The Mad Sculptor (35 page)

A crowd estimated at between 2,500 and 3,000 spectators—the largest such gathering since the mobs that had turned out to gawk at Bruno Richard Hauptmann—surrounded Homicide Court at 301
Mott Street. Though the building had been cleared of everyone who had no official business there, the corridors were jammed with municipal employees and the courtroom itself was packed with reporters, detectives, clerks and attendants. Someone else was present, too: Samuel S. Leibowitz.

The previous day, Bob’s one-line telegram had reached the lawyer at his summer home: “
WILL YOU PLEASE REPRESENT ME ON MY ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK
?” Leibowitz, who frankly admitted how much he thrived on publicity, was immediately intrigued at the thought of defending the nationally known Mad Sculptor. Something else, far less to do with his own love of the limelight, also drew him to the case. His long involvement in the Scottsboro affair had done much to enlarge his social conscience, and he already foresaw that the Irwin trial had a significant societal dimension—the potential to produce, as he put it, “a more logical approach to the problem of dealing with the criminally insane.”
¹¹

Hurrying back to the city, he had arrived at the courtroom not long before Bob was brought in. Having never so much as set eyes on Irwin, Leibowitz made it clear to the presiding magistrate that he was there on a provisional basis. He would represent the prisoner for the moment, but until he had a chance to confer at length with Irwin, he would not commit himself to the case. The arraignment itself lasted only a few minutes. A brief affidavit had been prepared by Detective Crimmins, specifying, in typically stilted legalese, that the defendant had “willfully and feloniously choked and strangled to death” both Mary and Ronnie Gedeon and fatally stabbed Frank Byrnes “with an ice pick held in his hand.” After Leibowitz waived the reading of the full complaint, Magistrate Alexander Brough adjourned the proceedings until Wednesday, June 30, then remanded Irwin to the Tombs without bail.

When the proceedings were over, Bob and Leibowitz spoke for ten minutes in the detention pen at one side of the courtroom. Bob was then shackled to two detectives and escorted outside to the police wagon parked at the curb. From the rooftops, windows, and fire escapes of the neighborhood tenements, hundreds of men and
women peered down at the celebrity killer, some of them hooting in derision.

A short time later, Leibowitz showed up at the Tombs and conferred with Bob in his cell for an hour and a half. Afterward, a swarm of newsmen surrounded the lawyer, bombarding him with questions. Leibowitz said little, though he confirmed that he had decided to represent Irwin. When one of the reporters asked if he would try for an insanity defense, Leibowitz responded with a legal phrase in Latin: “
Res ipsa loquitur
”—the thing speaks for itself.
¹²

That same afternoon, Joseph Gedeon’s lawyer, Peter Sabbatino, held a press conference at his East 22nd Street apartment. “We are glad that any suspicion that might have existed against my client has been removed,” he read from a prepared statement. “The original arrest of Mr. Gedeon and the impression created by the police department that he was a suspect always left a cloud on his reputation and character, and he felt in the past weeks that people looked upon him as an unproved murderer. His reputation is now cleared.”

A strained-looking Ethel, “attired in a black dress and hat that accentuated her pallor,” was there with her father. When reporters began peppering her with questions about Bob—“What do you have to say about Irwin? Did you think he was crazy? Was he your lover?”—she burst into tears and fled to a bedroom.

Turning to Gedeon, the reporters then tried asking him about the man who had murdered his wife and younger daughter. To every one of their questions, however, the little upholsterer had the same response.

“Go to hell,” he told them.
¹³

Gedeon’s mistreatment at the hands of the police was the subject of an editorial in the next day’s
New York Post
. Headlined “The Irwin Case: Where Were the Cops?,” the piece was an attack on the “boob police” practice of relying on “mild or severe third degree methods.” The “Gedeon murder case proves the point,” asserted the editor:

Robert Irwin is in jail—but only because he wanted to go to jail. Until he made that decision and surrendered he was as safe from police interference as if he had been a United States Senator on a good-will tour.

The cops concentrated their attention on the father of the murdered Veronica Gedeon for almost a week after the Easter Sunday crime. He was “questioned” day after day. The process, so much easier on the gray matter than crime detection, lasted until Irwin was enabled to go to Cleveland and get a job in a hotel.

