The Mad Sculptor (41 page)

Bob was also invoked in another far more impressive magazine piece, this one by the famous author Theodore Dreiser, whose abiding fascination with sensational murders had resulted in his 1925 masterpiece,
An American Tragedy
. Published in the
North American Review
, the article deals, among other things, with the admixture of good and evil impulses within every person. Addressing his readers directly, Dreiser asks them to consider why they—
we
—derive so much enjoyment from reading about horrific murders. And the example he chooses is the case of Robert Irwin:

Why do so many—not all, but many—run to see a crashed plane, or a train, or two autos with numerous dead about? Why? What is it? Weariness of humdrum and commonplace? Love of change? Horror of the same thing happening to themselves? Or is it something evil in them? In us? Do we like to see other people suffer when we ourselves are safe and don’t suffer? Are we really just evil or a mixture of good and evil, whether we want to be or not?

This, too, is something to think of in connection with this Gedeon murder by Robert Irwin.…For in connection with this particular murder do you recall the national excitement? Everyone was interested.…Do you recall the sales of the newspapers during those four weeks in which the murder was the hourly extra edition feature? Any least little thing in connection with it? When Papa Gedeon was arrested? When the sister was found? When Irwin’s name was first mentioned?…
If you ran and bought extras, as many of you did, are you evil?…Will you get mad if I suggest that it is because some of you like murders, terrible ones, particularly where they relieve the monotony of life?
¹⁹

Dreiser wasn’t the only important American novelist fascinated by the Irwin case. Robert Penn Warren, for example—future U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist for his 1946 bestseller,
All the King’s Men
—based the shocking, climactic murder scene of his second novel,
At Heaven’s Gate
, on Bob’s strangulation of Ronnie Gedeon.
²⁰

Far more extensive use of the Irwin case was made by Thomas Berger, best known for his satiric Western,
Little Big Man,
published in 1964. Despite a prefatory note advising readers “not to identify the characters in the narrative which follows—criminals, policemen, madmen, citizens, or any combination thereof—with real human beings,” his 1967 novel,
Killing Time,
is such a thinly veiled version of the Irwin case that it amounts to a roman à clef. Only the slightest changes have been made to the real-life facts.

On Christmas Day, an attractive young woman named Betty Bayson—along with her husband, Arthur, and her scrawny, hard-drinking father, Andrew Starr—arrives at her mother’s apartment to find a scene of carnage. The naked body of her strangled sister “Billie,” a promiscuous underwear model, is sprawled on a bed, from beneath which protrude the feet and ankles of their murdered mother. A male boarder named Appleton lies dead on the floor of the living room, a screwdriver sticking out his left temple. Old man Starr becomes the immediate suspect and is subjected to a brutal interrogation, though the police quickly realize that he is innocent.

The central figure of the darkly comic novel is the actual killer, a young sculptor/taxidermist named Joe Detweiler. A likeable fellow—except for his sporadic outbursts of homicidal rage—Detweiler, son of a séance-holding mother, has devoted his life to perfecting a technique called Realization that will allow him to travel through
space “using only his mind.” In his effort to concentrate all his energies on developing this technique, he has tried to have his penis amputated. Arrested for the triple murder, he is represented by “the best defense counsel in America,” a brilliant courtroom strategist named Henry Webster Melrose who has won eighty-two capital cases and lost none. In the end, Detweiler, after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, is sentenced to life, given an immediate examination by prison psychiatrists who find him insane, and transferred to an “institution for the confinement of felonious lunatics.”
²¹

Though Berger’s book was widely reviewed, there is no indication that Bob was aware of it. By the time of its publication, he had been transferred to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Fishkill, New York. Eight years later, after a long, agonizing struggle with cancer, he died there at age sixty-seven.

His former attorney, Sam Leibowitz, outlived him by three years, dying of a stroke in June 1978 at the age of eighty-four. For the last twenty-nine years of his professional life, until his retirement in 1970, Leibowitz had served on the bench, having been elected Justice of the Kings County Court in 1941.

