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

by Schechter, Harold

  The modern Pentecostal movement was born on January 1, 1901, in a small midwestern Bible school run by evangelist Charles Fox Parham. A preacher since his early adolescence, Parham had crossed paths with revivalists, faith healers, and holiness ministers of various stripes, including Benjamin Hardin Irwin. Impressed with the wild emotionalism of Irwin’s followers, Parham came to share the belief in a work of grace beyond conversion and sanctification. Unlike Irwin, however, he concluded that the one true sign of this “third baptism” was not an overwhelming experience of holy fire but the miraculous onset of glossolalia—the gift of tongues, the power bestowed upon Jesus’s disciples on the feast day of Pentecost, as recorded in the Book of Acts: “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.…And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”13

  Establishing his headquarters in Topeka, Kansas, Parham started an educational institute, the Bethel Bible College. In late December 1900, his students undertook a concerted effort to receive the gift of tongues. At around 7:00 p.m. on New Year’s Day, one of them, thirty-year-old Agnes Ozman, asked her teacher to lay his hands upon her. He did so and began to pray. “I had scarcely repeated three dozen sentences,” Parham later recounted, “when a glory fell upon her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.” In short order, the entire student body, along with Parham himself, was speaking in tongues.14

  Over the next few years, Parham and a band of young acolytes spread the Pentecostal message into Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. In January 1906, he opened a Bible training school in Houston. Among the twenty-five students who signed up to hear Parham lecture on “the Holy Spirit in His different operations” was William J. Seymour.15

  The Louisiana-born son of former slaves, the thirty-six-year-old Seymour had taken up preaching several years earlier after surviving a near-fatal bout of smallpox. Eager to learn from Parham, he was allowed to listen in on a few weeks’ worth of lectures from the hallway outside the classroom, safely segregated from his white brethren. In February 1906—having imbibed Parham’s belief in glossolalia as the true “Bible evidence” of third baptism—Seymour accepted an invitation to preach in Los Angeles. By the beginning of April, he had moved his services into a boxy, ramshackle building on Azusa Street.

  Within a matter of weeks, Parham’s preaching had sparked an explosion of religious hysteria that “beggared description. Men and women would shout, weep, dance, fall into trances, speak and sing in tongues, and interpret their messages into English.”16 In the third week of April, the Los Angeles Times ran a page-one story, describing the “riot of religious fervor” at the Azusa Street Mission, where the wildly gesticulating congregants “work themselves up into a state of mad excitement,” which “ends in a gurgle of wordless prayer.…They claim to have ‘the gift of tongues’ and to be able to comprehend the babel.”17

  As news of the revival spread across the nation, mobs of people flocked to Azusa Street, some merely to gawk at the delirious antics of the “holy rollers” (as critics branded the worshippers) but most to experience the Pentecostal baptism for themselves. By late 1906, the movement claimed at least thirteen thousand adherents who had spoken in tongues.18 Among them was Benjamin Hardin Irwin.

  As he reported in an issue of the holiness magazine Triumphs of Faith, Irwin’s embrace of Pentecostalism took place on Christmas Day 1906, when he renounced his former belief in spiritual pyrotechnics and began speaking in tongues.

  I felt my lips and tongue and jaw being used as they had never been used before. My vocal organs were in the hands and control of another, and the Other was the Divine Paraclete within me. He was beginning to speak through me in other tongues.…He caused me to use words which I had never heard or conceived of before. I was enabled to speak with greater fluency than I had ever spoken in my native English.…Since that time, I have been used of God in speaking many times in Chinese, Hindoostani, Bengali, Arabic, and other languages unknown to me.

  Following this transformative experience, Irwin became an Azusa Street missionary, “leading Pentecostal services from California to Oakland.”19

  Exactly what had transpired in the time between Irwin’s scandalous resignation from the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church he had founded and his reemergence on Azusa Street is, for the most part, a mystery. From the few surviving records of that period, however, we do know one crucial fact. During that six-year stretch, he took a second wife and sired three sons with her.20

  Her maiden name was Mary Lee Jordan. Born in Carthage, Texas, in 1870, she came from an old Southern family that, while boasting a number of prominent “businessmen, judges, and men of wealth,” was known for “a certain degree of mental instability.” One of her brothers “was a known sex pervert who had been sterilized after it was found that he had been committing sodomy upon his young nephew.” Another suffered from “mental amnesia.” Her sister was “described as excitable and emotional,” her mother “was adjudged by authorities as insane,” and her father was “said to have been impetuous, highly nervous, and to have been shot by an enemy while on horseback.”21

  Surviving descriptions of Mary are full of contradictions. Some say that she was “college trained,” others that she had a “secondary school education.” At times, she is characterized as “easy-going,” at others as possessing a “nervous, high-strung temperament.” She is sometimes portrayed as a semi-invalid who, by her own admission, “was not brought up to work,” though documents indicate that she “worked as a washerwoman and cleaning lady to make a home for her sons.” All accounts agree on one point, however: that her most salient trait was her “extreme religious fanaticism.”22

  She dated her spiritual awakening to an experience that occurred in her early girlhood. As she later testified, she “was walking at night” when, all at once, she “saw a ball of light, fell down on her knees, prayed all night and was converted.”23 Soon she was swept up in the fast-rising tide of the holiness movement. She appears to have met her charismatic husband-to-be around the time of his sudden plunge from grace. They were married in Canada in 1902.

  Their first son was born the following year. As with all their children, his name would reflect the extravagant zeal of his parents: Vidalin Bathurst Irwin, after the famed Icelandic bishop Jon Vidalin and the Reverend Jess Bathurst, one of Benjamin’s closest associates in the holiness movement. Their youngest son, born six years later, would be christened Pember in honor of G. H. Pember, English evangelist and author of such works as The Antichrist Babylon and the Coming of the Kingdom, The Great Prophecies of the Centuries Concerning Israel and the Gentiles, and Mystery Babylon the Great. Both Vidalin and Pember would grow up to be hardened criminals and do long stretches in prison for assorted felonies.

  Their middle brother would outdo them both in iniquity. He was born in a gospel tent during a massive camp meeting held in Arroyo Seco Park, just outside Pasadena, on August 5, 1907. No doctor was there to assist with the delivery. His first name was a tribute to one of his father’s spiritual heroes, the seventeenth-century French theologian François Fénelon, while his middle name commemorated the place of his own birth: Fenelon Arroyo Seco Irwin. The world would come to known him by other names: Robert Irwin. The Beekman Hill Maniac. The Easter Sunday Slayer. The Mad Sculptor.

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  The Brothers

  BENJAMIN IRWIN’S PENTECOSTAL baptism did nothing to reform his character. Even after receiving the blessing of tongues—the supposed sign of his spiritual cleansing—he continued to consort with other women. His long-suffering wife was well aware of his infidelities. “He was definitely immoral,” Mary would later report, “and a slave to his passions.”1 Even worse than his womanizing, however, was a secret she learned after nearly nine years of marriage: Benjamin had never bothere
d to divorce his first wife. He was not only a philanderer but a bigamist, too. In early 1910, not long after Mary made this shocking discovery, Benjamin Irwin deserted his family, running off with a younger woman.

  Burdened with the sole support of three young sons, Mary took on a number of menial jobs. Her chronically poor health, however—which proved resistant to the divine healing promised by her faith—made it impossible for her to work on a regular basis. Often she was bedridden. With the pittance she earned as a part-time house cleaner and laundress—never more than a few dollars a day—she kept her children fed on whatever meager provisions she could afford. Their diet was heavy on potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. Often, they were reduced to begging day-old bread from neighborhood bakers.

