The Laughing Gorilla (33 page)

All four stepped into a region of wild mountains and dense growth. Fell led the group a hundred yards off the road to the rim of an embankment, then halted. His bravado had faded. He would go to the edge but no farther and tottered there as if held by an invisible hand. “The body is down there,” he said in a choked voice. Fell took the sheriff’s flashlight and shone it below. With the light he directed Britt and Maloney as they descended the steep incline. The beam crawled over the ragged surface until it settled on the bank of a little ravine.

Fell remained above with McGrath, who was too fat to make the descent. “No, not there, Tom” Fell said, pointing with the light. “Four feet over.” He was shaking now in the heat and the light darted nervously. “A little more to the right. Over there. Hold it. There!” The beam circled on a white pile of powder by a slight depression. “There she is, right there. . . . I don’t want to see the body. I know everything’s just as I left it because I dropped out this way about three weeks ago and found everything O.K. But when you come out to get her you’d better bring better equipment than I did.” His booming laugh echoed through the canyons. “That acid has had plenty of time to work. I had to bend her like a jackknife to make her fit.”

Britt confirmed that the scattered powder was caustic quicklime, the residue of two bags. “Well, he didn’t fool us,” called the sheriff. “If the lime is there the body must be there. It can wait. This is all we need. We’ll let the coroner take care of this. Come on back.” Britt and Maloney clawed their way up the steep incline to the car.

“Thanks, Jerry,” said McGrath. “You told the truth.” He patted his shoulder. Fell was as embarrassed as a schoolboy.

“I don’t know why I couldn’t leave the road and approach the grave,” Fell apologized. “I guess I was afraid I’d get my best suit soiled.” He began a slow soft shoe dance on the gravel—dancing on the grave of his victim. “Oh, Jerry, Jerry,” said Britt. Minutes later they all started back to the county jail.

“How many bodies have they found down there?” Fell asked as they drove.

“Two,” Maloney lied.

“How do they look, pretty good?” Fell turned to the sheriff. “Say Jimmy, did you ever get the wire off the other fellow?”

McGrath stiffened, but said nothing. He only smiled, a faint crescent in the moonlight.

“No, we haven’t found a body tied up in wire.”

“Well, I might as well tell you about this one too.”

It was now 3:45 A.M., Tuesday morning.

—CRIME MANUAL OF THE PERIOD

 

 

 

 

 

OUTSIDE
Woodside Glens the prowl car slowly returned from Ada Rice’s lonely moonlit grave. As they snaked north of the Saratoga Gap, the detectives and their prisoner grew reflective, their faces silver in the light. The truncks of tall trees, exposed in their headlights, slid nakedly by the cruising car. Neither Fell nor the fat sheriff had made the steep descent to the burning grave, but the smell of the lime bed clung to them as surely as it clung to Britt and Maloney’s clothes.

“What’s this about?”

“Oh, the man with the saber who struck me and fled—I killed him too—with a blow from a revolver,” said Slipton Fell blithely.

McGrath said nothing.

“I didn’t learn until later who the man with the saber was, the man who slugged me and ran away. I learned that when he came to blackmail me, to bleed me under the threat that he would expose me. We fought with guns. I clubbed him to death with his.”

Fell’s smooth face broke into a fatuous grin. McGrath looked glum.

“You see,” Fell continued, “Mrs. Rice was going to elope with this fellow Baronovich, this Bulgarian army cavalry officer. And he was the guy who was in the house when I killed Mrs. Rice the night I came to move in my belongings. After the night of June 13, Baronovich kept calling me at the service station and hounding and blackmailing me for money as his price of silence. After several demands, he handed me Mrs. Rice’s bank passbook, suggesting I draw out $135 and pay it to him to keep silent. Otherwise he would disclose my first crime. And so I was forced to forge a check in that amount. I paid him all I could and finally told him I couldn’t raise anymore.

“Well, one night either late in November or early December I came home to the cottage, and found him sitting in a chair in the living room. He had a .38-caliber revolver in his lap. We talked a little. I refused to pay him more and this started a quarrel. Suddenly, he jammed the gun on me. I pushed it aside, reached for my gun, then got an arm lock on him. He was a big man so we had quite a fight.

