The Mad Sculptor (5 page)

“Go on,” said Leibowitz, his voiced resounding in the hushed courtroom.

“And he said—”

Raising her balled-up handkerchief to her eyes, Vera broke into sobs.

“You’ll have to control yourself, young lady,” said the judge. “Tell your story to the jury.”

It took a few moments for Vera to pull herself together and resume her story. Standing before her, exposed in that obscene fashion, Gebhardt had said: “You will do everything I want.”

What Gebhardt wanted was so repulsive—such a “crime against nature,” in the view of Vera’s contemporaries—that, though her very life hinged on convincing the jury that the murder was justified, she could barely bring herself to repeat his monstrous demand. Finally, “choked with sobs,” she spoke “the ugly words he had used.” The newspapers of the time could only hint at the nature of this grotesque “indignity.” Years would pass before chroniclers of the case revealed that Gebhardt had attempted to force her to perform fellatio.
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“No, no, never!” Vera cried as Gebhardt stood leering at her.

Suddenly she “remembered the gun” and snatched it from the drawer. “Let me out,” she warned, “or I’ll do something desperate.”

“You damned bitch,” said Gebhardt. “I’ll kill you.”

With that, Vera testified, “he grabbed my hand and he pulled me toward him and I pulled away from him and that is when the gun went off. He fell on the bed and he staggered up. And I shot him again.”

Leibowitz—who had opted not to make an opening statement at the start of the trial—delivered a five-hour summation on Friday, April 3. He began at 10:00 a.m. in “a mild, chatty voice but turned
up the heat quickly. He shouted, pounded the table, tore off his coat and put it on again,” treating the courtroom to “one of the choice performances of his long life at the bar.”
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In his version of events, Vera—despite her mature years, college degree, and taste for Lawrentian “obscenities”—was a starry-eyed innocent who, like so many American women, was a “sucker” for a smooth-talking foreigner like Gebhardt.

“You know these men,” said Leibowitz in a mocking, mincing voice. “The gallant, Continental manners—he can hold a coat just so. You know we Americans can’t hold a candle to them. The girls love these pseudo attentions. Women cry for it.” Speaking as one regular “red-blooded” guy to twelve others, Leibowitz could only wonder at the mysteries of the opposite sex. “What do we men know about love? What do we know about those complex wheels that turn in the skulls of those creatures we call women? He whispers sweet nothing in her ears and her heart says, ‘Why, this is love.’ ”

Far from being “an enchantress or an adventuress,” all Vera wanted was a “home, respectability. She wanted to be able to say to her neighbors, ‘Meet my husband, Dr. Gebhardt.’ ” When he gave her a “cheap little ring,” she eagerly seized on it as a “promise of marriage.” To her, it “epitomized a home and children, her very life itself.”

Gebhardt, however, was interested in only one thing. A “professional heartbreaker,” a “gigolo,” a “roamer” who “didn’t care a hoot about his wife,” he regarded Vera as nothing more than “his toy, his human plaything.” “The man was an egomaniac,” Leibowitz declared. “He determined to conquer her, like a superman.” When Vera finally attempted to break free of his nefarious clutches, he resolved to make her submit one last time to his perverse desires. “That’s why he lured her to his room with that last foul pretense that he had been taken ill in the night. And she trustfully answered his call.”

When Gebhardt attacked her, she had every right to use violence to protect herself. The fact that she had previously “submitted to his importunities does not mean that she was bound to submit always.
If to prevent the commission of a crime upon herself she resorted to whatever form was necessary, she did not commit murder or manslaughter or any other crime,” said Leibowitz.

“She warned him she’d do something desperate. The warning didn’t stop him. The bullets did.” Indeed, it was “an act of God” that her pistol was in Gebhardt’s bureau drawer that night. “God knows what might have happened to this girl if the gun weren’t there.”

“She had a right to kill to get out of that room,” said Leibowitz, after reminding the jurors of the sexual abomination she had been threatened with. She was “a poor girl trying to get away from a lecherous beast.”

“Give this little girl a fair shake,” begged Leibowitz. “She suffered her Calvary that day. She walked with a cross on her back and a crown of thorns on her head.

