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

by Robert Graysmith

  Elsewhere, the bloodless body of an unidentified man laden down with chains and weights had shot to the surface. It was estimated it had been thrown over the side of the nearby San Mateo-Hayward Bridge by a very strong man. Dullea caught that case.

  SOUTH of San Francisco, the Bay tides were running strong and swift. Getting the waterlogged bundle onboard the Coast Guard cutter was arduous. The sailor was bound in chains just like escape artist Harry Houdini in his recent performance at the Orpheum but had been substantially less successful in breaking loose. Link by link, the guardsmen snipped away the chains with a bolt cutter. When the mutilated corpse was released from his irons, a singular feature stood out—he had not one drop of blood in his veins.

  Britt had briefed Dullea so he knew about the victim Fell weighted in chains and threw from the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. All Dullea knew for sure was that someone was killing sailors in grisly ways. Unfortunate seamen had been found in the water, suspiciously murdered on the docks, thrown out windows, stabbed with a combination of stilettos and butcher knives, and fatally beaten. Dullea thought the crimes might be linked, but if the sailor killings were part of a sequence held together by a substantial motive, what was that motive? It was the same problem he had in the Gorilla Man case.

  Dullea took a deep breath of Bay air. It cleared his head. The early morning was crystal clear. Gulls wheeled above as the police launch cut south. Barges passed by, delivering large steel beams to the Bay Bridge skeleton, and derricks were lifting them into place. In spite of eight months of setbacks (they lost the trestle twice in storms and once when a ship rammed it), the bridge was nearing completion. Architect Charles Purcell had designed it as two distinct structures, conjoined mid-Bay (exactly between two earthquake faults) at Yerba Buena Island to span the widest navigable stretch of water ever. When the two main sections were in place, the hard rock men would bore a tunnel through the island’s center to connect them.

  Dullea saw the Coast Guard cutter ahead. A minute later, he was aboard and minutes later followed the cutter back to the dock in the police launch, having learned the bloodless sailor wasn’t Baronovich. “Including the sailor in chains we dragged up, Raoul Louis Cherborough,” Dullea said, “that makes the sixth mysterious killing on San Francisco Bay in two years.16 All the victims were seamen very active in union disputes.” The fifth victim, Chief Engineer George W. Alberts of the freighter Point Lobos had been stabbed with two knives.17 Dullea’s informant, Matthew Guidera, told him, “A.M. Murphy of the Marine Fireman’s Union, and I are roommates in the Terminal Hotel on Market Street [adjacent to the Bay Hotel], so we both could be near the ships and docks in case of a dispute involving members of our respective unions. A union leader dispatched a bunch of men to kill Alberts and the rest.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Business has picked up 100% since the organ grinder traded in his monkey for a gorilla.

  —VINTAGE CARTOON SHOWING A GORILLA HOLDING A PASSERBY BY HIS ANKLES AND SHAKING MONEY OUT

  AS the first rays of Tuesday’s daybreak streaked the sky, McGrath got a cup of coffee and signaled two trusties to load long-handled shovels into his car. As he drove to the solitary grave, several carloads of reporters and deputies kept a less than respectful distance behind. He turned onto the little-used side road and parked. So did the reporters. The trusties hauled out the shovels and made a leisurely descent of the slope, this time by ropes secured to the auto bumper. The portly sheriff saw that workmen had been excavating very close to the grave. “We probably would have discovered the corpse very soon no matter what,” he said. The deputies and trusties, all in shirtsleeves, unbuttoned their vests and hefted their shovels and pickaxes. McGrath, badge pinned to his black vest, used the rope and joined them. He didn’t bother to roll up his sleeves, just hefted his pick and struck a blow as flashbulbs exploded.

  Blowflies were buzzing. You couldn’t see them in the faint dawn light, but you could feel them. Diggers removed two feet of leaves and debris and a second layer of earth discolored by quicklime. The lime had seared the earth to a depth of another foot. Sunrise was filtering through the trees when they uncovered the decomposed body of Mrs. Rice another two feet down. A reporter became ill at the sight. “This is all we need,” said McGrath. “We’ll let the coroner take care of this.” The attendants lifted the body, placed it in a round-ended wicker sarcophagus with handles at both ends and made the treacherous ascent, the lead attendant walking backward and pulling as his partner pushed the casket.

