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

by Robert Graysmith

  “Could you send a man over to my house to pump up my tires?” she asked.

  “I’ll do as good,” said William Werder, the manager. “One of my new employees lives only a short distance from your home. I’ll write down his address.”

  Ada went there and knocked on the door. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes (in the middle of the afternoon), a Greek god answered the door and began laughing. Almost immediately, she had liked his infectious laugh. Under a palooka shirt, worn outside his trousers and buttoned all the way to the bottom, he was barrel-chested. He had huge hands and strong white teeth. Like many other older women Ada had instantly fallen under the young man’s spell, his wonderful jokes, and endless role-playing. Slipton Fell even played the mandolin.

  NINETEEN

  Homicide is not always murder, but murder is always homicide.

  —DETECTIVE MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

  BY Wednesday, April 10, 1935, five days after the Bay Hotel murder, things were not going well for the investigation. By 10:00 A.M., the SFPD Narcotics Division had already called Dullea back and gotten his day off to a rotten start. “Bette Coffin has never under any circumstances been a squeal of ours,” they reported.

  An hour later, Dullea’s phone rang again. This time it was the FBI. “Your victim was never a drug informant of ours,” the local special agent informed him. Another lead was dashed.

  Dullea, working in his shirtsleeves and wearing the tie his wife had bought him, swiveled around to glare at the wall of his tiny office. A dozen three-by-five cards were tacked there. He was rearranging them as Detective Sergeant McInerney entered with reports under his arm and coffee from the Chinese establishment next door. Dullea took the coffee, then spread the reports out. The first was an unsolved San Diego case. On February 20, 1931, someone had hauled the mutilated nude body of eleven-year-old Virginia Brooks down a hill, hung it from a tree, and bound it with a sixty-foot long rope. The loops at both ends had been tied with intricate knots of the type used by seafaring men. “Since those gentlemen are notorious travelers,” thought Dullea, “the killer had probably sailed for other ports immediately afterward.”

  Dullea was about to save the bulletin (such a madman might be back someday) when he found a second report cross-indexed with the first. Chief Quinn had made a notation in pencil on the back of a brown envelope sealed by a string that wound around a button. He unwound the string counterclockwise and dumped out a second file.

  Two months after the Brooks murder, a powerful man had dragged the disfigured nude body of seventeen-year-old artist’s model Louise Teuber down a slope and suspended it from a tree by a sixty-foot long double-looped line. The sailor’s knots, identical to those in the Brooks murder, convinced Dullea those threads were part of the same bloody tapestry. The elusive sailor had returned to port. The brutality of the assaults recalled to Dullea the savagery of the Bay Hotel murder, so he filed both reports in his cabinet. They also called to mind the murders by Earle Nelson, who had used strips of cloth with a “complicated sailor’s knot” to bind his victims’ wrists.

  In the late afternoon he ordered Inspector McGinn to the East Bay to interview Bette Coffin’s mother. McGinn consulted his watch. While unhappy about crossing the Bay during rush hour, McGinn knew he had at his disposal a web of efficient ferryboat lines that spun out across the Bay to Contra Costa, Alameda, Solano, and Marin Counties.

  Commuters either converged at the Hyde Street Pier west of Fisherman’s Wharf or at the Ferry Building, the terminus for four steam railroads and five interurban systems with twenty-nine cable car and streetcar lines. At 5:05 P.M. McGinn joined the evening rush as workers spilled out of their offices onto Montgomery and Market streets. Streetcars began to pile up. Within minutes, the broad thoroughfare was packed with people pushing for the 5:15 P.M. boat. They made a dragging trudge past the Bay Hotel and Last Chance Cafe. Their heads were lowered guiltily because they had jobs and so many did not. They crossed the iron bridge spanning the Loop or dodged the Belt Line cars at the downstairs entrance to the Ferry Building.

