posted 12-28-2010 06:21 PM            

Capt. George W. McClusky, Chief of the Detective Bureau., believes that before another twenty-four hours shall have passed he will be able to tell the name of the person who purchased the little silver match holder in which the bottle of poison was anonymously sent to Harry Cornish, physical director of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, and which caused the death of Mrs. Kate J. Adams at 61 West Eighty-sixth Street on Wednesday morning last.

With the assistance of Assistant District Attorneys McIntyre and Blumenthal, Capt. McClusky has been able to forge many of the links which seem to be necessary to the discovery of Harry Cornish’s would-be slayer. Capt. McClusky, who has now absolute charge of the case, is reticent regarding statements, but yesterday he intimated that his work had not been in vain and that he would he able to tell within a very short time who sent the mysterious package.

Edward F. Rogers, the husband of Mrs. Florence Rogers, and an insurance adjuster of Buffalo. may turn out to he the most important witness for the State that the detectives have yet found. Mr. Rogers arrived in New York on Thursday night. and went to the Imperial Hotel, but did not register. He took a room on the third floor, and he sent for Assistant District Attorney McIntyre, who was at the dinner given in honor of retiring Justice Fitzgerald at the Waldorf Astoria, and who could not reach the Imperial until 1:30 o'clock yesterday morning. There Rogers and McIntyre held a long consultation. and Mr. McIntyre left the hotel for his home at 2:30 o'clock.

Mr. Rogers stated later that he had come to New York for the purpose of throwing what light he could on the death of his mother-in-law. When asked what plans he had regarding the development of his purpose, he replied that it was too early to tell. He would not say whether he was going to call at the Flat where his wife resides, and asked to be excused from answering any questions pertaining to his relations with Mrs. Rogers. Mr. Rogers said that he would certainly move if it became known that he was staying at the Imperial. He carried out his declaration and left the hotel at 8:20 o'clock yesterday morning, paying his bill, but leaving his baggage behind.

He kept out of sight during the day, but intimated to his friends that he would make a public statement before the day closed. At midnight his whereabouts was still a mystery, and his promised statement was not forthcoming. At the District Attorney’s office it was learned that Mr. Rogers may be able to throw considerable light on the tragedy, inasmuch as he has been separated from Mrs. Rogers for a number of years, and that their relations, contrary to published reports, were never very pleasant. He is reported to have said that since the separation Cornish, being a friend of Mrs. Rogers, had aroused jealousies of several, one of whom may have sent to him the bottle of poison. Mrs. Rogers is suing for divorce, the papers having been filed in Hartford.

MATCHBOX MAKER FOUND

Only a limited number of the holders had been sold and furnished with a list of the firms the police renewed their search. The arrival of Mr. Rogers and the discovery of the manufacturing firm yesterday kept Capt. McClusky unusually busy, and he did not leave his office until 7:30 o'clock last night, when he went directly to the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and held a long conference with Harry Cornish. About 9:30 o'clock he left the club and returned to Police Headquarters. There he was requested to state the nature of his visit. He replied: "I cannot."

Whether a man or a woman sent the package is yet a matter of conjecture. Assistant District Attorney McIntyre still clings to the theory that no one but a woman could have developed such a scheme. While talking to a reporter for The New York Times yesterday, he said: "My long experience with criminal cases leads me to believe that a woman conceived this affair. I can see the handiwork of a woman in every minute detail, and when the whole affair has been made public I think that it will be seen that I am right."

Capt. McClusky, while he is not willing to admit that a woman was the perpetrator, said yesterday that the handwriting is the strongest evidence pointing to a woman's work, but he knows of many cases where men have deliberately carried out criminal acts using the methods of a woman to escape detection.

The fact that Lebkuecher & Co. are the manufacturers of the match or toothpick holders was brought to light yesterday through their trade mark, a crescent and a letter L stamped on the under side. As a clue the name of the manufacturers is considered important by the police, as it may
lead to the identity of the person who sent the poison to Cornish at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. The police appear to have at first overlooked the trade mark, or "hall mark." as it is called in the jewelry trade, but this is denied by Capt. McClusky, who says that he is in possession of a great many more facts than are yet known outside of his department.

Lebkuecher & Co. like all other makers of silverware, keep a record of the retail firms and brokers or jobbers to whom they send their wares. They have not sold a single holder to a department store, and because of this fact the buyer can be more easily traced. Yesterday they went over their books since the first batch of the holders was turned out in October, 1896, and found that they had sold them to fifteen firms. scattered from Connecticut to California, and as far South as Florida. Some of these in turn have been sold by jobbers to other retailers. But the difficulty of tracing the firms to whom these have been sold is comparatively easy, as the company has made but thirty altogether, of which twenty-three have been sold, and the remainder still remain in the factory at Newark. Frank A. Lebkuecher of the firm objected yesterday to giving out a list of his customers, but consented to the publication of a list of the cities to which the original orders had been sent.

The police have sent out queries to all these dealers, to discover. if possible, if any firm which has made sales can identify the purchaser of the one in question. The firm manufactured the holders as a novelty and for that reason turned out but a few of them. The retail price is about $5. There were two patterns, but on top of the bowl. The first batch, of which there were seven made, were ornamented with the small beads, and the one sent to Cornish through the mails was of this pattern. The base of the holder is about two inches in diameter, and the bowl two inches in height.

