The Laughing Gorilla (19 page)

She married August H. L. Mengler, a slight, wearied sea captain and engineer, on July 8, 1930, in Martinez, California. Ada posed outdoors in a cane-back chair. In the photo of that happy day August stands stoutly behind her. Ada, in spring bonnet, white frock, and pearls, nestles a bouquet of roses in her lap, but the determined thrust of her jaw hints at trouble to come. It came on November 1, 1932, when she left the family home at Woodside Glens to travel abroad. “She’s been living at an unknown address in Greece without my permission,” August complained. When she extended her Grecian tour, he drove to San Francisco to see his lawyer, Joseph I. McNamara, at his office in the Kohl Building.

His signed complaint of September 23, 1933, alleged Ada had married him “more for his worldly goods, than love and affection.” He cited extreme cruelty and a passion for welfare work and social reform that caused her to neglect their home. “I gave her large sums of money to make her trip,” he said. “I sent more when she urgently cabled that she was stranded in Europe, but no more. I fear she will use the money for more world travel. I love her, but cannot live with her.”

One thing puzzled McNamara. Not only did Ada travel under the name Ada French, but gave her forwarding address as 80 Wall Street, New York, the address of her former husband, Fred. August filed for divorce on September 21, 1933. Two days later, he was as dead as Fred French.

August collapsed in the lobby of an O’Farrell Street hotel (other reports placed his death in bed upstairs) and died as ambulance attendants transported him to Central Emergency Hospital. With August’s sudden death, Ada had an incentive to return after a year away. She went to see McNamara who described her as “a woman of violent passion . . . subject to frequent outbursts of temper in my office.” August’s children were convinced their father’s death was due to heart trouble aggravated by marital worries and fought Ada’s claim as rightful heir. Ultimately, she was awarded her husband’s bank account of about $2,500 and their jointly shared property, which amounted to another $10,000. They had homes at Muir Woods Park in Marin County, Berkeley Country Club Terrace at El Cerrito, Cardiff by the Sea in LA County, and the two gloomy lots in Woodside Glens, the only property August had demanded for himself in his complaint. Consequently, that was the only property Ada really desired. On that contested lonely spot of ground was the remote, square bungalow she loved so much.

Last January 29, the Reverend Jason Noble Pierce, pastor of the First Congressional Church, had married Ada to seventy-two-year-old Charles Freeman Rice, a Seattle contractor. As a member of a powerful Alaskan family, he had been the mayor of Nome in 1921 and 1922. Ada’s brother, Don Carlos Brownell, was the present mayor of Seward, Alaska. Rice filed for divorce after two months for the same reasons as Mengler—Ada’s preoccupation with social reform to the exclusion of her home life. Ada’s recent sojourn in Seattle had been to arrange the terms of divorce. Two days earlier, Mr. Rice requested that real estate agents John and Davenport Bromfield look to Ada for future payments on the bungalow and told her to watch for them. Putting her unhappiness on the back burner, Ada reached the service station, a single structure with glass bubble pumps and a Coke machine with glass bottles.

“Could you send a man over to my house to pump up my tires?” she asked.

“I’ll do as good,” said William Werder, the manager. “One of my new employees lives only a short distance from your home. I’ll write down his address.”

Ada went there and knocked on the door. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes (in the middle of the afternoon), a Greek god answered the door and began laughing. Almost immediately, she had liked his infectious laugh. Under a palooka shirt, worn outside his trousers and buttoned all the way to the bottom, he was barrel-chested. He had huge hands and strong white teeth. Like many other older women Ada had instantly fallen under the young man’s spell, his wonderful jokes, and endless role-playing. Slipton Fell even played the mandolin.

—DETECTIVE MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

 

 

 

 

 

BY
Wednesday, April 10, 1935, five days after the Bay Hotel murder, things were not going well for the investigation. By 10:00 A.M., the SFPD Narcotics Division had already called Dullea back and gotten his day off to a rotten start. “Bette Coffin has never under any circumstances been a squeal of ours,” they reported.

An hour later, Dullea’s phone rang again. This time it was the FBI. “Your victim was never a drug informant of ours,” the local special agent informed him. Another lead was dashed.

