Even by tabloid standards, “Fiorenza’s Own Amazing Story” was outrageous, provoking a furious response from one of Hearst’s main competitors, Julius David Stern, publisher of the New York Post. After contacting the district attorney and confirming that “no reporter from any newspaper had ever talked to Fiorenza in jail,” Stern published a scathing front-page editorial denouncing the purported autobiography as “the baldest fake in years”—a semipornographic thriller, “so written as to blacken a dead woman’s character and build up sympathy for a confessed murderer.” Besides its defamation of the victim—“a woman who, during her lifetime, was respected by all who knew her”—what made “the Hearst hoax” particularly disgraceful was its potential to influence Fiorenza’s future trial.
“How many prospective jurors have read the Mirror’s vile insinuations that Mrs. Titterton led Fiorenza on,” thundered Stern, “that she encouraged him to spend time with her while she probed him for literary material? Hearst’s fake is so abhorrent that it shames the whole newspaper business. It is so dangerous that it can lead to a miscarriage of justice.”36
In desperation, several friends of Fiorenza reached out to the courtroom miracle worker who had just performed the seemingly impossible in the case of Vera Stretz. Samuel Leibowitz, however, flatly refused. “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole,” he told reporters. “That guy is sitting in the electric chair right now.”
“Are you afraid you might spoil your record if you took the case?” one of the newsmen suggested.
Leibowitz bristled. “It isn’t that,” he snapped. “It’s a dirty, nasty affair and I don’t want anything to do with it.”37
On May 19, just a month after his arrest, Fiorenza went to trial, represented by Manhattan defense lawyer Henry Klauber. Dressed in an ill-fitting blue-serge suit, with his slick-backed black hair “accenting the whiteness of his sharp features,” he sat through the weeklong proceedings with an air of bland indifference. Only once—when his stricken mother took the stand to testify (falsely) that he had been at home on the morning of the murder—did he display any trace of emotion, wiping his eyes, burying his face in his hands, and shaking his head.
After a fruitless attempt to show that Mrs. Titterton had actually been killed by a shadowy “fiend” who had been on the loose in the neighborhood at the time of the murder, Klauber switched to an insanity defense. His main witness was Dr. James Lincoln McCartney, former psychiatrist at Elmira Reformatory, who (using the now-outmoded terminology for schizophrenia) characterized Fiorenza as “a dementia praecox case.” In rebuttal, the prosecution called a quartet of experts, including Dr. Perry Lichtenstein—author of a magazine article, among other professional publications, titled “Who’s Looney Now?”—and Dr. Thomas Cusack, who insisted that Fiorenza was not nearly “wacky” enough to be diagnosed with dementia praecox. All four prosecution experts agreed that the defendant was “keenly aware of the nature and quality of his behavior at the time of the crime.”
The conflicting psychiatric testimony left the jurors deeply divided. Retiring to the jury room at 3:00 p.m. on May 27, they deliberated for more than eleven hours without reaching a verdict. When Judge Charles C. Nott Jr. received word shortly after 2:00 a.m. that they were deadlocked, he refused to let them go to their hotels, ordering them locked up in the jury room until they came to a decision. Finally, at precisely 10:07 a.m., they emerged with a verdict. Fiorenza was found guilty of first-degree murder.
The following week, on Friday, June 6, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Standing before the bench in his blue suit, blue shirt, and white tie, he displayed not a flicker of emotion. He was equally impassive when he went to his death on January 22, 1937, one of four prisoners executed within a twenty-minute span that night. Accompanied by the Catholic chaplain the Reverend John P. McCaffrey, Fiorenza walked calmly into the execution chamber and said nothing as he sat on the chair. The switch was thrown at 11:09 p.m. Three minutes later, he was pronounced dead.38
4
* * *
Sex Fiends
FROM THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT trials of the 1690s to the so-called “day care hysteria” of the 1980s—when ritual sex abuse was reputedly epidemic in our nation’s preschools—Americans have regularly been seized with panic over one supposedly rampant evil or another. Every era seems to produce its own defining monster, from the arsenic-dispensing “domestic poisoner” of the 1890s to the switchblade-wielding juvenile delinquent of the 1950s, the suburban Satan worshipper of the 1970s to the suicidal mass-murderer of our own terrorism-obsessed age. Beginning in 1937, the boogeyman that haunted the American psyche was the “sex fiend.”
