“Is that the body of Mrs. Rice?” asked McGrath.
“It might be her,” said Fell, smiling. “You got her from the place I put her, didn’t you? And she’s got a crack on the side of her head, hasn’t she? It isn’t in very good condition, is it? Ha ha!” he roared “Hell of a looking thing, isn’t it? Teeth? No—ha ha!—they don’t look like her teeth to me. But, hell, it must be her. I killed her and put her in there! Now I want a big beef-steak.” Just minutes after the viewing, Fell was eating a thick porterhouse steak with Britt. “Nothing like a nice, juicy one,” Fell said jovially.
“Boy though, this is tough.”
“Here have a piece of mine,” said Fell, cutting his steak in half. “Say, Jimmy, did you ever see a corpse walking?”
Britt put down his knife, took a sip of coffee, and carefully wiped his lips. “No, Jerry, I can’t say I have.”
It was a rough day for those passionate of heart. When San Francisco clerk Henry Ohley shot himself in front of his girl’s house on Clipper Street, the bullet penetrated his lung. As he lay near death at Mission Emergency Hospital, Ohley gasped out a story of romance blasted by the girl’s father. At the San Francisco airport, officials encircled a nude long-legged blond. Miss Florence Cubitt, “the Flying Nudist,” had left San Diego wearing only a beaming smile. “She’ll keep her clothes on in our planes if it takes every pilot and stewardess on the line to make her do it!” said the airline officials. And in Seattle, Charles Rice finally learned what had happened to his ex-wife. “I was unaware Ada was dead—naturally I was shocked,” said the elderly contractor who really had loved her.
That afternoon Inspectors George O’Leary and Ed Hansen of the SFPD police Auto Detail drove Fell downtown. He claimed that last June he dropped Mrs. Rice and the Bulgarian out “somewhere in the San Francisco theatrical district.” “I think I can pick out the spot,” he said. “Ah, there it is.” Fell indicated a hotel at 493 Eddy Street at Hyde Street. Inside, the clerk recalled that two weeks before Fell’s arrest a letter had come addressed to a Baronovich. “But we had no such guest,” he said, “and so the letter was sent to the dead letter office.” O’Leary and Hansen took Fell to the HOJ so he could go through their missing persons books on a chance of finding a picture of Baronovich. He could not.
A smirking photo of Fell was etched onto a copper plate and trimmed to fit with a metal table saw. It was inserted onto a page and rolled to the stereotyping machine, which automatically cut off four large blotting sheets, pasted them together, and mashed onto the page until it fit every indentation. Bent into a half circle, the dampened matrix was placed in a type-high casting box, then strapped to the high-speed press.
By evening, Fell’s face was plastered across every front page with colorful names to match his personalities—“the Enigma Man,” “the Laughing Killer of the Woodside Glens,” “the Playboy Murderer,” “the Poker Slayer,” “the Laughing Murderer,” and the “Burly Lothario.” Fell kept himself in the news by doing anything the reporters asked, except admit to other killings. John Smeins, the Bay Hotel night clerk, studied a series of these pictures in the Examiner. “I know that face,” he told himself. “I know he’s been here before.” Then it came to him.
“That’s the man!” Smeins said. “That’s the laughing Mr. Meyers.” Smeins dialed Inspector Otto Frederickson. “I examined some pictures published in the papers and I’m absolutely convinced he’s the man who registered with Mrs. Coffin and disappeared from the hotel a short time later.”
“Are you certain?”
“I’ll never forget those ruddy cheeks and his smile and that laugh. He told me, ‘All these women are alike,’ just those words exactly. ‘They want beer and sandwiches before they go to sleep,’ he said. I’m positive Fell accompanied Bette Coffin and registered them as ‘Mr. and Mrs. H. Meyers of LA’ before he took her up to a third floor room.”
That night Inspector Engler interrogated Fell for three hours. At the first mention of Bette Coffin his big smile vanished. “You’re on the wrong track,” he snapped, angrily denying he had committed such an atrocity.
“All right,” said Engler. “In that case I want you to write something for me. I want you to write ‘Mr. and Mrs. H. Meyers City’ on this pad.” The Laughing Gorilla had indicated San Francisco as his place of residence by printing “City.”
