Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (53 page)

Robert Irwin, “The Mad Sculptor”

(
Courtesy of the New York Daily News.
)

Little Fenelon was only three when his father deserted the family, plunging them into a state of permanent hardship. Their home was a “shack with flour sacking neatly stretched over the unplastered walls.” To support her abandoned brood—Fenelon, his two obstreperous brothers, and a little girl who would die at two of whooping cough—Mrs. Irwin worked at assorted menial jobs, from scrubwoman to sweatshop seamstress, rarely earning more than $3 a day. Meals consisted of “buttermilk and stale bread, with the bread obtained from bakeries by begging.” Toys being an unaffordable luxury, Fenelon’s only plaything was the bathroom soap. Molding it into various shapes, he discovered a gift for sculpting.

With three growing sons to raise on her own, Mrs. Irwin consulted whatever child-rearing manuals she could get her hands on. Having read “that children should not learn about sex in a smutty way and that parents should not treat sex as something mysterious,” she made sure to bathe in front of her sons, naked from the waist
up. When she wasn’t displaying her breasts to young Fenelon, she was force-feeding him heavy servings of scripture, insisting that he “read three chapters of the Bible every day and learn a psalm by heart every Sunday.” In reaction, he became a devotee of Robert Ingersoll—the noted nineteenth-century freethinker, regarded by Mrs. Irwin as “one of the devil’s chief allies”—and changed his name to Robert in honor of his intellectual hero.

Unlike his delinquent brothers, who steadily progressed from reform schools to state penitentiaries, Bob managed to stay out of trouble throughout his adolescence. At eighteen, unemployed and an insupportable burden on his mother, he had himself voluntarily admitted to a juvenile home, where he befriended a sympathetic attendant who encouraged his artistic pursuits by providing him with modeling clay.

After fifteen months in the juvenile home, he embarked on a wandering life, working briefly in an art studio in Hollywood and studying with the eminent sculptor Lorado Taft in Chicago before ending up in New York City in 1930 at the age of twenty-three. Seeking any sort of job that related to sculpting, he found temporary employment as a clerk in an art supply shop, an assistant to the master sculptor Alexander Ettl, and a taxidermist’s helper.

In early 1931, troubled with increasingly violent fantasies, he had himself committed to the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, explaining to the supervising physician, Dr. Samuel Feigin, that he was afraid he “would kill somebody so I would be hung.” After a three-week incarceration, he was sent to the Burke Foundation, a convalescent home in White Plains. He remained there as a patient “for the period allotted by the providers of charity for the convalescence of poor people,” then stayed on as a waiter.

He returned to Manhattan in the spring of 1932, but his dreams of finding art-related work were thwarted by the grim realities of the Depression. For a while he was reduced to sleeping on park benches and begging for food from restaurants. Eventually he found a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant called McFadden’s on the city’s East Side. A few days later, in October 1932, he rented a spare room in the Beekman Hill flat of a family named Gedeon.

Four members of the family inhabited the dreary fourth-floor walk-up on East Fiftieth Street: the fiftyish father, Joseph Gedeon, a Hungarian émigré who ran a little upholstery shop a few blocks downtown; his wife, Mary, a “once-gorgeous Magyar, still comely in her forties”; an older daughter named Ethel, a “placid brunette
with impeccable morals”; and Ethel’s younger, party-girl sister, Veronica. A stunning eighteen-year-old with one brief impulsive marriage already behind her, Ronnie, as she was known to the world, worked as an “artist’s model,” posing nude for the members of a seedy amateur camera club. She also modeled regularly for pulp detective magazines, appearing as the scantily clad, trussed-up victim of assorted sex fiends and lust killers in stories such as “Pretty but Cheap” and “I Was a Teenaged White Slave.”

To supplement Joseph’s meager earnings, the Gedeons regularly took in a boarder or two. Bob Irwin had been living in their overcrowded flat for only a couple of days when—“in order to bottle up his sexual energies for higher purposes” (as he later explained)—he locked himself in the bathroom, took a brand-new razor blade to his penis and tried to slice it off.

