The Laughing Gorilla (7 page)

On the same day the Whispering Gunman was convicted, Quinn had transferred, unannounced, five high-ranking officers and six policemen looking into graft within the SFPD. “The less talk about the transfers the better for all concerned,” Quinn threatened as he packed off the most aggressive to work at the city jail or Potrero Station. “When you’re at Potrero Station you can’t go any further down,” said one cop, “so if you ever get transferred from Potrero Station you must be on your way up.” In a department predominantly Irish—40 percent native-born Irish and 40 percent Irish American, such a demotion was called an “Irish promotion.”

Dullea carefully studied the ceiling line of the elegant office, looking for the twin wires it was alleged Chief Quinn used to bug his deputy chief’s office next door. Quinn, a San Francisco native, was born April 23, 1883. He attended Lincoln Grammar School; graduated from Sacred Heart College; and studied law at Saint Ignatius College, graduating in 1925. He had been walking a beat since 1906. With a sweep of his cigar—long, thin, expensive—Quinn directed Dullea to a seat. He held his cigar between his first two fingers, thumb tucked under, and pointed down. When he had a point to make he held it like a gun. When he was of equal temperament, he held it perfectly horizontal. But when it pointed up . . . “Get to the point, Charlie. I’m busy on these robberies.”

In May, a big redheaded man had pushed into the Lowe-Davis Loan Company asking for a $100 loan. “Sorry, we don’t lend that much,” said the manager. “Just for that, I’m going to take the whole works.” Drawing an automatic, Red escaped with the money on the No. 9 Market Street car.

In July, he robbed the American Trust Company and escaped in a Yellow Cab. He and a partner then knocked over the Bank of America on Seventeenth. In this wild era of Tommy guns, sawed-off shotguns, and bank heists, there were six times more crooks in the nation than grocers. One year, six hundred banks were robbed for a loss of $3.5 million to the nation. Quinn’s solution was to replace ringing alarms at the banks with silent alarms and invite the employees to the HOJ firing range to learn to shoot. He suspected experienced bank robber George “Red” Kerr. In the end, the robber turned out to be Tommy Coleman, a San Quentin escapee who was a dead ringer for Kerr, who was innocent. Quinn signed his report with a Wahl-Eversharp Gold Seal fountain pen, which had a 14K-gold point and embellishments. He turned it in the light. It was a treasured gift from Commissioner Roche.

Dullea didn’t know how to suggest that a trusted, popular public official was plotting murder. Finally he just came out with it. There was a moment of silence as the chief absorbed his words. Then his jowls quivered, his watery eyes blinked, and his cigar jutted to forty-five degrees. “Which side are you on?” he snapped. His fist came down hard. “I want you to back off Egan! Get it, Charlie?”

Quinn stood and walked to the recessed window. His posture was perfect, alert, filled with fierce energy and strength. He was a big man, two hundred pounds and taller than Dullea. In spite of the spare tire around his waist, the overall impression was of power.

Clasping both hands behind his back, the big Irishman rocked back and forth, his eyes sweeping the blossoming trees of Portsmouth Square across the street. The room was pin-drop quiet. Dullea could hear a clerk down the hall pecking out a report. “Because men are human,” Quinn explained in a calm voice, fighting to control his irritation, “there will be occasional scandals and some, as a matter of course, will involve public officials, but much of this is imagined in the fevered minds of do-gooders.” He turned, small teeth tight against his lower lip. “I want you to back off of any sort of investigation. I will handle matters such as that. Do you understand, Charlie? For Christ’s sake, Egan’s a former city police officer and a fireman.” The cigar dropped to half-mast. Dullea’s moment had passed.

He returned to his small ground floor office with the green tacked carpet, more distraught than before. Quinn’s comments had seemed overly defensive to him—as if he knew of a deeper internal corruption than Frank Egan, which in itself was horrendous. Yes, thought Dullea, curious remarks. But his problem had still not been solved. Still ringing in his ears were the last words he had heard Egan speak over the planted bug—“By Friday night all my troubles will be over.” But which Friday night? And by
troubles
did he mean Josie Hughes? Or someone else? Each Friday night after that Dullea ordered a secret two-man watch be kept on Josie. There might be nothing to the threat, but he could not take the chance. He did not intend to fail another woman as he had all those San Francisco landladies in 1926.

