The poisoner had been careful, but he had not been careful enough. On the morning of December 28, 1898, sixty-two-year-old Catherine Adams woke with a headache. She had spent the previous evening at the theater with her daughter Florence and her cousin Harry Cornish, with whom she lived in New York. After the show they had enjoyed a late supper and drunk some wine.

Whatever the cause of her discomfort, the perfect remedy lay close at hand. Just a few days earlier, Harry Cornish had received an anonymous gift in the post: a bottle of Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer, a common medicine for upset stomachs, headaches, and hangovers. At Catherine Adams’s request, Cornish opened it, mixed a spoonful of the powder with half a glass of water, and gave it to his cousin. She took a sip and said it tasted awful.

“It’s medicine,” Harry replied. “It isn’t supposed to taste nice. ”

Within minutes, she was violently ill. A doctor was sent for.

While waiting, somewhat foolishly, Harry Cornish tried some of the mixture himself. The results were unsurprising. When Dr. Edward Hitchcock arrived, he discovered he had not one patient but two, both suffering from the same sudden sickness.

Harry handed him the bottle and asked if he had any idea what it might be. The doctor examined it. “Well, it’s evidently not Bromo-Seltzer,” he replied. He sniffed the contents and caught the scent of bitter almonds: cyanide.

Rather unaccountably, he then decided to taste the seltzer himself. The results were again predictable. He felt ill immediately, and a second doctor had to be called to minister to the first. Fortunately, this new physician did not try the mixture, sparing those present something that was beginning to resemble a cumulative nursery rhyme.

Despite the ministrations of the medical men, Catherine Adams died within the hour. A coroner was not immediately available, so in spite of his illness, Harry Cornish made a heroic journey across New York, stopping along the way to inform people and summon a coroner. He finally made his way to the Knickerbocker Athletic Club on Madison Avenue and 45th Street, where he served as athletics director, and staggered to bed. Two doctors who were members of the club pumped his stomach.

Both Harry Cornish and Dr. Hitchcock recovered. An autopsy and analysis of the Bromo-Seltzer quickly confirmed that Mrs. Adams had died of cyanide poisoning, and that the source was the medicine.

Chief Captain George W. McCluskey took charge of the investigation, assisted by Detective Sergeant Arthur Carey. It was at once clear to them that because the Bromo-Seltzer had been sent to Harry Cornish, he was the intended victim. Fortunately, Cornish still had the packaging, the handwritten label, and a small hallmarked silver bottle holder that had come with the unwanted gift.

A facsimile of the label was published on the front page of William Randolph Hearst’s New York flagship, the Evening Journal, in the hope that someone would recognize the handwriting. Someone did. The secretary of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, John Adams, thought the handwriting looked familiar. Comparing it to a letter sent by a man who had resigned from the club following a prolonged feud with Harry Cornish, he found he was correct.

The handwriting on the label seemed to be that of a man named Roland Molyneux. Roland Burnham Molyneux was born in New York in 1866, the son of a noted Civil War general who had fought on the Unionist side and prospered greatly in trade. General Edward Molyneux was a strict, unyielding man, with order and discipline at the heart of everything he did, and he imposed his standards rigorously within his own family of three boys. The family had newly acquired wealth, and like many such families, it had pretensions, apparently convinced that the name Molyneux was linked to luminaries who had fought at Agincourt with Henry V or been honored by Henry VIII.

Such pretensions are jealously guarded. Certainly young Roland Molyneux was keen to be considered a gentleman, and anything that increased his stock in that department was prized. He was a rather snobbish, affected young man. Roland studied chemistry at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then worked as a chemist for his father’s business, and later for a die manufacturing company in Newark, New Jersey.

He also had a keen interest in physical development. He was a talented gymnast, adept on the trampoline and the horizontal bar, and in an age when such activities in a strictly amateur capacity were well regarded among proper families, it brought him respect. In 1896 he joined the newly formed Knickerbocker Athletic Club in New York, and quickly established himself both as a gymnast and as an organizer of events, becoming involved in committee work. In spite of his pretensions and aspirations, Molyneux led something of a double life.

He frequented opium dens, used prostitutes, and had at least one mistress whom he had seduced when she was barely thirteen years old. He liked women, but there was something distinctly odd about his attraction to them; his interest was reputed to be perverse in character. There was a dark side to Roland Molyneux. It was also in 1896 that Harry Cornish joined the Knickerbocker Club as its athletic director.

He was himself a man of prodigious athletic prowess, gifted and popular, a man’s man. He had been married, but that had not curtailed his activities with other women in the least. He had a reputation as a womanizer who frequented brothels in New York. It was reported that Cornish defeated Molyneux in a weightlifting competition at the time—the story may be apocryphal—but Roland Molyneux took an instant dislike to Cornish.

He was a man who could brook no rivals, and he had a deep insecurity that led him to resent anyone who challenged him in his chosen areas. He resented Cornish’s success in the club, his success with women, his popularity with men, his physical excellence and athletic prowess. He was enraged that Cornish took liberties that Molyneux did not think he qualified for, and that he promoted himself in the press, appropriating publicity the club might enjoy. Molyneux did his level best to get Cornish dismissed, writing letters of complaint to the board of governors, often on trivial matters, and succeeded in having some of Cornish’s perks downgraded and his liberties curtailed.

It was petty, snobbish, and vindictive, and it mystified the club members. For his part, Cornish was openly contemptuous of Molyneux and lost no opportunity to display it, taunting him. Roland’s nickname was Molly, short for Molyneux, but Cornish used it in a specifically derogatory manner to imply effeminacy. There was no love lost between the two, but Molyneux in particular seemed to have developed an obsessive dislike of his adversary.

The matter came to a head with a particular confrontation in which Molyneux demanded of the committee that either Cornish be dismissed or he would resign. Naturally, such an ultimatum resulted in the latter. Molyneux resigned. He met Cornish on the stairs afterward, and Cornish taunted him: “You tried to get me out, but it’s you who are out.

” “You win,” replied Molyneux calmly, with a faint smile. Police believed all of this furnished Molyneux with an excellent motive for wishing his rival dead. But that was not sufficient to support a charge of murder and attempted murder. Even the handwriting which seemed to point clearly to Molyneux was not sufficient in itself; handwriting is a notoriously unreliable identifier.

As for the exclusivity of the motive, a man like Cornish, although generally well liked in his club and circle, would naturally engender hostility among others whom his womanizing might affect—the husbands of his conquests, for instance. Further investigations uncovered that Molyneux, a chemist, had access to many poisons, including cyanide. Although not an especially difficult substance to obtain in 1899, the ease with which a chemist could procure it provided him a considerable advantage. And there was another thing: the cyanide employed in this case was discovered to be of an unusual kind.

It was cyanide of mercury, not potassium cyanide—a chemical used rarely and principally in the manufacture of pigments. Roland Molyneux was a chemist and worked as a pigment maker. This promoted further suspicion of Molyneux, but it was merely suggestive, not proof. Nevertheless, Chief Investigator Captain McCluskey was now privately certain that Roland Molyneux was his man.

Detectives set about tracing the origins of the blue bottle, the silver holder, and the packaging. They discovered that the blue bottle was not in fact a Bromo-Seltzer bottle at all, but a blue bottle resembling one, of the type used in the supply of cyanide of mercury. It had been procured close to where Molyneux worked in New York, but could not be connected to Molyneux himself. The silver bottle holder had similarly been sold by a jeweler in New York, but the man who bought it was described as having a red beard—although the seller suggested to detectives that the purchaser might have been wearing a false beard.

Nothing could be definitely proved in this. But there was a much more powerful circumstance pointing to Roland Molyneux as the poisoner. Dr. Wendell Phillips, a fellow member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club who had treated Harry Cornish at the club on the day he staggered there, was troubled by something.

Cornish’s symptoms bore a strong similarity to those experienced by a man called Henry Barnett, a New York City stockbroker who had died at the club just a few weeks before, apparently of diphtheria. What was remarkable was that Barnett had died after taking Cuttyhunk Powder—a medicine that, he told his doctor, Henry Beaman Douglas, before he died, he had received anonymously in the post. It seemed an astonishing coincidence. Dr.

Douglas had given Barnett’s cause of death as weakness of the heart caused by diphtheria. But having second thoughts, Douglas took possession of the Cuttyhunk Powder and sent it off for analysis. It was found to contain cyanide of mercury. It was clear to detectives that the two poisonings were linked and attributable to the same hand.

Both poisons used were an identical rare substance. Both had been sent to an intended victim anonymously. The intended victim in both cases was a member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. And handwriting experts determined that the labels in both cases were written by the same hand—and that hand was agreed to be that of Roland Molyneux.

Furthermore, Molyneux appeared to have a strong motive for the murder of Henry Barnett. Molyneux had married a woman called Blanche Cheeseborough just a week after Barnett’s funeral, a woman he had long pursued and even lived with as man and wife. It seemed that Barnett had been pursuing Blanche himself, and rumor had it that Blanche was involved in sexual relations with Henry Barnett. Blanche Molyneux, née Cheeseborough, was a twenty-four-year-old woman at the time of the murders, an attractive woman with green eyes—or one green eye, as she apparently had a glass eye as a result of a childhood accident.

She was a flirtatious character, strongly drawn to men. She had two ambitions: one was to become a famous opera singer, the other was to lose her maidenly virtue. She achieved one of these. She wished to travel to Europe, but financial considerations prevented this, and one of her reasons for marrying Molyneux was doubtless that he was wealthy.

It was also established that Blanche had rejected Molyneux’s marriage proposal soon after being introduced to Henry Barnett, but she accepted his second proposal just before Barnett’s death. There was, it seemed to District Attorney Asa Bird Gardiner, strong evidence of motive against Molyneux in both murders, an abundance of evidence of means and opportunity, and evidence of handwriting. In fact, the evidence relating to handwriting was strengthened considerably when letters written on a delicate blue paper marked by interlinked silver crescents were discovered to have been written by the same hand as the poison package labels. These letters had been sent using letter collection addresses preserved in the names of Henry C.

Barnett and Harry Cornish. But the man who had reserved these boxes was neither of these men. He answered the description of Roland Molyneux, and he had taken these boxes in their names many months before either man had been sent poison. It seemed to police that Roland Molyneux had both men on his mind many months before he acted against either.

Furthermore, he had used these letter addresses to send for and collect items of medicine purporting to cure impotence. The press was impatient to see an arrest. On January 2, Hearst’s Evening Journal led with a headline naming Roland Molyneux as the prime suspect. The district attorney’s office and police were furious.

They were not yet ready to charge Molyneux, and this put him on his guard. They could only respond by denying the truth of the headlines. An inquest was held at Manhattan Court Building on February 9, 1899, under New York City Coroner Edward H. Hart, sitting with a jury.

It heard from Harry Cornish about the death of his cousin Catherine Adams and about Molyneux’s complaints against him. Molyneux, in attendance with an attorney, was cool and self-composed throughout, and he was treated with a courtesy that bordered on deference by Assistant District Attorney James Osborne. By contrast, Osborne openly attacked Harry Cornish, questioned him aggressively, and always addressed him by his surname, as “Cornish. ”

For his part, Molyneux said he was only vaguely aware of the poison cyanide of mercury.

He denied he had ever bought a silver bottle holder, or written the labels on the poison packages, or ever rented a letterbox. He denied possessing the distinctive silver-crested robin’s egg blue writing paper, and denied being an opium fiend, in the parlance of the day. Blanche Cheeseborough Molyneux was also treated with great courtesy by Osborne. She denied she had ever been more than a friend to Henry Barnett.

The press, which was quite openly naming Molyneux the chief suspect, was furious at the deference shown by Assistant DA Osborne. It blasted the district attorney’s office, police, and authorities for treating Molyneux with such regard in the face of the mountain of evidence against him, in complete contrast with the way it treated Harry Cornish. Roland Molyneux and his father, General Edward Molyneux, who sat with his son in court, and his lawyer—also a close friend, Bartow Sumter Weeks—grew in confidence daily. Roland Molyneux even consented to give police a sample of his handwriting, in this atmosphere of congeniality, writing words and sentences dictated to him by police.

But all was not as it seemed. The attacks on Cornish, the apparent suspicions the assistant DA attached to him, and the kid-glove treatment of Molyneux and Blanche Cheeseborough at the hearing had all been a ruse—a rather unscrupulous one, perhaps, but nevertheless an effective one, with the single objective of luring Molyneux into such a sense of ease that he would provide the police with a sample of his handwriting. There was in fact no suspicion of Cornish. As soon as the intended objective was achieved, once Molyneux had given police his handwriting sample, it was passed to handwriting experts and subjected to the closest scrutiny.

Even without the experts, it was apparent that Roland Molyneux was the author of the poison labels. There were numerous similarities. He had been asked to write the letter word “forty,” which had been misspelled on the labels by the addition of a superfluous “u”—and Molyneux had repeated this characteristic spelling error. Now the kid gloves came off.

Cornish was permitted to give a statement to the coroner’s court on the matter of his feud with Molyneux. He spoke of Molyneux’s possession of books—which was widely known in the Knickerbocker Club—that had volumes on perversion, bestiality, and necrophilia amongst them. He also spoke of a collection of photos in Molyneux’s possession that was degenerate in nature, though no specifics were given. He also told of Blanche’s relationship with Barnett, and the ensuing antipathy that developed on Molyneux’s side.

The letterboxes taken in Cornish and Barnett’s names, both intended victims, were shown by Osborne to have been taken by Molyneux for receiving impotence medicines. Three letters soliciting these, written on the distinctive blue paper, were signed “Cornish,” and one was signed “Barnett. ” “Please send me a sample of salts to 1620 Broadway and oblige, yours etc. , H.

Cornish,” was one such letter. It was clear that the handwriting of these was that of Molyneux. The distinctive paper used was Molyneux’s—later it would be confirmed by the woman who had been seduced at the age of thirteen by Molyneux, a woman called Mamie Milando, that he had indeed owned this paper. The assault upon Molyneux was relentless.

Protests from his friend and counsel, Bartow Weeks, were in vain; he was overruled by the coroner. The evidence was heard. Assistant DA Osborne was in full flow, and he directed the force of his pugnacious eloquence at Roland Molyneux. He asked the foremost handwriting expert of the day, William J.

Kinsley, a professional document examiner, to confirm that the handwriting on the letters was that of Roland Molyneux. Kinsley did so. Comparing these specimens with the poison package mail to Cornish, Osborne asked, “What is your opinion? ” “That they were written by one and the same hand,” said Kinsley.

“And that is the hand of whom? ” “It is the hand of Roland B. Molyneux,” he replied. A procession of six more handwriting experts took the stand—the best the United States could muster, men of integrity and learning in a variety of spheres of penmanship.

All agreed as a matter of certainty that Roland Molyneux had written both the labels and the letters. The coroner’s court was a catastrophe for Roland Molyneux. The press had already determined his guilt; they had armies of newspapermen employed as detectives, often quite effectively, and had no doubt in the matter. The coroner’s court, very much like its English counterpart at the time, did not possess powers to pass sentence upon a person, but it did possess all the force and effect in its pronouncements to bring such a matter to court.

Notably, its jury could give a verdict. Colonel Asa Bird Gardiner, the district attorney, summed up the prosecution arguments for the jury. He described Blanche as a dissolute woman. Roland Molyneux, he said, was a degenerate—a phrase loaded to imply not only homosexual connotations but other sexual practices thoroughly disparaged in late Victorian New York.

On February 27, the jury was charged by the coroner and retired for almost two hours. It returned to deliver a verdict of murder against Roland Molyneux. Detectives Carey and McCafferty at once arrested Molyneux, and he was taken to the Tombs prison via the Bridge of Sighs, which connected the Manhattan Court Building with the detention center. The trial of Roland Molyneux began on November 14, 1899, before the Recorder, Judge John Goff.

Molyneux was charged with the first-degree murder of Catherine Adams—a guilty verdict for which carried a death sentence. He was also charged with the attempted murder of Harry Cornish, but not, crucially, with that of Henry Barnett. Although the case rested entirely on the murder of Catherine Adams, the prosecution relied heavily on evidence accrued from the murder of Henry Barnett to reinforce its case. Why did it decide to prosecute solely the murder of Catherine Adams?

It is not an unusual procedure to seek to streamline a prosecution by focusing on a single case, selecting the strongest one for the purpose. The principle is sound enough from a prosecutor’s perspective; after all, the penalty for being found guilty of one murder is the same as for two, and both would result in a death sentence. There was also a belief in the DA’s office that the Barnett case was the weaker of the two, because although cyanide of mercury had been found in his organs, there was an element of uncertainty as to whether or not this could be proved to have caused his death. The weight of evidence of motive in the case of Cornish, it believed, was sufficient to present a persuasive case.

Furthermore, it intended to use the evidence of the murder of Barnett to reinforce and substantiate the former. The clear relationship between the two cases was absolute. It seemed to the prosecution that it would be necessary only to link the two as evidence of system for the case to be proved. But this proved to be a fatal error.

The trial was slow to get off the ground. It was to be the longest and most expensive in the history of the US up to that time. It took two weeks simply to select a jury; 504 candidates were questioned by the counsels for prosecution and defense, to the frustration of Judge John Goff. At last the magic number of twelve was arrived at, and the trial got underway properly on December 4, 1899.

Roland Molyneux was confident, relaxed, jaunty even, throughout the proceedings. Frequently he seemed amused and laughed out loud at a statement, observation, or question of Assistant DA Osborne, who again led proceedings. It was, of course, designed to infuriate Osborne, and it frequently made its mark, visibly angering him. The defense was led by George Gordon Battle and Molyneux’s friend Bartow Sumter Weeks.

The prosecution case was clear enough. The gift of the silver bottle holder and Bromo-Seltzer, given as a jocular gift in the run-up to the Christmas season, had been traced to Roland Molyneux. Cyanide of mercury, a rare poison used in the manufacture of colors, was available only to a chemist, and more likely one involved in color manufacture, like Roland Molyneux. The items had been procured in Newark, New Jersey, where Roland Molyneux worked.

The labels were handwritten by Roland Molyneux. Therefore Roland Molyneux had sent the poison which killed Catherine Adams to Henry Cornish. Having set out the path he intended to pursue, Osborne then introduced Henry C. Barnett’s death in November 1898.

Bartow Weeks was on his feet with an objection. After consideration, Judge Goff decided it was admissible as evidence. As Osborne pointed out, the stupidest person in the country could not deny the link between the two cases. It was to be a crucial point.

