Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     When the end of the Spanish-American War was marked by the signing of a peace treaty in Paris on the evening of December 10, 1898, New Yorkers were free to enjoy the Christmas season with special gusto, and even the first lady, Mrs. McKinley, rushed up from Washington to do her shopping. The great stores of the metropolis beckoned their customers to view the treasures they had heaped up for the holiday celebrations. R.H. Macy's advertised: "The store is like a colossal Christmas tree. Each aisle is radiant with hundreds of tokens and emblems of the festive season. Fixtures and counters are decked with the brilliant regalia of holiday merchandise. The displays appeal to your sentiment and thrift." The Barrios Diamond Co. at Broadway and Canal Street announced with becoming modesty "the greatest sale of jewelry in the history of the world." December 24th was proclaimed by the Wanamaker Company as the "Day of Things Forgotten," and the department store vowed its readiness to assist "that energetic personage, the Eleventh-Hour Buyer." A quieter voice arose from Union Square: Tiffany & Co. gave notice of the arrival of many new creations in gold and silver from their own workshops and "by intelligent selection of choicest European novelties direct from the principal manufacturers abroad."
     The city's theaters and museums offered attractions that rivaled the lures of its emporia. On December 6, Marcella Sembrich made her first appearance of the season at the Metropolitan Opera as Violetta in La Traviata, and May Irwin's new musical comedy garnered the laughter that New Yorkers had lavished the month before on Weber and Field's parody, Cyranose de Bric-a-Brac. The British influence made itself felt with The Geisha at the Harlem Opera House and Trelawny of the Wells at the Lyceum. On Christmas Day, the fiftieth performance of The Merchant of Venice was on the boards at Daly's Theatre. For art lovers, the American Art Galleries, Madison Square South, offered an exhibition of the paintings of James Tissot, admission 50 cents on weekdays and 25 cents on Sundays.
     The local news during the weeks before Christmas piqued the New Yorkers' love for scandal while leaving their holiday spirits undisturbed. In late November Commissioner of Correction Francis J. Lantry announced that the plans for the new Tombs prison were defective and that the beams and girders of the building would have to be strengthened at a probable cost of $20,000. It was the city's law courts, though, that provided the spiciest gossip of the season. Mrs. Margaret E. Cody went on trial for attempted blackmail of the heirs of robber-baron Jay Gould through threats to disclose that Gould had fathered an illegitimate 

daughter. Despite the testimony of handwriting expert David Carvalho that Gould's name on the baptismal record of his reputed child had been clumsily forged, the jury could not agree on a verdict, with seven standing for conviction and five for acquittal. Even more intriguing was the series of trials that proceeded in December in the courtroom of Recorder John W. Goff. William Moore and his wife were separately tried for perpetrating a classic "badger game" crime at the expense of Martin Mahon, proprietor of the New Amsterdam Hotel. By prearrangement with his wife, Moore discovered her in the embraces of Mahon, and allegedly proceeded to rob him and force him at gunpoint to sign $5,000 in promissory notes. Mr. Moore was convicted in a second trial after the first jury deadlocked; the jury in his wife's case was dismissed after fruitless deliberations for twenty-two hours. On December 27, William Moore was sentenced to nineteen years after the district attorney told Recorder Goff:

This crime has been known as the "badger" game since the days of Queen Anne. It is a diabolical crime, and because of its insidious nature there have been few convictions for it. It is one of the most dangerous that infests our community.

