The curtains were closed. The room was stifling. The man on the other side of the room was flanked by three uniformed officers. His chin was trembling. His head was lowered. Dullea saw the slashed, strangled body of a young, red-haired woman sprawled across the bed. When he remembered that Bette Coffin’s hair had been the same shade of titian red, his heart began to pound.
“I’m the one who told the police,” the bloodied sailor said. “I did it.” He shook his handcuffs.
“Why did you do it?” asked Dullea, walking to the bed and looking down on the victim. “Make us understand. What was your motive?” He was very interested in motives these days. Dullea knelt. An expertly made hangman’s noose had been tightened around her neck and some razor-sharp cutting implement had been used to cut away a portion of her torso. Not only had the sailor sectioned her body, but he had printed a message across her stomach in makeup pencil: “Honey I Love You.” Dullea noticed that she had drawn her eyebrows on with the same pencil. A second note pinned to the sheet said essentially the same thing. The killer had gotten the idea from that day’s Examiner story about film star Barbara Leonard who had been beaten in her bathroom by two men who tied her up and wrote on her back in blue makeup pencil: “LAST WARNING.” They wrote it in reverse so she could read it in the mirror. Dullea agreed with Husted that the mutilations were remarkably similar to the Bay Hotel homicide. But this time the strangling and slashing hadn’t been enough for the killer. He had bashed her head in with a wooden rolling pin.
When he got no answer from the killer, Dullea went to the mantle and used his handkerchief to pick up a whisky bottle. He tilted it. Only dregs remained. Maybe the bottle was the motive. He returned to the bed and studied the suspect’s face. It was bleak and remorseful. Ramon Lee Hughes, a thirty-six-year-old sailor, was a good looking guy, with a full head of hair. But when remorse overtook him his face collapsed like puff pastry. Hughes rose. He could hardly stand. He tottered across the room and sat down heavily on the edge of the sofa. Blinking rapidly, he laced his fingers together like a second set of handcuffs. Heavy gold rings on each of his fingers glinted. Raising his arms, the sailor laid his cheek along his manacled hands as if making a pillow of them. He was sobering up quickly now and regretting what he had done.
“He’s the most pitiful hangdog drunk I’ve ever seen,” Dullea whispered to Husted. “In no way does he match my perception of the Bay Hotel killer.”
But then neither had the handsome, likable Slipton Fell (whose face also lost its attractiveness when he broke into an insensate grin). Hughes didn’t even have Fell’s strength and size. Eventually, he stopped sobbing, composed himself, and told Dullea why he had done it. “Jealousy, I guess, that and drink,” Hughes said, “damn drink-fired jealousy that’s all. She meant everything to me.”
The staff of the Ellis Hotel knew the victim as twenty-three-year-old Genevieve “Jean” Montgomery (her birth name was Genevieve Clucky). Five years before she and another woman, Mrs. Bette Keith, had come to California from Toledo, where Jean’s father was a police detective.
“Jean had recently gotten divorced from John Montgomery, a Centralia, Washington lumberjack. I paid for the divorce, I wanted to be with her that much. She was my common law wife. She had just returned from a week’s visit to San Diego. When I discovered this snapshot of her and another sailor, we argued.”
Dullea took the photo. It showed Jean in a jaunty little white hat with a red stripe and a silk scarf around her neck just where the noose was now. After Jean had drunk herself into a stupor, Hughes must have knotted her cloth belt around her neck and watched her die. Afterward he had done his awful work with a straight razor.
“What do you know about the mutilation slaying of Bette Coffin two years ago?” asked Dullea.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hughes. He blinked rapidly and passed out. Dullea knelt and tied the prisoner’s shoe so he wouldn’t trip when he came to. They managed to walk the confessed killer out of the hotel, into the car, and to Kearney Street. Dullea stopped the car across from Portsmouth Square. Lights were blazing on the second floor of the old HOJ—that meant the reporters were up and prowling. A cool breeze rose. He pulled around to the rear, where three deputies waited to take Hughes to the tanks and avoid the press. At the north wing Bernard Reilly, the jail superintendent, was at the visitor’s cage; when he saw them, he climbed off a high wooden bench and escorted Hughes to Judge Thomas Prendergast’s court. Hughes’s public defender arrived, protested that he hadn’t had time to familiarize himself with the first-degree murder case, and requested a delay. “All right,” said Prendergast, “I’ll put the case over until September 8.”
