The Mad Sculptor (38 page)

In contrast to the members of the lunacy commission—whose contact with Bob consisted entirely of observing him through the bars of his cell while he either ignored or spat curses at them—Hinsie and Glueck spent more than seventy hours interviewing him. Their sessions were held behind the closed doors of the prison counsel room. Bob’s wildly, sometimes frighteningly, erratic behavior during these examinations was later described in graphic detail by Dr. Hinsie:

He would begin by excessive talking and would be considerably upset when he was interrupted for explanations on some point he had raised. Upon interruption he would stare at the examiner, grit his teeth, pound the table viciously with his fists and yell that he would not suffer any interruptions. If allowed to talk at free will he would become ecstatic and enthusiastic. Marked emotional instability as revealed by rapid shifts in mood from happiness to sadness and to agitation were quite common. At times, he was in such a vicious frame of mind that the examiner felt some qualms regarding his own safety, more especially since the defendant threatened he would kill the warden
or the prison physician or guard. He would then pace the floor and behave like a caged animal.
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Irwin worked himself into a pitch of near-frenzied exaltation while discoursing on his current efforts to transform his body through the power of electricity. Pulling open his shirt, he displayed several pads of steel wool stuck to his undershirt, acquired from the men who cleaned the jail. He wore them, he explained, “as a means to build up electrical impulses in myself. There is no limit to the extent that I can build myself mentally and physically through electricity. I can stop the action of my heartbeat, prevent my lungs from expanding and contracting, control the passage of food through my body. All this is done by electricity.”

Once he had “developed his electrical powers to the highest extent,” he would “be able to become that greatest sculptor in the world, to make any kind of invention, to learn any language without studying it, to walk on water, to turn my body into light, to attain immortality.

“I will have powers over and above all other people in the world,” he crowed. “I think I can say without bragging that at present I am further advanced in all my thoughts than any man who has ever lived. I, therefore, have Godlike qualities absolutely. All I have to do is wish and I get everything.”

To prove his godlike powers, he offered to demonstrate his ability to convert his hair into gold. When Hinsie, after watching Bob’s head for a while, was obliged to inform him that the “experiment was a failure,” Bob became “greatly agitated.”

Despite this minor setback, he predicted that “within a period of three years I’ll attain to the translucency of form so that I’ll just evaporate right out of the place. I will walk through matter. I will walk through a stone wall. Bullets will go through me without affecting me. The electricity will enable me to cure all of my troubles and to cure other people just like Jesus Christ cured them.”

Questioned closely about the murders, he revealed details he had not previously disclosed. While strangling Ronnie, he said, “there
was sunlight or a beautiful light coming down from above. The light was a living thing, like it was a divinity. It seemed to be a divine message that I was getting nearer to the great white throne, nearer to the crystal sun. My head seemed be surrounded by vibrating electricity.”

At the same time, he was aware that he was being watched by “two great evil eyes that grew larger and larger” and seemed to carry a “special significance.” Under their influence, he said, he would “have killed forty people if they had been in the room then.” Only afterward did he realize that the staring eyes “came from the green dial of the clock.”
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Their extended examinations of the prisoner led Hinsie and Glueck to the same conclusion. Irwin’s “fantastic delusional system” conformed completely to a personality pattern encountered “in patients whose diagnosis is unqualifiedly that of the schizophrenia-hebephrenia form. The murders were committed with the delusion that the accomplishment of this act would bring to the patient control of the universe which he had planned for so many years. Under the stress of these delusions and hallucinations, normal intellectual processes played no essential role. Therefore, Irwin at the time of the murders could not know the nature and quality of his act.”

As the two eminent psychiatrists were now prepared to attest on the witness stand, Robert Irwin was “both medically and legally insane.”
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Owing, among other factors, to the exceedingly slow working of the lunacy commission, Bob’s trial was postponed until the fall of 1938. By then the city had a new district attorney: Thomas E. Dewey, the fearless young “gangbuster” whose relentless crusade against racketeers like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano would propel him to the governor’s mansion in Albany and two runs for the White House as the Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948.