     Cornish boarded uptown with his widowed aunt, Katherine Adams, and her daughter, Florence Rodgers. On December 27, he brought his mysterious present home, much to the delight of Mrs. Adams, who found that the pattern of the toothpick holder closely matched the design of her silverware. Cornish's cousin Florence teased him with the remark, "Oh, some bashful girl has sent you a present." That night, the three went to a theater, returning about midnight. The next morning, around nine o'clock, Mrs. Adams awoke with a dreadful headache and called to her daughter. Remembering the bottle of Bromo in Harry's room, Florence immediately asked him for it. After drawing the cork of the bottle only with difficulty by the use of a dinner fork, Cornish poured out about a half-teaspoonful in a glass. He failed to observe in his haste that the grains of the powder were smaller than usual and effervesced only slightly.
     As soon as Katherine Adams drank the mixture, she screamed and fell back on her bed, writhing in agony. Florence sent a hall boy for Dr. Edwin Hitchcock, but only after a second call did the inarticulate messenger convince the physician of the seriousness of the situation. Hitchcock, with his stomach pump and emergency bag in hand, ran to the Adams house but arrived to find Mrs. Adams senseless. She lay on her back, her eyes rolled up and her jaw slack. The doctor administered restoratives but could detect only two very faint pulse beats. He told the frantic Florence and Harry who stood at the beside that future efforts were useless. In fact, Mrs. Adams had died within an hour of taking the draught.
     Cornish, examining the glass from which his aunt had drunk, remarked that it could not be "dangerous" and took a small sip. His face immediately became livid and he retched uncontrollably. Dr. Hitchcock, desperate for a remedy, instantly decided to test the deadly poison himself. He seized the bottle and poured as much on his finger "as might lie on a knife point" and placed it on the tip of his tongue. He instantly got a metallic taste and recognized the odor of almond, characteristic of cyanide. Beginning to become extremely nauseated, Hitchcock nursed himself with whisky and shared a sour apple with Cornish. These homely cures appeared to work well, for both men soon began to feel better. Cornish, however, required several days' convalescence and medical attention.
     Katherine Adams and Harry Cornish had both swallowed cyanide of mercury, which had been mixed with the white powder of Bromo Seltzer. Cornish could hardly be blamed for having failed to have his suspicions aroused by the painkiller package. Bromo Seltzer, then as now, was put up in a distinctive blue bottle. It was stoppered with cork to which a coating of paraffin was evenly applied. The bottle received by 

Cornish appeared at first glance to be properly sealed, but closer examination by the police showed that the label had been washed off a Bromo Seltzer bottle and pasted on a smaller one used by chemists for cyanide. The name Bromo Seltzer, blown into the drug firm's bottles, did not appear in the small bottle sent to Cornish. The paraffin veneer "was thick and irregular, as if pressed down hurriedly by human fingers."
     The press corps lost no time in seeking out the close relatives of Harry Cornish, who had clearly been the poisoner's target. Who could have had a motive to murder him? His divorced wife Addie, interviewed in Boston where she lived with their ten-year old daughter Jenny, was completely nonplused and had no theory to offer. However, Cornish's father, Harry Cornish Sr., was apparently not tongue-tied when the new role of detective was thrust upon him; he was quoted as entertaining suspicions of a man and a woman. He said that his son Harry (then thirty-six) had had trouble with a man over a love affair when he was only nineteen years old. The press also reported professional speculations about the hidden murderer. Dr. W.H. Birchmore, chemist and a recognized authority on cyanide, was convinced that "none but a physician of understanding, a pharmacist, above the average of such in chemical knowledge or a person not necessarily in either of these professions but well versed in chemistry, can be the poisoner in this case." Assistant district attorney McIntyre, questioned at the Democratic Club, limited himself to the observation that the handwriting on the poison package evidently had been disguised and looked as if it had been penned by a woman.
     The bizarre murder stunned the public, for it was seen as a continuation of a recent wave of poisonings, many of them perpetrated by anonymous mailings. An early, widely publicized crime in this series was the 1891 murder of Josephine A. Barnaby, a wealthy Providence widow, by Thomas Thatcher Graves, a physician who had cured her of a paralytic disorder and abused her gratitude by obtaining control of her assets and by inducing her to appoint him executor and to grant him a large legacy. His instrument was a bottle of whiskey containing a solution of arsenic strong enough to kill many widows. Pasted on the bottle was a written New Year's greeting asking her to accept "this fine old Whiskey" from her "friends in the woods," an intended allusion to an Adirondacks guide who was beginning to rival Graves as an object of Mrs. Barnaby's beneficence. Mrs. Barnaby died and her friend, Mrs. Worrell, became ill after indulging in a toddy prepared from the "whiskey."
     Perhaps the news of the Graves murder came under the eyes of San Francisco's celebrated poisoner, Cordelia Botkin, who gave a sinister new meaning to the culinary concept of "sweet and sour" by seeding with 

