The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation
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4. For an excellent description of the neighborhood’s transformation, see Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), pp. 431–433. Also, see Federal Writers’ Project, New York City Guide: A Comprehensive Guide to the Five Boroughs of the Metropolois—Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Richmond—Prepared by the Ferderal Writers’ Project of the Work Progress Administration in New York City (New York: Random House, 1939), pp. 226–228.
5. Sidney Kingsley, Dead End: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 11–13.
6. Jay Maeder, “The Dead End Kids East Side Story,” New York Daily News, March 4, 1999, p. 31.
Chapter 2. Vera and Fritz
1. New York Post, November 14, 1935, p. 1; New York Daily Mirror, November 22, 1935, p. 3, and November 20, 1935, p. 1; New York Daily News, November 13, 1935, p. 3; New York Post, November 16, 1935, p. 1.
2. New York Daily News, November 13, 1935, pp. 3 and 5; New York Times, November 13, 1935, p. 1; New York Post, November 12, 1935, pp. 1 and 4, and March 25, 1936, pp. 1 and 9; Quentin Reynolds, Courtroom: The Story of Samuel S. Leibowitz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950), pp. 211–214.
3. New York Daily Mirror, November 13, 1935, p. 5; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 216.
4. Dorothy Kilgallen, Murder One (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 70–72.
5. New York Daily News, November 14, 1935, pp. 3 and 12; New York Times, November 14, 1935, p. 4.
6. New York Daily News, November 13, 1935, p. 3.
7. Ibid.
8. Fifty years after the Gebhardt murder, the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News recalled the case in a piece that perfectly captured the sensationalistic tone of the original coverage. See “Blonde Gets Off Scot-free for Blowing Away Her Nazi Loverboy,” Weekly World News, July 30, 1985, p. 44.
9. Reynolds, Courtroom, pp. 215–216; New York Times, November 13, 1935, p 3.
10. New York Daily Mirror, November 13, 1935, p. 1; “Blonde Gets Off,” p. 44.
11. New York Daily News, November 14, 1935, pp. 3 and 18; November 15, 1935, pp. 3 and 6; and November 16, 1935, pp. 3 and 5.
12. New York Times, November 15, 1935, p. 13; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 214.
13. The family name was originally Lebeau. According to an oft-repeated anecdote, Samuel’s father, Isaac, was advised by a friend that he would fare better in the New World if he Americanized his name, a change he could make by simply spelling it “Leibow” and adding “itz.” See Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 20, and Robert Leibowitz, The Defender: The Life and Career of Samuel S. Leibowitz, 1893–1933 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), p. 2.
14. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 22; Diana Klebanow and Franklin L. Jonas, People’s Lawyers: Crusaders for Justice in American History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), p. 161.
15. Klebanow and Jonas, People’s Lawyers, p. 161; Fred D. Pasley, Not Guilty: The Story of Samuel S. Leibowitz (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933), p. 68.
16. Klebanow and Jonas, People’s Lawyers, p. 162.
17. Alva Johnston, “Let Freedom Ring,” The New Yorker, June 4, 1932, p. 22.
18. Leibowitz, The Defender, pp. 105–106.
19. John R. Vile, Great American Lawyers: An Encyclopedia, Vol. I (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), p. 461.
20. Pasley, Not Guilty, pp. 134, 141, 145, 151; The New Yorker, June 4, 1932, p. 21.
21. Klebanow and Jonas, People’s Lawyers, p. 183; Reynolds, Courtroom, pp. 292–293.
22. Klebanow and Jonas, People’s Lawyers, p. 185.
23. Ibid., p. 196; Jim Fisher, The Lindbergh Case (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 403–408.
24. New York Daily Mirror, November 30, 1936, p. 3.
25. Ibid. Also, see New York Times, November 30, 1935, p. 32.
26. New York Daily Mirror, March 28, 1936, p. 3.
27. New York Post, March 20, 1936, p. 3, and March 21, 1936, p. 3; New York Daily Mirror, March 21, 1936, p. 3. Leibowitz did not conceal his disappointment when, that very night, French’s ailing mother died and he was forced to withdraw.
28. New York Times, March 24, 1936, p. 3; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 219.
29. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 222.
30. New York Post, March 26, 1936, p. 3; Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 77.
31. New York Post, March 28, 1936, p. 3; New York Daily Mirror, March 31, 1936, p. 3.
32. New York Times, March 28, 1936, p. 3; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 224; Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 78.
33. Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 81; New York Post, March 26, 1936, p. 3.
34. New York Daily News, November 13, 1935, p. 8; New York Daily Mirror, March 28, 1936, p. 6.
35. New York Post, March 26, 1936, p. 1; Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 82.
36. New York Daily Mirror, March 28, 1936, p. 3.
37. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 227.
38. New York Post, March 28, 1936, p. 3.
39. Quoted by Kilgallen, Murder One, pp. 85–86.
40. New York Daily Mirror, March 28, 1936, p. 3.
41. New York Post, March 26, 1936, p. 1.
42. New York Post, March 31, 1936, p. 2; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 238; Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 92.
43. New York Journal-American, April 2, 1936, p. 11; Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 106.
44. New York Journal-American, April 2, 1936, pp. 1 and 11.
45. New York Daily News, April 4, 1936, pp. 2 and 3; New York Times, April 4, 1936, p. 1. The acquittal was not only a personal triumph for Leibowitz but a confirmation of what recent research into cognitive science has shown: that “lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who lay out ‘the facts of the case.’ ” See Drew Westen, “What Happened to Obama?,” New York Times Sunday Review, August 7, 2011, p. 6.
46. New York Daily News, April 4, 1936, p. 1.
47. New York Daily News, April 5, 1936, pp. 3 and 4; New York Post, April 5, 1936, p. 1; New York Daily Mirror, April 5, 1936, pp. 3 and 4.
48. New York Daily Mirror, April 6, 1936, p. 3.
Chapter 3. “Beauty Slain in Bathtub”
1. James Farber, “Murder Victim Won Honors as Student,” New York Daily News, April 11, 1936, p. 3; “Obituary Notes: Nancy Evans Titterton,” Publishers Weekly, April 18, 1936, p. 1614.
2. New York Post, April 11, 1936, p. 3.
3. “Lewis H. Titterton” in Current Biography: Who’s New and Why 1943, ed. Maxine Block (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1944), pp. 768–770; “Woman Writer Slain in Home,” New York Daily News, April 11, 1936, p. 3.
4. Eight months after Nancy Titterton’s murder, “I Shall Decline My Head” was anthologized—along with stories by such masters of the form as Isak Dinesen, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Isaac Babel, and Katherine Anne Porter—in A Book of Contemporary Short Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1936), edited by Professor Dorothy Brewster of Columbia University.
5. Joseph Faurot, “The Inside Story of New York’s Bathtub Slaying,” Official Detective Stories, July 1936, p. 7.
6. New York Post, April 14, 1936, p. 1; New York Daily Mirror, April 13, 1936, pp. 3 and 6; New York Times, April 11, 1936, pp. 3.
7. New York Daily News, April 22, 1936, pp. 3 and 11; New York Times, May 26, 1936, p. 45.
8. New York Post, April 21, 1936, p. 4.
9. New York Daily News, April 12, 1936, p. 4; New York Times, April 11, 1936, p. 1, and April 22, 1936, pp. 1 and 12; Faurot, “New York’s Bathtub Slaying,” p. 4.
10. Faurot, “New York’s Bathtub Slaying,” pp. 4–5; Colin Evans, Blood on the Table: The Greatest Cases of New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (New York: Berkley Books, 2008), pp. 69–71.
11. New York Daily News, April 22, 1936, p. 6.
12. See New York Daily News, April 11, 1936, p. 4, and New York Times, April 11, 1936, p. 4.
13. New York Daily News, April 11, 1936, p. 3, and April 12, 1936,
p. 34.
14. New York Post, April 11, 1936, p. 3; New York Daily Mirror, April 11, 1936, p. 3; New York Daily News, April 15, 1936, p. 3.
15. New York Daily News, April 16, 1936, p. 7; New York Post, April 16, 1936, p. 9.
16. New York Daily Mirror, April 15, 1936, p. 1; April 17, 1936, p. 1; and April 18, 1936, p. 1.
17. Susan Lowndes, ed., Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911–1947 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), p. 138.
18. Edward Sefton Porter, Conscience of the Court (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 175.
19. New York Daily Mirror, April 13, 1936, p. 3; April 14, 1936, p. 12; and April 16, 1936, p. 30. Faurot, “New York’s Bathtub Slaying,” p. 7. New York Daily News, April 13, 1936, p. 6.
20. New York Daily Mirror, April 14, 1936, p. 12; New York Daily News, April 14, 1936, p. 3. Though Simon turned out to be wrong about the Titterton case, his conjecture perfectly describes a killer who would gain nationwide notoriety several decades later: the Boston Strangler.
21. New York Daily Mirror, April 16, 1936, p. 30, and April 18, 1936, pp. 3 and 5.
22. New York Daily Mirror, April 12, 1936, p. 6; New York Daily News, April 12, 1936, p. 4.
23. New York Daily News, April 14, 1936, p. 5.
24. New York Times, April 17, 1937, p. 44; New York Daily Mirror, April 21, 1936, p. 3.
25. New York Times, April 19, 1936, p. E11, and April 26, 1985, p. 35; New York Post, April 25, 1936, p. 12; New York Daily News, April 14, 1936, p. 5. For a fascinating look at Gettler’s career, see Deborah Blum, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010).
26. Evans, Blood on the Table, p. 85; Faurot, “New York’s Bathtub Slaying,” p. 43.
27. Porter, Conscience of the Court, p. 179.
28. New York Post, April 21, 1936, p. 4.
29. Evans, Blood on the Table, pp. 79–80; New York Post, April 22, 1936, pp. 1 and 14.
30. New York Daily News, April 22, 1936, pp. 3 and 20.
31. Porter, Conscience of the Court, pp. 179–180.
32. New York Times, April 23, 1936, p. 5; Faurot, “New York’s Bathtub Slaying,” p. 44.
33. New York Daily Mirror, April 22, 1936, pp. 3 and 5, and May 22, 1936, pp. 3 and 4; New York Daily News, April 22, 1936, pp. 1 and 3; New York Times, April 22, 1936, pp. 1 and 12; Evans, Blood on the Table, pp. 86–88; Bromberg, The Mold of Murder: A Psychiatric Study of Homicide. (New York and London: Grune and Stratton, 1961), p. 152.
34. New York Daily Mirror, April 23, 1936, p. 3; New York Post, April 23, 1936, pp. 3 and 7; New York Times, April 23, 1936, p. 5.
35. New York Daily Mirror, April 25, 1936, pp. 2 and 3; April 26, 1936, pp. 3 and 7; April 27, 1936, pp. 3 and 6; April 28, 1936, pp. 3 and 6; April 29, 1936, pp. 4 and 9; and April 30, 1936, pp. 2 and 3.
36. New York Post, May 1, 1936, p. 1.
37. New York Daily News, April 23, 1936, p. 7.
38. New York Times, May 20, 1936, p. 4; May 21, 1936, p. 7; May 26, 1936, p. 48; May 27, 1936, p. 48; May 28, 1936, p. 1; May 29, 1936, p. 44; June 6, 1936, p. 34; and January 22, 1937, p. 42. New York Daily News, May 23, 1936, p. 3; May 25, 1936, p. 3; and May 27, 1936, pp. 2 and 3. New York Post, May 26, 1936, p. 1 and 13. Evans, Blood on the Table, pp. 89–92.
Chapter 4. Sex Fiends
1. See Harold Schechter, Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Fiendish Killer! (New York: Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1998), and New York Times, May 1, 1935, p. 44.
2. See Tamara Rice Lave, “Only Yesterday: The Rise and Fall of Twentieth Century Sexual Psychopath Laws,” Louisiana Law Review, No. 69 (April 2009), p. 551; “Sex Crime Wave Alarms the U.S.,” Literary Digest, April 10, 1937, pp. 5–7; and Smith Ely Jelliffe, “Why Do Such Things Happen?,” Cosmopolitan, July 1937, pp. 56–57, 170–171. In New York City, Hoover’s syndicated article appeared in This Week, the Sunday magazine section of the New York Herald Tribune, September 26, 1937, pp. 2 and 23.
3. Chapters include “The Sex Criminal Emerges,” “Is the Sex Deviate Born or Made?,” and “What Shall We Do with the Sex Criminal?” See Bertram Pollens, The Sex Criminal (New York: Emerson Books, 1938).
4. New York Times, March 21, 1937, p. 24; August 9, 1937, p. 1; and August 15, 1937, pp. 1 and 2.
5. Pollens, The Sex Criminal, pp. 84–85; Jelliffe, “Why Do Such Things Happen?,” p. 56; “Sex Crime Wave Alarms U.S.,” p. 5–7; Andrea Friedman, “ ‘The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts’: Campaigns Against Burlesque in Depression-Era New York City,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 7, No. 2 (October 1996), pp. 226–227.
