Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

The Blue Box from Tiffany’s by H. W. Corley

A rare poison sends a man to trial for the murder of someone he had never seen nor heard of...

The widely famed Molineux case of the late nineties ranks among the celebrated trials of criminal history of all time and is one of the most noted mysteries known to American law, interesting for two particular reasons.

One, it was the first case in which an American had ever been accused of poisoning a rival.

Two, the poison involved had not, tip to that date, appeared more than three times in the entire crime annals of the world.

Then, too, the accused man went to trial for the murder of some one whom he had never seen, and of whom, very likely, he had not even heard.

The case was talked of everywhere, it occupied the minds of the social set; legal circles discussed it, and the man on the street found much therein to occupy his attention.

The case has a proper beginning, possibly, in 1895 when, at the corner of Madison Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street, there was built the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, at first exclusive, then embroiled in a famous murder trial and now extinct.

The club, an outgrowth of the Pequod Association, provided its members with the latest equipment and training in physical culture and furnished living quarters for young bachelors, at the very negligible price, even then, of two dollars a day.

Henry Crossman Barnet, forty years old, stocky sportsman rather than athlete, fond of society and comfortable living, attended the club not so much because of its gymnastic privileges as because when not aboard some yacht or other he found it a very pleasant place to dwell there.

Barnet had a brokerage business in Broad Street requiring not too much of his attention, an affable manner, a flair for society and a Vandyke beard.

Roland B. Molineux was the central figure of the affair.

Molineux was younger than Barnet, less than thirty at the time the Knickerbocker opened its doors, and his connection with the club was largely for the gymnastics.

He was born in Brooklyn, son of General Edward Leslie Molineux, commander of the Seventh Regiment, and manufacturer of paints, oils and dry colors. He was of French extraction, which accounted to a large extent for his suave manner and undeniable charm, was educated in the common schools of Brooklyn, and as he grew older showed a distinct liking for chemistry.

He went to a polytechnic institute, where he majored in sciences, then he graduated and worked for his father for several years.

He was singularly pleasing in appearance and manner, and at the tender age of sixteen there is a record of an entanglement in a divorce case, from which predicament his family withdrew him and sent him to New Mexico to meditate.

While working in his father’s factory he saw an advertisement for a similar position in Newark, with a firm known as Herrmann’s. He applied by letter, received the appointment and left his father’s employ.

When the club opened Molineux had already made a name for himself at the Brooklyn Y. M. C. A. in amateur athletics, and at the suggestion of some friends that he add the glory of his prowess to the list of the newly formed club, he joined the Knickerbocker.

He moved then, bag and baggage, to Madison Avenue, commuting to Newark by trolley and the Cortlandt Street ferry, this being before the days of tubes or tunnels.

The club gladly welcomed Molineux, his reputation as an amateur horizontal bar performer extended over the country and he rivaled professionals in his work on the trapeze and flying rings.

At the factory his executive skill, combined with his unusual ability in color work won him the position of superintendent, while at the Knickerbocker his interest in club affairs soon placed him on the house committee. And this is where another man, in whom the case is interested, comes into the tale.

This man was Harry S. Cornish, who was director of physical training at the Knickerbocker. Since the young chemist was constantly in the gymnasium, Cornish saw much of Molineux. Molineux was the better athlete, though he looked anything but the part, being delicately built and aesthetic in appearance.

Cornish, famous trainer and athlete of the day looked the typical athlete. He was overbearing in manner, to those who he thought could not jeopardize his position, and cringing to those who could. And since he could not, for some time, decide to which class Molineux belonged, his behavior in that quarter was uncertain.

There is no question in the world that there was bad blood between Molineux and Cornish. Even the most casual member of the club knew of its existence. Yet for all that Molineux disliked Cornish, no one had heard any active expression of that dislike, many said that they could hardly imagine his saying an ill-tempered or ill-mannered thing, no matter what the provocation.

But as the years went on the animosity increased and brought added proof of its depth and seriousness.

Half the club, for example, recalled the occasion of the amateur circus performance given by the members of the gymnasium in which Molineux, was featured and Cornish figured as director.

There were one or two scenes of displeasure which in the hands of any one save Molineux would have been embarrassing to the onlookers.

Molineux complained that Cornish did not know his place, that he mingled too familiarly with the guests of the members. And Cornish had his bit to say about the well-fitting costumes and the cosmetics used by the star performer, who seemed aware of the attractive figure he presented in action.

“That man is a positive boor,” the chemist had said several times.

“Molineux’s a snob!” came from Cornish.

Cornish went so far one afternoon as to call Molineux, behind his back, of course, a rumseller — a name carrying greater contempt in those days.

But only when the athlete took his pen in hand to write scathing criticisms of a friend did Molineux blow up.

Barney Wefers, the great sprinter of the time, received a letter from Cornish criticizing a man named Bartow S. Weeks on some point of minor athletics. How the letter fell into Molineux’s hands is not known. Yet fall it did and he carried it to the governors of the Knickerbocker Club, demanding the dismissal of Cornish.