Dullea, working in his shirtsleeves and wearing the tie his wife had bought him, swiveled around to glare at the wall of his tiny office. A dozen three-by-five cards were tacked there. He was rearranging them as Detective Sergeant McInerney entered with reports under his arm and coffee from the Chinese establishment next door. Dullea took the coffee, then spread the reports out. The first was an unsolved San Diego case. On February 20, 1931, someone had hauled the mutilated nude body of eleven-year-old Virginia Brooks down a hill, hung it from a tree, and bound it with a sixty-foot long rope. The loops at both ends had been tied with intricate knots of the type used by seafaring men. “Since those gentlemen are notorious travelers,” thought Dullea, “the killer had probably sailed for other ports immediately afterward.”

Dullea was about to save the bulletin (such a madman might be back someday) when he found a second report cross-indexed with the first. Chief Quinn had made a notation in pencil on the back of a brown envelope sealed by a string that wound around a button. He unwound the string counterclockwise and dumped out a second file.

Two months after the Brooks murder, a powerful man had dragged the disfigured nude body of seventeen-year-old artist’s model Louise Teuber down a slope and suspended it from a tree by a sixty-foot long double-looped line. The sailor’s knots, identical to those in the Brooks murder, convinced Dullea those threads were part of the same bloody tapestry. The elusive sailor had returned to port. The brutality of the assaults recalled to Dullea the savagery of the Bay Hotel murder, so he filed both reports in his cabinet. They also called to mind the murders by Earle Nelson, who had used strips of cloth with a “complicated sailor’s knot” to bind his victims’ wrists.

In the late afternoon he ordered Inspector McGinn to the East Bay to interview Bette Coffin’s mother. McGinn consulted his watch. While unhappy about crossing the Bay during rush hour, McGinn knew he had at his disposal a web of efficient ferryboat lines that spun out across the Bay to Contra Costa, Alameda, Solano, and Marin Counties.

Commuters either converged at the Hyde Street Pier west of Fisherman’s Wharf or at the Ferry Building, the terminus for four steam railroads and five interurban systems with twenty-nine cable car and streetcar lines. At 5:05 P.M. McGinn joined the evening rush as workers spilled out of their offices onto Montgomery and Market streets. Streetcars began to pile up. Within minutes, the broad thoroughfare was packed with people pushing for the 5:15 P.M. boat. They made a dragging trudge past the Bay Hotel and Last Chance Cafe. Their heads were lowered guiltily because they had jobs and so many did not. They crossed the iron bridge spanning the Loop or dodged the Belt Line cars at the downstairs entrance to the Ferry Building.

McGinn scanned the dying tree in the plaza where dark-haired Harmonica Nell had sold papers for years. Her reedy mouth organ blues had risen above the hawking of other newsies. Her soulful eyes had wrung pennies from every commuter. Nell played best when the fog crept in and sang her finest when icy winds whistled around the Moorish Clock Tower. She vanished one day to reemerge as Mae Stockdale, widow and moll to killer Jim O’Neil. In May, police captured her in Stockton in a shootout. She was sentenced to Tehachapi Women’s Prison, from which she made three escapes (Nell became known as the female Houdini). In early April 1935, poor Nell was committed to the Ukiah State Hospital for the Insane. So many roads to take, thought McGinn, but only one final destination.

A number of slips at the Ferry Building were kept by different companies. The SP exclusively used Slips 9 and 10 for its screw-driven, steel-hulled twin ferries, the
New Orleans
and the
El Paso.
Constructed in Bethlehem’s Potrero yard for $1 million each, they made eight round-trip crossings a day to the East Bay. The Western Pacific’s
Feather River
and the SP’s
Encinal
were both heading across for Oakland via the “Creek Route.” Most ferries were linked with railways. The screw steamer
Berkeley
was the fastest, but the small
Edward T. Jeffery,
which held fewer passengers and cars, got to Oakland in eighteen minutes. McGinn plunked down 35¢ for a round trip; if you brought your car onboard you paid $1.20.

The downstairs waiting room filled rapidly. On the second floor, tired workers occupying wooden benches staggered to their feet as the brass-rod fence slid away. McGinn slipped into a corridor leading to the berthed ferries, and saw the
Jeffery
getting up steam. A nervous sailor, he watched anxiously as the hydraulic gangplank lowered. A few Bay ferryboats had capsized when the water ballast at one end was too heavy and the passengers had congregated at that end. He followed a slight incline onto the main deck and then inside.

