Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. Late one night in the spring of 1937, a young woman stumbled into her New York City apartment building, drunk from a long night of partying with friends.
She made her way up the steps and reached her apartment door, and after she opened it up, she stepped inside and her little dog ran up to say hello, and so she gave her dog a pet, and then she walked towards her bedroom.
But the moment she stepped foot into that pitch black bedroom, something just felt off.
It was too quiet. But before she could figure out why that was, something heavy came flying out of the darkness and hit her on the face.
And for a moment, the woman just stood there, stunned.
And then a second later, something else emerged from the darkness.
Two hands. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, the next time you're at the Amazon Music Follow Button's house for a party, ask if you can add a song to play next, but then proceed to only add our brand new show, Run Fool.
Okay, let's get into today's story. Are you searching for a romantic summer getaway?
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Caught between pretending to belong and unexpectedly finding where she truly fits in, Valerie learns her summer is about to get far more complicated than she ever planned.
She's in over her head and head over heels.
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Go to audible.com slash richgirlsummer. On the evening of March 27, 1937, a 20-year-old woman named Veronica Ronnie Gideon walked alone down a dark street in New York City.
She hugged herself against the early spring chill as she made her way to the home of a man she barely knew.
Ronnie's boyfriend had left for the Easter weekend to visit his family, so he had asked his best friend to keep an eye on Ronnie while he was away.
That friend had invited Ronnie to his place for dinner and then an evening of drinking and dancing.
And that's where Ronnie was headed right now.
She was feeling a bit nervous, but also excited, and she was wearing one of her favorite outfits, a pretty blue tea dress.
Ronnie thought it was pretty funny that her boyfriend was so worried she might cheat on him that he had basically set her up on a date tonight himself.
Sure, a second man was going to join Ronnie and her boyfriend's best friend, but that just meant Ronnie would be out on the town with two men that were not her boyfriend.
And they planned to stay out at the bars until they closed at 3 a.m.
But even if she didn't admit this, Ronnie did understand why she made her boyfriend nervous.
She was totally gorgeous with a bubbly personality and a quick sense of humor.
She also had a modeling career that was really starting to get her notice too.
In fact, recently she'd started to think she could actually become a famous model.
Only a few days earlier, the latest issue of Inside Detective Magazine had hit newsstands all over the city and there on the cover was Ronnie herself.
In the photo, she looked terrified, with one arm shielding her face and the other covering her bare chest.
The picture was supposed to illustrate an alarming story called Party Girl about unmarried young women who like to drink and have premarital sex until they all get sent to jail for immorality.
In the 1930s, true crime magazines that featured barely dressed young women in danger were enormously popular.
And Ronnie had appeared on several covers with headlines like, Pretty But Cheap and I Am A White Slave.
But the real Ronnie was nothing like those pictures.
She liked to go out and have a good time, but she wasn't wild.
She had only been in love one time when she was 16 years old and she eloped with a family friend named Bobby Flower, but that marriage ended disastrously after only a few weeks.
And for many nights after that breakup, Ronnie felt heartbroken about losing Bobby and she'd write about him in her diary until she fell asleep.
And now, four years later, despite having a new boyfriend, Ronnie wasn't actually looking for love.
She was just looking to have fun. And what better place than New York City, Ronnie thought as she stepped off the curb to cross Fifth Avenue.
And at that moment, a yellow taxi cab zipped by close enough to make Ronnie jump back and jolt her out of her daydream.
And then after collecting herself, she looked up and she could see she was just a few blocks away from Steve's place near Central Park.
Steve's neighborhood was way more fashionable than Ronnie's.
Ronnie still lived at home with her mother, Mary Gideon, in a tiny fourth floor apartment near the East River.
Ronnie found her home to be pretty depressing.
Her mother had been unhappily married to her father, Joseph Gideon, for decades, until her father had left the family three years earlier.
Joseph was a sour man who repaired furniture for a living, and he did not approve of Ronnie's love of the nightlife.
Ronnie had been relieved when he moved out, though he still had a key and came over on holidays and on some weekends.
But even without Ronnie's dad around, the apartment was still overcrowded.
This was the Great Depression, and people often rented extra rooms to strangers to raise extra money.
One of Mary and Ronnie's roommates was a boarder named Frank Burns, who lived in one of the bedrooms and joined the family at dinner each night.
And the other boarder was one of Ronnie's friends, who was just staying temporarily.
So lately, Ronnie had been sharing the same bed as her mother.
Ronnie loved her mother, but she sometimes felt like the walls were closing in when they would spend the evening together listening to the radio in their tiny living room.
It was even harder when Frank joined them.
He was partially deaf, and her mother had to turn the radio up super loud just so he could hear his favorite show, Amos and Andy.
And Frank was just one in a parade of boarders who intruded on Ronnie's family life.
Ronnie recalled one other boarder, a struggling artist named Bob Irwin, who wanted to marry her big sister, Ethel.
Her sister was a very beautiful woman, but who hid her beauty behind horn-rimmed glasses and hair that was pulled into a tight bun.
