“Electricity,” said Leibowitz, explaining Bob’s latest obsession. “He believes that, by 1948, he’ll have stored enough energy in his body to melt the prison bars.”29
28
* * *
Aftermath
EVEN BEFORE BOB WAS SENTENCED, Sam Leibowitz had already found himself involved in another made-for-tabloid murder case.
At around 7:30 p.m. Sunday, November 6, 1938—the eve of the start of Bob’s trial—a seventeen-year-old girl named Eva Kopalchak showed up at the Bellevue psychiatric ward, where she had been confined twice before for attempted suicide. Dressed in male drag—her stepfather’s trousers, a fedora hat, and a lumberman’s jacket—she calmly told the on-duty doctors that she had killed her mother, Mrs. Christina Piatak, earlier that day.
“She didn’t like the company I was keeping,” said Eva by way of explanation. “She didn’t want me to drink and smoke. And she wouldn’t give me any money.”
After arguing for a while, Eva had taken a .22-caliber rifle from a closet and shot her mother six times in the back, head, and chest, then crushed her skull with an iron shoemaker’s last “to put her out of her misery.” After donning her stepfather’s clothing, she strolled to a bar and grill at 30th Street and First Avenue, smoked a cigar, and had a few shots of whiskey before making her way to Bellevue. Records showed that she had been committed to Rockland State Hospital in February of that year but released at her mother’s insistence in July.
Her story of matricide seemed so improbable and Eva’s demeanor so patently bizarre that the doctors gave it little credence. It wasn’t until Monday morning that policeman August Gillman, sent to Mrs. Piatak’s apartment to inform her of her daughter’s whereabouts, discovered the middle-aged woman’s body lying in a pool of dried blood with six spent rifle cartridges scattered on the floor around her.
Arraigned in the Jefferson Market Court later that day, Eva was asked by Magistrate Abeles if she was sorry for what she did.
“Well after all,” Eva said with a shrug, “she is my mother.”
A week and a half later, on Thursday, November 18, the “female Irwin” (as the tabloids quickly dubbed her) appeared in Homicide Court for a hearing. No longer garbed in her “fantastic attire” but in a prim blue sweater and black skirt, she was accompanied by Sam Leibowitz, who had agreed to represent her after she contacted him by mail. Eva would become yet another killer saved from the chair by the Great Defender. In the end, she was allowed to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter with a term of ten to twenty years.
“Are you sure of what you are doing in entering this guilty plea?” asked the judge.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Eva answered. “My lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, has told me this is the best thing to do. I think I will be all right when I come out of prison.”1
Bob arrived for his own sentencing on Monday morning, November 28, looking forward to the chance of delivering one of his grandiosely self-serving speeches. Judge Wallace, however, was in no mood for more of the Mad Sculptor’s bombast.
Flanked by four husky bailiffs, the prisoner, wearing a dark suit, gray shirt, and black tie, sauntered into the courtroom shortly after 10:00 a.m. Presented at the bar, he was asked the standard question by the clerk: “Have you anything to say before the sentence is pronounced?”
Clearly determined to take full advantage of his last appearance in the legal spotlight, Irwin placed his hands on the prisoner’s rail, leaned forward, and launched into a carefully prepared speech.
“Your Honor,” he began in sonorous tones, “ordinarily this business of asking a man if he wants to say anything is a mere formality, for the ordinary prisoner is generally guilty of willful aggression against society or ignorant and unable to speak for himself.”
As Bob paused for a moment for rhetorical effect, Sam Leibowitz leaned his head toward the man beside him, Assistant DA Sewell T. Tyng, and muttered, “I just can’t keep this fellow from talking.”
“I am not guilty of any willful aggression against society,” Bob continued in a booming voice. “I am not ignorant. And I certainly can speak for myself. Your Honor, please, will you permit me—”
“Unfortunately, you have pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree,” Judge Wallace broke in impatiently. “This is not the time to make an extended oration.”
“I’m not!” Bob shouted. “I have some facts—”
“I don’t care to hear them,” said the judge.
