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

by Schechter, Harold

  Besides Lyons, a group of high officials was assembled in the room, among them Commissioner Valentine, District Attorney Dodge, Assistant DA Miles O’Brien, Deputy Chief Inspector Francis Kear, and Captain Ed Mullins. Much to their frustration, the normally voluble prisoner suddenly clammed up, refusing to answer any questions or to verify the confession he had made in Chicago. Staring defiantly up at Dodge, he said, “You can beat the Jesus out of me, you won’t make me talk.”

  “We don’t do things like that here,” the DA answered with a tight smile.

  Owens, also present in the room, had a theory about Bob’s stubborn silence. “He thinks his contract with the Herald and Examiner is so binding that he can’t make a statement to anybody,” Owens said to the others. “Otherwise he’ll forfeit the five thousand dollars.”

  Turning to Bob, he said, “The contract says you can’t give your story to other newspapers. It doesn’t mean you can’t talk to the District Attorney or the police.”

  “All we want to know,” said Dodge, “is whether the confession you signed in Chicago was a true confession.”

  Bob, however, would not be cajoled into talking. The “atmosphere in the room is too hostile,” he said. He insisted on having “at least one friendly face” present. When asked whom he had in mind, Bob replied without hesitation: Dr. Fredric Wertham.9

  The phone had been ringing for a while before it roused Wertham from his sleep. Gazing at the bedside clock with bleary eyes, he saw that it was half past three in the morning. He lifted the receiver and gave a groggy hello.

  “Is that you, doctor?” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yes, this is Dr. Wertham.”

  “Don’t you recognize me? It’s Bob.”

  Wertham was stunned into momentary silence. “Where on earth are you?” he asked when he regained his voice.

  “Down here in police headquarters with Commissioner Valentine and the district attorney and a lot of other police officials.”

  Half believing that the call was a hoax, Wertham asked to speak to one of the officials. Almost at once, someone got on the phone and identified himself as Inspector John Lyons.

  “Bob insists that he has to talk to you,” said Lyons. “Commissioner Valentine would appreciate it if you would. He’ll send his own car to fetch you.”

  Wertham asked for a few minutes to get ready. By the time he had washed, shaved, and thrown on his clothes, the police car was waiting for him.

  Minutes later he was ushered into a side entrance of the Centre Street headquarters. Inside a second-floor conference room, he found Bob standing in front of a long table whose seats were occupied by “about fifteen of the highest officials of the police department and the district attorney’s office.”

  At his first glimpse of the psychiatrist, Bob broke into a broad grin. “Not often in my life,” Wertham said afterward, “have I seen a man so pleased to see me.”

  Obtaining permission from Commissioner Valentine to confer in private, Wertham and Irwin were led into the corridor, where they stood in a corner and spoke in hushed voices, Bob “talking excitedly” and “looking around to make sure that no one was listening.”

  “What’s happened won’t make any difference between us, will it?” he asked with a catch in his voice.

  “Absolutely not,” Wertham assured him. “Everything is as before between you and me. But why on earth didn’t you come to me before Easter and tell me you felt so badly again?”

  “Oh, let’s leave those old things,” Bob said. Then, “with arms and hands gesticulating,” he began “talking a blue streak,” relating everything that had happened since he’d arrived at headquarters.

  “I wouldn’t talk to them before you came, but they were very nice about it,” he said. “They gave me a salad with lettuce and tomatoes. I’m crazy about tomatoes. They didn’t even beat me up.”

  “High police officials never beat people up,” Wertham said dryly. “They have cops for that. That just shows what serious trouble you’re in now.”

  Trying to impress upon Bob that he was in an “awful mess” and that his refusal to talk only made him look guiltier, Wertham urged him to break his silence.

  “You don’t have to tell them the whole story,” he said. “But you seem to have talked a lot to reporters in Chicago. So tell them something here, just to satisfy them. Your life is in terrible danger.”

  “You know that I was sick,” said Bob.

  “Were!” exclaimed the doctor. “You are sick. And all you have to do is be yourself. That is your only chance. I promise you I’ll do anything I can for you, whatever happens.”

