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

by Schechter, Harold

  The Mirror, true to its three-ring-circus sensibility, cited experts of its own, like “Mrs. Myra Kingsley, prominent astrologist of 225 East 54th Street,” who determined from the victim’s horoscope “that the crime was due to the conjunction of the planet Mars—the War God—with the Sun in the Eighth house, which signifies DEATH.” Mrs. Kingsley also deduced from Nancy’s “chart that the murderer was an older man, and that he either came from or has gone to a distance since the crime was committed.” Not to be outdone, the Post hired its own astrologist, Mrs. Belle Bart, who insisted that “the murderer is German or English, has a light complexion, takes drugs or drinks, met Mrs. Titterton in the fall of 1935, escaped from Beekman Place in a southwesterly direction and would probably be arrested in Washington Square or thereabouts.”15

  Within a week of the murder, the unknown, aspiring author had become such a tabloid sensation that the headlines simply called her by first name: “NANCY KNEW KILLER,” “MAN OF MYSTERY BOUGHT NANCY FLOWERS,” “NANCY’S HUSBAND NAMES MURDER SUSPECT.”16 Visiting from England at the time was a writer of authentic renown: Marie Belloc Lowndes, best known for her novel The Lodger, a thriller about Jack the Ripper made into an early Alfred Hitchcock film. On the evening of Friday, April 18, she dined with Edmund Pearson, dean of American true crime historians. Her diary entry about the occasion records only a single topic of conversation: “All New York is horrified over the murder of a woman writer, Mrs. Titterton, strangled on Good Friday. She was about thirty and happily married.” Speculating on the identity of the killer, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes could reach only one conclusion: “It was a lunatic’s murder.”17

  There was no shortage of suspects, beginning with Lewis Titterton. He was not only the victim’s husband—always the likeliest perpetrator when a married woman meets a violent death—but also a bookwormish Brit “whose accent and manner were alone enough to put the average detective’s back up,” as one commentator noted.18 Titterton, however, had no trouble proving he was at work all day. And even the cops most inclined to sneer at his egghead demeanor were moved by the depth of his grief.

  For a few days, investigators focused on a “sandy-haired young man with needlepoint eyes and a manner that verged on the feminine” who, according to the Countess Alice Hoyos—a beautiful divorcée occupying the apartment directly below the Tittertons’—had been skulking around the neighborhood for the previous week. W. A. DeWitt, a writer for Reader’s Digest who lived in the neighboring building, claimed that, on the morning of the murder, he had glanced through his window and seen a “Negro in dungarees walking across the roof of No. 22 Beekman Place from which access to the fire escape leading to the Titterton apartment was readily accessible.” Other supposed witnesses pointed their fingers at “a shifty-eyed youth loitering in front of the building,” “a reputedly demented man who had been annoying maids and matrons in the neighborhood,” and a pair of mysterious “prowlers, one in his early twenties with several missing teeth, the other a forty-year-old man with a florid face.”19

  From Police Chief George Fallon of Quincy, Massachusetts, came a tip about a fugitive wanted for a similar bathtub strangling in that city. Another official, Dr. Carleton Simon, “former Special Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD and present criminologist of the International Association of the Chiefs of Police,” opined that Mrs. Titterton died “as the innocent victim of a sexual adventurer who, obeying an uncontrollable emotional urge, set out to talk his way into apartments in the Beekman Place district. He planned to force his attentions upon any women he met who challenged his bestial desire. Mrs. Titterton chanced to be that woman.”20

  That Nancy had admitted her killer into the apartment and even, as the evidence suggested, allowed him into her bedroom fueled a host of scandalous rumors that the tabloids were only too happy to promote. Every day brought unsubstantiated stories of another secret paramour. There was the “rejected suitor of her bachelor girlhood who had been in touch with her since her marriage.” The “brilliant literary figure widely known to millions” who urged Nancy to “divorce her husband and marry him.” The mysterious gentleman who, according to a neighborhood florist, “frequently bought gardenias there for Mrs. Titterton.” At one point, the Mirror even had her consorting with “a youngish male adventurer of the type known as a ‘gigolo.’ ”21

