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

by Robert Graysmith

  During a dry run over the KGO microphone, Quinn called patrol cars by number and told them to report to 111 Sutter Street, the NBC studio. Microphones in front of the station picked up the sound of the cars arriving and each driver reporting his arrival. Then he had a better idea. “What if we had high-powered radio-equipped autos patrolling all districts 24 hours a day and available for every police department?” he thought. “What if we had a radio channel dedicated to police communication and installed receivers in police cars? Then dispatches about crimes in progress could be flashed to officers on patrol.”

  Quinn put Ralph Wiley, chief of the Department of Electricity, in charge of KGPD, a shortwave radio station. Communications were forwarded from the SFPD’s private, low-frequency radio transmitter in the Jefferson Square Central Fire Alarm Station to twin Eiffel Towers to Quinn’s new Automotive Radio Patrol Unit—a fleet of nineteen radio cars, four solo motorcycles, and detail cars equipped with earphones. While radio car officers still could not talk to the dispatcher, the radio allowed several cars to simultaneously converge on a crime scene. In extreme emergencies KGPD could be patched into KGO on the NBC radio network to alert citizens.

  Day after day, the chief put his radio patrol cars and motorcycle officers through dry runs—how to surround a bank, wait for backup, and cut off all possible escape routes. Somehow he found funds for nine police operators to answer forty incoming phone lines. “If only we had money to hire extra men, money to finance prolonged manhunts across the continents and overseas,” he said. “We are striving toward it, but it is uphill work. However, year by year, we secure more alert recruits; we train them longer and more thoroughly, and we can obtain more modern equipment, employ more modern methods. Then and only then we might make more progress against crime.”13

  La Tulipe walked the marble corridor to the big corner office and knocked decisively. An hour later he thanked Chief Quinn and returned to his office heartened by his words. By July 1950, the SFPD would have spent over $100,000 to make LaTulipe’s lab the best in the state—a modern ballistics-comparison microscope, bell jars, meters, spectrographs, enlargers with bellows, and other machines for magnifying and evaluating evidence and catching criminals with invisible evidence.

  At the new ID Bureau, La Tulipe’s unidentified print from the Bay Hotel was compared to their foreign files (the FBI exchanged prints with sixty-eight countries) and was finally identified. It belonged to the missing Otto von Feldman, the former Bay Hotel porter, the one employee LaTulipe hadn’t printed. With that avenue closed, LaTulipe now began looking for strangulation/dissection murders comparable to Bette Coffin’s. Perhaps the Cleveland cases could teach him something about the kind of man who committed such brutal crimes and why he did what he did.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Bloating and disfiguration of the skin begins in a “floaters” fingertips within a few hours, and covers the complete hand in about twenty-four hours.

  —CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

  IN Cleveland, along Praha Avenue and Bragg Street at the foot of solitary, steep-sided Jackass Hill, people passed briskly if not at a trot. On Sweeney and Francis streets and across the Kingsbury Run on Kinsman Road neighbors heard laughter on Saturday night, January 25, 1936. It was a mirthless chuckle at first but took on such a heartless tone that folks cowered in their homes and children hid under their beds. Cautiously, some drew back their curtains and peeked out. A stooped figure carrying a sack was trudging along the curved rails at the turn. His tracks filled with snow behind him. The bare limbs of ice-encased trees shown like glass in the moonlight as he lumbered toward a deserted factory at 2315 East Twentieth Street. The temperature dropped further and hardly a soul was out but one.

  It was freezing Sunday morning and the temperatures in Cleveland the night before had plunged to near zero. The next night would be as cold. Raw winds whispered among the abandoned freight cars. Grass alongside the rails shivered with a brittle rattle. The howling of a dog rose to meet the frigid gale. Pedestrians near Charity Hospital turned up their coat collars against the piercing wind and rushed about their business. None of them paid much attention to Nick Albondante’s howling dog, Lady.

  Neighbors heard Lady’s howl up and down the east side of Central Avenue in the Third Ward, “The Roaring Third,” a torrid region of speakeasies and houses of prostitution that Ed Andrassy once frequented. At 11:00 A.M. a black woman entered the White Front Meat Market at 2002 Central. “There seems to be some hams setting outside near your back door in a couple of baskets,” she told the butcher. “You should bring them in.”

