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

by Robert Graysmith

  “Get her fingerprints, Frank,” said Dullea. “I have a hunch she’s probably got a record.”

  LaTulipe rolled the victim’s prints at the scene (which he rarely did), then discovered fingerprints on a nearly empty pint whisky bottle on the mantle. They had been deliberately smudged. The Gorilla Man was playing with them. He bagged the bottle anyway, then drove the print cards to the HOJ and turned them over to Inspector Daniel O’Neill, chief of the Bureau of Identification. LaTulipe had learned some things about the type of man they were hunting. Anatomists and mutilators are erotically stimulated by the victim’s suffering and sexually gratified by inflicting the wound.

  “The man and woman registered just before noon on Monday,” Margaret Rice told Mitchell. “She had only a purse. I remembered he demanded a front room on the third floor but we had none.” Most of the Hotel Irwin’s guests had been out between 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M. when the murder was probably committed. None had heard a sound or seen anything out of the ordinary. “You boys question hotel employees,” Mitchell told Corrasa and Engler. “This case looks so similar to the Coffin case I’ll bet we can almost guess what the hotel clerk will say. I wonder if he used the name ‘Meyers’ again?”

  Manager Arthur Edwards said they had registered as “Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilkins of Los Angeles” around 11:00 A.M. the day before. “The only thing she carried was a purse and a corsage of gardenias,” he said, and described the suspect as “30 to 35 years old, possibly 40, short, stocky, about 5’, 9” and 175 to 180 pounds. He had medium light hair, almost blond—maybe from the sun, and a tanned, weather-beaten complexion. He was wearing a dark suit which fit snugly because of his broad shoulders and barrel chest. His coat collar was turned up around his neck and he wore his hat pulled low, like this.” Edwards showed them. “His hands were in his pockets.” The description of “Mr. Wilkins” tallied with that of “Mr. Meyers” provided by John Smeins in April 1935.

  “Did he say anything?” asked Engler.

  “It’s an odd thing. It was just shortly after one o’clock when he came out of the elevator and said his wife was hungry and asked me where he could get some sandwiches. ‘Women are funny,’ he said to me. His voice was kind of soft and musical. He said, ‘My wife decided she wanted me to bring her in a couple of sandwiches instead of going out for something to eat. I guess the Brass Rail right around the corner is a good as any place hereabouts, ain’t it?’ I told him ‘yes’ and he went sauntering out the door. He was whistling and laughing. It was a strange laugh. That’s the last I saw of him.”

  “My God,” thought Engler, “those are almost the identical words the Gorilla Man used at the Bay Hotel. He is unquestionably the killer.”

  “The way I figure it,” Mitchell said, “we can cinch the Coffin killing and this murder on the same man by proving that the signatures on both registers are identical.” Corrasa took the hotel register and a stat of the Bay Hotel ledger to Inspector McGinn. To his practiced eye both looked alike and analysis later that day confirmed the signatures were identical. McGinn theorized that the killer targeted red-haired women down on their luck. “I think he picks them up in some bar,” he said, “and we should check those out first.”

  “That’s already being done. But where has the Gorilla Man been all this time? Look at the tremendous time lag between his 1931 New York murders, the 1935 San Francisco killing and now this one. How has he held his compulsion in check?”

  “He hasn’t,” said McGinn fiercely. “It just means that there are others we don’t know about or haven’t connected with him—yet.”

  “I’ve identified the victim’s prints from the hotel bedroom,” O’Neill told Dullea. “She’s Mrs. Robert E. [Earl] McCarthy alias Irene Chandler and a few other monikers. She’s thirty one.” In April, the LAPD made an inquiry concerning the support of her boys, Harry, ten, and Ralph, nine. In 1921 she was arrested for prostitution in San Diego and over the following nine years jailed for the same offense eleven times, all in San Diego. “There’s that San Diego connection again,” thought Dullea. Mrs. Coffin’s son had mentioned a sailor with a short name from San Diego and Dullea had a file on two San Diego murders committed by some sailor who tied unusual knots. San Diego seemed to be the logical starting point. Teletyped requests got them a photo of Irene just as O’Neill located a more current one from the local files.

