For his part, Bob agreed to provide a complete signed confession for exclusive publication by the Hearst syndicate and to “refrain from giving interviews to any newspapers other than the Hearst press for a term of two weeks.”7
Accompanied by Dienhart, O’Malley, Romanoff, a cameraman, and a stenographer, Bob was then whisked off to a room at the Morrison Hotel. After a bath, a shave, and a room-service meal, he seated himself in an armchair and lit a cigarette. With a captive audience hanging on his every word, he settled back and launched into a rambling monologue. He related his entire life story, philosophized at length about art, immortality, and religion, and expounded on his theory of visualization (“my contribution to civilization,” as he called it).
Stifling their impatience, Dienhart and his colleagues kept prodding him to focus on the matter at hand: the Easter Sunday murders. Finally, he gave them their money’s worth.
24
* * *
Confession
THAT NIGHT I SAID TO MYSELF I am going up there and killing Ethel,” Bob told his rapt listeners. “I never intended to get anybody but her. I thought that after killing Ethel then they would kill me in the chair, but I didn’t care.
“Then I said to myself that after being in the nut house all your life, you can’t go to the chair. You might, but the chances are that you won’t. They’ll put me in the nut house again and then I’ll be there all the rest of my life and catch up with myself in a spiritual way.”
After sharpening his ice pick, he had walked to the apartment building at 316 East 50th Street, arriving at around nine that Easter eve. No one answered when he pressed the downstairs buzzer. He waited on the sidewalk for nearly an hour before he saw Mary Gedeon approaching. Surprised—and not entirely pleased—to see him, she nevertheless invited him upstairs.
“Mrs. Gedeon did not want me to have anything to do with Ethel,” Bob explained. “Outside of that she was always very friendly to me.”
Mary had been out for much of the day and was dead tired. Sinking into a chair at the kitchen table, she asked if he would walk the dog. Bob was happy to oblige, taking Touchi for a stroll around the block.
Back upstairs, he joined Mary in the kitchen. The last time he had visited the apartment, back in December, Ethel had been staying with her mother, and Bob had gotten it into his head that she and Joe Kudner were separated. Assuming that she was “out having a good time,” he did his best to stall until she returned. Pulling out his little pad and a pencil, he began to draw Mary’s portrait. “I took just as long as I could on that picture, and all of the time I was feeling her out about Ethel.”
Bob was still sketching when the little Englishman Frank Byrnes showed up. He and Bob shook hands and exchanged a few pleasantries before Byrnes retired to his bedroom and closed the door.
He had been there for more than an hour when Mary, who still had some holiday preparations to attend to before she went to bed, said, “Bob, Ethel isn’t here and it’s very late.”
“I am going to stay here until I see Ethel,” Bob replied.
Mary, her patience at an end, half rose from her seat and yelled, “Get out of here, or I’ll call the Englishman.”
Bob went mad.
“At that moment,” he related, “I hit her with everything I had. She fell back on the floor with her legs back over her head. I grabbed her by the neck. I was astonished at the fight she made. She had plenty of life in her. She scratched my face like nobody’s business.
“I had Mrs. Gedeon by the throat and I never let loose of that throat for twenty minutes. Finally her arms dropped back limp and her shoulders sagged to the floor.
“All the time this damned Englishman was in the next room just ten feet away. She died right in the front of that room, just ten feet away. She put up a hell of a fight. I can’t understand why she didn’t bring the whole town down on us.”
At this point in his narrative, Bob revealed a detail so obscene that it was censored from all published versions of his confession. Made even more shocking by the matter-of-fact tone in which he divulged it, it explained the injuries that Medical Examiner Gonzales had found on Mary Gedeon’s genital area.
Mary Gedeon had, in fact, been sexually violated. But not by Robert Irwin.
“While I had her on the floor,” he recalled, “the dog put his nose to her private parts. I continued to choke her for about twenty minutes before I was sure she was lifeless. I wanted to degrade her as low as I possibly could, so I pulled her garments from her body and allowed the dog to ravish Mrs. Gedeon.”1
“My face was badly scratched,” Bob continued after a momentary pause. “My hands were full of blood. I smeared it on her, on her face and on her breast. Then I threw her in the bedroom under the bed.” When Touchi crawled in after his mistress, Bob thought of killing the animal, too, but refrained “out of pity.”
