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

by Schechter, Harold

  On Monday evening, the day after the massacre, Smith delivered one of his rabble-rousing diatribes to the Men’s Club of St. Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, in the course of which he referred to the dominant news story of the day. “I charge that the crime which was committed in Fiftieth Street in Manhattan, the murder of Veronica Gedeon, artists’ model, and two others, was committed by a sex-mad maniac,” he thundered, “part of the atheistic Communistic lawlessness which is gnawing at our social structure.” Reporting on his speech the following afternoon, the Post took an appropriately derisive tone. “Now we know the reason for the current wave of revolting sex crimes in New York City,” the paper jeered. “The Communists are to blame.”26

  One person the police were much interested in talking to was Lucy Beacco, the visiting friend of Ronnie’s who had been staying in the little bedroom where the bodies of the two Gedeon women were found. From a letter they discovered atop her bureau, investigators learned that she had gone to spend the Easter weekend with friends in North Adams, Massachusetts.

  Brought back to Manhattan late Monday afternoon, she was questioned by the police, then escorted to the crime scene by Detective Martin Owens, who instructed her to take a look around and tell him whether anything was missing. Aside from the sheets and pillowcase removed by the crime lab technicians, everything appeared to be where she’d left it. She was just about to leave when something caught her eye.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, pointing to the bureau. “I had a clock on there.”

  “When did you last see it?” asked Owens.

  “Friday night when I left for Massachusetts.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” said Beacco.

  Asked to describe it, the young woman said it was “a cheap clock, a Baby Ben. It didn’t cost more than two or three dollars.” Why anyone would bother to steal it was a mystery.27

  18

  * * *

  Murder Sells

  BY TUESDAY, THE TABLOID COVERAGE of the case had already reached a frenzied pitch, with the News devoting nine full pages to the story. Treating the tragedy as pure pop entertainment, the paper bestowed a snappy title on the crime—“The Murder of the Artist’s Model,” New York’s most thrilling “Drama of Death.” Under the headline “THE CAST IN ‘THE MURDER OF THE ARTIST’S MODEL,’ ” it even ran a Hollywood-style credit list, as though the principal figures in the case, including the victims, were merely actors playing roles in a movie melodrama:

  THE MODEL—Veronica Gedeon

  THE ROOMER—Lucy Beacco

  THE MOTHER—Mrs. Mary Gedeon

  THE LODGER—Frank Byrnes

  THE BOYFRIEND—Stephen Butter

  THE FATHER—Joseph Gedeon

  THE BEST FRIEND—Jean Karp

  THE KILLER—?1

  So unbridled was the tabloid’s “wallowing treatment of the murders” that—in response to a barrage of letters from indignant readers objecting to its focus on “morbid sensationalism”—Daily News publisher Joseph Medill Patterson was moved to defend his newspaper’s policy in a remarkable editorial. Titled “What Is the Best Story?” and accompanied by a pair of photographs—one of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the other of a half-naked Veronica Gedeon—the editorial contrasted the News’s cursory mention of an important Supreme Court decision handed down on Monday with its lip-smacking coverage of the Gedeon murders.

  Acknowledging that “the Supreme Court story was historically more significant,” Patterson nevertheless argued that his managing editor made the right decision by playing up the Gedeon tragedy. “Look at this murder story as a story,” he argued:

  The murders themselves were grisly and mysterious enough. But also they were committed against a background of light living and light loving, family complications, bootlegging, shadowy married friends of the victims, etc. Mystery story writers—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, the late Conan Doyle, or Edgar Allan Poe himself if he were alive—would revel in such an assortment of raw materials for a murder plot. And the resulting novel, play, or movie would sell. Murder sells papers, books, plays, because we are all fascinated by murder. It is a part of life—the most fatally intriguing part. And this is a murder story in real life.…Perhaps people should be more interested today in the Supreme Court than in the Gedeon murder, but we don’t think they are.2

  Two days later, as though to thumb its nose at snooty critics who condemned it for pandering to popular taste, the paper proudly ran a letter from a typical reader that perfectly validated Patterson’s point:

