The Mad Sculptor (6 page)

John himself had been working at Kruger’s shop for the past three years, sweeping out the place, cleaning the display windows, and helping with the upholstery, a skill he had picked up during one of his stints in the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York. From the age of twelve—when he was arrested for stealing a bicycle—Fiorenza had been in and out of trouble with the law. In the scheme of things, his offenses were trivial. His most serious conviction to date, on a charge of grand larceny, had resulted from the theft of two snare drums and a trombone from the basement of a neighborhood music shop. A psychiatrist who examined him at the time diagnosed Fiorenza as a “neurotic type of personality deviate” with poor impulse control: “with him, the wish is father to the thought
and leads quickly to action without consideration or foresight.” On two occasions, he had given in to an “uncontrollable urge to take ‘joy rides,’ ” making off with stolen cars in broad daylight, once with the owner clinging precariously to the running board and shouting for him to stop. “Perhaps,” a prominent New York City psychoanalyst named Walter Bromberg ventured, “this urge to drive cars could be interpreted as a symbolic expression of the pressure of unrecognized, powerful sexual drives.” Bromberg, of course, had the benefit of hindsight. Until Good Friday 1936, no one—John Fiorenza included—realized just how dangerously explosive his sexual drives were.

Kruger—who regarded his assistant as a “good-natured” if “not very quick-witted” young man whose troubles had been “over little things”—knew all about John’s police record. Indeed, that very morning, Fiorenza had shown up late for work in order to keep an appointment with his probation officer, Peter Gambaro. Or so Theodore Kruger had been led to believe.
⁸

From the rear of the truck, Kruger and his assistant removed a loveseat, newly upholstered in green fabric. They had picked up the little sofa the previous day from the Tittertons’ apartment and were now returning it as per prearrangement. Their load wasn’t heavy and the two men had no trouble carrying it up to the fourth floor, where they found the Tittertons’ door ajar. After rapping on the door and getting no response, they carried the loveseat inside and set it down in its original location in the living room. Kruger called out for Mrs. Titterton. Receiving no answer, he left the bill on the seat cushion, then motioned for his helper to follow him from the apartment. They had just started down the stairway when Kruger—thinking he would telephone Mrs. Titterton once he returned to his shop and make sure she was satisfied with the job—decided to go back and get her phone number.

“I found the phone in the bedroom and took the number,” Kruger told reporters later that day. “Suddenly I noticed the bathroom light was on and the door was open a few inches. I walked over and knocked. Finally I pushed the door wide open.”

A woman’s foot hung over the edge of the bathtub. Kruger called out Mrs. Titterton’s name, but the figure in the bathtub did not stir. He went closer and peered into the tub. “My knees began shaking and I felt sick,” he related. “I shouted to Johnny, ‘My God, something’s happened to the missus! Call the police!’ ”

Fiorenza did as he was told. Kruger was so rattled that only much later would he recall something strange. Though Fiorenza had not yet even glanced into the bathroom, he told the sergeant who answered: “There’s a woman tied up in the bathtub.”
⁹

In less than five minutes, a half dozen homicide detectives were crowded inside the Tittertons’ bathroom. Inside the tub, Nancy lay on her stomach, naked except for a torn white slip bunched around her waist and the sheer magenta-colored hose hanging down her legs. Twisted around her neck was a makeshift noose, fashioned from a pink pajama top and a matching silk dressing jacket, tightly knotted together. Water dripping from the showerhead had pooled around her dark, swollen face.

From the state of the apartment, the detectives were able to reconstruct the general circumstances of the crime. There was no sign of forced entry; evidently, Nancy had freely admitted her killer. The kitchen, living room, and library were undisturbed. The assault had taken place in the bedroom, where one of the twin beds was in disarray and the victim’s garter belt, brassiere, blue tweed skirt, and pink blouse were strewn around the floor, violently ripped from her body by her attacker. Ligature marks on her wrists showed that he had bound her hands together before raping her. Afterward, she had been garroted and dragged into the bathroom. An autopsy revealed that she was still alive when she was dumped in the tub and had died of slow asphyxiation.
¹⁰

At approximately 5:45 p.m., Assistant Medical Examiner Thomas A. Gonzales arrived on the scene. Moments later, Lewis Titterton returned from work. He had not been notified of the tragedy and was startled by the milling crowd outside his building and the fleet
of police cars at the curb. He collapsed in horror at the news that greeted him upstairs.

