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

by Robert Graysmith

  Wafer and Keneally looked at each other and pressed their earphones more tightly against their ears. They’d heard this voice before directed in derision at them as they testified on the witness stand. Yes! It was Frank Egan, who had represented the late, unlamented Pete Farrington at trial.

  “How much is involved?” asked Housman.

  “Nearly $20,000, a tidy sum,” continued Egan. “It would settle all my debts and leave me a little spare cash.”

  “Oh, well. She’ll probably die someday.”

  “Not soon enough. Hell, she’s only fifty-seven. Wouldn’t it be funny if she got run over? But she never will. She’s too cautious. I guess I’ll have to kill her myself!”

  “And you’d be the first man suspected. The police would find out she has got $20,000 of double indemnity insurance in your favor and they’d clap their hand right on your shoulder. For God’s sake, who else would want to kill her except you?”

  “Do you think I’m a dumbbell? I wouldn’t do it myself and I wouldn’t let it look like murder.”

  “Then what would you make it look like?”

  “A hit-and-run accident.”

  Wafer and Keneally drove to the HOJ to repeat what they had overheard. “Oh, come on, boys,” Dullea said with a wide grin. He leaned back in his swivel chair and put his hands behind his head. “Egan had to be joking. Imagine a man in his position planning such a thing. Whether you like him or not, he’s one of the city’s biggest political figures. Heck, he might even be mayor one of these days.”

  “He said it in all seriousness, Captain!” said Wafer. “Come listen for yourself.” As Dullea monitored the open line, Egan explained how he’d establish an alibi the night of Josie’s “accident.” “I would go to the Friday night fights,” he said. “I would have a ringside seat, and make myself very conspicuous. The whole hit-and-run thing could happen while I was there.” Housman asked who would do the job for him. “Oh, there are several guys that I got out of the pen I could call on. If they didn’t do what I told them I could send them back.”

  Dullea put down the earphone feeling morally obligated to warn the intended victim. “I sat back,” said Dullea, “and pondered on what could be done to prevent Egan from carrying out his murderous plan. I could not arrest him. He had committed no crime. And we had no legal proof that it was his voice we had heard over the wires. Besides, the whole plot was so incredible for a man in his position, that even if we could prove that it was he who had done the talking, he would have no difficulty in making it appear that he had been merely joking.”

  Dullea spun out Josie’s number on the rotary dial. He had decided that to tell her who he was would do no good and might do some harm. As Egan’s benefactor, she might take it for granted that Dullea, Egan’s political enemy, was trying to do him a personal injury. If she were to tell Egan, he, as an exceedingly clever lawyer, would seize the situation and turn it to his own advantage. “Egan would compel me,” decided Dullea, “through a slander suit, to reveal the source of my information—and thus deprive me of my secret means of learning anything further about his plans or Earl Leter’s murder.”

  “This is a friend,” Dullea told Josie. “I want to warn you against Frank Egan. He’s after your money. He wants your insurance. You are in grave danger if you have anything further to do with him.”

  “Warn me against Frank Egan?” Josie burst into laughter. “Why he’s the best friend I have.” She slammed down the phone.

  Because Josie hadn’t taken his warning seriously, Dullea wrote her an anonymous letter detailing Egan’s plot to carry out her hit-and-run murder. This had one effect. The following day Josie complained to Alexander Keenan, her physician, “Nephew has all my money and I do not even have the scratch of a pen to show for it. Instead of me, you should present your next medical bill to Frank Egan.”

  When Dr. Keenan did, Egan told him Josie’s funds had been exhausted. This shocked Josie who began calling Egan’s office every hour or going there and pestering his steno, Marion Lambert.

  Over the Dictaphone Dullea heard Egan say, “Aunty’s driving me crazy to return her money. Now she’s threatening to take me before the Bar Association. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s her life or mine.” Dullea doubled the guard around her and penned another warning note, which had no effect. Finally, he dismissed the men stationed outside 41 Lakewood Drive, Josie’s home, and began standing guard himself. He hadn’t been able to save Clara Newman and all the other landladies from the Gorilla Man, but forewarned he could save Josie Hughes.

