The Mad Sculptor by Harold Schechter

Author:Harold Schechter [Schechter, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781853085
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

19

Prime Suspect

For both the newsmen assigned to the case and the public at large, the announcement was a bolt from the blue. Early Monday morning, April 5, Acting Lieutenant Thomas Martin of the Homicide Squad called a news conference at the East 51st Street police station, where he distributed a photograph of a clean-cut, good-looking young man staring intently at the camera.

“We now have a definite suspect in the Gedeon murder,” said Martin. “His name is Robert Irwin. We are more interested in him than in any other man we’ve questioned in this case.” 1

In the days since Ethel revealed the identity of the second, highly volatile “Bobby” in her slain sister’s diary, investigators had uncovered virtually all the key facts about Irwin’s life: his fanatically religious upbringing, his stints in reform school with his delinquent brothers, his time in Hollywood, his studies with Lorado Taft, his attempt at self-emasculation, his two periods of confinement at the Rockland State Hospital, his work as a taxidermist, his recent expulsion from the St. Lawrence University Theological School.

They knew about his “explosive personality,” his pattern of erupting into terrifying outbursts of violent rage, his efforts to “achieve supreme superiority in sculpture” by bottling up his “love urges.” With one hundred detectives assigned to the case, they had traced his movements from Canton to Manhattan on Good Friday, spoken to Clarence Low and Leonora Sheldon, and located the Ottburgs’ boardinghouse, where they learned that Irwin had skipped out sometime in the middle of Saturday night, leaving behind his gray fedora, an empty cardboard carton, and a box of table salt. 2

Besides putting together a compelling circumstantial case, they had found more concrete evidence. Dispatched to Canton, a pair of detectives had quickly tracked down Pauline Dishaw, the salesgirl at the J. J. Newberry department store who had sold Irwin a cheap pair of gray suede gloves, identical in style, size, and material to the one found at the murder scene. In Irwin’s room at the Hosleys’ boardinghouse, where he had left some of his belongings behind, they also turned up his notebook. There, among his paeans to Ethel’s perfection, he had vented his bitterness toward the two women he blamed for coming between him and his beloved. “If only Ronnie and Mrs. G. hadn’t interfered!” he had written. “How I hate Ronnie and her mother for what they have done to me!” 3

These entries strongly suggested that Irwin had a clear-cut motive for the killings: “to revenge himself on Mrs. Gedeon and Veronica for having broken up his romance with Ethel,” as the New York Times reported. Certainly he had the physical strength to commit the strangulations, with powerful hands developed from his years of molding clay and wielding a mallet and chisel. Police had also been informed by several of Irwin’s acquaintances that he “habitually carried” an eight-inch-long sculptor’s tool “with a sharp point and taped handle”— presumably the weapon “with which Byrnes was stabbed.”

They even had a theory linking Irwin to the oddly shaped piece of soap found on the floor of the Gedeons’ living room.

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