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

by Schechter, Harold

  Informed of the defense attorney’s statement, Rosenblum stressed “that there is no such thing as a jury sending an insane killer away for the rest of his life. He can be released from an institution for the criminally insane any time psychiatrists decide he is sane.” As an example, he pointed to the case of Harry K. Thaw, the millionaire playboy found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1906 murder of famed architect Stanford White in the country’s first “Trial of the Century.” Sentenced to incarceration for life at Matteawan, Thaw was declared sane eight years later, found not guilty at a second trial, and set free.9

  On Monday, November 7, 1938, opening day of the Irwin trial, the courtroom was filled to capacity for what newspapers predicted would be the greatest “battle of psychiatrists” since the Thaw case.10 Among the throng of journalists covering the story were two of the city’s celebrity columnists: Damon Runyon—beloved Broadway chronicler whose 1931 bestseller Guys and Dolls had turned the colorful denizens of the “Great White Way” into figures of pop myth—and Dorothy Kilgallen, best known to a later generation as a television personality on the hit 1950s quiz show What’s My Line? but at this point in her career a star reporter for the New York Evening Journal.

  At precisely 10:30 a.m., the bailiff boomed out the name “Robert Irwin” and a husky guard led Bob into the room. Reporters who had last seen him a year earlier were startled by the change in his appearance. Convinced—as he had told Dr. Hinsie—that, with his newly acquired electrical control over his bodily functions, he no longer required much food, he had lost more than twenty-five pounds. “In his double-breasted dark, chalk-striped suit,” wrote Damon Runyon, Irwin was “a mere bag o’ bones,” a “jerky, pallid, little wraith of a man,” his “face so drawn that you could hang your hat on his cheek bones.”11

  Wearing a smirk and walking with pronounced swagger, Bob strode to the defense table and dropped into the chair beside Leibowitz’s associate counsel, Vincent Impellitteri, former assistant district attorney and future mayor of New York City. Throughout that long day’s proceedings, Bob would alternate between periods of incessant, nervous motion and extended stretches of dozing. Occasionally, he would rise muttering from his chair. His guard, “constantly on the watch for an outburst from the egocentric killer,” would swiftly move in and forcibly reseat him. “Declared by his attorney ‘as crazy as a bedbug,’ ” remarked Runyon, Irwin “certainly looked the part.”12

  Jury selection was the first order of business. The previous May, the female population of New York State had won an important victory in the struggle for equality when, on the last day of its spring session, the legislature passed a law allowing women to serve on juries.13 Leibowitz was well pleased, for reasons made clear by Mignon Bushel, the Evening Journal reporter granted an exclusive interview with Bob just days after his surrender. Bushel had begun her story by declaring: “I do not know if Robert Irwin is insane in a technical way. But I do know that no jury of women would convict him. For Irwin is a handsome, tragic young man who cannot resist women. And women cannot resist him.”14

  The blue-ribbon panel of 150 potential jurors selected for the Irwin trial, however, consisted entirely of men. When Leibowitz protested, he was informed by Frederick H. Cahoon, Acting Commissioner of Jurors, that, while women now had the option to serve on juries, they were “barred from membership on special panels of talesmen for murder trials.” Leibowitz immediately declared that “the procedure was not legal” and that “if Irwin were found guilty of first-degree murder, he would make the exclusion of women talesmen the main contention for a reversal.”15

  In his opening remarks to the panel, Leibowitz, dressed in the outfit he traditionally wore at the start of every trial—blue suit, white shirt, and red tie—suggested that he would rely on what the Daily News described as “the highly original defense of ‘mental drunkenness.’ ” “We shall claim,” said Leibowitz, “that though Irwin was not intoxicated by reason of liquor, he was intoxicated the night of those murders by reason of mental disease. We say that even if he were not insane under the law, he was still out of his mind that night by reason of his state of mind.”16

  Utterly unawed by his opponent’s reputation as a courtroom wizard, Rosenblum promised to call an array of psychiatric experts who would testify that while “Irwin perhaps was abnormal,” he was legally sane when he perpetrated the crime he was being tried for. Stressing the premeditated quality of the act, Rosenblum declared that “the People are going to prove that the defendant is guilty of murder in the first degree because he plunged an ice pick into Frank Byrnes’s head.”17

  Consistent with his belief that the average person “knows nothing about the mind” and cannot understand that a man who seems superficially normal might be suffering from a mental disease, Leibowitz posed the same question to each potential juror: “Have you any fixed notion of what a crazy man must look like? Do you think he must be in a straitjacket and frothing at the mouth in order to be insane?”

