The Laughing Gorilla (36 page)

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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.”

“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.

“Who wants to buy my overcoat?” Fell quipped to the crowd.

“I wouldn’t take it as a present,” said a voice from the back.

“Do you feel relieved?” someone asked.

“I haven’t decided yet. I feel like a dog getting out of water who hasn’t shaken himself yet. Some people might be surprised by my action today, but it wasn’t a sudden decision. I’d been thinking about it all the time. As I’ve said no one knows what is in my mind.”

“Jerry, I think you’re crazy,” a spectator said.

“And can you prove you’re not?” said Fell.

By 7:30 P.M., Fell was at the prison gates to start serving a life sentence as prisoner number 58,769. The former weightlifter towered over Warden James Holohan, whose first words to the new inmate were fierce. “Take that pipe out of your mouth!” he snapped. “You’re just lucky they didn’t string you up down there.”

Fell stopped laughing as if he had been slapped across the face. Britt and Maloney had never spoken so harshly to him during his long interrogations. His face grew pained. Taking off his snap brim felt hat, Fell held it over his heart and addressed the newspapermen with one foot inside San Quentin and the other on free ground.

“Fellows,” Fell said, “there’s just one thing I’d like to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I know I’ve caused a lot of grief especially for the relatives of the deceased. I want to thank all of you for your kindness. I’m going in now to do my damnedest to make good,” he said jerking a thumb in the direction of the prison. “You can count on that.” He gave a hearty wave of his hand. “So long, Boys!” he called.

He considered many of them friends, had even rehearsed his good-bye speech with Maloney, whom he considered the best of them. It was not hard for the reporters to see why Mrs. Rice had fallen for Fell. In his dark outfit, with no shirt or socks, and in yachting shoes he was a very handsome man. He had charmed the reporters, too.

“Good luck, Jerry,” they cried. His huge hands closed around Maloney and Britt’s hands as he bid them farewell. “Thanks, Jimmy,” said Fell. “Thanks, Tom.” His eyes brimmed over. As the steel gates slammed behind him, the press heard the warden say, “Put some handcuffs on him!” A minute later the big man’s hearty, booming laugh was echoing down the cell block. Fell was his old jocular self (or selves) again.

“Good-bye, Jerry!” the newsmen called after him as if parting from a loved one. They still stood there as a group taking it all in as night fell.

 

 

FOR
months after, the Richmond Oil Company continued to receive letters lauding the excellent work of Jerry von Selz at their Woodside station. The letters, all in different handwriting and signed by different names, bore one thing in common—the postmark of San Quentin Prison. Fell did keep his word. He made good inside as captain of the prison’s tumbling team, champion weight lifter, and prison strong man. But when he took up pole vaulting, guards cast a nervous eye toward the low walls, calculated his superb physical condition, and scrapped the program. Finally, Fell, desperate to fight for his country, attempted to enlist. Army doctors rejected him as a “constitutional psychopathic inferior” but did order him to a minimum security facility at Chino. Fell obtained maps of Mexico, shipped his prized mandolin ahead, and strolled away from the honor institution. He never got to Mexico, but did reach Minnesota where he enlisted with the draft board as Corporal Ralph Jerome “Tiny” Morgan, a physical education instructor. Identified by his prints, he was extradited back to California to serve out his sentence. Fell was never discharged of the murder of Michael Baronovich. That would have been impossible. How could he have killed a man who had never lived? With the help of some makeup, Baronovich was only another of Fell’s multiple identities or, at the very least, a product of his frenzied and imaginative dream mind, the only place he was real.

 

 

“
WHY
are you so glum, Charlie?” asked La Tulipe. “We put Bette Coffin’s killer in Q yesterday.” Dullea turned in his chair and stared out the grimy window. The trees were still bare. “Slipton Fell either killed for gain or by accident,” he explained. “He was a greedy boy who just wanted to be liked, but hadn’t the stomach for murder. Remember how his killing of Mrs. Rice so unnerved him he couldn’t sleep in her house? No, Fell wasn’t the Gorilla Man.”

Then who had killed Mrs. Coffin and committed the brutal murders in San Diego, New York, and San Francisco? Was there a connection with the Butcher in Cleveland? The only suspect the Cleveland police ever had “that amounted to a nickel” was a Great Lakes sailor named Harry who once worked in a morgue doing autopsies. That was enough to make LaTulipe wonder all night.

—REPORT ON THE SFPD

 

 

 

 

 

THE
grand jury investigation into alleged police graft and extortion progressed in secret. Ed Atherton, the DA’s $100,000 privately contracted investigator, liked it that way. Such stealth gave the former G-man, officer in the foreign service, and private investigator the opportunity to apply a little extortion of his own. It helped that he lacked sympathy for the little fellows, the foot soldiers of the system. He considered them sacrificial lambs to find, publicize, prosecute, and annihilate to give the public the impression they made up the entire San Francisco underworld.

The forty-year-old Atherton had studied law at Georgetown University, entered the consular service during the Great War and served in Italy, Bulgaria, and Jerusalem before joining the DOJ in 1924. While with the FBI, he moved to New York, Boston, Detroit, and finally Los Angles where he helped capture a neo-revolutionary army of Mexican nationals at the border. Over the following two years he headed the FBI office in San Francisco. After he resigned in 1927, he started a private investigating firm in LA with his partner, Joseph Dunn. Atherton’s local snitches included Louis Bucchiers, a bootlegger, extortionist, greengrocer, and night janitor at the
Chronicle.
Bucchiers pointed him in the direction of a waterfront cop, a balding, former heavyweight boxer, Lieutenant Henry “Dutch” Ludolph of the Harbor Station.

“I respect you because you have the reputation of being the straightest straight-shooter in town,” Atherton told Ludolph. Atherton didn’t interrogate as much as insinuate himself into the confidences of those he interviewed. He turned one cop against another by convincing him that another cop had already talked. “I have no intention of hurting you in any way or bringing about your prosecution,” he said smoothly. “All I want are the higher-ups. Play ball with us.” Ludolph kicked over his chair and went to see his attorney.

“He’s trying to get me,” Ludolph told Jake Ehrlich.

“Who?”

“That man, Atherton. I tell you, Jake, I never took a nickel of graft in my life. I’m clean as a whistle or I wouldn’t come to you. He wants I should put the finger on
everyone;
on all the other guys in the business.” A cop in San Francisco was never “on the force,” but always “in the business.”

“Atherton isn’t willing to settle for a squealing Ludolph,” Ehrlich thought. “He wants a broken, destroyed and thoroughly stigmatized victim.” Ludolph claimed to have amassed his fortune of $50,000 (twenty-three times an average man’s annual income in 1936) by picking winning horses and prizefighters. He could document every wager, but began with his bet on Battling Nelson against Joe Gans at two a half to one odds. “I took the Swede for $250 (Ludolph’s present month’s salary). I won. I got a stake. From then on I was just lucky, lucky but careful. I bet on the horses where I can’t lose. I never blew no money on the hotsy-totsies.” Recently, he had won on Hidden Sight in the eighth race at Narragansett, which paid sixteen to one. “Atherton claims I’ve been collecting for me, for the mayor’s last campaign, for the organization; all that kind of crud.”

On the west side of Nob Hill, Atherton was fine-tuning his seventy-page grand jury report, which mentioned a hundred crooked cops by name and smeared another hundred honest ones. “At gathering general information, near information, rumors, whispered asides and irresponsible scandal,” said Ehrlich, “he was an ace at rounding up documented fact that could be turned into legally admissible evidence. Atherton was an ace with a broad A.”