The Mad Sculptor (23 page)

Knowing Valentine’s reputation, Butter feared he might be subjected to some “roughshod treatment” at the hands of his interrogators. The commissioner and Lyons, however, saw at once that the young man was no triple murderer and—perceiving how distraught he was—took care to conduct their questioning in a “polite, almost apologetic” way.
²⁰
As a clerk transcribed his statement, Butter—the last person besides her killer to have seen Ronnie Gedeon alive—provided a detailed account of her final evening.

A twenty-three-year-old messenger for a Wall Street brokerage house, Butter lived at home with his parents and younger sister, who had driven upstate to their rural retreat in South Cambridge, New York, for the holiday. His best friend, Lincoln Hauser, had also gone away for the weekend, though not before asking Stephen to “keep an eye” on the girl he was dating, the beautiful blond artist’s model Ronnie Gedeon. Stephen had arranged for Ronnie and her best friend, Jean Karp, to come over to his place on Saturday night for dinner and, to make it a foursome, had invited a pal of his own, Frank Schlenner. When Ronnie arrived at just before eight, however, she was alone, Jean having come down with a severe head cold.

The trio spent the evening drinking beer and gin, dancing to radio music, and enjoying a spaghetti dinner prepared by Ronnie. At around 2:00 a.m., Schlenner took his leave, explaining that he had “promised to take his mother to an early mass downtown.” Throwing on their overcoats, Butter and Ronnie headed over to the Monte Carlo Bar and Grill at 145 51st Street for a couple of gin highballs. At 3:00 a.m., closing time, he walked her home, escorted her upstairs, and—after making plans to call for her at ten the next morning and take her to mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—headed back to his apartment. He had neither seen nor heard anything unusual when he left her at her door. On Sunday morning, he had shown up at her
building as arranged, but when he rang the downstairs buzzer no one answered. Puzzled, he returned to his own apartment and dialed her number at intervals until just before 3:00 p.m., when Detective Owens picked up the phone.

The interrogation lasted until 9:00 p.m., when Butter was informed that he was free to go. Physically exhausted and emotionally spent, he made his way onto the street, where he was besieged by reporters clamoring for a statement. “Gee, it’s tough,” Butter managed to say. “We had a swell time Saturday. Veronica was a swell kid.”
²¹

Butter’s warm opinion of Ronnie was seconded by her former husband, Robert Flower, the “Bobby” who figured so prominently in the early parts of her diary. Traced to a bowling tournament at the 212th Street Armory, where he was operating a hot dog stand, the “tall, thin, good-looking young man” struggled to control his emotions as he spoke about his murdered ex-wife.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Ronnie,” he said hoarsely. “She was a sweet kid and never hurt anyone in her life. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason for anything like this to happen to her.”

Asked about their failed marriage, Flower made it clear that he harbored no ill will toward his ex-wife. “When we got married she was just a kid,” he told his interrogators. “I guess neither of us knew what it was all about. We got along pretty well but I guess she didn’t want to be tied down. She wanted good times and going places and I just didn’t have the money. After a while we talked things over and decided our marriage wasn’t a go. Ronnie sued for annulment on the grounds that she was a minor at the time of our marriage. We stayed good friends and I tried to see her once in a while. The last time I saw her was about three weeks ago. We went to see
Lost Horizon
at the Music Hall.”

He paused for a moment, as if to get hold of himself, and then, in a voice quivering with grief and fury, said: “I hope they find the son-of-a-bitch who did it and send him to the chair.”
²²

Brought to the police station for questioning a short time later,
Frank Schlenner—the young man who had partied with Butter and Ronnie on the night of the slayings—confirmed his friend’s account, as did Linc Hauser, who had hurried back from his father’s vacation home in Saratoga Springs. Fetched from her home in the Bronx, Ronnie’s best friend, Jean Karp, was so overcome with grief that she could barely speak. Police learned that she had intended to stay overnight at Ronnie’s place following the dinner at Butter’s apartment. Had she done so, she undoubtedly would have met the same fate as her friend. She had escaped murder (as one tabloid put it) “only because of the beneficent accident of a severe cold.”
²³

