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

by Schechter, Harold

  Falling silent, he stood there trembling for a moment, then began rushing wildly around the room. “I haven’t had anything to eat in forty-eight hours,” he cried. “Only a bowl of soup and one slice of white bread. I can’t stand it!”

  As he buried his face in his hands and wept convulsively, Leibowitz signaled to the guards, who pulled Irwin to the door.

  Once he was gone, Leibowitz turned to the assembled newsmen and said: “Yesterday, he seemed calm and collected. You saw how he acted today—like a raving maniac. And that’s the man the district attorney wants to try for murder!”8

  Despite his confident pronouncements that he would have no trouble convincing a jury that Irwin was legally sane, District Attorney Dodge was taking no chances. On August 30—one day after Irwin went berserk in the Tombs—Dodge applied to General Sessions Judge John J. Freschi for the appointment of a lunacy commission to examine Robert Irwin and report on his mental condition. Over the protests of Sam Leibowitz, Judge Freschi granted the DA’s request.9

  Beginning in the late 1800s, New York Criminal Court judges could, at their discretion, appoint a lunacy commission to evaluate the sanity of a defendant charged with homicide. Each commission consisted of three “disinterested men”: an attorney, a physician, and a layman, almost always a businessman. After conducting a lengthy investigation, the members would offer an opinion as to whether the defendant was mentally fit to stand trial. In later years, the commissioners were also expected to assess the defendant’s state of mind while committing the crime. The role of the commission was strictly advisory—the court was at liberty to approve or dismiss its findings.10

  By the time of the Mad Sculptor murders, the entire lunacy commission system had come under fierce attack by the public, the psychiatric community, and many government officials. An investigating committee established by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia concluded that, between January 1930 and December 1936, “lunacy commissions have cost the City of New York $1,359,949 and that one million dollars of this amount has been sheer waste, since the service performed by lunacy commissions could readily be performed by the psychiatric divisions of the city hospitals with small additional force.”

  Not only were these commissions a misuse of taxpayers’ money, their findings also were generally regarded as “almost valueless by specialists in this field.” Until 1936, when the situation was belatedly rectified, none of the three members on a lunacy commission, including the doctor, was “legally required to have any psychiatric knowledge or training.” A significant percentage of lunacy commission reports were ultimately “rejected by the court as not reliable.” Cases of defendants who managed to escape trial by feigning insanity were rife. In one notorious instance, a career criminal named Martin Lavin, arrested for killing a man in a bar holdup, convinced a lunacy commission that he was insane by claiming that he “heard voices.” Sent to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, he was discharged as a malingerer shortly after his commitment and, soon afterward, shot and killed a police sergeant while robbing a pawnshop.11

  In spite of the well-documented deficiencies and abuses associated with the system, lunacy examinations continued to be ordered at a profligate rate. Between 1930 and 1938, one Brooklyn judge alone appointed 1,212 lunacy commissions, doling out the lucrative positions to relatives, friends, and political cronies. Increasingly viewed as nothing more than a flagrant “patronage racket,” the system was finally ended by the New York State Legislature in 1939. At the time of its abolition, the case of Robert Irwin, still fresh in the minds of lawmakers, was cited as a glaring example of everything wrong with lunacy commissions.12

  In later years, Fredric Wertham did nothing to conceal his disdain for Irwin’s lunacy commission. Its chairman, attorney Archibald Watson, former corporation counsel for an earlier mayoral administration, had close ties to the city government and would be appointed County Clerk of New York before the commission had finished its work. The second member, Dr. Israel Wechsler, was a physician who specialized in neurology. The third, Dr. Charles Ryan, was a “rich man who had become psychiatrist,” in Wertham’s dismissive words.13