There this man, who has confessed the murder of Veronica Gedeon, her mother, and a lodger, lived for three months. With his picture in every police station in the country, he was never bothered by a detective. It was a waitress who finally identified him, but even so he gave Cleveland police the slip after she notified them and went on his way to Chicago.

In Chicago, he walked past hundreds of officers to go to a newspaper office, where he finally surrendered.

Clearly, “the usual police policy of dragging the first friendless suspect into custody for ‘grilling’ and feeding the newspapers with heated suspicions is a life-insurance policy for murderers,” the editorial concluded. “We offer humble thanks for waitresses who read mystery magazines.”
¹⁴

By the time the editorial appeared, the object of those “humble thanks” was enjoying a head-spinning dose of fifteen-minute celebrity. Two days earlier, Henrietta Koscianski—the “plump and pretty pantry maid,” “chubby Cinderella detective,” “Public Heroine No. 1,” as the tabloids variously dubbed her—had received a telegram from
Inside Detective
editor West Peterson, informing her that she was the winner of the magazine’s one-thousand-dollar reward for the capture of Robert Irwin.

“Sure, Irwin surrendered of his own accord,” Peterson explained to reporters when the announcement was made. “But we feel that if
Miss Koscianski hadn’t recognized his picture in the magazine and reported it through the hotel manager to the Cleveland police, Irwin would never have been forced into flight and surrender. She gets the dough.”

On Monday afternoon, June 28, accompanied by her truck-driver father, Henry, she boarded a United Air Liner for her first airplane trip, an experience described in luridly purple prose by a tabloid writer named Dale Harrison: “A scullery girl came out of the kitchen today and followed a bewildering rainbow to a New York pot of gold. Murder painted the rainbow that arched Henrietta Koscianski’s journey. The blood of Ronnie Gedeon, her mother and luckless Frank Byrnes dotted it.”
¹⁵

At 4:15 p.m., the plane landed at Newark Airport, where West Peterson awaited with a crowd of newspapermen and photographers. Emerging from the cabin, Henrietta posed on the rolling metal stairs, clutching the current issue of
Inside Detective
, its cover prominently displayed. Flanked by her beaming father and Peterson—who kept reminding her to hold up the magazine so the cameramen could see it—she answered a few questions about Bob. Though she had repeatedly turned down his requests for a date, she always found him to be a “perfect gentleman” and hoped he had “no hard feelings” toward her. Since she never read the newspapers—“I get all mixed up when I read them,” she explained—she had been completely unaware of the Mad Sculptor case until she had seen the issue of
Inside Detective
the previous Wednesday. “I guess my dad and mother won’t kid me so much now about reading all those detective magazines and listening to the crime broadcasts when they want to be hearing music on the radio,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know why but I’ve always been interested in reading about detectives and criminals. I like mystery, I guess. But I never picture myself as being a detective. And here I am—a detective in one of the most famous murder cases.”

As for what she planned to do with the money, she explained that it would all “go to her family—part of it to pay for her little brother’s recent appendectomy, the rest towards buying a family home.”

Taxied across the Hudson to Manhattan, Henrietta embarked on a whirlwind of glamorous activities. She made an appearance on the NBC radio show
Vox Pop
, a popular program of short man-on-the-street interviews; had cocktails on the roof garden of the Hotel Astor, where she was introduced to the romantic idol and singing sensation Rudy Vallee; and dined at New York City’s hottest cabaret, the Hollywood restaurant, where she was summoned onstage by famed MC Nils T. Granlund and invited to sing. Facing a roomful of Manhattan sophisticates, the nineteen-year-old kitchen girl, whose performing had been limited to her high school glee club, showed no trace of the jitters as she signaled to the bandleader and launched into the hit song “Where Are You?” from the recent movie
Top of the Town.
When she was done, the crowd burst into an ovation.