Fell wrote the words several times and with both hands. He copied the name “H Meyers” twice so they were not exact replicas. “The handwriting is very similar to that on the hotel register,” Engler said. “I believe you’re denying this crime because in this case you can’t square it on the grounds of self defense as you are endeavoring to square the San Mateo killings.”
“That hotel clerk got me wrong,” said Fell. “I tell you I’ve never been in that hotel. I gave you my handwriting to compare with the register and didn’t try to fake it. They’ll find it doesn’t match. You’ll see. That murder was a lot more horrible than I would ever commit and I’m ready to take another lie detector test on that case any time. That little machine is the greatest thing ever invented. It certainly told my story. I know what I have done. You can give me that test or any other test.”
Engler took the sample to La Tulipe. “There is some similarity between Selz’s writing and that found on the hotel register,” he said, “but not much.” Fell had omitted the period after the initial “H” and after “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Other experts saw a great resemblance in the capital “H” in both exemplars, but the comparisons went no further.
Fell’s exemplar for comparison.
The Laughing Gorilla’s handprinting.
When Smeins saw Fell in person he was more positive than ever that he was “Mr. Meyers.” “Well,” Frederickson asked Dullea, “is Fell the Bay Hotel Murderer or not?” “I’ll settle this once and for all,” said Dullea. “Bring in Otto von Feldman, the former Bay Hotel night porter, to corroborate Smeins’ identification.”
Frederickson located von Feldman in San Diego. He had earlier recognized Fell’s photo in the paper. Frederickson brought him up and in person he found Fell’s features “even more similar.” “That’s him,” he said. “That’s the man who registered with her. That’s ‘Mr. Meyers.’ I’ll never forget that beefy build and disarming smile.”
Then Fell stood and von Feldman saw he was taller than “Mr. Meyers.” This confused him. But the killer’s odd hunched walk could be accounted for by a tall man crouching.
Out in the Bay, workers were completing half of the steel deck trusses between the anchorage and Pier W-1 on the west suspension bridge as newsies cried on the streets—“Triple Murder Suspect . . . Linked to Hotel Murder”. . . “Youth Confesses Two Killings.” Dullea picked up a Chronicle and read:
DEATH SUSPECT LINKED WITH HOTEL KILLING. IDENTIFIED BY CLERK AS THE MAN REGISTERING WITH COFFIN WOMAN.
REDWOOD CITY, MARCH 10—“That’s the man!” John Smeins, night clerk at the Bay Hotel, 24 Sacramento St., San Francisco, thus today identified the confessed slayer of Mrs. Ada French Rice and of a mystery man named as Baronovich. . . . He had accompanied the ill-fated woman to a room in the hotel. Ill-fated, because the next morning she was found dead in bed. Her mouth had been taped and she had been slashed about the body with a razor. But death had been caused by strangulation, an autopsy revealed. . . . Her companion on that last night of her life was heavy set man of 27, with ruddy cheeks and a disarming smile. Smeins forgot all about him until a startled hotel employee the next day found the nude and mutilated body of the woman.
Maloney could not understand why Fell accepted liability for two other murders, but not to being “Mr. Meyers.” “We know you were responsible for the murder of Bette Coffin in the Bay Hotel,” he told Fell. “For God’s sake, you bragged about it!”
“No, Tom. think back, I said that Baronovich killed Bette Coffin.”
“And you killed him, didn’t you.”
“Tom, I’m just a poor boy working his way through college. On that night I was work
ing in a San Francisco oil station.”
The press claimed Fell had a wife who had mysteriously disappeared two years ago, but the only proof of her existence was an application form dated August 25, 1934, that mentioned her address as 1625 Fairview Street in Berkeley. McGrath obtained the actual oil company form, which contradicted the rumor. Fell’s mother had lived at that address.
McGrath was worried. He could only tentatively identify the lime pit remains as those of Mrs. Rice. Without an official identification, the DA had no assurance of a conviction. Their case now hinged on two very iffy dental reconstructions being done at Palo Alto. Remarkably, Fell had provided the information that Ada had her teeth worked on shortly before their first meeting. Both dentists completed a chart of the dead woman’s teeth, but their comparisons were inconclusive.
Neither could Ada’s nephew, Lawrence Doherty, a Clay Street lawyer, conclusively identify her when he visited the Redwood City Morgue. Doherty contacted Hugh French, Ada’s son in New York, who had written him in June that he had been “worried about her.” “Your mother has been murdered,” the lawyer wired. “The murderer has confessed.”
