The Mad Sculptor (25 page)

The excitement over the ostensible solution to the crime was short-lived. Both men proved to have airtight alibis. The bloodstains on Frenchy’s handkerchiefs were the result of his chronic and copious nosebleeds, while the stains on Mocoro’s ice pick turned out to be rust. Swarmed by reporters as he left the police station, Frenchy
brushed off the notion that he might do harm to either Gedeon woman and offered a theory of his own.

“I never fight with anybody,” he proclaimed. “I am a gentleman. I have never caused trouble for anybody, especially any woman. To Ronnie I was like the papa. The uncle. We were friends. No, I did not kill Ronnie Gedeon, that beautiful girl. No, I did not kill her good, hard-working mama nor this lodger of theirs, a man I do not know from Adam.”

“Then who did?” asked a reporter.

“I tell you,” said Frenchy. “Mama Gedeon was a very stingy woman. Somebody killed her for her money. The other two were killed because they hear or see something.”
²⁴

With his most promising suspects cleared, Lyons offered a somber assessment to the press. “We are up against a stone wall and will just have to keep working on in the dark until we get something we can sink our teeth into,” he declared, mixing his metaphors in a way that might have seemed amusing under less tragic circumstances.
²⁵

One man who claimed to have some knowledge of the culprit was the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith. A silver-tongued hate-monger who preached racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry, Smith—over the radio, on the lecture circuit, and in the pages of his monthly magazine,
The Cross and the Flag
—called for the forced shipment of America’s “black savages” to Africa, the deportation of its Jews to Russia, and the “halt of immigration by Asiatics,” all in the service of purging the country of its insidious non-Aryan elements. He also railed ceaselessly against the “Bolshevik menace,” also known in his parlance as “Christ-hating Muscovites.”

On Monday evening, the day after the massacre, Smith delivered one of his rabble-rousing diatribes to the Men’s Club of St. Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, in the course of which he referred to the dominant news story of the day. “I charge that the crime which was committed in Fiftieth Street in Manhattan, the murder of Veronica Gedeon, artists’ model, and two others, was committed by a sex-mad maniac,” he thundered, “part of the atheistic Communistic lawlessness which is gnawing at our social structure.”
Reporting on his speech the following afternoon, the
Post
took an appropriately derisive tone. “Now we know the reason for the current wave of revolting sex crimes in New York City,” the paper jeered. “The Communists are to blame.”
²⁶

One person the police were much interested in talking to was Lucy Beacco, the visiting friend of Ronnie’s who had been staying in the little bedroom where the bodies of the two Gedeon women were found. From a letter they discovered atop her bureau, investigators learned that she had gone to spend the Easter weekend with friends in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Brought back to Manhattan late Monday afternoon, she was questioned by the police, then escorted to the crime scene by Detective Martin Owens, who instructed her to take a look around and tell him whether anything was missing. Aside from the sheets and pillowcase removed by the crime lab technicians, everything appeared to be where she’d left it. She was just about to leave when something caught her eye.

“Wait a minute,” she said, pointing to the bureau. “I had a clock on there.”

“When did you last see it?” asked Owens.

“Friday night when I left for Massachusetts.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, absolutely,” said Beacco.

Asked to describe it, the young woman said it was “a cheap clock, a Baby Ben. It didn’t cost more than two or three dollars.” Why anyone would bother to steal it was a mystery.
²⁷

18

Murder Sells

B
Y TUESDAY, THE TABLOID COVERAGE
of the case had already reached a frenzied pitch, with the
News
devoting nine full pages to the story. Treating the tragedy as pure pop entertainment, the paper bestowed a snappy title on the crime—“The Murder of the Artist’s Model,” New York’s most thrilling “Drama of Death.” Under the headline “
THE CAST IN
‘
THE MURDER OF THE ARTIST
’
S MODEL,
’ ” it even ran a Hollywood-style credit list, as though the principal figures in the case, including the victims, were merely actors playing roles in a movie melodrama:

