On Easter Sunday, March 28, 1937, Joseph Jedian arrived at his estranged wife’s apartment building in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood carrying white lilies for the family holiday dinner. When no one answered the bell, he grew concerned. His daughter Ethel and her husband soon arrived, and together they persuaded the building superintendent to let them in. Inside the fifth-floor apartment at 316 East 50th Street, Joseph found his 20-year-old daughter Veronica lying dead on her bed.
Beneath another bed, concealed from view, he discovered the body of his wife, 54-year-old Mary Jedian. In a third room, the lodger, a deaf English waiter named Frank Burns, lay motionless with multiple stab wounds. The victims had been killed sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 that morning. Medical examination showed that both women had been strangled, and Mary bore defensive wounds from struggling against her attacker.
Burns had been stabbed 11 times with a thin implement, likely an ice pick, driven through his skull. He had been killed while asleep, his deafness preventing him from hearing the earlier violence. Investigators found a meticulously carved sculpture made from a bar of soap lying on the floor. Gray hairs were clutched in Veronica’s hand, suggesting she had grabbed her attacker during the struggle.
The family’s small dog had not barked during the night, a detail that led police to believe the perpetrator was known to the household. Veronica Jedian had worked as a model for detective magazines and pulp publications, posing in dramatic, imperiled scenes that helped sell out entire print runs. Her parents had divorced years earlier, and her mother ran a boarding house. Among the former lodgers was a young sculptor named Robert George Irwin.
Irwin had developed an obsession with Ethel, the elder daughter, who had recently married. He had a documented history of mental instability, including a self-mutilation attempt that led to his commitment to a state hospital. After his release, he had been expelled from a theological school just 10 days before the murders. Witnesses reported seeing him near the East River, where he spoke of drowning himself, and later walking near the boarding house.
Police issued a warrant for Irwin’s arrest, launching the largest manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. For nearly three months, he eluded capture. In late June, a chambermaid at a Cleveland hotel recognized him from a photograph in a detective magazine. The man, working under the name Bob Murray, cleaned out his locker and fled.
Irwin fled to Chicago, where he telephoned the Chicago Tribune offering to surrender for a price. The newspaper dismissed the call as a prank. He then contacted the Chicago Herald-Examiner, which took him seriously and negotiated an arrangement: $5,000 and a new white linen suit in exchange for his exclusive confession and subsequent surrender. In his published confession, Irwin said he had gone to the apartment seeking Ethel, intending to kill her because she was the dearest object in the world to him.
He wanted to behead her and create a death mask. Finding her absent, he spoke with Mary, who asked him to leave. The request enraged him, and he strangled and stabbed her. When Veronica arrived and spoke his name, he strangled her, fearing she would identify him.
He then killed Burns to eliminate a potential witness. Irwin was flown to New York, where police took him into custody on June 26, 1937. At his trial in the autumn of 1938, public interest was extraordinary, with spectators thronging the courtroom. But soon after a jury was selected, Irwin pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder.
The plea avoided the death penalty and included the peculiar promise that a pair of trousers he had abandoned at Grand Central Station would be returned to him. Judge James Wallace sentenced him to 139 years in prison: 99 years for Burns, 20 years for Mary, and 20 years for Veronica. Following sentencing, Irwin was sent to Sing Sing for psychological examination, where prison physicians ruled him very definitely insane. He was transferred to Dannemora State Hospital, then to Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane in Fishkill, New York, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The case prompted significant changes in New York. Legislative hearings exposed grave deficiencies in the psychiatric system, and several hospital administrators lost their positions for releasing Irwin despite clear warning signs. New protocols were established for evaluating and supervising potentially dangerous patients. The case also drew attention to the exclusion of women from juries in first-degree murder trials.
On the eve of the initial trial date, it was announced that none of the 841 potential jurors was a woman, despite statutes allowing women to serve. One day later, the courts began placing women on jury lists for such cases. Mary and Veronica Jedian were laid to rest in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Yonkers.
The location of Frank Burns’ burial remains unrecorded. Robert George Irwin died of cancer in 1975, having spent 37 years confined in institutions for the criminally insane. He was 67 years old.