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

by Robert Graysmith

  McGinn, LaTulipe, and Inspector George Engler coursed up busy Market Street in its generally westward path toward the Pacific and rolled up and over Twin Peaks. Some twelve thousand feet below ran the longest transit tunnel in the world (an extension of the No. 12 streetcar downtown line). The two-and-a-quarter-mile-long bore took five minutes. From 4th and Market over 20th Avenue and Ellis Street, it took McGinn forty-two minutes to reach Ingleside Terraces and call Dullea.

  “Every window is locked,” McGinn said, “and every door is double-bolted and locked from the inside.”

  “Then how did Josie get out?” Dullea asked. “She didn’t have a key on her. Get inside no matter how.” McGinn was smashing a window with his gun butt when Anthony J. Bell, a special police officer employed as a watchman, pulled up. Bell had patrolled the vicinity of Josie’s home for several years and knew Josie and her habits. “What’s going on here?” Bell shouted. “Frank Egan called me last night and told me to pay particular attention to the Hughes home and see that nobody breaks in.”

  McGinn flashed his badge, then climbed through into the vestibule, entered the front living room and down a hallway to the dining room. Inside, fifty canaries in fifty little cages began to sing all at once. Covering his ears, McGinn turned left into the kitchen and a small breakfast nook. Josie’s frugal dinner was still laid out to be cooked. Her keys were still on the dining room sideboard. Upstairs, her hat and coat lay on the bed. He tested the locked windows, then walked out onto the little porch above the garage. He went downstairs where he and LaTulipe observed that the garage double doors had a self-engaging spring lock. “So they took her out by way of the garage,” surmised McGinn. “That’s the only way.” He knelt and smelled a puddle on the floor—water, soap, and cleanser. But whoever had scrubbed the concrete had missed four black impressions.

  “Tire marks!” said LaTulipe. “But Josie didn’t own a car.” Positioning his tripod directly above the treads to prevent foreshortening, he directed a light across the surface for maximum contrast and snapped a shot with his mounted four-by-five speed Graphic. Then, starting at one edge, he pressed a strip of fingerprint tape onto the print, overlapped it with a second strip by a quarter inch, and lifted the entire impression. On the concrete he found several long gray hairs, which he put into a glassine envelope.

  AT the morgue Dr. A. M. Moody, the pathologist, briefed Dullea. “Josie Hughes died of a crushed liver. Her chest was caved in by the wheel of a car and the left side of her face and shoulder were covered with friction burns. She was flat on her back at the time.”

  “Could she have lived long enough to turn herself over?”

  “No, death was instantaneous.”

  “Then since she was found lying facedown someone must have placed or thrown her that way after she was dead.”

  At the sloped table Dullea methodically went over Josie’s white waist with a magnifier. Near the left shoulder the garment was badly soiled with grease, but the brown silk sweater over it had no holes, tears, or dirt marks. It was also buttoned wrong. “Her sweater was put on after she was killed,” said Dullea. “Someone else dressed her and that means she was killed at home.

  “Egan’s accomplices, and it must have been a two-man job, borrowed a heavy car, drove it into Josie’s garage, chloroformed her unconscious and threw her under the wheels of the car. They ran back and forth over her prone body inside her own house. They dropped her dead body into the road several blocks away to simulate a hit-run accident.”

  No matter where he touched in this murder wheel, its spokes all ran to Egan. La Tulipe compared the garage floor tire tracks to those pressed into Josie’s skirt. “They are identical,” he said.

  “Frank, take some men and go out to Egan’s house,” said Dullea. “Compare this tire pattern with those of his Lincoln sedan. But I don’t expect a match. Egan’s blue Lincoln is of a much lighter shade.”

  At Egan’s, La Tulipe jacked up the rear of the Lincoln, rolled the tire treads with ink, lowered the wheels onto a long strip of paper, and pushed the car forward one complete revolution to make an impression. While he was doing this Egan fled. “I was terribly angry at all this suspicion,” he explained later. “I walked out of the house. I guess my mind snapped. I cannot remember anything else.”

  “This appears to be a most serious case,” Assistant DA Isador Golden told the press, “with some unhappy phases.” Golden ran one hand through his silvering hair. “To disclose certain facts at this time would be to defeat the ends of the police and destroy their efforts to prove the truth in this case.”

