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

by Robert Graysmith

  He drove the man, now attired in police uniform, up Kearney Street to Portsmouth Square and lower Chinatown to the HOJ. Dullea, Quinn, and Commissioner Roche were waiting inside the chief’s office.

  “I have nothing to say except that I am not guilty,” the man told them.

  “Make a report of your activities for the twenty four hours on the day of the Majestic burglary,” said Quinn.

  “I spent the day at home,” he said, “but during the afternoon I took a walk and got a shave. I am not guilty—I did not do the things they charge me with. Are you going to take the word of a patrolman who doesn’t like me against my word? I can assure you, I can prove my innocence. This is a frame-up.”

  When Tiny Meyers was brought face to face with him, he said instantly, “That’s the man!”

  Quinn suspended the officer, and Roche stripped him of his star, police revolver, and handcuffs. Captain McDonald and Inspectors William Gilmore and Ray O’Brien escorted the prisoner upstairs to the City Prison, where he printed his name in the big book on the booking sergeant’s desk. They locked him in a felony cell, but kept Frank and Meyers confined in separate tanks. “It was with great reluctance,” said Roche on the steps outside, “that we took the action we did. We certainly did not proceed on the unsupported word of Meyers. We made an exhaustive investigation. We are satisfied that the evidence against the prisoner is strong enough to warrant that action. He will be tried in court as would any citizen. We’re on our way to his home to tell his wife. I would much rather tell her that her husband was dead.”

  Quinn only extolled the officer’s impeccably long service. “His record had been without a blemish and outstanding,” he said.

  The defendant’s lawyer, John J. Taaffe, alleged a frame-up in language so blue he almost came to blows with Tatham. Tatham ended the matter by stalking away. On November 20, the grand jury, after a five-hour session, indicted the officer for burglary with explosives. Through his official position, he had been able to check the activities of beat and special officers.

  On January 23, 1935, as extraordinarily high seas capsized three boats off Bay Point, the convicted officer was brought in shackles into superior court. Against the turbulent background, Judge I. L. Harris’s face was stormlike. “You have the mark of Cain on you,” he said. “You have violated the trust of the people of San Francisco. . . . You are a man who has humiliated himself and brought dishonor and disgrace to the service.”

  He sentenced the turncoat cop to fifteen years. A witness further implicated the turncoat in a Los Angeles robbery, which got him another fifteen years. “I told you at the time I would see you again,” Mrs. Ella King said. “I remember your face very well.”

  DA Brady contacted the State Board of Prison Terms and Paroles and urged the limit. “He is a peculiarly antisocial person,” he wrote. “He saw fit to aid in the perpetration of the very crime he was supposed to prevent, and my experience with such persons is that they rarely change.”

  At the prisoner’s request Dullea was to visit the Phantom at Folsom Prison on Saturday, February 23. He showered, donned a freshly pressed suit, and made the lonely drive over pitted roads to the prison. In January, on an exceptionally cold day, Deputy Sheriff Al Parker and three of the traitor’s fellow cops had driven the prisoner along the same route and watched the iron gates slam behind him. Inside, he had been assigned a number, sprayed with DDT powder, and confined in a cell—seven feet by nine feet by eight feet furnished with a dirty sink, a lidless toilet bowl, and four metal shelves on L-braces, which supported two upper and two lower bunks for three other men.

  Dullea checked his gun, entered a small gray room, and studied the concrete gun towers and marching convicts in formation outside the barred window. Guards ushered in a stolid, hatchet-faced man who slumped onto a wooden bench. Dullea cast his eyes on “a pathetic creature,” a doting husband, father, and respected officer with years of immaculate service. Now he was a broken man, head lowered, face pale, and hair gone completely gray. His hands were calloused from hard labor at the rock quarry. His chest was racked with sobs. Dullea shook his head. By God, he would never have suspected him of being the Phantom. The prisoner composed himself and looked up at Dullea.

  “Gambling led me to crime and gambling took every dollar I made. I just want to say I am sorry, Charlie,” Sergeant Oliver L. Hassing sobbed.

  Dullea turned his back on the Dutchman, the role model of his youth. “Frankly I don’t care,” he said, and left.

