Rogues' Gallery by John Oller

Author:John Oller [Oller, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

On the same night that Jerome crashed Canfield’s Manhattan casino in December 1902, a play titled The Great Poison Mystery opened in a theater in Jersey City. Its barely disguised characters needed no introduction to the audience: Robert Milando, the young head of a chemicals company and death row prisoner in Sing Sing facing a second trial; his father, General Milando; Robert’s sweetheart, Blanche Marlboro; his enemy, Harrison Cornwall, athletic director of the Metropolitan Sporting Club; and Cornwall’s aunt, Mrs. Adamson, who dies from drinking a headache remedy laced with cyanide of mercury. To wild applause, the accused Milando is pronounced innocent by the jury, and the villainous Cornwall is exposed as the true killer.

It was an absurdly melodramatic production—a “ridiculous paraphrase” of the actual case, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reviewer called it—that never made it to Broadway. But while bad art, it had accurately imitated life. For three weeks earlier, Roland Molineux, the most famous convicted murderer in America still in jail, was acquitted in his second trial for murder.

The long passage of time between Molineux’s first and second trials had proved to his advantage. For one thing, there was a new judge: in place of John W. Goff was John S. Lambert, who was more sympathetic to the defense and kept things moving along briskly. Some key prosecution witnesses had died or, in the case of Mary Melando, avoided the jurisdiction and couldn’t be subpoenaed. New surprise alibi witnesses for Molineux came out of the woodwork four years after the murders with stories that were as questionable as they were belated, but they introduced an element of doubt.

The defense put on its own handwriting expert, David Carvalho, to rebut the state’s experts’ specimen comparisons. Like prosecution expert Daniel Ames, the highly credentialed Carvalho had been a defense expert in the famous 1899 treason case in France against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, in which handwriting evidence had played a major role. The defense also pointed the finger at Cornish as the real poisoner of his aunt. And Roland Molineux, who took the stand in his own defense this time, held up ably during his cross-examination.

Complicating life for the prosecution was the fact that all references to Henry Barnet’s poisoning were kept from the jury. That rendered irrelevant both the letter box evidence to prove a common scheme and the evidence of Molineux’s jealousy of Barnet over Blanche Chesebrough. She neither testified nor showed up at the second trial.

The jury needed only thirteen minutes of deliberation to return its verdict of not guilty. Among those who watched the joyful defendant and his father leave the courtroom in triumph was District Attorney Jerome, who made the pro forma motion to discharge the prisoner from the Tombs.

“Justice prevails. I am a happy man,” Molineux declared to cheering onlookers outside, while his father issued a statement that read, “The strife is over, the battle won, and Might has lost, but Right has won.”

Their joy would not last long.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.