Veronica Gedeon was a 20-year-old commercial model from Long Island City whose murder during Easter Weekend in 1937 captivated New York City. It was reported widely in newspapers there. After Gedeon's murderer was apprehended there were substantial changes in the psychiatric laws in the state of New York.

Lurid photographs

Gedeon appeared at an Illustrators Society show for models which was raided by members of the New York City Police Department

New York City Police Department

The New York City Police Department , established in 1845, is currently the largest municipal police force in the United States, with primary responsibilities in law enforcement and investigation within the five boroughs of New York City...

 on November 8, 1935. She posed for crime-oriented periodicals such as Inside Detective and Headquarters Detective. Her murder featured an ironic twist because of the sensational titles
of the pictorials she appeared in. In Party Girl, Pretty But Cheap, and I Am A White Slave photographs showed her flimsily clad, beaten, smothered, and tied up.

Family history

Gedeon attended William Cullen Bryant High School

William Cullen Bryant High School

William Cullen Bryant High School, or William C. Bryant High School, and Bryant High School for short, is a secondary school located in Queens, New York City, New York, United States serving grades 9 through 12.-Name:...

. She was of Hungarian ethnicity, from a family which came to the United States in 1907. The Gedeon family resided in Astoria, Queens

Astoria, Queens

Astoria is a neighborhood in the northwestern corner of the borough of Queens in New York City. Located in Community Board 1, Astoria is bounded by the East River and is adjacent to three other Queens neighborhoods: Long Island City, Sunnyside , and Woodside...

 until 1929. They moved to 240 East 53rd Street where Gedeon's mother, Mary, ran a rooming house until December 5, 1936, when the establishment was turned over to a superintendent. Earlier Mary Gedeon operated several speakeasies during the latter portion of the Prohibition

Prohibition

Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is the practice of prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and consumption of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries during which the...

 era.

Murderer's profile and arrest

The family relocated to an apartment at 318 East 50th Street (Manhattan)

50th Street (Manhattan)

50th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The street runs eastbound from 12th Avenue, across the full width of the island, ending at Beekman Place and carries the M50 bus line, which returns on 49th Street...

, where Gedeon's mother took in boarders. A scupltor, Robert George Irwin

Robert George Irwin

Robert George Irwin , an artist-sculptor and recurring mental hospital patient, pled guilty to killing three persons on Easter weekend in 1937 in the Beekman Hill area of New York City’s Turtle Bay neighborhood....

, 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

Bellevue Hospital Center

Bellevue Hospital Center, most often referred to as "Bellevue", was founded on March 31, 1736 and is the oldest public hospital in the United States. Located on First Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, Bellevue is famous from many literary, film and television...

 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

Lindbergh kidnapping

The kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was the abduction of the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The toddler, 18 months old at the time, was abducted from his family home in East Amwell, New Jersey, near the town of Hopewell, New Jersey, on the evening of...

. In late June 1937 a Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...

 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

Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business...

, Irwin admitted he wanted to behead Ethel and make a death mask

Death mask

In Western cultures a death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits...

.