The Laughing Gorilla: A True Story of Police Corruption and Murder

by Robert Graysmith

  As “Evan Louis Fuller,” he got a job at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. After he fell from a ladder at work and suffered a second serious head injury, the voices howling inside his head grew louder. On August 12, 1919, under the name Evan Fuller, he married a shy fifty-eight-year-old Catholic schoolteacher, Mary Theresa Martin. Their marriage was stormy. Nights he would “go out and look for work” and return days later in someone else’s clothes. His jealous indignation, constant haranguing from the Bible, and threats to kill her drove Mary to an emotional collapse in 1920. As she convalesced at St. Mary’s, he threw himself on her, raving that her doctor had been sleeping with her. Ripping away the sheets, he molested her before orderlies could wrest him off and ran away.

  On May 19, 1921, he gained entry to Charles Summers’s home at 1519 Pacific Avenue by pretending to be a plumber. In the basement he found Summers’s twelve-year-old daughter, May, playing with dolls; he knocked her down with a clenched fist, and choked her. Her screams brought her elder brother, who grappled with him before he escaped. It took two cops to subdue the powerful young man. Charged with a sexual assault on a child and confined at Detention Hospital, he was diagnosed as “erratic, violent and dangerous.” On June 13, psychiatric doctors committed him to Napa Hospital for the Insane in “a constitutional psychopathic state.” He escaped within a week. Police apprehended him in the bushes outside his aunt’s house peeping at his cousin as she undressed. Six months later, he made another break, was recaptured, and escaped again on November 2, 1923. He showed up wild-eyed at his aunt’s house wearing a crazy hat. The hospital finally discharged him on paper, “in absentia,” on June 15, 1925. His family last saw him in October of the same year.

  From San Francisco, he traveled to Philadelphia where he strangled Mrs. Olla McCoy on October 18,1925; May Murray, on November 6; and Lillian Weiner, on November 9. All three had “Room for Rent” signs in their windows and were bound with strips of cloth tied with a “complicated sailor’s knot.” He sold items of their clothing at a north-side pawnshop, where the pawnbroker got a good look at him.

  The next glimpse of him came when Clara Newman admitted him to her San Francisco boardinghouse. Clara’s nephew Merton Newman, a slight, dark-haired young man in glasses, passed them on the second-floor landing. He had heard the Gorilla Man’s odd, knowing laugh echoing up the staircase, so he noted the mild-spoken stranger’s huge hands with special attention. “The balls of his thumbs,” Merton recalled, “were very broad and square, with swollen joints and nails at least a half-inch long.” His eyes were cunning, hypnotic, difficult to draw away from. Grumbling about the malfunctioning furnace, Merton nodded to Clara and the man and continued on to the basement. Behind he could hear the snap and cracking of the man’s knuckles.

  Walking flat-footed on the soles of his feet, toes extended, Aunt Clara’s prospective lodger trailed her to the top third-floor room. “It’s a reconditioned attic,” she apologized. As she walked, he watched her hips.

  Clara’s age didn’t matter to the Gorilla Man. Any woman of any age he found alone would suit his purposes: she need only be a landlady with a room to let. His strict aunt, who had raised him in an atmosphere of worshipful zealotry, had been a landlady, and he hated her. As Merton worked over the basement furnace, he was vaguely disquieted. He swept out the clinkers and, above his hammering and stoking, heard footsteps padding down the stairs. “I’ll be back with the rent,” said a voice. That soft, mocking laugh echoed again. He heard the front door shut with a bang. After he finished, Merton wiped his hands and left without going upstairs.

  On Wednesday, February 24, he called on his aunt to see if the furnace had given her further trouble. No one had seen Clara for days. His search ended at the third-floor lavatory, where he found the naked corpse of his aunt. Merton flew downstairs to call the police. When Detective Lieutenant Charles Dullea and Inspector Francis (Frank) LaTulipe climbed the stairs, they had to stop at the door to steady themselves.

  “Once Clara Newman entered the room,” LaTulipe conjectured when he had recovered, “the killer yanked her to him. With one hand he took some sort of cord and twisted it around her neck, leaving behind this ligature imprint.” He pointed out the livid red line on her throat, almost hidden by the black marks of gigantic hands and deep fingernail indentations. “Then he choked her with his hands as she struggled.”

