The Mad Sculptor (26 page)

Gedeon continued to chat away merrily until one of the reporters began to press him on his alibi. “That’s enough,” he growled, leaping from his chair and bolting from the restaurant. After a quick trip by cab to McCabe’s funeral parlor—where he dropped off the burial clothes that Ethel had tearfully picked out for Mary and Ronnie—he returned to his shop and locked himself inside.

Shortly afterward, a group of his friends showed up, all fellow Hungarians, including Paul Nadanyi, editor of the local Hungarian newspaper, the
Daily Népszava
. After a few glasses of schnapps, Gedeon agreed to be interviewed by Nadanyi. His “mood fluctuating from gloom to belligerence,” he blamed his travails on his wayward daughter and overindulgent wife. As for the police, who clearly still had him under surveillance, he expressed nothing but defiance: “The cops can’t break me,” he said, shaking a fist. “I have seven lives.”
⁸

From the sidewalk below his second-story shop, reporters called up to Gedeon that his alibi had been shaken. Going to the door, he was told that the owner of Corrigan’s Bar and Grill, Cal Parliapiano—who had originally corroborated Gedeon’s account of his whereabouts at the time of the murders—had “changed his story and now says he’s not sure you
were
in his place all the time you said you were.” Though the barkeep had seen Gedeon at the skee ball machine twice that evening—when he arrived for work at
7:00 p.m. and when he left around midnight—he couldn’t say for certain “whether he was there all during the intervening hours.”

Hearing this news, Gedeon erupted into “geysers of wrath.” “You’re lying, he’s lying or you both are crazy as hell!” he screamed. Gathering up his buddies, he shoved his way through the clamoring mob and made his way to the curb, where he and his friends piled into a taxi and took off.

They spent the next five hours drinking schnapps and playing gin rummy at his friend Herman’s apartment. At around ten, Gedeon felt in the mood for his favorite pastime. Taking a cab to Radio City Bowling and Billiards, across Sixth Avenue from the Music Hall and open twenty-four hours, they bowled merrily all night, Gedeon using his usual sixteen-pound ball and racking up consistent scores in the 200-to-225 range.

They were still going at it at seven in the morning when a bunch of reporters—tipped off about Gedeon’s location—burst into the place. Making their escape, Gedeon and his friends took a cab to the Beekman Tavern on Second Avenue and 50th Street, around the corner from his deceased wife’s apartment. “Done up like a Bavarian beer garden,” it had been Mary’s favorite watering hole.

Taking a table in back, they lit cigarettes and ordered beers. Gedeon was just starting on his second glass when the newspapermen showed up. One of the photographers—John Reidy of the
Mirror
—pointed his Speed Graphic at Gedeon. His face a mask of rage, the little man flung the contents of his glass at Reidy, then cocked his arm and—as the cameraman pressed the shutter button—hurled the glass itself.

A melee erupted. Chairs were thrown, beer steins shattered, punches exchanged. As he scuffled with Reidy, Gedeon’s pince-nez eyeglasses were knocked to the floor and trampled to pieces. Finally, a pair of beat cops rushed in and put a halt to the fracas.

Gedeon was escorted back to his shop, where a “fresh batch of newshounds—the day shift—was waiting.” Standing on his stoop, the little upholsterer—his clothes and hair disheveled, his glasses gone—hurled curses at the reporters and gestured his contempt by
drawing a finger across his throat. Then he disappeared inside, bolted the door behind him, stripped off his clothes, and—exhausted from his long night of carousing—collapsed on his cot.

He managed only three hours of sleep. Shortly before 11:00 a.m., he was awakened by a pounding on his door. It was Detective Sidney Lecher, sent there with orders from District Attorney William C. Dodge to bring Joseph Gedeon in for another round of questioning.
⁹

To the disappointment of the police, who were hoping that the bloody fingerprint found on the bathroom door of the apartment would tie Gedeon to the killings, the crime lab experts had been unable to come up with a match. Despite the lack of physical evidence against him, however, investigators were increasingly convinced that Ronnie’s father was the culprit. Apart from his bizarrely unfeeling behavior in the wake of the killings, there was the revised testimony of Cal Parliapiano, which had punctured a hole in the upholsterer’s supposedly “airtight alibi.” Gedeon’s skee ball partner that night, a linotype operator named Thomas Kelly, could only “swear to his presence from midnight to closing, while the bartender, Eddie Murray, didn’t remember seeing him at all. ‘It was one of the busiest nights we ever had. They were lined up two deep at the bar.’ ”
¹⁰
That left a gap between 7:00 p.m. and midnight when Gedeon’s whereabouts could not be independently confirmed. Nor could anyone testify to his movements after 3:00 a.m.

