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

by Schechter, Harold

  The central figure of the darkly comic novel is the actual killer, a young sculptor/taxidermist named Joe Detweiler. A likeable fellow—except for his sporadic outbursts of homicidal rage—Detweiler, son of a séance-holding mother, has devoted his life to perfecting a technique called Realization that will allow him to travel through space “using only his mind.” In his effort to concentrate all his energies on developing this technique, he has tried to have his penis amputated. Arrested for the triple murder, he is represented by “the best defense counsel in America,” a brilliant courtroom strategist named Henry Webster Melrose who has won eighty-two capital cases and lost none. In the end, Detweiler, after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, is sentenced to life, given an immediate examination by prison psychiatrists who find him insane, and transferred to an “institution for the confinement of felonious lunatics.”21

  Though Berger’s book was widely reviewed, there is no indication that Bob was aware of it. By the time of its publication, he had been transferred to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Fishkill, New York. Eight years later, after a long, agonizing struggle with cancer, he died there at age sixty-seven.

  His former attorney, Sam Leibowitz, outlived him by three years, dying of a stroke in June 1978 at the age of eighty-four. For the last twenty-nine years of his professional life, until his retirement in 1970, Leibowitz had served on the bench, having been elected Justice of the Kings County Court in 1941.

  At the time he ran for the judgeship, opponents warned that the man who made his early reputation by representing the likes of Al Capone and Mad Dog Coll would be soft on criminals before the bar. Their predictions proved wildly off the mark. Before long, the Great Defender had acquired a new nickname: “Sentencing Sam.” First as a Criminal Court Judge in Brooklyn, later as a State Supreme Court Judge, he referred to accused criminals as “animals” and “rats,” spoke harshly in open court to their lawyers, and boasted that he was “tough with hardened criminals because toughness is all they understand.” When one felon who had offered to testify suddenly clammed up on the stand, Leibowitz roared: “I’ll give you a thousand years, if necessary! You’ll be buried in jail so you never see daylight again!”

  He was also highly vocal on a charged political issue. Believing that it served as an effective deterrent and helped, as he put it, to “eliminate poisonous snakes from the community,” Judge Leibowitz—the former lawyer who had saved more than a hundred clients, including Robert Irwin, from the chair—became a staunch advocate of capital punishment.22

  Epilogue

  The Lonergan Case

  IN THE DECADES before Helen Gurley Brown became its editor and turned it into a swinging-sixties sex guide for single young women, Cosmopolitan magazine was a general interest monthly, combining fiction and feature articles on myriad subjects. One of the highlights of its October 1948 issue was a piece titled “Ten Greatest Crimes of the Century,” written by one of the founding fathers of the hard-boiled detective genre, Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and other noir classics.

  No. 1 on Chandler’s list is the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. No. 2 is the Ruth Snyder–Henry Judd Gray “Double Indemnity” murder, the greatest tabloid sensation of the 1920s. The Robert Irwin “Mad Sculptor” case comes in at No. 3—ahead of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (No. 4), the kidnap-murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb (No. 8), and the serial murders committed by William Heirens, the infamous “Lipstick Killer” (No. 10).

  Had the article been written fifty years later—at the end of the century instead of the middle—it would undoubtedly have included such sensational crimes as the Manson murders, the Columbine massacre, and the O. J. Simpson case. Still, Chandler’s choices, by and large, have withstood the test of time. Only one has so completely faded from public memory that even most histories of American crime make no mention of it. It appears on Chandler’s list as No. 9: the Lonergan case.1

  Born into a middle-class Catholic family in Toronto, the youngest of three children, Wayne Lonergan grew up possessed of every trait necessary to the career of a professional fortune hunter: dashing good looks, glittering charm, easy sexuality, and a driving desire to enjoy the high life. Celebrity scribe Dominick Dunne aptly compares him to Patricia Highsmith’s social-climbing, sociopathic hero, Tom Ripley, described by his creator “suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral.”2