Now Weeks, aside from being a friend of Molineux as well as other members of the club, was also president of the New York Athletic Club, an honored and rival organization.

The governors sent around their apologies — for Weeks, too, had heard of the note — decided that this was ample restitution and declined to go further in the matter.

Quite naturally the trainer decided that he had won a point in a personal quarrel. He could not let the matter rest at that and the next time he met Molineux said to him sneeringly.

“Well, you didn’t get me out, did you?”

It is odd to observe that Molineux’s answer was couched in the terms which would probably have been employed to-day.

“You win,” said Molineux cheerfully, and hurried down the stairs to keep an appointment.

In relating this encounter, Molineux told friends that Cornish called him a vile name — as usual — and remarked that his obscene conversation in the gymnasium and dressing rooms was lowering the tone of the club.

Cornish denied it, but other members testified to frequent lapses on the part of the physical director into vulgarity which was, to say the least, below the standards set by good taste.

“This club isn’t large enough to hold us both,” Molineux said, and at about that time Weeks invited him to join the New York Athletic Club where he felt that things would be far more pleasant.

He gave in his resignation, which was accepted, and quit the place.

The new club did not offer living quarters and for this reason Molineux took some rooms in a building of the factory at Newark which were made quite comfortable and which were convenient in the event of late hours in his office. But for the most part, his social activities and club membership brought him to New York each night.

There was one result at least, of Molineux’s adversion to Cornish. The athletic director was asked to live outside the club and his rooms were turned over to the use of a member.

He went to live with a Mrs. Katherine Adams, a distant relative whom he called aunt, in her flat on Eighty-Sixth Street.

Here in the Adams flat also lived Mrs. Laura Rodgers, and her son, daughter and grandson of Mrs. Adams. Mrs. Rodgers, separated from her husband, had an excellent alimony, which with what Cornish paid, allowed the family to live in ease.

Later, the investigation tried to prove that the athlete was unduly interested in the divorcee. This theory, however, failed to gain any ground and the idea was dismissed after three days.

Now, of course, Cornish never saw Molineux, who gave the Knickerbocker Club a wide berth. Occasionally he would hear of him at some athletic meet, or from some of the members. He saw Barnet, who frequently ran into the young chemist socially and with whom a social friendship was maintained.

These were happy days for Molineux, for he had by this time formed an acquaintance with a certain Miss Blanche Cheeseborough, an acquaintance fast ripening into a romance.

Molineux, usually aloof and detached where women were concerned became at once infatuated when he met her.

Miss Cheeseborough has been described in the press in more various ways probably than any other woman ever appearing in the news. In those days it was not the duty of the reporter to call the woman of whom he wrote beautiful, unless she happened to merit the term.

Miss Cheeseborough therefore was called everything ranging from downright ugly to exceedingly lovely. Some called her plain, referring disparagingly to the glass eye, the result of an accident in childhood; others referred to the eye as just the point which gave her charm.

She was in her early twenties, undeniably prepossessing, and endowed with the quality called style.

“Plain until she smiles,” one man wrote of her, “and then a vague dimple appears in the corner of her mouth, her upper lip lifting curiously like that of a teasing puppy.”

Some one who saw her later under difficult circumstances said that she had the look of a “persecuted saint.” All agreed that she was poised, mysterious, inscrutable, fascinating to a degree.

And, consequently, Roland Molineux had many rivals.

Her life history, too, is interesting. She had come to New York from Rhode Island with her parents who died subsequently, leaving her in the ostensible care of two married sisters.

She was living with one of them, at the time she met Molineux, in an over-furnished, over-elaborate apartment on the West Side.

Although her parents left her no money, she subsisted well, mainly on the bounty of her brothers and sisters. She had a job, singing in the choir of a Brooklyn church which paid her ten dollars a week.

She was quiet and modest and her shy little manners of speech made her known and loved by the church members. She dressed quietly on Sundays and thanked the Sunday school superintendent for a modest bouquet of flowers and for lemonade which was tendered her at the simple Sunday school picnics.

During the days when Molineux pressed his suit, Blanche was most charming. He was not a jealous admirer, for he presented many of his friends, including Barnet, who also became infatuated.

The number of rivals swelled and swelled.

“Was Barnet in love with Miss Cheeseborough?” Molineux was asked later and he replied that naturally he did not know what was in the other’s mind.

“I can hardly blame him if he admired her,” Molineux added. “Every one did,” he explained.

Molineux proposed to Miss Cheese-borough on Thanksgiving Day and while she did not immediately accept him, she did so later. Barnet, fluttering about, did not, as far as the evidence went, propose at all.

The relations between the two men were markedly cordial — there was never, apparently, any break between them.

But something transpired to keep Blanche from receiving the attentions of Barnet after June, 1898, although she corresponded with him. Nobody seemed to discover just what brought this about — certainly not Barnet’s lack of interest.