  Her family and friends reacted with outraged denials. From Dayton, her grieving mother, Mrs. Frank Evans, issued a statement affirming the warmth of Nancy’s marriage: “She never mentioned the name of any other man but Lewis to me in her letters. They were completely devoted to each other.” A close friend of the Tittertons, Caroline Singer—well-known writer of travel books and wife of famed illustrator Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge—concurred. “I never saw more devoted persons than Nancy and her husband,” she told reporters. “There was no possibility of an outside love interest in her life. She was too fastidious for anything so sordid as a semi-Bohemian relationship with some other man. She had an integrity of character which would have prevented any second-rate love affair.” Besides, added Singer, even if Nancy had been unfaithful, she would certainly have chosen a tender and sensitive lover, not “the brute type of man” who might resort to physical violence.22

  The police, too, swiftly dismissed the love-affair angle. On the day of Nancy’s funeral—a simple Episcopalian service attended by more than two hundred people, most from the publishing world—Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons cautioned reporters not to leap to salacious conclusions. “We are satisfied now that Mrs. Titterton voluntarily admitted the man. This does not mean, however, that he was a lover or even a close friend. It may have been a salesman or repair man of some sort, someone who made a casual call.”23

  By then, the hunt for Nancy Titterton’s killer had become the biggest homicide investigation in the city’s history, with sixty-five detectives on the case. On Thursday, April 16, forty of those detectives gathered for a two-hour conference at police headquarters to compare notes. Afterward, their commander, Deputy Chief Inspector Francis J. Kear, appeared before reporters to offer a bleak assessment. After running down scores of tips and following every possible lead, his men were no closer to making an arrest than they were at the beginning. “POLICE AT A LOSS IN THE TITTERTON CASE,” read a headline in the next morning’s Times, while the Mirror declared that the murder was shaping up to be “the perfect crime.”24 Even as New Yorkers were reading these gloomy reports, however, developments were taking place behind the scenes that would break the case wide open.

  When Dr. Charles Norris became New York’s first chief medical examiner in 1918, he immediately recruited Bellevue biochemist Alexander O. Gettler as his toxicologist. Setting up a laboratory on the fourth floor of the city mortuary at Bellevue, Gettler quickly earned a reputation as a “modern Merlin,” a master of “criminological chemistry.” Newspaper photos accompanying the stories about his forensic feats invariably showed the white-coated Gettler posed with some impressive piece of lab apparatus—a kind of 1930s CSI whiz capable of cracking seemingly unsolvable crimes with one of his “well-nigh magical scientific techniques.” By the time of his retirement in 1959, he was internationally renowned as the “father of forensic chemistry,” the “world’s greatest test-tube sleuth.” By his own estimate, he and his assistants worked on approximately two thousand cases a year. Of those, one of his greatest triumphs would be the solution of the Titterton mystery.25

  Studying it under his microscope, Gettler discovered that the piece of twine found in the tub beneath the dead woman’s body contained a strand of istle, a stiff fiber obtained from several species of Mexican plants and used in the manufacture of cheap scrubbing brushes, burlap, and cordage. Inspector Lyons immediately had a circular sent to more than two dozen rope-makers in the region: “ADVISE IMMEDIATELY WHETHER YOU MANUFACTURE QUARTER INCH HEMP FIBER TWISTED TWINE WITH SINGLE STRAND ISTLE. TWINE THIS DESCRIPTION IMPORTANT IN HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION.”

  Twenty-three telegrams with negative replies came back before an
executive with the Hanover Cordage Company of York, Pennsylvania, telephoned to say that his firm made a similar product. Carrying the telltale piece of twine, a detective set out for York at once, where Hanover officials confirmed that it came from their factory. They also explained that the cord was commonly used as upholstery binding.

