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

by Robert Graysmith

  Kelleher checked the rooms on both sides. No one had heard a disturbance during the night. Perhaps the driving rain had drowned out any sounds. And her mouth had been taped. “I’ve got one question,” McGinn said. He walked around the room and bath. “Where is their luggage?”

  He rode down to the lobby where Anna Lemon confirmed the room door had been locked. Their “cold-blooded gent” had taken the hotel key away with him. He might still have it on him; the murder weapon, too, because it was not in evidence. McGinn got Anna Eve Lemon’s full name and the names and addresses of anyone else who might be a witness. First was the absent night porter, Otto von Feldman, then the night clerk, John Smeins. Selchaw had no forwarding address for von Feldman, but did for Smeins. McGinn scrawled “John Smeins” on the right-hand page of his notebook along with the address Selchaw provided. “When did they check in?” he asked.

  “Let’s see,” said Selchaw, pulling the register to himself, and ran his finger down a line of signatures. “Here it is. Smeins registered the woman and her husband registered just after 3:00 A.M.”

  McGinn turned the book. Two inked lines as jagged as barbed wire read: “Mr & Mrs. Meyers.” The mysterious Mr. Meyers had put a period after Mrs., but not after Mr. On the left-hand page of McGinn’s notebook was a space for suspects. He wrote “Mr Meyers.” “I’m curious,” he asked. “How did Mr. and Mrs. Meyers explain their lack of luggage? I couldn’t find any suitcases in their room.”

  “Luggage? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Smeins. But I do know the man left a wake-up call.” He pointed out the notations “3:00 A.M.” and “10:00 A.M.”

  “I will ask Smeins,” said McGinn.

  Because the night clerk lived only blocks away, he ordered Desmond and Kelleher there. “Hurry,” McGinn said. Exiting the Bay Hotel, the two waterfront cops passed LaTulipe coming in the front door. Only half a block away all four clock faces of the Ferry Tower were illuminated, glowing softly down on the dismal hotel. Close on LaTulipe’s heels trotted the police photographer carrying the huge cameras of the time. Investigator Ray Boreas was just crossing the street. Now the detectives could truly begin finding the answer to the puzzle of the murder on the third floor of the Bay Hotel, the most horrible any of them had ever seen. Because Smeins had seen the face of the murderer and could identify him, he was crucial to their case. He might even be in danger himself. Desmond and Kelleher quickened their pace.

  FIFTEEN

  Do not touch, alter, or move anything until it has been measured, photographed, and examined by the persons responsible for the evidence.

  —THE GOLDEN RULE OF INVESTIGATIONS

  AT 4:35 on the rainy Saturday afternoon of April 6, Francis X. La Tulipe reached the small drab room in the Bay Hotel. The falling rain outside had tinted its walls a tea-stained blue the texture of smoke. Ever after, the expert criminologist called number 309 “the blue room.” He dragged his forensic equipment—micrometers, microscopes, and bulky instruments used to make meticulous measurements—from the elevator. He was a brave man to do battle armed with only these tools. LaTulipe dropped his apparatus outside the door. Inside was a rapid succession of pops, the photographer “shooting a flashlight.” A final searing crackle resounded as he hurled one last bulb to the carpet, having photographed the victim from every conceivable angle—close-ups of the head, full face, and profile—all crucial to learning her real name. The photographer packed up, and as he left gave a thumbs-up to LaTulipe.

  When someone garroted wealthy patroness Mrs. Rosetta Baker with a sheet in her hotel apartment at 814 California Street, La Tulipe had gone over the death chamber inch by inch with a powerful glass. He located a dime-size irregular patch of skin torn from a finger during the struggle, a white button ripped from a man’s shirt, the worn lift of a man’s shoe heel, and the thin wooden peg used to hold it in place. “It was a perfect case,” La Tulipe recalled. “Plenty of evidence at hand, but we couldn’t get a conviction.”

  “Seek the evidence . . .” he thought, the mantra of Dullea’s men, as he studied every inch of the nude body. “Frenzy,” he said, “whoever it was was carried away with frenzy.”