  Dullea imagined Clara fighting, her body automatically convulsing, her legs drawing up in spasms, then dropping and going limp before he stripped her. Could her missing necklace have been the ligature? Autopsy surgeon Shelby Strange would know.

  His postmortem revealed an engorgement of her lungs and the right side of her heart, an unusually long retention of body heat, and an exceptional fluidity of her blood. The trachea was injected and red and the tympanum (the cavity of the middle ear) had been ruptured. When the strangler gripped her throat, the hyoid bone fractured where his broad thumbs met, though just one of his huge hands could have covered her mouth and nose to cause suffocation. Strange was pretty sure Clara’s struggles had contributed to her death. The swift accumulation of fluids, saliva, and mucus in the bronchial tree had choked her as completely as the crushing hands. Through tests, Strange established that she had been raped.

  “Not like any rapist I’ve come across before, there’s a sadistic element to his crime,” he told Dullea. “You won’t believe this, Charlie. She was violently beaten and repeatedly assaulted after being strangled.” The Gorilla Man was a necrophiliac, a perverse creature of abnormal sensuality compelled to copulate with a dead body.

  When Merton viewed the body, he saw the deep fingernail marks on her neck. “They are at least an inch and a half deep,” Dr. T. B. W. Leland, the coroner, told him. Merton then made the connection to the hulking man who had passed him on the stairs and given that long, strange laugh. “I particularly recall those long nails,” he said. “He has to be the man who killed her. Look, I want to accompany her body to Detroit.”

  “I believe you should remain here and I’ll tell you why. As you are the only man who can identify any suspects arrested as the stranger you saw. It might delay the solution of this murder were you to leave.” Reluctantly, Merton agreed.

  “We have narrowed the search,” Dullea told his men at the HOJ, “to the mysterious stranger described by Merton Newman as having confronted him in the house sometime before he discovered his aunt’s body.”

  But the Gorilla Man had only begun his reign of terror against women. On March 2, 1926, Mrs. Laura Beale was found by her husband; she had been strangled with a silk belt and then violated under circumstances similar to Clara’s. The description of Laura’s killer matched that of the Bible-carrying young man known as Roger Wilson. Alarm spread throughout the Bay Area as Dullea intensified his manhunt and staked out pawnshops in case Clara’s necklace should turn up. On June 10, as armed posses combed San Francisco, the Gorilla Man appeared at a rooming house on Dolores Street run by Lillian St. Mary. She joined the others, smothered, her naked body stuffed beneath her house bed. Six days later, a self-righteous young man with a Bible visited a rooming house at 1372 Clay Street. “The man was stocky and well-built, with shifty eyes, strange blue eyes, and the hands of a giant,” said the landlady, Mrs. P. A. Ford, who lived on the fifth floor. “When he asked to see a room on the third floor, I called my husband, and the stranger immediately left, saying he wasn’t interested in an apartment.”

  He didn’t go far, only downstairs to the fourth floor where he knocked on Mrs. Stidger’s door. “I’m here to fix your phone,” he told her.

  When Mrs. Stidger expressed suspicion, the man fled next door to Mrs. Gladys Dunne, manager of an apartment house. A smile played about his lips all the while Gladys was showing him a room. Those huge hands were flexing and cracking, when a janitor appeared and he ran away again.

  The next day, three East Bay women reported a man with a Bible had tried to rent apartments from them. On June 17, in Albany, California, Mrs. Flint Huffa
rt went to bed. Her head was filled with nightmares of the “Gorilla fiend” who had been in all the papers. During the night, she dreamed the strangler had climbed through her window and was choking her. When he seemed about to win, she reached under her pillow and pulled out the revolver she kept there for protection. Firing full into his face, Mrs. Huffart awakened to find she had shot her own hand.

  A number of strangers, trading on the Gorilla Man’s reputation, carried out depredations of their own against terrified landladies and laid the blame at his door to confuse the police. The Santa Cruz police arrested a stockily built foreigner after the brutal rape of Allie Doyle, a young widow, and assaults on two other women. A mob would have lynched him as the Gorilla Man, if Dullea had not driven Merton Newman at high speed to Santa Cruz. “That’s not the Gorilla Man,” Merton said. In Santa Barbara on June 24, the real Gorilla Man strangled landlady Ollie Russell with a curtain cord so tightly that blood gushed from her neck. An LA police bulletin described “the Strangle Murderer” as “probably Greek, rather high cheek bones, dark skin and a thin face.”