IAN REDMOND,
GORILLA

 

 

 

 

 

“
AMERICA
had never seen anything like Earle Leonard Nelson before or since,” wrote Jay Robert Nash of the Gorilla Man’s true identity. “There have been killers who were just as methodical and who carried out their brutal murders with just as much religious fervor—but none had the transcontinental intensity. . . . He was a killer apart, a killer’s killer, a mass murderer who worked coast to coast with a Bible in his hand.”

The era of the sex crime that followed World War I may have begun with the Gorilla Man, who terrorized the North American continent for years.

 

 

IN
Winnipeg on June 9, 1927, Earle Nelson encountered fourteen-year-old Lola Gowan on the front steps of 133 Smith Street selling artificial flowers her crippled sister made to support her family, who lived on University Street across from the Vaughn Street jail. He wanted to buy some, but she would have to come to his room so he could get his money. Once inside, he wrapped a cloth around her neck, strangled her, and repeatedly violated her. Stuffing her corpse under his bed, he went to sleep.

In the morning he packed Lola’s belongings and headed down Portage Avenue to find new lodgings. On Riverton Avenue he spotted a “Room for Rent” sign in a window. He told landlady Emily Patterson he didn’t have any money but would do repair work in exchange. He was seen fixing the Pattersons’ screen door. That evening Emily’s husband, William, returned home. “Where is your mother, children?” he asked. “Oh, Daddy, she’s been gone all day,” the two boys cried.

Emily hadn’t been seen since that morning. After a search of the neighborhood, William reported her missing, then put the kids to bed. As it approached midnight, he grew more worried. He trudged to their bedroom and, sobbing, dropped to his knees at the foot of their bed. For almost an hour he prayed for Emily’s safe return. “Please direct me to where she is,” he begged. When he opened his eyes he saw little pink fingertips peeking out from under the bed. Reaching beneath, he felt an ice-cold hand. While he had been praying for Emily’s return, she had been only inches away—naked, throat crushed, and raped after death. Her wedding ring was missing. The strangler had taken it along with the family Bible, $70, and William’s brown whipcord suit. As was Earle Nelson’s custom he left behind his own clothes.

His discards provided enough clues to send the police on a canvas of local boardinghouses that ended at Katherine and August Hill’s. “I haven’t taken in any suspicious lodgers lately,” said Mrs. Hill. “In fact we’ve had no new lodgers since Mr. Woodcots last Wednesday. He’s rather on the short side, dark, with blue eyes and a simian mouth and jaw.”

The detectives raced upstairs to his room. As soon as they entered they smelled a sickening smell. As a detective bent to retrieve an artificial flower, he saw the body of the missing flower girl, mutilated beyond recognition. “Good God, man!” he shouted.

“To think that that fiend lay sleeping in that room all night with that poor dead girl under his bed!” August said as he shielded his sobbing wife. So horribly treated was Lola’s body that Chief of Detectives George Smith permanently sealed the record.

Nelson used $10 of the stolen money to buy a fountain pen, corduroy trousers, and a plaid shirt at Sam Waldman’s secondhand shop on Main Street. He left behind Patterson’s clothes, then got a massage, shave, and haircut at the Central Barber Shop next door. Nick Taylor grew suspicious as he cut Nelson’s hair. It was encrusted with blood from deep nail scratches on his scalp where Emily had fought back. Nelson caught a ride with Hugh Elder into Regina, Saskatchewan, two hundred miles west. He engaged a room from landlady Mary Rowe on June 12 under the name Harry Harcout. The next morning, he saw an accurate description of himself in the paper and bought new clothes from the Royal Second Hand Store. He changed into blue overalls, a khaki shirt, and cap, then caught a lift from Isadore Silverman, a scrap metal dealer, whose route took them around police patrols via back roads to Boissevain, Manitoba.

“If he’s heading for the border,” said Smith, “he’ll have to cross prairie country where there are few towns for him to lose himself. A lone hitchhiker should be easy to spot.”

Canadian constables and U.S. policemen closed in on him from both sides. When he bought some cheese and a drink at the Wakopa General Store the proprietor, Les Morgan, recognized him and notified Constable Wilton A. Gray, the only officer on duty at the Killarney, Manitoba, department.

