The Laughing Gorilla Page 17

  The previous October, Fell had been working at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in Oakland, when he reported his paycheck stolen. A replacement was issued, but when he cashed both drafts, the pilfered check was traced to him, and he was fired. Then he got a job at a Richmond gasoline service station, forged another check, and was sacked again. In the following November, Fell obtained a job at an auto assembly plant, where he met Joseph Anthony, a thirty-two-year-old oil service attendant at the Cutting Boulevard station. Anthony, who had come to California from Marshfield, Oregon, four years earlier, spent his free time inside his second-story apartment behind the filling station. He had no friends and no known enemies, except for Fell. Somewhere in the mix was a woman—there was always a woman—and the two men had fought over her. When Fell left the plant at the end of December, that should have been the end of the feud, but apparently wasn’t.

  On January 7, 1935, someone climbed the stairs to Anthony’s apartment and slugged Anthony as soon as he opened up the door. After a furious battle, the visitor knocked Anthony out, carried him to his bed, and trussed him hand and foot with wire he had brought along. Then he propped Anthony up with a pillow, stuck a burnt cigarette in his mouth, and buried a carpenter’s ax in his skull with tremendous force.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Shaw’s grocery shop took up the ground floor of Anthony’s building. When Mrs. Shaw had not seen Anthony for some time, she went upstairs, discovered his body, and called police. Richmond detectives initially suspected a woman of the killing because of the long fingernail scratches on his cheek, neck, and ears. But a strong man had to have carried Anthony to the bed and buried the ax so deep. He had left two fingerprints in blood on the haft of the ax. The only item stolen was Anthony’s gold watch. As for Slipton Fell, he possessed four watches of which he was immensely proud. All of them were gold.

  One of the jobs Fell did in the guise of yet another of his personalities was at the Woodside garage near lonely Ada Rice’s house. Under the name of Jerome Selz (Jerry to his friends), he pumped gas, wiped windshields, and repaired the occasional engine. He was the All-American boy in this role. Though Will Werder, the station manager, had recommended Fell to Ada, he personally didn’t like him. “Jerry was not popular with men,” Werder said, though this was not the truth. “Of course, he didn’t seem vicious or dangerous. In fact the reaction of most of us was that he was a conceited bore. No matter what subject we brought up, Jerry always knew all about it. He was the expert. He had done it better than anyone else and done it first. His favorite trick was to bet the firemen at Woodside that he could lift them from the ground by their belts using just his teeth. Jerry always won that bet.”

  Obviously, Fell had the public trust because the neighborhood let him act as a night watchman for the community. He was a very likable man, especially to older women. To promote himself at the Woodside garage, Fell had his other personalities—Ralph Jerome Selz, Ralph Sells, Charles Oliver, Slipton J. Fell, Upton Rose, Faran Wide, and more—write letters to the personnel department and home office of the big petroleum company that owned the Woodside station. The stream of letters lauded his charm, courtesy, matchless efficiency, zeal, and the blue-ribbon work he did. The same company had already discharged him once, but from their Oakland branch and under another name. When they rehired him as Jerry Selz, nobody was the wiser. The letters, all in the same handwriting, were so effective that, under his new name, Fell got a raise from the same company that had fired him.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Homicide is the killing of one human being by another. Compared to other major crimes, the statistics on homicide are low. Fortunately, homicides are few and far between in the overall crime picture.

  —CRIME TEXTBOOK OF THE PERIOD

  IT was now Tuesday, April 16, eleven days after Bette Coffin’s murder. The waterfront was cheerful, filled with bright sunlight. There was a slight breeze out of the west. The docks trembled with activity. For the moment, everything seemed right to Dullea. Gazing at the hoards of travelers, he observed, “All roads lead to the Ferry Building.”

