The Laughing Gorilla by Robert Graysmith Read Free Book Online Page A

rag. Dullea steadied himself and continued reading—April 27, 1927, Mary McConnell in Philadelphia; May 30, Jennie Randolph in Buffalo; June 1, two Detroit sisters, Mrs. Minnie May and Mrs. Maureen Atorthy. June 3, in Chicago, he strangled Mary Sietsema with an electric appliance cord and left her disheveled on the floor for her husband to find.
    One afternoon, LaTulipe walked in on Dullea and saw the big, tough Marine slumped with his head in his hands. The case had really gotten to him. Finally, in the summer of 1927 Dullea caught a break. When the Portland newspapers printed drawings of the expensive jewelry the Gorilla Man had pinched from wealthy widow Florence Monks, three landladies recognized it and notified the police. “We rented a room to a polite, pleasant, young man who had stayed with us a few days,” they said, “and we bought some of that jewelry from him.” Portland police at last learned the Gorilla Man’s real name just as he fled from Minnesota into Canada.
     
     
    G. CHANDLER picked up the Gorilla Man along the highway a mile north of Luna, Michigan, and drove him to Noyes, Minnesota. Mr. and Mrs. Hanna gave him a lift a mile south of the international border at Emerson, Manitoba. They drove him the rest of the way into Winnipeg and let him off at Corydon and Emerson streets. Around 5:00 P.M. on June 8, the Gorilla Man entered Jacob Garbor’s secondhand store on Main and traded in his blue suit for a herringbone coat, black boots, a gray felt hat, and a dollar in cash. He secured a job as a construction laborer, and that same day, as “Mr. Woodcots,” rented a second-floor bedroom on Smith Street from landlady Mrs. Katherine Hill. She found him quiet, likable, and pious: “He was a very devout gentleman who always carried a huge Bible under his arm.”
    He gave her a dollar, all he had, with the promise of eleven more for the rest of the month’s rent. Only his greatest willpower kept him from killing her on the spot.

FIVE
    The city’s most attractive neighborhoods were built west of Twin Peaks and south of Mount Davidson, according to a San Francisco City Guide of the period.
     
     
     
     
     
ON Friday, February 20, 1931, five months after the verdict in the Whispering Gunman’s trial, Captain Dullea was still sleepless and dissatisfied. He drove to the HOJ to lose himself in new investigations and forget the disagreeable public defender, Frank Egan. It was bad enough that today was the fifth anniversary of the day the Gorilla Man strangled Clara Newman, but Egan’s name crossed his desk immediately. Florence Cook, Egan’s prosperous client, had been found dead an hour earlier. Only $3 remained in her accounts. After Florence acquired a house on Post Street, she had become friends with Mrs. Flo Knight and through her met Egan, an occasional visitor to her ground-floor dancing school. “Before that time,” Florence’s ex-husband, Edward J. Cook, said bitterly, “my wife had been a shrewd business woman, dependable, not addicted to drink of any kind. From then on, she began drinking heavily and lost all sense of business and reliability.”
    When Cook gave his wife $1,500 for her needs and another $3,500 to deposit, she turned both sums over to Egan “for safekeeping.” When she served her husband with divorce papers, she confided to him, “I don’t want a divorce, Ed, honey, but Frank Egan insists on it.”
    Before Florence died “from the effects of alcohol,” she had deeded her property over to Egan, though witnesses to the signing believed they were witnessing her death certificate. Building residents warned Egan and her attending physician, Nathan S. Housman, that if they didn’t take Florence to a hospital instantly they would summon an ambulance themselves. Dullea knew Dr. Housman—prim, horse-faced, toothbrush mustache, tiny round glasses. He was not only Egan’s personal physician but a gangland doctor.
    When one of Housman’s patients, gangster Earl Leter, was