The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation

by Schechter, Harold

  One month later, he would dazzle observers with “his most brilliant performance yet” in the trial of Vera Stretz.23

  No sooner had he taken over the Stretz case than Leibowitz began to work the press. To counter the public perception of her as a cold-blooded femme fatale, he arranged a jailhouse interview for his client, attended by a dozen reporters from the city’s major papers.

  Dressed in a polka-dotted, Alice-blue frock and devoid of makeup (in accordance with prison rules), Vera met with the newsmen in the reception room of the Women’s House of Detention on the day after Thanksgiving, Friday, November 29. With Leibowitz at her side, she fielded their questions with a fervor that, as one attendee wrote, successfully “demolished her image as an emotionless ‘icy blonde.’ ”24 She grew particularly impassioned when one reporter asked, “Do you regret the circumstances which brought you here?”

  “Any decent woman would have done the same thing,” she replied with a quavering voice.

  His own voice ringing with indignation, Leibowitz interjected: “Legally, ethically, and from every human standpoint, Gebhardt got what was coming to him. He was the kind of creature that any red-blooded man here present would just love to take out to the nearest back yard for the purpose of knocking his head loose from his torso.”

  From this and similar statements, the newsmen concluded that Leibowitz planned a self-defense plea based on “some vile insult directed by Dr. Gebhardt against Vera’s womanhood,” on a “gross violation of his secretary-sweetheart’s fundamental faith in the purity and cleanliness of his affection,” as the tabloids put it. Though tantalizingly vague as to the nature of Gebhardt’s “vile,” “gross” behavior, these reports left little doubt that Leibowitz meant to dish up some particularly steamy revelations when the trial got underway.25

  When it finally opened on Friday, March 20, 1936, it was the hottest show in town, drawing a huge crowd of spectators, among them such luminaries as Walter Winchell, actress Tallulah Bankhead, and Dudley Field Malone, Clarence Darrow’s co-counsel in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial.26 Even before the first witness was called to the stand, the outlines of Leibowitz’s “decency defense” began to emerge. Questioning prospective jurors, he startled observers—and drew heated objections from his opponent, Assistant District Attorney Miles O’Brien—by grilling them on their knowledge of “the philosophical superman theories of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.” Given Gebhardt’s nationality—and his close ties to Nazi bigwigs (at his funeral service several months earlier, a swastika flag had been draped over his coffin)—reporters inferred that Leibowitz intended to draw a link between Gebhardt and the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, whose attitude toward the opposite sex was summed up in such maxims as “Man shall be trained for war and women for the recreation of the warrior,” “A man who has the depth of spirit…must conceive of woman as a possession, as confinable property, as being predestined for service,” and “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!”

  Leibowitz also made it clear that he was looking for jurors with a highly developed sense of old-fashioned chivalry. Knowing “what a high value Southerners place on a woman’s virtue,” he seemed especially eager to empanel William A. French Jr., a radio engineer and native of North Carolina. First, however, there was a potentially disqualifying matter to resolve. “Would you be prejudiced against me,” asked Leibowitz, “because I was counsel for the Scottsboro Boys?” When French replied with an emphatic “no,” the lawyer then asked the same question he would pose, in one form or another, to every talesman: “If a woman killed to protect her body and no matter what form that protection took—would you find her not guilty because of the law of self-defense?” Satisfied with French’s response, Leibowitz quickly accepted him.27

  At the end of the first day’s proceedings, Leibowitz met with reporters, who peppered him with questions about his focus on Nietzschean philosophy. “Nietzsche was Gebhardt’s god,” he informed them. The remark confirmed what they had already deduced about Leibowitz’s strategy. “It seems obvious that he will argue that the defendant killed Gebhardt to prevent an unnatural assault,” the papers reported—“that Vera squeezed the trigger to protect herself from the degrading advances of a brute who had sopped up a superman complex from Nietzsche’s writings.”28

  In contrast to his flamboyant opponent, Prosecutor O’Brien proceeded in a dry, matter-of-fact way that bordered on the bland. His opening statement, lasting a mere twenty minutes, was a straightforward recounting of the events of November 12, 1935, when Dr. Gebhardt’s 168-pound, five-foot-eight, nightshirt-clad body was found on the floor of his Beekman Tower Hotel room, perforated by four bullets from Vera Stretz’s pistol. The deadpan manner in which he delivered his statement made it clear that he felt he had an open-and-shut case—that the facts spoke so loudly for themselves that they required no undue emphasis on his part to impress themselves on the jury. As one chronicler puts it:

