The Laughing Gorilla (18 page)

He took a call, then fed a sheet of paper into the roller. He typed a few lines, snatched the page out, and rolled in another. He wondered why some maniac had re-created the autopsy murder of Mary Kelly, the last and most horrible of Jack’s Whitechapel crimes. He scanned another headline: “Police Seek Clues in Brutal Crime,” then took up the
Examiner
’s front page: “Girl Murdered and Mutilated in Hotel Here; Body Found Nude, Mouth Taped, Torso Slashed with Razor.” The most famous police reporters in the city had responded to the tragedy—Fred L. Diefendorf, Hank Peters, Eddie Gillen, Rod Leidy, Jimmy Yeiser, Eddie Longan, and Charles Huse. The
Chronicle
city editor finally decided on an update, which Bosworth buried on an inside page:

Around noon, the bullpen came to life, and the rhythm of work began—a machinelike repetition of cutting, rubber stamping, and time stamping. At the horseshoe-shaped copy desk, an editor corrected the Bay Hotel story, cut it to fit, capped it with three subheads, and scribbled the type size on it. He spiked the carbon and picked a battered brass cylinder out of the basket at his elbow. Rolling the typed original into it, he sealed the rubber end flap to a brass button. Glad to be rid of such an unsettling story, he fed it to a pneumatic tube in a hiss of compressed air to the Press Room out back.

The Linotype operator extracted the copy. Her fingers moved mechanically over her keyboard, converting the letters to metal type. A cauldron of lead bubbled at her elbow. There came the reassuring
click-click-click
of mats cast down the channels and across the star wheel. The instant the elevator dropped, a full line was sent to cast. Finally, she walked the full stick to the bank. The printer eyeballed it with a pica ruler, loosened the quoins, and tightened the chase. He swept the unused type into the hell box.

On roller skates, the boy in white tails delivered sausage sandwiches called hot dogs (weren’t they made of dog meat?). Tad Dorgan, the
Examiner
’s cartoonist, had made “Hot dog!” an excited exclamation. For the next three hours, the reporters worked on their stories in the field, calling them back to the assistant editor or dictating to a copyboy. At 3:00 P.M. the budget meeting began as the assistant city editors brought in their lists with slug lines and stories for the next day’s paper. After the managing editor decided their sequence, the photo editor offered up pictures for the stories.

At 3:30 P.M., a booming laugh emanated from the front elevators and rolled past the reception area, down the corridor and the editorial board-room, and into the City Room. When the echoing laugh reached the barnlike room it lost its echo. The ceiling was baffled to reduce noise. Reporters frowned at such merriment interrupting their deep thoughts, especially on a hung-over Monday.

A laughing man with prepossessing features filled the doorway. He was the classic Adonis type, as good looking as a movie star, except for slightly too-thick lips. Twenty-six years old, six feet tall, and 230 pounds, he was perfectly well made, except for his long arms and huge hands. He had slate gray eyes and a smooth face full of good humor. His teeth were flashing white and his dark hair glossy and lustrous. He frequently smoothed it back using his long fingers as a comb. His ruddy, tanned complexion, deepened by weeks at sea, was rapidly assuming a healthy pink color.

He wore a rumpled, well-tailored gray suit, a light V-neck shirt with short sleeves (to show off his considerable muscles), and black moccasin-style Oxfords with no socks. He was sleek and well fed, a lusty consumer of thick steaks and whole fried chickens. He was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and instantly attractive to women, especially older ones like Bette Coffin. The laughing man lived on the same block as the Bay Hotel.

Bosworth smiled in spite of himself. With his expansive gestures and endless jokes and tales, Slipton Fell was well liked. He was a soldier of fortune—a prolific sailor and adventurer who had traveled through Alaska; wandered all over South America; and journeyed extensively in North Africa, Russia, and Asia Minor. He spoke German, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian and had an alternate personality to go with each. “He was extremely coy about giving his real name,” Bosworth recalled. “Currently he was using the name Slipton J. (for Just) Fell and I called him that.”

Bosworth had assigned him to gather some colorful stories in Latin America. While there, Fell plotted a revolt (which failed) and was forced to escape on an outbound freighter. As proof, he carried a letter of introduction from a Nicaraguan consul to the bandit chief Sandino, a self-described local patriot, which he displayed at the slightest encouragement. Bosworth did doubt Fell’s list of expenses in gathering the story. “He had somehow become separated from his assistants ‘Upton Rose’ and ‘Faran Wide,’” said Bosworth, “and wanted to apprise them of his whereabouts.”

If his outrageously named assistants were only other facets of Fell’s personality, Bosworth didn’t know so he kept all three on the payroll. Besides, he admired the young man’s boldness. Bosworth waved him over.

“As I remember it,” Bosworth said later, “Mr. Fell entered this pixilated place just as the Sunday editor fired another volley of sneezes—7, 8, 9 . . . and as a hundred pound ‘Jap’
yawara
instructor [the subject of a
Chronicle
Sunday piece] was paving the way for some publicity by throwing a 200 pound reporter flat on his back. . . . Yet the personable young man calling himself Slipton J. Fell had no difficulty in attracting attention, despite these rival sideshows.”

“Fired?” Slipton Fell asked with a crooked grin. He smoothed the wrinkles in his gray jacket.

“Fried!” said Bosworth, indicating his reporter’s tipsiness. “And you seem to have cut yourself, Mr. Fell.”

“I guess he just slipped n’ fell,” said a copyreader at the U-shaped desk.

