The Mad Sculptor by Harold Schechter

and that all life is only a part of the Divine Life,” said Bob. “I think that the progress of evolution is from the material to the mental or spiritual plane and I think that visualizing, developing the faculty of visualizing, may be one of the greatest contributions in that direction. And I think that by putting myself under pressure at any cost I would be able to contribute.”
    Like others, District Attorney Dodge was particularly curious about Bob’s theft of Lucy Beacco’s worthless alarm clock.
    “What was there about the clock that attracted you?” he asked.
    As before, when Detective Crimmins had posed the same question, Bob grew uncharacteristically flustered.
    “Because I looked at the clock and saw the green lights,” he said nervously.
    “The luminous hands?” said Dodge. “Something about the clock that attracted you and you wanted it?
    “It—it wasn’t the clock,” Bob stammered. “I had a clock. It was the green light…not the numbers…I don’t know.” 10
    At 6:35 Monday morning, a little more than an hour after he finally opened up to the officials, Bob was escorted to the basement and placed in Cell No. 1, the same cell once occupied by Joseph Gedeon during his weeklong ordeal. Five minutes later, with a sergeant and two detectives keeping suicide watch, he stretched out on the cot and, despite the bright light burning directly overhead, fell instantly asleep.
    He was awakened at 8:00 a.m., given a cup of coffee, and taken to the lineup. Hair mussed, suit rumpled, jaw darkened with a three-day growth of stubble, he went through “the routine questioning with ennui written on his face. He smiled frequently and yawned broadly, covering his mouth with a languid gesture. He slouched so insolently that the officer in charge had to shout through a megaphone, ‘Stand up there!’ ”
    With a brawny detective clutching each of his wrists, he was then hustled out the front entrance of headquarters, where a police wagon waited to transport him to his arraignment. Wedged between the two massive lawmen, the slender, five-foot-seven prisoner looked “like a dwarf.” Sinking into the back seat, he spotted a copy of that morning’s Daily News on the cushion beside him. A picture of himself appearing “gay and nonchalant” as he posed for photographers in Chicago occupied the bottom two-thirds of the front page, beneath a headline reading, “ IRWIN ’ S OWN STORY .” Snatching up the paper, he immediately began reading and didn’t raise his head until the van reached Homicide Court a few blocks away.
    A crowd estimated at between 2,500 and 3,000 spectators—the largest such gathering since the mobs that had turned out to gawk at Bruno Richard Hauptmann—surrounded Homicide Court at 301Mott Street. Though the building had been cleared of everyone who had no official business there, the corridors were jammed with municipal employees and the courtroom itself was packed with reporters, detectives, clerks and attendants. Someone else was present, too: Samuel S. Leibowitz.
    The previous day, Bob’s one-line telegram had reached the lawyer at his summer home: “ WILL YOU PLEASE REPRESENT ME ON MY ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK ?” Leibowitz, who frankly admitted how much he thrived on publicity, was immediately intrigued at the thought of defending the nationally known Mad Sculptor. Something else, far less to do with his own love of the limelight, also drew him to the case. His long involvement in the Scottsboro affair had done much to enlarge his social conscience, and he already foresaw that the Irwin trial had a significant societal dimension—the potential to produce, as he put it, “a more logical approach to the problem of dealing with the criminally insane.” 11
    Hurrying back to the city, he had arrived at the courtroom not long before Bob was brought in. Having never so much as set eyes on Irwin, Leibowitz made it clear to the presiding magistrate that he was there on a provisional basis. He