Robert George Irwin
(1908-1975), an artist-sculptor and recurring mental
hospital patient, pled guilty to killing three persons
on Easter weekend in 1937 in the Beekman Hill area of
New York City’s Turtle Bay neighborhood.
One of his victims, Veronica “Ronnie” Gedeon, was a
model who often appeared in seductive pulp magazine pictures. The
crime, its investigation, Irwin’s arrest, and the resulting court
proceedings were heavily publicized, often with eye-catching photos of
Miss Gedeon and headlines describing Irwin as the “mad sculptor.”
Veronica Gedeon left behind a portfolio of sexy photos that, in
retrospect, had no relevance to the crime, its cause or Irwin’s
responsibility for it. However, that coincidence kept the story on
front pages of newspapers around the country for months, publicity
which ultimately helped to bring Irwin into custody.
Irwin’s prosecution, which ended through a plea-bargain
that kept him incarcerated for life, renewed debate about the use and
scope of New York’s version of the insanity defense. Once sentenced,
Irwin was deemed “definitely insane” by state psychiatrists. He spent
the rest of his life in secure mental institutions.
Personal background
The son of evangelist parents, Irwin
was reportedly born in a tent on an old-fashioned camp
meeting ground in Portland, Oregon. His father deserted
the family before Robert was three years old, leaving
them impoverished. When a family court judge noted that
Robert could learn a trade at a state reformatory, he
volunteered and spent fifteen months there, where he
first learned to sculpt. He soon idolized Lorado Taft,
one of the leading American sculptors of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, and later moved in with Taft’s
family. Then, working for a waxworks studio in Los
Angeles, he carved commercial busts of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and other public figures.
Irwin’s descent
Irwin was considered “brilliant if
erratic and at times violent.” He tried to emasculate
himself, using a razor. He then consented to be
committed to a state mental hospital, where he initially
stayed for a year. After his discharge, he moved into a
New York City rooming house owned by Mary Gedeon. There,
Irwin had become infatuated with her daughter Ethel, but
his love for her was not returned. He underwent further
mental illness treatment for two more years at Rockland
State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York, and was released
in the summer of 1936. By then, Ethel Gedeon had married
George Kudner. Irwin then made a sculpture of Ethel with
a cobra coiled around her neck.
He enrolled as a student at the Theological School
of St. Lawrence University at Canton, New York. However, he was
expelled on March 18, 1937, ten days before Easter, because of “instability.”
He then rented (for a single day) a $2.50-a-week room in a house on
52nd Street in New York City, several blocks from Mary Gedeon’s
rooming house at 316 E. 50th Street. After considering and rejecting
the idea of drowning himself in the East River, he instead walked to
the Gedeon rooming house.
The Easter Weekend murders
On March 28, 1937 (Easter Sunday),
relatives arriving at the Gedeon's flat for dinner
discovered the partially-clothed bodies of Mary Gedeon
and her younger daughter Veronica, in Veronica’s bedroom.
Mrs. Gedeon had been strangled and stabbed, and Veronica
had been strangled. In a nearby room, they discovered
the body of Frank Byrnes, a deaf English waiter who had
been stabbed many times. The ensuing police
investigation revealed that around 3:00 a.m., Veronica
had returned, intoxicated, from a date. Fifty minutes
earlier, Charles Robinson, an upstairs neighbor, had
noticed the door to the Gedeons’ flat was partially open,
and had closed it. This led detectives to conclude that
the assailant had entered the apartment before Veronica
arrived, and waited for her. They also concluded that
Brynes was likely killed while he slept.
Police attention focused initially on a driver,
then on Mary Gedeon’s ex-husband, Joseph Gedeon. By April 7, however,
their attention had shifted toward Irwin, in part because a sculpture
carefully carved in ordinary bath soap was discovered at the crime
scene. A nationwide manhunt for Irwin followed. State Inspector John
Lyons was reported as stating of Irwin, “It makes no difference
whether he committed three hundred murders, so far as the State is
concerned. His psychopathic background shows he is insane."
The hunt for Irwin, and his surrender
In late June 1937, a pantry maid in
Cleveland's Statler Hotel saw a picture of Irwin in a
pulp magazine and noticed a resemblance to a bar boy who
been working at the hotel for less than two months,
under the name of Bob Murray. He cleaned out his locker
and disappeared soon after she asked him about his last
name and whether he knew about Robert Irwin. Once again,
the search for Irwin became the lead story on the front
pages of daily newspapers nationwide.
The next day, the Chicago Tribune received a
call from someone claiming to be Irwin and offering to surrender for a
price, but the Tribune dismissed the call as a prank. The
William Randolph Hearst-owned Chicago Herald-Examiner, however,
received a similar call, took it seriously, and made an arrangement
under which Irwin would be paid $5,000 for an exclusive story, then
surrender. After Irwin came to the newspaper’s offices, its city
editor John W. Dienhart, and reporters G. Duncan Bauman and Austin
O’Malley kept Irwin in a room in the Morrison Hotel in Chicago,
working on the terms of a confession to the Beekman Hill murders that
the newspaper would publish as an exclusive, while briefly shielding
him from police. The Hearst companies then flew him to New York City,
where he was turned over to police. At that point, famous New York
criminal defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz, who had represented the
Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and was reported to have saved 123 murder
defendants from the death penalty, appeared as Irwin’s attorney.
In his published confession, Irwin he stated that
he originally intended to kill Ethel Gedeon Kudner because “she was
the dearest object in the world” to him, but that he “accidentally”
killed the others instead. He explained that he went to the Gedeons’
flat, expecting to find Ethel. He first struck then strangled Mary
Gedeon, after she had asked him to leave. After her daughter Veronica
arrived, he terrorized her, but strangled her only after she called
him by name, showing that she recognized him. Afraid to leave alive a
possible witness (but unaware of Byrnes’ deafness), Irwin entered
Byrnes' room, then stabbed him to death in his bed. In his confession
to New York detectives Irwin compared himself to a radio, explaining:
-
Bob Irwin is nothing. I am only a receiving set.
