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

by Schechter, Harold

  Other photographs, reproduced from the true crime magazines she had modeled for, gave an additional lurid twist to the story. Under headlines reading “Prophecy of Murder,” “Shadows of the Doom to Come,” and “Act that Turned Real Off-Stage,” a terrified-looking Ronnie—dressed in skimpy undergarments or half-open kimonos—was shown trussed up with ropes, falling to her knees with a gun to her head, or cowering at some unseen attacker. The accompanying captions were all variations on the same portentous theme: the eerie way in which the pictures seemed to foretell her terrible fate. “When Veronica Gedeon posed for this photograph just a year ago to illustrate the cover of a magazine, she had no inkling that she, too, would be the victim of circumstances she was portraying,” said the Journal. “Veronica Gedeon is here shown registering horror for a recent magazine illustration. Is this the way she gazed on her doom in her home early Easter morning?” wrote the News. “A year ago, the beautiful Veronica Gedeon took this terror-stricken pose to illustrate a story in Inside Detective magazine. Twelve months later she was again the shrinking beauty. But this time her attacker was not acting,” intoned the Mirror.6

  Acquaintances of Ronnie, incensed at seeing her pictured as “a wild girl with wild ways” who “met with a wild fate,” rushed to her defense. She was “definitely a person of the proprieties,” said her best friend, Jean Karp, who informed reporters that, in recent months, “Ronnie had taken a deep interest in the Bible, reading it for literary not religious reasons.” Another good friend, Bobby Haenigsen—wife of cartoonist Harry Haenigsen, creator of the popular comic strip Penny—affirmed that “Ronnie was a fine girl. She and her mother were very devoted to each other. They were more like sisters than mother and daughter.” The illustrator Saul Tepper, who had occasionally employed her as a model, described her as “a swell kid with a beautiful smile. She never impressed me as the kind of a girl who could become involved in any kind of a tragedy. She was so gay and light-spirited. I never saw her moody or temperamental. From what I saw of her I got the impression of a gay, good-natured girl who seemed to get a lot of fun out of life.” Even West Peterson, editor of Inside Detective, the true crime magazine Ronnie had repeatedly posed for, chimed in with a testimonial. Veronica, he declared was “ ‘decent’ in every sense of the word…an honest girl from a family in straitened circumstances who was trying to earn her own living with the natural talents with which she was endowed. She was not ‘cheap.’ She did not sleep with men so that they would give her money. Had she not chosen to be a photographers’ and illustrators’ model, she might have been another stenographer, a sales girl, or a nurse. She had the intelligence to succeed in any of these callings.”7

  Offsetting these heartfelt tributes, however, was a deluge of rumors that cast Ronnie’s character in a highly dubious light. Her “little black book” reportedly “bulged with the phone numbers” of her many boyfriends, a number of them “important Wall Street men with private numbers and public wives.” Reportedly, she “was once employed at the Man About Town nightclub, 15 West 51st Street, but was discharged after getting into a brawl in which she received a black eye.” There was her bare-breasted appearance in the notorious November 1935 Society of Illustrators burlesque show. And even darker stories soon emerged. Though quick to justify her behavior as an act of financial desperation, West Peterson felt compelled to reveal that Veronica had once “posed for a film taken by an unscrupulous photographer to be unreeled at bawdy stag parties.” And shortly after the murders, the gossip king Walter Winchell, the nation’s most powerful newspaper columnist, wrote that Ronnie had recently suffered “a sorta breakdown” from “too much whoopee.” Though the message was coded, anyone fluent in Winchell’s inimitable style—his “slanguage,” as he called it—understood that he was referring to an abortion (a fact quickly confirmed when detectives tracked down the physician who had performed it).8

  Still, it wasn’t Winchell or any other professional scandalmonger who was most responsible for fueling the public perception of Ronnie as a promiscuous party girl. It was her father.

