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

by Robert Graysmith

  Her head was drawn back tautly by a pair of brown silk stockings knotted to the brass bedposts. Dark, ugly marks had been dug into her throat, and her eyes were bulging. She had been strangled by a huge pair of hands. What struck Corrasa was that the victim’s hair was the same red as Bette Coffin’s. Had they found the Gorilla Man at last? Corrasa was doubtful because of the young man’s slenderness and height.

  The young man sat down on the edge of the bed, placed a cigarette in an ivory holder, and began calmly smoking. “Oh, why I do these crazy things is beyond my comprehension,” he said. He crossed his legs and swung one foot back and forth. “Crazy me. Only when my sanity returns do I realize the consequences of my foolhardiness. In my depression I can do nothing but run away to relieve my mind of its many, many burdens and the pressures put upon me.”

  He was Albert Walter Jr., the twenty-eight-year-old son of a Boston real estate broker. He had been a law clerk, butler, chef, lumber man, salesman, and soldier in the Army Medical Corps, had even served a disciplinary term on Alacatraz, where Fell had been imprisoned. Inspectors Harry Husted and George Engler and Assistant DA John McMahon joined Corrasa and Stanton. In the next hour the five men learned a few things about a new motive for murder.

  “I used to live out here in 1926 and after we went east,” Walter said. “I still made a trip back here about once a year. When I was last in San Francisco six months ago a wealthy importer invited me home. I knocked him unconscious and stole his gold watch.” He smiled. “I guess I was not cut out to be a good guest.” He looked down at the body. His face was expressionless. “I killed her because I hate all women. I hate them. I’ve always known that someday I would kill one of them.”

  “And now you have.”

  “Now I have.”

  “When did you come to San Francisco?”

  “Just fourteen days ago, this trip. The girl is Blanche Cousins.”

  Walter, unable to endure more of his ten-month marriage and sick of managing a restaurant, caught a bus west out of New York City. Blanche Cousins boarded at Salt Lake City and she and Walter began talking. By noon of the next day at Sacramento, they were good friends. Blanche, the daughter of an Idaho Falls rancher, was on her way to attend business college. The next night in San Francisco she checked into the YWCA. “I’m counting on seeing you a lot,” Walter told her. “I don’t have many friends in the city,” she told him. “Neither do I,” he said.

  “She moved from the YWCA hotel into this apartment,” he continued. “That first night she cooked dinner for me here, a sort of housewarming I guess. Last night she cooked dinner for me again. I came in about 7:00 P.M., and we had a couple of cocktails before eating. Afterward we sat on the davenport talking for a while and then we did the dishes. We went back to the davenport after that and talked for a while about her work at school, what she did back in Idaho Falls, and what I intended to do about getting a job and staying out here—you know, the usual thing.

  “Then I began to make love to her. I had tried to several times before but she always resisted. This time she said something about not being too hasty about things. I didn’t see why she should resist me and I went blind with anger. Suddenly, I grabbed her by the throat and began to choke her. Then she didn’t resist anymore. I lost my head—I guess. I don’t remember all the details. I didn’t know whether she was dead or not and I didn’t care. I took down the folding bed and lifted her onto it. I pulled off her sweater, slacks, and slip and threw them across the room. Then I ravished her.” There was silence in the room. Walter had stayed in the room doing unspeakable things for an hour, then tied her stockings around her neck and knotted the ends to the bedposts.

  “Why?” asked Corrasa. “She was already dead.”

  “I suppose so. I felt for her pulse and listened for her heart. Why does anyone do any mad thing?”

  Another necrosadist, to use LaTulipe’s term, thought Corrasa.

  “I’ve tried to lead a normal life,” Walter said, “but this hatred and bitterness keeps cropping up in spite of me. I left my wife twice in New York because I was afraid I’d kill her. When Blanche Cousins repulsed me, it all surged up in me again. She symbolized all the things I wanted and couldn’t have. That’s why I choked her. I’ve hated women, but I couldn’t stay away from them.”

  Walter left his room about 11:30 P.M., visited a cocktail bar or two, then bought a bottle of whiskey and registered in a hotel over on Mason Street. He drank until 5:00 A.M., then dropped off to sleep. At noon, he dressed, left the hotel, and walked along the Embarcadero and through Chinatown for hours. “I just wanted to be left alone—and to walk—I wasn’t sorry then, I’m not sorry now.” He had gone back to the hotel, packed his suitcase, sold all his belongings at a pawn shop—then around 8:30 P.M., walked to headquarters to turn himself in.

