The Laughing Gorilla by Robert Graysmith Read Free Book Online

up his residence at 225 Urbano Drive as security for a loan. Now the bank was initiating foreclosure proceedings against him to collect the overdue $9,000 note. He owed nearly that much to the estate of August and Katie Weber, an aged couple who had advanced him $5,000 in return for a promissory note. While Egan was Katie’s attorney, he siphoned $3,120 owed her from the city employees pension fund into his own account. He accomplished this by banking the money to her credit, then withdrawing it with a blank check (one of many Katie had signed so Egan could pay her expenses) and redepositing the money in a dummy bank account under the fictitious name of “Minnie Peyser.” “You have nothing to fear,” Egan told his tool, Janet Kent. “No one will ever connect you with Minnie Peyser.”
    Next, he led Mrs. Weber to believe he had repaid the $5,000 loan by producing a forged bank passbook showing a deposit entry for $5,000. On November 16, 1930, Katie died under suspicious circumstances, and her husband, a retired street sweeper, began demanding an autopsy and threatening a lawsuit to regain any remaining funds.
    Other shady dealings came to light. Eight years earlier, when Egan and his wife, Lorraine Kipp, were married, she had come into a sizable inheritance from the estate of Margaritha Busch, heiress to the brewery fortune. Lorraine had been her companion and nurse. Within two days of Busch’s death, Egan filed a deed of gift with the county recorder, transferring a $200,000 row of apartment houses on O’Farrell Street to his wife. When Busch’s Chicago relatives sued, Lorraine settled out of court for a third of the amount. When another of Egan’s clients, Mrs. Catherine Craven, died from alcohol, her nieces examined her $25,000 estate and found only an empty safe deposit box and a few real estate mortgages. When they asked Egan what had happened, he threw them out of his office. Florence Cook, another of his wealthy clients, was also proving to be a problem.
    Devastating losses through depreciations of securities Egan held had him reeling. The large emergency sums of money he had stowed in a safe deposit box had dwindled away. Even Josie Hughes’s two modest insurance premiums totaling a mere $113.20 a month had become a drain on his limited income. The pressure was relentless. Egan, a chronic sufferer of sinus, gallbladder, and kidney afflictions, the last requiring an operation, was headed for a nervous breakdown. Harassed by creditors Egan thought of the rewards—riches, that bottomless will, the double-indemnity insurance policies. He thought of the alternatives, too—eviction, financial ruin, illness, public scandal, the loss of his powerful political position, and jail. It was enough to drive a man to murder.

FOUR
    The term Gorilla: Since 1930: A person with gorilla-like strength; a person known for his strength and lack of intellect; a hoodlum or thug; strong-arm men, gorillas and tough guys. Specif., one hired to kill or do violence.
    — DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG
     
     
     
     
     
    OVER a period of seventeen months, during which Dullea had the misfortune to catch the Gorilla Man case as the first officer on the scene, the Gorilla Man strangled, then raped landladies from San Francisco to Council Bluffs and across to New York State. He traveled from Philadelphia to Buffalo, from Detroit to Chicago, and finally with the United States up in arms fled across the border into Canada. Dullea studied the U.S. death toll. Three Philadelphia landladies—Olla McCoy, May Murray, and Lillian Weiner. After eleven San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, and Portland strangulation murders, the Gorilla Man fled to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he choked Mrs. John Berard on December 23, 1926. Four days later in Kansas City, Missouri, the Gorilla Man garroted Mrs. Bonnie Pace. The next day, Mrs. Germania Harpin and her eight-month-old daughter were both strangled and violated—the infant throttled with a