  McGrath returned to the jail to find the press assembled around the prisoner’s cell. At first Fell had been grumpy (the jailers had awakened him early), but after breakfast and a look at the front pages, he was in an increasingly playful mood. “So you’ve been digging, eh?” Fell said as they entered. “Well, you boys will want a lot of pictures now, but try to make them better than the last ones. They weren’t very good.” He flexed his muscles under the tight black T-shirt, smoothed back his hair and chided them. “My rollicking, highly amusing little escapade hasn’t been big news until now, boys. Well, it’ll be on the front page now. I’m going to run Hitler right off the paper.”

  “Do you think you’ll hang?”

  “Hang? Well, I don’t know. Sheriff McGrath is a grand guy and I’ll vote for him the next time he runs for office if I’m in any position to vote. If the sheriff thinks I ought to hang that’s his business and I don’t hold it against him. I guess I’ve done my part to help Sheriff McGrath who’s a fine stout fellow.”

  “How many people have you killed, Jerry?”

  “I wouldn’t say,” he replied, smiling his brilliant smile. “Aw, hell, I wouldn’t tell you that on a bet.” He winked.

  “Have you ever been on the stage,” a reporter asked the movie-star handsome prisoner.

  “Sure, once, but they kicked me off on the desert near Utah. As I recall it was a Pickwick stage.”

  “Murder is a joke to him,” a reporter wrote. “To him murder is no crime. It’s an uproarious prank with a laugh in every phrase. He is the happy killer. He carefully sets the stage for his effects—and they are always comedy effects.”

  “Stand behind the bars, Jerry,” a cameraman requested, “and face us from that position.”

  “Oh, no, guys. I don’t think bars would make a good frame. I like the ones taken inside the cell. Come on inside.” A photographer entered with a bulky camera and dazzled Fell with several shots. Abruptly he retaliated by grabbing the camera, bracing his foot against the bars and taking the photog’s picture. He stood for as many pictures as they desired. He tilted his cheek against his hand and rolled his eyes upward “in a familiar cherubic attitude.” He posed lit from below with his penetrating eyes staring directly into the lenses. “Hypnotic is the only word that would do that look justice,” remarked Britt. Fell performed an impromptu clog dance for the newsmen. “Two weeks ago I was going to San Mateo Junior College,” he said as he spun around, both arms out, “—just working my way through school and getta load of me now. Wow.”

  “How long have you known Dorothy?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dorothy Farnum.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “The girl at your place.”

  “Oh, that girl. She told me her name was ‘Boots.’ I don’t know Dorothy well. I got in the jug right after I met her. But go easy on that stuff about my living with a hitchhiker. I’ve got my social prestige to think of.”

  While his cute little hitchhiking pal enjoyed the luxury of regular hot meals and a bath, she had the wandering bug again. McGrath decided to free her. Starry-eyed, she said, “Oh boy, Sheriff, I can be just in time for a walkathon in Dallas.” Boots set off briskly with a new suitcase, not Ada’s but one that McGrath bought her with his own money. She and Fell were very much alike the sheriff thought and watched Boots tap-dance out of sight.

  “Once again Jerry, why did you order a book on poisons?” Maloney asked. Fell’s toxicology book had arrived that morning. As f
ar as Maloney was concerned Boots, who thought the whole thing “just so much balderdash over nothing,” had narrowly escaped death.

  In the afternoon Fell was returned to Mrs. Rice’s grave. While the deputies dug for any other bodies, Fell posed gaily for the photographers. “It was just an accident,” he told them. “Just one of those things. Anyway they wouldn’t stretch me. I’m too young to be stretched. But you know, boys, hanging is a damn sight better than life imprisonment—but they won’t hang me because the murder was not of my own volition.”

  BEFORE dawn on Wednesday morning, March 11, McGrath, Maloney, Britt, a Call-Bulletin reporter, and a photographer drove Fell to the bungalow so he could reenact both murders. Fell was dressed in a black V-neck undershirt, black gabardine pants with striped black and white suspenders, and loafers with no socks. First Maloney got down on one knee and took measurements of the living room with a tape and marked the location of the davenport, corner fireplace, andirons, and the gilded full-length mirror on a map.