  He also addressed the issue that Rosenblum had raised in relation to the Harry Thaw case. “You have heard and read how defendants acquitted in murder cases by reason of insanity have gotten out of the crazy house,” said Leibowitz to each venireman. “Tell me, would you feel that if Robert Irwin is put in the crazy house, he might get out one day and take more life—would you vote to put him in the electric chair and be done with him, once and for all?”

  When one of the potential jurors answered yes, Leibowitz emitted an incredulous “What?”

  “I meant no, actually,” the venireman muttered sheepishly. Leibowitz, however, used one of his twenty peremptory challenges to dismiss him.

  The most heated exchanges between the two lawyers occurred on the frequent occasions when Leibowitz brought up Thomas Dewey, whose public appeal was such that, after just one year as district attorney, he was already on the ballot as the Republican candidate for governor of New York State. Concerned that some veniremen might be “blinded by Dewey’s reputation” as a “Galahad in shining armor,” Leibowitz, over Rosenblum’s furious protests, asked each of them about his attitude toward the district attorney. “Do you think that because Mr. Dewey’s office is prosecuting this case, it has to be absolutely legitimate, otherwise Mr. Dewey wouldn’t prosecute?” “Suppose Mr. Dewey comes into court, would you regard anything he said as holy and a symbol of purity and virtue?” “You don’t feel that just because the D.A. produces a witness, the witness must be shrouded in purity and truthfulness?” One potential juror, about to be accepted by both sides, was immediately rejected by Leibowitz after admitting that he had attended “a testimonial dinner to Dewey after he convicted Lucky Luciano.”18

  When the trial was adjourned at 6:30 p.m.—eight hours after it began—only three jurors had been seated: Consolidated Edison clerk James H. Day, security analyst Henry Andrews, and Harry Held Jr., manager of a paint supply firm. Given the pace of the first day’s proceedings, the newspapers predicted that the trial would last at least a month.19

  Tuesday, November 8, was Election Day. In New York, the Democratic incumbent, Herbert Lehman, eked out a victory for his fourth and final term as governor; Dewey would have to wait until 1942 before beginning his own three terms as the state’s chief executive. Because of the holiday and Judge James G. Wallace’s full schedule on Wednesday, the trial did not resume until noon on Thursday.

  It lasted until 4:00 p.m. When the abbreviated session was adjourned, only two more jurors had been seated: hairnet salesman Sidney F. Stern and C. Markham Langham, employee of a shipping firm. In accordance with New York State law requiring a defendant to stand and “look upon” every man chosen to decide his fate, Irwin was made to rise from his chair and stare into the faces of Stern and Langham as clerk Siegfried Steinberg mumbled the swearing-in formula. As he had in the case of the three jurors chosen on Monday, Bob seemed to find the ritual intensely amusing, wearing a “continued grin that was almost a giggle.”20

  Following adjournment, Leibowitz and
Rosenblum retreated to Judge Wallace’s chambers, where the three remained closeted for an hour. Rumors swirled that a plea bargain was in the offing. According to these unverified reports, the district attorney’s office was seriously concerned that Leibowitz, with his formidable powers of persuasion, would have no trouble convincing the jury that his client was a hopeless madman. Should the Great Defender prevail, Irwin could become another Harry K. Thaw, committed to Matteawan only to be released after supposedly regaining his sanity.