  All night Corrasa questioned him about numerous unsolved sex crimes involving red-haired women and stranglings recently perpetrated in San Diego, on Bette Coffin and Mrs. Ruby Allen and Louise Jeppesen in Golden Gate Park. Walter shook his head.

  “Nope, I don’t know anything about them, especially Mrs. Coffin,” he said. “You’re going to have to be content with solving just this one murder. Why don’t you just let me go ahead and die and get it over with? I’m sick of life.”

  Conscientious public defender Gerald Kenny, whom Frank Egan had targeted for assassination, was Walter’s lawyer at trial. As a child Walter had suffered head injuries that might have affected him, and he had contracted VD, which had a bearing on his adult behavior. But tests showed Walter did not have a sexual disease and Dr. Marvin Hirschfield determined him to be “a psychopath with psychotic episodes.” Dr. E. W. Mullins of Agnews Street Hospital for the Insane, Dr. Joseph Pohrim, and Dr. Frank Sheehy testified that Walter knew the difference between right and wrong. Albert’s father, Albert Walter Sr. and his wife, Angela, made a dramatic plea for his life by telling of insanity in the family and his son’s aimless wanderings and unnatural sex life. When the jury went out, father and wife, unfamiliar with courtroom procedure, left the courtroom thinking a recess had been called. Kenny told them of the death verdict outside on the sidewalk twenty-three minutes later. “Don’t worry. I have no intention of committing suicide in my cell,” Walter told Judge Jacks. “All I want to do now is to hang—as soon as possible. My only regret is I won’t hang sooner. I just want to be hanged and forgotten.” And he was. They hung the silk-stocking strangler at San Quentin a month later.

  THIRTY-NINE

  We called the new HOJ the Marble Orchard. I had the pleasure of working at the original HOJ. The word was that you had to have a lot of juice in those days.

  —HOMICIDE INSPECTOR DAVE TOSCHI

  ED Atherton, the DA’s investigator, traveled south to meet with Melvin Purvis, credited with engineering the slaying of bank robber John Dillinger and Republic’s first choice to play Dick Tracy in their new serial. Over the weekend, the two former G-men selected four federal agents to sniff out the big lies in the testimony. But to get to the big man behind the corruption, Atherton would have to request another two payments of $25,000 each.

  LIEUTENANT Joe Mignola of Ellis-Polk Station, who had commanded his men to fire buckshot into the strikers at Pier 20, refused to be sworn. After him Lieutenant Mark Higgins of Western Addition Station admitted to $46,000 in cash, an expensive auto, and ritzy home though his yearly salary was only $3,000. He was a bit hazy as to whether he used money from his secret safety deposit box or bank accounts to purchase stock. “It’s my wife’s habit to just hand me money in an envelope and I usually just dropped it in the box,” he said. With a disarming smile, he admitted he often got “surprise packages” of $4,000 and $12,000.

  During a long grand jury session, Lemon’s attorney, Edwin McKenzie, accused Roche of bias. “I am perfectly willing to step down,” Roche said, “and have Mayor Rossi name a man to take my place. I have been in the department for twenty-four years and it is difficult for me even to contemplate this action because i
t would look like an admission of bias and a desire to avoid my duty. I don’t want to resign. To do so at this time would seem like quitting under fire and shirking my duty.”

  On Friday night, May 30, the commission heard arguments by the attorneys for nine policemen under fire on whether Roche should be disqualified from hearing the proceedings and whether the whole commission should be disqualified. Without a beat, the mayor backed Roche. “The proceedings are entirely legal,” said Roche, “and there is no chance for the disqualification of any member of the Commission.”

  “Then Captain Lemon pleads not guilty to all the charges against him,” said McKenzie.

  Patrolman E. J. Christal, nine years a special-duty officer, defied the jury, too. “You cannot force me to be a witness against myself,” he said, and brought up a technical point—the charges were insufficient in that they were sworn to before Chief Quinn who was not empowered to administer oaths.

