The Laughing Gorilla

by Robert Graysmith

  “What about her?” McMahon slid the sketch across the polished bar.

  “Nah, I . . . I don’t know her at all.” Tony was obviously lying. McMahon leveled a murderous gaze at him. “Please, please why should I lie?” said Tony, wiping his hands on his apron. Two gold teeth gleamed. Clearly, he would squeal on the two men, but not the woman.

  Disgusted, McMahon walked to a corner phone booth, called a patrolman to stake out Tony’s, and returned to the HOJ. “The story’s probably this,” Dullea told him. “Tony knows the woman was somehow coerced into helping the two robbers. For that reason no one in the community is going to help you locate her. San Francisco’s Italian community, some 58,000, is remarkably close-knit and loyal, especially toward women and particularly one of such stunning beauty.”

  “Charlie, I’ve got a theory. Canadian police are preparing to try Big Johnson for a fresh bank holdup. I think Berta and Farrington committed the Pier 26 robbery to raise money for his defense. If so, they might reach out to their pal in jail.”

  McMahon got to Seattle on June 7 and, from the jail, tailed two of Big Johnson’s visitors. He got within a block of the Whispering Gunman before he was spotted. Farrington fled to British Columbia. A sergeant nabbed the gunman, who was in a barbershop with a hot towel over his face, a loaded .38-caliber revolver on his hip, and a crate of ammo in his hotel room upstairs. Captain Claussen journeyed to Tacoma to eyeball Farrington. “That’s the bastard! The son of a bitch,” he shouted. “I’ll testify he’s the guy who pulled the trigger on Malcolm.” Extradited, Farrington whimpered to McMahon all the way back to San Francisco about his bad breaks and heart condition (which had spared him from the whip in Canadian prison). “I only read about the copper killing the next morning,” he rasped, “and I was in Los Angeles when I done that.”

  FRANK J. Egan was a boyish, pleasant-looking man of slender build with short black hair, bushy brows, and the tightlipped smile of a schoolmaster. But his profile was a jigsaw piece—rounded forehead curving down into a long, sloped nose, an upper lip angling back to a pursed mouth, and a chin thrusting forward like a fist. His eyes, glassy as black marbles, shone with a strange light. As San Francisco’s first and only public defender, it fell to him to represent Farrington. “Egan was my bitter political enemy,” admitted Dullea. “A state of official enmity existed between his office and the police department, since they were on opposite sides of almost every case. I knew that Egan flattered even himself that the police were afraid of him and would like to get rid of him. He was an exceedingly clever lawyer so we prepared our case against Farrington carefully.”

  On September 4, Egan, in sartorial splendor, sauntered into court. Beneath a new camel’s-hair coat, the public defender wore a well-cut gray flannel suit. He removed the coat and jacket and hung them on the back of a chair. Tucking his thumbs under colorful suspenders, he squared his narrow shoulders, and in shirtsleeves began pleading Farrington’s case before Judge J. J. Trabucco’s court. On the first day of trial, the widow Malcolm locked her eyes, filled with hope, on prosecution witness Oscar Brehmer, especially during his last half hour on the stand. But when Assistant DA Harmon Skillin questioned Harry Gibson, the cabbie could be certain only about the gunman’s cap, suit, and weapon, and the widow began to sob.

  In his lab, LaTulipe was wrestling with Malcolm’s uniform. Its dark fabric made it difficult to define the density of powder residues blown into the bullet penetration area. How could he document this “tattooing” for a jury and demonstrate that the slugs had been fired at extreme close range? “There is one way,” he thought—a test sensitive to black and smokeless powder residue and insensitive to all other chemicals except nitrates. He desensitized a piece of photographic paper in a hypo bath, washed and dried it, then immersed it for ten minutes in a warm 5 percent solution of Kodak’s dye and C acid. After the treated paper dried, he placed it face-up under the uniform, made sandwiches of dry toweling moistened with 20 percent acetic acid, and ironed the packet. Clusters of dark red spots appeared that corresponded to the burned powder grains around the bullet holes. LaTulipe had his visual evidence.

  Elsewhere, McMahon was grappling with other clothes: Farrington’s. Labels steered him to a Stockton haberdasher who had consigned the shirts, underwear, and ties to a store at the Hotel Wolf in San Francisco. Hotel records placed Farrington at the Wolf (registered as Edward Murray of Tracy) on the same day Malcolm was gunned down.

