The Laughing Gorilla (40 page)

“I just killed my wife,” he said. His chest was heaving. “I’m the one who called the police.” “Show me where,” said the cop. Without hesitation he led the traffic cop back to a Tenderloin hotel at 510 Ellis Street. Inside the double hotel room on a bed was a body, nude, bloody, and unspeakably mangled. It was still warm. Her hair was titian red.

“If you don’t tell me about the arrest, you sonuvabitch, I’ll blast you all over town,” the “Iron Duke” bellowed. The Iron Duke wasn’t his real name. That was Bill Wren. He wasn’t a duke, but might well have been. As the
Examiner
’s city editor, he ran San Francisco. The police commissioner, the DA, and the mayor went in person to his office at Third and Market to curry favor. He only had to say to high officials, “Bill Wren wants” and “desire became command.”

The belligerent, Boston-born editor kept his power by devious means. His men worked the same way. His columnist Bob Patterson once called up Bones Remmer, the notorious gambler. “Somebody told me an embarrassing story concerning you, Bones,” he said. “I’m going to have to run it in my column. I hate to embarrass you, but business is business. Of course, I might be persuaded to not run the story if you were to give me $500.”

When Bones came over to Patterson’s office to give him the money, the doors flew open, flash bulbs popped, and the next day’s paper had a front-page picture of them exchanging money—“Bones Rimmer Tries to Bribe
Examiner
Columnist.” In retaliation, Bones offered records of Patterson’s long criminal history and prison time to the other papers. None would print it. They had their ethics. That was what passed as journalism in San Francisco.

It hadn’t taken Wren long to find out someone was in custody for the Bay Hotel murder—after all these years. Chief Quinn had called first. “There’s been another autopsy murder in a hotel,” he said. “A sailor confessed that he’d just killed and mutilated a woman.”

As soon as the chief hung up, a chambermaid, one of the dozens on Wren’s payroll, called. Like Anna Lemon, she had unlocked a room door and discovered a partially dissected body. Then a uniformed officer rang him. “We’ve got the Gorilla Man,” he said. “He’s just confessed to another hotel murder and mutilation. I spoke to him myself. Keep it under your hat. I’ll call back with more.” The Iron Duke hung up, then looked to the framed motto over his head: “Tell me nothing in confidence.” “Copy,” he bellowed.

He needed his best reporter who was whiling away the afternoon hours at one of the newspaper watering holes. Since the repeal of prohibition in 1934, the word
saloon
was out and
tap room, juice joint, cocktail lounge,
and
tavern
were in.

The story spread in the hot afternoon. Reporters heard the news at Jerry and Johnny’s and Jay Hurley’s near the
Examiner.
The buzz, like a current of electricity, flowed on to the House of Shields across from the
Call
on New Montgomery. Word of the arrest passed among the tipsy scribes at Murphy’s Spa at the Market-Grant intersection and at Gallagher’s saloon at Mission and Fourth streets, where most of the
Bulletin
ink-stained wretches hung out. At Hanno’s behind the
Chronicle,
the printers took off their square, folded-newspaper hats, threw them in the alley and began buzzing about the news.

Dullea’s patrol car, siren screaming, reached the Tenderloin’s epicenter, Eddy and Leavenworth streets. That tawdry region encompasses the area between Geary, Van Ness, Market, and Mason streets. Dullea and Husted entered the Ellis Street Hotel and ascended to room 516. On a chair by the door sat a traffic cop in uniform with his head buried in his hands.

The curtains were closed. The room was stifling. The man on the other side of the room was flanked by three uniformed officers. His chin was trembling. His head was lowered. Dullea saw the slashed, strangled body of a young, red-haired woman sprawled across the bed. When he remembered that Bette Coffin’s hair had been the same shade of titian red, his heart began to pound.

“I’m the one who told the police,” the bloodied sailor said. “I did it.” He shook his handcuffs.