She said she was not interested in Bob, but Bob never gave up.
He continued to drop in on the family even after he had moved out.
In short, the apartment had long felt like a prison to Ronnie.
By comparison, she felt absolutely free when she went out to the bars and clubs of New York.
Just then, Ronnie passed by the famous Radio City Music Hall, where she had seen the movie Snow White with her boyfriend, Lincoln Hauser, a couple of months earlier.
And they had had so much fun, Ronnie remembered, and the colors were totally amazing.
Lincoln liked to tell people that the two of them were engaged, which was not actually true, but they were a pretty good couple.
And thinking about this made Ronnie feel kind of strange that she was now about to go have dinner and drinks with Lincoln's best friend.
Ronnie approached the front door of her boyfriend's friend, Stephen Butter, a little before 8 p.m.
As she climbed the front steps, she could hear big band swing music blaring from Stephen's radio.
She rang the bell. Moments later, Stephen, who was dressed in a sharp pinstripe suit complete with a pocket handkerchief, opened the door and welcomed Ronnie inside with a theatrical bow.
This was going to be a fun night. For the next six hours, Ronnie lost herself in the evening with Stephen and his other friend.
They had planned to go bar hopping, but they were having such a good time dancing to the radio music while drinking gin and beer that they just stayed at Stephen's place until quite late.
Stephen expected Ronnie to make them dinner, but she wasn't offended.
The kitchen was considered women's work in those days, so Ronnie made a pasta dinner for all three of them.
Steven was not quite as handsome as Ronnie's boyfriend, and his family was not quite as wealthy.
But Ronnie thought he was still very charming and had lots of promise, he was working on Wall Street after all, and the more gin and beer they drank, the more they flirted and danced cheek to cheek.
Finally, at 2 a.m., Steven's other friend called it a night and went home, but Steve and Ronnie decided their night was not quite done.
They threw on their coats and they headed for the Monte Carlo Bar and Grill, which was on the way to Ronnie's apartment, for a few more gin highballs.
As Ronnie swallowed her last sip of alcohol, she thought about how her night might have turned out if she'd listened to her mother.
Mary had wanted Ronnie home to help in the kitchen.
Tomorrow was Easter Sunday and they were expecting guests, Ronnie's sister Ethel and her husband, as well as their father.
But Ronnie had secretly slipped out the door for the evening while her mother was still out shopping for the pork loin and green beans.
Ronnie felt guilty, but not too much. By the time Steve escorted Ronnie back to her apartment building, they were leaning on each other to keep from falling down.
But they both knew that since Ronnie was dating Steve's best friend, they shouldn't let things get romantic.
So instead of a goodnight kiss, Steve offered to escort Ronnie to church the next morning for Easter mass at 10.
And she happily said yes. Ronnie let herself in the main building door and began climbing the four flights of stairs to her apartment.
She was a little dizzy from all the booze, but she felt lighthearted.
Steve had been a good companion for the evening, and she was glad that she'd see him again in the morning.
Ronnie walked in the door of her apartment at about 3 a.m., trying to be extra quiet so she didn't wake up the people inside, which included her mother and one of the two boarders named Frank.
As for the other boarder, which was Ronnie's friend, they were out of town.
Ronnie quietly ducked into the bathroom near the front door and undressed down to her slip.
She took off her makeup and washed her face and hands.
She brushed her teeth and then brushed her hair.
And then finally she was ready for bed and so she tiptoed to the dark silent bedroom where she and her mother slept.
As she entered the bedroom, Ronnie couldn't see or hear a thing, not even her mother's breathing.
And then suddenly, a hard object struck Ronnie in the face.
It stunned Ronnie far more than it hurt her, but she was so terrified and confused, she didn't move an inch.
And then a second later, a man's hand came out of the blackness and squeezed around Ronnie's throat and then shoved her roughly onto the bed. please don't touch me ronnie managed to croak in little more than a whisper but the man just squeezed tighter the next morning was easter and ronnie's father joseph gideon woke up feeling totally hungover inside of the little room he had been renting since he separated from ronnie's mother mary But despite Joseph's throbbing headache from all the beers and shots of alcohol he had drank the night before, Joseph was actually in a great mood.
He was going to have dinner with his family, and he and his estranged wife, Mary, had big news.
After three years of separation, they were actually going to give married life another try.
Joseph could not wait to tell his two daughters.
Joseph slapped on his fedora hat and whistled as he walked the few blocks from his rented room to his wife's apartment, arriving a full half an hour before his 2.30 p.m. invitation.
Not wanting to be rude by showing up early, Joseph found a payphone and called Mary, but no one answered.
But Joseph didn't mind. He figured they must still be out at the Easter parade.
And so in the meantime, he went shopping for gifts for his family, which included buying cigars that he planned to smoke with his daughter Ethel's husband to celebrate his reunion with his ex-wife Mary.
But when Joseph returned back to Mary's apartment building and rang the front entrance door to the lobby at about 2.40 p.m., there was still no answer inside and Joseph suddenly wondered if he had gotten the time wrong.
