The Mad Sculptor (37 page)

At Leibowitz’s insistence, Irwin was immediately transferred from the Tombs to the Raymond Street Jail in Brooklyn. There, the ever-canny lawyer saw a prime opportunity for a public relations coup. Knowing that the fracas in the Tombs had left Irwin in a highly unsettled frame of mind, he arranged a meeting between reporters and his client in the anteroom off Warden Harry Schleth’s office.

At roughly 12:45 on the last day of August, Bob—haggard, unshaven, dressed in a dirty white shirt and wrinkled gray prison trousers—appeared at the threshold of the interview room. “His eyes were blood-flecked and staring,” wrote one observer. “He was trembling.”

As he entered the room, he clutched at his throat and screamed: “What is this? What are you doing to me? Who are these people?”

Taking Bob by the arm, Leibowitz, speaking in the soothing tones one might use with a hysterical child, said: “Sit down, Bob. Take it easy, now. They’re reporters, they want to help you.”

“We’re not going to harm you,” one of the reporters said. “Please sit down.”

With an audible whimper, Bob sank into a chair and began brushing nervously at his hair.

“Have you been mistreated?” someone asked.

“For two weeks,” Bob blurted, “they had doctors staring at me. Leering at me with their eyes! I couldn’t stand it!”

With that, he burst into sobs, leaped from his chair, and began to mumble incoherently. Straining to hear, the reporters could make out broken sentences: “They beat me from behind…beat me with blackjacks…six men with blackjacks.…I couldn’t fight six men with blackjacks.”

Falling silent, he stood there trembling for a moment, then began rushing wildly around the room. “I haven’t had anything to eat in forty-eight hours,” he cried. “Only a bowl of soup and one slice of white bread. I can’t stand it!”

As he buried his face in his hands and wept convulsively, Leibowitz signaled to the guards, who pulled Irwin to the door.

Once he was gone, Leibowitz turned to the assembled newsmen and said: “Yesterday, he seemed calm and collected. You saw how he acted today—like a raving maniac. And that’s the man the district attorney wants to try for murder!”
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Despite his confident pronouncements that he would have no trouble convincing a jury that Irwin was legally sane, District Attorney
Dodge was taking no chances. On August 30—one day after Irwin went berserk in the Tombs—Dodge applied to General Sessions Judge John J. Freschi for the appointment of a lunacy commission to examine Robert Irwin and report on his mental condition. Over the protests of Sam Leibowitz, Judge Freschi granted the DA’s request.
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Beginning in the late 1800s, New York Criminal Court judges could, at their discretion, appoint a lunacy commission to evaluate the sanity of a defendant charged with homicide. Each commission consisted of three “disinterested men”: an attorney, a physician, and a layman, almost always a businessman. After conducting a lengthy investigation, the members would offer an opinion as to whether the defendant was mentally fit to stand trial. In later years, the commissioners were also expected to assess the defendant’s state of mind while committing the crime. The role of the commission was strictly advisory—the court was at liberty to approve or dismiss its findings.
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By the time of the Mad Sculptor murders, the entire lunacy commission system had come under fierce attack by the public, the psychiatric community, and many government officials. An investigating committee established by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia concluded that, between January 1930 and December 1936, “lunacy commissions have cost the City of New York $1,359,949 and that one million dollars of this amount has been sheer waste, since the service performed by lunacy commissions could readily be performed by the psychiatric divisions of the city hospitals with small additional force.”

Not only were these commissions a misuse of taxpayers’ money, their findings also were generally regarded as “almost valueless by specialists in this field.” Until 1936, when the situation was belatedly rectified, none of the three members on a lunacy commission, including the doctor, was “legally required to have any psychiatric knowledge or training.” A significant percentage of lunacy commission reports were ultimately “rejected by the court as not reliable.” Cases of defendants who managed to escape trial by feigning insanity were rife. In one notorious instance, a career criminal named
Martin Lavin, arrested for killing a man in a bar holdup, convinced a lunacy commission that he was insane by claiming that he “heard voices.” Sent to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, he was discharged as a malingerer shortly after his commitment and, soon afterward, shot and killed a police sergeant while robbing a pawnshop.
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In spite of the well-documented deficiencies and abuses associated with the system, lunacy examinations continued to be ordered at a profligate rate. Between 1930 and 1938, one Brooklyn judge alone appointed 1,212 lunacy commissions, doling out the lucrative positions to relatives, friends, and political cronies. Increasingly viewed as nothing more than a flagrant “patronage racket,” the system was finally ended by the New York State Legislature in 1939. At the time of its abolition, the case of Robert Irwin, still fresh in the minds of lawmakers, was cited as a glaring example of everything wrong with lunacy commissions.
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In later years, Fredric Wertham did nothing to conceal his disdain for Irwin’s lunacy commission. Its chairman, attorney Archibald Watson, former corporation counsel for an earlier mayoral administration, had close ties to the city government and would be appointed County Clerk of New York before the commission had finished its work. The second member, Dr. Israel Wechsler, was a physician who specialized in neurology. The third, Dr. Charles Ryan, was a “rich man who had become psychiatrist,” in Wertham’s dismissive words.
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Their first attempt to examine Irwin took place on September 29. In preparation for the interview, Bob had been brought from his cell to the prison counsel room, where inmates were allowed to confer privately with their lawyers. Bob was sitting “alone in the room quietly reading a newspaper before the arrival of the commission,” the
New York Times
reported, “but when a keeper started to unlock the door to the room, Irwin pushed a heavy oak table against the door, which opened from inside, and threw his weight against it, barring the commission members.” When several keepers managed to force the door open, Bob “attempted to strike one of them with a chair
but was overpowered. Because he appeared to be in a state of considerable excitement, the commission ordered Warden Adams to take Irwin back to his cell, where he eventually became quiet.”
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Two days later, the commissioners were back. When Bob saw them approaching his cell, he began kicking the bars of his cell door and yelling, “Get those fucking bastards out of here! I told you I don’t want to see preachers or doctors! Get ’em out of here! Get ’em out!”

