The Mad Sculptor (31 page)

It was Ross who put together the vaudeville troupe that Julia had joined in early 1935. Traveling in her company throughout the Midwest, he had fallen in love with the beautiful young violinist. Apparently
Julia was receptive to his “amorous advances” until she discovered that he was still married, at which point she broke off their affair. She remained friendly with him, however, and allowed him to serve as her theatrical agent. For his part, Ross had continued to obsess over Julia. Interviewed by Homicide Squad detectives who had come to inform him of his daughter’s death, Julia’s anguished father told a story of increasing harassment by Ross.

“Julia didn’t know what to do,” Nussenbaum said between sobs. “The man kept continually making advances to her. I went to New York with my brother-in-law and asked him to please leave Julia alone if he really loved her. When I told him that Julia would never marry him, he said that ‘only over my grave will she marry anyone else.’ ”

Just a few hours after a five-state alarm was sent out, State Troopers W. M. Lewis and Edward Smith picked up Ross at his father-in-law’s house. Drunk to the point of stupefaction, he was locked up overnight in the Sullivan County jail without his tie, belt, or shoelaces. The next morning, as tabloid headlines trumpeted the city’s latest crime sensation—“
MURDER IN THE RADIO STUDIO
,” “
TIMES SQUARE HAMMER SLAYING
,” “
BLUDGEONING DEATH OF THE BEAUTIFUL VIOLINIST
”—Detectives Bradley Hammond and John J. Quinn of the NYPD drove him back to Manhattan.

Bleary-eyed, disheveled, and still barely coherent, Ross screamed hysterically while being booked. When newspaper cameramen tried to take his picture, he threw himself facedown on the floor at the feet of District Attorney Dodge, who was photographed looking visibly embarrassed as he stood over the sobbing, prostrate prisoner. Under an intense grilling by Dodge and others, Ross admitted that he “might have hit Julia to defend himself,” though he claimed to have virtually no memory of the events. “I remember seeing the elevator operator on my way to Room 306,” he said. “Julia was there. As to who was there first, I can’t remember because I’d been drinking. I remember that Julia and I were alone and that she argued with me. She hit me with a stick. I don’t remember what kind of stick but I must have taken it from her and hit her with it. I don’t remember
hitting her. The next thing I remember I was on a bus and I fell asleep. I don’t remember how I got to Woodridge, my wife’s home, but I got there. I don’t remember anything until I woke up in jail in Monticello.”

It wasn’t until the close of the interrogation that Ross was told that the girl had died six hours after the discovery of her body. He uttered a terrified shriek and babbled, “No! No! My God, I didn’t kill her. I’d never do anything like that to Julia. She was always so good to me, so kind, so gentle.” Sobbing her name over and over, he was placed in the “suicide cell” overnight.

By then, police knew that the soundproof studio where Julia was attacked had been reserved that Sunday morning by a man named Ross. Convinced that the crime was a coldly premeditated act—that the beautiful young violinist “was deliberately lured to the rehearsal room so that she might be killed in the Sunday morning quiet of a deserted office building”—Dodge announced on Monday afternoon that he would “go before the grand jury as promptly as possible and ask for this man’s indictment for first degree murder.”
¹

Ross’s lawyer, Joseph Perlstein of 1440 Broadway, specialized in theatrical contracts, not criminal defense. With Mischa facing the death penalty, his brother Zachary immediately turned to the man who had represented one hundred thirty clients charged with first-degree murder and saved every one from the electric chair: Samuel S. Leibowitz.

When Ross was arraigned in Homicide Court on Tuesday, April 21, Leibowitz was at his side. Following the proceedings, the Great Defender spoke to reporters. His comments made it clear that he intended to pursue the time-honored tactic of smearing the female victim. Far from being a sexually obsessed stalker, Ross—so Leibowitz suggested—was a loving husband and father whose marriage had run into trouble and who wanted nothing more than to reconcile with his wife. When, during their fateful encounter on Sunday morning, he informed Julia that he was ending their affair and returning to his family, the beautiful “love thief” had flown into a jealous rage and set upon him in a frenzy. Her death was the tragic
outcome of the violent altercation she herself had provoked. “It’s an old, old story,” said Leibowitz, “that a woman cannot steal another woman’s husband without flirting with death.”

