The Mad Sculptor (30 page)

After drifting “from pillar to post”—“living in the jungle where beast ate beast and only the fittest survive”—he was led by his “guiding star” to the Hollywood studio of Carlo Romanelli, “under whom I spent two years of intensive and profitable study.” Eventually, when “the desire for more worlds to conquer got the better of me,” he left for Chicago to work with Lorado Taft. The “nation’s outstanding sculptor” took such a shine to the young artist that he found a place for Bob at the home of his stepmother. Shortly afterward, Arthur Halliburton came to live there, too. Bob describes his assault on Halliburton, though in his version, his housemate at Mrs. Taft’s was entirely to blame. “A highbrow type,” Halliburton (according to Bob) flaunted his “social superiority” by snidely remarking on “some of my crude habits, or what he considered them.” As a result, “we had a brawl” that “gave me a chance to show my
physical
superiority.”

Bob’s struggles to pursue the “sacred cause” of his art during the difficult years of the Depression made him “open to all sorts of fears and worries.” How, he asked himself, “can I become a great sculptor, as I have led myself to believe?” Concluding that “the instinct to propagate” was the “most diverting factor,” he ended up in Bellevue after attempting to “deprive myself of sex urges.” There he found himself “in the psychopathic ward with people who”—unlike himself—“had actually gone mad.”

Following his transfer to Rockland, he was able to meditate on all sorts of mysteries and profundities that he shares in his memoir:

I can understand how the reproductive organs in Vedic literature symbolize the creation of life. The normal expression means greater health, greater intellect, a finer spirit. The anemic figures of the saints must have been done by suppressed, sexless creatures or those indulging in unnatural practices.…

What makes a homo-sexual? Probably many factors. If I had money, I would finance a scientific study to get at the basis and with that we might get everybody back on the beaten track. Does art make people veer in that direction? For instance, Oscar Wilde and many another genius? Do lesbian women make good wives might be another good question to propound.…

In a world of plenty for everybody there is not enough to go round. My simple wants are not too much to expect, but materialism and art don’t go together. If I labor, I long for my art. If I model, I starve.…Why is it so? The philosopher might say it is all part of the game and one should take it in stride like the runner as part of the next step. The Yoga would say it was all an illusion.

The narrative takes him all the way through his decision to enter the St. Lawrence University seminary, his “encounter with a fellow theological student for breaking my models,” his dismissal by Dean Atwood, and his imminent departure for the “big city.”

Bob’s autobiography is certainly no literary masterpiece. It is crammed with clichés and stilted Victorian language. “Mother’s religion was the consolation from all the woes that flesh is heir to,” reads a typical passage. “Day by day, one step at a time, was her plan. She never doubted the Lord would provide. There was always the silver lining, no matter how dark the cloud.” Still, it is clearly the work of a bright and literate person. For all its flagrant rationalizations, rambling digressions, and delusions of grandeur, it is hardly the work of the raging lunatic portrayed in the press. Only one passage
strikes an ominous chord. After casually noting that he had “done a bust of Ethel,” Bob ruminates on the “snake nature” of women. Then, in words whose chilling import was clear only in retrospect, he adds: “There is something worse than the serpent’s sting. To be jilted and spurned by one for whom one cares sears the very soul and makes the world go black.”
¹⁷

While not completely discounting the possibility that Irwin had fled westward, Commissioner Valentine remained convinced that the sculptor was holed up somewhere in the metropolitan area. “New York City is the greatest hideout in the world,” he declared at a news conference on Tuesday, April 13. “Despite the fact that we’re getting tips from all over the country, I’ve always believed he’s right here.” Anyone “sheltering or harboring” the fugitive, he reminded the public, was “himself committing a felony.”
¹⁸

Believing that the cash-strapped Irwin might “demand a cut of the sale of his life story,” Valentine ordered a pair of Homicide Squad detectives to keep surveillance on William Lamkie. Other police officers, disguised as uniformed security guards, were posted in the exhibition halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the theory that “Irwin will be driven by irresistible artistic need and impulse to visit the galleries.” According to a story in the
Mirror
, police were also keeping watch over artists’ supply shops in lower Manhattan after getting wind of a macabre rumor that Irwin was “barricaded in a Greenwich Village studio at work on a sculptural masterpiece which will be his farewell to the world…a post-mortem likeness in stone of Ronnie Gedeon.”
¹⁹

