The Devil's Gentleman (41 page)

77

B
lanche’s move to the little white house in Sing Sing—calculated to impress the world with her selfless devotion to Roland—did nothing to stop the press from portraying her in the most scandalous light. Little more than a week after her arrival, a highly sensationalized story appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Written by Hearst’s popular sob sister Winifred Black, a.k.a. Annie Laurie, the article purported to be a biography of Blanche—“the great puzzle mystery of the Molineux case”—based on interviews conducted with the subject herself.

Written in the floridly sentimental style Black was famous for, the article told of the “poor little one-eyed country girl” who “came to New York some ten years ago to earn an honest living by singing in a church choir,” and who had ended up leading a shocking double life: modest young lady by day, shameless voluptuary after dark:

Blanche Molineux…the woman who wore the quietest little gowns and the plainest hats on Sunday, and who dressed in gorgeousness and diamonds on week days.

The woman who thanked the Sunday school superintendent for a 10 cent bunch of wild flowers, and then went home to an apartment heavy with the perfume of hot house roses at $10 a dozen.

The woman who drank lemonade at the Sunday school picnic at Williamsburg, and who served champagne in silver buckets at her home in New York.

Even more inflammatory than this portrayal of Blanche as a woman of highly questionable morals—her luxurious life funded by wealthy male “friends”—were Black’s insinuations concerning Roland. Describing Blanche’s first encounter with her future husband on the yacht
Viator,
the article claimed that there were three men aboard the boat: Roland, Henry Barnet, and a “rich bachelor,” never identified by name. During that magically romantic excursion, “with its moonlight, its wealth of flowers, and its plenteous supply of champagne,” all three men fell “very much in love with Blanche Chesebrough.”

Just a few weeks later, however, two of those three died, “one of cyanide of mercury poisoning and the other of some cause that brought a quick and sudden end.” Blanche was left free to marry the only survivor—Roland Molineux.
¹

The widespread dissemination of the article (which appeared first in the
Denver Post,
then ran in
The Philadelphia Inquirer
before showing up in the
New York Journal
) brought a prompt and impassioned reply, published over Blanche’s signature, though both General Molineux and Bartow Weeks had a hand in its composition. In it, Blanche decries Black’s “villainous assault” upon her character, an act of perfidy made even more unforgivable for having been written by a woman. “It surpasses my understanding,” Blanche exclaims, “that any woman can so cruelly and falsely vilify without a shadow of foundation a sister woman on whom the shadow of affliction has already fallen so heavily.”

Denouncing the article as a collection of “baseless calumnies,” “wicked lies,” “infamous innuendoes,” she proceeds to set the record straight, denying that, as a single woman, she had ever “lived luxuriously in gorgeous apartments in upper New York,” and describing the fateful yachting party as a perfectly innocent occasion, during which she was chaperoned by her older sister.

As for the “gross and atrocious falsehoods” concerning Roland, Blanche proclaims her “absolute confidence” in her “noble husband,” who “is wholly innocent of the frightful crime with which he is charged”:

I know this, not only from the fact that no evidence save that of paid experts and venal witnesses of the lowest character has been brought against him, but also and chiefly from my knowledge of his own character. I know him to be brave, strong, and true—the last man to commit a crime of cunning, malice, and cowardice. He might strike in anger and hot blood, but the stealth and premeditation of the poisoner are foreign to his nature.

After a bitter attack on James Osborne, who had so scurrilously suggested that her relationship with Henry Barnet was “something more than an ordinary friendship,” the letter concludes with a heartfelt appeal to “the women of this land—the wives, the daughters of this American nation”:

I ask you to feel for me, for one moment put yourself in my place, and you wonder that I break the silence so long enforced upon me; that I cry against the malicious, the cruel, the wanton lies? Shall a man, because he is vested with the power of public office, because he is the prosecuting official in a charge brought against the unfortunate husband of one American woman, shall he, I say, be permitted to make that hapless wife the target of his merciless invective, his unfounded and unproven accusations? Is she to be defamed and robbed of her fair name? Is her honor, her dignity, her character, to be wantonly sullied?
²

Blanche’s reply received exactly the kind of attention the General was counting on: front-page coverage in virtually every New York City daily. He himself followed up with an attack on James Osborne, a native of North Carolina who was even then visiting his aged mother in his hometown, Charlotte. Osborne, said the General in a widely reprinted statement, was a man who made a mockery of the proud tradition “of Southern chivalry. I have fought Southerners, and I know they are brave men. I thought it was always said of them that they never attacked women. I understand that Mr. Osborne is a Southerner—of what sort can now be judged, after his characterization of my daughter-in-law.

“I say to all the world,” the General vowed in conclusion, “that she is my daughter, and that I shall protect her to the end.”
³

Given the public’s prurient fascination with Blanche, it was only a matter of time before the General was called upon to make good on that pledge. Not long after the appearance of Mrs. Black’s spurious biography, stories began to circulate in the papers that Blanche had returned to the city, where she was seen dining at Rector’s restaurant on Broadway and Forty-fifth Street with a male companion, clearly not her husband.

Once again, General Molineux found it necessary to issue a statement, attacking the story as “entirely without foundation.” On “the night in question,” his daughter-in-law “was at Sing Sing with my wife and other relatives.” She had not been to Rector’s restaurant “at any time since her husband’s arrest” indeed, “to the best of her recollection,” she had “never been there in her life.” After reconfirming his faith in Blanche, the General warned that we would “take prompt measures” against anyone who published such “cruel libels” in the future.
⁴

While General Molineux did battle with Blanche’s detractors, Roland’s lawyers were engaged on another front. In early March, they filed a notice of appeal. Roland’s death sentence—officially slated for the last week of the month—was put on indefinite hold. A few weeks later, to argue the case before the Court of Appeals, they retained one of the country’s most prominent attorneys, John G. Milburn of Buffalo.

It was a canny choice. The Court of Appeals sat in Buffalo, and Milburn—a top corporate lawyer who had successfully represented many appellants (including John D. Rockefeller)—was arguably the city’s leading resident. Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, he was an imposing six-footer, famed for his “golden-voiced” eloquence and commanding presence.
⁵

At the time he agreed to represent Roland Molineux, much of his attention was focused on a project that had dominated his life for the past several years, the great Buffalo World’s Fair (officially known as the Pan-American Exposition) scheduled to open the following May. As the head of the exposition’s board of directors, Milburn had countless details to attend to, including preparations for a planned visit by President McKinley himself.

Milburn had frequently played host to visiting dignitaries, including Vice President Roosevelt and the French ambassador, both of whom had been recent guests at his stately home on Delaware Avenue. McKinley’s visit to the Buffalo exposition was still more than a year away, and no official date had been set. But there was little doubt that, when he came to town, the president would stay at the Milburn residence.

78

I
n 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.”
⁹
It 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.