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

by Robert Graysmith

  “Did you find the head?” said Nevel.

  “No! My God! Here’s another body.”

  The second male, nude, headless, on its stomach, had been cleanly dismembered at the shoulder by cuts around the flexure of the joints. All the skin edges, muscles, blood vessels, and cartilage had been cut squarely. The head had been severed by a long, sharp knife through the intervertebral discs, then wrenched completely out of the joint cavity by a powerful twist. Musil flipped over the second butchered corpse—emasculated, too. Both sets of severed genitals lay together.

  The first victim was young and lanky, his wrists marked by rope burns. The second fiftyish and heavyset, had unmarked wrists. The older victim’s tattoos suggested he was a sailor. His torso was also painted with a pinkish, odd-smelling fluid that came off on Musil’s fingers. “Some kind of lubricating oil?”

  May discovered a two-gallon water bucket half-filled with the same sticky substance.10 “I think it’s meant to preserve the body,” Nevel said. “If so it failed.”

  The gases of decomposition emitted a nauseating odor. Putrefaction had advanced from a greenish discoloration to a general darkening and bloating of the whole body. The darkened veins looked like Venetian marble. Bacteria in the intestinal tract had multiplied, breaking down tissues and was now busy reducing the corpse to its basic chemical compounds. The sun and insect life had done the rest, but not all. Someone had tried to set the body on fire.

  “After luring his victim to his home with promises of money or sex or drink,” theorized Nevel, “he strips his victim of clothes, immobilizes him in some way, then emasculates him with a surgeon’s scalpel. He cuts his victim’s neck, severs it before he can cry out, and with the next stroke and a strong right hand twist beheads his victim.”

  The killer had been sane enough to bring rope, a railway lantern, and a bucket of preservative. Jackass Hill was an odd choice for a dumping ground. Nevel had seen sectioned bodies disposed of at widely separated points—backyards and basements, rubbish heaps and rivers, farms and fields, even a swamp. Two months earlier, two young wards of the Carmelite Orphanage at Hammond, Indiana, were passing through the swamp where Al Capone hoodlums John Scalisi, Albert Anselmi, and Joseph Guinta had been dumped when they found a dead man in a basket. His legs had been cut off and a knotted rope drawn tightly around his neck. The victim, missing Chicago grocery clerk Ervin Lang, had been slain elsewhere. Lang’s mother-in-law, Blanche Dunkel, had lured him to Evelyn Smith’s apartment, doped him with whisky and ether, strangled him, and sawed off his legs, which she packed in a little trunk.

  As the sun slipped behind the shapeless knoll, Coroner Arthur J. Pearce, mustached and jowly, reached Jackass Hill. At night, the sounds of the dreary run were amplified—the rustle of small animals and the staccato click of trains on distant tracks and the lonely call of their whistles. Stitt and Hill dug by flashlight and, in a shallow grave, found the young man’s head. Stitt lifted it by its hair. Flashing wigwag signals and the checkerboard lights of a passing Shaker Heights commuter train revealed their ghastly expressions. Caught against the swaying treetops the mouth held an ironic smile, clouded eyes looking sightlessly at their own truncated body. The older man’s head was seventy feet from its body in an exaggerated stage of decay—sagging dead skin and the right eye squeezed shut as if winking.

  “And these fellas were emasculated and decapitated while they were still alive,” said Nevel.

  The wind rose, a whispering laugh among the willows.

  DETECTIVE May was exhausted, yet oddly excited. Detectives Blackwell and Stubley had spent the late evening questioning workers in the Erie Railway shops while he went up-spill to a huge encampment where a few inelegant wooden bridges spanned the trench. The Flats District, the valley formed by the river, was home to a hard-nosed colony of casual workers, alcoholics, addicts, ex-cons, and down-and-outers. They survived off refuse dumps lining the gully. From the Erie Railroad tracks this Hooverville of lean-tos, dilapidated board shanties, oiled-paper tents, and corrugated metal houses crept up the steep slope.

  At the crossroad, May smelled sewage from the gully. “Its filth blows in the winds, assails the nostrils, and offends the eyes,” locals said of the Run.

