Read The Devil's Gentleman Online

Authors: Harold Schechter

The Devil's Gentleman

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

Prologue
SING SING: FEBRUARY
1900

Part One
THE SOLDIER AND THE CLUBMAN

CHAPTER
1

CHAPTER
2

CHAPTER
3

CHAPTER
4

CHAPTER
5

CHAPTER
6

Part Two
BLANCHE

CHAPTER
7

CHAPTER
8

CHAPTER
9

CHAPTER
10

CHAPTER
11

CHAPTER
12

CHAPTER
13

CHAPTER
14

CHAPTER
15

CHAPTER
16

CHAPTER
17

CHAPTER
18

CHAPTER
19

CHAPTER
20

CHAPTER
21

CHAPTER
22

Part Three
DEGENERATE

CHAPTER
23

CHAPTER
24

CHAPTER
25

CHAPTER
26

CHAPTER
27

CHAPTER
28

CHAPTER
29

CHAPTER
30

CHAPTER
31

CHAPTER
32

CHAPTER
33

CHAPTER
34

CHAPTER
35

CHAPTER
36

CHAPTER
37

CHAPTER
38

CHAPTER
39

CHAPTER
40

CHAPTER
41

CHAPTER
42

CHAPTER
43

Part Four
INQUEST

CHAPTER
44

CHAPTER
45

CHAPTER
46

CHAPTER
47

CHAPTER
48

CHAPTER
49

CHAPTER
50

CHAPTER
51

CHAPTER
52

Part Five
THE PEOPLE VERSUS MOLINEUX

CHAPTER
53

CHAPTER
54

CHAPTER
55

CHAPTER
56

CHAPTER
57

CHAPTER
58

CHAPTER
59

CHAPTER
60

CHAPTER
61

CHAPTER
62

CHAPTER
63

CHAPTER
64

CHAPTER
65

CHAPTER
66

CHAPTER
67

CHAPTER
68

CHAPTER
69

CHAPTER
70

CHAPTER
71

CHAPTER
72

CHAPTER
73

CHAPTER
74

Part Six
THE MAN INSIDE

CHAPTER
75

CHAPTER
76

CHAPTER
77

CHAPTER
78

CHAPTER
79

CHAPTER
80

CHAPTER
81

CHAPTER
82

CHAPTER
83

CHAPTER
84

CHAPTER
85

CHAPTER
86

CHAPTER
87

CHAPTER
88

Part Seven
AFTERMATH

CHAPTER
89

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY HAROLD SCHECHTER

PRAISE FOR THE DEVIL’S GENTLEMAN

COPYRIGHT

For Will and Mary Molineux

A
t the start of the twentieth century, death by electricity was a relatively recent form of capital punishment. It was only in June 1888 that New York became the first state to pass a law replacing hanging with electrocution. Two years later, on August 6, 1890, a thirty-year-old ax murderer named William Kemmler became the first man to die in the chair. After being hooked up to the apparatus, Kemmler was hit with a high-voltage charge lasting seventeen seconds. When the shock failed to kill him, the switch was thrown again. This time, the current was kept on for more than a minute. As Kemmler roasted, the room filled “with the stench of burning hair and flesh.” Some witnesses vomited, while others fainted or fled in horror.
1

Over the succeeding decade, more than three dozen criminals were put to death in New York by the new, presumably more humane, mode of execution. All were men. That particular gender barrier was broken in March 1899, when a hard-bitten housewife named Martha Place became the first female to be killed in the chair. In the weeks leading up to her electrocution, her case became a cause célèbre. Even while reveling in the lurid details of her crime (Mrs. Place had smothered her seventeen-year-old stepdaughter after flinging sulfuric acid in the girl’s face), the
New York Journal
—William Randolph Hearst’s wildly sensationalistic “yellow” paper—crusaded for clemency on the grounds of her sex. The effort proved unavailing. Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute her sentence, declaring that, when it came to punishment, female criminals deserved equality with men. On the morning of March 20, 1899, clutching a psalm book and muttering “Lord, save me, Lord, save me,” Mrs. Place was led to the death chair, becoming a pioneer of sorts in the women’s rights movement.
2