LEBKUECHER’S STATEMENT

"Of the twenty-three holders sold, one each went to Salem, New York, Newark, Jacksonville, Brooklyn, Syracuse, Washington; Philadelphia; and Trenton. Two went to Baltimore, two to St. Louis, four to Chicago, four to Middletown and two to San Francisco. We have seven left in our factory. The one Cornish had was made in October, 1896. Our later patterns were manufactured about a year ago. Detectives Herlich and Carey brought the holder here this morning , and after recognizing it, I gave them the information in my possession. The chances of identifying the purchaser of Cornish’s holder depends, of course, upon the memory of the jeweler who sold it."

WORK OF TRACING BEGUN

While the holder may have been sold in any of the cities mentioned except Baltimore and San Francisco, the later models, it is thought, being sent there, the police are more concerned in Middletown, New York. and Hartford, where it is thought the Middletown Plate Company, the Eastern representatives of the manufacturers, may have had a customer. It was learned last night that two of the four holders sent to Middletown on June 19 and Sept. 30 of last year have been accounted for. One of the June purchases was sent to the Chicago branch of the Middletown house. One of the September purchases was sent to E. L. White of Guthrie, Oklahoma. Both were numbered '814' and, like the others, marked "Sterling." What became of the other two is not yet clearly established. Detectives from this city have been sent to Hartford and vicinity, in an endeavor to obtain a clue there, as Hartford is at present looked upon to be a more promising field for investigation than this City.

But what may yet turn out to be a more important clue is the tracing of the holder through Black, Starr & Frost, jewelers, in Fifth Avenue, this city. A member of this firm said that they had no record of having purchased one of the holders from Lebkuecher & Co., so far as he could find out, and he was positive he had no such article in stock. Frank A. Lebkuecher's record shows that the firm did purchase one of the holders on Nov. 1, 1896, and it was one of the first patterns.

The fact that Capt. McC1usky sent two detectives to the store early yesterday morning may account for the conflicting statements and explain why the firm failed to discover any record of the particular holder it had bought from the Newark manufacturers. Of two other firms in the vicinity of New York, one in Brooklyn still has in stock the holder it purchased a year ago, while the retail house in Newark sold the article it had purchased from the manufacturers in November. 1896, within a month, and would be unable to identify its customer.

Wherever the holder received by Cornish came from, it must have been kept in the retailer's stock for over a year. It looks as bright and polished as if it had just come out of the factory. On the bottom can still be seen traces of mucilage which held the cost tag of the retailer. and which had evidently been removed but a short time before it was mailed. The detective department it is evident believes that the holder was sold either from the Middletown house or from the Fifth Avenue firm in this city, although Capt. Mclusky would make no admission of this last night.

Not much attention is being paid by the police to the discoloration of the bromo seltzer label. While the Baltimore firm which manufactures bromo-seltzer says it has not for years used any other but white paper for its labels printed in blue, it is pointed out that the muddy discoloration noticed might have been due to some chemical wash. Coroner Hart yesterday selected the New York Bacteriological and Pathological Laboratory of which Dr. Witthaus is President, to make the chemical analysis of portions of the body of Mrs. Adams to determine the exact nature of the substance contained in the bromo seltzer bottle. The selection was made. it is said, on the suggestion of Dr. Jenkins of the Board of Health who is a Director in the institution. Considerable comment was heard yesterday concerning the refusal of the Health Board to allow Dr Lederle to make the examination and giving it to a private institution. Dr. Jenkins explained this by saying that no officer of the board could accept an outside "salary" while holding office, and in his opinion the law was a proper one in that a failure to strictly observe it would militate against outside individual chemists and laboratories.

THE NATURE OF BROMO-SELTZER.

He examined the contents of the bottle and found that instead of being white it had a yellow tint and when put into water it did not effervesce. He thought some one had been tampering with the Emerson Drug Company's bottles and refilling them with interior goods. so he wrote to the company regarding the matter, thinking it would be of interest to the company to know that some one was possibly infringing on its rights. He enclosed a sample of the contents of the bottle. He received in answer the following letter, which he immediately forwarded to the District Attorney's office in this city:

Dear Sir: We are in receipt of your favor of the 24th, and in reply would say that we are very sorry to hear you have had trouble with our bromo-seltzer. The sample which you returned us was bromo-seltzer, but it had decomposed in the bottle. Some time ago we decided to granulate bromo-seltzer what have found that it did not keep as well. We have since gone back to the old way of making the same and trust you will have no further trouble. We are sending you by express a half-pound bottle, which you will accept with our compliments.
Respectfully,
EMERSON & Co.
Baltimore. Sept, 27, l898.

Among the myriad of rumors fluttering around, as to who sent the poison to Cornish, is one which indicates that it was sent by a person who knew something about poisons. Cyanide of potassium come in crystals. The stuff in the bottle which Cornish received was pulverized as if it had been in a mortar under a pestle. One acquainted with the natural state of cyanide
of potassium would know how to prepare it to make it lock like brorno-seltzer.

Singular as it may seem. the paper covering to the bottle received by Cornish was of a dark, bluish tint. The New York agent of the Emerson Drug Company of Baltimore. Charles D. Passages, 6 West Twenty-third Street. says that none but white labels have ever been used on the bottles of bromo-seltzer sent out by his company.

Then the cork in Cornish’s bottle had been rammed in until the top was even with the lies of the neck. The Emerson Company packs its bottles with the corks protruding about three-eighths of an inch. The cork in Cornish's bottle had been paraffin in its cork. The Emerson Company does not paraffin its corks.