Face contorted in fury, Bob screamed: “This is a farce! I have a definite and real reason why sentence should not be pronounced! You say you represent justice. I say you do not. You represent a rich man’s justice!”
Ignoring Irwin’s wild taunts, Wallace announced that the guilty pleas had been accepted on the recommendation of the district attorney’s office “for the reason there is a question of whether the defendant is of sufficient mentality to be responsible in law for the commission of his acts.
“There is no question the defendant is mentally unsound,” he added. “In my opinion, the State has lost nothing in accepting these pleas, except possibly the execution of this defendant, and that would bring no credit to the State.”
He then pronounced the sentence: twenty years each for the murders of Veronica and Mary Gedeon and ninety-nine years to life for the murder of Frank Byrnes, the terms to run consecutively for a total of 139 years.
Still tightly gripping the rail, Bob shouted, “Your Honor, you should at least let me present my side of the case!”
At that point, two of the guards stepped forward, locked his arms in theirs, and started leading him way. Crimson with rage, Irwin shrieked at the judge: “You’re not as fair to me as I expected you to be! You should have let me talk!”
Just as he reached the door, he managed to yank himself free of the attendants’ grasp. Wheeling around to sweep his gaze around the courtroom, he barked out a bitter laugh and cried, “I wonder if Ethel had the courage to show her face here? Is she here?”
In an instant, the guards grabbed him again by the arms. “She hasn’t got the courage!” he wailed as they dragged him out the door.2
Handcuffed to two detectives, Bob was taken by taxi straight to Grand Central Station. Before boarding the train that would carry him to Sing Sing, he made a final statement to reporters. “I think it’s ridiculous,” he said calmly, “for the court to ask if a man has anything to say before sentence is pronounced against him and then not let him talk. If the truth of this whole business become known, the people will have a different idea of what justice really is.”3
Soon after 1:30 p.m., he arrived at the prison and was assigned his new identity: No. 95741. Before relinquishing his civilian clothes, he undid a large safety pin securing the side pocket of his suit jacket, removed five crisp new hundred-dollar bills—the money he had been promised by Sam Leibowitz—and turned it over to an official for safekeeping. It was reportedly the largest sum ever brought to Sing Sing by a prisoner, surpassing even the amount carried by Richard Whitney, former president of the New York Stock Exchange, when he had started his five- to ten-year term in April for embezzlement.4
Locked in a padded cell in the solitary confinement unit, Bob was placed under observation by Dr. Amos T. Baker, Sing Sing’s chief psychiatrist. Over the course of the next week, Baker spent two to three hours a day with Bob, who was his usual cooperative, often maniacally talkative self. Other prison doctors visited him, too, sometimes bringing him coffee and candy, along with drawing materials. Bob passed much of his time making pencil sketches, including one he sent to Sam Leibowitz as a thank-you gift: a cartoon of a “frock-coated Leibowitz snatching a tiny Irwin from the lethal embrace of the electric chair.”5
Despite the grim accommodations, Bob immediately felt at home at Sing Sing and was eager to remain there. On December 8, however, Dr. Baker delivered his evaluation to Warden Lewis Lawes. Irwin was “very definitely insane” and “unsuitable for a correctional institution.”6 Hoping to be able to stay at the p
rison, Bob asked for an interview with Warden Lawes but was refused.
