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

by Schechter, Harold

  Both women had “died of manual strangulation, the killer’s hands applying such force that Mrs. Gedeon’s thyroid cartilage was torn, while the girl’s throat showed signs of hemorrhage in the larynx and muscles of the neck.”10 Judging from her badly bruised knuckles, Mary had put up a ferocious struggle. Until the women were autopsied, Gonzales couldn’t say whether they had been raped, though in the case of Ronnie—her beautiful body sprawled naked on the bed, her slip ripped off, and her panties shoved behind the bed board—the answer seemed self-evident to investigators. Mrs. Gedeon’s cotton drawers had also been torn away, and there were fresh scratches and abrasions on her upper thighs and genital area.

  There were some clumps of mud scattered on the fire escape landing outside Byrnes’s bedroom. At first, Kear took them as evidence that the killer had climbed onto the fire escape and slipped in through the unlocked window. Peering upward out the window, however, he discovered the source of the mud: a bunch of clay flowerpots on the fire escape directly overhead, damp soil oozing from the drainage holes in their bottoms. Since no mud had been tracked inside the apartment, Lyons concluded that the killer hadn’t been on the fire escape after all.

  There was only one other way that the killer could have entered: through the front door. Examining the lock, detectives found no signs of forced entry, indicating that the killer had been freely admitted to the apartment. That the Gedeons knew their killer was suggested by another clue—one that, in the words of the New York Post, added “a significant Conan Doyle touch to the grisly murders.”11 In the story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson travel to Dartmoor to investigate the disappearance of a famous racehorse and the apparent murder of its trainer. At one point, referring to the guard dog in the stable, Holmes draws the local inspector’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When the inspector protests that “the dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.”12

  The behavior of Ronnie’s dog was equally significant to investigators. From the moment they had entered the apartment, the little Pekingese had put up such a shrill, persistent barking that the police finally summoned the ASPCA, which dispatched a special car to take the dog to a shelter. Neighbors confirmed that Touchi was an “annoying little animal” that “yapped its head off at strangers.”13 Not a single tenant, however, had heard the slightest sound from the dog on the night of the slayings, leading Lyons to the same conclusion reached by Sherlock Holmes—“that the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”14

  One of the building’s occupants, Cosmon Cambinias, did report hearing a suspicious noise on the previous night. According to Cambinias—who lived two floors below the Gedeons—he had just gotten into bed at eleven o’clock when he was startled by “a scream and the sound of a scuffle” from above. He went to his window and stuck his head outside, but all the “bedrooms on that side of the building were in darkness. The Gedeon apartment seemed silent as a tomb.” Hearing no further noise, he “dismissed the incident” and went back to bed.15

  Another tenant, an automobile mechanic named Charles Robinson who lived with his wife on the sixth floor, described a curious incident that police found potentially significant. “I got home about a quarter past two this morning,” reported Robinson, “and when I got up as far as the fourth floor, I noticed that the door to the Gedeon apartment was open. As I passed it on my way up to my own place, I noticed the door was closing gradually, as if somebody was behind it, pushing it. I dunno, there was something about the way the door started to close that gave me the creeps, and I beat it to the sixth floor as fast as I could.”16

  While two of Lyons’s men were interviewing the neighbors, the rest continued to search the apartment. Inside a drawer in the living room secretary, Detective Martin Owens found a dog-eared address book with a black imitation-leather cover. At virtually the same time, one of his colleagues came across a little volume, bound in tan fabric with a broken brass clasp, shoved in Ronnie’s bedroom bureau among her lingerie. Its frontispiece bore the printed tile “Five Year Diary.” Over this inscription, in a childish hand, she had written the word “My” and under it had scrawled her name.

