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

by Robert Graysmith

  His discards provided enough clues to send the police on a canvas of local boardinghouses that ended at Katherine and August Hill’s. “I haven’t taken in any suspicious lodgers lately,” said Mrs. Hill. “In fact we’ve had no new lodgers since Mr. Woodcots last Wednesday. He’s rather on the short side, dark, with blue eyes and a simian mouth and jaw.”

  The detectives raced upstairs to his room. As soon as they entered they smelled a sickening smell. As a detective bent to retrieve an artificial flower, he saw the body of the missing flower girl, mutilated beyond recognition. “Good God, man!” he shouted.

  “To think that that fiend lay sleeping in that room all night with that poor dead girl under his bed!” August said as he shielded his sobbing wife. So horribly treated was Lola’s body that Chief of Detectives George Smith permanently sealed the record.

  Nelson used $10 of the stolen money to buy a fountain pen, corduroy trousers, and a plaid shirt at Sam Waldman’s secondhand shop on Main Street. He left behind Patterson’s clothes, then got a massage, shave, and haircut at the Central Barber Shop next door. Nick Taylor grew suspicious as he cut Nelson’s hair. It was encrusted with blood from deep nail scratches on his scalp where Emily had fought back. Nelson caught a ride with Hugh Elder into Regina, Saskatchewan, two hundred miles west. He engaged a room from landlady Mary Rowe on June 12 under the name Harry Harcout. The next morning, he saw an accurate description of himself in the paper and bought new clothes from the Royal Second Hand Store. He changed into blue overalls, a khaki shirt, and cap, then caught a lift from Isadore Silverman, a scrap metal dealer, whose route took them around police patrols via back roads to Boissevain, Manitoba.

  “If he’s heading for the border,” said Smith, “he’ll have to cross prairie country where there are few towns for him to lose himself. A lone hitchhiker should be easy to spot.”

  Canadian constables and U.S. policemen closed in on him from both sides. When he bought some cheese and a drink at the Wakopa General Store the proprietor, Les Morgan, recognized him and notified Constable Wilton A. Gray, the only officer on duty at the Killarney, Manitoba, department.

  Constable Gray was patrolling twelve miles north of the international border just outside the small farming community of flat land and tree-lined rivers and hills when he saw a man nonchalantly walking down the road and asked his name. With a shy smile, he said it was Wilson and that he was a stock hand who worked on a nearby farm. Gray was suspicious. No Canadian would call a spread this far west a farm. “We’re looking for a man who is responsible for the deaths of twenty six women,” Gray said, and watched for a giveaway sign.

  “A mass murderer? I only do my lady-killing on Saturday nights.”

  “You’d better ride back to Killarney with me, so we can check your story.”

  “Fair enough. You fellows have to play it safe when there’s a killer on the loose.”

  “It can’t be him,” Gray thought. “He’s too cool.”

  At the ancient and tiny Killarney jail, Gray took away his shoes, socks, and belt as a precautionary measure, then double-locked him inside a cell and handcuffed him to the bars. He then walked fifteen feet away into the next room to ring Inspector Smith in Winnipeg.

  “I think we’ve got the wrong man,” Gray told him. “He says that his name is Wilson.”

  “That must be the strangler!” Smith said. The Gorilla Man had used the name Wilson here in Winnipeg and in San Francisco. “Don’t be taken in by his innocent demeanor. Twenty-six women are dead because they made the same mistake. For the love of God! You didn’t leave him alone, did you?”

  Gray ran into the next room. The Gorilla Man was gone. He had picked his cuffs with a nail file he found under his bunk, opened the cell doors with a wire, and escaped without his shoes. As a posse was assembled, Smith sent four detectives to the isolated village by plane. He and another fifty followed by train. Meanwhile, Nelson, who had stolen new clothes, was fast asleep in William Allen’s barn, one block from the jail. The next day, he showed up at the station to wait for a southbound train and hid in some bushes by a grain elevator.

  Constable William Renton spotted Nelson, jumped the fence, and intercepted him. He studied the stranger’s disheveled clothes—a moth-eaten sweater and a pair of hockey skates with the blades removed serving as shoes. “You look like you slept in the open last night, sir.”