  “Sure,” Charles Page said, laying down his cleaver.

  Lady continued baying, her breath a frosty cloud, tiny sickles dripping from her nose. Behind the brick plant, Waite’s off duty cabs filled a bleak lot. Beyond, dense woods stretched to a double curve of railroad tracks and a line of corrugated metal sheds. In the distance, thirty feet in the air, an iron railway trestle spanned the tracks. Across it a train glided toward East Forty-ninth and the frozen knob of nearby Jackass Hill. A band of black children playing along the tracks heard Lady and ran up the snowy slope to see her scratching at two wicker baskets. At 11:20 A.M. Page stepped from his rear door.

  A minute later Sergeant McBride got Page’s call. “My God, there’s another body without a head,” he cried. “It’s in two half-bushel baskets behind the Hart factory. And it’s worse, much worse than those others.”

  He had instantly made the connection between the butcher murders and a body dumped near the tracks of the run. Orley May, and Lieutenant Harvey Weitzel started for the plant, but Sergeant Hogan, head of homicide since November, got there first. At 11:25 A.M., his howling siren died away in front of Crescent Manufacturing. Chief Matowitz’s patrol car, and cruisers D-2 and No. 3 converged right behind.

  Within the baskets were two burlap sacks containing a blackish-streaked package that accommodated a solidly frozen right arm, right hand, two thighs, and half a woman’s nude lower torso imbedded with coal dust. “O.K., begin the search for the missing legs and head because all we’ve got now is a bloody jigsaw puzzle,” Matowitz said.

  “The same thin curved knife was used,” said Pearce. “The head was severed between the third and forth vertebrae in the same professional manner.”

  But were the incisions truly professional? Even the great London forensic expert Lord Spilsbury had erred in judging a similar dismemberment. At Charing Cross Station someone had checked a round-topped, wickerwork trunk. Inside was a stout female body divided into large pieces at each shoulder and hip joint. The constable who found the body took his job seriously; he refused to allow the remains to be removed until a surgeon certified she was dead. “Clean dismemberment of parts suggests an experienced slaughter man,” Spilsbury wrote but, after finding hesitation cuts, corrected his assessment. “Two tentative cuts, one opening the peritoneum and the second at the back of the right knee, should have told me the operator was unskilled.”

  Cuyahoga County Coroner Sam Gerber concluded their impossibly strong, right-handed killer had been in a state of fury. After breaking the skin, he wrenched her arm from its shoulder socket, roughly disarticulated her knee joints, and fractured the midportion of her lower legs.

  Fingerprints on the severed right hand matched those of an Ashtabula, Ohio, native, Mrs. Florence Sawdey Polillo (aka Florence Martin, Flo Ghent, Florence Ballagher, Flo Davis, and Clara Dunn). Her file listed arrests for vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and prostitution. The stocky forty-two-year-old, who had dyed chestnut hair and brown eyes, was currently on relief and resided somewhere in the slums. Heavy snowflakes were flattening on stoops by the time Nevel and Hogan located her rooming house at 3205 Carnegie Avenue. Mrs. Ford, a red-haired and fiery tempered landlady, answered Nevel’s knock.

  “What do you want?” she snapped.

  “Take it easy! This isn’t an arrest,” said Nevel. “We want some information about Sawdey Polillo. She had a room here.”

  “She owe
s me a month’s rent and she run out on me a week ago. Maybe if you find her, you’ll get my dollar and a half back.”

  “You’re never going to lay eyes on that dollar and a half. Mrs. Polillo is dead. We found her torso in some old baskets this morning. Did anyone come to see her recently?”

  “Well, sure, lots of men came to see her, but not during the last week. She had a few boyfriends—Martin a tall, blond truck driver with the Cleveland Transfer, a lover named Eddie and a Great Lakes sailor named Harry.”

  Until four weeks earlier a peddler lived with her until he threatened to “cut her all up.” Mrs. Ford last saw Flo on Friday at 8:30 P.M. “Sawdey was a heavy drinker and argued a lot when she was drunk,” she said. “Her only bad habit was that she would occasionally get a quart of liquor and drink it all by her lonesome in her room. When she was drinking she was pecky—quarrelsome. But Saturdays she usually stayed home and ironed.”

