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

by Schechter, Harold

  In the spring of 1937, Henrietta had been at the hotel for a year and a half, long enough to know most of her fellow employees, at least by sight. Sometime in early May, she noticed a new face among the workers: a young man of medium height with dark, wavy hair and a nice-looking face. He had been hired as a dishwasher, then worked for a few weeks as busboy before being promoted to bar boy in the grillroom, responsible, among his other duties, for keeping the bar stocked with clean glasses and ice and for fetching the bartenders their meals. His name—so he said—was Bob Murray.

  A conscientious fellow—described by his supervisor, Mike McNeeley, as “the best worker I ever had”—Bob was much admired by his peers for his artistic ability. During lunch breaks, he would sit at a table in the employees’ cafeteria and sketch deft little portraits of the hotel help that he sold for twenty-five cents each. He was known to be “polite and easy-going,” though he could also “flare into sudden and unexpected fits of anger.” On one occasion, he came close to beating up a busboy named Andy Petro over some trivial disagreement. Only McNeeley’s intervention saved Petro from a thrashing.2

  Sometime in mid-June, Henrietta caught Bob’s eye. He began hanging around the kitchen during the after-dinner lulls, chatting away about art and religion and so many other subjects that Henrietta often had trouble following his conversation. At one point, much to her surprise, he asked her on a date. She turned him down gently, explaining that she “didn’t know him well enough.”

  On Wednesday, June 23, Bob offered to sketch Henrietta’s portrait for free. Having heard so much about his artistic talents from the other workers, she readily agreed. She seated herself at the counter while he perched on a nearby stool and began to draw. While he worked, he told her that he “used to earn his living going from house to house, making sketches of people,” though he didn’t say where or when. He took only ten minutes to finish his picture, a flattering profile view of Henrietta that captured her pert nose, pretty mouth, large dark eyes, and fashionably marcelled hair.

  Not long afterward, her night shift over, Henrietta took the service elevator up to the thirteenth-floor employees’ dormitory, where she shared a room with a maid named Dorothy Kresse. Though it was nearing midnight by the time she got ready for bed, Henrietta was still wide-awake. She asked if Dorothy had anything to read. As it happened, Dorothy had just purchased the current issue of one of her favorite magazines, Inside Detective. She tossed it over to Henrietta, who quickly became absorbed in the true detective magazine.

  Its cover was characteristically lurid. Against a blood-red backdrop, a beautiful young woman, her silk nightgown slipping from one shoulder to expose most of her left breast, cowered on a bed while a pair of clutching male hands reached down for her throat. “VERONICA GEDEON—MODEL FOR INSIDE DETECTIVE IS MURDERED!” screamed the headline.

  The accompanying story, written by the magazine’s editor, West F. Peterson, paid tribute to Ronnie Gedeon as an altogether decent, considerate young woman who, despite her great beauty, never put on airs. “All who encountered Ronnie through business liked her,” Peterson wrote. “She always had a smile for the receptionist, she never ‘ritzed’ the office boy. At Christmas, when one of the staff was ill, she chipped in to buy the convalescent a present.…Members of the art department, who knew her best, said she was fun-loving, conscientious, generous, and altogether likable.

  “For this reason,” the article continued, “the news of her sudden and altogether horrible death came as a shock almost too staggering to be credible. And it is only natural that Inside Detective is taking a personal interest in the solution of the mystery and the capture of the killer.”

  After summarizing the case, Peterson concluded by presenting what he described as “the most unusual cash reward ever offered in my years of observing real-life detective dramas”:

  The publishers of Inside Detective have offered a one thousand dollar reward to be given to the detective or private citizen who does most toward obtaining the detection, apprehension, and conviction of the killer or killers.…

  If Robert Irwin is not captured at the time of publication of the current issue, Inside Detective readers are urged to watch for the young artist who is admittedly affected with a social disease, and whose alleged mania to kill springs from a religio-sexual complex which, in the past, caused him to be committed to institutions for the insane.…

  Anyone turning in Robert Irwin will automatically be considered a leading candidate for the Inside Detective reward money.

  STUDY IRWIN’S PHOTOGRAPH!

  NOTE IRWIN’S CHARACTERISTICS!