Hugh and his sister, Phyllis, started West. The last hope for a firm identification lay in their hands.
Fell, always fast with a quip, grew solemn and borrowed a fountain pen from Britt. “For the first time,” he scrawled, “I am beginning to realize that maybe it’s not so good for me to laugh and josh about these killings. Maybe it’s given folks a wrong impression about me, made them believe I am cold and heartless. San Mateo police called me the most brutal, ruthless and remorseless killer they had ever known. But the fact of the matter is that I have nothing on my conscience and I couldn’t do anything else. The whole mess is just one of those unfortunate things that could happen to anybody. It just happened to me, that’s all.”
He didn’t feel sorry because he didn’t have anything to feel sorry about. One killing was an accident, pure and simple, and the other one was in self-defense. “Of course, I feel sorry for poor Mrs. Rice. She was a nice old lady and I was very fond of her. And I feel sorry that Baronovich is dead, after all, it was his life or mine and I’d rather be alive myself than be dead with Baronovich alive. Can’t blame me for that. Any normal person would have done the same thing as I did.” He signed his true name, Heinrich Fritz Ralphe Jerome von Braun Selz.
Psychiatrists, attempting to explain Fell’s joviality, chalked it up to superegoism. “Because he believes he was justified in slaying two persons,” said one expert, “the rest of the world should feel the same way, according to his philosophy. Fell is not insane, but his friends always considered him ‘strange.’”
Undersheriff George Brereton of San Diego, lured by the news that Fell had lived near the two San Diego victims during April 1931 and displayed a “strange familiarity with them,” rushed to San Francisco. “Did you kill Louise Teuber, a seventeen-year-old artist’s model, and eleven-year-old Virginia Brooks in San Diego?” he asked Fell. Their mutilated bodies had been bound with a double-looped rope tied with a sailor’s knot such as found in Fell’s car. “I know all about that,” Fell volunteered. “Well, maybe I did that and maybe I didn’t.”
Richmond Police Chief L. E. Jones’s men, Inspectors George Bengley and Harry Connelly, arrived on Brereton’s heels anxious to connect Fell to the January 7 ax murder of Joseph Anthony the previous year. “I left the service oil station late in ’34,” Fell told them, but admitted to living about a block away from Anthony. “Your fingerprints to some extent resemble the single bloody print on the haft of a carpenter’s ax,” said Bengley. Fell looked at the print card. “Well, I guess they look like my fingerprints all right, but I can’t tell you about the murder. I know nothing about that. The fingerprints may be similar, but they’re not mine. I was over in Alameda employed at a Richmond auto assembly plant about the same time. I’m guilty of this Woodside killing, but not that one. If you keep on investigating you’ll get your man, but it won’t be me.”
“We’ll settle this,” said Bengley, who inked up Fell’s fingers, rolled a set of prints, then hurried back to Richmond to make enlargements. They were not identical. Fell was never charged for Anthony’s killing. Next the San Mateo police unsuccessfully tried to link him to the murder of an elderly merchant in Santa Ana on October 24, 1932. The next day was Friday the thirteenth, the jinx day.
THIRTY-SIX
I recorded Fell’s dubious and equally mirthful confessions of having done away with a doubly dubious Bulgarian cavalry officer.
—CHRONICLE EDITOR ALLAN BOSWORTH
FRIDAY the thirteenth turned out to be lucky for many people. Over on Haight Street a mother saved her two small children from a gas leak just in time and got them to Park Emergency. On Jackson Street two workmen were lifting a thirty-six-hundred-pound marquee over the Woey Loy Goey Restaurant’s door when it dropped on them. It is surprising that they suffered only fractured left heels. Every Friday the thirteenth the Anti-Superstition Club rented room 1313 at an exclusive hotel and drank black cat cocktails, ate coffin ice cream, broke mirrors, and walked under ladders. Nobody died. In San Mateo, a passerby saved an infant from a burning car. It would be a lucky day for the Laughing Killer, too. Fell began the morning of the thirteenth by taking two phone calls from Anna, his mother in LA. At noon he had a steak. Then, to the shock of everyone, he stopped grinning; hired John McCarthy, a San Francisco lawyer he had known for some time; and saved his own life.
“I don’t want to hang,” Fell told him.
“You won’t.”