He was still convinced that Ethel would show up. He had no intention of leaving until he had “done what I had come to do. I had to keep waiting for Ethel. She was the one I felt I must kill. I simply had to wait for her to finish what I had planned.”
He realized that Ronnie might arrive first. He had no desire to kill her. “She was beautiful, and I hate to destroy beauty. I said to myself if Ronnie comes in first, I can tie her up and leave her.” He had read somewhere that a bar of soap wrapped in a rag made an effective blackjack, one that “would stun but nothing more. So I went in the kitchen and got some ordinary soap and made a blackjack out it with a washrag.” He would later be amused to read in the tabloids that he had used the soap to carve a small sculpture of Ethel.
At about 3:00 a.m., he heard Ronnie enter after saying a laughing good night to someone in the hallway. She went directly into the bathroom, while he waited in the darkness of the little bedroom where he had concealed her mother’s corpse. “She stayed in there the longest time,” Bob related. “I thought she was never coming out.”
It was already after 4:00 a.m. when Ronnie suddenly entered the bedroom. Bob—who had been lost in thoughts of Ethel and hadn’t heard Ronnie leave the bathroom—hurriedly “let her have it” with the blackjack. “The soap went all over the floor,” he said. “It didn’t have the slightest effect. I can well believe that she was drunk because she didn’t put up any fight at all.”
Grabbing her by the throat, he dragged her onto the bed. “I held her the longest time, just tight enough so that she could breathe,” he explained. “There were moments when the pressure was relaxed enough so that she could speak a few words but not loudly.”
Disguising his voice, he asked her where Ethel was. Ronnie answered that she was at home with her husband, Joe Kudner.
“I gave it up and I didn’t know just what in God’s name I would do,” said Bob. “I wanted to let Ronnie live if I could. We were always pals. I suppose she thought I was going to rape her. She said, ‘Please don’t touch me. I just had an operation and the doctor said if I have intercourse, I could die.’ I had no such thought in mind. So I kept holding on—just light enough to prevent noise, not tight enough to kill.”
He estimated that he had kept his grip on her for around two hours, though he had little sense of the passage of time. “When you get in a mix-up like that,” he said, “you don’t think about what you are doing, and time means nothing. The whole night passed to me like a blue daze.”
Finally, her voice weak and tremulous, Ronnie said: “Bob, I know you. You are going to get in trouble if you do this.”
Those words were her death sentence.
“The minute she used my name,” Bob said calmly, “I clamped down on her and choked her until she was lifeless. She immediately became the most repulsive thing I have ever seen in my life. It was like blue death, just oozing out, a spiritual emanation just oozing out.
“I turned on the lights and ripped off her chemise, leaving her on top of the bed, her mother’s body underneath.” He then put out the lights and left the room.
It was daybreak by then. Knowing that Frank Byrnes could ident
ify him, he “went in and fixed the Englishman” with the ice pick he had intended to use on Ethel. “I struck him the first time in the temple, so far as it would go. The pick was about six inches long. The poor fellow lay there twitching but did not bleed. I had to hit him eleven times.
“After I put him out of his misery, I went in and took a little clock. The last thing I said to myself was: ‘Buddy, you did it!’ ”
Up until that moment in Bob’s recitation, no one had interrupted him. Now, however, Dienhart asked how he felt about the murders.
“I’m certainly sorry I killed all three of them,” Bob said offhandedly. “There was only one I was after, and that was Ethel. I don’t know whether it was hate or love that made me want to kill her. If she had come in first, I would have killed her and nobody else. I don’t think I would have marred up her features, as I only wanted to stab her once with the ice pick, and one little hole wouldn’t show.”
And what did Bob expect to happen to him now, Dienhart asked.
“Whatever is coming to me, I’ll take,” Bob answered with a smile. “If I don’t get the chair and I go to an institution, I’ll use my money to hire someone to work for me to drill me in visualizing. I want to develop myself.
