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

by Schechter, Harold

  As he later explained to reporters, Whalen began to wonder “what I would do if I were in Irwin’s position.” To begin with—contrary to what Commissioner Valentine believed—he would leave the city as quickly as possible. He “pictured himself trying to get out of town, lugging two heavy suitcases and lacking enough money to travel by taxicab.” The “most natural thing,” he concluded, “would be to go to a railroad station and check the bags.”

  Before joining the NYPD a decade earlier, Whalen had worked as a baggage clerk in the checkroom of Grand Central Station and knew that pieces of unclaimed luggage sometimes offered up “fertile secrets for the police.” Among the items found during his time there were “a number of revolvers, a complete opium layout, several large quantities of silverware, and two stillborn babies.”

  With Captain Dowd’s permission, Whalen immediately set about examining “every piece of luggage in the checkrooms at Grand Central, Penn Station, and at bus and subway lockers.” Though he initially came up empty-handed, he couldn’t shake his conviction that Irwin had stashed his bags somewhere before taking flight. “How a fugitive from justice could openly carry a suitcase which had received so much publicity was beyond me,” he explained.

  Returning to Grand Central and enlisting the help of a baggage clerk, he went through the checkroom again. His persistence paid off. At roughly 8:45 p.m. on April 26, 1937, Whalen came upon a pair of battered suitcases, one held shut with a knotted old belt. Among the contents were an artist’s sketchbook bearing Irwin’s name, a box of business cards printed with the inscription “Robert Irwin, Sculptor,” various newspaper clippings on the Easter Sunday Massacre, and a cheap Baby Ben alarm clock promptly identified by Lucy Beacco as the one taken from the tiny bedroom where the bodies of Ronnie and Mary Gedeon had been found.

  Though the clock was a particularly important find—the first piece of physical evidence directly linking Irwin to the crime—the recovery of the suitcases would play no role in his capture. It did, however, confirm Detective Whalen’s intuition. Commissioner Valentine was wrong. Robert Irwin, the Mad Sculptor of Beekman Place, had fled the city.21

  Part V

  The Defender

  21

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  Murder in Times Square

  BY THE TIME DETECTIVE WHALEN embarked on his search for the missing suitcases, the tabloids had run out of stories to report—or invent—about the Easter Sunday triple slaying. Happily for lovers of lurid homicides, mid-April brought a juicy new murder that—while not quite up to the sensationalistic standards set by the Irwin case—provided the public with a week or so of morbid titillation.

  A few minutes before two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, April 18, Miss Moya Engels, a nightclub performer known for her Hawaiian hula-hula act, arrived at the WOV radio station building, just east of Times Square, where she had reserved rehearsal space to practice a new routine. The door to the third-floor studio she had engaged—No. 306—was closed but unlocked. No sooner had she stepped inside than she froze in confusion. On the opposite side of the twenty-five-by-forty-foot room, a pair of woman’s feet, shod in black oxfords, protruded from beneath the gray rayon wall-curtains used as soundproofing. “I thought the girl had fainted from dancing,” Engels later told reporters. “She was groaning and breathing heavily. Then I pulled aside the drapes and looked at her.” At her first glimpse of the woman, Engels let out a scream and ran from the studio to seek help.

  Summoned by the elderly elevator operator, Paul Klein, two radio patrolmen, Officers Walter Rowley and George H. Stevenson, arrived on the scene within minutes. The beautiful chestnut-haired victim, still clinging to life, had been savagely bludgeoned with a claw hammer that lay on the floor a few feet from the entrance to the studio. She was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, where she managed to survive for another six hours before succumbing to her injuries—“a compound fracture of the skull and lacerations of the brain,” according to the findings of Assistant Medical Examiner Milton Helpern.

