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

by Schechter, Harold

  Halliburton’s recollection of his assailant as a “screaming maniac” contributed to the tabloid depiction of Bob as a monster of supernatural dimensions. “IRWIN PICTURED AS A WEIRD ‘DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE,’ ” blared one headline. “Combined in the sex-tormented psychopath, police found the contradictions of wild lust and the rigid asceticism of a religious fanatic,” read the accompanying story. “Sometimes he was the perfect gentleman, as when he squired about New York just a few hours before the slaying pretty Leonora Sheldon, Social Registerite and amateur artist. At other times, caught in a maelstrom of perverted lust, he was portrayed as a demon with homicidal tendencies.” His “diverse personalities” were very much in evidence at Rockland, where, according to one unnamed source, he would transform in an instant from “a tractable, even likable patient” into a raging madman “swept away by demoniac furies—fighting attendants with a giant’s strength, shrieking threats to kill and maim those who attempted to check the wild flights of fancy in which he picture himself as a superman.”4

  Another article, citing the opinion of Dr. Mortimer Sherman, former chief alienist at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, described Irwin as a “Sadistic Gorilla Man.” Sherman’s diagnosis was based on the photograph of Irwin distributed by the New York City Police, a picture in which Bob, neatly dressed in jacket and tie, head slightly cocked to one side, wears a studious expression on his clean-cut, boyish-looking face. Sounding less like a twentieth-century psychiatrist than a practitioner of nineteenth-century physiognomy—the quack pseudoscience of deducing a person’s psychology from his or her facial characteristics—Sherman opined that Bob’s slightly knit eyebrows were “slanting downward in Satanic fashion.” His nostrils (perfectly shapely to an objective eye) were “upturned in an animal snarl.” His mouth—in actuality rather delicately shaped, with a full, almost feminine lower lip—was a “straight slit that shows the snarling animal.” These “face characteristics,” Sherman declared, “show him subject to abnormal types of sex called sadism in which lusts of pleasure and pain are the primary elements of the sex life.”5

  The same photograph of Bob, with a trim little moustache airbrushed onto his face, was used to draw a parallel between the Mad Sculptor and one of the country’s most notorious criminals. Juxtaposing this doctored photo with a strikingly similar portrait of America’s former Public Enemy No. 1, the Daily News ran a piece describing Irwin as the “crime-twin of John Dillinger”—“a Dillinger of Sex.” This time, the paper’s go-to expert was Dr. William Moulton Marston, a noted psychologist who, a few years later, would enter into pop culture lore as the creator of the comic book character Wonder Woman. According to Dr. Marston, the two killers were “similar in almost every external respect. Both have the same bulging foreheads, distended nostrils, heavy-lobed ears, and thinning hair.” His “microscopic study” of the two faces showed conclusively that “Irwin’s murders for sex” were “the twin of Dillinger’s murders for money.”6

  Another psychiatrist, who had supposedly treated Irwin at Bellevue, reinforced the characterization of the fugitive as a creature from a grade-B horror movie—“a night-prowling, gorilla-fisted rover.” Irwin “paced his detention cell ceaselessly with a rolling lumbering gait, slightly hunched over,” this unnamed doctor was quoted as saying. “He napped fitfully through the days and only came fully alive by night when he was in a frenzy to get away.”7

  Though close-up, page-one photographs of Bob’s hands showed him to be not “gorilla-fisted” at all but possessed of long, tapering fingers, tabloid readers were assured that his years of sculpting in clay had endowed him with superhuman power. “His hands appear delicate but are deceiving in their strength,” one paper noted. “When the black lightning from the half-world of madness strikes his twisted brain, those hands become infused with the power of five men—and death is at his fingertips!” Any frustration of his desire might provoke his “murderous rage.” In the throes of one of his “ungovernable tantrums,” his “long strong fingers” would “invariably lunge for his victim’s throat.”8

