The Mad Sculptor (33 page)

With Robert Irwin’s phone call to the
Herald and Examiner
on the afternoon of Saturday, June 26, life—as the saying goes—was about to imitate art.

Having been dismissed as a hoaxer when he tried the
Tribune
, Bob took a different tack when he reached Harry Romanoff, Frank Carson’s successor as city editor of the
Herald and Examiner
.

“I’m a friend of Robert Irwin, who is wanted in New York for the Gedeon murders,” said Bob. “He wants to give himself up. What kind of deal can you make with him?”

“I’d have to know more about it,” Romanoff calmly replied. “Obviously no deal can be made over the telephone. We’d have to talk it over with you face to face.”

“That can be arranged,” said Bob. “I’ll meet your representative at 2:30 near the fountain at the south end of the Art Institute.”

At the appointed time, reporter Austin O’Malley arrived in Grant Park and headed for the designated rendezvous spot: Lorado Taft’s celebrated sculpture
Fountain of the Great Lakes
. Gazing up at the grouping of five graceful nymphs was a slender young man in a well-worn gray suit and gray fedora. O’Malley recognized him at once as Robert Irwin.

After introducing himself, O’Malley led Bob to Michigan Avenue and hailed a cab. Minutes later, they were seated in the office of Managing Editor John Dienhart. Within an hour, Bob had signed a contract that began:

Universal Service agrees that if the undersigned Robert Irwin proves to the complete satisfaction of the police authorities that he is the Robert Irwin now wanted by the New York police in the Gedeon case and upon fulfillment of the terms of the agreement, a sum of $5,000 will be paid to the undersigned.

For his part, Bob agreed to provide a complete signed confession for exclusive publication by the Hearst syndicate and to “refrain from giving interviews to any newspapers other than the Hearst press for a term of two weeks.”
⁷

Accompanied by Dienhart, O’Malley, Romanoff, a cameraman, and a stenographer, Bob was then whisked off to a room at the Morrison Hotel. After a bath, a shave, and a room-service meal, he seated himself in an armchair and lit a cigarette. With a captive audience hanging on his every word, he settled back and launched into a rambling monologue. He related his entire life story, philosophized at length about art, immortality, and religion, and expounded on his theory of visualization (“my contribution to civilization,” as he called it).

Stifling their impatience, Dienhart and his colleagues kept prodding him to focus on the matter at hand: the Easter Sunday murders. Finally, he gave them their money’s worth.

24

Confession

T
HAT NIGHT I SAID TO MYSELF
I am going up there and killing Ethel,” Bob told his rapt listeners. “I never intended to get anybody but her. I thought that after killing Ethel then they would kill me in the chair, but I didn’t care.

“Then I said to myself that after being in the nut house all your life, you can’t go to the chair. You might, but the chances are that you won’t. They’ll put me in the nut house again and then I’ll be there all the rest of my life and catch up with myself in a spiritual way.”

After sharpening his ice pick, he had walked to the apartment building at 316 East 50th Street, arriving at around nine that Easter eve. No one answered when he pressed the downstairs buzzer. He waited on the sidewalk for nearly an hour before he saw Mary Gedeon approaching. Surprised—and not entirely pleased—to see him, she nevertheless invited him upstairs.

“Mrs. Gedeon did not want me to have anything to do with Ethel,” Bob explained. “Outside of that she was always very friendly to me.”

Mary had been out for much of the day and was dead tired. Sinking into a chair at the kitchen table, she asked if he would walk the dog. Bob was happy to oblige, taking Touchi for a stroll around the block.

Back upstairs, he joined Mary in the kitchen. The last time he had visited the apartment, back in December, Ethel had been staying with her mother, and Bob had gotten it into his head that she and Joe Kudner were separated. Assuming that she was “out having a good time,” he did his best to stall until she returned. Pulling out his little pad and a pencil, he began to draw Mary’s portrait. “I took just as long as I could on that picture, and all of the time I was feeling her out about Ethel.”

Bob was still sketching when the little Englishman Frank Byrnes showed up. He and Bob shook hands and exchanged a few pleasantries before Byrnes retired to his bedroom and closed the door.

He had been there for more than an hour when Mary, who still had some holiday preparations to attend to before she went to bed, said, “Bob, Ethel isn’t here and it’s very late.”

“I am going to stay here until I see Ethel,” Bob replied.