  Their first attempt to examine Irwin took place on September 29. In preparation for the interview, Bob had been brought from his cell to the prison counsel room, where inmates were allowed to confer privately with their lawyers. Bob was sitting “alone in the room quietly reading a newspaper before the arrival of the commission,” the New York Times reported, “but when a keeper started to unlock the door to the room, Irwin pushed a heavy oak table against the door, which opened from inside, and threw his weight against it, barring the commission members.” When several keepers managed to force the door open, Bob “attempted to strike one of them with a chair but was overpowered. Because he appeared to be in a state of considerable excitement, the commission ordered Warden Adams to take Irwin back to his cell, where he eventually became quiet.”14

  Two days later, the commissioners were back. When Bob saw them approaching his cell, he began kicking the bars of his cell door and yelling, “Get those fucking bastards out of here! I told you I don’t want to see preachers or doctors! Get ’em out of here! Get ’em out!”

  Ignoring Bob, the turnkey unlocked the cell door to admit the visitors. No sooner had he done so than “Irwin lunged past him and made for the commissioners. The turnkey grappled with him and shouted for help. Several other guards quickly responded, but it took almost twenty minutes before the kicking, screaming, cursing prisoner was finally brought under control and dragged back into his cell.”15

  The commissioners tried again on February 10, 1938. They found Bob lying on his cot, reading a book on his latest enthusiasm, the esoteric philosophy Rosicrucianism. The moment he became aware that the commissioners were standing outside his cell, “he immediately covered his head with a blanket and retreated to a corner of the cage, huddling there on the floor and occasionally poking his head out from underneath the blanket and yelling, ‘Get out of here!’ Eventually they left in disgust.”16

  Over the course of their inordinately protracted investigation, the commissioners managed not a single interview with Bob. Their conclusions were based on the testimony of twenty-two witnesses examined over the course of seven months—the equivalent, as Sam Leibowitz observed, of an internist diagnosing a patient’s gastrointestinal problems by asking his friends about his eating habits. The transcript of the witness testimony ran to seven hundred and fifty-six typewritten pages. Of that number, more than three hundred were the testimony of Fredric Wertham, who appeared before the commission seven times. Providing lengthy and highly detailed accounts of his interactions with Irwin, Wertham was emphatic in his opinion that “Irwin suffered from a mental disease every time I saw him. That he always suffered from the same mental disease. That if he had not had this mental disease, these murders would not have been committed by him. That the three murders were in my opinion definite symptoms of his mental disease. That he was not in full possession of his mental powers during the night of the murders.”17

  On March 24, 1938—seven months after it was appointed—the commission finally issued its report. It came to a scant seven pages and made no reference at all to Wertham’s opinions, giving more prominence to the testimony of Leonora Sheldon, the young socialite who had never met Bob before the afternoon of the murders and whose entire relationship with him consisted of brief visits to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed by lunch at Schrafft’s. While acknowledging that Irwin had been “occasionally treated for mental disorders,” it attributed his problems to his “poorly digested reading in philosophy and psychology.”18

  “After careful examination and consideration of the material and relevant testimony and such personal observation of the defendant as there was opportunity to make,” the report concluded, “we are of the opinion that the said defendant was not in such a state of idiocy, imbecility, lunacy, or insanity as not to know the nature and quality of t
he acts for which he has been indicted and not to know that the acts were wrong; that is he not in such a state of idiocy, imbecility, lunacy, or insanity as to be incapable of understanding the proceedings or making his defense.”19

  Printed in The American Journal of Psychiatry, the report provoked incredulity and outrage among mental health experts, who assailed it as “patently unsound,” “a most injudicial document,” “at variance with modern and progressive standards in forensic psychiatry.” “The attitude expressed is that of an inquisition,” railed one critic. Others complained that it relied on concepts “which are not part of the psychiatric vocabulary,” that it “failed to present the attitude of disinterested scientific men,” that it could have been written by “any lawyer from newspaper accounts,” that it “glossed over any evidence which would indicate mental derangement on the part of the defendant.” “If it did not deal with matters of life or death,” fumed one eminent psychiatrist, “it might be considered comic.”20