Adrian Gregory, a coworker of Frank Byrnes’s at the Racquet and Tennis Club, shed some light on the Englishman’s movements on the last night of his life. The “pint-sized” waiter—who had come to America from his native Liverpool in 1924—had left work at around 8:40 that evening. He had tried to “borrow a couple of bucks” from Gregory to attend the employees’ annual dance at the Hotel McAlpin that evening. Failing to get the money, Byrnes returned to his rented room and apparently went straight to bed.
²⁴

These interviews—combined with Dr. Gonzales’s preliminary medical findings and the detectives’ own methodical study of the crime scene—allowed Kear to provide reporters with a tentative reconstruction of the murders:

Byrnes was the first victim slain as he slept. Subsequently, Mrs. Gedeon returned home. The killer had apparently been lying in wait for her. As she entered the house, she was attacked, dragged into the bedroom and criminally assaulted. The strangulation and the assault were apparently simultaneous. The body was pushed under the single bed in the room adjoining the ‘master’ bedroom. When Miss Gedeon came home she apparently stepped into the bedroom to the left of the entrance and partially disrobed. Evidently she did not want to awaken her mother. Leaving her clothing on the hamper in the bathroom, she then walked across the living room. As she entered the other bedroom, the murderer attacked her. The girl was clad only in her chemise. This was ripped off during the violent
struggle that followed. It seems the killer must have begun strangling the model immediately. After the murder, the body was dragged to the small chamber adjoining the large bedroom and dumped on the single bed. Then the killer opened the front door and slunk into the night.
²⁵

Based on the evidence gathered up to that point, it was a perfectly plausible scenario. In almost every particular, however, it would prove to be wrong.

17

The Party Girl

A
T A TIME
when New Yorkers were routinely treated to such tabloid headlines as “
RUM-CRAZY RIPPER CARVES DRUNKEN WOMAN TO DEATH
,” “
GIGOLO CONFESSES TO TORSO MURDER
,” and “
LOVER SLASHES SWEETHEART WHO SPURNED HIM
,” the slaying of the two Gedeon women and their boarder might have been expected to provide the public with some fleeting diversion at best. A rare combination of ingredients, however—a kind of perfect storm of prurience—raised the triple murder above the usual crime-and-scandal-sheet fare, turning it into what
Newsweek
magazine proclaimed “the best story in Manhattan tabloid history, everything that sensational journalism could ask for.”
¹

There was, to begin with, the person of Ronnie Gedeon, the ideal tabloid victim: a stunning twenty-year-old model, strangled, stripped naked, and (so early reports insisted) sexually assaulted on the bed beneath which her murdered mother’s body lay. The corpses of the two women, along with that of Frank Byrnes, had been transported
to the morgue at Bellevue, where autopsies were scheduled for late Monday morning. As Dr. Gonzales made clear, there was no way of telling whether the women had been raped until the postmortem examinations were completed and vaginal swabs analyzed. Unconstrained by anything as trivial as mere fact, however, the tabloids lost no time in attributing the murders to the era’s leading boogeyman, the sex maniac.

“
ART BEAUTY, MOTHER SLAIN BY SEX-FIEND
” read the headline of Monday’s
New York Evening Journal
, which—blithely ignoring the words of caution issuing from the medical examiner’s office—informed readers that “there was no doubt in the mind of investigators that a maniacal sex factor figured in the murders.” A half-page cartoon in the
Journal
showed a young female labeled “American Womanhood” opening her apartment door to be confronted by the towering shadow of a monster labeled “Sex Murderer.” Another, on the editorial page of the same paper, depicted a drooling thug in a cap labeled “Sex Fiend Killer” moving a skull-shaped playing piece over a checkerboard labeled “American Homes.” Other newspapers referred to the perpetrator as a “sex-poisoned beast,” a “sex-maddened strangler,” and a “sex-crazed lunatic” who violated his victims’ bodies “before or after death.”
²

Dispensing with any pretense of journalistic objectivity, Monday’s
Daily News
delivered its front-page story of the crime—“a blood-chilling episode of insensate lust and death”—in the pulp-fiction style of a dime store whodunit:

It was dark as pitch—but the darkness was alive with danger. The clock struck 3. Veronica Gedeon turned the key in the lock of her Beekman Hill apartment. The silence was heavy. Touchi, her pet Pekinese, didn’t run to greet her. That was strange. Veronica, who was 20, closed the door behind her in her five-room suite at 316 E. 50th St. A hand shot out of the darkness. It closed around her throat. Its powerful fingers pressed tighter—tighter.