  At around 4:00 a.m. Sunday, following a continuous twelve-hour grilling, Joseph Gedeon emerged from the East 51st Street station and found himself surrounded by a mob of newspapermen barraging him with questions. Announcing that he needed to get back to his upholstery shop—he had a “rush job” to finish, he explained, and had “already lost a day of work”—he made for the Second Avenue El with the reporters at his heels. Back at his shop, having refused to utter a word during the brief train ride, he locked himself inside and set about “reupholstering an overstuffed fan chair in green horsehair velvet for a client on the Upper East Side.” He was too exhausted to concentrate, however. Throwing himself onto his cot, he dozed fitfully for a few hours, awakening shortly before 8:00 a.m. Thinking he might feel better if he had something in his stomach—more than twenty-four hours had elapsed since his last meal—he headed out to a greasy spoon on 34th Street called the Willow cafeteria but found himself unable to eat. He drank two cups of coffee, then returned to his shop.9

  Waiting for him on the sidewalk were five detectives led by Captain Frank Curry, who was armed with a search warrant. Gedeon unlocked the door and let them inside. No sooner had they entered than Curry spotted a set of upholstery needles, a few more than eighteen inches long, lying on Gedeon’s workbench. At a nod from the captain, one of his men confiscated them all.

  “How am I supposed to get any work done without my tools?” asked an irate Gedeon.

  When Curry replied that the needles would be returned just as soon as the crime lab was done with them, the old man stormed out of the shop, elbowed his way through the milling crowd of reporters, and hurried to the apartment of a friend named Herman a few blocks uptown, where he spent the next few hours spewing epithets at the police and imbibing schnapps.10

  When he returned to his shop at around 1:30 p.m., the detectives were gone, though a handful of reporters were still gathered at his doorstep. His tongue loosened by the alcohol, Gedeon invited them inside. Perched on the edge of his cot, he lit a cigarette and began to hold forth, while the newspapermen took note of the squalid condition of his “dismal little cubicle,” paying particular attention to the “pictures of bare-breasted women tacked to the wall,” the “cheap ‘art’ magazines filled with nude photographs” stacked in a corner of the room, and, on a wooden shelf above his bed, books of mail-order erotica like Dr. La Forest Potter’s Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities (“A startling, provocative disclosure of fantastic, strange amatory curiosities among savage and civilized races!”).

  Gedeon was indignant about the way police had treated him. “They took my fingerprints, I don’t know why,” he growled. “They even took the stuff from under my fingernails.”

  They’d also made him empty his pockets. “They found some nude pictures,” he blithely told the reporters, who were busily scribbling away in their notepads. “French postcards. When they asked me about them, I said, ‘Why shouldn’t I have them? I’m a grown man and it’s all right to have those pictures with me.’

  “One time,” he continued, “one of the detectives called me a liar. I said to him, ‘You’re a liar, too. I suppose if I took off my glasses, you’d hit me. Well, I’d hit you right back.’ ”11

  Asked by the reporters about his alibi, Gedeon repeated the story of his evening at Corrigan’s, crowing about his triumph at skee ball and wondering aloud about his misplaced hat. To a man, the reporters were confounded by the little upholsterer’s demeanor—his apparent indifference to the horror that had befallen his family. “Gedeon’s reaction to the tragedy is impersonal, detached,” observed the Journal. “He is as ready to talk about his bowling score on the night of the killing as he is about the deaths of his wife and Ronnie. He seems more concerned with the disappearance of his gray hat than with the loss of his loved ones.”12

  Equally startling were the things he had to say about his younger daughter. “Ronnie was wild and willful,” he d
eclared. “She made suckers out of lots of men. Believe me, I know how she was. She would lead a guy right on, right up to the point of—whatever you want to call it—and then give him the horse laugh. She would tease men that way. Maybe she did that to some guy and got him so worked up and nuts that he killed her for it. Girls like Ronnie don’t realize you can’t treat a man that way.”13

  When asked if he thought the killer might have been someone romantically involved with his wife, Gedeon dismissed the idea with a sneer. “I don’t think my wife would be attractive to other men. She was a very cold woman, the coldest I ever knew. But,” he added with a shrug, “there’s no accounting for taste.”14

  By then, he had grown weary of answering questions. With an impatient wave of the hand, he dismissed the reporters, who went off to file their stories about the bizarre little man who, in blaming his daughter’s terrible death on her own reckless sexual behavior—“the exuberant employment of her charms,” as one newspaper put it—had left her “without a shred of reputation.”15