Joseph was still standing right outside the main door of this building when his daughter Ethel and her husband came up behind him.
Ethel told Joseph that he was right, the dinner was scheduled for 2.30 p.m., but she thought, you know, maybe mom might have the radio up too loud and so she can't hear the buzzing of the bell when you ring it.
And so Joseph nodded and tried the bell a couple more times, but still nobody opened up the front door.
Eventually another tenant inside the building heard all this buzzing and just let all three of them in the main door to the building.
Joseph immediately bounded up the four flights of stairs to Mary and Ronnie's apartment.
He was going to give them a piece of his mind for leaving the Easter guests waiting outside.
But when he got to the actual apartment door, leaving Ethel and her husband far behind, Joseph immediately knew something just wasn't right.
The front door was not fully shut, it had not latched.
And so when Joseph pushed on it just lightly, it flung open.
And when he stepped into the living room, he saw Ronnie's little Pekingese dog named Tucci.
Usually Tucci would run right up to him, but today Tucci stayed put and just sat there very reserved with her ears flat against her head.
Joseph called out for Mary and Ronnie, but there was only silence in the apartment.
Joseph looked across to the kitchen and saw the pork, which was supposed to be today's dinner, sitting on the counter, obviously uncooked.
Joseph went into the bedroom that Mary and Ronnie shared, but no one was there.
Nothing was disturbed, except there were broken pieces of a bar of soap scattered all across the carpet.
With mounting anxiety, Joseph then entered the second bedroom where Ronnie used to sleep until her friend moved in, and what he saw in there was worse than anything Joseph could have imagined.
His daughter, Ronnie, was lying stark naked on the bed, her eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling.
Her skin was the color gray-blue, and her neck was mottled with dark bruises.
Joseph practically fell over in his haste to get out of the room containing his daughter's corpse.
But when he stumbled into the third bedroom, there was only more horror.
Frank, the boarder, was lying under the covers, the blanket right up to his neck, but his head was mutilated and covered in blood.
Joseph could not take it anymore, and he just ran out of the apartment and began charging down the stairs while screaming, "'They're all dead!'
He breathlessly told Ethel and her husband about the terrible things he had just seen, and they both instantly went pale.
But then Ethel asked, "'Well, what about mother?'
Joseph said he had not seen her, and he just hoped she had escaped and ran to the police.
And then Joseph did exactly that. He ran out of the apartment and then ran a block away to the neighborhood police station where he reported what he had just found.
Minutes later, Joseph returned to the apartment, now with a detective by his side.
And almost immediately, the detective made another shocking discovery.
He saw a foot sticking out from under the bed that Ronnie was lying on top of.
Peering underneath, the detective could see there was another body.
It was Mary Gideon, and she was fully dressed and had terrible bruising around her neck.
Whoever had killed her had apparently tried to hide her body by wedging it beneath the bed.
All three victims' bodies were very stiff by the time they were found.
They had clearly all been dead for hours.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. For the first time, my show, Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted for a special episode.
A Redacted Medical Mystery uncovers how routine surgery leads to classified government operations.
Listen now on the Medical Mysteries or Redacted feeds, or search A Redacted Medical Mystery wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey listeners, Mr. Ballin here. What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light.
And it's called Lawless Planet. Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
From activists who vanish in the Amazon to whistleblowers uncovering billion-dollar environmental crimes, these aren't just stories about the environment.
They're real-life thrillers about people caught between powerful forces willing to kill to keep their secrets buried.
Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.
No more wading through cliffhangers or dealing with ads, because let's be honest. ads shouldn't be the most nerve-wracking part of true crime.
To start your ad-free listening journey, download the Amazon Music app for free or head to amazon.com slash ballin.
That's amazon.com slash b-a-l-l-e-n. Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. I'm excited to tell you about something special.
For the first time, My show, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted, Declassified Mysteries with Luke LaManna, to tell a story so complex it required our combined storytelling styles.
This special episode is called A Redacted Medical Mystery.
In it, unexplained symptoms after a routine surgery quickly unravel into something much darker, leading straight to classified government operations hidden for decades.
To listen and uncover the truth alongside us, head to either the Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries or Redacted show pages right now. or search for A Redacted Medical Mystery in the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're fascinated by unexplained medical stories, well, stick around on Medical Mysteries.
Every week, we dive deep into cases that will leave you questioning everything you know about the human body.
And if government conspiracies are more your style, Redacted is your go-to for stories that unravel secrets never meant to see the light of day.
Remember, you can listen to both shows early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus.
By late Sunday afternoon, a small army of New York detectives, led by Tufkai Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons, had descended on Ronnie and Mary's apartment, and the flashbulbs of crime scene photographers popped in every room as they recorded details of the gruesome murders.
The detectives found a single gray Swede glove in Frank's bedroom, likely left behind by the killer.
They also found Ronnie's torn silk panties behind the headboard where her body lay, suggesting it was her assailant who had removed her clothes either before or after killing her.