  A check of company’s sales records showed that several rolls of the rope had recently been purchased by a New York City wholesaler. When police paid a visit to the wholesaler, they learned that on Thursday, April 9—the day before Nancy Titterton’s murder—one of these rolls had been delivered to the East Side shop of Theodore Kruger.26

  Kruger himself had long been dismissed as a suspect, having been in his shop all Good Friday morning, as several witnesses testified.27 His twenty-four-year-old assistant, however, was a person of interest to the police. Not only had they learned of his lengthy arrest record, they had also turned up the psychiatric report that described him as a “personality deviate” and predicted that, without ongoing treatment, the young compulsive car thief would “have difficulty in learning to refrain from illegal acts from time to time.”28

  Fiorenza was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance. In the meantime, Dr. Gettler continued his hunt for forensic evidence that would tie the killer directly to the crime. He found it on Monday, April 20. Going over Nancy Titterton’s rumpled bedspread inch by inch with a high-powered magnifying glass, Gettler discovered a single odd-looking hair, less than half an inch long. It was white and “strangely stiff”—certainly not human. Placing it under his microscope, he determined that it was horsehair of the type used as furniture stuffing. Obtaining a sample from the Tittertons’ newly reupholstered loveseat, Gettler confirmed that the two hairs matched. There was only one plausible way that the horsehair could have ended up on Nancy’s bed: the killer must have had it on his clothing when he attacked her. And he had gotten it on his clothing while working in Kruger’s shop.29

  Questioned about his employee, Kruger insisted that, despite his various run-ins with the law, Fiorenza was “a perfect gentleman.” “There was never anything about him that was bad,” said Kruger. “Why, I’ve seen him take meat out of his sandwich for lunch and give it to our dog.” He was a good worker, too, very reliable, always on time. True, he’d shown up a few hours late on the day of the murder, but he had a solid excuse: his weekly appointment with his probation officer, Peter Gambaro.30

  When detectives visited the probation office in the Criminal Court building, however, they discovered that Gambaro, a practicing Catholic, had taken Good Friday off. And no one else in the office had any memory of seeing Fiorenza that morning.31

  With his alibi blown, Fiorenza was immediately taken into custody and whisked to an undisclosed location in the Bronx, where he underwent sixteen hours of relentless grilling. He didn’t break down until 10:30 the next morning, when he turned to Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine and, in a voice hoarse with exhaustion, said: “Give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you all I know.”32

  According to his confession—transcribed by Detective George Swander and signed by Fiorenza—he had gone to the Tittertons’ apartment on Thursday afternoon, April 9, to pick up the loveseat with Kruger. As soon as he set eyes on Nancy, the “idea came to me of doing what I did to her afterward.” He could see that she was too slight to put up much resistance and so soft-spoken that she would be unable to make much of an outcry. All the rest of that day and night, he brooded on his plan.

  The next morning, after telephoning Kruger to say that he would be late because of an appointment with his parole officer, he proceeded to 22 Beekman Place. In his pocket was a fifty-two-inch length of cord he had taken from the shop the previous day.

  “I rang the downstairs bell. The latch sounded. I went upstairs. Mrs. Titterton answered the door. She was all dressed and had a garment—a dress or a pair of pajamas, something like that—in her hand. I told her I came about the loveseat. Just to get her in there I asked her, didn’t she want to have the loveseat in the bedroom? She didn’t know. But that made her go into the bedroom to see in her mind how the loveseat would look there. I went in there with her.”

  No sooner were they inside the bedroom than Fiorenza lunged at Mrs. Titterton. She just had time to let out a scream before he “grabbed whatever it was she had in her hand and stuffed it into her mouth, so she couldn’t yell any more.” Throwing her facedown on the bed, he pulled the cord from his pocket and tightly bound her wrists. He then turned her over on her back and, in a blind frenzy, tore off her clothes and raped her. “From time to time, when she started to scream as the gag worked loose, I throttled her with my hands. She raised an awful fuss.”

  Afterward, as she lay whimpering on the bed, he snatched up the pajama top and a thin dressing jacket, knotted them together, and strangled her. She was still breathing when he carried her into the bathroom. He thought about filling the tub to make it look as if she had drowned but couldn’t find the plug. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, he sliced the rope in several pieces from her wrists. He thought he “put it all in my pocket and took it away.”