After finishing his preliminary examination, Dr. Gonzales ordered the body removed. Lying beneath it on the bottom of the tub was a strand of cord about thirteen inches long, cleanly cut at both ends. Though it matched the marks on Nancy’s wrists, it was too short to have kept her hands tightly bound. Detectives immediately deduced that it came from a longer piece of rope. Evidently, the killer, intent on removing all physical evidence, had sliced off the rope and carried it away with him. In his haste, however, this segment, concealed beneath Nancy’s body, had escaped his notice.

To the naked eye, there was nothing at all distinctive about the piece of cord. In the end, however, it would prove to be the key element in a landmark feat of forensic detection: “the string,” as the
Daily News
declared, “that tied the slayer to the chair.”
¹¹

From the moment the story broke, the Beekman Place “Bathtub Murder” became the talk of the town, thanks to the gleefully exploitive coverage by the tabloids. That the killing occurred exactly one week to the day after Vera Stretz’s acquittal and just a block north of the building where Fritz Gebhardt was shot to death only added to its lurid appeal.
¹²

Hearst’s
Mirror
did its usual shameless job of turning the tragedy into prurient entertainment. On Saturday, April 11, under the headline “
HOW WOMAN WAS FOUND STRANGLED TO DEATH IN MURDER MYSTERY
,” it presented the gruesome sex-killing as a five-panel comic strip, complete with graphic drawings of the corpse and a fedora-wearing detective bearing a marked resemblance to Dick Tracy. The following day, its entire back page—normally reserved for the latest sports headlines—was devoted to a voyeuristic photo of Mrs. Titterton’s body being removed from the apartment on its way to the morgue.
¹³

In the relentlessly titillating coverage of the case, the victim—by all accounts a demure, “owlishly solemn” woman who favored modest
tweeds and sports clothes and wore her hair in a mannish cut—was portrayed as a slinky redhead who liked to parade around her apartment in a negligee, even when “delivery boys and workmen” were present. As if the particulars of the murder weren’t sensational enough, the tabloids spiced up their stories with hints of sexual perversion. According to the
Mirror,
Dr. Gonzales’s initial examination of the violated corpse revealed “evidence of abnormality that convinced him that only a degenerate could have committed the crime.” Citing experts like Arthur Carey, former head of the NYPD’s homicide bureau, the
News
informed readers that “crimes of this shocking type” are “relatively frequent,” as should be expected “with so many perverted, twisted, and mentally unbalanced persons on the loose.”
¹⁴

The
Mirror,
true to its three-ring-circus sensibility, cited experts of its own, like “Mrs. Myra Kingsley, prominent astrologist of 225 East 54th Street,” who determined from the victim’s horoscope “that the crime was due to the conjunction of the planet Mars—the War God—with the Sun in the Eighth house, which signifies
DEATH
.” Mrs. Kingsley also deduced from Nancy’s “chart that the murderer was an older man, and that he either came from or has gone to a distance since the crime was committed.” Not to be outdone, the
Post
hired its own astrologist, Mrs. Belle Bart, who insisted that “the murderer is German or English, has a light complexion, takes drugs or drinks, met Mrs. Titterton in the fall of 1935, escaped from Beekman Place in a southwesterly direction and would probably be arrested in Washington Square or thereabouts.”
¹⁵

Within a week of the murder, the unknown, aspiring author had become such a tabloid sensation that the headlines simply called her by first name: “
NANCY KNEW KILLER
,” “
MAN OF MYSTERY BOUGHT NANCY FLOWERS
,” “
NANCY
’
S HUSBAND NAMES MURDER SUSPECT
.”
¹⁶
Visiting from England at the time was a writer of authentic renown: Marie Belloc Lowndes, best known for her novel
The Lodger,
a thriller about Jack the Ripper made into an early Alfred Hitchcock film. On the evening of Friday, April 18, she dined with Edmund Pearson, dean of American true crime historians. Her
diary entry about the occasion records only a single topic of conversation: “All New York is horrified over the murder of a woman writer, Mrs. Titterton, strangled on Good Friday. She was about thirty and happily married.” Speculating on the identity of the killer, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes could reach only one conclusion: “It was a lunatic’s murder.”
¹⁷