  Upstairs in a tidy furnished room Nevel and Hogan found a dozen smiling dolls arranged on the davenport, bed, and chairs. Each had her own name neatly printed on a card. Hogan fingerprinted the clock, kitchenette stove, even the grinning dolls.

  On Tuesday, Flo’s ex-husband, Andrew Polillo, a mail clerk, drove in from Buffalo to identify the torso. He hadn’t seen her since she walked out on him six years earlier, but he knew about an old abdominal scar from the removal of a tumor “It’s her,” he said.

  At 5:45 P.M., February 7, a Bennett Trucking Company employee passed behind a vacant house at 1419 Orange Avenue SE and stumbled over a heap in a slight depression strewn with chicken feathers, coal dust, hay, and charcoal. Beneath were Mrs. Polillo’s lower legs and left arm frozen to the ground. Police never found her missing head. Chief Matowitz said, “There is nothing for us to do but wait. Some day he will make some little slip.”

  His worst fear was that the butcher had chosen his victims indiscriminately. But the seemingly random victims were linked—Matowitz just didn’t know it yet.

  THIRTY

  In America, as in Europe, sex crime became increasingly frequent after the end of the First World War. The American police . . . found it difficult to deal with. Sex crime often appears to be motiveless.

  —CRIMES AND PUNISHMENT

  ONE Friday neighbors saw Fell looking refreshed and strumming his mandolin on the lawn. Wherever he had been, he had taken along his multiple personalities like well-worn luggage and probably opened each at least once. He stretched in the vaporous evening and began his exercises: a series of jumping jacks, thrusts, and deep knee bends. Yet, Fell still could not bring himself to sleep inside the house. All would be remedied if he could convince someone to move in with him. He asked his co-workers at the San Mateo gas station, but no one was interested. This stung the likable Fell because it indicated a lessening of his powers of persuasion and charm. It was for the best. He feared what he might say in his sleep that someone might overhear. It was an impossible situation—alone he couldn’t sleep and with someone he dared not sleep.

  Fell, under the nickname “Bromo,” was now a full-time student at San Mateo Junior College. First he charmed Dean Taggert of the University of San Mateo to enroll him “in order to complete a geology course to be financed by an oil executive.” The boisterous freshman was so popular, students nominated him as a candidate for class president (he would be defeated by a female student). “At one of our highjinks,” said a class-mate later, “everyone wanted Bromo to enter a hog-calling contest because he was so brilliant at it.”

  The handsome weightlifter, now twenty-seven years old, was truly not himself these days. A year ago he’d been smitten with Wilma Heaton, a pert girl at Vallecita Place in Berkeley. Wilma’s mother recalled that her daughter met Fell while he was working in a Richmond auto plant. “He impressed me as quite gentlemanly,” she said, “but he seemed a little too mysterious.”

  On Valentine’s Day, Fell appeared at the Alameda County Hospital where Wilma was a waitress. “I have an appointment to meet with Ben after work,” she told him, “and I can’t keep our engagement this evening.”

  “Who’s Ben?” Fell ran to his car and returned with a gun under his coat. One moment he was threatening Wilma; the next moment he was begging for forgiveness. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Wilma” he cried. “I couldn’t bear the opportunity of hurting anyone or anything. I’d like to hunt you with a camera, not a gun.” To prove this he dashed outside again and stowed the pistol away. He returned with pictures of a yacht floating before an island. “I promise you,” he said, “we’ll go on a tropical cruise.”

  Another lie. For weeks Fell had been attempting to trade the Woodside bungalow for a powerful cabin cruiser, though he knew conflicting claims on the property made such an exchange illegal.

  When Oakland fireman Benjamin Larsen arrived for his date with Wilma, Fell shouted, “I’m going to kill you.”

  When Larsen phoned the police, Sergeant Herman Bernstein and Patrolman Vince Spooner responded. “That man has threatened to kill Miss Heaton whom he is waiting to see and who has spurned his attention,” Larsen said. He pointed out Fell lurking at the entrance.

