2015 Edgar Award Nominee
Beekman Place, once one of the most exclusive addresses in Manhattan,
had a curious way of making it into the tabloids in the 1930s:
SKYSCRAPER SLAYER, BEAUTY SLAIN IN BATHTUB read the headlines. On Easter
Sunday in 1937, the discovery of a grisly triple homicide at Beekman
Place would rock the neighborhood yet again--and enthrall the nation.
The young man who committed these murders would come to be known in the
annals of American crime as the Mad Sculptor.
Caught up in the Easter Sunday slayings was a bizarre and
sensationalistic cast of characters, seemingly cooked up in a tabloid
editor's overheated imagination. The charismatic perpetrator, Robert
Irwin, was a brilliant young sculptor who had studied with some of the
masters of the era. But with his genius also came a deeply disturbed
psyche; Irwin was obsessed with sexual self-mutilation and was
frequently overcome by outbursts of violent rage.
Irwin's primary victim, Veronica Gedeon, was a figure from the world of
pulp fantasy--a stunning photographer's model whose scandalous seminude
pinups would titillate the public for weeks after her death. Irwin's
defense attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, was a courtroom celebrity with an
unmatched record of acquittals and clients ranging from Al Capone to the
Scottsboro Boys. And Dr. Fredric Wertham, psychiatrist and forensic
scientist, befriended Irwin years before the murders and had predicted
them in a public lecture months before the crime.
Based on extensive research and archival records, The Mad Sculptor
recounts the chilling story of the Easter Sunday murders--a case that
sparked a nationwide manhunt and endures as one of the most engrossing
American crime dramas of the twentieth century. Harold Schechter's
masterly prose evokes the faded glory of post-Depression New York and
the singular madness of a brilliant mind turned against itself. It will
keep you riveted until the very end.