  For his part, Leibowitz was only concerned that his client, a desperately sick man, escape the electric chair. As he had already made clear, he was no more eager than the prosecution to see Irwin back on the streets. Both sides were said to be amenable to a deal that would spare Irwin from the chair but ensure that he would spend the rest of his days in confinement.21

  Among the reporters who lingered in court while the lawyers and Judge Wallace conferred was Damon Runyon. When the two attorneys emerged from the judge’s chambers, Runyon approached them and asked “if there was any foundation of truth to the report.”

  Drawing Rosenblum aside, Leibowitz exchanged a few whispered words with his opponent before replying: “We have decided to make no comment.”22

  One day earlier, Germany had been the scene of an appalling outburst of anti-Semitic violence. Following the death of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, shot in Paris as a radical act of protest by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, Hitler and his minions seized on the assassination to instigate a nationwide pogrom. On the night of November 9, Nazi storm troopers and rioters throughout Germany burned 267 synagogues, vandalized 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and rounded up roughly 30,000 Jewish males who were shipped off to concentration camps. The countless shattered storefronts whose shards littered the streets in the aftermath of the rampage gave the episode its infamous name: Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

  Outraged accounts of the pogrom filled the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Reading about it in his cell in the Tombs, Bob seemed most affected by the plight of the young assassin, Grynszpan. He immediately shared his feelings with Leibowitz, informing his attorney that, to show his sympathy for the boy, he was willing to “take his place and be guillotined.”

  Leibowitz declined to convey the offer to the French authorities, though he did make sure to share his client’s latest bizarre notion with the press.23

  If the first two days of the Irwin trial were notably lacking in drama, the third made up for that deficiency. “It was the triple-killer himself,” the New York Times reported, “who transformed the session from a routine circumstance of criminal law into one of the most dramatic denouements that has ever taken place in the Supreme Court Building.”24

  At first, observers assumed it would be another tedious day of jury selection. Forty talesmen were questioned in the morning, with only three more accepted by noon recess, bringing the total to eight. No sooner had court reconvened at 2:20 p.m., however, than Leibowitz requested that all jurors be excused from the room. Once they had filed outside, he approached the bench and—confirming the rumors that Damon Runyon had been the first to report—asked “that a plea of guilty to murder in the second degree be accepted for each indictment.”

  Though Irwin did not “fit the common conception of insanity,” said Leibowitz, it was incontestably the case that he “has been insane since childhood with dementia praecox of the hebephrenic type.” In the opinion of the defense experts, his condition was only bound to get worse, “until he is a gibbering idiot, sitting in a corner, smiling to himself.”

  There was no surer sign of his insanity, said Leibowitz, than his obsession with visualization.

  From seventeen on, he has had a crazy notion that by visualization he could project himself into the past and make such men as Napoleon, Bismarck, or Nietzsche live again. He felt he could do the same thing for the future, so much so that he could change things from one form into another; that he was able to bring about such a cataclysm as would be too terrible to behold; that he would take his place on the throne next to God as a man not only omniscient but omnipotent.

  Leibowitz then made a startling disclosure. He had spent much of the noon recess cajoling his client into accepting the guilty plea. Irwin, initially resistant, had finally relented under one condition: that Leibowitz give him five hundred dollars, the total amount (according to Bob’s calculations) that he would need over the years to pay a prison guard or fellow inmate twenty-five cents a day to “sit in or near his cell” and help with his visualization experiments.25

  After Leibowitz took his seat at the defense table, Assistant DA Rosenblum approached the bench. Still in a combative mood, he made it clear that the prosecution still believed that Irwin was sane and “legally responsible” for his acts. As he recapped the facts of the defendant’s life, he portrayed Bob as a lifelong criminal, who had first been “adjudged a juvenile delinquent at the age of twelve.”

  “That’s a lie!” Bob snarled. Glaring at the prosecutor, he began to rise from his seat. Three guards quickly moved in and forced him back down.

  Rosenblum’s tone was so hostile that Judge Wallace finally asked, “Are you opposed to the acceptance of his plea?”