Informed of Leibowitz’s remarks, Julia’s family—just returned from her burial at a Jewish cemetery in Fairfield—responded with outrage. “He won’t get away with that,” said her sister, Mrs. Edith Schnee, her voice shaking with indignation. “Ross was Julia’s booking agent and accompanist, that’s all. Their relationship wasn’t even platonic. She could scarcely endure his presence and spent most of her time trying to get him to let her alone.”

Apprised of these remarks, Leibowitz issued a clarifying statement that did little to appease Julia’s family. “I do not want to be misunderstood as condoning the killing of a human being if the same was done unlawfully,” he said. “The relationship between the parties, such as it was, does not justify the taking of human life unlawfully. Nor do I want to paint this unfortunate girl as a sinner and the same time my client as a saint. However, it has been my observation that these triangle affairs eventually lead to tragedy. No woman, or man for that matter, can court another’s spouse without inviting disaster.”

Whatever hope Leibowitz entertained of convincing a jury that Ross hadn’t planned Julia’s murder in advance was severely undermined on Tuesday afternoon, when James Cockerell, superintendent of the Hotel Normandie, identified the murder weapon as a hammer stolen from his tool chest the morning of the killing. He had left the tool chest on the floor beside a public telephone booth in the hotel lobby while he went off on an errand. As Cockerell headed out, he had noticed someone walking by the phone booth—Mischa Ross.

By the time Ross came to trial on Monday, June 7, it was clear that escaping the chair was the best he could hope for. At Leibowitz’s urging—and with the consent of District Attorney Dodge—he pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of second-degree murder, carrying a penalty of twenty years in prison to life. Afterward, “his eyes sparkling with unconcealed happiness at being permitted to dodge
a trial for first-degree murder,” he was taken into the adjoining jury room, where he calmly described to reporters how he had killed Julia Nussenbaum.

“I didn’t think I loved her,” he said. “She was in love with me, though. She knew I was married but she loved me.”

On the evening before the killing, he continued, a friend gave him a bottle of sweet red wine. The next morning, “I drank the whole bottle. It made me sort of light-headed.”

As he started to leave the hotel for the studio, where he and Julia had arranged to meet, he spotted the hammer in the tool chest beside the telephone booth. “I took it with me,” he said, “more for a joke than anything else, I guess.”

As soon as he and Julia met in the studio, they started arguing. They had quarreled frequently, he explained, “and always because I wanted to leave her and go back to my wife.” “She got very excited,” said Ross. “She slapped me. I told her if she felt that way, she should go ahead and kill me. I gave her the hammer. She hit me on the left shoulder and arm. I took the hammer away from her and hit her back. I don’t know how many times.

“She fell to the floor. I don’t remember striking her after she fell. Maybe I did. I don’t know. I don’t remember trying to hide the body like the police say I did. I was in a daze. You fellows know how badly a whole bottle of wine will make you feel.

“I didn’t think she was dead. I left her there on the floor and went away. The next thing I remember I woke up in my father-in-law’s home in Monticello.”

Asked by a reporter if he felt sorry for the slaying, Ross replied, “Naturally.”

Two weeks later at his sentencing, Ross stood weeping self-pitying tears while Leibowitz appealed to Judge Saul S. Streit for clemency: “I don’t think this man went there with murder in his heart. They had a quarrel and he lost his head. There was a genuine affection between them for two years. A life sentence would not serve any purpose. He is not a criminal at heart. It was a crime of passion.”

Judge Streit, however, was unmoved. Referring to the prisoner
as a “heinous, brutal murderer,” he scoffed at Ross’ contention that Julia had struck him first with the hammer. “I can’t see why he brought the hammer here in the first place, or why he struck her from eight to twelve blows with it. I think there’s sufficient evidence here for a jury to find him guilty of murder in the first degree.”

With that, Judge Streit handed down a sentence of thirty-five years to life.

