The Devil's Gentleman (31 page)

59

H
ad the electronic media existed back then, the trial of Roland Molineux would have been a round-the-clock extravaganza on the order of the O. J. Simpson circus. But even without cable TV at their disposal, Pulitzer and Hearst—the great pioneers of what would come to be known as tabloid journalism—knew how to whip the public into a frenzy.

The
Journal
in particular pulled out all the stops for the start of the “Great Poison Trial” on Tuesday, November 14.
MOLINEUX FIGHTS DESPERATELY FOR HIS LIFE
! screamed the front page of the evening edition in letters nearly three inches tall. Though the headlines would get smaller in the coming weeks, the proceedings would continue to dominate the news throughout their duration.

That period of time turned out to be much longer than anticipated. The prognosticators who foresaw a three-week courtroom battle were significantly wide of the mark. In the event, the trial lasted four times as long, beginning a few weeks before Thanksgiving Day 1899, and not coming to an end until early February of the new year.

Presiding at the trial was a ruddy-faced, white-bearded character named John Goff, who held the soon-to-be-obsolete office of recorder. An acid-tongued Irishman and bitter foe of Tammany Hall, Goff was the kind of judge who made no pretense of impartiality. Having “made up his mind as to the guilt or innocence of the accused,…he used his discretion with liberality in favor of the side of justice as he saw it.”
¹
Throughout the Molineux trial, his preferential treatment of the prosecuting attorney, James Osborne, would make it perfectly clear to the jury that, in Goff’s view, the defendant deserved to be convicted.

It was nearly half past ten before Goff arrived and took his seat on the bench on opening day. By then, the courtroom was filled to capacity. Many of the spectators were prominent attorneys, who were there to observe what they correctly believed would turn out to be a landmark trial. Some had traveled all the way from the West Coast just to witness the event.

Meanwhile, in the corridor outside, scores of curiosity-seekers begged for admission. Among them were at least a dozen young women, a number of whom had brought their lunches. One of these hopefuls, a “stylishly dressed blonde wearing expensive diamonds,” swore that she was a close friend of Roland’s. Her pleas, however, did not move the burly court officer standing sentinel at the doorway, and she—like the other “morbid type” of women who had come to moon over the handsome defendant—was turned away.
²

Roland himself was brought into the courtroom a few minutes after Goff made his entry. After seven months in the Tombs, he looked pale and doughy, though as “faultlessly groomed” as ever in his black single-breasted, tightly buttoned sack coat. His stiff standing collar was so high that, to keep it from crinkling, he was compelled to hold his head thrown back, a posture that made it appear as if he were looking down his nose at the world. His face, though of a waxen pallor, was clean-shaven. His hair was neatly combed and meticulously parted down the middle, with the merest hint of a bald spot in back.

Proceeding to the front of the room, he seated himself beside his father, who had been the first to arrive in the courtroom that morning. The General, who had aged visibly since last seen in public, had exchanged his derby for a black silk skullcap, which he would wear throughout the trial to keep his balding head warm in the unheated room. As Roland sank down beside him, the “white-haired veteran” eagerly grasped his boy by the hand.

“I’m all right, Father,” said Roland, who then cast a glance around the room. When he caught sight of Harry Cornish, seated a few rows away, he frowned deeply. Cornish coldly met his stare.
³

Roland next shook hands with his counsel, Bartow Weeks and Weeks’s partner in his Wall Street firm, George Gordon Battle.

A courtly Southerner who had migrated to New York City after the Civil War, Battle had worked in the Manhattan DA’s office before entering into private practice. He would go on to have a long and distinguished career in both law and local politics, though he is remembered today, if at all, only because of his controversial namesake. A generous benefactor, Battle, in later years, helped put his office boy, a poor but promising youngster name Sylvester Liddy, through law school. In gratitude, Sylvester would name his firstborn after his mentor: George Gordon Battle Liddy—or as the world came to know him during the Watergate scandal, G. Gordon Liddy.
⁴

In trumpeting the start of Roland’s trial as an edge-of-the-seat life-or-death struggle, the yellow papers had primed the audience for a thrilling melodrama. What they got instead, at least to begin with, was something much closer to farce.

