The Laughing Gorilla

by Robert Graysmith

  “And how do you know she’s in the Balkans?” police later asked a neighbor.

  “Why, that nice young man who lives in her house told me,” she said. “That’s how I know Ada was traveling abroad. She went away to the Balkans as a foreign correspondent.” Given a moment, the neighbor would even be able to name Ada’s young traveling companion. “He told me that she’d gone away with a Bulgarian cavalry officer named ‘something—itch.’ Oh, yes, I remember—‘Michael Baronovich.’”

  The existence of this dark, distinguished Bulgarian officer on leave was confirmed by two more sources. Bill collector Lawrence Maloney had visited Mrs. Rice’s Woodside Glens home. “At the door,” he recalled, “I was introduced to a man of distinguished appearance . . . a tall dark man with a black wavy brush of hair.”

  When Maloney returned again, both Mrs. Rice and the Bulgarian were gone. Instead he was greeted by Slipton Fell, who cheerfully paid the delinquent bill for her and told him he was the new owner. “I bought the cottage for $1700,” Fell said, cinching his robe. According to Fell, Ada asked him to come up at night and leave some things because she was leaving the next day. “When I drove up in front of the cottage it was pitch black. There wasn’t a light about the place. That struck me as funny.”

  The second source was Mr. and Mrs. Albert Johnson, proprietors of the Woodbank Auto Camp on Cooley Avenue in East Palo Alto. Several times last year, Mrs. Rice had told them of a “beautiful boy with black wavy hair” who was traveling in Turkey and coming from Bulgaria to visit her. As proof, Mrs. Rice gave the Johnsons, who collected stamps, envelopes from Athens and Turkey. The envelope from Turkey, postmarked June 28, 1934, had a notation on the back: “From I. Reikdjan, 11-13 Topham, Kele Cadds, Istanbul.” I. Reikdjan, Mrs. Johnson conjectured, might be the real name of the “beautiful boy from Bulgaria.”

  Those closest to Mrs. Rice, her estranged husband in Seattle and her bankers, weren’t too concerned about her absence. She typically left the country to live at unknown addresses overseas. Wasn’t that why August Mengler had divorced her? Wherever Ada was they knew she was alive hot on a story or writing a book or being a self-righteous pest. Besides, the tracks of her industry were factually documented on the backs of checks. The banks saw drafts bearing Mrs. Rice’s very recognizable signature pass through their hands. All had been written after she had gone away.

  A letter with a return address of Coxsackie, New York, requested that her bank transfer $135 from her savings account to her checking account. No one noticed that the envelope was postmarked Redwood City, a town only four miles from Woodside Glens. Hugh and Phyllis, Ada’s children in New York, still received reassuring typewritten letters from her with a syntax and style of writing consistent with their mother’s and bearing authentic-looking signatures.

  County authorities could also point to a signed paper naming Slipton J. Fell the new proprietor of Ada’s Woodside Glens bungalow along with some $5,000 worth of property. Ten days after Fell moved in, Mrs. Rice had deeded him her home, some Skyline Boulevard property, and an El Cerrito parcel of land in reciprocation for some Sierra County mining claims on which he had filed. The Downieville mining site was worthless, and Fell owned only a fraction of it and that under an alias.

  Considerable time would pass before even one person genuinely missed Mrs. Ada French Mengler Rice. Charles Rice did, only because he had court papers that needed her signature. “I made several unsuccessful attempts to find her during the divorce proceedings,” Rice said. “And there were no answers to the divorce action notices which my attorneys ran in California papers.”

  If need be, he would go to the higher courts to get her signature. He would not let up until he found her.

  Much later everyone, Mr. Rice included, conceded that Ada Rice had gone up in smoke. And along with her, Michael Baronovich, her handsome young friend, had evaporated. The timing was intriguing. The pair had “gone traveling” just two months after the Gorilla Man killed Bette Coffin a half block from Slipton Fell’s San Francisco hotel room. Ada had vanished less than two weeks after Fell moved into her home.

