Killer Colt (26 page)

It was clear at a glance that the victim had died of massive head injuries. “The whole of the upper part of his forehead was beaten in just about where the roots of the hair would be.” Gilman judged that these wounds to the front of the skull could have “readily been made” by the implement that Whiting now displayed to the court: the hatchet-hammer found in Colt’s office. He had, however, discovered a small but striking anomaly elsewhere. On the left side of the head “just behind the ear and a little above it,” there was a “small, round, clean hole into which you could thrust a finger.” Gilman was “at a loss to see how it could have been made. I never could account for it satisfactorily to myself. I suppose the hatchet might possibly have done it, but it would be a remarkable fact if it did.”

A large nail or spike driven into the skull with a mallet might have produced it, said Gilman, but there was no evidence that anything of the sort had occurred. There was one other possibility, Gilman continued, raising
an issue that would generate much controversy in the days and weeks ahead. The small, clean hole behind Adams’s left ear could have been made by a bullet.

Of course, there were problems with this theory. The noise reported by both Asa Wheeler and Arzac Seignette—the “clashing of foils”—sounded nothing like the discharge of a pistol. Moreover, no bullet had been found inside Adams’s skull, only some bone fragments floating among the putrefied mass of brain matter.

Still, considering John Colt’s close relationship to the celebrated sibling seated beside him, it certainly seemed plausible to many observers that a handgun might have been involved in the murder.
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The jurors heard from two more medical experts that day, Drs. Kissam and Archer, who corroborated Gilman’s findings and shared his belief that the finger-sized hole could not have been made by the hatchet-hammer. Whether it might have been caused by a gunshot, they were unable to say, since neither had ever seen “a skull that was pierced by a bullet.” Other witnesses included Law Octon’s wife, Mercy, who told of lending John a handsaw on the day before the murder, and the picture framer Charles J. Walker, who testified that when he had gone to Colt’s office later that day to ask him for the saw, “he told me to go to hell.”
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Before adjourning for the remainder of the weekend, Judge Kent issued his usual instructions to the jurors, reminding them that they were “to speak to no one about the trial” and go nowhere except “in the custody of officers.” When one of the jurors, Charles Delvan, “enquired if they might be permitted to spend Sunday at home instead of remaining together during that day,” Kent regretfully denied the request.

“If I were able,” said Kent, “I would have the trial proceed without intermission but the law prohibits a court being held on Sunday.” If the jurors so wished, he added, they could go to church, “but it was necessary that they do so as a body.”

District Attorney Whiting worried that permitting the jurors to attend church could be grounds for a later appeal, since they might “hear a sermon about this matter that would influence their verdict.” Kent considered this
objection briefly before declaring that he would allow the jurors to attend church “if the prisoner consented.” After a brief consultation with his attorneys, Colt agreed.

There was still one last order of business to be taken care of. As a “terrible commotion” broke out among the spectators, who jumped to their feet and began jostling for a better view, Abner Milligan entered with the lidless crate, carried it to the front of the courtroom, and set it down on the floor near the jury. A “middling sized packing box of the ordinary appearance,” it consisted of two pieces of wood on each side and two on the bottom, all secured with nails whose ends protruded into the box. Inside was the bundle of canvas variously described as old sailcloth and window awning. The odor emanating from the box was, in the words of one reporter, “not gratifying to the olfactories,” though it was the sight of the object even more than its smell that caused John Colt to wince and avert his face.
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As a number of jurors pressed handkerchiefs to their noses, Milligan testified that Adams’s trussed-up body had been crammed into the center of the box. Holding up the piece of canvas, he explained that along with “some oakum,” the cloth had been stuffed into either end of the box to keep the corpse from moving around.

By the time he was done with his testimony, a number of people at the front of the courtroom, including Dudley Selden, appeared visibly queasy. Even before Milligan had finished bundling the awning back into the box, “Mr. Selden and other gentlemen in the vicinity had fled the courtroom.”
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I
t was no secret that John’s attorneys intended to claim that the slaying of Samuel Adams was a case of manslaughter—not a cold-blooded, premeditated murder but a killing committed in the heat of passion and provoked by the victim. Anticipating this argument, District Attorney Whiting began Monday’s session by summoning a parade of witnesses to attest to the printer’s gentle and pacific nature.

David Downs, a cobbler who made boots and shoes for the printer and his wife, described Adams as a man of “very good temper.” This impression was confirmed by several other witnesses. A bookbinder named James Fiora confessed that, though he had “blown up at” Adams on several occasions, the latter “never made any reply.” John L. Blake, an elderly clergyman who had occupied rooms directly above Adams’s shop for five or six years, described a time when he had spoken “harshly to him unintentionally. He made no reply, but I saw that his feelings were much affected and that he shed a tear.” If anything, Blake claimed, Adams was “passive and mild” to a fault. Referring to the printer’s juvenile apprentices, Blake declared that they “were frequently noisy, but he did not appear to have the necessary energy to keep them in proper discipline. He was always kind to them—perhaps too much so.”