“Let her go free. She’s entitled to it. Even though it is raining outdoors, let her go free clad in her thin coat—let her stumble out into the world, let her breathe God’s free air, as she has a right to do!”
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The jury received the case at 3:34 p.m. and—not having eaten since breakfast—immediately broke for lunch. Their deliberations began in earnest at 5:15. Less than three hours later, at 8:10 p.m., they announced that they had reached a verdict.

When, a few minutes later, jury foreman Curtis L. Lee declared the defendant not guilty, the largely female audience broke into a wild applause, while Vera herself—“the Weeping Willow love slayer,” as the tabloids now called her—collapsed in a faint and had to be revived with spirits of ammonia. As the congratulatory crowd swarmed around her, several guards “formed a flying wedge and whisked her to an anteroom,” while Samuel Leibowitz, making “no attempt to conceal his elation,” offered exuberant thanks to the jurors.
⁴⁵

Less than a half hour earlier, the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, following several stays of execution, was finally led to the chair in the New Jersey State Prison, still protesting
his innocence. Given his infamy as perpetrator of the single greatest American crime of the twentieth century, the front page of the next morning’s
New York Daily News
served as striking testimony to the notoriety the Stretz case had achieved. In equally bold letters it read: “
BRUNO DEAD. VERA FREE
.”
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Meeting with reporters that same morning in Leibowitz’s office, Vera—looking refreshed and wearing “a smart new green ensemble and black pancake hat”—struck a solemn note when asked about her future. She was “through with men,” she announced. “Marriage, a home, babies—those are for normal people, not me.” When one female reporter called out, “Don’t let this ruin your life,” Vera sadly replied: “My life has been ruined already. I can never be the same woman again.”
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By the following day, Vera had apparently settled on a plan. Accompanied by a photograph captioned, “
PRESENTING THE STRETZ GIRL…AUTHOR
!,” the
Mirror
reported that she intended to write a “prison novel” based on her experiences in the Women’s House of Detention while awaiting her trial. She had already come up with a title:
The House of Innocence
.
⁴⁸

The article on Vera’s authorial aspirations, appearing on Monday, April 6, was the
Mirror
’s last piece on the Stretz affair. For devoted tabloid readers, the months-long circus surrounding the Beekman Place murder had come to an end.

They wouldn’t have to wait long for a new one.

3

“Beauty Slain in Bathtub”

W
HETHER VERA STRETZ COMPLETED
any part of her projected prison novel is unknown. Certainly no such book ever appeared in print. As with so many others who dream of literary glory, her plans of becoming a published author remained in the realm of the hypothetical.

Nancy Evans Titterton, on the other hand, was the real thing.

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Nancy had been involved with literature from her earliest years. A graduate of Antioch College, where she won honors in English, she had briefly operated a small bookshop in her hometown before moving to New York City in 1924 to pursue a literary career. Renting an apartment in Greenwich Village, she went to work in the book department of Lord & Taylor while writing newspaper book reviews in her spare time. After a few years as a bookseller, she was hired by the publishing house of Doubleday, Doran, where (in a grimly ironic coincidence that the tabloids never tired of noting) she helped develop the company’s popular Crime Club series.
¹

She met her future husband, Lewis H. Titterton, in 1927. A slight,
sandy-haired Englishman who sported a neatly trimmed moustache and round, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Titterton had studied ancient Middle Eastern languages at Cambridge University and Harvard. In 1925, still in his twenties, he was offered the prestigious post of assistant editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
. From there he moved into the book business as assistant sales manager and later associate editor of the Macmillan Company. During his spare time, he translated French novels and turned out several hundred book reviews, mostly for the
New York Times
.