  IMMEDIATELY after the autopsy murder the Bay Hotel’s night porter, Otto von Feldman, the ex-German military officer, had moved to San Diego. He would recognize Fell from a photograph in the Chronicle feature story that Fell had cajoled Bosworth into running. It would be widely reprinted when Fell was arrested for two murders and suspicion of four or five more. But von Feldman would not make that association with the Bay Hotel and Fell until March of 1936. At virtually the same time, John Smeins, the Bay Hotel night clerk, would reach the same conclusion.

  “My God,” von Feldman would say, gripping the paper and locking his eyes on the portrait of Slipton Fell, a mosaic of tiny dots. Otto’s breath would catch in his throat. “My God,” he would whisper, “that’s ‘Mr. Meyers.’ ”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Gorilla.

  Gorilla who?

  Gorilla my dreams.

  —JUVENILIA 1930s

  ON May 27, Captain Dullea, Police Commissioner Theodore Roche, and Chief Quinn went to lunch at the St. Francis Hotel. Roche wanted to discuss the Hassing scandal; Quinn wanted to bury it. Lunch promised to be interesting. Overall the chief was cheerful. True Detective Magazine had just named him “a far-reaching officer whose handling of his department has made it one of the most effective crime-combative and crime-preventive agencies in the country.”

  From their cab Dullea heard the reassuring click-clack of birdcage traffic signals and the pleasant rumble of a Powell Street cable car. Across from Union Square he saw the majestic St. Francis Hotel. Unlike most other hotels in town, it wasn’t a copy of another great edifice. The Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, a replication of Madrid’s Royal Palace, had gone bankrupt. But the St. Francis survived because it was architecturally unique, had no mortgage, and was privately owned. Its owner, Templeton Crocker, riding out the tough times on his yacht, the Zaca, seldom meddled in its daily operation. The addition of a fourth wing in 1913 made it the largest hotel on the Pacific Coast. Silent film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle made it the most notorious.

  On Labor Day weekend 1921 baby-faced Fatty and his loyal pal, dead-pan comic Buster Keaton, motored up from Hollywood in Arbuckle’s $25,000 Pierce-Arrow. The 266-pound comedian, known for his Mephistophelian marksmanship with pies, had begun his career in San Francisco. He ended it there. Homicide Chief Louis de Mattei led Arbuckle, a raincoat over his pajamas, into the HOJ and booked him for the “rape-murder” of starlet Virginia Rappe during a wild party in room 1221 of the St. Francis. Though innocent, Hearst’s Examiner gleefully tried Fatty through three trials. He was acquitted in all, but was a broken man.

  Ahead, Dullea saw taxis and limos arriving and departing in clouds of exhaust. A few idled in front of the hotel’s sedate gray-and-white canopy on Powell Street. A doorman in mid-street blew his whistle and raised a flutter of pigeons as they climbed out. The lobby had an ornate carved ceiling, dark marble pillars, sofas, chairs, writing desks, fireplace, and a Viennese Magneta clock, which controlled every clock in the hotel. They paused at the bar for a drink in the comfortable, oak-paneled Club Room. When it was remodeled with chrome, Lucite, and black patent-leather walls, the name changed to the Coffin Room. The dining room had been called the Rose Room, the Garden Room, the Fable Room, the Embassy Room, and the Empire Room, but its new pastel paintings of a sleek blond goddess were so praiseworthy it was renamed the Mural Room.

  Swiss headwaiter Ernest Gloor, a moon-faced man in tiny silver spectacles, escorted the three men to a well-situated table. Where he seated you in the Mural Room demonstrated your degree of importance. Paradise was the first five tables, everything else—Siberia. Gloor was rarely intentionally rude, but when he was, it was well deserved and executed with exquisite, icy politeness. Gloor’s sole occupation was to remind high society how important they were and how unimportant everyone else was. Upon the death of Mr
s. Eleanor Martin, the queen of San Francisco Society, Gloor had assumed her place and single-handedly transformed Monday lunch at the St. Francis into an awesome ritual. Everyone who was worthwhile attended.

  Dullea listened to a string quartet, the hum of talk, the tinkling of glasses, and the giggling from under the tables—children playing at the feet of society mothers dressed in silver furs and I. Magnin’s latest. Below, in the hotel’s steamy laundries, kitchens, and boiler rooms, workers were slaving for $20 for a six-day week. The previous year they struck for better wages and were preparing to do it again.