  Yet that same frenzied someone had tidied the room, made the bed with her in it, left very little blood, and been cool enough to bring along a roll of tape. “Mutilated and gagged with adhesive tape,” he wrote. “Why gag someone who was already dead? Had she been alive during the mutilation?” He hoped not. Using tweezers, LaTulipe carefully peeled away the three strips of tape crisscrossing her mouth. Beneath were three elevated, white tattoos, permanent compression marks. They were white because after death blood can no longer reach the capillaries.

  He studied her bruised throat where large, powerful hands were outlined in black. Nine years earlier, the Gorilla Man’s strong gripping fingers had left the same bruises. His hands, too, had been huge, with long flat nails. Gorillas have long flexible thumbs capable of stretching to grasp large branches, but almost every muscle, bone, internal organ, and blood vessel of the gorilla is repeated in man. Even their hands are relatively short and wide—like human hands.

  LaTulipe examined the cuts. Were they lacerations or incisions? Lacerated wounds have ragged, contused edges split away at bony prominences with strands of connecting tissue bridging the gaps. He saw none of these characteristics. All her wounds were incised, the least common wound, and implied a very sharp razor or knife. Knives were not ordinarily carried, except by seamen.

  He studied a shallow pool of blood surrounding the breast on the night table. A slicing tool suggested that the killer was undersexed. In his sadistic delirium, he had employed a cutting tool as a symbolic mimicry of sex. The pointless mutilations told La Tulipe this might be a lust murder. The lust murderer bites, dissects—slashing the abdomen, exposing abdominal viscera, and eviscerating the torso. He amputates the genitals.

  La Tulipe looked for “scarf-skin”—abrasions confined to the cuticle—but found no blood or skin beneath her nails. Even if he found some he could do very little except determine blood type, sex, and race. A triangle of black celluloid-like material on the floor caught his eye. He bent and retrieved it. The killer’s tight grip on his cutting tool had broken off a piece of the handle. Getting down on his hands and knees, LaTulipe peered under the bed. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he saw the instrument of mutilation—a razor marked with a residue of flesh, cartilage, and crusted blood. LaTulipe bagged it and a tuft of coarse hair. He placed both in a clean pill box.

  Deputy Coroner Mike Brown drove the morgue wagon to the Bay Hotel himself. The roly-poly veteran was out of breath as he wheeled his gurney into the elevator. Heavy, thick-necked, turtlelike, he was a head shorter than McGinn. Two years earlier on another April weekend, Brown had conveyed Josie Hughes’s body to the morgue. “He is an ace investigator,” said McGinn of Brown, “a relentless searcher of facts, one of the kindliest and most sympathetic of all men in spite of his daily work among the tragic dead.”

  What was the worst he had seen? Brown thought a moment. “A construction worker’s suicide with a shotgun filled with water,” he decided. “When he placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger, the pressurized water acted explosively and took off the top of his head.”

  But Brown had never seen anything like the atrocity in room 309. He took one look at the body and began sobbing. Even the cerebral La Tulipe was touched by his compassion. Coroner Thomas B. W. Leland arrived and, after viewing the body, authorized Brown to remove it. Sergeant Birdsall gathered the clothes from the chairs, and followed the gurney down in the elevator. Brown was still crying. Birdsall put his beefy arm around his shoulders.

  After Brown drove the body away, La Tulipe began rooting for latents. He studied the victim’s nails and the victim herself. An attacker’s fingers bearing blood can actually leave prints on skin. La Tulipe decided to try a new fingerprint trick. He placed iodine crystals in a glass tube and blew lightly through an atomizer. The heat of his breath transformed the
crystals into a gas that would react actively on any greasy matter. He got close and blew back and forth over the wall. Previously invisible prints appeared. But the second he ceased blowing, the fugitive brown marks began to fade.

  He took a photo, fumed some more and took another. He repeated this process until his head began to ache. The toxicity of the gas in such close proximity caused his head to swim. Men had died doing this test. Staggering to the window, he stuck his head outside and took several deep breaths. After his mind cleared, he began to dust the window frame. As the cloud of finely ground carbon settled, made sluggish by the misty rain, it adhered to one good print. LaTulipe picked it up on tape, affixed it to a card, and after taking exact measurements of the blue room, locked the door and left.