  O’Brien, in effect, was saying to the jury, “This woman and Gebhardt were having an affair. Something went wrong with it and she killed him. It’s that simple. Why cloud the issue with irrelevant nonsense about Nietzsche or about possible unnatural acts? She was in her right mind and deliberately killed him. That’s all that counts and that constitutes first-degree murder.”29

  A parade of prosecution witnesses offered devastating testimony, including future chief medical examiner Dr. Milton Helpern and ballistics expert Sergeant Harry Butts, who established that Gebhardt had been shot at point-blank range, twice in the back. Listening at the defense table, Vera repeatedly broke into convulsive sobs and, on several occasions, fell into a swoon and had to be revived with smelling salts. By the time the prosecution rested, O’Brien, in his dry, methodical way, had done a seemingly unassailable job of depicting the death of Dr. Gebhardt as “a cold-blooded premeditated execution.”30

  When the courtroom opened on the following morning, Friday, March 27, the eager, largely female crowd surged through the doorway, filling up the spectator section within minutes. Out in the corridor, a hundred or more disappointed sensation-seekers clamored vainly for admission. They had come for the trial’s long-awaited climax, the testimony of Vera Stretz, Leibowitz’s sole witness. For weeks, the tabloids had offered lurid hints about the motives that drove Vera to kill—the “abnormal,” “weird and repulsive,” “dangerously sadistic” practices that Gebhardt had tried to force upon her.31 Now, with Vera finally slated to take the stand, the public would learn if the prurient rumors were true. They would not be disappointed.

  Under Leibowitz’s questioning, Vera—looking “pathetically pale” and twisting a handkerchief nervously in her hands32—related the familiar story of her passionate love affair with the dashing German financier. She told of their initial meeting aboard the Caribbean cruiser Vulcania, of their shipboard flirtation, of their first New Year’s Eve kiss in Havana. By the time they returned to New York City, their friendship, she said, was already “very deep.”

  Soon he was phoning her regularly, squiring her to expensive restaurants, sending her flowers, candy, books. She was swept off her feet by the “fascinating,” “gallant,” “brilliant” man of the world, so “ardent” in his attentions.33

  Shortly afterward, upon returning from one of his frequent business trips to Europe, he took her to a supper club, where he declared his love for her. Vera—who, it emerged, had been briefly married in her midtwenties to a man twice her age and now affected a world-weary cynicism—told him that she “didn’t believe in love.”34

  “What did he say to that?” asked Leibowitz.

  “He said, ‘All right, I’ll teach you.’ ”

  And how, inquired Leibowitz, did she respond?

  “I told him I would be charmed to have him teach me.”

  “Despite his being to your knowledge a married man?” asked Leibowitz.

  “He said he and his wife had not lived together for years,” said Vera. “That was all dead. He said that ordinary laws were made for
ordinary men, but he was not an ordinary man.”

  “A superman perhaps?” said Leibowitz, provoking a swift—and sustained—objection.35

  With “the humility of a slave,” Vera surrendered herself utterly to his tutelage—to his “love school,” as the tabloids called it.36 She first gave herself to him sexually during a trip to Lake George the preceding May. “He wanted to pretend it was our wedding trip,” said Vera. “We registered as Mr. and Mrs. Gebhardt.”

  “Why,” asked Leibowitz, “did you have intimate relations with him?”

  “Because I loved him intensely,” said Vera. “I could not help yielding to him.”

  At the time, Vera was living on 57th Street in a one-room apartment with a window that opened on a fire escape. Visiting one night, Gebhardt expressed his concern that “someone could come up that fire escape and into this room and run away with the little girl I love.” Vera reassured him that she could scare off any intruder with a licensed pistol she owned, purchased for protection several years earlier when she resided in East Harlem. Gebhardt, according to Vera’s testimony, “asked me to show it to him and I did. He didn’t want me to have it—thought it was dangerous for me. He took it and the cartridges and put them in his coat pocket. He kept the gun from then on.”37 Shortly afterward, Vera moved into the Beekman Tower Hotel to facilitate their affair.