Aside from the corpses though, the apartment seemed totally undisturbed.
This was not a robbery. The killer came specifically for these people.
Inspector Lyons concluded that the boarder, Frank, one of the victims, was probably killed first as he slept.
Someone had stabbed him 11 times in the head, likely with an ice pick.
His skull was nearly caved in. Both Ronnie and Mary had been strangled to death by someone's hands, and Mary at least had put up a fierce fight.
She had bruises all over her knuckles. The detectives could not say for sure if the women had been sexually assaulted, but it seemed fairly obvious to Inspector Lyons that they must have.
However, he would leave it to the medical examiner to confirm that detail.
One other thing stood out to Inspector Lyons as he puffed on a cigar and watched another detective give Ronnie's dog a belly scratch.
Why didn't the neighbors hear anything while three brutal murders were committed in the middle of the night?
Tucci was the type of nervous little dog that barked incessantly at strangers.
But apparently, Tucci had not made a sound at all, or had just been so quiet that neighbors were not woken up by the dog.
But to Lyons, the implication here was clear.
Whoever committed what would soon be known as the Easter Sunday Massacre must have known this dog well, so much so that the dog did not bark when they saw this person.
The next day, the murders made the papers.
In New York, there were newspapers that warned of a, quote, sex fiend that was on the loose in the city and that he would surely strike again.
The media really fixated on the fact that Ronnie was this beautiful model who was found in the nude, and so they eagerly printed these photographs from Ronnie's modeling work where she was in various states of undress.
By coincidence, Ronnie had been murdered exactly one year after another sensational murder just down the street.
A delivery man had snuck into the apartment of writer Nancy Titterton and then assaulted her, strangled her, and left her tied up naked in her bathtub.
Now the Titterton murder seemed to be happening all over again, the newspaper said.
One newspaper said that all American women were now in danger from the rising wave of sex murders.
Locksmiths reported a sudden increase in lock sales to men eager to protect their women from predators.
Inspector Lyons felt his blood pressure starting to rise as he read the morning headlines while he finished his breakfast.
A story about the murder described Ronnie as being this prize beauty who was slaughtered by a sex-crazed lunatic who was still on the loose.
To Lyons, stories like these just made his job harder, whipping up public fears and putting pressure on the police to find the killer faster, which he felt just encouraged sloppy detective work.
Just then, as if on cue, the police commissioner himself called Lyons. and he told him to take as many detectives as he needed because solving the Easter Sunday massacre was now the department's top goal.
By the time Lyons set off for police headquarters that morning, he had a plan to employ 75 detectives who would talk to everyone who lived near the Gideons and they would talk to anyone who knew the Gideons over the past few years.
This would be one of the biggest criminal investigations in New York City's history.
And Lyons would make it clear to his massive team of investigators that they should not hesitate to get rough with people if they had to.
One of the first people brought in for questioning was Ronnie's father, Joseph Gideon.
At 4 p.m. that Monday, Joseph Gideon reported to the same neighborhood police station where he came running to plead for help the day before.
This time though, he was trailed by a gang of reporters who were shouting questions at him while he remained grimly silent.
Joseph expected to be treated as a grieving loved one, but the police treated him like a suspect from the start.
They fingerprinted him and made him empty all his pockets to be sure he had no weapons.
Then they relentlessly grilled him with questions for 12 hours as detectives took turns trying to get Joseph to break down.
But over the course of this interview, Joseph only grew more ornery.
Joseph had an alibi. Well, sort of. He had spent Saturday evening drinking at a bar and playing skee-ball with some other people who could confirm he was there.
But by the time his daughter and his ex-wife were killed sometime after 3 a.m., Joseph was sleeping off the bender in his bed with no witnesses.
One detective called Joseph a liar for saying he had nothing to do with the heinous crime, so Joseph called the detective a liar right back.
Police eventually had to let Joseph go at about 4am on Tuesday because they had absolutely no evidence that he had done anything wrong, but they weren't quite done with Joseph.
When Joseph went to his furniture repair shop to open up for the day a few hours later, he found five detectives waiting for him. they immediately seized the long needles that Joseph used for working on upholstery to see if maybe they matched the wounds on Frank Burns' head.
Now, Joseph complained very bitterly to police.
He couldn't even do his job. Reporters who had been tailing Joseph saw him blow up at the police and they immediately crowded around the little upholsterer.
And this time, Joseph shocked them by saying really horrible things about his dead wife and daughter.
He said that his daughter, Ronnie, was wild and willful and that she loved to tease men.
Maybe one of them had finally killed her for it, he said.
When one of the reporters suggested that the killer could be someone romantically involved with his wife, he scoffed.
He said that his wife was so cold that men, aside from him, probably would not find her attractive.
As Joseph was talking to these reporters, he showed no sign that he was actually grieving the loss of his family.
Instead, he just seemed really, really mad.
And so after a wave of newspaper stories printed Joseph's harsh comments, Lyons' investigators began focusing even harder on Joseph.
He certainly seemed unfeeling enough to potentially have killed his own family.
