For most of his fifty-eight years, Lamkie had been a model citizen. A graduate of Brown University, professor of municipal government at NYU, and member of the United States Shipping Board (precursor of the U.S. Maritime Commission) during the Great War, he had enjoyed an enviable life in a quiet Connecticut suburb with a devoted wife and two well-mannered sons. And then, in the spring of 1933, his life came unglued. For reasons he could never explain, he found himself committing a bit of small-time insurance fraud, claiming (falsely) that his car had been stolen and collecting five hundred dollars on his policy. When the insurance company discovered the scam, he was charged with perjury and second-degree grand larceny. In light of his sparkling résumé and spotless record, he was allowed to plead guilty to petit larceny and given a suspended sentence.
Not long afterward, he began to hear voices. Abandoning his family, he became a follower of the colorful cult leader Pierre Bernard, a.k.a. the “Omnipotent Oom,” the self-made swami and yoga pioneer who had founded a “utopian Tantric community” on a seventy-two-acre estate (complete with a thirty-room Georgian mansion) in upstate New York. Within months of arriving at Oom’s bucolic headquarters, Lamkie was arrested for sending viciously threatening letters to a former landlady. Adjudged mentally unsound, he was committed to Rockland State Hospital, where he met Bob Irwin.7
During the course of their shared two-year confinement in the asylum, the two became good friends and confidants, Lamkie deriving bemused fascination from Bob’s quasi-metaphysical theorizing. Since their release, they had remained sporadic correspondents. By the spring of 1937, Lamkie was working as an industrial relations consultant and living with one of his two now-adult sons at 4039 43rd Street in Long Island City, a short subway ride away from Manhattan. It was there that Bob reached him by phone late on Good Friday afternoon.
They arranged to meet that evening for dinner at a Schrafft’s restaurant in midtown. Bob arrived with a thick manila envelope that turned out to contain a manuscript he had been working on since his arrival at Canton: a handwritten fifty-page autobiography—“the highlights of my varied life and wide experiences with all kinds and classes of people,” as Bob described it. Accompanying it was a typed, formal letter requesting, in effect, that Lamkie serve as Bob’s ghostwriter: “You can take this sketch of my career, add to or subtract as you think fits the purpose,” Bob wrote. “Take any liberty you think best.…This life story would of course appear over my signature and what you might add would be my words. You would be just expressing my thoughts.”8
Exactly where Bob thought his autobiography would appear wasn’t at all clear, though he obviously believed that there would soon be enough curiosity about his life story to merit its publication. He was determined that the world know the truth. “I’m damned sick and tired of being misunderstood,” he nearly shouted. When Lamkie seemed reluctant to take on the project, Bob became violently agitated. “He was shaking,” Lamkie said afterward. “He was irrational.” Alarmed at Bob’s emotional state, Lamkie relented. By the time he returned home a few hours later, manuscript in hand, Lamkie was concerned that his friend was on the brink of doing something desperate. “I could see,” he would report, “that everything was coming to a climax.”9
After saying good-bye to Lamkie, Bob wandered aimlessly for a while. Drifting over to Times Square, he passed the entrance to Hubert’s dime museum. A tawdry showplace located in the basement of a penny arcade, Hubert’s was home to Professor Heckler’s celebrated flea circus, along with an assortment of carnival freaks, sideshow performers, and celebrity has-beens, among them the African-American prizefighter Jack Johnson, one-time heavyweight champion of the world. With his love of boxing, Bob couldn’t pass up the chance to see the legendary pugilist, now pushing sixty. Paying his fifteen-cent admission, Bob descended into the seedy underworld of Hubert’s, where he listened to the nattily dressed Johnson recite—for the dozenth time that day—the tale of his epic 1910 bout with the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries. Afterward, Bob approached Johnson and asked permission to draw his portrait. The old fighter agreed to sit for him the following day. But Bob never returned for the appointment.10
Leonora Sheldon, the fiancée of Bob’s friend Anders Lunde, had come down from Vassar for the holiday weekend and was staying with family friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Mullens, at their apartment on Riverside Drive. At 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, she and Bob met by prearrangement on a street corner near the Mullenses’ home and walked to the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. There, Leonora introduced him to her brother, William, who had agreed to help Bob find work in the Department of Preparation and Installation, responsible for creating the museum’s dramatic habitat dioramas. For unknown reasons, however, the job, as Bob later put it, “didn’t pan out.”11