  “Where do you farm?” Nelson pointed to a building by the tracks. “That’s a slaughterhouse,” said Renton.

  Nelson began running down the railway tracks as the morning express rolled into view and rushed right into Smith’s arms as he stepped from the train. Captain Matheson of the SFPD flew from San Francisco to Winnipeg to confirm Nelson’s identity. He studied the strange, blank-faced man who wore a tweed suit and cap. His wide shoulders and huge manacled hands still gave the impression of power. During his trial, Nelson showed no emotion as forty American witnesses identified him. “That’s the man,” said Matheson.

  When Nelson’s aunt Lillian and estranged wife, Mary, attended, he ignored them. On November 14, 1927, the jury deliberated just forty-eight minutes before convicting him of Emily Patterson’s murder. Despite his pleas of insanity and innocence (“Murder just isn’t possible for a man of my high Christian ideals”), he was sentenced to hang on Friday, January the thirteenth as the thirteenth man ever hung at the Vaughn Street Jail, which was across the street from the Patterson family home. “I am innocent,” Nelson said. “I stand innocent before God and man. I forgive those who have wronged me and ask forgiveness of those I have injured. God have mercy!” Earle Nelson’s insatiable habit of strangling landladies was finally broken.

  “THAT’S odd,” Dullea had said as he perused the San Francisco papers. No mention anywhere of the Gorilla Man’s execution in Canada. He could not be sure he was even dead. In Chicago, where there was a corrupt police force, criminals bought their way off death row or faked their executions. Perversely, Dullea hoped the Gorilla Man was still alive to return so he could have a second chance to catch the murderer.

  Elsewhere the Gorilla Man stirred. His huge hands opened and closed. He was coming back to life. His eyes turned west.

  SEVEN

  “Gorilla” actually meant a hairy, tough man before it meant the ape; the ape gets its name from the man and not the other way around as one might think.

  —IAN REDMOND, GORILLA

  THE second anniversary of Officer John Malcolm’s murder, Friday, April 29, 1932, was exceptionally cold. Inspectors Jim Malloy and Bart Lally were bundled up and parked on Fairfield Way where it curved over to intersect Lakewood Avenue and continued north to dead-end at Kenwood Way. Lally, cigar clenched between his teeth, scanned the road for the hundredth time. Malloy had been combing his wavy, silver hair straight back. Each time the thick shock had sprung back as curvy as Fairfield Way. There was scarcely a straight line in the Ingleside Terraces or in nearby St. Francis Woods’ shaded, winding ways. It was as if their architect had only a French curve with which to draw his plans.

  Because all the streets were curved and steep, it made a stakeout difficult and concealed any potential attack on Josie around the corner. The roads were built wide to accommodate big automobiles like the 1926 sable black Phaeton Lincoln custom touring car in front of Josie’s house. Its engine was running smoothly. In those days you could get eight good years out of such a model with a radio and a speaker set into bird’s-eye maple.

  Mrs. Walter Bowers, a neighbor, saw the touring car at 4:30 P.M. “A man drove up in the car—owl lights, a low tonneau and extra-thick trunk,” she said, “and appeared to conceal his face with a hand and his cap pulled down over his eyes.” She also sensed there might be a second man sitting in the rear seat. Fourteen doors down Mrs. G. E. Little of 55 Lakewood also scrutinized the unique sedan and its driver. “A horse-faced young man, about twenty-three, with a close-cropped mustache was sitting in it,” she said. “He tried to shield his face, but I got a real good look at him. I would recognize h
im if I saw him again. He was Verne Doran, you know, Mr. Frank Egan’s chauffeur.”

  At 4:35 P.M., Josie rang her friend Mrs. Joseph Dennis. “It’s gotten so I’m afraid to leave the house at night,” she lamented. As they chatted Mrs. Dennis heard Josie’s doorbell sound. “It might be someone trying to get me,” said Josie, and hung up.