Now, the detectives were obviously very suspicious of Joseph Gideon, but that didn't mean anything he said to them they didn't take seriously.
And so when Joseph suggested police should really look into all the men in his daughter's life to see if maybe they had something to do with it, the police said, yeah, we will do that.
And so the police tracked down all the men who had dated Ronnie over the years or Ronnie had been close to in some way, starting with Stephen Butter, the man that Ronnie had been with the evening right before she had died, the best friend of her boyfriend.
Stephen had gone to pick up Ronnie for Easter Mass as they had planned to on Sunday morning, but when he got there just before 10 a.m., no one answered the buzzer.
And so Steven went back home, perplexed, and he kept calling Ronnie periodically throughout the day until 3 p.m. when a detective answered the phone.
The detective told Steven they needed to talk to him right away, but didn't say why.
By the time Stephen got to the police station an hour later, he was so nervous he was visibly shaking.
But when police began speaking to him, he didn't really add much of value.
Stephen didn't even know Ronnie was dead until he got to the police station.
All Stephen could say was that Ronnie was a, quote, swell kid and they had a, quote, swell time together.
Lyons pretty much immediately dismissed Stephen as a suspect, but Ronnie's social life left investigators with plenty more men to talk to, and Ronnie had some seriously complicated relationships with men.
When Ronnie's boyfriend, Lincoln Houser, spoke to detectives at his home, he alternated between praise for Ronnie as a sweet, church-going young woman and slammed her as a party girl who often stayed out all night and loved to, quote, play the field with other men.
Lincoln admitted that he worried his girlfriend would cheat on him when he was away, but he trusted his friend Stephen to keep an eye on her for him, which is why he had set them up to hang out that night.
But Lincoln would say, you know, despite the quarrels they had in their relationship, he loved Ronnie and was absolutely devastated by her death.
Also, Lincoln had a solid alibi. He was 50 miles away with family when Ronnie was killed.
Ronnie's ex-husband, Bobby, came to the police station next for questioning, and he insisted he had no hard feelings after his marriage to Ronnie broke up.
He said they were both too young to be married, and they stayed friends and even got together once in a while.
He had last seen Ronnie a few weeks before her death when they went to a movie.
At some point, Bobby would tell Detective Lyons that he really hoped they would find the murderer and send him to the electric chair.
So far, Ronnie's love life had not produced much in the way of a suspect.
Of all her partners, Bobby was probably Lyons' best bet, given the failed marriage, but both Bobby and Ronnie seemed to have genuinely moved on from each other.
Then, one of Ronnie's closest friends suggested that police take a look at a sometime chauffeur named George Frenchy-Gueray, who previously rented a room in Mary and Ronnie's apartment.
He was an eccentric man who wore his chauffeur's uniform even when he wasn't working, and he spoke in a heavy French accent.
But behind his kind of goofy, harmless exterior, Frenchy had a criminal record.
Most importantly, according to Ronnie's friend, he had fought with Ronnie's mother, Mary, over money.
In addition, Frenchy had developed a crush on Ronnie, but she had no interest, and she told him to leave her alone.
Two of Lyons' detectives visited Frenchy at his rented room a few blocks from Ronnie's apartment.
There, they would find two bloody handkerchiefs, which Frenchy blamed on nosebleeds.
Frenchy did have an alibi, saying he had spent Easter weekend at a buddy's apartment, but when the detectives visited that apartment, they found no less than four ice picks, including one that appeared to be bloodstained.
By Monday afternoon, the late editions of the newspapers were speculating that Frenchy had committed these murders, perhaps with the help of the friend he stayed with that weekend.
Police quickly arrested both men. But a police analyst determined that the stain on the ice pick seized by police was not blood, it was rust.
And they had no other evidence to connect Frenchy and his friend to the murders, and so Lyons reluctantly let them go.
At a crowded press conference on Tuesday, three days after the murders, Lyons showed serious frustration from the three days of nonstop investigating with little to show for it.
He admitted that detectives were, quote, in the dark about who killed Mary, Ronnie, and Frank.
There was one very small bit of good news, though.
The coroner reported that there was no physical evidence that either woman was sexually assaulted.
Maybe the killer was not a sex fiend after all.
And so the detectives decided to redouble their efforts on looking into Ronnie's father, Joseph Gideon.
Everywhere Joseph went in those first days after the murders, he was followed by reporters, giving him endless chances to say something to make his position worse.
He knew that he was under police scrutiny, but he boasted to reporters that the police could not break him.
And he flew into a rage when reporters questioned his whereabouts at the time of the killings.
Adding to public suspicions, the walls of Joseph's shop were covered with French postcards featuring naked women, and he admitted to a fondness for erotica.
One newspaper said that Joseph suffered from, quote, "'queer animal desires' that prompted him to leave his wife."
Maybe, the newspaper speculated, Joseph was driven by some perversion to kill his own family.
On Thursday, April 1st, so four days after the murders, detectives returned to Joseph's shop to look for a long needle that they had missed on their first sweep.