  TWELVE

  In four short stories written between 1841 and 1844, E. A. Poe laid down the four tenets of the modern crime story—solving a real life case, the use of psychological deduction and double bluff and the person least likely device.

  —JOHN WALSH, POE THE DETECTIVE

  THE night was clear and crisp, yet the odd apelike figure remained unresolved and broken, reforming as it lumbered from one shadow to another. It moved in a peculiar flat-footed shamble. A streetlight cast its shadow raggedly against a brick wall—that of a heavyset figure with short legs, sloping shoulders, and arms striking in their length—unnaturally long, like those of a gorilla. The light of an approaching auto made his eyes momentarily gray, then blue-brown and yellow where the beams flared. Where his coat collar was turned up a neat triangle of bronze showed in the vee. With his broad shoulders stooped, head down, and arms hanging at his side, with all extraneous detail removed, the silhouette could have been that of an ape.

  His father had been an undertaker, conducting business out of their basement in Jersey, and he had been one too, or at least a morgue attendant. He recalled the fascination of rows of pale bodies lined up in the basement of Mt. Sinai Hospital. His duties had included dissecting corpses for autopsies and sewing them up. It got so he thought of autopsies all the time, and it made it hard to sleep. Vividly, he remembered the powerful chemical smell enhanced by the small space heater. He recalled the slanting floor and its central drain, the large deep sinks, and the metal table—that above all.

  But he was also an adventurer and sailor plying the Great Lakes and would be one again. To the bone, he was a traveling man. A year earlier he had married a woman in Baltimore, a good, moral person who wasn’t good and moral enough to stop him from heading out again on her dollar and taking more lives. The name he was using was not his own, only one of a vast catalog of identities, costumes, occupations, and different personalities he kept filed away in his head. He could be anyone at any time. The most of his true self he gave the world was the fleeting glimpse of his huge shadow and an odd, haunting laugh he couldn’t control.

  When the Gorilla Man was drunk, he floated in a kind of moral weightlessness. Then his will was negated and a colored curtain dropped over his eyes. Sometimes it was a red haze as transparent as silk. Other times it was a blue ocean tide that rolled over him. Europeans had been acquainted with such creatures as the Gorilla Man long before Americans. The French and Tyrolean rippers, Vacher and Xaver, had spoken of uncontrollable impulses preceded by colored hazes that compelled them to do unspeakable things. Xaver, a slightly eccentric boy of good name, felt one day an “irresistible red tide” sweep over him. Vacher also reported an “imperious and irresistible passion came on like a terrible red tide inspired by the Devil.”

  The Gorilla Man fought hard to control himself. Under the compulsion of those red and blue curtains of light he could not control himself. And he had been having those dreams again. When he heard of murders he asked himself, “Could it be me?” unable to admit he had committed acts of violence. “I lay down and tried to think about things I know,” he confided. “I try to piece it all together. I try to reason it out. I try to think how I got this blood on my hands. I think I saw a razor. I don’t know. I actually don’t know.”

  He cast his eyes on San Francisco Bay and the nearby Ferry Building. Glad to be off the Great Lakes where he had been a sailor and back in a bustling city filled with women, he went into the nearest waterfront bar. As he listened to the chimes
of the Moorish Clock Tower, he began to drink as fog rushed by the door like an express.

  BY April 1935, Verne Doran was out on parole. Herbert Emerson Wilson, a convicted murderer in charge of Dorm No. 2 at Folsom Prison, claimed Doran had admitted he had conspired with prosecutors to falsely implicate Egan. Dullea knew that Wilson was a crony of Egan’s.

  On April 5, workmen completed the portion of the Bay Bridge running from the east portal of the Yerba Buena Island Tunnel to Pier E-2, a slip at the westerly end of a fourteen-hundred-foot long cantilever. On its high side, the bridge already dwarfed the Palace Hotel. Dullea gave a low whistle at the astonishing progress as he walked to his car by the Ferry Building. The big billboard atop the Bay Hotel proclaimed, “4 Proback Jr. blades for ten cents. You take a chance when you buy the Unknown.” Next to the word unknown was displayed a huge gleaming razor.