  Both items were immediately turned over to Inspector Kear. Thumbing through the address book, Kear saw that it was filled with names and telephone numbers, “mostly of men.” The diary entries dated back to February 1932, when they mostly concerned Ronnie’s tumultuous relationship with a young man identified only as “B.” or “Bobby.”17

  Kear was still examining the diary when the telephone in the central bedroom rang. Detective Charlie McGowan, who was standing closest to the phone, picked up the receiver. The caller was a young man who asked to speak to Ronnie. Identifying himself as a police officer, McGowan got the name and address of the caller—Stephen Butter of 581 Lexington Avenue—then, telling him to stay put, hurried off to Butter’s apartment, a short distance away.

  Less than ten minutes later, the “tall, slim, frightened-looking” Butter, who knew only that he was “wanted for questioning,” was escorted into the East 51st Street station, where a mob of newsmen was gathered at the entrance.18 At his first glimpse of them, Butter realized that something dire had happened. It wasn’t, however, until he spoke to Ronnie’s grief-wracked sister, Ethel—who was seated beside her husband in the waiting area outside Inspector Lyons office—that he learned the shocking truth.

  By then, Lyons himself had arrived from the crime scene and been joined by Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine. A rough-hewn former beat cop who “early concluded that cracking jaws and flattening noses were the only means of impressing law and order upon bums,” Valentine had spent years fighting graft in the department as the head of the confidential squad, a precursor of the Internal Affairs bureau. Though he won many promotions, he made even more enemies, and ultimately found himself demoted and exiled to the wilds of Brooklyn. It wasn’t until 1934 that his “stubborn honesty paid off” and he was appointed commissioner by the reforming Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. His reputation as a two-fisted, tough-as-nails lawman was sealed shortly thereafter when, spotting a well-dressed suspect in a lineup, he roared at his men: “That velvet collar should be smeared with blood. I don’t want those hoodlums coming in looking as if they stepped out of a barber’s chair. From now on, bring ’em in mussed up!”19

  Knowing Valentine’s reputation, Butter feared he might be subjected to some “roughshod treatment” at the hands of his interrogators. The commissioner and Lyons, however, saw at once that the young man was no triple murderer and—perceiving how distraught he was—took care to conduct their questioning in a “polite, almost apologetic” way.20 As a clerk transcribed his statement, Butter—the last person besides her killer to have seen Ronnie Gedeon alive—provided a detailed account of her final evening.

  A twenty-three-year-old messenger for a Wall Street brokerage house, Butter lived at home with his parents and younger sister, who had driven upstate to their rural retreat in South Cambridge, New York, for the holiday. His best friend, Lincoln Hauser, had also gone away for the weekend, though not before asking Stephen to “keep an eye” on the girl he was dating, the beautiful blond artist’s model Ronnie Gedeon. Stephen had arranged for Ronnie and her best friend, Jean Karp, to come over to his place on Saturday night for dinner and, to make it a foursome, had invited a pal of his own, Frank Schlenner. When Ronnie arrived at just before eight, however, she was alone, Jean having come down with a severe head cold.

  The trio spent the evening drinking beer and gin, dancing to radio music, and enjoying a spaghetti dinner prepared by Ronnie. At around 2:00 a.m., Schlenner took his leave, explaining that he had “promised to take his mother to an early mass downtown.” Throwing on their overcoats, Butter and Ronnie headed over to the Monte Carlo Bar and Grill at 145 51st Street for a couple of gin highballs. At 3:00 a.m., closing time, he walked her home, escorted her upstairs, and—after making plans to call for her at ten the next
morning and take her to mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—headed back to his apartment. He had neither seen nor heard anything unusual when he left her at her door. On Sunday morning, he had shown up at her building as arranged, but when he rang the downstairs buzzer no one answered. Puzzled, he returned to his own apartment and dialed her number at intervals until just before 3:00 p.m., when Detective Owens picked up the phone.

  The interrogation lasted until 9:00 p.m., when Butter was informed that he was free to go. Physically exhausted and emotionally spent, he made his way onto the street, where he was besieged by reporters clamoring for a statement. “Gee, it’s tough,” Butter managed to say. “We had a swell time Saturday. Veronica was a swell kid.”21

  Butter’s warm opinion of Ronnie was seconded by her former husband, Robert Flower, the “Bobby” who figured so prominently in the early parts of her diary. Traced to a bowling tournament at the 212th Street Armory, where he was operating a hot dog stand, the “tall, thin, good-looking young man” struggled to control his emotions as he spoke about his murdered ex-wife.