There was no shortage of suspects, beginning with Lewis Titterton. He was not only the victim’s husband—always the likeliest perpetrator when a married woman meets a violent death—but also a bookwormish Brit “whose accent and manner were alone enough to put the average detective’s back up,” as one commentator noted.
¹⁸
Titterton, however, had no trouble proving he was at work all day. And even the cops most inclined to sneer at his egghead demeanor were moved by the depth of his grief.

For a few days, investigators focused on a “sandy-haired young man with needlepoint eyes and a manner that verged on the feminine” who, according to the Countess Alice Hoyos—a beautiful divorcée occupying the apartment directly below the Tittertons’—had been skulking around the neighborhood for the previous week. W. A. DeWitt, a writer for
Reader’s Digest
who lived in the neighboring building, claimed that, on the morning of the murder, he had glanced through his window and seen a “Negro in dungarees walking across the roof of No. 22 Beekman Place from which access to the fire escape leading to the Titterton apartment was readily accessible.” Other supposed witnesses pointed their fingers at “a shifty-eyed youth loitering in front of the building,” “a reputedly demented man who had been annoying maids and matrons in the neighborhood,” and a pair of mysterious “prowlers, one in his early twenties with several missing teeth, the other a forty-year-old man with a florid face.”
¹⁹

From Police Chief George Fallon of Quincy, Massachusetts, came a tip about a fugitive wanted for a similar bathtub strangling in that city. Another official, Dr. Carleton Simon, “former Special Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD and present criminologist of
the International Association of the Chiefs of Police,” opined that Mrs. Titterton died “as the innocent victim of a sexual adventurer who, obeying an uncontrollable emotional urge, set out to talk his way into apartments in the Beekman Place district. He planned to force his attentions upon any women he met who challenged his bestial desire. Mrs. Titterton chanced to be that woman.”
²⁰

That Nancy had admitted her killer into the apartment and even, as the evidence suggested, allowed him into her bedroom fueled a host of scandalous rumors that the tabloids were only too happy to promote. Every day brought unsubstantiated stories of another secret paramour. There was the “rejected suitor of her bachelor girlhood who had been in touch with her since her marriage.” The “brilliant literary figure widely known to millions” who urged Nancy to “divorce her husband and marry him.” The mysterious gentleman who, according to a neighborhood florist, “frequently bought gardenias there for Mrs. Titterton.” At one point, the
Mirror
even had her consorting with “a youngish male adventurer of the type known as a ‘gigolo.’ ”
²¹

Her family and friends reacted with outraged denials. From Dayton, her grieving mother, Mrs. Frank Evans, issued a statement affirming the warmth of Nancy’s marriage: “She never mentioned the name of any other man but Lewis to me in her letters. They were completely devoted to each other.” A close friend of the Tittertons, Caroline Singer—well-known writer of travel books and wife of famed illustrator Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge—concurred. “I never saw more devoted persons than Nancy and her husband,” she told reporters. “There was no possibility of an outside love interest in her life. She was too fastidious for anything so sordid as a semi-Bohemian relationship with some other man. She had an integrity of character which would have prevented any second-rate love affair.” Besides, added Singer, even if Nancy
had
been unfaithful, she would certainly have chosen a tender and sensitive lover, not “the brute type of man” who might resort to physical violence.
²²

The police, too, swiftly dismissed the love-affair angle. On the
day of Nancy’s funeral—a simple Episcopalian service attended by more than two hundred people, most from the publishing world—Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons cautioned reporters not to leap to salacious conclusions. “We are satisfied now that Mrs. Titterton voluntarily admitted the man. This does not mean, however, that he was a lover or even a close friend. It may have been a salesman or repair man of some sort, someone who made a casual call.”
²³