THE MODEL
—Veronica Gedeon

THE ROOMER
—Lucy Beacco

THE MOTHER
—Mrs. Mary Gedeon

THE LODGER
—Frank Byrnes

THE BOYFRIEND
—Stephen Butter

THE FATHER
—Joseph Gedeon

THE BEST FRIEND
—Jean Karp

THE KILLER
—?
¹

So unbridled was the tabloid’s “wallowing treatment of the murders” that—in response to a barrage of letters from indignant readers objecting to its focus on “morbid sensationalism”—
Daily News
publisher Joseph Medill Patterson was moved to defend his newspaper’s policy in a remarkable editorial. Titled “What Is the Best Story?” and accompanied by a pair of photographs—one of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the other of a half-naked Veronica Gedeon—the editorial contrasted the
News
’s cursory mention of an important Supreme Court decision handed down on Monday with its lip-smacking coverage of the Gedeon murders.

Acknowledging that “the Supreme Court story was historically more significant,” Patterson nevertheless argued that his managing editor made the right decision by playing up the Gedeon tragedy. “Look at this murder story as a story,” he argued:

The murders themselves were grisly and mysterious enough. But also they were committed against a background of light living and light loving, family complications, bootlegging, shadowy married friends of the victims, etc. Mystery story writers—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, the late Conan Doyle, or Edgar Allan Poe himself if he were alive—would revel in such an assortment of raw materials for a murder plot. And the resulting novel, play, or movie would sell. Murder sells papers, books, plays, because we are all fascinated by murder. It is a part of life—the most fatally intriguing part. And this is a murder story in real life.…Perhaps people should be more interested today in the Supreme Court than in the Gedeon murder, but we don’t think they are.
²

Two days later, as though to thumb its nose at snooty critics who condemned it for pandering to popular taste, the paper proudly ran a letter from a typical reader that perfectly validated Patterson’s point:

I ain’t much of a hand at writing because my kids only a year ago taught me to write. But I want to tell you that I think your
paper is darn good. I learnt to read from
The News
. I like them pictures of the beautiful murdered model and I tear them out of the paper and hang them on the wall. My wife gets mad, but ha ha. And them people who says your paper is not good is nuts, ha ha. —Delighted Customer
³

For its part, the
Mirror
played up the human-interest angle by running a voyeuristic
True Confessions
–style feature supposedly penned by Veronica’s boyfriend, Lincoln Hauser. Titled “Ronnie’s Fiancé Tells Love Tale,” the five-part series promised titillating revelations by the person who knew the “slain beauty” more “thoroughly” and “intimately” than anyone else.

While portraying the “slain artist’s model” as a “sweet kid” who brought “dainty foods and flowers” to hospitalized friends, “loved the pageantry of the church,” avidly read “the classics and fine poetry,” and longed for “a home, children, and an orderly life,” the ostensible memoir mostly dished up juicy innuendoes about her life as a party girl. Ronnie “played the field and she played it recklessly and enjoyed every minute of it.” She “had a closet full of clothes. Some she bought herself and some were bought for her. A well-known insurance man frequently bought her beautiful gowns and accessories.” She “knew dozens of headwaiters by their first names. Sometimes her escorts were middle-aged men. She would come home sometimes at six or seven o’clock in the morning after a night in the finest clubs and hotels in the city.” In the studios where she posed in the nude, she met “prominent men and women and would be asked to join them in wild parties. Sometimes she went and sometimes she did not. She wanted to quit but invariably she would say that there was some kind of an excitement about it that she couldn’t shake off. She knew that it was the wrong thing to do but there was no way to get her to stop.”