  A different, though no less sinister picture of Irwin—portraying him not as a raging madman but as a coldly calculating psychopath—was painted by Bryan Bishop, a journalist who had spent time in Rockland several years earlier after suffering a nervous breakdown. According to Bishop, Bob had himself committed to Rockland as part of a diabolical scheme to commit the perfect murder. “Even in those days,” Bishop recalled, “he was plotting revenge against Ronnie and her mother. He spoke about it constantly. The key to getting away with the crime, he said, was to get yourself into an asylum. That way, there was no need to worry. Once you were branded as insane, you could never be convicted like other men.” To various observers, the reported discovery of a collection of newspaper clippings on the Nancy Titterton case in Bob’s lodgings at Canton was proof that he had long been planning his own Beekman Place murder.9

  With this monster on the loose, no one was safe. “NEW KILLINGS BY SCULPTOR FEARED,” ran a headline in Wednesday’s Evening Journal. Under the theory that the penniless fugitive might resort to panhandling, police warned the public to beware of any beggar matching Irwin’s description. “If such a panhandler asks for a dime on the street, it’s wisest to give him the dime—and look for the nearest cop,” officials advised. “It may cost you your life to refuse. It is not beyond reason to imagine Irwin, begging from three or four persons and being turned down by all, having a homicidal outburst. Do not attempt to subdue this man without armed help.”10

  The relentless newspaper portrayal of a city haunted by a homicidal “night-prowling” madman had the inevitable result. “Night and day, hysterical pleas for help have been flooding police telephones,” the Evening Journal reported. Virtually all the calls came from single women, who had remarkably similar stories to tell. Preparing for bed, or lying awake under the covers, or on the brink of dozing off, they would suddenly become aware of a menacing presence and look up in horror to see a sinister man peering at them from the fire escape, or trying to climb through the window, or standing beside their beds with clutching, outstretched hands.11

  On Saturday, April 10—five days after police first identified Robert Irwin as their number one suspect—Commissioner Valentine announced to reporters that he was “confident that Irwin will be apprehended in a reasonable time.” So certain was the commissioner of the Mad Sculptor’s imminent capture that he cancelled a print order for an additional twenty thousand wanted circulars “because Irwin will be in our hands before the circulars are needed.”12

  Despite this and similarly sanguine pronouncements, however, Irwin continued to elude the police. Each day brought new headlines placing him in different parts of the country: Columbia, South Carolina; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Steubenville, Ohio; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Kenosha, Wisconsin. On Sunday, April 11, the New York Times reported that police in Utica, New York, had received a suicide note signed “Robert Irwin.” “I am sick of the whole business,” it read. “I think several cops recognized me. I am going to end it all. Please send my clothes to the Rockland State Hospital.” Two days later—claiming that “police have officially turned the manhunt for Irwin into a woman-hunt”—the Mirror floated the theory that Irwin was making his way to the West Coast as “a female impersonator.” “During his school days, Irwin took part in amateur dramatics and was reported to be exceedingly clever in makeup,” read the story. “The regular features of his face, moreover, would aid him passing as a girl.”13

  Though Commissioner Valentine and his subordinates failed to see the humor in the situation, one editorial wag was inspired to remark on the countless cross-country sightings of Irwin in a mocking bit of doggerel:

  The police have a tip that he’s sailed for Peru,

  Information received puts him in Utah, too.

  They’re dragging the river and combing all Queens

  With a net. He’s in Armonk, likewise New Orleans.

  An important anonymous telephone call
r />   Says “He’s here” merely “here” and no address at all.