E
VEN AFTER HIS
admission to the Bellevue psychiatric ward, Irwin was intent on having his penis amputated, begging several of the surgical interns to perform the operation. Recognizing that the young man was “a potential threat to himself and society,” Wertham arranged for him to remain in Bellevue for five months. At the end of that period, diagnosing his patient as “improved but not recovered,” he persuaded Irwin to commit himself voluntarily to Rockland State Hospital. Irwin remained there until May 1934, when he returned to New York City and found work at various odd jobs—dishwasher, coatroom attendant, elevator operator. He also moved back in with the Gedeons. Within days, he had become fixated on the older daughter, the sweet-natured and virtuous Ethel.

At first she responded warmly to Irwin’s friendly overtures. She enjoyed hearing him hold forth on art and happily accompanied him on visits to the city’s museums. Eventually, however, she grew weary of him. Dejected by her growing indifference—and by his failure to find fulfilling work—Irwin sought out Wertham, who saw at once that Irwin was slipping back into a dangerously unstable state. In January 1935, at the psychiatrist’s urging, Irwin had himself recommitted to Rockland.

Despite one bizarre outburst of violence—when he attacked a young doctor who had complimented him on a bust he was sculpting in the hospital’s workshop—Irwin was discharged in September 1936 as “improved.” At the suggestion of a sympathetic attendant, he applied for admission to the St. Lawrence Theological School in Canton,
New York. He remained there six months. Along with the usual assortment of odd jobs—delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, and shoveling snow—he supported himself by teaching two sculpture classes, one for adults, one for children. By the spring of 1937, however, his behavior had become sufficiently erratic that he was expelled from the school. Taking a bus to New York City, he showed up at the Gedeons’ flat on the morning of Good Friday, only to learn that there was no vacancy, the spare room having been rented to an Englishman named Frank Byrnes, a bartender at the tony Racquet and Tennis Club. Later that day, he found a furnished room a few blocks away, paying the landlady $1 for the night.

S
EVERAL MONTHS EARLIER,
Dr. Wertham had received an invitation from Johns Hopkins Hospital to deliver a paper at a conference celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic. The topic he chose was the type of violent crime caused by an “aberration of reasoning under the impact of emotional complexes”—what Wertham called a “catathymic crisis.” Among the examples he cited was that of Robert Irwin, whose “attempted self-emasculation” was a striking “case of violence turned against oneself.” Wertham went on to predict that because Irwin had not fully recovered from his condition, he was certain to “break out again in some act of violence either against himself or others.”

On March 28, 1937—Easter Sunday—his prediction came horribly true.

E
MBROILED IN INCREASINGLY
bitter arguments with his wife, Mary, over their younger daughter’s untrammeled behavior, Joseph Gedeon had moved out of the family flat earlier that year, taking up residence in a cubbyhole room behind his upholstery store that he proceeded to stock with a large assortment of pulp girlie magazines. In a conciliatory gesture, Mary had invited him over for Easter dinner. They were to be joined by their older daughter, Ethel, now married and living with her husband, Joe Kudner, in the suburbs.

It was Joseph Gedeon who discovered the massacre. Arriving at noon with a bouquet of flowers for his estranged wife, he entered the unlocked flat and found Ronnie’s nude and lifeless body sprawled on her mattress. Mary’s corpse was stuffed beneath the bed. Their boarder, Frank Byrnes, lay dead in the next room, killed in his sleep
from multiple stab wounds to the head. Paralyzed with shock, Joseph was standing dazed in the bedroom when Ethel and her husband showed up a few minutes later and—after taking in the appalling scene—notified the police. Autopsies conducted later that day by the city’s chief medical examiner established that both women had been manually strangled, while Byrnes’ face and skull had been punctured fifteen times with a pointed implement, evidently an icepick.

The irresistible mix of sensational elements—a triple murder on Easter Sunday featuring the nude corpse of a stunning young “artist’s model”—made the case a tabloid editor’s dream. “Police Hunt Beekman Hill Maniac!” screamed the headlines. By midweek, the Daily News was devoting no fewer than nine full pages—including its front and back pages and a double-page center spread—to the story, illustrated with sixteen photographs, nine of which featured Ronnie, “the Queen of the Crime Magazine,” either seminude or in a negligee.

