The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation

by Schechter, Harold

  Far from being “an enchantress or an adventuress,” all Vera wanted was a “home, respectability. She wanted to be able to say to her neighbors, ‘Meet my husband, Dr. Gebhardt.’ ” When he gave her a “cheap little ring,” she eagerly seized on it as a “promise of marriage.” To her, it “epitomized a home and children, her very life itself.”

  Gebhardt, however, was interested in only one thing. A “professional heartbreaker,” a “gigolo,” a “roamer” who “didn’t care a hoot about his wife,” he regarded Vera as nothing more than “his toy, his human plaything.” “The man was an egomaniac,” Leibowitz declared. “He determined to conquer her, like a superman.” When Vera finally attempted to break free of his nefarious clutches, he resolved to make her submit one last time to his perverse desires. “That’s why he lured her to his room with that last foul pretense that he had been taken ill in the night. And she trustfully answered his call.”

  When Gebhardt attacked her, she had every right to use violence to protect herself. The fact that she had previously “submitted to his importunities does not mean that she was bound to submit always. If to prevent the commission of a crime upon herself she resorted to whatever form was necessary, she did not commit murder or manslaughter or any other crime,” said Leibowitz.

  “She warned him she’d do something desperate. The warning didn’t stop him. The bullets did.” Indeed, it was “an act of God” that her pistol was in Gebhardt’s bureau drawer that night. “God knows what might have happened to this girl if the gun weren’t there.”

  “She had a right to kill to get out of that room,” said Leibowitz, after reminding the jurors of the sexual abomination she had been threatened with. She was “a poor girl trying to get away from a lecherous beast.”

  “Give this little girl a fair shake,” begged Leibowitz. “She suffered her Calvary that day. She walked with a cross on her back and a crown of thorns on her head.

  “Let her go free. She’s entitled to it. Even though it is raining outdoors, let her go free clad in her thin coat—let her stumble out into the world, let her breathe God’s free air, as she has a right to do!”44

  The jury received the case at 3:34 p.m. and—not having eaten since breakfast—immediately broke for lunch. Their deliberations began in earnest at 5:15. Less than three hours later, at 8:10 p.m., they announced that they had reached a verdict.

  When, a few minutes later, jury foreman Curtis L. Lee declared the defendant not guilty, the largely female audience broke into a wild applause, while Vera herself—“the Weeping Willow love slayer,” as the tabloids now called her—collapsed in a faint and had to be revived with spirits of ammonia. As the congratulatory crowd swarmed around her, several guards “formed a flying wedge and whisked her to an anteroom,” while Samuel Leibowitz, making “no attempt to conceal his elation,” offered exuberant thanks to the jurors.45

  Less than a half hour earlier, the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, following several stays of execution, was finally led to the chair in the New Jersey State Prison, still protesting his innocence. Given his infamy as perpetrator of the single greatest American crime of the twentieth century, the front page of the next morning’s New York Daily News served as striking testimony to the notoriety the Stretz case had achieved. In equally bold letters it read: “BRUNO DEAD. VERA FREE.”46

  Meeting with reporters that same morning in Leibowitz’s office, Vera—looking refreshed and wearing “a smart new green ensemble and black pancake hat”—struck a solemn note when asked about her future. She was “through with men,” she announced. “Marriage, a home, babies—those are for normal people, not me.” When one female reporter called out, “Don’t let this ruin your life,” Vera sadly replied: “My life has been ruined already. I can never be the same woman again.”47

  By the following day, Vera had apparently settled on a plan. Accompanied by a photograph captioned, “PRESENTING THE STRETZ GIRL…AUTHOR!,” the Mirror reported that she intended to write a “prison novel” based on her experiences in the Women’s House of Detention while awaiting her trial. She had already come up with a title: The House of Innocence.48

  The article on Vera’s authorial aspirations, appearing on Monday, April 6, was the Mirror’s last piece on the Stretz affair. For devoted tabloid readers, the months-long circus surrounding the Beekman Place murder had come to an end.

  They wouldn’t have to wait long for a new one.

