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

by Schechter, Harold

  Determined to wrest a confession from “the extremely odd little man,” investigators proceeded to subject him “to a grilling of such intensity as had seldom, if ever, been equaled in any New York homicide investigation.”15 Sequestered in a “bare and forbidding” room on the third floor of the East 51st Street police station, Gedeon was seated on a hard-backed wooden chair, a blazing light trained on his face. Working in teams, his interrogators—including at times Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro, Deputy Police Commissioner Harold Fowler, Deputy Chief Inspector Kear, and District Attorney Dodge himself—pounded away at him for hours on end. Occasionally, the pounding was more than verbal. Like other suspects subjected to the third degree in those days, Gedeon ended up with some ugly contusions.

  Right from the start, his questioners made it clear that they no longer believed his alibi. “You claim you were in Corrigan’s the whole time,” said Kear. “But now the bar owner says he only saw you there at seven p.m. and at midnight.”

  Gedeon was unfazed. “He was busy that night. Maybe he didn’t see me continuously. But I was there in the crowd.” As for the people who said he was dressed in a brown suit, “they’re mistaken,” said Gedeon. “I had on this same gray suit as now.”

  At one point, Kear produced the gray suede glove found at the murder scene and asked Gedeon to try it on. Though it fit easily, the upholsterer insisted that it wasn’t his. “I’m a poor man,” he said. “I haven’t owned any gloves for two or three years.”

  “Considering that your wife and daughter have been horribly killed, you’ve shown little grief,” said Kear.

  “I’m always that way,” Gedeon answered. “Things hurt me deep, but inside.”

  “You didn’t love your wife?”

  Gedeon’s answer was harsh. “She was an ignorant woman. She didn’t know how to bring up her children. But I wouldn’t kill her.”

  “Did you love Veronica?”

  “She was never dutiful to me,” Gedeon replied. “I paid twenty dollars for the Book of Knowledge when she was little. She wouldn’t study it. All she wanted to do was go to movies. But Ethel, my other daughter, she read the book. She was a good girl.”

  Despite the medical examiner’s finding that neither woman had been sexually assaulted, the interrogators returned again and again to Gedeon’s supposedly aberrant psychology, the main symptoms of which were his unabashed interest in sex and the pleasure he derived from pictures of bare-breasted women.

  “You are a student of erotica, are you not?” asked Assistant DA Marro.

  “I have pictures of naked women in my room and books on unusual sex practices,” Gedeon admitted. “But that wouldn’t make me commit murders,” he sensibly added.

  “Why do you have a full length mirror attached to your bathroom door?” he was asked.

  “Oh, I am very much interested in nature.”

  “You mean you’re interested in nude women?”

  “Well, that’s a part of nature. Yes, I like to see them.”

  “Why is the mirror on the door?”

  “Well, I like to make love to women and to be able to see how they look when I kiss them. I love all nature—anything that is beautiful. Not only women but trees, flowers, birds.”

  “You don’t regard yourself as being abnormal in your attitude towards women?” Marro pressed.

  “No,” Gedeon insisted. “I’m not abnormal at all. I’m just a man who appreciates life.”

  “Why have you got all those pictures of nude women around your room?”

  “What’s so odd about that?” asked Gedeon. “They aren’t nasty pictures. They are out of art magazines.”

  “You have some peculiarities about the relations of men and women, haven’t you?” Marro persisted.

  “Well, I think there is always a conflict between the sexes. Women want to dominate men, but men shouldn’t let them do that.”

  “You mean it’s the business of men to control women?”

  “If you don’t control them,” said Gedeon, “they take advantage of you.”

  “What did you quarrel with your wife about when you and she separated?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Gedeon said. “They were not respectful to me at home. So I said, ‘All right, I’ll leave. You live your own life and I’ll live mine.’ ”

  “You didn’t hate your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Well,” said Gedeon, “she was my wife.”

  Hour after hour, the cross-examination went on. For all the effort to break him, however, the little upholsterer stood firm.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake,” he kept repeating. “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t kill my family.”16

  Despite his denials, authorities remained convinced that it was only a matter of time before Gedeon cracked. Emerging from the isolated interrogation room late Wednesday afternoon, District Attorney Dodge was surrounded by newsmen. “I can state positively that we have a definite suspect,” he said with a grin.