  “No,” said Rosenblum. “In view of the status of the defendant, we feel the circumstances absolutely warrant our consent to such a plea.”

  “It requires more than consent,” snapped the judge. “It must be a recommendation.”

  “It is a recommendation,” said Rosenblum. “Only we must be absolutely certain that this man will be in an institution for life. Under no circumstances can he ever be allowed to get back into society.”

  “I am shoulder to shoulder with him on that,” interjected Leibowitz.

  Turning toward the defense table, Judge Wallace peered over his glasses at Irwin. “Well, what does the defendant have to say? Is he willing to take a plea to murder in the second degree?”

  Clearly struggling to control himself, Irwin rose from his chair. Eyes blazing, lips curled in bitterness, he seemed, at first, too overwrought to speak. Once he found his voice, however, his words came pouring out of him in a crazed rush. No one who saw and heard him that day could doubt, as the Times reported, “the degree to which he appears demented.”26

  “Do you realize,” asked the judge, “that you are admitting by your plea that you committed murder in the second degree?”

  “Your Honor, technically, since it seems to me everything is a technicality, I admit that,” said Bob. “But actually I do not admit to murder. I have looked up in the dictionary what it says about murder, how it defines murder, and it says, ‘The malicious killing of one human being by another.’ And there is nothing malicious in what I have done.”

  “Well, you admit you took an ice pick and killed a man named Byrnes with it?” said Judge Wallace.

  Irwin hesitated for a moment, as if thinking hard. Then: “I admit that. Yes, sir.”

  “You knew at the time that you were killing him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you admit that you strangled Mrs. Gedeon?”

  “Yes,” said Bob, growing more excited by the moment. “And I admit I killed Ronnie. But I want to repeat that I take this plea against my better judgment. I have been talked blue in the face—”

  Judge Wallace interrupted softly: “No, you don’t take any plea against your better judgment.”

  The judge’s soothing tone had its effect. Irwin relaxed somewhat and went on: “I only take it because I have been provided by Mr. Leibowitz, out of his kindness and out of his purse, with a means of continuing the one thing that I put my life into. I don’t consider myself a murderer.”

  “You think you had a right to kill these three people?”

  “I think that under the circumstances I had every right. And I want to say this, Your Honor,” he continued, casting a baleful glare at the prosecution table. “If I ever talked to that jury, and if this thing had gone to
trial, I would have emerged in an entirely different light than those professional liars over there, before the court and the jury—”

  Shaking with fury, he shifted his gaze to the press table. “And that goes for a few more people,” he shouted. “How abominably you treated me! You dirty dogs! Nobody wants to understand me. Nobody wants to see what I’m driving at. No one!”

  Evidently thrown into a quandary by this outburst, Judge Wallace sat silently for a moment. “The important thing for me to make up my mind,” he finally murmured, as though debating with himself, “is whether he realizes what he is doing before I accept the plea.”

  Then, addressing Bob again, he said: “You realize you are going to be sent to prison, probably for the rest of your natural life, on your plea?”

  “I realize that, Your Honor,” Irwin replied scornfully, “and it makes no difference to me. I prophesy to you that in ten years I will be out.”

  With that, the plea was accepted, sentencing set for two weeks from that day, and Bob—flashing “a mad toothy grin for the photographers”—was led back to the Tombs.27

  Thomas Dewey lost no time in releasing a prepared statement from his office:

  It is imperative that the community be permanently protected against Irwin’s possible return to society. This man has been previously committed as insane five times. Had the case gone to jury, Irwin might have been held legally insane at the time the murders were committed and he then could have been released on the community again. Now that will never happen. At the time of sentence, Mr. Rosenblum, by my direction, will recommend a sentence of ninety years to life on each of the three murder indictments, to be served consecutively. Such a sentence would ensure Irwin’s confinement for the rest of his natural life.28

  On his way out of the courtroom, Leibowitz, wearing a triumphant look, was surrounded by reporters, all of whom had the same question. What had Bob meant when he predicted that he would be out in ten years?