  I ain’t much of a hand at writing because my kids only a year ago taught me to write. But I want to tell you that I think your paper is darn good. I learnt to read from The News. I like them pictures of the beautiful murdered model and I tear them out of the paper and hang them on the wall. My wife gets mad, but ha ha. And them people who says your paper is not good is nuts, ha ha. —Delighted Customer3

  For its part, the Mirror played up the human-interest angle by running a voyeuristic True Confessions–style feature supposedly penned by Veronica’s boyfriend, Lincoln Hauser. Titled “Ronnie’s Fiancé Tells Love Tale,” the five-part series promised titillating revelations by the person who knew the “slain beauty” more “thoroughly” and “intimately” than anyone else.

  While portraying the “slain artist’s model” as a “sweet kid” who brought “dainty foods and flowers” to hospitalized friends, “loved the pageantry of the church,” avidly read “the classics and fine poetry,” and longed for “a home, children, and an orderly life,” the ostensible memoir mostly dished up juicy innuendoes about her life as a party girl. Ronnie “played the field and she played it recklessly and enjoyed every minute of it.” She “had a closet full of clothes. Some she bought herself and some were bought for her. A well-known insurance man frequently bought her beautiful gowns and accessories.” She “knew dozens of headwaiters by their first names. Sometimes her escorts were middle-aged men. She would come home sometimes at six or seven o’clock in the morning after a night in the finest clubs and hotels in the city.” In the studios where she posed in the nude, she met “prominent men and women and would be asked to join them in wild parties. Sometimes she went and sometimes she did not. She wanted to quit but invariably she would say that there was some kind of an excitement about it that she couldn’t shake off. She knew that it was the wrong thing to do but there was no way to get her to stop.”

  In the end, Hauser’s purported memoir was an epitome of tabloid cynicism, serving up sexual titillation under the guise of moral instruction: the cautionary fable of a good-hearted but unconstrained young woman who “played the field and played it recklessly” and paid the ultimate price for her promiscuous ways.4

  Tabloid publishers weren’t the only ones to indulge in the crass exploitation of the Beekman Hill tragedy. On the same day that Patterson’s editorial appeared, city newspapers began running an advertisement by the Segal Lock and Hardware Company. Beneath the bold-type warning “IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU!,” the ad showed a picture of the lock maker’s patented “jimmy-proof” dead bolt and a newspaper clipping headlined “TRIPLE MURDER IN GEDEON FLAT.”

  That the perpetrator of the Easter Sunday Massacre was no homicidal intruder but (as authorities had made clear from the start) an acquaintance of the Gedeons made no difference. Throughout the city—but particularly in Beekman Place and adjacent neighborhoods—locksmiths reported doing a “land-office business.” In a single day, Charles Negroponte, who ran a shop at 204 East 50th Street and whose “normal sales averaged six or so daily,” sold “seventy-five new locks.” His merchandise was moving even faster than it had a year earlier, after the neighborhood’s previous atrocity. “When Mrs. Titterton was killed, things got good,” said Negroponte. “We never expected to see days like that again.” Compared to the “swell business” he was doing now, however, Negroponte viewed the “post-Titterton rush as a mere flurry.”5

  On Tuesd
ay afternoon, police announced that Dr. Erasmus Hudson—a New York physician and fingerprint expert who had gained national renown for his work on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case—had managed to raise a bloody thumbprint from the bathroom door of the Gedeons’ apartment by means of his pioneering silver nitrate technique. Specialists from the Bureau of Criminal Identification at police headquarters were in the process of comparing the print to those taken from the many individuals who had already been called in for questioning. Kear and his cohorts were particularly eager to see if the telltale print matched up with the thumb mark of the man who was rapidly becoming their prime suspect: Joseph Gedeon.6

  As much as anything else, it was Gedeon’s weird indifference to the murders that had piqued the suspicions of the detectives. His bizarrely blasé behavior was on full display on Tuesday. Even as the bodies of his wife and daughter were being transported from the Bellevue morgue to James McCabe’s funeral parlor on West 90th Street—where a crowd of morbid curiosity seekers was already gathering on the sidewalk for a glimpse of the celebrity corpses—the little upholsterer was pursuing his daily routines as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

  Emerging from his shop at around eight in the morning, Gedeon—trailed by a mob of reporters and a pair of detectives assigned to keep watch on him—strolled to Diamond Dry Cleaners at 547 Third Avenue, where he dropped off a gray topcoat to be sponged and pressed. He then proceeded to the Willow cafeteria on 34th Street, stopping first at a corner newsstand to pick up the morning tabloids.

