The Laughing Gorilla (20 page)

—2003 SCIENTIFIC REPORT

 

 

 

 

 

“
I
was a dog robber in the marines,” Captain Dullea told McGinn the next morning. He laughed and explained, “A dog robber is an orderly for a commanding officer.” Dullea had attended Franklin Grammar School and graduated Lowell High, clerked a while and when still a very young man joined the Marines in 1908. “Yes, we marines saw the world all right—at least the Philippines and Mexico.” As a corporal, Dullea had been a member of the first Madera campaign forces. Discharged in 1911, he always kept his Marine Corps discharge close at hand. Presently, the papers were in the middle right-hand drawer of his desk, along with personal letters, trinkets, photos, keepsakes, and drawings his boys had made for him.

From the time he joined the SFPD in 1914, Dullea’s fellow officers had admired him for his endurance, agility, strength, and facility in self-defense and apprehension. He could bring in a man with a minimum of force and was courageous in the face of danger. He “showed street sense” in his dealings with criminals and informers and people on the border of criminal behavior. He was “alley-wise,” demonstrating calmness in the face of complex situations such as family disturbances, potential suicides, robberies in progress, and accidents. Most of all, they credited him with initiative, effective judgment and imagination, and exceptional skill in questioning witnesses of crimes and suspected offenders.

They respected him for advancing through the ranks and for the military efficiency with which he ran his department. The few honest cops admired him for his high level of personal integrity and ethical conduct. Dullea never had accepted favors or a bribe. When he joined the police department in 1915, all the cops still sat at old-fashioned inkwell-imbedded schoolroom desks. He found it laughable to watch the big detectives trying to straddle the small chairs as they filled out reports.

After the long, monotonous routine patrols, broken by life-threatening situations, he followed the regular course of advancement. Dullea became a police corporal in 1921, a sergeant in 1923, and a lieutenant later that same year. He made captain in January 1929, then chief of inspectors, captain of detectives, and finally captain of inspectors on the same day Quinn was elevated from sergeant to chief: November 20, 1929. On the average, it takes a patrolman thirteen years to become a sergeant, nineteen years to become a lieutenant, and twenty-three years to become a captain.

“Dullea’s biography,” said the papers, “is the story of San Francisco’s big cases. Remember the Jepson case? Dullea was in it. Remember the attempted diary delivery payroll robbery? Dullea was in it. Remember the capture of Stevens and Kessel? Dullea was in that. And everyone knows the still famous Egan case and that of the Whispering Gunman. He was there—in every phase of the detective work.”

The hard-hitting detective chief took each job that crossed his path, did it right and never gave up. He was easygoing when things were easy and tough when tough cases cracked his way.

While Dullea was fabled for his honesty and morality, Chief Quinn was not. It bothered Dullea that when Egan escaped jail rumors that the chief had allowed it had been widely believed. Had corruption really taken hold of the department again? Whether Quinn was a party to it or blind to the facts, he did not know.

Both he and Quinn had been bred “South of the Slot,” so called after the slots in the tracks that cut the town in half at Market, the widest thoroughfare in town. The two inside tracks were reserved for the Market Street Railway. The outer two were for the city’s own Municipal Railroad. At rush hour the “Roar of the Four” was deafening as the cars rushed along the odd four-track system. When Dullea and Quinn were kids, they pitched pennies at the slots and “nipped the fender” by riding on the folded cowcatcher on the trailing side of the Muni cars.

By Thursday night, April 11, six days after the Bay Hotel autopsy murder, Dullea was still having difficulty getting his mind around the unfathomable Gorilla Man. He had stopped asking Who and Where? and was now, like McGinn, wondering Why? No motive seemed to apply, not robbery, passion, vengeance, or gain of any sort. “In God’s name,” thought Dullea, “what had the killer hoped to accomplish by such butchery? Bette Coffin was too poor to be worth robbing. She was not excessively desirable, nor a beauty or in her youth even attractive. Still, she was a simple mother who deserved life as much as the next. The killer had whistled and laughed as he lumbered away. Could such a man even be human?”

