The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Read online

  Gruesome as they were, however, none of these murders earned more than a few fleeting columns in the tabloids. The case of Vera Stretz, by contrast, dominated the front pages for weeks.

  At around 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, November 12, 1935, Miss Mary Hazelton, a guest on the twentieth floor of the Beekman Tower, was startled awake by a noise never heard before inside the exclusive residential hotel: a series of rapid cracks, unmistakably the sound of gunfire, coming from somewhere overhead. She immediately telephoned the assistant night manager, Mr. Leslie Taite, at his post at the front desk.

  Taking the elevator to the top story, Taite began a fruitless check for signs of disturbance, working his way down floor by floor. When he emerged onto the nineteenth floor, he spotted a woman perched on the little sofa beside the elevator, wearing a gray cloth coat with a chinchilla collar and a close-fitting gray felt hat. Clutched in her hands was a large black handbag of crushable pin seal leather. She appeared, Taite later testified, “a little dazed.”

  “Have you found him?” asked the woman.

  Taite replied that he hadn’t found anyone and didn’t know what the woman was talking about.

  “He’s on the twenty-first floor,” said the woman. “Room 2114. Rap on the door. If no one answers, go in. There’s a man there who may need some help.”

  Leaving the woman, Taite immediately rode back up to the twenty-first floor, hurried to the designated room, and knocked on the door. When no one responded, he entered with his passkey.

  Lying motionless on his side in the bedroom was a middle-aged man in a blood-soaked nightshirt. Taite knew who he was: Dr. Fritz Gebhardt, a prominent German financier and regular tenant of the hotel. Taite saw at a glance that Gebhardt was dead. Snatching up the phone from the bed table, he called the police.

  By then, the woman who had directed him to the room was making her way down the staircase. At the third-floor landing, however, her progress was barred by a padlocked accordion gate. Abandoning the stairwell, she rang for the service elevator. A few moments later, the elevator arrived and the door slid open. Inside was a pair of police officers, John Holden and Walter A. Mitchell, who had just arrived in response to Taite’s call.

  “Where are you going?” asked Holden.

  “I want to go down,” said the woman, though she made no move to get into the elevator.

  As Holden stepped out and approached her, she suddenly said: “How is he?”

  “Who do you mean?” said Holden.

  “The man upstairs,” said the woman. “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Holden. “Why?”

  “I shot him,” the woman said calmly.

  “Let me see that handbag,” said Holden.

  Shaking her head, the woman clutched the purse more tightly to her body.

  Holden reached out and tore it from her grasp. Undoing the chromium clasp, which bore the monogram “VS,” he pulled the bag open, peered inside, then reached in and removed a .32-caliber double-action revolver, still warm to his palm.

  “All right, you have the gun,” said the woman. “Now give me back my bag.”

  “I think I’ll hold onto it,” said Holden. Later, in the station house, detectives emptied the bag and—along with a compact, lipstick, and embroidered handkerchief—found a box containing forty-six .32-caliber cartridges, four discharged shells, the key to the dead man’s room, a platinum ring set with a square-cut aquamarine, and a crumpled silk woman’s nightgown, badly stained with blood.

  Escorted to the twenty-first floor by the two patrolmen, the woman—who had given her name as Vera Stretz—was led into Gebhardt’s room, shown the bullet-riddled body, and asked “why she did it.”

  “Please don’t ask me that,” she said. “I’ll only talk to a lawyer.”2

  At the East 51st Street precinct house, she was questioned by Deputy Chief Inspector Francis J. Kear, in command of Manhattan detectives. Beyond admitting to the murder, Stretz—so cool and composed that the tabloids quickly branded her the “Icy Blonde”—stubbornly refused to discuss it. By then, reporters had gotten wind of the murder and dozens of newspapermen had gathered at the station house, among them the celebrity columnist Walter Winchell, who, on the following morning, would describe Stretz as “an attractive blonde woman—nothing sassy or brassy about her—but wholesome, sweet, her clothes were plain and in good taste.” As she was being led off to Homicide Court for her arraignment, several newsmen called out, “Why did you do it, Vera?” All she would say was: “It’s a long story—a very long story.”3