  REMEMBER THAT IRWIN MAY BE ANYWHERE—AND THAT HE MAY BE MASQUERADING IN FEMALE ATTIRE!

  Watch for Robert Irwin, if, at the time this magazine is on sale, you have not already read of his capture, dead or alive. Notification of his apprehension should be wired or telephoned to The Editor, Inside Detective Magazine, 140 Madison Avenue, New York.3

  The article was illustrated with more than a dozen photographs, some of Ronnie’s titillating poses for the magazine, a few of Joseph Gedeon, one of Ronnie’s Pekingese, Touchi (“The Only Murder Witness”), and, very prominently, the widely circulated portrait of Robert Irwin, the “Hunted Maniac.”

  Henrietta stared for a long time at Irwin’s photograph. To her eyes, the fugitive looked strikingly like Bob Murray. She showed the picture to Dorothy, who laughingly agreed that the mad killer bore a resemblance to “our Bob.” Henrietta thought it would be fun to tease Bob about it the next time she saw him. Then she turned off the light and went to sleep.4

  It wasn’t until Friday evening, June 25, that she saw Bob again, when he showed up in the kitchen to fetch some ice for the bar and came over to chat. After a few minutes of small talk, Henrietta, a playful lilt in her voice, asked, “Say, Bob, what’s your last name again?”

  His eyes narrowed slightly. “Murray,” he answered. “Why?”

  “Ever hear of Robert Irwin?” she asked.

  His reaction startled her. Spinning on his heel, he muttered a barely audible “no” and strode from the kitchen.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Henrietta later recalled. Could it possibly be that her friend Bob Murray really was the infamous Mad Sculptor? “Looking back now, I think I didn’t want to believe it.”

  Her suspicions fully aroused, Henrietta hurried to her room for the detective magazine, which she showed to a half dozen of her fellow employees—her boss Alice Barnes, stewards Larry Guardini and John Konya, desk clerk Manuel Meridas, waiter captain William Peters, and the night manager, Louis de Clairmont. All saw the resemblance at once. At approximately 12:25 a.m., Clairmont called the police. A squad of detectives arrived within minutes. Inside the grillroom, they learned that the bar boy calling himself Bob Murray hadn’t been seen since he had been sent to the kitchen for ice. A search of the building turned up no sign of him.

  From his employment application, they learned that he was living at the Lake Hotel, a cheap hostelry on Ninth Street where rooms could be had for $1.50 a week. Racing to his room, they found signs that it had been vacated in a hurry. Among the scattered items left behind was a batch of tabloid clippings on the hunt for the Mad Sculptor.

  The next morning, early editions of newspapers throughout the country plastered the story on their front pages: “IRWIN FOUND IN OHIO, ESCAPES,” “IRWIN SPOTTED IN CLEVELAND, ESCAPES POLICE NET,” “GIRL SPOTS IRWIN IN CLEVELAND; HE FLEES,” “IRWIN ELUDES CLEVELAND POLICE AFTER GIRL RECOGNIZES FUGITIVE.”5

  After sending out an eight-state alarm and assigning 187 men to the case, Cleveland Chief of Police George Matowitz held a news conference to offer his opinion. “I think Irwin probably went out on a freight train or aboard a tramp steamer or an ore freighter. It was by some hobo route—we are sure of that.”

  Shown Irwin’s picture, however, several ticket clerks at the Greyhound bus terminal said that it closely resembled a man who had boarded a 1:20 a.m. bus for Chicago.6

  23

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  The Front Page

  CLEVELAND HAD NEVER BEEN Bob’s original destination. In fact, for a week after the massacre, he had made no attempt to flee at all.

  From the moment the killing was over, he had felt perfectly at peace with himself—“as calm as I’ve been in my life before.” Without bothering to check if the apartment door was locked, he had gone into the bathroom to wash up. He then spent a leisurely hour rummaging through drawers, searching in vain for some photographs of Ethel. He came across Ronnie’s diary but had no interest in it.

  In the bedroom where Ronnie and her mother lay, he grabbed the little alarm clock, its glowing, hypnotic face faded now in the dawning Easter light. Given the nasty scratches on his cheeks, he knew he’d have to keep out of sight for a few days, so he went into the kitchen and stuffed a paper bag full of provisions. Then, retrieving the ice pick from the side table where he’d placed it, he left the apartment and headed back to the Ottburgs’ house on 52nd Street. There was no need to hurry. It was 6:30 a.m. and the Sunday streets were deserted.