  DESMOND and Kelleher, walking briskly, reached the night clerk’s home a few blocks from the Bay Hotel. The two seasoned waterfront shooflies had been the perfect men to send. No one knew the Embarcadero as well; no one understood those who lived there better. Kelleher’s son, Tim, within a few years, would join his father as a SFPD detective. It was still raining, but lighter now. Sailors passed arm in arm with smiling women in colorful outfits. Everyone was getting ready for Saturday night. The bars were doing a thriving business. Music and loud voices sounded. Neon lights sprang on. Just after 5:00 P.M., Desmond and Kelleher reached two rows of tawdry boardinghouses with stone lions out front. They climbed the steps. It took Desmond a moment to read the mailboxes and locate the right room. He rang the bell. Neither man expected the living skeleton who answered the door.

  A bald head with pinkish, hooded eyes shone luminously in the darkness. The long, grim face, beaklike nose, veined neck and prominent Adam’s apple suggested a vulture. The undernourished skeleton had drawn on thin triangular eyebrows and wrapped an argyle-patterned robe around his narrow shoulders. The design added to his general angularity. His bare legs suggested to Kelleher that he was naked beneath the robe. The smell of lilac vegetal was overpowering.

  “I’m Smeins,” he said, then ushered them into a room overlooking the street, sat down, and daintily crossed long hairless legs. “I’d be glad to answer any questions you have,” he said. He reached down and petted the calico cat curled at his feet.

  “Start at the beginning, and tell us all you remember.”

  “The register is correct about the time—3:00 A.M.,” he said in a calm, deliberate manner. He paused each time before speaking as if collecting his thoughts. “The woman and a man I supposed was her husband registered as: Mr. and Mrs. H. Meyers of Los Angeles. ‘We don’t have luggage,’ they told me. ‘We’ve just driven up from Southern California. We were just too tired to bring it in. Give us a quiet room. We don’t want to be disturbed.’

  “When the man and the woman came in, they were not walking arm-in-arm, but seemed very chummy all the same.” Smeins rubbed his long, dry hands together. “She was very much at ease and not a bit shy. They were laughing and talking and addressing each other as ‘dear.’ He said, ‘I want a room and a bath.’ Then he turned to the girl and said, ‘Is that all right?’ She said, ‘Yes, dear.’ I handed her a folder listing San Francisco places of amusement, streetcars, playgrounds and all that sort of stuff. She smiled and said, ‘Oh, thanks. This will help me get acquainted.’ The bloke paid for the room with a $2 bill. They had no baggage with them. Then I took them up in the elevator to the third floor, to their room, #309. There were a number of vacancies but Mr. Meyers had requested that room, I was happy to oblige.

  “I asked the couple, ‘Is there anything else you would like?’ She replied, ‘No, thank you.’ So I left as the man closed the door and locked it. I heard the lock click as I walked away. About 4:30 A.M., the elevator bell rang. So I went up to the third floor with the elevator, and there was the man looking cheerful. I took the bloke down to the lobby.”

  Desmond was flabbergasted. The monster had accomplished all that horror in less than an hour and a half.

  “You know,” said Smeins, “I think the same man may have stopped at the hotel last summer and maybe the summer before, but had never stayed any length of time. I think he was known around the hotel as a crewman on a coast ship by what name I don’t know or even what port he was from.”

  “That would have been during the bloody dock strikes,” said Desmond. “Perhaps he was stranded in San Francisco along with all the idled ships.” The coast ships had particularly been hit hard. The crippling shipping strikes had wrecked the passenger steamer Harvard under command of Captain Louis Ellsinger (a witness in the Malcolm shooting) as surely as the Point Arguello rocks had sunk her sister ship, Yale.

  “Make a check of the hotel’s old register and see if you can find his name,” Kelleher told Smeins, knowing that it would only be another alias as surely as “Mr. Meyers” was.

  “Was there anything unusual about the man?” asked Desmond.

  “What wasn’t?” A huge grin crossed the skeletal face. He rocked one slippered foot.

  “Now think carefully, what did he look like?”

  “Von Feldman might have seen him more clearly because he went up to fix the window, but let’s see.” He put one hand under his sloping chin and thought. “Mr. Meyers was fairly well-dressed in a dark suit that fit snugly.”

