CRIME: Easter Killer

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He went to the Gedeon apartment. . . . "I drew Mrs. Gedeon's picture to kill as much time as possible. In comes this little Englishman. She introduced him to me. He went to his room. . . . I said, 'I am going to stay here until I see Ethel [the elder daughter].' She . . . yelled, 'Get out of here.' I hit her. . . . I choked her. . . . All the time this damned Englishman was in the next room just ten feet away. She put up a hell of a fight . . . my hands were full of blood. I smeared it on her, on her face and on her breast. I threw her in the bedroom under the bed. . . .

"Finally Ronnie [Veronica Gedeon, the artists' model daughter] came in. She went into the bathroom. . . . I thought she was never coming out. . . . I made a sort of blackjack out of a piece of soap in a cloth. . . . I hit her. But the soap just splattered. . . . I grabbed her from behind. . . . I can very well believe that she was drunk because she didn't put up any fight at all. I . . . took her in her room . . . held her just tight enough so that she could breathe. She asked me not to attack her, 'Please don't, I've had an operation.' I strangled her. When Ronnie was dead, I looked at her with a sick feeling all through me. Her beauty was gone. . . . Blue death seemed to issue from her—like a sort of spiritual emanation. . . . My brain was working so fast I could almost hear it. . . . The Englishman. I must kill him too. . . . I stood for a moment over his bed. . . . Asleep? But how could I be sure? . . . I lifted the ice pick, point down, and struck. . . . Afterwards, in the newspapers, I read that he had been stabbed 15 times. I don't know. . . . It was morning when I stepped out and closed the door. . . . There was an overwhelming weariness all through me. . . . I was so sleepy, I could hardly walk the short distance around the corner to my room. I went in and dropped on my bed. It was not until evening that I was awakened by the cries of newsboys below my window. . . . They were yelling about a 'triple murder.' . . . It did not frighten me. I was as calm as I ever had been. I was sure that I would not be suspected. I was so sure of this that I did not even take the trouble to move from the neighborhood—not for a week."

From Manhattan he had gone by train to Philadelphia, by bus to Washington, D. C., by devious means to Cleveland where he had stayed until surprised by the pantry maid's question. The three murders were not intended, he said. He had intended to murder only the elder married daughter, Ethel Gedeon Kudner, with whom he had been in love, years before when he was a roomer at the Gedeons'. The murder was to satisfy an overpowering urge for a tremendous emotional experience. "I thought that after killing Ethel, then they would kill me in the chair, but I didn't care. Then I said to myself that after being in the nut house all of your life, you can't go to the chair. . . . They'll put me in the nut house again and then I'll be there all the rest of my life and catch up with myself, in a spiritual way."

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