More than one hundred witnesses were called, including detectives, more than fifty handwriting experts alone, doctors, and even Roland Molyneux’s one-time thirteen-year-old mistress, Mamie Milando—still touchingly loyal, but obliged to confirm Molyneux’s possession and use of the distinctive silver-crested blue paper. The prosecution case lasted eighty-three days, with endless interruptions, delays caused by a juror’s sickness, and two weeks devoted to considering the handwriting evidence alone. When the prosecution case ended, it was predicted the defense case would last a further eight weeks. But it didn’t.

Bartow Weeks decided, in consultation with the General and Molyneux, to call no witnesses and offer no evidence. It was not required, he argued; the case was simply not proven. Nor did he place Roland in the box. It was a bad move.

In summing up for the defense, Weeks alluded to the insufficiency of the prosecution evidence. He urged the jury to err on the side of humanity. “The wrong you can do can never be restored,” he warned them. “Gentlemen, in a case of doubt, when the scales are oscillating, let them turn in favor of the prisoner.

It is a terrible thing to destroy the temple of an immortal soul. ” It was a powerful address, and it clearly moved the jury. Judge John Goff summed up with admirable succinctness, instructing the jury to base its verdict on four points: first, that the defendant sent the package to Harry Cornish; second, that this was an attempt to kill Harry Cornish; third, that Harry Cornish received the package and gave the Bromo-Seltzer to Catherine Adams; fourth, that Mrs. Adams died as a result of this.

The affirmation of these four propositions, he said, would prove the case for the prosecution; the failure of any one of them would deny it. On February 11, 1900, after the longest trial in US legal history at that time, the jury retired. It did not return until late in the evening, and when it did so, it found that Roland Molyneux was guilty of the first-degree murder of Catherine Adams. Five days later, on February 16, Judge Goff sentenced him to death.

Roland Molyneux was removed to the death house in Sing Sing prison to await his execution in the electric chair. An appeal was lodged by lawyers acting for Molyneux, and after due consideration of the arguments, in June 1901, seven judges of the New York Court of Appeals quashed the verdict on the grounds that the conviction was based on presumptions concerning the murder of Henry Barnett. Molyneux had not been tried or convicted of the murder of Barnett, and the current indictment related solely to the murder of Catherine Adams. The evidence relating to Barnett should never have been admitted in court; to accept it struck at the root of the principle of the presumption of innocence.

This ruling established an important principle of US law known as the Molyneux Rule: that evidence relating to other crimes or alleged crimes by the defendant could not be admitted in court. As a result of the verdict being quashed on appeal, Molyneux was returned to the Tombs prison to face a retrial on October 13, in which the death of Barnett was excluded entirely from the prosecution case. It was this time a straightforward matter in which there was little will to prove the charge. Many prosecution witnesses were not called, or could not be called for one reason or another.

A new judge, one well disposed to Roland Molyneux, was appointed—John A. Lambert—who was keen to see the matter expedited by all possible means. The defense counsel, ex-governor of New York Frank S. Black, was excellent.

Assistant DA Osborne, again acting as prosecutor, had lost his fire. He was in truth exhausted physically and emotionally. He did his best, but the tide had turned in the press and in public opinion. It was a procession.

Some new, improbable witnesses, including the disreputable graphologist David Carvalho, were called by the defense. They provided a mere fig leaf of justification for an acquittal. It was short, perfunctory justice. The jury was out for only a few minutes.

It found Roland Molyneux not guilty—which was surely a just verdict, though it brought no justice to the victims: to Catherine Adams, or to the silent elephant in the courtroom throughout, whose name could not be spoken, Henry C. Barnett. He had been airbrushed from existence. Roland Molyneux walked free.

New York rang with the cheers of celebration; crowds followed his carriage as he made his way home with his father, General Molyneux. There was no longer any collective animus against Roland Molyneux; it was spent. The wrath of the community had been satisfied by the long trial and the suffering. The pride and determination of the old general, his steadfastness and courage, his unswerving loyalty to his son, the light of battle in his dimmed eyes undimmed, was taken to heart by the public and press.

All the old soldiers of the Union, and even those of the Confederacy it seems, swung in behind their old comrade and adversary. It was said that although Roland Molyneux had been charged with murder, it was General Molyneux who had been acquitted of it. The prurient details and the seedy underlife of a gentleman’s club in New York revealed by the trial were played out to maximum effect in the press. The revelations of the sexual conduct of the loose inhabitants of New York society gave major impetus to the development of popular journalism and the emphasis given to sensational copy.

Crime may not pay, but it does sell, and so does sex. William Randolph Hearst was astute enough to grasp this and seize the opportunity to establish and consolidate his newspaper empire. Apart from the social aspects, the far-reaching principle of inadmissibility of evidence of other crimes being used at trial was established. The effect of the Molyneux Rule, said William E.