In regard to these points Mr Passsapae said:"I have been with the Emerson Company for six years. During all that time have never seen any but white labels on the bottles of bromo-seltzer. It is possible that the label on the bottle sent to Mr. Cornish may have been dipped in some chemical solution which may have effected a change in color. I do not know whether a solution of cyanide of potassium should have effected a change in the color of the paper or not, but I believe that it is possible. The white label on the bottle may have become a dull color from handling. The only blue used on our labels is the blue ink in which the name of the drug and the directions tor taking are printed."

WORK OF McCLUSKY’S MEN

Yesterday several carriages, presumed to have come from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Pulled up at Police Headquarters, and their occupants were hurried into Capt. McClusky’s private office, where long consultations were held. But drivers and visitors were shrouded in mystery and silence. They would say nothing to any outsider. In his statement last night Capt. McClusky said:"There is nothing that I can speak of now. The case is incomplete as far as the Detective Bureau has gone. I do not deny that I have, made some progress. I saw Cornish this morning, but he told me nothing new. Rogers has made a statement to me, which I cannot make public just now."

"I have heard from Hartford regarding the report made by the parents of Cornish to the effect that they suspected a man of sending the poison, and I learn that that man died in 1885. I have not discontinued this part of the investigation, however. Cornish and Rogers have never had any trouble. In fact, they hardly knew each other."

"I have definitely ascertained that the package was mailed on Dec. 23 in one of the receivers on the Broadway side of the General Post Office. I know the store in which the silver holder, manufactured by Lebkuecher & Co., was sold. I want to add that there is no secrecy about Rogers. We knew he was coming to New York. We knew where he was last night, and we know where he is now."

No amount of questioning would make Capt. McClusky divulge anything further.

THE HOVEY FAMILY.

When she accompanied Mrs. Rogers to Capt. McClusky's office on Thursday afternoon. Capt. McClusky learned that Mrs. Rogers was in Hartford about two weeks ago, and while there staid at the Hovey home. 23 Steym Street. Mrs. Rogers bought a number of Christmas presents at the stores in that city, and packed a trunk with them, which she forwarded to this city. These presents, she stated, were for her mother, her husband, and her invalid brother. She was very much attached to her mother. Mrs. Adams's son Frank Adams, came to this city shortly after Mrs. Rogers. He is a cripple.

The condition of Harry Cornish did not change yesterday. He is still a very sick man, and requires the constant attention. of Drs, Phillip and Conroy, who alternate at his bedside in his room at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. His only callers yesterday were Capt. McClusky and a representative of the District Attorney’s office. Scores of friends to see him, but his physicians
thought it best to admit no one but the State and municipal officers, as Cornish is in such a condition that he cannot stand excitement. Yesterday afternoon he sent, a telegram to his mother in Hartford read:"Don't worry. I am all right and well"

Funeral services for Mrs. Adams will he held in the apartment this morning; at 10 o'clock. The body will then be taken to Hartford for burial beside that of Mr. Adams, who died in 1881.

posted 12-28-2010 11:36 PM            

quote:

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The Molineux Case
By Jim Fisher

"…the great Machiavelli of handwriting experts in America was engaged by the defendant."
--the prosecutor at the Molineux trial

On the day before Christmas, 1898, thirty-five-year-old Harry Cornish, the physical director of Manhattan’s swank Knickerbocker Athletic Club, received in the mail from an anonymous sender, a blue tiffany pasteboard box containing a silver toothpick holder enclosed around a small, blue bottle of Bromo Seltzer. Thinking that the package was a Christmas gift from someone who had forgotten to include a card, Cornish saved the portion of the mailing paper that bore the following handwritten address:

Mr. Harry Cornish
Knickerbocker Athletic
Club, Madison Avenue
And Fourty-(sic)
Fifth Street
New York City

Harry Cornish lived as a tenant in an apartment house at 61 West Eighty Sixth Street that was owned and occupied by his landlord, Mrs. Katherine J. Adams. On December 28, 1898, Mrs. Adams awoke with a severe headache, and with a wet towel wrapped around her head, went about her household chores. The towel caught Cornish’s attention on his way to fetching the morning paper. To alleviate her headache, Cornish retrieved the remedy he had received anonymously in the mail. Shortly after consuming the Bromo Seltzer mixed in a glass of water, Mrs. Adams doubled up in pain, grabbed her stomach, staggered into the bathroom, and collapsed. A few minutes later she was dead. Cornish, as well as Mrs. Adam’s daughter Florence, had taken sips from the glass which caused them nothing more than temporary stomach pains.

The physician who came to the apartment, upon examining the body and learning that Mrs. Adams had died almost immediately after consuming the headache remedy, suspected that the woman had been poisoned. The doctor said he would turn the Bromo Seltzer bottle over to the coroner’s physician for analysis.

The next day, Harry Cornish reported the circumstances of his landlord’s sudden and violent death to John H. McIntyre, an assistant prosecutor in the New York City District Attorney’s office. McIntyre notified the police department from where Captain of Detectives George McClusky assigned the case to Detective Sergeant Arthur A. Carey, an experienced investigator who had been in the homicide bureau six years.

