The Mad Sculptor (29 page)

A less fanciful possibility was advanced by Commissioner Valentine. “Irwin is a psycho case,” he told reporters, “and we’re afraid he’ll commit suicide the moment he feels we’re getting close to him.” Not long after the commissioner issued this statement, a young man resembling Irwin threw himself from a window of the Hotel Montclair
on Lexington Avenue and 49th Street, leaving behind four dollars to cover his bill and a note to the manager apologizing for “the publicity that my action will cause you.” Two men were brought to the Bellevue morgue to view the body: John Stuart, who had once roomed with Irwin at the Gedeons’ brownstone, and Alexander Ettl, owner of the sculpture-casting firm where Bob had briefly worked in the fall of 1930. Both announced that the young suicide was not Irwin.
²

Ettl, who theorized that Bob might have stabbed Frank Byrnes to death with a sharp-pointed sculptor’s gauge, was featured in the
Mirror
’s center-page photo spread, posing with one of the implements. He wasn’t the only acquaintance of Bob’s to get his picture in the papers. In the coming days, the tabloids would run photographs of anyone their reporters could track down who had some connection to the case: Irwin’s former art students at St. Lawrence University (including the two children of Professor Angus MacLean); Benjamin Hosley, the Canton beekeeper at whose home he had boarded; Leonora Sheldon’s fiancé, Anders Lunde, and her panda-hunting brother, William; Bob’s New York patron, Clarence Low; Pauline Dishaw, the salesgirl who had sold him the gloves he wore on the night of the murders; Gilbert Maggi, his boss at Chelsea Realistic Products, who, after firing Bob, found himself confronted by a cleaver-wielding madman; Leroy Congdon, the divinity student who had been attacked by Bob for no good reason, leading to the latter’s expulsion from theology school; and Arthur Halliburton, his old housemate in Chicago, who had also been on the receiving end of one of Bob’s insane outbursts—“the most brutal beating I have ever known anyone to receive,” as he described it to reporters.
³

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

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.