Another booming laugh. Fell dusted the spots, smoothed back his hair and bared strong, even teeth. He had been missing since Friday, when he had been scheduled for an interview about his “Latin American vagabonding.” When Fell couldn’t recall where he had been over the weekend, he replied by laughing nervously—an infectious laugh that rose above the ringing phones and cries of “Boy!”

“Where did you find him this time?” said Bosworth.

“Alkied and drying out in the drunk tank,” replied a reporter who had rescued Fell from the top floor of the HOJ. He was with Ralph.” When that
Chronicle
reporter was intoxicated, he hailed cabs for long pointless journeys he couldn’t pay for and ended up jail.

“Just who was he today?” Bosworth asked.

“‘J. Hannegan, cook,’” said the reporter. “I had to convince the sergeant he was really a
Chronicle
writer and not a cook. I sprung Fell too just for the hell of it.”

“And just who was
he
today?”

While Fell was a likable fellow, his personality was a maze of different identities, “one of the singularly fey characters then peopling the city room.” Wherever else he had been since Friday, Fell knew all about the murder. He never ceased begging for a picture and feature story about himself. Well, thought Bosworth, he would grant Fell his wish. The
Chronicle
would write of him: “His mouth is large and sensual when not wreathed in a fatuous grin or cleaved by his ringing guffaw.”

“Run a good picture of him in his sailing costume,” said Bosworth, “the one with the ascot and briar pipe.” Fell had previously supplied a photo of himself at the rail of a liner sporting a mustache and dressed in a tweed cap, black vest, and expensive camel’s-hair coat. His collar was upturned and shirt open in a vee as he posed. “No one knows what’s in my mind, but, oh, if you only did,” said Fell who left with a backward wave.

“Never mind Fell’s real name,” Bosworth recalled. “He got his story . . . he got his picture and went happily on his way, and when he had gone the city room seemed a quiet and sober place, and the managing editor decreed a more conservative make-up for the first edition and that damned Bay Hotel story got changed again.”

At 6:00 P.M. Metro (with eight men) and International (with four men) sent out the layouts for the first edition. At 7:00 P.M. the production department returned a proof of the first edition for the outlying circulation areas. The managing editor checked the layout, quickly turned it around, and sent it back to the production department. Between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M., the reporters began heading to the bar in the alley. At 10:00 P.M., the copy editors honed their stories for the Home and Final Editions, and at midnight the Final went to print. A counting machine on the presses stopped at the circulation number. Between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M., the last papers were bailed and loaded onto circulation trucks waiting in stalls on the loading dock. Now the terrible events of the Bay Hotel could be read the next morning.

Fell was in a rush to get to his new job in Woodside Glens south of San Francisco. Though this turned out to be his last visit to the
Chronicle,
Bosworth never forgot him. A decade later he recorded his experiences with the apelike young man in a lively article titled, “The Laughing Killer of the Woodside Glens.”

—COMMISSION REPORT ON THE SFPD

 

 

 

 

 

THE
next morning, Tuesday, April 9, the reclusive Mrs. Ada Phillys French-Mengler-Rice returned to the Woodside Glens from one of her mysterious excursions. The fifty-eight-year-old writer and former journalist lived alone atop a knoll two miles south of Woodside and four miles west of Redwood City. As the black cab glided through the foggy hills, curious neighbors parted their blinds and silently gauged its progress. With a bitter twist to their lips, they studied the rigid profile framed in the rear window. The stolid, dark-haired woman had been gone an interminable time. They knew Mrs. Rice as well to do and a world traveler, though none of them knew why she was well to do or where she traveled. She often took long journeys to other countries without notifying her husband, children, and relatives. “I’ve only seen her only twice in twelve years,” complained Mrs. Lawrence Doherty, Ada’s cousin in Oakland across the Bay.

The neighbors both hated and feared Ada Rice who, consumed with social welfare and club work, had been president of the Redwood City Women’s Temperance Union. She had proven a willful, ineffectual, and spiteful leader. Her tips to the police had initiated a number of nighttime raids against her neighbors, whom she erroneously suspected of operating whisky stills in violation of the Wright Act, California’s version of the Volstead Act.

Fog overflowing the brooding hills surrounding Skyline Boulevard rode the road’s spine down into the rocky ravine and shrouded the cab just off the Canada Road. At the head of the long drive, Ada paid the cabbie and exited by a broken white picket fence. Her terraced summer cottage stood bleak and empty on the two and half acres her second husband, August Mengler, had bought when he still loved her. He had still loved her when he built the boxy house with his own two hands. Only one thing broke the stern, shingled squareness of the split-level vacation bungalow—a half-story penthouse with a skylight done in the Japanese style. A brick garage on the right side did project slightly onto the dismal lot. Skeletal trees stirred in the wind. Ada saw that her rock garden had been overtaken by thistles. Three steps took her to the front door. The screen door lay on its side against the house. Inside, it was silent. The winds howling down off Skyline Boulevard were screened out by the soundproofed ceiling Ada had installed. Ada’s few visitors said it “looked like a museum.” A crude masonry fireplace filled one corner, white concrete protruding between its flagstones. A set of andirons supported two iron pokers. Right of the fireplace was a davenport with one bad leg and a door that led to a back bedroom, where French doors admitted in gray light. On both sides, cold light filtered through double windows.

On those rare times when the fog cleared, a fenced-in redwood timber deck on the roof provided an outlook for Ada and permitted her to sun-bathe there or under the skylight. While she had been gone, Mrs. Rice had stored her car on blocks in the garage. She opened the arched door and realized she would need a man to pump up the tires and remove the blocks. Ada hiked to a nearby service station, thinking over her problems as she went. First, she was thrice married. Her first husband, