Roland was hastily hauled off to Sing Sing, where he spent the next eighteen months in durance vile and in extensive literary endeavor, much after the pattern of the more recent Caryl Chessman, in another death house. Roland even managed to get published a small volume of sketches of prison life, entitled The Room with the Little Door. It is now out of print, but certain critics of the time compared it not unfavorably with the works of Ambrose Bierce.
In October, 1901, the New York Court of Appeals reversed the verdict against author Roland and ordered a new trial on the grounds that he had been unjustly tried for two murders at once. This is, of course, in strict accordance with the letter of our law. It is sometimes different in England; George Joseph Smith, the “Brides in the Bath” mass murderer, would never have got his just deserts if it had not been brought out at his trial that he had been repeating the same murder technique over and over again for years.
By the time of the second trial, poor old Katherine Adams was quite forgotten; so was Harry Barnet. One notices that victims in murder cases soon fade out of the picture, and that public sympathy is apt to go out to “that poor boy in the death house, fighting for his life.” It is quite common nowadays for defense attorneys to object most strenuously to the prosecution’s presentation of photos of the battered, bloody corpse, because it might inflame the jury.
This trial of our hero, Roland Molineux, was heard before Justice Lambert of Buffalo, and here a very different picture presented itself. The public was by now sick and tired of the case; the newspapers gave it little space. Mr. Osbourne was allowed much less leeway in introducing the handwriting evidence. Ex-Governor Black handled the defense with aggressive brilliance.
Roland put up a surprise alibi: at the time the poison package had been mailed to Cornish, he himself had been visiting out at Columbia University, and even had a full professor present to swear to it! There was also the Marvelous Female Witness, the surprising lady who comes into so many major murder trials. She swore on her sacred oath that she had been in the New York central post office on that fatal day, and that after four years, she could clearly recollect standing at the window and seeing a man — a man not answering to Molineux’s description in any way — mailing a package. She had even been close enough to glimpse a few essential words of the address; she had seen the name Mr. Harry Cornish and the word Knickerbocker. Her memory certainly must have been phenomenal — and why she had kept silent for four years about all this is not a question for us to ask, except to ourselves.
It is a well-known fact, and a reflection on American justice and its legal lights, that no person of means has ever been executed for murder in this country. The poor, the ignorant, who have no choice but to be defended by the public defender, usually get the works, period.
At any rate, in this second trial, Roland Molineux was freed. The jury was out only four minutes. He was returned with apologies to the arms of his beloved Blanche — who divorced him some months later and married her attorney. Then and there the lovely if one-eyed charmer disappears from the scene.
Molineux himself, no longer the playboy son of a wealthy father, no longer the superintendent of a chemical firm making Prussian blue, settled down most seriously to his literary work. He had published Death Chamber Stories and Tales of the Tombs, then essayed a serious romantic novel entitled Vice Admiral of the Blue, full of purplish prose about Lord Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, a copy of which I believe is still available in the New York Public Library. It did not make any best-seller lists, but Roland, as a famous author, suddenly did pop up in Who’s Who, and with the help of a female amanuensis even wrote a play, The Man Inside, which was produced on Broadway by the late, great David Belasco. The play unfortunately had a very short run.
But our hero, Roland Molineux, never quite gave up. This young man, who had murdered once to gain a lady, and who had murdered months later in an abortive attempt on the life of a man who had called him “a vile name,” soon married his fair literary aide and moved out to Long Island. This was in November of 1913. Evidently the long rest in the death house had restored him physically.
The end, however, was tragic and perhaps inevitable. One bright autumn morning in the fall of the year 1914, Molineux appeared on the streets of a suburban town clad in a straw hat and absolutely nothing else, running up and down the sidewalks and shouting that he was a wild she-wolf from Bitter Creek, and that it was his night to howl.
The men with the strait jacket came and took him away, and just three years later, in a padded cell in King’s Park State Hospital, he passed on to his reward. He lies buried in a nearby cemetery, but it is reported that in the last forty years, nobody, except for your reporter, has taken the trouble to visit his grave.
Requiescat in pace. May his victims rest as well.
Dead Drunk
by Frank Kane
The blonde stood at the picture window, stared down at the silver ribbon that was the East River ten stories below. The occasional hoot of a tug or the clank of a barge barely penetrated into the room.
She had been poured into a tight-fitting sheath that hinted at the sleekness of her thighs, the roundness of her hips, and gave up any pretense of disguising the cantilever construction of her façade.
The man was sprawled in an easy chair, a half-filled glass in his hand, a cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He was eying the snugness of her skirt around her hips with appreciation. When she turned to face him, the effect from the flip side was equally interesting.
She appeared to have made a decision. “All right, Mr. Davis—”
The man swirled the liquor around the sides of his glass. “Tim,” he told her. “Mr. Davis sounds so formal.”
A brief flash of annoyance clouded the slanted green eyes; the full lips narrowed into a thin slash. “Let’s keep this on a business basis, shall we?” She walked over to the portable bar against the wall, picked up a glass, spilled some liquor into it and added ice. “You say you’ve been hired by my husband to get him the evidence he needs for a divorce.” She looked over to where he sat. “So?”
Tim Davis took the cigarette from between his lips, grinned at her. “Baby, baby. You sure didn’t try to do much covering up.” He leaned over, crushed the cigarette out in an ash tray. “You left a trail a mile wide.” He tapped his breast pocket. “I’ve got stuff here that would get him that decree in any court in the country.” He licked at his slack lips. “Real good stuff.”
The blonde took a deep swallow from her glass. “How much?”
The man in the chair shrugged. “Suppose you do buy this stuff back, Lorna—”
“Mrs. Kyler,” the woman said coldly.
Davis considered, shrugged again. “Like the guy says. What’s in a name? Mrs. Kyler today” — he tapped his breast pocket suggestively — “no Mrs. Kyler tomorrow. You know?”
The blonde drained her glass, set it down, walked back to the window, her full hips working smoothly against the fabric of her skirt. She stood with her back to him. “If you didn’t come here to sell the information, what do you want?”
The private detective clinked the ice in his glass against the sides. “Like I was saying, Lorna. It wouldn’t do any good to buy this stuff back. There’s lots more around where this came from. You buy me off, there’s a hundred other oops your husband could buy to get him what he wants.”