  Dullea got behind the wheel, humming. These days, he was a more relaxed man. He had put his three most heartbreaking cases behind him—that of a cop killer, an ex-cop who was a killer, and a dirty cop. Dullea counted as the foremost tragedies of life the loss of a friend, the inability to save a friend, and the betrayal of a friend. He had endured all three in five years but it had made him realize what had to be done. It was odd, Dullea thought as he spun onto Market, Officer Malcolm had been murdered on April 29. Josie Hughes had been murdered on April 29. The Phantom had struck on an April 29. Now April had rolled around once more. What tragedy would this cruelest of months bring this time? The first sign of trouble in a clear sky is a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand appearing on the horizon, then darkening until the entire sky is filled with fury.

  That night Dullea slept well, a by-product of the sea air, the dazzling light, and the rapid construction of the two astonishing bridges that would change San Francisco forever. He would need his strength. In a matter of hours, he would be present at the birth of a new breed of man. The series of seemingly unsolvable crimes would make him wonder if the person who committed them was not human, but some animalistic creature. In fact, early descriptions would compare the suspect to a gorilla with a razor who laughed as he escaped.

  As with the shooting of Officer Malcolm, Dullea’s biggest case would be linked to the Embarcadero, that fogbound region of brutality, that busy crossroads of all manner of men and some who might not be men at all. The police of Whitechapel, London, would not have been surprised. Dullea learned about this creature the next day as rain beat against his office window.

  THIRTEEN

  Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired.

  —E. A. POE, “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”

  ON Saturday, April 6, 1935, Anna Lemon quit the auto ferry as soon as the hydraulic apron lowered into place with a thud. Heavy rain was pounding the raw-and-ready Embarcadero as other ferries, blasting their whistles, eased into the seven remaining slips. Commuters, in time to the beat of paddles, lifting and lowering in the waves, tramped soldierlike up one of four projecting Y-shaped gangways. On a busy day, the fleet transported nearly sixty thousand people between the East Bay and San Francisco’s Ferry Building, making the Ferry Building second in foot traffic only to London’s Charing Cross Station. Anna made a zigzag dash into a tarpaper-covered corridor abutting the rear of the terminal and trudged up the gusty walkway. She emerged into the Grand Nave at the second-floor level where symmetrically placed skylights let in some illumination. But in such blustery weather, the shafts of leaden light only underscored the gloom.

  At 8:00 A.M., the siren sounded (it would sound again at noon and at 4:30 P.M.). To the north and south of the Ferry Building square steel doors rolled up. The stomp of heavy boots announced an army of longshoremen marching inside to unload cargo. Donkey engines near the roundhouse began hauling up stacks of lumber in clouds of steam. Among storage sheds and grimy warehouses, men began stacking, steam fitting, and repaying. Anna and her fellow commuters, shielding themselves from the downpour, exited from the second floor and swarmed onto an arched, cast-iron footbridge. The wide span, soaring from the long, continuous double front arcade of the Ferry Building, shuddered beneath their weight and sank a little.

  The driving rain had halted today’s anticipated opening of the Pacific Coast League. Lefty O’Doul, an ex-pitcher/outfielder from Butchertown6 and winner of National League titles with the Phillies and Dodgers, would have to wait another day to debut as the Seals’ manager; Dullea, a rabid hardball fan, would have to wait to watch O’Doul.

  Below the footbridge, alive with its tide of black umbrellas, the Ferry Building shed rain like a duck. Each of its fifty repetitive arches disgorged mouthfuls of passengers. In front twisted the Great Ferry Loop, its graceful curves accommodating ten streetcars at a time. The elegant streetcar turnaround, one of the first things built after the Great ’06 Quake and upgraded thirteen years later, was widely applauded as a fine idea. It speeded loading and unloading of the streetcars, though commuters scurrying off the ferries in peak hours were often cut off by passing Belt Line locomotives. At rush hour, the freights effectively prevented commuters from boarding cars or getting to taxies on the south side. For that reason the city had constructed the wide footbridge above the Loop in 1918.