Mrs. Adam’s autopsy revealed, in her throat and stomach, traces of cyanide of potassium. For a more detailed analysis of the poison, the coroner’s physician sent the digestive organs to the noted New York City toxicologist, Dr. Rudolph Witthaus. Witthaus, fifty-three, had studied chemistry and medicine at Columbia University. He had been a professor of chemistry and physiology at New York University for twenty years, and had testified in dozens of criminal trials. Although he was considered one of the most educated and cultured men in the city, Witthaus, who was a bit of a cynic and didn’t suffer fools lightly, was given to fits of rage when those around him didn’t live up to his standards. This made him a difficult and unpopular man to work for.2

When the press learned of the unusual circumstances surrounding Mrs. Adam’s violent and mysterious death, the case became headline news in New York City and across the country. Early reportage of the death featured the publication of a photograph of the handwritten address on the Bromo Seltzer parcel. When the secretary of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club saw that picture, he thought he recognized the handwriting as belonging to a former member of the club. That man was Roland B. Molineux, a muscular and handsome thirty-year-old who was a bit of a snob, and quite vain about his athletic prowess. He was the national amateur horizontal bar champion, a title that was, at the turn-of-the-century, quite important in the athletic world. Because Molineux had recently written several angry letters to the club, the secretary had become familiar with his handwriting and spelling, which included his misspelling of forty as “fourty” as it had been written on the fatal package. Detective Carey, who had considered Harry Cornish as a possible suspect, now switched his attention to Roland Molineux.

Molineux’s father, Edward Leslie Molineux, was a former Union general in the Civil War, a power in the local Republican party, and the president of one of the largest dye manufacturers in the United States. As a result, Roland Molineux had grown up in a wealthy and prominent family. Young Molineux had followed his father into the dye business by studying chemistry, and then working as the superintendent of a dry color factory in Newark, New Jersey. But as a playboy and man about town, work was not a high priority with Molineux. Still, Molineux’s background in chemistry, as far as Detective Carey was concerned, made him a good suspect in a homicide case involving poison.

Henry Cornish, born and raised in Boston, was divorced from his wife who had caught him with another woman. He had worked as physical director at athletic clubs in Boston and Chicago where he had made a name for himself by turning out excellent athletes, and by managing the athletic games at the World’s Fair in 1893. Because he was impulsive, blunt, and had no feel for compromise, Harry Cornish was not well-liked by members of the Knickerbocker Club.

Molineux and Cornish had first clashed in April, 1897 after Cornish defeated Molineux in a weight-lifting competition. This had motivated Molineux , not well-liked himself, to attempt to talk the board of directors into dismissing Cornish. The physical director responded by writing letters to other members of the club in which he described Molineux as a third-rate athlete, accusing him of selling illicit rum and patronizing prostitutes. This infuriated Molineux who threatened to resign from the club if Cornish was not removed from office. When the board of directors voted in December, 1897 to retain the physical director, Molineux, feeling betrayed, resigned his membership in the exclusive club. He did this a full year before Mrs. Adams drank the Bromo Seltzer and died.

Detective Carey had learned that the two-ounce bottle containing the effervescent salts was not a genuine Bromo Seltzer container. A real bottle of Bromo Seltzer was too large for the silver holder that had contained the poisoned headache remedy. Focusing on the bottle holder, Detective Carey located the jewelry store in Newark where it had been purchased. Records at the store revealed that the holder had been purchased on December 2l, a week before Mrs. Adam’s death. The sales woman said she remembered selling it to a man in his early thirties who had a full, red beard. Since Roland Molineux didn’t sport a beard, Detective Carey figured that either the sales clerk was mistaken or he was after the wrong man. While the detective doggedly pursued his leads, Molineux was being hounded by reporters demanding to know why he had not availed himself to the police. Did he have something to hide? Molineux told reporters he would be glad to submit to police questioning on the condition that his attorney be present during the interrogation.

In an effort to resolve the problem of the man with the red beard, Detective Carey, in interviewing Newark police officers, came across a patrolman who had seen Molineux in the vicinity of the jewelry store on the day the silver holder had been purchased. After reading about this in the paper, Molineux and his attorney confronted the sales woman who told them that Molineux was not the man who had purchased the silver holder.

Notwithstanding problems and holes in his case, Detective Carey still suspected that Roland Molineux, in an attempt to kill Henry Cornish, had poisoned Katherine Adams. He based this suspicion on the following: Molineux hated Cornish, thus a motive; Molineux had training in chemistry; Doctor Witthaus had found that Mrs. Adams had not been killed by Cyanide of potassium, but from the effects of cyanide of mercury, a corrosive used in the blending of dry colors in the dye factory where Molineux had been employed; the Bromo Seltzer holder had been sold from a story near the dye factory; a patrolman had seen Molineux in the neighborhood on the day the holder was purchased; the secretary of the Knickerbocker Club identified Molineux’s handwriting as being on the fatal package; and, in several of his letters to the club, Molineux had misspelled forty as “fourty.”

It wasn’t much, not nearly enough to obtain an arrest warrant, but just enough to keep Molineux as a prime suspect. The investigation had stalled, and Detective Carey was badly in need of a break. And that is exactly what he got when he learned of the death of a man named Henry C. Barnet, and this man’s connection to Molineux’s wife Blanche, nee Chesebrough. A reporter had dug up information about Barnet and Blanche Chesebrough that would jump-start Detective Carey’s investigation.