Hughes was then to endure a withering all-night third-degree interrogation about the Bay Hotel murder.
He took a seat on a rickety chair in a small room on the ground floor. Two cops entered. Hughes eyed the saps dangling by leather thongs from their wrists. One cop brought his sap down across the bridge of Ramon’s nose. “Why did you do it? What about all the others? What about the Bay Hotel?” The other cop got out the rubber hose and hefted it in his palm as if to gauge its weight. Around 4:00 A.M. three guards escorted Hughes to a narrow corridor in one of the jail wings where he spent an hour pacing and biting his lips to the jibes of other prisoners in their cells.
A ferocious rivalry for exclusives drove Bay Area journalists to extremes. Reporter Willie Hale covered his crime stories armed with a revolver. The papers were as fanatical. Anytime a man went to a newspaper office to say he was guilty of murder and wanted to confess, the first thing the paper did was squirrel him away from the police. Security guards and city policemen on the newspaper payroll, then blockaded the plant until an extra packed with exclusive stories and lurid photographs was printed and loaded onto trucks for delivery. Then the police were notified.
Just before dawn, before any other reporter, the Iron Duke’s man went to the booking sergeant on the top floor. “I’ve been assigned by the city editor,” he said. “I want you to bring out Hughes from his cell so I can question him in the interview room.” It was not a question but an order: Bill Wren wants.
“Okay,” said the sergeant, “but he doesn’t want to be photographed.”
But Wren’s man had concealed his cameraman and got a shot of Hughes, bruised, bleary-eyed, and exhausted, as he entered. “Your pictures already been taken and I can assure you it’s not going to be flattering,” he told Hughes. “But if you sit for a carefully lit and posed picture it might present a better image on the front page.” Of course Hughes posed and gave an interview while he did.
Husted located Jean’s close friend, Bette Keith, and was interviewing her when another woman, Florence Montgomery of 971 Mission Street, came to the jail and said she was Jean’s sister. “We had found no local relatives of the attractive divorcee,” said Husted.
Upon seeing Jean’s body, she collapsed and asked to be taken to Hughes’s cell so she could confront him. “When she was taken to his cell,” said Husted, “she came at him with her nails. What made her outburst all the more puzzling was that she was not really the slain woman’s sister.”
At noon, Hughes used his pocket money to have a hamburger sent in from a nearby restaurant along with a newspaper. His face was on the front page as the long-sought Gorilla Man. Now he was completely distraught. After another grilling, he signed a complete confession admitting to slaying the Montgomery girl. He hadn’t held back a fact, even seemed anxious to tell all, yet emphatically denied (just as Slipton Fell and Walker had) the murder of Bette Coffin and Mrs. Johnston in New York or the girls in San Diego, or the women in Golden Gate Park. He returned to his cell, shoulders slumped, and reread the newspaper story. He listened to the house sergeant conduct roll call, heard all the groans and sighs of the station house, the changing of shifts, and the despair of new prisoners.
An hour later, came a sharp rap on Dullea’s door. He and McGinn had been discussing Pete McDonough’s jailing for refusing
to discuss police graft before the Grand Jury headed by Marshall Dill. “Come quickly, Captain, up to the jail,” a sergeant said.
McGinn and Dullea followed and peered through the bars of Hughes’s cell. His body was hanging by the neck from a noose made from his suspenders. His tongue was distended, eyes wide, and hair disarrayed. Tears on both cheeks had dried white. And that, McGinn thought, is the end of the Gorilla Man, but Dullea ordered him to sift through the records of the U.S. shipping commissioner until he found Hughes’s record. They had to be sure. The next morning, McGinn got a shock. According to the shipping records and the suicide’s former shipmates, Ramon Hughes had been on the high seas at the time of the Coffin and Johnston murders.
FORTY-ONE
For a century in the U.S. a large, uncouth man had been called a big ape.
