The Laughing Gorilla

by Robert Graysmith

  Daily, Fell grew more nervous. He hated the square bungalow by day and feared it by night. He loathed its emptiness and the hollowness it imparted to his voice. When he did sleep, his nightmares frightened him, but not nearly so much as the terror that he might talk in his sleep. Finally, he stopped sleeping in the house altogether. “Where does he sleep?” wondered the neighbors. They studied the dark windows and speculated. “If not inside the bungalow, then where?”

  Fell had concealed Mrs. Rice’s car (with different plates) and a second auto in a private garage in nearby Burlingame. When the sun went down, he left the fearful knoll with relief, unlocked the garage, and crawled into the backseat of Ada’s car. It was barely capacious enough to contain his 230 pounds and six-foot length, but it soothed him because the seats had the familiar smell of old lace. It made him realize that he had genuinely liked the older woman. But even in the familiar surroundings of Ada’s car he slept only a few hours. When he was composed enough to drift off, he would cry out and suddenly awake. What had he said? Shaken he looked around the little garage. Seeing he was alone, he pulled his rumpled suit over himself and dozed off again.

  In the morning light he saw Ada had left a few personal items in the car—her passport and some insurance papers. A finance company still held title to the car. He realized if he reported it stolen he might get a few extra bucks to tide him over.

  After filing a claim and collecting from the insurance company, Fell began taking long midnight drives along the coast highway. At each hairpin turn, his lights stabbed into deep canyons. He studied them as if they held the solution to his problem of the haunted bungalow. For whatever he expected to find on his lonely nocturnal drives he was well prepared. He had packed the trunk with a rolled blanket, adhesive tape, cotton cloth, a bottle of ammonia, a container of chloroform, and a sixty-foot length of rope with loops at both ends tied with a sailor’s knot. And as he sped, feeling the cool air against his face, Fell laughed as loud as he could but found no release. He couldn’t endure many more sleepless nights in the cramped garage. His mouth and throat were dry and his head throbbed. What could he do?

  BY September 13, 1935, only one person still missed Mrs. Ada French Mengler Rice. That was Mr. Rice. He desperately needed Ada’s signature, and she was nowhere to be found and hadn’t been since mid-June. At first, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s office seemed interested in locating her and though inclined to serve the divorce papers they weren’t exactly putting their backs to the wheel. Understandably, it was hard to keep their attention. Things rarely happened in their placid county and never in Woodside Glens. Only a case as big as murder could shatter their torpor. By February 1, the deputies would stop asking questions altogether, because on that day Mr. Rice would finally be granted his divorce in absentia and thus no longer be interested in the fate of Ada Rice. But for now, they continued their less-than-dogged hunt for the journalist.

  So far not a shadow of suspicion had fallen on Slipton Fell. All the neighbors knew was that the house on the knoll sat vacant and presumably uncomfortable enough to compel him to sleep elsewhere. To the inquisitive neighbors he had explained away Ada’s absence with good news. Ada and a handsome young cavalry officer had taken a sudden trip to Bulgaria, perhaps, he winked, to elope. Ada had found happiness at last. And with that Fell, flexing his long arms, had returned to the house.

  The next day, John and Davenport Bromfield, Realtors (told by an irate Mr. Rice to now look to Ada for mortgage payments), materialized at the Woodside Glens bungalow. Fell answered the door.

  “Ada’s in New York and I’ve taken over the property,” he told them.

  “But so far you’ve failed to make any payments,” said the Bromfields.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said and closed the door. After that the Bromfields were unable to locate Fell. All the neighbors could tell them was that the young weightlifter and eccentric adventurer was off somewhere on another of his excursions, his destination as mysterious as Ada’s. After three weeks, the Bromfields initiated legal action to regain possession of the lonely house on Canada Road.

  In San Francisco, Dullea knew Mr. Meyers to be a seafaring man. What he didn’t know was that the devious Slipton Fell was an international sailor. Unlike some of his stories of adventuring, government toppling, and bandit joining, this was true. He had gone voyaging now, leaving the lonely and presumably haunted estate in Woodside Glens empty. The strange square house would hold its secrets until his return. Now, wherever Slipton Fell was, he could sleep again at last.