  East Side and West Side, the town all around

  Persuasive, ubiquitous, and yet unfound

  Is this fellow distinguished by having the quaint

  Gift of being at once several places he ain’t.14

  That the police were becoming increasingly desperate in their efforts to track down the nation’s most sought-after fugitive became painfully clear when John C. Tucker, a Jersey City hypnotist who claimed to have “helped solve several important cases,” offered to assist in the manhunt. Tucker proposed to enter the Gedeon apartment with an aide, a fellow New Jerseyan named Hale Haberman. Tucker would then put Haberman into a trance “and, presto, the whereabouts of suspect Robert Irwin would be revealed through the aide in a twinkling.” Though Assistant Chief Inspector Lyons was ultimately prohibited from availing himself of the hypnotist’s services, his initial impulse was to give Tucker a chance. “It can’t do any harm,” he told reporters.15

  Lyons also raised some eyebrows when he made what amounted to an offer of immunity to Irwin in return for his surrender. “The man is stark mad,” Lyons told a group of reporters. “He’ll never be indicted or go to trial for this crime. It makes no difference whether he committed three of three hundred murders as far as the State is concerned. It’s no longer a criminal matter; it is simply a medical case. All we want now is to safeguard the public. He’s a danger to the community wherever he might be.”

  Joining the effort to secure Irwin’s surrender, Dr. Russell Blaisdell, superintendent of Rockland State Hospital, issued a public appeal to his former patient:

  In view of what has been published in the newspapers and broadcast over the air, your disappearance and continued absence are looked upon with grave suspicion. It is much to your interest to come forward and give an accounting of your movements. As one who has always befriended you and had your interest at heart, I advise and urge you to go immediately to the police or communicate with me at this hospital.

  But Blaisdell’s plea, like the bait dangled by Lyons, did nothing to lure Irwin out of hiding.16

  In the struggle for newsstand supremacy, the Daily News scored a major coup over its tabloid rivals with the serialized publication, beginning Monday, April 12, of “Robert Irwin’s Own Life Story.” The autobiography had been acquired from Bob’s old Rockland friend, the former Oom cult member William Lamkie, who had shown up at the paper’s offices a week earlier with his lawyer, Ellis Bates, offering Bob’s manuscript for sale. Appearing in installments over five successive days, the “self-searching record of the young sculptor’s emotions, desires and ambitions” (as it was touted in the paper) is a revealing document.

  In Irwin’s telling, his life was a courageous struggle to surmount the hardships and deprivations of his past: his philandering evangelist father; his neglectful, fanatical mother; his “drab, insecure childhood”; his consignment to reform school, where his “instinctive love for art first asserted itself.” Possessed of “the urge to be on my way to greener pastures,” he embarked on the adventurous life of a picaresque hero.

  After drifting “from pillar to post”—“living in the jungle where beast ate beast and only the fittest survive”—he was led by his “guiding star” to the Hollywood studio of Carlo Romanelli, “under whom I spent two years of intensive and profitable study.” Eventually, when “the desire for more worlds to conquer got the better of me,” he left for Chicago to work with Lorado Taft. The “nation’s outstanding sculptor” took such a shine to the young artist that he found a place for Bob at the home of his stepmother. Shortly afterward, Arthur Halliburton came to live there, too. Bob describes his assault on Halliburton, though in his version, his housemate at Mrs. Taft’s was entirely to blame. “A highbrow type,” Halliburton (according to Bob) flaunted his “social superiority” by snidely remarking on “some of my crude habits, or what he considered them.” As a result, “we had a brawl” that “gave me a chance to show my physical superiority.”

  Bob’s struggles to pursue the “sacred cause” of his art during the difficult years of the Depression made him “open to all sorts of fears and worries.” How, he asked himself, “can I become a great sculptor, as I have led myself to believe?” Concluding that “the instinct to propagate” was the “most diverting factor,” he ended up in Bellevue after attempting to “deprive myself of sex urges.” There he found himself “in the psychopathic ward with people who”—unlike himself—“had actually gone mad.”