After an hour or so of procedural bickering between Osborne and Weeks, the two lawyers got down to the first order of business, the selection of a jury. It was a process normally accomplished in a day, two at most. Jurors could be rejected either by mutual consent of the prosecution and defense or by objection of either side. The entire remainder of day one was given over to the questioning of potential jurors, none of whom was deemed acceptable.

Some were excused because they had moral scruples against capital punishment. Others did not appear physically suited for what promised to be a long and demanding task. One fellow complained that he did not wish to serve because, if the trial lasted several weeks, it would “interfere with my health on account of lack of exercise.” Another was dismissed because “he had caught a cold while waiting for his name to be called.”

For the most part, however, talesmen were disqualified because of their inability to provide suitable answers to the questions posed by Osborne and Weeks.

One prospective juror, a chandelier salesman named Edward N. Sprague, gave an emphatic no when asked if “he would have any trouble convicting a man on the basis of circumstantial evidence.” He was then asked to define circumstantial evidence.

“Fictitious and imaginary evidence,” was his reply.

As Roland barked out a laugh, Weeks asked incredulously, “Do you mean to say that you would find a verdict of murder in the first degree upon fictitious and imaginary evidence?”

Sprague shrugged as if to say, Why, yes, is there something wrong with that?—at which point he was summarily excused.
⁵

Another talesman, a cabbie named Hugh Dougherty, brought down the house when Osborne posed the following query: “Do you understand that, in order to justify legal guilt from circumstantial evidence, the inculpatory facts must be absolutely incompatible with the innocence of the accused?”

“I never heard that while driving my cab,” said Dougherty.

As the examination of the talesmen proceeded, the courtroom took on the atmosphere of a comedy show. At one point during his questioning of a hatmaker named Jacob J. Bantler, Weeks asked, “What is turpitude?”

“An all-around man,” Bantler replied without a moment’s hesitation, provoking another outburst of hilarity from the audience.

Dougherty and Bantler weren’t the only ones flummoxed by the high-flown vocabulary and arcane legalese of Osborne and Weeks. Indeed, the lawyers’ insistence on framing their questions in the most convoluted way possible brought the first of many reprimands from Goff.

“What would you understand,” Weeks asked a gentleman named Albert C. Ayer, “if the court were to say to you that the human mind sometimes acts with such celerity that it is sometimes impossible to measure, and that the deduction of malice from the perpetration of the deed should be drawn after carefully considering all the circumstances?”

As Ayer stared at the attorney in mute bewilderment, Goff said angrily, “I won’t allow citizens to be brought here and submitted to ridicule by such questions. You have been asking questions that the most learned of jurists could hardly answer.”

“But, Your Honor,” Weeks protested, “it is the desire of both the prosecution and of ourselves that men of a high order of intelligence be secured as jurors in this case. That is why we ask these questions.”

“But I won’t allow it,” said Goff. “These citizens are summoned here for their capacity as jurors and not to be made ridiculous by hypothetical conglomerations that nobody could understand. I, too, want to secure good and intelligent jurors, but they can be secured without such questions.”

Goff’s rebuke had little effect on either Weeks or Osborne, who seemed either incapable of—or unwilling to—ask a straightforward question. Ayers was rejected because he did not understand the terms
hypothesis, celerity,
and
morbid propensity
. Likewise, the next talesman, a man named Joseph C. Emsheimer, was excused because he could not give a definition of the words
probative, obliquity,
and
turpitude
.

And so it went. By the end of day one, nothing had been accomplished. When Goff adjourned the proceedings at 2:00
P.M.
, the jury box was still empty.
⁶

The story was the same the following day. From 10:30
A.M.
until 5:30
P.M.
, nearly fifty potential jurors—men from all walks of life and with varying degrees of formal education—were called to the front of the courtroom and subjected to questions like: “If the court should charge you that you should keep your mind in a condition of equipoise until all the facts were presented, what would you understand by that?” and “If the court should say to you that the presence of the principal need not be personal—that he need not be personally present in order to be responsible for his act—that the act of another, if by his inducement or authority or direction, would be sufficient—would you understand that?”

