On Easter Sunday, March 28, 1937, Joseph Gideon arrived at the apartment building on East 50th Street in New York City, expecting to spend the holiday with his ex-wife Mary and their two daughters. He found the building locked and received no answer when he rang the bell. When his eldest daughter Ethel and her husband arrived, they faced the same problem. Eventually, another resident let them inside.
At the fifth-floor apartment, Ethel used her key to open the door. Joseph went in first and called for his daughter. What he found in Veronica’s bedroom ended any hope of a family reunion. Mary Gideon and her twenty-year-old daughter Veronica lay partially clothed.
Mary had been strangled and stabbed; Veronica had been strangled. In a nearby room, the household lodger, a deaf English waiter named Frank Burns, had been stabbed multiple times as he slept. Joseph Gideon called the police immediately. Veronica Gideon had been born in 1917 in Astoria, Queens.
Her Hungarian parents had emigrated to the United States in 1907, part of a wave of more than a million Hungarians who arrived between 1880 and 1920, drawn by economic opportunity and the promise of cheap labor in American industry. After finishing school, Veronica worked as a model, though not in the fashion industry. She posed for detective magazines like Inside Detective and Pulp, often scantily dressed. Her photographs sold magazines quickly, and photographers recommended her for commercial work.
But in 1937, a young woman involved in that kind of modeling was sometimes regarded as having little moral integrity. Her parents had divorced just as her career began, though they remained on good terms and both wanted to help their daughters. After the divorce, Veronica and Ethel lived with their mother in a fifth-floor apartment in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, where Mary Gideon took in boarders to make extra money. The police investigation began with the evidence inside the apartment.
Veronica had returned home intoxicated from a date at around 3 a. m. , roughly fifty minutes before her father arrived. An upstairs neighbor, Charles Robinson, had noticed the apartment door partially open and closed it.
Detectives believed Mary and Frank were already dead when Veronica came home, and that the attacker had waited for her. Despite the partially clothed state of the two female victims, the medical examiner found no signs of sexual assault. Oddly, forensic searchers found a sculpture carved from a bar of soap at the scene. Initial suspicion fell on a young man named Stephen Butler, who occasionally drove Veronica to her photo shoots and had been openly infatuated with her, though she did not return his feelings.
He was deeply distraught over her murder. Police also looked at Joseph Gideon, whose lack of emotion at the crime scene troubled them. He blamed Mary for the breakdown of the marriage and told officers he did not think his youngest daughter had chosen an appropriate career. Both men had alibis and were ruled out.
Attention then turned to a former lodger who had developed an unhealthy obsession with Ethel. Robert George Irwin was born on August 5, 1907, near Pasadena, California. His parents, devoted Christians, named him Fennelon Arroyo Seco Irwin after a nearby river and a favorite theologian, but he later changed his name to honor the agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll.
His father deserted the family before Robert turned three, leaving them broke. As a teenager, Robert volunteered for a state reformatory after a judge suggested he could learn a trade there, and he spent fifteen months inside. He idolized Lorado Taft, a leading American sculptor, and later moved in with Taft’s family. As a young man, he worked for a wax company in Los Angeles, carving commercial busts of presidents and other famous figures.
He then moved to New York to pursue other passions. His behavior was erratic, sometimes violent. He had once tried to emasculate himself with a razor and spent time in a state mental hospital. After his release, he boarded at Mary Gideon’s house and developed a crush on Ethel, which she did not return.
Disappointed, he was admitted to Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York, where he received further mental health treatment for two years before being released in the summer of 1936. By then, Ethel had married a man named George Kunda. Robert, still fixated on her, made a sculpture of her, then added a cobra coiled around her neck after learning she was married. He enrolled at the theological school of St.