  3

  * * *

  “Beauty Slain in Bathtub”

  WHETHER VERA STRETZ COMPLETED any part of her projected prison novel is unknown. Certainly no such book ever appeared in print. As with so many others who dream of literary glory, her plans of becoming a published author remained in the realm of the hypothetical.

  Nancy Evans Titterton, on the other hand, was the real thing.

  A native of Dayton, Ohio, Nancy had been involved with literature from her earliest years. A graduate of Antioch College, where she won honors in English, she had briefly operated a small bookshop in her hometown before moving to New York City in 1924 to pursue a literary career. Renting an apartment in Greenwich Village, she went to work in the book department of Lord & Taylor while writing newspaper book reviews in her spare time. After a few years as a bookseller, she was hired by the publishing house of Doubleday, Doran, where (in a grimly ironic coincidence that the tabloids never tired of noting) she helped develop the company’s popular Crime Club series.1

  She met her future husband, Lewis H. Titterton, in 1927. A slight, sandy-haired Englishman who sported a neatly trimmed moustache and round, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Titterton had studied ancient Middle Eastern languages at Cambridge University and Harvard. In 1925, still in his twenties, he was offered the prestigious post of assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. From there he moved into the book business as assistant sales manager and later associate editor of the Macmillan Company. During his spare time, he translated French novels and turned out several hundred book reviews, mostly for the New York Times.

  In 1929, after a two-year courtship, he and Nancy were wed in the picturesque Little Church Around the Corner on East 29th Street. They lived briefly on West 47th Street—the heart of Manhattan’s notorious Hell’s Kitchen—before moving to the far more congenial milieu of Beekman Place, renting an apartment in a handsome five-story walk-up overlooking the East River. “I’m so glad to get out of Hell’s Kitchen,” she wrote to one friend shortly after the move. “Even though we had bars on the window, I never felt safe there. Nothing could happen to anyone on Beekman Place.”2

  By then, Titterton had gone to work at NBC, where he quickly found himself promoted to chief of the script division, a somewhat incongruous position for so bookish a man. Intent on elevating the cultural quality of radio programming, he commissioned scripts from serious dramatists and hosted a weekly interview program featuring eminent men of letters. Even among his competitors at rival stations he was regarded as a force for good, a champion of literacy in a world of Amos ’n’ Andy, Gang Busters, and Chandu the Magician.3

  Nancy, in the meantime, had left her job and was devoting herself full time to fiction writing. After publishing several pieces in Scribner’s, she achieved a breakthrough in August 1935 when her poignant tale “I Shall Decline My Head” appeared in Story magazine, the prestigious journal that would introduce the work of J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, and Tennessee Williams, among others.4 On the strength of that story—about an old man adrift in dreams of the past—she was given a contract for a first novel and immediately set to work on it.

  Compared to the literary luminaries she counted as her Beekman Place neighbors, Nancy Evans Titterton was still a relative unknown. For a few weeks in the spring of 1936, however, she became the biggest name in town.

  Good Friday fell on April 10 that year. After breakfast that morning, Lewis Titterton left his fourth-floor apartment in the five-story walk-up building at 22 Beekman Place and strolled the few blocks to his of
fice at Radio City. In his mailbox he found “an amusing letter from a friend” and telephoned his wife to read it to her. They shared a laugh over the letter before hanging up. The time was approximately 9:00 a.m. They would never speak again.5

  Nancy had another telephone conversation that morning, this one with Mrs. Georgia Mansbridge of 12 St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village. They chatted for a few minutes at around 10:15 a.m. about a dinner party scheduled for the following night. “I feel sure no one was in her apartment when we spoke,” a distraught Mrs. Mansbridge would tell reporters the following day. “Poor little Nancy—she couldn’t fight. She had no strength, and she wouldn’t know what to do. All she could do was scream.”

  The only person to hear Nancy scream—other than the man who raped and killed her—was Oneda Smithmead, a “colored maid” in an apartment one floor below. At around 11:30, Smithmead heard a woman call out “Dudley, Dudley, Dudley!”—the name of the building handyman, Dudley Mings. There was an urgency to the cry, but since the tenants routinely shouted for Mings whenever a toilet overflowed, a ceiling light blew, or a sash window wouldn’t open, Smith attached little significance to it. Only in retrospect (as the New York Post reported) was “the cry interpreted as a desperate plea for the help of the only man who might be about the premises” at that hour of the workday.

