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

by Robert Graysmith

  The detectives, who knew they sat in a house of death, became silent again. The psychological war between the detectives and their suspect continued.

  “You know,” said McGrath, “funny thing about those blowflies.” He laced his fingers over his ample belly, lifted his chins, and peered upward. The flies continued to circle and lose themselves in the dark corners of the bungalow. “Now I wonder what they are doing. I wonder . . .” he tilted his head farther back. Everyone followed suit. More minutes of silence elapsed as everyone studied the flies. Round and round.

  Now the cops began to speak again, not of a confession, but about prime bangtail. Fell was having a fine time. Because most cops on the SFPD were Irish, he told his Irish jokes. “What’s an Irish beauty?” he asked and answered, “A woman with two black eyes.” “What’s Irish confetti?” he asked and answered, “Bricks.”

  Drinks went round and everyone drank until McGrath and his men put down their glasses, fell silent, and studied the circling flies again. Transfixed, Fell followed their gaze. “Now I wonder about those flies,” said the sheriff. “I wonder what they’re doing.”

  “Stop it! Stop looking at those damned flies,” Fell cried. “Stop talking about them.” He pointed his finger at the light, then darted it from man to man accusingly. “Stop looking at them! Stop looking at me that way . . . let me think . . . let me think.” He folded his arms like a child.

  After more chatter and another silent treatment, Fell put his head between his hands. The only sound was the monotonous buzzing of flies.

  “Well, Jerry,” said the sheriff with his biggest smile, “aren’t you going to tell us what you did with the body.”

  “No, I’m not and you’re never going to find it! You’ll never find it, because I won’t tell you where it is.” He thought about what he had said, then laughed at himself and looked a little sheepish. His friends seemed disappointed in him.

  Close to midnight, Fell stood solemnly. “All right, fellows,” he said calmly as all his breath ran out, “if you want it, I’ll give it to you.”

  Girven reopened his pad, licked the tip of his pencil, and poised to take shorthand. McGrath lit a cigarette and took a puff. Britt looked the saddest Maloney had ever seen him. “You were right,” Fell said haltingly. He put both hands on the table palms down and sat down. His eyes were wet. “Yes, I killed her—but you’ll never find the body. I have taken good care of that. I killed her with a poker, but her death was an accident. I returned to the darkened house on the night of last June 13—a night I will never forget. Ada had told me I could come up that night and leave some things. She was getting ready to leave almost any day. When I drove up in front of the cottage there wasn’t a light about the place. That struck me as funny.” He chuckled throughout at himself and at the oddness of the events that had brought him to the remote bungalow with his friends.

  “As I walked into the living room I had a ‘sixth sense’ feeling that somebody else was in there, although I couldn’t have seen my hand in front of my face. I sensed the presence of two persons in the room. I still couldn’t see. Then somebody sloughed me. It felt as if somebody had crowned me with a sandbag. I was dazed, but went down fighting. I fell to the floor and I guess I must have fallen in front of the fireplace. I felt my hand close over the poker. I don’t know how it got in my hand. Anyway I grabbed the poker, and came up fighting. Again I sensed—still I couldn’t see—that someone was standing in front of me. I couldn’t see a thing but I began swinging thinking I was hitting at a man. I lashed out with the poker and it hit something. I struck again quickly and I hit again! I heard a body thud to the floor. Then I heard someone burst through the French doors there in the back.” Fell pointed toward the room where Boots was sequestered out of earshot.

  “I heard him run out and away. There was enough moonlight outside for me to see. I saw a husky man as big as myself running away with a saber in his hand and slashing at the darkness behind him. I was still a little punch drunk from the blow I had received and it took me a minute or two to pull myself together. Finally I turned on the lights and saw Mrs. Rice lying on the floor, clad only in a pair of step-ins. She was almost naked. Blood was running from her nose and ears. Her head had been bashed in with a heavy fireplace poker. I had killed Mrs. Rice.”