  The next Friday night, Dullea drove to Josie’s home in Ingleside Terraces. He passed Cerritos Avenue and Moncado Way, the site of the old Ingleside Steeplechase Race Track. It was gone now. Nearly twenty years earlier, developers had purchased the land for $2,500 per acre and constructed housing tracts around the site, following its straightaways and turns. Urbano Drive, built over the track, duplicated its lozenge shape, running east to west. Dullea turned onto the road and soon reached Egan’s “charming many-gabled three-story” on the straightaway. He saw Egan in the window. Dullea drove on to the clubhouse turn. Nestled in the vee of Entrada Court was the biggest sundial in the world, where local ladies conducted needlework parties. Five curving roads intersected the track, and just on the other side of Ocean Avenue, they became Fairfield, Lakewood, Manor, and Pinehurst drives. Dullea crossed Ocean to Lakewood, where Josie lived.

  Josie’s two-story stucco stood at the end of a line of similar whitewashed Spanish Colonials crawling up and over a steep hill. Most Ingleside Terraces homes had been designed in the Arts and Crafts or Mediterranean style. The developer, Joseph Leonard, had made “crowded conditions impossible” by offering oversize lots, ranging from fifty to eighty feet in width and from one to two hundred feet in depth from four different plans. Josie’s small two-bedroom had cost her $6,000.

  Dullea secreted himself uphill where he could see Josie’s front door and peer down on her mission-tiled roof. Her dark-trimmed bay windows overlooked the street. A small garage, virtually soundproof, lay below the master bedroom where a basement ordinarily would be. The garage was locked and empty. Josie did not drive and never allowed anyone the use of her garage.

  Around 8:00 P.M. a tall, lean figure came puffing uphill from the direction of Urbano Drive and mounted the ten brick steps to Josie’s door. A quick sharp buzz. When Josie opened the door, Dullea saw Frank Egan framed in the light. As the door closed, Dullea rushed down the drop of the hill but checked himself in mid-street. “Egan wouldn’t act without an ironclad alibi,” he thought. “Mrs. Hughes could not be safer than when Egan is in the house with her.” An hour later Egan came down the steps and Dullea phoned Josie. When she answered, he hung up. Afterward, Josie’s neighbors complained her phone rang far into the late hours.

  Over the next week Dullea monitored the Dictograph. “From time to time,” he said, “we heard Egan refer again to the project of murdering Mrs. Hughes, and almost as frequently I phoned and attempted to convince her that she should have nothing more to do with him.”

  Dullea overheard Egan planning to become “the Czar of San Francisco” by murdering any political foes in his path to the mayor’s seat. He even targeted his ineffectual assistant, Gerald Kenny, a man who could absorb a martini at fifty paces. But there was no more talk of killing Josie. Dullea concluded he was aware his plan was blown. As Egan’s ranting grew more incoherent, Dullea decided he was either drunk or using dope or his mind was failing. If he was not in his right mind, there was no reason to take his threats more seriously than those of any hophead.

  More months passed. Dullea disconnected the bug, but consulted with his lawyer, Vince Hallinan, who assured him there was no longer any danger. On March 7, the bank, as forecast, filed a foreclosure suit on Egan’s house. Whatever the desperate public defender was going to do he was going to do it soon.

  Anguished by indecision, Dullea decided to see Chief Quinn. Two years before, Quinn, a favorite of the mayor and police commiss
ioners, had rocketed from sergeant to chief of police. His first official act as chief had been to lock Mrs. Frances Orlando in the Bush Street Jail for the crime of dressing in men’s clothes. Quinn’s promise of a clean department had been welcome words to Dullea. During the Rum Bribery Investigations in April 1922, police officers, deputy sheriffs, and their higher-ups had been arrested in every district. Police Commissioner Theodore Roche had begun cleaning house with the arrest of knife-wielding ex-cop Tom Joyce, the proprietor of a blind pig at 47 Sixth Street. “Cops accepting bribes from saloon keepers in return for immunity from arrest,” Roche said, “will be prosecuted on charges of conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act [which outlawed alcohol]. Policemen accepting money from bootleggers will be weeded out. I have no use for a crook inside or outside the department.”

  Had corruption returned to levels equaling those wild and wooly days when every cop was on the take? Dullea’s flaw was that, like most honest men, it was difficult for him to perceive dishonesty in others. But with the example of Egan, his faith was shaken. He had learned how far a respected man of the public trust could fall. Unable to endure another sleepless night, he walked down the marble corridor to the chief’s office at the northwest corner of the HOJ.