  “Though he refused to comment further,” the News reported, “his implication was obvious that the police were ready to break ‘The Murder of the Artist’s Model.’ ” Screaming headlines in the tabloids left no doubt that Joseph Gedeon was about to be charged with the atrocity: “HOLD FATHER OF MURDERED MODEL,” “POLICE TIGHTEN NET ON SLAIN MODEL’S DAD,” “GEDEON’S ALIBI TORN BY GAPS,” “GEDEON FACES ARREST.” One paper went so far as to publish a close-up of the little upholsterer’s eyes under the caption “EYES OF A MURDERER,” while the front page of the Mirror carried the photo of Gedeon—his face contorted with rage—about to hurl his beer glass at the cameraman.17

  Gedeon’s situation looked even grimmer when, shortly after Dodge made his announcement of an imminent break in the case, a team of detectives was dispatched to the upholsterer’s shop to search for several items. One was the mate to the incriminating gray glove. Another was the brown suit Gedeon had reportedly been wearing on the night of the murder. The third was the ostensible weapon used to kill Frank Byrnes: what the tabloids, in their typically inflammatory style, had taken to calling the “Gedeon Death Needle.”

  After the News ran a picture of the varying sized needles confiscated during the initial search of Gedeon’s workplace, an upholsterer named Sam Kross got in touch with the police, having spotted something strange in the photograph. According to Kross, Gedeon’s supposedly complete set lacked a vital component: a twelve-inch “regulator” (as the needles are known in the trade). Questioned about the absent tool, Gedeon could only say that he must have lost it.18

  Despite a concerted effort that included the Department of Sanitation—which was enlisted to search “all the sewers in the area bordered by Forty-eighth and Fifty-third Streets from Third Avenue to the East River”—the vanished foot-long “regulator” was never found. Nor did the police turn up the missing glove. They did find a threadbare brown suit jacket, but Gedeon dismissed it with a snort as an “old rag” he hadn’t worn in years and insisted that he had no idea where the matching vest and pants were, having discarded them long ago.19

  Quite unexpectedly, police found something else besides the old jacket while ransacking Gedeon’s premises: a nickel-plated .38-caliber revolver loaded with two bullets and buried in a box of horsehair in a corner of his workroom. Taken to his shop and confronted with the weapon, Gedeon spun a wildly improbable tale, claiming that, on the steamship that brought him from Hungary twenty-nine years earlier, he had met a man who “gave me the gun and asked me to hold onto it for him.” Nearly three decades later, Gedeon was still waiting for its rightful owner “to call for it.”

  As for how it came to be hidden in the horsehair, the little man explained with a smirk that he had kept it in his bureau drawer until recently, when a “big, blonde hustler” dropped in to keep him company one night and happened upon the pistol. “So I hid it, figuring that trouble might come of a girl like that knowing where there was a loaded gun handy.”20


  Since Gedeon had initially denied owning a gun, “detectives were elated at having caught him in such a definite lie,” the New York Post reported. They were happy for another reason, too. By then, the upholsterer had already endured a brutal twenty-four-hour interrogation. Without formally charging him with a crime, police couldn’t hold him indefinitely. Since the gun was unlicensed, however, Gedeon was now subject to arrest for violating New York State’s Sullivan Act, a felony punishable by up to five years in jail.

  He would be formally charged with the crime on Thursday evening. Before that happened, however, his inquisitors—partly out of basic human decency, partly in the hope that the emotional stress of the occasion “might break the stoicism with which he had thus far resisted their efforts”—granted him permission to attend the funeral of his wife and daughter.21

  Bundled into a police car with four detectives, Gedeon was driven uptown to West 90th Street, where a mob of the morbidly curious—estimated at between three and five thousand people—thronged the sidewalks outside McCabe’s funeral parlor. Others watched from the surrounding rooftops, fire escapes, and apartment windows. When the police car pulled up and the wizened little man climbed out, a shout went up: “There he is! There’s Gedeon!” Shielding his face with his hat, he was hustled through the surging mob by his police guards.

