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

by Schechter, Harold

  A powerfully built, strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old, Demsky had endured a grim, Dickensian boyhood. One of seven children of poor Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms of Russia for the supposedly gold-paved streets of America, he had grown up in a hardscrabble section of Amsterdam, New York, where his father—a bitter, uncommunicative man given to outbursts of drunken rage—barely made a living as a junk peddler and ragman. Food was so scarce in the Demsky household that young Izzy was reduced to stealing eggs from a neighbor’s chicken coop. To shield their ramshackle house from the cold, the walls were insulated with manure collected year-round from his father’s dray horse. Every daily walk to school was a perilous gauntlet through neighborhoods filled with Jew-hating gangs.

  Thanks to his native talents—and the patronage of an infatuated English teacher—Demsky flourished in high school, distinguishing himself in public speaking, acting, and essay writing. With money scraped together from various odd jobs—newspaper delivery boy, department store clerk, bellhop, waiter, factory hand—he managed to enroll at St. Lawrence. He found part-time work as a janitor and lived frugally, scrounging food from other students and renting a cubbyhole room in a cheap boardinghouse.

  Between his studies, his menial work, and his athletic pursuits (he would become an intercollegiate wrestling champ), Demsky had little time for socializing. During his sophomore year, however, he bonded with Bob Irwin. “He was friendly, interested in boxing, and did odd jobs like me—a paper route, shoveling snow,” Demsky later recalled. “I liked his sculptures and enjoyed talking to him.” Bob did, however, have one glaring defect of character. Like Demsky’s father, he “had a violent temper”:

  He offered to buy a milkshake one day. I declined, because he didn’t have much money either, and I figured going Dutch would be better. He insisted with such vehemence that I backed off and let him buy. He left school a little while later.

  Less than two weeks after his departure from Canton, Bob Irwin would go from utter obscurity to nationwide notoriety. Izzy Demsky would always remember that tumultuous time in the life of the normally sleepy little college town. Twenty years later—long after he had changed his name to Kirk Douglas and achieved his own, far greater renown as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars—he would conjure up memories of his old college friend while making Lust for Life, the biopic of Vincent van Gogh that earned Douglas one of his three Best Actor Oscar nominations. “I felt sorry for him, a talented artist at the mercy of incomprehensible forces,” Douglas would write. “When I thought of Van Gogh, I thought of Bob Irwin.”7

  Bob took his classroom notes in a plain cardboard-bound notebook that also served as a sketch pad and journal. Its pages were filled with a hodgepodge of drawings, jottings, and clippings: freehand portraits of various acquaintances, rough sketches of future sculptural projects (among them a bust of Christ with devil’s horns protruding from his forehead), biblical verses, obscene limericks, and a bizarre miscellany of newspaper items (including an advertisement extolling the virtues of Sears Roebuck toilets). There were also dozens of sporadically made diary entries, a considerable number of which referred to Ethel Kudner.

  Though Bob had struggled to put Ethel out of his mind, he continued to brood over the woman he regarded as the paragon of her sex. Surrounded by “drawings of her various features, eyes, ears, nose, chin and full face,” his entries are full of lovesick effusions. “God how I adore Ethel! Perfection. That’s what she is. Absolute perfection. I could go out of my mind when I realize that she is married to someone else. It has made a shipwreck of me.” The mere thought of other women actively repelled him. “Sex? It means nothing now!” he wrote. “I wouldn’t even KISS anyone else now that Ethel is gone—forever.” A later entry suggests that he had attempted to employ his powers of visualization to communicate with her telepathically. “Girl of my dreams! Can’t you hear the still small voice in the night? Can’t you hear me calling to you with words of adoration on my lips and a song of love in my heart?”8

  Evidently determined to convey his feelings more directly, Bob made a trip to Manhattan in mid-December, three months after his move to Canton. Planning to stay with Mary and Veronica, he proceeded directly to their apartment. By then, the two women—along with Ronnie’s pet Pekingese, Touchi—had moved out of their brownstone and found cheaper quarters in a shabby, six-story tenement a few blocks away, on the run-down fringe of Beekman Place. By sheer happenstance, Ethel was visiting for a few days, her husband having gone off on a business trip. Though not especially thrilled by Bob’s unexpected arrival, she was cordial to him as always. Mary and Veronica, on the other hand, did little to conceal their annoyance at Bob for his unwanted attentions to Ethel.