And it could not have been Molineux’s wish, for after his engagement to Miss Cheeseborough he asked Barnet to take her to the Knickerbocker Club amateur circus performance, where he himself did not care to appear.

In October of that year Barnet was taken ill at the club. Nothing very much, just a headache, and a sore throat. Nevertheless he thought it advisable to call in a doctor.

Dr. Henry Douglass, who lived near the club, came at his request, examined him, found little trouble, and at length took a throat culture which he sent to be examined for possible diphtheria germs.

These germs were lacking, however, and the case at length set down to false diphtheria for which Barnet was duly treated.

Nevertheless his malady did not respond to the care and the doctor finally thought that he detected slight symptoms of mercury poisoning.

Then he saw some Kutnow powders on the desk.

There is calomel in Kutnow powders and for awhile the doctor decided that there was too much mercury present in the calomel and sent the box out to be analyzed.

Back came the report in a hurry — the mercury was there all right, not in the form of calomel, but in the deadlier form of cyanide of mercury! The powders were, in fact, a large proportion of the poison!

“Where did you get the powders?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, they are samples,” replied Barnet. “They came to me in the mail.”

Quite naturally he took no more of the powders. He seemed to be recovering slightly, then relapsed and by the end of the week he was dead.

Now Barnet had moved about, upstairs and down, during his convalescence and the death certificate was, therefore, filled in to the effect that he had died of heart failure, from too great exertion during the period following the attack of false diphtheria.

He was buried at Greenwood, and a large throng of friends followed him to his grave.

Every one remarked that they did not see Roland Molineux at the services or the cemetery. They wondered at this for the two were the best of friends apparently and the friendly rivalry which had existed between them would, they believed, only make Molineux the more anxious to observe social amenities.

It became evident that he was doing just that.

“I wasn’t invited to the funeral,” he said when asked why he had not attended. “I have always considered it the correct procedure to fail to appear in a case like that!”

But he added that he had inquired several times for Barnet when he heard that he was ill, that Miss Cheeseborough had, at his suggestion, sent flowers and written a note.

They had both neglected to call because they feared the false diphtheria, particularly at the time of their approaching wedding, when illness would have delayed the ceremony.

For they were planning to be married. And in less than three weeks after Barnet’s death the ceremony was held at the Waldorf, where the couple remained for a honeymoon, after which they took rooms at a fashionable boarding house on West End Avenue.

Molineux kept the rooms at the factory, where he studied, and retained the young woman, Mamie Melando, to keep the place in order — two facts which had much bearing on the case when it later came to court.

From here let us jump to Christmas week, and the morning before the holiday.

Cornish, still living at his aunt’s, left for the club earlier than usual, for there was much to do in connection with the Christmas affairs at the club.

As he came bustling into his office he saw on the desk a large lot of mail — and a square, small box wrapped in ordinary wrapping paper.

“A Christmas gift, by Jove,” was his ejaculation, sweeping the letters aside and examining the parcel with unusual interest.

The address was in an unknown hand and omitted the name and address of the sender — such packages usually carried them. Scenting a mystery, he tore off the wrapper.

It was pleasant to receive an unexpected gift.

“Perhaps it is a joke,” suggested his assistant unfeelingly.

“Ah, perhaps it is a lady,” some one else remarked, and with this agreeable idea in view the package was opened to view.

It was a blue box from Tiffany’s. Within the box lay silken tissue, swathing a delicate silver bottle holder of charming design and embracing a blue bottle of bromo seltzer!

Clearly a joke, and a shout went up at the expense of the director. But Cornish was a little puzzled. For the joke was lacking. He had never taken a dose of bromo seltzer in his life. This “natural enough pleasantry at Christmas,” to quote the district attorney, in the case had little point.

But the holder was fine, so Cornish left the present in plain view on his desk and showed it to every one who came in.

By noon it was quite the thing to kid Cornish about the Christmas gift sent him by a facetious lady; one or two late risers sent to inquire for a dose of bromo seltzer; and one of these, Harry King, was given the bottle and told to go as far as he liked.

Harry King’s guardian angel was busy that morning. King took the bottle and the tumbler to the water cooler. There was no water. And, grumbling at the lax ways into which servants had fallen these days, he set the bottle back on the desk and went elsewhere for his dose.

Two days later, when every one had admired the gift, Cornish took it home, the bromo seltzer bottle still intact.

At home, of course, both women admired the little holder. Mrs. Rodgers said that it was the same design as the silver on her dresser, and Cornish promptly handed it to her, with the remark that she might set it with the rest.

“Only I’ll keep the bromo for my own use,” he laughed.

Two days later, as he frequently did to lighten the work for Mrs. Adams, he invited the family to dine with him at a restaurant. The party was a gay affair and they returned home in high spirits. Every one enjoyed it, except, perhaps, Mrs. Adams, for the rich food made her ill, and she went promptly to bed.

The next morning Cornish rose and, as was his custom, went to the rear door of the apartment for his newspaper. He found Mrs. Adams bending over the stove in the kitchen preparing breakfast, with a cloth tied about her head.