Dullea kept an anxious eye on the docks. Forty-seven years after Jack the Ripper invented motiveless, compulsive murders in London, America had her own motiveless serial killer. Someone was killing prostitutes in the rundown section of a great city apparently for the sheer pleasure of it. As reporter Fred Diefendorf later wrote, “This Bay Hotel murder was only one of several crimes in the U.S. that were to parallel in horror the series of ghastly murders committed by Jack the Ripper in England some decades ago which shocked the entire civilized world.”

There was a much better analogy than the Ripper thought Dullea. He put on his coat and hat and went out. Yes, a more apt analogy, a story he remembered from his childhood by Poe, the story of an ape wielding a razor. Down by the docks salt spray peppered his face. Wind tore at his coat, and the most robust foghorn on the Bay began booming from the Ferry Building as if calling for help.
Ohh, Gawd! Ohh, Gawd!

 

 

AFTER
a meager supper, Dullea had no sooner unlocked the door to his office than he made a giant stride in his search for the Gorilla Man. After his homicide detectives had searched the Bay Area for any unsolved murders that matched theirs and found none, they had requested by mail that all West Coast detectives be on the lookout for a killer with huge hands and the loping stride of an ape who may have committed an autopsy murder in their city. Finally, Dullea attempted to establish a pattern with other unsolved girl murders in widely separated parts of the nation. As part of his plan, thousands of circulars had been distributed through every seaport in the United States asking detectives to be “particularly on the lookout for a fiendish ‘Jack the Ripper’ who might be a seafaring man.”

Dullea looked down at his desk. The eight-by-ten manilla envelope bore a New York postmark. He slit it open and spread out several yellow pages on his blotter. He read the first paragraph and sat bolt upright. “The report inside,” he said later, “was very enlightening.”

If the subject matter had not been so grim, a broad grin would have crossed his face. Before his eyes lay a connection between the San Francisco murder and an unsolved New York City homicide case from almost two years earlier. At last!—a concrete link to the Bay Hotel killer and a crime exactly like it clear across the country. In answer to his bulletin the NYPD had forwarded to Dullea all they knew of the tragedy of Wilhelm Johnston and his wife Florence W. Johnston in Washington Heights. He laid the first page down, flattened it, and began to read silently. About 11:00 P.M. on Saturday, October 21, 1933, Mrs. Flo Johnston was found strangled, stripped, and horribly autopsied with a razor. A huge stain on the second-floor landing and bloody streaks on the stairs suggested a second body, that of her husband, had been dragged down the stairs.

Dullea had little more information at this point, except for the last paragraph. The NYPD had searched abandoned buildings in the area and probed the river for Wilhelm Johnston without success. This was interesting, Dullea thought. If this was their man from the Bay Hotel, the Gorilla Man was not only a cross-country murderer of women, but of males, too. Such wandering journeymen were almost impossible to catch. It meant that there could be other murders as ghastly as Mrs. Coffin’s they might never know about. Just because the Bay Hotel creature was elsewhere didn’t mean he had stopped being who he was and doing what he did for whatever reason he had. Dullea had to start at the beginning again and look for what he had missed. The answer was right in front of him.

—CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

 

 

 

 

 

BECAUSE
night clerk John Smeins’s description of the deeply tanned Mr. Meyers indicated the murderer might be a sailor, the SFPD search had centered on the Embarcadero. The dockworkers were a rough lot of multilingual, mostly single and lusty men who kept 135 brothels running all night and 150 gambling dens and three hundred bookie joints running all day. “You could play roulette in the Marina,” columnist Herb Caen wrote, “shoot craps on O’Farrell, play poker on Mason, and get rolled at 4 A.M. in a bar on Eddy.”

The waterfront’s population changed constantly as sailors shipped in and out, returned from long voyages, and embarked on longer ones perhaps never to return. Every year, seven thousand ships and forty million commuters and travelers arrive and depart this second busiest crossroads in the world. The detectives spread out over the waterfront, an astonishing setting for the saga of the Gorilla Man.