  Exactly what transpired during his brief visit to New York City is unclear, though one fact is well documented. By the time he returned to Canton, he had managed to convince himself that—all evidence to the contrary—Ethel had moved back in with her mother and sister because her marriage was in trouble.9 This delusional belief was only one sign that his mental state, precarious at best, was growing shakier by the day.

  He began to rant endlessly about visualization and the godlike powers it would grant him, including the ability to travel though time. To his classmate Albert Niles, he revealed his current attempts to “project his mind into the past” and observe “the conduct of historical figures” like his idol Napoleon. “I liked Bob,” said Niles. “But he was emotionally and mentally unstable.”10

  At the same time, he began haranguing his fellow divinity students about a bizarre “scheme for religious revolution”—“a worldwide upheaval” that would “supplant Christianity” with a new spiritual movement he called “communistic religion.”

  “It was a confused theory,” commented his friend Anders Lunde with considerable understatement. On one occasion, Lunde recalled, Bob took the stage during morning chapel services and launched into an impassioned speech about the need for a radical change in world religion—“but after his first few sentences, his rationality left him and with tears streaming down his face he walked from one side of the platform to the other in the grip of uncontrolled emotion.” Afterward, as the assembly filed out of the chapel, Professor MacLean came up beside Lunde and whispered, “That boy is crazy.”11

  And then there were his increasingly frequent outbursts of uncontrolled anger, culminating in an episode that occurred in the third week of March 1937. The victim of Bob’s fury on that occasion was a fellow divinity student named Leroy Congdon. Precisely what he did to provoke Bob is unclear. According to one account, he was visiting the children’s art class Bob taught when he “tripped over a table and broke a piece of sculpture.” Another source claims that Bob and his young pupils had constructed an elaborate model of Noah’s Ark, and that—after borrowing a few of the animal figures to use in a puppet show—Congdon “returned some of them broken.”12 What is indisputably true is that, on the afternoon of Sunday, March 21, in front of the entire class, Bob flew into an insane rage at Congdon, spewing such vile curses and ugly threats that several of the students—including Professor MacLean’s daughter, Susan, who was taking the class with her older brother, Colin—burst into tears. Then, before the flabbergasted Congdon could gather his wits, Bob hauled off and smashed him in the jaw.

  When Angus MacLean got wind of the incident later that day, he called both young men into his office and asked for an explanation. As Congdon began to speak, MacLean saw that Bob was growing highly agitated and “warned him not to lose control of himself.” His words had the opposite effect. With a crazed roar, Bob leaped from his chair and “went after Congdon,” MacLean later testified. A powerfully built man who had served with the Canadian Army during World War I, MacLean “grabbed Irwin by the neck” and put him in a headlock “until he to promised to behave himself.” Afterward, he “told Bob I could not have him working with the children when he was not emotionally dependable.”

  The following day, MacLean—“now deeply concerned with I
rwin’s behavior and mental condition”—brought him to see Dean Atwood. Bob “made wild charges against Congdon,” Atwood recalled, “and accused Dr. MacLean of being ‘against him.’ ” Atwood “tried to soothe” Bob and “suggested that he apologize to Congdon and forget the incident.” Instead, “Irwin jumped from his chair, his eyes gleaming, and expressed his antipathy for Congdon in uncontrolled violent fashion.” Then he stormed out of the office.

  Two days later, on Wednesday, March 24, Atwood expelled Bob from the school for “instability.” At the same time, he wrote a letter to Dr. Russell Blaisdell, superintendent of Rockland State Hospital, “stating that we were alarmed and raising the question of whether or not a man liable to such irrational and violent antipathy was not dangerous.”13

  How—or even whether—Blaisdell replied to this query is unknown. One psychiatrist who did have an opinion on the subject was Dr. Fredric Wertham.