Eleven months later, during the second week of February 1900, the Sing Sing Death House received a convicted murderer whose notoriety outstripped even that of the infamous Mrs. Place. His name was Roland Burnham Molineux, and—largely thanks to the feverish attentions of Hearst and his fellow scandal-mongerer, Joseph Pulitzer—his case had riveted the country for more than a year.

At the time of his transfer to Sing Sing, he had already spent twelve months in the city prison, known as the Tombs. Since his arrest in early 1899, his clean-favored face had grown pasty and his athlete’s physique had lost much of its muscular tone. Still, at thirty-four years old, he cut a striking figure. Even behind bars he was never less than immaculately dressed, grooming himself each morning as though preparing to visit his club. Unfailingly suave (if not supercilious) in manner, he bore himself at all times like a gentleman of the highest rank. Throughout his trial—the longest at that time in the history of New York State—he had barely been able to conceal his ennui. For a man convicted of what his accusers called “the greatest crime of the age,” he struck observers as a marvel of nonchalance.

Once immured in the Death House—an environment so grim that, by comparison, the Tombs seemed like a Newport hotel—he managed to maintain his unflappable air. At least in the beginning. Within weeks of his arrival, however, something happened that shook even Roland Molineux’s remarkable aplomb.

Among the other inmates on Death Row was a thirty-seven-year-old Italian immigrant named Antonio Ferraro. A year and a half earlier, in September 1898, Ferraro had bumped into a onetime friend, Lucciano Machio, on a Brooklyn street corner. Machio was overdue in repaying some cash he had borrowed from Ferraro, and before long, the two were hurling insults into each other’s face. The words grew uglier. Knives were drawn. Within minutes, Machio lay dying on the sidewalk, a gaping wound in his throat.
3

Convicted and sentenced to die, Ferraro pinned his last hopes on an appeal. Late on the afternoon of February 23, 1900, however, he received word that the effort had failed and his execution would take place within the week. Ferraro did not take the news well. As one paper reported, “he emitted a prolonged scream that broke in fearful violence on the silence of the Death House and terrified the other prisoners. For a half hour, the hopeless man shrieked hysterically and rushed around the cell, moaning and shouting curses.”
4

Though his priest, Father Orestes Allucci, eventually managed to calm him down a bit, Ferraro spent the next few days intermittently bursting into inhuman howls or spewing “fearful blasphemies.” Even on the morning of his execution—Monday, February 26—Ferraro was still violently protesting his fate. The curtains had been drawn in front of the other condemned cells, so that Roland could see only shadows. But he could hear Father Allucci say, “Do you forgive your enemies?”

Ferraro answered with a bitter curse.

“But you must,” Father Allucci pleaded as he walked beside the doomed man. “Say yes, for God’s sake, say yes! You must, or God will not—” By then, the priest was weeping.

“No!” shrieked Ferraro. “No—no!”

That cry of maddened refusal was the last Roland heard of Ferraro. In another moment, the condemned man was led into the execution chamber. Later, Roland heard that it had taken five separate jolts of electricity to kill Ferraro. He had died, according to
The New York Times,
“harder than any man who has so far died in the electric chair.”
5

Roland was so badly rattled that, for days afterward, he found it hard to eat or sleep. Gradually, however, he recovered his composure. What, after all, did he have to fear? His father had vowed to win his freedom and bring him safely home. And if anyone could be counted on to keep his word, it was General Edward Leslie Molineux, who throughout his long and celebrated life had maintained a moral stance as upright as his posture; a man for whom the concepts of duty, honor, and justice were nothing less than sacred—however quaint and outmoded they might seem to his son.

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