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

by Robert Graysmith

  If the subject matter had not been so grim, a broad grin would have crossed his face. Before his eyes lay a connection between the San Francisco murder and an unsolved New York City homicide case from almost two years earlier. At last!—a concrete link to the Bay Hotel killer and a crime exactly like it clear across the country. In answer to his bulletin the NYPD had forwarded to Dullea all they knew of the tragedy of Wilhelm Johnston and his wife Florence W. Johnston in Washington Heights. He laid the first page down, flattened it, and began to read silently. About 11:00 P.M. on Saturday, October 21, 1933, Mrs. Flo Johnston was found strangled, stripped, and horribly autopsied with a razor. A huge stain on the second-floor landing and bloody streaks on the stairs suggested a second body, that of her husband, had been dragged down the stairs.

  Dullea had little more information at this point, except for the last paragraph. The NYPD had searched abandoned buildings in the area and probed the river for Wilhelm Johnston without success. This was interesting, Dullea thought. If this was their man from the Bay Hotel, the Gorilla Man was not only a cross-country murderer of women, but of males, too. Such wandering journeymen were almost impossible to catch. It meant that there could be other murders as ghastly as Mrs. Coffin’s they might never know about. Just because the Bay Hotel creature was elsewhere didn’t mean he had stopped being who he was and doing what he did for whatever reason he had. Dullea had to start at the beginning again and look for what he had missed. The answer was right in front of him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Investigation is the process of uncovering the unknown details of an incident by systematic search and patient inquiry—the truth of the matter.

  —CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

  BECAUSE night clerk John Smeins’s description of the deeply tanned Mr. Meyers indicated the murderer might be a sailor, the SFPD search had centered on the Embarcadero. The dockworkers were a rough lot of multilingual, mostly single and lusty men who kept 135 brothels running all night and 150 gambling dens and three hundred bookie joints running all day. “You could play roulette in the Marina,” columnist Herb Caen wrote, “shoot craps on O’Farrell, play poker on Mason, and get rolled at 4 A.M. in a bar on Eddy.”

  The waterfront’s population changed constantly as sailors shipped in and out, returned from long voyages, and embarked on longer ones perhaps never to return. Every year, seven thousand ships and forty million commuters and travelers arrive and depart this second busiest crossroads in the world. The detectives spread out over the waterfront, an astonishing setting for the saga of the Gorilla Man.

  Inspectors Desmond and Kelleher treaded amid creaking winches and sheds marked “Pago Pago” and drank their way through barrel houses and the lowest dives. They always ended up back at the city’s most celebrated landmark, the 240-foot-tall Clock Tower as much an icon to San Francisco as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. On bright days they watched the campanile’s shadow, as if a sundial, extend across the Great Loop and, with its inexorable scythelike sweep, touch the Bay Hotel. Page Brown, who died young, had modeled the Neoclassical clock tower after the Giralda, the Moorish tower of the Cathedral of Seville and adopted portions of Venice’s Piazza San Marco. After the 1906 quake jolted loose the Colusa sandstone that sheathed the tower, they restored it with reinforced concrete.

  The Clock Tower marks the midpoint of the Embarcadero, which would grow to over twelve miles long, with eighteen miles of ship berthing space along forty-two piers. There were also two deep water channels—Islais Creek and China Basin. Other Bay ports were expanding, too. Dock workers were already unloading bulk oil, ores, and sugar at Pinole Point, Ozol, Port Chicago, Oleum, Selby, Crockett, Martinez, Avon, Benicia, Hercules, Port Costa, Valona, and Antioch. Within two years, Redwood City would open as a deep-water anchorage to join the well-established dry cargo harbors of Oakland, Alameda, and Richmond.

  Normally combing the docks for a Gorilla Man would have been effortless. Certainly, a man of such a striking appearance, of such strength and unholy habits, with such huge hands and vaguely apelike features and eerie laugh should be easy to locate. Surely, his monstrous appearance would betray him. And yet he might not be as fierce as thought. They had only Smeins’s word to go on. He might have been tall and walking hunched as he fled the Bay Hotel. Perhaps he was only a very powerful weightlifter and not repellant, even attractive enough to entice a woman to follow him. Police had yet to learn that evil sometimes came in ordinary, even attractive packaging and that not every homicide had a motive.