  So did his greatest cases—the shooting of Officer Malcolm, the “kidnapping” of Frank Egan, and the Bay Hotel murder across the street, a tragedy forever linked to the Ferry Building and its daggerlike Clock Tower. The sweeping panorama of blue mountains, sky, and water lifted Dullea and McGinn’s spirits. As they ate crab, Captain Coombs’s Lochgoil glided in like a feather from Rotterdam and berthed alongside Pier 33. Dullea asked McGinn if, with the jailing of the Phantom, they had seen the last of large-scale corruption within the department. McGinn shook his head. “Maybe, Charlie” he said, “but I doubt it.” He said no more. Sometimes it was wiser not to know too much.

  The motor ship Ele under Captain Selbje of the north German Lloyd (with Princess von Preussen aboard) tied up alongside. The Lloyd got under way immediately and headed toward Oakland as Captain Blanquie’s French Line motor ship Washington sailed for France and Antwerp. As vessels came and went, an elderly man at the end of Pier 45 fell into the water. Captain Eddie McCarthy of the lookout service and his pal Al Bartlett dove in and saved him.

  The south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge had risen another 20 feet from its concrete base, striving to match the tower on the Marin shore at a full 745 feet. The welders and riveters were making better progress than Dullea’s men, though his homicide squad had an astounding clearance rate of 80 percent. (Today, 20 percent is considered phenomenal.) But in the lovely light, the terrible murder at the Bay Hotel was fading in everyone’s memory. Only its exceptional horror and Dullea’s persistence kept it alive. Dullea returned home, tortured that he’d overlooked some essential clue. “But I can’t quite put my finger on it,” he told Winifred over dinner.

  It was elusive, tantalizing. A vague, yet important bit of evidence lay undiscovered—plainly visible, yet somehow invisible. He couldn’t escape the fact that he already knew the answer. He knew the secret of the Laughing Gorilla, and he knew his name.

  Before dawn on Sunday, April 21, Dullea and his family joined forty thousand San Franciscans trudging up Mount Davidson (Blue Mountain) south of Twin Peaks and west of Glen Park. As the city’s highest natural point, one of its three tallest peaks, it is visible fifty miles at sea. Through a cold, wet fog, the worshipers followed the narrow path the WPA had just improved. Now women could wear high heels during the Easter pilgrimage.

  At the 925-foot summit a bitter wind chilled the celebrants. It was a typical San Francisco day—dismal to sunny to foggy to windy, so they had dressed for both warm and cold. Dullea’s double-breasted, worsted kept him snug, but he feared for the women in their spring dresses. They gathered in front of a new 103-foot-tall east-facing cross. Plans had called for a 100-foot cross, but because they’d had concrete and steel left for three extra feet—why not? The March before, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had illuminated the cross via telegraph from the White House. The cross, 10 square feet at the base and 16 feet into solid rock, tapered to 9 feet at the top. Dullea saw twenty-five bullet holes fired by cops during a drunken orgy pockmarking the cross.

  The sun broke through to reveal an array of colorful Easter hats swaying like golden yarrow on the hillside. Faces uplifted as they sang “The Old Rugged Cross.” As Dullea bowed his head, he remembered the last time he had prayed for guidance—the day Josie Hughes had lost her life through his failure to act in time.

  OVER at the Chronicle Allan Bosworth was working a Sunday shift. The socialite copy boy was dressed more traditionally today, but still skating figure-eights around the rows of pillars. The Sunday editor was still sneezing nine times in a row, and Bosworth was still secretly praying for a fatal tenth sneeze. A skeleton crew at the horseshoe copy desk was sipping coffee, cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays. Reporters were playing cards and working off hangovers. The police speaker was squawking. Business as usual, except for Bosworth, who was troubled. Slipton J. Fell had known too much about the Bay Hotel mutilation murder. “Ha ha!” he had laughed callo
usly. “The killer had put her breast on the bedside table and taken away her nose.”

  “At the Chronicle we were ignorant of a few facts,” Bosworth wrote later. “We did not know that when Slipton J. Fell visited us, any Latin American adventuring was in his past, and that his last sea voyage was only from Alcatraz to the Army pier. He had been in the disciplinary barracks of more than one post and come to Alcatraz Island as an Army deserter.”