  In the spring of 1939, hungry for the kind of thrills his stodgy hometown couldn’t supply, twenty-two-year-old Wayne abandoned Toronto and made his way to New York City, where he promptly found work as a “chair boy” at the newly opened World’s Fair. Garbed in a uniform that showed off his physique to best advantage—“khaki shorts, a white shirt rolled up over the elbows, and a pith helmet”—he pushed weary sightseers around the grounds in a rented rattan wheelchair. It was in that capacity that he met Bill Burton.3

  A roly-poly forty-three-year-old with epicurean tastes, Burton—born William Bernheimer—was heir to a $7 million fortune from his family’s flourishing brewery, at one time the world’s largest. Married, with a daughter named Patricia, he kept a villa on the French Riviera, dabbled in society portraiture, and played sugar daddy to an endless stream of young male lovers.

  Shortly after meeting Burton at the fair, golden-boy Wayne Lonergan—happy to hop into bed with anyone, male or female, who could provide him entrée into Manhattan’s fast-living “café-society” set—became the latest of the older man’s “protégés.”

  Bill Burton suffered a fatal heart attack in October 1940. By then, his daughter, Patsy, had become infatuated with her father’s former boyfriend. In July 1941, the pair of lovebirds eloped to Las Vegas and were married. “If he was good enough for my father,” twenty-one-year-old Patsy explained, “he’s good enough for me.”4

  Patsy promptly became pregnant, but neither her delicate condition nor the birth of their son in the spring of 1942 put a damper on their nightlife. When the two weren’t out carousing at the Stork Club or El Morocco, they were at each other’s throats. “They fought like cats and dogs,” one close friend recalled. “There was never any peace between them. Once, when they got into an argument, I heard her say to Wayne, ‘I suppose that’s to be expected when a girl marries a man who’s beneath her.’ ”

  Neighbors complained of the hair-raising screams emanating from the couple’s apartment. When questioned about the commotion, Wayne blithely explained, “Oh, we had a row and I beat her up.”5

  To no one’s surprise, the couple separated in the summer of 1943, exactly two years after their wedding. Soon afterward, Wayne returned to Toronto, where he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a cadet, while Patsy—after cutting him out of her will and naming their infant son, Wayne Jr., as her heir—threw herself into her nightly social whirl with wholehearted abandon.

  Her activities on the night of Saturday, October 23, 1943, were typical. At a little after seven o’clock, her date, a forty-three-year-old Italian count named Mario Enzo Gabellini, picked her up and took her to the bar at the Peter Cooper Hotel on East 39th Street, where they rendezvoused with another couple, a magazine publisher named Thomas Farrell and his date. After imbibing a few drinks, the four taxied to a restaurant on East 58th Street, where they consumed several more rounds of liquor with dinner. From there they repaired to the Stork Club for a long evening of dancing and drinking. After closing the place down at 4:00 a.m., they headed for Farrell’s apartment for a few more hours of drinking. It was 6:30 a.m. when Gabellini finally took Patsy home. Too exhausted to put on a nightgown or turn down the bed, she stripped off her garments—mink jacket, black dress, girdle, bra, panties and stockings—tossed them onto a cushioned bench and collapsed on top of the covers of her Second Empire–style four-poster.6

  Wayne had flown to New York City that weekend on a forty-eight-hour pass and was staying at the Upper East Side apartment of a friend, John Harjes. On Saturday, October 23, after lunching with friends, he purchased a stu
ffed elephant for his eighteen-month-old son at the Fifth Avenue toy emporium FAO Schwarz, then paid a brief visit to the boy, playing with him for about an hour. Sometime around 7:00 p.m., smartly dressed in his RCAF uniform, he headed uptown to pick up his date for the evening, Mrs. Jean Murphy Jaburg, a one-time stage actress and movie bit player, recently separated from her husband. She and Wayne attended the Broadway hit One Touch of Venus, followed by a midnight dinner at the ‘21’ Club and drinks at the Blue Angel supper club. At around 3:00 a.m., he dropped her off at her apartment, kissed her good night, and made a lunch date for Sunday at the Plaza Hotel.

