The Laughing Gorilla (45 page)

The next day, February 16, he read that his old nemesis, Dr. Nathan S. Housman, the man Egan had told of his plot to murder Josie Hughes, was at the end of his six-week trial in Judge J. E. White’s court. The doctor was facing thirty counts of violations of the State Narcotics Act. Mrs. Alma E. Black, an elderly widow under his care for some time, had died of a drug overdose, yet his records showed no entry of any narcotic prescriptions for her. Dullea found it telling that Mrs. Black had left her $200,000 estate to Housman. Nate Coughlan represented the balding doctor. At one point, he lunged at prosecutor John McMahon shouting—“You’re a liar—a liar!” As they rolled along the counsel table trailing punches, Bailiff Frank Burns and Narcotics Inspector Walter Creighton separated them. Two days later, the nine-woman, three-man jury found Housman guilty of three dope counts. The verdict brought a wry smile to Dr. Housman’s lips that was so similar to Chief Quinn’s tight little smile, that it was impossible to tell them apart. As for Chief Quinn, he went in to radio.

—SFPD FORENSICS REPORT

 

 

 

 

 

ON
Tuesday, June 25, 1940, a northeast wind was sweeping the docks, shaking the Ferry Building and rocking the boats on the water. The huge clock tower above the Bay Hotel was just striking 9:00 A.M. as Chief Dullea leaned back in his chair at the HOJ and took a sip of coffee. He was grim, living as he was in the age of the human monster. Where there had been none before, sequential murderers were becoming a twentieth-century phenomenon. Dullea still did not understand them and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

All the red and blue flags were cracking in that wind the day Dullea finally got his big break in the Gorilla Man case. Later he would remember every moment—how the panes had rattled and the streets had been blown clean of papers and rubbish. The odd weather pattern had not gone unnoticed. Around that time, experts had observed that a sudden northeast wind after a prevailing period of hot, mild, or not too cold weather, frequently coincided with outbursts of sexual crime. Just as Mrs. Andrassy had felt a confluence all about her before a laughing apelike visitor had appeared at her door asking for her son, Dullea felt a storm building.

His mouth was dry as cotton. He licked his lips and took another sip. So many years. “Where had his quarry been all these years?” If it hadn’t been for a similar series of Gorilla Man dissections in Cleveland and LaTulipe’s obsession with the case, he would have forgotten the maniac by now. Had it really been five years since Anna Lemon left the ferry on such a blustery day, reached the darkened Bay Hotel and several hours later run back down three flights of stairs screaming? In spite of a decade of wind and rain, the stain left by Officer John Malcolm’s blood on Pier 26 had still not completely washed away. So many years of waiting. So much frustration. The dread that somewhere the worst was happening and he could not stop it haunted him. The new chief went about his morning’s work. His trusted aides, McGinn and Tatham, came and went, good friends, dogged hunters who never gave up. The clock tower struck noon, then one o’clock. The long-anticipated break in the New York and Bay Hotel murders came a half hour later.

A sharp rap and a patrolman burst in. “Chief, a hotel maid, Margaret Rice, found a woman jammed between the bed and wall,” he said, “nude . . . unspeakably mutilated with a razor.” Just like Bette Coffin. For a second Dullea couldn’t move. His eyes held that sleepy, contemplative look they always did before decisive moments when he roused himself into action. Instinctively, Dullea knew the progeny of Earle Nelson had returned. This time, they would not blame the wrong man as they had with Slipton Fell. This time, there would be no tragedy like Ramon Hughes dangling from a noose in his cell. Dullea, LaTulipe at his heels, ran down the front steps and into a cruiser idling at the curb. They swung wide at the intersection, the wire radio aerial whipping like a lash, headed for 108 Fourth Street at Mission—the Hotel Irwin.

The two detectives, hearts pounding, ascended to the seventh floor and down a dimly lit hall into a double room overlooking the street. The curtains were drawn. Dullea smelled the fragrance of gardenias in the room. A fresh corsage had been trampled underfoot. Two white, waxy petals, doubled like a little sailing ship, were floating in a thin, red lake. Longtime partners George Engler and Al Corrasa (who had arrested Albert Walter) had just cracked the murder of Hewlett Tarr, a cashier at the Curren Theatre. They tracked the shooter in a stolen Yellow Cab to the Koffee Kup Restaurant three miles outside town. Now they were gathered around an overturned mattress. The killer had hidden his victim as if ashamed of what he had done. Inspector Frank Ahern and Lieutenant Michael Mitchell (head of the Homicide Squad and one of the toughest cops in the city) heaved the mattress off. Mitchell’s eyes widened. He didn’t feel so tough now.