  Fell explained how he wrapped the body in a quilt and sat down to think things out. “It looked bad,” he told Britt and the others, “although my conscience was clear. How could I explain how I came to kill a woman in her own home? Would anybody believe the truth?” He feared the authorities would discover he’d served time in the Alcatraz disciplinary barracks in 1931 and hold that against him. “Well, I figured it all out and decided the only thing to do now was to hide that body where no one would ever find it.”

  He felt confident people knew Mrs. Rice had planned to take a trip and lease the cabin to him while he went to college. Later he could say he received a report that she’d died abroad and in that way explain everything.

  “I carried her body out, loaded it in the back seat of my sedan and drove down the Skyline Boulevard. I knew the country pretty well and I knew a good spot to hide it.” He paused and looked each of them in the eye. “Say, if you want a sensation, fellas, try hauling a corpse around the country at night and have the owls hooting overhead. Whoo-ooo! Whoo-OO-OOO! Hooooot! I can still hear those owls laughing at me. Say, I haven’t had any breakfast yet. You guys got any gum?” Britt shook his head. It was silent except for the buzzing flies until Fell continued.

  “I turned off at the Saratoga Gap and onto a side road, turned four miles on the road to Big Basin. I lugged the body away from the car a piece and rolled it down the hill into a canyon, then drove back to the cottage and went to sleep.” All the next day he thought about his problem and finally decided to fix the body so that nobody would ever find it. “I left her nude body under the trees for two nights. The next night I went into Palo Alto and stole two bags of lime from a warehouse and went back on a motorcycle bringing along a shovel.” When he found the body just as he left it, he dug a little foxhole through the grass about three feet deep and broke the shovel handle in the process. He couldn’t make the grave deep enough, so Fell buried her in jackknife fashion, with her head down and hands behind her back. “I loaded the grave with lime and put the lady in it. Then I poured the rest of the lime over her and covered that with dirt. Then I kicked the rest of the lime around so it wouldn’t be noticed and left.”

  That seemed to be the story. The sheriff got up and went back to talk with Boots, a woman he considered a “tough proposition, one of the toughest” he’d ever stumbled across.

  “It’s nobody’s business I lived with him,” Boots told him. “It is strictly my own and nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to discuss. He treated me all right and was very much the gentleman. Why, there wasn’t a thing improper in our relationship.”

  “Did you know he was a confessed murderer?”

  Her eyes grew large; the slender girl flushed. “Goodness, no.” She paused. “He isn’t. Aw, you’re kidding me, aren’t you? T’aint so! Why, it can’t be so. Why . . . why. . . I refuse to believe it. I don’t believe it!” She shook her head violently. “Anyway, I don’t know anything about it. I thought I was safe when Jerry invited me to stay.” She ran her hand through mousy hair. “Is it so? That nice fellow?”

  “It’s so. He said he’s going to lead us to the spot where Mrs. Rice is buried.”

  The petite woman’s eyes grew wider. “I am sure he never would have harmed me. My suitcase fell apart,” she said, “and he gave me another. The writing on it said, ‘Ada French Rice.’” The attractive girl rambled on. After a minute or so she said, “I’m going to have to start keeping a diary. That’s the one thing I haven’t got even if I have been traveling for two years.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Shucks, no—I don’t hardly know the fellow. I didn’t even learn his real name. I just called him Jerry.”

  “Have y
ou ever been in trouble before?”

  “I’m not in trouble now am I?”

  “Have you ever been in jail before?”

  “No.”

  “Well you are now, as a material witness.”

  She shrugged. “You’ve got to learn to take it on the chin,” she said. “I’m used to that. There are good and bad people all over the country. That I lived with Jerry is strictly my business and nothing to be ashamed of or nothing to discuss. As far as I can tell it’s simply something that’s causing a great deal of fuss for no apparent reason. It’s just a lark. But I tell you I yearn for the road right now. I just know I’m going to miss the Dallas walkathon.”

  Fell entered and smiled at Boots. “All right, Sheriff. Come ahead. I’ll show you where it is.” He led the way to the sheriff’s auto. McGrath, Maloney, and Britt followed. “Well, Jimmy,” Fell said to Britt, “Win, lose or draw, we’ll still be friends. I’m going to Hollywood when I get through here.” He sat next to McGrath and Britt took the wheel.