  “He said he would kill me,” Wilma said, “and then kill Ben if I didn’t go out with him. I don’t want to prosecute. I just want him out of here.”

  After a brief struggle, Bernstein and Spooner wrestled him into another room. While Spooner kept him covered, Bernstein searched Fell’s car.

  He popped open the glove compartment and discovered a .38-caliber revolver. Fell only grinned. He produced a badge, deputy’s credentials, proof he was a night watchman, and a permit to carry the gun signed by San Mateo County Sheriff James J. McGrath, the fattest sheriff in these parts. All the cops could do was escort him to the city limits and warn him not to return to Alameda County. Fell laughed as he sped away, but his ears were burning. He was not used to being rebuffed by any woman and it made him angrier than he could remember.

  On February 17, he drove to the Redwood City public library. “I’m looking for this book on poisons,” he told librarian Clara P. Dills, “A Manual of Toxicology by Albert Harrison Brundage.”

  “We’ll have to request that particular book from the state library in Sacramento.”

  “Well, hurry! I’ve got to have that book before March 15.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to expedite it.” Dills put a rush tag on it.

  Fell had urgent use for that book, but for whom? Did he intend to poison Wilma Heaton who had spurned him? Or was it for someone he had yet to meet?

  Ten days later Fell took one of his frequent nighttime rides at a point above El Camino Real near San Jose. As he turned round a wide bend his lights framed a lovely young woman down on her knees. Her travel-worn suitcase had burst and scattered her belongings. She stood as he pulled over, shielded her eyes and studied the handsome man in the headlights. He was tall and perfectly made. She was twenty-five years old (though she looked nineteen), petite (about 112 pounds), with mousy dark brown hair, high cheekbones, long eyelashes, big eyes, and a ready smile with a little too much lipstick. She wore blue denim, bell-bottom hiking pants instead of a skirt. The bicycling craze two years earlier had given California girls an excuse to wear trousers like Marlene Dietrich’s. She had rolled her white cotton socks over the tops of black dancing shoes, and Fell could hear their taps click on the pavement. Across her scoop-neck sweater she had a picture of the Bambino, “the Sultan of Swat,” slamming a ball out of the park. George Herman Ruth had hit 714 homers in his twenty-two professional seasons. In 1930 and 1931, when everyone else was out of work, “The Babe” was making $85,000 a season. Fell loved the Babe, even though he had been in a slow decline since 1927. “Roots still in there,” Ruth once said on live radio. “He breezes the first two pitches by—both strikes. The mob’s tearing down Wrigley Field. I shake my fist after that first strike. After the second I point my bat at those bellerin’ bleachers—right where I aim to park the ball. I hit that fuckin’ ball on the nose—right over the fuckin’ fence
for two fuckin’ runs.”

  “That’s odd apparel for thumbing a ride,” Fell said. “More like a stage costume.”

  “I wear this outfit when I compete in walkathons,” she said.

  “I’m Jerry,” he called as he flashed a fake card that said he was a deputy sheriff. That relaxed her.

  “I’m Boots,” she said, though she used different monikers during her wanderings: Dorothy Farnum, Dorothy Farmen, and Dorothy Wanworthy. Like Fell, her names were as interchangeable as hats. Boots’s real name was Winifred Hemmer, though from age two to fourteen she had lived in a Grand Rapids, Michigan, orphanage as “Dorothy Hemmer.” “I’ve three brothers and sisters, but I don’t know where to find them,” she told Fell. “I know nothing about any other members of my family, or if there are any at all.”

  “That’s my story too. What’s the rest of yours?”

  For the previous two years, Boots had been hitchhiking around the country living in hobo jungles and riding the railroad brake beams from Michigan to Florida to California to Washington State and back down to California. She eked out a meager living as a walkathon champion and itinerant marathon dancer. In December, Boots had taken third prize at the North Bend, Oregon, walkathon and so had a little money. “I have to conserve it,” she said, patting the cash in her breast pocket. Fell was intrigued. He had been scratching around for money like a chicken after feed and not only that she was cute. Boots, a stage performer of specialty songs and dances, was headed for San Francisco to enter a dance competition and talent show.