  Five years before everyone on the waterfront had gone the extra mile to find beloved Officer Malcolm’s killer. Captain Chris Claussen had traveled all the way to Tacoma to finger the Whispering Gunman—“That’s the bastard!” Those days were gone. Since July it had been impossible for cops to work along the waterfront. “Unbelievable,” said Dullea. “They are no help at all. . . . People assail the police department but do not take into account their own lack of civic consciousness in failing to testify or to help us. In serious cases I have consistently met with refusals by citizens to appear as witnesses against defendants.”

  None of the waterfront regulars was talking. The sole exceptions were the city’s grimy waterfront hotels and boardinghouses who depended on police protection for survival and city permits to keep operating. So they were cooperative—a little. But they were the only ones. Longshoremen hated the police with a cold fury because of “Bloody Thursday.” The previous summer, the Embarcadero had been a tinderbox awaiting the first spark. Chief Quinn had furnished that spark.

  During California’s worst strike, dockworkers picketing for better working conditions through the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) had been bloodied, even murdered by the SFPD. The chief’s special antistrike force had so alienated the city’s most exploited group, that it would be years before Dullea and his men could regain their formerly cordial relationship with the longshoremen. In 1933, the peak year of Communist-led agricultural strikes, Quinn had answered Alameda County DA Warren’s call for “a coordinated statewide assault on Communist provocateurs by the lawmen and prosecutors of California.” The previous August, Quinn, Mayor Rossi, and other anti-Communist officials, contriving a Red scare, attended an Oakland meeting of the California Peace Officer’s Association.

  The previous April, the longshoremen had been organizing for a strike when Ignatious H. McCarty, a crackajack salesman with the Lake Erie Chemical Company, rang up Chief Quinn. His fervor for the mechanics of police crowd control verged on the pathological. He was forever searching for more effective riot control tools.

  “Tell me, Chief Quinn,” he gushed, “just what do you need?”

  “For one thing the clubs are too light,” complained Quinn. The Alameda sheriff had advocated the use of railroad brake sticks (four-foot-long wooden poles rounded like baseball bats that conductors used to manage mail sacks onto trains).

  “Too light? Let me see what I can do with that,” said McCarty. He wrote his superior: “These cops here, when they hit a man over the head, are not satisfied unless he goes down and a good split occurs. Our clubs are too light for this purpose. Could you contemplate making them heavier? Advise.”

  The new extra-long, extra-heavy riot clubs, nightsticks with a lead core, were forthwith shipped to San Francisco to the delight of Chief Quinn, who addressed his next concern. He was a little leery of the effectiveness of the tear gas being offered him. For the last decade, the SFPD had kept tear gas and mustard gas bombs in its arsenal for routing barricaded criminals and dispersing strikers, and he found it too mild.

  “Oh, the new stuff is not the usual tearing kind,” explained McCarty. “These are canisters of a powerful vomiting and nausea gas. The longshoremen won’t know what hit them.”

  “Really!” Quinn’s sales resistance shattered quicker than a cracked skull. “I’ll need several crates of the sickening gas before Easter.”

  “Chief Quinn was determined to be nobody’s Sentimental Alice,” wrote historian Kevin S
tarr. When the longshoremen struck the previous May, Quinn ordered his antistrike squad (182 patrolmen, 17 mounted policemen, and 5 prowl cars) to Pier 35 where the Industrial Association—the powerful San Francisco business interests intent on breaking the unions—were moving cargo by truck convoy. They were also conveying two hundred scab workers (some dressed as policemen) to unload the Diana Dollar. “Bear down hard on any threats of disorder,” he ordered as longshoremen blocked the convoy.

  Along the Mission-style facades of the Matson Navigation Company piers, sixty cargo ships specializing in the Hawaiian trade were idled. Three American-Hawaiian freighters had anchored in the stream to save wharfage duties. Another two were abandoned in their berths. On May 28, 1934, Mayor Rossi ordered Quinn to “put every man in the department on the Embarcadero if necessary to preserve peace and order.”

  The chief’s detachment of five hundred mounted and foot patrols armed with sawed-off shotguns and tear-gas bombs rushed strikers at Pier 20. “Some of you boys with shotguns fire into the crowd,” Lieutenant Joe Mignola ordered. “If bricks start floating at us again, somebody will wind up in the morgue and I don’t think it will be any of us.”

