The Laughing Gorilla (46 page)

—CHIEF QUINN,
TRUE DETECTIVE
ARTICLE

 

 

 

 

 

OFFICER
Marcus, excited, lost no time calling Chief Dullea. Within the hour, the barman had come through with the address. Dullea sent Ahern and Corrasa scurrying for their car with a warrant for arrest in hand. Speeding southwest on Mission Street, they passed the Hotel Irwin and halted in front of a hotel near Seventh and Mission. Rushing through the dimly lit lobby, they rode up in the elevator with a bellhop. A dark-haired woman dressed in lounging pajamas opened the door.

“My name is Ahern, I’m a policeman. This is Corrasa, my partner. We need to speak with you.” The blinds were partially drawn and only a single lamp was burning. The woman sat down, crossed her legs, adjusted her satins, and lit a cigarette. Ahern showed her Irene McCarthy’s morgue picture. “You were a friend of hers weren’t you?” She glanced, shook her head, and put her hand over her eyes. “Yes, yes,” she said. “That’s her. Poor Irene. I had known her for several months. I want to be of help. This is such a terrible thing.

“I accompanied Mrs. McCarthy, Irene, into a bar shortly before 10:00 A.M., on June 25. We sat down and had a drink together. Then she left. A little while later a man came in and sat down at the same table with me. He had been drinking and asked me if I wanted to step out. I told him I’d think it over. When he insisted on buying me a drink, I didn’t refuse. He bought several drinks and began to get confidential. When he said he was ‘on the beach’ here, or something like that, I gathered he was a sailor. I asked him what ship he was on. He said he was looking for a berth.”

“Do you know his name?” Ahern leaned forward.

She walked to the window. Faint bars of light through the closed blinds striped her face. Ahern saw her back tense. She had remembered. “I saw his name,” she said. In a moment of drunken expansiveness the man had flashed his seaman’s certificate to her. “Now what was that name? Wait.”

They waited.

“Yes, I’ve got it. I’m sure his first name was ‘Harry.’”

“Harry what?”

“All I can remember is Harry. I only saw his certificate a second.”

“What’s Harry got to do with Mrs. McCarthy?”

“She knew him. I was talking to him when Irene came in. They seemed to be old friends from San Diego . . . Irene came back in a little while and sat down beside us. They left the tavern together, saying they were going to do up the town. That was the last time I saw my poor friend alive. Poor Irene.”

Ahern and Corrasa drove back to headquarters with the name “Harry” ringing in their ears. But what did they actually have? They had a first name. They had an occupation. “The name ‘Harry’ is a slim lead,” Dullea told them, “but if there’s one chance in a million then we’ll get this bird.”

 

 

DULLEA
had put off lunch. The wind was howling outside the HOJ by the time LaTulipe brought coffee. Dullea put up his feet—his first moment of rest in a week. “Sometimes the most important clues are right in front of you,” he said, “but invisible.” There was the creak of his swivel chair as he leaned back. He recalled a case of Alameda County Deputy Sheriff Grover Mull’s a few years back. “One bleak Sunday, a windy day like today,” Dullea said, “Deputy Mull and Sheriff Doug Webb were cutting up Broadway as an oncoming rainstorm chased their cruiser . . .”

 

 

AT
Tenth Street and Broadway, Oakland’s main thoroughfare, Mull and Webb took a breakneck run at Hayward, fifteen miles to the east, then sped through Fruitvale, Fitchburg, and Elmhurst towns. As they roared down bumpy roads the few streetlights leaped up in the growing dusk. Sweating in semitropical heat, they flew through the town of San Leandro and ate up ten miles of sparsely settled country. Scattered farms, fruit and nut stands, and a single filling station flashed by. At Hayward’s eastern limit, they swung right onto a graveled roadway where at the far end lay 795 Pinedale Court—the Everett Richmond home with a beautiful young brunette out front. “We’ve just gotten home and been nearly crazy since father’s shooting,” Mrs. Richmond sobbed.

Inside the entry hall a pool of blood shimmered on the polished hardwood floor. The radio was playing loudly, a popular dance tune Mull knew. She clicked it off. “Father was wounded in the abdomen by a masked man hiding in the hallway,” she said. “He got to a neighbor’s house and was driven to the Hayward Sanitarium.” Mull left Mrs. Richmond and Webb on the couch and traced the daylight shooter’s escape route out the front entry hall. He had made a sharp right, then run down a side street, his arms filled with jewelry and silverware.