On the evening of Wednesday, April 14—in what most newspaper commentators saw as an act of desperation—police made a major sweep of the Bowery, rounding up forty-three young, bearded derelicts and hauling them into Night Court, where Magistrate Leonard McGee, acceding to the request of Commissioner Valentine, sentenced all of them to five days in jail on vagrancy charges. The sentences were meant to give the police “ample time to peer behind the whiskers of the captured derelicts, take their fingerprints, and study
their physical characteristic to make sure none of them might be Irwin.”

Once again, the cops came up empty-handed. “
POLICE ADMIT IRWIN CLUES ARE EXHAUSTED
,” read the headline in the next day’s
Evening Journal
. The accompanying story quoted Captain William T. Reynolds, in charge of the Fourth Detective District, who acknowledged that the manhunt had reached a dead end.

“All the leads we have had were washouts,” said a dispirited Reynolds. “We are stumped in our search for Irwin.”
²⁰

Though one of the few New York City detectives not assigned to the manhunt, John J. Whalen—currently detailed to the Grand Jury Squad under Captain Barney Dowd—had been following the case closely in the newspapers. From reading interviews with the Ottburgs—Irwin’s landlords at the time of the murders—he knew that the sculptor had arrived in the city with a pair of beaten-up suitcases, one tied shut with a piece of rope.

As he later explained to reporters, Whalen began to wonder “what I would do if I were in Irwin’s position.” To begin with—contrary to what Commissioner Valentine believed—he would leave the city as quickly as possible. He “pictured himself trying to get out of town, lugging two heavy suitcases and lacking enough money to travel by taxicab.” The “most natural thing,” he concluded, “would be to go to a railroad station and check the bags.”

Before joining the NYPD a decade earlier, Whalen had worked as a baggage clerk in the checkroom of Grand Central Station and knew that pieces of unclaimed luggage sometimes offered up “fertile secrets for the police.” Among the items found during his time there were “a number of revolvers, a complete opium layout, several large quantities of silverware, and two stillborn babies.”

With Captain Dowd’s permission, Whalen immediately set about examining “every piece of luggage in the checkrooms at Grand Central, Penn Station, and at bus and subway lockers.” Though he initially came up empty-handed, he couldn’t shake his conviction that Irwin had stashed his bags somewhere before taking flight. “How
a fugitive from justice could openly carry a suitcase which had received so much publicity was beyond me,” he explained.

Returning to Grand Central and enlisting the help of a baggage clerk, he went through the checkroom again. His persistence paid off. At roughly 8:45 p.m. on April 26, 1937, Whalen came upon a pair of battered suitcases, one held shut with a knotted old belt. Among the contents were an artist’s sketchbook bearing Irwin’s name, a box of business cards printed with the inscription “Robert Irwin, Sculptor,” various newspaper clippings on the Easter Sunday Massacre, and a cheap Baby Ben alarm clock promptly identified by Lucy Beacco as the one taken from the tiny bedroom where the bodies of Ronnie and Mary Gedeon had been found.

Though the clock was a particularly important find—the first piece of physical evidence directly linking Irwin to the crime—the recovery of the suitcases would play no role in his capture. It did, however, confirm Detective Whalen’s intuition. Commissioner Valentine was wrong. Robert Irwin, the Mad Sculptor of Beekman Place, had fled the city.
²¹

Part V

The Defender

21

Murder in Times Square

B
Y THE TIME DETECTIVE WHALEN
embarked on his search for the missing suitcases, the tabloids had run out of stories to report—or invent—about the Easter Sunday triple slaying. Happily for lovers of lurid homicides, mid-April brought a juicy new murder that—while not quite up to the sensationalistic standards set by the Irwin case—provided the public with a week or so of morbid titillation.