—WICKED WORDS
IN Cleveland, Friday, June 5, 1936, dawned mild with warm zephyrs promising a beautiful summer. In the final days before vacation, Louis Cheeley and Gomez Ivey from the Outhwaite School ditched class. They hiked from East Sixty-fifth through the Kingsbury Run gully, tracing the NY Central tracks to slightly northeast of Jackass Hill, where Jimmy and Peter had found the two headless bodies last September. Warily, they eyed the seemingly empty boxcars and yawning doors to hobo shanties and gave them a wide berth. Coming even with the East Fifty-fifth Street Bridge spanning the gully, they observed a black willow tree growing between the rapid transit line and the tracks. A pair of brown tweed trousers had been balled into the Y of two limbs. Their weight made the slender branches droop enough for Gomez, thirteen, to reach them with his fishing pole, shake the pants and listen for a jingle. Nothing. “Wait, there might be folding money in the pockets.” Another tug, and the head of a man (who resembled Ed Andrassy) rolled to his feet. Dark brown eyes looked up sightlessly at him. Rigor had fashioned the mouth into a beatific smile. The boys raced to Gomez’s house. At 5:00 P.M. Mrs. Ivey found them huddled inside a closet and called patrolman Hendricks of the Fifth Precinct, who notified Inspectors Musil and May. “It’s like a game with him,” said May. “Last time he left the body and took the head. This time he took the body and left the head.”
At daybreak, Hogan, bird-dogging for the matching body, spiraled out from the willow. A mile away from Jackass Hill to the southwest, he reached two sets of railroad tracks at the intersection of Woodland Avenue and East Fifty-first. Two workers on a crane signaled him and pointed to a nude corpse belly down among sharp thistles. The head had been skillfully decapitated, but emasculation had not been performed. Someone had interrupted the Butcher this time.
A colorful butterfly was tattooed on the victim’s left shoulder. On his left calf was the cartoon character Jiggs. On his left forearm were crossed flags, the initials “W. C. G.,” and a heart and an anchor. On his right calf were the names “Helen” and “Paul,” a cupid, and an anchor. On his right arm were a flag, a dove, and another anchor. The anchors suggested he was a sailor. Nevel mailed facsimiles of the tattoos to the Navy Department, eastern seaport cities, the Ohio Identification Bureau in Columbus, and the FBI’s newly installed Tattoo Identification File. There was no match. The victim had probably arrived by rail and fallen asleep in the run, where the Butcher happened upon him. “First he cut his throat,” Hogan said, “then hacked away at his neck. Then he undressed the victim. Stripping the victim is a maniac’s trick.”
A patrolman from the populous Lithuanian area between East Sixty-sixth Street and Wade Park Avenue sought out Nevel. “A man they call ‘the Beast,’ a strange sunken-eyed man, gaunt and bent like an animal,” he said, “comes out at only night. He grovels at back doors for scraps.” The Beast sounded suspiciously like Andrassy’s visitor. He always told the same story—“I was once a fine doctor . . .” The Butcher’s scalpel implied he might be a doctor, medical student, osteopath, chiropractor, orderly, nurse, hunter, or “a clergyman tutored in surgery and turned to excessive religiosity.” He might even be a butcher. Nevel spread word among the Lithuanians. “Call us immediately, the next time the Beast appears at your door,” he said.
Four days later, Nevel’s phone rang. “The Beast has broken into a house on Wade Park Ave. He’s still there!”
Nevel and Hogan surprised a dirty, unshaven man at the kitchen table. His ragged clothes hung loosely on him; his face was ghastly white, his cheeks hollow, and eyes deeply buried.
“Where do you live?” Hogan snapped.
“In the slums,” the Beast sobbed, giving an address Hogan recognized as a flat in a house of prostitution. “Take us there.” Like Andrassy’s room, his room contained only a bed and a broken chair. “I was once a fine doctor,” the Beast began. “I had a wife and a child, a personal life and a great house. In one instant I lost it all.”
“Go on,” said Hogan. The toughest interrogator on the force had fallen oddly silent. Something in the measured way the Beast spoke held the ring of truth.
“One night in Chicago there was a holdup,” he said. “I got caught up in it and was struck in the head by the holdup man. That violent blow robbed me of all my medical skill and my memory. Now I am as you see me. But once I was a fine doctor.” The Beast rummaged in a trunk and returned with a doctor’s bag filled with medical instruments (scalpels unused for years) and some ragged parchments. Reverently, he unfolded diplomas awarded him from major medical schools in Vienna, Paris, and Chicago.
“Just another bum steer,” Hogan said outside. He was a hardhearted man, but Nevel saw him wipe his eyes.
