The proceedings inside the grand jury room, which began at 11:15 a.m., lasted less than forty-five minutes. Seven witnesses testified: Ethel and Joe Kudner, Dr. Thomas Gonzales, Patrolman Edward (who was present when Joseph Gedeon first identified the bodies of the three murder victims), and Detectives Crimmins, Owens, and Tunney. At a few minutes before noon, Julius Bachrach, acting foreman of the grand jury, handed up the three indictments, each charging Robert Irwin with murder in the first degree. Immediately afterward, Irwin was brought from the Tombs and arraigned before Judge William H. Allen. When clerk Edward Cowing asked the defendant how he pleaded, Leibowitz broke in. “I am not ready to plead for the defendant, Your Honor,” he said. “I ask for an adjournment until tomorrow morning. In my opinion, this man is crazy as a bedbug.”
District Attorney Dodge begged to differ. “I expect to prove that Irwin was not insane at the time of the murder, and I will prove that he knew the nature and quality of his acts,” he told reporters after the prisoner was led back to the Tombs. “I will pit my thirty-one years of experience as a lawyer to prove him guilty of murder.”19
Among the many who agreed with Dodge was Dr. Russell E. Blaisdell, superintendent of the Rockwell State Hospital. “In picturing Irwin’s mental condition at the time of the murders,” he told reporters, “it points to his knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. That is the test upon which any decision regarding his legal sanity hinges. While Irwin was suffering from a psychosis, that alone does not establish insanity. We have about two thousand patients suffering from psychoses who are not insane.”20
Taking issue with Blaisdell was Dr. Louis Berg, former head psychiatrist at New York State Hospital for the Insane, soon to gain nationwide attention for his crusade against daytime radio soap operas, which (so he claimed) caused everything from acute anxiety and increased blood pressure to gastrointestinal disturbances, vertigo, and “nocturnal frights” in their female listeners.21 Irwin, Berg declared, was both “medically and legally insane.” Besides being an incurable paranoid schizophrenic—“a dementia-praecox paranoiac,” in the terminology of the time—Irwin also exhibited the “abnormal traits” of extreme exhibitionism and egocentricity. Taken together, Berg declared, “these point to a deep-seated maladjustment” that “so influences the individual that he may not know the difference between right and wrong.”22
The same conflicting opinions of Bob’s mental state were offered by those who had known him. While admitting that he was neither “a doctor nor a lawyer” and thus unqualified to judge “whether or not Bob is insane,” Irwin’s St. Lawrence friend Anders Lunde stressed that the young sculptor “had never acted in a way that made me think he’d do anything” like commit murder. “He always seemed a fine, brilliant person to me,” said Lunde.23
Henrietta Koscianski, on the other hand, announced that, should Bob plead insanity, she was prepared to testify on his behalf. After spending an hour closeted with Sam Leibowitz, she emerged from his office to tell reporters that she could truthfully “say Bob was not responsible. He seemed childish. If he broke a glass, he was terribly depressed. If he got a dime tip, he’d sing like mad.”24
Even the personnel on board the airplane that had conveyed Bob from Chicago to New York City had utterly different impressions of him. To stewardess Bernadette Anderle, “he seemed very nice and courteous. Once I heard him remark about the ‘beauty of the cirrus clouds.’ He looked like a little boy. If I didn’t know about him, I would never dream he was the type of man that could be possibly be guilty of those awful crimes.” By contrast, pilot Charles W. Allen was struck by Bob’s bizarre indifference to his situation. “He impressed me as looking like a nut.”25
One person who expressed no doubt at all about Irwin’s sanity was Robert Flower. Interviewed at his father’s Third Avenue bowling alley, Flower spat out his detestation of the man who had murdered his ex-wife.
