The Mad Sculptor (22 page)

He found the proprietor, Calogero Parliapiano, behind the bar, collected his house prize from the previous night—one dollar—and ordered a celebratory schnapps. Somehow, in the course of that beer-soaked evening, he had misplaced his gray fedora. Parliapiano, however, hadn’t come across the hat while cleaning up that morning, and no one had turned it in. Gedeon soothed his disappointment with another schnapps before leaving the bar. Outside, he headed for Second Avenue, on his way to Easter dinner with his family.
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Since separating from his wife four years earlier, Gedeon had maintained cordial relations with Mary, sharing holiday meals with her and their daughters and making occasional use of her bathtub. He had been up in her apartment just two nights earlier to enjoy a leisurely bath, the first he’d had in weeks. Afterward, they sat in the kitchen and came to a momentous decision. It was time for the two of them to reconcile. They would break the happy news to their children over Easter dinner.

Of course, Joseph wouldn’t be able to move back in just yet since there was no space for him in the flat at present. Ronnie had turned over her little room to a visiting friend, Lucy Beacco, and was sharing the central bedroom with her mother. The other small bedroom was occupied by a boarder Mary had taken in five weeks before, a dapper little fellow Joseph knew only as “the Englishman.”

Though Beekman Place was only a fifteen-minute stroll from
34th Street, Gedeon, still slightly hung over, opted for the Second Avenue El, arriving in his wife’s neighborhood a few minutes before 2:00 p.m. He wasn’t expected for another half hour, so—not wanting to show up unannounced—he found a phone booth in a cigar store and dialed the apartment. No one answered. Joseph, as he later explained, found that somewhat “odd” but “assumed his family was still at the Easter parade.” He bought a few cigars to share with his son-in-law, Joe Kudner, then shopped for some small gifts for Mary and the girls: a potted lily and a two-pound box of chocolates. He still had some time to kill, so he ambled over to a newsstand and checked out the current issue of
Paris Nights
, another “spicy” magazine filled with bare-breasted beauties.
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At around 2:40 p.m., he strolled over to the building at 316 East 50th Street, rang the downstairs bell for his wife’s apartment, and waited to be buzzed inside. He got no reply. He was still standing in the vestibule, wondering where Mary could be, when Ethel and Joe Kudner arrived, having driven in from Astoria, Queens. When Joseph informed them that no one appeared to be home, Ethel insisted that he try the bell again. Before he could push the button, one of the tenants emerged from the inner hallway. Holding the door open, Gedeon and the Kudners stepped inside.

Leaving Joe at the foot of the staircase with Ethel—who was wearing new Easter shoes that pinched her feet and didn’t want to make the climb if no one was there—Gedeon headed up the four flights to apartment No. 16. The door, unlocked, swung open at his touch. He passed from the little entrance foyer into the darkened living room. Touchi, Ronnie’s Pekingese, who usually bounded up to greet him, approached him nervously, ears flattened to his head, then tried to crawl beneath the davenport. Apart from the dog’s whimpers, the apartment was utterly silent.
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Entering the kitchen, Joseph switched on the overhead light. The main dinner ingredients—a forlorn-looking pork loin and a bowl of uncut green beans—sat on the counter, uncooked.

With a growing sense of disquiet, Gedeon moved to the main bedroom. The double bed, shared by Mary and Ronnie, had not
been slept in. The pillows were fluffed, the violet bedspread undisturbed. Everything was in order. As he scanned the room, however, his eye was caught by something peculiar: several chunks of what appeared to be a broken soap bar scattered on the carpeted floor.

Avoiding the soap, Gedeon stepped over to the door of the little bedroom on the left. The door was ajar. He pushed it open and peered inside.

Stretched faceup on the bed, completely naked, was his daughter Ronnie. Her complexion was a ghastly blue, her bulging eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Ugly bruises ringed her neck. Even without touching her, Joseph could see that her body had gone stiff.

He backed away from the awful sight and hurried to the other bedroom. The Englishman’s rigid corpse lay sideways on the mattress, a blanket covering him up to the shoulders, his blood-caked head resting on a pillow drenched in gore.