Appalling sex crimes, of course, were nothing new. In 1934, for example, the maniac Albert Fish was arrested for the dismemberment-murder, committed six years earlier, of schoolgirl Grace Budd, a portion of whose flesh he took away with him and made into a cannibal stew. The following year, Francis Flynn—a divorced, thirty-nine-year-old taxicab dispatcher and father of a seventeen-year-old daughter—made tabloid headlines after luring six-year-old Margaret Parlato into his Queens apartment, molesting her, drowning her, then disposing of her body down the dumbwaiter shaft of his building.1
It wasn’t until 1937, however, that—if the media were to be believed—a so-called “sex crime wave” engulfed the nation. Under titles like “Sex Crime Wave Alarms the U.S.,” “Can We End Sex Crimes?,” and “Is the Sex Criminal Insane?,” popular newsstand magazines—among them Time, the Saturday Evening Post, the Nation, the Literary Digest, and Cosmopolitan—ran panic-inducing articles about the purported plague of psychopathic sex-murders. In a widely syndicated piece called “War on the Sex Criminal!,” FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover declared that “the sex fiend, most loathsome of all the vast army of crime, has become a threat to safety of American childhood and womanhood.” Even the staid New York Times, famed for its high-minded avoidance of anything that smacked of sensationalism, found itself running so many articles on the subject—one hundred and forty-three in 1937 alone—that it had to create a new “Sex Crimes” subject heading in its annual index.2 Book publishers, quick to capitalize on the scare, rushed out works like The Sex Criminal by Dr. Bertram Pollens, senior psychologist of the New York City penitentiary on Rikers Island and head of its clinic for sex offenders.3
Historians of the phenomenon point to a string of sensational New York City sex-murders that sparked the hysteria. In March 1937, Simon Elmore, a fifty-seven-year-old housepainter, encountered four-year-old Joan Kuleba on a Staten Island beach. Promising to show her “a place where grasshoppers did all sorts of wonderful things,” he led her to a tumbledown house in a nearby marsh, where—after sexually assaulting her—he strangled her with the shoulder straps of her bathing suit, dropped “a fifty-pound clump of bricks on her back,” then strolled home for lunch. That August, Lawrence Marks, a forty-nine-year-old unemployed hospital worker, strangled eight-year-old Paula Magagna in her Brooklyn home, raped her after death, and left her nude body lying in the cellar. Not long afterward, twenty-six-year-old Salvatore Ossido, a Brooklyn barber and father of two small children, lured a nine-year-old parochial schoolgirl, Einer Sporrer, into the back room of his shop, crushed her skull with a hammer, raped her corpse, then stuffed it into a burlap sack and dumped it on the stoop of a house a block and a half away.4 And of course there was the rape-murder of Nancy Titterton, a crime that “sent a wave of horror and fear across the whole United States” and that rarely went unmentioned in the many newspaper and magazine articles on the “rising tide of perversion” supposedly sweeping the nation.5
Fiorenza was prominently cited in a feature that appeared in the New York Daily News on March 28, 1937—Easter Sunday. Written by journalist Arthur Watson and titled “Sex Criminals Nearly Always Repeaters,” the article detailed the futile efforts of both the legal system and the psychiatric establishment to “cure and control the abnormalities of these perverts.” Concluding with the sobering assessment that, apart from either
permanent institutionalization or castration, there was no way to protect society from the depredations of these creatures, the story was illustrated with portraits of three of the most notorious “sex fiends” of recent years: Fiorenza, Albert Fish, and Salvatore Ossido, whose brutal murder and postmortem rape of little Einer Sporrer had occurred only a week earlier.6
Even as New Yorkers were digesting Watson’s disheartening report, a new atrocity was taking place in their midst—a crime that would stun the nation, set off one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history, and confirm the growing belief that the psychopathic “sex fiend” had become “the most terrible menace now confronting American people.”7 For New Yorkers, the shock of the Easter Sunday horror was amplified by its timing and locale. Not only did it occur exactly one year after the Good Friday rape-murder of Nancy Titterton but it also happened just a block and a half away from that earlier outrage, in a neighborhood that suddenly seemed to have fallen under an inexplicable curse: Beekman Place.