“Give me five minutes alone with Robert Irwin and my debt to him will be paid. That scoundrel is accorded more attention than a celebrity and is treated as though he had done something wonderful. Has the public forgotten his crimes? Are they concentrating on his superb acting? Why, he should be sent to the chair so fast there could be no question on the workings of the law. I don’t think Irwin is any crazier than I am. I can tell from his confession that he’s sane because that’s exactly how he talks. I would like to beat every part of him until he could no longer cry out for mercy. He has it coming to him.”26
Along with a crowd of female “morbid rubberneckers”—“women who seemed to find some form of pleasure at gaping at Irwin”—Flower was present in the Court of General Sessions the next morning. At two minutes before noon, Irwin, badly in need of a shave, his once-crisp linen suit a mass of wrinkles, was led into the room. As he made his way toward the front, Flower leaned over the railing and shouted, “You dog!” Irwin ignored him.
After informing the prisoner that three indictments charging him with murder in the first degree had been returned, Court Clerk Cowing asked how he pleaded.
It was Leibowitz who again spoke up for his client. “He pleads not guilty,” said the lawyer, while Irwin looked on in mild indifference, as though he were “a tolerantly interested bystander.”
Leibowitz then requested an adjournment to fix a date for the trial. He was scheduled to leave at the end of the week for Decatur, Alabama, to take part once again in the seemingly endless case of the Scottsboro Boys—his fifth trip down South in as many years to defend the falsely accused young black men.27 Dodge offered no objection and the postponement was granted.
The day before his departure, Leibowitz—who by then had engaged in several jailhouse interviews with his client—met with reporters. “The man is absolutely crazy,” he declared. “His brain is like a scrambled egg. He has no conception of the seriousness of the charge against him. The fact that he may go to the electric chair means nothing to him. He laughs when he should cry and cries when he should laugh. He’ll answer questions right enough, but if you let him talk, he just raves on and on.”
Informed of these remarks, the district attorney countered with his own culinary metaphor. Irwin, he said, was not scrambled but hard-boiled.28
To Fredric Wertham—a man generally not given to wisecracks—the opposing statements of Leibowitz and Dodge made it sound as though the fight over Robert Irwin’s life would be less of a great legal battle than a cooking contest.29 As the psychiatrist who had gotten Irwin to open up to the New York City authorities, Wertham found himself much in the news in the days following his former patient’s surrender, particularly after reporters learned of the lecture he had delivered the previous March on the “catathymic crisis.” Crediting Wertham with identifying a previously unknown mental disease that explained “hitherto baffling crimes of violence,” newspapers trumpeted his discovery in dramatic headlines: “IRWIN SLEW IN GRIP OF NEW MANIA,” “NEW MENTAL ILLNESS KEY TO CRIME.”
Not everyone, of course, was so impressed. To many observers, Wertham’s theory was nothing more than psychiatric gobbledygook. The editorial page of the New York Sun, for example, conveyed its skepticism in a bit of mocking verse:
He did not murder anyone
And such a charge not nice is:
He’s just the charming victim of
A “catathymic crisis”30
Other editorials were every bit as scornful. Under the headline “DUMB—LIKE A FOX,” the New York Post sneered that, while Irwin might or might not be “crazy as a bedbug,” he was certainly sane enough to have hired Sam Leibowitz, “the criminal lawyer who boasts that not one of his clients has ever been sentenced to the electric chair.”31
Much harsher was an editorial in the June 29 issue of the Daily News. Headlined “CRIME AND INSANITY,” it freely admitted that Irwin was insane, then argued that there were stronger reasons for “putting the murderously insane quietly and painlessly out of the way than for executing, say, a man who has killed in a moment of passion, or for revenge, or for s
ome other sane though deplorable motive.” While such a sane killer might be rehabilitated after “twenty or so years in jail,” there “was no such prospect” for the “murderously insane,” whose “minds are out of normal gear. In asylums or out, they are continuous threat to the safety of anybody who comes near them.…We think the case is clear for the execution of criminally insane killers, on the same grounds that mad dogs are put out of the way.”