  ON September 18, in the rivers, woods, and swamps of Cleveland (at the time the sixth largest city in the country), citizens were suffering at the hands of a motiveless sequential killer, another necrosadist. The fever that had gotten into the nation’s blood in San Francisco had spread to Ohio. The Gorilla Man’s children were at work, and they were industrious. Like the San Francisco and New York killings, the Ohio murders were something new in the United States—motiveless, random murders.

  The Cleveland detectives’ only clue was that all the victims had been dismembered with a surgeon’s scalpel by a laughing man with long arms. Was there a link with Dullea’s sailor who laughed and killed without motive? Cleveland resident Edward Andrassy probably knew the identity of the fiendish killer, but he was too busy running for his life to do anything about it—a laughing Gorilla was out to get him.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Wild gorillas are vegetarians, feeding on buds, leaves, ripe fruit, barks and herbs. Beginning at dawn they travel all day, selecting plants growing within reach of their long arms. Only captive gorillas eat meat and the only captive gorilla in the nation in 1935 was in Cleveland.

  —GORILLA, EYEWITNESS BOOKS

  “IT’S not as if there hadn’t been warning signs of impending trouble,” said Mrs. Helen Andrassy. She had felt vague rumblings over the last year, like that of an approaching storm. The very air above Cleveland seemed charged. Last September the headless torso of a young woman, coated with a sticky, odd-smelling fluid, had washed ashore on Beulah Park Beach at the foot of East 156th Street. This “Lady of the Lake” had floated from the Kingsbury Run down the Cuyahoga River and along the lake front. Two days later and thirty miles east near North Perry, a man gathering driftwood on Euclid Beach encountered more of her bare bones—scarified by the action of sand and as white and broken as the rocks. These findings were so distressing, even Mrs. Andrassy’s twenty-nine-year-old son mentioned them.

  “What is the matter with you?” Mrs. Andrassy asked on Wednesday, September 18. She got no reply and went back to mopping the kitchen linoleum. “You’ve been acting strangely for over a week.”

  “He’s coming.” The gaunt figure shifted in his chair.

  “Who’s coming?” she asked.

  “He’s coming to kill me, Ma,” he said. “I tell you I’m going to die.”

  Mrs. Andrassy pushed back the gingham curtains in the tiny kitchen window and peered out on the gray afternoon surrounding 1744 Fulton Road. Northwest winds were sweeping this blue-collar section of the city, where she shared a modest home with her husband, Joe, and son, Ed. Joe would be working late at his tiny, failing factory tonight. For the last two weeks, Ed had been unaccountably fearful, his large expressive eyes fixed on the door, jug ears cocked to catch the slightest sound. He had been more secretive than ever, his unaccountable comings and goings occurring at all hours. Ed had strange friends, too, scattered all over Rowdy Row, a section bordered by East Fifty-fifth Street, the Kingsbury Run, and Prospect Avenue. He also frequented a cheap saloon on the corner of East Twentieth Street and Central Avenue.

  His mom had given up wondering why Ed’s marriage hadn’t worked and why he couldn’t hang onto a job. Since 1925, he had twice been an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the City Hospital, a door-to-door magazine salesman, a bellhop, a laborer, and eight other jobs—all lost. Ed was shiftless and that was that. His only notoriety was as a police character found intoxicated and dozing in a gravey
ard. Four years earlier cops had imprisoned him in the Warrensville Heights Workhouse.

  “An Italian gang is after me, Ma,” Ed had said to explain the ice pick he carried. Two weeks before, a stranger had hammered on their door and threatened, “Ed, I want you to leave my wife alone!” Now another fierce banging shook their door. “Don’t open the door, Ma. If you love me, don’t open the door!” As Ed scurried into his room, the front doorknob rattled as if by a gale. Mrs. Andrassy peered out and saw a man with stooped shoulders on the mat. The cold wind stirred his tattered coat. A few leaves drifted across the cracked walkway. “He was stocky, but not fat,” she recalled, “and about five-feet, eight-inches tall.” Mrs. Andrassy opened the door a crack.

  “Let me see Ed,” said a coarse voice.