Late on December 9, 1938—ten days after his arrival at Sing Sing—Bob, shackled to two other prisoners, was transported by train and automobile from Ossining to Plattsburgh. At around 8:00 a.m. the following morning, he arrived at his new home, the Dannemora State Hospital. Despite his disappointment at the transfer, Bob—so one hospital official reported to the press—went through his routine admission procedure in “gay spirits.”7
For a while, he seemed content. Soon after his arrival, he sent a Christmas card to Fredric Wertham. “This institution has more restrictions & it lacks the educational facilities of Sing Sing but the attendants & doctors are friendly to me & they do serve better food than either Sing Sing or Rockland,” he wrote. “I suppose that later on things will be much better & I guess it’s largely what you make of it & so far I have made only friends & no trouble at all with anybody.” He requested two books that Wertham promptly purchased and shipped to him: Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen by British biologist, statistician, and popularizer Lancelot Hogben.8
Like virtually every incarcerated mass killer—even those far less physically attractive than Irwin—he quickly attracted the attention of what a later generation would call a groupie. “A beautiful senorita from Cuba has been writing me in Spanish and I’m in love all over again!” he informed Wertham. To facilitate their communication, he began to teach himself Spanish. Before long, in his characteristically fanatical way, he not only had thrown himself into the study of other foreign tongues—French, German, Latin, Polish, and Italian—but also had invented an international language of his own. “I think I have really got something here,” he crowed in a letter to Wertham, “something new in the field of languages—a new principle that neither Esperanto nor any other language ever had; which in addition to many advantages of explicitness, brevity, beauty, uniformity, flexibility, ease of learning, etc., will make the mere speaking of this language tend to improve the health and prolong the life of the speaker.”9
When he wasn’t involved with his new linguistic obsession, he was pursuing other enthusiasms. He continued to be fascinated by the esoteric philosophy of Rosicrucianism and urged Wertham to take a look at Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, “the most wonderful book I ever read in my life, bar none.” He became interested in the life of Franz Mesmer and attempted to teach himself hypnotism, which he believed would help him “to learn to visualize.” And he developed a hobbyist’s passion for ornithology, inspired by his observations of the sparrows that nested right outside his window. He had “become quite a bird lover,” he wrote to Wertham’s wife, the sculptor Florence Hesketh. One passage from his letter made its way into the newspapers:
It’s cold here; I have a sparrow in a box with his foot frozen off; I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill him as I cannot keep him in that box & he can’t possibly live if I turn him loose. This is a tough world for lots of people, including sparrows.10
One lifelong passion he felt forced to abandon was art. “I am not permitted to model and I wouldn’t want to anyway unless I could cast my statues in plaster & I know that I will never be permitted because of the metal tools I need in that work,” he wrote to Wertham. “I was hoping to do some pictures in oil and try to sell them so as to help my two brothers get a little money but the Commissioner of Correction has refused me permission to do so, so I am not interested in doing any art work.” Wertham, who believed strongly that his former patient might “reach a certain degree of self-expression and happiness and gain a degree of internal freedom” through his art, appealed to the Department of Corrections on Bob’s behalf, but to no avail.11
For more than a decade, Wertham and his wife kept up a correspondence with Bob, sending him regular letters and holiday cards, along with chocolates, cigarettes, books, and subscriptions to weekly news magazines. Over the years, the tone of Bob’s replies grew increasingly dispirited. At first, he struck a note of confidence, even defiance:
This prison life is a tough life but there are some indications that things might get better for me here. I hope so & intend to stay out of trouble. Looking back thru the years I remember that my life was always a tough life, but I don’t think that it is for nothing & you will see that I will win out in the end and get out of here a free man. I am a long way from being discouraged. An experience like I have been thru will either crush you or make you hard inside. I don’t feel crushed.12
By the following year, his tone was markedly more subdued: “I think that things might get better for me in time—hope so at any rate—but the mills of the gods grind slow.”13
After that, his letters grew increasingly despondent. In place of his usual hyperenthusiasm—for philosophy, religion, language—there was a sense of hopelessness and futility. He had even lost interest in visualization: “There is nothing to say about myself.” “As for me, there is nothing new I can say.” “There is not much I can tell you about myself. This place is always about the same.”14
Despite his early pledge to “stay out of trouble,” he grew increasingly belligerent. Convinced that “the employees were unfriendly to him and that the other patients were talking about him,” he eventually assaulted another inmate. When an attendant intervened, Bob ripped the nozzle from a wall-mounted fire extinguisher and threatened to kill the man with it. He was forcibly subdued and thrown into solitary confinement.15