  ON June 1, Richmond Station Patrolman James F. Madden, the third witness of the night, took the stand. Dullea studied the florid, baby-faced vet as he eased his bulk into the witness chair. There was a discernible creak. Had the grand jury at last uncovered a $200,000+ copper still pounding a beat? For weeks, the papers had been hinting at just such a revelation. Dullea doubted it would get that bad. Gillen reviewed the facts aloud. Madden had joined the SFPD in 1908 at a salary of $122 a month and a savings account of $2,000 saved from his $12 to $18 weekly wages as a teamster. Madden pushed back his porkpie hat and revealed thin dark hair. He clenched a cigar in his mouth, then began fishing around in his front pockets and patting on both sides of his loud tie. His hands were too small for such a big man but finally did the job. Pulling back his sleeves like a magician, he extracted ten bank books and balanced them on his chubby knees.

  When an aunt died, Madden had been enriched by a bequest of $1,000. He had property on a lot at 166 Oak Street. In 1910, he invested in two flats at 1460 Waller Street and lived in one with his wife and son. From 1918 to 1921 he received $100 a month from a Haight Street garage property and “dabbled in securities,” beginning with shares in the Rolph Coal Company. Three years later, he purchased 100 shares of BancItaly stock at $136 a share. “Gee,” he said, “before I knew it, I had $44,000.” His fat face was wreathed in a smile. He took up another book and began reeling off figures that had the jurors goggle-eyed. “I reaped a harvest of dollars from the buying and selling of horseflesh in partnership with my late brother, Dr. J. O. Quinlan.

  “Then things went like wildfire,” he said with a wave of stubby fingers. “I split up my stocks, divided them, the bank bought me others, they all went up, and pretty soon I owed the bank $80,000. Well, sir, I paid that off and still had a lot of money and stocks left. I paid the mortgage on my home, then, and decided to sell my stocks and concentrate on bonds. The crash came but I didn’t lose anything. The bonds went up; I sold them. Then I bought stocks again, sold them, bought bonds, sold the bonds, bought stocks, until I guess I must have had an awful lot of things.”

  Gillen’s head swam. Hard pressed to keep up with his pencil, he rapidly jotted down figures. Madden was far from finished. From his back trouser pockets he withdrew another ten books, laid them out and thumbed through them. “I got a few safe deposit boxes for my cash,” he said, and read off $100,000 items without batting an eye.

  “Is it true that between 1910 and 1935, these sums passed through your accounts?” said Gillen, looking down at his pad.

  “Yes, I guess that’s about right.”

  “Is it also true that in 1929 you deposited a total of $126,415.27?”

  “Yes, that’s also correct. Let me tell you about that. I decided to borrow some money from the banks and I got $300,000 from them.”

  “On what security?”

  “On my stocks and bonds.” He said he played the market at a loss in 1931 when he dropped $3,612.96. The following year he lost $1,414.22, and the year after that $20,775.03. In 1934 he lost $4,246.94.

  “During 1934, did you deposit $143,209.34?”

  “Yes,” said Madden nonchalantly, “but mostly in the last quarter of the year. You see, there was a lot of reports that the State was going to the dogs, so I sold many of my bonds temporarily, sold most everything and laid low in 1934.” As he testified over the two-and-a-half-hour Grand Jury session Madden was at perfect ease.

  Asked if he had ever paid any income tax, Madden estimated he had paid $7,400 over a ten-year period. From his vest pocket he plucked out six more bank books and began to read nonchalantly. Gillen’s pencil flew as he added. The grand total was—$834,021.12!

  “I’m exhausted, bewildered and thoroughly flabbergasted by the amount,” Gillen admitted. He ran his hands through his hair and sat down.

  “I am a thrifty man,” said Madden matter-of-factly.

  “It would take a Philadelphia lawyer six months working day and night, to fathom your resources.”

  And these were 1936 dollars, as the nation was crawling out of the depths of the Depression. “We know that his fortune is large,” said the DA to Dullea, “so large that I’d have to put my entire staff on it for the rest of the summer to get an accurate estimate.”

  How Madden had accumulated such wealth on less than $200 a month was mind-boggling.

  FORTY

  It was as if a compulsion had seized him and guided his hand, not so much against his will but without his knowledge. He seemed to recall only flashes of his acts, but enough to satisfy the detectives that they had the Gorilla Man in their grasp.