Suspicion initially fell on Joseph Gedeon, who “told detectives quite bluntly that he despised his wife and had nothing but contempt for his daughter Ronnie.” Certainly he was strong enough to have choked the two women to death, his work as an upholsterer having left him with “unusually powerful hands.” Evidence suggested, moreover, that the perpetrator was no stranger to the family. Though at least one tenant of the building had heard a sharp, quickly stifled scream emanate from the Gedeons’ apartment on the night of the murder, no one had heard so much as a single yap from their Pekingese, Tonchi—a sign that the dog knew the killer.

Searching the upholsterer’s squalid little room, police turned up “sexy photographs and erotic books,” a discovery that the newspapers quickly trumpeted as evidence of his degenerate nature. Jealous rage was put forth as a motive after “neighbors repeated rumors that Mary Gedeon and roomer Frank Byrnes had a relationship that transcended the conventional one of landlady and boarder.” Dragged from his bed after less than three hours of sleep and hauled down to the station house, Gedeon was grilled for thirty-three hours straight, while the tabloids rushed to announce that the cops had found their killer.

Even as Joe Gedeon was being tried and convicted on the front pages (“Eyes of a Killer!” blared one headline, accompanied by a close-up photograph of the scrawny little upholsterer’s scowling face), detectives were focusing on a different lead. Soap carving, a hobby heavily promoted by Procter & Gamble, was a nationwide craze during the Great Depression. In their search of the murder scene, detectives had found a
sculpted bar of castile soap on the bedroom floor, evidently carved by the killer as he patiently waited for his final victim to come home. Questioning Ethel about the family’s boarders, the investigators first heard the name of the young sculptor Bobby Irwin. Their suspicions were heightened by several references to Irwin in Ronnie’s diary. “I think he is out of his head,” she had written in one entry. “I am afraid of B.,” she confided in another. Several witnesses reported seeing Irwin in the neighborhood shortly before the crime.

Tracking his path back to Canton, detectives discovered Irwin’s own diary, left in the rooming house where he had lived during his brief stint at the St. Lawrence Theological School. One entry in particular left little doubt that Irwin was the culprit:

It didn’t take long for the tabloids to get wind of this latest development. “Scour City for Maniac!” screamed the headlines. “Hunt Artist in 8 States!” “Mad Sculptor Had Mania to Strangle!”

A
MERICA’S MOST WANTED
criminal would remain at large for three months. In late June, nineteen-year-old Henrietta Koscianski, a “buxom, black-eyed” pantry maid at Cleveland’s Statler Hotel, was leafing through the latest issue of Inside Detective magazine when she happened on a story about the manhunt for the “Mad Sculptor,” Robert Irwin. The article was accompanied by a photograph of the suspect, whose face bore a striking resemblance to a recent acquaintance of Henrietta’s, a bar boy going by the name of Bob Murray who had been working at the hotel for about a month and a half. Encountering Bob later that day, Henrietta asked him if he “knew about Robert Irwin.” “Never heard of him,” said Bob. That evening he cleaned out his locker and skipped town.

The following day, June 26, 1937, a phone call came in to the newsroom of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, a Hearst-owned tabloid. Identifying himself as Robert Irwin,
the caller offered to surrender himself to the paper for a suitable price. A deal was immediately struck. After signing a contract for $5,000, Irwin was spirited off to the Morrison Hotel, where for the next twenty-four hours he was kept incommunicado while he dictated a lengthy confession to city editor John Dienhart and a pair of reporters.

Having secured the biggest story of the year—“Irwin Surrenders! Confesses! Exclusive!” screamed the headline—Dienhart arranged for Irwin’s surrender to the authorities. At around midnight on Sunday, June 27, Irwin was flown in a Hearst-chartered plane to New York City and hustled directly into the presence of Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine and District Attorney William C. Dodge. Suddenly clamming up—“You can beat the Jesus out of me, you won’t make me talk,” he told the DA—Irwin asked to see Dr. Wertham, who was roused from his sleep and rushed to headquarters by police car. Two hours later, at around 5:20 a.m. on June 28, Irwin finally opened up, spilling out a story that conformed in every detail to the confession he had made in Chicago.