The Mad Sculptor (39 page)

Tuesday, November 8, was Election Day. In New York, the Democratic incumbent, Herbert Lehman, eked out a victory for his fourth and final term as governor; Dewey would have to wait until 1942 before beginning his own three terms as the state’s chief executive. Because of the holiday and Judge James G. Wallace’s full schedule on Wednesday, the trial did not resume until noon on Thursday.

It lasted until 4:00 p.m. When the abbreviated session was adjourned, only two more jurors had been seated: hairnet salesman Sidney F. Stern and C. Markham Langham, employee of a shipping firm. In accordance with New York State law requiring a defendant to stand and “look upon” every man chosen to decide his fate, Irwin was made to rise from his chair and stare into the faces of Stern and Langham as clerk Siegfried Steinberg mumbled the swearing-in formula. As he had in the case of the three jurors chosen on Monday, Bob seemed to find the ritual intensely amusing, wearing a “continued grin that was almost a giggle.”
²⁰

Following adjournment, Leibowitz and Rosenblum retreated to Judge Wallace’s chambers, where the three remained closeted for an hour. Rumors swirled that a plea bargain was in the offing. According to these unverified reports, the district attorney’s office was seriously concerned that Leibowitz, with his formidable powers of persuasion, would have no trouble convincing the jury that his client was a hopeless madman. Should the Great Defender prevail, Irwin could become another Harry K. Thaw, committed to Matteawan only to be released after supposedly regaining his sanity.

For his part, Leibowitz was only concerned that his client, a desperately sick man, escape the electric chair. As he had already made clear, he was no more eager than the prosecution to see Irwin back on the streets. Both sides were said to be amenable to a deal that would spare Irwin from the chair but ensure that he would spend the rest of his days in confinement.
²¹

Among the reporters who lingered in court while the lawyers and Judge Wallace conferred was Damon Runyon. When the two attorneys emerged from the judge’s chambers, Runyon approached them and asked “if there was any foundation of truth to the report.”

Drawing Rosenblum aside, Leibowitz exchanged a few whispered words with his opponent before replying: “We have decided to make no comment.”
²²

One day earlier, Germany had been the scene of an appalling outburst of anti-Semitic violence. Following the death of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, shot in Paris as a radical act of protest by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, Hitler and his minions seized on the assassination to instigate a nationwide pogrom. On the night of November 9, Nazi storm troopers and rioters throughout Germany burned 267 synagogues, vandalized 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and rounded up roughly 30,000 Jewish males who were shipped off to concentration camps. The countless shattered storefronts whose shards littered the streets in the aftermath of the rampage gave the episode its infamous name: Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Outraged accounts of the pogrom filled the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Reading about it in his cell in the Tombs, Bob seemed most affected by the plight of the young assassin, Grynszpan. He immediately shared his feelings with Leibowitz, informing his attorney that, to show his sympathy for the boy, he was willing to “take his place and be guillotined.”

Leibowitz declined to convey the offer to the French authorities, though he did make sure to share his client’s latest bizarre notion with the press.
²³

If the first two days of the Irwin trial were notably lacking in drama, the third made up for that deficiency. “It was the triple-killer himself,” the
New York Times
reported, “who transformed the session from a routine circumstance of criminal law into one of the most
dramatic denouements that has ever taken place in the Supreme Court Building.”
²⁴

At first, observers assumed it would be another tedious day of jury selection. Forty talesmen were questioned in the morning, with only three more accepted by noon recess, bringing the total to eight. No sooner had court reconvened at 2:20 p.m., however, than Leibowitz requested that all jurors be excused from the room. Once they had filed outside, he approached the bench and—confirming the rumors that Damon Runyon had been the first to report—asked “that a plea of guilty to murder in the second degree be accepted for each indictment.”

Though Irwin did not “fit the common conception of insanity,” said Leibowitz, it was incontestably the case that he “has been insane since childhood with dementia praecox of the hebephrenic type.” In the opinion of the defense experts, his condition was only bound to get worse, “until he is a gibbering idiot, sitting in a corner, smiling to himself.”