  A week later, an all-male jury began deliberating Farrington’s fate. For five hours, their shouting resounded down the marble corridors of City Hall. At 10:13 P.M., as they were about to be locked up for the night, they reached a verdict of first degree murder. Because the jury offered no recommendation, it was a mandatory death sentence. Peter M. Farrington Sr., father of the killer, was in the court when C. A. Browning, court clerk, read the sentence of death. So was Mrs. William Farrington, the defendant’s sister-in-law, who shrieked and hurled curses at the jury as three bailiffs carried her bodily out of court. Farrington never flinched, only listened calmly and thanked his counsel. Then, half-turning toward the jury, he whispered so softly Dullea could hardly hear, “You have made a terrible mistake.”

  He showed some character in the end by refusing to disclose the name of the comely young woman in the backseat of the Dodge. “Publicity would destroy her character,” the Whispering Gunman told McMahon, who drove immediately to Tony’s, hopeful that the barman might speak now. “She’s from a fine family,” he said. “Those rats, they got her drunk and that’s why everybody’s glad you got them,” Tony spat between his gold teeth. “For myself I know nothing. And nothing’s all I’ll ever know.”

  Exactly thirteen months after he murdered Officer Malcolm, the Whispering Gunman would climb thirteen steps to a San Quentin gallows and complain no more.2

  During the first days of Farrington’s trial a gray-haired and lanternjawedwoman had sat front row. As Egan’s longtime benefactor, Mrs. Jessie Scott Johnson Hughes, “Josie,” had come to cheer him on before he handed the case off to co-counsel Nate Coghlan and Ed Lomasney. At times, the fifty-seven-year-old woman’s eyes brimmed over, filled with admiration for her youthful protégé. The well-to-do widow lived alone in one of the city’s posh new residential districts west of Twin Peaks, an area of “respectability.”

  Josie called Frank Egan “Son” and “Nephew” and he called her “Mother” and “Aunty.” During the 1906 quake and fire, Egan, then a lowly expressman, encountered Josie fleeing the flames. When he salvaged her luggage, they became inseparable friends. Under her motherly guidance, Egan studied law and set up a private law practice in 1914. Four years later, when the state legislature formally established the office, he was appointed San Francisco’s public defender. In 1921, he was elected to the post in his own right and four successive times after that. Finally, Egan became Josie’s financial adviser, and this is where all the trouble began.

  First, Egan cozied away her house on Moultrie Street, then had attorney Vincent W. Hallinan (who was also Dullea’s lawyer) draw up Josie’s will naming himself executor. Josie already had a $5,000 insurance policy, with Egan as her beneficiary. But on February 9, 1932, he had convinced Josie she needed another $10,000 of coverage. Her insurance company had disagreed. “Ten thousand dollars is too much for you to carry,” they told her, “but we will issue you a $5,000 policy.”

  Egan presented an $8,500 promissory note, purportedly bearing Josie’s signature, and offered to pay her premiums if the company would grant a $10,000 policy to protect the note. The company issued the second $5,000 policy, designating Egan as sole beneficiary and assigning him double-indemnity clauses. Should Josie die accidentally, he would receive $20,000, and he desperately needed that money.

  Though Egan earned $8,000 a year as the San Francisco public defender, three years before he had put up his residence at 225 Urbano Drive as security for a loan. Now the bank was initiating foreclosure proceedings against him to collect the overdue $9,000 note. He
owed nearly that much to the estate of August and Katie Weber, an aged couple who had advanced him $5,000 in return for a promissory note. While Egan was Katie’s attorney, he siphoned $3,120 owed her from the city employees pension fund into his own account. He accomplished this by banking the money to her credit, then withdrawing it with a blank check (one of many Katie had signed so Egan could pay her expenses) and redepositing the money in a dummy bank account under the fictitious name of “Minnie Peyser.” “You have nothing to fear,” Egan told his tool, Janet Kent. “No one will ever connect you with Minnie Peyser.”

  Next, he led Mrs. Weber to believe he had repaid the $5,000 loan by producing a forged bank passbook showing a deposit entry for $5,000. On November 16, 1930, Katie died under suspicious circumstances, and her husband, a retired street sweeper, began demanding an autopsy and threatening a lawsuit to regain any remaining funds.