  McGinn scanned the dying tree in the plaza where dark-haired Harmonica Nell had sold papers for years. Her reedy mouth organ blues had risen above the hawking of other newsies. Her soulful eyes had wrung pennies from every commuter. Nell played best when the fog crept in and sang her finest when icy winds whistled around the Moorish Clock Tower. She vanished one day to reemerge as Mae Stockdale, widow and moll to killer Jim O’Neil. In May, police captured her in Stockton in a shootout. She was sentenced to Tehachapi Women’s Prison, from which she made three escapes (Nell became known as the female Houdini). In early April 1935, poor Nell was committed to the Ukiah State Hospital for the Insane. So many roads to take, thought McGinn, but only one final destination.

  A number of slips at the Ferry Building were kept by different companies. The SP exclusively used Slips 9 and 10 for its screw-driven, steel-hulled twin ferries, the New Orleans and the El Paso. Constructed in Bethlehem’s Potrero yard for $1 million each, they made eight round-trip crossings a day to the East Bay. The Western Pacific’s Feather River and the SP’s Encinal were both heading across for Oakland via the “Creek Route.” Most ferries were linked with railways. The screw steamer Berkeley was the fastest, but the small Edward T. Jeffery, which held fewer passengers and cars, got to Oakland in eighteen minutes. McGinn plunked down 35¢ for a round trip; if you brought your car onboard you paid $1.20.

  The downstairs waiting room filled rapidly. On the second floor, tired workers occupying wooden benches staggered to their feet as the brass-rod fence slid away. McGinn slipped into a corridor leading to the berthed ferries, and saw the Jeffery getting up steam. A nervous sailor, he watched anxiously as the hydraulic gangplank lowered. A few Bay ferryboats had capsized when the water ballast at one end was too heavy and the passengers had congregated at that end. He followed a slight incline onto the main deck and then inside.

  The leisurely crossings were pleasant breaks in the commuters’ daily drudgery, but onboard this trip was a disagreeable ferry traveler known as “Mrs. Blight.” She fought with every conductor and gate man, argued with the newsies, browbeat the waiters, and made terrible scenes with the passengers. Everyone feared Mrs. Blight who routinely filled the spaces on both sides of her seat with bundles while people all around her stood; she even put up her feet to steal more room. No one, not even McGinn, dared challenge this formidable creature—and he was armed.

  He debarked at the Oakland Mole (which contained the slip for SP auto ferries) at the foot of Seventh Street and took an Espee steam train along a long reedy pier. Alameda Mole passengers rode the electric Red Train. Shortly, McGinn reached 1697 Twelfth Street in the downtown and knocked on the door of a clapboard house with yellow trim and lavender flowers. Mary Luz, Bette Coffin’s mother, answered. Wiping his feet on the mat, McGinn entered and sat down on the davenport. Like Al, The Mouse, Mary had long ago accepted her daughter’s self-destructive lifestyle. She suggested McGinn speak with Bette’s fifteen-year-old son, Otis Leonard Coffin, who lived in Richmond with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Wellington Coffin. “Will might provide more information,” she said.

  By hire cab, McGinn reached 1808 Eureka Street in the neighboring city. “No,” said Mr. Will Coffin, “I don’t remember Bette ever mentioning anyone she was afraid of, certainly not a laughing sailor with big hands and long arms.”

  But then Otis interrupted. His mother had a burly friend somewhat like that. “Where was he from?” McGinn asked.

  This might be important, so he took out his notebook. The boy thought. “San Diego or maybe San Pedro,” he said. “I think maybe he was a sailor. I saw him only once, last summer outside a tavern South of Market.”

  McGinn was familiar with that section of cheap saloons (“Free Lunch Today”) and rooming houses (“20 cents a Room”) not far from the Bay Hotel. “Go on,” said McGinn, his pencil poised. “What else do you remember?”

  “He had a short name with an ‘H’ in it, like Ha
nk or Henry or Harry,” Otis said. “But that’s all I can recall of the name, only that it was short, only that I saw him that once.”

  “San Diego or San Pedro, Hank, Henry, or Harry,” wrote McGinn. Maybe the name was important, vague but important. He closed his notebook.

  “Poor Bette,” said Will Coffin. “Nothing ever seemed to work out for her. If you ask me, it’s that husband of hers you should take a closer look at.”

