Easter Killer

Buxom, black-eyed Henrietta Koscianski, 19, a pantry maid in Cleveland's Statler Hotel, gave her starched white blouse a straightening pat and winked at one of the other girls as the young man who washed bar glasses and supplied cracked ice came on duty one night last week. "Say, Bob," she asked, "what's your last name?"

"Murray," he answered quickly. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing. But did you ever hear of Robert Irwin?"

"No," he said, turning away. Few minutes later he disappeared.

Two nights before the bar boy had done a clever pencil sketch of Henrietta, and she had had a chance to study his face as he sketched. Business was slow that night and later she had gone upstairs to borrow something to read from one of the other girls. In a detective magazine she had seen a picture of 29-year-old Robert Irwin, former insane asylum inmate, sculptor of sorts, wanted in Manhattan for the horrible Easter Sunday murders of the beauteous artists' model Veronica Gedeon. her mother and a man lodger. "Why that looks like our Bob!" she exclaimed. She showed the picture to the other girl who agreed on the resemblance. Friday night she would show it to Bob. It would amuse him.

By midnight Friday, Pantry Maid Koscianski was all atremble. The bar boy had obviously skipped town. His locker was empty. The police had been to his $1.50 a week hotel, found only an old pair of shoes and New York newspapers with stories about the Gedeon murders and the recent death threats against a staff physician at Rockland State Hospital where Irwin had once been a mental patient. "I feel like a nickel now," mumbled Miss Koscianski.-"I didn't call the police because I just thought it was a coincidence. I didn't have the nerve to think of him actually as a killer."

Next day, to Hearst's Chicago Herald & Examiner came one of those incredible strokes of luck that make newspaper life worth living. Robert Irwin, the most sought-after murderer then at large in the U. S. (TIME, April 12), had just telephoned the Chicago Tribune ("Worlds Greatest Newspaper"), offered to surrender for a price, was not believed. So he called the Hearst paper, had his terms accepted, and slouched into their offices to pour out the story of the Gedeon murders in a voluminous, jumbled, sex-loaded signed confession. From late Saturday until Sunday afternoon Hearst writers and cameramen had their prize to themselves. Other papers, writhing as Hearst extra after extra hit the stands, howled to Chicago's police. Detectives searched the Herald & Examiner office in vain. Irwin had been spirited away to the Morrison Hotel where Hearst men played cards with him, treated him well. When he was finally surrendered to the Cook County Sheriff the next afternoon he looked rested and refreshed and his white linen suit was crisp. Awaiting him in Manhattan by prearrangement was the famed criminal defense lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz. Toward midnight, in a Hearst-chartered transport. Prisoner Irwin was flown to New York City to face the murder charges. It was his first flight, would probably be his last.

Hearstpapers nationwide screamed the headlines IRWIN SURRENDERS!--CONFESSES! EXCLUSIVE! Excerpts:

He went to the Gedeon apartment. . . . "I drew Mrs. Gedeon's picture to kill as much time as possible. In comes this little Englishman. She introduced him to me. He went to his room. . . . I said, 'I am going to stay here until I see Ethel [the elder daughter].' She . . . yelled, 'Get out of here.' I hit her. . . . I choked her. . . . All the time this damned Englishman was in the next room just ten feet away. She put up a hell of a fight . . . my hands were full of blood. I smeared it on her, on her face and on her breast. I threw her in the bedroom under the bed. . . .

"Finally Ronnie [Veronica Gedeon, the artists' model daughter] came in. She went into the bathroom. . . . I thought she was never coming out. . . . I made a sort of blackjack out of a piece of soap in a cloth. . . . I hit her. But the soap just splattered. . . . I grabbed her from behind. . . . I can very well believe that she was drunk because she didn't put up any fight at all. I . . . took her in her room . . . held her just tight enough so that she could breathe. She asked me not to attack her, 'Please don't, I've had an operation.' I strangled her. When Ronnie was dead, I looked at her with a sick feeling all through me. Her beauty was gone. . . . Blue death seemed to issue from her--like a sort of spiritual emanation. . . . My brain was working so fast I could almost hear it. . . . The Englishman. I must kill him too. . . . I stood for a moment over his bed. . . . Asleep? But how could I be sure? . . . I lifted the ice pick, point down, and struck. . . . Afterwards, in the newspapers, I read that he had been stabbed 15 times. I don't know. . . . It was morning when I stepped out and closed the door. . . . There was an overwhelming weariness all through me. . . . I was so sleepy, I could hardly walk the short distance around the corner to my room. I went in and dropped on my bed. It was not until evening that I was awakened by the cries of newsboys below my window. . . . They were yelling about a 'triple murder.' . . . It did not frighten me. I was as calm as I ever had been. I was sure that I would not be suspected. I was so sure of this that I did not even take the trouble to move from the neighborhood--not for a week."

From Manhattan he had gone by train to Philadelphia, by bus to Washington, D. C., by devious means to Cleveland where he had stayed until surprised by the pantry maid's question. The three murders were not intended, he said. He had intended to murder only the elder married daughter, Ethel Gedeon Kudner, with whom he had been in love, years before when he was a roomer at the Gedeons'. The murder was to satisfy an overpowering urge for a tremendous emotional experience. "I thought that after killing Ethel, then they would kill me in the chair, but I didn't care. Then I said to myself that after being in the nut house all of your life, you can't go to the chair. . . . They'll put me in the nut house again and then I'll be there all the rest of my life and catch up with myself, in a spiritual way."

*Her nickel feelings quickly vanished when the detective magazine in which she had seen Irwin's picture awarded her $1,000, gave her an airplane ride to Manhattan, introduced her at a night club, interviewed her on the radio. ''I ddn t know whether I'll return to my job as pantry-maid or not," she said.

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