Mary, her patience at an end, half rose from her seat and yelled, “Get out of here, or I’ll call the Englishman.”

Bob went mad.

“At that moment,” he related, “I hit her with everything I had. She fell back on the floor with her legs back over her head. I grabbed her by the neck. I was astonished at the fight she made. She had plenty of life in her. She scratched my face like nobody’s business.

“I had Mrs. Gedeon by the throat and I never let loose of that throat for twenty minutes. Finally her arms dropped back limp and her shoulders sagged to the floor.

“All the time this damned Englishman was in the next room just ten feet away. She died right in the front of that room, just ten feet away. She put up a hell of a fight. I can’t understand why she didn’t bring the whole town down on us.”

At this point in his narrative, Bob revealed a detail so obscene that it was censored from all published versions of his confession.
Made even more shocking by the matter-of-fact tone in which he divulged it, it explained the injuries that Medical Examiner Gonzales had found on Mary Gedeon’s genital area.

Mary Gedeon had, in fact, been sexually violated. But not by Robert Irwin.

“While I had her on the floor,” he recalled, “the dog put his nose to her private parts. I continued to choke her for about twenty minutes before I was sure she was lifeless. I wanted to degrade her as low as I possibly could, so I pulled her garments from her body and allowed the dog to ravish Mrs. Gedeon.”
¹

“My face was badly scratched,” Bob continued after a momentary pause. “My hands were full of blood. I smeared it on her, on her face and on her breast. Then I threw her in the bedroom under the bed.” When Touchi crawled in after his mistress, Bob thought of killing the animal, too, but refrained “out of pity.”

He was still convinced that Ethel would show up. He had no intention of leaving until he had “done what I had come to do. I had to keep waiting for Ethel. She was the one I felt I must kill. I simply had to wait for her to finish what I had planned.”

He realized that Ronnie might arrive first. He had no desire to kill her. “She was beautiful, and I hate to destroy beauty. I said to myself if Ronnie comes in first, I can tie her up and leave her.” He had read somewhere that a bar of soap wrapped in a rag made an effective blackjack, one that “would stun but nothing more. So I went in the kitchen and got some ordinary soap and made a blackjack out it with a washrag.” He would later be amused to read in the tabloids that he had used the soap to carve a small sculpture of Ethel.

At about 3:00 a.m., he heard Ronnie enter after saying a laughing good night to someone in the hallway. She went directly into the bathroom, while he waited in the darkness of the little bedroom where he had concealed her mother’s corpse. “She stayed in there the longest time,” Bob related. “I thought she was never coming out.”

It was already after 4:00 a.m. when Ronnie suddenly entered the
bedroom. Bob—who had been lost in thoughts of Ethel and hadn’t heard Ronnie leave the bathroom—hurriedly “let her have it” with the blackjack. “The soap went all over the floor,” he said. “It didn’t have the slightest effect. I can well believe that she was drunk because she didn’t put up any fight at all.”

Grabbing her by the throat, he dragged her onto the bed. “I held her the longest time, just tight enough so that she could breathe,” he explained. “There were moments when the pressure was relaxed enough so that she could speak a few words but not loudly.”

Disguising his voice, he asked her where Ethel was. Ronnie answered that she was at home with her husband, Joe Kudner.

“I gave it up and I didn’t know just what in God’s name I would do,” said Bob. “I wanted to let Ronnie live if I could. We were always pals. I suppose she thought I was going to rape her. She said, ‘Please don’t touch me. I just had an operation and the doctor said if I have intercourse, I could die.’ I had no such thought in mind. So I kept holding on—just light enough to prevent noise, not tight enough to kill.”

He estimated that he had kept his grip on her for around two hours, though he had little sense of the passage of time. “When you get in a mix-up like that,” he said, “you don’t think about what you are doing, and time means nothing. The whole night passed to me like a blue daze.”

Finally, her voice weak and tremulous, Ronnie said: “Bob, I know you. You are going to get in trouble if you do this.”

Those words were her death sentence.

“The minute she used my name,” Bob said calmly, “I clamped down on her and choked her until she was lifeless. She immediately became the most repulsive thing I have ever seen in my life. It was like blue death, just oozing out, a spiritual emanation just oozing out.

“I turned on the lights and ripped off her chemise, leaving her on top of the bed, her mother’s body underneath.” He then put out the lights and left the room.