  Though reluctant to speak without a lawyer present, Bob allowed himself to be convinced. Returning to the conference room, he took a seat, lit a cigarette, and began to talk, confirming all the details of his Chicago confession. For the most part, he recounted the tale in a calm, untroubled way, though he grew intensely agitated at several points. While he showed no emotion when describing how he’d torn off Mary’s underwear so the dog could get at her genitals, he flew into a rage when the district attorney asked if he had raped Ronnie, taking the query as “a horrid accusation.”

  At another point, when Commissioner Valentine asked if he felt any remorse, Bob became wildly excited.

  “Yes, but I believe those lives are not lost, they are borrowed and I can repay them,” he said, eyes glinting.

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Valentine.

  “I don’t believe anything is lost and that all life is only a part of the Divine Life,” said Bob. “I think that the progress of evolution is from the material to the mental or spiritual plane and I think that visualizing, developing the faculty of visualizing, may be one of the greatest contributions in that direction. And I think that by putting myself under pressure at any cost I would be able to contribute.”

  Like others, District Attorney Dodge was particularly curious about Bob’s theft of Lucy Beacco’s worthless alarm clock.

  “What was there about the clock that attracted you?” he asked.

  As before, when Detective Crimmins had posed the same question, Bob grew uncharacteristically flustered.

  “Because I looked at the clock and saw the green lights,” he said nervously.

  “The luminous hands?” said Dodge. “Something about the clock that attracted you and you wanted it?

  “It—it wasn’t the clock,” Bob stammered. “I had a clock. It was the green light…not the numbers…I don’t know.”10

  At 6:35 Monday morning, a little more than an hour after he finally opened up to the officials, Bob was escorted to the basement and placed in Cell No. 1, the same cell once occupied by Joseph Gedeon during his weeklong ordeal. Five minutes later, with a sergeant and two detectives keeping suicide watch, he stretched out on the cot and, despite the bright light burning directly overhead, fell instantly asleep.

  He was awakened at 8:00 a.m., given a cup of coffee, and taken to the lineup. Hair mussed, suit rumpled, jaw darkened with a three-day growth of stubble, he went through “the routine questioning with ennui written on his face. He smiled frequently and yawned broadly, covering his mouth with a languid gesture. He slouched so insolently that the officer in charge had to shout through a megaphone, ‘Stand up there!’ ”

  With a brawny detective clutching each of his wrists, he was then hustled out the front entrance of headquarters, where a police wagon waited to transport him to his arraignment. Wedged between the two massive lawmen, the slender, five-foot-seven prisoner looked “like a dwarf.” Sinking into the back seat, he spotted a copy of that morning’s Daily News on the cushion beside him. A picture of himself appearing “gay and nonchalant” as he posed for photographers in Chicago occupied the bottom two-thirds of the front page, beneath a headline reading, “IRWIN’S OWN STORY.” Snatching up the paper, he immediately began reading and didn’t raise his head until the van reached Homicide Court a few blocks away.

  A crowd estimated at between 2,500 and 3,000 spe
ctators—the largest such gathering since the mobs that had turned out to gawk at Bruno Richard Hauptmann—surrounded Homicide Court at 301 Mott Street. Though the building had been cleared of everyone who had no official business there, the corridors were jammed with municipal employees and the courtroom itself was packed with reporters, detectives, clerks and attendants. Someone else was present, too: Samuel S. Leibowitz.

  The previous day, Bob’s one-line telegram had reached the lawyer at his summer home: “WILL YOU PLEASE REPRESENT ME ON MY ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK?” Leibowitz, who frankly admitted how much he thrived on publicity, was immediately intrigued at the thought of defending the nationally known Mad Sculptor. Something else, far less to do with his own love of the limelight, also drew him to the case. His long involvement in the Scottsboro affair had done much to enlarge his social conscience, and he already foresaw that the Irwin trial had a significant societal dimension—the potential to produce, as he put it, “a more logical approach to the problem of dealing with the criminally insane.”11

