 |
| 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.
On further investigation, detectives found a check for $13,000 tucked in Dolly’s corset. It was drawn on the Garfield National Bank and signed by Dudley Gideon. Dr. Kennedy had endorsed the back of it—S. J. Kennedy.
At the trial, the prosecution contended
Kennedy killed Dolly Reynolds to get possession of the check.
Coroner’s Physician O’Hanlon found several
lacerations on the woman’s head, but none severe enough to kill her.
O’Hanlon said she died from a broken neck.
A blow on the back of her head with the heavy pipe would easily break her neck.
The crudely made bludgeon weighed close to twenty pounds. It was bent on one
end, forming the letter “J.” Detective-Sergeant Carey later testified that he
found a similar solder on a pipe in the cellar at Kennedy’s home in New Dorp,
Long Island.
 |
| Samuel J. Kennedy (The Chanute Times. May 12, 1899) |
At first, the police believed Dolly Reynolds died during an attempted robbery, but her maid, Margaret Adams, found the missing jewels the next week. She discovered a chamois bag hidden behind a crock on the pantry shelf. It contained a gold watch set with diamonds, seven diamond rings, a diamond bracelet, and several unset diamonds.
Margaret Adams explained to detectives
that there was no Mr. Reynolds. Dolly cooked the name up to make herself appear
respectable to her neighbors. “Mr. Reynolds” was Morris B. Mendham, a
stockbroker with Mendham Bros., who had offices at 20 Broad Street.
Mrs. Reynolds said Morris Mendham paid for
Dolly’s singing and piano lessons and the $75 monthly rent on her fashionable
apartment. However, she skipped over sharing details on why a portly
45-year-old gentleman who lived at the Hotel Lorenz lavished so much time and
money on her 21-year-old daughter.
Morris Mendham was a character in his own
right. When he died in 1912, The Evening World said he led a “colorful
life” and had a “kaleidoscopic career.” His father left him and his brothers a
fortune when they were young. They brought their mother to New York and bought
seats on the Consolidated Exchange and later the New York Stock Exchange. The
brothers made a bundle on the stock market and invested much of it in real
estate.
Mendham gambled big time, loved women, and
had terrible luck with both. Two of his relationships ended with the tragic deaths
of the women. The first was Alice Cossens. She poisoned and shot herself at
Coleman House on Broadway and Twenty-Seventh Street. Five years later, in 1898,
Dolly Reynolds died in her room at the Grand Hotel.
When he turned 55 in 1912, Mendham married
his ward, 24-year-old Frances Carnwright. He passed away several months later.
Ironically, Mendham was never seriously investigated for either death. When asked, Mendham told investigators he had been at Long Branch when Dolly died.
Detectives seemed to take his word for it, even though the maid said Mendham and Dolly had quarreled the day before because he asked for her jewelry back.
 |
| Morris Mendham (The Evening World. January 11, 1901) |
At the trial, it came out Kennedy acted as Dolly’s bookie, regularly placing bets for her. One day he came to her with a somewhat hair-brained idea that he said would make them both rich. He just needed some seed money to get the scheme off the ground.
Kennedy told the girl that he’d discovered
an electrical device the jockey could use to speed up his horse. It guaranteed that
he could pick winners every time.
Of course, there was no such device. It
was just a ruse he devised to take Dolly’s money.
Dolly’s mother said Kennedy asked her
daughter to bet $500 on a fixed horse race. She would get $4,000 back, plus her
$500. Mrs. Reynolds told her daughter it was a swindle, but Dolly gave the
dentist the money, anyway.
He told Dolly they won $20,000 and half of
it was hers. When she got upset because Kennedy didn’t pay up quickly enough,
Kennedy gave her the forged check for $13,000. He didn’t have a choice. Dolly
threatened to tell his wife everything if she didn’t get her share.
The name on the check—Dudley “Dave” Gideon
was a famous turf man, but that meant nothing to Dolly. When the detectives
took the check to the bank, they discovered it was no good. Dudley Gideon
didn’t have an account at the Garfield National Bank. The teller verified that
the signature on the back matched Dr. Kennedy’s.
That’s all the police needed to arrest him.
They had a man in the dental chair with Kennedy getting his teeth fixed and two
more men outside his office waiting for word on the check.
Dr. Ernest J. Lederle, a chemist from the
health board, took the lead pipe found next to the body apart inch by inch down
to the iron rod inside and matched it to an iron rod found in Kennedy’s cellar.
“He showed the fragment of bar fitted into the lead pipe of the bludgeon and
the fragment of pipe fitted over the bar in the bludgeon.”
 |
| Samuel Kennedy an his attorney entering the courtroom. (The Evening World. February 11, 1901) |
Later at the trial, Lederle showed how the cap from the bludgeon fit snugly into the pipe found in Kennedy’s cellar. It was an exact match. Then he produced the underclothing Kennedy wore on the night of the murder. They had eight-inch black marks made by the bludgeon on the right side of the garment along the hip, as did his pants pockets.
When asked what made the mark, Kennedy
said it might have been his keychain. He didn’t know.
Of course, there were problems and
accusations that the police manufactured the evidence against Dr. Kennedy. For
example, the section of lead pipe found in Kennedy’s basement wasn’t found on
the first three trips to the house but on the fourth—after the police had
visited a shop run by plumber Daniels S. Melville.
Melville showed detectives several
sections of matching pipe, then they returned to Kennedy’s home in New Dorp and
discovered the evidence. The defense found that suspicious. Later, when
Melville turned up in Florida when he was scheduled to testify for the defense,
Kennedy’s lawyers claimed the police tampered with the witness and encouraged
him to move away.