  Earlier in the year, Wertham had received an invitation to present a paper at a ceremony marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of his former workplace, the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The topic he chose was the so-called “catathymic crisis,” the previously unrecognized mental disorder that, so he believed, accounted for certain acts of criminal violence. Without identifying him by name, he cited Bob Irwin as an example of an “unrecovered case”—a patient who had reached the stage of “superficial normality” but had not yet achieved the ultimate goal of full “insight and recovery.” Without further intensive psychotherapy, Wertham declared, “a recurrence of the pattern of violence…could be predicted.”

  “This man is not cured,” concluded Wertham, who would have the grim satisfaction of seeing his prognosis confirmed. “He will break out again in some act of violence against himself or others.”14

  15

  * * *

  Crisis

  MARY AND VERONICA’S DILAPIDATED brownstone on 53rd Street might have seen better days, but it was positively palatial compared to their current place, a fourth-floor walk-up at 316 East 50th Street. Cramped and dimly lighted, with rear-facing windows overlooking a junk-strewn backyard, the apartment consisted of three bedrooms—two hardly bigger than walk-in closets—a bathroom, kitchen, and combination living/dining room. Despite the limited space, the ever-frugal Mary continued to take in boarders. Such claustrophobic conditions—the two Gedeon women and a renter sharing a small, dreary flat—might have been impossibly oppressive. What made the situation tolerable was the fact that Ronnie was rarely at home.

  In the evenings, she was out on the town with one of her many male admirers. Her days were largely taken up with her flourishing, if somewhat unsavory, career as a model.

  She had gotten her modest start in the business thanks to Ethel, who had invited her to a party where she met Helen Norden, Ethel’s boss at Vanity Fair. Impressed with Ronnie’s looks, Norden introduced her to Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher (and Norden’s lover), who arranged for her to model for his daughter Natica, an aspiring artist.

  Over the next few years, while dreaming of a career as a high-fashion model, Ronnie took whatever jobs she could find. Registering with the Hollywood Service Agency, she found sporadic work at trade shows, buyers conventions, and the like. Eventually, she discovered that she could find consistent and well-paid work as a “figure model,” posing in the nude for amateur photography clubs. She had a firm, shapely body (her file at her modeling agency records her measurements as 5’8” in height and 126 pounds, with a 34” bust, 25” waist, and 35” hips) and, even more crucially, an utter lack of inhibition when it came to taking off her clothes.

  In November 1935, she gained fleeting notoriety when she appeared “decoratively underdressed” in the annual stag show mounted by the New York Society of Illustrators at the Heckscher Theatre at Fifth Avenue and 104th Street—a benefit performance for struggling artists attended by eight hundred men, including such notables as cartoonist Rube Goldberg, famed illustrator Howard Chandler Christy, and Herbert Bayard Swope, first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for reporting and former managing editor of the New York World. “Clad only in scanties,” as one tabloid reported, Ronnie was “about to make her entrance in a skit called ‘Nobody Makes a Pass at Me’ ” when the theater was raided by the police, who halted the show on the grounds of indecency. Five of the young female performers were taken into custody and charged with dancing in the nude, though Ronnie—thanks to her “silver-tongued eloquence”—managed to “talk herself out of her impending arrest.”1

  She reached the pinnacle of her career a year later when she began to pose for pulp true crime magazines. The 1930s were the heyday of these sensational publications. Fans of the genre could choose from more than one hundred titles—True Detective, Master Detective, Startling Detective, Real Detective, Dynamic Detective, Daring Detective, American Detective, Official Detective Stories, and dozens more. All offered garishly illustrated covers, generally featuring a half-naked beauty in mortal distress; interior black-and-white photos of both actual crime scenes and staged re-creations; and slick, well-researched stories with punchy tabloid titles (“Love Secrets of California’s Rattlesnake Romeo!” “Pennsylvania’s Sex Terrorist and the Horror in the Well!” “The Southwest’s Pseudo-Maniac and the Singing Corpse!” “Crimson Trail of San Francisco’s Gas-Pipe Killers!”).

