Press: Murder for Easter

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"What Is the Best Story?" was the headline of his editorial, which debated the News's wallowing treatment of the murders as contrasted with its brief recording of the Supreme Court's important batch of decisions the day after Easter (TIME, April 5). Wrote Publisher Patterson: "If we could print only one of the two stories we'd choose the Supreme Court. . . . Perhaps people should be more interested today in the Supreme Court than in the Gedeon murder, but we don't think they are. . . . Murder sells papers, books, plays because we are all fascinated by murder." Letting its soul-searching go at that, the News then plunged ahead with all the rest of Manhattan's press to follow the Gedeon story on through. Suspicion fell upon the estranged father Joseph Gedeon (pronounced Gedyon), an upholsterer with erotic tendencies. Reporters hounded him into beer halls, had chairs thrown at them.

At a photographer who aimed at him, Father Gedeon hurled a glass of beer, making a news-picture of the week (see cut. p. 68). Police pulled him out of bed after three hours' sleep one morning, grilled him nonstop, with time out only to attend the funeral of the murdered women, for 33 hours. His alibi had obvious gaps. Although neighbors had heard screams the murder night, the dead women's Pekingese had not barked, must have known the strangler. Despite his wispy build and his age (54), the upholsterer had unusually powerful hands. The police questioned him on the sexy photographs and erotic books in his bedroom behind the upholstery shop, puzzled over his composure at the funeral, hounded him about the murders. But the police could not "break" him. Boasted he to Editor Paul Nadanyi of the Hungarian paper Amerikai Magyar Nepszava, who questioned him in Hungarian, "They can't break me—I have seven lives." By week's end, when the newspapers had begun to build Gedeon up to look like another Bruno Richard Hauptmann and the police had begun to bog down before three more unsolved murders, up popped the discovery of Robert Irwin. A twice-committed mental hospital patient, 29-year-old Sculptor Irwin had once roomed with the Gedeons and was so abnormal about sex that he had tried to have himself emasculated. Learning that he had come to New York, hired a room for a single day near the Gedeon apartment and disappeared the night of the murders, the police settled on him as the murderer and began a nation-wide search. Thus this perfect story, playing a lurid obbligato to the Supreme Court and the Sit-Down in Manhattan's lively press, flamed on into another week of joy for the city editors.