They had already confiscated most of Joseph's tools, but a sharp-eyed upholsterer who did not know Joseph, who just happened to see a picture in the newspaper of all of Joseph's equipment that had been confiscated, told police that it looked like one needle was missing.
He said it was a foot-long, quote, regulator with a very sharp point that every good furniture restorer would have.
And police knew this tool was plenty big enough to have been the weapon that killed Frank Byrne.
Newspapers immediately started running with the story, referring to the missing needle as the Gideon death needle, but the detectives would never find it.
However, in their search for this other needle, they would find something else very unexpected in Joseph's shop, an unlicensed, loaded .38 caliber revolver hidden in a corner.
Since Joseph had previously told police that he did not have a gun, they had now caught him in a lie.
When one of the detectives phoned Assistant Chief Inspector Lyons with this news, he was elated.
Now, Lyons said, they had Joseph Gideon right where they wanted him.
Lyons ordered his men to start trailing Joseph wherever he went, just like the reporters were doing.
They were going to allow Joseph to attend the funeral for his wife and his daughter, but that didn't mean he'd be going alone.
Lyons told them to give Joseph a police escort so that a law enforcement officer was never more than an arm's length away.
Several thousand people were waiting outside McCabe's funeral parlor when the police car carrying Joseph Gideon pulled up on Thursday afternoon.
People were out on the sidewalk, while many more were draped over fire escapes, looking out windows, and even standing on the roof.
Many hoped for a glimpse of the man suspected of killing Ronnie and Mary, and when Joseph stepped out of the police car, surrounded by four detectives, someone in the crowd shouted, There he is!
But before anyone could lay a hand on Joseph, the detectives hustled him through the mob and into the chapel.
There, Mary and Ronnie lay side by side in open caskets, surrounded by flowers, many from Ronnie's male admirers as well as artists that she had worked with.
The chapel was absolutely full, but only a handful of people actually knew the victims personally.
People such as her ex-husband Bobby Flower, her boyfriend Lincoln Hauser, and her boyfriend's best friend Stephen Butter, the last person to see Ronnie alive, aside from her killer.
And there were a few people who had known the Gideons from the past, people like Bob Irwin, the young sculptor who had once boarded with Ronnie and Mary and asked Ronnie's older sister Ethel to marry him.
Bob dabbed a tear from his eye with a handkerchief as the priest stepped up to the pulpit and began to speak.
After the service was over, several of the men who had loved Ronnie kissed her as they passed her casket and openly wept.
As for Ronnie's father, Joseph, he would keep his composure inside of the chapel, but when they all made their way out to the cemetery, he would break down in heavy sobs as he watched his daughter and ex-wife lowered into the ground.
As he wept, his other daughter, Ethel, ran over and gave him a hug and cried with him.
After the burial was over, police did not wait.
They immediately grabbed Joseph and took him directly to the police station where they would question him for another six straight hours, shaking and occasionally slapping Joseph the whole time.
Despite Joseph's emotional display at the cemetery, detectives still strongly suspected he had killed his own family members, and if they pressed hard enough, he would confess.
But without that missing needle that apparently Joseph could have used to kill the border Frank or some other physical evidence linking Joseph to the crime in some way, prosecutors were not able to charge Joseph with murder.
And when Joseph continued to deny that he was the killer, the police went to their plan B and they charged him with illegal gun possession and put him in jail for that.
By early Friday morning, April 2nd, less than a week after the murders, jail guards were taking Joseph's felt, necktie, and shoelaces to prevent him from committing suicide.
Then they led him to his cell. Joseph's mind was numb as he sat on his jail cell cot, staring up at the bare light bulb that lit up the cell.
The police had been questioning him relentlessly since he found the bodies of his wife and daughter four days earlier, and when detectives weren't grilling him, reporters followed his every move and shouted more questions.
He had slept no more than maybe a few hours the whole time.
For just a second, Joseph recalled last Sunday morning when he had been so excited to tell his daughters that he was getting back together with their mother.
And now that was all gone. Then Joseph Gideon fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Assistant Chief Inspector Lyons was amazed at Joseph Gideon's stubbornness.
He was the leading suspect in a triple murder, but Joseph refused to give an inch, even when police questioned him for hours and tried to scare the man with threats, shoves, or slaps across his face.
Lyons was hopeful that Joseph would crack after a few days in jail, but he knew that his team could not put all their hopes in just one suspect.
After all, the case they had against Joseph was far from airtight.
And one of Lyons' best detectives had found what looked like a pretty good piece of evidence pointing toward a different suspect.
One that made it look like Ronnie's ex-husband, Bobby Flower, was not who he appeared to be.
The evidence found was Ronnie's diary. The entries from four years earlier in 1933, when she married Bobby Flower, oozed with love for him.
She would do anything for Bobby. He was her soulmate.
This tracked with what Bobby had told police.
But in 1934, Ronnie's diary entries took a dark turn.
She started writing about how Bobby seemed to be stalking her sister Ethel.