  Following Fell’s directions, they drove down Skyline Boulevard under a high moon. Every tree was tinged with silver. Four miles south of Saratoga Gap close to the Santa Cruz County line at the junction of Skyline Boulevard and Boulder Creek Road was a desolate area. As they drove, they could hear the rush of the nearby San Lorenzo River. Finally, about eleven miles northeast of Saratoga, Fell asked Britt to turn off the main highway onto a lonely side road. Two hundred feet along the narrow twisting path and about fifty feet from the highway, he raised his hand and signaled. “Stop here,” he said. “In there.”

  All four stepped into a region of wild mountains and dense growth. Fell led the group a hundred yards off the road to the rim of an embankment, then halted. His bravado had faded. He would go to the edge but no farther and tottered there as if held by an invisible hand. “The body is down there,” he said in a choked voice. Fell took the sheriff’s flashlight and shone it below. With the light he directed Britt and Maloney as they descended the steep incline. The beam crawled over the ragged surface until it settled on the bank of a little ravine.

  Fell remained above with McGrath, who was too fat to make the descent. “No, not there, Tom” Fell said, pointing with the light. “Four feet over.” He was shaking now in the heat and the light darted nervously. “A little more to the right. Over there. Hold it. There!” The beam circled on a white pile of powder by a slight depression. “There she is, right there. . . . I don’t want to see the body. I know everything’s just as I left it because I dropped out this way about three weeks ago and found everything O.K. But when you come out to get her you’d better bring better equipment than I did.” His booming laugh echoed through the canyons. “That acid has had plenty of time to work. I had to bend her like a jackknife to make her fit.”

  Britt confirmed that the scattered powder was caustic quicklime, the residue of two bags. “Well, he didn’t fool us,” called the sheriff. “If the lime is there the body must be there. It can wait. This is all we need. We’ll let the coroner take care of this. Come on back.” Britt and Maloney clawed their way up the steep incline to the car.

  “Thanks, Jerry,” said McGrath. “You told the truth.” He patted his shoulder. Fell was as embarrassed as a schoolboy.

  “I don’t know why I couldn’t leave the road and approach the grave,” Fell apologized. “I guess I was afraid I’d get my best suit soiled.” He began a slow soft shoe dance on the gravel—dancing on the grave of his victim. “Oh, Jerry, Jerry,” said Britt. Minutes later they all started back to the county jail.

  “How many bodies have they found down there?” Fell asked as they drove.

  “Two,” Maloney lied.

  “How do they look, pretty good?” Fell turned to the sheriff. “Say Jimmy, did you ever get the wire off the other fellow?”

  McGrath stiffened, but said nothing. He only smiled, a faint crescent in the moonlight.

  “No, we haven’t found a body tied up in wire.”

  “Well, I might as well tell you about this one too.”

  It was now 3:45 A.M., Tuesday morning.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The temperature of the water and the fat of the body plus gases within will cause the corpse to surface, just as gas in a balloon gives it buoyancy.

  —CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

  OUTSIDE Woodside Glens the prowl car slowly returned from Ada Rice’s lonely moonlit grave. As they snaked north of the Saratoga Gap, the detectives and their prisoner grew reflective, their faces silver in the light. The truncks of tall trees, exposed in their headlights, slid nakedly by the cruising car. Neither Fell nor the fat sheriff had made the steep descent to the burning grave, but the smell of the lime bed clung to them as surely as it clung to Britt and Maloney’s clothes.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Oh, the man with the saber who struck me and fled—I killed him too—with a blow from a revolver,” said Slipton Fell blithely.

  McGrath said nothing.

  “I didn’t learn until later who the man with the saber was, the man who slugged me and ran away. I learned that when he came to blackmail me, to bleed me under the threat that he would expose me. We fought with guns. I clubbed him to death with his.”

  Fell’s smooth face broke into a fatuous grin. McGrath looked glum.