  From beneath the dry sand, came the sound of rushing waters. He listened to the rhythmic burbling of the underground sewers as he scanned the dark windows of packing case huts and linoleum houses. Chicken feathers eddied in little windstorms. Rats scurried beneath makeshift flooring. Dogs growled. Just beneath Commercial and Canal Roads vagrants had burrowed caves into the cliffside. Against May’s light they pulled their tarpaper doors shut.

  Nearby, Jackass Hill towered bare and forbidding, hunched like an ape. On its summit one house was lit. In the early minutes of Tuesday, September 24, May canvassed it. Out front, a housewife gazed over the bleakness of the Run. Streets in neighborhoods near the Run were rarely lit, and those that were were lit as poorly as Ed Andrassy’s street.

  “Have you seen anyone on the hill?” May asked.

  “Sunday night,” she said, “I saw two men coming up the slope. They’d just seen a man below wiping his hands on a bloody towel and wanted me to call the police, but I refused. I thought they were making the story up.”

  May slid to where the two boys had made their grim find. The clang-clang-clang from the cross-back at the grade crossing warned him before he was blinded by a blaze of light. A train flew by. For two hours he scoured the hillside, came up empty-handed and disgusted, returned to his car, and drove to the Cleveland morgue.

  Coroner Pearce was completing postmortems on numbers 44996 and 44997. Both had been expertly decapitated with a swift, confident stroke by a curved scalpel between the third and fourth vertebrae. The fact that both victims had suffered an emasculation operation before death puzzled Pearce. “This element doesn’t fit into the picture of a sex-crazed killer,” he thought. “Then again the emasculation suggests a lust murderer—that’s a motive of sorts.”

  As far as he could tell, the motive was not lust, revenge, or money. “These crimes are something new in the modern annals of crime in the U.S., not sex murders, but motiveless murders.”

  The motive was that there was no motive.

  At 9:00 P.M. Chief Matowitz, Nevel, May, and Sergeant James T. Hogan studied Pearce’s findings. Hogan was the toughest third-degree man on the force, but now his lean Yankee face was chalk white; his dark hair streaked with sweat. The younger victim was Ed Andrassy who, for his last meal, had eaten vegetables, the main diet of the Flats District vagrants.

  “For some reason the killer didn’t care if we learned who Andrassy was,” Nevel said, “yet he removed every mark of identification from the older victim who must have had some connection to the murderer. Until we can find who the older victim is, we must learn everything we can about Andrassy. The severe rope burns on his wrists showed he had been tied, awake, and struggling when decapitated. He was lured to his death and struck unawares, perhaps even given a ‘mickey,’ chloral hydrate. Andrassy knew the killer and whatever means he employed to incapacitate his victims and would have been forewarned. That’s why he had to dope Andrassy and tie his hands. Ed was a very morbid young man and might have been involved in the first murder.”

  The older victim had been killed three weeks before Andrassy. “Maybe he left a clue behind. If he knew the identity of the fiendish killer he took that secret to his grave.”

  Inspector Nevel drove to the Andrassy home. “Edward knew he was going to die,” the mother moaned. “Four or five days ago . . . last Wednesday, a man came to the door. Edward was frightened of him . . . I didn’t like his eyes.” She repeated his description, that of a gorilla with heavy brows, and recalled his weird laugh.

  “He must have been lying in wait and watching your house,” Nevel said.

  Andrassy had been killed the first night he set foot outside. Using his medical ID badge, Ed often took advantage of women in the guise of administering a physical examination. One gyn
ecological exam of an acquaintance’s wife ended in sodomy just as her husband surprised them. “Perhaps,” Mrs. Andrassy said, “the man who came to our door was the outraged husband of one of those unfortunate women. We don’t know any of Edward’s friends. I do know he used to work in a hospital.”

  The killer had demonstrated surgical skill, but Ed had been a hospital orderly, not a doctor.

  By dawn, Nevel had matched every name in Ed’s address book with a phone number. Andrassy had a “boy friend” named “Eddie” who sold the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly. Or was “Eddie” only Ed? Mrs. Andrassy, in tears, pushed the mug books away, able to recall only her visitor’s haunting laugh. A Cleveland newspaper named the killer “The Butcher,” associating the animalistic qualities of the crimes with that profession.

  Chief Matowitz believed both victims had been beheaded in a soundproof and private place. “Somewhere in this city,” he said, “is a murder laboratory. We’ve got to find that hidden lab before he uses it again.”