  Investigators, however, already believed that they had pieced most of that story together. Searching Vera’s apartment on the nineteenth floor of the Beekman Tower Hotel, they had discovered a cache of correspondence between the couple, along with a suicide note and a will written out by Vera two days before the slaying. The thirty-one-year-old Stretz—the cultured, NYU-educated daughter of a well-known musician and bandleader—had met the dashing Gebhardt the previous December on a holiday cruise to the Caribbean. During a romantic New Year’s Eve stop at Havana, they had danced through the night and exchanged a romantic kiss at the stroke of twelve. Their shipboard flirtation had swiftly blossomed into a full-blown affair.

  By June 1935, Vera had gone to work at his Fifth Avenue import firm, Frank von Knoop & Co., where she served as both his personal secretary and, as the tabloids put it, his “office wife” (a phrase only recently popularized by Faith Baldwin’s best-selling novel of that name). That same month, the two had taken a vacation to Lake George, New York, registering in a hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Gebhardt. Not long after their return, Vera had moved into an apartment in the Beekman Tower, two floors beneath her lover’s. Sometime in late July, before leaving on a business trip to Europe, Gebhardt had presented her with the aquamarine ring.4

  Throughout their lengthy separation, they had exchanged scores of impassioned letters. He was her “Darling Fritzie” who made her feel “feverish” with desire. She was his “Veralein,” his “dear girlie,” who filled him with such longing that “the fastest steamer” was “not fast enough to take me home to you.”5 She was understandably stunned, therefore, when, upon his long-awaited return on November 8, he revealed the existence of a wife and children in Baden-Baden—a family he had no intention of abandoning.

  “The belated discovery that Dr. Gebhardt, whom she had told girl friends was her ‘fiancé,’ already had a wife in Germany sent her on her errand of death,” the Daily News reported on the morning after the murder:

  As detectives reconstructed the tragedy, Miss Stretz went to the fashionable apartment of the German industrialist intending to slay both him and herself after learning that he had a wife living abroad. As a prelude to her adventure with death, she participated in a highly romantic interlude—as the negligee bore witness. Sometime during—or after—this impassioned scene, the role of the blonde secretary changed. From her handbag she obtained the revolver she had brought to the tryst and sent four shots into Dr. Gebhardt’s body through his old-fashioned nightgown.…The finding of the will, made out by the girl two days earlier, led to the deduction that she had planned not only the murder of her lover but her own suicide as well. If such was the case, she lost her nerve after firing the four shots into Dr. Gebhardt.6

  As a category of crime, such “love killings” weren’t particularly uncommon. At virtually the same time as the Gebhardt murder, a platinum-blond showgirl named Bunny Williams shot her two-timing husband dead in an Atlantic City hotel room, and the crime was barely noted in the papers.7 Though the Stretz case had more than its share of prurient ingredients—one tabloid writer described it as “a scorching story with all the elements of a banned-in-Boston novel”8—what made it so irresistible was, as much as anything else, the social standing of its principals, not only the classy, college-bred killer but also her prominent lover and victim.

  A handsome, cosmopolitan forty-three-year-old, Gebhardt had been a decorated World War I flying ace, serving in the
squadron of Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary “Red Baron.” Following the war, he had earned his doctorate degree in political economy from Frankfurt University with a dissertation on “The International Trade in Machinery.” After a brief teaching stint, he had gone into business, earning a fortune in the automobile and locomotive industries before establishing a highly successful import-export firm that specialized in “exchanging German raw material for American commodities.” Charming, cultured, fluent in several languages, he also harbored political ambitions and had hopes of being named German ambassador to the United States—a fair expectation, given his close friendship with high Nazi officials, particularly Hermann Göring, a fellow Richthofen pilot during the Great War.9

  The tabloids had a field day with the story of the demure “Skyscraper Slayer” and her philandering “Nazi Loverboy.”10 Since it quickly emerged that Vera had known about Gebhardt’s wife all along, new theories about her motives abounded. He had been cheating on her with another woman. He had reneged on a promise to ask his wife for a divorce during his recent trip to Germany. He had attempted to end their affair after learning of his imminent appointment as the German ambassador to the United States, brusquely informing her that “no breath of scandal must attach to me.”11

  Vera herself wasn’t talking, not to the press, not to her father, Frank, not even to family lawyer Arthur Moritz. Emerging from an interview with Vera the day after the shooting, a grim-faced Moritz advised Frank Stretz that, though Vera had offered few specifics, it was clear that she was “in a bad spot.” He himself could do nothing for her. His specialty was civil law, and what Vera needed was “the best criminal lawyer in the country.”