  When they met the following day around noon, Wayne was no longer dressed in his uniform but in an expensive, if somewhat ill-fitting, suit. He was also wearing Max Factor foundation makeup on his chin, though Mrs. Jaburg appeared not to notice. After lunch, they returned to her apartment for a few hours before Wayne took a cab to LaGuardia Airport for a flight back to Toronto.7

  Since Patsy frequently needed a full day to recover from her previous night’s exploits, no one was immediately worried when she failed to emerge from her bedroom on Sunday. It wasn’t until early evening that her naked body was discovered sprawled across her bed, her head beaten in with a pair of fourteen-inch brass candlesticks, the room a shambles. Bits of human flesh were subsequently found under her fingernails, evidently scratched from the face of her killer.

  With sixty detectives assigned to the case, Wayne was swiftly tracked to Toronto. The police were quick to note some nasty scratches on his chin. Proclaiming his innocence, Wayne waived extradition and was flown back to New York City, where—so he announced—he intended “to help the authorities” find his wife’s killer.

  Grilled for twenty-four straight hours, he told a story so unsavory that his interrogators were initially nonplussed. According to Wayne, after bidding Jean Murphy Jaburg good night early Sunday morning following their night on the town, he had picked up an American soldier on Lexington Avenue and brought him back to John Harjes’s apartment for sex. Wayne had then fallen asleep, only to awaken sometime later to find the other man rummaging through the pockets of his uniform. He had leaped on the man and, in the bitter fight that ensued, his face had been badly scratched. Finally, the other soldier managed to pull free and escape, making off with Wayne’s uniform and all the money in his pockets. Wayne had been forced to borrow one of his friend’s suits for his Sunday lunch date at the Plaza with Mrs. Jaburg.

  At first, the police were inclined to believe him, since—as one officer put it—“a guilty man would never offer an alibi so degrading.”8 It wasn’t until he was confronted with incontrovertible physical evidence—his bloody fingerprints on the candlesticks used to crush the victim’s skull—that Wayne broke down and confessed.

  At a little before nine o’clock that Sunday morning, he had gone to his wife’s apartment and knocked on her bedroom door. Patsy, still completely nude, let him in. Sitting beside each other on the bed, they exchanged increasingly testy words. He accused her of “behaving like a tart.” She called him “a couple of names.” Finally, she told him to “get the hell out here” and “don’t ever come back.” As he headed for the door, she shouted, “You’ll never see the baby again—ever!”

  “I lost my head,” Lonergan explained to his interrogators. Grabbing one of the heavy brass candlesticks from the sideboard, he rushed at her and smashed her in the head with such force that the candlestick broke. Blind with rage, he grabbed the second candlestick and struck her again. Still conscious, she clawed at him, raking his chin. He seized her by the throat and choked her. It took her, by his estimate, three minutes to die.

  Hurrying back to Harjes’s apartment, he scissored his bloodstained uniform to pieces, stuffed them in his duffel bag, weighed the bag down with a dumbbell, and tossed it in the river. He then purchased some makeup at a neighborhood drugstore to conceal the scratches on his face and, borrowing one of his friend’s suits, went off to keep his lunch date. “The best-looking degenerate ever to go on trial for murder in the history of the New York court system,” he was ultimately convicted of second-degree homicide and sentenced to thirty-five years to life.9

  With its deliciously scandalous elements—“whispered vices whose details are unprintable and whose character is generally unknown to the average normal person,” as the Journal-American put it—the Lonergan case was the greatest tabloid sensation in years. Among the lurid rumors that swirled around the crime was a widespread story that Wayne had killed Patsy when she nearly bit off his penis while performing “a final act of fellatio on him.”10

  What made the case so titillating, however, was not just the sex but the setting. The killing took place at 313 East 51st Street, a four-story town house a few blocks from the sites of two other horrors still fresh in the minds of New Yorkers. The brutalized heiress became the third in a trio of lovely young women found naked and slain in the fashionable Manhattan neighborhood. Nancy Titterton. Veronica Gedeon. Now Patsy Burton Lonergan. Once again, as newspapers throughout the country never failed to mention, savage death had visited Beekman Place.11

  Vera Stretz and her attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, prepare to leave the courtroom following her acquittal.