  Hogan was to find the knife—a short, high, curved scimitar-shaped knife like the Persian shamshir. The majority of Cleveland’s million citizens were foreign born, some eighty nationalities making steel. Large tracts of Persian, Polish, Turkish, Lithuanian, Russian, Syrian, Greek, and Bohemian immigrants sprawled near the Run.

  Detectives Peter Merylo and Martin Zalewski, the latter a former beat cop in the Jackass Hill area, began the search there. Zalewski spoke seven eastern European languages; Merylo was nearly as proficient. Because the odd dust on the older victim’s clothes originated around railroad tracks and flophouses, they visited every dive, slum, hobo camp, and rail yard. Chemists subjected his clothes to tests, unaware that some laundry’s unique symbols can be invisible, printed in a patented ink revealed only under ultraviolet or infrared light. On November 23, when the Missing Persons Bureau failed to match him with any missing person on file in Ohio, his prints were airmailed to the newly named FBI in Washington. At roughly the same time in San Francisco, La Tulipe sent the FBI the single unidentified print he had found in room 309 of the Bay Hotel. The Federal Identification Bureau prided itself in answering all queries within thirty-six hours, except those from the Pacific Coast. “Always a bridesmaid,” thought La Tulipe.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Anthropometry is the science of fingerprints. In the 1930s the theory that the shape of the third or ungual phalanx of the finger was unique to each individual was considered a surefire method of identification.

  —CRIME LAB HANDBOOK OF 1937

  THE tall, silver-haired criminalist, reading glasses tilted on his brow, counted the modest tools at his disposal in his SFPD lab—outdated texts and unreliable equipment, everything taped, tacked, nailed, patched, and jury-rigged or invented by himself. LaTulipe envied the new bureau with it unlimited budget.

  Arguably J. Edgar Hoover became the FBI’s first director because of prison official A. J. Renoe’s limited budget. From November 1923 to July 1924, the Department of Justice employed as custodians of the Federal Identification Bureau housed at Leavenworth Penitentiary at Kansas the most unlikely examiners of all. The ID file was run by convicts inside the prison. Budgetary constrictions had compelled Renoe to rely on “trusties” to conduct print comparisons for authorities from coast to coast. In 1903 New York’s Sing Sing Prison (then Napanoch, Clinton, and Auburn Prisons) adopted fingerprints as a means of infallible identification. A year later, St. Louis became the first major American city to convert completely to fingerprints. U.S. law enforcement had been slow to recognize the value of fingerprints as an evidentiary tool, favoring instead Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry system, a complex series of eleven caliper measurements of bony lengths of the face and body to differentiate individuals from each other. All that had changed when an African American prisoner, Will West, arrived at Leavenworth to serve a life sentence for murder and discovered another William West already there serving a life sentence for murder. The faces and bone measurements of both were perfectly alike. Only their fingerprints were different.

  In May 1923 New York City Police Commissioner Richard Enright, head of the International Police Conference (IPC), called for a meeting of the powerful International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) to remedy the fingerprint situation.11 A few days later Major Richard Sylvester, superintendent of the Metropolitan Police in Washington, D.C., barged into Assistant Attorney General Rush L. Holland’s office. The hawk-profiled, long-haired jurist listened as Sylvester described the scandalous work being done by Leavenworth convicts. Holland sent for his close friend Chief Hugh D. Harper of Colorado Springs, who was returning to El Paso County by way of Washington. “When a particular record vanishes from the files,” Harper said as he settled his considerable weight into a chair, “I am certain convicts who are naturally not sympathetic with police activity have destroyed it.”

  “I’ve just spoken to Major Sylvester,” said Holland. “He suggested Leavenworth’s records be consolidated with the makeshift fingerprint bureau being maintained by the IACP in Washington. I want you to personally take over the print bureau at Leavenworth.”

  “No. It’s in horrible shape,” said Harper, aghast. “It’s not a job for one man. It’s a job for the government.”

  “Then who? What if I detail William J. Burns, head of the Bureau of Investigation, to the June meeting?”