  “He isn’t here,” she lied. He gave a cheerless laugh in response. “There was something weird and inhuman about that laugh,” Mrs. Andrassy said. “He had unusual eyes—hidden by shaggy eyebrows and buried in their sockets. His eyes were large and luminous—brilliant. He had massive shoulders and long arms. His fingers were long too, tapering and steady. His face was thin, but there was a mysterious power and strength hidden in that face. It was kind of like an ape’s.”

  “Tell Ed he better watch out,” the stranger said. “Tell him something’s going to happen. And he knows just what that something is.” His lips shut into a thin line and he lurched down the walk with a peculiar gait. He was lost in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon. On the wind she heard his laugh again.

  Mrs. Andrassy knew Gorilla Men existed. In January, Ohio’s “Human Gorilla” had proved that. The full moon shining down on the Steubenville plant of the Wheeling Steel Corporation was as bright as the open hearth furnaces spilling onto the snow-blanketed yards. Beyond stretched the Ohio River and blue West Virginia hills. As shifts were changing at 11:30 P.M., steelworker A. A. Lashley saw a Gorilla Man shoot down Fred Melscheimer, a new train service engineer. “With his head down and powerful shoulders stooped, he looked like a gorilla,” said Lashley. “Honest to God. His arms were extraordinarily long, almost touching the ground. He was dressed in dark trousers, a jacket belonging to an overall suit, a soft hat [like the kind the mill police wore], a pair of mill-issue work gloves and a black cloth mask that hid his features.”

  He loped away in a sort of dogtrot and effortlessly vaulted the fence separating the plant from Mingo Boulevard two hundred feet away. Under a blood red moon fifty-four days later, he pumped six bullets into James Bartlett, another train service employee, before escaping behind the mill’s blast furnace. In July, he gunned down two more three hundred feet from the first shooting, then, muttering incoherently, he trotted to the river and escaped in a rowboat.

  On July 28, mill police, acting on a tip, were waiting and captured him. Lieutenant C. H. Bailey ripped off the black mask. The Ohio Gorilla was David D’Ascanio, forty-seven, a mill railroader and sweeper in the plant’s new process department. “His lips were a long thin line in the midst of a broad square face,” said Bailey. “He was short, swarthy and powerful.”

  A slit in his canvas overalls allowed him to access his .38 caliber Colt Police Special in a cloth holster. His cap and slicker had been stolen from a mill policeman. D’Ascanio was taken to his Lincoln Street room. He had covered the windows with double shades and plugged the keyhole. “Have you any friends?” Bailey asked.

  “No,” the apelike man replied. “You’ve got to have money to have friends. I’ve got no money and I’ve never cared much for women. I kill nobody!” But police found a black mask in a drawer and a trunk full of .38 ammo.

  “So there were other Gorilla Men,” thought Mrs. Andrassy, and one had just visited her son.

  It was not D’Ascanio. He would be sentenced to death next month. Ed Andrassy had barricaded the door to his room by wedging a chair under the brass knob. It was a small, spare room—one chest, one bed, five nature magazines with nude pictures of men and women playing volleyball, two medical books on gynecology, and a small red address book that he kept hidden. Ed went without dinner that night and didn’t eat all day Thursday, only moped in his room repeating that somebody was going to kill him. “Edward lived in constant fear of his life,” his father said later. “He always told us to mind our own business when we tried to straighten him out.”

  As soon as it was dark Ed peeked out at an empty tree-lined street. It was poorly lit. Anyone could have been waiting there. In spite of that, at 8:00 P.M. he slipped on his blue coat and crept out without a word.

  As a rule, the Andrassys made little commentary on their son’s erratic comings and goings. Like his other failings, they had come to accept them. If not for the long-armed man and Ed’s dire remarks about a gang, the family wouldn’t have given his absence a second thought. They spent all of Friday morning without any real sense of trepidation. By noon Mrs. Andrassy had discounted the alleged threats and by evening was waiting for him to return as usual. Saturday and Sunday passed with little concern. By Monday morning the family was barely troubled. It was Ed’s way, they told themselves and went about their lives as if nothing were wrong at all.