  “Step here,” Fell stage directed the camera man, “and I’ll show you just how it was done. Ha, ha!” He drafted Britt to play the role of Ada Rice. With a smile he raised the poker Maloney had entrusted him with. “I came home that night and although the lights were out, I felt the presence of someone. Then suddenly I was struck a heavy blow which knocked me into the fireplace. I seized this poker and swung it twice—this way.”

  Grinning broadly, Fell held the poker by the point and brought the handle end to his left shoulder, then swished it mightily right and left. “I heard someone fall, turned on the lights and found I had killed Mrs. Rice. She lay near the fireplace, clad only in scanties.” All along Fell had been chuckling at his own jokes, kidding, winking, and nudging what he called “my jovial policemen,” but now he steadied himself against the door. “Hold on—(a look of horror crossed his face) I’ve got a rotten taste in my mouth.”

  “Is it from memories?” Britt asked.

  “No. Hell, I haven’t got any conscience. But say, don’t put that in the paper—(he turned toward the Bulletin man) that I haven’t got any conscience; they’ll think I’m cruel.”

  Now Britt stood in for Michael Baronovich.

  “I met Baronovich in the murder house,” said Fell. “He had taken all the money I offered him. He pulled a gun. I knocked it like this.” Fell made a graceful lunge. “We had a terrific fight.” “He was a big man, so we had quite a struggle. I went down like this.” He went down on his left knee. “At one time, and it seemed a question of self-defense, he raised the gun like this and I grappled for it. He had great strength and it looked like I was going to lose.” Fell put his left hand on Britt’s right shoulder, and crossing over grasped his arm at the wrist. “I got an arm lock like this behind him, twisted his arm. He dropped the gun. I clipped him on the head. I hit him again and again.” It was like watching a Hollywood film.

  The detectives left the bungalow so he could show them another grave, a watery one this time. “Gee, you fellows are too fast for me,” Fell said. “I’ve got to get some sleep. Baronovich isn’t going anywhere. Let’s let this go until tomorrow.” He yawned.

  “No, we have to do it now,” said McGrath sternly. He needed to know exactly where the weighted body of Baronovich had been consigned to the depths from the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. The party traveled in silence to the icy waters where divers were still searching. “I threw the body there on the night of December 6,” he said. “I remember seeing a stalled vehicle when I drove out onto the bridge to the place I had mentally picked. I found a green truck parked there. I stopped behind the driver and asked him if he had broken down and needed any help. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m just taking a nap—just sleepy,’ he told me. So I got back in my car and drove further on, one mile east of the drawbridge. About 200 yards east of the curve past the toll house, I finally stopped the car and hauled out the body. I remember they were fixing the concrete here and some of the sand is still here. Also I remember the red light. See that newly patched section of the guard rail. They were just repairing it when I drove out here with his body. I tried to roll the body through the concrete rails of the bridge. You can see they’re too narrow. What a job that was.” McGrath bent to look. Yes, the spaces between the triple-railed span were too narrow to permit a body to slide through. Below in a rowboat Lawrence Nieri in overalls and Adolph Waldeck in a hat and three-piece suit were probing with long poles.

  Jack French of the Chronicle, the only cameraman there, snapped Fell directing operations from the bridge, leaning over the rail and giving a thumbs-up to Nieri and Waldeck. Fell offered to demonstrate to journalist Fred Glover how he tossed Baronovich over and started to lift him over his head. Glover would have gone in the drink, if Fell hadn’t been cuffed.

  Only when they were on the official launch speeding south across the water did McGrath unmanacle Fell. About a mile from the drawbridge McGrath’s trusties, taking advantage of low tide conditions, were sweeping the Bay floor with grappling hooks. By now the iron wire had probably rusted, and as the weights dropped away, the body would be free. “Probably the tide had swept it out to sea,” thought McGrath.