  From her Social Security card and other items found in her purse, her identity was quickly established: Julia Nussenbaum, twenty-four years of age, originally of Bridgeport, Connecticut, currently residing at 439 West 123rd Street with a roommate, Miss Dorothy Hunkins. Within a short time, investigators had uncovered other key facts. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and an accomplished concert violinist, Julia had traded the symphony hall for the vaudeville stage two and a half years earlier. Adopting the stage name Tania Lubova, she had joined an eight-member troupe, consisting of five musicians and three dancers, that had enjoyed considerable success on the midwestern Orpheum Circuit. More recently, she had teamed up with an accordionist-singer named Maria Montiglo. They were scheduled to leave the next day for a two-week engagement at the Esquire, Toronto’s best-known nightclub.

  According to her roommate, someone had telephoned Julia late Saturday night, asking her to be at the Times Square rehearsal studio at ten o’clock Sunday morning. Dressed in a rose-patterned blue dress and gray-blue spring coat and carrying her seven-hundred-dollar violin in a zippered leather bag, she had left the apartment at around 8:45 a.m.

  The elevator operator Paul Klein told police that, at roughly 9:45 a.m., he had taken a tall, powerfully built man up to the third floor and seen him head down the narrow hallway to the studio. Julia had arrived around ten o’clock. About fifteen minutes later, the man rang for the elevator and descended to the street. Klein had noticed nothing strange about his behavior. Silence fell on the building until, four hours later, Moya Engels showed up.

  From a telltale track of blood that ran in a sweeping curve across the floor of the studio, police were able to reconstruct the crime. Evidently, Julia, still wearing her coat and hat, had seated herself on one of the wooden chairs near the south wall of the studio, placing her violin case on the floor beside her. She and her assailant, clearly someone she knew, had talked for a few minutes. Suddenly, without warning, he had produced the claw hammer and delivered a savage barrage of blows to her forehead. Bleeding profusely, she had crumpled to the floor. In a frenzied attempt to hide her body, he had dragged her to a little dressing room on the opposite side of the studio but, finding it locked, had hauled her toward the drapes and shoved her beneath them.

  From interviews with the dead girl’s stricken father and other family members and friends, police quickly identified a suspect: thirty-one-year-old Mischa Ross. Born Mischa Rosenbaum in Danitzer, Russia, not far from Kiev, Ross, a talented mandolin player, had come to the United States with his brother Zachary in 1925 as part of a touring Russian orchestra. They had settled in New York after obtaining forged birth certificates indicating that they had been born in Montreal. In 1931, while playing in an orchestra in a Catskills hotel, he had romanced the adolescent daughter of the owner, Nathan Nessolovitz. The two were married and had a daughter, Adele. Three and a half years later, Ross deserted his family and moved into the Hotel Normandie on West 46th Street, while his wife and child went to live at his father-in-law’s house in the village of Woodridge, not far from Monticello, New York. Ross visited them occasionally when not on tour.

  It was Ross who put together the vaudeville troupe that Julia had joined in early 1935. Traveling in her company throughout the Midwest, he had fallen in love with the beautiful young violinist. Apparently Julia was receptive to his “amorous advances” until she discovered that he was still married, at which point she broke off their affair. She remained friendly with him, however, and allowed him to serve as her theatrical agent. For his part, Ross had continued to obsess over Julia. Interviewed by Homicide Squad detectives who had come to inform him of his daughter’s death, Julia’s anguished father told a story of increasing harassment by Ross.

  “Julia didn’t know what to do,” Nussenbaum said between sobs. “The man kept continually making advances to her. I went to New York with my brother-in-law and asked him to please leave Julia alone if he really loved her. When I told him that Julia would never marry him,
he said that ‘only over my grave will she marry anyone else.’ ”

  Just a few hours after a five-state alarm was sent out, State Troopers W. M. Lewis and Edward Smith picked up Ross at his father-in-law’s house. Drunk to the point of stupefaction, he was locked up overnight in the Sullivan County jail without his tie, belt, or shoelaces. The next morning, as tabloid headlines trumpeted the city’s latest crime sensation—“MURDER IN THE RADIO STUDIO,” “TIMES SQUARE HAMMER SLAYING,” “BLUDGEONING DEATH OF THE BEAUTIFUL VIOLINIST”—Detectives Bradley Hammond and John J. Quinn of the NYPD drove him back to Manhattan.