  Nancy Titterton.

  All of the images appear courtesy of the author’s private collection unless otherwise noted.

  Robert Irwin.

  In addition to her magazine modeling, Veronica Gedeon frequently posed for members of amateur “camera clubs.”

  “The Mad Sculptor” at work. (Reprinted by permission of the New York Daily News)

  Layout of the Gedeons’ apartment.

  A detective examines the blood-soaked bed where boarder Frank Byrnes was slain.

  Police remove the body of Ronnie Gedeon from her Beekman Place apartment building.

  Bob’s portrait bust of Ethel.

  Following her murder, dozens of amateur shutterbugs peddled their nude photographs of Ronnie to the tabloids, which printed them with discreetly placed, airbrushed veils. This is one of the rare unretouched versions.

  Joseph Gedeon takes aim with a beer glass at a tabloid news photographer.

  Ronnie’s ex-husband, Robert Flower, kneels at her casket.

  Ronnie’s diary. Her entries about “Bob,” originally assumed to refer to her ex-husband, helped detectives identify her killer.

  This portrait of Bob was distributed around the country via police circulars, newspapers, and magazines—including Inside Detective.

  The Statler Hotel in Cleveland, where Bob found work under the pseudonym “Bob Murray.”

  Bob’s sketch of Henrietta Koscianski.

  Henrietta identified Bob while reading the cover story in the July 1937 issue of Inside Detective magazine.

  Detective Frank Crimmins escorts Bob from the plane that brought him back to New York City from Chicago.

  Dressed in the dapper white suit he demanded as part of his surrender agreement, Bob is led to court for his arraignment.

  Ethel Kudner leaves the grand jury room in the company of her lawyer.

  Samuel Leibowitz, “the Great Defender,” prepares for business.

  Wayne Lonergan displays the charms that won the hearts of both Patsy Burton and her father, Bill.

  Acknowledgments

  I OWE MY GREATEST debt of thanks to my agent, David Patterson, whose guidance and advice were absolutely essential to this project, from conception to realization.

  Thanks also to:

  Kenneth Cobb, New York City Municipal Archives

  Bruce Kirby, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress

  Mark McMurray, St. Lawrence University

  Thomas Mills, Cornell University Law Library

  Richard Pope

  Martha Sachs, Penn State University Harrisburg Library

  E. Morris Sider, Messiah College

  Lewis Titterton

  As always, I give thanks to—and for—my dear and loving wife, Kimiko Hahn. As the poet said: “If ever two
were one, then surely we.”

  About the Author

  HAROLD SCHECHTER is a professor of American literature and culture. Renowned for his true-crime writing, he is the author of the nonfiction books Fatal, Fiend, Bestial, Deviant, Deranged, Depraved, and The Serial Killer Files. He lives in New York State.

  www.haroldschechter.com

  Notes

  Prologue: 268 East 52nd Street, New York City

  1. New York Journal, March 29, 1937, p. 8.

  2. Box 21, Folder 10, Papers of Fredric Wertham, 1818–1936, Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

  Chapter 1. Dead End

  1. William B. Aitken, Distinguished Families in America, Descended from Wilhelmus Beekman and Jan Thomasse Van Dyke (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons/The Knickerbocker Press, 1912), pp. 3–4, 118–120.

  2. Steven Gaines, The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), p. 112.

  3. Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976), p. 248. Blackwell’s Island would undergo several name changes, first to Welfare Island, then to Roosevelt Island.