  The Old Girl (as they called the fortresslike HOJ) was a boxy, serviceable stone edifice with semicircular bays and tall fan windows with radiating sash bars, each like half a lemon slice. The elaborate fretwork, stone mullions, grillwork, parapets, and a long rooftop battlement failed to add a grain of cheer to the oppressive tomb. Chief Quinn’s office was something else entirely.

  The big front room was opulent—fine rugs, parqueted hardwood floors, and long polished tables. A photo of the chief hung alongside Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph Jr. next to pictures of two early civilian-appointees, DA White of the Mooney bomb plot days and affable Dan O’Brien who tried to be “a good fellow” by day and an officer-administrator by night and failed miserably at both. Quinn’s latest photo showed him in action on the running board of his new armored police vehicle and Captain Mike Riordan aiming a machine gun through a gun port. In Dullea’s own office was exhibited only a single photo and that of his wife and three sons.

  Against one wall the chief proudly displayed shining rows of police trophy cups. In his office, Dullea had a single battered trophy he hadn’t won for anything. Someone once brought him flowers in it, and he’d kept the empty cup. Next to an early lowboy radio, the chief prominently displayed the ensign of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which he hoped to someday head. Across the room the stolid Irishman, a study in military severity, sat rigidly behind a huge mahogany desk. He was well-buffed, well-starched perfection, his superbly cut dark blue serge studded with golden epaulettes and full gold braid. A gold star, two gold stripes, and three gold buttons gleamed on each sleeve. Quinn’s gilded elegance contrasted against a triangle of colorful flags unfurled on both sides of him. “Assured, resplendent in blue and gold, almost Napoleonic in his posture,” Kevin Starr wrote of Quinn’s appearance at a Civic Center rally, “the Chief embodied the power of established authority as it struggled to contain the increasing restiveness of the populace.” That day, Quinn stood not against a background of flags but against a white sea of union placards. He was not only antiunion but antireform, especially with his own department. He routinely stifled any opposition or attempts for reform by discrediting or transferring any critic into the hinterlands.

  On the same day the Whispering Gunman was convicted, Quinn had transferred, unannounced, five high-ranking officers and six policemen looking into graft within the SFPD. “The less talk about the transfers the better for all concerned,” Quinn threatened as he packed off the most aggressive to work at the city jail or Potrero Station. “When you’re at Potrero Station you can’t go any further down,” said one cop, “so if you ever get transferred from Potrero Station you must be on your way up.” In a department predominantly Irish—40 percent native-born Irish and 40 percent Irish American, such a demotion was called an “Irish promotion.”

  Dullea carefully studied the ceiling line of the elegant office, looking for the twin wires it was alleged Chief Quinn used to bug his deputy chief’s office next door. Quinn, a San Francisco native, was born April 23, 1883. He attended Lincoln Grammar School; graduated from Sacred Heart College; and studied law at Saint Ignatius College, graduating in 1925. He had been walking a beat since 1906. With a sweep of his cigar—long, thin, expensive—Quinn directed Dullea to a seat. He held his cigar between his first two fingers, thumb tucked under, and pointed down. When he had a point to make he held it like a gun. When he was of equal temperament, he held it perfectly horizontal. But when it pointed up . . . “Get to the point, Charlie. I’m busy on these robberies.”

  In May, a big redheaded man had pushed into the Lowe-Davis Loan Company asking for a $100 loan. “Sorry, we don’t lend that much,” said the manager. “Just for that, I’m going to take the whole works.” Drawing an automatic, Red escaped with the money on the No. 9 Market Street car.

  In July, he robbed the American Trust Company and escaped in a Yellow Cab. He and a partner then knocked over the Bank of America on Seventeenth. In this wild era of Tommy guns, sawed-off shotguns, and bank heists, there were six times more crooks in the nation than grocers. One year, six hundred banks were robbed for a loss of $3.5 million to the nation. Quinn’s solution was to replace ringing alarms at the banks with silent alarms and invite the employees to the HOJ firing range to learn to shoot. He suspected experienced bank robber George “Red” Kerr. In the end, the robber turned out to be Tommy Coleman, a San Quentin escapee who was a dead ringer for Kerr, who was innocent. Quinn signed his report with a Wahl-Eversharp Gold Seal fountain pen, which had a 14K-gold point and embellishments. He turned it in the light. It was a treasured gift from Commissioner Roche.