  Upstairs in his room, he discovered that one of his gloves was missing. He realized right away that he must have left it in the apartment, but going back for it seemed like too much of a bother. Stripping off his clothes, he climbed into bed and slept all day.

  He awoke to the shouts of newsboys, crying their extras in the streets below. For the next week, he stuck mostly to his room, venturing out only after dark to buy a paper from a late-night newsstand. During the day, from his rear-facing window, he watched the constant commotion at the 51st Street police station—the mob of reporters milling on the sidewalk, the comings and goings of detectives and squad cars. A couple of times, he even caught a glimpse of Joe Gedeon being hustled through the crowd into the station house.

  Very late one midweek night—when the tabloid witch hunt against Gedeon was at its height—he had chanced a trip to a twenty-four-hour eatery, the Surrey Cafeteria on Third Avenue and 54th Street. He was seated at the counter, finishing his hamburger, when the fellow beside him looked up from his newspaper and, nodding toward a photograph of the little upholsterer, said, “Do you think the old fellow is guilty?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered with a shrug. “You never can tell.” Then he hurriedly paid his check and left.

  He had made up his mind that, if Gedeon were charged with the murders, he would turn himself in. He liked the old man and, as he later told people, “wouldn’t have let him go to the chair.” He prayed things wouldn’t come to that, though. His hope was that “it would end by throwing suspicion on some unknown lover of Ronnie and that the lover would not be found.”

  It wasn’t until a full week after the murders that he figured it was time to leave town. Late Sunday afternoon, April 4, he checked his bags at Grand Central Station and took a train to Philadelphia. He stayed there until Monday morning when, passing a newsstand, he saw a headline reading “MAD ARTIST WANTED.”

  He knew at once who had fingered him to the cops: that son-of-a-bitch William Lamkie, a man he had regarded as one of his closest friends. He vowed to get even with him one day.

  He still had the ice pick in his coat pocket. He tossed it into a trash can and, around 10:00 a.m., hopped a bus for Washington, D.C.

  He spent all Monday afternoon walking around the city, strolling to the White House and visiting the National Gallery. With his face plastered all over the front pages, he assumed he’d be arrested any minute and was surprised when no one recognized him. During his entire time as America’s most wanted fugitive, he made no effort to alter his appearance and was much amused by the newspaper stories describing him as a “master of disguise” who might be going around in female clothing.

  After his afternoon of sightseeing, he made his way to the freight yards. He “had done a lot of bumming,” he explained afterward, “but had no freight car experience. I decided to go whatever way the freight went.” He found a vacant boxcar, climbed inside, and went to sleep.

  When he woke up the following morning, Tuesday, April 6, the train was moving and he had company—“a regular bum who gave me all sorts of tips.” The two traveled all the way to Willard, Ohio, where Irwin got off. From there, he hitchhiked to Akron, then caught another ride to Cleveland, arriving there on Thursday, April 8. He had settled into his new life pretty comfortably by the time that pantry girl, Henrietta Whatsername, recognized him.1

  He had hurried from the kitchen and kept on going until he reached his hotel. He knew he couldn’t stay on the run forever. His arrest was inevitable—probably sooner rather than later, now that he’d been recognized. Why not make a splash by giving himself up? Not to the cops but to someone who appreciated his importance, who had once called him a “mad genius” on his nightly broadcast—America’s most popular newspaper columnist and radio commentator, Walter Winchell.

  Quickly gathering his belongings, he made straight for the bus terminal, only to find that he was two bucks short of the twelve-dollar fare to New York City. So he bought a one-way ticket on the next bus to Chicago.

  Now, seated by a window in the sleek, blue-and-white Super Coach, he debated his next move. It suddenly occurred to him that he could make good money by turning himself in to a newspaper—certainly more than that double-crosser Lamkie had gotten for peddling his life story to the tabloids.