  “With her picture,” said Engler, “we certainly ought to be able to find some bartender where she and the suspect had been drinking. At the very least we might be able to find the shop where they purchased the pint of whisky. It’s unusual for many people to buy liquor in the early morning. They were probably drinking somewhere close to the hotel.”

  The Examiner headlined: “SEX MANIAC KILLS WOMAN IN HOTEL; Nude, Mutilated Victim Strangled With Belt; Drinking Companion Flees.” By 6:00 P.M. the burning arc lights of the photo engraver had converted the victim’s photo (stolen by a zealous reporter from her room) into a masking Velox of forty-five dots per square inch, which sulfuric acids etched onto a copper printing plate.

  Dullea mapped out an area a mile square in the heart of San Francisco. “Within this zone,” he said, rapping it with his knuckles, “I want you to check every bar and rooming house, question every hotel clerk and guest, and grill every bartender and beat cop. Then do it all over again.” Less than twenty-four hours after Mrs. McCarthy’s nude body was discovered, Lieutenant Mitchell had already visited eighty-two bars.

  This first day brought no leads. No one had seen “Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilkins of Los Angeles.” On the second day, Engler and Corrasa, carrying photos of the latest victim and old and new descriptions of the sadistic ripper, visited local hotels and located two where the couple had attempted to register and been turned away. Why? Was it the lack of luggage? Or had the man appeared forbidding in some way? On the third day, nearly two blocks away from the Hotel Irwin, Inspector Frank Ahern discovered a third lodging house where “Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilkins of Los Angeles” had been rejected.

  Dullea’s men labored for a solid week, taking little time out to eat or sleep. By Tuesday, July 2, they had covered the Embarcadero, the financial district, and south of Market with no success. Dullea read their typed reports over and ordered all the uniformed cops in the waterfront area to pitch in. Perhaps a beat cop would find something they had missed as they made another crisscross of the lowest bars.

  Beat cop Carl Marcus’s feet were killing him, so he stopped to rest at a tavern near his regular corner in the south of Market District. The regular bartender was not there. A relief barman was in his place. When Marcus showed him Irene McCarthy’s photo he did a double take.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait a minute. Yeah, I recognize her. She was in here two days in a row. I worked last week too, glad to get the work. So that would make it Tuesday and Wednesday, the 23rd and 24th. I’m positive she was in here, but not with a man—with another woman—yeah, Wednesday morning.”

  “Not a man. Too bad.” Marcus turned to go.

  “Wait. Would this help? I’m certain I can locate her drinking companion.” And she might know the identity of the man with huge hands who moved like an ape.

  FORTY-NINE

  Sgt. Tom McInerney taught fifty bank clerks at a time to shoot at the HOJ firing range. “You must realize most holdup men do not look like thugs,” he said. “They will be well-dressed, wearing a cap or hat, and will enter with a briefcase or a shopping bag.”

  —CHIEF QUINN, TRUE DETECTIVE ARTICLE

  OFFICER Marcus, excited, lost no time calling Chief Dullea. Within the hour, the barman had come through with the address. Dullea sent Ahern and Corrasa scurrying for their car with a warrant for arrest in hand. Speeding southwest on Mission Street, they passed the Hotel Irwin and halted in front of a hotel near Seventh and Mission. Rushing through the dimly lit lobby, they rode up in the elevator with a bellhop. A dark-haired woman dressed in lounging pajamas opened the door.

  “My name is Ahern, I’m a policeman. This is
Corrasa, my partner. We need to speak with you.” The blinds were partially drawn and only a single lamp was burning. The woman sat down, crossed her legs, adjusted her satins, and lit a cigarette. Ahern showed her Irene McCarthy’s morgue picture. “You were a friend of hers weren’t you?” She glanced, shook her head, and put her hand over her eyes. “Yes, yes,” she said. “That’s her. Poor Irene. I had known her for several months. I want to be of help. This is such a terrible thing.

  “I accompanied Mrs. McCarthy, Irene, into a bar shortly before 10:00 A.M., on June 25. We sat down and had a drink together. Then she left. A little while later a man came in and sat down at the same table with me. He had been drinking and asked me if I wanted to step out. I told him I’d think it over. When he insisted on buying me a drink, I didn’t refuse. He bought several drinks and began to get confidential. When he said he was ‘on the beach’ here, or something like that, I gathered he was a sailor. I asked him what ship he was on. He said he was looking for a berth.”