  Other shady dealings came to light. Eight years earlier, when Egan and his wife, Lorraine Kipp, were married, she had come into a sizable inheritance from the estate of Margaritha Busch, heiress to the brewery fortune. Lorraine had been her companion and nurse. Within two days of Busch’s death, Egan filed a deed of gift with the county recorder, transferring a $200,000 row of apartment houses on O’Farrell Street to his wife. When Busch’s Chicago relatives sued, Lorraine settled out of court for a third of the amount. When another of Egan’s clients, Mrs. Catherine Craven, died from alcohol, her nieces examined her $25,000 estate and found only an empty safe deposit box and a few real estate mortgages. When they asked Egan what had happened, he threw them out of his office. Florence Cook, another of his wealthy clients, was also proving to be a problem.

  Devastating losses through depreciations of securities Egan held had him reeling. The large emergency sums of money he had stowed in a safe deposit box had dwindled away. Even Josie Hughes’s two modest insurance premiums totaling a mere $113.20 a month had become a drain on his limited income. The pressure was relentless. Egan, a chronic sufferer of sinus, gallbladder, and kidney afflictions, the last requiring an operation, was headed for a nervous breakdown. Harassed by creditors Egan thought of the rewards—riches, that bottomless will, the double-indemnity insurance policies. He thought of the alternatives, too—eviction, financial ruin, illness, public scandal, the loss of his powerful political position, and jail. It was enough to drive a man to murder.

  FOUR

  The term Gorilla: Since 1930: A person with gorilla-like strength; a person known for his strength and lack of intellect; a hoodlum or thug; strong-arm men, gorillas and tough guys. Specif., one hired to kill or do violence.

  —DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG

  OVER a period of seventeen months, during which Dullea had the misfortune to catch the Gorilla Man case as the first officer on the scene, the Gorilla Man strangled, then raped landladies from San Francisco to Council Bluffs and across to New York State. He traveled from Philadelphia to Buffalo, from Detroit to Chicago, and finally with the United States up in arms fled across the border into Canada. Dullea studied the U.S. death toll. Three Philadelphia landladies—Olla McCoy, May Murray, and Lillian Weiner. After eleven San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, and Portland strangulation murders, the Gorilla Man fled to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he choked Mrs. John Berard on December 23, 1926. Four days later in Kansas City, Missouri, the Gorilla Man garroted Mrs. Bonnie Pace. The next day, Mrs. Germania Harpin and her eight-month-old daughter were both strangled and violated—the infant throttled with a rag. Dullea steadied himself and continued reading—April 27, 1927, Mary McConnell in Philadelphia; May 30, Jennie Randolph in Buffalo; June 1, two Detroit sisters, Mrs. Minnie May and Mrs. Maureen Atorthy. June 3, in Chicago, he strangled Mary Sietsema with an electric appliance cord and left her disheveled on the floor for her husband to find.

  One afternoon, LaTulipe walked in on Dullea and saw the big, tough Marine slumped with his head in his hands. The case had really gotten to him. Finally, in the summer of 1927 Dullea caught a break. When the Portland newspapers printed drawings of the expensive jewelry the Gorilla Man had pinched from wealthy widow Florence Monks, three landladies recognized it and notified the police. “We rented a room to a polite, pleasant, young man who had stayed with us a few days,” they said, “and we bought some of that jewelry from him.” Portland police at last learned the Gorilla Man’s real name just as he fled from Minnesota into Canada.

  G. CHANDLER picked up the Gorilla Man along the highway a mile north of Luna, Michigan, and drove him to Noyes, Minnesota. Mr. and Mrs. Hanna gave him a lift a mile south of the international border at Emerson, Manitoba. They drove him the rest of the way into Winnipeg and let him off at Corydon and Emerson streets. Around 5:00 P.M. on June 8, the Gorilla Man entered Jacob Garbor’s secondhand store on Main and traded in his blue suit for a herringbone coat, black boots, a gray felt hat, and a dollar in cash. He secured a job as a construction laborer, and that same day, as “Mr. Woodcots,” rented a second-floor bedroom on Smith Street from landlady Mrs. Katherine Hill. She found him quiet, likable, and pious: “He was a very devout gentleman who always carried a huge Bible under his arm.”

  He gave her a dollar, all he had, with the promise of eleven more for the rest of the month’s rent. Only his greatest willpower kept him from killing her on the spot.