Her assassin dragged the girl—who had been a prize beauty
and an artist’s model—toward her bedroom. The pressure on her throat became unendurable. Her lungs burst. She ceased to struggle. She was dead.

Then the strangler stripped her of her clothes.
³

The morbid fascination provoked by the crime was made even greater by its setting. Not a single tabloid failed to note the connection among the Vera Stretz case, the Nancy Titterton bathtub murder, and the current atrocity, all of which had taken place within a few blocks of one another in the ostensible haven of Beekman Place. The parallels between the Titterton slaying and the Gedeon murders seemed especially striking. Both crimes had occurred on Easter weekend exactly a year apart. And both had been discovered by men who worked as upholsters—John Fiorenza in the Titterton case and now the estranged husband and father, Joseph Gedeon.
⁴

What truly elevated the killing of Ronnie Gedeon above the common run of criminal sensations, however—and endowed her with a celebrity she had never enjoyed in life—was something unparalleled in tabloid publishing: a profusion of photographs of the lovely young victim posing provocatively in various states of undress. Within hours of the first published reports of the slaying, a freelance photographer named J. Jay Hirz telephoned the city desk of the
Daily News
to say that he was in possession of several dozen “figure studies” of the slain model that he was willing to part with for ten dollars apiece. Before long, other amateur shutterbugs—members of private “camera clubs” who forked over five dollars an hour to take pictures of naked women—emerged from the woodwork to peddle their own lascivious “art photos.” By Monday evening, the late editions were already running nude pictures of Ronnie, discreetly retouched with gauzy, airbrushed veils. On the following day, the
Daily News
alone featured nine photos of the “prize beauty,” either seminude or in a negligee. “As a murder mystery, it was a natural,”
Time
magazine observed in a piece about the case. “As a picture story, it was a Roman holiday.”
⁵

Other photographs, reproduced from the true crime magazines
she had modeled for, gave an additional lurid twist to the story. Under headlines reading “Prophecy of Murder,” “Shadows of the Doom to Come,” and “Act that Turned Real Off-Stage,” a terrified-looking Ronnie—dressed in skimpy undergarments or half-open kimonos—was shown trussed up with ropes, falling to her knees with a gun to her head, or cowering at some unseen attacker. The accompanying captions were all variations on the same portentous theme: the eerie way in which the pictures seemed to foretell her terrible fate. “When Veronica Gedeon posed for this photograph just a year ago to illustrate the cover of a magazine, she had no inkling that she, too, would be the victim of circumstances she was portraying,” said the
Journal.
“Veronica Gedeon is here shown registering horror for a recent magazine illustration. Is this the way she gazed on her doom in her home early Easter morning?” wrote the
News.
“A year ago, the beautiful Veronica Gedeon took this terror-stricken pose to illustrate a story in
Inside Detective
magazine. Twelve months later she was again the shrinking beauty. But this time her attacker was not acting,” intoned the
Mirror
.
⁶

Acquaintances of Ronnie, incensed at seeing her pictured as “a wild girl with wild ways” who “met with a wild fate,” rushed to her defense. She was “definitely a person of the proprieties,” said her best friend, Jean Karp, who informed reporters that, in recent months, “Ronnie had taken a deep interest in the Bible, reading it for literary not religious reasons.” Another good friend, Bobby Haenigsen—wife of cartoonist Harry Haenigsen, creator of the popular comic strip
Penny
—affirmed that “Ronnie was a fine girl. She and her mother were very devoted to each other. They were more like sisters than mother and daughter.” The illustrator Saul Tepper, who had occasionally employed her as a model, described her as “a swell kid with a beautiful smile. She never impressed me as the kind of a girl who could become involved in any kind of a tragedy. She was so gay and light-spirited. I never saw her moody or temperamental. From what I saw of her I got the impression of a gay, good-natured girl who seemed to get a lot of fun out of life.” Even West Peterson, editor of
Inside Detective
, the true crime magazine Ronnie had repeatedly
posed for, chimed in with a testimonial. Veronica, he declared was “ ‘decent’ in every sense of the word…an honest girl from a family in straitened circumstances who was trying to earn her own living with the natural talents with which she was endowed. She was not ‘cheap.’ She did not sleep with men so that they would give her money. Had she not chosen to be a photographers’ and illustrators’ model, she might have been another stenographer, a sales girl, or a nurse. She had the intelligence to succeed in any of these callings.”
⁷