  Bleary-eyed, disheveled, and still barely coherent, Ross screamed hysterically while being booked. When newspaper cameramen tried to take his picture, he threw himself facedown on the floor at the feet of District Attorney Dodge, who was photographed looking visibly embarrassed as he stood over the sobbing, prostrate prisoner. Under an intense grilling by Dodge and others, Ross admitted that he “might have hit Julia to defend himself,” though he claimed to have virtually no memory of the events. “I remember seeing the elevator operator on my way to Room 306,” he said. “Julia was there. As to who was there first, I can’t remember because I’d been drinking. I remember that Julia and I were alone and that she argued with me. She hit me with a stick. I don’t remember what kind of stick but I must have taken it from her and hit her with it. I don’t remember hitting her. The next thing I remember I was on a bus and I fell asleep. I don’t remember how I got to Woodridge, my wife’s home, but I got there. I don’t remember anything until I woke up in jail in Monticello.”

  It wasn’t until the close of the interrogation that Ross was told that the girl had died six hours after the discovery of her body. He uttered a terrified shriek and babbled, “No! No! My God, I didn’t kill her. I’d never do anything like that to Julia. She was always so good to me, so kind, so gentle.” Sobbing her name over and over, he was placed in the “suicide cell” overnight.

  By then, police knew that the soundproof studio where Julia was attacked had been reserved that Sunday morning by a man named Ross. Convinced that the crime was a coldly premeditated act—that the beautiful young violinist “was deliberately lured to the rehearsal room so that she might be killed in the Sunday morning quiet of a deserted office building”—Dodge announced on Monday afternoon that he would “go before the grand jury as promptly as possible and ask for this man’s indictment for first degree murder.”1

  Ross’s lawyer, Joseph Perlstein of 1440 Broadway, specialized in theatrical contracts, not criminal defense. With Mischa facing the death penalty, his brother Zachary immediately turned to the man who had represented one hundred thirty clients charged with first-degree murder and saved every one from the electric chair: Samuel S. Leibowitz.

  When Ross was arraigned in Homicide Court on Tuesday, April 21, Leibowitz was at his side. Following the proceedings, the Great Defender spoke to reporters. His comments made it clear that he intended to pursue the time-honored tactic of smearing the female victim. Far from being a sexually obsessed stalker, Ross—so Leibowitz suggested—was a loving husband and father whose marriage had run into trouble and who wanted nothing more than to reconcile with his wife. When, during their fateful encounter on Sunday morning, he informed Julia that he was ending their affair and returning to his family, the beautiful “love thief” had flown into a jealous rage and set upon him in a frenzy. Her death was the tragic outcome of the violent altercation she herself had provoked. “It’s an old, old story,” said Leibowitz, “that a woman cannot steal another woman’s husband without flirting with death.”

  Informed of Leibowitz’s remarks, Julia’s family—just returned from her burial at a Jewish cemetery in Fairfield—responded with outrage. “He won’t get away with that,” said her sister, Mrs. Edith Schnee, her voice shaking with indignation. “Ross was Julia’s booking agent and accompanist, that’s all. Their relationship wasn’t even platonic. She could scarcely endure his presence and spent most of her time trying to get him to let her alone.”

  Apprised of these remarks, Leibowitz issued a clarifying statement that did little to appease Julia’s family. “I do not want to be misunderstood as condoning the killing of a human being if the same was done unlawfully,” he said. “The relationship between the parties, such as it was, does not justify the taking of human life unlawfully. Nor do I want to paint this unfortunate girl as a sinner and the same time my client as a saint. However, it has been my observation that these triangle affairs eventually lead to tragedy. No woman, or man for that matter, can court another’s spouse without inviting disaster.”

  Whatever hope Leibowitz entertained of convincing a jury that Ross hadn’t planned Julia’s murder in advance was severely undermined on Tuesday afternoon, when James Cockerell, superintendent of the Hotel Normandie, identified the murder weapon as a hammer stolen from his tool chest the morning of the killing. He had left the tool chest on the floor beside a public telephone booth in the hotel lobby while he went off on an errand. As Cockerell headed out, he had noticed someone walking by the phone booth—Mischa Ross.