There was also the matter of his clothing. Several patrons of Corrigan’s had told detectives that they recalled seeing Gedeon in a shabby brown suit on the night of the killings. Since Sunday, however, he had been wearing a gray-checked jacket and pants, leading police to suspect that “the brown suit might have been discarded because it had been stained with blood.”
¹¹

Casting Gedeon’s character in a particularly unsavory light was his supposed sexual degeneracy. In the tabloids, he was now routinely described as “a student of erotica”—“a French postcard fancier” who lived in a “sleazy bower of love shelved with risqué
books,” used “pictures of naked women to satiate his queer animal desires,” and had deserted his wife “in favor of solitude and sex practices more bizarre than the marriage bed.” Retained by the
Daily News
to provide expert commentary on the unfolding case, Dr. Carleton Simon—former Special Deputy Police Commissioner of New York and author of such works as
Homosexualists and Sex Crimes, The Menace of Dope
, and
The Negro Criminal
—flatly declared that “Gedeon’s behavior is certainly not that of a normal man.” The evidence? “He likes to read about sex and treasures photographs of nude women.”
¹²

Certainly he had the physical strength to perpetrate the murders. Though he was slight of stature with a “mousy appearance,” he had developed enormously powerful hands, partly from years of “pulling cloth and leather” in his upholstery work, partly from his addiction to bowling (he boasted of routinely playing seventy games in a single night). His favorite parlor trick was bending a beer-bottle cap in half between his thumb and forefinger.
¹³

As for a motive, the current thinking among the members of the Homicide Squad was that—having discovered “that Mary Gedeon and roomer Frank Byrnes had a relationship that transcended the conventional”—Gedeon had “killed his wife and Byrnes in a fit of jealousy and added Ronnie because his disapproval of her way of life amounted to a fixation.”
¹⁴

Determined to wrest a confession from “the extremely odd little man,” investigators proceeded to subject him “to a grilling of such intensity as had seldom, if ever, been equaled in any New York homicide investigation.”
¹⁵
Sequestered in a “bare and forbidding” room on the third floor of the East 51st Street police station, Gedeon was seated on a hard-backed wooden chair, a blazing light trained on his face. Working in teams, his interrogators—including at times Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro, Deputy Police Commissioner Harold Fowler, Deputy Chief Inspector Kear, and District Attorney Dodge himself—pounded away at him for hours on end. Occasionally, the pounding was more than verbal. Like other suspects
subjected to the third degree in those days, Gedeon ended up with some ugly contusions.

Right from the start, his questioners made it clear that they no longer believed his alibi. “You claim you were in Corrigan’s the whole time,” said Kear. “But now the bar owner says he only saw you there at seven p.m. and at midnight.”

Gedeon was unfazed. “He was busy that night. Maybe he didn’t see me continuously. But I was there in the crowd.” As for the people who said he was dressed in a brown suit, “they’re mistaken,” said Gedeon. “I had on this same gray suit as now.”

At one point, Kear produced the gray suede glove found at the murder scene and asked Gedeon to try it on. Though it fit easily, the upholsterer insisted that it wasn’t his. “I’m a poor man,” he said. “I haven’t owned any gloves for two or three years.”

“Considering that your wife and daughter have been horribly killed, you’ve shown little grief,” said Kear.

“I’m always that way,” Gedeon answered. “Things hurt me deep, but inside.”

“You didn’t love your wife?”

Gedeon’s answer was harsh. “She was an ignorant woman. She didn’t know how to bring up her children. But I wouldn’t kill her.”

“Did you love Veronica?”

“She was never dutiful to me,” Gedeon replied. “I paid twenty dollars for the
Book of Knowledge
when she was little. She wouldn’t study it. All she wanted to do was go to movies. But Ethel, my other daughter, she read the book. She was a good girl.”