The northeastern storm had overtaken him. As it began to rain, lights came on in the close-by houses. Except for a gentle patter among the banana trees and tall palms, it was deathly silent. In the blueness, Mull found a single shoe print in the soft ground where the prowler had jumped down. Embedded in the angle formed by the junction of the heel and sole were tiny red particles and a metallic pellet. Getting a spade and a box from the tool shed, he carefully cut out the square of turf and got it out of the rain. He made a reverse cast, using a spoon as a baffle to break the fall of water and dry plaster of Paris from one end of the impression to the other. He took the hardened print back to Chief Silva.

“‘The way I dope this out,” Silva said, “the criminal picked this ore up some other place. And if we can locate where that and this bit of red earth originated we’ll have our man. We’ll search every square-inch of town until we find it. When we find it, we’ll investigate every person, every house, every shoe, and every foot of land in that neighborhood.”

Silva’s men discovered the gully where the red earth and metal had come from and found the remains of a handout. A local housewife, Mary McWilliams, recognized the newspaper she had wrapped the lunch in because of a penciled notation she had made on its margin.

Still Mull felt they’d overlooked some essential clue in their preliminary investigation, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The clue was elusive, tantalizing. A vague, yet important bit of evidence still lay undiscovered in the Richmond house. “Hold it!” Mull said. “There’s something wrong here. Mrs. Richmond shut off the radio just as she sat down on the couch. Why should the radio have been playing at all? She said they had arrived home only a short time before. According to the father’s testimony from his hospital bed, [he had since died] he was shot immediately after stepping into the house and so he didn’t turn on the radio.”

They rushed back to Pinedale Court. “Yes,” Mrs. Richmond recalled, “the radio was playing when we got home. The queerest part is that the radio’s been out of order for the last three days. We haven’t been able to tune it at all.”

“Yet it was playing perfectly last night,” said Mull. “The only conclusion is that the gunman fixed it. But why? Why would he fix the radio?” Mull took the cover off the radio and explored the inside. Though the killer had wiped his prints away everywhere else in the home, he might not have wiped down the inside of the radio. He had not. Mull developed six different sets of fingerprints in the interior. He matched five of the prints to radio salesmen and repairmen and the sixth to Joseph M. Reid, a San Quentin ex-con. Mrs. McWilliams identified him as the tramp she fed.

When Mull caught Reid fencing the stolen items at a pawnshop, the fugitive dropped behind a trash can and began firing at him. As Mull lay full length on the sidewalk, he counted six shots from Reid’s weapon. If Reid had a revolver Mull had him. If he had an automatic Reid would have one or more bullets left and Mull would be in a fix if he rushed him now. He took the chance. With drawn gun he charged and captured Reid trying to reload.

“While bumming through Hayward,” Reid confessed, “I picked the Richmond home as a likely place to rob. Using a skeleton key, I entered by the small door on the side street. First thing I always do is turn on the radio, turn it on loud. This gives neighbors the impression some of the family is home and prevent calls to the police from neighbors who observed me through the windows. This time I found the radio not working. I used to be a radio repair man so I made a very simple repair inside the cabinet. I had to take off my gloves to do this, but I figured
no one
would think to look for prints inside the machine.”

 

 

“
BUT
Mull did,” said Dullea to LaTulipe. “An invisible clue. What do you think of that?” He paused. From the beginning he had felt there was an invisible clue in his case. But where? Was it a witness? Was it someone already in jail? Could it be another crooked officer or dishonest public official? God, there had been so many. Dullea’s eyes strayed to a file cabinet standing in a shaft of rain light. It had to be there somewhere in that file. The thought nagged at him. He couldn’t sleep or eat until he found it. The Gorilla Man was someone he already knew. He would bet everything on that. But who?

