The Mad Sculptor (2 page)

Over the following decades, the neighborhood continued to decline. As waves of European immigrants poured into the city and surged northward from the teeming ghettos of the Lower East Side, Beekman Place became engulfed by slums, its aging brownstones reduced to cheap boardinghouses for the foreign-born workers eking out a living at the waterside factories and abattoirs.

Its rehabilitation began in the 1920s when the East Side riverfront was colonized by Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and other adventurous blue bloods. The old brownstones were renovated into stylish town houses, while several elegant apartment buildings, designed by some of the era’s leading architects, arose on the site. One of the most impressive structures was the twenty-six-story Art Deco skyscraper at the corner of East 49th Street and First Avenue. Intended as a club and dormitory for college sorority women, it was originally known as the Panhellenic House but was renamed the Beekman Tower when it became a residential hotel for both sexes in 1934.
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By then, the now-fashionable neighborhood was home to a particularly rich concentration of artists, writers, and theatrical celebrities, among them Katharine Cornell, Ethel Barrymore, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. In later years, the neighborhood would boast such residents as Irving Berlin, Greta Garbo, and Noël Coward.

While Beekman Place and its even swankier neighbor, Sutton Place, were undergoing their revival, however, the surrounding
streets remained untouched by gentrification. In the early 1930s, the area was a glaring study in contrasts, a neighborhood where luxury towers soared amid grimy tenements, where frayed laundry hung on lines within sight of private gardens, and where young toughs frolicked in the river beside the yachts and motor launches of the superrich.

In October 1935, New York theatergoers got a vivid look at this “strange otherworld” when the socially conscious crime drama
Dead End
opened on Broadway. Written by Pulitzer Prize–winner Sidney Kingsley (and later adapted for the screen by Lillian Hellman), the play concerns a poor aspiring young architect named Gimpty, hopelessly in love with a beautiful society girl; a vicious gangster named Baby-face Martin, drawn back to the old neighborhood by vestigial stirrings of human sentiment; and a gang of adolescent wharf rats seemingly doomed to criminal lives of their own. Its setting, inspired by the dock off 53rd Street just north of Beekman Place, is described in stage directions that perfectly capture the jarring contrasts that characterized the area in the mid-1930s:

DEAD END
of a New York street, ending in a wharf over the East River. To the left is a high terrace and a white iron gate leading to the back of the exclusive East River Terrace Apartments. Hugging the terrace and filing up the street are a series of squalid tenement houses. And here on the shore, along the Fifties is a strange sight. Set plumb down in the midst of slums, antique warehouses, discarded breweries, slaughter houses, electrical works, gas tanks, loading cranes, coal-chutes, the very wealthy have begun to establish their city residence in huge, new, palatial apartments.

The East River Terrace is one of these. Looking up this street from the vantage of the River, we see only a small portion of the back terrace and a gate; but they are enough to suggest the towering magnificence of the whole structure.…Contrasting sharply with all this richness is the diseased street below, filthy, strewn with torn newspapers and garbage from the tenements. The tenement houses are close, dark and crumbling.
They crowd each other. Where there are curtains in the windows, they are streaked and faded; where there are none, we see through to hideous, water stained, peeling wallpaper, and old broken-down furniture. The fire escapes are cluttered with gutted mattresses and quilts, old clothes, bread-boxes, milk bottles, a canary cage, an occasional potted plant struggling for life.
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Exactly two weeks after
Dead End
premiered, Beekman Place was suddenly in the news—not as the inspiration for Broadway’s latest hit but as the site of a shocking murder, a crime that swiftly turned into New York’s biggest tabloid sensation in years. Two other, even more gruesome killings would occur there within an eighteen-month span. One helped ignite a nationwide panic over a supposed epidemic of psychopathic sex crimes. The other came to be viewed as among the most spectacular American murder cases of the century.

If
Dead End
was meant to convey a message about the roots of criminality—“that mean streets breed gangsters”
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—these grisly real-life crimes carried a moral of their own, one that had less to do with Kingsley’s brand of 1930s social realism than with the Gothic nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe. Beekman Place—a supposed bastion of safety for the privileged few—turned out to be much like Prince Prospero’s castellated fortress in “The Masque of the Red Death.” For all its wealth and glamour, it could not keep horror at bay.

