The Mad Sculptor by Harold Schechter Page A

would represent the prisoner for the moment, but until he had a chance to confer at length with Irwin, he would not commit himself to the case. The arraignment itself lasted only a few minutes. A brief affidavit had been prepared by Detective Crimmins, specifying, in typically stilted legalese, that the defendant had “willfully and feloniously choked and strangled to death” both Mary and Ronnie Gedeon and fatally stabbed Frank Byrnes “with an ice pick held in his hand.” After Leibowitz waived the reading of the full complaint, Magistrate Alexander Brough adjourned the proceedings until Wednesday, June 30, then remanded Irwin to the Tombs without bail.
    When the proceedings were over, Bob and Leibowitz spoke for ten minutes in the detention pen at one side of the courtroom. Bob was then shackled to two detectives and escorted outside to the police wagon parked at the curb. From the rooftops, windows, and fire escapes of the neighborhood tenements, hundreds of men andwomen peered down at the celebrity killer, some of them hooting in derision.
    A short time later, Leibowitz showed up at the Tombs and conferred with Bob in his cell for an hour and a half. Afterward, a swarm of newsmen surrounded the lawyer, bombarding him with questions. Leibowitz said little, though he confirmed that he had decided to represent Irwin. When one of the reporters asked if he would try for an insanity defense, Leibowitz responded with a legal phrase in Latin: “ Res ipsa loquitur ”—the thing speaks for itself. 12
    That same afternoon, Joseph Gedeon’s lawyer, Peter Sabbatino, held a press conference at his East 22nd Street apartment. “We are glad that any suspicion that might have existed against my client has been removed,” he read from a prepared statement. “The original arrest of Mr. Gedeon and the impression created by the police department that he was a suspect always left a cloud on his reputation and character, and he felt in the past weeks that people looked upon him as an unproved murderer. His reputation is now cleared.”
    A strained-looking Ethel, “attired in a black dress and hat that accentuated her pallor,” was there with her father. When reporters began peppering her with questions about Bob—“What do you have to say about Irwin? Did you think he was crazy? Was he your lover?”—she burst into tears and fled to a bedroom.
    Turning to Gedeon, the reporters then tried asking him about the man who had murdered his wife and younger daughter. To every one of their questions, however, the little upholsterer had the same response.
    “Go to hell,” he told them. 13
    Gedeon’s mistreatment at the hands of the police was the subject of an editorial in the next day’s New York Post . Headlined “The Irwin Case: Where Were the Cops?,” the piece was an attack on the “boob police” practice of relying on “mild or severe third degree methods.” The “Gedeon murder case proves the point,” asserted the editor:
Robert Irwin is in jail—but only because he wanted to go to jail. Until he made that decision and surrendered he was as safe from police interference as if he had been a United States Senator on a good-will tour.
The cops concentrated their attention on the father of the murdered Veronica Gedeon for almost a week after the Easter Sunday crime. He was “questioned” day after day. The process, so much easier on the gray matter than crime detection, lasted until Irwin was enabled to go to Cleveland and get a job in a hotel.
There this man, who has confessed the murder of Veronica Gedeon, her mother, and a lodger, lived for three months. With his picture in every police station in the country, he was never bothered by a detective. It was a waitress who finally identified him, but even so he gave Cleveland police the slip after she notified them and went on his way to Chicago.
In Chicago, he walked past hundreds of officers to go to a newspaper office, where he finally surrendered.
    Clearly, “the