  At roughly the same time—about half past three on Monday afternoon—Dr. Gonzales was completing his autopsies on the victims. Remnants of spaghetti in Ronnie’s stomach confirmed Stephen Butter’s account of her final evening, as did the large quantity of alcohol in her stomach, blood, and brain. Mrs. Gedeon’s stomach contained the remains of “a hearty dinner of cabbage, green vegetables, and potatoes, only partially digested when she died.” The “arrested state” of this meal suggested that she had been killed sometime between 10:00 p.m. and midnight, lending “mute corroboration to Cosmon Cambinias’ story of the cry in the night.”16

  Despite the cuts and bruises around Mary Gedeon’s genitalia and signs that Ronnie had recently engaged in sexual intercourse, Gonzales could find no definitive evidence that either woman had been raped. The tabloids, compelled to abandon their characterization of the killer as a sex-maddened fiend, scrambled to come up with a catchy new nickname, finally settling on the “Phantom Strangler of Beekman Place.”17

  One small discovery—reported by the tabloids in typically overheated fashion as “human flesh and hair clawed from the strangler”—consisted of two very fine, almost colorless hairs, microscopic in size, along with some equally tiny bits of skin found beneath Mary Gedeon’s fingernails. These—along with Frank Byrnes’s pillowcase, which bore a bloody palm print—were turned over to the “scientific sleuths” of the Police Crime Laboratory at the Poplar Street station in Brooklyn. Under a headline reading “STRAND OF HAIR + BIT OF SKIN MAY = ELECTRIC CHAIR,” the New York Evening Journal ran a story acknowledging that the tiny hairs and “minute particles of skin” taken from Mrs. Gedeon’s fingernail scrapings were exceptionally “meager clues” but pointed out that the clues that led to the solution of the Nancy Titterton murder—a length of twine and a single strand of horsehair—were “equally meager.” In the end, however, analysis showed that the hairs and skin had come from Mary Gedeon herself, while the bloody palm print had been left accidentally by Dr. Gonzales during his examination of Byrnes’s body at the murder scene.18

  By Monday, seventy-five detectives from the homicide, gang, and Broadway squads were at work on the case, checking out the nearly 150 names found in Ronnie’s address book, along with every person who had ever boarded with the Gedeons. Searching for anyone who might have been harboring a grudge against one of the victims, investigators soon learned of a man named James Fetton. A few years earlier, when Mary was still in possession of her brownstone on East 53rd Street, she had applied for home improvement funds to the federal loan association where Fetton worked as an appraiser. When he tried to shake her down—threatening to turn in an unfavorable report unless she came across with a valuable necklace she owned—she filed a formal complaint. Convicted of attempted extortion, Fetton ended up serving a ninety-day sentence and had been heard to issue threats against the woman who had put him behind bars. Tracked down and questioned by police, however, he turned out to have an alibi “tight as a drum.”19

  Other suspects were identified and quickly dismissed—an intern at nearby Midtown Hospital said to have been in love with Ronnie; a male singer at the Man About Town nightclub, where she had briefly worked as a hostess; a “William College student” she had gone out with a few times.20

  For a while, attention shifted to the third and most enigmatic of the victims, Frank Byrnes, described by Inspector Lyons as a “man of mystery.” Information gleaned from his relatives in Liverpool revealed that he had come to America about thirteen years earlier and worked at a variety of jobs, including “butler to a Park Avenue millionaire and cocktail shaker in a Manhattan club.” He was reputed to be a ladies’ man, as well as an inveterate racetrack gambler. The latter habit—if true—raised the possibility that Byrnes had been the real target of the killer, perhaps after welshing on a bet. There was also speculation that Byrnes and Mary Gedeon had been targeted for death by a “former intimate friend” of the “still-attractive matron”—a “huge Hungarian” named John Pattanlyus who, “suspicious that the suave, well-educated Englishman was a rival for Mrs. Gedeon’s attentions,” had slain them both in a fit of insane jealousy, then killed Ronnie when the young model returned home and stumbled on the murder scene. In the end, however, these theories led nowhere.21

  It was Ronnie’s best friend, Jean Karp, who provided what appeared to be the most promising lead. Too overwrought to supply much coherent information in the immediate aftermath of the murders, she was questioned again on Monday. This time, she mentioned a man who instantly found himself on the front page of every tabloid in town: a sometime chauffeur named Georges “Frenchy” Gueret.

