The Mad Sculptor (28 page)

Interviewed by reporters following the burial, George Longfellow described his relative as a man who was not only an exceptionally heavy sleeper but also partially deaf. “Byrnes would fall into a deep slumber the minute he hit the bed,” said Longfellow. “And he had been hard of hearing for years.” The statement shed light on one of the nagging mysteries in the case: why Frank Byrnes had not been awakened by Mary Gedeon’s death struggle.
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Rumors that the forty-five-year-old Mary had been romantically involved with a “mysterious stranger”—a man she had introduced to several friends as her “new husband”—sent police on a futile hunt for the “second Mr. Gedeon” (as the tabloids dubbed this phantom). Her daughter’s seemingly endless string of boyfriends also came in for renewed scrutiny. According to the papers, detectives were now seeking “a young army officer who gave Ronnie her first taste of high society life at a Waldorf-Astoria military ball a year ago”; a married art patron and a professional athlete, each suspected of being the father of her aborted child; and the “Boston playboy millionaire whom they had formerly regarded as a figment of imagination created by the eccentric upholsterer to divert suspicion from himself.”
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Even as the tabloids were describing these latest developments, however, police were hard on the trail of an entirely different suspect. Hoping to lull him into a false sense of security, they had been conducting their investigation with such secrecy that even many officers assigned to the case knew nothing about it.
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It was Ronnie’s dog-eared five-year diary that had first alerted them to his existence. Since the discovery of the little volume in her bedroom bureau, investigators had been poring over the nearly fifteen hundred entries dating back to 1932.

References to “Bobby”—her ex-husband, Robert Flower—dominated
the early parts of the diary, where he was described as “the most lovable creature,” her “first love and also my last,” a young man she was “crazy about” and would “do anything for.” The name appeared again toward the end of the diary. These entries, however, had a weirdly “sinister tenor.” Now, Bobby was obsessed with Ronnie’s older sister. He was “out of his head.” His pursuit of Ethel had turned into a kind of stalking. “I am afraid of B.,” wrote Ronnie. “He has been hanging around the house since Ethel handed him a large dose of ozone.”

The dramatic shift in Ronnie’s feelings about Bobby puzzled investigators until it occurred to them that she was talking about two different men.

Early Wednesday morning—around the time that Joseph Gedeon was being taken to the police station to begin his grueling interrogation—Detective Martin Owens drove out to Astoria, Queens, to question Ethel Kudner. Told about her sister’s diary, Ethel confirmed that the later entries referred not to Bobby Flower but to an ex-boarder at her mother’s brownstone.

“But he couldn’t have anything to do with this,” she quickly added. “He isn’t that kind of person. He’s an exceptionally talented sculptor. His heart is in work.”

“Why don’t you let me be judge of that?” said Owens. “Now tell me. What’s his full name?”

“Irwin,” said Ethel. “Robert Irwin.”
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19

Prime Suspect

F
OR BOTH THE NEWSMEN
assigned to the case and the public at large, the announcement was a bolt from the blue. Early Monday morning, April 5, Acting Lieutenant Thomas Martin of the Homicide Squad called a news conference at the East 51st Street police station, where he distributed a photograph of a clean-cut, good-looking young man staring intently at the camera.

“We now have a definite suspect in the Gedeon murder,” said Martin. “His name is Robert Irwin. We are more interested in him than in any other man we’ve questioned in this case.”
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In the days since Ethel revealed the identity of the second, highly volatile “Bobby” in her slain sister’s diary, investigators had uncovered virtually all the key facts about Irwin’s life: his fanatically religious upbringing, his stints in reform school with his delinquent brothers, his time in Hollywood, his studies with Lorado Taft, his attempt at self-emasculation, his two periods of confinement at the Rockland State Hospital, his work as a taxidermist, his recent expulsion from the St. Lawrence University Theological School.

