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| Dolly Reynolds. (The Sun. March 24, 1899) |
The Grand Hotel was your typical New York
meeting place, “in that part of New York where people go and come as they
please and where no one seems to care about his neighbor’s affairs. The clerk
of the hotel finds no time to ask many questions of his guests, and he would
not think it strange if any of them passed in or out at 2 or 3 o’clock in the
morning.”
The clerk didn’t ask Dolly Reynolds (real
name Emmeline Reynolds) any questions when she checked in on the afternoon of
August 15, 1898. She signed in as “E. Maxwell and wife” and was shown to room
84 on the fourth floor. “The good appearance she made was a sufficient
guarantee that he would get all that was coming to him in the shape of pay for
board or lodging.”
Dolly ate lunch by herself in the dining
room at 2 p.m. She left the hotel and returned at 6 p.m., accompanied by a man
later identified as Dr. Samuel J. Kennedy. They left the hotel and returned
just before midnight. Not long after that, John Day, a negro bellboy, brought
them a bottle of champagne. Day told the court he remembered Kennedy because of
his generous tip—25 cents on a $1.75 bottle of champagne.
Dr. Kennedy slipped out of the hotel in
the middle of the night. Elevator boy Patrick Lenehan said he took Kennedy to
the first floor at 2:30 a.m. Desk clerk, Joseph Gregory, watched him leave the
hotel by the Broadway door.
The next morning, chambermaid Mary Higgins
opened the unlocked door and found Dolly Reynolds dead on the floor of her room
with her head bashed open. After getting over the shock, she made some mental
notes to herself. There were two glasses of champagne on the table, one full
and the other half full. The pillowcases were still pinned in place, so no one
had slept in the bed, and a fifteen-inch section of lead pipe was lying next to
the body.