At the time he ran for the judgeship, opponents warned that the man who made his early reputation by representing the likes of Al Capone and Mad Dog Coll would be soft on criminals before the bar. Their predictions proved wildly off the mark. Before long, the Great Defender had acquired a new nickname: “Sentencing Sam.” First as a Criminal Court Judge in Brooklyn, later as a State Supreme Court Judge, he referred to accused criminals as “animals” and “rats,” spoke harshly in open court to their lawyers, and boasted that he was “tough with hardened criminals because toughness is all they understand.” When one felon who had offered to testify suddenly clammed up on the stand, Leibowitz roared: “I’ll give you a thousand years, if necessary! You’ll be buried in jail so you never see daylight again!”

He was also highly vocal on a charged political issue. Believing
that it served as an effective deterrent and helped, as he put it, to “eliminate poisonous snakes from the community,” Judge Leibowitz—the former lawyer who had saved more than a hundred clients, including Robert Irwin, from the chair—became a staunch advocate of capital punishment.
²²

Epilogue

The Lonergan Case

I
N THE DECADES
before Helen Gurley Brown became its editor and turned it into a swinging-sixties sex guide for single young women,
Cosmopolitan
magazine was a general interest monthly, combining fiction and feature articles on myriad subjects. One of the highlights of its October 1948 issue was a piece titled “Ten Greatest Crimes of the Century,” written by one of the founding fathers of the hard-boiled detective genre, Raymond Chandler, author of
The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye
, and other noir classics.

No. 1 on Chandler’s list is the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. No. 2 is the Ruth Snyder–Henry Judd Gray “Double Indemnity” murder, the greatest tabloid sensation of the 1920s. The Robert Irwin “Mad Sculptor” case comes in at No. 3—ahead of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (No. 4), the kidnap-murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb (No. 8), and the serial murders committed by William Heirens, the infamous “Lipstick Killer” (No. 10).

Had the article been written fifty years later—at the end of the century instead of the middle—it would undoubtedly have included such sensational crimes as the Manson murders, the Columbine
massacre, and the O. J. Simpson case. Still, Chandler’s choices, by and large, have withstood the test of time. Only one has so completely faded from public memory that even most histories of American crime make no mention of it. It appears on Chandler’s list as No. 9: the Lonergan case.
¹

Born into a middle-class Catholic family in Toronto, the youngest of three children, Wayne Lonergan grew up possessed of every trait necessary to the career of a professional fortune hunter: dashing good looks, glittering charm, easy sexuality, and a driving desire to enjoy the high life. Celebrity scribe Dominick Dunne aptly compares him to Patricia Highsmith’s social-climbing, sociopathic hero, Tom Ripley, described by his creator “suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral.”
²

In the spring of 1939, hungry for the kind of thrills his stodgy hometown couldn’t supply, twenty-two-year-old Wayne abandoned Toronto and made his way to New York City, where he promptly found work as a “chair boy” at the newly opened World’s Fair. Garbed in a uniform that showed off his physique to best advantage—“khaki shorts, a white shirt rolled up over the elbows, and a pith helmet”—he pushed weary sightseers around the grounds in a rented rattan wheelchair. It was in that capacity that he met Bill Burton.
³

A roly-poly forty-three-year-old with epicurean tastes, Burton—born William Bernheimer—was heir to a $7 million fortune from his family’s flourishing brewery, at one time the world’s largest. Married, with a daughter named Patricia, he kept a villa on the French Riviera, dabbled in society portraiture, and played sugar daddy to an endless stream of young male lovers.

Shortly after meeting Burton at the fair, golden-boy Wayne Lonergan—happy to hop into bed with anyone, male or female, who could provide him entrée into Manhattan’s fast-living “café-society” set—became the latest of the older man’s “protégés.”