Some of the testimony, however, suggested that Samuel Adams was not quite the model of equanimity that his staunchest defenders claimed. Under cross-examination, several of the witnesses, including the Reverend Mr. Blake, were forced to concede that they could not say how Adams would react in circumstances that might “try his temper.” Hugh Monahan,
Adams’s foreman, had seen his employer “fly into a passion twice” during the preceding year, “once when a man threatened to sue him.” Most relevant of all to Colt’s situation was the testimony of a merchant named Charles Post, who suggested that, during the final months of his life when he felt under increasing financial pressure, Adams was prone to outbursts of extreme, irrational suspicion over matters of money—behavior that seemed to verge (in the terminology of a later era) on paranoia.

Post, called upon to identify Adams’s gold pocket watch, had been present when the printer accepted the timepiece as partial payment for a debt owed him by the young merchant Lyman Ransom. During cross-examination, Dudley Selden asked Post how Adams had reacted when Ransom first explained that he did not have the money to make good on his note. Had Adams “displayed temper” or used “harsh language”?

When Whiting objected to this line of questioning, Selden appealed to Judge Kent. “I do not wish to lacerate the feelings of the friends of Mr. Adams by saying anything against his character or general conduct,” Selden said in kindly tones. “I would not harrow the breasts of those attached to the unfortunate deceased whose bones have now been committed to the dust by even insinuating anything against him. Nevertheless, if we can show that he had exhibited a strong temper when endeavoring on another occasion to collect money, we have a right to do so.”

After briefly considering the matter, Kent ruled in Selden’s favor, declaring “that a man’s temper could, under these circumstances, be shown.” Selden then repeated his question to Post.

“Mr. Adams had a confab with Mr. Ransom,” the merchant answered. “He seemed to be angry because Mr. Ransom didn’t have the money to pay him. He told Mr. Ransom he believed he meant to swindle him out of his debt.”

Had Adams said anything else? Selden asked.

Post allowed that he had, then repeated Adams’s words: “ ‘Everybody is trying to cheat me.’ ”
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Before court was adjourned for the day, the mystery of the missing lid was finally solved, laying to rest the rumors that it had been sold to a dime museum, perhaps by the city watchman, H. Patrick. The answer was provided
by another watchman, Benjamin Lewen, who revealed that a month or so earlier, he and a coworker named Ball had been on duty at the watchhouse during a particularly frigid evening. No coal had yet been laid up for the winter, so they went searching for “anything we could make a fire with.” Seeing the lid inside the cell—and finding the door open—they had taken it, split it into kindling, and used it to build a fire.

Ball, who took the stand next, confirmed Lewen’s story and added a detail that left no doubt that the wooden object the two men had incinerated was the lid of the infamous packing crate. “It smelled strong at first,” said Ball, “but even stronger when we put it in the fire.”
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D
r. Gilman’s testimony concerning the small, clean hole behind the corpse’s left ear had raised a possibility that the prosecution was eager to explore: that the killing of Samuel Adams was a premeditated crime committed with a pistol. Colt, in this scenario, had “planned the encounter in advance and armed himself accordingly.”
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True, neither Asa Wheeler nor his student had heard a gunshot. But the district attorney felt he could account for that anomaly.

In the years before the development of self-contained cartridges, Colt’s revolvers operated by cap and ball. Each chamber of the revolving cylinder was loaded with a charge of gunpowder and a lead ball. A small percussion cap containing a highly combustible compound was then affixed to a nipple on the back end of each chamber. When struck by the hammer, the cap would explode, igniting the powder inside the chamber, which propelled the bullet through the gun barrel.

It was, of course, the detonated gunpowder that produced the loudest bang. What Whiting proposed to show was that a man could be killed by a pistol loaded with a cap and ball, but no gunpowder: that the percussion cap alone could “explode with sufficient force to drive a ball into a man’s head without making enough noise to be heard in the next room.”
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Dudley Selden had objected on technical grounds to the introduction of any evidence concerning a firearm. The indictment, he argued, made no mention of any weapon except a hatchet. On Tuesday morning, however, Judge Kent began by ruling in favor of the district attorney—thus opening
the way for some of the most remarkable scenes ever witnessed in an American courtroom.

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Recalled to the stand as the day’s first witness, Asa Wheeler confirmed that John Colt did, in fact, keep a pistol on the premises. As Wheeler recollected, on the evening of September 13, just four days before Samuel Adams’s disappearance,

Wheeler spent about fifteen minutes examining and handling the weapon. He never saw it again, though “after the discovery of the murder” he had immediately “thought of the pistol.”

Grilled closely by Dudley Selden about the dimensions and workmanship of the gun, Wheeler acknowledged that he did “not know much about firearms—I know more about bookkeeping.” He proceeded to prove the point with a comment that elicited a prolonged outburst of laughter from the spectators. Asked about the gun’s cocking mechanism, Wheeler was at a loss to describe it. “But there was certainly a cock to that pistol,” he declared, to the general merriment of the courtroom.
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