Though badly disappointed, Bob—who could see that Leonora felt almost as crestfallen as he did—put on a cheerful face and asked her to come along with him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, across the park on Fifth Avenue. Inside, he treated her to the same talk on his favorite statue—Verrocchio’s Colleoni—that he had given Ethel. An amateur artist herself, Leonora was so taken with Bob’s lecture that she agreed to meet him again the next afternoon for a more extended tour of the galleries.12
With severely limited funds and no job in the offing, Bob returned to his room at the Ottburgs’ to fetch one of his sculptures, a small portrait bust of Marlene Dietrich. He then proceeded to the 42nd Street offices of Stage, “The Magazine of After-Dark Entertainment,” as it billed itself: a slick, lavishly illustrated monthly devoted primarily to the professional doings of Broadway and Hollywood stars, along with current happenings in the worlds of popular music, radio, and dance.13 Explaining to the receptionist that he was “seeking commissions to execute busts of actors for the magazine, Katherine Cornell and Cole Porter in particular,” he was informed that the art director, Scudder Middleton, was away for the holidays and was told to try again next week.14
By the time Bob left the building, a terrible depression had descended on him. Heading east, he made his way toward the 53rd Street pier, where Ethel had once rebuffed his marriage proposal and where, two weeks after that shattering rejection, he had seriously considered throwing himself into the river. Now, once again, his thoughts turned to suicide.
As he crossed First Avenue, he saw something lying in the gutter—an old ice pick, dropped or discarded by an ice deliveryman. He snatched it up and slipped it into his coat pocket.
Seating himself at the edge of the pier, he stared into the river for a long time, trying to work up the courage to jump in. He was just about to take the plunge when he was vouchsafed a glorious vision. “The water turned light and was swirling all around like liquid light,” he later recounted. “It was just as beautiful as can be.” As he watched in mounting wonder, “the water of the river rose up and moulded itself into the form of Ethel. Her hair was gold.” “I saw it,” he declared, “just as clear as I see flesh and blood.”
A tremendous exaltation suffused his spirit. He “had the distinct feeling that electricity and sparks were vibrating about his head and that lights were flashing all around.” At that instant, he realized that his painful years of struggle to perfect his powers of visualization had led to this culminating moment. He was on the brink of attaining godhood, the ultimate goal of visualization. On the very weekend marking the Savior’s resurrection, he himself was about to be transmuted into Jesus Christ!
Only one thing was lacking. He knew he “could not quite accomplish the role of Christ, without making a sacrifice, for a sacrificial rite was necessary to bring the wisdom of heaven upon earth.” The problem, of course, was that, “while Christ went down into the grave and rose from the tomb in immortality,” Bob worried that if he himself “went to the grave, which meant suicide by drowning,” he might not rise again, in which case “all the principles for which he had worked for so many years would vanish.”
The solution presented itself in a f
lash of inspiration. He would sacrifice Ethel. The internal pressure generated by her murder would be so intense that he “would be liberated from all the bonds of mortality and would arrive at the stage of Redeemer.”15
Believing that Ethel was still living apart from her husband, he decided to seek her out at Mary and Ronnie’s apartment a few blocks away. First, however, he went in search of an open hardware store. Finding one on Second Avenue, he purchased a small hand file. He then returned to his room at the Ottburgs’, where he sharpened the ice pick he had retrieved from the gutter. Back outside, he walked the streets until nightfall, then turned his steps toward 50th Street.16
Part IV
The Mad Sculptor
16
* * *
Bloody Sunday
IT WAS ALREADY PAST NOON when Joseph Gedeon crawled out of his cot on Easter Sunday—no surprise since he hadn’t gone to bed until after 3:00 a.m. He quickly performed his daily ablutions—scrubbed his face, brushed his teeth, trimmed his mousy moustache, splashed some water on his armpits. He couldn’t take a shower since the sink and a toilet were the only bathroom fixtures in his living space—a screened-off corner of his workshop, barely big enough to accommodate his cot, a table and chair, a small woodstove, and a plywood closet he had built for his meager wardrobe. Still he felt relatively fresh, having bathed just two days earlier at his estranged wife’s apartment.1
After affixing his pince-nez eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose, he donned a well-worn gray suit and checked himself in the full-length mirror attached to the outside of his bathroom door. The wall adjacent to the door was papered with Gedeon’s extensive collection of cheesecake pinups, clipped from the pages of his favorite girlie magazines: Beauty Parade, High Heel, Silk Stocking. Then he shrugged on his overcoat and headed outside.