  They moved repeatedly from one run-down section of Los Angeles to another, finally settling in a ramshackle cottage on Omaha Street. The place had no indoor plumbing or electricity and was so cramped that the boys took turns sleeping on the porch. Its interior decor featured stretched flour sacking on the walls and a few old sticks of furniture. The sole item of value was Mary’s prized pump organ. A talented musician, she would gather her sons in the evening and lead them in singing “He Calleth Thee,” “I’ve Been Washed in the Blood,” “Resting Safe with Jesus,” and other favorite Pentecostal hymns.2

  Religion remained the center of her life. She awoke at five each morning to pray for an hour and spent every available minute at the Azusa Street Mission, seeking respite from her troubles in the ecstatic transports of Pastor Seymour’s revival. Her middle son—“intensely devoted to his mother” in his early childhood—often accompanied her to the meetings. Throughout his life he would carry “memories of religious fervor, fanaticism and terror”—of men and women babbling in unknown tongues and offering witness to the miraculous cures effected by “hysterical prayer.” After one frenzied service, he ran home through a storm, shouting, “I’ll be good! God save me! I’ll be good!”3

  His father exposed him to a very different side of existence. Once, when Fenelon was five, Ben paid him an unexpected visit and ended up taking him “downtown to a house where two women lived” (as Irwin later recalled). “These women were very nice to me and they put me in a room and my father went away with these women for an hour or two. The women were about thirty years old.” It wasn’t until many years later, of course, that he understood the purpose of his father’s visit to the house where the two nice women lived.4

  Typical of some early Pentecostals—who, placing the love of Christ above all else, “virtually abandoned regular family life to follow the Lord”5—Mary was increasingly neglectful of her children. “Her religion was the consolation from all the woes that flesh is heir to,” Irwin would recall. “Though affectionate in her way, she was wedded to God’s mission and with this absorbing interest she became…oblivious of our growing needs. So we were reared in squalor, under-nourished, poorly clothed and our housing was merely a shelter. Our life was drab, insecure, deprived of the natural life of the normal child. Mother had her religious emotions to sustain her, while we had but empty stomachs to go to bed on.”6 With their mother otherwise occupied, her sons found themselves free to run wild.

  Wildest of all was Vidalin, a textbook delinquent clearly marked for a criminal future. A real-life version of the stereotypical street toughs Sidney Kingsley would depict in Dead End, he began smoking at the age of eight and was soon up to forty cigarettes a day. At nine, he was hanging around neighborhood pool halls. By ten, he was engaged in petty theft, stealing pigeons from their sidewalk coops outside of local butcher shops and selling them for twenty-five cents a pair.

  His serious troubles began at the age of eleven when he entered sixth grade and befriended a young hoodlum named Gale Wing. Two years his senior, Wing had already been arrested once for stealing copper wire from the city’s Bureau of Power and Light, burning off the insulation, and selling it to an unlicensed junk dealer for ten cents a pound. He was also the leader of the self-styled “Pasadena Avenue Gang,” a bunch of juvenile miscreants described by one social worker as “a menace to the neighborhood.” Inducted into the gang, Vidalin was soon skipping school to join them in their criminal escapades—mostly housebreaking, petty larceny, and the occasional theft of an automobile, which was either abandoned after a wild joyride or dismantled and sold to shady dealers in used car parts.7

  On the evening of August 24, 1917—two months past his fourteenth birthday—Vidalin was arrested for the first time. Loitering outside the Sunbeam Theater on Pasadena Avenue with a couple of pals, he began pelting moviegoers with handfuls of gravel as they emerged from a showing of the William S. Hart horse opera, The Gun Fighter. Unfortunately for Vidalin, the police station was directly across the street. Charged with truancy and public nuisance, he was given probation, which he promptly violated by playing hooky during the day and “loafing on the streets late at night.” In the first week of October, upon the petition of his mother, he was declared a ward of the court and sentenced to the Whittier State School until the age of twenty-one.8

  While awaiting transfer to the reform school, he was confined to Juvenile Hall, the short-term detention center for delinquents (equivalent to county jail for adults). Within days, he and a trio of fellow inmates had engineered an escape, using a chisel stolen from the woodworking shop. Caught in San Bernardino and returned to his cell, he escaped again less than two weeks later, this time making his way to Tijuana, where—according to a doubtful yarn he told to one social worker—he “won fifty dollars gambling with two Mexicans.” He was picked up in Oceanside a week later and brought back to Juvenile Hall, where he promptly found himself in trouble for stealing a sweater from another boy.9

  He was finally admitted to Whittier in September 1918. In a published report on the remedial goals of the reform school, Superintendent Fred C. Nelles explained that its inmates “could be divided into three groups”: “those who are feeble-minded,” those “of sound mind whose delinquency is associated with some form of misunderstanding or neglect,” and “those who wrong-doing has become habitual and who are intentionally, deliberately, and willfully guilty of misconduct.”10 From the start, it was clear that Vidalin Irwin fell into the last category.