A few minutes before two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, April 18, Miss Moya Engels, a nightclub performer known for her Hawaiian hula-hula act, arrived at the WOV radio station building, just east of Times Square, where she had reserved rehearsal space to practice a new routine. The door to the third-floor studio she had engaged—No. 306—was closed but unlocked. No sooner had she stepped inside than she froze in confusion. On the opposite side of the twenty-five-by-forty-foot room, a pair of woman’s feet, shod in black oxfords, protruded from beneath the gray rayon wall-curtains used as soundproofing. “I thought the girl had fainted from dancing,”
Engels later told reporters. “She was groaning and breathing heavily. Then I pulled aside the drapes and looked at her.” At her first glimpse of the woman, Engels let out a scream and ran from the studio to seek help.

Summoned by the elderly elevator operator, Paul Klein, two radio patrolmen, Officers Walter Rowley and George H. Stevenson, arrived on the scene within minutes. The beautiful chestnut-haired victim, still clinging to life, had been savagely bludgeoned with a claw hammer that lay on the floor a few feet from the entrance to the studio. She was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, where she managed to survive for another six hours before succumbing to her injuries—“a compound fracture of the skull and lacerations of the brain,” according to the findings of Assistant Medical Examiner Milton Helpern.

From her Social Security card and other items found in her purse, her identity was quickly established: Julia Nussenbaum, twenty-four years of age, originally of Bridgeport, Connecticut, currently residing at 439 West 123rd Street with a roommate, Miss Dorothy Hunkins. Within a short time, investigators had uncovered other key facts. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and an accomplished concert violinist, Julia had traded the symphony hall for the vaudeville stage two and a half years earlier. Adopting the stage name Tania Lubova, she had joined an eight-member troupe, consisting of five musicians and three dancers, that had enjoyed considerable success on the midwestern Orpheum Circuit. More recently, she had teamed up with an accordionist-singer named Maria Montiglo. They were scheduled to leave the next day for a two-week engagement at the Esquire, Toronto’s best-known nightclub.

According to her roommate, someone had telephoned Julia late Saturday night, asking her to be at the Times Square rehearsal studio at ten o’clock Sunday morning. Dressed in a rose-patterned blue dress and gray-blue spring coat and carrying her seven-hundred-dollar violin in a zippered leather bag, she had left the apartment at around 8:45 a.m.

The elevator operator Paul Klein told police that, at roughly 9:45 a.m., he had taken a tall, powerfully built man up to the third floor
and seen him head down the narrow hallway to the studio. Julia had arrived around ten o’clock. About fifteen minutes later, the man rang for the elevator and descended to the street. Klein had noticed nothing strange about his behavior. Silence fell on the building until, four hours later, Moya Engels showed up.

From a telltale track of blood that ran in a sweeping curve across the floor of the studio, police were able to reconstruct the crime. Evidently, Julia, still wearing her coat and hat, had seated herself on one of the wooden chairs near the south wall of the studio, placing her violin case on the floor beside her. She and her assailant, clearly someone she knew, had talked for a few minutes. Suddenly, without warning, he had produced the claw hammer and delivered a savage barrage of blows to her forehead. Bleeding profusely, she had crumpled to the floor. In a frenzied attempt to hide her body, he had dragged her to a little dressing room on the opposite side of the studio but, finding it locked, had hauled her toward the drapes and shoved her beneath them.

From interviews with the dead girl’s stricken father and other family members and friends, police quickly identified a suspect: thirty-one-year-old Mischa Ross. Born Mischa Rosenbaum in Danitzer, Russia, not far from Kiev, Ross, a talented mandolin player, had come to the United States with his brother Zachary in 1925 as part of a touring Russian orchestra. They had settled in New York after obtaining forged birth certificates indicating that they had been born in Montreal. In 1931, while playing in an orchestra in a Catskills hotel, he had romanced the adolescent daughter of the owner, Nathan Nessolovitz. The two were married and had a daughter, Adele. Three and a half years later, Ross deserted his family and moved into the Hotel Normandie on West 46th Street, while his wife and child went to live at his father-in-law’s house in the village of Woodridge, not far from Monticello, New York. Ross visited them occasionally when not on tour.