  A colorful character who, even when unemployed, paraded around in a chauffeur’s uniform, complete with jodhpurs and leather puttees, the Parisian-born Gueret conformed in every respect to the popular stereotype of his countrymen. A self-proclaimed connoisseur of good food, fine wine, and pretty women, he spoke, after seventeen years in this country, with a thick French accent. His preferred headwear was a woolen beret, though he also owned a straw boater hat of the type favored by his idol, the Gallic troubadour Maurice Chevalier, whose syrupy ballads he was fond of performing at dinner parties.

  Investigators quickly discovered, however, that the debonair “Frenchy”—who had boarded at the 53rd Street brownstone with Mary and Ronnie shortly before their move to the 51st Street flat—had a darker side. He had a police record: an arrest on a petty larceny charge that had earned him a short stint in jail. More to the immediate point were the accusations leveled by Jean Karp: that Frenchy had “quarreled bitterly” with Mary Gedeon over some money issues and “made a nuisance of himself” to Ronnie with his unwanted attentions. He also fit the police profile of the killer in another way: as an inmate of the Gedeons’ home, he would have been known to the Pekingese, Touchi.22

  Early Monday, Frenchy was picked up for questioning at the East 53rd shop of shoemaker Ballo Torregraso, where he was “doing a paint job in exchange for some lounging privileges.” Shortly afterward, Detective Frank Crimmins and John B. Kaiser—“crack operatives of the Seventeenth Squad”—were sent to his rented room at 201 East 50th Street, a block and a half from the Gedeon apartment. When a search of his living quarters turned up two badly bloodstained handkerchiefs, the tabloids lost no time in declaring the case cracked.

  “HOLD ‘FRENCHY’ IN MURDER OF 3,” trumpeted the Mirror. “SEIZE CHAUFFEUR IN MODEL’S MURDER,” blared the News. The situation grew even grimmer for Frenchy when he told his interrogators that he had spent part of Easter weekend at the home of his friend Charles Mocoro. Sent to Mocoro’s room at 987 Second Avenue, detectives found four ice picks, one bearing what appeared to be blood stains. Lyons and his colleagues had already begun to entertain the theory that the triple slaying was committed by two men, a possibility that would resolve one of the more puzzling aspects of the case: “how a single murderer could overcome both Mrs. Gedeon and Veronica without disturbing the apartment more than was done.�
� Mocoro quickly found himself in custody.23

  The excitement over the ostensible solution to the crime was short-lived. Both men proved to have airtight alibis. The bloodstains on Frenchy’s handkerchiefs were the result of his chronic and copious nosebleeds, while the stains on Mocoro’s ice pick turned out to be rust. Swarmed by reporters as he left the police station, Frenchy brushed off the notion that he might do harm to either Gedeon woman and offered a theory of his own.

  “I never fight with anybody,” he proclaimed. “I am a gentleman. I have never caused trouble for anybody, especially any woman. To Ronnie I was like the papa. The uncle. We were friends. No, I did not kill Ronnie Gedeon, that beautiful girl. No, I did not kill her good, hard-working mama nor this lodger of theirs, a man I do not know from Adam.”

  “Then who did?” asked a reporter.

  “I tell you,” said Frenchy. “Mama Gedeon was a very stingy woman. Somebody killed her for her money. The other two were killed because they hear or see something.”24

  With his most promising suspects cleared, Lyons offered a somber assessment to the press. “We are up against a stone wall and will just have to keep working on in the dark until we get something we can sink our teeth into,” he declared, mixing his metaphors in a way that might have seemed amusing under less tragic circumstances.25

  One man who claimed to have some knowledge of the culprit was the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith. A silver-tongued hate-monger who preached racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry, Smith—over the radio, on the lecture circuit, and in the pages of his monthly magazine, The Cross and the Flag—called for the forced shipment of America’s “black savages” to Africa, the deportation of its Jews to Russia, and the “halt of immigration by Asiatics,” all in the service of purging the country of its insidious non-Aryan elements. He also railed ceaselessly against the “Bolshevik menace,” also known in his parlance as “Christ-hating Muscovites.”