Molineux had met Blanche Chesebrough in the summer of 1897 at a yachting party in Maine. She was an aspiring opera singer who hadn’t been able to lift her career beyond singing in the church choir. Blanche had accompanied Molineux to several Knickerbocker Club affairs where, a few months after they had become an item, he introduced her to a friend named Henry Barnet, a successful New York City stock broker and member and resident of the Knickerbocker Club. Barnet, instantly infatuated with the beautiful and mysterious young woman with the green, artificial eye, asked her out. She accepted, and when she did, Henry Barnet went from Molineux friend to bitter rival. In October, 1898, Molineux asked Blanche to marry him. Explaining that she was in love with Henry Barnet, she refused his hand. About a month later, on November 10, Henry Barnet took ill and suddenly died. The official cause of death: cardiac asthenia induced by diptheric poisoning. Eight days after Barnet’s death, Molineux again asked Blanche to marry him. This time she accepted his proposal. They were married on November 29, about a month before Katherine Adams drank the spiked Bromo Seltzer.

In investigating Barnet’s death, Detective Carey learned that a few days before he died, Barnet had received, by mail from an anonymous sender, a box of Kutnow Powder, in its day, a popular stomach remedy. The effervescent laxative had been found on the small table next to Barnet’s bed. Analyzed by Doctor Witthaus, the powder had been laced with cyanide of mercury, the poison that would later kill Katherine Adams. The press ran with the story, linking Barnet’s death to the Katherine Adams/ Bromo Seltzer case. The intended victims in both cases, Cornish and Barnet, had been enemies of the same man, Roland Molineux.

Detective Carey, in suspecting that Roland Molineux had purchased the Kutnow Powder, searched the company’s files and found a handwritten note that read:

Please send me a sample of Salts to 1620 Broadway and oblige

Yours, etc.,
H. Cornish

The Broadway address was a mail drop, a box that had been leased from a private rental company. When Detective Carey showed the note to Henry Cornish, he denied writing it, insisting that someone had forged his signature. The owner of the mail drop, when shown a photograph of Roland Molineux, identified him as the man who had rented the box. Inside the mail box, Carey found two unopened letters, both from patent medicine companies in Cincinnati responding to requests for product samples. Carey contacted these companies and asked for the letters requesting samples of the medicine. When he received the letters, Carey found that they had been written on the same robin’s egg blue paper embossed with the same stationery design of interlocked crescents as the letter sent for the Kutnow Powder. All three letters had been signed, "H. Cornish."

Before he could go further with his investigation, Carey had to find out if Cornish or Molineux had written the letters requesting the samples of medicine. To do this, he hired a New York City questioned document examiner named William J. Kinsley. Kinsley had been in the field ten years, and in the past five, had testified as an expert in dozens of civil and criminal trials. Following his involvement in the Molineux case, Kinsley would go on to testify in a number of high-profile cases.3 Kinsley compared the writing on the three patent medicine request letters with samples of Molineux’s known writing, and concluded that Molineux had written the letters on the robin egg stationery, not Cornish.

When the owner of a New York City mail box rental service read about Carey’s identification of the letters signed “H. Cornish,” he informed the detective that in May, 1898, five months before Henry C. Barnet had gotten sick and died, he had rented a box to man who called himself H.C. Barnet. In that box, Carey found an unopened medicine sample request which, according to William Kinsley, had also been written by Molineux .

At this point, Molineux had not been questioned by the authorities, but after receiving William Kinsley’s report, prosecutor James W. Osborne asked Molinuex for a set of formal handwriting samples. Molineux agreed, showing up at the district attorney’s office with his lawyer, George Gordon Battle. The handwriting samples were acquired by William Kinsley who dictated to Molineux certain carefully selected words that included the address of the Knickerbocker Club. When Molineux wrote forty, he misspelled it “fourty,” just like it had appeared on the Bromo Seltzer package.

Armed with a substantial quantify of questioned writing, as well as conceded and request samples bearing Molineux’s known writing, Carey called in virtually every qualified handwriting expert in the country, eight in all, to examine the evidence. None of these experts were told of Kinsley’s findings, or what any of the other experts had concluded. When all of the document examination reports were in, the decision among all of the experts was unanimous, Roland Molineux had written the three Cornish letters, the Barnet letter, and the address on the Bromo Seltzer package.

The coroner’s inquest into Katherine Adam’s death began on February 9, 1899 and lasted three weeks. Although the inquest had been convened to consider the Bromo Seltzer case, prosecutor John Osborne used the occasion to prove that Henry Barnet had also been murdered. To that end, he put Doctor Witthaus on the stand who testified that the Kutnow Powder found on the table next to Barnet’s bed had been spiked with the same kind of poison that had killed Katherine Adams, cyanide of mercury. Osborne called Molineux’s wife, Blanche Chesebrough Molineux to the stand and grilled her about her affair with her husband’s rival, Henry Barnet. When she denied that her relationship with Barnet had been romantic, Osborne produced a love letter she had written to him. Having established a motive for Barnet’s death, Osborne called William Kinsley and some of the other handwriting experts who connected Molineux, through document analysis, to the poisons that had caused both deaths. Since coroner’s inquests are all prosecution and no defense, the case against Molineux looked strong. On February 27, the coroner’s jury unanimously recommended that Roland Molineux be brought before a grand jury on a charge of murder in the death of Katherine Adams. Molineux was immediately arrested and hauled off to jail.

Molineux had not been charged with killing Henry Barnet because there was no physical proof that Barnet had been poisoned to death. In an effort to determine if he had died of foul play, the coroner’s physician ordered, on the day following Molineux’s arrest, that his body be exhumed for autopsy. An examination of Barnet’s organs by Doctor Witthaus revealed that Barnet had in fact ingested cyanide of mercury, but the conclusion drawn from this evidence was made inconclusive by the fact that Barnet, shortly before he died, had taken a dose of Calomel, a remedy that contained mercury.

