The Laughing Gorilla (30 page)

On leap year day, February 29, time and circumstances finally caught up with Slipton Fell. It was the same day visiting playwright George Bernard Shaw leaned at the rail of the British liner
Arandora Star
and made disparaging remarks about the unfinished bridges in the Bay. “Those beastly red poles with ropes strung between them,” he snorted. And San Francisco? “It is frightfully one-horse, I should say, but no worse than the rest of your country.”

Leap year day was the same day eighteen-year-old Teresa Hawkins ended a week-long bout of intermittent laughter. Since taking a stressful shorthand test, she had alternated between spasms of laughter and semiconsciousness. And laughter filled the air in the secluded bungalow and echoed in the redwood canyons of Woodside Glens.

Leap year day was the same day Fell phoned the San Mateo police. “I want to report that the gas service station where I work has just been held up by three men,” he said. He gave them the name “Jerome Braun von Selz” (there was identification in his possession also naming him both Heinrich Fritz von Braun Selz and Ralph Jerome von Selz). The responding officers got to the Woodside gas station and dutifully wrote down everything he said.

“I was held up by three men and robbed of $12,” Fell said. Such a pitiful amount of money, yet he felt compelled to see it through. That money would get him to Hollywood.

“Can you describe any of the holdup men for us, Jerry?” asked Officer Tom Burke. “Let’s see,” he began, visualizing the first robber. “He is deeply tanned with ruddy cheeks. He’s about my age . . . dark brown hair and slate-gray eyes and has big white teeth. He is big, six-feet tall, 220-230-pounds . . .”

Burke looked quizzically at the other officer. Fell’s astonishing ego had just provided a flawless description of
himself.
Burke, now convinced the robbery was a hoax, arrested Fell for filing a false report. At the San Mateo station, he immediately confessed, offering to not only replace the stolen $12 but another $16 he had previously lifted from the till. The judge sentenced him to thirty days in the Redwood City Jail. During Fell’s incarceration the oil company owners were perplexed. Though their employee was in jail, they continued to receive letters lauding his stellar performance at the gas station.

 

 

AT
the HOJ in San Francisco, Inspector George O’Leary of the SFPD Auto Detail caught a routine case, read the file, then sat straight up. That Mrs. Ada Rice seemed to be missing did not interest him. It seemed not to interest anyone in her neighborhood. In Seattle, Charles F. Rice wasn’t interested—he had gotten his divorce on February 1. She had no other relatives that O’Leary could find, and her children were back East. What got O’Leary’s heart pumping was that Ada’s car had been reported stolen—ahh, that was his meat! Let’s see—the money had been paid out to an individual with the dubious name of Slipton J. Fell. Slipped and Fell.

Someone with the same name had just been arrested in San Mateo for staging a hoax holdup. O’Leary walked the file over to his partner, M. L. “Jimmy” Britt, special agent for the National Auto Theft Bureau. Britt, in his polka-dot tie and three-piece gray suit, was the epitome of an insurance salesman. But the investigators were good at what they did. Six years earlier they had swiftly tracked down the owner of the light blue Dodge driven by the Whispering Gunman. They decided to forgo lunch and drive out to the Redwood City Jail, meet the young man, and dig a little deeper into this coincidence.

—LORD SPILSBURY, WHOSE VOLUMINOUS FILES SHOWED WHOLE YEARS WITHOUT A SINGLE MURDER BY KNIFE

 

 

 

 

 

DEPUTY
Sheriff Thomas F. Maloney of the San Mateo Jail was fascinated by what his jailers told him. “Jerry laughs aloud in his sleep,” they said, referring to Fell, whom they knew as Jerry.

“He what? You’re kidding.”

“Seriously. Not only that, Jerry sobs in his sleep. Sometimes he cries out.”

Maloney was further intrigued when he learned that Fell had been living by himself at Mrs. Rice’s house. Then where was Ada? At 12:30 P.M. O’Leary and Britt got to the jail. Maloney, still curious about the striking young man, asked to sit in on their interview. Britt said, “Sure.” Big, beefy Maloney, broad shouldered and double chinned in a dark suit and argyle tie, was hard to ignore, but once he pulled his hat brim down, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and leaned into a corner everyone forgot he was there.

“Is this about the robbery?” Fell asked, looking from Britt to O’Leary in his friendly, inquiring, doglike way.

“No, Jerry, this is something else entirely,” began Jimmy Britt. The slender man was about half the size of Fell. Like the deputies, Britt took to him right away. “We see here that you reported an auto stolen [in December]. A finance company held title to the car.”

“That’s correct, Jimmy.” Fell always spoke in a positive manner followed by a big smile and a slicking back of his hair with his fingers.

“And that insurance was paid to you,” said Britt.

“Yes, Jimmy. I received $18 for my equity and it sure came in handy.”

Throughout the full two and a half hours of questioning, Fell cracked jokes. “He’s as good as radio,” admitted O’Leary. But really all they got in answer to their questions was laughter. Finally, they went outside. Britt had an idea. He would offer Fell a promise of no prosecution if he led them to the missing car. Fell thought about the offer, and late in the afternoon he led Britt, Maloney, and O’Leary to the private Burlingame garage. Inside was Mrs. Rice’s missing car and a second vehicle, both affixed with stolen license plates. As Maloney stood in the dark garage, he felt a stab of fear. For the first time he was concerned for Ada’s safety. He poked around in the backseat and realized that Fell had been sleeping in her auto for some time.

“Jerry, why can’t you sleep at the house alone?” Maloney asked. “What’s in Ada’s house that frightens you so?” No answer. “Why do you cry out in your sleep in jail? Is it because there’s something on your mind?”

“What? Why do you ask that?” said Fell. “Do I do that?” He looked mystified, then lowered his chin to his chest. “What did I say. Did I say anything last night?” He composed himself, and his megawatt smile clicked on again.

“And what’s all this stuff, Jerry?” asked O’Leary, who had opened the trunk. Maloney and Britt went around to the rear where they saw a box hidden under a tan blanket. Inside were rolls of adhesive tape, three bottles of ammonia and chloroform, cotton, and a long rope with loops at both ends tied with sailor’s knots.

“God, I forgot about that,” Fell said. He fingered the rope as if it brought back memories. “Let me explain. I’ve been keeping those things in the car for safety. There’re for a couple of fellows who have done me injury and I’m out looking for them at night. It’s quite a story and will take a while to tell.”

“We’ve got the time,” said Maloney, who sat down on the running board and crossed his legs.

“Well, I’ve been driving around looking for a couple of fellows who had done me harm—two former prisoners, ‘Boston’ and ‘Jiggs,’ I met in 1931 at the Alcatraz Island disciplinary barracks. After they got out, they kept after me and tried to involve me in a ‘hot car’ racket. They persisted in trying to use my garage as a place to bring their stolen cars. I couldn’t break away from them, so I planned first to knock them out with ammonia, tie them up and turn them over to police. Then I got a better idea. I thought I’d study this book on toxicology, which I asked for at the library, and find some poison which would just stun them so I could turn them over to the authorities.”

Maloney got up, squeezed into the car, and rooted in the backseat. Under the seat he found Mrs. Rice’s passport (she had been Mrs. Ada French when it was issued, but the picture was undoubtedly of her). If Mrs. Rice were traveling overseas what was her passport doing here? How had she left the country? “When did you last see Mrs. Rice?” asked Maloney. His eyes narrowed.

“I drove her to the San Francisco financial district with a Bulgarian army officer, Tom. I was just helping in an elopement.”

They returned the prisoner to his cell. By then Fell’s mood had brightened again. “So long, Tom. So long, Jimmy. So long, George,” he called after them. Solemnly, they made the journey to the square house on the knoll, each man lost in his own thoughts and worrying what they would find. The sun was going down by the time they reached the Canada Road.

Inside the bungalow they rummaged through the ground floor. In a small low closet Maloney ferreted out Ada’s canceled checks, thumbed them, then showed O’Leary. “Look at this,” he said. “All of the checks were written and dated after Ada had ‘gone traveling.’”

This was not a good sign. Neither could they unearth the mine stock Fell claimed to have given Ada in exchange for the house or the deeds to her other property at El Cerrito, Muir Woods Park in Marin County, and Cardiff by the Sea in LA County.

The next day Maloney drove to Ada’s bank in Palo Alto to examine a letter supposedly written by Mrs. Rice from Coxsackie, New York, that requested $135 be transferred from her savings account to her checking account. He noticed something the bankers hadn’t. The postmark showed the letter had actually been mailed from Redwood City. Next Maloney questioned Ada’s neighbors to find out more about the handsome young Bulgarian cavalry officer who Fell claimed had “gone away” with her. “Oh, Mrs. Rice went away to the Balkans as a foreign correspondent,” they all said.

“And how do you know all this?”

“Why, that nice young man who lives in her house told us,” they said.

Next Sheriff James McGrath, an enormously fat man, visited Ada’s bungalow. He surveyed the earth surrounding it. It was nearly all rock and thick clay. No bodies were buried here. If there had been, county workmen digging in the yard all this week would have discovered them. Signs of their activity were everywhere except around Ada’s rock garden, which was overgrown with thistles and weeds. Undaunted, McGrath began pulling aside the rocks. He had solved a similar missing person’s case back in May 1930 when Frank Roderick, a LaHonda rancher, vanished. McGrath had trapped William Woodring, the ranch handyman, and Mrs. Minnie Roderick into confessing they were lovers. They led McGrath to a deep well where they had buried Roderick’s body.

When McGrath located Fell’s worthless Sierra mine stock, it suggested a possible resting place for Mrs. Rice’s body. What if Ada were buried in one of the Placer mine claims in the Downieville region mentioned in the stock? McGrath ordered a search of the diggings and bottomless shafts there—an impossible task. Ada might never be found. The deed to her house was also missing.

Maloney was more practical. If they were going to find Ada and her Bulgarian friend, Fell was going to have to show them the way He suspected Ada had fallen for the handsome young man. “Fell’s the type that motherly old ladies wring their hands over because he never had a mother to guide him,” he told Britt. “He’s the kind that sob sisters insist ‘couldn’t possibly have done a thing like that.’”

Britt had concluded early on that threats would never work on Fell. Maloney suggested a psychological approach to break through Fell’s wall of mirth. “His actions are those of an overgrown kid,” he told Britt. “He appears clever, cunning and cagey, but responds to flattery with an intensity I’ve never seen before. I think we’ll have to play to that if we’re going to get anywhere. And most of all we’ve got to treat him as an equal, as a friend, and get him to help us.”

The young man’s hale-fellow-well-met personality concealed a reservoir of loneliness. Yes, they would win him over by becoming his friends. Like his jailers, they called him Jerry without fail. That night at the jail, Fell alternately laughed and sobbed in his sleep once more. Maloney stood by his cell and listened. Fell spoke a few words, but the lawman could not decipher them.

 

 

NEXT
morning, as Bay Bridge workers erected the final steel trusses between the anchorage and Pier W-1, Britt and Maloney signed Fell out of jail. He traveled with them to Ada’s bungalow in good spirits, pointing out wildlife from the window and laughing. It was a hot day, and they were all glad to get out of the heat. Inside the bungalow, they stopped dead. The ceiling was crawling with a black, buzzing tide that hadn’t been there 48 hours earlier. “Blow flies,” said Britt. Bluebottle and greenbottle flies lay their eggs in rotting meat. As carbohydrates and proteins break down, thousands of fly-blown maggot offspring are produced in a short time. Britt, the smallest, got a ladder and climbed above the rafters. Balancing on the top step, he pulled himself up into the narrow crawl space just above where the flies buzzed. The heat was terrific and it was hard to see between timbers and the cloud of flies. There was the sweet smell of rot. Finally, Britt gave up and climbed down. “Nothing is inside there—now,” he said.

In the afternoon he and Maloney drove their prisoner along lengthy Skyline Boulevard, a favorite spot since Prohibition days
¹⁵
for gangsters to dump their victims. Back and forth like a shuttlecock they drove, while attempting to create the impression they were just old friends out for a drive. In a way they were. The mood was light, but Maloney scrutinized their prisoner, looking for any reaction as they passed likely burial sites. Huge redwood canyons rolled away by the hundreds and dropped into bottomless canyons. Shadows grew longer. Fog rolled in from the sea and covered over Skyline Boulevard until only twenty yards of the woods were visible from the road. At one spot Maloney noticed a shallow depression—blackened and crawling with blowflies such as they’d observed on Ada Rice’s ceiling. The flies gave Maloney an idea. “This looks like a grave,” he said. “Back it up a bit, Jimmy.” Maloney stuck his head out the window and studied the swarming spot. “Yes, sir-re-Bob! And wouldn’t that canyon over there be a fine place to throw a body—nobody would ever find it. What do you think, Jerry?”