  Dullea brought up the successful fight police officers had waged against a Senate bill during the last legislative session. “The bill,” he said, “would have made inadmissible as evidence a confession or statement by a defendant which was not given before a magistrate and recorded verbatim by a court reporter. If such a law were in force our hands would have been completely tied. We not only have to prove that a man is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but we have to sell our stories to twelve jurors. If one disagrees with us there is a mistrial. Still the sob sisters on the Chronicle are worried that someone’s wrist shall be slapped every time we take in a criminal.”

  The chief grunted his assent. He loathed any kind of press, any kind of dissent.

  “Honeycombed with graft and inefficiency!” Quinn said, his face reddening. “How many times have you heard that phrase?” The big hands clinched. “Why should such ugly charges as ‘graft’ and ‘inefficiency’ be so often linked with the police in the average citizen’s mind?” He thought the answer obvious: “Undeserved and untruthful publicity, reams of it! In the mouths of pseudo-experts, alarmists, and malcontents, these two words have carried in the public press from one coast of America to the other. Up, down, and across the country they have ricocheted until they have become not merely words, but by-words.” Quinn railed against these “verbal battering rams” used so often that their mere mention “conjured up the mental image of a crooked policeman.”

  He paused and picked up the tall menu. He had worked up an appetite.

  After the waiter took their orders, Roche mentioned the Hassing scandal of December. “All the unpleasantness of the last few years on the waterfront has been ended,” Quinn assured him. “The White Mask Gang is no more. It’s over.” He challenged him to find any instances of actual police corruption. “Egan and Hassing were former San Francisco policemen.” There had been crooked DAs, too. Asa Keyes, the Los Angeles DA, had sold his position in the $50 million Julian Petroleum scandal. They had placed him in the Old Man’s Ward at San Quentin under the charge of the head trusty, Herb Wilson, whom he had sent up.

  The chief blew out a column of smoke from his cigar, poured coffee from a silver pot, and took a sip. “Take the SFPD which I believe to be absolutely representative of a typical American police department,” he said. “Look at the facts, and endeavor to find out just how much corruption, graft and inefficiency our department really contains. You hear criticism. Two to one, it’s in connection with the alleged shortcomings of some other police department. By repetition these false charges have done their insidious work. The policeman, like the doctor or the lawyer, is a public servant, the one whom you can turn to in an hour of need. Just as there are occasional dishonest policeman like Oliver Hassing, so too there are occasional dishonest doctors like Dr. Housman and crooked lawyers like Frank Egan. But you can’t look with scorn upon a whole profession because of these few dishonest practitioners. Why, then, brand the police departments of America with the stigma of crookedness because a few policemen do go wrong? Remember that each police department is a separately governed unit. The scandal in one, or the broadcast inefficiency of another, cannot destroy the hundreds of smooth working departments and the thousands of honest policemen.”

  Dullea shifted uncomfortably. Egan’s escape from the HOJ had never been explained. Someone higher up had allowed it. And someone higher up had provided Sergeant Hassing (way out at Richmond Station) with the confidential schedules of both waterfront and special patrols. Was Quinn that higher up? At best, Dullea thought, he was ignorant of the far-reaching decay. At worst, he blindly countenanced the corruption within. But Quinn, with the unanimous backing of the mayor and Police Commission, was invincible. He had the power to fill key positions and was in charge of the Inspectors Bureau—Auto, Burglary, Fraud, Homicide, Missing Persons, Traffic, and Patrol Divisions—and headed up Administration and Personnel.

  Above the chief was the Police Commission. Quinn was answerable to its three civilian members who are appointed by the mayor and who serve at his pleasure. The degree of a commission’s independence varies with the mayor and the extent to which he tries to influence management of the police department. If the commissioners come into irreconcilable conflict with him, they are obliged to tender their resignation. A primary reason for placing civilians, not policemen, on the commission for four-year terms is that a civilian commission is better able to maintain the delicate balance between liberty and restrictiveness required to preserve both freedom and order. They all had full-time jobs and in being detached from the SFPD’s daily operations had more perspective than would sworn personnel. Blatantly, Quinn extolled the virtues of the commission past and present. According to him, no such animal as a crooked cop could survive under the watch of such an “alert” police watchdog.