The grand jury indicted Molineux in the spring of 1898, however, because prosecutor Osborne had used details of Henry Barnet’s death as evidence in the Adams case, the indictment was set aside on appeal. A second attempt at indicting Molineux failed when the grand jurors refused to return a true bill. Finally, on Osborne’s third try, he got his indictment. The murder trial was set for November l4, 1899.

Molineux’s attorney, George Gordon Battle, to weaken the prosecution’s handwriting evidence, hired his own expert, David N Carvalho. An employee of the New York City’s District Attorney’s office, Carvalho’s entrance into the case on behalf of the defense infuriated the prosecutor, John Osborne. Carvalho, a notorious self-promoter and headline grabber, had just received international notoriety in the famous Dreyfus case in France. Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew and captain in the French Army, had been accused of furnishing military secrets to Germany. He was tried and found guilty of treason in 1894 on the strength of Alphonse Bertillon’s testimony that Dreyfus was the writer of the bordereau. After that conviction had been set aside, he was re-tried early in 1899. Carvalho had testified as a defense handwriting expert in both trials. Notwithstanding Carvalho’s testimony that secrets passed to the Germans were not in Dreyfus’ hand, the defendant, on retrial, was again convicted of treason.4 Carvalho examined the handwriting evidence in the Molineux case, and declared that the defendant had not written any of the questioned documents. This would make him a key witness for the defense.

Detective Carey, aware that the case against Molineux was in some respects flimsy, had not ended his investigation with the indictment. A week before the opening day of the trial, Carey interviewed a young woman who had worked at the Newark dry color works under superintendent Molineux. Mary Melando had also made extra money cleaning her boss’s apartment. When shown the robin’s egg blue stationery with the interlocking crescents, the stationery used to request samples of Bromo Setlzer and Kutnow Powder under Cornish’s name, Melando said she had seen stationery just like it on Molineux’s desk.

On November l4, 1898, with reporters from all over the country in the courtroom, the Molineux trial got underway. Testimony was delayed twelve days before the opposing attorneys came to an agreement over the jury. The heart of the prosecution’s case, and the trial itself, consisted of the handwriting evidence. If the jury believed the prosecution’s experts, Molineux would be found guilty, if not, he’d go free. In his opening remarks to the jury, prosecutor John Osborne, a fiery southerner who was a good friend of the judge, said:

The experts will tell you the peculiarities of the handwriting—they will very plainly show you that there are enough characteristics left to prove that all three (the address on the poison package and the Cornish and Barnet letters) were written by the same man; and if I do not show all of this to be a fact, then this defendant will walk out of court a free man.5

Following the testimony of the Coroner’s physician, Doctor Witthaus; Detective Carey, and several of the people he had interviewed; Osborne put on the handwriting evidence which consisted of fourteen witnesses, nine of whom were questioned document examiners, the rest being people familiar with the defendant’s handwriting. Five bank tellers and the secretary of the Knickerbocker Club being in the latter category. Over the repeated objections of Molineux’s attorney regarding the credibility and reliability of handwriting expertise, Judge John Goff allowed the testimony on the grounds that the jury could determine, as a matter of fact, whether the experts were credible. Besides Daniel T. Ames, the most prominent document examiner, the other qualified experts included John F. Tyrrell from Milwaukee, and New York City’s Albert S. Osborn. Tyrrell and Osborn would become two of the eight prosecution experts in the Lindbergh trial in 1935, and Osborn, following the publication of four books on the subject, would become the father of the questioned document field. Also testifying as prosecution experts were: Dr. Persifer Frazer of Philadelphia; William E. Hagan of Troy, New York (the author of two early books on questioned documents); William J. Kinsley of New York City; Benjamin F. Kelly, also from New York City; Henry L. Tollman from Chicago; and Edwin B. Hay from Washington, D.C. This phase of the trial lasted weeks and featured more that fifty handwriting exhibits.6

During the trial, Molineux, impeccably dressed at the defense table, looked bored, and on occasion amused. Appearing unconcerned, he passed the time by smiling at his wife, and playing tick tach toe with himself on the backs of envelopes. He rarely spoke to his attorney, and paid little attention to what was being said on the witness stand.

At the close of the prosecution’s case, George Gordon Battle stood up and announced that “We believe that the prosecution has failed to establish its charge and we rest the defense upon the People’s case.”7 Realizing that his sole handwriting expert, David Carvalho, was no match against the impressive battery of prosecution witnesses, Battle had rested his case without putting on a single witness. He was pinning his hopes on an appeal, one that would be made possible if prosecutor Osborne, in his closing remarks, tried to connect Henry Barnet’s death to the Adams case. This would be, in his view, a procedural flaw that on appeal would lead to a new trial. Battle’s decision, however, had robbed document examiner David Carvalho of his moment in the Molineux case limelight.

With the evidence phase of the case behind them, it was time for the closing arguments. As the defense attorney had hoped, Osborne in his closing remarks, brought up the Barnet case:

You must remember that this defendant was married on November 29, 1898. You must remember that Barnet died on November 10, 1898….You must remember that the defendant testified at the inquest that he had been trying to marry this woman from a time running back to January 1898….The plain, cold facts are that this woman had refused him until Barnet was cold in his grave.