  An hour later Mrs. Albert E. Jacks, sixteen doors up, saw Frank Egan walking within a block of Josie’s home. That was not unusual because he lived so nearby. Shortly after, the Lincoln started up and came cruising north along Fairfield at twenty-five miles per hour. As it turned into Kenwood Way, Malloy adjusted his little spectacles and noted the uncommon Phaeton trunk and unique spotlight that hung from the median of its radiator, which was very unlike a Packard’s jutting radiator (gangsters commonly took their victims for a last ride in a Packard sedan). Within two years, except for Fords and Chevys, the square radiator would be replaced by the streamlined radiators of the Chrysler airflow and the Pierce-Arrow’s gracefully tapered front. The back and side curtains were tightly drawn, and Malloy could not see inside. The car pushed on east, swung south on Keystone Way, then rolled back around on Ocean Avenue, the local main drag, to Lakewood. The sedan crept past the lookouts for a second time. As if testing the waters, it came around a third time. When the sedan passed a fourth time traveling at sixty miles per hour, its lights were out and it quickly passed out of sight.

  When the dark sedan did not return, Malloy and Lally felt secure in relinquishing their surveillance because they knew Josie never went out at night; at 8:35 P.M., they returned to the HOJ. An hour later Mrs. Jacks observed a large touring car with its lights out back away from Josie’s unused garage. A second man slipped from the bushes at the end of the driveway, closed the garage door, and slid into the auto like a cat. At 9:45 P.M., the speeding Lincoln passed Rena and Warren Louw walking east from Timothy Pflueger’s new white-towered movie palace, the El Rey Theater on Ocean. They had just seen The Champ, a tear-jerker starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper.

  When the cruising auto returned, this time going west, and slowly passed the Louws, it made them nervous enough to step back into a doorway. The Louws waited until the car had rounded the curve of Kenwood and swooped northeast before they continued up the severe incline for another two hundred feet to 150 Kenwood. They reached the O’Neil home—white picket fence, weedy overgrown yard, street pole, and a dark shape lying in the road flush to the curbstone. “You don’t think much finding a woman’s body like that,” recalled Mr. Louw. “You just feel.” He ran the twenty doors down to his house and rang the police from there. “Then I went back to see if she was really dead. She was.”

  When Inspectors Herman Wobke, Ray O’Brien, and LaTulipe reached the scene, they saw no evidence around the body of any accident. “No skid marks or broken glass,” LaTulipe remarked. “It’s chilly and she’s not wearing a coat or hat. She has no purse and there are no house keys on her. The car was going downhill, yet her head is pointing uphill and her ankles are crossed.”

  Anyone hit by a speeding car is usually thrown headfirst in the direction the car is going. No blood about the face (only the bruise marks of what looked like a fist) and no marks of having been hit before being run over. Her sole identification was a gold ring inscribed “Joe to Jessie.” When this fifth unidentified female body of the year was conveyed to the morgue by Deputy Coroner Mike Brown, the best known and most respected coroner in the state, Lieutenant Pete Danahy and reporter Charlie Huse were waiting. Danahy saw no cuts or bruises on the hands, arms, elbows, feet, knees, or legs, places where they should be. “That don’t look so hot to me as a hit-and-run case,” said Danahy, dragging out his pad and pen, “but it sure has possibilities as an old-fashioned murder mystery.”

  Early Saturday morning, Egan raced down the marble steps to the coroner’s clammy basement office to identify Jane Doe number five. “Mrs. Jessie Scott Hughes is an old and very dear friend,” he told Mrs. Jane Walsh, the coroner’s chief deputy. “It’s her. I’ve handled her business affairs for years as an advisor, ever since I was in private practice.”

  “Has she any relatives?” asked Mrs. Walsh as she bent to retrieve a blank form.

  “Yes,” Egan said, “but she is not on friendly terms with any of the family. As Mrs. Hughes would have wished, I shall take charge of the funeral arrangements.” Mrs. Walsh nodded her head sympathetically, asked if Josie had left a will and who the beneficiary was.

  “I am,” said Egan. “She left an estate of $25,000 and named me the executor.”

  “Did she have any insurance?”

  “Only a $2,000 policy,” Egan said as he signed the delivery receipt to turn Josie’s body over to a private undertaker. “Relation to deceased: Executor,” he printed.