Werner, one of the appeals court judges, is that the state cannot prove against the defendant any crime not alleged in the indictment. It acted as a safeguard to protect a defendant from an assumption of guilt because they may have committed similar crimes previously. A case must be tried on its own merits, and the evidence pertaining to it alone. The judgment went further than the implicatory requirements of the Molyneux case itself, stating that no evidence should be admissible, except in specific circumstances, whether proved or not, if it was not directly pertaining to the crime being tried.

The Molyneux Rule still stands as the principle on which a jury must focus on the evidence relating to the crime being tried and disregard evidence relating to any others. It proved to be a fateful decision on the part of the prosecution not to include in the indictment against Molyneux the murder of Henry Barnett. In this way, the evidence heard jointly would have had the effect of being mutually supportive. Although motive was weaker in the Barnett case, because it was not clear at that time the extent of the relationship between Blanche and Barnett, the parallel aspects of both crimes and their common author would have had the effect of strengthening both.

It is interesting to compare the approach in the Molyneux trial with that of another case three thousand miles across the pond in London, just twelve years later. The same situation arose, in which a judge was asked to allow a case of murder to be tried with two other cases being admitted as evidence of system. This was the case of the Brides in the Bath murders, and the trial of George Joseph Smith. He was tried in 1915 for the murder of Bessie Mundy, whom he had married following a short acquaintance.

He insured her life for a large sum of money, visited a doctor with her and persuaded him that she suffered from epilepsy, procured a bath for her, and drowned her that same evening. Then he arranged her burial and collected the life insurance in short order. Sir Edward Marshall Hall argued before the Central Criminal Court in London that each case should only be heard singly and separately, to prevent any contamination of the other cases. The Crown argued that the other cases should be allowed to show evidence of system—that Smith had used and applied the same methods to a degree in which it was impossible that the death of any one woman could be an unfortunate accident; it was murder.

The judge, Thomas Scrutton, ruled that evidence should be allowed as showing system. As Marshall Hall later wrote to the Bishop of Croydon, at that moment when the judge ruled admissibility of the other murders as evidence of system, George Joseph Smith was doomed. That a woman should drown in her bath following an epileptic fit on her wedding night, having taken out insurance in her husband’s favor and made her will that same day, was possible. That this should occur on three separate occasions was not; the chances against this were astronomical.

In recognition of the critical importance of this allowance of evidence of system in the George Joseph Smith case, Marshall Hall attempted to save Smith at appeal by arguing that the judge had been wrong to allow the linking of crimes in this way; each should have been heard separately on its own individual merits. He failed, and the appeal court judge, Lord Reading, allowed evidence of system to be established as an accepted precedent in English law. Two cases, three thousand miles apart, separated by little more than a decade, and heard by different appeal courts, had very different and far-reaching outcomes for those concerned and for their respective justice systems. Both cases involved a man with clear motives for murder.

Means and opportunity were fully established in both cases. The circumstantial evidence was highly suggestive, and the guilt of both men could only be proved by taking more than one crime into consideration with the other. But one man was hanged, and the other man walked free. In the case of George Joseph Smith, it was not sufficient to prove that he had married a woman under a false name, taken out life insurance on her, gone to stay at a guest house with her, run her bath for her, and popped out to the shops—only to discover his wife had drowned of an epileptic fit in the bath during his absence.

Such a thing could happen; improbable tragedies occur. But not more than once to the same person, in the same circumstances. That strains human credulity and places the matter beyond mere suspicion, into a province beyond reasonable doubt. That was what was required in the case of Roland Molyneux also.

It was not sufficient that he detested the man he was accused of trying to murder, inadvertently killing Catherine Adams. That he had sound reasons for wishing him dead. That he was a chemist with access to the specific poison used to kill her. That he had purchased a box the same as that used to send that poison to the intended victim.

That he had used the same distinctive blue paper with the silver markings. That handwriting was identified as being that of the sender. Such things are possible. Handwriting is not a science; coincidences occur; accidents happen.

But not more than once, with the same man, in the same circumstances. The jury at the first trial of Roland Molyneux gave a correct verdict in finding him guilty; so did the second jury in finding him not guilty. The first did so on the basis of the two cases being seen in conjunction, and in this the matter was clearly beyond a reasonable doubt: that Molyneux had murdered two people. The second jury gave its verdict on the basis of one case alone, and in this the matter was not placed beyond reasonable doubt.

The case was, as the defense pointed out, simply not proven. There was reasonable suspicion, but not reasonable proof. Legally, Roland Molyneux could be found not guilty; the doctrine of the presumption of innocence prevailed. But as a matter of human judgment, whose standards of proof are less exacting, it is quite possible to say with confidence that Roland Molyneux got away with murder.

Roland Molyneux committed two murders, and it is possible that he was responsible for other murders too. When he met Blanche and fell for her, he was one of three men who succumbed to her charms on the yacht of a millionaire in Maine in the summer of 1897. Curiously, the other two men died of typhoid. That seems a remarkable thing—not of itself, in those insanitary times—but given the circumstances, and that both men had set their caps at Blanche in competition with Roland Molyneux, it is at least suspicious.