Once again, Goff, growing more impatient by the minute, took the lawyers to task, warning them that unless they managed to impanel a jury soon, he would be compelled to hold night sessions. But his threats were unavailing. The day ended again without the selection of a single juror.

By day three, some of the talesmen were so worried about being made into laughingstocks that they showed up with crib sheets—little slips of paper containing written definitions of words like
celerity
and
perfidy.
There was a comical aspect to the sight of these grown, respectable men “looking for all the world like nervous schoolboys, determined not to fail on their English examinations…and frightened with the prospect of being forced to spend another year in study.”
⁷
Still, as far as most observers were concerned, the humor had largely drained from the situation. Two men were finally chosen for the jury that day, but only after another thirty-plus candidates had been questioned, bringing the total to nearly one hundred.

By then, the papers were in an uproar. In a withering editorial,
The New York Times
blasted the two attorneys for “wasting both time and the taxpayer’s money.” By posing questions “that would be more in place in a competitive examination for a professorship of rhetoric than in an endeavor to obtain a fair jury for the trial of a criminal case,” Osborne and Weeks had turned the proceedings into a “discreditable spectacle.”
⁸

The
Sun,
meanwhile, published a scathing satire that described potential jurors fleeing the courtroom in despair after being asked questions like: “Tell me, sir, is your psychological integument sufficiently pachydermatous to obviate the potentiality of the percolation of irrelevant perceptions?” and “Would the juxtaposition of inherently incompatible circumstances in the testimony militate against proper ideation on your part?”
⁹

Nothing, however—neither the mockery of the press nor the efforts by Goff to speed things along—seemed to work. The selection of the Molineux jury proceeded at an agonizing pace. Day after day, the papers ran the same disheartening headlines:
NO NEW JURORS FOUND TO TRY MOLINEUX
,
NO NEW JUROR SECURED, MOLINEUX TALESMEN UNACCEPTABLE TODAY, STILL NO MOLINEUX JURY.
When, at the start of the second week of the trial, three men were chosen on a single day, the
Brooklyn Eagle
hailed it, unironically, as a “splendid achievement.”
¹⁰

With the proceedings mired in tedium and nothing dramatic to report, the yellow papers resorted to a venerable tactic: the promulgation of sensational rumors. On November 22, Hearst’s
Evening Journal
featured an explosive charge on its front page:
INSANITY TAINT IN BRANCHES OF MOLINEUX FAMILY
! The gist of the story was that Roland suffered from hereditary madness and would most likely plead insanity.

People who bothered to read the piece all the way through, however, would have discovered that this depiction of the Molineux clan as a kind of latter-day House of Usher was less than convincing. The supposed “insane streak” that ran through the family consisted of two distant female cousins of Roland’s who had reportedly “shown signs” of unspecified “mental trouble” and a woman, Hedda Strack, “wife of Molineux’s great grand-uncle on his mother’s side,” who “was an epileptic.”
¹¹

The next day, Weeks protested in court that the article was prejudicial to his client, then dropped the matter and returned to the seemingly endless business of jury selection. It was November 23, ten days after the start of the trial, and there were still five spots to fill in the jury box.

The process would not be completed until the following week, Wednesday, November 29. At a few minutes before 5:00
P.M
.—not long after Goff threatened to continue the session into the night, if necessary—the twelfth man, an employee of the American Book Company named Frederick Crane, took his place in the jury box. A collective sigh of relief went up in the courtroom. It had taken more than two weeks and the examination of 504 talesmen to accomplish the task, though the consensus was that, in the end, the two sides had secured a jury of remarkable caliber—a dozen men “of high standing and unusual intelligence.”
¹²