Despite the medical examiner’s finding that neither woman had been sexually assaulted, the interrogators returned again and again to Gedeon’s supposedly aberrant psychology, the main symptoms of which were his unabashed interest in sex and the pleasure he derived from pictures of bare-breasted women.

“You are a student of erotica, are you not?” asked Assistant DA Marro.

“I have pictures of naked women in my room and books on
unusual sex practices,” Gedeon admitted. “But that wouldn’t make me commit murders,” he sensibly added.

“Why do you have a full length mirror attached to your bathroom door?” he was asked.

“Oh, I am very much interested in nature.”

“You mean you’re interested in nude women?”

“Well, that’s a part of nature. Yes, I like to see them.”

“Why is the mirror on the door?”

“Well, I like to make love to women and to be able to see how they look when I kiss them. I love all nature—anything that is beautiful. Not only women but trees, flowers, birds.”

“You don’t regard yourself as being abnormal in your attitude towards women?” Marro pressed.

“No,” Gedeon insisted. “I’m not abnormal at all. I’m just a man who appreciates life.”

“Why have you got all those pictures of nude women around your room?”

“What’s so odd about that?” asked Gedeon. “They aren’t nasty pictures. They are out of art magazines.”

“You have some peculiarities about the relations of men and women, haven’t you?” Marro persisted.

“Well, I think there is always a conflict between the sexes. Women want to dominate men, but men shouldn’t let them do that.”

“You mean it’s the business of men to control women?”

“If you don’t control them,” said Gedeon, “they take advantage of you.”

“What did you quarrel with your wife about when you and she separated?”

“Nothing in particular,” Gedeon said. “They were not respectful to me at home. So I said, ‘All right, I’ll leave. You live your own life and I’ll live mine.’ ”

“You didn’t hate your wife?”

“No.”

“Did you love her?”

“Well,” said Gedeon, “she was my wife.”

Hour after hour, the cross-examination went on. For all the effort to break him, however, the little upholsterer stood firm.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” he kept repeating. “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t kill my family.”
¹⁶

Despite his denials, authorities remained convinced that it was only a matter of time before Gedeon cracked. Emerging from the isolated interrogation room late Wednesday afternoon, District Attorney Dodge was surrounded by newsmen. “I can state positively that we have a definite suspect,” he said with a grin.

“Though he refused to comment further,” the
News
reported, “his implication was obvious that the police were ready to break ‘The Murder of the Artist’s Model.’ ” Screaming headlines in the tabloids left no doubt that Joseph Gedeon was about to be charged with the atrocity: “
HOLD FATHER OF MURDERED MODEL
,” “
POLICE TIGHTEN NET ON SLAIN MODEL
’
S DAD
,” “
GEDEON’S ALIBI TORN BY GAPS
,” “
GEDEON FACES ARREST
.” One paper went so far as to publish a close-up of the little upholsterer’s eyes under the caption “
EYES OF A MURDERER
,” while the front page of the
Mirror
carried the photo of Gedeon—his face contorted with rage—about to hurl his beer glass at the cameraman.
¹⁷

Gedeon’s situation looked even grimmer when, shortly after Dodge made his announcement of an imminent break in the case, a team of detectives was dispatched to the upholsterer’s shop to search for several items. One was the mate to the incriminating gray glove. Another was the brown suit Gedeon had reportedly been wearing on the night of the murder. The third was the ostensible weapon used to kill Frank Byrnes: what the tabloids, in their typically inflammatory style, had taken to calling the “Gedeon Death Needle.”

After the
News
ran a picture of the varying sized needles confiscated during the initial search of Gedeon’s workplace, an upholsterer named Sam Kross got in touch with the police, having spotted something strange in the photograph. According to Kross, Gedeon’s supposedly complete set lacked a vital component: a twelve-inch “regulator” (as the needles are known in the trade). Questioned
about the absent tool, Gedeon could only say that he must have lost it.
¹⁸

Despite a concerted effort that included the Department of Sanitation—which was enlisted to search “all the sewers in the area bordered by Forty-eighth and Fifty-third Streets from Third Avenue to the East River”—the vanished foot-long “regulator” was never found. Nor did the police turn up the missing glove. They did find a threadbare brown suit jacket, but Gedeon dismissed it with a snort as an “old rag” he hadn’t worn in years and insisted that he had no idea where the matching vest and pants were, having discarded them long ago.
¹⁹