Lawrence University in Canton, New York, but was expelled on March 18, 1937, just ten days before Easter, because of his mental instability. After his expulsion, he rented a room in New York City, only blocks from Mary Gideon’s apartment. On the night of the murders, witnesses had seen him near the East River, where a concerned onlooker spoke to him as he claimed he was going to drown himself. He was later seen walking near the building on East 50th Street where the Gideons lived.
By April 7, police named Robert Irwin their primary suspect and distributed his picture across New York City. A wide search began, but Irwin had vanished. At Grand Central Station, police were alerted to a discarded suitcase. Inside, they found an alarm clock, the only item taken from Mary Gideon’s apartment.
As days passed, officers began to think Irwin had already left the country. National newspapers, eager to print the story of the triple murder, placed Irwin’s picture next to photos of the beautiful Veronica Gideon. Public interest surged, and sales followed. But weeks passed with no sign of him.
Then, at the end of June, a maid at a hotel in Cleveland noticed a striking resemblance between the wanted man and a bar boy who had recently started working there. The bar boy went by the name Bob Murray. When the maid asked him about Robert Irwin, Murray cleaned out his locker and disappeared. The maid informed the police, and the search intensified.
Newspapers once again filled their front pages with headlines like Slain Beauty, usually accompanied by one of Veronica’s more seductive photographs. The police still could not find him. Then the Chicago Tribune received a strange call from someone claiming to be Robert Irwin, offering to surrender for a prize. The editor assumed it was a prank and did not investigate.
The caller next contacted the owner of the Chicago Herald Examiner, who took the call seriously. He arranged a meeting with the man who claimed to be Irwin, and they agreed on terms: five thousand dollars and a new white linen suit in exchange for an exclusive story, after which Irwin would surrender. The caller was indeed Robert Irwin. After granting an exclusive interview and confession, he was flown to New York and handed over to police.
In his published confession, Irwin claimed he had only ever planned to kill Ethel because she was the dearest object in the world to him, but he had accidentally killed the others. He told reporters he went to the house looking for Ethel, wanting to behead her and make a death mask, deeply hurt that she did not love him. At the apartment, he ran into Mary and spoke with her for a while, but when he discovered Ethel no longer lived there, he became enraged. After Mary asked him to leave, he strangled and stabbed her.
When Veronica arrived home and used his name, he strangled her because he knew she could identify him. Then, realizing there was another bedroom occupied by the lodger Frank Burns, he stabbed Burns to death because he did not want to leave any witnesses. This paid confession nearly sent Irwin to the electric chair. In a later confession to New York detectives, he compared himself to a radio, saying, Bob Irwin is nothing.
I am only a receiving set, an extremely imperfect one, which can indistinctly tune in with the Divine Mind. He described his whole idea in life as perfecting himself so the receiving set could always get the divine music at its best. Irwin was arrested and charged with three counts of murder. A mental health examination deemed him normal, with no sign of mental illness.
His trial began in the fall of 1938 and drew enormous public interest, with Veronica’s pictures once again on the front pages. During the trial, Irwin pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder as part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. He also secured a promise that a pair of trousers abandoned in the suitcase at Grand Central Station would be returned to him. He was sentenced to 139 years in prison: 99 years for the murder of Frank Burns, 20 years for the murder of Mary Gideon, and 20 years for the murder of Veronica Gideon.
Sent to Sing Sing prison for a psychological examination, prison doctors ruled him very definitely insane. On December 10, 1938, he was moved to Matteawan, a state institution for the criminally insane in Fishkill, New York. He lived out the rest of his life there and died of cancer in 1975. The case also had a broader effect.
The heavy publicity around the trial focused attention on the exclusion of women from juries in first-degree murder cases in New York. The initial trial dates began with the acting commissioner announcing that none of the jurors were women, despite statutes expressly allowing women to serve. One day later, New York courts began putting women on the jury list for such cases.
It is widely believed Irwin was captured and brought to justice only because Veronica Gideon’s extensive portfolio of seductive photographs kept the story on front pages across the country for months, keeping public pressure on the investigation and ultimately leading to his arrest.