The Laughing Gorilla

by Robert Graysmith

  The tempo in the City Room picked up. Rows of Teletypes began chattering. Bells jangled insistently with news from Europe. Adolph Hitler was on almost every page every day. Copy boys tore, wrapped, and bound punched tapes with rubber bands.

  At 11:00 A.M. the editors arrived to hold their preliminary meeting in the conference room to decide what would go in the paper. Though newspaper circulation remained high at the Examiner and Chronicle, ad revenue was plunging. Five years earlier there had been a 15 percent loss, then a 24 percent decrease the following year, and 40 percent the next, and 45 percent after that. Six years earlier, before Cornelius Vanderbilt and Will Hearst lost a bundle and the afternoon papers merged, there had been five big dailies.

  The barnlike room was filled with men and smoke, and black rotary phones on desks began ringing. So did the pay phones in a row of green booths lining the north wall. Ticker tapes spooled on the floor of the financial department. From the back, a fossilized Sunday editor sneezed violently nine times in a row, something he did every hour. Bosworth believed if he ever sneezed a tenth time it would kill him. He glared at the big black clock.

  Still no sign of his most personable, part-time reporter.

  He took a call, then fed a sheet of paper into the roller. He typed a few lines, snatched the page out, and rolled in another. He wondered why some maniac had re-created the autopsy murder of Mary Kelly, the last and most horrible of Jack’s Whitechapel crimes. He scanned another headline: “Police Seek Clues in Brutal Crime,” then took up the Examiner’s front page: “Girl Murdered and Mutilated in Hotel Here; Body Found Nude, Mouth Taped, Torso Slashed with Razor.” The most famous police reporters in the city had responded to the tragedy—Fred L. Diefendorf, Hank Peters, Eddie Gillen, Rod Leidy, Jimmy Yeiser, Eddie Longan, and Charles Huse. The Chronicle city editor finally decided on an update, which Bosworth buried on an inside page:

  POLICE HAVE NO CLUES TO SF HOTEL MURDER; COMB WATERFRONT PLACES TO SEARCH FOR SHORT SAILOR SUSPECT.

  After combing waterfront hangouts and sailors’ haunts all night police yesterday were still without a clue to the curiously gruesome slaying of Mrs. Bette Coffin, 34, former denizen of the city’s night life. Mrs. Coffin’s nude body, brutally beaten and mutilated, with one breast severed, was found Saturday afternoon in a hotel room at 28 Sacramento St. Death had been caused by strangulation and loss of blood.

  Sailor Sought

  Convinced that a seafaring man had killed the woman, with a possible sadistic motive or for revenge, Inspectors Michael Desmond and Bart Kelleher were searching for a sailor, short and stocky and about 26 years old. A man of this description registered at the hotel with the woman at 3 o’clock Saturday morning. He left alone an hour and a half later, saying that he was going to “get some beer and sandwiches.”

  Held Premeditated

  That the murder was premeditated was the belief of the police, who pointed out that the man undoubtedly had in his pocket when he entered the hotel the tape with which the woman’s mouth was bound, and the razor, found under the bed, with which the woman was mutilated. From Al Coffman, the woman’s husband, police obtained a list of her acquaintances and planned to question them.

  Around noon, the bullpen came to life, and the rhythm of work began—a machinelike repetition of cutting, rubber stamping, and time stamping. At the horseshoe-shaped copy desk, an editor corrected the Bay Hotel story, cut it to fit, capped it with three subheads, and scribbled the type size on it. He spiked the carbon and picked a battered brass cylinder out of the basket at his elbow. Rolling the typed original into it, he sealed the rubber end flap to a brass button. Glad to be rid of such an unsettling story, he fed it to a pneumatic tube in a hiss of compressed air to the Press Room out back.

  The Linotype operator extracted the copy. Her fingers moved mechanically over her keyboard, converting the letters to metal type. A cauldron of lead bubbled at her elbow. There came the reassuring click-click-click of mats cast down the channels and across the star wheel. The instant the elevator dropped, a full line was sent to cast. Finally, she walked the full stick to the bank. The printer eyeballed it with a pica ruler, loosened the quoins, and tightened the chase. He swept the unused type into the hell box.