  The hooks sliced into the cold water until they snagged a “leg” that turned out be a log. A few bits of cloth came up along with two feet of twisted baling wire. “That looks like some of the wire I used to truss up Baronovich,” said Fell. Dredging continued. Divers plunged into the black water. At end of the day their grappling hooks caught a heavy object. “No attempt will be made to raise it until low tide in the morning,” said McGrath, though he was anxious to see if it was a body.

  Next morning, they brought up something that might have been flesh, but that was as close as the authorities ever came to finding Baronovich.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  With “Floaters,” persons submerged in water for a long period of time, the palmar regions will have the appearance of ‘washerwoman’s skin.’”

  —CRIME TEXT OF THE TIME

  SHERIFF McGrath returned Fell to his Redwood City cell, and within minutes the prisoner was snoring loudly. He slept straight through until morning when the jailers roused him. Fell had no sooner awakened than he called for the papers. A broad grin crossed his face as he read the bold headlines. “Say, Sheriff, this is good!” he chortled. “Take a gander at this front page. Why, I guess this makes me a mass murderer.” Fell gave a boisterous laugh and slapped his leg.

  When Maloney discovered a lodge uniform among Fell’s belongings, he pleaded, “Please, Tom, hide that outfit from the press.” But a reporter independently stumbled upon it and wrote that Fell had the costume of a grave-digger from Holy Cross Cemetery. Thus, when Chronicle scribe Ray Leavitt asked, “Jerry, tell us about the time you went to school in Stockton?” Fell was furious. “How did you find that out!” he snapped, then regained his composure. “How did you find that out?” he repeated mildly, as if this revelation were only one of many more still to be uncovered.

  “I found a book in the Stockton schools with your real name in it,” said Leavitt, who wrote, “The Adonis Killer is colder than William Edward Hickman; more nonchalant than Elton M. Stone [two of the state’s handsomest and most fiendish killers]. Everything seems to be made to order to suit his fancy. It is as if he wrote his own mystery thriller, cleverly concealing the denouement so he alone could supply the key, and then reserved for himself the role of hero in his own miserably sordid play.”

  “This murder case against me went just boom! boom! boom! Like that,” Fell said. “A chain of circumstances involved me. Anyone would have done as I did under those circumstances. Except, perhaps what I did with the bodies after making corpses of them. Now I’m sorry that I tried to cover up. I may have trouble proving self defense. But let me tell you until you got situation like this you have no idea how you will react. Now if I hadn’t felt justified in these deaths I would have not pointed out Mrs. Rice’s body would I? I will admit that things don’t look too good, and that really is not a laughing matt
er. If they ask for my neck, it may be just too bad.

  “No, I don’t feel so good with two deaths on my hands. I am a happy-go-lucky fellow by nature. I’ve roamed a lot and laughed my way through life, but fellows, I am not laughing now, no matter what you may think. Right now, I’m not interested in any defense. I believe in capital punishment. As for me I’d rather be dead than imprisoned for life. I would even be willing to write my life story for $1,000.”

  “How many murders would you admit for that much money.”

  “Oh, say twice thirteen.”

  Sheriff McGrath questioned Fell about the unsolved shooting death last year on a San Mateo street of Kathleen Robinson. Fell studied a beach photo of her in a one-piece bathing suit—winsome, short dark hair, dazzling smile, pixielike. “I had nothing to do with that. I was not even in the locality at the time, but on one of my trips.”

  McGrath whisked Fell to the Redwood City Morgue—another salvo in his carefully orchestrated campaign of psychological warfare. If he confronted him with Mrs. Rice’s decomposed remains, he might wring additional murder confessions from him. After viewing x-rays, Dr. James Rinehart and Dr. A. H. Head, pathologist at the Mills Memorial Hospital, had jointly determined Ada’s cause of death. “Death was from a definite cerebral hemorrhage brought on by a terrific blow on top of the head and instantaneous. Tremendous depressing force indicates that more than one blow was struck.”

  Seeing the corpse had no effect on Fell. Instead, he was elated at the educational opportunities afforded by viewing a long-buried corpse. He studied the skull from every angle, asked about the depressed area, and engaged in a technical discussion with Coroner William Crosby about skull fractures. Crosby was stuck dumb by his series of jokes. Even the bleached skull was grinning as if at some private joke.