  Patrolman Emmet Honore shot a striker in the back, a police car knocked two girls to the pavement, and a mounted policeman rode over a twelve-year-old girl. Women leading a parade were clubbed, officers aiming “for the soft parts of their anatomies.” Three days later, Mignola’s officers ran amuck again near Steuart Street, attacking activists with blackjacks and clubs. In response the ILA struck all West Coast ports, effectively shutting down two thousand miles of intercoastal trade.

  The steamer City of Los Angeles, the Grace Line steamer Santa Rosa, and the coastwise six-hundred-passenger transport H.F. Alexander (which routinely sailed between Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) were idled. Travelers and crewmen alike were stranded, including a burly figure whose shadow fell on the doors of the Bay Hotel.

  His long arms were as muscular as a weightlifter’s and he moved with an eccentric, flat-footed shamble. The figure upturned his nostrils as if sniffing the wind and, overcome with an overwhelming desire for sleep, entered the lobby. Behind the desk, John Smeins noticed the guest’s expensive well-tailored gray suit, but not his face. Quite soon, his attention was diverted to the roving mobs outside. The Gorilla Man intended to stay a few nights, until the ships were moving again and the police had retreated from the docks.

  In his room, he studied his large hands. On the dorsum, the skin was not soft and yielding as is usual, but tough and thick to stand wear and covered with a fibrous septa. He washed his hands in cold water, shook them for several minutes to stop them from tingling. His thumbs made a snapping, cracking sound as he flexed them and then went to bed. The next two nights, the hotel staff heard him alternately laughing and sobbing. Once he screamed aloud.

  ON July 3, seven hundred policemen in gas masks rolled a line of boxcars into place to seal off the south side. At noon, five trucks chaperoned by eight police patrol cars edged south toward the warehouse at 128 King Street, an area Quinn had so far kept free of strikers. Suddenly, pickets broke their lines near the S.P. Depot, surged around a pile of bricks, and began hurling them. Inspector Desmond was hit under his eye, Inspector Cornelius in the head, and Officer John LaDue in the leg. A rock crashed through the cruiser window and grazed Sergeant McInerney as he was tossing gas bombs. A brick narrowly missed Quinn, who was crouching in the backseat and showered him with glass. Gas oozing from overturned cars threatened to ignite, and he barely escaped. He was certain now that Communists had been drawn to the city to turn the strike into an actual revolution against national law and order. “I am carrying on the important work of suppressing the radicals who seek to destroy our government,” he said. “This is not merely a bitter strike, but a well planned revolution.”

  An hour and a half later, strikers blockaded the Belt Line at Second and Townsend streets to prevent police from using the tracks. “Let ’em have it, boys!” Police Captain Thomas Hoertkorn shouted as his men fired shotguns into the crowd. In revenge, longshoremen “patrolled like vultures” for scabs, and when they found one, they kicked out his teeth or laid his leg across a curb and snapped it like a twig.

  On July 5, Bloody Thursday, thousands of city workers cheered a union parade of about 150,000 members. Quinn armed eight hundred cops with the new heavy riot sticks and canisters of vomiting gas. At 8:00 A.M. a state Belt Line locomotive dragging clouds of black smoke and carrying dozens of cops prodded two refrigerator cars toward the Matson Line docks. Near the roundhouse near Pier 30, marksmen hugged the slanted stairs of the coal car. Fire trucks played high pressure hoses on thirty thousand strikers and their sympathizers. The employers’ group, the powerful Industrial Association, had agents riding with the police. Sirens screaming, Quinn’s shock troops, in a sweeping front south of Market Street and east of Second Street, marched over strikers who withered beneath gas and shotgun and machine gun fire.

  At 9:30 A.M., at Piers 38 and 40, picketers held their ground as mounted police, protected by a broadside of rifle and pistol fire, swept up Rincon. At 1:00 P.M., a pincher movement by two phalanxes of cops south and north closed upon the ILA headquarters at 113 Steuart Street. Police split heads with nightsticks, and mounted patrols ran over those who fell. Cornered, the strikers made a wild surge on a police car and rocked it until two police inspectors leaped out. “If any of you sons of bitches want to start something, come on!” one cop taunted and spun around, shotgun locked into his cheek. He kept his forehand elbow down under the fore end and the grip hand’s elbow out to his side. His weight was slightly forward as he fired. He dropped the shotgun to waist level and took a second shot from a low assault position. Discarding the shotgun, he fired slugs from his revolver until it was empty.