  On roller skates, the boy in white tails delivered sausage sandwiches called hot dogs (weren’t they made of dog meat?). Tad Dorgan, the Examiner ’s cartoonist, had made “Hot dog!” an excited exclamation. For the next three hours, the reporters worked on their stories in the field, calling them back to the assistant editor or dictating to a copyboy. At 3:00 P.M. the budget meeting began as the assistant city editors brought in their lists with slug lines and stories for the next day’s paper. After the managing editor decided their sequence, the photo editor offered up pictures for the stories.

  At 3:30 P.M., a booming laugh emanated from the front elevators and rolled past the reception area, down the corridor and the editorial board-room, and into the City Room. When the echoing laugh reached the barnlike room it lost its echo. The ceiling was baffled to reduce noise. Reporters frowned at such merriment interrupting their deep thoughts, especially on a hung-over Monday.

  A laughing man with prepossessing features filled the doorway. He was the classic Adonis type, as good looking as a movie star, except for slightly too-thick lips. Twenty-six years old, six feet tall, and 230 pounds, he was perfectly well made, except for his long arms and huge hands. He had slate gray eyes and a smooth face full of good humor. His teeth were flashing white and his dark hair glossy and lustrous. He frequently smoothed it back using his long fingers as a comb. His ruddy, tanned complexion, deepened by weeks at sea, was rapidly assuming a healthy pink color.

  He wore a rumpled, well-tailored gray suit, a light V-neck shirt with short sleeves (to show off his considerable muscles), and black moccasin-style Oxfords with no socks. He was sleek and well fed, a lusty consumer of thick steaks and whole fried chickens. He was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and instantly attractive to women, especially older ones like Bette Coffin. The laughing man lived on the same block as the Bay Hotel.

  Bosworth smiled in spite of himself. With his expansive gestures and endless jokes and tales, Slipton Fell was well liked. He was a soldier of fortune—a prolific sailor and adventurer who had traveled through Alaska; wandered all over South America; and journeyed extensively in North Africa, Russia, and Asia Minor. He spoke German, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian and had an alternate personality to go with each. “He was extremely coy about giving his real name,” Bosworth recalled. “Currently he was using the name Slipton J. (for Just) Fell and I called him that.”

  Bosworth had assigned him to gather some colorful stories in Latin America. While there, Fell plotted a revolt (which failed) and was forced to escape on an outbound freighter. As proof, he carried a letter of introduction from a Nicaraguan consul to the bandit chief Sandino, a self-described local patriot, which he displayed at the slightest encouragement. Bosworth did doubt Fell’s list of expenses in gathering the story. “He had somehow become separated from his assistants ‘Upton Rose’ and ‘Faran Wide,’” said Bosworth, “and wanted to apprise them of his whereabouts.”

  If his outrageously named assistants were only other facets of Fell’s personality, Bosworth didn’t know so he kept all three on the payroll. Besides, he admired the young man’s boldness. Bosworth waved him over.

  “As I remember it,” Bosworth said later, “Mr. Fell entered this pixilated place just as the Sunday editor fired another volley of sneezes—7, 8, 9 . . . and as a hundred pound ‘Jap’ yawara instructor [the subject of a Chronicle Sunday piece] was paving the way for some publicity by throwing a 200 pound reporter flat on his back. . . . Yet the personable young man calling himself Slipton J. Fell had no difficulty in attracting attention, despite these rival sideshows.”

  “Fired?” Slipton Fell asked with a crooked grin. He smoothed the wrinkles in his gray jacket.

  “Fried!” said Bosworth, indicating his reporter’s tipsiness. “And y
ou seem to have cut yourself, Mr. Fell.”

  “I guess he just slipped n’ fell,” said a copyreader at the U-shaped desk.

  Another booming laugh. Fell dusted the spots, smoothed back his hair and bared strong, even teeth. He had been missing since Friday, when he had been scheduled for an interview about his “Latin American vagabonding.” When Fell couldn’t recall where he had been over the weekend, he replied by laughing nervously—an infectious laugh that rose above the ringing phones and cries of “Boy!”

  “Where did you find him this time?” said Bosworth.

  “Alkied and drying out in the drunk tank,” replied a reporter who had rescued Fell from the top floor of the HOJ. He was with Ralph.” When that Chronicle reporter was intoxicated, he hailed cabs for long pointless journeys he couldn’t pay for and ended up jail.