  Seating himself at a table, he flirted with the waitress as he put in his usual order of oatmeal and coffee, then settled back with the papers, pursing his mouth in apparent distaste as he pored over the many photos of his scantily clad daughter. From surrounding tables, reporters began peppering him with questions. Asked if he had any theories about the killer, he replied without hesitation.

  The culprit, he declared, was “a married millionaire who wanted to have an affair with Ronnie. I don’t know his name. I just know he came from Boston. He offered Ronnie a big car, an apartment, and jewelry if she would sleep with him. But she turned him down. I believe his frustration caused him to do it. Not that he killed her himself. He must have hired someone else to do it.”

  How, someone asked, could he take the tragedy so calmly?

  “I’m a fatalist,” he replied with a shrug. “Also a naturalist. I take things naturally. Everything occurs because of causation. Whatever happens has to happen, and so why get excited about it?”7

  There were, of course, certain things that did upset him. He lamented the fact that his wife carried no life insurance. “She always told me she didn’t want anyone to profit her death. I thought differently,” said Gedeon. “My idea is that a man and wife should be insured in each other’s names for the benefit of the domestic partnership.”

  Still, he wasn’t overly concerned about his finances. “A girl with five thousand dollars wants to marry me right now,” he explained. “But she’s ugly. I couldn’t marry an ugly woman. My idea of the right wife for me is a woman between thirty-five and forty, pretty and full of pep, but with good sense. I wouldn’t care whether she was a blonde or brunette.”

  Gedeon continued to chat away merrily until one of the reporters began to press him on his alibi. “That’s enough,” he growled, leaping from his chair and bolting from the restaurant. After a quick trip by cab to McCabe’s funeral parlor—where he dropped off the burial clothes that Ethel had tearfully picked out for Mary and Ronnie—he returned to his shop and locked himself inside.

  Shortly afterward, a group of his friends showed up, all fellow Hungarians, including Paul Nadanyi, editor of the local Hungarian newspaper, the Daily Népszava. After a few glasses of schnapps, Gedeon agreed to be interviewed by Nadanyi. His “mood fluctuating from gloom to belligerence,” he blamed his travails on his wayward daughter and overindulgent wife. As for the police, who clearly still had him under surveillance, he expressed nothing but defiance: “The cops can’t break me,” he said, shaking a fist. “I have seven lives.”8

  From the sidewalk below his second-story shop, reporters called up to Gedeon that his alibi had been shaken. Going to the door, he was told that the owner of Corrigan’s Bar and Grill, Cal Parliapiano—who had originally corroborated Gedeon’s account of his whereabouts at the time of the murders—had “changed his story and now says he’s not sure you were in his place all the time you said you were.” Though the barkeep had seen Gedeon at the skee ball machine twice that evening—when he arrived for work at 7:00 p.m. and when he left around midnight—he couldn’t say for certain “whether he was there all during the intervening hours.”

  Hearing this news, Gedeon erupted into “geysers of wrath.” “You’re lying, he’s lying or you both are crazy as hell!” he screamed. Gathering up his buddies, he shoved his way through the clamoring mob and made his way to the curb, where he and his friends piled into a taxi and took off.

  They spent the next five hours drinking schnapps and playing gin rummy at his friend Herman’s apartment. At around ten, Gedeon felt in the mood for his favorite pastime. Taking a cab to Radio City Bowling and Billiards, across Sixth Avenue from the Music Hall and open twenty-four hours, they bowled merrily all night, Gedeon using his usual sixteen-pound ball and racking up consistent scores in the 200-to-225 range.

  They were still going at it at seven in the morning when a bunch of reporters—tipped off about Gedeon’s location—burst into the place. Making their escape, Gedeon and his friends took a cab to the Beekman Tavern on Second Avenue and 50th Street, around the corner from his deceased wife’s apartment. “Done up like a Bavarian beer garden,” it had been Mary’s favorite watering hole.