  Hurrying back to the city, he had arrived at the courtroom not long before Bob was brought in. Having never so much as set eyes on Irwin, Leibowitz made it clear to the presiding magistrate that he was there on a provisional basis. He would represent the prisoner for the moment, but until he had a chance to confer at length with Irwin, he would not commit himself to the case. The arraignment itself lasted only a few minutes. A brief affidavit had been prepared by Detective Crimmins, specifying, in typically stilted legalese, that the defendant had “willfully and feloniously choked and strangled to death” both Mary and Ronnie Gedeon and fatally stabbed Frank Byrnes “with an ice pick held in his hand.” After Leibowitz waived the reading of the full complaint, Magistrate Alexander Brough adjourned the proceedings until Wednesday, June 30, then remanded Irwin to the Tombs without bail.

  When the proceedings were over, Bob and Leibowitz spoke for ten minutes in the detention pen at one side of the courtroom. Bob was then shackled to two detectives and escorted outside to the police wagon parked at the curb. From the rooftops, windows, and fire escapes of the neighborhood tenements, hundreds of men and women peered down at the celebrity killer, some of them hooting in derision.

  A short time later, Leibowitz showed up at the Tombs and conferred with Bob in his cell for an hour and a half. Afterward, a swarm of newsmen surrounded the lawyer, bombarding him with questions. Leibowitz said little, though he confirmed that he had decided to represent Irwin. When one of the reporters asked if he would try for an insanity defense, Leibowitz responded with a legal phrase in Latin: “Res ipsa loquitur”—the thing speaks for itself.12

  That same afternoon, Joseph Gedeon’s lawyer, Peter Sabbatino, held a press conference at his East 22nd Street apartment. “We are glad that any suspicion that might have existed against my client has been removed,” he read from a prepared statement. “The original arrest of Mr. Gedeon and the impression created by the police department that he was a suspect always left a cloud on his reputation and character, and he felt in the past weeks that people looked upon him as an unproved murderer. His reputation is now cleared.”

  A strained-looking Ethel, “attired in a black dress and hat that accentuated her pallor,” was there with her father. When reporters began peppering her with questions about Bob—“What do you have to say about Irwin? Did you think he was crazy? Was he your lover?”—she burst into tears and fled to a bedroom.

  Turning to Gedeon, the reporters then tried asking him about the man who had murdered his wife and younger daughter. To every one of their questions, however, the little upholsterer had the same response.

  “Go to hell,” he told them.13

  Gedeon’s mistreatment at the hands of the police was the subject of an editorial in the next day’s New York Post. Headlined “The Irwin Case: Where Were the Cops?,” the piece was an attack on the “boob police” practice of relying on “mild or severe third degree methods.” The “Gedeon murder case proves the point,” asserted the editor:

  Robert Irwin is in jail—but only because he wanted to go to jail. Until he made that decision and surrendered he was as safe from police interference as if he had been a United States Senator on a good-will tour.

  The cops concentrated their attention on the father of the murdered Veronica Gedeon for almost a week after the Easter Sunday crime. He was “questioned” day after day. The process, so much easier on the gray matter than crime detection, lasted until Irwin was enabled to go to Cleveland and get a job in a hotel.

  There this man, who has confessed the murder of Veronica Gedeon, her mother, and a lodger, lived for three months. With his picture in every police station in the country, he was never bothered by a detective. It was a waitress who finally identified him, but even so he gave Cleveland police the slip after she notified them and went on his way to Chicago.

  In Chicago, he walked past hundreds of officers to go to a newspaper office, where he finally surrendered.

  Clearly, “the usual police policy of dragging the first friendless suspect into custody for ‘grilling’ and feeding the newspapers with heated suspicions is a life-insurance policy for murderers,” the editorial concluded. “We offer humble thanks for waitresses who read mystery magazines.”14

  By the time the editorial appeared, the object of those “humble thanks” was enjoying a head-spinning dose of fifteen-minute celebrity. Two days earlier, Henrietta Koscianski—the “plump and pretty pantry maid,” “chubby Cinderella detective,” “Public Heroine No. 1,” as the tabloids variously dubbed her—had received a telegram from Inside Detective editor West Peterson, informing her that she was the winner of the magazine’s one-thousand-dollar reward for the capture of Robert Irwin.