They knew about his “explosive personality,” his pattern of erupting into terrifying outbursts of violent rage, his efforts to “achieve supreme superiority in sculpture” by bottling up his “love urges.” With one hundred detectives assigned to the case, they had traced his movements from Canton to Manhattan on Good Friday, spoken to Clarence Low and Leonora Sheldon, and located the Ottburgs’ boardinghouse, where they learned that Irwin had skipped out sometime in the middle of Saturday night, leaving behind his gray fedora, an empty cardboard carton, and a box of table salt.
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Besides putting together a compelling circumstantial case, they had found more concrete evidence. Dispatched to Canton, a pair of detectives had quickly tracked down Pauline Dishaw, the salesgirl at the J. J. Newberry department store who had sold Irwin a cheap pair of gray suede gloves, identical in style, size, and material to the one found at the murder scene. In Irwin’s room at the Hosleys’ boardinghouse, where he had left some of his belongings behind, they also turned up his notebook. There, among his paeans to Ethel’s perfection, he had vented his bitterness toward the two women he blamed for coming between him and his beloved. “If only Ronnie and Mrs. G. hadn’t interfered!” he had written. “How I hate Ronnie and her mother for what they have done to me!”
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These entries strongly suggested that Irwin had a clear-cut motive for the killings: “to revenge himself on Mrs. Gedeon and Veronica for having broken up his romance with Ethel,” as the
New York Times
reported. Certainly he had the physical strength to commit the strangulations, with powerful hands developed from his years of molding clay and wielding a mallet and chisel. Police had also been informed by several of Irwin’s acquaintances that he “habitually carried” an eight-inch-long sculptor’s tool “with a sharp point and taped handle”—presumably the weapon “with which Byrnes was stabbed.”

They even had a theory linking Irwin to the oddly shaped piece of soap found on the floor of the Gedeons’ living room. Beginning in 1925, Procter & Gamble had sponsored an annual soap-carving contest, awarding major prizes to the best original works
of art sculpted from Ivory soap. The contest—whose winners were judged by a committee of eminent sculptors, including Lorado Taft—turned the hobby of soap carving into a nationwide craze. By the early 1930s, annual submissions totaled well over five thousand little soap statues: everything from nude torsos to nativity scenes, Greek mythological heroes to Hollywood celebrities, circus animals to Civil War battle scenes.

To several of the detectives at work on the Easter Sunday murders, the chunk of soap on the Gedeons’ living room floor, when viewed from certain angles, resembled a woman’s face. With Irwin now identified as the prime suspect, the theory quickly circulated that, after killing Mrs. Gedeon and Frank Byrnes, the sculptor had whiled away his time as he waited for Ronnie’s return by carving a little bust of Ethel from a bar of bathroom soap.
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Ethel herself remained unconvinced of Bob’s guilt. Waylaid by reporters outside the midtown ASPCA, where she had gone to retrieve her sister’s Pekingese, Touchi, on Monday morning, she repeated the opinion she had expressed to Detective Owens. “I cannot believe that Irwin is the man who killed my mother and sister.” Dr. Russell Blaisdell, superintendent of Rockland State Hospital, was equally emphatic. While it was true that Bob had “trouble controlling his emotions, and a vicious temper,” Blaisdell told reporters, “this temper of his cooled off in a flash. After an outburst, he was extremely remorseful.

“I just can’t visualize him as being connected with the Gedeon murders,” the psychiatrist continued. “The Gedeon murders were done by a crafty fiend who lay in wait. Irwin never could have lain in wait. He wouldn’t have been able to control himself. And if he
had
done such a thing, he would have been sorry afterwards. He wouldn’t hide. He would try to find someone to unburden himself to.”
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The police, however, had no doubt that Irwin was their man. “We have enough evidence linking Irwin to the crime scene to get a Grand Jury indictment and send the man to the chair,” Chief Inspector Lyons told the press on Monday afternoon. That same evening, Police Commissioner Valentine ordered all New York City police
precinct commanders to post men “at all bridges and tunnels leading from the city and at all bus, railroad, airplane and ferry terminals.” At the same time, he issued a Teletype alarm to seven states besides New York—New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts:

Arrest for triple homicide this city. Robert ‘Bob’ Irwin, last known address 36 State St., Canton, N.Y. He is of U.S. nativity, 29, five feet nine, 140 pounds, stocky build, dark-blond wavy hair, high forehead, eyes squinty.

When last seen was wearing black overcoat with velvet collar, tan fedora hat, light scarf.

Suit may be black with penciled stripe or bluish gray with pin stripe; black shoes, size 8, which were made in Canada; medium blue shirt with black stripe, made by the New Way Process Co. of Pennsylvania.

Irwin is a sculptor, but may be employed, or seek employment, in taxidermy work or decorative flower establishments. Kindly make inquiries at art clubs and such places where he might seek employment.

