Buxom, black-eyed Henrietta Koscianski, 19, a pantry maid in Cleveland's Statler Hotel, gave her starched white blouse a straightening pat and winked at one of the other girls as the young man who washed bar glasses and supplied cracked ice came on duty one night last week. "Say, Bob," she asked, "what's your last name?"
"Murray," he answered quickly. "Why?"
"Oh, nothing. But did you ever hear of Robert Irwin?"
"No," he said, turning away. Few minutes later he disappeared.
Two nights before the bar boy had done a clever pencil sketch of Henrietta, and she had had a chance to study his face as he sketched. Business was slow that night and later she had gone upstairs to borrow something to read from one of the other girls. In a detective magazine she had seen a picture of 29-year-old Robert Irwin, former insane asylum inmate, sculptor of sorts, wanted in Manhattan for the horrible Easter Sunday murders of the beauteous artists' model Veronica Gedeon. her mother and a man lodger. "Why that looks like our Bob!" she exclaimed. She showed the picture to the other girl who agreed on the resemblance. Friday night she would show it to Bob. It would amuse him.
By midnight Friday, Pantry Maid Koscianski was all atremble. The bar boy had obviously skipped town. His locker was empty. The police had been to his $1.50 a week hotel, found only an old pair of shoes and New York newspapers with stories about the Gedeon murders and the recent death threats against a staff physician at Rockland State Hospital where Irwin had once been a mental patient. "I feel like a nickel now," mumbled Miss Koscianski.-"I didn't call the police because I just thought it was a coincidence. I didn't have the nerve to think of him actually as a killer."
Next day, to Hearst's Chicago Herald & Examiner came one of those incredible strokes of luck that make newspaper life worth living. Robert Irwin, the most sought-after murderer then at large in the U. S. (TIME, April 12), had just telephoned the Chicago Tribune ("Worlds Greatest Newspaper"), offered to surrender for a price, was not believed. So he called the Hearst paper, had his terms accepted, and slouched into their offices to pour out the story of the Gedeon murders in a voluminous, jumbled, sex-loaded signed confession. From late Saturday until Sunday afternoon Hearst writers and cameramen had their prize to themselves. Other papers, writhing as Hearst extra after extra hit the stands, howled to Chicago's police. Detectives searched the Herald & Examiner office in vain. Irwin had been spirited away to the Morrison Hotel where Hearst men played cards with him, treated him well. When he was finally surrendered to the Cook County Sheriff the next afternoon he looked rested and refreshed and his white linen suit was crisp. Awaiting him in Manhattan by prearrangement was the famed criminal defense lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz. Toward midnight, in a Hearst-chartered transport. Prisoner Irwin was flown to New York City to face the murder charges. It was his first flight, would probably be his last.
Hearstpapers nationwide screamed the headlines IRWIN SURRENDERS!—CONFESSES! EXCLUSIVE! Excerpts: