The Laughing Gorilla (3 page)

The Whispering Gunman shoved his long-barreled .38 against Malcolm’s chest (he could feel the brittle ribs) and whispered, “Up and gimme your gun.” Malcolm said a few words no one heard, never took another step, never got to his own gun. But the Whispering Gunman had heard his partner snap, “Here’s a cop! Give it to him,” and instinctively reacted. His revolver, pressed hard against Malcolm, kicked in his hand. Two muzzle flashes lit up the dusk as two slugs hammered into Malcolm’s heart, spun him around, and dropped him like cargo from a burst net. Instantly, he began forming his lake of blood. “Emilie,” he whispered, “Emilie . . .”

Malcolm’s blood was steaming as it ran down the incline, so much blood that no postmortem lividity took place. His radial artery still pulsed—a steady, plainly visible throbbing. The Whispering Gunman caught up with the moving Dodge and pivoted inside. The car roared northwest, weaving in and out of traffic before swinging southwest on Harrison Street. An ambulance was dispatched from the Harbor Emergency Hospital behind the nearby Bay Hotel.

 

 

“I think I know one of the bandits,” Mickey Rowan, an Embarcadero habitué ventured to Dullea. “He’s a mug known as a dice player along the waterfront. I think I can take you to where they’re hiding.”

The wide brim of Dullea’s hat cast the upper half of his face into shadow, making it difficult for Rowan to read his expression. Dullea shook his head, then signaled an officer to escort Rowan to the Hall of Justice. He never put much stock in eyewitness testimony: “It’s the last to look at and the first to suspect. Human memory remains the most unreliable of all proofs.” No, Dullea was counting on his famous “I squad” to come up with real evidence.

Overcome by emotion, he walked pier-side to watch the
President Hoover
sail in an hour late from the Orient. The
President Hayes,
due at dawn, had been delayed by rain at San Pedro, but the Australia-bound
Maunganul
was on time. He watched her backing slowly out into the stream trailed by what he knew was a line of ring-billed gulls. Short-billed gulls, fatter and lazier, never leave the ferry slips. Inspector William McMahon scattered a cloud of feathers as he fought to Dullea’s side. Handsome and square-faced, he was dressed in a gray suit that set off his arched brows, dark hair, and white sideburns. His gray, wide-set eyes were glistening. Malcolm had been his mentor since his rookie days. He and Dullea stood watching the ship traffic. McMahon spoke first.

“Malcolm, the finest old chap I have ever known, was an officer whose sage advice and help lifted me over many a stumbling block when I was a green policeman,” he said. “After viewing the life blood of my dear friend, I want a special assignment to be left on this case until John’s murderers are brought in to answer for their crime.”

Dullea agreed. As captain of the Robbery Detail, McMahon’s investigation dovetailed with that of his Homicide Bureau. McMahon knew Dullea would not leave the slightest suspicion uninvestigated. “I ran the plates,” Dullea said, “and it came back that the licensee is Mr. M. J. Skidmore of 543A Natoma Street. The plates had been filched from his car two days ago. He filed a report at the time.”

“What do you think of Skidmore?”

“Skidmore’s okay,” Dullea replied, studying the drifting liners and trailing gulls headed toward the Gate. He had already set the wheels of the pursuit in motion.

Inspector George O’Leary of the SFPD Auto Detail and M. O. “Jimmy” Britt of the National Auto Theft Bureau, had already ferreted out who owned the Dodge. Roland Sheehy, of the Budd Wheel Company at 1581 Bush Street, had reported it stolen last Friday. “It’s going to be cast off at the earliest possible opportunity,” Dullea advised Britt, who sent out an all-points bulletin over the ticker—“All cars be on the lookout for any light blue Dodges parked at curbs, especially in the Embarcadero district.” Captain Thomas Hoertkorn and Lieutenant John J. Casey alerted the city’s thirteen police precincts by Teletype and briefed the Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda police departments by phone. Waterfront police scrutinized ferryboats traversing the Bay and sheriff’s deputies staked out the air fields.

Chief Quinn knew all the old-timers, but Malcolm had been the best. “They won’t get away,” the tough Irishman said evenly as he ordered foot patrols, riflemen, and shotgun squads onto the Embarcadero. “Shoot to kill if they resist. This killing was the cold-blooded work of the worst type of gangster-gunman.” His voice grew cold. “There will be no letup until we bring the murderers in dead or alive. Get the man who killed Malcolm! Get ’em and swing ’em for this trick!”

—E. A. POE, “THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE”

 

 

 

 

 

THE
last such citywide manhunt had been four years earlier—February 20, 1926—a chill Saturday morning when the Gorilla Man rang the bell to Clara Newman’s Victorian in response to a white placard in her window. “Yes, I have three rooms vacant,” said the attractive sixty-year-old woman. A wealthy spinster, Clara kept her several substantial boardinghouses filled exclusively with male lodgers, whose masculine presence she enjoyed as long as they weren’t drinkers or sailors.

“Could you let me see the third floor room?” He cast his eyes upward as if praying. His voice was very soft. She noted his gorilla-like appearance.

“Of course you can see the room,” she said, fingering her strand of pearls.

The Gorilla Man’s watery blue eyes were piercing, unblinking. Clara had seen a travelog about gorillas at the new Embassy Theatre at Market and Seventh. What did she recall? They seldom stared directly unless they were going to attack, then they beat their broad chests with cupped hands and aggressively charged on all fours. Apes use their knuckles and the flat soles of their feet in a gait known as knuckle-walking. The stranger’s teeth, neat and even, were as strong as an ape’s. During manic periods, the Gorilla Man lifted heavy chairs with them to demonstrate his strength.

As he identified himself as “Roger Wilson,” a suspicion briefly crossed Clara’s mind. In the vicinity of Sacramento and Pierce streets near her boardinghouse, women had been terrorized for months by a “Mad Dancer.” He appeared completely nude in the windows of vacant houses and danced wildly before vanishing. While the young man matched the description, Clara considered him too devout to be that perverted creature. As they ascended, the Gorilla Man paused on the second-floor landing, grasped the double rails of the bannister, swayed a little, and began rubbing his right temple. “Oh, it’s only my head,” he apologized. “It’s paining me.” When he removed a JB Stetson hat with a wide brim, Clara saw the interior band bore the initials G. W. R. and a Masonic emblem. The hat was so large on him she knew it had to belong to someone else. Though his sandy hair was long and wavy on top, it was cut short on the sides where a clear liquid was running from a deep, thumb-size wound.

“Roger Wilson,” born in San Francisco on May 12, 1897, suffered his first blow at ten months old when syphilis killed his mother, Frances. Within seven months his father, James Ferral, died of the same disease. The orphaned boy went to live with his maternal grandparents, Jennie and Lars. When Jennie died in 1908, the boy, taught to be so submissive he couldn’t defend himself, was sent to live with his aunt Lillian Fabian. “At age ten he was riding his uncle William’s bike,” Aunt Lillian recalled, “when he skidded in front of a passing trolley and was struck.” His head became wedged beneath the streetcar fender and was battered against the cobblestones at every revolution of the wheels along a fifty-foot path. At the hospital, doctors assured Aunt Lillian the boy would not recover. The wound, literally a hole in his skull, had left him comatose. Lillian stood vigil anyway, and when he awoke on the sixth day, she was at his bedside with the Bible. “I can see he’s completely mended,” she divulged. “I can now psychically peer into his mind and the accident hasn’t changed him one little bit.”

But it had. Now he was prone to lapses of memory; long, sullen silences; and staring fixedly at his aunt’s visitors until they grew uncomfortable and fled. He flew into violent rages, refused to bathe, and swore like a sailor. When he heard voices speaking to him of religion, he clutched the family Bible to his chest and feverishly recited biblical passages. At dinner he buried his face in his plate and ate like an animal. Aunt Lillian pointed out that his antisocial behavior was countered by his devout character. “He is just like a child,” she said, “and we consider him like a child, but of course we never go too far with him because there is always fear of him.”

Even as a youngster, his hands were oversize and strong. He began physically tormenting his cousin Rachel. Several times Lillian surprised the “quiet, morbid” child peeking through a keyhole at Rachel as she undressed. Each time, the smirking boy dropped to his knees, clasped his huge hands and promised through moist, quivering lips never to peep again. Hadn’t Grandmother told him that sex was dirty? At fifteen, he exhibited a ferocious sexual appetite. Arrested for robbery in Plumas County at age eighteen, on July 25, 1915, he was sentenced to San Quentin State Prison for two years. Paroled on September 6, 1916, authorities arrested him again in Stockton on March 9, 1917, under the name “Clark” for petty larceny and sentenced him to six months in jail. On March 23, 1918, he was again arrested in LA on burglary charges under the name “Farrell.” He escaped the LA County Jail within five months.

As “Evan Louis Fuller,” he got a job at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. After he fell from a ladder at work and suffered a second serious head injury, the voices howling inside his head grew louder. On August 12, 1919, under the name Evan Fuller, he married a shy fifty-eight-year-old Catholic schoolteacher, Mary Theresa Martin. Their marriage was stormy. Nights he would “go out and look for work” and return days later in someone else’s clothes. His jealous indignation, constant haranguing from the Bible, and threats to kill her drove Mary to an emotional collapse in 1920. As she convalesced at St. Mary’s, he threw himself on her, raving that her doctor had been sleeping with her. Ripping away the sheets, he molested her before orderlies could wrest him off and ran away.

On May 19, 1921, he gained entry to Charles Summers’s home at 1519 Pacific Avenue by pretending to be a plumber. In the basement he found Summers’s twelve-year-old daughter, May, playing with dolls; he knocked her down with a clenched fist, and choked her. Her screams brought her elder brother, who grappled with him before he escaped. It took two cops to subdue the powerful young man. Charged with a sexual assault on a child and confined at Detention Hospital, he was diagnosed as “erratic, violent and dangerous.” On June 13, psychiatric doctors committed him to Napa Hospital for the Insane in “a constitutional psychopathic state.” He escaped within a week. Police apprehended him in the bushes outside his aunt’s house peeping at his cousin as she undressed. Six months later, he made another break, was recaptured, and escaped again on November 2, 1923. He showed up wild-eyed at his aunt’s house wearing a crazy hat. The hospital finally discharged him on paper, “in absentia,” on June 15, 1925. His family last saw him in October of the same year.

From San Francisco, he traveled to Philadelphia where he strangled Mrs. Olla McCoy on October 18,1925; May Murray, on November 6; and Lillian Weiner, on November 9. All three had “Room for Rent” signs in their windows and were bound with strips of cloth tied with a “complicated sailor’s knot.” He sold items of their clothing at a north-side pawnshop, where the pawnbroker got a good look at him.

The next glimpse of him came when Clara Newman admitted him to her San Francisco boardinghouse. Clara’s nephew Merton Newman, a slight, dark-haired young man in glasses, passed them on the second-floor landing. He had heard the Gorilla Man’s odd, knowing laugh echoing up the staircase, so he noted the mild-spoken stranger’s huge hands with special attention. “The balls of his thumbs,” Merton recalled, “were very broad and square, with swollen joints and nails at least a half-inch long.” His eyes were cunning, hypnotic, difficult to draw away from. Grumbling about the malfunctioning furnace, Merton nodded to Clara and the man and continued on to the basement. Behind he could hear the snap and cracking of the man’s knuckles.

Walking flat-footed on the soles of his feet, toes extended, Aunt Clara’s prospective lodger trailed her to the top third-floor room. “It’s a reconditioned attic,” she apologized. As she walked, he watched her hips.

Clara’s age didn’t matter to the Gorilla Man. Any woman of any age he found alone would suit his purposes: she need only be a landlady with a room to let. His strict aunt, who had raised him in an atmosphere of worshipful zealotry, had been a landlady, and he hated her. As Merton worked over the basement furnace, he was vaguely disquieted. He swept out the clinkers and, above his hammering and stoking, heard footsteps padding down the stairs. “I’ll be back with the rent,” said a voice. That soft, mocking laugh echoed again. He heard the front door shut with a bang. After he finished, Merton wiped his hands and left without going upstairs.

On Wednesday, February 24, he called on his aunt to see if the furnace had given her further trouble. No one had seen Clara for days. His search ended at the third-floor lavatory, where he found the naked corpse of his aunt. Merton flew downstairs to call the police. When Detective Lieutenant Charles Dullea and Inspector Francis (Frank) LaTulipe climbed the stairs, they had to stop at the door to steady themselves.

“Once Clara Newman entered the room,” LaTulipe conjectured when he had recovered, “the killer yanked her to him. With one hand he took some sort of cord and twisted it around her neck, leaving behind this ligature imprint.” He pointed out the livid red line on her throat, almost hidden by the black marks of gigantic hands and deep fingernail indentations. “Then he choked her with his hands as she struggled.”