There was no surer sign of his insanity, said Leibowitz, than his obsession with visualization.

From seventeen on, he has had a crazy notion that by visualization he could project himself into the past and make such men as Napoleon, Bismarck, or Nietzsche live again. He felt he could do the same thing for the future, so much so that he could change things from one form into another; that he was able to bring about such a cataclysm as would be too terrible to behold; that he would take his place on the throne next to God as a man not only omniscient but omnipotent.

Leibowitz then made a startling disclosure. He had spent much of the noon recess cajoling his client into accepting the guilty plea. Irwin, initially resistant, had finally relented under one condition: that Leibowitz give him five hundred dollars, the total amount (according to Bob’s calculations) that he would need over the years to
pay a prison guard or fellow inmate twenty-five cents a day to “sit in or near his cell” and help with his visualization experiments.
²⁵

After Leibowitz took his seat at the defense table, Assistant DA Rosenblum approached the bench. Still in a combative mood, he made it clear that the prosecution still believed that Irwin was sane and “legally responsible” for his acts. As he recapped the facts of the defendant’s life, he portrayed Bob as a lifelong criminal, who had first been “adjudged a juvenile delinquent at the age of twelve.”

“That’s a lie!” Bob snarled. Glaring at the prosecutor, he began to rise from his seat. Three guards quickly moved in and forced him back down.

Rosenblum’s tone was so hostile that Judge Wallace finally asked, “Are you opposed to the acceptance of his plea?”

“No,” said Rosenblum. “In view of the status of the defendant, we feel the circumstances absolutely warrant our consent to such a plea.”

“It requires more than consent,” snapped the judge. “It must be a recommendation.”

“It is a recommendation,” said Rosenblum. “Only we must be absolutely certain that this man will be in an institution for life. Under no circumstances can he ever be allowed to get back into society.”

“I am shoulder to shoulder with him on that,” interjected Leibowitz.

Turning toward the defense table, Judge Wallace peered over his glasses at Irwin. “Well, what does the defendant have to say? Is he willing to take a plea to murder in the second degree?”

Clearly struggling to control himself, Irwin rose from his chair. Eyes blazing, lips curled in bitterness, he seemed, at first, too overwrought to speak. Once he found his voice, however, his words came pouring out of him in a crazed rush. No one who saw and heard him that day could doubt, as the
Times
reported, “the degree to which he appears demented.”
²⁶

“Do you realize,” asked the judge, “that you are admitting by your plea that you committed murder in the second degree?”

“Your Honor, technically, since it seems to me everything is a technicality, I admit that,” said Bob. “But actually I do not admit to murder. I have looked up in the dictionary what it says about murder, how it defines murder, and it says, ‘The malicious killing of one human being by another.’ And there is nothing malicious in what I have done.”

“Well, you admit you took an ice pick and killed a man named Byrnes with it?” said Judge Wallace.

Irwin hesitated for a moment, as if thinking hard. Then: “I admit that. Yes, sir.”

“You knew at the time that you were killing him?”

“Yes.”

“And you admit that you strangled Mrs. Gedeon?”

“Yes,” said Bob, growing more excited by the moment. “And I admit I killed Ronnie. But I want to repeat that I take this plea against my better judgment. I have been talked blue in the face—”

Judge Wallace interrupted softly: “No, you don’t take any plea against your better judgment.”

The judge’s soothing tone had its effect. Irwin relaxed somewhat and went on: “I only take it because I have been provided by Mr. Leibowitz, out of his kindness and out of his purse, with a means of continuing the one thing that I put my life into. I don’t consider myself a murderer.”

“You think you had a right to kill these three people?”

“I think that under the circumstances I had every right. And I want to say this, Your Honor,” he continued, casting a baleful glare at the prosecution table. “If I ever talked to that jury, and if this thing had gone to trial, I would have emerged in an entirely different light than those professional liars over there, before the court and the jury—”

Shaking with fury, he shifted his gaze to the press table. “And that goes for a few more people,” he shouted. “How abominably you treated me! You dirty dogs! Nobody wants to understand me. Nobody wants to see what I’m driving at. No one!”