  “Over the last 20 years,” the chief said, “Mayor Rolph had achieved honesty and efficiency through a ‘hands off’ policy and the appointment of sterling Police Commissions. The current Commission’s president, Theodore J. Roche”—Quinn smiled wolfishly at Roche—“is a brilliant lawyer, a law partner of U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson and of the Hon. Matt Sullivan, former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. His $100-a-month goes to charity. He’s a man money can’t buy.

  “Commissioner Jesse B. Cook is an experienced, successful former chief. Commissioner Thomas E. Shumate—progressive, able, a leading physician is proprietor of a chain of drug stores and a breeder of blooded horses. Commissioner Frank J. Foran—vice-president of the King Coal Company, Olympic Club secretary, a golfer and prominent all-around sportsman. Can you conceive of such a mayor and Police Commission countenancing graft or inefficiency and corruption? They haven’t. They don’t. They will not!”

  Their lunches arrived on covered silver platters. The china was of the hotel’s own design. Roche grew thoughtful as he ate, partially convinced that the SFPD was nurturing vipers at its breast. Because men were human, Quinn often said, there would be occasional graft scandals and bad apples and some would involve cops. Roche studied Dullea. Sometimes one good apple survives in a barrel of bad apples. But one honest cop could do only so much. “The Hall of Justice was dirty and reeked of evil,” columnist Herb Caen observed when all the facts were in. “The City Hall, the DA and the cops ran the town as though they owned it, and they did.” The SFPD was the “toughest gang in town.”

  If Dullea wanted the SFPD swept clean, he would have to dislodge the mayor, the chief, and the police commissioners—his bosses—and do it himself. To speak out without proof and without powerful political friends in his corner was to be immediately exiled from the department. At the end of lunch, Quinn paid, then looked down at the change in his palm. It had been polished in a silver burnishing machine and rinsed and dried under hot lights until mint clean and germ free. For the last three years, only the St. Francis washed its coins. The chief went away jingling the gleaming silver, feeling a little better. Dullea hoped there weren’t thirty of them.

  AS they left the St. Francis, another luncheon was ending in San Rafael to the north where John V. Lewis, collector of Internal Revenue, was delivering an anticipated club address. His final words brought gasps from the audience. “And so we have discovered one retired SFPD officer,” he said, “whom we have asked to pay his long delayed federal tax on a personal fortune of $110,000!”

  Lewis’s revelation of such wealth in such economically troubled times
precipitated a stunning series of developments. Chief Quinn didn’t really enter the picture until the owner of Club Kamokila got angry.

  The comely Mrs. Alice Campbell was Hawaiian royalty. Her mother was Princess Kuaihelana of Hawaii’s royal ruling house, and her father, Jim Campbell, was the multimillionaire Pineapple King and Sugar Czar. Alice, a guileless woman known as “Princess,” had opened a nightclub in a former Methodist church on downtown Bush Street as a venue for her vocal aspirations. When Central Station officers began shaking her down, it irritated her that they never harassed the hookers working out of lavish upstairs rooms along nearby Lysol Alley. Not that Princess didn’t employ equally friendly women in grass skirts from the Powell Street sidewalks, she just didn’t like to be unfairly singled out.

  In short order, special-duty officers arrested her bartender and manager, convinced neighbors to file noise complaints, challenged her dance hall license, and stationed a permanent detail of six uniformed officers in her doorway to discourage customers. In each of the city’s fourteen districts, two to four special-duty men, a vice contact group (disrespectfully referred to as “bucket men” or “collectors” behind their backs), operated as aides de corps to the district captains. The captains were not only unsupervised but answerable to no one (not even the Bureau of Communications) as to their whereabouts at any hour of the day, even in emergencies, and exercised considerable authority subject only to minimal review by their superiors. Being virtually accountable to only their unaccountable captains, the bucket men were ripe for graft.

  “The Kamokila Club is a dive, one of the worst in town,” said Captain Fred Lemon, the bull-necked commander of Central Station. “This woman is not fooling anyone with this society bull and I’m going to close the place every night.”