  Inside the chapel, the air was heavy with the scent of dozens of wreaths, including one from the Society of Illustrators, “in whose show,” as the News helpfully reminded its reader, “Ronnie had a part when it was raided by police for indecency.” Other floral tributes were from “artists for whom Veronica had posed, from fellow models, and from her many boyfriends.”22

  The bodies of mother and daughter lay head to head in open satin-lined coffins. Ronnie wore a white satin gown with an orchid corsage pinned to her left shoulder. Mary was garbed in blue satin with a corsage of roses and lilies of the valley. Each had a rosary placed in her right hand.

  The little chapel was crowded, though mostly with news photographers and “determined curiosity seekers” who had managed to wangle their way inside. There were only a handful of actual mourners: Ronnie’s ex-husband, Bobby Flower; her supposed fiancé, Lincoln Hauser, and his pal Stephen Butter; her two closest friends, Jean Karp and a model named Sarilla Bell (who had also taken part in the notorious Society of Illustrators stag show). Ethel was in such a state of collapse that she had to be taken into another room. Her husband, Joe Kudner, sat through the brief service with his parents at his side.

  After asking the detectives to clear the room of strangers, Gedeon cast a brief glance at Veronica, then stood beside his wife’s bier for several minutes before seating himself in a folding chair behind his son-in-law. He sat dry-eyed through the service, conducted by the Reverend Father Joseph Daley of the nearby Church of St. Gregory the Great. “Enter not onto judgment of thy servants,” intoned the priest. “From the gate of hell deliver their souls.…Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.”

  When the prayers were completed, Gedeon stepped forward, glanced first at Mary, then at Veronica, and hurried back to his seat. If police were hoping that the sight of his murdered wife and daughter would cause him to crack and spill out a confession, they were disappointed. The little upholsterer remained utterly calm, in marked contrast to the emotion displayed by Joe Kudner and the trio of young men who had known and loved Veronica—Bobby Flower, Linc Hauser, and Stephen Butter. Each of them leaned over the casket and kissed the corpses. There were tears in the eyes of the three young men, while Kudner wept openly.

  Fifteen policemen struggled to hold back the crowds as Gedeon emerged from the funeral parlor and was hustled into a waiting squad car. Another smaller crowd of morbid spectators—this one numbering an estimated three hundred people—was waiting at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Yonkers, where the two caskets were to be buried, one on top of the other, in a grave owned by Ethel Kudner.

  Officiating at the burial was the mortician, James McCabe, who led the mourners in the Lord’s Prayer and three Hail Marys. As Gedeon watched the bodies of his wife and daughter disappear into the earth, he finally lost his “expressionless calm.” Bursting into tears, he stumbled toward Ethel, who sat weeping in a wooden folding chair.

  “Oh, Father! Father!” she cried, stretching out her arms and drawing him into the chair beside her. As he laid his head on her shoulder, his body convulsed with sobs, she threw her worn raccoon coat partly over him and held him in a close embrace. They sat there, weeping, until the brief service was over.23

  Immediately after the burial, Gedeon was returned to the East 51st Street police station, where he was grilled for another six hours before being formally placed under arrest for the gun charge. Driven downtown to police headquarters, he was fingerprinted and placed in Cell No. 1, his shoelaces, necktie, and belt confiscated as a routine precaution against suicide. Apart from the respite to attend the funeral, he had endured thirty-three hours of brutal, nonstop interrogation and—except for the brief, aborted doze following his nightlong carouse with his friends—had gone without sleep for more than two days. Though a large, metal-caged ceiling light glared directly overhead, Gedeon fell into a profound slumber the moment he stretched out on the cot.

  Awakened at 5:25 the next morning, he was given some coffee and cake, which he devoured with relish. At promptly 9:00 a.m., wearing his neatly buttoned double-breasted overcoat and a green hat cocked at a jaunty angle, he was brought upstairs to the lineup room, where he stood on the brightly lit platform and freely confessed to the unlawful possession of the handgun. Back to his old defiant self, he wore a disdainful smirk throughout the proceedings. Before leaving the stage, he topped off his performance by bowing deeply to his police audience and saluting them with a sardonic “I thank you—gentlemen.”