“Still ill?” he paused to ask sympathetically, and she nodded. “That’s a shame.”

“Just a headache. I am getting too old for rich food and late hours.”

He laughed this away, and after asking if he could be of aid to her, went back to his room to read until summoned for breakfast.

Presently Mrs. Rodgers interrupted him by softly tapping on the door.

“Mother has a very bad headache,” she explained. “I believe that a dose of the bromo seltzer might help her. Isn’t that what they take for dissipation?”

Mrs. Adams, who had followed her in, laughed at this. Cornish handed them the bottle and they disappeared.

Two minutes later they were back again, they could not open the bottle, they said, and stood by with water and a spoon while Cornish turned the trick.

“Ugh, how sour it tastes,” said Mrs. Adams, making a wry face as she downed it.

This interested Cornish. He had seen men take similar doses without wry faces, and decided to try one for himself. But he mixed for his own consumption a smaller doze. Hardly had he swallowed it when he began to feel dizzy and queer, and made his way to the chair by the window.

At that moment there was a cry from the dining room, whither Mrs. Adams had retreated; there were a thud and a scream from Mrs. Rodgers.

“Come quick, mother has fainted!” she called.

Cornish, ill himself, staggered to the other room, and, athlete though he was, was unable by this time to find strength to lift the woman from the floor, where she lay white and drawn in suffering.

“I am ill, too, terribly ill,” he gasped. “What do you suppose was in that bottle? Bromo seltzer could never act like that!”

“Go down to the drug store and find out what to do about it, quick,” urged Mrs. Rodgers, wringing her hands. “If it is poison they will know what to do.”

At the drug store on the corner they could give only this information: It was a poison, all right, which poison they did not know; they could not, consequently, give him the proper antidote.

“But there is a woman dying upstairs!” Cornish groaned.

“Then fetch a doctor,” advised the druggist, and he sent a boy out, calling others on the telephone.

At least half a dozen physicians got word to rush to the Adams flat — the first to arrive, half an hour later, found Cornish comfortable and Mrs. Adams dead.

Now neither this doctor nor Cornish reported the matter to the police. Plainly, they felt it was a case of poisoning with intent to kill Cornish. Mrs. Adams had merely intervened between the poisoner and his intended victim.

When he was able, which was shortly, Cornish hastened to the district attorney’s office, where he had a friend, and told them the story, which he later referred to as “trouble up at the flat.”

Quite naturally it perturbed him deeply to discover that he had an enemy who would resort to extreme measures. With the enemy at large it might easily happen again — with no intervention from Providence in the shape of kind old ladies who never did any one any harm.

The investigation was placed in the hands of George McCluskey, captain of the detectives, who at once absolved Cornish of any intention to kill his aunt by this subtle means.

The relations existing between Cornish and Mrs. Adams were friendly in the extreme. He would have gained nothing by getting her out of the way.

The husband of Mrs. Rodgers was then considered a possibility, as was the wife of Cornish, both divorced; but these two people were absolved upon the most trifling investigation.

Then detectives decided that the deed had been done by a woman in revenge. For some time they concentrated in finding this woman. She remained unfound. Gradually they relinquished the idea — and began to look about more generally for some one who might have hated Cornish.

The investigation here proved more fruitful, for the trainer had always been a man of warm friendships and bitter enmities. But they could settle on no definite person among them.

In the matter of clews they had, of course, several on hand. There was, first of all, the blue box from Tiffany’s. Just a box — such as was sent out of the shop by the hundreds, and which could not possibly aid in tracking their man.

The silver bottle holder within, however, proved more interesting. It had not been purchased at Tiffany’s at all, but belonged to a lot made by a firm called F. A. Lebkeneker & Co., manufacturing jewelers of Newark.

As luck would have it, there had been but twenty-three of these holders made — and only one had been sold in New York. This was immediately traced to a source which could be none other than innocent.

On the holder in question a reporter discovered a mark 814. This immediately identified it as one sold to the retail firm of Hartdegan & Co., also of Newark.

The article, Hartdegan & Co. told the men, was not a bottle holder at all, but was designed to carry toothpicks, or suggested itself possibly as a candlestick; the idea of the bottle originated with the purchaser.

The bookkeeper of the shop, Miss Emma Miller, had been impressed into sales service the few days before Christmas, and she recalled selling this particular bottle — to a gentleman of about thirty-five or forty, harsh voice, pleasing manner, reddish Vandyke beard, rather anxious to make quick work of the purchase. He was, she recalled, about five feet eight in height, well bred and well born.

Detectives decided that the purchaser was some one who normally divided his time between Newark and New York — assuming, of course, that the purchaser and the sender were the same person, since the trinket had been bought in one place and mailed in the other at an hour when a commuter would logically return.

So far, so good. Then they turned to the bromo seltzer to see what clew this might present. They found, instead of anything to aid them, that bottles like this were sold by the hundreds and thousands all over the country each year. Then some one brought in an important finding; this bottle, though it closely resembled one, was not an original bromo-seltzer container at all, but a bottle used for cyanide of mercury.