There have been times in this case when I began to think of poor old Mrs. Adams, stricken down, stricken down without an opportunity to make her peace with God, stricken down while she was in the performance of her family duty, leaving alone and unprotected her daughter and son; stricken down in the most cruel and the most brutal manner….Sometimes it seems to me in the nightmare that I can almost hear the voice of Mrs. Adams, calling me….And then Barnet, Barnet, in the vigor of his youth and manhood, stricken down in the same manner….And will a jury of my countrymen quail before the honest and just verdict? I think not.8

In his summation to the jury, Osborne also took a shot at David Carvalho: "Remember this—and don't forget it—that the great Machiavelli of handwriting experts in America was engaged by the defendant."9

On February 11, 1900, after three months and a cost to the state of $200,000, the longest and most expensive trial in history, the jury found Roland Molineux guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Katherine Adams. The Molineux case, however, beginning in one century and ending in another, was not over.

Molineux’s attorney, George Gordon Battle, immediately filed an appeal based upon these issues: Judge Goff, by not allowing the defense attorney to cross-examine any of the prosecution’s handwriting experts, had denied his client a fair trial. The judge, biased in favor of the prosecution, had also allowed Osborne to link the deaths of Katherine Adams and Henry Barnet without any direct, solid evidence connecting the defendant to the Barnet case. In fact, there wasn’t any real evidence that Barnet’s death had been a homicide. These errors, in Battle’s opinion, constituted grounds for a new trial.

As it turned out, Battle was right. In 1902, after serving two years in prison at Sing Sing in Ossening, New York, Molineux was granted a new trial. In the second trial, presided over by a different judge, Judge John D. Lambert, most of the questioned document evidence was excluded. Lambert did allow expert testimony regarding the handwriting on the Bromo Seltzer package. There was no mention in the second trial of Henry Barnet, and this time, David Carvalho got his day in court. The prosecution had also lost the testimony of Molineux’s cleaning lady, the woman who had testified that Molineux had been in possession of stationery like the stationery used to request the Bromo Seltzer and the Kutnow Powder. Molineux’s new attorney, Frank S. Black, the former governor of New York, besides David Carvalho, put on a witness who substantiated Molinuex’s alibi at the time the fatal package was mailed to Mrs. Adams.

This important alibi witness, a Professor Vulte of Columbia University, testified that the defendant had come to visit him at the school on the afternoon of December 23, 1898. The witnessed remembered the occasion because it was the last day before the Christmas break. Molineux had left Columbia that day at four-forty-five, which would not have given him enough time to be at the general post office in Park Row.

Following Professor Vulte to the stand came Mrs. Anna C. Stephenson, a surprise witness for the defense. The small, elderly woman, married to an ex-New York City cop, happened to be near the Park Row Post Office at five o’clock on December 23. Standing at the corner of Broadway and Vesey Streets, she saw a man take a package out of his pocket and look at it nervously. This caused the witness to look at the bundle in question, which, according to her sworn testimony, was addressed to Harry Cornish at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. It was this package the man dropped into the mail chute, a man who was not the defendant.

On cross-examination John Osborne was able to establish that the witness’s eyes were so bad she could barely read a newspaper headline. But since she had witnessed the event four years earlier, her eyes may have been better. It is doubtful that anyone in the courtroom took her testimony seriously. That was not the case, however, regarding the professor’s testimony.

This time the defense decided to put Roland Molineux on the stand. During the first trial this would have been a dramatic event, but the press had lost interest in the case, and his testimony barely made the back pages of a few city papers.

Appearing confident and composed, Molineux denied any connection to the poisoned Bromo Seltzer, renting the mail boxes, or ever owning robin’s egg blue stationery with the interlocking crescents. He was not the one who had addressed the fatal package, and would not know how to make cyanide of mercury. On cross-examination, Osborne was unable to shake the defendant. The prosecutor did make a point out of the fact that cyanide of mercury was a poison easily obtained from many places.

On November l2, 1902, after deliberating only four minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, an event ignored by the press, the same people who, a few years earlier, had played a role in his conviction.

Although a free man, Molineux’s life went downhill fast. In 1903, his wife Blanche rushed to Sioux Falls, South Dakota—the Reno of its day—for a quickie divorce, citing “mental cruelty.” Shortly thereafter she married a wealthy New York City lawyer. In 1905 Blanche attempted a career in Vaudeville under the name “Blanche Chesebrough Molineux,” but when Molineux threatened to sue over the use of his name, her plans were dashed.

In 1902, Molineux published a thin book of fiction called, The Room with the Little Door, the room being a cell on death row. Twelve years later he wrote a play called, The Man Inside, a dramatization of the life of a reformed criminal. The play was produced and appeared briefly in a midtown Manhattan theater.

In 1913, Molineux became a mental patient at a sanitarium in Babylon, Long Island. A few months later he escaped and was caught running around town, naked. Examined by a battery of alienists (now called psychiatrists), he was diagnosed as insane and committed to the State Mental Hospital at King’s Park, Long Island. Four years later, in 19l7, while still a mental patient, he died. He was fifty-one.

Molineux’s appeal and subsequent acquittal, along with the fact that David Carvalho’s testimony at the second trial had helped set him free, took some of the luster off the Molineux affair as a landmark case in the history of questioned documents. At the time, Carvalho’s lone expert dissent angered Daniel T. Ames and the other handwriting men who had weighed in with the prosecution. Disagreements among forensic experts in high-profile cases hurt the cause of forensic science, particularly in the early years when many courts would not allow this kind of testimony. Today, unfortunately, given the influx of graphologists into the field, battling handwriting experts is not uncommon, and is still bad for forensic science. In his book, Ames on Forgery: Its Detection and Illustrations, Ames attacked Carvalho’s credentials by detailing several cases in which his testimony conflicted with the outcome of the trial. Referring to Carvalho, he writes: “It has been from the appearance of such witnesses in courts that expert testimony has been unduly disparaged by the bench, the bar, and the press.