arsenic a box of candy she bought at a confectioner's store on Market Street. She mailed the box to Mary Dunning, the wife of her lover, who after a five-year liaison had had the poor taste to announce an intention of returning to his spouse.
     Botkin cast her nets more widely than had Dr. Graves, for although he might have expected his intended victim to share the poisoned whisky with friends, the spurned Cordelia cunningly calculated that her gift would tempt the sweet teeth of the Dunning children. In the box of chocolates she had written in a hand unknown to Mrs. Dunning: "Love to yourself and baby." As it turned out, the candy was eaten by four adults and two children and claimed the lives of both Mrs. Dunning and her sister.
     Botkin's trial began on December 9, 1898, less than three weeks before Mrs. Adams drank the poisoned Bromo Seltzer.
     In the meantime, two other murders by mail, apparently inspired by the Graves and Botkin killings, were reported in the press. On November 12, 1897, a man was murdered by poison contained in whiskey mailed to him as a gift, and on September 9, 1898, Margaret Wilkinson of Newark, New Jersey, was poisoned by a package of sugar mixed with arsenic.
     The copycat murder syndrome was even more clearly in evidence in two successive New York City poisonings involving the administration of a painkiller.
     In 1891 a young medical student at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, Carlyle Harris, under pressure to acknowledge publicly his secret marriage to Helen Potts, murdered her with a powerful dose of morphine. He had introduced the pure drug into a capsule that had originally contained a harmless sleeping draught consisting of quinine and a small quantity of morphine dispensed by a druggist on his prescription. Harris was tried in early 1892 and found guilty of murder.
     In the course of the proceedings, the defendant received scant sympathy from another New York doctor, Robert W. Buchanan, who in conversations with friends referred to Harris contemptuously as an amateur and bungler because he had not known how to prevent the contraction of the eye pupil, which is one of the characteristic symptoms of morphine poisoning. Within a few months Dr. Buchanan had occasion to follow precisely this formula for disguised poisoning when he murdered his wife by the administration of a mixture of morphine and belladonna (atropine), the latter drug having dilative powers that forestalled contraction of the pupils. Although he had copied and improved on Harris's recent murder pattern, Buchanan was convicted like his predecessor, and both men were executed.

     In the case of the Bromo Seltzer murder, the killer appeared to be imitating all these earlier crimes in the selection of a painkiller for his poison medium and in hitting upon an anonymous mailed gift as his means of delivery. But something even more alarming was soon observed at work: the Bromo Seltzer killer seemed to be copying himself.
     This baffling likelihood surfaced early when a physician, Wendell C. Phillips, who attended Cornish after his poisoning, noted that his symptoms closely resembled those of another club member, Henry C. Barnet, who had died in the previous November after taking a dose of another patent medicine named "Kutnow powder," which he said had been mailed to him anonymously. Henry Douglass, Barnet's principal physician, submitted the medicine to a chemist for analysis and was advised that it contained cyanide of mercury, but because he attributed his patient's death to diphtheria, the damning chemical report was not called to the attention of the police until after the murder of Mrs. Adams. The authorities then ordered Barnet's body exhumed, and the postmortem examination confirmed the presence of cyanide of mercury.
     The police investigation, with the able participation of Detective (later Deputy Inspector) Arthur A. Carey, hunted for a killer who had to fit a unique profile. He must have had reason to desire the elimination of both Barnet and Cornish, two members of the Knickerbocker Club, and must also have had access to the uncommon poison, cyanide of mercury. Through the initiative of club members who thought they recognized the handwriting on the Bromo Seltzer mailing package, the attention of the police was drawn to a man who seemed to fill the bill precisely: a former club member named Roland B. Molineux.
     Molineux, the thirty-one year-old son of a Civil War general, Edward Leslie Molineux, was a chemist and the superintendent of a Newark factory of Morris Herrmann & Company, a manufacturer of dry colors. The plant had a well equipped laboratory containing Prussian blue, chrome yellow, and other chemicals from which poison, including cyanide of mercury, could be produced. Rumors indicated that Molineux had strong, although varied, grievances against the two intended poison victims. Molineux and Barnet, it was said, had paid court to the same young woman, Blanche Chesebrough, who was regarded as a great beauty in spite of an artificial eye. When Barnet lay on what was to prove his deathbed, he received a letter from Blanche in which she expressed distress to learn of his illness and also assured him of her desire to see him to resolve some misunderstanding that had arisen between them. Seventeen days after Barnet's death, she married Molineux.
     Although crime annals had taught that men murder for far less substantial reasons than those that impel them to commit lesser crimes, Molineux's grievances against Cornish (were Molineux indeed the 

sender of the Bromo Seltzer package) would set a new standard in triviality. The police were told that Molineux had left the Knickerbocker for another athletic club after an unsuccessful campaign to have Cornish ousted from his post. Molineux's complaints had been many. Cornish had refused to follow his orders in connection with the club's plans for an amateur circus. And he had declined to order the make of horizontal bar preferred by Molineux, who was a champion gymnast and member of the club's athletic committee. He had written an insulting letter about a lawyer friend of Molineux, Bartow S. Weeks, asserting that Weeks was "guilty of a dirty piece of business." Still worse, Cornish had allowed strangers and athletic members to use obscene language in the club's swimming pool. Finally, it was said that, as Cornish was going downstairs from the room in which the club's board had rejected Molineux's complaints against him, he came upon his adversary. "You son of a bitch," he greeted Molineux, "you thought you would get me out and I got you out." Molineux resigned from the Knickerbocker Club in November 1897.
     As the investigation proceeded, a strange pattern of pre-murder conduct appeared to bind the two poisonings more closely together. Prior to the death of Barnet and the attempt on Cornish, fictitious letter-office accounts were established in the names of both intended victims; by this means, active correspondence was conducted in a disguised hand, ordering cures for impotence and other patent medicines. The medicines ordered from the "Barnet" letter-office box, established in late May 1898, included Kutnow powder; the renter of the box, whom the proprietor, Nicholas Heckmann, identified as Molineux, had called about twenty times to pick up his mail and packages. The "Cornish" box was rented on December 21, 1898, and a sample box of Kutnow powder ordered shortly thereafter by the false Cornish was delivered to the police by the letter-office proprietor in January. The personal information that was supplied in a "diagnosis blank" relating to a remedy applied for in the "Barnet" correspondence more accurately described Molineux than Barnet. The correspondence in both letter-office boxes contained many misspellings. In his memoirs, Detective Carey asserted that in samples of handwriting given by Molineux at the request of the police, he repeatedly spelled the word "forty" with a "u," as was done on the Bromo Seltzer mailing wrapper.
     The police were also successful in tracing the contents of the lethal package mailed to Harry Cornish at the Knickerbocker Club. The toothpick holder had been sold by Hartdegen's jewellery store in Newark on December 21; saleswoman Emma Miller remembered her customer as a man with a sandy Van Dyke beard who had asked for something to hold a bottle of Bromo Seltzer on a lady's dresser. (A number of Newark 

