The Laughing Gorilla (41 page)

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 snagged 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).

An attendant at the Soho refinery pump house saw an expensive black Lincoln pull onto the Jefferson Street Bridge. A short, heavyset man got out and heaved a heavy bundle into the river, where it was immediately swept away. Three weeks later, Joe Perry, a pump-house worker, observed the black Lincoln creep onto the bridge again. A month later, John Mokris and Frank Skrovan were crossing the High Level Bridge when a stranger appeared in the riverbed below. Carrying a weighty duffel bag, he crossed the slick rocks and disappeared into a brick storm drain. Over the gurgling water, they heard his steps echoing along the outflow pipes of the tunnel. They left an hour later, unfamiliar with Matowitz’s theory of a secret murder lab below ground. Merylo and Zalewski were on the bridge that night, too, but after so much unrelenting work came to blows. Zalewski left the investigation and Merylo retired to work the case privately. More human flotsam, the left foot, thighs, and headless torso of a tenth victim, appeared in the Cuyahoga River and washed ashore near Superior Avenue. Again, hesitation marks suggested the Butcher was breaking in an apprentice. The bodies became just another example of unidentified
disjecta membra
discovered in Cleveland’s sluggish rivers and icy lagoons and on the slopes of lonely Jackass Hill.

—RULES AND PROCEDURES, SFPD

 

 

 

 

 

IN
San Francisco Patrolman E. J. Christal, another special-duty man from Central Station, refused to talk to the grand jury, which held him in contempt and suspended him immediately. The next witness, Lieutenant Mark Higgins, had barely opened his mouth when a bailiff whispered something to Judge Robinson. The judge cleared the courtroom. A janitor, under orders for a week to keep a lookout, had stumbled across batteries and paraphernalia strung in the attic directly above the jury quarters. Dullea got a chair, climbed up and unscrewed the plate. Resting just inside a wire mesh opening he saw an amplifier. He tracked a thin, copper wire for six hundred feet along two sides of the City Hall attic to the Polk and Grove side and dropped down into a little room with a broken lock. An empty chair had been drawn up to a cardboard box with a Dictaphone inside. It was placed there after Friday because before then the room’s lock hadn’t been broken.

On June 3, 1936, Sheriff Murphy took Lemon and Hoertkorn into custody. Their bail was fixed at $250 each, which both men immediately paid, and then departed. “The attitude of this commission,” Roche said the next day, “is clearly and unequivocally established by their action last night in overruling Captain Lemon’s objections to the proceedings and denying his motion to dismiss. Because of the lateness of the hour it would have been impossible to have completed the trial of Captain Lemon upon the charges preferred against him.”

Gillen, who was “being swamped with various angles of the case,” wanted to name a temporary assistant DA to act as a special prosecutor. “While a Grand Juror may not divulge what has taken place in the Grand Jury Room,” he said, “there is no law that muzzles a DA who shall keep the public fully informed through the press as to what is taking place in this important investigation into a very important situation.”

On June 6, 1936, Atherton asked for another $50,000. The DA told him that $25,000 might be sufficient.

Chief Quinn, seeing the way things were going, publicly abolished the special-duty men as a major police evil and returned all bucket men to uniform. On June 10 at 8:00 A.M., he organized a permanent vice squad from eight trusted special-duty men attached to his own office. “Hereafter,” he said, “if an occasion arises when it is necessary to take men out of uniform for one reason or another, the captain may do so, but under a time limit of 24 hours. The same men shall not serve consecutively on this work on an immediate subsequent occasion, but others must be used. In the event this arrangement is not sufficient for investigative purposes, the new vice squad will take on the work.”

The new unit, headed by Patrolman Jim McCarthy, would handle all cases affecting public morals and also function as a narcotics unit during the planned dope cleanup campaign. The chief then shook up the districts most affected by the probe.

For several months before, Captain Art Layne had been working in the personnel department at the HOJ. Abruptly and to his great joy, he was transferred to the Crime Prevention Detail. Behind the scenes, Dullea had been working hard to return this honest cop to his former position at Central Station. In response the chief sent Layne on a long vacation and named Lieutenant Ed Copeland acting captain at Central Station during Lemon’s suspension. He transferred Captain Michael Riordan from Mission Station to Central to replace Copeland. Captain Bernard McDonald was transferred to Southern District, replacing Captain Hoertkorn, and Captain Peter McGee was transferred from Ingleside Station to Mission to fill Riordan’s vacancy. Lieutenant Jack Sullivan of Mission Station was transferred to Ingleside. The chief elevated two lieutenants to acting captains to fill in any remaining holes. Dullea decided not to appoint anyone to replace Lieutenant Mitchell as head of the Auto Detail until he saw how all the changes worked out and just how honest these men would prove to be.

The following day, June 12, Patrolman James Miles of Harbor Station, another special-duty man, refused to answer the Grand Jury. “Your questions are an invasion of my private affairs,” he said. “I believe I might be incriminated or subject to ridicule.”

Judge I. M. Golden assailed all the nontalking officers. “They are legally and morally to respond to questions affecting the welfare and security of the citizens employing them and touching upon their own integrity as law enforcement agents.”