  Golden, McGinn, and Dullea located the death car at a garage at Turk Street and Masonic Avenue. In the low tonneau Dullea found seven long gray hairs clinging to the passenger footrest. “This is probably where Josie was dropped from the car,” he said.

  At the lab, La Tulipe washed the seven hairs in ether alcohol to remove all greasy matter, gave a glass slide a coat of nail polish, and imbedded the hairs there. After the lacquer dried, he removed the hairs leaving behind an impression like tire treads and compared them to a similar slide containing impressions of Josie’s hairs found in her garage. They were alike.

  “McGinn,” Dullea said, “drive out to the 26th Avenue firehouse and see fire lieutenant Oscar Postel, the registered owner of car. He’s a friend of Egan’s.”

  An anonymous caller was telling Postel, “Get that car out of the garage,” when McGinn arrived.

  “The cops have already got it,” Postel said.

  McGinn grabbed the phone as the line went dead. He got the story out of Postel: “Egan’s chauffeur, Verne L. Doran, borrowed my Lincoln at noon on Friday to take him for a ride.”

  “Oscar didn’t see that car again until 10:45 that night,” fireman Charles Lynch added, “and when he did the radiator was still warm.”

  On Monday, May 2, at 5:30 P.M., Lorraine Egan’s phone rang. “I’m going to the Native Sons’ banquet for Coroner Leland,” Egan said, “and won’t be home to dress as it’s an informal affair.”

  She got another call at 9:00 P.M. “We’ve just taken Frank Egan for a ride,” a man told her and hung up.

  Shocked, Mrs. Egan called her brother, Harold Kip. “I am terribly worried, Harold,” she said. “I can’t understand why, if Frank were all right, he would not have left some word or called home. He is a home-loving man and never drank and has no enemies that I know of.”

  She was unaware that her husband, in his desperate attempts to head off financial disaster, had initiated business dealings with C. Vincent Riccardi, ex-con, disbarred attorney, and former jury fixer. For the last week, Egan had been carrying a loaded revolver in a breast holster and a reserve clip of cartridges in his pocket.

  Dullea was in his office drawing up an arrest warrant for Egan when the SFPD switchboard at Sutter 1-2020 put a call through to him. Dullea grasped the waist of the candlestick phone and pressed the bell-shaped receiver to his ear.

  “Captain, this is Frank Egan. Two men have got me.”

  “Who has got you?” asked Dullea. “Some of my men?”

  “No. These men, they’ve got me. In a telephone booth . . . wait until I get my bearings . . . at the north end of the Ferry Building. . . . They’re outside. They think I’m telephoning my wife. Help me! Charlie, you know I had nothing to do with the Hughes case. I was at the fights that night—”

  “Give me more definite information. I’ll shoot right down . . .” The phone clicked in Dullea’s ear. He dropped the receiver onto its hook and ordered officers to the Egan home as he dashed out. At high speed, Dullea drove the half mile to the concourse at the foot of Market Street. The wide street was silent except for the distant whine of police sirens and a cab rounding the corner. Its motor faded away, the sirens waned and the thoroughfare was quiet again.

  Dullea, eyes glittering with excitement, crossed to the Ferry Building. The majestic sweep of its front arcade was broken only by a protruding central entrance pavilion and four longitudinal bays arched like an
ancient Roman aqueduct. Dullea eyed its multiple doors and the six pairs of Corinthian columns running its entire 660-foot length. Each opening offered a place for a man to hide. Dullea quickened his step.

  Dispassionately, the great yellow eyes of the Clock Tower peered down on him, a mere speck 240 feet below. His steps echoed in the cavernous building as he jogged toward the Washington Street side, where there was a bank of pay phones. No sign of Frank Egan or two suspicious men or anyone who might have seen them. Outside, brakes squealed. His men had arrived. After a search, they came up empty. Dullea ordered all twenty detectives under him on duty to work the Hughes and Egan investigations as one case. But where was Egan?