  Not long afterward, Wiley Straughn, a fourteen-year-old delivery boy for a local dry cleaners, the London Valet Service, arrived at 22 Beekman Place with a dress for Mrs. Titterton. He pressed the downstairs bell repeatedly but got no response. Assuming that no one was home, he returned to the shop with the dress.6

  Later that day, another delivery arrived for the Tittertons. At approximately 4:15 p.m., a small truck pulled up in front of 22 Beekman Place and two men emerged from the cab. The driver was Theodore Kruger, the stocky, middle-aged owner of a local upholstery shop. With him was his assistant, John Fiorenza.

  A grade school dropout with a “dull normal” IQ, a stunted personality, and a face that seemed fixed in a perpetual smirk, Fiorenza, twenty-four, shared a Brooklyn apartment with his mother, Theresa, and her second husband, Ignazi Cupani, a WPA carpenter. Withdrawn to the point of extreme social isolation, he barely communicated at home—his stepfather claimed that Johnny had spoken to him no more than seven times in the past eleven years—and didn’t have a girlfriend until the age of twenty-one, when he began seeing a quiet, strictly raised young woman from the Bronx, Pauline D’Antonio. After two years of “keeping company” under the chaperoning eye of Pauline’s Old Country grandmother, the couple had gotten engaged. Hoping to wed in the fall, Pauline had recently taken a job in an underwear factory to earn money for her dowry.7

  John himself had been working at Kruger’s shop for the past three years, sweeping out the place, cleaning the display windows, and helping with the upholstery, a skill he had picked up during one of his stints in the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York. From the age of twelve—when he was arrested for stealing a bicycle—Fiorenza had been in and out of trouble with the law. In the scheme of things, his offenses were trivial. His most serious conviction to date, on a charge of grand larceny, had resulted from the theft of two snare drums and a trombone from the basement of a neighborhood music shop. A psychiatrist who examined him at the time diagnosed Fiorenza as a “neurotic type of personality deviate” with poor impulse control: “with him, the wish is father to the thought and leads quickly to action without consideration or foresight.” On two occasions, he had given in to an “uncontrollable urge to take ‘joy rides,’ ” making off with stolen cars in broad daylight, once with the owner clinging precariously to the running board and shouting for him to stop. “Perhaps,” a prominent New York City psychoanalyst named Walter Bromberg ventured, “this urge to drive cars could be interpreted as a symbolic expression of the pressure of unrecognized, powerful sexual drives.” Bromberg, of course, had the benefit of hindsight. Until Good Friday 1936, no one—John Fiorenza included—realized just how dangerously explosive his sexual drives were.

  Kruger—who regarded his assistant as a “good-natured” if “not very quick-witted” young man whose troubles had been “over little things”—knew all about John’s police record. Indeed, that very morning, Fiorenza had shown up late for work in order to keep an appointment with his probation officer, Peter Gambaro. Or so Theodore Kruger had been led to believe.8

  From the rear of the truck, Kruger and his assistant removed a loveseat, newly upholstered in green fabric. They had picked up the little sofa the previous day from the Tittertons’ apartment and were now returning it as per prearrangement. Their load wasn’t heavy and the two men had no trouble carrying it up to the fourth floor, where they found the Tittertons’ door ajar. After rapping on the door and getting no response, they carried the loveseat inside and set it down in its original location in the living room. Kruger called out for Mrs. Titterton. Receiving no answer, he left the bill on the seat cushion, then motioned for his helper to follow him from the apartment. They had just started down the stairway when Kruger—thinking he would telephone Mrs. Titterton once he returned to his shop and make sure she was satisfied with the job—decided to go back and get her phone number.

  “I found the phone in the bedroom and took the number,” Kruger told reporters later that day. “Suddenly I noticed the bathroom light was on and the door was open a few inches. I walked over and knocked. Finally I pushed the door wide open.”