“Even if I die, that won’t be the end of it. That cycle comes back. These people I killed aren’t lost. Theirs are borrowed lives, and if I live I will reap them. I only meant to borrow one life. I will repay these lives by developing that power of visualizing, which is the next step in the evolution of the human race.”2
25
* * *
Celebrities
THE NEWS BROKE at ten o’clock Saturday night when the five-star final edition of the Herald and Examiner hit the stands. “IRWIN SURRENDERS HERE; CONFESSES KILLING MODEL!” screamed the headline in letters three inches high. A self-congratulatory front-page item, four columns wide, boasted of the scoop as “by far the most notable newspaper achievement of the year.”
Within minutes, a squad of detectives descended on the Herald and Examiner building on Madison Street, while reporters from rival papers “staked out the exits and climbed onto an elevated railroad trestle that commanded a view of the newsroom.” Bob, however, was nowhere to be found.
Sequestered inside his room at the Morrison Hotel—where he would be kept incommunicado until the Hearst syndicate was ready to hand over its prize to the authorities—he ate a hearty dinner and passed some time playing gin rummy with Austin O’Malley and a few of the other newsmen. At one point, someone asked him what he planned to do with his five thousand dollars. Bob replied that he intended to use most of it to “help his two brothers,” Vidalin and Pember. Both were currently behind bars—Vidalin in Washington State Penitentiary for armed robbery, Pember in Oregon State for “assault with intent to rob.” Once they were released, they would be able to use Bob’s money to get a new start in life.
While commending Bob on his generous impulse, O’Malley suggested that he might “better spend the money for his own defense.” With five thousand dollars at his disposal, Bob could afford the best lawyer around.
“Maybe,” said O’Malley, “you can get Samuel Leibowitz.”1
Having received what he regarded as a reliable tip that Robert Irwin was hiding in Hoboken, New Jersey, Police Commissioner Valentine had initially dismissed the reports that the Mad Sculptor’s trail had been picked up in Cleveland. The news coming out of Chicago, however, changed his mind in a hurry. By Sunday morning, June 27, he had reached an arrangement with representatives of the Hearst organization. Two New York City detectives, Martin Owens and Frank Crimmins, would leave immediately for Chicago by chartered plane. They would be accompanied by reporter Ray Doyle of the Hearst-owned Daily Mirror. Irwin would be delivered directly into the custody of Owens and Crimmins. In exchange, Doyle would be “the only reporter present at the surrender.”2
The surrender was arranged for 1:30 p.m. at the office of Cook County Sheriff John Toman. At the designated time, Irwin appeared with his escorts from the Herald and Examiner. He was dressed in a natty summer outfit that he had demanded as part of his deal with the paper: white Panama hat, white linen suit, white shirt, blue tie, and two-tone, black-and-white shoes. Looking “well rested and thoroughly at ease,” he calmly signed a waiver of extradition. Detective Owens then took possession of the prisoner and made ready to return to the awaiting plane. Before leaving the sheriff’s office, he placed a courtesy call to Chicago’s Chief of Detectives, John L. Sullivan, formally notifying him of Irwin’s surrender.
It was immediately clear that Sullivan had no intention of letting the New York City police reap all the glory for the capture of America’s most high-profile fugitive. Demanding to see the official arrest warrant, he ordered Owens to stay put. Minutes later, a squad of Chicago police officers burst into the sheriff’s office and took Irwin into custody.3
With Owens and Crimmins beside him and his press retinue following close behind, Irwin was driven to Chief Sullivan’s office, where—much to the chagrin of the two New York City detectives—it was discovered that the arrest warrant had been made out for “Arthur Irwin.” A wire was immediately dispatched to Commissioner Valentine, requesting an amended document.
While awaiting a reply, Sullivan—determined to grab as much attention as possible before relinquishing Irwin—staged an elaborate charade for the benefit of the press. Before an audience of fifty newspapermen and an equal number of police officials, Bob—smiling, joking, and generally basking in the limelight—was paraded through the booking process. After being fingerprinted, he was told to remove his jacket so his physical measurements could be taken, a standard procedure in the Chicago PD, which had never fully abandoned the Bertillon system of “anthropometric identification” it had adopted in 1888.
