Robert George Irwin
Robert George Irwin (August 5, 1907 – 1975) was an American artist, sculptor, and recurring mental hospital patient who pleaded guilty to killing three people on Easter weekend in 1937 in the Beekman Hill area of New York City's Turtle Bay neighborhood.However, that coincidence kept the story on front pages of newspapers around the country for months, and that publicity ultimately helped to bring Irwin into custody.Irwin's prosecution, which ended through a plea bargain that kept him incarcerated for life, renewed debate about the use and scope of New York State's version of the insanity defense.[6] The son of evangelist parents, Irwin was reportedly born in a tent on an old-fashioned camp meeting ground in Portland, Oregon.Then, working for a waxworks studio in Los Angeles,[11] he carved commercial busts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other public figures.[1] He received further treatment for mental illness for two more years at Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York, and was released in the summer of 1936.[13] The ensuing police investigation revealed that shortly after 2 a.m., Charles Robinson, an upstairs neighbor, had noticed that the door to the Gedeons' flat had been partially open and so closed it.[13] By April 5, however, their attention had shifted toward Irwin,[18] in part because a sculpture carefully carved in ordinary bath soap was discovered at the crime scene.[20] After Irwin came to the newspaper's offices, its city editor, John W. Dienhart,[23] and the reporters G. Duncan Bauman[24] and Austin O'Malley kept Irwin in a room in the Morrison Hotel in Chicago, worked on the terms of a confession to the Beekman Hill murders the newspaper would publish as an exclusive, and briefly shielded him from police.[28] Contrary to Inspector Lyon's initial view Irwin was insane, New York now found him normal at the time of the murders and claimed that he knew the nature and quality of his acts.[29] The presiding judge postponed the trial in September 1937 to await the findings of a three-member commission of inquiry evaluating Irwin's sanity."[32] Soon after a jury was selected, however, Irwin pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, and a promise that a pair of trousers that he had abandoned in a suitcase left at Grand Central Station in 1937 would be returned to him.[2][36] Irwin's enduring legacy involves the way that newspapers exploited his crime by sensationalist headlines and racy photos, culminating with a paid confession that nearly put him in the electric chair.