Should Irwin somehow escape the death penalty, the editorial continued, he should at the very least be subjected to forced sterilization by means of either chemical or surgical castration:
It is bad enough to think of Irwin’s life being spared and Irwin allowed to live on as a menace to his keepers if not society at large. But how would it be to let this man pass on life to another generation?…As things go now, the chances are at least fair that Irwin may in time bequeath his twisted mentality and murderous instincts to children of his. Isn’t it in society’s interest to cut off dangerous strains in the population and encourage only healthy strains, so far as society can do so?32
According to one chronicler, this editorial elicited little more than a shrug from Bob. Execution held no terror for him. He had already boasted that he was “not afraid of this thing called death.” As for the prospect of castration, it was hardly a threat to a man who had once tried to slice off his penis.33
26
* * *
Lunacy
IN A TALK TITLED “Psychiatry in Court,” delivered to an audience of mental health professionals in May 1940, Sam Leibowitz spelled out his feelings about the insanity defense.
“Frankly,” he said, “I avoid it when I can possibly do so”:
Because jurors abhor the insanity defense. Jurors, frankly speaking, don’t like psychiatrists.…We may probe into the reasons for that and we won’t have to probe very far. The average juror knows nothing about the mind. The mind, to him, is synonymous with the brain. He may walk the street and see a cripple and sympathize with him. He can understand a broken arm or leg. He can understand that a man is suffering from consumption. He can see that from the sallow look. He can understand all these things that mean something to him. But when he walks along the street and sees a nice, rosy-cheeked individual apparently suffering from nothing at all, he cannot understand that that man may be suffering from a mental condition. He has probably never been in an institution. To him, insanity is something abstract. Unless he has had experience with someone in his family, the average juror feels that insanity is something cooked-up by the lawyers to save someone, especially for a fat fee.…The public is convinced that psychiatry as practiced in the courts is a racket.1
Leibowitz conceded, however, that there were times when the insanity defense was a “necessary evil.” One of those was the Irwin case.
Even before he departed for Decatur in the first week of July, Leibowitz began laying the groundwork for his defense of Irwin. One of his first steps was to invite Fredric Wertham to his office for an interview that lasted from 5:00 p.m. until midnight. It wasn’t long before Leibowitz—imagining himself as a jury member listening to “the erudite doctor”—concluded that twelve ordinary men would be utterly “bewildered by the technical terminology of the psychiatrist” and view the concept of “catathymic crisis” as “nothing but psychiatric double talk.” Indeed, just a few years earlier, Wertham’s testimony as an expert witness had failed to save the life of Albert Fish, a man so extravagantly deranged that even some jurors who voted for his conviction believed he was insane. By the time their lengthy conference was over, Leibowitz, despite his high regard for “the sincere and capable doctor,” had eliminated him as a possible defense witness.2
Leibowitz left for the South on Monday, July 5. Exactly three weeks later, in the dramatic finale of the Scottsboro case, he made a triumphant return to New York City with four of the young men, who had been suddenly freed by the state of Alabama after living six and a half years in the shadow of the electric chair. Three days later, at a tumultuous rally at the Hippodrome Theatre, more than five thousand weeping, cheering, and wildly applauding men and women greeted the Scottsboro Boys and their attorney with a fifteen-minute standing ovation.3
Immediately afterward, Leibowitz threw himself back into the Irwin case. In his typically exhaustive way, he pored over “every leading case in which criminal responsibility of the mentally ill was an issue,” interviewed prominent psychiatrists and psychologists, visited Bellevue’s mental hygiene ward, and traveled to Rockland State Hospital to inspect Irwin’s medical records.4 Always a master at using the press to his advantage, he also made sure that the public was kept constantly aware of Bob’s progressively erratic behavior behind bars.