Bill Burton suffered a fatal heart attack in October 1940. By then, his daughter, Patsy, had become infatuated with her father’s former
boyfriend. In July 1941, the pair of lovebirds eloped to Las Vegas and were married. “If he was good enough for my father,” twenty-one-year-old Patsy explained, “he’s good enough for me.”
⁴

Patsy promptly became pregnant, but neither her delicate condition nor the birth of their son in the spring of 1942 put a damper on their nightlife. When the two weren’t out carousing at the Stork Club or El Morocco, they were at each other’s throats. “They fought like cats and dogs,” one close friend recalled. “There was never any peace between them. Once, when they got into an argument, I heard her say to Wayne, ‘I suppose that’s to be expected when a girl marries a man who’s beneath her.’ ”

Neighbors complained of the hair-raising screams emanating from the couple’s apartment. When questioned about the commotion, Wayne blithely explained, “Oh, we had a row and I beat her up.”
⁵

To no one’s surprise, the couple separated in the summer of 1943, exactly two years after their wedding. Soon afterward, Wayne returned to Toronto, where he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a cadet, while Patsy—after cutting him out of her will and naming their infant son, Wayne Jr., as her heir—threw herself into her nightly social whirl with wholehearted abandon.

Her activities on the night of Saturday, October 23, 1943, were typical. At a little after seven o’clock, her date, a forty-three-year-old Italian count named Mario Enzo Gabellini, picked her up and took her to the bar at the Peter Cooper Hotel on East 39th Street, where they rendezvoused with another couple, a magazine publisher named Thomas Farrell and his date. After imbibing a few drinks, the four taxied to a restaurant on East 58th Street, where they consumed several more rounds of liquor with dinner. From there they repaired to the Stork Club for a long evening of dancing and drinking. After closing the place down at 4:00 a.m., they headed for Farrell’s apartment for a few more hours of drinking. It was 6:30 a.m. when Gabellini finally took Patsy home. Too exhausted to put on a nightgown or turn down the bed, she stripped off her garments—mink jacket, black dress, girdle, bra, panties and stockings—tossed them onto a
cushioned bench and collapsed on top of the covers of her Second Empire–style four-poster.
⁶

Wayne had flown to New York City that weekend on a forty-eight-hour pass and was staying at the Upper East Side apartment of a friend, John Harjes. On Saturday, October 23, after lunching with friends, he purchased a stuffed elephant for his eighteen-month-old son at the Fifth Avenue toy emporium FAO Schwarz, then paid a brief visit to the boy, playing with him for about an hour. Sometime around 7:00 p.m., smartly dressed in his RCAF uniform, he headed uptown to pick up his date for the evening, Mrs. Jean Murphy Jaburg, a one-time stage actress and movie bit player, recently separated from her husband. She and Wayne attended the Broadway hit
One Touch of Venus
, followed by a midnight dinner at the ‘21’ Club and drinks at the Blue Angel supper club. At around 3:00 a.m., he dropped her off at her apartment, kissed her good night, and made a lunch date for Sunday at the Plaza Hotel.

When they met the following day around noon, Wayne was no longer dressed in his uniform but in an expensive, if somewhat ill-fitting, suit. He was also wearing Max Factor foundation makeup on his chin, though Mrs. Jaburg appeared not to notice. After lunch, they returned to her apartment for a few hours before Wayne took a cab to LaGuardia Airport for a flight back to Toronto.
⁷

Since Patsy frequently needed a full day to recover from her previous night’s exploits, no one was immediately worried when she failed to emerge from her bedroom on Sunday. It wasn’t until early evening that her naked body was discovered sprawled across her bed, her head beaten in with a pair of fourteen-inch brass candlesticks, the room a shambles. Bits of human flesh were subsequently found under her fingernails, evidently scratched from the face of her killer.

With sixty detectives assigned to the case, Wayne was swiftly tracked to Toronto. The police were quick to note some nasty scratches on his chin. Proclaiming his innocence, Wayne waived extradition and was flown back to New York City, where—so he
announced—he intended “to help the authorities” find his wife’s killer.

Grilled for twenty-four straight hours, he told a story so unsavory that his interrogators were initially nonplussed. According to Wayne, after bidding Jean Murphy Jaburg good night early Sunday morning following their night on the town, he had picked up an American soldier on Lexington Avenue and brought him back to John Harjes’s apartment for sex. Wayne had then fallen asleep, only to awaken sometime later to find the other man rummaging through the pockets of his uniform. He had leaped on the man and, in the bitter fight that ensued, his face had been badly scratched. Finally, the other soldier managed to pull free and escape, making off with Wayne’s uniform and all the money in his pockets. Wayne had been forced to borrow one of his friend’s suits for his Sunday lunch date at the Plaza with Mrs. Jaburg.