  That same afternoon, a telegram went out in Vera’s name: “I desire to confer with you. Come immediately.” It was addressed to Samuel S. Leibowitz.12

  Brought to this country as a four-year-old boy by parents fleeing the rampant anti-Semitism of their native Romania, Samuel Simon Leibowitz had the kind of life that typifies the immigrant dream.13 Arriving in Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day 1897, his family took up residence in a two-room tenement flat on the Lower East Side, where they shared a water tap, bathtub, and toilet with the neighbors. Within a few years, his hard-working father, Isaac—who had sold dry goods in the Old Country—went from pushcart peddler to owner of his own store on Second Avenue and 107th Street, housing his family in the rear of the shop. Six years later, when Sam was thirteen, Isaac was able to open an even bigger store in Brooklyn and purchase a tidy home in the borough’s then-peaceful neighborhood of Cypress Hills.

  By all accounts, Sam, though an undistinguished student in other respects, displayed a precocious flair for elocution. No schoolroom activity gave him greater pleasure than standing in front of his classmates and declaiming “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or the Gettysburg Address. It was an early outlet for the strong theatrical streak he would later bring to bear in the courtroom, and his first taste of “the excitement and satisfaction of performing before an audience.”14

  Though Sam himself leaned toward a career in civil engineering, his father—typical of first-generation Jewish immigrants—wanted his son to be a lawyer. In the fall of 1911, Sam entered Cornell University Law School, where he shone not only academically but also as a star of the intercollegiate debating team and the first Jewish member of the Dramatic Club. In his senior year, he was elected president of the Cornell Student Congress. An ambitious young man with such a record of distinction, graduating from a top law school, would have been snapped up by one of Manhattan’s elite white-collar firms—assuming he was a WASP. Realistically assessing his prospects—and eager to exercise his particular combination of forensic and histrionic skills—he opted for criminal law.15

  His earliest clients were a colorful assortment of petty crooks and lowlifes. Typical of the breed was one “Izzy the Goniff,” allegedly caught while lifting the wallet of an unwary stroller on the Coney Island boardwalk. Less concerned with the legal outcome of his case than with his professional reputation—“I’ve been a pickpocket for twenty-five years,” he told Leibowitz, “and no sucker ever felt my mitt in his pocket”—he proceeded to demonstrate his prowess by stealing back the hundred-dollar retainer he had just paid the lawyer. At his trial, Leibowitz won over the jury by arguing that, though “his client was indeed a professional pickpocket and, if acquitted, would probably remain one, he was too good at it to be caught in the act by an ordinary citizen.”16

  By 1923, Leibowitz had racked up such an impressive record of acquittals for his small-time clientele that he began attracting a new and far higher-paying class of criminals, among them some of the country’s most notorious gangsters: Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles (feared hit man for Murder, Inc.), mob boss Albert Anastasia, and Al Capone.

  One of his most celebrated cases was his defense of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, charged with the murder of five-year-old Michael Vengalli, one of five children hit with machine-gun fire when Coll sprayed bullets into a crowded summertime street during the attempted drive-by assassination of a gangland rival. The main witness against Coll was a professional stooge named George Brecht who claimed he had been on the block selling Eskimo Pies and had recognized Coll as the death car sped by.

  Ordering his assistant to go out and buy fourteen Eskimo Pies, Leibowitz handed out the ice cream bars to the jury members, judge, and prosecutor. “While they ate, he proceeded to question the witness,” one journalist reported. “The man couldn’t describe the label, had no idea how the pies were made, and had never heard of dry ice. He said he carried the pies around in a cardboard box in the July sun and their own coldness kept them from melting.”