  By August 16, he was in Oakland in the East Bay at landlady Mrs. Mary Nesbit’s door. He discarded her in a pool of blood in the bathroom of the apartment she had planned to rent. When several months had passed without another attack, Dullea prayed that the killer had burned himself out. Although Jack the Ripper, a similar random killer, had apparently stopped by his own volition, the Gorilla Man could not. He appeared to be a maniacal sex pervert with a taste for murder driven by religious mania and a compulsive, relentless sexual appetite. “All crimes must have a motive,” said Dullea. LaTulipe was not so sure. The Gorilla Man was a new type of man.

  In Portland, Oregon, on October 19, he reappeared just long enough to throttle and violate three landladies in six days. He crammed Mrs. Beata Withers into an attic trunk filled with love letters from her failed romance. He twisted a scarf around Mrs. Mabel Fluke’s neck and hid her in the attic of her five-room bungalow. He jammed Mrs. Virginia Grant behind her basement furnace and then hitched back to San Francisco on November 10, where he choked Mrs. Anna Edmunds to death. Following his usual pattern he stuffed her brutally violated nude body under a bed in her boardinghouse. Five days later, he was in Seattle, where he squeezed the life out of Mrs. Florence Monks and three days later Mrs. Blanche Meyers in Portland. With so many of Dullea’s men hot on his heels, the random killer fled the West Coast for the Plains States, where it was cooler. Dullea was frustrated that he had come so close to catching the killer.

  “I will tell you this,” said LaTulipe. “Sadistic torture and murder will always follow a prescribed pattern. Not a blunt instrument one time and a knife the next, but always his hands or the cord. His set pattern will never vary: Shortly after getting a shave and a haircut he will call at any house with a ‘Room to Let’ sign in the window. Any landlady he finds alone he will strangle, then rape and leave nude in the offered room, usually under the bed. He will steal clothes from his victim to sell. He is a necrophiliac and a sadist. Going by his religiosity, I think the huge Bible he carries suggests a possible motive.”

  Dullea recognized some portion of the type—a lust killer. Was the Gorilla Man’s unbridled sadism in itself an object of sexual gratification and their elusive motive? The only thing he was certain of was that the Gorilla Man’s name was not Roger Wilson.

  THREE

  A gorilla . . . can make only about 20 sounds—roars, whimpers, screams, soft grumbles. . . . Laughter is not one of them.

  —GORILLA, IAN REDMOND

  BY 3:30 P.M., April 29, 1930, the day of Officer Malcolm’s murder, Chief Quinn’s patrols were still combing the city for the Whispering Gunman and his swarthy accomplice. “I want every piece of motor apparatus in the department out,” he said. “Scour the highways and alleys for the bandit car. I want a finger on every trigger.”

  Quinn named his Flying Squad after the winged-wheel insignia on the shoulder patches of its fifty-two young members (four from each of the city’s districts). He inaugurated the thirteen Harley-Davidson sidecar motorcycle units shortly after being sworn in as chief on November 20, 1929 (the same day Dullea became captain of inspectors). These “motorized bathtubs” were a mobile reserve capable of reaching any corner of the city within ten minutes. Quinn’s Flying Squad pulled on specially designed uniforms, high polished boots, and goggles. Each driver nudged out the kick starter, rose into the air, and came down hard. The cycles accelerated from the dark mouth of the underground garage, every sidecar equipped with automatic rifles, service pistols, cases of tear gas, light machine guns, and sawed-off shotguns.

  Although the Flying Squad had been specially trained by Quinn’s right-hand man, Detective Sergeant Tom McInerney, it had been under Dullea’s command from its first day. Fifteen years earlier Dullea had been a founding member of the Shotgun Squad. When four masked gunmen knocked over the Claremont Roadhouse, Dullea, then a very young motorcycle cop out of Richmond Station, had joined in the chase down Fulton Street. He fired on the getaway to puncture its tires but, being a famously bad shot, missed completely. Two of the four robbers hunched down in the tonneau of their car and returned fire, narrowly missing Dullea. At Sixth Avenue they veered north, raced past Richmond Station to Lake Street and crashed into a low wall on the Presidio grounds. In the ensuing gun battle, Corporal Fred Cook was killed and three of the robbers escaped. To capture them, the SFPD organized the first proactive motorized anticrime patrols—squads of armed detectives who kept in contact with headquarters by street phone, the only way they could communicate. The search for Malcolm’s killers would be conducted the same way.