Between June 9 and 12, Cleveland hosted the Republican National Convention, and two weeks later the Cleveland Exposition commemorated the opening of the Northwest Territory. When the big parade marched down Euclid Avenue, onlookers watched only their neighbors, wondering who among them might be the Butcher, who waited a month before dumping his next victim fifteen miles from the rest.
At 11:30 A.M., July 22, Marie Barkley, seventeen, reached a crisscrossing of railroad tracks at West Ninty-eighth and Industrial Rayon Corporation’s big plant. To one side, the land slid dangerously into the swamp. Opposite, Clinton Road cut deeply into Big Creek Gully, where a nude, emasculated corpse—badly decomposed and ravaged by rats, floated. Its head lay ten feet away, severed at the third and fourth vertebrae. What skin remained on the man’s fingertips was worn down as if filed. Decomposed hands with shriveled fingerprints can be recovered by soaking in hot water. Dr. Gerber meticulously peeled the rotting skin from the fingers and found a faint pattern on the underside. Fitting the reversed skin over his own fingertips, he rolled them and obtained recognizable prints that matched no missing person.
The Butcher had sanitized his male victims to erase any clues leading back to himself, but made no effort to hide the identities of his female victims. His cutting of the female genitalia only emphasized their femininity. His removal of the penes and testes of three male victims made them feminine. With this fifth victim Detectives Martin Zalewski and Peter Merylo began devoting their off-duty hours to undercover work. Camouflaging themselves as unshaven, long-haired vagrants (.38s concealed under their rags), they got into character by going sleepless and forgoing baths. Their disguises were so perfect, that cops kept arresting them. They poked through deserted tenement basements, crawled through rat-infested sewers, prowled the slums, and slept in flop houses. All they caught were lice.
At 11:15 A.M. on September 10, Jerry Harris, a transient, was sitting on the East Thirty-fourth Street bridge a half mile from Jackass Hill. A parcel wrapped in the previous week’s paper lay on the rough railway abutment next to him. Idly, he watched trains traverse the gully, headed toward his St. Louis hometown. Below, the current was threading around a twenty-foot deep pool of stagnant water. Half a human torso broke the glassy film and was carried into the active currents of the run. Jerry sprinted to the Socony Vacuum Oil Company’s tank station at East Thirty-seventh and alerted Leo Fields who called the police.
Nevel, Pearce, and Hogan arrived and fished in the hot sun until they s
nagged both halves of the torso. The newspaper bundle contained a bloodstained denim work shirt cut at the neck—the exact place where the killer had decapitated his victim. He was dressed and alive when beheaded with considerable force in the proper site for clean amputation. “The affront of the killer,” said Nevel, “returning over and over to Kingsbury Run. But there has to be more to the body.”
A Coast Guard boat grappled with ceiling hooks until they wrested two legs from the pool. The Fire Rescue Squad used a fire hose to flush debris down the run and drained out three million gallons of polluted water without finding the victim’s head or arms. “I bet his head is on a shelf somewhere with the others,” said Hogan.
After this murder the Butcher never returned to the great scar of Kingsbury Run, a region Hogan called the absolutely least enchanting spot on earth.
In Cleveland, the bone-numbing fear persisted. The hacked upper torso of a thirty-year-old mother rose in Lake Erie’s ice-caked waters and washed up on the frosty beach at Beulah Park. Segments of the same disarticulated body drifted near the river’s mouth. Exactly one year after Louis and Gomez turned up a head in a pair of pants, a skull was discovered wedged beneath the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge spanning the Cuyahoga. At Stone’s Levee, Hogan and May dug out a lime-impregnated burlap bag containing the partial skeleton of an African American woman, Mrs. Rose Wallace, a resident of Scoville Avenue. Rose had last been seen alive in the company of “Bob,” a dark-skinned white man, and shortly afterward in a car with three white men and her steady crush, “One-Armed Willie,” who had also been with Flo Polillo the night before she died.
Merylo and Zalewski had by now questioned 1,500 suspects such as the “Chicken Freak,” a sadistic truck driver who achieved sexual satisfaction only if his partner decapitated a live chicken during their lovemaking. Their patient, plodding work entailed spading up entire gardens for bones. East Side neighbors reported a skeleton in an old basement (a pile of chicken bones and spare ribs), bones clogging a sewer pipe (sheep bones), and a Sandusky dog dragged a human foot and leg from the brush (medical school specimens).
The Laughing Gorilla: A True Story of Police Corruption and Murder Page 31