  His credibility completely undermined, Brecht quickly lost his composure and was caught in lie after lie by Leibowitz. Coll ended up walking free, the beneficiary of what the tabloids quickly branded the “Eskimo Pie Defense.”17

  The so-called “Christian Fish Defense” became another enduring part of the Leibowitz legend. His client in this case was one Viscenzo Santangelo, charged with shooting a police officer responding to a domestic disturbance call at the Santangelo home. Despite the testimony of five eyewitnesses who swore they had seen him at the crime scene, the defendant claimed that he had been working all day at a fish store in Harlem. Employing a Leibowitz-like tactic of his own, the prosecutor had a basket of fish brought into the courtroom, then held them up one by one—a flounder, a mackerel, a porgy, twenty-one in all—and asked Santangelo to identify them. Displaying a degree of ignorance unusual for a fish-store employee, Santangelo guessed wrong every time. Leibowitz, however, had a riposte at the ready. Recognizing by their names that four of the jurymen were his coreligionists, he declared, in a voice ringing with indignation, that the prosecutor had perpetrated an unconscionable fraud:

  Was there in all that array of fish a single pike, or pickerel, or whitefish, or any other fish that can be made into gefilte fish? There was not! My client told you that he worked in a store at 114th Street and Park Avenue. The prosecutor knows that is a Jewish neighborhood and he did not show a single fish that makes gefilte fish. What a travesty of justice! My client is an Italian who works in a Jewish fish market and they try him on Christian fish!

  The jury took just ninety minutes to acquit.18

  Though a consummate performer who could, as the occasion demanded, elicit laughter, tears, or heart-swelling sympathy from a jury, Leibowitz was far more than a showman. He himself claimed that success “was due to preparation rather than to courtroom legerdemain”:

  He investigated the facts and the evidence—including the scene where the relevant events had taken place—for himself. He constructed the case as if he were the prosecutor, identifying the elements of the case and the strengths and weakness of each. Only then did he begin working on a defense. He learned everything available of the life history, personality, habits, and character of his client, potential witnesses, prosecuting attorney, presiding jurist, and potential
jurors. He would also do careful research into specialized fields of knowledge related to his case, whether ballistics, medicine, psychology or chemistry.19

  Always good for colorful copy, the stocky, balding, immaculately groomed attorney—a master of press manipulation—was a media darling, the starring attraction of such tabloid sensations as the Gigolo Murder Widow Trial, the Gravesend Bay Rowboat Murder Trial, the Honor Slayer Murder Trial, the Dream Slayer Murder Trial, the Phantom Slayer Murder Trial, the Four-Gun Sweeney Murder Trial, and the Insurance Death Plotter Murder Trial. By 1932, he had defended seventy-eight people accused of first-degree murder. His record stood at seventy-seven acquittals, one hung jury, no convictions.20

  In January 1933, Leibowitz was retained as the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys, the nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of gang-raping two white women aboard a freight train headed from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Huntsville, Alabama. In the face of constant death threats from Southern racists—who openly declared their desire to lynch the “Jew lawyer from New York”—he devoted the next five years to the cause célèbre. Working without pay or reimbursement for his expenses, he eventually brought the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he earned a place in civil rights history by convincing the justices that the Alabama trial system—which excluded African-Americans from serving on juries—was unconstitutional and had deprived his clients “of the equal protection of the laws as provided for the Fourteenth Amendment.”21

  By then, the “Great Defender” (as his admirers now called him) had resumed his criminal law practice in New York, though with one crucial difference. He was far less inclined to represent high-profile gangsters, turning down both Lucky Luciano and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, despite the latter’s offer of a $250,000 fee.22 In early 1936, he became involved in the single most spectacular case of the century, that of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, convicted kidnapper-killer of the Lindbergh baby. Retained by a wealthy socialite convinced that Hauptmann had been railroaded, Leibowitz conducted a series of jailhouse interviews with the prisoner, trying to convince him that his only hope of avoiding the chair was to admit his guilt. Even Leibowitz’s famously persuasive powers, however, could not wrest a confession from Hauptmann. In a rare admission of defeat, Leibowitz quit the case on February 19.