2

Vera and Fritz

T
O BECOME A TRUE TABLOID
sensation, a murder has to offer more than morbid titillation. It needs a pair of outsized characters—diabolical villain and defenseless, preferably female, victim—a dramatic storyline, and the kind of lurid goings-on that speak to the secret dreams and dangerous desires of the public. In short, the same juicy ingredients we look for in any good potboiler.

Certainly there was no shortage of shocking homicides during the latter half of November 1935. In upstate New York, sixteen-year-old Sylvester Lancaric—resentful of the attentions his mother lavished on his baby brother, John—stomped his little sibling to death. Not many miles away, twenty-three-year-old LeRoy Smith of Ladentown was kidnapped, held captive for three days, then shot through the heart by the jealous ex-boyfriend of his teenage sweetheart, Mary Swope Philpot. A twenty-one-year-old Virginia woman, Edith Maxwell, killed her father by “beating him over the head with her high-heeled shoe when he attempted to whip her for staying out until nearly midnight” with her date. In Columbus, Texas, Benny Mitchell and Ernest Collins, both seventeen, brutally murdered
nineteen-year-old Geraldine Kollman when she caught them stealing pecans on her father’s ranch. And in Washington, D.C., the body of twenty-six-year-old stenographer and choir singer Corinna Loring was found dumped in a park, her neck bound with wrapping cord and “wounds on her temple looking as though her head had been clamped in a pair of ice tongs.”
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Gruesome as they were, however, none of these murders earned more than a few fleeting columns in the tabloids. The case of Vera Stretz, by contrast, dominated the front pages for weeks.

At around 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, November 12, 1935, Miss Mary Hazelton, a guest on the twentieth floor of the Beekman Tower, was startled awake by a noise never heard before inside the exclusive residential hotel: a series of rapid cracks, unmistakably the sound of gunfire, coming from somewhere overhead. She immediately telephoned the assistant night manager, Mr. Leslie Taite, at his post at the front desk.

Taking the elevator to the top story, Taite began a fruitless check for signs of disturbance, working his way down floor by floor. When he emerged onto the nineteenth floor, he spotted a woman perched on the little sofa beside the elevator, wearing a gray cloth coat with a chinchilla collar and a close-fitting gray felt hat. Clutched in her hands was a large black handbag of crushable pin seal leather. She appeared, Taite later testified, “a little dazed.”

“Have you found him?” asked the woman.

Taite replied that he hadn’t found anyone and didn’t know what the woman was talking about.

“He’s on the twenty-first floor,” said the woman. “Room 2114. Rap on the door. If no one answers, go in. There’s a man there who may need some help.”

Leaving the woman, Taite immediately rode back up to the twenty-first floor, hurried to the designated room, and knocked on the door. When no one responded, he entered with his passkey.

Lying motionless on his side in the bedroom was a middle-aged man in a blood-soaked nightshirt. Taite knew who he was: Dr. Fritz
Gebhardt, a prominent German financier and regular tenant of the hotel. Taite saw at a glance that Gebhardt was dead. Snatching up the phone from the bed table, he called the police.

By then, the woman who had directed him to the room was making her way down the staircase. At the third-floor landing, however, her progress was barred by a padlocked accordion gate. Abandoning the stairwell, she rang for the service elevator. A few moments later, the elevator arrived and the door slid open. Inside was a pair of police officers, John Holden and Walter A. Mitchell, who had just arrived in response to Taite’s call.

“Where are you going?” asked Holden.

“I want to go down,” said the woman, though she made no move to get into the elevator.

As Holden stepped out and approached her, she suddenly said: “How is he?”

“Who do you mean?” said Holden.

“The man upstairs,” said the woman. “Is he all right?”

“I don’t know,” said Holden. “Why?”

“I shot him,” the woman said calmly.

“Let me see that handbag,” said Holden.

Shaking her head, the woman clutched the purse more tightly to her body.

Holden reached out and tore it from her grasp. Undoing the chromium clasp, which bore the monogram “VS,” he pulled the bag open, peered inside, then reached in and removed a .32-caliber double-action revolver, still warm to his palm.

“All right, you have the gun,” said the woman. “Now give me back my bag.”

“I think I’ll hold onto it,” said Holden. Later, in the station house, detectives emptied the bag and—along with a compact, lipstick, and embroidered handkerchief—found a box containing forty-six .32-caliber cartridges, four discharged shells, the key to the dead man’s room, a platinum ring set with a square-cut aquamarine, and a crumpled silk woman’s nightgown, badly stained with blood.

Escorted to the twenty-first floor by the two patrolmen, the
woman—who had given her name as Vera Stretz—was led into Gebhardt’s room, shown the bullet-riddled body, and asked “why she did it.”

“Please don’t ask me that,” she said. “I’ll only talk to a lawyer.”
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At the East 51st Street precinct house, she was questioned by Deputy Chief Inspector Francis J. Kear, in command of Manhattan detectives. Beyond admitting to the murder, Stretz—so cool and composed that the tabloids quickly branded her the “Icy Blonde”—stubbornly refused to discuss it. By then, reporters had gotten wind of the murder and dozens of newspapermen had gathered at the station house, among them the celebrity columnist Walter Winchell, who, on the following morning, would describe Stretz as “an attractive blonde woman—nothing sassy or brassy about her—but wholesome, sweet, her clothes were plain and in good taste.” As she was being led off to Homicide Court for her arraignment, several newsmen called out, “Why did you do it, Vera?” All she would say was: “It’s a long story—a very long story.”
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Investigators, however, already believed that they had pieced most of that story together. Searching Vera’s apartment on the nineteenth floor of the Beekman Tower Hotel, they had discovered a cache of correspondence between the couple, along with a suicide note and a will written out by Vera two days before the slaying. The thirty-one-year-old Stretz—the cultured, NYU-educated daughter of a well-known musician and bandleader—had met the dashing Gebhardt the previous December on a holiday cruise to the Caribbean. During a romantic New Year’s Eve stop at Havana, they had danced through the night and exchanged a romantic kiss at the stroke of twelve. Their shipboard flirtation had swiftly blossomed into a full-blown affair.

By June 1935, Vera had gone to work at his Fifth Avenue import firm, Frank von Knoop & Co., where she served as both his personal secretary and, as the tabloids put it, his “office wife” (a phrase only recently popularized by Faith Baldwin’s best-selling novel of that name). That same month, the two had taken a vacation to Lake George, New York, registering in a hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Gebhardt.
Not long after their return, Vera had moved into an apartment in the Beekman Tower, two floors beneath her lover’s. Sometime in late July, before leaving on a business trip to Europe, Gebhardt had presented her with the aquamarine ring.
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Throughout their lengthy separation, they had exchanged scores of impassioned letters. He was her “Darling Fritzie” who made her feel “feverish” with desire. She was his “Veralein,” his “dear girlie,” who filled him with such longing that “the fastest steamer” was “not fast enough to take me home to you.”
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She was understandably stunned, therefore, when, upon his long-awaited return on November 8, he revealed the existence of a wife and children in Baden-Baden—a family he had no intention of abandoning.

“The belated discovery that Dr. Gebhardt, whom she had told girl friends was her ‘fiancé,’ already had a wife in Germany sent her on her errand of death,” the
Daily News
reported on the morning after the murder:

As detectives reconstructed the tragedy, Miss Stretz went to the fashionable apartment of the German industrialist intending to slay both him and herself after learning that he had a wife living abroad. As a prelude to her adventure with death, she participated in a highly romantic interlude—as the negligee bore witness. Sometime during—or after—this impassioned scene, the role of the blonde secretary changed. From her handbag she obtained the revolver she had brought to the tryst and sent four shots into Dr. Gebhardt’s body through his old-fashioned nightgown.…The finding of the will, made out by the girl two days earlier, led to the deduction that she had planned not only the murder of her lover but her own suicide as well. If such was the case, she lost her nerve after firing the four shots into Dr. Gebhardt.
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