Though just as eager as his predecessor to see Irwin sent to the chair, Dewey, caught up in his first gubernatorial campaign, turned the prosecution over to his right-hand man, Assistant DA Jacob J. Rosenblum, who, in his short time on the job, had already racked up
a record of ten consecutive first-degree murder convictions.
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As Leibowitz had anticipated, the DA’s office announced that Irwin would be tried only for the murder of Frank Byrnes, a seemingly airtight case of coldly premeditated, first-degree homicide, perpetrated, by the defendant’s own admission, to eliminate a potential witness. It would be Leibowitz’s task to show that the slaying of Byrnes was “merely part of a general pattern of slaughter,” the climactic act of an insanity-induced orgy of violence.
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“I expect to save this boy’s life, for he doesn’t belong in the electric chair,” Leibowitz told reporters on Sunday, November 6, the day before the trial was scheduled to begin. “He is a dangerous lunatic and should be put away for the rest of his life. Under no circumstance will I attempt to free him. He did not know the nature and quality of his acts, and I can deal with any statement of the prosecutor to show that he did.” Referring to Inspector Lyons’s widely reported statement shortly after the murders that Irwin, then a fugitive, was “stark mad” and would “never be indicted or go to trial,” Leibowitz also announced his intention “to show that the police authorized newspaper announcements that he would be granted immunity if he gave himself up.”

Informed of the defense attorney’s statement, Rosenblum stressed “that there is no such thing as a jury sending an insane killer away for the rest of his life. He can be released from an institution for the criminally insane any time psychiatrists decide he is sane.” As an example, he pointed to the case of Harry K. Thaw, the millionaire playboy found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1906 murder of famed architect Stanford White in the country’s first “Trial of the Century.” Sentenced to incarceration for life at Matteawan, Thaw was declared sane eight years later, found not guilty at a second trial, and set free.
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On Monday, November 7, 1938, opening day of the Irwin trial, the courtroom was filled to capacity for what newspapers predicted would be the greatest “battle of psychiatrists” since the Thaw case.
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Among the throng of journalists covering the story were two of the city’s celebrity columnists: Damon Runyon—beloved Broadway
chronicler whose 1931 bestseller
Guys and Dolls
had turned the colorful denizens of the “Great White Way” into figures of pop myth—and Dorothy Kilgallen, best known to a later generation as a television personality on the hit 1950s quiz show
What’s My Line?
but at this point in her career a star reporter for the
New York Evening Journal
.