We shall never know for certain. It has also been suggested, though never tested and certainly quite beyond testing now, that Roland Molyneux had sought to have Mamie Milando killed because she was becoming a nuisance. Now, a hundred and twenty years later, these can of course only be curious, unprovable asides. Roland Molyneux was a strange man—furtive, secretive, debauched, certainly degenerate by the standards of his time.

He was also intelligent. He admitted in court to trying opium, but not to being an opium fiend, to use the vernacular for a drug addict of the time. But the characters of that twilight world of New York knew him well. He was a man drawn to darker passions, a man who lived in the shadows.

His possession of books devoted to sexual perversion, and a photo collection that shocked such men of the world as Harry Cornish, suggests a man drawn to the darkest of human predilections. In the forms he filled out using Barnett’s and Cornish’s names, but very clearly giving his own personal details, he stated he had suffered with gonorrhea and was impotent. He was impotent—we know this because Blanche later wrote an unpublished memoir concerning this. It seems a paradox, and yet the fact of a sexually impotent man with gonorrhea having a fascination in sexual perversions and a photo collection whose nature can only be guessed at is very suggestive.

Roland Molyneux was a deeply conflicted man sexually. He was surely homosexual, but he also had many perversions unacceptable to society at the time. He certainly struggled against this, even as he worked to improve his physical strength; he was fascinated with the human body and its processes. The robin’s egg blue note paper, the opulent decor of his rooms described pointedly as being Oscar Wildish at the time, his awkwardness with men like Harry Cornish, the way in which Blanche disparaged his lack of virility, and when she placed herself at his disposal sexually he demurred—all suggest a man of unusual sexual predilections.

Blanche was dismayed by his lack of manliness, she said. And when he introduced her to his then-friend Barnett, she was at once struck by the contrast with Barnett’s virility. Like Cornish, he was a man’s man; she liked such men. Years later she wrote of Barnett’s dynamic sexual approaches to her.

He had stolen her at a party from under Roland’s nose and whisked her off to a lone department so that he could seduce her, which he did. The two embarked on an affair. To her, he was everything a Molyneux was not. Molyneux discovered the affair.

She had already rejected Molyneux’s proposal, but made clear to him it was a provisional rejection; she was hedging her bets. He was a substitute who could be called from the bench if necessary. Roland was wealthy; Barnett, though a city stockbroker, was not. Molyneux withdrew and declared the coast was clear for the two of them.

But he resented it, in that quiet, mean way so characteristic of him. He could hold a long-term grudge; that was clear from his hiring letterboxes in Barnett’s and Cornish’s names many months before he attempted to kill either. He was nurturing his resentment. The fact that he sought impotence remedies in their names afforded him some small, secret vindictive satisfaction, and it was also a desire to curtail his perversions, those desires which made him feel guilty.

He was waiting for his opportunity. He could not exact his vengeance upon either man too soon after he had fallen out with them. He was not a stupid man; he was a man of infinite patience. He sat on his hands and bided his time.

That year he went to Europe for the summer. During his absence, no letters were sent from the two letter drops, and nothing was received. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, perhaps; Blanche’s relationship with Barnett would run its course and be satiated to an extent. He would get his way.

And he knew Blanche’s long-held ambition was to go to Europe; his visit offered her a reminder that he had the means to provide this. She would have been with him on this trip had she accepted his proposal. He played to Blanche’s ambition, to her self-absorbed, shallow nature. Molyneux certainly had an obsession with winning Blanche, but did he love her?

It seems doubtful. He was not sexually attracted to her—that much is clear—but he was drawn to the status New York could offer. He had suffered gonorrhea, and would later suffer syphilis. He was not in love with Blanche, but he could not stand to lose her to another man, especially one whom he regarded as his inferior.

And it was not enough to win; he needed to punish those who had the effrontery to challenge him, to defeat them. A game had been engaged. Blanche returned to Molyneux, albeit reluctantly, in the autumn. She despised him, but the merits outweighed the defects of such a union.

She agreed to marry Roland, but she could not let Barnett go. She was still pursuing him, met him in fact, and the two kissed, apparently according to her later account. But he rejected her now that she was back with Molyneux. She pleaded for them to remain close friends; she obviously wanted their sexual relationship to continue in spite of her agreement to marry Molyneux.

But Barnett wanted none of it. He turned on his heels and left, cold and angry, she calling after him, pleading with him. She never saw him again. He died soon afterwards, and just a week after his death, she was led to the altar, a smiling bride, by Roland Molyneux.

But that didn’t last. She had married a man she cordially detested. She played the part of devoted wife in court when she occasionally attended, threw herself into his arms and kissed him passionately, according to press reports. But she was held a virtual prisoner at the General’s mansion, prompted and briefed by lawyers, stage-managed in all she did and said.