“Why did you do it?” asked Dullea, walking to the bed and looking down on the victim. “Make us understand. What was your motive?” He was very interested in motives these days. Dullea knelt. An expertly made hangman’s noose had been tightened around her neck and some razor-sharp cutting implement had been used to cut away a portion of her torso. Not only had the sailor sectioned her body, but he had printed a message across her stomach in makeup pencil: “Honey I Love You.” Dullea noticed that she had drawn her eyebrows on with the same pencil. A second note pinned to the sheet said essentially the same thing. The killer had gotten the idea from that day’s
Examiner
story about film star Barbara Leonard who had been beaten in her bathroom by two men who tied her up and wrote on her back in blue makeup pencil: “LAST WARNING.” They wrote it in reverse so she could read it in the mirror. Dullea agreed with Husted that the mutilations were remarkably similar to the Bay Hotel homicide. But this time the strangling and slashing hadn’t been enough for the killer. He had bashed her head in with a wooden rolling pin.

When he got no answer from the killer, Dullea went to the mantle and used his handkerchief to pick up a whisky bottle. He tilted it. Only dregs remained. Maybe the bottle was the motive. He returned to the bed and studied the suspect’s face. It was bleak and remorseful. Ramon Lee Hughes, a thirty-six-year-old sailor, was a good looking guy, with a full head of hair. But when remorse overtook him his face collapsed like puff pastry. Hughes rose. He could hardly stand. He tottered across the room and sat down heavily on the edge of the sofa. Blinking rapidly, he laced his fingers together like a second set of handcuffs. Heavy gold rings on each of his fingers glinted. Raising his arms, the sailor laid his cheek along his manacled hands as if making a pillow of them. He was sobering up quickly now and regretting what he had done.

“He’s the most pitiful hangdog drunk I’ve ever seen,” Dullea whispered to Husted. “In no way does he match my perception of the Bay Hotel killer.”

But then neither had the handsome, likable Slipton Fell (whose face also lost its attractiveness when he broke into an insensate grin). Hughes didn’t even have Fell’s strength and size. Eventually, he stopped sobbing, composed himself, and told Dullea why he had done it. “Jealousy, I guess, that and drink,” Hughes said, “damn drink-fired jealousy that’s all. She meant everything to me.”

The staff of the Ellis Hotel knew the victim as twenty-three-year-old Genevieve “Jean” Montgomery (her birth name was Genevieve Clucky). Five years before she and another woman, Mrs. Bette Keith, had come to California from Toledo, where Jean’s father was a police detective.

“Jean had recently gotten divorced from John Montgomery, a Centralia, Washington lumberjack. I paid for the divorce, I wanted to be with her that much. She was my common law wife. She had just returned from a week’s visit to San Diego. When I discovered this snapshot of her and another sailor, we argued.”

Dullea took the photo. It showed Jean in a jaunty little white hat with a red stripe and a silk scarf around her neck just where the noose was now. After Jean had drunk herself into a stupor, Hughes must have knotted her cloth belt around her neck and watched her die. Afterward he had done his awful work with a straight razor.

“What do you know about the mutilation slaying of Bette Coffin two years ago?” asked Dullea.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hughes. He blinked rapidly and passed out. Dullea knelt and tied the prisoner’s shoe so he wouldn’t trip when he came to. They managed to walk the confessed killer out of the hotel, into the car, and to Kearney Street. Dullea stopped the car across from Portsmouth Square. Lights were blazing on the second floor of the old HOJ—that meant the reporters were up and prowling. A cool breeze rose. He pulled around to the rear, where three deputies waited to take Hughes to the tanks and avoid the press. At the north wing Bernard Reilly, the jail superintendent, was at the visitor’s cage; when he saw them, he climbed off a high wooden bench and escorted Hughes to Judge Thomas Prendergast’s court. Hughes’s public defender arrived, protested that he hadn’t had time to familiarize himself with the first-degree murder case, and requested a delay. “All right,” said Prendergast, “I’ll put the case over until September 8.”

Hughes was then to endure a withering all-night third-degree interrogation about the Bay Hotel murder.

He took a seat on a rickety chair in a small room on the ground floor. Two cops entered. Hughes eyed the saps dangling by leather thongs from their wrists. One cop brought his sap down across the bridge of Ramon’s nose. “Why did you do it? What about all the others? What about the Bay Hotel?” The other cop got out the rubber hose and hefted it in his palm as if to gauge its weight. Around 4:00 A.M. three guards escorted Hughes to a narrow corridor in one of the jail wings where he spent an hour pacing and biting his lips to the jibes of other prisoners in their cells.