  Reporter Henry “Hank” Peters, at a cashier’s window, overheard Egan and went directly upstairs to Dullea’s office. “I didn’t intend to get a ‘raise’ out of the captain,” Peters said later. “All I did was casually mention the hit-and-run body from last night had just been identified by Frank Egan. But when I spoke the name of Mrs. Hughes, he almost hit the ceiling. He said the case might develop into something tremendous, and then he closed up and wouldn’t say any more and told me to get out.”

  Alone in his office Dullea felt as if the shadow of the Gorilla Man had fallen over him again. Once more, he’d been unable to save a woman’s life. He wondered whether it really was a hit-and-run accident or if Egan actually carried out his plot in front of his detectives. Without warning, Egan strutted into Dullea’s office, took a chair, and tossed his expensive tan fedora onto the blotter. “I’ve just come from the morgue, Charlie,” he said. “This Josie Hughes, who was run over last night, was an old friend of mine. This is a terrible thing. She was like a mother to me.”

  “Where do you suppose she was going at that hour on a chilly night without a coat?” Dullea fought to contain his fury. Under the desk his hands were clenched.

  “Josie frequently went for long walks without her hat and coat.”

  “That’s not what the neighbors say. They said she prided herself on her appearance and never even went out to hang clothes on the line without wearing a hat. She was afraid to go out alone at night, especially so far above her home on the sharp incline where her body was found.”

  “Oh, no, you’re wrong there, Charlie. I had often warned her against walking about the neighborhood in the evening. Mrs. Hughes frequently took walks in the hills about her home attired only in house clothing and sweater—no coat, no hat. I cautioned her not to go out without her glasses—about a year ago she was almost hit by an auto—just as she was last night. Her son, James, fourteen, was killed in an auto accident fifteen years ago.”

  Dullea contemplated Egan’s facial expressions. Was he a cold-blooded murderer or not? His placid, self-assured demeanor provided no clue. But Egan was a skilled jury lawyer and consequently a fine actor.

  “By the way, Charlie, I was coming in to see you this morning anyway. Something ought to be done about the parking arrangements in front of the Dreamland Pavilion on fight nights. They’re terrible.”

  Dullea’s heart gave a leap, though his face remained impassive. There it was—the alibi he had expected. “Dreamland Pavilion? Is that where you were last night?”

  “Yep. I came early and remained ringside the entire evening. On the whole, it was a pretty good card, but the parking was terrible.”

  “Well, you should speak to [Captain Charles] Goff at the Traffic Bureau, not me.”

  “An amusing thing happened, by the way. Some drunk sat behind Dr. Housman and I and spent the whole evening throwing Eskimo pies at a friend who was with me.”

  “It’s lucky he didn’t throw them at you. He’d have made a fine mess of that.” Dullea indicated Egan’s spotless fedora. Now he was morally certain that last night’s tragedy had been the work of the man before him, but it would take more than a moral certainty to convince a jury. “San Francisco’s public defender
had murdered Mrs. Hughes,” he thought, “yet I can not arrest him.”

  “Well, I have to hurry to wind up Josie’s affairs,” Egan said, rising. “Busy, busy, busy.” On his way out he brushed past Lally, who had Louw’s statement in hand. “So Louw got a good description of the car did he?” Dullea asked Lally. “Louw knows cars,” Lally said. “He’s a garage mechanic and saw the cruising Lincoln well under a street light.”

  “Fine. Now make a list of all of Frank Egan’s friends and former clients, especially ex-cons and see which one owns a car like that.” Then he sent for Homicide Inspector Allan McGinn, head of the Death Squad.

  McGinn was a burly man, his tiny eyes and mouth lost in a broad, square face. His features were made even smaller by his prodigious nose and huge ears. He had carelessly shaved that morning, his shirt needed pressing, and in almost every respect he was drab. Only the shining gold of his shield accented his cheap suit and vest. McGinn placed his battered gray fedora where Egan had laid his splendid hat.

  McGinn was in bad with Chief Quinn that morning and was consequently depressed. The day before, Louis Zanardi had been beaten to death by three unidentified men after a baseball game at Rolph Play-ground, and McGinn was getting nowhere finding them. “Get out to Josie Hughes’s house,” Dullea told him. “Find out what really happened there last night.”