It was her best—her only—stage performance. By the time of the second trial, she had had enough. She had moved out of the General’s house, was being seen on the town again, and she never visited the courtroom. As soon as he was released, after almost four years, she decamped to Sioux Falls, where she engaged an attorney to effect a divorce from a man she could now only speak of or refer to as “that man.

” So great was her antipathy towards and dislike of him. What was his offense? His trial had ruined her, ruined any prospect she might have of a career, exposed her as an immoral woman in an age where such things mattered, where a woman’s greatest worth was chasteness before marriage and fidelity thereafter. Blanche had neither, and Molyneux had deprived her of her physical needs, to boot, which he could not himself satisfy.

And she knew also that in all likelihood he was a murderer—the murderer of a man she loved. She had had four years to think about it. She knew Roland. Everyone who met him seemed to sense there was something odd about him.

She fled after the trial and never saw him again. Roland Molyneux was conflicted in his sexuality. His obsessive resentment of Harry Cornish was born of jealousy; Cornish was the antithesis of Molyneux. He mocked his femininity, called him Molly with special derogatory emphasis.

He was a man’s man, habitué of brothels and whiskey parlors, a man quick with his fists if provoked, popular with men, admired by women. Molly, by comparison, was a secretive man admired by none. Molyneux’s athletic prowess was considerable, but it was not of the same kind as Cornish’s. His was born of obsessive-compulsive practice and meticulous rehearsal, not of the brutish physicality of Cornish.

His sexuality was a source of deep shame for him. He was the son of a proud father whose dominance of his sons was absolute, and whose code and strictures of duty and fidelity and manliness were displayed to all as a badge of honor throughout his life—and never more so than when he steered his son Roland through the hazards of his arrest and trials as the new century dawned. Roland Molyneux loved his father, but he felt profound dissatisfaction that he was not like his father. Even as he tried to win his approval, he balked at his lifestyle.

He killed Barnett and attempted to kill Cornish because he hated them for the wrongs they had done him, but also because they were what he was not; they possessed what he had not. He struck out at his father as he did so too, though he loved him. He sought respectability, conceived of himself and carried himself as a gentleman, while his actions as an opium fiend, as a sexual deviant, as a degenerate, contradicted this. Roland Molyneux nurtured his resentments; they were carefully suppressed within, as were all his shames.

He could easily meet the open challenge of Cornish’s sneering “You wanted to get me out, but I got you out” with a smiling “You win,” just as he relinquished Blanche to Barnett when the situation became apparent to him. But though he vacated the field of conflict apparently vanquished, conscious of his own inadequacy, his resentment festered, his controlled fury within tightly bound up with many other shames: his impotence in all things awaited release. Barnett and Cornish had been long in his sights, as the hired letterboxes attest, and he struck when the opportunity came and he felt confident to do so. He killed Barnett when he had re-secured Blanche, thus removing the obvious immediacy of motive, and emboldened and fortified by this success, he tried to kill Cornish at Christmas, when much overindulgence might easily account for some fatal digestive malady.

Blanche Cheeseborough married Wallace D. Scott, the attorney who secured her divorce for her in Sioux Falls, in 1903. Half a century after the trial, she wrote the aforementioned unpublished memoir, in which her admission to a sexual relationship with Barnett, which caused the breakup with Molyneux, her reference to Molyneux’s impotence, to his lack of virility which she admired in Barnett, and to the urgency of her own sexual needs, provide us with a perspective the prosecution could only grope blindly towards at the time. She attempted to make a career for herself as a singer, but the only pulling power she possessed was her notoriety.

It was not enough. She lived a life of quiet mediocrity, wistful for the things that might have been, until she died in 1954 at the age of eighty. Molyneux’s acquittal did not convince anyone. The mark of Cain was upon him; it would be with him wherever he went, and in all his dealings with others, it would be visible in their regard of him, and he would see their recognition of it in the eyes that surveyed him, secretly masking their true regard.

A man who aspired to be a gentleman could never be accepted as one in society. His mental condition—of which the inappropriate, often bizarre outbursts of laughter in court was surely a symptom—deteriorated. He worked for his father afterwards; where else could he work? He wrote a couple of books, which were mild efforts mildly received, and a play set in prison called The Man Inside, which was poorly received.

It was produced in November 1913, but Molyneux never saw it. He had married a woman that month, called Margaret Connell, to please his mother, he said, who was then dying. He had a nervous breakdown that month and was admitted to a sanatorium, his behavior becoming increasingly bizarre. In September 1914 he was pronounced insane and committed to Kings Park State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in New York’s Long Island.

It was here he died on November 2, 1917, of syphilis. If this malady had not precipitated his madness in 1898, then it was surely a consequence of the behavior it had engendered.