  She was unashamed of her behavior, as one of her many love letters—read aloud by Leibowitz—made clear. “The basis of my self-content,” she wrote, “is the good old-fashioned theorem that sexual intercourse is sacred and lovely, a unity of everything fine.”38 Gebhardt’s own letters to her smoldered with passion. “I look around and I feel your eye and I feel your kiss on my lips,” he wrote during one of their separations. “I long to caress you with my hands. A thousand dear kisses.”

  Their correspondence grew increasingly torrid. He mailed her picture postcards from European art museums of the most risqué paintings he could find—nymphs and satyrs disporting themselves in scandalous ways, languid odalisques reclining on rumpled beds, naked female slaves lounging in Oriental seraglios.

  In return she copied out an entire passage from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Preparing to read this excerpt aloud in court, Leibowitz asked that the spectator section be cleared. “If there are any women who will be shocked,” the judge announced, “they may leave the courtroom now.”

  No one budged from her seat.

  As the spectators cupped their ears and strained forward, Leibowitz—speaking so softly that his voice barely carried to the jury box—read the controversial passage in which the gamekeeper Mellors rhapsodizes about his enforced celibacy while separated from his married lover:

  If you’re in Scotland and I’m in the Midlands, and I can’t put my arms around you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I’ve got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the little Pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause. So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant.39

  That the demur, respectable, college-educated woman had penned such pornography (as most of the public still viewed it) was proof of how thoroughly subjugated she had become to her Teutonic “super lover,” of how masterfully he had turned her into his sexual plaything.40 Or so Leibowitz wished the jurors to think.

  For all of her slavish devotion to Fritz, however, Vera still retained sufficient self-respect to crave a conventional relationship. When, following a business trip to Boston in June 1935, he presented her with the aquamarine ring, she assumed that they were now formally engaged.41 Not long afterward, he left again, this time for Germany. It was Vera’s understanding that he intended to ask his wife for a divorce to clear the way for their own marriage. She was stunned, therefore, when, immediately upon his return on November 8, he informed her that “he had discovered in his travels that he was not the marrying kind.” He wanted their relationship to remain as it was, with Vera as his mistress.

  Vera would have none of it. “I told him I couldn’t have that kind of life anymore,” she testified. “I couldn’t bear it. I wanted a home and husband.” If Gebhardt wouldn’t wed her, she announced, “it was all over” between them.

  Her declaration evoked a side of her “Darling Fritzie” she had never witnessed before. “No one has ever left me before,” he sneered. “And you are not going to leave me.”

  The climactic act of the drama occurred the following night. Besides ministering to his sexual needs, Vera had frequently been called upon to play nurse to Gebhardt, who suffered from chronic abdominal pains. She was asleep in her room on Monday, November 11, when, at around 11:00 p.m., she was awakened by the telephone. The call was from Fritz, who claimed to be stricken with a severe gastric attack and unable to find his heating pad. Could she please come help him?

  Throwing her coat over her nightgown and slipping on her shoes, she hurried to his room. When he opened the door to admit her, she saw that he looked flushed, feverish. Ordering him back to bed, she followed him into his bedroom, then stepped over to the bureau to look for the pad. In the top drawer, among various “odds and ends”—a collar box, some neckties, cuff links—she saw the pistol he had confiscated from her several weeks earlier. She was still searching for the heating pad when Gebhardt snuck up from behind and grabbed her.

  “If you don’t need me,” she said, struggling vainly to break free, “I’m going.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “You’re staying here as long as I want you.”

  “You beast,” she cried. “Let me go!”

  Throwing her onto the bed, he “flung himself on” her, pinned her arms over her head, and raped her.

  “It was excruciatingly painful,” said Vera in a quavering voice. “I lay there moaning. Then he reached for me again and I sprang out of bed. I looked for my shoes. I saw one of them on the bureau. I found one mixed in the bedclothes. I put them on and said, ‘I hate you. I never want to see you again.’ ”

  As she stood by the bureau, getting into her shoes, Gebhardt rose from the bed and came at her. “You damned whore,” he snarled. “You are not like my others—but you will be before you leave this room. I will make you.”

  At this point in her narration, Vera faltered, as though reluctant to relive in her mind the sheer horror of that moment.

  “Then what happened?” asked Leibowitz.

  “I said, ‘Let me go, let me go,’ and he lifted”—here, tears began to flow from Vera’s eyes—“he lifted up his nightgown—he took—he lifted up his nightgown and he took his penis—”

  “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.42

 
“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.”43

  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.’ ”