He remained in his solitary cell for three years, often refusing to eat, growing emaciated, losing his teeth. In 1951, newspapers reported that he was dying of general paresis brought on by his congenital syphilis.16
Occasionally, his name would appear in newspapers and magazines for other reasons. On August 1, 1940, for example, Sydney Pilie, a hotel food checker who ran a sideline in mail-order pornography, was picked up by the police at his fourth-floor apartment at 316 East 50th—“the same apartment,” as the New York Times reported, “where Robert Irwin, demented sculptor, killed Veronica Gedeon, her mother, and another lodger three years ago.” As the cops were about to take Pilie into custody, he went into the kitchen, supposedly to turn off the gas stove, and threw himself out the low-silled window into a courtyard. He died instantly. According to the building superintendent, Fernando Molls, “other tenants had declined to lease the apartment after the Gedeon murders. Pilie, however, took the place without reluctance, declaring he was ‘not superstitious.’ ”17
A month later, September 1940—one year after the Nazi invasion of Poland plunged Europe into war—an essay appeared on the newsstands that compared Bob to Adolf Hitler. Published in the pulp magazine Detective Tales, the piece described Hitler as a “human monster” who, “in his power-lusting brain, actually believes that the stubborn Poles forced him to bomb Warsaw.” Wondering if “a parallel to this egomania can be found in the annals of crime as we know it here in America,” the article came up with a ready example: “Robert Irwin, slayer of Ronnie Gedeon, Ronnie’s mother, and one other innocent victim”:
“Society compelled me to do this,” Irwin is reputed to have told the police. And he went on to imply that society, having learned that he was a mental misfit, had failed to cure him; and having failed, had neglected to restrain him from moving with normal men and women. So convinced was he of this opinion, that he was “forced” to make society pay for the errors of its ways. There are many who would agree with Irwin; many who are convinced that society was grossly at fault in his case.18
Bob was also invoked in another far more impressive magazine piece, this one by the famous author Theodore Dreiser, whose abiding fascination with sensational murders had resulted in his 1925 masterpiece, An American Tragedy. Published in the North American Review, the article deals, among other things, with the admixture of good and evil impulses within every person. Addressing his readers directly, Dreiser asks them to consider why they—we—derive so much enjoyment from reading about horrific murders. And the example he chooses is the case of Ro
bert Irwin:
Why do so many—not all, but many—run to see a crashed plane, or a train, or two autos with numerous dead about? Why? What is it? Weariness of humdrum and commonplace? Love of change? Horror of the same thing happening to themselves? Or is it something evil in them? In us? Do we like to see other people suffer when we ourselves are safe and don’t suffer? Are we really just evil or a mixture of good and evil, whether we want to be or not?
This, too, is something to think of in connection with this Gedeon murder by Robert Irwin.…For in connection with this particular murder do you recall the national excitement? Everyone was interested.…Do you recall the sales of the newspapers during those four weeks in which the murder was the hourly extra edition feature? Any least little thing in connection with it? When Papa Gedeon was arrested? When the sister was found? When Irwin’s name was first mentioned?…If you ran and bought extras, as many of you did, are you evil?…Will you get mad if I suggest that it is because some of you like murders, terrible ones, particularly where they relieve the monotony of life?19
Dreiser wasn’t the only important American novelist fascinated by the Irwin case. Robert Penn Warren, for example—future U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist for his 1946 bestseller, All the King’s Men—based the shocking, climactic murder scene of his second novel, At Heaven’s Gate, on Bob’s strangulation of Ronnie Gedeon.20
Far more extensive use of the Irwin case was made by Thomas Berger, best known for his satiric Western, Little Big Man, published in 1964. Despite a prefatory note advising readers “not to identify the characters in the narrative which follows—criminals, policemen, madmen, citizens, or any combination thereof—with real human beings,” his 1967 novel, Killing Time, is such a thinly veiled version of the Irwin case that it amounts to a roman à clef. Only the slightest changes have been made to the real-life facts.
On Christmas Day, an attractive young woman named Betty Bayson—along with her husband, Arthur, and her scrawny, hard-drinking father, Andrew Starr—arrives at her mother’s apartment to find a scene of carnage. The naked body of her strangled sister “Billie,” a promiscuous underwear model, is sprawled on a bed, from beneath which protrude the feet and ankles of their murdered mother. A male boarder named Appleton lies dead on the floor of the living room, a screwdriver sticking out his left temple. Old man Starr becomes the immediate suspect and is subjected to a brutal interrogation, though the police quickly realize that he is innocent.
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 30
