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

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.

An Easy Process

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.

Two Identifications

“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.

The Blue Paper

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.