  The photo on the mantle showed a bright young woman in the days before she became an addict. “No one should have endured what she had,” thought McGinn. Coffin brought coffee to fortify him for his cold voyage back.

  Onboard the ferry, McGinn got a little sick. The sea began to kick up. A patchy fog was floating just above the surface. Powerful waves were buffeting the hull. Spray pelted the windows in the forward saloon deck where McGinn sat. He knew exactly when they passed Alcatraz, with its pelicans and black-crowned night herons. The Klaxon at the north end bleated twice and the one to the south once—a kind of moan—Ohhhhhh, Gawwd! He heard the draft in the smokestack, the slap of the paddlewheel, and the measured, rhythmic thrash of strokes in the huge cylinders.

  The choppy crossing took forty-one minutes, a minute above the average. Too seasick to file a report, McGinn wobbled home on unsteady legs. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. He was curious about this Hank, Henry, or Harry Somebody. What motive could there possibly have been for such savagery? The next day, McGinn promised himself, he would check to be sure their quarry hadn’t been arrested for another crime, but wasn’t hopeful. He was convinced the Gorilla Man had sailed out on a freighter immediately after he left the hotel, probably one bursting with wild animals like Frank Buck collected and where a Gorilla Man would feel perfectly at home among his own kind.8

  WINIFRED and Charlie Dullea passed the evening at the gilded Orpheum at Eighth and Market. It wasn’t “bank nite” or “tin can night” (when each movie-goer brought a tin can of food for the needy) so they paid 80¢ apiece, the evening rate for the double bill. The second film was Mister Dynamite, set in San Francisco by Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton man, who once wrote copy for Samuel’s Jewelers on Market. He once skipped out of the Hotel Pierre wearing all the clothes he owned in layers. Edmund Lowe in the title role played “a man of many schemes, most of them shady.” Dulleashifted in his seat after the first two murders and a suicide. He could think only of McGinn out in the fog trying to piece together Mrs. Coffin’s last hours. Where had she been before she entered that room colored blue by the rain? What stranger had she met that last night? And where? Winifred could tell her husband was troubled by some secret he knew or suspected.

  TWENTY

  Gorillas are intelligent. They use simple tools, such as a branch, to ascertain the depth of a swampy pool.

  —2003 SCIENTIFIC REPORT

  “I was a dog robber in the marines,” Captain Dullea told McGinn the next morning. He laughed and explained, “A dog robber is an orderly for a commanding officer.” Dullea had attended Franklin Grammar School and graduated Lowell High, clerked a while and when still a very young man joined the Marines in 1908. “Yes, we marines saw the world all right—at least the Philippines and Mexico.” As a corporal, Dullea had been a member of the first Madera campaign forces. Discharged in 1911, he always kept his Marine Corps discharge close at hand. Presently, the papers were in the middle right-hand drawer of his desk, along with personal letters, trinkets, photos, keepsakes, and drawings his boys had made for him.

  From the time he joined the SFPD in 1914, Dullea’s fellow officers had admired him for his endurance, agility, strength, and facility in self-defense and apprehension. He could bring in a man with a minimum of force and was courageous in the face of danger. He “showed street sense” in his dealings with criminals and informers and people on the border of criminal behavior. He was “alley-wise,” demonstrating calmness in the face of complex situations such as family disturbances, potential suicides, robberies in progress, and accidents. Most of all, they credited him with initiative, effective judgment and imagination, and exceptional skill in questioning witnesses of crimes and suspected offenders.

  They respected him for advancing through the ranks and for the military efficiency with which he ran his department. The few honest cops admired him for his high level of personal integrity and ethical conduct. Dullea never had accepted favors or a bribe. When he joined the police department in 1915, all the cops still sat at old-fashioned inkwell-imbedded schoolroom desks. He found it laughable to watch the big detectives trying to straddle the small chairs as they filled out reports.