Consigned to Tier No. 1 of the Tombs, where prisoners regarded as mentally unstable could be kept under close observation, Irwin alternated between periods of seeming normality and frenzied outbursts of emotion. Just a few days after his surrender, he allowed himself to be interviewed in his cell by a female reporter for the Evening Journal, Mignon Bushel. Asked about Ethel, Bob’s “face contorted” and he screamed, “I love her and I hate her. But I want to see her!” Suddenly catching a glimpse of the prison cat prowling outside his cell, he grew instantly calm and murmured, “Hello, kitty. Hello, kitty.” A moment later, in a “voice shrill with hysteria,” he cried: “I don’t expect to be painted like a lily but I want some consideration for what is in back of all this. This is like an iceberg with nine-tenths underneath water and only one-tenth above.” He then “burst into tears uncontrollably, like a child. ‘Whatever punishment is coming for me, I’ll take it with my chin up,’ he sobbed. ‘I only ask that people try to understand.’ ” Bushel was so “bewildered, shocked, and frightened by the changeability of his moods” that she fled in dismay.5
Not long afterward—just one day after Warden William A. Adams told reporters that Irwin was “as normal as any man in prison”—Bob erupted in fury at some perceived insult by one of the guards and, grabbing the bars of his cell door, began to shriek, “I’ve killed before and I’ll kill again!” It took the threat of a straitjacket to quiet him down.6
He remained quiet and cooperative for another few weeks. At about 2:15 p.m. on Sunday, August 29, however, as the prison physician, Dr. George D’Oronzio, walked past his cell, Bob, without warning, leaped from his cot and threw a cup of water at him.
D’Oronzio immediately informed Deputy Warden John Bockel, who had a keeper, Edward Cleary, bring Irwin to his office. When Bockel asked him “what the trouble was,” Irwin snarled, “I don’t want you sending those religious and medical bastards up here to annoy me.”
Bockel then informed Bob that he would have to be put in an isolation cell as punishment for hurling the water at D’Oronzio. At that, Bob “drew back his fist and shouted another volley of profanities.”
Advising Bob to “calm himself and do nothing rash,” Bockel, along with keepers Cleary, Joseph Smith, and Michael O’Connell, escorted the prisoner to the South Annex, where the isolation cells were located. Before Bob was placed in the cell, the deputy warden instructed the guards to search his clothing. “Suddenly,” Bockel testified afterward, “Irwin leaped upon McConnell, threw his arms around his neck, and bit him on the back of his neck. It took the combined efforts of the other two keepers and myself to pry him loose. He then started striking with both fists and kicking at anyone of us he thought he could reach.” After a ferocious struggle, the four brawny men managed to wrestle the frenzied prisoner into the isolation cell.
When Leibowitz learned of the incident the following day, he hurried to see Irwin, who, by then, had written his own four-page account of the disturbance. “Irwin is very jittery,” Leibowitz told reporters after his interview with Bob. “He was beaten unmercifully. He has a five-inch cut going from the right temple to the center of his forehead. There are four welts below his shoulder blades. It looks as if they were inflicted with a rubber pipe. They haven’t given that kid a drop of water since yesterday aft
ernoon. He’s almost mad with thirst.”7
At Leibowitz’s insistence, Irwin was immediately transferred from the Tombs to the Raymond Street Jail in Brooklyn. There, the ever-canny lawyer saw a prime opportunity for a public relations coup. Knowing that the fracas in the Tombs had left Irwin in a highly unsettled frame of mind, he arranged a meeting between reporters and his client in the anteroom off Warden Harry Schleth’s office.
At roughly 12:45 on the last day of August, Bob—haggard, unshaven, dressed in a dirty white shirt and wrinkled gray prison trousers—appeared at the threshold of the interview room. “His eyes were blood-flecked and staring,” wrote one observer. “He was trembling.”
As he entered the room, he clutched at his throat and screamed: “What is this? What are you doing to me? Who are these people?”
Taking Bob by the arm, Leibowitz, speaking in the soothing tones one might use with a hysterical child, said: “Sit down, Bob. Take it easy, now. They’re reporters, they want to help you.”
“We’re not going to harm you,” one of the reporters said. “Please sit down.”
With an audible whimper, Bob sank into a chair and began brushing nervously at his hair.
“Have you been mistreated?” someone asked.
“For two weeks,” Bob blurted, “they had doctors staring at me. Leering at me with their eyes! I couldn’t stand it!”
With that, he burst into sobs, leaped from his chair, and began to mumble incoherently. Straining to hear, the reporters could make out broken sentences: “They beat me from behind…beat me with blackjacks…six men with blackjacks.…I couldn’t fight six men with blackjacks.”
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 27
