The Mad Sculptor (42 page)

At first, the police were inclined to believe him, since—as one officer put it—“a guilty man would never offer an alibi so degrading.”
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It wasn’t until he was confronted with incontrovertible physical evidence—his bloody fingerprints on the candlesticks used to crush the victim’s skull—that Wayne broke down and confessed.

At a little before nine o’clock that Sunday morning, he had gone to his wife’s apartment and knocked on her bedroom door. Patsy, still completely nude, let him in. Sitting beside each other on the bed, they exchanged increasingly testy words. He accused her of “behaving like a tart.” She called him “a couple of names.” Finally, she told him to “get the hell out here” and “don’t ever come back.” As he headed for the door, she shouted, “You’ll never see the baby again—ever!”

“I lost my head,” Lonergan explained to his interrogators. Grabbing one of the heavy brass candlesticks from the sideboard, he rushed at her and smashed her in the head with such force that the candlestick broke. Blind with rage, he grabbed the second candlestick and struck her again. Still conscious, she clawed at him, raking his chin. He seized her by the throat and choked her. It took her, by his estimate, three minutes to die.

Hurrying back to Harjes’s apartment, he scissored his bloodstained uniform to pieces, stuffed them in his duffel bag, weighed the bag down with a dumbbell, and tossed it in the river. He then purchased some makeup at a neighborhood drugstore to conceal the scratches on his face and, borrowing one of his friend’s suits, went off to keep his lunch date. “The best-looking degenerate ever to go on trial for murder in the history of the New York court system,” he was ultimately convicted of second-degree homicide and sentenced to thirty-five years to life.
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With its deliciously scandalous elements—“whispered vices whose details are unprintable and whose character is generally unknown to the average normal person,” as the
Journal-American
put it—the Lonergan case was the greatest tabloid sensation in years. Among the lurid rumors that swirled around the crime was a widespread story that Wayne had killed Patsy when she nearly bit off his penis while performing “a final act of fellatio on him.”
¹⁰

What made the case so titillating, however, was not just the sex but the setting. The killing took place at 313 East 51st Street, a four-story town house a few blocks from the sites of two other horrors still fresh in the minds of New Yorkers. The brutalized heiress became the third in a trio of lovely young women found naked and slain in the fashionable Manhattan neighborhood. Nancy Titterton. Veronica Gedeon. Now Patsy Burton Lonergan. Once again, as newspapers throughout the country never failed to mention, savage death had visited Beekman Place.
¹¹

Vera Stretz and her attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, prepare to leave the courtroom following her acquittal.

Nancy Titterton.

All of the images appear courtesy of the author’s private collection unless otherwise noted.

Robert Irwin.

In addition to her magazine modeling, Veronica Gedeon frequently posed for members of amateur “camera clubs.”

“The Mad Sculptor” at work. (
Reprinted by permission of the
New York Daily News)

Layout of the Gedeons’ apartment.

A detective examines the blood-soaked bed where boarder Frank Byrnes was slain.

Police remove the body of Ronnie Gedeon from her Beekman Place apartment building.

Bob’s portrait bust of Ethel.

Following her murder, dozens of amateur shutterbugs peddled their nude photographs of Ronnie to the tabloids, which printed them with discreetly placed, airbrushed veils. This is one of the rare unretouched versions.