  FIVE

  The city’s most attractive neighborhoods were built west of Twin Peaks and south of Mount Davidson, according to a San Francisco City Guide of the period.

  ON Friday, February 20, 1931, five months after the verdict in the Whispering Gunman’s trial, Captain Dullea was still sleepless and dissatisfied. He drove to the HOJ to lose himself in new investigations and forget the disagreeable public defender, Frank Egan. It was bad enough that today was the fifth anniversary of the day the Gorilla Man strangled Clara Newman, but Egan’s name crossed his desk immediately. Florence Cook, Egan’s prosperous client, had been found dead an hour earlier. Only $3 remained in her accounts. After Florence acquired a house on Post Street, she had become friends with Mrs. Flo Knight and through her met Egan, an occasional visitor to her ground-floor dancing school. “Before that time,” Florence’s ex-husband, Edward J. Cook, said bitterly, “my wife had been a shrewd business woman, dependable, not addicted to drink of any kind. From then on, she began drinking heavily and lost all sense of business and reliability.”

  When Cook gave his wife $1,500 for her needs and another $3,500 to deposit, she turned both sums over to Egan “for safekeeping.” When she served her husband with divorce papers, she confided to him, “I don’t want a divorce, Ed, honey, but Frank Egan insists on it.”

  Before Florence died “from the effects of alcohol,” she had deeded her property over to Egan, though witnesses to the signing believed they were witnessing her death certificate. Building residents warned Egan and her attending physician, Nathan S. Housman, that if they didn’t take Florence to a hospital instantly they would summon an ambulance themselves. Dullea knew Dr. Housman—prim, horse-faced, toothbrush mustache, tiny round glasses. He was not only Egan’s personal physician but a gangland doctor.

  When one of Housman’s patients, gangster Earl Leter, was shot in a blind pig3 over at 110 Eddy Street, he died from a gunshot wound without telling who shot him. Dullea was confident that Leter had talked under anesthetic and named the shooter. “What I hope is that the doc will speak that name aloud at some point,” he told Ignatious McCarty, a surveillance expert, “and if we install a powerful microphone we can pick it up.”

  The night of July 1, McCarty packed his needle-nose pliers, two coils of telephone wire, a drill, and a knife and broke into Housman’s office on an upper story of the Flood Building, where he concealed a small Dictaphone in a seldom-used corner.

  So far, the wire tap had been disappointing. Either Housman didn’t have the information or he wasn’t discussing it. Inspectors Percy Keneally and George “Paddy” Wafer continued to monitor the line, while Dullea attempted to solve the strangling death of R
osetta Baker by a huge-handed killer in her California Street apartment. The wealthy widow had a fondness for younger men.

  July plodded by as the detectives hunkered down in their Monadnock Building hideaway at 385 Market Street, read the racing form, chewed the fat, and waited. Paddy studied the peeling paint and cigarette-littered floor with disgust. What a step down! Five years earlier, he and his partner, Detective Sergeant Louis De Mattei, had ended the murderous spree of the Terror Bandits, California’s first drive-by killers. And wasn’t he the one who had brought in a wounded Larry Weeks as bait and stationed then-Lieutenant Dullea by his hospital bed to capture the killers when they came to rescue their partner? In the sweltering room, Paddy scratched his stubble and adjusted his headset. From his earphones fine copper wires swooped up Market Street to Housman’s office.

  By July 30, the two sweating, smoking harness bulls were sick of the doctor, sick of his cronies, sick of their endless babble crackling over the insubstantial lines. There was no doubt Housman’s office was a hangout for the underworld. Abruptly they heard hollow laughter. “More lowlifes,” thought Wafer, but reached for his pad and adjusted his earpiece, as did Keneally.

  “Sure, Auntie could be killed easily,” said a laughing voice. “You know, she thinks so highly of me she calls me Nephew and Son.” Another laugh—snide, sarcastic, yet familiar—not the doctor’s high-pitched laugh because after all these months the two bulls heard that in their sleep. “If only I had that insurance of Josie Hughes,” the laughing voice continued.

  Wafer and Keneally looked at each other and pressed their earphones more tightly against their ears. They’d heard this voice before directed in derision at them as they testified on the witness stand. Yes! It was Frank Egan, who had represented the late, unlamented Pete Farrington at trial.