  “Just who was he today?” Bosworth asked.

  “‘J. Hannegan, cook,’” said the reporter. “I had to convince the sergeant he was really a Chronicle writer and not a cook. I sprung Fell too just for the hell of it.”

  “And just who was he today?”

  While Fell was a likable fellow, his personality was a maze of different identities, “one of the singularly fey characters then peopling the city room.” Wherever else he had been since Friday, Fell knew all about the murder. He never ceased begging for a picture and feature story about himself. Well, thought Bosworth, he would grant Fell his wish. The Chronicle would write of him: “His mouth is large and sensual when not wreathed in a fatuous grin or cleaved by his ringing guffaw.”

  “Run a good picture of him in his sailing costume,” said Bosworth, “the one with the ascot and briar pipe.” Fell had previously supplied a photo of himself at the rail of a liner sporting a mustache and dressed in a tweed cap, black vest, and expensive camel’s-hair coat. His collar was upturned and shirt open in a vee as he posed. “No one knows what’s in my mind, but, oh, if you only did,” said Fell who left with a backward wave.

  “Never mind Fell’s real name,” Bosworth recalled. “He got his story . . . he got his picture and went happily on his way, and when he had gone the city room seemed a quiet and sober place, and the managing editor decreed a more conservative make-up for the first edition and that damned Bay Hotel story got changed again.”

  At 6:00 P.M. Metro (with eight men) and International (with four men) sent out the layouts for the first edition. At 7:00 P.M. the production department returned a proof of the first edition for the outlying circulation areas. The managing editor checked the layout, quickly turned it around, and sent it back to the production department. Between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M., the reporters began heading to the bar in the alley. At 10:00 P.M., the copy editors honed their stories for the Home and Final Editions, and at midnight the Final went to print. A counting machine on the presses stopped at the circulation number. Between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M., the last papers were bailed and loaded onto circulation trucks waiting in stalls on the loading dock. Now the terrible events of the Bay Hotel could be read the next morning.

  Fell was in a rush to get to his new job in Woodside Glens south of San Francisco. Though this turned out to be his last visit to the Chronicle, Bosworth never forgot him. A decade later he recorded his experiences with the apelike young man in a lively article titled, “The Laughing Killer of the Woodside Glens.”

  EIGHTEEN

  An uncertainty pervaded the department as to the responsibilities of supervisory officers at all levels. There was an absence of a command structure which provides high level command decisions at night and on weekends.

  —COMMISSION REPORT ON THE SFPD

  THE next morning, Tuesday, April 9, the reclusive Mrs. Ada Phillys French-Mengler-Rice returned to the Woodside Glens from one of her mysterious excursions. The fifty-eight-year-old writer and former journalist lived alone atop a knoll two miles south of Woodside and four miles west of Redwood City. As the black cab glided through the foggy hills, curious neighbors parted their blinds and silently gauged its progress. With a bitter twist to their lips, they studied the rigid profile framed in the rear window. The stolid, dark-haired woman had been gone an interminable time. They knew Mrs. Rice as well to do and a world traveler, though none of them knew why she was well to do or where she traveled. She often took long journeys to other countries without notifying her husband, children, and relatives. “I’ve only seen her only twice in twelve years,” complained Mrs. Lawrence Doherty, Ada’s cousin in Oakland across the Bay.

  The neighbors both hated and feared Ada Rice who, consumed with social welfare and club work, had been president of the Redwood City Women’s Temperance Union. She had proven a willful, ineffectual, and spiteful leader. Her tips to the police had initiated a number of nighttime raids against her neighbors, whom she erroneously suspected of operating whisky stills in violation of the Wright Act, California’s version of the Volstead Act.