It was daybreak by then. Knowing that Frank Byrnes could identify
him, he “went in and fixed the Englishman” with the ice pick he had intended to use on Ethel. “I struck him the first time in the temple, so far as it would go. The pick was about six inches long. The poor fellow lay there twitching but did not bleed. I had to hit him eleven times.

“After I put him out of his misery, I went in and took a little clock. The last thing I said to myself was: ‘Buddy, you did it!’ ”

Up until that moment in Bob’s recitation, no one had interrupted him. Now, however, Dienhart asked how he felt about the murders.

“I’m certainly sorry I killed all three of them,” Bob said offhandedly. “There was only one I was after, and that was Ethel. I don’t know whether it was hate or love that made me want to kill her. If she had come in first, I would have killed her and nobody else. I don’t think I would have marred up her features, as I only wanted to stab her once with the ice pick, and one little hole wouldn’t show.”

And what did Bob expect to happen to him now, Dienhart asked.

“Whatever is coming to me, I’ll take,” Bob answered with a smile. “If I don’t get the chair and I go to an institution, I’ll use my money to hire someone to work for me to drill me in visualizing. I want to develop myself.

“Even if I die, that won’t be the end of it. That cycle comes back. These people I killed aren’t lost. Theirs are borrowed lives, and if I live I will reap them. I only meant to borrow one life. I will repay these lives by developing that power of visualizing, which is the next step in the evolution of the human race.”
²

25

Celebrities

T
HE NEWS BROKE
at ten o’clock Saturday night when the five-star final edition of the
Herald and Examiner
hit the stands. “
IRWIN SURRENDERS HERE; CONFESSES KILLING MODEL
!” screamed the headline in letters three inches high. A self-congratulatory front-page item, four columns wide, boasted of the scoop as “by far the most notable newspaper achievement of the year.”

Within minutes, a squad of detectives descended on the
Herald and Examiner
building on Madison Street, while reporters from rival papers “staked out the exits and climbed onto an elevated railroad trestle that commanded a view of the newsroom.” Bob, however, was nowhere to be found.

Sequestered inside his room at the Morrison Hotel—where he would be kept incommunicado until the Hearst syndicate was ready to hand over its prize to the authorities—he ate a hearty dinner and passed some time playing gin rummy with Austin O’Malley and a few of the other newsmen. At one point, someone asked him what he planned to do with his five thousand dollars. Bob replied that he intended to use most of it to “help his two brothers,” Vidalin and
Pember. Both were currently behind bars—Vidalin in Washington State Penitentiary for armed robbery, Pember in Oregon State for “assault with intent to rob.” Once they were released, they would be able to use Bob’s money to get a new start in life.

While commending Bob on his generous impulse, O’Malley suggested that he might “better spend the money for his own defense.” With five thousand dollars at his disposal, Bob could afford the best lawyer around.

“Maybe,” said O’Malley, “you can get Samuel Leibowitz.”
¹

Having received what he regarded as a reliable tip that Robert Irwin was hiding in Hoboken, New Jersey, Police Commissioner Valentine had initially dismissed the reports that the Mad Sculptor’s trail had been picked up in Cleveland. The news coming out of Chicago, however, changed his mind in a hurry. By Sunday morning, June 27, he had reached an arrangement with representatives of the Hearst organization. Two New York City detectives, Martin Owens and Frank Crimmins, would leave immediately for Chicago by chartered plane. They would be accompanied by reporter Ray Doyle of the Hearst-owned
Daily Mirror.
Irwin would be delivered directly into the custody of Owens and Crimmins. In exchange, Doyle would be “the only reporter present at the surrender.”
²

The surrender was arranged for 1:30 p.m. at the office of Cook County Sheriff John Toman. At the designated time, Irwin appeared with his escorts from the
Herald and Examiner
. He was dressed in a natty summer outfit that he had demanded as part of his deal with the paper: white Panama hat, white linen suit, white shirt, blue tie, and two-tone, black-and-white shoes. Looking “well rested and thoroughly at ease,” he calmly signed a waiver of extradition. Detective Owens then took possession of the prisoner and made ready to return to the awaiting plane. Before leaving the sheriff’s office, he placed a courtesy call to Chicago’s Chief of Detectives, John L. Sullivan, formally notifying him of Irwin’s surrender.