“I overpowered him. He dropped his gun and I picked it up, just happened to get it barrel first. He made a rush at me. I clipped him a couple of times on the side of the head. I hit him some more with the butt with all my strength, cracked his skull and pretty soon he was dead. He fell like a log and I realized I had killed another person almost in the same spot in front of the fireplace where I unwittingly killed Mrs. Rice. The first had been an accident pure and simple and the second had been a case of another man’s life or my own. There I was with another body to get rid of. I figured that if this sort of stuff went on I’d have to acquire a private cemetery.”

“What did you do with the body,” asked the sheriff. First Fell claimed he had incinerated the corpse in the oil tank of a locomotive, then provided a more plausible story. “For two days I kept it hidden behind the davenport. There was a heavy bunch of baling wire on the place, so I wrapped up what was left of Mr. Baronovich in fine style with wire from the radio antenna. Guess I must have wrapped him up and weighted him down in 80 pounds of wire by the time I finished. I wrapped him in a blanket and heaved it into the back seat of my car along with two big hunks of railroad iron, heavy railroad clamps, and a bunch of iron plates to fasten on.

“With him in the back of my car, I drove around the Bay for a while figuring a better way to dispose of it than the way I disposed of Mrs. Rice’s. I happened to recall that the men who had kidnapped that fellow down in San Jose had dumped his body off the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.”

On November 13, 1933, Harold Thurmond and Jack Holmes kidnapped Brooke Hart, the twenty-two-year-old son of Alex Hart, president of the DeAnza Hotel Company and the second biggest department store in San Jose. The boy’s abductors demanded $40,000 in ransom, then drove to the bridge where they knocked Hart out with a brick. They trussed him with wire, weighted him with concrete, and tossed him off the bridge alive. As he drowned, Thurmond fired several shots at the boy. Hart’s wallet later washed up on the guard rail of a tanker in the Bay and two weeks later two duck hunters found his corpse in the Alameda marshes a mile south. After Holmes and Thurmond were arrested, a rioting mob smashed their way into the Santa Clara County Jail and lynched them across the street in St. James Park.

“It was about 3:00 A.M. when I reached the bridge with Baronovich wrapped in a blanket in the rear of the car,” continued Fell. “I fastened the two weights to the head and feet. I tied several fishplates [the heavy iron oblongs used in railroad building to tie down rails] on the body. Then I lifted it out of the car. It was heavy with all those weights on it, but I’m strong and I didn’t have any trouble handling it. But when I tried to push the body out between the rails, the space between them was too small and it wouldn’t go that way. So I had to lift the body over the rail top. That was quite a job, I’m telling you. This guy weighed 200 pounds and I had almost as many pounds tied onto him. But I’m pretty husky myself and I finally had to lift it over the rail top, hoist it up and let go. I heard a big splash as he hit the water. I threw his gun in after him. Then I drove back to clean up the cottage. Now you can see why I didn’t feel guilty of any crime in connection with these two killings. Why do you think I could sleep and eat so well if I did?”

Maloney took Highway 92 south of San Francisco. When they got to the deserted bridge, the sheriff got out. He had no real proof except Fell’s word that Baronovich existed. The wealth of details was convincing, though. The sheriff peered over the side. The water was cold and black as ink, the current powerful. They could do nothing until daylight to find exactly where Fell had put the chained body over. “Let’s go back,” said the sheriff and they started for the Redwood City Jail.

Elsewhere, the bloodless body of an unidentified man laden down with chains and weights had shot to the surface. It was estimated it had been thrown over the side of the nearby San Mateo-Hayward Bridge by a very strong man. Dullea caught that case.

 

 

SOUTH
of San Francisco, the Bay tides were running strong and swift. Getting the waterlogged bundle onboard the Coast Guard cutter was arduous. The sailor was bound in chains just like escape artist Harry Houdini in his recent performance at the Orpheum but had been substantially less successful in breaking loose. Link by link, the guardsmen snipped away the chains with a bolt cutter. When the mutilated corpse was released from his irons, a singular feature stood out—he had not one drop of blood in his veins.