Bobby was out of his head, she wrote, and she was afraid of him.
The discovery suggested that Bobby Flower lied to the police about having, quote, no hard feelings for Ronnie.
Now, Bobby looked like an obsessed and potentially dangerous liar.
So Detective Lyons went straight to Ronnie's sister, Ethel.
He figured she would be the best person to fill him in on the details of Bobby Flower's troubling past.
When the detective arrived at Ethel's home in Queens, she greeted him cordially, but as Lyons started explaining that he wanted to hear more about how Bobby Flower stalked her, he watched as Ethel's face grew more and more puzzled.
Finally, Ethel interrupted Lyons and just asked him, what are you talking about?
And now it was Lyons' turn to be confused.
He pulled out Ronnie's diary and began walking Ethel through some of the entries.
At first, Ethel just stared at the little book uncomprehendingly.
But when Lyons started reading her the passages about how Ronnie was afraid of Bobby and how Bobby wouldn't leave the family alone, a light suddenly clicked on inside of Ethel's brain.
She put her hand on Lyons' arm to silence him, and with big serious eyes, she said she knew exactly what Ronnie was talking about.
Inspector Lyons walked out of Ethel's parlor, reeling from what she had just told him, but clear about what he needed to do.
He now realized that he had been completely wrong in his interpretation of the diary.
Now he had to learn more about Bobby, a lot more. he immediately dispatched one detective to Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital in upstate New York to pull Bobby's medical records.
And when Lyons saw what the records contained, he and his colleagues became increasingly alarmed at the kind of person they were dealing with.
Bobby had a history of mental breakdowns and sudden explosions of violence dating back to when he was just 14 years old.
Once he tried to amputate his own penis and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for a year and a half.
In fact, he had just been released when he had met Ronnie.
There was no time to lose. They needed to talk to Bobby right away.
So they went straight to the boarding house where he was staying.
Bobby wasn't there, but his journal was.
In it, he ranted and raved about Mary and Ronnie and how they were the reason his relationship with Ethel had broken up.
Meanwhile, other detectives have been going from store to store in the New York City area trying to find who sold the killer the gray suede glove that was left behind at the crime scene.
Eventually, they found a young clerk in a J.J.
Newberry's department store who remembered selling the gloves to a man just a few short weeks before.
And when this young clerk described the man, it matched the description of Bobby perfectly.
Inspector Lyons now realized he had a new primary suspect, someone with a clear motive to harm the Gideons and who had been physically linked to the crime scene.
Lyons had Ronnie's father, Joseph Gideon, released on bail from his firearms charges.
He knew Joseph was not the killer. And early on Monday morning, April 5th, Lyons called a press conference to say that police now knew who committed the Easter Sunday massacre. and he passed out pictures of this new person to the gathered reporters.
Soon, Bobby's face would be on the front page of newspapers all across America.
Over the next three months, police heard dozens of rumors about where to find Bobby, but none of them panned out until late June, when a hotel employee in Cleveland reported that one of her coworkers looked exactly like Bobby.
The man called himself Bob Murray, but she offered that it could be a fake name.
Unfortunately, the woman decided to speak to this so-called Bob Murray person about his resemblance to the Bobby police were looking for, and it turned out it was Bobby.
This startled him and gave him a warning that his cover was blown, and so Bob Murray jumped on the first Greyhound bus headed for Chicago, leaving the police empty-handed again. the media began to poke fun at the police's inability to catch their murderer, portraying him as this crafty fugitive who was capable of eluding a nationwide manhunt.
But it was at this time, totally out of the blue, Bobby decided to just turn himself in.
He figured that eventually he was going to get caught, so why not make some money first?
He decided to call one of Chicago's big city newspapers, the Chicago Herald-Examiner, and sell his whole sordid story.
On the evening of Saturday, June 26th, Bobby sat down with reporters to describe in detail his role in the triple murder three months earlier.
But it would turn out this Bobby was not Bobby Flower, Ronnie's ex-husband.
This was a very different Bobby. When Inspector Lyons had gone to Ethel's house with Ronnie's diary and started asking her about why Bobby Flower had begun stalking her, Ethel had been totally lost.
Bobby Flower had been the love of Ethel's sister's life and had remained her friend until her death.
But when Inspector Lyons started showing Ethel the actual passages of Ronnie's writing, it clicked for her and she realized Ronnie was talking about a different Bobby in her diary.
Not Bobby Flower, but Bobby Irwin, the young sculptor who had once rented a room with the family and subsequently become infatuated with Ethel.
And so the police had just confused the two Bobbies.
Here's the real story of what happened to Ronnie and Mary Gideon and the boarder that was living with them, Frank Burns.
Bobby Irwin was a down-on-his-luck 26-year-old sculptor who the Gideon family had taken on as a boarder in 1934, three years before the murders.
Ronnie had been 17 at the time and was still recovering from her failed marriage to the other Bobby.
Ethel had been 21 years old and was building a career as a secretary after her own marriage had just fizzled out.
Both sisters at the time were avoiding romantic entanglements.