A ferocious rivalry for exclusives drove Bay Area journalists to extremes. Reporter Willie Hale covered his crime stories armed with a revolver. The papers were as fanatical. Anytime a man went to a newspaper office to say he was guilty of murder and wanted to confess, the first thing the paper did was squirrel him away from the police. Security guards and city policemen on the newspaper payroll, then blockaded the plant until an extra packed with exclusive stories and lurid photographs was printed and loaded onto trucks for delivery.
Then
the police were notified.

Just before dawn, before any other reporter, the Iron Duke’s man went to the booking sergeant on the top floor. “I’ve been assigned by the city editor,” he said. “I want you to bring out Hughes from his cell so I can question him in the interview room.” It was not a question but an order: Bill Wren wants.

“Okay,” said the sergeant, “but he doesn’t want to be photographed.”

But Wren’s man had concealed his cameraman and got a shot of Hughes, bruised, bleary-eyed, and exhausted, as he entered. “Your pictures already been taken and I can assure you it’s not going to be flattering,” he told Hughes. “But if you sit for a carefully lit and posed picture it might present a better image on the front page.” Of course Hughes posed and gave an interview while he did.

Husted located Jean’s close friend, Bette Keith, and was interviewing her when another woman, Florence Montgomery of 971 Mission Street, came to the jail and said she was Jean’s sister. “We had found no local relatives of the attractive divorcee,” said Husted.

Upon seeing Jean’s body, she collapsed and asked to be taken to Hughes’s cell so she could confront him. “When she was taken to his cell,” said Husted, “she came at him with her nails. What made her outburst all the more puzzling was that she was not really the slain woman’s sister.”

At noon, Hughes used his pocket money to have a hamburger sent in from a nearby restaurant along with a newspaper. His face was on the front page as the long-sought Gorilla Man. Now he was completely distraught. After another grilling, he signed a complete confession admitting to slaying the Montgomery girl. He hadn’t held back a fact, even seemed anxious to tell all, yet emphatically denied (just as Slipton Fell and Walker had) the murder of Bette Coffin and Mrs. Johnston in New York or the girls in San Diego, or the women in Golden Gate Park. He returned to his cell, shoulders slumped, and reread the newspaper story. He listened to the house sergeant conduct roll call, heard all the groans and sighs of the station house, the changing of shifts, and the despair of new prisoners.

An hour later, came a sharp rap on Dullea’s door. He and McGinn had been discussing Pete McDonough’s jailing for refusing to discuss police graft before the Grand Jury headed by Marshall Dill. “Come quickly, Captain, up to the jail,” a sergeant said.

McGinn and Dullea followed and peered through the bars of Hughes’s cell. His body was hanging by the neck from a noose made from his suspenders. His tongue was distended, eyes wide, and hair disarrayed. Tears on both cheeks had dried white. And that, McGinn thought, is the end of the Gorilla Man, but Dullea ordered him to sift through the records of the U.S. shipping commissioner until he found Hughes’s record. They had to be sure. The next morning, McGinn got a shock. According to the shipping records and the suicide’s former shipmates, Ramon Hughes had been on the high seas at the time of the Coffin and Johnston murders.

—WICKED WORDS

 

 

 

 

 

IN
Cleveland, Friday, June 5, 1936, dawned mild with warm zephyrs promising a beautiful summer. In the final days before vacation, Louis Cheeley and Gomez Ivey from the Outhwaite School ditched class. They hiked from East Sixty-fifth through the Kingsbury Run gully, tracing the NY Central tracks to slightly northeast of Jackass Hill, where Jimmy and Peter had found the two headless bodies last September. Warily, they eyed the seemingly empty boxcars and yawning doors to hobo shanties and gave them a wide berth. Coming even with the East Fifty-fifth Street Bridge spanning the gully, they observed a black willow tree growing between the rapid transit line and the tracks. A pair of brown tweed trousers had been balled into the Y of two limbs. Their weight made the slender branches droop enough for Gomez, thirteen, to reach them with his fishing pole, shake the pants and listen for a jingle. Nothing. “Wait, there might be folding money in the pockets.” Another tug, and the head of a man (who resembled Ed Andrassy) rolled to his feet. Dark brown eyes looked up sightlessly at him. Rigor had fashioned the mouth into a beatific smile. The boys raced to Gomez’s house. At 5:00 P.M. Mrs. Ivey found them huddled inside a closet and called patrolman Hendricks of the Fifth Precinct, who notified Inspectors Musil and May. “It’s like a game with him,” said May. “Last time he left the body and took the head. This time he took the body and left the head.”