Although Molineux was considered innocent by the noted crime writer, Edmund Pearson, and other writers in the genre, the handwriting evidence, given the integrity and qualifications of the prosecution’s experts, suggests otherwise. There are, however, aspects of the Molineux case that remain a mystery. For example, the exact circumstances surrounding the death of Henry Barnet will never be known. Did Molineux really kill him by spiking the Kutnow Powder? This is perhaps a question that could have been answered a decade later when the field of forensic toxicology came into being. The Molineux case is forgotten now, but in its time, it was the crime of the century—in fact—the crime of two centuries.

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1. This account of the Molineux case is based upon the following sources: Carey, Arthur A., Memoirs of a Murder Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doren & Co., 1930 (pp 69-95); Klaus, Samuel, The Molineux Case. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929; Ames, Daniel T., Ames on Forgery: Its Detection and Illustrations. NY: Ames-Rollinson Co., 1900 (pp 216-39); Pearson, Edmund, Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927 (pl25); Carvalho, Claire and Boyden Sparks, Crime in Ink. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929 (pp 31-48); Le Brun, George P. (as told to Edward Radin), It’s Time to Tell. NY: William Morrow, 1962 (pp 22-47); Smith, Edward H., Famous Poison Mysteries. NY: The Dial Press, 1925 (pp 69-83); Crouse, Russel, Murder Won’t Out. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1932 (“The Murder of Katherine Adams,” pp. 117-38).
2. Witthaus would publish his four-volume treatise, Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology (NY: Wood) from 1906 to 1911.
3. In 1909, William J. Kinsley was brought into an obscene letter case involving a suspect named Oscar Krueger who had, a year earlier, been identified as the writer of the questioned document by another handwriting expert. On the strength of this expert’s testimony, Krueger was found guilty in Federal Court and sent to prison in Atlanta. Because he didn’t have any money, he had been unable to hire his own expert. He had been in prison one year when the government re-opened the case by asking Kinsley to examine the handwriting. When Kinsley reported that Krueger was not the writer of the obscene letter, he was pardoned by President Taft. In 1900 Kinsley published a 24-page booklet called, Tales Told by Handwriting. NY: Ames-Rollinson Co.
4. In 1910, the French courts, clearing Alfred Dreyfus of treason, set him free.
5. Ames, Daniel T., Ames on Forgery: Its Detection and Illustrations. NY: Ames-Rollinson Co., 1900
(p. 220).
6. All of the handwriting exhibits are shown in Ames on Forgery: Its Detection and Illustrations. Noted crime writer Edmund Pearson, in his 1927 book, Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co.), questions the validity of the prosecution’s handwriting case by ridiculing the professional qualifications of the experts. He writes: “The strong point for the prosecution lay in the evidence which was produced to show that the address of the package sent to Cornish was in the handwriting of Molineux. Fourteen handwriting experts, five of whom were bank employees, and were perhaps as impressive as any, agreed that the address on the bottle of Bromo-Seltzer was written by the prisoner.
7. Knappman, Edward (ed), Great American Trials. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1994 (p. 222).
8. Knappman, p. 222-23.
9. Ames, p. 234.
10. Ames, p. 234. In his memoir, Crime in Ink (as told to by Boyden Sparks, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), Carvalho defends his position in the Molineux case.
11. Another book favorable to the notion that Molineux was innocent is: LeBrun, George P. (as told to Edward Radin), It’s Time to Tell. NY: William Morrow, 1962 (pp. 22-47).

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posted 12-30-2010 10:57 AM            

The developments in the sensational poisoning case in New York of last week to a great extent hinge upon the trademark of the silver match box or bottle holder which was sent with the poisoned bromo-seltzer to Harry Cornish, and which resulted in the death of Mrs. Kate J. Adams. The trade-mark has been a clew of the utmost importance to the police and may be the means of bringing the murderer to justice. Upon the silver match box or bottle holder sent with the poison was the mark:

Mr. Lebkuccher was seen and identified the so-called bottle holder as one of about 25 match safes or toothpick holders which he had made about two years ago. Mr. Lebkuecher referred to his books and gave the police a list of the firms to whom the articles had been sold by him. These included the following:

Middletown Plate Co., Middletown. Conn
Cooke & Jacques, Trenton. N. J.
George It. Evans, Philadelphia
Greenleaf &- Crosby. Jacksonville. Fla..
Mermod & Jaccard Jewelry Co., St. Louis
Daniel Low, Salem, Mass.
Moses Straus. Borough of Brooklyn
Back, Starr & Frost, Borough of Manhattan
Becker & Lathrop. Syracuse. N. Y
Salvatore Desio, Washington, D. C.
C. Hartdegen & Co., Newark, N. J.
J. R. Armigcr Co., Baltimore, Md.
Stevens & Co., Chicago
Spaulding & Co., Chicago
Phelps & Adams, San Francisco

posted 12-30-2010 04:18 PM            

I wonder where the piece is now? Destroyed, on the market, or in some forgotten evidence locker?

It sounds like a footed cylindrical cup, with a bowl-like foot that acts as an ashtray. Suspect it looked vaguely like this...