“I don’t ever want to go back to that job in the hotel kitchen,” she exulted after returning to her table. “I’ve always wanted to sing. I’ve always pictured myself as something like a Kate Smith.”
¹⁶

Early the following morning, Tuesday, June 29, she was taken from her suite at the Hotel Astor to the offices of
Inside Detective
and presented with her one-thousand-dollar check. From there, Peterson took her by taxi to the Court of General Sessions, where the grand jury was expected to hand down its indictments. In the corridor outside the grand jury room, Joseph Gedeon, in one of his less pugnacious moods, was talking to some of the same reporters he had cursed at a day earlier. “I wasn’t an enemy to Irwin,” he said, puffing on a stogie. “He was always a nice boy. What he done he has to suffer for, though. I was always for justice.” When one of the newsmen pressed him for more information about Irwin, however, the little upholsterer ignored him, switching to a subject of far greater moment to him. He had been out bowling the night before, Gedeon announced, and had “made a score of 289.”
¹⁷

Spotting Henrietta, the photographers on the scene immediately instructed her to stand beside the wizened little man, who brought a flush of dismay to her face by suggesting that they exchange a kiss for the benefit of the cameras. She looked visibly relieved when the photographers
explained that a handshake would do, though Gedeon seemed somewhat crestfallen.
¹⁸

The proceedings inside the grand jury room, which began at 11:15 a.m., lasted less than forty-five minutes. Seven witnesses testified: Ethel and Joe Kudner, Dr. Thomas Gonzales, Patrolman Edward (who was present when Joseph Gedeon first identified the bodies of the three murder victims), and Detectives Crimmins, Owens, and Tunney. At a few minutes before noon, Julius Bachrach, acting foreman of the grand jury, handed up the three indictments, each charging Robert Irwin with murder in the first degree. Immediately afterward, Irwin was brought from the Tombs and arraigned before Judge William H. Allen. When clerk Edward Cowing asked the defendant how he pleaded, Leibowitz broke in. “I am not ready to plead for the defendant, Your Honor,” he said. “I ask for an adjournment until tomorrow morning. In my opinion, this man is crazy as a bedbug.”

District Attorney Dodge begged to differ. “I expect to prove that Irwin was not insane at the time of the murder, and I will prove that he knew the nature and quality of his acts,” he told reporters after the prisoner was led back to the Tombs. “I will pit my thirty-one years of experience as a lawyer to prove him guilty of murder.”
¹⁹

Among the many who agreed with Dodge was Dr. Russell E. Blaisdell, superintendent of the Rockwell State Hospital. “In picturing Irwin’s mental condition at the time of the murders,” he told reporters, “it points to his knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. That is the test upon which any decision regarding his legal sanity hinges. While Irwin was suffering from a psychosis, that alone does not establish insanity. We have about two thousand patients suffering from psychoses who are not insane.”
²⁰

Taking issue with Blaisdell was Dr. Louis Berg, former head psychiatrist at New York State Hospital for the Insane, soon to gain nationwide attention for his crusade against daytime radio soap operas, which (so he claimed) caused everything from acute anxiety and increased blood pressure to gastrointestinal disturbances, vertigo, and “nocturnal frights” in their female listeners.
²¹
Irwin, Berg declared,
was both “medically and legally insane.” Besides being an incurable paranoid schizophrenic—“a dementia-praecox paranoiac,” in the terminology of the time—Irwin also exhibited the “abnormal traits” of extreme exhibitionism and egocentricity. Taken together, Berg declared, “these point to a deep-seated maladjustment” that “so influences the individual that he may not know the difference between right and wrong.”
²²

The same conflicting opinions of Bob’s mental state were offered by those who had known him. While admitting that he was neither “a doctor nor a lawyer” and thus unqualified to judge “whether or not Bob is insane,” Irwin’s St. Lawrence friend Anders Lunde stressed that the young sculptor “had never acted in a way that made me think he’d do anything” like commit murder. “He always seemed a fine, brilliant person to me,” said Lunde.
²³

Henrietta Koscianski, on the other hand, announced that, should Bob plead insanity, she was prepared to testify on his behalf. After spending an hour closeted with Sam Leibowitz, she emerged from his office to tell reporters that she could truthfully “say Bob was not responsible. He seemed childish. If he broke a glass, he was terribly depressed. If he got a dime tip, he’d sing like mad.”
²⁴