An extremely imperfect one, which can indistinctly tune in the
divine mind. You have heard a radio that isn’t working well. You
turn the dials and get a squawking. Only once in a while can we get
the pure clear music. My whole idea in life was to perfect myself so
‘the receiving set’ could always get the divine music at its best.
Irwin’s prosecution, plea and sentencing
Hours after New York police took
Irwin into custody, he was indicted for three counts of
first degree murder. Contrary to Inspector Lyon’s
initial view that Irwin was insane, New York now found
him normal. As Irwin’s trial date approached in the fall
of 1938, William A. Adams (warden of The Tombs detention
center) said, “Irwin certainly isn’t crazy now. He’s as
normal as any man in prison.” Irwin attorney
Liebowitz, however, replied that Irwin “was, is and will
be hopelessly insane. He’s crazy as a bedbug.”
Publicity again peaked as the trial date approached;
one news account reported that “not since the Harry K. Thaw murder
trial had a case excited wider interest.” Soon after a jury was
selected, however, Irwin pled guilty to three counts of second degree
murder, in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, and a promise that
a pair of trousers that he abandoned in a suitcase left at Grand
Central Station in 1937 would be returned to him.
Judge James Wallace sentenced him to 139-years-to-life
in prison (99 years-to-life for the slaying of Byrnes, 20 years-to-life
for the slaying of Mary Gedeon, and 20 years-to-life for the slaying
of Veronica Gedeon). He was then sent to Sing Sing Prison for a
psychological evaluation, where prison doctors ruled him “very
definitely insane.” On December 10, 1938, he arrived at Dannemora
State Hospital.
Death
and legacy
Irwin died of cancer in 1975 in
Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in
Fishkill, New York.
Irwin’s enduring legacy involves the way newspapers
exploited his crime through sensationalist headlines and racy photos,
culminating with a paid confession that nearly put him in the electric
chair. In the immediate aftermath of the crime, New York Daily News
publisher Joseph Medill Patterson responded to criticism of the
sensationalism, editorializing that “murder sells papers, books, plays
because we are all fascinated by murder.” He defended the News’
choice to give the story greater attention than President Roosevelt’s
failed attempt to “pack” the U.S. Supreme Court, explaining that
“perhaps people should be more interested today in the Supreme Court
than in the Gedeon murder, but we don’t think they are.
Buxom,
black-eyed Henrietta
Koscianski, 19, a pantry
maid in Cleveland's Statler
Hotel, gave her starched
white blouse a straightening
pat and winked at one of the
other girls as the young man
who washed bar glasses and
supplied cracked ice came on
duty one night last week. "Say,
Bob," she asked, "what's
your last name?"
"Murray,"
he answered quickly. "Why?"
"Oh,
nothing. But did you ever
hear of Robert Irwin?"
"No," he
said, turning away. Few
minutes later he disappeared.
Two
nights before the bar boy
had done a clever pencil
sketch of Henrietta, and she
had had a chance to study
his face as he sketched.
Business was slow that night
and later she had gone
upstairs to borrow something
to read from one of the
other girls.
In a
detective magazine she had
seen a picture of 29-year-old
Robert Irwin, former insane
asylum inmate, sculptor of
sorts, wanted in Manhattan
for the horrible Easter
Sunday murders of the
beauteous artists' model
Veronica Gedeon. her mother
and a man lodger. "Why that
looks like our Bob!" she
exclaimed. She showed the
picture to the other girl
who agreed on the
resemblance. Friday night
she would show it to Bob. It
would amuse him.
By
midnight Friday, Pantry Maid
Koscianski was all atremble.
The bar boy had obviously
skipped town. His locker was
empty. The police had been
to his $1.50 a week hotel,
found only an old pair of
shoes and New York
newspapers with stories
about the Gedeon murders and
the recent death threats
against a staff physician at
Rockland State Hospital
where Irwin had once been a
mental patient. "I feel like
a nickel now," mumbled Miss
Koscianski.-"I didn't call
the police because I just
thought it was a coincidence.
I didn't have the nerve to
think of him actually as a
killer."
Next day,
to Hearst's Chicago Herald &
Examiner came one of those
incredible strokes of luck
that make newspaper life
worth living. Robert Irwin,
the most sought-after
murderer then at large in
the U. S. (TIME, April 12),
had just telephoned the
Chicago Tribune ("Worlds
Greatest Newspaper"),
offered to surrender for a
price, was not believed.
So he
called the Hearst paper, had
his terms accepted, and
slouched into their offices
to pour out the story of the
Gedeon murders in a
voluminous, jumbled, sex-loaded
signed confession. From late
Saturday until Sunday
afternoon Hearst writers and
cameramen had their prize to
themselves. Other papers,
writhing as Hearst extra
after extra hit the stands,
howled to Chicago's police.
Detectives searched the
Herald & Examiner office in
vain. Irwin had been
spirited away to the
Morrison Hotel where Hearst
men played cards with him,
treated him well. When he
was finally surrendered to
the Cook County Sheriff the
next afternoon he looked
rested and refreshed and his
white linen suit was crisp.
Awaiting him in Manhattan by
prearrangement was the famed
criminal defense lawyer,
Samuel Leibowitz. Toward
midnight, in a Hearst-chartered
transport. Prisoner Irwin
was flown to New York City
to face the murder charges.
It was his first flight,
would probably be his last.