“If it had been a bromo bottle,” a druggist told them, “the trade-mark would have been blown into the glass.”

Then they tried to discover the source of the cyanide of mercury. Here they had a difficult time of it, for they found that the drug was so rare that druggists of wide experience could live out a lifetime without laying eyes upon it. Yet, once known, it was one of the easiest substances in the world to detect.

It had been discovered by a druggist named Scheele, who had come across the drug accidentally while concocting a certain color later named Prussian blue in his color laboratory. It was used in chemical and analytical laboratories, and up to that time there had been only three reported cases of poisoning by it in the entire world.

Power and Wightman, called by the district attorneys “the princes of manufacturers of chemicals,” who made more, probably, than any one else in the entire country, had sold but thirty ounces of cyanide in the whole year, and this in thirty one-ounce bottles.

The bottle sent to Cornish was one of the thirty bottles sold by this firm. Ten of the thirty had been sold in Newark, the wholesalers retaining six of them, the other four traced to innocuous sources, such as the laboratory of the high school. Then the wholesalers recalled selling a loose ounce over the counter for cash

This complicated matters somewhat, and they were further involved by the professor of chemistry at the high school, who rushed into the district attorney’s office to state that, after all, he had not purchased his cyanide from Power and Wightman, and that therefore two bottles were still unaccounted for by the police.

Sixty thousand orders in the files were painstakingly gone over, but the two missing bottles never were traced.

While this was going on a handwriting expert W. J. Kinsley, who had been studying the address on the poison package, reported that he believed it to have been written by a man between the ages of twenty-five and forty — a person who wrote much, probably a business man.

To whose advantage was it to have killed Cornish?

No one could be found who would have profited by the death of the trainer, but a search disclosed that he had many enemies who might have been glad to play a practical joke.

There was named a man with a continued and deep hatred of Cornish. This was Molineux. He was between twenty-five and forty. He was a business man who wrote much, and the description given by the girl in Hartdegan’s who sold the silver bottle holder seemed to fit him. True, he had not a red beard, but he might easily have worn a false one. And while his voice was not harsh, that could easily have been assumed.

Then an enterprising detective found a wigmaker who stated that on the day of the purchase of the bottle holder a tall, well-dressed man had come into his shop to hire a wig and beard “with a natural look,” and had paid eight dollars and seventy-five cents for the privilege of using one overnight.

Molineux was a color maker — like Scheele, the discoverer. He too might have concocted the drug right in his laboratory, and none the wiser, thought the police.

Then a friend of Cornish came forward to state that he, as a chemist, could easily make this cyanide of mercury, difficult in itself to procure, from two easily and innocently obtained materials. He could make it, he said, by boiling Prussian blue with yellow oxide of mercury, red oxide of mercury, or queen’s yellow. It was simple enough — boil the two and filter the compound when crystals were formed.

There were ominous mutterings among the detectives and supporters of Cornish. Then a certain New York paper came boldly out with the statement that the police were — or should be — looking for Molineux.

A friend of the family chanced to read the head at five in the morning, and hurried to the Molineux house, where he rang the bell loudly and flapped the paper in the sleepy general’s face.

They woke Roland, and after a consultation hurried straight to the home of McCluskey, the detective in charge.

“I understand that you are looking for me,” Molineux, debonair and smiling, remarked to the burly detective.

McCluskey patted him on the back and told him not to be silly; to go his way; that if he had been wanted, they would have come after him.

“You are as free as air,” McCluskey said.

Molineux went his way — straight to the offices of his friend, Bartow S. Weeks, who was an attorney.

Though all his friends pooh-poohed the idea of involving Molineux, the family felt their position keenly — all except Roland. Debonair, smiling, cane on arm, he visited the offices of the police in Newark and told them that they could find him at any time at his offices.

Then he and Weeks went to Hartdegan & Co. to see Miss Miller.

She failed to identify Molineux as her customer, even making allowances for the red beard. The story of the wigmaker was laughed out of the press — for he could not describe the man who hired the wig twice in the same manner. Molineux went smiling on his way.

But Weeks got on the job and hired D. N. Carvalho, a handwriting expert often utilized by the police, to clear up the mystery of the poison package address.

Kinsley, who had been at work on it since the third day after the murder, announced no progress in the matter. Carvalho was silent. And the investigation chased its tail in the sun.

Four weeks passed, and then there came a bolt out of the blue. Two letter box men got into the affair and gave important information.

In those days branch post offices were rare and stationers made an excellent income by receiving mail for those who preferred not to use their own addresses, much in the same manner that general deliveries are used to-day. Ladies who wished to carry on clandestine correspondence; men who engaged in dubious business projects found them convenient. And letter box men asked no questions and carried no tales.

But, they explained, when the police were concerned they would not keep silent. The picture published in the press as the suspect in the Adams murder closely resembled a man who had come to their shops and ordered mail boxes, under the significant names of H. Cornish and H. C. Barnet!