  Newspapers, on the other “hailed the decision with joy,” praising the Irwin lunacy commission for its exemplary work in confirming what the press had claimed all along: that the “fiendish sculptor” was nothing but a “classic example of the insanity faker.”21

  One day after the commission submitted its report, Judge Freschi endorsed the findings. “The approved report means that the defendant may now legally be tried,” the judge declared. He stressed that the question of Bob’s “sanity at the time of the commission of the crime may be raised again and decided at the trial.” As far as the commission was concerned, however, “Robert Irwin was then sane.”22

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  * * *

  Plea

  IN THE COURSE OF HIS intensive preparations for the Irwin trial, Sam Leibowitz had unearthed a 1915 opinion written by Benjamin Cardozo, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, then serving as a judge on the New York Court of Appeals. The opinion related to the case of Hans Schmidt, a Roman Catholic priest sent to the electric chair in 1916 for the dismemberment-murder of his pregnant mistress, Anna Aumüller.1

  In it, Cardozo had argued that “there are times and circumstances in which the word ‘wrong’ as used in the statutory test of responsibility ought not to be limited to ‘legal’ wrong. If there is an insane delusion that God has appeared to the defendant and ordained the commission of the crime, we think it cannot be said of an offender that he knows the act to be wrong.” Cardozo was quick to add that a defendant could not be excused of responsibility simply because “he has views of right and wrong at variance with those that find expression in the law”—unless, that is, such variation had “its origin in some disease of the mind.”

  As far as Leibowitz was concerned, Cardozo’s criteria applied perfectly to Irwin. That Bob suffered from “some disease of the mind” was a fact uncontested even by the prosecution. Even more to the point, his wild-eyed theory of merging with the “Universal Mind” by perfecting his powers of visualization clearly qualified as an insanely deluded God complex.2

  To make this case to a jury, Leibowitz knew he needed a particular type of psychiatrist—not the kind who spends so much of his life on the witness stand that he comes across as a medical gun-for-hire but a highly respected practicing physician who appeared only rarely before juries. The men whose services he retained were Dr. Leland E. Hinsie, assistant director of the New York Psychiatric Institute and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and Dr. Bernard Glueck, former director of the psychiatric clinic at Sing Sing, who had achieved nationwide prominence as an expert witness at the 1924 trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.3

  In contrast to the members of the lunacy commission—whose contact with Bob consisted entirely of observing him through the bars of his cell while he either ignored or spat curses at them—Hinsie and Glueck spent more than seventy hours interviewing him. Their sessions were held behind the closed doors of the prison counsel room. Bob’s wildly, sometimes frighteningly, erratic behavior during these examinations was later described in graphic detail by Dr. Hinsie:

  He would begin by excessive talking and would be considerably upset when he was interrupted for explanations on some point he had raised. Upon interruption he would stare at the examiner, grit his teeth, pound the table viciously with his fists and yell that he would not suffer any interruptions. If allowed to talk at free will he would become ecstatic and enthusiastic. Marked emotional instability as revealed by rapid shifts in mood from happiness to sadness and to agitation were quite common. At times, he was in such a vicious frame of mind that the examiner felt some qualms regarding his own safety, more especially since the defendant threatened he would kill the warden or the prison physician or guard. He would then pace the floor and behave like a caged animal.4

  Irwin worked himself into a pitch of near-frenzied exaltation while discoursing on his current efforts to transform his body through the power of electricity. Pulling open his shirt, he displayed several pads of steel wool stuck to his undershirt, acquired from the men who cleaned the jail. He wore them, he explained, “as a means to build up electrical impulses in myself. There is no limit to the extent that I can build myself mentally and physically through electricity. I can stop the action of my heartbeat, prevent my lungs from expanding and contracting, control the passage of food through my body. All this is done by electricity.”