  He got out of the building without being seen and hurried around the corner. A block away, he tossed the cord into an ash can, never guessing that he had left a piece behind. He then ducked into a drugstore on First Avenue and called Kruger to say that he had been delayed longer than expected but was on his way.

  He reached the shop at around 11:50. “I helped fix the loveseat. I didn’t say anything about killing the woman.” At 4:00 p.m., he “went back with my boss to the Tittertons,” taking care to let Kruger enter the apartment first and discover the body.

  When Fiorenza’s interrogators asked him why he had targeted Nancy Titterton, even he seemed baffled. “She wasn’t my type,” he said. “If I saw her on the street, I would not give her a second look.”33

  The woman who presumably was his type, his fiancée Pauline D’Antonio, initially refused to believe any of it. “He did not do it,” she told the reporters who swarmed to her apartment at 2385 Lorillard Place in the Bronx (just a short block away, as the tabloids delighted in noting, from the home of Anna Hauptmann, widow of the convicted killer of the Lindbergh baby). “They are telling lies about him. He did not confess. He could not have confessed to such a thing. He will be back and we will be married in September.”

  By the following morning, however, she had undergone a change of heart. “It’s all over,” she said. “I can have nothing to do with him. Thank God I found out before we were married. I’d have died if he’d been the father of my child, my husband.”

  Informed of her comments in his cell at police headquarters, Fiorenza looked glum: “I guess she’ll never come to see me now. Well, what can I do? I made a serious mistake.”34

  Not content to titillate its readers with the lurid details of Fiorenza’s actual confession, Hearst’s Daily Mirror resorted to a stunt so brazen that it made the city’s other tabloids seem like models of journalistic sobriety. Beginning on Saturday, April 25, it ran a sensational six-part series headlined “Fiorenza’s Own Amazing Story,” trumpeted as the exclusive firsthand account of “the events leading up to the fateful Good Friday when the body of Mrs. Nancy Titterton was found in the bathtub at 22 Beekman Place.” A prefatory note claimed that Fiorenza had dictated the story from his cell in the Tombs to a staff reporter from the Mirror named David Charney.

  According to this startling tale, Fiorenza had first encountered his future victim six months earlier when “she called up Kruger’s where I worked and I went up to see her about fixing some furniture and upholstery work. She was a fine-looking woman. She had a lot of class.” Much to his surprise, she “started to ask me questions about myself. Gee, I couldn’t get over her being so nice to me, just a plain working fellow.” Noticing the dirt under his fingernails, he felt embarrassed in her presence, but “she told me not to worry about my hands” and invited him to sit down in the living room. “She seemed anxious to talk more about me. Among
other things, she asked about my fiancée. She also asked if I was interested in the arts. I didn’t get that. It was very highfalutin talk.” Initially flattered by her attention, he began to feel “dopey” when he realized that “she was a writer” and “was studying me like them doctors study guinea pigs to see what they got behind their minds. I was a type to her. When I left she asked me to come back again. I was thinking of her. She was thinking of a guinea pig.”

  The remaining five installments of this sleazy potboiler describe Fiorenza’s burgeoning obsession with the beguiling Mrs. Titterton, who comes across as a careless, high-society tease, inviting him back repeatedly to pump him for material she can use in her fiction while ignoring the erotic effect she is having on him. Before long, Fiorenza is in the grip of a “wild, uncontrollable passion” for her. “Every other woman I saw looked to me like Mrs. Titterton. I’d pick up a magazine and all the faces of the good-looking women in it were like her. Daydreaming about her, I pictured myself dressed up in a swell tuxedo, married to her. We just finished up a cocktail and the butler comes up, bows, and says the car’s waiting.” By its final chapter, “Fiorenza’s Own Amazing Story” has turned into a cut-rate version of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: the story of a poor working boy engaged to a doting girl of his own class who becomes infatuated with an upper-crust beauty and dreams of possessing her. In this account, however, it is the beautiful socialite who ends up dead.35