Swiveling on his heels, Gedeon rushed downstairs, where Ethel and Joe waited in the lobby. “They’re all dead,” he cried. “Murdered!” Aghast, Ethel and Joe followed him up to the fourth floor. While Kudner—face pale, lips drawn tight—viewed the two bodies, Ethel sat weeping in the kitchen. “Where’s Momma?” she sobbed. Her father assured her that Mary must have escaped and gone for the police. “I’ll go see,” he said. Hurrying outside, he made for the East 51st Street station house a block away, while, upstairs, his son-in-law picked up the phone and dialed SPring 7-3100—the number of the NYPD headquarters.
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The first officers to arrive at the scene were Detectives Martin Owens and William Gilmartin of the Seventh Precinct. It was Gilmartin who discovered Mary Gedeon’s corpse. Clothed in a green housedress, pink corset and brassiere, pink slip, and brown stockings, she was wedged beneath the bed that held the body of her daughter. It was clear at a glance that she, too, had been strangled. As with Ronnie and the boarder, her body was stiff with rigor mortis.
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By then, a cadre of detectives from the Homicide Squad—among them Charlie McGowan, Tony Fader, Ruddy McLaughlin, and Tom
Tunney (brother of Gene Tunney, former heavyweight boxing champion)—had shown up, along with Deputy Chief Inspector Francis Kear, Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons, and Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro. Close on their heels came the acting chief medical examiner, Dr. Thomas A. Gonzales, and a battery of experts from the Police Research Laboratory.

While the crime scene photographers wielded their Speed Graphic cameras and the fingerprint men went to work on every surface that might possibly yield a telltale loop or whorl, Kear and his detectives scoured the apartment for clues. In a corner of the Englishman’s bedroom, they found a man’s right-hand gray suede glove, size 8¼ and “practically new.” A pair of torn pink silk panties—clearly Ronnie’s judging by their size—was jammed between the wall and the head of the bed on which her body lay. The rest of her garments—a fur coat, a dress, and a hat—were piled on the bathroom clothes hamper, at the foot of which lay her silk stockings and a pair of black suede pumps. A towel stained with dried blood had been carelessly tossed over the edge of the bathtub.
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Otherwise—except for the mangled bar of soap on the floor of the central bedroom—nothing was disturbed or out of place. The bureau drawers hadn’t been ransacked, and the women’s purses were untouched. Whatever the motive for the Easter Sunday Massacre (as the press would soon call it), robbery clearly wasn’t it.

A preliminary examination of the bodies revealed that the boarder, a trim little man clad only in his undershirt and drawers, had received eleven stab wounds to the head with a sharp-pointed implement, “probably an ice pick.” Gonzales later determined that the fatal wound, struck with an assassin’s precision, had been delivered to the base of the skull, entering “just below the
foramen magnum
”—the opening through which the spinal cord enters the skull—and penetrating the brain.
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From the position of the body and the undisturbed condition of the bedclothes, the Englishman—quickly identified as Frank Byrnes, a waiter at what the tabloids invariably referred to as the “swanky” Racquet and Tennis Club on Park Avenue—appeared to have been killed in his sleep.

Both women had “died of manual strangulation, the killer’s hands applying such force that Mrs. Gedeon’s thyroid cartilage was torn, while the girl’s throat showed signs of hemorrhage in the larynx and muscles of the neck.”
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Judging from her badly bruised knuckles, Mary had put up a ferocious struggle. Until the women were autopsied, Gonzales couldn’t say whether they had been raped, though in the case of Ronnie—her beautiful body sprawled naked on the bed, her slip ripped off, and her panties shoved behind the bed board—the answer seemed self-evident to investigators. Mrs. Gedeon’s cotton drawers had also been torn away, and there were fresh scratches and abrasions on her upper thighs and genital area.

There were some clumps of mud scattered on the fire escape landing outside Byrnes’s bedroom. At first, Kear took them as evidence that the killer had climbed onto the fire escape and slipped in through the unlocked window. Peering upward out the window, however, he discovered the source of the mud: a bunch of clay flowerpots on the fire escape directly overhead, damp soil oozing from the drainage holes in their bottoms. Since no mud had been tracked inside the apartment, Lyons concluded that the killer hadn’t been on the fire escape after all.