  A woman’s foot hung over the edge of the bathtub. Kruger called out Mrs. Titterton’s name, but the figure in the bathtub did not stir. He went closer and peered into the tub. “My knees began shaking and I felt sick,” he related. “I shouted to Johnny, ‘My God, something’s happened to the missus! Call the police!’ ”

  Fiorenza did as he was told. Kruger was so rattled that only much later would he recall something strange. Though Fiorenza had not yet even glanced into the bathroom, he told the sergeant who answered: “There’s a woman tied up in the bathtub.”9

  In less than five minutes, a half dozen homicide detectives were crowded inside the Tittertons’ bathroom. Inside the tub, Nancy lay on her stomach, naked except for a torn white slip bunched around her waist and the sheer magenta-colored hose hanging down her legs. Twisted around her neck was a makeshift noose, fashioned from a pink pajama top and a matching silk dressing jacket, tightly knotted together. Water dripping from the showerhead had pooled around her dark, swollen face.

  From the state of the apartment, the detectives were able to reconstruct the general circumstances of the crime. There was no sign of forced entry; evidently, Nancy had freely admitted her killer. The kitchen, living room, and library were undisturbed. The assault had taken place in the bedroom, where one of the twin beds was in disarray and the victim’s garter belt, brassiere, blue tweed skirt, and pink blouse were strewn around the floor, violently ripped from her body by her attacker. Ligature marks on her wrists showed that he had bound her hands together before raping her. Afterward, she had been garroted and dragged into the bathroom. An autopsy revealed that she was still alive when she was dumped in the tub and had died of slow asphyxiation.10

  At approximately 5:45 p.m., Assistant Medical Examiner Thomas A. Gonzales arrived on the scene. Moments later, Lewis Titterton returned from work. He had not been notified of the tragedy and was startled by the milling crowd outside his building and the fleet of police cars at the curb. He collapsed in horror at the news that greeted him upstairs.

  After finishing his preliminary examination, Dr. Gonzales ordered the body removed. Lying beneath it on the bottom of the tub was a strand of cord about thirteen inches long, cleanly cut at both ends. Though it matched the marks on Nancy’s wrists, it was too short to have kept her hands tightly bound. Detectives immediately deduced that it came from a longer piece of rope. Evidently, the killer, intent on removing all physical evidence, had sliced off the rope and carried it away with him. In his haste, however, this segment, concealed beneath Nancy’s body, h
ad escaped his notice.

  To the naked eye, there was nothing at all distinctive about the piece of cord. In the end, however, it would prove to be the key element in a landmark feat of forensic detection: “the string,” as the Daily News declared, “that tied the slayer to the chair.”11

  From the moment the story broke, the Beekman Place “Bathtub Murder” became the talk of the town, thanks to the gleefully exploitive coverage by the tabloids. That the killing occurred exactly one week to the day after Vera Stretz’s acquittal and just a block north of the building where Fritz Gebhardt was shot to death only added to its lurid appeal.12

  Hearst’s Mirror did its usual shameless job of turning the tragedy into prurient entertainment. On Saturday, April 11, under the headline “HOW WOMAN WAS FOUND STRANGLED TO DEATH IN MURDER MYSTERY,” it presented the gruesome sex-killing as a five-panel comic strip, complete with graphic drawings of the corpse and a fedora-wearing detective bearing a marked resemblance to Dick Tracy. The following day, its entire back page—normally reserved for the latest sports headlines—was devoted to a voyeuristic photo of Mrs. Titterton’s body being removed from the apartment on its way to the morgue.13

  In the relentlessly titillating coverage of the case, the victim—by all accounts a demure, “owlishly solemn” woman who favored modest tweeds and sports clothes and wore her hair in a mannish cut—was portrayed as a slinky redhead who liked to parade around her apartment in a negligee, even when “delivery boys and workmen” were present. As if the particulars of the murder weren’t sensational enough, the tabloids spiced up their stories with hints of sexual perversion. According to the Mirror, Dr. Gonzales’s initial examination of the violated corpse revealed “evidence of abnormality that convinced him that only a degenerate could have committed the crime.” Citing experts like Arthur Carey, former head of the NYPD’s homicide bureau, the News informed readers that “crimes of this shocking type” are “relatively frequent,” as should be expected “with so many perverted, twisted, and mentally unbalanced persons on the loose.”14