  From Anna’s vantage point the three sets of intertwining tracks below described the shape of a light bulb—rounded end facing the Ferry Building; base stretching up mile-long Market. In the downpour, streetcars with steamed windows lined up. Muni cars kept to the outside curve, but sometimes strayed onto the middle loop next to the Geary line. On the outer loop, a C car was starting up. Behind it a green and white Market Street Railway No. 5 car and a gray 21 Hayes Street car waited their turns.

  The revolving streetcars, like lovers in the rain, waltzed around a rundown plaza. A plot of rust-stained greenery struggled to breathe next to a grill that vented toxic fumes from a short tunnel running under the Loop. Each day, eleven thousand motorists entered the 950-foot-long auto subwayat Mission Street, dipped briefly under the Loop. and reemerged into daylight at Washington Street, blinking like moles. When their eyes adjusted, the first thing they saw was a gigantic Camel cigarette billboard.

  On the north side of the bridge, the four-wheel dinkey to the Presidio was just leaving. Through the A-struts Anna saw the Sacramento-Clay cable car pass beneath and swing wide onto rain slick Sacramento, a major east- west downtown street. Between Sacramento and Clay, flourished a region of longshoremen’s quick-lunch counters, beer parlors, secondhand clothing stores, and the Harbor Emergency Hospital. At East Street across 120-foot-wide Market Street stood the Ensign Cafe and Saloon where a call of “Captain!” at any time of day brought every man to his feet.

  Anna reached the other side of the incline. There the span was welded to a wedge-shaped, three-story building with a rounded portico and a Moorish trim of iron grillwork. Its roof bristled with billboards and poles flying advertising banners. In the pelting rain, Anna gingerly made her way down two broad flights to Brundage’s. The drugstore took up the slightly rounded cusp of the bridge-anchoring building. Its doors intersected the apex from Sacramento Street to Commercial Street. Advertisements reading “Bear Photo Developing” and “Ex-Lax, the Chocolated Laxative” covered the second-floor windows.

  Anna turned right onto the north side of Sacramento and passed The Loop, a tavern offering Valley Brew. It had replaced a take-home family bakery that had occupied the site for years. The Loop’s neon sign was clever. From the vantage point of early morning commuters one side read: “The Loop First Chance.” Workers trudging home along Market Street saw: “The Loop Last Chance.” Next, Bernstein’s Fish Grotto’s awnings advertised “Crabs, Cod and Clams In Season” and “Chowder For A Dime.” Above, Harris Clothiers, signs hawked “Yachting costumes.”

  Anna reached her destination—24 Sacramento Street, a four-story hotel where she worked as a maid. A vertical, two-and-a-half-story neo
n sign spelled out, one letter atop another, three words: Bay Hotel ROOMS. At the bottom the word BATH filled a circle, as if the period of an exclamation point. Like any exclamation point, it expressed contempt, anger, enthusiasm, pain, and sorrow, the most common emotions felt at the Bay Hotel. After today, its most common emotion would be fear.

  The Bay Hotel lay in the shadow of the Clock Tower. In early 1850, it had been one of three floating brigs in the Cove drawn up on the mud under a high bank. The city fathers had transformed it into a hotel at the southeast corner of Battery and Green streets, a hostelry favored by seafaring men, stevedores, Alaskan fishermen, and ladies who catered to “this salty type of clientele.” There, the city honored its first elected sheriff, the greatest Texas Ranger of all. Twelve years earlier the Bay Hotel’s rooftop billboard declared “ROOMS 50 Cents and Upward. Strictly Modern Improvements.” Now a nifty backward sign had been painted across the entire two-hundred-foot side of the Bay Hotel, catching the eye of every arriving commuter. In mirror-image the lettering said “OWL Cigars 5 cents.”

  After the new six-story Hotel Terminal (the “Waldorf Astoria of waterfront dumps”) opened on the north side of Market Street, the Bay Hotel’s fortunes began to decline. The Terminal had a kitchen, and its lighted sign made it the first hotel transcontinental railroad passengers saw as they emerged from the Ferry Building. In larger letters than the Bay Hotel’s, their sign advertised: “European Plan Rooms, $1.00, with bath $1.50 up.” That rainy day, the Hotel Terminal’s colossal sign proclaimed: “Commercial & Tourist, 300 rooms 150 Baths.”