  In 1925, Fell, under an alias, enlisted at Vancouver, Washington, barracks, then “bought” his way out. Four years later, he rejoined the infantry in San Francisco and again paid his way to freedom. In fall 1930, he attended Oregon State College at Monmouth, from which he was expelled for poor grades and inciting a riot as an outgrowth of “communistic tendencies.” He traveled to Los Angeles; lived in San Diego for a while; and journeyed to Mexico, Nicaragua, and all the other glorious places he spun tales about. In April 1931, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was transferred to March Field, Riverside, and then Randolph Field (Texas), from which he deserted in September. Two months later, he was arrested in San Francisco and sentenced to one year at hard labor at Fort Winfield Scott. So Fell was not only a liar (though many of his adventures would prove to be true), thought Bosworth, he was a deserter.

  Bosworth would later discover Slipton Fell was also a murderer.

  The editor settled back in his swivel chair and lit a cigarette. The paper had gone to press—forms locked up, photos etched in copper-backed zinc, cardboard mats made, hot metal poured, and curved plates strapped to huge presses. The loud warning bell rang loudly for the Monday edition. Presses began rolling in the basement, a distant throb like a pulse. On the loading dock, printed papers were bailed in wire and driven away by trucks.

  “As for Fell’s real name . . .” Bosworth said. “Never mind that. Who has the time?” He hit the space bar on his typewriter, rolled a page into place, and began to type. Except for his hunt and peck, it was silent in the long brightly lit room. Bosworth considered Fell one of the most unusual individuals he had ever met. “I became involved,” he typed, “in the remote fashion of a news editor in assembling and presenting the story of his crime, and his dubious and equally mirthful confessions. It was an incredible story.”

  THE first time Mrs. Ada Rice met Fell she appreciated his tumultuous roar, the same booming gaffaw that so unnerved and annoyed editor Bosworth. She found it charming, even infectious. Most of all, Ada saw him as a rambunctious boy full of adventure yet possessed of a sensitive soul. Such individuals as Fell rarely display bizarre psychotic symptoms but give serious attention to appearing normal and covering their tracks. Fell, fascinated with the workings of his own mind, had recently taken a personality test in a magazine to try to understand himself.

  He answered the questions methodically. “The questions asked what I liked and disliked in life and what I hoped to do about it,” Fell said. After twenty minutes he turned to the back page to consult a key that told what sort of character he had as determined by his answers. “Well, I didn’t get a very good rating. The answers I gave, according to the magazine, indicated I am inclined to be sulky. It also said I am the type that whines and complains when things go against me. I ask you, am I whining and complaining now? Don’t I seem to be in a jolly mood? Am I not a good Joe—the salt of the earth? Also the character analysis said I am subject to outbreaks of brutality and that I have abnormal ideas as to rightness and I don’t mean righteousness because by no stretch of the imagination can I be termed a righteous man.”

  To almost everyone but Bosworth (who had suspicions) and Werder (who was jealous), the very likable Mr. Fell appeared sane and sober, though egocentric. “I am absorbed in what I am doing,” Fell explained, “and the quiz said that I look on things from my own tangent, that I am unreasonable and have no respect for individualism and want things done my own way. I am inquisitive. Well, I ask you, is that me? Well? It said I am inclined to flare up and lack accomplishment.”

  Mrs. Rice didn’t agree. The first day she met Fell she judged him a man of great accomplishment. As a world traveler (like herself) he spoke English, French, and German (like herself). As they returned to her house along a wooded path, he told her about his rip-roaring adventures in revolution-torn Latin America. As proof, he stopped under an oak and showed her a consul’s letter of introduction to the South American “patriot” Sandino whose insurgent forces Fell had tried to join. This fascinated the romantic Mrs. Rice. It went to the core of her social consciousness. They had so many things in common.