  “Do you know his name?” Ahern leaned forward.

  She walked to the window. Faint bars of light through the closed blinds striped her face. Ahern saw her back tense. She had remembered. “I saw his name,” she said. In a moment of drunken expansiveness the man had flashed his seaman’s certificate to her. “Now what was that name? Wait.”

  They waited.

  “Yes, I’ve got it. I’m sure his first name was ‘Harry.’”

  “Harry what?”

  “All I can remember is Harry. I only saw his certificate a second.”

  “What’s Harry got to do with Mrs. McCarthy?”

  “She knew him. I was talking to him when Irene came in. They seemed to be old friends from San Diego . . . Irene came back in a little while and sat down beside us. They left the tavern together, saying they were going to do up the town. That was the last time I saw my poor friend alive. Poor Irene.”

  Ahern and Corrasa drove back to headquarters with the name “Harry” ringing in their ears. But what did they actually have? They had a first name. They had an occupation. “The name ‘Harry’ is a slim lead,” Dullea told them, “but if there’s one chance in a million then we’ll get this bird.”

  DULLEA had put off lunch. The wind was howling outside the HOJ by the time LaTulipe brought coffee. Dullea put up his feet—his first moment of rest in a week. “Sometimes the most important clues are right in front of you,” he said, “but invisible.” There was the creak of his swivel chair as he leaned back. He recalled a case of Alameda County Deputy Sheriff Grover Mull’s a few years back. “One bleak Sunday, a windy day like today,” Dullea said, “Deputy Mull and Sheriff Doug Webb were cutting up Broadway as an oncoming rainstorm chased their cruiser . . .”

  AT Tenth Street and Broadway, Oakland’s main thoroughfare, Mull and Webb took a breakneck run at Hayward, fifteen miles to the east, then sped through Fruitvale, Fitchburg, and Elmhurst towns. As they roared down bumpy roads the few streetlights leaped up in the growing dusk. Sweating in semitropical heat, they flew through the town of San Leandro and ate up ten miles of sparsely settled country. Scattered farms, fruit and nut stands, and a single filling station flashed by. At Hayward’s eastern limit, they swung right onto a graveled roadway where at the far end lay 795 Pinedale Court—the Everett Richmond home with a beautiful young brunette out front. “We’ve just gotten home and been nearly crazy since father’s shooting,” Mrs. Richmond sobbed.

  Inside the entry hall a pool of blood shimmered on the polished hardwood floor. The radio was playing loudly, a popular dance tune Mull knew. She clicked it off. “Father was wounded in the abdomen by a masked man hiding in the hallway,” she said. “He got to a neighbor’s house and was driven to the Hayward Sanitarium.” Mull left Mrs. Richmond and Webb on the couch and traced the daylight shooter’s escape route out the front entry hall. He had made a sharp right, then run down a side street, his arms filled with jewelry and silverware.

  The northeastern storm had overtaken him. As it began to rain, lights came on in the close-by houses. Except for a gentle patter among the banana trees and tall palms, it was deathly silent. In the blueness, Mull found a single shoe print in the soft ground where the prowler had jumped down. Embedded in the angle formed by the junction of the heel and sole were tiny red particles and a metallic pellet. Getting a spade and a box from the tool shed, he carefully cut out the square of turf and got it out of the rain. He made a reverse cast, using a spoon as a baffle to break the fall of water and dry plaster of Paris from one end of the impression to the other. He took the hardened print back to Chief Silva.

  “‘The way I dope this out,” Silva said, “the criminal picked this ore up some other place. And if we can locate where that and this bit of red earth originated we’ll have our man. We’ll search every square-inch of town until we find it. When we find it, we’ll investigate every person, every house, every shoe, and every foot of land in that neighborhood.”

  Silva’s men discovered the gully where the red earth and metal had come from and found the remains of a handout. A local housewife, Mary McWilliams, recognized the newspaper she had wrapped the lunch in because of a penciled notation she had made on its margin.