Despite the wintry weather, the streets were full of holiday strollers—men, women, and children resplendent in their Easter finery.2 Heading east on 34th Street, he rounded the corner onto Third Avenue and ducked into Corrigan’s Bar and Grill, where—except for a couple of brief interruptions—he had passed the previous evening from 7:00 p.m. until 2:55 a.m., just before closing time. He had drunk so many beers that he had staggered home in a state of semistupefaction. Even so, he had managed to roll the evening’s highest score at skee ball—the popular, bowling-style arcade game that involved sending a small ball up an inclined ramp into holes ringed with rubberized targets. His winning score—310 points—was inscribed on a blackboard above the machine.
He found the proprietor, Calogero Parliapiano, behind the bar, collected his house prize from the previous night—one dollar—and ordered a celebratory schnapps. Somehow, in the course of that beer-soaked evening, he had misplaced his gray fedora. Parliapiano, however, hadn’t come across the hat while cleaning up that morning, and no one had turned it in. Gedeon soothed his disappointment with another schnapps before leaving the bar. Outside, he headed for Second Avenue, on his way to Easter dinner with his family.3
Since separating from his wife four years earlier, Gedeon had maintained cordial relations with Mary, sharing holiday meals with her and their daughters and making occasional use of her bathtub. He had been up in her apartment just two nights earlier to enjoy a leisurely bath, the first he’d had in weeks. Afterward, they sat in the kitchen and came to a momentous decision. It was time for the two of them to reconcile. They would break the happy news to their children over Easter dinner.
Of course, Joseph wouldn’t be able to move back in just yet since there was no space for him in the flat at present. Ronnie had turned over her little room to a visiting friend, Lucy Beacco, and was sharing the central bedroom with her mother. The other small bedroom was occupied by a boarder Mary had taken in five weeks before, a dapper little fellow Joseph knew only as “the Englishman.”
Though Beekman Place was only a fifteen-minute stroll from 34th Street, Gedeon, still slightly hung over, opted for the Second Avenue El, arriving in his wife’s neighborhood a few minutes before 2:00 p.m. He wasn’t expected for another half hour, so—not wanting to show up unannounced—he found a phone booth in a cigar store and dialed the apartment. No one answered. Joseph, as he later explained, found that somewhat “odd” but “assumed his family was still at the Easter parade.” He bought a few cigars to share with his son-in-law, Joe Kudner, then shopped for some small gifts for Mary and the girls: a potted lily and a two-pound box of chocolates. He still had some time to kill, so he ambled over to a newsstand and checked out the current issue of Paris Nights, another “spicy” magazine filled with bare-breasted beauties.4
At around 2:40 p.m., he strolled over to the building at 316 East 50th Street, rang the downstairs bell for his wife’s apartment, and waited to be buzzed inside. He got no reply. He was still standing in the vestibule, wondering where Mary could be, when Ethel and Joe Kudner arrived, having driven in from Astoria, Queens. When Joseph informed them that no one appeared to be home, Ethel insisted that he try the bell again. Before he could push the button, one of the tenants emerged from the inner hallway. Holding the door open, Gedeon and the Kudners stepped inside.
Leaving Joe at the foot of the staircase with Ethel—who was wearing new Easter shoes that pinched her feet and didn’t want to make the climb if no one was there—Gedeon headed up the four flights to apartment No. 16. The door, unlocked, swung open at his touch. He passed from the little entrance foyer into the darkened living room. Touchi, Ronnie’s Pekingese, who usually bounded up to greet him, approached him nervously, ears flattened to his head, then tried to crawl beneath the davenport. Apart from the dog’s whimpers, the apartment was utterly silent.5
Entering the kitchen, Joseph switched on the overhead light. The main dinner ingredients—a forlorn-looking pork loin and a bowl of uncut green beans—sat on the counter, uncooked.