They were quite unshaken in their insistence that the man had been Molineux. Nicholas Heckman, 242 W. Forty-Second Street, had read, he said, of Barnet’s death in the paper, nevertheless the gentleman, he could not help but observe, had come in regularly for his mail.

He could not help noticing that it was composed mainly of communications from patent medicine firms.

Morris Koch, letter box man at 1260 Broadway, stated that his experience duplicated that of Heckman.

The Studio Publishing Company of the same address presented a letter signed “Roland B. Molineux,” asking for a sample copy of their paper — in which there had appeared an advertisement of Koch’s letter box business. And this letter was written on egg blue paper with three intertwined crescents, paper which appeared later in the files of a certain patent medicine firm signed “H. Cornish.” It appeared a third time in the files of a doctor’s office on Columbus Avenue signed “Roland B. Molineux,” and giving the Newark address.

The paper was traced from the maker, Whiting and Company, to several shops in Newark and New York. Mamie Melando, who cared for Molineux’s rooms at the factory, swore that this paper had been among Molineux’s effects — and based her statement on the fact that it had pleased her so much that she occasionally pilfered some.

Friends of Molineux remarked that Miss Melando had ample opportunity to place this egg blue paper in Molineux’s desk at some outside instigation. Or that Miss Melando was plainly talking through her hat.

Early in February the district attorney’s office announced that by right of a recently established decision of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, they would take the matter out of the detectives’ hands and that henceforth all investigation would emanate from that office.

The first thing they did was to order a coroner’s inquest. And since the letter box men had added Barnet’s name to the mystery and Dr. Douglass came forward and told all he knew about the Kutnow powders and the cyanide of mercury, the district attorney ordered Barnet’s body exhumed. The findings there added to the general excitement. Enough poison was discovered to have killed half a dozen men.

In the time which intervened between the calling of the inquest and its occurrence, rumors that Cornish had openly accused Molineux gained credence and he was invited to make these accusations officially at the inquest.

Instead he denied ever having made them at all.

“Don’t you recall saying that Molineux was the only man who could possibly have done it, accusing him?” he was asked.

“I do not accuse Mr. Molineux. Anything I may have said to McCluskey was by way of suggestion and not meant to be a charge.”

Molineux lost none of his calmness during this proceeding. He conducted himself with such dignity and restraint that he won sympathy and created an immediate and excellent impression. Impassive and unshaken, he told frankly of the differences with Cornish during the last few years of his connection with the Knickerbocker Club.

He said that he and Barnet were always friendly, that he had not called on the sick man during his last illness because of the approaching wedding — quite naturally he would not wish to get diphtheria.

He denied ever having egg blue paper. He denied the mail boxes, he denied writing to patent medicine firms for remedies, this in face of the fact that the physical description — i.e., height, weight, and other characteristics — fitted him to the last inch.

When asked if he knew anything about cyanide of mercury he said that he had not heard of it, yet with his wide knowledge of poisons this seemed surprising.

Mrs. Molineux was also a witness at the inquest and won much admiration for her attitude. She was beautiful, unmoved, inscrutable. She told of her acquaintance with Barnet — for this angle of the matter seemed to have much weight — “the same mind conceived the idea of sending both poisons,” was McCluskey’s verdict.

She said that she had written to him at Molineux’s suggestion and when the letter was read in court she showed no discomposure.

“I was distressed,” the letter ran, written less than a month before the date of her wedding, “to hear of your illness. I arrived home on Saturday. I am so exceedingly sorry to know that you are indisposed. Won’t you let me know when you are able to be about? I want so much to see you. Is it that you do not believe me? If you would but let me prove to you my sincerity! Don’t be cross with me any more. And accept, I pray you, my very best wishes. — Yours, BLANCHE.”

“Why,” asked the district attorney, “did you ask him not to be cross with you?”

“That was merely a matter of form,” Mrs. Molineux answered calmly. She was cool, serene, unruffled.

“Was Barnet in love with Mrs. Molineux?” they thundered at Molineux next, and he replied:

“I am sure that I do not know his mind toward her, but I can hardly blame him if he admired her.”

“Was she in love with Barnet?”

“Permit me,” remarked Molineux smoothly, “to point to the fact that she married me.”

Molineux’s friends were indignant when they realized that he was placed in a position where accusation against him might at any time become official.

They insisted that while he had, unquestionably, made a study of poisons, he was not unique in this respect; that he would hardly stoop to strike an enemy under cover of darkness, that a poisoner was the lowest form of murderer, and that Molineux, with murder in his heart would be far more apt to settle things with his fists. But why should Molineux wish to strike at Cornish? Their paths had not crossed for a year and the differences were by that time forgotten on both sides.

What gain was there to be had from Cornish’s death?

The statement from Frederick Stearns of Detroit, who said that he had received a letter signed with Cornish’s name asking for news of a certain Harpster, which was not, he knew, written in Cornish’s hand, had much weight when it was proved to be written on egg blue paper topped by three interlaced crescents.