  Fog overflowing the brooding hills surrounding Skyline Boulevard rode the road’s spine down into the rocky ravine and shrouded the cab just off the Canada Road. At the head of the long drive, Ada paid the cabbie and exited by a broken white picket fence. Her terraced summer cottage stood bleak and empty on the two and half acres her second husband, August Mengler, had bought when he still loved her. He had still loved her when he built the boxy house with his own two hands. Only one thing broke the stern, shingled squareness of the split-level vacation bungalow—a half-story penthouse with a skylight done in the Japanese style. A brick garage on the right side did project slightly onto the dismal lot. Skeletal trees stirred in the wind. Ada saw that her rock garden had been overtaken by thistles. Three steps took her to the front door. The screen door lay on its side against the house. Inside, it was silent. The winds howling down off Skyline Boulevard were screened out by the soundproofed ceiling Ada had installed. Ada’s few visitors said it “looked like a museum.” A crude masonry fireplace filled one corner, white concrete protruding between its flagstones. A set of andirons supported two iron pokers. Right of the fireplace was a davenport with one bad leg and a door that led to a back bedroom, where French doors admitted in gray light. On both sides, cold light filtered through double windows.

  On those rare times when the fog cleared, a fenced-in redwood timber deck on the roof provided an outlook for Ada and permitted her to sun-bathe there or under the skylight. While she had been gone, Mrs. Rice had stored her car on blocks in the garage. She opened the arched door and realized she would need a man to pump up the tires and remove the blocks. Ada hiked to a nearby service station, thinking over her problems as she went. First, she was thrice married. Her first husband, Fred French, a minister’s son and the father of her three children, had died suddenly.

  She married August H. L. Mengler, a slight, wearied sea captain and engineer, on July 8, 1930, in Martinez, California. Ada posed outdoors in a cane-back chair. In the photo of that happy day August stands stoutly behind her. Ada, in spring bonnet, white frock, and pearls, nestles a bouquet of roses in her lap, but the determined thrust of her jaw hints at trouble to come. It came on November 1, 1932, when she left the family home at Woodside Glens to travel abroad. “She’s been living at an unknown address in Greece without my permission,” August complained. When she extended her Grecian tour, he drove to San Francisco to see his lawyer, Joseph I. McNamara, at his office in the Kohl Building.

  His signed complaint of September 23, 1933, alleged Ada had married him “more for his worldly goods, than love and affection.” He cited extreme cruelty and a passion for welfare work and social reform that caused her to neglect their home. “I gave her large sums of money to make her trip,” he said. “I sent more when she urgently cabled that she was stranded in Europe, but no more. I fear she will use the money for more world travel. I love her, but cannot live with her.”

  One thing puzzled McNamara. Not only did Ada travel under the name Ada French, but gave her forwarding address as 80 Wall Street, New York, the address of her former husband, Fred. August filed for divorce on Sept
ember 21, 1933. Two days later, he was as dead as Fred French.

  August collapsed in the lobby of an O’Farrell Street hotel (other reports placed his death in bed upstairs) and died as ambulance attendants transported him to Central Emergency Hospital. With August’s sudden death, Ada had an incentive to return after a year away. She went to see McNamara who described her as “a woman of violent passion . . . subject to frequent outbursts of temper in my office.” August’s children were convinced their father’s death was due to heart trouble aggravated by marital worries and fought Ada’s claim as rightful heir. Ultimately, she was awarded her husband’s bank account of about $2,500 and their jointly shared property, which amounted to another $10,000. They had homes at Muir Woods Park in Marin County, Berkeley Country Club Terrace at El Cerrito, Cardiff by the Sea in LA County, and the two gloomy lots in Woodside Glens, the only property August had demanded for himself in his complaint. Consequently, that was the only property Ada really desired. On that contested lonely spot of ground was the remote, square bungalow she loved so much.

  Last January 29, the Reverend Jason Noble Pierce, pastor of the First Congressional Church, had married Ada to seventy-two-year-old Charles Freeman Rice, a Seattle contractor. As a member of a powerful Alaskan family, he had been the mayor of Nome in 1921 and 1922. Ada’s brother, Don Carlos Brownell, was the present mayor of Seward, Alaska. Rice filed for divorce after two months for the same reasons as Mengler—Ada’s preoccupation with social reform to the exclusion of her home life. Ada’s recent sojourn in Seattle had been to arrange the terms of divorce. Two days earlier, Mr. Rice requested that real estate agents John and Davenport Bromfield look to Ada for future payments on the bungalow and told her to watch for them. Putting her unhappiness on the back burner, Ada reached the service station, a single structure with glass bubble pumps and a Coke machine with glass bottles.