  After the long, monotonous routine patrols, broken by life-threatening situations, he followed the regular course of advancement. Dullea became a police corporal in 1921, a sergeant in 1923, and a lieutenant later that same year. He made captain in January 1929, then chief of inspectors, captain of detectives, and finally captain of inspectors on the same day Quinn was elevated from sergeant to chief: November 20, 1929. On the average, it takes a patrolman thirteen years to become a sergeant, nineteen years to become a lieutenant, and twenty-three years to become a captain.

  “Dullea’s biography,” said the papers, “is the story of San Francisco’s big cases. Remember the Jepson case? Dullea was in it. Remember the attempted diary delivery payroll robbery? Dullea was in it. Remember the capture of Stevens and Kessel? Dullea was in that. And everyone knows the still famous Egan case and that of the Whispering Gunman. He was there—in every phase of the detective work.”

  The hard-hitting detective chief took each job that crossed his path, did it right and never gave up. He was easygoing when things were easy and tough when tough cases cracked his way.

  While Dullea was fabled for his honesty and morality, Chief Quinn was not. It bothered Dullea that when Egan escaped jail rumors that the chief had allowed it had been widely believed. Had corruption really taken hold of the department again? Whether Quinn was a party to it or blind to the facts, he did not know.

  Both he and Quinn had been bred “South of the Slot,” so called after the slots in the tracks that cut the town in half at Market, the widest thoroughfare in town. The two inside tracks were reserved for the Market Street Railway. The outer two were for the city’s own Municipal Railroad. At rush hour the “Roar of the Four” was deafening as the cars rushed along the odd four-track system. When Dullea and Quinn were kids, they pitched pennies at the slots and “nipped the fender” by riding on the folded cowcatcher on the trailing side of the Muni cars.

  By Thursday night, April 11, six days after the Bay Hotel autopsy murder, Dullea was still having difficulty getting his mind around the unfathomable Gorilla Man. He had stopped asking Who and Where? and was now, like McGinn, wondering Why? No motive seemed to apply, not robbery, passion, vengeance, or gain of any sort. “In God’s name,” thought Dullea, “what had the killer hoped to accomplish by such butchery? Bette Coffin was too poor to be worth robbing. She was not excessively desirable, nor a beauty or in her youth even attractive. Still, she was a simple mother who deserved life as much as the next. The killer had whistled and laughed as he lumbered away. Could such a man even be human?”

  Dullea kept an anxious eye on the docks. Forty-seven years after Jack the Ripper invented motiveless, compulsive murders in London, America had her own motiveless serial killer. Someone was killing prostitutes in the rundown section of a great city apparently for the sheer pleasure of it. As reporter Fred Diefendorf later wrote, “This Bay Hotel murder was only one of several crimes in the U.S. that were to parallel in horror the series of ghastly murders committed by Jack the Ripper in England some decades ago which shocked the entire civilized world.”

  There was a much better analogy than the Ripper thought Dullea. He put on his coat and hat and went out. Yes, a more apt analogy, a story he remembered from his childhood by Poe, the story of an ape wielding a razor. Down by the docks salt spray peppered his face. Wind tore at his coat, and the most robust foghorn on the Bay began boom
ing from the Ferry Building as if calling for help. Ohh, Gawd! Ohh, Gawd!

  AFTER a meager supper, Dullea had no sooner unlocked the door to his office than he made a giant stride in his search for the Gorilla Man. After his homicide detectives had searched the Bay Area for any unsolved murders that matched theirs and found none, they had requested by mail that all West Coast detectives be on the lookout for a killer with huge hands and the loping stride of an ape who may have committed an autopsy murder in their city. Finally, Dullea attempted to establish a pattern with other unsolved girl murders in widely separated parts of the nation. As part of his plan, thousands of circulars had been distributed through every seaport in the United States asking detectives to be “particularly on the lookout for a fiendish ‘Jack the Ripper’ who might be a seafaring man.”

  Dullea looked down at his desk. The eight-by-ten manilla envelope bore a New York postmark. He slit it open and spread out several yellow pages on his blotter. He read the first paragraph and sat bolt upright. “The report inside,” he said later, “was very enlightening.”