Two hours later, McCarthy and attorney Bruce Fratis were at the Redwood City Court House conferring privately with DA Gil Ferrell and Assistant DA Louis Dematteis. All four crossed the street to the jail where they surprised Sheriff McGrath grilling Fell about the Bay Hotel murder. Five minutes later, Fell, surrounded by officers and lawyers, walked two blocks to the store court room of Justice of the Peace Edward McAuliffe. The stout McGrath puffed to keep up. Once inside McAuliffe’s tiny court, they agreed that Fell be held for superior court trial and rushed him along the street to the gray stone courthouse. Officials, assuming Fell had recanted his alibi, came on the run. At every stop, the procession of bystanders, guards, and lawyers increased as if drawn by the defendant’s magnetic personality. Swiftly, Judge A. R. Cotton’s courtroom was jammed beyond capacity with cops, lawyers, court reporters, and pretty secretaries who had deserted their desks to watch Fell. Everyone was there except a handful of deputy sheriffs out searching for a giant Japanese gardener, Frank Mayeda. He had hacked a woman to death with an ax, then turned on her daughters, who were recuperating at a nearby hospital. Mayeda, hands drenched in blood, staggered to the City Hall to give himself up, but the doors were locked, the phones ringing, and no one answering. Everyone was at the courthouse. “Where is everybody?” he asked, then walked to Walter Hobart’s Hillsborough estate to surrender to their chauffeur. “I am sorry, very sorry for this terrible thing,” he said. Officers Martin McDonnell and William Cotter locked Mayeda in the same jail cell Fell had so recently occupied, then joined everyone else at the courthouse.
At 3:55 P.M., after a brief arraignment, McCarthy waived Fell’s preliminary examination. Fell’s hands were clasped, his face set and flushed. He was shirtless, his blue polo sweater open at the throat showcasing his muscular chest. Dematteis had no sooner begun questioning Fell than the defendant signaled Judge Cotton, who had just fixed the degree of the crime as murder in the first degree. The interruption put him off stride.
“Do you wish to plead now?” he asked Fell directly and not his attorney.
Fell nodded.
“Wait a minute,” said McCarthy.
Things were happening too fast. Cotton silenced McCarthy with a wave. “What is your pleasure?” he asked.
Stone-faced, Fell said in a frail voice: “I plead guilty.”
“My God, he’s copping a plea,” whispered McGrath. “He’s just saved himself from the gallows.”
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p; “Before sentence is pronounced,” said Ferrell, who privately believed that “unofficially” Fell was responsible for the Bay Hotel, San Diego, and New York murders, “I wish to say it is recommended the supreme penalty not be imposed. By his willingness to plead guilty, he has saved the State much expense. I would like to point out that he cooperated fully with the officials. This is the sensible course to take. It saves the county time and money. Besides Fell was the only one who could have identified Ada Rice’s body. Had he changed his story we might have had a situation.” He turned to Fell. “You have a right to a delay of sentence from two to five days.”
“No, I want to get it over with,” said Fell. “I don’t want to hang. They said maybe I’d get life if I pleaded guilty. I want to do that.”
Still, the sentence of life imprisonment rocked Fell back on his heels. The deputies affectionately pumped Fell’s hand and patted him on the back as he had achieved some great accomplishment. “What about Baronovich?” asked the press.
“There was no intentional omission,” Ferrell told them, “in our failure to charge Selz with the Bulgarian murder. We had witnesses to Fell’s other confession, but the Judge just didn’t call for them and I thought he would bar any testimony of the second confession. Police are still dragging and if they ever find Baronovich’s corpse we will charge Fell.”
“Will you see your mother,” a reporter asked Fell as he lit his pipe outside.
“I expect to soon.”
“How do you feel about going to prison?”
“How would you?” he shouted back. “I’m not down in the dumps.”
The hearing was so brief it set records. Only fifty-five minutes after he pleaded guilty, Fell was on his way to San Quentin with McGrath, Britt, and Maloney. One of the reasons Fell had confessed was to help his “pals.” On board the ferry to Sausalito, passengers flocked to the dining room to peer at him. Fell, ascot around his neck, white teeth wolfish, was getting in one last attack on a juicy steak. Holding a steak knife, he poured ketchup over his steak and fries. “It’s the last good dinner I’ll get for a long while.” He beamed. Next to him, Britt was having a steak, too.
The Laughing Gorilla Page 27