wigmakers conveniently told the press that they had sold red beards about the same date.) The bottle used by the poisoner was identified by a mark as originating with Powers & Weightman, manufacturing chemists.
     Soon another important breakthrough was announced. At the inquest Molineux had denied ever having seen a letter in his ordinary hand on robin's-egg-blue paper with three overlapping silver crescents. That letter had been sent to Dr. James Burns, asking for a medicine for impotence. The same stationery was used in correspondence through the fictitious letter-office boxes. It was now reported by the Newark police that Mary Melando, a fellow employee of Molineux at the Herrmann factory who took care of his rooms there, had seen sheets of similar paper in the drawer of his sideboard.
     Mary told friends that Molineux had seduced her when she was thirteen years of age and that they had remained lovers until two years ago. Despite his abandonment of her in favor of Blanche, they still remained something of a mutual-aid team; she cleaned his rooms at the factory, and he had interceded in her behalf when she was caught in a police raid on a brothel. Full of gratitude, Mary refused to leave New Jersey to testify for the prosecution at the trial in New York City. Under the procedures of the day, she could not be compelled to cross the river. The means that were used to procure this essential witness for the state are worthy of James Bond. Detective Carey recalls the episode in his memoirs:

She did testify, and in New York City. How she came to do this I shall not detail. Suffice it to say that she was fond of the theatre. She attended one in Paterson, New Jersey, one evening. She left the theatre after the performance in a great hurry and went to the railroad station. Two trains going in opposite directions pulled in. A man cried, "This train for Newark." Mary stepped aboard it. She discovered it was not going toward Newark but towards Suffern, New York. But the train had started. She got off at Suffern, and stepped into the arms of [Police Sergeant] McCafferty, who was waiting at the depot.

five hundred talesmen had to be examined before a jury could be empaneled. The assistant attorney general, James W. Osborne, who was responsible for the state's case, faced this painfully selected jury with some reason for trepidation. Even though Recorder Goff might well be expected to favor the prosecution, Osborne was faced with the heavy burden of establishing guilt for the most secret of murders - poisoning - through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence. This burden was made more imposing in the Molineux trial by the physical remoteness achieved by the poisoner through the mailing of the lethal package. Osborne's grand strategy was to establish that the attempts on Barnet and Cornish were made in pursuance of a common design in which each murder was accomplished through the anonymous mailing of a package of patent medicine laced with cyanide of mercury and preceded by letter-office correspondence with remedy manufacturers in the forged name of the intended victim. Under this approach, evidence of the common authorship by Molineux of the Barnet and Cornish correspondence and of the address on the Bromo Seltzer mailing package would be a powerful means for bringing the whole scheme home to the defendant.
     In following the prosecution plan, Osborne encountered a number of obstacles. After equivocating during direct examination, Emma Miller, the seller of the silver holder mailed with the Bromo Seltzer bottle, stated positively during recross-examination that Molineux was not the man she had waited on and that there was no possibility of her being mistaken. And although Nicholas Heckmann identified Molineux as having personally hired the letter-office box in Barnet's name, Joseph Koch, at whose office the Cornish account was later established, was equally sure that, while the defendant had called on him to talk about a letter-office box, a box ultimately was rented in Cornish's name by a "third man." The fiercest battle was fought over the authorship of the forged correspondence, with the prosecution offering fourteen expert witnesses, including two perennial handwriting analysts, John F. Tyrrell and Albert Osborn, who both reappeared in the Lindbergh kidnaping case thirty-five years later; the defense relied on the advice of another eminent authority on questioned documents, David Carvaho, who had in the previous year appeared for the prosecution in the trial of Margaret Cody for attempted blackmail of the Gould heirs.
     On February 6 defense counsel Bartow S. Weeks, the same lawyer Cornish had maligned in the letter that had fueled Molineux's anger, surprised the courtroom by declining either to offer evidence or to move for dismissal. He stated instead his belief that the prosecution had failed to establish its charge and immediately began his closing argument. When the jury returned after a day's deliberation, Week's confidence proved unfounded. The verdict was guilty.