With a growing sense of disquiet, Gedeon moved to the main bedroom. The double bed, shared by Mary and Ronnie, had not been slept in. The pillows were fluffed, the violet bedspread undisturbed. Everything was in order. As he scanned the room, however, his eye was caught by something peculiar: several chunks of what appeared to be a broken soap bar scattered on the carpeted floor.
Avoiding the soap, Gedeon stepped over to the door of the little bedroom on the left. The door was ajar. He pushed it open and peered inside.
Stretched faceup on the bed, completely naked, was his daughter Ronnie. Her complexion was a ghastly blue, her bulging eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Ugly bruises ringed her neck. Even without touching her, Joseph could see that her body had gone stiff.
He backed away from the awful sight and hurried to the other bedroom. The Englishman’s rigid corpse lay sideways on the mattress, a blanket covering him up to the shoulders, his blood-caked head resting on a pillow drenched in gore.
Swiveling on his heels, Gedeon rushed downstairs, where Ethel and Joe waited in the lobby. “They’re all dead,” he cried. “Murdered!” Aghast, Ethel and Joe followed him up to the fourth floor. While Kudner—face pale, lips drawn tight—viewed the two bodies, Ethel sat weeping in the kitchen. “Where’s Momma?” she sobbed. Her father assured her that Mary must have escaped and gone for the police. “I’ll go see,” he said. Hurrying outside, he made for the East 51st Street station house a block away, while, upstairs, his son-in-law picked up the phone and dialed SPring 7-3100—the number of the NYPD headquarters.6
The first officers to arrive at the scene were Detectives Martin Owens and William Gilmartin of the Seventh Precinct. It was Gilmartin who discovered Mary Gedeon’s corpse. Clothed in a green housedress, pink corset and brassiere, pink slip, and brown stockings, she was wedged beneath the bed that held the body of her daughter. It was clear at a glance that she, too, had been strangled. As with Ronnie and the boarder, her body was stiff with rigor mortis.7
By then, a cadre of detectives from the Homicide Squad—among them Charlie McGowan, Tony Fader, Ruddy McLaughlin, and Tom Tunney (brother of Gene Tunney, former heavyweight boxing c
hampion)—had shown up, along with Deputy Chief Inspector Francis Kear, Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons, and Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro. Close on their heels came the acting chief medical examiner, Dr. Thomas A. Gonzales, and a battery of experts from the Police Research Laboratory.
While the crime scene photographers wielded their Speed Graphic cameras and the fingerprint men went to work on every surface that might possibly yield a telltale loop or whorl, Kear and his detectives scoured the apartment for clues. In a corner of the Englishman’s bedroom, they found a man’s right-hand gray suede glove, size 8¼ and “practically new.” A pair of torn pink silk panties—clearly Ronnie’s judging by their size—was jammed between the wall and the head of the bed on which her body lay. The rest of her garments—a fur coat, a dress, and a hat—were piled on the bathroom clothes hamper, at the foot of which lay her silk stockings and a pair of black suede pumps. A towel stained with dried blood had been carelessly tossed over the edge of the bathtub.8
Otherwise—except for the mangled bar of soap on the floor of the central bedroom—nothing was disturbed or out of place. The bureau drawers hadn’t been ransacked, and the women’s purses were untouched. Whatever the motive for the Easter Sunday Massacre (as the press would soon call it), robbery clearly wasn’t it.
A preliminary examination of the bodies revealed that the boarder, a trim little man clad only in his undershirt and drawers, had received eleven stab wounds to the head with a sharp-pointed implement, “probably an ice pick.” Gonzales later determined that the fatal wound, struck with an assassin’s precision, had been delivered to the base of the skull, entering “just below the foramen magnum”—the opening through which the spinal cord enters the skull—and penetrating the brain.9 From the position of the body and the undisturbed condition of the bedclothes, the Englishman—quickly identified as Frank Byrnes, a waiter at what the tabloids invariably referred to as the “swanky” Racquet and Tennis Club on Park Avenue—appeared to have been killed in his sleep.
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 16