The Mad Sculptor Read Online Free PDF Page B

anyone testify to his movements after 3:00 a.m.
    There was also the matter of his clothing. Several patrons of Corrigan’s had told detectives that they recalled seeing Gedeon in a shabby brown suit on the night of the killings. Since Sunday, however, he had been wearing a gray-checked jacket and pants, leading police to suspect that “the brown suit might have been discarded because it had been stained with blood.” 11
    Casting Gedeon’s character in a particularly unsavory light was his supposed sexual degeneracy. In the tabloids, he was now routinely described as “a student of erotica”—“a French postcard fancier” who lived in a “sleazy bower of love shelved with risquébooks,” used “pictures of naked women to satiate his queer animal desires,” and had deserted his wife “in favor of solitude and sex practices more bizarre than the marriage bed.” Retained by the Daily News to provide expert commentary on the unfolding case, Dr. Carleton Simon—former Special Deputy Police Commissioner of New York and author of such works as Homosexualists and Sex Crimes, The Menace of Dope , and The Negro Criminal —flatly declared that “Gedeon’s behavior is certainly not that of a normal man.” The evidence? “He likes to read about sex and treasures photographs of nude women.” 12
    Certainly he had the physical strength to perpetrate the murders. Though he was slight of stature with a “mousy appearance,” he had developed enormously powerful hands, partly from years of “pulling cloth and leather” in his upholstery work, partly from his addiction to bowling (he boasted of routinely playing seventy games in a single night). His favorite parlor trick was bending a beer-bottle cap in half between his thumb and forefinger. 13
    As for a motive, the current thinking among the members of the Homicide Squad was that—having discovered “that Mary Gedeon and roomer Frank Byrnes had a relationship that transcended the conventional”—Gedeon had “killed his wife and Byrnes in a fit of jealousy and added Ronnie because his disapproval of her way of life amounted to a fixation.” 14
    Determined to wrest a confession from “the extremely odd little man,” investigators proceeded to subject him “to a grilling of such intensity as had seldom, if ever, been equaled in any New York homicide investigation.” 15 Sequestered in a “bare and forbidding” room on the third floor of the East 51st Street police station, Gedeon was seated on a hard-backed wooden chair, a blazing light trained on his face. Working in teams, his interrogators—including at times Assistant District Attorney P. Francis Marro, Deputy Police Commissioner Harold Fowler, Deputy Chief Inspector Kear, and District Attorney Dodge himself—pounded away at him for hours on end. Occasionally, the pounding was more than verbal. Like other suspectssubjected to the third degree in those days, Gedeon ended up with some ugly contusions.
    Right from the start, his questioners made it clear that they no longer believed his alibi. “You claim you were in Corrigan’s the whole time,” said Kear. “But now the bar owner says he only saw you there at seven p.m. and at midnight.”
    Gedeon was unfazed. “He was busy that night. Maybe he didn’t see me continuously. But I was there in the crowd.” As for the people who said he was dressed in a brown suit, “they’re mistaken,” said Gedeon. “I had on this same gray suit as now.”
    At one point, Kear produced the gray suede glove found at the murder scene and asked Gedeon to try it on. Though it fit easily, the upholsterer insisted that it wasn’t his. “I’m a poor man,” he said. “I haven’t owned any gloves for two or three years.”
    “Considering that your wife and daughter have been horribly killed, you’ve shown little grief,” said Kear.
    “I’m always that way,” Gedeon answered. “Things hurt me deep, but inside.”
    “You didn’t love your wife?”
    Gedeon’s