  AFTER school on Monday, September 23, Jimmy Wagner and Peter Kostura went to play on one of the raw hillocks overseeing the timeless furrow of the Kingsbury Run. A run is a midland creek that sometimes rushes with powerful currents and at other times is dry. Breathless, sixteen-year-old Jimmy and twelve-year-old Peter came out on the shapeless heap of Jackass Hill on Cleveland’s East Side.

  On the eroding summit at the end of East Forty-ninth Street, a few houses were cloistered among a thicket of white and black willows. The fruit of the white willows had been yellowish and drooping in June. By the end of June, the black willows had gone to seed. By July, both kinds were spotted green and white, August heat made their berries swell, and by September they were drooping in dense blue clusters. The big sassafras tree retained its red, club-shaped pedicels, but its empty fruit cups were trilling in the wind.

  Straggly sunflowers poked through tin cans by a rusting bedspring where the boys spent a while jumping up and down. Downy shad bushes, brown-headed wool grass, and seedy spikes of sawgrass—itchy stuff—caught at their trousers. The boys flew kites in the sweeping winds and peered down into the isolated run at a spot where the Erie Gully and wider run met. The wind was raising dust clouds along the flat-bottomed gully—the arid bed of a creek. Sections of cliff sheathed away onto vacant tin-roofed buildings, corrugated iron sheds, a refinery lime house, and the Erie Railroad shops below. Two switch engines were working the yards as strings of freight and passenger cars on sidings about the broad arroyo shook in the wind.

  Two Rapid Transit System trains crossed the basin at an angle, linking the economically depressed downtown to the swank suburbs of Shaker Heights. They brought every manner of man to the gully from every manner of place for every manner of reason. Thirty pairs of sooty tracks filled the run for most of its length. Beyond Forty-ninth Street the tracks split, and the Erie line diverted into a little gully of its own as the Shaker, Rapid, and Nickel Plate Railroad lines continued. As the canyon swung southeast from the industrial area out to East Ninetieth Street, its rushing waters were diverted into subterranean sewers. At the Thirty-seventh Street Bridge these sewers emerged to create a stagnant pool that flowed into the Cuyahoga River. From the southern shore of Lake Erie, the valley formed by the excessively polluted Cuyahoga (the only U.S. river to ever catch fire) cleaves the city into an east and west side. Toward Lake Erie, the gully became a canyon lit along its bluffs at night by vats of molten slag and the sulfur-belching stacks of steel mills. It was hell.

  When Jimmy and Peter’s softball rolled over the steep sixty-foot slope, they started after it, pushing their way through tangled underbrush. Halfway down Jimmy broke free into an open sedge hollow and crawled down into a shallow indentation. “Peter, there’s a man down there,” he shouted. “And he doesn’t have any clothes on!” The body, clad only in black cotton socks, lay on its side.
“Or any head!”

  They slid the rest of the way down and flagged a watchman who phoned the Erie Railroad police. Sergeant Arthur Marsh and Patrolman Arthur Stitt heard the story and rang the Cleveland PD. By 5:15 P.M., Lieutenant Gorman and the No. 6 Police Emergency Team were at the scene. Five minutes later, Chief of Police George J. Matowitz, a round-faced administrator in full gold braid, contacted Detectives Orley May and Emil Musil, and within twelve minutes they, too, had reached the Erie yards.

  A squad car carrying Inspector Charles O. Nevel arrived at the leaden trench. His silver hair was striped with black, his thin lips were drawn tight, and his blue eyes were intent beneath wire-rimmed glasses. Nevel, May, Musil, and the two railway dicks trailed the boys up the steep grade. Nevel’s keen eyes took in every twig and footprint. Except for the boys’ flight path he saw no broken branches or disturbed earth. Near the body lay a white shirt, trousers, checkered cap, and blood-stiffened blue coat. They rolled the nude body, which had not only been decapitated but emasculated. “It appears the body has been here only a short time,” said May.

  “Forty-eight hours at the outside,” said Nevel.

  “This means that the missing head and uh, the rest, might be nearby.”

  “There’s not enough blood. He was killed elsewhere and carried to the scene. There’s only one reason to mutilate a body in such a way—to conceal its identity. May, Get Coroner Pearce out here.” While light remained they searched for the head. Musil, about thirty feet away, gave a cry.

  “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.