  Following his transfer to Rockland, he was able to meditate on all sorts of mysteries and profundities that he shares in his memoir:

  I can understand how the reproductive organs in Vedic literature symbolize the creation of life. The normal expression means greater health, greater intellect, a finer spirit. The anemic figures of the saints must have been done by suppressed, sexless creatures or those indulging in unnatural practices.…

  What makes a homo-sexual? Probably many factors. If I had money, I would finance a scientific study to get at the basis and with that we might get everybody back on the beaten track. Does art make people veer in that direction? For instance, Oscar Wilde and many another genius? Do lesbian women make good wives might be another good question to propound.…

  In a world of plenty for everybody there is not enough to go round. My simple wants are not too much to expect, but materialism and art don’t go together. If I labor, I long for my art. If I model, I starve.…Why is it so? The philosopher might say it is all part of the game and one should take it in stride like the runner as part of the next step. The Yoga would say it was all an illusion.

  The narrative takes him all the way through his decision to enter the St. Lawrence University seminary, his “encounter with a fellow theological student for breaking my models,” his dismissal by Dean Atwood, and his imminent departure for the “big city.”

  Bob’s autobiography is certainly no literary masterpiece. It is crammed with clichés and stilted Victorian language. “Mother’s religion was the consolation from all the woes that flesh is heir to,” reads a typical passage. “Day by day, one step at a time, was her plan. She never doubted the Lord would provide. There was always the silver lining, no matter how dark the cloud.” Still, it is clearly the work of a bright and literate person. For all its flagrant rationalizations, rambling digressions, and delusions of grandeur, it is hardly the work of the raging lunatic portrayed in the press. Only one passage strikes an ominous chord. After casually noting that he had “done a bust of Ethel,” Bob ruminates on the “snake nature” of women. Then, in words whose chilling import was clear only in retrospect, he adds: “There is something worse than the serpent’s sting. To be jilted and spurned by one for whom one cares sears the very soul and makes the world go black.”17

  While not completely discounting the possibility that Irwin had fled westward, Commissioner Valentine remained convinced that the sculptor was holed up somewhere in the metropolitan area. “New York City is the greatest hideout in the world,” he declared at a news conference on Tuesday, April 13. “Despite the fact that we’re getting tips from all over the country, I’ve always believed he’s right here.” Anyone “sheltering or harboring” the fugitive, he reminded the public, was “himself committing a felony.”18

  Believing that the cash-strapped Irwin might “demand a cut of the sale of his life story,” Valentine ordered a pair of Homicide Squad detectives to keep surveillance on William Lamkie. Other police officers, disguised as uniformed security guards, were posted in the exhibition halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the theory that “Irwin will be driven by irresistible artistic need and impulse to visit the galleries.” According to a story in the Mirror, police were also keeping watch over artists’ supply shops in lower Manhattan after getting wind of a macabre rumor that Irwin was “barricaded in a Greenwich Village studio at work on a sculptural masterpiece which will be his farewell to the world…a post-mortem likeness in stone of Ronnie
Gedeon.”19

  On the evening of Wednesday, April 14—in what most newspaper commentators saw as an act of desperation—police made a major sweep of the Bowery, rounding up forty-three young, bearded derelicts and hauling them into Night Court, where Magistrate Leonard McGee, acceding to the request of Commissioner Valentine, sentenced all of them to five days in jail on vagrancy charges. The sentences were meant to give the police “ample time to peer behind the whiskers of the captured derelicts, take their fingerprints, and study their physical characteristic to make sure none of them might be Irwin.”

  Once again, the cops came up empty-handed. “POLICE ADMIT IRWIN CLUES ARE EXHAUSTED,” read the headline in the next day’s Evening Journal. The accompanying story quoted Captain William T. Reynolds, in charge of the Fourth Detective District, who acknowledged that the manhunt had reached a dead end.

  “All the leads we have had were washouts,” said a dispirited Reynolds. “We are stumped in our search for Irwin.”20

  Though one of the few New York City detectives not assigned to the manhunt, John J. Whalen—currently detailed to the Grand Jury Squad under Captain Barney Dowd—had been following the case closely in the newspapers. From reading interviews with the Ottburgs—Irwin’s landlords at the time of the murders—he knew that the sculptor had arrived in the city with a pair of beaten-up suitcases, one tied shut with a piece of rope.