Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (54 page)

After his arrival from Canton on Good Friday, Irwin had spent the following day in a futile search for a job. By evening, he had plunged into such a severe depression that he considered drowning himself in the East River. As he stood brooding on a pier, a new thought entered his deeply disordered mind: “I made up my mind to kill Ethel and go to the chair for it.”

As he turned from the river, he “saw an ice pick lying in the gutter” and put it in his pocket. He then proceeded toward First Avenue. It was around 9:00 p.m. when he reached the Gedeons’ apartment.

When the Pekingese, Tonchi, crawled under the bed to cower beside his dead mistress, Irwin thought briefly of killing it too, but “felt too much pity for the animal to do it.”

After washing the blood off his hands, Irwin turned off all the lights and sat down to wait. It wasn’t until close to 3:00 a.m. that Ronnie came home and went directly into the bathroom. She stayed in there for nearly an hour, while Irwin improvised a blackjack out of a soap bar and a rag. When Ronnie finally emerged,

Though both murders occurred only feet from Frank Byrnes’ bedroom, the Englishman had never stirred, being almost completely deaf. He was still sound asleep when Irwin, as he put it, “went in and fixed” him. “I just gave it to him in the temple with the ice pick. I stuck him once and he kept on twitching.” Irwin then proceeded
to “put him out of his misery” with another dozen or so stab wounds to the head, one so deep that it penetrated the medulla.

The massacre completed, Irwin left the apartment, “as calm as I’ve been in my life.” Still, he felt disappointed at the way things had turned out. “I never wanted to get any one of them except Ethel,” he explained. “I wanted to kill Ethel because I loved her. If Ethel had come in first I would have killed her and nobody else.”

T
WO DAYS AFTER
being brought to New York City, Irwin was indicted on three counts of first-degree murder. By then he had managed to secure the services of famed attorney Samuel Leibowitz, best remembered for his defense of the Scottsboro Boys. Anticipating an insanity plea, the prosecution convinced the court to appoint a three-man “lunacy commission,” which, without examining Irwin, concluded that he was legally sane. The tabloids, hungry for blood, applauded the finding, declaring that “the fiendish sculptor” was a “classic example of an insanity faker” and deriding any doctor who expressed sympathy for Irwin. A prime target was Wertham, whose diagnosis was satirized in a sneering tabloid limerick:

Armed with the findings of his own team of experts—who had actually interviewed Irwin at length and pronounced him “both medically and legally insane”—Leibowitz was able to save his client from the chair by having him plead guilty to three counts of second-degree murder at his November 1938 trial. He was sentenced to life in Sing Sing, where (as Leibowitz expected) he was examined by prison psychiatrists, who promptly ruled that he was “very definitely insane.” On December 10, 1938, he was transferred to Dannemora State Hospital. He remained institutionalized for the rest of his life, dying of cancer in 1975 in Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

The Easter Sunday Murders produced a legacy of outrage. “The whole case has exposed disgraceful conditions from start to finish,” one writer thundered. “The incompetence
of those state psychiatrists who released a dangerous psychopath three times; the crowded conditions of our inadequate state asylums which force the psychiatrists to release older inmates to make way for new; the shocking behavior of the police department in their treatment of Mr. Gedeon; the indecent behavior of the newspapers.” Stung by criticism of his paper’s over-the-top coverage, Daily News publisher Joseph Medill Patterson defended himself with an argument that was hard to deny. “Murder sells,” he declared, “because we are all interested in murder.”

D
ESPITE THE FACT THAT HIS CRIMES TERRORIZED AN ENTIRE CITY AND NEARLY
precipitated an international crisis, few Americans have ever heard of the mid-twentieth-century serial murderer Eddie Leonski. The explanation for this state of affairs seems obvious. Unique among U.S. psycho killers, Leonski perpetrated his murderous spree half a world away. Though his crimes were reported in the national press, they seemed too remote to resonate with the American public, particularly at a time when our country was preoccupied with much larger worries.