     Undaunted and against the advice of his lawyer, Molineux addressed the court before the death sentence was announced. He had not bought the bottle holder, hired the Cornish letter-office box, or possessed any of the instruments used in the crime. Nicolas Heckmann's testimony that he had opened the Barnet letter-office box was blamed on the sensation-seeking press: "Yellow journalism put a price upon my head. It was an invitation to every blackmailer, every perjurer, every rogue, every man without principle but with a price, and to that invitation Mr. Heckmann responded." On March 26, 1900, Molineux was taken to Sing Sing prison.
     In 1901 his appeal came before the New York Court of Appeals. The court unanimously reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial.
     All seven judges agreed that the trial court had erroneously admitted hearsay testimony by Barnet's principal physician, Douglass, as to statements made to him by Barnet to the effect that he had received the Kutnow powder through the mail and that he had become ill after taking a dose of it. Presumably Barnet's condition at the time of the alleged statements was not regarded as sufficiently hopeless for these crucial revelations to be regarded as "dying declarations." (Analogous hearsay evidence was admitted in the defense of Klaus von Bulow at his first trial, in 1982, for the attempted murder of his wife, when a hospital technician testified as to Mrs. von Bulow's statement that she had tried to kill herself.)
     On a broader issue of evidence that struck a devastating blow to the prosecution's case on retrial, the court split four to three. In a signal victory of common law over common sense, the majority held that admission of any evidence relating to the alleged killing of Barnet was barred by the general rule that "the state cannot prove against a defendant any crime not alleged in the indictment, either as a foundation for a separate punishment, or as aiding the proof that he is guilty of the crime charged." Holding that none of the recognized exceptions to that rule applied, the majority decided that evidence of the Barnet killing did not establish that the two murders were committed pursuant to "a common plan or scheme," nor did it tend to identify Molineux as the same person who committed the two crimes. In the majority's view, the use of cyanide of mercury in both cases no more established a common scheme than if the two victims had been shot -- and indeed, the majority opinion noted, the widely differing motives put forward for the two crimes tended to disprove any connection.
     The majority also discounted the significance of the letter-office box correspondence conducted in the names of the two intended victims, observing that this evidence showed merely that "if the same person was operating through both boxes, he was employing similar means for 

different ends, or for some common purpose not disclosed by this record. The methods referred to are as identical as any two shootings, stabbings or assaults, but no more so."
     The principal dissenting opinion, written by Chief Justice Parker, appears to have by far the better of the arguments. The opinion noted that cyanide of mercury, the poison used in both killings, "is a rare and unusual poison, not kept on sale by druggists generally as strychnine and many other poisons are, and the books of the medical and chemical professions record only five cases, prior to these, of death by that poison." The fact that within a period of seven weeks two murder attempts had been made with this rare poison suggested the likelihood that one person had sent both packages. Parker also regarded the evidence of the correspondence carried on in the names of the two intended victims as relevant, not only because of the testimony by lay and expert witnesses that it was all in the handwriting of Molineux, but also because "there is to be gleaned from the letters themselves and the circumstances surrounding and attending their writing very strong evidence that one brain conceived and carried out both schemes." In each case the letter-office box was hired in the name of the intended victim; remedies for impotence were ordered in the victim's name; both the Cornish and Barnet letters were undated; and both series of letters, as well as the address on the poison package, contained misspelled words.
     While the majority seemed troubled by the fact that the fictitious correspondence in the letter-office boxes had no rational connection with the ensuing murders, Chief Justice Parker clearly did not find it necessary to do more than note the highly unusual fact that the strange activity with reference to each intended victim preceded the mailing of the poison. Perhaps a more profound awareness of the irrationality often associated with criminal malice would have supported the view that the opening and use of the letter-office boxes in the names of Barnet and Cornish were hostile actions by which the would-be murderer appropriated the names and personalities of his intended victims before he made his attempts on their lives.
     At the retrial, which began in October, 1902, a number of factors swung the balance in Molineux's favor. First, of course, was the appeal court's ruling that evidence relating to the Barnet poisoning was inadmissible. Only six of the harmless Barnet letters were admitted as standards of comparison with the Cornish letters; the rest were excluded. Another advantage was that Mary Melando, having been tricked once by the police, could not again be enticed into an appearance in New York City.