  “I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Ronnie,” he said hoarsely. “She was a sweet kid and never hurt anyone in her life. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason for anything like this to happen to her.”

  Asked about their failed marriage, Flower made it clear that he harbored no ill will toward his ex-wife. “When we got married she was just a kid,” he told his interrogators. “I guess neither of us knew what it was all about. We got along pretty well but I guess she didn’t want to be tied down. She wanted good times and going places and I just didn’t have the money. After a while we talked things over and decided our marriage wasn’t a go. Ronnie sued for annulment on the grounds that she was a minor at the time of our marriage. We stayed good friends and I tried to see her once in a while. The last time I saw her was about three weeks ago. We went to see Lost Horizon at the Music Hall.”

  He paused for a moment, as if to get hold of himself, and then, in a voice quivering with grief and fury, said: “I hope they find the son-of-a-bitch who did it and send him to the chair.”22

  Brought to the police station for questioning a short time later, Frank Schlenner—the young man who had partied with Butter and Ronnie on the night of the slayings—confirmed his friend’s account, as did Linc Hauser, who had hurried back from his father’s vacation home in Saratoga Springs. Fetched from her home in the Bronx, Ronnie’s best friend, Jean Karp, was so overcome with grief that she could barely speak. Police learned that she had intended to stay overnight at Ronnie’s place following the dinner at Butter’s apartment. Had she done so, she undoubtedly would have met the same fate as her friend. She had escaped murder (as one tabloid put it) “only because of the beneficent accident of a severe cold.”23

  Adrian Gregory, a coworker of Frank Byrnes’s at the Racquet and Tennis Club, shed some light on the Englishman’s movements on the last night of his life. The “pint-sized” waiter—who had come to America from his native Liverpool in 1924—had left work at around 8:40 that evening. He had tried to “borrow a couple of bucks” from Gregory to attend the employees’ annual dance at the Hotel McAlpin that evening. Failing to get the money, Byrnes returned to his rented room and apparently went straight to bed.24

  These interviews—combined with Dr. Gonzales’s preliminary medical findings and the detectives’ own methodical study of the crime scene—allowed Kear to provide reporters with a tentative reconstruction of the murders:

  Byrnes was the first victim slain as he slept. Subsequently, Mrs. Gedeon returned home. The killer had apparently been lying in wait for her. As she entered the house, she was attacked, dragged into the bedroom and criminally assaulted. The strangulation and the assault were apparently simultaneous. The body was pushed under the single bed in the room adjoining the ‘master’ bedroom. When Miss Gedeon came home she apparently stepped into the bedroom to the left of the entrance and partially disrobed. Evidently she did not want to awaken her mother. Leaving her clothing on the hamper in the bathroom, she then walked across the living room. As she entered the other bedroom, the murderer attacked her. The girl was clad only in her chemise. This was ripped off during the violent struggle that followed. It seems the killer must have begun strangling the model immediately. After the murder, the body was dragged to the small chamber adjoining the large bedroom and dumped on the single bed. Then the killer opened the front door and slunk into the night.25

  Based on the evidence gathered up to that point, it was a perfectly plausible scenario. In almost every particular, however, it would prove to be wrong.

  17

  * * *

  The Party Girl

  AT A TIME when New Yorkers were routinely treated to such tabloid headlines as “RUM-CRAZY RIPPER CARVES DRUNKEN WOMAN TO DEATH,” “GIGOLO CONFESSES TO TORSO MURDER,” and “LOVER SLASHES SWEETHEART WHO SPURNED HIM,” the slaying of the two Gedeon women and their boarder might have been expected to provide the public with some fleeting diversion at best. A rare combination of ingredients, however—a kind of perfect storm of prurience—raised the triple murder above the usual crime-and-scandal-sheet fare, turning it into what Newsweek magazine proclaimed “the best story in Manhattan tabloid history, everything that sensational journalism could ask for.”1