  By the time Ross came to trial on Monday, June 7, it was clear that escaping the chair was the best he could hope for. At Leibowitz’s urging—and with the consent of District Attorney Dodge—he pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of second-degree murder, carrying a penalty of twenty years in prison to life. Afterward, “his eyes sparkling with unconcealed happiness at being permitted to dodge a trial for first-degree murder,” he was taken into the adjoining jury room, where he calmly described to reporters how he had killed Julia Nussenbaum.

  “I didn’t think I loved her,” he said. “She was in love with me, though. She knew I was married but she loved me.”

  On the evening before the killing, he continued, a friend gave him a bottle of sweet red wine. The next morning, “I drank the whole bottle. It made me sort of light-headed.”

  As he started to leave the hotel for the studio, where he and Julia had arranged to meet, he spotted the hammer in the tool chest beside the telephone booth. “I took it with me,” he said, “more for a joke than anything else, I guess.”

  As soon as he and Julia met in the studio, they started arguing. They had quarreled frequently, he explained, “and always because I wanted to leave her and go back to my wife.” “She got very excited,” said Ross. “She slapped me. I told her if she felt that way, she should go ahead and kill me. I gave her the hammer. She hit me on the left shoulder and arm. I took the hammer away from her and hit her back. I don’t know how many times.

  “She fell to the floor. I don’t remember striking her after she fell. Maybe I did. I don’t know. I don’t remember trying to hide the body like the police say I did. I was in a daze. You fellows know how badly a whole bottle of wine will make you feel.

  “I didn’t think she was dead. I left her there on the floor and went away. The next thing I remember I woke up in my father-in-law’s home in Monticello.”

  Asked by a reporter if he felt sorry for the slaying, Ross replied, “Naturally.”

  Two weeks later at his sentencing, Ross stood weeping self-pitying tears while Leibowitz appealed to Judge Saul S. Streit for clemency: “I don’t think this man went there with murder in his heart. They had a quarrel and he lost his head. There was a genuine affection between them for two years. A life sentence would not serve any purpose. He is not a criminal at heart. It was a crime of passion.”

  Judge Streit, however, was unmoved. Referring to the prisoner as a “heinous, brutal murderer,” he scoffed at Ross’ contention that Julia had struck him first with the hammer. “I can’t see why he brought the hammer here in the first place, or why he struck her from eight to twelve blows with it. I think there’s sufficient evidence here for a jury to find him guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  With that, Judge Streit handed down a sentence of thirty-five years to life.

  It was not the outcome Ross had hoped for. “I didn’t expect to get more than twen
ty years to life,” he groused as he was led from the courtroom. For Samuel Leibowitz, however, the case only added to his reputation as the greatest criminal defense attorney of his time—the man who had never lost a client to the chair.2

  22

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  Henrietta

  SITUATED AT THE CORNER of Euclid Avenue and East 12th Street in downtown Cleveland, the Statler was one of the city’s finest hotels, each of its seven hundred rooms equipped with such state-of-the-art amenities as a “private bath with anti-scald device, running ice-water, electric closet light, and a thermostat which keeps the temperature at any point desired by the guest” (as one advertisement touted). A popular site for business conventions, wedding receptions, and charity balls, it was also the favorite gathering place for the Cleveland mob, which not only rented rooms there for its secret initiation ceremonies but also, in 1928, held a historic event on the premises: the first summit meeting of organized crime leaders from around the country, among them such Mafia bigwigs as Joe Profaci, Vincent Mangano, and Pasqualino “Patsy” Lolardo. For any hotel employee, from kitchen helper to concierge, a job at the Statler meant “working within the elite of the service industry.”1

  One of those employees was Henrietta Koscianski. A buxom, black-eyed nineteen-year-old whose face—apart from her blocky, deeply cleft chin—had a delicate prettiness, Henrietta was the daughter of poor Polish-American parents who had struggled to send her through high school. She had gone to work immediately after graduation, toiling at various menial jobs before finding a steady position at the Statler. She worked as a pantry maid, preparing vegetables and making salads, desserts, and cold dishes for thirteen dollars a week, most of which went to the support of her family.