Part II
Fenelon
5
* * *
The Firebrand
IN LATER YEARS, after he had perpetrated one of the most sensationally savage murders of his age, psychiatrists would find much in his background to account for his fanatical temperament.
His father, Benjamin Hardin Irwin, was born in 1854 and grew up in Missouri until the age of nine, when the family traveled by covered wagon to the Nebraska Territory, settling near the town of Tecumseh. Benjamin was still an adolescent when, tired of tending his father’s cattle, he fled the farm and found work in a stone quarry. There, he saw firsthand “the power of dynamite to blow things up”—an experience that would leave a lasting imprint on his imagination. A brilliant, if largely self-educated, young man, he taught school for a while, dabbled in local politics, and—after immersing himself in Blackstone’s Commentaries—moved into town and set himself up as a lawyer, continuing to practice for about eight years. It was during this period that he married and had a son.1
A turning point in his life occurred in 1879. By then, Irwin had sunk into a deep well of self-loathing. In his own estimation, he was “the most wicked man” in the community—a black-hearted sinner who lied to friends, cheated clients, quarreled constantly with neighbors, and beat his wife and child when drunk. Overwhelmed with disgust at his wickedness, he was saved when, during a meeting at the local Mount Zion Baptist Church, his soul was converted to Christ.
His awakening took place at a time of intense religious ferment, when a great wave of revivalism swept over the land. Inspired by the teachings of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ministers of the burgeoning holiness movement preached that salvation entailed “two separate phases of experience for the believer.” In the first—conversion or justification—“the penitent was forgiven for actual sins of commission, becoming a Christian but retaining ‘a residue of sin within.’ ” The second, more controversial, experience was known as “entire sanctification,” a work of divine grace that “purified believers of this remaining ‘inbred sin’ and gave a person ‘perfect love’ of God and humanity.”2
Through his contact with itinerant holiness preachers, Benjamin Hardin Irwin learned of the doctrine of sanctification and received the experience himself at eleven o’clock, Saturday night, May 16, 1891. In the grip of an agonized realization of the “turpitude and vileness” of his “inherent depravity,” he began to pray so loudly that he woke up his neighbors. All at once—as he later testified—“the flood gates of Heaven were opened wide, and there came into my soul successive waves and mighty inundation of light, and love and joy and faith, and power and glory and loyalty to God.” He “melted into a flood of tears” at the realization that “the Holy Ghost in his fullness had come into my soul. I was sanctified.”3
Embarking on the life of a revivalist preacher, he conducted hundreds of camp meetings over the next few years in small towns throughout Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. He was, by all accounts, a riveting, larger-than-life figure—“magnetic in personality, charismatic in delivery, able in mind, handsome in build, and articulate of tongue.”4 His own son would compare him to Elmer Gantry, the barnstorming preacher of Sinclair Lewis’s scathing attack on American evangelism. Gantry, of course, is the very embodiment of religious hypocrisy, a compulsive womanizer who rails against sexual immorality even while ogling the nubile girls in the choir. In this regard, too, the analogy with Irwin would prove to be apt.5
As Irwin pursued his ministry, he found himself yearning for an even more “intimate acquaintance with the living God.” Possessed of “an unspeakable soul-hunger,” he turned for solace to the writings of the Methodist theologian John Fletcher, who spoke of a spiritual experience beyond conversion and sanctification—a third work of grace he described as “the baptism of burning love.”
Seeking such experience for himself, Irwin received it near midnight on October 23, 1895. As he lay in bed, he
saw in the room above me a cross of pure, transparent fire. It was all fire. I have been able to see that cross in the same place above me every moment from that time to this. No fire that was ever kindled in earth was half as pure, so beautiful, so divinely transparent as that. In a few moments the whole room where we were lying seemed to be all luminous with a seven-fold light, and a little later still the very heavens were all aglow with transparent flame. The very walls of the room seemed to be on fire.