Melville said no such thing happened. His
wife was seriously ill and needed to go to Florida for health reasons. He
offered to give his testimony before he left, but Kennedy’s lawyers told him to
wait. The defense did nothing to stop him from going, and no—the police didn’t
give him any money to disappear.
The same argument arose over a straw-hat hotel;
employees testified they saw Dr. Kennedy wearing. Kennedy said he never owned
one. The police dug up a store clerk who worked at Smith, Gray & Co., who
said he sold one to Kennedy earlier that day. Like the section of lead pipe—it
came down to a case of, he said, she said. Without specific guidance, the
jurors had to sort the truth out for themselves.
 |
| Marion Kennedy, wife of Dr. Samuel Kennedy. (The Evening World. May 14, 1901) |
Detectives also found torn scraps of paper in the hotel room. When pieced together, they formed a doctor’s prescription pad advertising “Milk of Magnesia.” It matched a pad found in Dr. Kennedy’s office.
All the evidence pointed toward Dr.
Kennedy.
When detectives arrested Kennedy, they
found a letter from Dolly Reynolds in his jacket pocket. It said she would be
registered at the Grand Hotel as “E. Maxwell and wife, Brooklyn.”
When questioned, Kennedy said he drew a
complete blank for four days. He didn’t know what he did, where he was, where
he’d been, or who he met. The chloral he took kept him in a daze. Somehow, he
remembered spilling a bottle of chloral on Monday afternoon. Maybe the fumes
affected him? He couldn’t remember.
When mixed with water, chloral is a
relaxant, commonly known as chloral hydrate. Doctors often prescribe it as a
short-term sedative or sleep medicine. However, criminals use it as a date rape
medicine because it is odorless and colorless and quickly knocks the victim
out.
A jury found Kennedy guilty of
first-degree murder on March 31, and the judge sentenced him to die in the week
beginning May 22. When asked if he had anything to say, Kennedy said, “I am
entirely innocent of this charge.” He blamed his conviction on evidence given
by policemen perjuring themselves.
In May, after Kennedy’s conviction for
killing Dolly Reynolds, Richard T. Nicholson, an inmate of Wormwood Scrubs
Prison in London, England, threw a wrench in the works when he confessed to the
murder.
 |
| Assistant District Attorney Osborne summarizing his case. (The Evening World. June 14, 1901) |
Nicholson said he had served with the 71st Regiment in Cuba during the Spanish War. He met Dolly Reynolds when he returned to New York and spent time with her at various Tenderloin resorts. Then, in August, they went to a hotel (Nicholson forgot the name), and he went berserk and shot her.
Coroner’s Physician O’Hanlon said
Nicholson was “unmistakably lying” when he confessed to killing Dolly Reynolds.
Nicholson said he shot her while she lay on the bed, but there was no evidence
anyone had used the bed. That was the first thing the maid noted after seeing
the dead body lying in room 84.
Besides, the only wound on the body was
the gash in the head that killed her. No one shot Dolly Reynolds. So, it was
clear Nicholson was lying. Detectives figured he was fishing for free passage
home once his 18-month prison term in London was up. Several other offenders
had pulled that trick on them in the past.
The Court of Appeals granted Dr. Kennedy a
new trial on November 20, 1900, citing errors in the trial. Judge Haight said
Captain James K. Price instructed the colored boy in the hotel “as to his duty
in testifying at the trial, which all tended to show the boy was certain as to
the identity of the defendant from the conversation of the two.”
Detectives moved Kennedy from the death
house at Sing Sing back to the Tombs, where he would await his trial.
Kennedy’s second trial ended in a hung
jury on February 22, 1901. A headline in The Evening World said
the jury “stood 11 to 1 for freeing the accused,” which made little sense when
you read the rest of the story. The next line said, “It has been impossible to
determine with any exactness how the jury stood.” They debated for 23 hours and
6 minutes before returning that verdict.
During his third trial in early May 1901,
Kennedy stunned the jury when he picked up the bludgeon used to kill Dolly
Reynolds. He “handled it as if testing its weight and, with a carefree smile,
handed the murderous weapon back to counsel.”
Kennedy’s third trial closed on June 16,
1901, with a hung jury. Assistant District Attorney Osborne wasn’t sure whether
there would be a fourth trial. “I don’t merely think Dr. Kennedy murdered
‘Dolly’ Reynolds,” said Osborne. “I know it!”
The court released Dr. Kennedy on $10,000
bail on June 18, 1901. Mrs. Eleanor N. Hand, torpedo expert Lt. Hand’s wife,
pledged her house at 334 West 69th Street as security.
Even though Dr. Kennedy was free,
Assistant District Attorney Philbin hinted that the prosecution was moving
toward a fourth trial. Detectives had uncovered fresh evidence against Kennedy.
Almost two years later, in March 1903,
Judge Cowl dismissed the indictment against Dr. Samuel J. Kennedy and freed him
from all charges for the murder of Dolly Reynolds. The court had dismissed his
bail the previous month.
Before you go...
If you’ve ever stayed up way too late watching a true crime documentary, gone down a rabbit hole reading about an unsolved murder, or found yourself saying, “How have I never heard this case before?”—you’re in the right place.
I dig into murders, disappearances, serial killers, cold cases, small-town mysteries, forgotten crimes, and the strange, unsettling stories that time almost erased. No sensationalized headlines. No made-up drama. Just well-researched stories built from newspaper archives, court records, police reports, and historical documents.
If you enjoy what you read and would like to help keep the lights on, consider buying me a Big Gulp.
Every little bit helps pay for old newspapers, research materials, public records, travel, and the countless hours spent piecing together stories that deserve to be remembered.
Buy Me a Big Gulp / NickVulich.com
If true crime is your thing, you might also enjoy these books...
No comments:
Post a Comment