  “Mr. Burns does not stand ‘ace-high’ with many of the chiefs. If he went to Buffalo he would merely antagonize them. But there is an assistant to Mr. Burns named J. Edgar Hoover, a bright, efficient young fellow and very affable. The Chiefs would take more kindly to Hoover than Burns.”

  “Now that you mention it, I do prefer his company.” Holland called Hoover “Speed” because he rushed in, rattled off his words with Gatlinggun rapidity, then whisked himself out. He didn’t know Hoover spoke fast to mask a crippling stutter. Sharp-featured, bulldoglike and stout with black curly hair, Hoover came down, chatted with the two men for fifteen minutes, then left like a rocket. “You know, Hugh, he always reminds me of ‘Off again, on again, gone again, Finnigan.’ But he’s intelligent, has a splendid personality and the drive it will take to put the matter over in the proper way. Yes, Hoover is the properly qualified man to send.”

  In Buffalo Commissioner Enright advocated a national repository of fingerprints be housed within the Department of the Interior. The powerful IACP, which favored the DOJ, won out.

  “Do we have any legal right to move the present fingerprint bureau from Leavenworth Prison to Washington?” Attorney General Harry A. Daugherty asked Holland.

  “Yes, I checked with various acts of Congress and I couldn’t find anything that denied the Attorney General such authority. Naturally, the appropriation for maintaining the bureau is carried in the appropriation for the Leavenworth penitentiary and that ties it pretty close to that institution.”

  “Well, some of our political friends out that neck of the woods will probably raise heck about it.”

  “Well, dammit, General,” Holland said, “I’ll be the goat and take all the blame.”

  “You will do nothing of the kind!” said Daugherty. “Take the bull by the horns and I’ll stand back of you.” With that he authorized Holland to ship the convict fingerprint records from Leavenworth to the Washington bureau and discard their two hundred thousand Bertillon measurements “into the limbo of forgotten things and useless antiquities.”

  In September, the IACP, using DOJ funds, transported their records of 150,000 fingerprints to Washington and consolidated them with the Leavenworth file of 650,000 prints. The result, “pretty much a jumble,” was run by two employees who tied fingerprint cards into 50,000-card bundles and stacked them in the corner. For six months the nation was without any identification bureau at all.

  When Daugherty entangled the bureau in the Teapot Dome Scandal, President Calvin Coolidge forced him to resign. “Daugherty left the government service,” Holland said, “the most cruelly and brutally maligned man I have ever known i
n public life.”

  On May 10, 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named J. Edgar Hoover as acting director of the Bureau of Investigation. He strong-armed Congress into funding a permanent Identification Division within the Bureau, then negotiated with William A. Pinkerton and St. Louis Chief Martin O’Brien to consolidate the bureau’s existing fingerprint files with the IACP records. With Congress’s first subsidy of $56,000, twenty-one new employees were added to the Identification Division in the Old Railroad Building.

  On November 24, 1932, the lab—with a borrowed microscope, ultraviolet light equipment, and a helixometer (to examine the inside of gun barrels) that did not work—was finally up and running. By November 1935, the lab had $100,000 of new equipment and was able to compare the Jackass Hill victim’s prints with its five million fingerprint records. There was no match .12 Next his prints went to a new Civil Identification Section (140,000 prints of government employees, military recruits, and civil defense workers and 30,000 prints of civilians who had volunteered as a precautionary measure). The Single Latent Fingerprint Section included partial fingerprints and palm prints. When John Dillinger had his fingers scarified with skin grafts and acid, his prints still showed a sufficient number of points to establish positive identification. But the Jackass Hill victim’s prints were not in these files either. The tattooed sailor would never be identified.

  THAT same day, LaTulipe decided to approach Chief Quinn about his poor lab equipment. He had to admit Quinn did have some far-reaching ideas. A long string of loan company and bank holdups two years earlier had given him an idea of how to combine his two great loves: police work and radio.

  At that time, the only way to dispatch officers already in the field was to have uniformed vehicular units call stations through pay phones and request instructions. Quinn’s idea was that they use commercial radio to summon police. Regular radio programming would be interrupted, a gong sounded, and listeners would hear the chief say: “Neighbors and friends hearing this broadcast will confer a great favor on the police department by notifying all police officers of this message . . .” Within a few moments, the streets near the various police headquarters were thronged with reporting officers and volunteer citizens.