ That is all I remember.
“In a moment, the man crossed the street,” she continued. “As I had a package to mail, I thought that I would follow him and mail my package where he mailed his. I did follow him and saw him mail his package, and I mailed mine immediately afterwards. The man then went out of the general post office, and I did not see him again.”
When, in the days following Katherine Adams’s death, the newspapers published a facsimile of the poison package address, Mrs. Stephenson (so she claimed) had immediately realized the significance of what she had seen. She “discussed the matter with her husband,” but he advised her “not to get mixed in the case.”
Black then turned to the defense table. “Molineux, stand up,” he commanded.
Roland sprang to his feet and looked squarely at the witness.
“Now, look at this defendant,” Black said to Mrs. Stephenson, “and tell me if he is the man who mailed the poison package.”
“He is not,” came the unhesitating reply.
“Are you sure?” asked Black.
“Perfectly sure,” said Mrs. Stephenson.2
As Black took his seat with a smile, James Osborne rose. He, too, was smiling, though far more grimly. Asking Harry Cornish to stand, he turned to Mrs. Stephenson and asked, “Is this the man who had the package?”
Osborne’s move was clearly meant to confound the witness. But (as another young prosecutor would discover during the last great murder trial of the twentieth century, when he asked the defendant to try on the killer’s gloves in full view of the jury) such dramatic courtroom demonstrations sometimes backfire.
“It looks very much like him,” said Mrs. Stephenson.
Osborne, reddening, said, “Are you sure of that?”
“Well, I am pretty sure he’s the man,” answered the witness.
Osborne did his best to recover from this blunder. Under his polite but insistent cross-examination, Mrs. Stephenson revealed that she was unable to read without glasses, which by her own admission she hadn’t been wearing on the day in question; that she suffered from “nervous prostration” and that her decision to testify on Molineux’s behalf had been influenced by “divine guidance.” Osborne also called her policeman-husband to the stand, who testified that he “did not put much stock” in her story.3
Afterward, when reporters asked for his opinion on Mrs. Stephenson, Osborne snorted and said, “I believe the woman thought she was telling the truth. But she is laboring under a delusion such as is common to women of her time of life. She says that she could read the poison address at about 4:30 o’clock on that day. Well, as a matter of fact, the sun set at around 4:30 that day. The street was already dark. It scarcely seems credible that this woman could have read the address at that time with her bad eyesight.”
“Do you think the jury will agree with you?” someone asked.
“Oh, I don’t believe she made much of an impression on the jury,” replied Osborne—a remark that struck more than one observer as a case of wishful thinking.4
Mrs. Stephenson wasn’t Black’s only surprise witness. Barton Huff, a traveling salesman from Battle Creek, Michigan, swore that, a few days before Christmas 1898, he had gone into Hartdegen’s jewelry store to inquire about a watch fob he had seen in the window. As he approached the counter, a man rushed into the shop, pushed his way to the front, and told the saleswoman that “he wanted to buy a silver bottle holder to match some dresser articles that a woman friend of his had.” The man was about five feet ten inches tall, weighed approximately 175 pounds, and wore “a pointed sandy beard.” He bore no resemblance at all, said Huff, to Roland Molineux.5
Professor Herman Vulte of Columbia Medical College, another defense witness never heard from before, testified that on the afternoon of December 23, 1898—the time when the poison package was mailed from the general post office in lower Manhattan—Roland had been in his company the entire afternoon. They did not part until 4:45 P.M. Even if Roland had caught the nearest trolley, then transferred to an elevated car and proceeded directly downtown, he could not possibly have arrived at the general post office before it closed.6 Vulte was one of nineteen witnesses to take the stand on Friday, November 7. Their testimony marked the end of the defense case. Final arguments would begin the following Monday, after which Roland’s fate would be in the hands of the jury.
On the following afternoon, Saturday, November 8, a reporter for Pulitzer’s World wangled an interview with Blanche at her suite in the Murray Hill Hotel. Why, he wondered, had she not attended a single minute of the trial?
Blanche would only say that she didn’t “think a courtroom is the proper place for a woman.” Of course, things would have been different if her husband—“Mr. Molineux,” as she referred to him—had “nobody else in the world to cheer him up.” But with his “dear old father at his side,” she didn’t see any pressing reason to be there.
Asked her opinion of the trial, she declared that “Mr. Molineux” was bound to be acquitted. But the prospect seemed to fill her with little joy. It was her own long ordeal that she harped on. “You cannot know what a woman suffers when she sees her good name dragged into the gutter by cruel heartless creatures who do not care what lies they tell about a defenseless person,” she said bitterly. “I often wonder how I have borne it all.”
When the reporter asked about her future with her husband, Blanche gave a strikingly evasive reply. “The future? No matter what the future may be, nothing can repay me for all that I, an innocent woman, have suffered.”
It was, of course, a disingenuous reply. Blanche knew very clearly what her future held. She hinted at it in her next remark.
“For four long years,” she said, “I have felt like an inhabitant of the infernal regions. At last, I feel as though I can see the first gleam of light—as though the gates of the inferno were about to open, permitting me to escape.”7