Cornish swore that only two people knew that Harpster had ever worked for Steams, himself and Molineux.

Molineux was put on the stand and given a chance to swear that he had not been aware of Harpster’s connection with the Stearns Company in Detroit and he failed to take oath to that effect, saying that while he did not recall hearing it, he “might have known it.”

Then Cornish invited himself once more on the stand. He said that he could prove that Molineux had lied under oath when he said that he and Barnet were friendly and cited an instance or two to confirm his point.

“One day,” Cornish related, “I saw Barnet out of the club on his way to a yachting trip. He seemed anxious to go, but presently he was back again, bag and baggage.

“I asked him why he had changed his plans, and he said that he could not go aboard as Molineux was there. Does that look as if they were the best of friends?”

The worst blow to Molineux, however, was the action of Heckman, who took the stand and swore that Molineux had hired a box from him. Only then did the accused man lose his calm.

He sprang to his feet shouting.

“I never saw Heckman in New York before to-day,” he insisted; “I only saw him in Newark when some one brought him to my office to identify me. He didn’t know me then. Why should he suddenly decide to know me now?”

Tilings looked blacker and blacker for Molineux. Seven handwriting experts took the stand and gave as their opinion the belief that the same hand had written the address on the poison package as had written the admitted Molineux writing. They swore, too, that he had declined to write certain given sentences in vertical writing when they requested that he do so.

His own handwriting experts said nothing to remove the impression created by those who spoke for the State. Colonel Gardiner from the district attorney’s office spent two hours summing up the evidence. The jury left the room and in another two hours brought back their verdict.

“We find,” said the coroner’s jury, “that Katherine Adams came to her death on December 28, 1898, at 61 West Eighty-Sixth Street by cyanide of mercury, a poison administered by Harry S. Cornish, to whom said poison was sent through the mails in a bottle of bromo seltzer by Roland B. Molineux.”

His friends were in despair when they heard the action of the coroner’s jury. They rallied round the general who threw his entire fortune into the defense of his son.

It was nearly a year before the case came to trial. During this time his friends proved themselves friends indeed by their attitude, his lawyers worked indefatigably to clear up the matter of the address on the poison package.

They made fierce assaults upon the proceedings of the prosecution, and finally succeeded in having one indictment thrown out, that of including in the affair the matter of the Barnet mystery. Then another grand jury from an up-State Supreme Court refused to indict at all and dismissed the indictment on grounds of faulty procedure.

Molineux was free — but was promptly rearrested while leaving the courthouse on a charge of assault filed by Cornish. In July he was again indicted and the case went to trial.

General Molineux sat beside his son, anxious, weary, loyal; Mrs. Molineux, too, sat at her husband’s side, smiling, self-contained, non-committal.

The trial, which was notable for its great length and unprecedented expensiveness, opened by formally establishing the death of Mrs. Adams. Then the handwriting experts took the stand and held it for nearly a week at a cost to the State of thirty thousand dollars.

They talked about pen habits and showed the court that every writer has them and that when any one wishes to disguise his hand, the thing to do, obviously enough, is to omit the characteristics which are his habitually. This was why the address on the poison package looked nothing like the admitted writing of Molineux’s — on the face of it, and why, to an expert, they looked very much alike indeed.

They talked of size, shape, spacing, general proportion, shade and speed. They repeated and upheld each other, and suggested that had Molineux not been fundamentally a courteous gentleman, that, after all, he might have got away with it — they all had tripped him up on the words “please” and “oblige.”

“Only one man in a million, in my opinion,” said Tyrell, Kinsley’s assistant, “could have written the word oblige in just that way, and in my opinion that man is Molineux.”

Experts for the defense made the State’s experts admit that there were differences in the writing in question and in the admitted handwriting.

“How do you account for the breaks which appear in the admitted handwriting and do not occur in the writing on the package?” asked Carvalho, for the defense.

“In my opinion the defendant was coached when he wrote the admitted handwriting,” replied Tyrell coolly and gazing steadfastly at Carvalho and his assistants.

Cornish could not have written the address on the package, the State’s experts said, and proceeded to show why to the tune of several thousand dollars.

The Barnet tingle of the affair had been ruled out, nevertheless the State found occasion to drag it in by the heels on every occasion. The defense naturally objected, the prosecution apologized for bad technique and promised to be good in the future.

But how that case came cropping up, and when Recorder Goff insisted that they stop referring to it, the State ingenuously suggested calling it the A. B. case instead of calling it by name.

Now, as it happened, the doctor who had rushed to the aid of Mrs. Adams had been the assistant of Dr. Douglass, who attended Barnet, and, accordingly, he was at liberty to refer to any similar case in his past experience.

“Can’t you say all there is to say about it and then stop?” asked the Recorder in despair, when he had expostulated half a dozen times.

“I apologize,” said Osborne, the assistant district attorney, “but I want to give the jury the benefit of the evidence of one of the best analytical chemists in the country.”