Ignoring Bob, the turnkey unlocked the cell door to admit the visitors. No sooner had he done so than “Irwin lunged past him and made for the commissioners. The turnkey grappled with him and shouted for help. Several other guards quickly responded, but it took almost twenty minutes before the kicking, screaming, cursing prisoner was finally brought under control and dragged back into his cell.”
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The commissioners tried again on February 10, 1938. They found Bob lying on his cot, reading a book on his latest enthusiasm, the esoteric philosophy Rosicrucianism. The moment he became aware that the commissioners were standing outside his cell, “he immediately covered his head with a blanket and retreated to a corner of the cage, huddling there on the floor and occasionally poking his head out from underneath the blanket and yelling, ‘Get out of here!’ Eventually they left in disgust.”
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Over the course of their inordinately protracted investigation, the commissioners managed not a single interview with Bob. Their conclusions were based on the testimony of twenty-two witnesses examined over the course of seven months—the equivalent, as Sam Leibowitz observed, of an internist diagnosing a patient’s gastrointestinal problems by asking his friends about his eating habits. The transcript of the witness testimony ran to seven hundred and fifty-six typewritten pages. Of that number, more than three hundred were the testimony of Fredric Wertham, who appeared before the commission seven times. Providing lengthy and highly detailed accounts of his interactions with Irwin, Wertham was emphatic in his opinion that “Irwin suffered from a mental disease every time I saw
him. That he always suffered from the same mental disease. That if he had not had this mental disease, these murders would not have been committed by him. That the three murders were in my opinion definite symptoms of his mental disease. That he was not in full possession of his mental powers during the night of the murders.”
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On March 24, 1938—seven months after it was appointed—the commission finally issued its report. It came to a scant seven pages and made no reference at all to Wertham’s opinions, giving more prominence to the testimony of Leonora Sheldon, the young socialite who had never met Bob before the afternoon of the murders and whose entire relationship with him consisted of brief visits to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed by lunch at Schrafft’s. While acknowledging that Irwin had been “occasionally treated for mental disorders,” it attributed his problems to his “poorly digested reading in philosophy and psychology.”
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“After careful examination and consideration of the material and relevant testimony and such personal observation of the defendant as there was opportunity to make,” the report concluded, “we are of the opinion that the said defendant was not in such a state of idiocy, imbecility, lunacy, or insanity as not to know the nature and quality of the acts for which he has been indicted and not to know that the acts were wrong; that is he not in such a state of idiocy, imbecility, lunacy, or insanity as to be incapable of understanding the proceedings or making his defense.”
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Printed in
The American Journal of Psychiatry
, the report provoked incredulity and outrage among mental health experts, who assailed it as “patently unsound,” “a most injudicial document,” “at variance with modern and progressive standards in forensic psychiatry.” “The attitude expressed is that of an inquisition,” railed one critic. Others complained that it relied on concepts “which are not part of the psychiatric vocabulary,” that it “failed to present the attitude of disinterested scientific men,” that it could have been written by “any lawyer from newspaper accounts,” that it “glossed over any evidence which would indicate mental derangement on the part of
the defendant.” “If it did not deal with matters of life or death,” fumed one eminent psychiatrist, “it might be considered comic.”
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Newspapers, on the other “hailed the decision with joy,” praising the Irwin lunacy commission for its exemplary work in confirming what the press had claimed all along: that the “fiendish sculptor” was nothing but a “classic example of the insanity faker.”
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One day after the commission submitted its report, Judge Freschi endorsed the findings. “The approved report means that the defendant may now legally be tried,” the judge declared. He stressed that the question of Bob’s “sanity at the time of the commission of the crime may be raised again and decided at the trial.” As far as the commission was concerned, however, “Robert Irwin was then sane.”
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27

Plea

I
N THE COURSE OF HIS
intensive preparations for the Irwin trial, Sam Leibowitz had unearthed a 1915 opinion written by Benjamin Cardozo, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, then serving as a judge on the New York Court of Appeals. The opinion related to the case of Hans Schmidt, a Roman Catholic priest sent to the electric chair in 1916 for the dismemberment-murder of his pregnant mistress, Anna Aumüller.
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In it, Cardozo had argued that “there are times and circumstances in which the word ‘wrong’ as used in the statutory test of responsibility ought not to be limited to ‘legal’ wrong. If there is an insane delusion that God has appeared to the defendant and ordained the commission of the crime, we think it cannot be said of an offender that he knows the act to be wrong.” Cardozo was quick to add that a defendant could not be excused of responsibility simply because “he has views of right and wrong at variance with those that find expression in the law”—unless, that is, such variation had “its origin in some disease of the mind.”

As far as Leibowitz was concerned, Cardozo’s criteria applied
perfectly to Irwin. That Bob suffered from “some disease of the mind” was a fact uncontested even by the prosecution. Even more to the point, his wild-eyed theory of merging with the “Universal Mind” by perfecting his powers of visualization clearly qualified as an insanely deluded God complex.
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To make this case to a jury, Leibowitz knew he needed a particular type of psychiatrist—not the kind who spends so much of his life on the witness stand that he comes across as a medical gun-for-hire but a highly respected practicing physician who appeared only rarely before juries. The men whose services he retained were Dr. Leland E. Hinsie, assistant director of the New York Psychiatric Institute and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and Dr. Bernard Glueck, former director of the psychiatric clinic at Sing Sing, who had achieved nationwide prominence as an expert witness at the 1924 trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.
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