  An hour before he called Dullea, Egan was observed parking in his regular slot at the St. George Garage on Bush Street. He and another man walked to 333 Kearney Street, where they took the elevator to Egan’s office. At 9:20 P.M., when the elevator operator saw the frosted glass go dark, he locked the building for the night. Fifteen minutes later, a patrolman glimpsed Egan and Dr. Housman crossing Powell Street and Geary Avenue. On Kearney Street, the pair bumped into William Otts, a private eye. “Somebody has been tapping my office phone wires in connection with Mrs. Hughes’ death,” Egan complained, “and I want you to investigate this.”

  At 10:00 P.M., hotel clerk, R. J. Fraser sighted Egan and Housman strolling along Geary near Jones Street.

  This puzzled Chief Quinn. “Egan said he was in the Ferry Building,” he noted, “yet we can place him either in his office or on the street at that time.”

  The chief arranged with NBC radio affiliate KGO for some radio time on Thursday. He reached the complex at 9:00 P.M., passed a glass-enclosed Spanish patio, which permitted a small audience to watch programs live, and strode to the microphone. Quinn loved radio and loved a big audience (three out of five families owned a radio at that time) and was at his best as he broadcast a personal entreaty to Egan at 9:15 P.M.

  “As Chief of Police,” he began, “I am appealing to you as a public official to appear and make explanation of your telephone conversation with Captain Dullea in which you indicated you were held against your will. It’s your duty to reveal the names of the men you said have you in custody. If we do not hear from you within a reasonable time, we shall have to take other measures.”

  Three days later, there was the first public indication that Josie’s death was more than a hit and run, but one of murder. After a conference with DA Matt Brady, Dullea ordered the entire department to search for Egan in connection with Josie’s death. McGinn opted out. He was investigating another murder. O’Bryan Bemis, who had won big at the track, had just been found dead at Fort Funston at the California Rod and Gun Club range. Thus it was Lieutenant George Richards, head of the Robbery Detail, who spent the next day scrutinizing city hospital records.

  In the late afternoon, he reached an old family residence at 601 Steiner Street, a weathered Victorian known as the Park West Sanitarium, and knocked on a thick oak-paneled door. He was admitted into rooms of high ceilings and richly carved walls. At the admitting desk, he located Egan’s name in the register—signed in by Vince Hallinan yesterday at 2:00 A.M. “I told him to notify the police,” said Mrs. L. C. Broniscoe, owner. “Mr. Egan was in a terrible condition, unshaven, clothing rumpled. He appeared to be suffering from malnutrition and said he had not eaten since Sunday only wandered the streets in a daze.”

  As they waited for Dullea, Mrs. Broniscoe showed Richards the basement steam chambers for alcoholics, electrical apparatus for delirium tremens sufferers, and patients strapped in canvas sheet and immersed in cold baths. “It’s an odd place,” she said. “The longer you are here, the less you know. A few years ago a woman hanged herself. My nurse opened a closet door on the second floor and found her body suspended from a clothes hook.”

  When Dullea arrived, Dr. V. Mitchell and Dr. Milton Lennon, Egan’s physicians, barred him from seeing Egan for twenty-four to thirty-six hours. “He’s in a highly hysterical condition with the symptoms of a man who has had no rest and is greatly worried,” Mitchell said.

  “Look, in a homicide matter we have the right to question anyone if there is any reason to suppose he may help us solve it,” said Dullea. “When he gets well enough I want to ask him the circumstances of a homicide case in which the victim was known to him and see if he can shed any light on the investigation.”

  “Between you and me, I do not think he wandered in the open. He appears to have been indoors since his escape.”

  “It’s nobody’s business where he’s been!” said Hallinan, who had just rushed in. “I am Egan’s attorney and have instructed him not to say anything. He will not talk to the police. He does not feel obliged to explain the telephone call to you. Further, he is not going to be badgered about this thing. The whole thing is ridiculous. No order for Egan’s arrest has been issued.”

  For the next twenty-four hours a detail of inspectors surveilled Egan for “his protection.” The only inspector allowed to see Egan was McGinn. “He had his eyes closed and looks wan,” he reported.

  Twenty-four hours later, Dullea told Egan, “You are not under arrest, but inasmuch as you called on me last Monday night, indicating you required protection, I am now furnishing you that protection—inside a cell.”

  Now Dullea began searching for Woodland boy Verne La Page Doran, Egan’s chauffeur. “Doran is hiding out in a mine run by a crazy old man in a rugged canyon several miles from Carmel,” a snitch told him. “Be careful. He is heavily armed and guarded by his friends.”