  Interviewed upon admission by the resident psychologist, a Dr. Hoag, the fifteen-year-old delinquent crowed about his criminal exploits, boasting that he had committed as many as twenty “housebreaking jobs” on his own and another ten with fellow members of the Pasadena Avenue Gang and had once netted $150—roughly $2,500 in today’s money—from robbing a grocery store in Alhambra. To gauge his ethical development, Hoag posed a hypothetical question: “If you were walking along the street and there was no one in sight except a man in front of you who, in pulling out his handkerchief, dropped a ten-dollar bill, what would you do?” Without hesitation, Vidalin replied: “I would be inclined to put the money to my own use.”

  Hoag was impressed with Vidalin’s intelligence, describing him as “one of the brightest boys he had ever examined.” At the same time, the psychologist found him “unmanageable,” “quarrelsome,” “deceitful,” and “possibly psychopathic,” with “blunted moral reactions.”11 His diagnosis was quickly confirmed by Vidalin’s behavior. Within weeks of his arrival, he was sent to Whittier’s penal farm for “disobedience, refusal to work, refusal to answer when spoken to, and a determination not to succeed.” After thirty-one days, he was returned to the general population, only to be banished again a mere five days later for an attempted escape. On January 29, 1919, just nine days after his release, he hurled a stone at a boy named Charles Smith and was returned to the penal farm, where he remained until February 17. After a few months of relative calm, he was charged with participating in a plot to attack the watchman with a baseball bat. This time, he earned a stint in a lightless solitary confinement cell, euphemistically known as “the rest room.” By the time he was freed from the penal farm on July 22, he had secured his reputation as one of the reform school’s most incorr
igible cases.12

  Taking his big brother as role model, Pember—the youngest of the three Irwin boys—began running afoul of the law at the age of nine. Possessed of both a superior IQ and a variety of nervous disorders—one social worker described him as a nail biter and bed wetter, with “spasmodic twitching of the eyelids” and other tics—he was first arrested in July 1918 after snatching a change purse from a playmate and running off to Eastlake Park, where he spent the money riding the miniature railroad and visiting the nearby alligator farm. Owing to his “persistent thefts and disobedience of his mother,” he was committed to Juvenile Hall, where he remained until the following April, when he was placed in the foster home of a family named Canty. Two months later, he ran away. Turned in by his mother, he was sent to the Strickland Home for Boys, a five-acre farm on the northern fringe of Los Angeles, converted into a refuge for wayward youths. Its stated aim was to promote character development in its troubled young charges—a worthy endeavor that, in the case of Pember Irwin, would prove entirely futile.13

  Though his criminal notoriety would, in the end, far exceed that of his brothers, Fenelon was the least ungovernable of the three as a young child. Often, while the other two were out looking for trouble, he “stayed at home…to help his mother with the housework.”14 Studious and exceptionally bright, he did so well upon entering school that he skipped second grade. He was, from his earliest years, a voracious reader. Eventually, he would devour every book on the family shelves, beginning with Plutarch’s Lives, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and—his favorite—François Guizot’s A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times.15

  Before he reached ten, however, he was beginning to show signs of disturbance. At school, he grew “more unruly, less attentive, and developed a tendency to truancy.” Later, he would blame his problems on his “growing class consciousness”—his shameful realization that he “was more poorly clothed than his fellow students, had worse shoes and sometimes no shoes at all, and had no lunch while they were all furnished with lunch by their families.” He was also prone to violent outbursts of temper and—though not particularly big for his age—gained a reputation as a fearsome fighter, ready to “beat the tar” out of anyone who “got fresh” with him.16