     But by far the most dramatic turnabout was the decision of the defense to put Molineux on the stand. Calm, smooth and convincing, he established an alibi for the afternoon on which the poison package was allegedly mailed at the General Post Office on Park Row - he was visiting a professor at Columbia University. He denied authorship of the Cornish and Barnet letters and maintained that he had never even heard of cyanide of mercury. He now admitted writing to Dr. James Burns on the celebrated robin's-egg-blue paper but claimed that he must have picked up a sheet in some restaurant or hotel.
     David Carvalho, never known to underrate his own importance, subsequently cited as a major turning point a blunder by Osborne, the assistant district attorney, in his heckling cross-examination of Molineux. Osborne asked the defendant how he came to engage Carvalho, who had the reputation of testifying only if strongly persuaded of the truth of the position he supported. "He came to my lawyer's office," Molineux testified. Then Osborne made the classic cross-examiner's error, venturing a question calling for an answer that he could neither predict nor challenge: "Well, what did he say?" The defendant, glad of the opportunity, gave a devastating response: "He said that if he came to the conclusion that I had written the compromising paper, he would at once inform the district attorney and deliver me up."
     All in all, the cross-examination was an unqualified triumph for the defendant. His father, the general, observed after his son left the stand: "Roland bore himself under fire like a true Molineux."
     The old soldier's confidence was amply justified, for the jury acquitted Roland after twelve minutes' deliberation.
     After his acquittal, Molineux gave up the paint business for literature, writing plays, stories, and poetry. In 1903 he published The Room with the Little Door, a collection of sketches based on his experiences in the Tombs prison and the death house at Sing Sing. Strange to say, it is a distinctly sunny work and even has good words to say in behalf of the "third degree," which he assured his readers was never applied to him. Critics hailed the book as the first fruit of a sensitive and promising young talent. David Belasco in 1913 produced Molineux's melodrama of prison life, The Man Inside.
     A year later, the newspapers reported that Molineux had escaped from a sanitarium in Babylon, Long Island, where he had been under treatment for a nervous breakdown and "had started for a run in the village, without trousers and dressed in running shirt and a bathrobe." With the consent of his father, he was committed to the King's Park State Hospital for the Insane, where he died in 1917. The hospital records attributed his death to general paralysis, cerebral type, due to syphilitic infection (general paresis).

     If it is pardonable in retrospect to conclude that Roland Molineux's first jury was the wiser one, he can be seen as a murderer whose career anticipated by almost a century some of the most extraordinary phenomena of present-day American crime. In the details of his technique - the lacing of a painkiller with cyanide, the use of an ostensibly original sealed drug package, and the indirect means of delivery of the poison, he is the ancestor of the still-unknown murderer who killed seven people in the Chicago area in 1982 with poisoned capsules of the aspirin substitute, Extra-Strength Tylenol. Moreover, as a murder convict who was able to turn the experiences of imprisonment into a literary career, he blazed the trail for Jack Henry Abbott. In 1981 Abbott (who had stabbed a fellow inmate to death in 1967) was paroled in large part due to Norman Mailer's trumpeting of the literary merit of a collection of the convict's prison correspondence (published as In the Belly of the Beast). In both these cases, Molineux's modern successors have outdone him in horrors. The Tylenol murderer claimed many more victims and, so far as is known, had no grievances against any of them; and while Molineux's brief literary celebrity left no ill effects except a few bad books, Abbott, only a few months after his release, killed again, stabbing an actor and part-time waiter in a dispute at a restaurant in lower Manhattan.

* This article was previously published in 69 ABAJ 282-286 (March 1983) and in Jonathan Goodman (ed.), The Christmas Murders 49-67 (London: Allison & Busby, 1986). As republished in the present collection, the article is based on the London text, which differs in its concluding section from the original.