Between the bed and the wall was the strangled body of a young woman clad only in black stockings, her legs sprawled in a vee. An autopsy had been conducted on her with a razor-sharp knife. The strangler had cut away a portion of her torso, flung it beside her body, then burned it with cigarettes and matches. This time the Gorilla Man had taken his time in order to enjoy himself. “One look at the victim and we saw the remarkable similarities to the Bay Hotel murder,” Corrasa said. “We knew the Gorilla Man was back.”

Her face was entirely covered by a girdle pulled tightly across her mouth, nose, and neck. Dullea carefully peeled it back to reveal black and blue marks around her eyes and deep claw marks on her cheeks exactly like Bette Coffin’s. In life she had been a pretty girl. The cloth belt knotted around her throat had puckered her flesh as the killer slowly tightened it. Her dress, with a few of the belt loops torn away, hung over the back of a chair. Beneath the ligature were the outlines of a huge pair of hands. Like Clara Newman, the attractive young woman had been strangled
twice
.

Above her black stockings, on the woman’s right thigh, was a blue eagle.

“What do you think of that?” asked Dullea. “Isn’t that a U.S. Ensign?”

“Wait a minute,” Ahern said. “I think I know her. I’ve often seen her with sailors near the Ferry Building. But I don’t know her name.” He saw her cheap purse on the dresser, but when he opened it found no identification, only a key to another hotel room.

“Get her fingerprints, Frank,” said Dullea. “I have a hunch she’s probably got a record.”

LaTulipe rolled the victim’s prints at the scene (which he rarely did), then discovered fingerprints on a nearly empty pint whisky bottle on the mantle. They had been deliberately smudged. The Gorilla Man was playing with them. He bagged the bottle anyway, then drove the print cards to the HOJ and turned them over to Inspector Daniel O’Neill, chief of the Bureau of Identification. LaTulipe had learned some things about the type of man they were hunting. Anatomists and mutilators are erotically stimulated by the victim’s suffering and sexually gratified by inflicting the wound.

“The man and woman registered just before noon on Monday,” Margaret Rice told Mitchell. “She had only a purse. I remembered he demanded a front room on the third floor but we had none.” Most of the Hotel Irwin’s guests had been out between 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M. when the murder was probably committed. None had heard a sound or seen anything out of the ordinary. “You boys question hotel employees,” Mitchell told Corrasa and Engler. “This case looks so similar to the Coffin case I’ll bet we can almost guess what the hotel clerk will say. I wonder if he used the name ‘Meyers’ again?”

Manager Arthur Edwards said they had registered as “Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilkins of Los Angeles” around 11:00 A.M. the day before. “The only thing she carried was a purse and a corsage of gardenias,” he said, and described the suspect as “30 to 35 years old, possibly 40, short, stocky, about 5’, 9” and 175 to 180 pounds. He had medium light hair, almost blond—maybe from the sun, and a tanned, weather-beaten complexion. He was wearing a dark suit which fit snugly because of his broad shoulders and barrel chest. His coat collar was turned up around his neck and he wore his hat pulled low, like this.” Edwards showed them. “His hands were in his pockets.” The description of “Mr. Wilkins” tallied with that of “Mr. Meyers” provided by John Smeins in April 1935.

“Did he say anything?” asked Engler.

“It’s an odd thing. It was just shortly after one o’clock when he came out of the elevator and said his wife was hungry and asked me where he could get some sandwiches. ‘Women are funny,’ he said to me. His voice was kind of soft and musical. He said, ‘My wife decided she wanted me to bring her in a couple of sandwiches instead of going out for something to eat. I guess the Brass Rail right around the corner is a good as any place hereabouts, ain’t it?’ I told him ‘yes’ and he went sauntering out the door. He was whistling and laughing. It was a strange laugh. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“My God,” thought Engler, “those are almost the identical words the Gorilla Man used at the Bay Hotel. He is unquestionably the killer.”