“Say, old man,” said the officer recording his statistics, “you look as though you’re in good shape.”
“You bet I am,” Bob said, puffing out his chest. “I always keep myself that way.”
A few minutes later, when one of the spectators offered another flattering comment about his physique, Bob struck a preening pose and said, “Sure, I’m proud of it.”
Police matrons and female clerks kept popping into the room to steal glimpses of the celebrity killer. They emerged like starstruck schoolgirls, burbling, “How good-looking he is…What a lovely boy…Hasn’t he got nice hair…How could he have done such a thing…”4
Manacled to Detective Charles Moore, Bob was then placed in the weekly police lineup, along with eight other men arrested on minor charges. Told to turn this way and that on the floodlit platform so the audience could view him from all sides, he obeyed with “a jaunty, unconcerned air.” When Chief Sullivan asked if he understood why he was there, Bob grinned and said, “Sure. A trip to New York.”
Only once did he lose his composure. As he stepped from the lineup, a news photographer reached out and snatched Bob’s Panama hat from his head to get a better picture of his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” screamed Bob, lunging so violently at the man that Detective Moore, still handcuffed to the prisoner, was thrown off balance. For those witnessing the scene, the moment was a revelation—a dramatic display of “the swift flow of emotion that made him such a dangerous character.”5
By the time Bob was led back down to Chief Sullivan’s office, he had regained his aplomb. By then, a corrected warrant had been wired from Chief Valentine. Officially transferred into the custody of Detectives Owens and Crimmins, Bob was driven to the Chicago Municipal Airport in Cicero, where an estimated crowd of four hundred gawkers—most of them women—were waiting to see him off. At precisely 5:32 local time, Bob and his entourage—now consisting of the two New York City detectives, a pair of Chicago policemen, Ray Doyle of the New York Daily Mirror, and three other Hearst reporters—took off in a specially chartered, twenty-one-seat American Airlines passenger plane, the Arkansas, flagship of the line’s fleet.6
During the four-hour flight, Bob—wh
ose handcuffs were removed upon boarding—devoured a meal of sliced chicken, tomato salad, nut bread, and coffee; chain-smoked an entire pack of cigarettes; chatted pleasantly with stewardess Bernadette Anderle; and calmly answered questions posed to him by Detective Crimmins.
He grew visibly agitated only once—when Crimmins asked why he “stole that clock from Ronnie Gedeon’s bedroom the night she was killed.”
“Do you know,” Bob said with a grimace, “that’s the one thing I’m ashamed of—stealing that clock. To kill is one thing. But to be a sneak thief—ugh!”
“So why did you do it?” Crimmins pressed.
Bob blinked nervously. “The clock was in front of me as I strangled Ronnie. Its dial shone. It looked like two green eyes. It fascinated me.”7
Even before the plane landed in New York, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had been contacted by reporters struck by the uncanny parallels between their hit show The Front Page and the events that had just played out in Chicago. Both men reacted with high amusement. Recalling his own brazen exploits as a crime reporter for the Herald and Examiner, MacArthur was gratified to see that the paper still retained its old scrappy spirit. “After I left, it seemed to calm down,” he said. “I thought it had reformed. As an alumnus, I’m delighted it has not.”
As for Hecht—by then the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood—he conveyed his delight in mock indignation. “We ought to sue the Herald and Examiner for plagiarism!” he exclaimed to reporters. “They stole our plot! Our best plot!”8
A mob of several hundred curiosity seekers, kept back from the landing strip by more than two dozen police officers, was waiting at Floyd Bennett Field in southeast Brooklyn when the Arkansas touched down shortly before midnight. Handcuffed to Owens, Bob—looking somewhat rumpled but chipper as ever—stepped off the plane and waved cheerfully to the crowd before being bundled into a police automobile. Preceded, flanked, and followed by a cavalcade of motorcycle patrolmen and squad cars, he was sped to police headquarters on Centre Street, hustled through a rear entrance to avoid the horde of newsmen gathered in front, and led directly to Assistant Chief Inspector Lyons’s second-floor office.
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 25