Surprisingly little is known about Leonski’s early life, though the psychiatrists who eventually examined him were able to draw certain conclusions about the sources of homicidal mania. Born in 1917, he grew up in a tenement on the Upper East Side of New York City, one of six children of Polish-born parents, both confirmed alcoholics. He was seven when his father abandoned the family. Not long afterward, his mother, Amelia, took up with another drunkard. She herself suffered at least two mental breakdowns, severe enough to land her in Bellevue, where she was diagnosed with both manic-depression and incipient schizophrenia. From an early age, three of his brothers were chronic troublemakers, eventually racking up lengthy rap sheets. One of them ended up in a state psychiatric institution, where he lived out his life.

According to all accounts, Eddie was the apple of his unstable mother’s eye. He,
in turn, had the kind of deeply disturbing attachment to her found in other homicidal mama’s boys. On the surface, he was slavishly devoted to her. Throughout his adolescence, he never had a girlfriend, declaring that—until some hypothetical future when he might decide to get married—his mother “alone would be the object of his affection.” Beneath this adoration, however, there seethed a fierce subconscious hatred that would eventually vent itself in serial murder.

Serial killer Eddie Leonski

(©
Bettmann/Corbis. Used by permission.
)

Typical of psychopathic personalities, there was a vast disparity between Eddie’s dark, hidden self and the appealing mask he showed to the world. A shy, scrawny child, he took up weight lifting and developed into a powerfully built young man with a splendid physique—narrow waist, broad shoulders, and “thick muscular forearms.” In contrast to his brothers, who rarely did an honest day’s work, he undertook a three-year course in stenography following his high school graduation and tried his hand at various secretarial jobs before becoming a store clerk at a branch of Gristede’s, the venerable Manhattan supermarket chain. Always proud of his physical strength, he liked to impress his co-workers by performing impromptu weight-lifting stunts such as “snatching up a 100-lb. bag of sugar from the
floor with one hand and holding it high over his head.” With his bright blue eyes, sweetly innocent face, and million-dollar smile, he was a favorite of the female customers. A valued employee, he had just been transferred to the company’s newest store when, on February 17, 1941, he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

After basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, Leonski was assigned to the Fifty-second Signal Battalion in Fort Sam Houston, a big army base in San Antonio, Texas. It was there that his erratic behavior first began to get him in trouble. Having grown up in a household of alcoholics, Eddie himself had taken up liquor at an early age. Now—perhaps because of the stress of separation from his mother—he began to hit the bottle more heavily than ever, favoring bizarre concoctions of whiskey or beer mixed with ketchup, mustard, hot peppers, and ice cream. Under the influence of drink, he would—according to the testimony of one superior—“act like a man out of his head”: walking on his hands down the street, starting brawls, raving at the top of his lungs, or bursting into uncontrolled tears at the thought of his far-distant mommy. Though obedient and reliable when sober, with a boyish charm that was impossible to dislike, he was, as his commanding officer later put it, “perpetually in small trouble.”

On one occasion, just a few weeks after his arrival in San Antonio, he found himself in trouble that was not so trivial. Cruising the red light district on the city’s west side, he picked up a woman, got embroiled in a violent quarrel with her, and began to choke her on the street. Arrested and jailed, he escaped more serious consequences when the woman filed the relatively minor charge of simple assault. Surviving records do not reveal the upshot of the incident, though Leonski clearly incurred neither jail time nor a discharge. At the time, the United States was gearing up for war and the army needed every able-bodied man at its disposal. And so, on January 12, 1942, Eddie Leonski—who had wept so helplessly the night before his departure that his barrack mates had to pack his bags for him—departed for Australia along with forty-five hundred fellow soldiers.

B
Y EARLY
1942, the Japanese—having embarked on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “their frenzied career of conquest”—had overrun Burma, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur. Having been forced to retreat from the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, recently appointed supreme commander of the Allied forces in the southwest Pacific Theater, retreated to Australia, which was to serve as America’s base of operations in the Pacific for the duration of the war. Leonski and his
comrades were part of the first wave of an estimated one million U.S. servicemen who would eventually pass through Australia.