Inspectors Desmond and Kelleher treaded amid creaking winches and sheds marked “Pago Pago” and drank their way through barrel houses and the lowest dives. They always ended up back at the city’s most celebrated landmark, the 240-foot-tall Clock Tower as much an icon to San Francisco as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. On bright days they watched the campanile’s shadow, as if a sundial, extend across the Great Loop and, with its inexorable scythelike sweep, touch the Bay Hotel. Page Brown, who died young, had modeled the Neoclassical clock tower after the Giralda, the Moorish tower of the Cathedral of Seville and adopted portions of Venice’s Piazza San Marco. After the 1906 quake jolted loose the Colusa sandstone that sheathed the tower, they restored it with reinforced concrete.

The Clock Tower marks the midpoint of the Embarcadero, which would grow to over twelve miles long, with eighteen miles of ship berthing space along forty-two piers. There were also two deep water channels—Islais Creek and China Basin. Other Bay ports were expanding, too. Dock workers were already unloading bulk oil, ores, and sugar at Pinole Point, Ozol, Port Chicago, Oleum, Selby, Crockett, Martinez, Avon, Benicia, Hercules, Port Costa, Valona, and Antioch. Within two years, Redwood City would open as a deep-water anchorage to join the well-established dry cargo harbors of Oakland, Alameda, and Richmond.

Normally combing the docks for a Gorilla Man would have been effortless. Certainly, a man of such a striking appearance, of such strength and unholy habits, with such huge hands and vaguely apelike features and eerie laugh should be easy to locate. Surely, his monstrous appearance would betray him. And yet he might not be as fierce as thought. They had only Smeins’s word to go on. He might have been tall and walking hunched as he fled the Bay Hotel. Perhaps he was only a very powerful weightlifter and not repellant, even attractive enough to entice a woman to follow him. Police had yet to learn that evil sometimes came in ordinary, even attractive packaging and that not every homicide had a motive.

Five years before everyone on the waterfront had gone the extra mile to find beloved Officer Malcolm’s killer. Captain Chris Claussen had traveled all the way to Tacoma to finger the Whispering Gunman—“That’s the bastard!” Those days were gone. Since July it had been impossible for cops to work along the waterfront. “Unbelievable,” said Dullea. “They are no help at all. . . . People assail the police department but do not take into account their own lack of civic consciousness in failing to testify or to help us. In serious cases I have consistently met with refusals by citizens to appear as witnesses against defendants.”

None of the waterfront regulars was talking. The sole exceptions were the city’s grimy waterfront hotels and boardinghouses who depended on police protection for survival and city permits to keep operating. So they were cooperative—a little. But they were the only ones. Longshoremen hated the police with a cold fury because of “Bloody Thursday.” The previous summer, the Embarcadero had been a tinderbox awaiting the first spark. Chief Quinn had furnished that spark.

During California’s worst strike, dockworkers picketing for better working conditions through the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) had been bloodied, even murdered by the SFPD. The chief’s special antistrike force had so alienated the city’s most exploited group, that it would be years before Dullea and his men could regain their formerly cordial relationship with the longshoremen. In 1933, the peak year of Communist-led agricultural strikes, Quinn had answered Alameda County DA Warren’s call for “a coordinated statewide assault on Communist provocateurs by the lawmen and prosecutors of California.” The previous August, Quinn, Mayor Rossi, and other anti-Communist officials, contriving a Red scare, attended an Oakland meeting of the California Peace Officer’s Association.

The previous April, the longshoremen had been organizing for a strike when Ignatious H. McCarty, a crackajack salesman with the Lake Erie Chemical Company, rang up Chief Quinn. His fervor for the mechanics of police crowd control verged on the pathological. He was forever searching for more effective riot control tools.

“Tell me, Chief Quinn,” he gushed, “just what do you need?”

“For one thing the clubs are too light,” complained Quinn. The Alameda sheriff had advocated the use of railroad brake sticks (four-foot-long wooden poles rounded like baseball bats that conductors used to manage mail sacks onto trains).

“Too light? Let me see what I can do with that,” said McCarty. He wrote his superior: “These cops here, when they hit a man over the head, are not satisfied unless he goes down and a good split occurs. Our clubs are too light for this purpose. Could you contemplate making them heavier? Advise.”