  It was 6:30 Saturday morning when he arrived in Chicago. He spent a few hours wandering around Lake Shore Drive and the Loop. Spotting a movie marquee announcing an exclusive newsreel of the June 22 Joe Louis–Jim Braddock heavyweight match, he bought a thirty-five-cent ticket and, after taking in the footage of the bout, stayed to watch the main feature, Wings Over Honolulu, starring Ray Milland and Wendy Barrie.2

  Afterward, he found the nearest drugstore, shut himself inside the rear telephone booth, and dialed the number of the Chicago Tribune. Connected to the city editor, he identified himself as Robert Irwin and was answered with an irate “Take it somewhere else, buddy. I don’t have time for monkey business.” When the editor slammed down the phone, Bob slipped another nickel into the coin slot and called the Chicago Herald and Examiner.3

  Created from the merger of two Chicago newspapers, Hearst’s Herald and Examiner was famed for its old-school, bare-knuckled journalism. Its no-holds-barred approach was epitomized by night city editor Frank Carson. In 1920, for example, following a sensational murder-suicide involving the head of a prominent Chicago advertising firm and his mistress, Ruth Randall, Carson managed to steal a pivotal piece of evidence—Randall’s diary—from the safe at police headquarters. He then copyrighted it and announced his plan to publish it in sections over the course of a week. When authorities howled that Carson was preventing the coroner’s jury from seeing the diary, he “cheerfully announced that the jury was not going to be deprived of the document—they could read it in the Herald and Examiner in daily installments.”4

  Carson’s crime reporters were equally brazen, going to any lengths necessary to secure a scoop, from impersonating police officials to buddying up to murder suspects. It was partly by befriending Carl Wanderer, for example, that Herald and Examiner reporter Charles MacArthur helped crack one of Chicago’s most notorious homicides. A heavily decorated World War I veteran, Wanderer had just returned from a movie with his pregnant wife, Ruth, on the night of June 21, 1920, when a gun-wielding vagrant accosted them in the vestibule of their apartment building. According to his account, when the “raggedy stranger” opened fire on Ruth, mortally wounding her, Wanderer drew his own pistol and shot the man dead. Wanderer was hailed as a hero until MacArthur, working with his crony Ben Hecht, a reporter for the rival Chicago Daily News, began to notice discrepancies in his story. Ultimately MacArthur and Hecht managed to wrest the truth from Wanderer, who confessed that the “mugging” was part of a byzantine plot to murder his wife so that he could run off with his homosexual lover.5

  MacArthur and Hecht would later immortalize their freewheeling days as Chicago crime reporters in thei
r smash Broadway hit, The Front Page. In that 1927 play, an escaped murderer turns himself over to Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the Herald and Examiner, who keeps the fugitive hidden from the police and other newsmen so that he can get the exclusive scoop on the story.6

  With Robert Irwin’s phone call to the Herald and Examiner on the afternoon of Saturday, June 26, life—as the saying goes—was about to imitate art.

  Having been dismissed as a hoaxer when he tried the Tribune, Bob took a different tack when he reached Harry Romanoff, Frank Carson’s successor as city editor of the Herald and Examiner.

  “I’m a friend of Robert Irwin, who is wanted in New York for the Gedeon murders,” said Bob. “He wants to give himself up. What kind of deal can you make with him?”

  “I’d have to know more about it,” Romanoff calmly replied. “Obviously no deal can be made over the telephone. We’d have to talk it over with you face to face.”

  “That can be arranged,” said Bob. “I’ll meet your representative at 2:30 near the fountain at the south end of the Art Institute.”

  At the appointed time, reporter Austin O’Malley arrived in Grant Park and headed for the designated rendezvous spot: Lorado Taft’s celebrated sculpture Fountain of the Great Lakes. Gazing up at the grouping of five graceful nymphs was a slender young man in a well-worn gray suit and gray fedora. O’Malley recognized him at once as Robert Irwin.

  After introducing himself, O’Malley led Bob to Michigan Avenue and hailed a cab. Minutes later, they were seated in the office of Managing Editor John Dienhart. Within an hour, Bob had signed a contract that began:

  Universal Service agrees that if the undersigned Robert Irwin proves to the complete satisfaction of the police authorities that he is the Robert Irwin now wanted by the New York police in the Gedeon case and upon fulfillment of the terms of the agreement, a sum of $5,000 will be paid to the undersigned.