  At the house he reinflated her car’s tires and removed the blocks; when Ada asked him inside for a drink, he agreed. The sun was just going down, and the chill fog was tumbling into the ravine by its sheer weight. Fell energetically stoked the logs in the hearth until sparks fanned out. When the fire was crackling he grinned broadly, leaned back on the divan, and sipped his drink. Ada sat at his feet as he told her about the Chronicle feature story on himself (“Yes, I will get you a clipping”) and how he had attended the Olympic Games in Holland in 1928.

  “I was doing freelance work for the magazines,” Fell recalled. “I had no passport and they kicked me out. So I went to Belgium, and from there I was kicked out to Germany. I was kicked out of most of Europe. Hell, what’s the use of a passport anyway? I traveled all over South America without one. One way of seeing the world is to just let yourself get kicked around.” He paused, recalling some unpleasant experience and covered his real feelings with a robust laugh. His perfect teeth flashed in the dimness. “I traveled through Western Canada, just working my way around, and practically covered all of the U.S. wandering.”

  To Ada, the bungalow seemed bright and cheery for the first time since her husband left. Loving his laugh as she did, she suggested that Fell move in, and he did on the first of June, though his version of the story differed from Ada’s in one respect, the most important one. “I first met her when she drove into the service station where I worked,” he said. “One day she came into the place. Her car was acting up a bit, and I began to tinker with it—I’m pretty good with machinery—and fixed it. She offered me a tip which I refused. Company regulations, you know! But I guess that gave her a friendly feeling for me, because pretty soon she asked me out to her house. We found we had a lot in common. We’d both traveled a lot—the same places in some cases—and we both liked to talk about our travels. We talked a lot about books, too, and really had fine times together. Finally she told me she’d just talked herself into taking a trip, and she asked me if I’d like to rent her house while she was away. It is a swell little house and of course I jumped at the chance. Wouldn’t anybody?”

  Just as Frank Egan had called Josie Hughes his “Auntie” and Josie in return had called him “Nephew,” Fell called Ada his “Woodside Mother” and she called him her “Woodside Son.” She already had a son, but Fell appealed to her motherly instincts, as Egan had appealed to Josie’s. “He has never really had a mother to guide him,” Ada thought, “why couldn’t I be his?”

  But Fell had a real mother who had given birth to him in San Francisco in 1908. Until recently, she had lived in Berkeley where she taught school under the name Anna J. Selz. She returned to Oxnard, her birthplace, to work as a high school principal. As far as Fell was concerned, he didn’t have a father. He hadn’t seen him since he was five and had been totally self-supporting from age twelve.

  “Do you have any siblings?” Ada asked. Fell smiled mysteriously and said that he had a thirty-one-year-old brother somewhere in the Bay Area. Residents of the Woodside neighborhood later recalled Fell introducing a man as his brother at the local tavern. It puzzled them that the brother bore no resemblance to Fell and spoke with a vaguely foreign accent. Apparently the “Woodside Brother” remained in the vicinity for only a short time, certainly no longer than a December evening, when he told them he was “going up to see ‘Jerry’ at the bungalow” and vanished.

  Fell also introduced an aged woman to the tavern crowd as �
��my little mother.” “She’s taking care of me and cooking at the house,” he said. That “mother” disappeared abruptly. Fell, who had been speaking constantly of her for months, never mentioned her again. Afterward, he was seen digging at night in the rocky yard encircling Ada’s bungalow.

  For a while Fell’s wisecracking, multiple personalities, and stories kept Ada entertained, his incandescent smile and that wonderful dark hair, those broad shoulders and muscular arms made her life worth living again. For the first time in years she felt fulfilled enough to forget her multiple husbands and quarrelsome neighbors. He diminished her wanderlust, though it could never be completely extinguished. At night the rocky glen was lit up and filled with music.

  ADA was a solitary woman, and when she mysteriously vanished one night, few neighbors took particular notice (they hadn’t seen that much of her before). Those who did thought she was traveling abroad. Fell did nothing to dispel that notion and gave them the impression that she was traveling in Greece or the Balkans “or somewhere over there.”