Evidently thrown into a quandary by this outburst, Judge Wallace
sat silently for a moment. “The important thing for me to make up my mind,” he finally murmured, as though debating with himself, “is whether he realizes what he is doing before I accept the plea.”

Then, addressing Bob again, he said: “You realize you are going to be sent to prison, probably for the rest of your natural life, on your plea?”

“I realize that, Your Honor,” Irwin replied scornfully, “and it makes no difference to me. I prophesy to you that in ten years I will be out.”

With that, the plea was accepted, sentencing set for two weeks from that day, and Bob—flashing “a mad toothy grin for the photographers”—was led back to the Tombs.
²⁷

Thomas Dewey lost no time in releasing a prepared statement from his office:

It is imperative that the community be permanently protected against Irwin’s possible return to society. This man has been previously committed as insane five times. Had the case gone to jury, Irwin might have been held legally insane at the time the murders were committed and he then could have been released on the community again. Now that will never happen. At the time of sentence, Mr. Rosenblum, by my direction, will recommend a sentence of ninety years to life on each of the three murder indictments, to be served consecutively. Such a sentence would ensure Irwin’s confinement for the rest of his natural life.
²⁸

On his way out of the courtroom, Leibowitz, wearing a triumphant look, was surrounded by reporters, all of whom had the same question. What had Bob meant when he predicted that he would be out in ten years?

“Electricity,” said Leibowitz, explaining Bob’s latest obsession. “He believes that, by 1948, he’ll have stored enough energy in his body to melt the prison bars.”
²⁹

28

Aftermath

E
VEN BEFORE BOB WAS SENTENCED
, Sam Leibowitz had already found himself involved in another made-for-tabloid murder case.

At around 7:30 p.m. Sunday, November 6, 1938—the eve of the start of Bob’s trial—a seventeen-year-old girl named Eva Kopalchak showed up at the Bellevue psychiatric ward, where she had been confined twice before for attempted suicide. Dressed in male drag—her stepfather’s trousers, a fedora hat, and a lumberman’s jacket—she calmly told the on-duty doctors that she had killed her mother, Mrs. Christina Piatak, earlier that day.

“She didn’t like the company I was keeping,” said Eva by way of explanation. “She didn’t want me to drink and smoke. And she wouldn’t give me any money.”

After arguing for a while, Eva had taken a .22-caliber rifle from a closet and shot her mother six times in the back, head, and chest, then crushed her skull with an iron shoemaker’s last “to put her out of her misery.” After donning her stepfather’s clothing, she strolled
to a bar and grill at 30th Street and First Avenue, smoked a cigar, and had a few shots of whiskey before making her way to Bellevue. Records showed that she had been committed to Rockland State Hospital in February of that year but released at her mother’s insistence in July.

Her story of matricide seemed so improbable and Eva’s demeanor so patently bizarre that the doctors gave it little credence. It wasn’t until Monday morning that policeman August Gillman, sent to Mrs. Piatak’s apartment to inform her of her daughter’s whereabouts, discovered the middle-aged woman’s body lying in a pool of dried blood with six spent rifle cartridges scattered on the floor around her.

Arraigned in the Jefferson Market Court later that day, Eva was asked by Magistrate Abeles if she was sorry for what she did.

“Well after all,” Eva said with a shrug, “she
is
my mother.”

A week and a half later, on Thursday, November 18, the “female Irwin” (as the tabloids quickly dubbed her) appeared in Homicide Court for a hearing. No longer garbed in her “fantastic attire” but in a prim blue sweater and black skirt, she was accompanied by Sam Leibowitz, who had agreed to represent her after she contacted him by mail. Eva would become yet another killer saved from the chair by the Great Defender. In the end, she was allowed to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter with a term of ten to twenty years.