It was not the outcome Ross had hoped for. “I didn’t expect to get more than twenty years to life,” he groused as he was led from the courtroom. For Samuel Leibowitz, however, the case only added to his reputation as the greatest criminal defense attorney of his time—the man who had never lost a client to the chair.
²

22

Henrietta

S
ITUATED AT THE CORNER
of Euclid Avenue and East 12th Street in downtown Cleveland, the Statler was one of the city’s finest hotels, each of its seven hundred rooms equipped with such state-of-the-art amenities as a “private bath with anti-scald device, running ice-water, electric closet light, and a thermostat which keeps the temperature at any point desired by the guest” (as one advertisement touted). A popular site for business conventions, wedding receptions, and charity balls, it was also the favorite gathering place for the Cleveland mob, which not only rented rooms there for its secret initiation ceremonies but also, in 1928, held a historic event on the premises: the first summit meeting of organized crime leaders from around the country, among them such Mafia bigwigs as Joe Profaci, Vincent Mangano, and Pasqualino “Patsy” Lolardo. For any hotel employee, from kitchen helper to concierge, a job at the Statler meant “working within the elite of the service industry.”
¹

One of those employees was Henrietta Koscianski. A buxom, black-eyed nineteen-year-old whose face—apart from her blocky, deeply cleft chin—had a delicate prettiness, Henrietta was the
daughter of poor Polish-American parents who had struggled to send her through high school. She had gone to work immediately after graduation, toiling at various menial jobs before finding a steady position at the Statler. She worked as a pantry maid, preparing vegetables and making salads, desserts, and cold dishes for thirteen dollars a week, most of which went to the support of her family.

In the spring of 1937, Henrietta had been at the hotel for a year and a half, long enough to know most of her fellow employees, at least by sight. Sometime in early May, she noticed a new face among the workers: a young man of medium height with dark, wavy hair and a nice-looking face. He had been hired as a dishwasher, then worked for a few weeks as busboy before being promoted to bar boy in the grillroom, responsible, among his other duties, for keeping the bar stocked with clean glasses and ice and for fetching the bartenders their meals. His name—so he said—was Bob Murray.

A conscientious fellow—described by his supervisor, Mike McNeeley, as “the best worker I ever had”—Bob was much admired by his peers for his artistic ability. During lunch breaks, he would sit at a table in the employees’ cafeteria and sketch deft little portraits of the hotel help that he sold for twenty-five cents each. He was known to be “polite and easy-going,” though he could also “flare into sudden and unexpected fits of anger.” On one occasion, he came close to beating up a busboy named Andy Petro over some trivial disagreement. Only McNeeley’s intervention saved Petro from a thrashing.
²

Sometime in mid-June, Henrietta caught Bob’s eye. He began hanging around the kitchen during the after-dinner lulls, chatting away about art and religion and so many other subjects that Henrietta often had trouble following his conversation. At one point, much to her surprise, he asked her on a date. She turned him down gently, explaining that she “didn’t know him well enough.”

On Wednesday, June 23, Bob offered to sketch Henrietta’s portrait for free. Having heard so much about his artistic talents from the other workers, she readily agreed. She seated herself at the counter while he perched on a nearby stool and began to draw. While he worked, he told her that he “used to earn his living going from
house to house, making sketches of people,” though he didn’t say where or when. He took only ten minutes to finish his picture, a flattering profile view of Henrietta that captured her pert nose, pretty mouth, large dark eyes, and fashionably marcelled hair.

Not long afterward, her night shift over, Henrietta took the service elevator up to the thirteenth-floor employees’ dormitory, where she shared a room with a maid named Dorothy Kresse. Though it was nearing midnight by the time she got ready for bed, Henrietta was still wide-awake. She asked if Dorothy had anything to read. As it happened, Dorothy had just purchased the current issue of one of her favorite magazines,
Inside Detective
. She tossed it over to Henrietta, who quickly became absorbed in the true detective magazine.

Its cover was characteristically lurid. Against a blood-red backdrop, a beautiful young woman, her silk nightgown slipping from one shoulder to expose most of her left breast, cowered on a bed while a pair of clutching male hands reached down for her throat. “
VERONICA GEDEON—MODEL FOR
INSIDE DETECTIVE
IS MURDERED
!” screamed the headline.

The accompanying story, written by the magazine’s editor, West F. Peterson, paid tribute to Ronnie Gedeon as an altogether decent, considerate young woman who, despite her great beauty, never put on airs. “All who encountered Ronnie through business liked her,” Peterson wrote. “She always had a smile for the receptionist, she never ‘ritzed’ the office boy. At Christmas, when one of the staff was ill, she chipped in to buy the convalescent a present.…Members of the art department, who knew her best, said she was fun-loving, conscientious, generous, and altogether likable.