  “Muscular,” said Kelleher.

  “Yes, I would say so.”

  Smeins described a burly suspect, twenty-six to thirty years old, with blue-brown eyes, a slitlike mouth, low-set ears, and vaguely simian features. “He kept his face averted. He was short and heavyset, about 5’ 8” and weighed around 180-190 pounds. But he could have been taller and heavier. I got the impression he was crouching. He had a powerful build—broad chest, long arms, wide shoulder, and short legs. Huge hands and a large head. He had a strong lower jaw and enlarged canine teeth. I would say he had light to medium-brown hair and a tanned, weather-beaten complexion.”

  “Like that of a seafaring man,” said Kelleher. “Our killer is a sailor.”

  “Mr. Meyers had huge hands and massive shoulders—like those of an ape.”

  “A gorilla man,” said Desmond. A Gorilla Man! He looked to Desmond. It couldn’t be happening again.

  “I’d know him if I saw him again,” said Smeins. “When Mr. Meyers came down into the lobby about 4:30 A.M., his coat collar was turned up around his neck and his face was partially hidden. He wore his hat pulled low. It was a porkpie, a snapbrim with a low flat crown. He was all ready to go out into the rain. He kept his hands in his pockets.”

  “He plunged his hands inside his pockets to hide bloodstains on them,” said Kelleher glumly.

  “And he pulled the hat down to hide any scratches on his face,” added Desmond. “Did he say anything more?”

  “Well, the bloke said to call them about 10:00 A.M. He said his wife was hungry and asked me where he could get some sandwiches. He had a soft melodious voice, I remember that much. As I recall his actual words were, ‘It’s hell with these women. All they want is beer and sandwiches before they’ll go to sleep. That damn woman is sending me out for beer and sandwiches.’ I told him where he might get some sandwiches on Market Street and he went sauntering out the door. He walked with a kind of gait, on the flat of his feet. I thought it was a bit queer at the time. He was whistling nonchalantly and gave out a kind of queer little laugh. He laughed all the way out. I thought it might be the oddest laugh I’ve ever heard. And when he didn’t show up again and knowing what you’ve told me now I’m positive it was. He still hadn’t come back when I went off duty at 7:00 A.M.”

  The cat purred contentedly at the skeleton’s feet. The tiny claws flexed. The solid ticks of the clock sounded as Smeins, unblinking, stared at them in silence. The detectives left after Smeins promised to try to remember more about the sailor who had stopped at the Bay Hotel. Smeins sat down to think, then leaped up and went for the phone.

  SIXTEEN

  The name gorilla was given to the largest of the anthropoid apes by American missionary and naturalist Thomas S.
Savage upon his return from Africa in 1849.

  SMEINS’S very remarkable portrait of “Mr. Meyers,” a unique man described by another unique man, was disseminated by the communications room at the HOJ to all Bay Area law enforcement agencies. By Teletype, phone, and radio they broadcast a description of what could only be a human gorilla who used a razor to kill. On the Embarcadero, speeding growlers were reflected in the rain-slick streets, black upon black punctuated by flashing red. Chief Quinn’s Flying Squad gunned their motorcycles and roared from the HOJ like hunting animals. These ninety men and forty-five sidecar units had proven to be the SFPD’s most efficient pursuit vehicles, outperforming the Buick town cars. At 6:00 P.M., Captain Dullea, because of the serious nature of the crime, assigned dozens of his detectives to fan out over the Embarcadero. “He’s a husky man with big hands, broad shouldered and hunched like a gorilla,” he told them. “He’s very strong. Spread out and search the docks, search ships and seaman’s hangouts. It’s our only chance—our one lead.”

  Night fell, and the slanting rain ceased. In his small office, Dullea was troubled. The site of the murders—the third floor, and the method of murder—a strangling by a beastlike killer with huge hands, reminded him of the Gorilla Man. But he could not reasonably connect the two. He was dead, wasn’t he? He had died in Canada, hadn’t he? Yet for the second time in his career Dullea and his men were on the lookout for a Gorilla Man who strangled his female victims in rooming houses and hotels. He pushed back his chair, rose, and walked to a wall map to consider the avenues of escape from the city. There weren’t many.