  Inspectors Jim Malloy and George Page charged the mine, but Doran had already slipped in from Salinas to surrender at a San Francisco car barn.

  At noon on Saturday, May 14, Assistant DA Golden summoned to his Mills Tower office Quinn, Dullea, and Doran’s lawyer, Walter McGovern. Dullea shook hands with Doran (a cold, firm handshake) and told the twenty-three-year-old, “I will do everything in my power to recommend leniency, but only if you talk. Do you know anything at all about the charge that Mrs. Hughes was murdered? Did you ever talk to Mr. Egan or with any other person about taking the life of Mrs. Hughes at any time?”

  “No, sir, I never knew anything about her death until I read it in the papers.”

  “Have you any knowledge with reference to her death?” McGovern, a pudgy man with a small, prim mouth, asked. He adjusted his wire-rim glasses. “Were you ever in her home?”

  “No, no. Never,” Doran answered. “I only knew where she had lived because I read it in the newspapers after she died.”

  “Did you ever talk to Mr. Egan or with any other person about taking the life of Mrs. Hughes at any time?” Doran said no. “You have learned that if you make a statement involving other persons, that you will be granted your liberty?”

  “Captain Dullea will do everything in his power to recommend leniency.”

  “But of course the fact that you are innocent does not mean you will not be framed.”

  Before Egan provided him with an alibi, Doran had been serving a year for burglary in San Quentin. Now he not only faced fifteen years on parole violations but burglary and holdup charges in Judge Lile T. Jack’s court. That afternoon, Dullea broke Doran who gave up his accomplice—Albert Tinnin (alias Robert Knight), Egan’s process server. Tinnin once made a spectacular escape from the Tehama County Jail at Red Bluff. Before Egan provided him with an alibi the previous February, he had been serving ten years to life at San Quentin for the 1924 attempted murder of a Corning woman he had chloroformed and left to die. Josie had also been chloroformed. But Mrs. Marjorie Cockroff was saved when the wind blew her door open. Had she perished, her sister, Helen Kincaid, Tinnin’s San Francisco live-in girlfriend, would have received the entire $100,000 shared inheritance their mother had left them. The attorney handling Miss Kincaid’s share of the estate? Frank Egan.

  A month before Josie’s murder Tinnin left his sister’s house to register at the Blackstone Hotel on O’Farrell Street. As leader of the Folsom Prison band
, he bragged he was going to organize a city orchestra. A week before the murder, Egan introduced Tinnin to Doran. Four days before the murder, Egan bought Tinnin a saxophone, a $300 clarinet, and a Luger pistol. The night before the murder, Egan visited Tinnin for the seventh time at the Blackstone. The day of the murder, Doran and Tinnin rang Josie’s bell on a ruse to enable them to recognize her later. Afterward, they met in Egan’s office, as he called Josie and told her, “I’m bringing two friends for dinner.” When Josie saw the sedan in the driveway she opened the garage door and Doran drove in. “Where’s Frank Egan?” she asked and refused to get her hat and coat and join them.

  “Tinnin struck her several times,” said Doran, “and knocked her unconscious. He placed her in front of the right front wheel and had me drive over her then back over her. Then we put her in the car and drove to Kenwood and threw her out.” After the killing, they informed Egan they had accomplished their assignment, then played Ping-Pong until 11:30 P.M. The Monday night Egan disappeared, Tinnin fled the Blackstone Hotel, carrying only his clarinet case.

  “That’s it,” said Dullea. He slapped his thigh. “Doran’s story is enough. He and Tinnin murdered Josie at Egan’s directive. We have a strong case and I can’t find a flaw in it. The physical facts check in every detail and corroborative witnesses have been found. Whether Tinnin now talks makes no difference. If he wants to plead guilty and take his chance with the court, that is his own business. But he will get no recommendation of clemency from me.”

  Golden’s phone rang. He listened, then hung up. His face was ashen. “Frank Egan had escaped from jail,” he said.

  “It has to be an inside job,” Dullea said. “Someone in the SFPD facilitated Egan’s escape.”

  How deep the bought illegalities and official venality ran he could only guess.

  EIGHT