Britt had briefed Dullea so he knew about the victim Fell weighted in chains and threw from the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. All Dullea knew for sure was that someone was killing sailors in grisly ways. Unfortunate seamen had been found in the water, suspiciously murdered on the docks, thrown out windows, stabbed with a combination of stilettos and butcher knives, and fatally beaten. Dullea thought the crimes might be linked, but if the sailor killings were part of a sequence held together by a substantial motive, what was that motive? It was the same problem he had in the Gorilla Man case.

Dullea took a deep breath of Bay air. It cleared his head. The early morning was crystal clear. Gulls wheeled above as the police launch cut south. Barges passed by, delivering large steel beams to the Bay Bridge skeleton, and derricks were lifting them into place. In spite of eight months of setbacks (they lost the trestle twice in storms and once when a ship rammed it), the bridge was nearing completion. Architect Charles Purcell had designed it as two distinct structures, conjoined mid-Bay (exactly between two earthquake faults) at Yerba Buena Island to span the widest navigable stretch of water ever. When the two main sections were in place, the hard rock men would bore a tunnel through the island’s center to connect them.

Dullea saw the Coast Guard cutter ahead. A minute later, he was aboard and minutes later followed the cutter back to the dock in the police launch, having learned the bloodless sailor wasn’t Baronovich. “Including the sailor in chains we dragged up, Raoul Louis Cherborough,” Dullea said, “that makes the sixth mysterious killing on San Francisco Bay in two years.
¹⁶
All the victims were seamen very active in union disputes.” The fifth victim, Chief Engineer George W. Alberts of the freighter
Point Lobos
had been stabbed with two knives.
¹⁷
Dullea’s informant, Matthew Guidera, told him, “A.M. Murphy of the Marine Fireman’s Union, and I are roommates in the Terminal Hotel on Market Street [adjacent to the Bay Hotel], so we both could be near the ships and docks in case of a dispute involving members of our respective unions. A union leader dispatched a bunch of men to kill Alberts and the rest.”

—VINTAGE CARTOON SHOWING A GORILLA HOLDING A PASSERBY BY HIS ANKLES AND SHAKING MONEY OUT

 

 

 

 

 

AS
the first rays of Tuesday’s daybreak streaked the sky, McGrath got a cup of coffee and signaled two trusties to load long-handled shovels into his car. As he drove to the solitary grave, several carloads of reporters and deputies kept a less than respectful distance behind. He turned onto the little-used side road and parked. So did the reporters. The trusties hauled out the shovels and made a leisurely descent of the slope, this time by ropes secured to the auto bumper. The portly sheriff saw that workmen had been excavating very close to the grave. “We probably would have discovered the corpse very soon no matter what,” he said. The deputies and trusties, all in shirtsleeves, unbuttoned their vests and hefted their shovels and pickaxes. McGrath, badge pinned to his black vest, used the rope and joined them. He didn’t bother to roll up his sleeves, just hefted his pick and struck a blow as flashbulbs exploded.

Blowflies were buzzing. You couldn’t see them in the faint dawn light, but you could feel them. Diggers removed two feet of leaves and debris and a second layer of earth discolored by quicklime. The lime had seared the earth to a depth of another foot. Sunrise was filtering through the trees when they uncovered the decomposed body of Mrs. Rice another two feet down. A reporter became ill at the sight. “This is all we need,” said McGrath. “We’ll let the coroner take care of this.” The attendants lifted the body, placed it in a round-ended wicker sarcophagus with handles at both ends and made the treacherous ascent, the lead attendant walking backward and pulling as his partner pushed the casket.

McGrath returned to the jail to find the press assembled around the prisoner’s cell. At first Fell had been grumpy (the jailers had awakened him early), but after breakfast and a look at the front pages, he was in an increasingly playful mood. “So you’ve been digging, eh?” Fell said as they entered. “Well, you boys will want a lot of pictures now, but try to make them better than the last ones. They weren’t very good.” He flexed his muscles under the tight black T-shirt, smoothed back his hair and chided them. “My rollicking, highly amusing little escapade hasn’t been big news until now, boys. Well, it’ll be on the front page now. I’m going to run Hitler right off the paper.”