In 1929, after a two-year courtship, he and Nancy were wed in the picturesque Little Church Around the Corner on East 29th Street. They lived briefly on West 47th Street—the heart of Manhattan’s notorious Hell’s Kitchen—before moving to the far more congenial milieu of Beekman Place, renting an apartment in a handsome five-story walk-up overlooking the East River. “I’m so glad to get out of Hell’s Kitchen,” she wrote to one friend shortly after the move. “Even though we had bars on the window, I never felt safe there. Nothing could happen to anyone on Beekman Place.”
²

By then, Titterton had gone to work at NBC, where he quickly found himself promoted to chief of the script division, a somewhat incongruous position for so bookish a man. Intent on elevating the cultural quality of radio programming, he commissioned scripts from serious dramatists and hosted a weekly interview program featuring eminent men of letters. Even among his competitors at rival stations he was regarded as a force for good, a champion of literacy in a world of
Amos ’n’ Andy, Gang Busters,
and
Chandu the Magician
.
³

Nancy, in the meantime, had left her job and was devoting herself full time to fiction writing. After publishing several pieces in
Scribner’s
, she achieved a breakthrough in August 1935 when her poignant tale “I Shall Decline My Head” appeared in
Story
magazine, the prestigious journal that would introduce the work of J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, and Tennessee Williams, among others.
⁴
On the strength of that story—about an old man adrift in
dreams of the past—she was given a contract for a first novel and immediately set to work on it.

Compared to the literary luminaries she counted as her Beekman Place neighbors, Nancy Evans Titterton was still a relative unknown. For a few weeks in the spring of 1936, however, she became the biggest name in town.

Good Friday fell on April 10 that year. After breakfast that morning, Lewis Titterton left his fourth-floor apartment in the five-story walk-up building at 22 Beekman Place and strolled the few blocks to his office at Radio City. In his mailbox he found “an amusing letter from a friend” and telephoned his wife to read it to her. They shared a laugh over the letter before hanging up. The time was approximately 9:00 a.m. They would never speak again.
⁵

Nancy had another telephone conversation that morning, this one with Mrs. Georgia Mansbridge of 12 St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village. They chatted for a few minutes at around 10:15 a.m. about a dinner party scheduled for the following night. “I feel sure no one was in her apartment when we spoke,” a distraught Mrs. Mansbridge would tell reporters the following day. “Poor little Nancy—she couldn’t fight. She had no strength, and she wouldn’t know what to do. All she could do was scream.”

The only person to hear Nancy scream—other than the man who raped and killed her—was Oneda Smithmead, a “colored maid” in an apartment one floor below. At around 11:30, Smithmead heard a woman call out “Dudley, Dudley, Dudley!”—the name of the building handyman, Dudley Mings. There was an urgency to the cry, but since the tenants routinely shouted for Mings whenever a toilet overflowed, a ceiling light blew, or a sash window wouldn’t open, Smith attached little significance to it. Only in retrospect (as the
New York Post
reported) was “the cry interpreted as a desperate plea for the help of the only man who might be about the premises” at that hour of the workday.

Not long afterward, Wiley Straughn, a fourteen-year-old delivery
boy for a local dry cleaners, the London Valet Service, arrived at 22 Beekman Place with a dress for Mrs. Titterton. He pressed the downstairs bell repeatedly but got no response. Assuming that no one was home, he returned to the shop with the dress.
⁶

Later that day, another delivery arrived for the Tittertons. At approximately 4:15 p.m., a small truck pulled up in front of 22 Beekman Place and two men emerged from the cab. The driver was Theodore Kruger, the stocky, middle-aged owner of a local upholstery shop. With him was his assistant, John Fiorenza.

A grade school dropout with a “dull normal” IQ, a stunted personality, and a face that seemed fixed in a perpetual smirk, Fiorenza, twenty-four, shared a Brooklyn apartment with his mother, Theresa, and her second husband, Ignazi Cupani, a WPA carpenter. Withdrawn to the point of extreme social isolation, he barely communicated at home—his stepfather claimed that Johnny had spoken to him no more than seven times in the past eleven years—and didn’t have a girlfriend until the age of twenty-one, when he began seeing a quiet, strictly raised young woman from the Bronx, Pauline D’Antonio. After two years of “keeping company” under the chaperoning eye of Pauline’s Old Country grandmother, the couple had gotten engaged. Hoping to wed in the fall, Pauline had recently taken a job in an underwear factory to earn money for her dowry.
⁷