  “You see,” Fell continued, “Mrs. Rice was going to elope with this fellow Baronovich, this Bulgarian army cavalry officer. And he was the guy who was in the house when I killed Mrs. Rice the night I came to move in my belongings. After the night of June 13, Baronovich kept calling me at the service station and hounding and blackmailing me for money as his price of silence. After several demands, he handed me Mrs. Rice’s bank passbook, suggesting I draw out $135 and pay it to him to keep silent. Otherwise he would disclose my first crime. And so I was forced to forge a check in that amount. I paid him all I could and finally told him I couldn’t raise anymore.

  “Well, one night either late in November or early December I came home to the cottage, and found him sitting in a chair in the living room. He had a .38-caliber revolver in his lap. We talked a little. I refused to pay him more and this started a quarrel. Suddenly, he jammed the gun on me. I pushed it aside, reached for my gun, then got an arm lock on him. He was a big man so we had quite a fight.

  “I overpowered him. He dropped his gun and I picked it up, just happened to get it barrel first. He made a rush at me. I clipped him a couple of times on the side of the head. I hit him some more with the butt with all my strength, cracked his skull and pretty soon he was dead. He fell like a log and I realized I had killed another person almost in the same spot in front of the fireplace where I unwittingly killed Mrs. Rice. The first had been an accident pure and simple and the second had been a case of another man’s life or my own. There I was with another body to get rid of. I figured that if this sort of stuff went on I’d have to acquire a private cemetery.”

  “What did you do with the body,” asked the sheriff. First Fell claimed he had incinerated the corpse in the oil tank of a locomotive, then provided a more plausible story. “For two days I kept it hidden behind the davenport. There was a heavy bunch of baling wire on the place, so I wrapped up what was left of Mr. Baronovich in fine style with wire from the radio antenna. Guess I must have wrapped him up and weighted him down in 80 pounds of wire by the time I finished. I wrapped him in a blanket and heaved it into the back seat of my car along with two big hunks of railroad iron, heavy railroad clamps, and a bunch of iron plates to fasten on.

  “With him in the back of my car, I drove around the Bay for a while figuring a better way to dispose of it than the way I disposed of Mrs. Rice’s. I happened to recall that the men who had kidnapped that fellow down in San Jose had dumped his body off the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.”

  On November 13, 1933, Harold Thurmond and Jack Holmes kidnapped Brooke Hart, the twenty-two-year-old son of Alex Hart, president of the DeAnza Hotel Company and the second biggest department store in San Jose. The b
oy’s abductors demanded $40,000 in ransom, then drove to the bridge where they knocked Hart out with a brick. They trussed him with wire, weighted him with concrete, and tossed him off the bridge alive. As he drowned, Thurmond fired several shots at the boy. Hart’s wallet later washed up on the guard rail of a tanker in the Bay and two weeks later two duck hunters found his corpse in the Alameda marshes a mile south. After Holmes and Thurmond were arrested, a rioting mob smashed their way into the Santa Clara County Jail and lynched them across the street in St. James Park.

  “It was about 3:00 A.M. when I reached the bridge with Baronovich wrapped in a blanket in the rear of the car,” continued Fell. “I fastened the two weights to the head and feet. I tied several fishplates [the heavy iron oblongs used in railroad building to tie down rails] on the body. Then I lifted it out of the car. It was heavy with all those weights on it, but I’m strong and I didn’t have any trouble handling it. But when I tried to push the body out between the rails, the space between them was too small and it wouldn’t go that way. So I had to lift the body over the rail top. That was quite a job, I’m telling you. This guy weighed 200 pounds and I had almost as many pounds tied onto him. But I’m pretty husky myself and I finally had to lift it over the rail top, hoist it up and let go. I heard a big splash as he hit the water. I threw his gun in after him. Then I drove back to clean up the cottage. Now you can see why I didn’t feel guilty of any crime in connection with these two killings. Why do you think I could sleep and eat so well if I did?”

  Maloney took Highway 92 south of San Francisco. When they got to the deserted bridge, the sheriff got out. He had no real proof except Fell’s word that Baronovich existed. The wealth of details was convincing, though. The sheriff peered over the side. The water was cold and black as ink, the current powerful. They could do nothing until daylight to find exactly where Fell had put the chained body over. “Let’s go back,” said the sheriff and they started for the Redwood City Jail.