  Still Mull felt they’d overlooked some essential clue in their preliminary investigation, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The clue was elusive, tantalizing. A vague, yet important bit of evidence still lay undiscovered in the Richmond house. “Hold it!” Mull said. “There’s something wrong here. Mrs. Richmond shut off the radio just as she sat down on the couch. Why should the radio have been playing at all? She said they had arrived home only a short time before. According to the father’s testimony from his hospital bed, [he had since died] he was shot immediately after stepping into the house and so he didn’t turn on the radio.”

  They rushed back to Pinedale Court. “Yes,” Mrs. Richmond recalled, “the radio was playing when we got home. The queerest part is that the radio’s been out of order for the last three days. We haven’t been able to tune it at all.”

  “Yet it was playing perfectly last night,” said Mull. “The only conclusion is that the gunman fixed it. But why? Why would he fix the radio?” Mull took the cover off the radio and explored the inside. Though the killer had wiped his prints away everywhere else in the home, he might not have wiped down the inside of the radio. He had not. Mull developed six different sets of fingerprints in the interior. He matched five of the prints to radio salesmen and repairmen and the sixth to Joseph M. Reid, a San Quentin ex-con. Mrs. McWilliams identified him as the tramp she fed.

  When Mull caught Reid fencing the stolen items at a pawnshop, the fugitive dropped behind a trash can and began firing at him. As Mull lay full length on the sidewalk, he counted six shots from Reid’s weapon. If Reid had a revolver Mull had him. If he had an automatic Reid would have one or more bullets left and Mull would be in a fix if he rushed him now. He took the chance. With drawn gun he charged and captured Reid trying to reload.

  “While bumming through Hayward,” Reid confessed, “I picked the Richmond home as a likely place to rob. Using a skeleton key, I entered by the small door on the side street. First thing I always do is turn on the radio, turn it on loud. This gives neighbors the impression some of the family is home and prevent calls to the police from neighbors who observed me through the windows. This time I found the radio not working. I used to be a radio repair man so I made a very simple repair inside the cabinet. I had to take off my gloves to do this, but I figured no one would think to look for prints inside the machine.”

  “BUT Mull did,” said Dullea to LaTulipe. “An invisible clue. What do you think of that?” He paused. From the beginning he had felt there was an invisible clue in his case. But where? Was it a witness? Was it someone already in jail? Could it be another crooked officer or dishonest public official? God, there had been so many. Dullea’s eyes strayed to a file cabinet standing in a shaft of rain light. It had to be there somewhere in that file. The thought nagged at him. He
couldn’t sleep or eat until he found it. The Gorilla Man was someone he already knew. He would bet everything on that. But who?

  UNSPEAKABLE necrophiles like the Gorilla Man are propelled by an unfathomable compulsion, a misplaced desire that drives them beyond murder to the disarticulation of their victims. Though new to America, this type of woman killer had been horribly active in Europe throughout the last decade. Lord Spilsbury could name a dozen recent victims in Britain in eight of the twelve cases he was called in to help solve. “Within four years,” he wrote, “the murders of four women of the streets, all strangled and all but one living in Soho, swelled the list of unsolved crimes.” He attributed them to the same known hand. “The rarest class of murder, very fortunately—for it is the most terrifying to contemplate is that apparently committed for the sake of killing by a person who by all accepted standards is perfectly sane. Casual murders without motive by a maniac are intrinsically unsolvable.” Sadistic crime remained at a fairly low level during the 1930s, but by 1946 would double in England. By 1956 such crimes would quadruple in the big U.S. cities and there would be a profusion of what Dullea called Gorilla Men.

  OVER at the big gray stone customhouse sleepless detectives were combing through mountains of the U.S. shipping commissioner’s records for the past six years. It was a daunting task. Every month more than four hundred ships left the San Francisco port with crews ranging from twenty to upward of four hundred each. All night, Engler, Corrasa, and Ahern plodded through shipping line registers of the more than forty steamship companies that signed crews out of San Francisco and scrutinized the names of all crews in the harbor at the time of the murders. Next, they compiled a list of all men whose given names were Harry and matched those with known addresses and compared their handwriting. Luckily, the commissioner required their signatures be kept on file.