 

 

UNSPEAKABLE
necrophiles like the Gorilla Man are propelled by an unfathomable compulsion, a misplaced desire that drives them beyond murder to the disarticulation of their victims. Though new to America, this type of woman killer had been horribly active in Europe throughout the last decade. Lord Spilsbury could name a dozen recent victims in Britain in eight of the twelve cases he was called in to help solve. “Within four years,” he wrote, “the murders of four women of the streets, all strangled and all but one living in Soho, swelled the list of unsolved crimes.” He attributed them to the same known hand. “The rarest class of murder, very fortunately—for it is the most terrifying to contemplate is that apparently committed for the sake of killing by a person who by all accepted standards is perfectly sane. Casual murders without motive by a maniac are intrinsically unsolvable.” Sadistic crime remained at a fairly low level during the 1930s, but by 1946 would double in England. By 1956 such crimes would quadruple in the big U.S. cities and there would be a profusion of what Dullea called Gorilla Men.

 

 

OVER
at the big gray stone customhouse sleepless detectives were combing through mountains of the U.S. shipping commissioner’s records for the past six years. It was a daunting task. Every month more than four hundred ships left the San Francisco port with crews ranging from twenty to upward of four hundred each. All night, Engler, Corrasa, and Ahern plodded through shipping line registers of the more than forty steamship companies that signed crews out of San Francisco and scrutinized the names of all crews in the harbor at the time of the murders. Next, they compiled a list of all men whose given names were Harry and matched those with known addresses and compared their handwriting. Luckily, the commissioner required their signatures be kept on file.

“I’ve got a hunch,” said Engler as he closed the last book without luck. “This guy Harry might have shipped out of some Pacific Northwest port—possibly Seattle or Portland. We might check there. He registered at both hotels as from LA, but might have used that only to throw us off the trail.”

“It doesn’t seem likely that a sailor who was almost broke,” said Dullea, “would spend his dough to come here from up north, while he might do that from LA. First, though, forget about the bars for now and question as many waterfront types as possible. I figure that a sailor would hang around waterfront dives along the Embarcadero and being a drinker tend to shoot off his mouth.”

A number of the old wharf rats and waterfront habitués prided themselves on knowing everyone on the waterfront. Engler and Corrasa went looking for one. The tragedy had started at the Ferry Building and might end there. In the night fog, the deserted Ferry Building and its Neoclassical Clock Tower were ghostlike. It was not hard to image it before the ’06 quake—busy derricks at the base of Market Street (which then lay in cobbles), a long arcaded wooden shed with stalls for horse-drawn streetcars, and elegant carriages and coaches delivering guests to hotels.
²³
At the south end, Engler saw a light flare as a man cupped his hands to light a cigarette. He saw a flash of beard and a long, flushed face. He was short-legged, in boots, rolled cuffs, felt hat, and bulky jacket. They put the question to him. “I know half a dozen Harrys,” he said, “but for the price of a drink I’ll give it some thought.” Engler and Corrasa were thirsty, too, so they adjoined to the Ensign Cafe across from the Bay Hotel. “As I said, I know several Harrys, but only one matches your description.” He had another drink and scratched his beard. “That would be Harry Gordon.” He had another, then turned in his seat. “He generally ships on deck as an able-bodied seaman and if I’m not mistaken he’s Danish.”

Engler doubted Gordon was Harry’s real name but was elated all the same. Immediately, a dogged canvass ensued of all Pacific Coast Ports for any Harry Gordons. They asked the police of every Pacific Coast port to obtain a copy of Harry Gordon’s signature from their local shipping commissioners. The next day, the LAPD airmailed a copy of a Harry W. Gordon’s handwriting to the SFPD. As soon as it arrived, LaTulipe made a comparison with the Photostatted signatures on the two hotel registers and Harry Gordon’s seaman’s card. All three were written by the same man. The identity of the Gorilla Man was known at last. Harry was a simple name, the name of commoners, kings, cabbies, and killers.

Because Gordon was living in southern California, Mitchell would need assistance from local law enforcement. Dullea knew LA Detective Lieutenant Jerry Gannon would mesh well with his men and could make the actual arrest. On Friday, July 5, Gannon was officially assigned to work hand in glove with the SFPD detectives. The problem was that the only address they had for a sailor named Harry Gordon was a San Pedro seaman’s union hiring hall. According to records he had used it many times before.

“He’s listed to be called for work within three days,” Gannon Teletyped the SFPD. “Harry Gordon is positively going to be at a union meeting on July 8.”