  Once he had “developed his electrical powers to the highest extent,” he would “be able to become that greatest sculptor in the world, to make any kind of invention, to learn any language without studying it, to walk on water, to turn my body into light, to attain immortality.

  “I will have powers over and above all other people in the world,” he crowed. “I think I can say without bragging that at present I am further advanced in all my thoughts than any man who has ever lived. I, therefore, have Godlike qualities absolutely. All I have to do is wish and I get everything.”

  To prove his godlike powers, he offered to demonstrate his ability to convert his hair into gold. When Hinsie, after watching Bob’s head for a while, was obliged to inform him that the “experiment was a failure,” Bob became “greatly agitated.”

  Despite this minor setback, he predicted that “within a period of three years I’ll attain to the translucency of form so that I’ll just evaporate right out of the place. I will walk through matter. I will walk through a stone wall. Bullets will go through me without affecting me. The electricity will enable me to cure all of my troubles and to cure other people just like Jesus Christ cured them.”

  Questioned closely about the murders, he revealed details he had not previously disclosed. While strangling Ronnie, he said, “there was sunlight or a beautiful light coming down from above. The light was a living thing, like it was a divinity. It seemed to be a divine message that I was getting nearer to the great white throne, nearer to the crystal sun. My head seemed be surrounded by vibrating electricity.”

  At the same time, he was aware that he was being watched by “two great evil eyes that grew larger and larger” and seemed to carry a “special significance.” Under their influence, he said, he would “have killed forty people if they had been in the room then.” Only afterward did he realize that the staring eyes “came from the green dial of the clock.”5

  Their extended examinations of the prisoner led Hinsie and Glueck to the same conclusion. Irwin’s “fantastic delusional system” conformed completely to a personality pattern encountered “in patients whose diagnosis is unqualifiedly that of the schizophrenia-hebephrenia form. The murders were committed with the delusion that the accomplishment of this act would bring to the patient control of the universe which he had planned for so many years. Under the stress of these delusions and hallucinations, normal intellectual processes played no essential role. Therefore, Irwin at the time of the murders could not know the nature and quality of his act.”

  As the two eminent psychiatrists were now prepared to attest on the witness stand, Robert Irwin was “both medically and legally insan
e.”6

  Owing, among other factors, to the exceedingly slow working of the lunacy commission, Bob’s trial was postponed until the fall of 1938. By then the city had a new district attorney: Thomas E. Dewey, the fearless young “gangbuster” whose relentless crusade against racketeers like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano would propel him to the governor’s mansion in Albany and two runs for the White House as the Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948.

  Though just as eager as his predecessor to see Irwin sent to the chair, Dewey, caught up in his first gubernatorial campaign, turned the prosecution over to his right-hand man, Assistant DA Jacob J. Rosenblum, who, in his short time on the job, had already racked up a record of ten consecutive first-degree murder convictions.7 As Leibowitz had anticipated, the DA’s office announced that Irwin would be tried only for the murder of Frank Byrnes, a seemingly airtight case of coldly premeditated, first-degree homicide, perpetrated, by the defendant’s own admission, to eliminate a potential witness. It would be Leibowitz’s task to show that the slaying of Byrnes was “merely part of a general pattern of slaughter,” the climactic act of an insanity-induced orgy of violence.8

  “I expect to save this boy’s life, for he doesn’t belong in the electric chair,” Leibowitz told reporters on Sunday, November 6, the day before the trial was scheduled to begin. “He is a dangerous lunatic and should be put away for the rest of his life. Under no circumstance will I attempt to free him. He did not know the nature and quality of his acts, and I can deal with any statement of the prosecutor to show that he did.” Referring to Inspector Lyons’s widely reported statement shortly after the murders that Irwin, then a fugitive, was “stark mad” and would “never be indicted or go to trial,” Leibowitz also announced his intention “to show that the police authorized newspaper announcements that he would be granted immunity if he gave himself up.”