There was only one other way that the killer could have entered: through the front door. Examining the lock, detectives found no signs of forced entry, indicating that the killer had been freely admitted to the apartment. That the Gedeons knew their killer was suggested by another clue—one that, in the words of the
New York Post
, added “a significant Conan Doyle touch to the grisly murders.”
¹¹
In the story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson travel to Dartmoor to investigate the disappearance of a famous racehorse and the apparent murder of its trainer. At one point, referring to the guard dog in the stable, Holmes draws the local inspector’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When the inspector protests that “the dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.”
¹²

The behavior of Ronnie’s dog was equally significant to investigators.
From the moment they had entered the apartment, the little Pekingese had put up such a shrill, persistent barking that the police finally summoned the ASPCA, which dispatched a special car to take the dog to a shelter. Neighbors confirmed that Touchi was an “annoying little animal” that “yapped its head off at strangers.”
¹³
Not a single tenant, however, had heard the slightest sound from the dog on the night of the slayings, leading Lyons to the same conclusion reached by Sherlock Holmes—“that the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”
¹⁴

One of the building’s occupants, Cosmon Cambinias, did report hearing a suspicious noise on the previous night. According to Cambinias—who lived two floors below the Gedeons—he had just gotten into bed at eleven o’clock when he was startled by “a scream and the sound of a scuffle” from above. He went to his window and stuck his head outside, but all the “bedrooms on that side of the building were in darkness. The Gedeon apartment seemed silent as a tomb.” Hearing no further noise, he “dismissed the incident” and went back to bed.
¹⁵

Another tenant, an automobile mechanic named Charles Robinson who lived with his wife on the sixth floor, described a curious incident that police found potentially significant. “I got home about a quarter past two this morning,” reported Robinson, “and when I got up as far as the fourth floor, I noticed that the door to the Gedeon apartment was open. As I passed it on my way up to my own place, I noticed the door was closing gradually, as if somebody was behind it, pushing it. I dunno, there was something about the way the door started to close that gave me the creeps, and I beat it to the sixth floor as fast as I could.”
¹⁶

While two of Lyons’s men were interviewing the neighbors, the rest continued to search the apartment. Inside a drawer in the living room secretary, Detective Martin Owens found a dog-eared address book with a black imitation-leather cover. At virtually the same time, one of his colleagues came across a little volume, bound in tan fabric with a broken brass clasp, shoved in Ronnie’s bedroom bureau
among her lingerie. Its frontispiece bore the printed tile “Five Year Diary.” Over this inscription, in a childish hand, she had written the word “My” and under it had scrawled her name.

Both items were immediately turned over to Inspector Kear. Thumbing through the address book, Kear saw that it was filled with names and telephone numbers, “mostly of men.” The diary entries dated back to February 1932, when they mostly concerned Ronnie’s tumultuous relationship with a young man identified only as “B.” or “Bobby.”
¹⁷

Kear was still examining the diary when the telephone in the central bedroom rang. Detective Charlie McGowan, who was standing closest to the phone, picked up the receiver. The caller was a young man who asked to speak to Ronnie. Identifying himself as a police officer, McGowan got the name and address of the caller—Stephen Butter of 581 Lexington Avenue—then, telling him to stay put, hurried off to Butter’s apartment, a short distance away.

Less than ten minutes later, the “tall, slim, frightened-looking” Butter, who knew only that he was “wanted for questioning,” was escorted into the East 51st Street station, where a mob of newsmen was gathered at the entrance.
¹⁸
At his first glimpse of them, Butter realized that something dire had happened. It wasn’t, however, until he spoke to Ronnie’s grief-wracked sister, Ethel—who was seated beside her husband in the waiting area outside Inspector Lyons office—that he learned the shocking truth.

By then, Lyons himself had arrived from the crime scene and been joined by Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine. A rough-hewn former beat cop who “early concluded that cracking jaws and flattening noses were the only means of impressing law and order upon bums,” Valentine had spent years fighting graft in the department as the head of the confidential squad, a precursor of the Internal Affairs bureau. Though he won many promotions, he made even more enemies, and ultimately found himself demoted and exiled to the wilds of Brooklyn. It wasn’t until 1934 that his “stubborn honesty paid off” and he was appointed commissioner by the reforming Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. His reputation as a two-fisted, tough-as-nails
lawman was sealed shortly thereafter when, spotting a well-dressed suspect in a lineup, he roared at his men: “That velvet collar should be smeared with blood. I don’t want those hoodlums coming in looking as if they stepped out of a barber’s chair. From now on, bring ’em in mussed up!”
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