In the end, Hauser’s purported memoir was an epitome of tabloid cynicism, serving up sexual titillation under the guise of moral instruction: the cautionary fable of a good-hearted but unconstrained
young woman who “played the field and played it recklessly” and paid the ultimate price for her promiscuous ways.
⁴

Tabloid publishers weren’t the only ones to indulge in the crass exploitation of the Beekman Hill tragedy. On the same day that Patterson’s editorial appeared, city newspapers began running an advertisement by the Segal Lock and Hardware Company. Beneath the bold-type warning “
IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU
!,” the ad showed a picture of the lock maker’s patented “jimmy-proof” dead bolt and a newspaper clipping headlined “
TRIPLE MURDER IN GEDEON FLAT.
”

That the perpetrator of the Easter Sunday Massacre was no homicidal intruder but (as authorities had made clear from the start) an acquaintance of the Gedeons made no difference. Throughout the city—but particularly in Beekman Place and adjacent neighborhoods—locksmiths reported doing a “land-office business.” In a single day, Charles Negroponte, who ran a shop at 204 East 50th Street and whose “normal sales averaged six or so daily,” sold “seventy-five new locks.” His merchandise was moving even faster than it had a year earlier, after the neighborhood’s previous atrocity. “When Mrs. Titterton was killed, things got good,” said Negroponte. “We never expected to see days like that again.” Compared to the “swell business” he was doing now, however, Negroponte viewed the “post-Titterton rush as a mere flurry.”
⁵

On Tuesday afternoon, police announced that Dr. Erasmus Hudson—a New York physician and fingerprint expert who had gained national renown for his work on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case—had managed to raise a bloody thumbprint from the bathroom door of the Gedeons’ apartment by means of his pioneering silver nitrate technique. Specialists from the Bureau of Criminal Identification at police headquarters were in the process of comparing the print to those taken from the many individuals who had already been called in for questioning. Kear and his cohorts were particularly
eager to see if the telltale print matched up with the thumb mark of the man who was rapidly becoming their prime suspect: Joseph Gedeon.
⁶

As much as anything else, it was Gedeon’s weird indifference to the murders that had piqued the suspicions of the detectives. His bizarrely blasé behavior was on full display on Tuesday. Even as the bodies of his wife and daughter were being transported from the Bellevue morgue to James McCabe’s funeral parlor on West 90th Street—where a crowd of morbid curiosity seekers was already gathering on the sidewalk for a glimpse of the celebrity corpses—the little upholsterer was pursuing his daily routines as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

Emerging from his shop at around eight in the morning, Gedeon—trailed by a mob of reporters and a pair of detectives assigned to keep watch on him—strolled to Diamond Dry Cleaners at 547 Third Avenue, where he dropped off a gray topcoat to be sponged and pressed. He then proceeded to the Willow cafeteria on 34th Street, stopping first at a corner newsstand to pick up the morning tabloids.

Seating himself at a table, he flirted with the waitress as he put in his usual order of oatmeal and coffee, then settled back with the papers, pursing his mouth in apparent distaste as he pored over the many photos of his scantily clad daughter. From surrounding tables, reporters began peppering him with questions. Asked if he had any theories about the killer, he replied without hesitation.

The culprit, he declared, was “a married millionaire who wanted to have an affair with Ronnie. I don’t know his name. I just know he came from Boston. He offered Ronnie a big car, an apartment, and jewelry if she would sleep with him. But she turned him down. I believe his frustration caused him to do it. Not that he killed her himself. He must have hired someone else to do it.”

How, someone asked, could he take the tragedy so calmly?

“I’m a fatalist,” he replied with a shrug. “Also a naturalist. I take things naturally. Everything occurs because of causation. Whatever happens has to happen, and so why get excited about it?”
⁷

There were, of course, certain things that did upset him. He lamented the fact that his wife carried no life insurance. “She always told me she didn’t want anyone to profit her death. I thought differently,” said Gedeon. “My idea is that a man and wife should be insured in each other’s names for the benefit of the domestic partnership.”

Still, he wasn’t overly concerned about his finances. “A girl with five thousand dollars wants to marry me right now,” he explained. “But she’s ugly. I couldn’t marry an ugly woman. My idea of the right wife for me is a woman between thirty-five and forty, pretty and full of pep, but with good sense. I wouldn’t care whether she was a blonde or brunette.”