  Taking a table in back, they lit cigarettes and ordered beers. Gedeon was just starting on his second glass when the newspapermen showed up. One of the photographers—John Reidy of the Mirror—pointed his Speed Graphic at Gedeon. His face a mask of rage, the little man flung the contents of his glass at Reidy, then cocked his arm and—as the cameraman pressed the shutter button—hurled the glass itself.

  A melee erupted. Chairs were thrown, beer steins shattered, punches exchanged. As he scuffled with Reidy, Gedeon’s pince-nez eyeglasses were knocked to the floor and trampled to pieces. Finally, a pair of beat cops rushed in and put a halt to the fracas.

  Gedeon was escorted back to his shop, where a “fresh batch of newshounds—the day shift—was waiting.” Standing on his stoop, the little upholsterer—his clothes and hair disheveled, his glasses gone—hurled curses at the reporters and gestured his contempt by drawing a finger across his throat. Then he disappeared inside, bolted the door behind him, stripped off his clothes, and—exhausted from his long night of carousing—collapsed on his cot.

  He managed only three hours of sleep. Shortly before 11:00 a.m., he was awakened by a pounding on his door. It was Detective Sidney Lecher, sent there with orders from District Attorney William C. Dodge to bring Joseph Gedeon in for another round of questioning.9

  To the disappointment of the police, who were hoping that the bloody fingerprint found on the bathroom door of the apartment would tie Gedeon to the killings, the crime lab experts had been unable to come up with a match. Despite the lack of physical evidence against him, however, investigators were increasingly convinced that Ronnie’s father was the culprit. Apart from his bizarrely unfeeling behavior in the wake of the killings, there was the revised testimony of Cal Parliapiano, which had punctured a hole in the upholsterer’s supposedly “airtight alibi.” Gedeon’s skee ball partner that night, a linotype operator named Thomas Kelly, could only “swear to his presence from midnight to closing, while the bartender, Eddie Murray, didn’t remember seeing him at all. ‘It was one of the busiest nights we ever had. They were lined up two deep at the bar.’ ”10 That left a gap between 7:00 p.m. and midnight when Gedeon’s whereabouts could not be independently confirmed. Nor could anyone testify to his movements after 3:00 a.m.

  The
re was also the matter of his clothing. Several patrons of Corrigan’s had told detectives that they recalled seeing Gedeon in a shabby brown suit on the night of the killings. Since Sunday, however, he had been wearing a gray-checked jacket and pants, leading police to suspect that “the brown suit might have been discarded because it had been stained with blood.”11

  Casting Gedeon’s character in a particularly unsavory light was his supposed sexual degeneracy. In the tabloids, he was now routinely described as “a student of erotica”—“a French postcard fancier” who lived in a “sleazy bower of love shelved with risqué books,” used “pictures of naked women to satiate his queer animal desires,” and had deserted his wife “in favor of solitude and sex practices more bizarre than the marriage bed.” Retained by the Daily News to provide expert commentary on the unfolding case, Dr. Carleton Simon—former Special Deputy Police Commissioner of New York and author of such works as Homosexualists and Sex Crimes, The Menace of Dope, and The Negro Criminal—flatly declared that “Gedeon’s behavior is certainly not that of a normal man.” The evidence? “He likes to read about sex and treasures photographs of nude women.”12

  Certainly he had the physical strength to perpetrate the murders. Though he was slight of stature with a “mousy appearance,” he had developed enormously powerful hands, partly from years of “pulling cloth and leather” in his upholstery work, partly from his addiction to bowling (he boasted of routinely playing seventy games in a single night). His favorite parlor trick was bending a beer-bottle cap in half between his thumb and forefinger.13

  As for a motive, the current thinking among the members of the Homicide Squad was that—having discovered “that Mary Gedeon and roomer Frank Byrnes had a relationship that transcended the conventional”—Gedeon had “killed his wife and Byrnes in a fit of jealousy and added Ronnie because his disapproval of her way of life amounted to a fixation.”14