  At 4:00 P.M., Corporal Harold Leavy, behind the wheel of his “prowler,” located a light blue Dodge parked at 55 Second Street in the wholesale district a half mile from Pier 26. Leavy felt the engine—still warm—then peered into the backseat. Scattered on the floor were adding-machine tapes, a packet of blank white envelopes, two dimes, and a nickel. Murphy’s empty black leather satchel lay open on the seat. A half hour later, Inspector LaTulipe, the eccentric and wizard criminologist in charge of the SFPD’s I squad, reached the getaway car. He was a striking man—long, thin face; silver hair combed in a high pompadour; and a nose as sharp as a ship’s prow—the better to ferret out clues.

  LaTulipe popped open his battered case of photographic apparatus and fingerprint gear and unpacked sensitive plates, flashguns, bulbs, a heavy Graflex, and a scale ruler. “I began going over the sedan for prints,” he said, “our first step I hoped in identifying the murderous bandit pair and their pretty little companion.”

  LaTulipe swirled a soft camel’s-hair brush in the direction of an emerging fingerprint. His touch was so light he sometimes used a feather to develop latent minutiae. With long, even strokes he gently brushed finely ground carbon dust along the ridge flow and coaxed a perfect print on the steering wheel into visibility. He blew away the excess, then shifted photographic plates to capture two other prints from the front passenger side and rear window. Excited, he returned to his threadbare lab. In 1930, there was no national repository of fingerprints—the federal ID bureau wouldn’t be up and running for two years. Until then, LaTulipe would have to resort to cruder methods. Beginning with the delta of a print, he counted the friction ridges separating it from the specific core of the pattern and visually tried to match it to prints in his meager files.

  Three days later, Captain Dullea, Chief Quinn, Inspector McMahon and his partner, Martin Porter, and ninety-eight uniformed patrolmen solemnly motored to Officer Malcolm’s funeral. The long line of prowl cars, lights flashing, stole silently to Cypress Lawn Cemetery. They left with sirens screaming. Dullea watched the manicured lawns and marble headstones flash by. “At least,” he told Quinn, “the old workhorse died in harness.”

  “Those bastards,” said Quinn. His huge fists closed. “I want them bad.” Quinn smiled a wolfish smile. His lower teeth were small, sharp, and inclined outward. His ears were square, and his thick hai
r a rusty brown. He was baby faced, but with his ever-present cigar looked more like a ward heeler than a policeman.

  “Since the gunman was dressed in good, but shabby clothes,” McMahon suggested, “I think he’s going to rag himself out as soon as he can. We’ll make the rounds of local tailors.”

  But first he and Porter rode directly to the I Bureau to hear what LaTulipe had to say. As they entered, he doffed his Moore-Stetson (today was San Francisco Straw Hat Day) and fanned two pasteboards out onto his scarred desk. “Boys, I got a file on two of the prints,” he said. “All you have to do now is find these bums.”

  Mug shots are notoriously poor likenesses, but these were unusually sharp. The first card, #12014 (from the Seattle PD), was of George Berta. The second, #4718 (from the Tacoma PD), showed a man with distended brown eyes and slicked-back hair—Peter M. Farrington Jr., alias Joe Gorman, alias the Whispering Gunman.

  “Berta and Farrington belonged to the gang who robbed the Nanaimo Canadian Bank in ’22,” LaTulipe said. “They served an eight-year stretch for that caper and only got out last year. Their partners, Tony Moresco and Lou Costello, broke jail. We’re still looking for them. A fifth member, Big Johnson the Scandinavian, is still in jail at Seattle awaiting trial. Nobody ever forgets Big Johnson. That’s why the big oaf keeps getting caught. As for the woman, I’ve got no record.”

  “Have Harry the Cabbie work up a composite sketch of her with one of the newspaper artists,” said McMahon. With Harry’s completed portrait in hand, they traced the crooked waterfront. At last they reached Tony’s Place on the ground floor of a bookie joint and saw their pet stoolie behind the bar polishing glasses with his apron. “Who you want for the shooting all right are Berta and Farrington,” Tony Sudoni replied. “They come in once in a while, but ain’t been here for a week.”