  Howard Sperry, a sailor, and Nick Counderakis, an unemployed cook, had just completed their shifts in the longshoremen’s relief kitchen when they were mortally wounded, Sperry at Steuart and Market streets and Counderakis near the corner of the Audiffred Building on Mission Street. Charles Olsen was hit in the arm, face, chest, and leg and lay near death. Thirty-two strikers were shot and over three score gassed or badly injured. “Still the strikers surged up and down the sunlit streets among thousands of foolhardy spectators,” the Chronicle’s Royce Brier wrote. “Panic gripped the east end of Market St. Soldiers in San Francisco. War in San Francisco.” By midnight tanks were rolling along the Embarcadero.

  On July 9, thousands marched somberly from the Ferry Building down Market Street to Valencia Street for Sperry and Counderakis’s funerals. Theaters, restaurants, and shops hung signs in sympathy: “Closed Till the Boys Win.” No streetcars, buses, or taxis were running. The only transportation were railroad-owned ferryboats, because they carried the U.S. mail from the southeast end of the Ferry Building. Federal law forbade their crews from striking.

  On July 17, two regiments from the 40th Infantry Division of the National Guard occupied the Embarcadero from Fisherman’s Wharf to China Basin. “If it is a question of you or the rioters, get them first,” Lieutenant Colonel David Hardy ordered his 159th Infantry and the 125th Coast Artillery troops. “If you are attacked clip them, then bayonet them, then use bullets.”

  They blocked both ends of Jackson Street from Drumm to Front with machine gun-mounted trucks and raided the ILA soup kitchen at 84 Embarcadero.

  Widespread violence ended two days later, and the strike two days after that. Ship owners agreed to settle by arbitration and Australian immigrant Harry Bridges, head of the ILA, sent his men back to work. The ILA gained control over the waterfront hiring halls, the key issue of the walkout. “San Francisco has stamped out without compromise an attempt to import into its life the very real danger of revolt,” said Mayor Rossi on national radio.

  On April 12, 1935, the city’s establishment praised Chief Quinn “for the strong stand he had taken against Communists during the summertime maritime strike.”

  His round, b
aby face beamed with pride. An hour later, Dullea got a call from Desmond and Kelleher. While combing shore-side dives and flea-bag hotels they had found three witnesses who had seen Bette Coffin with the Gorilla Man. They were to be in Dullea’s office first thing in the morning.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Putrefaction causes color changes and bloating. Often the features thicken until they are unrecognizable.

  —FORENSIC TEXT OF THE PERIOD

  ON April 13, eight days after the Bay Hotel murder, Dullea’s intense manhunt on the waterfront yielded the first sighting of Bette Coffin in those missing hours before she checked into the Bay Hotel. The three dock workers took chairs in Dullea’s office. Their hatred of the chief had been overridden by a sense of moral outrage that a woman they knew had been butchered. Besides, they liked Dullea.

  They had seen Bette about 11:00 P.M. the night of her murder at Fifth and Market streets, ten blocks from the Ferry Building. An hour later they spotted her again a block away at the Old Mint.9 The Chronicle clock tower cast light directly onto the steps under the portico where she sat with a stocky young man. His drunken laughter was so distinctive that the trio heard it long after the fog and rain had swallowed the couple up. The man’s face had been shadowed, so the crucial hours between 1:00 A.M. and 3:00 A.M., when Bette and her “husband” registered at the Bay Hotel, remained a mystery, but it did get Dullea to thinking.

  Had they been so drunk that they were turned away at various hotels until they were accepted at the Bay Hotel? La Tulipe compared the foggy east side of London’s Whitechapel and prostitutes and the foggy east side of San Francisco’s Embarcadero and prostitutes. More than fifty years earlier at 1:00 A.M. an inebriated Catherine Eddowes had been liberated from Bishopsgate Police Station. Turned away from her lodgings, she was drunkenly wandering Mitre Square when she met the Ripper.