Constable Gray was patrolling twelve miles north of the international border just outside the small farming community of flat land and tree-lined rivers and hills when he saw a man nonchalantly walking down the road and asked his name. With a shy smile, he said it was Wilson and that he was a stock hand who worked on a nearby farm. Gray was suspicious. No Canadian would call a spread this far west a farm. “We’re looking for a man who is responsible for the deaths of twenty six women,” Gray said, and watched for a giveaway sign.

“A mass murderer? I only do my lady-killing on Saturday nights.”

“You’d better ride back to Killarney with me, so we can check your story.”

“Fair enough. You fellows have to play it safe when there’s a killer on the loose.”

“It can’t be him,” Gray thought. “He’s too cool.”

At the ancient and tiny Killarney jail, Gray took away his shoes, socks, and belt as a precautionary measure, then double-locked him inside a cell and handcuffed him to the bars. He then walked fifteen feet away into the next room to ring Inspector Smith in Winnipeg.

“I think we’ve got the wrong man,” Gray told him. “He says that his name is Wilson.”

“That must be the strangler!” Smith said. The Gorilla Man had used the name Wilson here in Winnipeg and in San Francisco. “Don’t be taken in by his innocent demeanor. Twenty-six women are dead because they made the same mistake. For the love of God! You didn’t leave him alone, did you?”

Gray ran into the next room. The Gorilla Man was gone. He had picked his cuffs with a nail file he found under his bunk, opened the cell doors with a wire, and escaped without his shoes. As a posse was assembled, Smith sent four detectives to the isolated village by plane. He and another fifty followed by train. Meanwhile, Nelson, who had stolen new clothes, was fast asleep in William Allen’s barn, one block from the jail. The next day, he showed up at the station to wait for a southbound train and hid in some bushes by a grain elevator.

Constable William Renton spotted Nelson, jumped the fence, and intercepted him. He studied the stranger’s disheveled clothes—a moth-eaten sweater and a pair of hockey skates with the blades removed serving as shoes. “You look like you slept in the open last night, sir.”

“Where do you farm?” Nelson pointed to a building by the tracks. “That’s a slaughterhouse,” said Renton.

Nelson began running down the railway tracks as the morning express rolled into view and rushed right into Smith’s arms as he stepped from the train. Captain Matheson of the SFPD flew from San Francisco to Winnipeg to confirm Nelson’s identity. He studied the strange, blank-faced man who wore a tweed suit and cap. His wide shoulders and huge manacled hands still gave the impression of power. During his trial, Nelson showed no emotion as forty American witnesses identified him. “That’s the man,” said Matheson.

When Nelson’s aunt Lillian and estranged wife, Mary, attended, he ignored them. On November 14, 1927, the jury deliberated just forty-eight minutes before convicting him of Emily Patterson’s murder. Despite his pleas of insanity and innocence (“Murder just isn’t possible for a man of my high Christian ideals”), he was sentenced to hang on Friday, January the thirteenth as the thirteenth man ever hung at the Vaughn Street Jail, which was across the street from the Patterson family home. “I am innocent,” Nelson said. “I stand innocent before God and man. I forgive those who have wronged me and ask forgiveness of those I have injured. God have mercy!” Earle Nelson’s insatiable habit of strangling landladies was finally broken.

 

 

“
THAT’S
odd,” Dullea had said as he perused the San Francisco papers. No mention anywhere of the Gorilla Man’s execution in Canada. He could not be sure he was even dead. In Chicago, where there was a corrupt police force, criminals bought their way off death row or faked their executions. Perversely, Dullea hoped the Gorilla Man was still alive to return so he could have a second chance to catch the murderer.

Elsewhere the Gorilla Man stirred. His huge hands opened and closed. He was coming back to life. His eyes turned west.

—IAN REDMOND,
GORILLA

 

 

 

 

 

THE
second anniversary of Officer John Malcolm’s murder, Friday, April 29, 1932, was exceptionally cold. Inspectors Jim Malloy and Bart Lally were bundled up and parked on Fairfield Way where it curved over to intersect Lakewood Avenue and continued north to dead-end at Kenwood Way. Lally, cigar clenched between his teeth, scanned the road for the hundredth time. Malloy had been combing his wavy, silver hair straight back. Each time the thick shock had sprung back as curvy as Fairfield Way. There was scarcely a straight line in the Ingleside Terraces or in nearby St. Francis Woods’ shaded, winding ways. It was as if their architect had only a French curve with which to draw his plans.