Lodges in cheap rooming houses and was formerly an inmate of the Rockland State Hospital Insane Asylum. May be hitchhiking to Philadelphia, Pa. or Washington, D.C. Also check morgues for suicides and give this case the necessary attention.
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For a solid week, Ronnie Gedeon and her eccentric, “erotic-minded” father had been the headliners in “The Murder of the Artist’s Model.” With the announcement that her killer had been positively identified, all that changed overnight. To be sure, the sensationalistic papers continued to milk Ronnie’s life for every last prurient drop. When police released excerpts of her diary to the press, the
Daily Mirror
ran a story headlined “Slain Model’s Diary Bares Love Secrets,” claiming that the little volume was “pulsating with the life and love that stirred” within the lovely young model. Even this story, however (which turned out to consist of such “pulsating”
entries as “Dear Diary, I am crazy about a certain boy named Bobby” and “Went out last night and nearly fell asleep, I was so bored”), was relegated to the inside pages.
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It was her killer who would now dominate the front pages. Just as the doomed, fast-living Ronnie seemed tailor-made for the sensationalistic press, Robert Irwin was a tabloid editor’s dream: a talented artist and aspiring seminarian whose long history of bizarre behavior had culminated in the “Easter Sunday triple-murder orgy.” Tabloid scribes tripped over themselves in their rush to coin lurid epithets for the latest criminal sensation: “the sex-tormented artist-theologian,” “the sex-tortured madman,” “the religio-sex maniac,” “the erratic and erotic sculptor.” It was a writer for
Daily News
who came up with the winner, the nickname by which Robert Irwin would become known in the annals of American crime: the Mad Sculptor.
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20

Manhunt

W
ITH IRWIN
’
S PHOTOGRAPH SPLASHED
across the front page of virtually every newspaper in the East and an estimated twenty thousand law officers on the lookout for him from Maine to Maryland—“the greatest manhunt since the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby”—police were confident that he would be apprehended within a matter of days. In New York City alone, several hundred detectives were detailed to the search. Under the theory that he was “down to his last dollar,” a dozen officers from the East 5th Street station scoured the dives, missions, and municipal shelters of the Bowery, that squalid “street of forgotten men” where, police theorized, “the panicky fugitive might desperately hope to pass unknown and unregarded.” Others combed the “flophouse districts on upper Third Avenue, on East 23rd Street, on Eighth Avenue in the 20s, and on lower Fulton St., Brooklyn.” Police were also dispatched to Bellevue and other city hospitals on the chance that he had checked himself into a psychiatric ward.

As with every highly publicized manhunt, there were countless sightings of the fugitive. In Manhattan, he was seen panhandling on
the Lower East Side, dining in a bar and grill on Rivington Street, staying at a cheap lodging house in Hell’s Kitchen, and “dancing stark naked on a fire escape.” Anonymous tipsters from around the country claimed that he was staying at a hotel in Atlantic City, hitchhiking in the Poconos, shopping for jewelry in Baltimore, skulking around the campus of Vassar College, begging for a handout from fraternity members at Rutgers University, riding a boxcar to Hollywood, driving a stolen car to Cape Cod, and stowing away on a ship carrying volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. He was also supposedly spotted in Astoria, Queens, presumably on his way to the home of his obsessive love interest, Ethel Kudner. Taking no chances, authorities persuaded her to abandon her residence and go into seclusion at an undisclosed location under twenty-four-hour police guard.

Ethel’s father had his own novel theory about Irwin’s whereabouts. Early Tuesday morning, Joe Gedeon and his attorney, Peter Sabbatino, were back in court for a hearing on the gun possession charge. When Sabbatino requested a month-long postponement, District Attorney Dodge offered no objection. As various commentators dryly noted, this sudden agreeableness on the part of the prosecutor was a barely adequate form of atonement for Gedeon’s outrageous mistreatment—the legal equivalent of beating up a man for an offense he didn’t commit and then, after realizing your mistake, shaking his hand and saying, “No hard feelings.” Following the brief proceedings, Gedeon spoke to reporters about Irwin. “I think he’s the man, all right,” said the little upholsterer. “He’s very clever. And he’s also extremely adept at making wonderfully life-like masks. If you ask me, I think he’ll try to disguise himself with a mask of some kind and go parading around the streets while detectives hunt him.”
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