Veronica Gedeon - Murderer's Profile and Arrest

Murderer's Profile and Arrest

The family relocated to an apartment at 318 East 50th Street (Manhattan), where Gedeon's mother took in boarders. A sculptor, Robert George Irwin, was found guilty of murdering Gedeon, her mother, and a roomer in a fifth floor apartment there on the night of March 28, 1937. Irwin spent time in and out of Bellevue Hospital Center and Rockland County Hospital. He was briefly a boarder at the Gedeons but was put out of the household after he developed a crush on Gedeon's sister Ethel.

The manhunt which apprehended Irwin covered eight states and was the largest since the Lindbergh kidnapping. In late June 1937 a Cleveland, Ohio hotel employee recognized Irwin whose photograph appeared in the periodical True Detective Mysteries. Irwin was working there as a bellhop but fled quickly to Chicago, Illinois, where he was taken into custody by police waiting for him at the depot. Irwin confessed his affection for Ethel and said that the murders had been accidents. He arrived at the Gedeon apartment searching for Ethel but became enraged to find that she no longer lived there. So he killed the Gedeon women and the lodger in anger after Mary Gedeon allowed him to come inside. Having once sculpted a conventional bust of Herbert Hoover, Irwin admitted he wanted to behead Ethel and make a death mask.