But Bobby Irwin, who called himself Bob, even though Ronnie referred to him exclusively as Bobby in her diary, was a confident guy.
He was sure that one day he would be recognized as one of the world's greatest sculptors, and he thought Ethel was totally beautiful.
He had even convinced Ethel to sit for him so that he could create a sculpture of her head out of marble.
And the end product, Ethel's whole family agreed, was totally striking.
The sculpture version of Ethel was both beautiful and peaceful.
Her eyes were closed as if she was sleeping.
While Ronnie had always thought Bob Irwin was very creepy, Ethel had actually found him very talented and charismatic at first.
He would take her to art museums where he would tell her all about the great masters and how his own artistic technique, something he called visualization, would lead him to the top as well.
Ethel enjoyed the outings, but when Erwin asked her to marry him one summer night as they walked on the East River waterfront down by the piers, she was floored.
Ethel told Erwin no and said that she was already engaged to an aspiring lawyer.
This would be the man that Ethel would later marry.
She said she still wanted to be friends with Erwin, but Erwin was totally heartbroken.
After that, living in the same house was very uncomfortable, and so Irwin moved out later in 1934.
That had been the end of the story as far as Ethel was concerned, but the story was not over for Bobby Irwin.
By March 27, 1937, the day of the murders, Bobby Irwin lived at a boarding house a short walk from Ronnie and Mary's place.
He still hadn't made it big as an artist.
That very day, in fact, he had interviewed for another job that did not pan out.
And he blamed the failures of his life on Ethel.
He decided he couldn't live with her being married to someone else, so he sharpened his ice pick and set out for the Gideon home.
His plan was actually just to kill Ethel, but his plan was flawed.
He didn't realize that Ethel did not live there anymore.
She had her own place with her husband in Queens.
No one was home in the apartment when Erwin arrived, so he waited on the sidewalk until Mary Gideon arrived.
Mary was not scared of Bob Erwin at all.
Despite his obvious pining for her older daughter, he seemed like a nice guy.
So she let him follow her up to the apartment.
Mary was tired and not eager to visit, but she was polite as Erwin pulled out a sketchbook and began to draw her.
In reality, he was stalling for time in hopes that Ethel would arrive.
Then Mary's boarder, Frank Burns, came home and said hello before quickly retiring to his own bedroom.
Eventually, Mary got tired of this long visit and just told Erwin that he had to leave.
But Erwin said he was not gonna leave until he saw Ethel.
And so Mary said, okay, well, I'm gonna get my boarder to throw you out.
And that's when Erwin lunged for Mary's throat, squeezing as tight as he could and holding on even as she scratched his face repeatedly with her fingernails.
And he kept choking Mary for 20 minutes until she was completely still.
Then he stuffed her body under the bed in one of the smaller bedrooms.
Erwin was astonished that Frank did not come out of his room during all the commotion, but he didn't have time to think about the border.
He was there to kill Ethel. It occurred to Erwin that Ronnie might be the next person to come home, not Ethel, and he didn't want to kill Ronnie.
It's true that she had disapproved of his relationship with Ethel, but he didn't hold a grudge about that.
So he walked into the bathroom and grabbed a bar of soap and put it inside of a sock.
If Ronnie came home first, he decided, he would just smack her in the face with the soap and hopefully knock her out.
Erwin waited for nearly two hours in the dark of the Gideon's apartment until finally he heard Ronnie's voice after 3 a.m. speaking to her little dog.
And when Ronnie finally came into the bedroom where Erwin was waiting, he wound up and smashed her on the left cheek with the bar of soap inside of the sock, shattering the soap into pieces.
But to Erwin's surprise, this vicious blow seemed to have no effect on Ronnie.
She just stood there. So Erwin grabbed her by the throat and pushed her onto the bed.
He would say that he did not want to kill her at this point, but she was just making it so hard.
He tried to disguise his voice, hoping she wouldn't recognize him, but she spoke to him by name as he was grappling with her, and she told him he was gonna get in trouble if he didn't stop.
And this was just too much for Erwin. And so he would furiously choke the life out of Ronnie and then rip off her clothes just to make the attack look as degrading as possible.
By then, it was after 5 a.m., Ethel had not come back yet, and so Erwin knew he just needed to leave.
But first, he knew he had to get rid of Frank, the boarder.
Now, Frank never came out during the two attacks on the women, likely because he was almost deaf and didn't hear them.
But Erwin thought he just could not take any chances, so he crept into Frank's room and began stabbing Frank in the face with his ice pick again and again and again.
Finally, after Frank was dead, Irwin headed for the door, his only regret being that he did not get to kill Ethel.
The Chicago Herald and Examiner paid Irwin $5,000 for his confession.
It was the most money Irwin had ever made in his life, but the cops arrested him before he could spend it.
New York prosecutors said they would be seeking the death penalty, but Irwin would plead guilty on the eve of his trial and would be sentenced to 139 years in prison instead.
Bobby Irwin would live in mental hospitals until his death in 1975.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
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