Robert George Irwin (August 5, 1907 – 1975) was an American artist, sculptor, and recurring mental hospital patient who pleaded guilty to killing three people on Easter weekend in 1937 in the Beekman Hill area of New York City's Turtle Bay neighborhood.
One of his victims, Veronica "Ronnie" Gedeon, was a model who often appeared in seductive pulp magazine pictures. The crime, its investigation, Irwin's arrest, and the resulting court proceedings were heavily media publicized, often with eye-catching photos of Gedeon and headlines describing Irwin as the "mad sculptor." Veronica Gedeon left behind a portfolio of sexy photos that in retrospect, had no relevance to the crime, its cause, or Irwin's responsibility for it. However, that coincidence kept the story on front pages of newspapers around the country for months, and that publicity ultimately helped to bring Irwin into custody.
Irwin's prosecution, which ended through a plea bargain that kept him incarcerated for life, renewed debate about the use and scope of New York State's version of the insanity defense. Once sentenced, Irwin was deemed "definitely insane" by state psychiatrists. He spent the rest of his life in secure mental institutions.
Harold Schechter's 2014 book The Mad Sculptor tells Irwin's life story.
Personal background
The son of evangelist parents, Irwin was reportedly born in a tent on an old-fashioned camp meeting ground in Portland, Oregon. However, he was actually born in the Arroyo Seco Park near Pasadena, California on August 5, 1907. He was named for the nearby river (as was the park) and one of his father's favorite theologians, François Fénelon. Hence, he entered life as Fenelon Arroyo Seco Irwin. He later changed his name, much to the horror of his devout mother, to honor his philosophical idol the agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll. His father was Rev. Benjamin Hardin Irwin, a nationally known figure in the Holiness movement who had founded a racially-integrated radical Holiness denomination in 1898 at a national convention in legally-segregated Anderson, South Carolina. He denounced as sinful everything from Coca-Cola to wearing ties. (The body that Irwin founded is now known as the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.) In 1900, a sexual scandal ended his career with the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church and the senior Irwin went solo. In Canada, sometime during 1902, he married Robert's mother, Mary Lee Jordan of Texas, without divorcing his first wife. His father deserted the family before Robert was three years old, which left them impoverished. When a family court judge noted that Robert could learn a trade at a state reformatory, he volunteered and spent 15 months there, where he first learned to sculpt. He soon idolized Lorado Taft, one of the leading American sculptors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and later moved in with Taft's family. Then, working for a waxworks studio in Los Angeles, he carved commercial busts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other public figures.
Descent into madness
Irwin was considered "brilliant if erratic and at times violent." He tried to emasculate himself, using a razor. He then consented to be committed to a state mental hospital, where he initially stayed for a year. After his discharge, he moved into a New York City rooming house owned by Mary Gedeon. There, Irwin had become infatuated with her daughter Ethel, but his love for her was not returned. He received further treatment for mental illness for two more years at Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York, and was released in the summer of 1936. By then, Ethel Gedeon had married Joseph Kudner. Irwin then made a sculpture of Ethel with a cobra coiled around her neck.
He enrolled as a student at the Theological School of St. Lawrence University at Canton, New York. However, he was expelled on March 18, 1937, ten days before Easter, for "instability." He then rented (for a single day) a $2.50 ($44.11 in 2018)-a-week room in a house on 52nd Street in New York City, several blocks from Mary Gedeon's rooming house at 316 E. 50th Street. After considering and rejecting the idea of drowning himself in the East River, he instead walked to the Gedeon rooming house.
Easter Weekend murders
On March 28, 1937 (Easter Sunday), relatives arriving at the Gedeons' flat for dinner discovered the partially clothed bodies of Mary Gedeon and her younger daughter Veronica, in Veronica's bedroom. Mrs. Gedeon and Veronica had been strangled, and Mrs. Gedeon had been stabbed as well. In a nearby room was the body of Frank Byrnes, a deaf English waiter, who had been stabbed many times.