Two days later, following a trip to Enid, Oklahoma, he was returning home by train when a “second wave struck”:
All at once I became conscious that I was literally on fire. This expression may seem a strange one, but I cannot express it any other way. Everything about me seemed to be on fire—actually burning, blazing, glowing. I felt that I was in the midst of a fiery presence. At no time in my life have I known or felt such unutterable bliss. For five hours I felt that I should certainly be consumed—and there I entered into an infinitely deeper and more wonderful rest than I have ever known before.6
Aflame with the spirit of the living God, the newly “fire-baptized” Irwin began to preach his message of a “third experience” in holiness periodicals, self-published pamphlets, and raucous tent meetings that were soon attracting huge throngs of believers, hungry to receive the “blessed fire” themselves. Under the ministry of the firebrand preacher, thousands of believers were soon testifying to the powerful new baptism. “Some said they felt fire burning in their souls, but others claimed it as a burning in their bodies also. It was felt in the tongue, in the fingers, in the palm of the hand, in the feet, in the side, in the arms.…The church would seem to be lighted with fire, the trees of the wood would appear as flames of fire, the landscape would seem to be baptized in the glory of the fire.” Whipped into a frenzy of “godly hysteria” by Irwin’s exhortations, those who received the fire would shout, scream, laugh, bark like dogs, speak in tongues, fall into trances, or shake with the “jerks.”7
As Irwin’s message spread throughout the South and Midwest, he met with bitter, sometimes violent, opposition. More moderate holiness leaders denounced him as a “mystical renegade” promoting a heretical doctrine. At one camp meeting, a mob of rowdies broke up his wildly convulsive services, tearing down and burning his tents, pistol-whipping some congregants and hurling chairs at others. At another, one of his closest associates was plunged into a horse trough and nearly drowned.8
Such hostility did nothing to daunt “the apostle of fire.” “People may oppose us,” he declared, “preachers may preach against the experience, and devils may howl, but we have come to preach blood and fire till Jesus comes.” In a pamphlet titled “Pyrophobia (A Morbid Fear of Fire),” he lashed out at his critics, deriding them as mealymouthed defenders of a “fossilized” faith and assuring his followers that “God would soon strike dead those who opposed his ministry.”9
For two years, beginning in 1896, Irwin brought his fiery crusade to two dozen states, proclaiming the glory of the “blissfu
l, burning, leaping, love-waves of God’s living fire” and thundering against the vices of the age, from “the handling of tobacco in every form” to the “use of slang language” to the wearing of such “prideful” adornments as male neckties (“I would rather have a rattlesnake around my neck than a tie,” he declared).10
Even while decrying every stimulant from cigars to coffee to Coca-Cola, however, Irwin himself seemed addicted to ever-increasing doses of ecstatic experience. By 1899, he was trumpeting a series of new, even more explosive works of grace: the baptisms of dynamite, lyddite, selenite, and oxydite, guaranteed to “utterly demolish” the “strongholds of Satan,” blast “into atoms his deepest laid and most systematic plots and plans,” and “blow sin back to hell.” Critics, convinced of his growing fanaticism, suggested that the only blessing Irwin lacked was “the baptism of common sense.”11
Irwin was at the height of his power and influence when, in 1900, his world combusted. In the spring of that year, his followers were stunned by reports that he had been spotted in Omaha, drunk and smoking a big cigar. Enemies within the holiness movement began mocking him in print as the “Whiskey Baptized” preacher. Rumors of financial chicanery also circulated, one critic claiming that “at times, the collections entrusted to him could not be accounted for.” Later, an even more shocking revelation came to light: that Irwin’s “life for many years alternated between the pulpit and the harlot house. He would go from the pulpit to wallow with harlots the rest of the night.”12
Publicly confessing to a life of “open and gross sin,” Irwin resigned from his church in disgrace and dropped from sight. Several years would pass before he resurfaced.
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 6