  Dullea didn’t know how to suggest that a trusted, popular public official was plotting murder. Finally he just came out with it. There was a moment of silence as the chief absorbed his words. Then his jowls quivered, his watery eyes blinked, and his cigar jutted to forty-five degrees. “Which side are you on?” he snapped. His fist came down hard. “I want you to back off Egan! Get it, Charlie?”

  Quinn stood and walked to the recessed window. His posture was perfect, alert, filled with fierce energy and strength. He was a big man, two hundred pounds and taller than Dullea. In spite of the spare tire around his waist, the overall impression was of power.

  Clasping both hands behind his back, the big Irishman rocked back and forth, his eyes sweeping the blossoming trees of Portsmouth Square across the street. The room was pin-drop quiet. Dullea could hear a clerk down the hall pecking out a report. “Because men are human,” Quinn explained in a calm voice, fighting to control his irritation, “there will be occasional scandals and some, as a matter of course, will involve public officials, but much of this is imagined in the fevered minds of do-gooders.” He turned, small teeth tight against his lower lip. “I want you to back off of any sort of investigation. I will handle matters such as that. Do you understand, Charlie? For Christ’s sake, Egan’s a former city police officer and a fireman.” The cigar dropped to half-mast. Dullea’s moment had passed.

  He returned to his small ground floor office with the green tacked carpet, more distraught than before. Quinn’s comments had seemed overly defensive to him—as if he knew of a deeper internal corruption than Frank Egan, which in itself was horrendous. Yes, thought Dullea, curious remarks. But his problem had still not been solved. Still ringing in his ears were the last words he had heard Egan speak over the planted bug—“By Friday night all my troubles will be over.” But which Friday night? And by troubles did he mean Josie Hughes? Or someone else? Each Friday night after that Dullea ordered a secret two-man watch be kept on Josie. There might be nothing to the threat, but he could not take the chance. He did not intend to fail another woman as he had all those San Francisco landladies in 1926.

  SIX

&nbs
p; The ancient Greeks got their 5th century B.C. word Gorillai from the native name of a hairy tribe in Africa and used it to mean savage.

  IAN REDMOND, GORILLA

  “AMERICA had never seen anything like Earle Leonard Nelson before or since,” wrote Jay Robert Nash of the Gorilla Man’s true identity. “There have been killers who were just as methodical and who carried out their brutal murders with just as much religious fervor—but none had the transcontinental intensity. . . . He was a killer apart, a killer’s killer, a mass murderer who worked coast to coast with a Bible in his hand.”

  The era of the sex crime that followed World War I may have begun with the Gorilla Man, who terrorized the North American continent for years.

  IN Winnipeg on June 9, 1927, Earle Nelson encountered fourteen-year-old Lola Gowan on the front steps of 133 Smith Street selling artificial flowers her crippled sister made to support her family, who lived on University Street across from the Vaughn Street jail. He wanted to buy some, but she would have to come to his room so he could get his money. Once inside, he wrapped a cloth around her neck, strangled her, and repeatedly violated her. Stuffing her corpse under his bed, he went to sleep.

  In the morning he packed Lola’s belongings and headed down Portage Avenue to find new lodgings. On Riverton Avenue he spotted a “Room for Rent” sign in a window. He told landlady Emily Patterson he didn’t have any money but would do repair work in exchange. He was seen fixing the Pattersons’ screen door. That evening Emily’s husband, William, returned home. “Where is your mother, children?” he asked. “Oh, Daddy, she’s been gone all day,” the two boys cried.

  Emily hadn’t been seen since that morning. After a search of the neighborhood, William reported her missing, then put the kids to bed. As it approached midnight, he grew more worried. He trudged to their bedroom and, sobbing, dropped to his knees at the foot of their bed. For almost an hour he prayed for Emily’s safe return. “Please direct me to where she is,” he begged. When he opened his eyes he saw little pink fingertips peeking out from under the bed. Reaching beneath, he felt an ice-cold hand. While he had been praying for Emily’s return, she had been only inches away—naked, throat crushed, and raped after death. Her wedding ring was missing. The strangler had taken it along with the family Bible, $70, and William’s brown whipcord suit. As was Earle Nelson’s custom he left behind his own clothes.