At precisely 10:30 a.m., the bailiff boomed out the name “Robert Irwin” and a husky guard led Bob into the room. Reporters who had last seen him a year earlier were startled by the change in his appearance. Convinced—as he had told Dr. Hinsie—that, with his newly acquired electrical control over his bodily functions, he no longer required much food, he had lost more than twenty-five pounds. “In his double-breasted dark, chalk-striped suit,” wrote Damon Runyon, Irwin was “a mere bag o’ bones,” a “jerky, pallid, little wraith of a man,” his “face so drawn that you could hang your hat on his cheek bones.”
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Wearing a smirk and walking with pronounced swagger, Bob strode to the defense table and dropped into the chair beside Leibowitz’s associate counsel, Vincent Impellitteri, former assistant district attorney and future mayor of New York City. Throughout that long day’s proceedings, Bob would alternate between periods of incessant, nervous motion and extended stretches of dozing. Occasionally, he would rise muttering from his chair. His guard, “constantly on the watch for an outburst from the egocentric killer,” would swiftly move in and forcibly reseat him. “Declared by his attorney ‘as crazy as a bedbug,’ ” remarked Runyon, Irwin “certainly looked the part.”
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Jury selection was the first order of business. The previous May, the female population of New York State had won an important victory in the struggle for equality when, on the last day of its spring session, the legislature passed a law allowing women to serve on juries.
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Leibowitz was well pleased, for reasons made clear by Mignon Bushel, the
Evening Journal
reporter granted an exclusive interview with Bob just days after his surrender. Bushel had begun her story
by declaring: “I do not know if Robert Irwin is insane in a technical way. But I do know that no jury of women would convict him. For Irwin is a handsome, tragic young man who cannot resist women. And women cannot resist him.”
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The blue-ribbon panel of 150 potential jurors selected for the Irwin trial, however, consisted entirely of men. When Leibowitz protested, he was informed by Frederick H. Cahoon, Acting Commissioner of Jurors, that, while women now had the option to serve on juries, they were “barred from membership on special panels of talesmen for murder trials.” Leibowitz immediately declared that “the procedure was not legal” and that “if Irwin were found guilty of first-degree murder, he would make the exclusion of women talesmen the main contention for a reversal.”
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In his opening remarks to the panel, Leibowitz, dressed in the outfit he traditionally wore at the start of every trial—blue suit, white shirt, and red tie—suggested that he would rely on what the
Daily News
described as “the highly original defense of ‘mental drunkenness.’ ” “We shall claim,” said Leibowitz, “that though Irwin was not intoxicated by reason of liquor, he was intoxicated the night of those murders by reason of mental disease. We say that even if he were not insane under the law, he was still out of his mind that night by reason of his state of mind.”
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Utterly unawed by his opponent’s reputation as a courtroom wizard, Rosenblum promised to call an array of psychiatric experts who would testify that while “Irwin perhaps was abnormal,” he was legally sane when he perpetrated the crime he was being tried for. Stressing the premeditated quality of the act, Rosenblum declared that “the People are going to prove that the defendant is guilty of murder in the first degree because he plunged an ice pick into Frank Byrnes’s head.”
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Consistent with his belief that the average person “knows nothing about the mind” and cannot understand that a man who seems superficially normal might be suffering from a mental disease, Leibowitz posed the same question to each potential juror: “Have you
any fixed notion of what a crazy man must look like? Do you think he must be in a straitjacket and frothing at the mouth in order to be insane?”

He also addressed the issue that Rosenblum had raised in relation to the Harry Thaw case. “You have heard and read how defendants acquitted in murder cases by reason of insanity have gotten out of the crazy house,” said Leibowitz to each venireman. “Tell me, would you feel that if Robert Irwin is put in the crazy house, he might get out one day and take more life—would you vote to put him in the electric chair and be done with him, once and for all?”

When one of the potential jurors answered yes, Leibowitz emitted an incredulous “What?”

“I meant no, actually,” the venireman muttered sheepishly. Leibowitz, however, used one of his twenty peremptory challenges to dismiss him.

The most heated exchanges between the two lawyers occurred on the frequent occasions when Leibowitz brought up Thomas Dewey, whose public appeal was such that, after just one year as district attorney, he was already on the ballot as the Republican candidate for governor of New York State. Concerned that some veniremen might be “blinded by Dewey’s reputation” as a “Galahad in shining armor,” Leibowitz, over Rosenblum’s furious protests, asked each of them about his attitude toward the district attorney. “Do you think that because Mr. Dewey’s office is prosecuting this case, it has to be absolutely legitimate, otherwise Mr. Dewey wouldn’t prosecute?” “Suppose Mr. Dewey comes into court, would you regard anything he said as holy and a symbol of purity and virtue?” “You don’t feel that just because the D.A. produces a witness, the witness must be shrouded in purity and truthfulness?” One potential juror, about to be accepted by both sides, was immediately rejected by Leibowitz after admitting that he had attended “a testimonial dinner to Dewey after he convicted Lucky Luciano.”
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When the trial was adjourned at 6:30 p.m.—eight hours after it began—only three jurors had been seated: Consolidated Edison clerk James H. Day, security analyst Henry Andrews, and Harry
Held Jr., manager of a paint supply firm. Given the pace of the first day’s proceedings, the newspapers predicted that the trial would last at least a month.
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