A True Crime Cover Model Was Murdered on Easter Sunday in 1937

When New York City police officers stepped into a Midtown East apartment on Easter Sunday in 1937, they encountered a crime scene that seemed almost impossibly grim.

Inside, they found three bodies.

In one bedroom lay Frank Byrnes, a 35-year-old deaf English waiter who rented a room in the apartment. He had been stabbed 15 times in the head and body. In another bedroom, officers found Mary Gedeon, 54, strangled and pushed beneath a bed. And on top of that bed lay Mary’s daughter: 20-year-old commercial model Veronica “Ronnie” Gedeon, undressed and strangled.

Despite their brutality, the killings might have remained only a local crime story if not for the young woman at the center of them.

Before her death, Gedeon worked as a commercial model, posing for photographers who produced dramatic images for pulp detective magazines and crime story covers. Instead of fading into the city’s long list of unsolved murders, the case quickly became a national sensation, fueled by the strange coincidence that the victim herself had been captured on camera in staged scenes of violence.

The photographs had nothing to do with the killings, but the eerie overlap between fiction and reality—a real murder victim who had posed in staged crime scenes—propelled the case onto front pages nationwide at a time when sensational crime reporting was rapidly becoming a staple of American journalism. Time described the coverage as a “news-picture frenzy.”

The case also introduced the public to Robert George Irwin, a 29-year-old sculptor with a history of psychiatric hospitalizations who would eventually confess to the killings.

“It was one of those crimes that had an irresistible combination of ingredients: sex, violence and New York City,” Harold Schechter, author of The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

The killings themselves were brutal and puzzling.

Neighbors told police they had heard screams during the night of the murders—March 28, 1937—and detectives found no clear sign that the apartment had been broken into. The lack of forced entry suggested that the killer may have been someone the victims knew, police decided. Neighbors had not heard the family’s dog, a Pekingese, bark overnight, reinforcing that theory. 

Within days, suspicion focused on a former resident of the apartment: Irwin, who had previously rented a room from Mary Gedeon.

Irwin had once shown promise as an artist. He studied sculpture and occasionally sold his work, but his life was marked by instability. Friends and acquaintances described him as intense and erratic, prone to sudden mood swings and periods of paranoia.

He had also spent time in psychiatric institutions. In the years before the murders, Irwin had been hospitalized multiple times for mental illness, including delusions and violent outbursts.

And he was obsessed with Gedeon’s older sister, Ethel.

Irwin met Ethel while he was living in the Gedeon household as a boarder. According to investigators, he quickly developed an intense fixation on her. But the feelings were not returned. Ethel later married another man and moved out of the apartment, a rejection that investigators believe deeply unsettled Irwin.

By early April, police had begun searching for Irwin in connection with the murders. When they discovered he had disappeared, the investigation turned into a nationwide manhunt.

Irwin’s photograph, along with images of Veronica, appeared in newspapers across the U.S. as police tried to track him down. For months, the search for the missing sculptor became a continuing headline.

The hunt for Irwin ended dramatically in June 1937 when he walked into a newspaper office in Chicago and identified himself as the killer authorities had been seeking.

According to his account, Irwin had gone to the Gedeon apartment hoping to find Ethel. Investigators later said he had developed a disturbing fantasy about killing her and fashioning a mask from her face.

Instead, he encountered Mary.

The two spoke for a time, Irwin said, before an argument erupted over his desire to stay all night to wait for Ethel. Suddenly, he told investigators, he lunged at her, striking her and then strangling her to death. Afterward, he pushed Mary’s body beneath the bed and waited in the apartment, still hoping Ethel would arrive. But Veronica walked through the door next.

Irwin told police that she went into the bathroom and began to undress. When she emerged, he attacked her, wrapping his hands around her throat. He claimed he had not initially intended to kill her until she said that she recognized him.

He strangled her and threw her body onto the bed.

Finally, fearing that Byrnes might have seen him, Irwin crept into the boarder’s room and stabbed him repeatedly as he lay in bed.

“Irwin is a fascinating character,” Schechter says. “He could be very charming, seemingly rational. But he was a madman.”

Irwin’s prosecution drew enormous attention in New York. Reporters crowded courtrooms and chronicled the case in detail, describing the accused killer as a mentally disturbed artist responsible for one of the city’s most shocking crimes.

His defense centered on his long history of mental illness. Psychiatrists examined Irwin and debated whether he was legally sane. 

But before the case reached trial, Irwin pleaded guilty to the killings. The plea deal, struck in 1938, spared Irwin the death penalty. A judge instead sentenced him to 139 years in prison. Irwin died of cancer in 1975 while incarcerated at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Fishkill, N.Y. 

Yet even after the legal proceedings ended, the case lingered in the public imagination—not only because of its brutality, but because of the extraordinary way it had been covered.

Crime reporting in the 1930s was becoming increasingly visual and sensational, as newspapers competed fiercely for readers during the Depression. Despite relatively low crime rates, the era was one in which “people became transfixed” by violent crimes, says Jeff Adler, a historian who studies American crime and violence at the University of Florida.

Crimes involving white, middle-class victims tended to attract the most attention, Adler tells A&E Crime + Investigation. And to capture readers’ fascination, “it helped if the killings were gory,” he adds. The Gedeon case offered exactly that: A young model whose photographs resembled scenes from detective fiction, a triple murder inside a Manhattan apartment and a mentally ill sculptor whose violent fantasy had turned real.

“The primitive way” the murders were committed, Adler says, made the story “even more exotic.”