“The way I figure it,” Mitchell said, “we can cinch the Coffin killing and this murder on the same man by proving that the signatures on both registers are identical.” Corrasa took the hotel register and a stat of the Bay Hotel ledger to Inspector McGinn. To his practiced eye both looked alike and analysis later that day confirmed the signatures were identical. McGinn theorized that the killer targeted red-haired women down on their luck. “I think he picks them up in some bar,” he said, “and we should check those out first.”

“That’s already being done. But where has the Gorilla Man been all this time? Look at the tremendous time lag between his 1931 New York murders, the 1935 San Francisco killing and now this one. How has he held his compulsion in check?”

“He hasn’t,” said McGinn fiercely. “It just means that there are others we don’t know about or haven’t connected with him—yet.”

“I’ve identified the victim’s prints from the hotel bedroom,” O’Neill told Dullea. “She’s Mrs. Robert E. [Earl] McCarthy alias Irene Chandler and a few other monikers. She’s thirty one.” In April, the LAPD made an inquiry concerning the support of her boys, Harry, ten, and Ralph, nine. In 1921 she was arrested for prostitution in San Diego and over the following nine years jailed for the same offense eleven times, all in San Diego. “There’s that San Diego connection again,” thought Dullea. Mrs. Coffin’s son had mentioned a sailor with a short name from San Diego and Dullea had a file on two San Diego murders committed by some sailor who tied unusual knots. San Diego seemed to be the logical starting point. Teletyped requests got them a photo of Irene just as O’Neill located a more current one from the local files.

“With her picture,” said Engler, “we certainly ought to be able to find some bartender where she and the suspect had been drinking. At the very least we might be able to find the shop where they purchased the pint of whisky. It’s unusual for many people to buy liquor in the early morning. They were probably drinking somewhere close to the hotel.”

The
Examiner
headlined: “SEX MANIAC KILLS WOMAN IN HOTEL; Nude, Mutilated Victim Strangled With Belt; Drinking Companion Flees.” By 6:00 P.M. the burning arc lights of the photo engraver had converted the victim’s photo (stolen by a zealous reporter from her room) into a masking Velox of forty-five dots per square inch, which sulfuric acids etched onto a copper printing plate.

Dullea mapped out an area a mile square in the heart of San Francisco. “Within this zone,” he said, rapping it with his knuckles, “I want you to check every bar and rooming house, question every hotel clerk and guest, and grill every bartender and beat cop. Then do it all over again.” Less than twenty-four hours after Mrs. McCarthy’s nude body was discovered, Lieutenant Mitchell had already visited eighty-two bars.

This first day brought no leads. No one had seen “Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilkins of Los Angeles.” On the second day, Engler and Corrasa, carrying photos of the latest victim and old and new descriptions of the sadistic ripper, visited local hotels and located two where the couple had attempted to register and been turned away. Why? Was it the lack of luggage? Or had the man appeared forbidding in some way? On the third day, nearly two blocks away from the Hotel Irwin, Inspector Frank Ahern discovered a third lodging house where “Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilkins of Los Angeles” had been rejected.

Dullea’s men labored for a solid week, taking little time out to eat or sleep. By Tuesday, July 2, they had covered the Embarcadero, the financial district, and south of Market with no success. Dullea read their typed reports over and ordered all the uniformed cops in the waterfront area to pitch in. Perhaps a beat cop would find something they had missed as they made another crisscross of the lowest bars.

Beat cop Carl Marcus’s feet were killing him, so he stopped to rest at a tavern near his regular corner in the south of Market District. The regular bartender was not there. A relief barman was in his place. When Marcus showed him Irene McCarthy’s photo he did a double take.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait a minute. Yeah, I recognize her. She was in here two days in a row. I worked last week too, glad to get the work. So that would make it Tuesday and Wednesday, the 23rd and 24th. I’m positive she was in here, but not with a man—with another woman—yeah, Wednesday morning.”

“Not a man. Too bad.” Marcus turned to go.

“Wait. Would this help? I’m certain I can locate her drinking companion.” And she might know the identity of the man with huge hands who moved like an ape.