  There was, to begin with, the person of Ronnie Gedeon, the ideal tabloid victim: a stunning twenty-year-old model, strangled, stripped naked, and (so early reports insisted) sexually assaulted on the bed beneath which her murdered mother’s body lay. The corpses of the two women, along with that of Frank Byrnes, had been transported to the morgue at Bellevue, where autopsies were scheduled for late Monday morning. As Dr. Gonzales made clear, there was no way of telling whether the women had been raped until the postmortem examinations were completed and vaginal swabs analyzed. Unconstrained by anything as trivial as mere fact, however, the tabloids lost no time in attributing the murders to the era’s leading boogeyman, the sex maniac.

  “ART BEAUTY, MOTHER SLAIN BY SEX-FIEND” read the headline of Monday’s New York Evening Journal, which—blithely ignoring the words of caution issuing from the medical examiner’s office—informed readers that “there was no doubt in the mind of investigators that a maniacal sex factor figured in the murders.” A half-page cartoon in the Journal showed a young female labeled “American Womanhood” opening her apartment door to be confronted by the towering shadow of a monster labeled “Sex Murderer.” Another, on the editorial page of the same paper, depicted a drooling thug in a cap labeled “Sex Fiend Killer” moving a skull-shaped playing piece over a checkerboard labeled “American Homes.” Other newspapers referred to the perpetrator as a “sex-poisoned beast,” a “sex-maddened strangler,” and a “sex-crazed lunatic” who violated his victims’ bodies “before or after death.”2

  Dispensing with any pretense of journalistic objectivity, Monday’s Daily News delivered its front-page story of the crime—“a blood-chilling episode of insensate lust and death”—in the pulp-fiction style of a dime store whodunit:

  It was dark as pitch—but the darkness was alive with danger. The clock struck 3. Veronica Gedeon turned the key in the lock of her Beekman Hill apartment. The silence was heavy. Touchi, her pet Pekinese, didn’t run to greet her. That was strange. Veronica, who was 20, closed the door behind her in her five-room suite at 316 E. 50th St. A hand shot out of the darkness. It closed around her throat. Its powerful fingers pressed tighter—tighter.

  Her assassin dragged the girl—who had been a prize beauty and an artist’s model—toward her bedroom. The pressure on her throat became unendurable. Her lungs burst. She ceased to struggle. She was dead.

  Then the strangler stripped her of her clothes.3

  The morbid fascination provoked by the crime was made even greater by its setting. Not a single tabloid failed to note the connection among the Vera Stretz case, the Nancy Titterton bathtub murder, and the current atrocity, all of which had taken place within a few blocks of one another i
n the ostensible haven of Beekman Place. The parallels between the Titterton slaying and the Gedeon murders seemed especially striking. Both crimes had occurred on Easter weekend exactly a year apart. And both had been discovered by men who worked as upholsters—John Fiorenza in the Titterton case and now the estranged husband and father, Joseph Gedeon.4

  What truly elevated the killing of Ronnie Gedeon above the common run of criminal sensations, however—and endowed her with a celebrity she had never enjoyed in life—was something unparalleled in tabloid publishing: a profusion of photographs of the lovely young victim posing provocatively in various states of undress. Within hours of the first published reports of the slaying, a freelance photographer named J. Jay Hirz telephoned the city desk of the Daily News to say that he was in possession of several dozen “figure studies” of the slain model that he was willing to part with for ten dollars apiece. Before long, other amateur shutterbugs—members of private “camera clubs” who forked over five dollars an hour to take pictures of naked women—emerged from the woodwork to peddle their own lascivious “art photos.” By Monday evening, the late editions were already running nude pictures of Ronnie, discreetly retouched with gauzy, airbrushed veils. On the following day, the Daily News alone featured nine photos of the “prize beauty,” either seminude or in a negligee. “As a murder mystery, it was a natural,” Time magazine observed in a piece about the case. “As a picture story, it was a Roman holiday.”5