  —CHRONICLE NEWS ITEM

  JUST before rush hour, a nondescript man in a wide-brimmed hat staggered east along Ellis Street. He was thin, sickly, and bore a deep cut above his left eye. The backs of his hands were lacerated and bleeding, his eyes glazed and staring. Tears coursed down his stubbled cheeks. He wore an ill-fitting jacket over sailor’s whites and had drawn both arms up to his chest. Crowds parted as he shuffled for three blocks—four blocks. “What’s the trouble, Bud?” At the fifth block, he tottered into the bustling intersection at Stockton and Market.

  Heads turned as he crossed against the Wiley signal bell that rang dingding-ding when the light changed. “This guy’s just come from the mother of all drunks,” the cop thought, “or been hit by a truck.” The sailor held out his arms, opened his hands and offered a piece of tattered flesh to the cop. Screams erupted from those closest. One woman fainted. The crowd melted away as if fearing contamination.

  “I just killed my wife,” he said. His chest was heaving. “I’m the one who called the police.” “Show me where,” said the cop. Without hesitation he led the traffic cop back to a Tenderloin hotel at 510 Ellis Street. Inside the double hotel room on a bed was a body, nude, bloody, and unspeakably mangled. It was still warm. Her hair was titian red.

  “If you don’t tell me about the arrest, you sonuvabitch, I’ll blast you all over town,” the “Iron Duke” bellowed. The Iron Duke wasn’t his real name. That was Bill Wren. He wasn’t a duke, but might well have been. As the Examiner’s city editor, he ran San Francisco. The police commissioner, the DA, and the mayor went in person to his office at Third and Market to curry favor. He only had to say to high officials, “Bill Wren wants” and “desire became command.”

  The belligerent, Boston-born editor kept his power by devious means. His men worked the same way. His columnist Bob Patterson once called up Bones Remmer, the notorious gambler. “Somebody told me an embarrassing story concerning you, Bones,” he said. “I’m going to have to run it in my column. I hate to embarrass you, but business is business. Of course, I might be persuaded to not run the story if you were to give me $500.”

  When Bones came over to Patterson’s office to give him the money, the doors flew open, flash bulbs popped, and the next day’s paper had a front-page picture of them exchanging money—“Bones Rimmer Tries to Bribe Examiner Columnist.” In retaliation, Bones offered records of Patterson’s long criminal history and prison time to the other papers. None wo
uld print it. They had their ethics. That was what passed as journalism in San Francisco.

  It hadn’t taken Wren long to find out someone was in custody for the Bay Hotel murder—after all these years. Chief Quinn had called first. “There’s been another autopsy murder in a hotel,” he said. “A sailor confessed that he’d just killed and mutilated a woman.”

  As soon as the chief hung up, a chambermaid, one of the dozens on Wren’s payroll, called. Like Anna Lemon, she had unlocked a room door and discovered a partially dissected body. Then a uniformed officer rang him. “We’ve got the Gorilla Man,” he said. “He’s just confessed to another hotel murder and mutilation. I spoke to him myself. Keep it under your hat. I’ll call back with more.” The Iron Duke hung up, then looked to the framed motto over his head: “Tell me nothing in confidence.” “Copy,” he bellowed.

  He needed his best reporter who was whiling away the afternoon hours at one of the newspaper watering holes. Since the repeal of prohibition in 1934, the word saloon was out and tap room, juice joint, cocktail lounge, and tavern were in.

  The story spread in the hot afternoon. Reporters heard the news at Jerry and Johnny’s and Jay Hurley’s near the Examiner. The buzz, like a current of electricity, flowed on to the House of Shields across from the Call on New Montgomery. Word of the arrest passed among the tipsy scribes at Murphy’s Spa at the Market-Grant intersection and at Gallagher’s saloon at Mission and Fourth streets, where most of the Bulletin ink-stained wretches hung out. At Hanno’s behind the Chronicle, the printers took off their square, folded-newspaper hats, threw them in the alley and began buzzing about the news.

  Dullea’s patrol car, siren screaming, reached the Tenderloin’s epicenter, Eddy and Leavenworth streets. That tawdry region encompasses the area between Geary, Van Ness, Market, and Mason streets. Dullea and Husted entered the Ellis Street Hotel and ascended to room 516. On a chair by the door sat a traffic cop in uniform with his head buried in his hands.