  Beginning in the spring of 1936, Ronnie modeled for a number of these magazines—Inside Detective, Front Page Detective, and Detective Foto—almost always “in the semi-nude in an attitude of shame and humiliation.” She was a cowering, scantily clad beauty threatened by a pistol-wielding thug in the story “Nine Mad Dogs,” a negligee-wearing moll in “Pretty But Cheap,” a half-naked victim in “I Am a White Slave.” Her final appearance was in the April 1937 issue of Inside Detective, where her photograph—“cringing and shame-stricken,” one arm flung over her face, the other raised to conceal her naked bosom—accompanied the story “Party Girl,” an “exposé of a Boston vice ring smashed by the police.” The issue hit the newsstands in the third week of March. Within days of its initial publication, that same picture—along with dozens of others—would be reprinted in newspapers throughout the country.2

  On Thursday, March 25, 1937—one day after his expulsion from the St. Lawrence University Theological School—Robert Irwin set out by bus for Manhattan.

  With nothing to keep him in Canton, he was hoping to move back to the city and was on his way to hunt for work. He had reason to feel optimistic. His friend Anders Lunde was engaged to a twenty-two-year-old socialite named Leonora Sheldon, whose brother William was affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History. A young naturalist who would gain renown as the world’s leading expert on the American woodcock, William had recently returned from an expedition to Sichuan, China, where he had become the third person ever to shoot a giant panda. His specimen, mounted and displayed in a diorama of its natural habitat, was a prize of the museum.3 Given Bob’s experience at Thomas Rowland’s taxidermy shop, Lunde was hopeful that his friend might land a job at the museum and had written to Leonora, who offered to do what she could on Bob’s behalf.

  Dressed in a dark-blue pin-striped suit, a threadbare Chesterfield overcoat—its black velvet collar in such sorry shape that he generally turned it up to conceal its worn-out nap—a yellow scarf, a tan fedora, and gray suede gloves purchased several days earlier from the J. J. Newberry store on Main Street in Canton, Bob embarked for the city around midnight. He carried two beat-up suitcases, one tied shut with a length of rope, and a few small sculptures in a cardboard box, including the portrait bust he had done of Clarence Low, the state official he had met the year before at Rockland. He left the rest of his possessions at the Hosleys’ boardinghouse, explaining to his landlords that, depending on how his job search went, he would either be back in a few days or send a forwarding address.4

  Arriving in midtown early on the morning of March 26—Good Friday—Bob went directly to Clarence Low’s office at 103 Park
Avenue to present him with the bust, which had been modeled on photographs Low had supplied. Bob apologized profusely as he placed the little statue on Low’s desk. “It isn’t any good,” he kept saying, his voice so unsteady that Low feared he might burst into tears. “You should have posed for it, Mr. Low.” Though Low secretly agreed—“the side view was all right but the front was not so hot,” he later testified—he assured Bob that the statue was fine. Bob then launched into a tirade against the St. Lawrence Theological School, growing more agitated by the minute. “He talked wildly,” Low would say afterward, “and he looked just as wild as he talked.” Eager to get rid of Bob, Low made a show of looking at his watch and explained that he had a train to catch at Grand Central. As Bob accompanied him to the corner of Park and 43rd, he blathered nonstop about the job he hoped to get at the Museum of Natural History. “He talked like a maniac,” said Low. Before they parted, Low “advised him to take the job and make a name for himself.” He then shook Bob’s hand and hurried into the station, “glad to get away.”5

  Bob’s next order of business was finding a place to lodge. Knowing that there would be no space for him at the Gedeons’ but eager to stay nearby, he scouted the neighborhood, finally settling on an attic room at 248 East 52nd Street, the brownstone home of a German-American couple, Charles and Matilda Ottburg. Identifying himself only as a “farmer from Utica,” he handed over a week’s rental—$2.50 plus a fifty-cent deposit on the key—and told his landlords not to worry about the daily upkeep of his room. “Don’t bother to clean my room or make my bed,” he said. “I’ll do that all myself.” He then lugged his belongings upstairs.

  Besides a skylight, the room had a rear-facing window. Peering out, Bob saw that it commanded a view of the East 51st Street police station. He spent the next half hour or so settling in. Then he headed back outside, found a pay phone, and put in a call to an acquaintance, William Lamkie.6