  Brought into Felony Court for his preliminary arraignment, he was allowed a brief consultation with his lawyer, Peter L. F. Sabbatino, a former assistant district attorney retained by Ethel. Seated on a court bench, Gedeon described, with accompanying gestures, the third-degree treatment he had received at the hands of the police: how they had yanked his ears, bent his arms nearly to breaking over the back of his chair, slugged him in the stomach, and battered him about the face and head.

  Sabbatino’s adversary that morning was the man now occupying his former position, Assistant DA Raymond Leo. Appearing before Magistrate Michael Ford, the two lawyers got involved in a battle that quickly “approached the fisticuffs stage.” Describing the upholsterer as a “possible suspect in the triple Gedeon murders,” Leo asked the judge to set bail at $15,000. Sabbatino sneered that the police were “barking up the wrong tree.” Since his client had no criminal record and was there on a mere misdemeanor charge, Sabbatino demanded a nominal bail of fifty dollars.

  When the judge sided with the prosecutor and set bail at $10,000, Sabbatino erupted. “Your Honor,” he said, “my client has been subjected to the third degree. They used the old back room tactics on him. He was kicked and pulled and dragged and slapped for hours. He’s a mass of bruises.” Acceding to Sabbatino’s demand, Magistrate Ford ordered an immediate physical examination of the prisoner by three court-appointed MDs: Gedeon’s personal doctor, Barnett Dobrow; Ralph J. Carotenuto, the Tombs’ resident physician; and Dr. Perry Lichtenstein, who was attached to the DA’s office.

  Informed of Sabbatino’s charges, Police Commissioner Valentine brushed them off. “I don’t believe it,” he told reporters. “It’s the usual allegation of an attorney whose client is in serious trouble. At the beginning of the investigation, I instructed Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons to see that no one laid a hand on Gedeon. He’s the victim of a double hernia and a frail little man.”

  Asked about the visible bruises on Gedeon’s face, the commissioner had a ready response. “I’m told the suspect’s injuries were inflicted when he bumped into a swinging door at the East 51st Street Station. And the old fellow was mixed up in a number of brawls with photographers when he
was out of police custody.

  “His eyeglasses were smashed in one of those brawls,” Valentine added, “and it was the police who chipped in to buy him the new glasses he wore in court. That was done out of pity. The old man was staggering around blind as a bat.”24

  Though Gedeon still topped the official list of suspects and the tabloids continued to bay for his blood, not everyone was convinced of his guilt. One doubter was John Shuttleworth, editor of True Detective magazine. On the morning of the little upholsterer’s arraignment, Shuttleworth asked one of his writers, Frank Preston, to “check with Gedeon’s neighbors. See if they know anything about his movements on Saturday night.”

  It didn’t take long for Preston to track down thirty-one-year-old Anthony Rocco at a smoke-filled pool hall below street level in the East 20s. After some prodding, Rocco, a former amateur boxer who occupied a tiny flat above Gedeon’s workshop, admitted that he had seen the upholsterer on Sunday morning at five minutes past 3:00 a.m.

  “I was coming home late from a party and he was just reeling in,” Rocco recalled. “He looked to be pretty drunk. I said ‘Good morning’ just as he was putting his key in the lock. He mumbled back, ‘Good morning.’ I saw him go into his room and I went upstairs.”

  When asked how he could be “so sure about the time,” Rocco explained that he “always set my alarm clock by my wrist watch and when I got upstairs it was exactly seven minutes after three.”

  “Why haven’t you told the police about this?’ asked Preston.

  “Because I didn’t want to get into a jam,” Rocco said.

  After convincing the ex-pug that he had nothing to worry about, Preston rushed him down to the Centre Street headquarters, where Rocco related his story to the police, corroborating Gedeon’s alibi that he had returned straight home from Corrigan’s on the night of the murder.25

  Later that afternoon, Sabbatino was back in court, brandishing the report of the three physicians, who had found unmistakable signs that Gedeon had in fact been manhandled during his thirty-three-hour ordeal. The little man’s “injuries included abrasions to the lower jaw, scratches behind the right ear, a black-and-blue left ear, abrasions and contusions above the right eye, and black-and-blue marks on the chest and back of the neck.”