6. New York Daily News, March 28, 1937, pp. 54–55.
7. “Sex Crime Wave Alarms the U.S.,” p. 7.
Chapter 5. The Firebrand
1. Martin H. Schrag, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of the Reverend Benjamin Hardin Irwin,” Brethren in Christ History and Life, Vol. 4, No. 1 (June 1981), p. 5.
2. Ibid., p. 6.
3. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
4. Ibid., p. 13.
5. In an interview with probation officer B. G. Dodge, Irwin described his father as “a sort of Elmer Gantry—he set out to reform the world. The only drawback was that he neglected first to reform himself.” Dodge’s handwritten report is filed in Box 21, Folder 10, Papers of Fredric Wertham. Irwin also calls his father “the Elmer Gantry of his day” in the first part of the serialized autobiography published by the New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, p. 8.
6. Schrag, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage,” p. 10–11; Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 51–52.
7. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, pp. 52–55.
8. Randall J. Stephens, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 180–181; C. F. Carter, “Fantastic Fanaticisms,” Scrap Book, Vol. 5, No. 3 (March 1908), p. 406; Schrag, “Benjamin Hardin Irwin and the Brethren in Christ,” Brethren in Christ History and Life, Vol. 4, No. 2 (December 1981), 109.
9. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, p. 56; Stephens, The Fire Spreads, p. 180.
10. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, p. 58.
11. Ibid., p. 58; Schrag, “Benjamin Hardin Irwin,” p. 19; R. G. Robins, A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 44.
12. See New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, p. 8; Stephens, The Fire Spreads, p. 184; and Dr. Harold Hunter, “International Pentecostal Holiness Church,” http://www.pctii.org/iphc.html.
13. See Vinson Synan, The Old-Time Power (Franklin Springs, GA: Advocate Press, 1973), p. 92; Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, p. 89; and Cecil M. Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006), p. 42. The scriptural basis for the belief in glossolalia appears in the second chapter of Acts.
14. Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham, Founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement (Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, 1930), pp. 52–53. Technically speaking, Ozman manifested xenolalia, the spontaneous ability to converse in a real foreign language unknown to the speaker. Glossolalia, the typical Pentecostal “tongue speech,” refers to utterances in a completely unrecognizable language.
15. Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission, pp. 43–44, 49.
16. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, p. 98.
17. “Weird Babel of Tongues,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1906, p. 1.
18. Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 61.
19. Vinson Synan, Voices of the Pentecost: Testimonies of Lives Touched by the Holy Spirit (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 2003), pp. 89–90; Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, p. 128.
20. Altogether
, Mary bore five children by Benjamin: a twin of Vidalin named Victor, who died at under two weeks, and a girl named Mary Louise who died of “membranous cramp” at three months. (See Edythe K. Bryant, “Family History No. 183, Whittier State School Department of Research,” p. 17, in Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.) According to one newspaper account, Mary Louise died “because her father neglected her care when left alone with the baby” (New York Daily Mirror, April 17, 1937, p. 6). Grant Wacker writes that it was the “painful experience” of his young daughter’s death that “triggered” Irwin’s Pentecostal baptism. See Heaven Below (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 60.
21. Fredric Wertham, The Show of Violence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1949), p. 111; report of B. G. Dodge, pp. 18–19.
22. See Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 111; report of B. G. Dodge, p. 18; and New York Daily Mirror, April 18, 1937, p. 8.
23. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 111.
Chapter 6. The Brothers
1. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 16.
2. Ibid., p. 13.
3. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 111.
4. Fredric Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 3, 1933, p. 2, Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham, 1818–1936.
5. As religious historian Edith L. Blumhofer writes: “Immersed in a world in which spiritual forces often loomed larger than tangible realities, Pentecostals frequently yielded to inclinations to neglect conventional social obligations to pursue spiritual experiences. Taking literally injunctions to love nothing more than Christ, some virtually abandoned regular family life to ‘follow the Lord.’…Leaders soon found it advisable to encourage the faithful to acknowledge and fulfill family obligations…denouncing as ‘false teaching’ the idea that God had called married women to do ‘mission work and to leave the little children at home to fare the best they can.’ ” See Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, p. 93.
6. “Robert Irwin’s Own Story,” New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, p. 3.
7. Bryant, “Family History No. 183,” p. 11.
8. Ibid., p. 7.