The leisurely crossings were pleasant breaks in the commuters’ daily drudgery, but onboard this trip was a disagreeable ferry traveler known as “Mrs. Blight.” She fought with every conductor and gate man, argued with the newsies, browbeat the waiters, and made terrible scenes with the passengers. Everyone feared Mrs. Blight who routinely filled the spaces on both sides of her seat with bundles while people all around her stood; she even put up her feet to steal more room. No one, not even McGinn, dared challenge this formidable creature—and he was armed.

He debarked at the Oakland Mole (which contained the slip for SP auto ferries) at the foot of Seventh Street and took an Espee steam train along a long reedy pier. Alameda Mole passengers rode the electric Red Train. Shortly, McGinn reached 1697 Twelfth Street in the downtown and knocked on the door of a clapboard house with yellow trim and lavender flowers. Mary Luz, Bette Coffin’s mother, answered. Wiping his feet on the mat, McGinn entered and sat down on the davenport. Like Al, The Mouse, Mary had long ago accepted her daughter’s self-destructive lifestyle. She suggested McGinn speak with Bette’s fifteen-year-old son, Otis Leonard Coffin, who lived in Richmond with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Wellington Coffin. “Will might provide more information,” she said.

By hire cab, McGinn reached 1808 Eureka Street in the neighboring city. “No,” said Mr. Will Coffin, “I don’t remember Bette ever mentioning anyone she was afraid of, certainly not a laughing sailor with big hands and long arms.”

But then Otis interrupted. His mother had a burly friend somewhat like that. “Where was he from?” McGinn asked.

This might be important, so he took out his notebook. The boy thought. “San Diego or maybe San Pedro,” he said. “I think maybe he was a sailor. I saw him only once, last summer outside a tavern South of Market.”

McGinn was familiar with that section of cheap saloons (“Free Lunch Today”) and rooming houses (“20 cents a Room”) not far from the Bay Hotel. “Go on,” said McGinn, his pencil poised. “What else do you remember?”

“He had a short name with an ‘H’ in it, like Hank or Henry or Harry,” Otis said. “But that’s all I can recall of the name, only that it was short, only that I saw him that once.”

“San Diego or San Pedro, Hank, Henry, or Harry,” wrote McGinn. Maybe the name was important, vague but important. He closed his notebook.

“Poor Bette,” said Will Coffin. “Nothing ever seemed to work out for her. If you ask me, it’s that husband of hers you should take a closer look at.”

The photo on the mantle showed a bright young woman in the days before she became an addict. “No one should have endured what she had,” thought McGinn. Coffin brought coffee to fortify him for his cold voyage back.

Onboard the ferry, McGinn got a little sick. The sea began to kick up. A patchy fog was floating just above the surface. Powerful waves were buffeting the hull. Spray pelted the windows in the forward saloon deck where McGinn sat. He knew exactly when they passed Alcatraz, with its pelicans and black-crowned night herons. The Klaxon at the north end bleated twice and the one to the south once—a kind of moan—
Ohhhhhh, Gawwd!
He heard the draft in the smokestack, the slap of the paddlewheel, and the measured, rhythmic thrash of strokes in the huge cylinders.

The choppy crossing took forty-one minutes, a minute above the average. Too seasick to file a report, McGinn wobbled home on unsteady legs. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. He was curious about this Hank, Henry, or Harry Somebody. What motive could there possibly have been for such savagery? The next day, McGinn promised himself, he would check to be sure their quarry hadn’t been arrested for another crime, but wasn’t hopeful. He was convinced the Gorilla Man had sailed out on a freighter immediately after he left the hotel, probably one bursting with wild animals like Frank Buck collected and where a Gorilla Man would feel perfectly at home among his own kind.
⁸

 

 

WINIFRED
and Charlie Dullea passed the evening at the gilded Orpheum at Eighth and Market. It wasn’t “bank nite” or “tin can night” (when each movie-goer brought a tin can of food for the needy) so they paid 80¢ apiece, the evening rate for the double bill. The second film was
Mister Dynamite,
set in San Francisco by Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton man, who once wrote copy for Samuel’s Jewelers on Market. He once skipped out of the Hotel Pierre wearing all the clothes he owned in layers. Edmund Lowe in the title role played “a man of many schemes, most of them shady.” Dulleashifted in his seat after the first two murders and a suicide. He could think only of McGinn out in the fog trying to piece together Mrs. Coffin’s last hours. Where had she been before she entered that room colored blue by the rain? What stranger had she met that last night? And where? Winifred could tell her husband was troubled by some secret he knew or suspected.