  “Sure, Irwin surrendered of his own accord,” Peterson explained to reporters when the announcement was made. “But we feel that if Miss Koscianski hadn’t recognized his picture in the magazine and reported it through the hotel manager to the Cleveland police, Irwin would never have been forced into flight and surrender. She gets the dough.”

  On Monday afternoon, June 28, accompanied by her truck-driver father, Henry, she boarded a United Air Liner for her first airplane trip, an experience described in luridly purple prose by a tabloid writer named Dale Harrison: “A scullery girl came out of the kitchen today and followed a bewildering rainbow to a New York pot of gold. Murder painted the rainbow that arched Henrietta Koscianski’s journey. The blood of Ronnie Gedeon, her mother and luckless Frank Byrnes dotted it.”15

  At 4:15 p.m., the plane landed at Newark Airport, where West Peterson awaited with a crowd of newspapermen and photographers. Emerging from the cabin, Henrietta posed on the rolling metal stairs, clutching the current issue of Inside Detective, its cover prominently displayed. Flanked by her beaming father and Peterson—who kept reminding her to hold up the magazine so the cameramen could see it—she answered a few questions about Bob. Though she had repeatedly turned down his requests for a date, she always found him to be a “perfect gentleman” and hoped he had “no hard feelings” toward her. Since she never read the newspapers—“I get all mixed up when I read them,” she explained—she had been completely unaware of the Mad Sculptor case until she had seen the issue of Inside Detective the previous Wednesday. “I guess my dad and mother won’t kid me so much now about reading all those detective magazines and listening to the crime broadcasts when they want to be hearing music on the radio,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know why but I’ve always been interested in reading about detectives and criminals. I like mystery, I guess. But I never picture myself as being a detective. And here I am—a detective in one of the most famous murder cases.”

  As for what she planned to do with the money, she explained that it would all “go to her family—part of it to pay for her little brother’s recent appendectomy, the rest towards buying a family home.”

  Taxied across the Hudson to Manhattan, Henrietta embarked on a whirlwind of glamorous activities. She made an appearance on the
NBC radio show Vox Pop, a popular program of short man-on-the-street interviews; had cocktails on the roof garden of the Hotel Astor, where she was introduced to the romantic idol and singing sensation Rudy Vallee; and dined at New York City’s hottest cabaret, the Hollywood restaurant, where she was summoned onstage by famed MC Nils T. Granlund and invited to sing. Facing a roomful of Manhattan sophisticates, the nineteen-year-old kitchen girl, whose performing had been limited to her high school glee club, showed no trace of the jitters as she signaled to the bandleader and launched into the hit song “Where Are You?” from the recent movie Top of the Town. When she was done, the crowd burst into an ovation.

  “I don’t ever want to go back to that job in the hotel kitchen,” she exulted after returning to her table. “I’ve always wanted to sing. I’ve always pictured myself as something like a Kate Smith.”16

  Early the following morning, Tuesday, June 29, she was taken from her suite at the Hotel Astor to the offices of Inside Detective and presented with her one-thousand-dollar check. From there, Peterson took her by taxi to the Court of General Sessions, where the grand jury was expected to hand down its indictments. In the corridor outside the grand jury room, Joseph Gedeon, in one of his less pugnacious moods, was talking to some of the same reporters he had cursed at a day earlier. “I wasn’t an enemy to Irwin,” he said, puffing on a stogie. “He was always a nice boy. What he done he has to suffer for, though. I was always for justice.” When one of the newsmen pressed him for more information about Irwin, however, the little upholsterer ignored him, switching to a subject of far greater moment to him. He had been out bowling the night before, Gedeon announced, and had “made a score of 289.”17

  Spotting Henrietta, the photographers on the scene immediately instructed her to stand beside the wizened little man, who brought a flush of dismay to her face by suggesting that they exchange a kiss for the benefit of the cameras. She looked visibly relieved when the photographers explained that a handshake would do, though Gedeon seemed somewhat crestfallen.18