The attorneys for Molineux attacked the handwriting experts and insisted that they had failed to show that the defendant had written the poison package address; they insisted that the prosecution had failed to show any connection between the letter boxes and the case, and had utterly failed to show any motive for attempting to take the life of Cornish, which was obviously the idea behind the poison package.

“There is the motive, gentlemen!” the prosecution kindly explained to the jury, and pointed to Mrs. Molineux, But even then it failed to make the connection between the lady and Cornish at all clear.

But the testimony from Stearns of Detroit, the matter of the egg blue paper had its effect. There was wide variance of opinion as to what the verdict would be.

As many were amazed and stunned to hear that the jury, after deliberating eight hours, had found him guilty as were prepared for that word.

Molineux, guilty of murder in the first degree, was sentenced to the chair.

“I am not afraid, because I am not guilty,” he said when he heard it, but his face was ashen.

He went to Sing Sing’s death house at once.

Now in those days the State did not give a man warning as to the time of his execution. Every man there might expect to be taken at any time. Every step along the corridor brought a chill to every man’s heart. He might be the next. The time might be now! It must have been a rather terrible period.

Molineux read a great deal, and while he declined to join in the sociable games of checkers which the other condemned men played by calling their moves across the tiers or to join in conversation, he was liked, even admired, by those around him.

“He seems a very affable gentleman,” the diary of one of these men set forth, “but finds more pleasure in his own society than in that of other people. I don’t think that this is because he is haughty, in any way, but because his mind is more highly cultivated than most murderers. He likes to do gymnastics in his cell.”

After Molineux’s incarceration the fight for the new trial began. General Molineux had spent his fortune — more than one hundred thousand dollars — but friends eagerly made up the rest of the huge sum required.

And then the Court of Appeals brought a unanimous decision and set aside the verdict on the ground that the Barnet case had been improperly introduced in the first trial.

This meant that Molineux was automatically released from Sing Sing and taken to the Tombs. He declined to go out on bail.

“Nothing but acquittal will satisfy me now,” he said. “I would rather remain in my cell than walk out with suspicion still against me.”

His family furnished his cell in the Tombs with his own bed, chairs, lamps, tables, books. It was cozy and homelike.

The second trial was shorter, but no less exciting than the first. Molineux, who did not go on the stand during the first trial, was now a marvel of alertness and skill at parrying the district attorney’s gibes.

The State tried to establish a sort of Jekyll and Hyde existence on the part of Molineux. They endowed him, in fact, with three personalities, one which would undoubtedly be innocent; the second which would have wished to kill Cornish; and the third which probably, though they did not say so, would have killed Barnet for attention to the young lady who later became his wife.

The handwriting experts were given little or no consideration, though whether in the interests of justice or economy is not known.

Molineux’s defense was an alibi — he attempted to prove that he had been at Columbia University at the precise hour when the package was mailed at the post office many miles down town.

Evidently he proved it. For the jury went out November 4, 1902, and deliberated thirteen minutes, bringing back a unanimous verdict of not guilty.

Roland B. Molineux, after nearly four years of torture, was free.

It was shortly after the acquittal that his wife, who had been loyal to him throughout, went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and obtained a divorce. She later married W. Scott, an attorney of Sioux Falls.

For the first time in years he could at last feel out of the limelight. His photographs had been broadcast throughout the country, and, from a feeling of sensitiveness, he shrank from exposing himself to public view. He grew a beard and otherwise changed his appearance.

At once he began a campaign for the betterment of prison conditions. He devoted much time to reading and to writing sketches of prison life.

His father tried to awaken his interest in his old work, for the war had depleted the resources of the color business and he felt that Roland might devise substitutions, but his interest in the old work flagged, and when, after repeated attempts, he failed to find the proper materials, he dropped the work.

He wrote a play on prison life called “The Man Inside,” and, through an agent, sold it to Belasco. The play went indifferently, but Margaret Connelley, the young woman who arranged the sale, proved an interest of much importance, and in 1913, the first Mrs. Molineux having divorced him, he married her.

But even she failed to fully restore his peace of mind, although she devoted her life to trying. Born and reared in a sensitive fashion, Molineux could not accustom himself to the fate which had been his. The rough life in prison, the aspect of his father’s lost fortunes in his behalf, worried him, and he became ill.

Daily he grew less cheerful, and in spite of all that his father and his wife could do, gradually developed melancholia. Laughing and crying, now grave now gay, he became a pitiful figure indeed to those who loved him. Always interested in athletics, they persuaded him to go to Mac Levy’s Farm on Long Island for a rest.

Levy had been a good friend to him and was much liked by Molineux. But one day he attacked the trainer so savagely that it was thought unsafe to leave him without restraint. He attacked his wife and later his father, and in September, 1914, he was forcibly taken to an insane asylum.

“We can only stand by our boy and hope on.” his father declared.

But he never recovered from his malady. In November, 1917, he died at a State hospital for the insane.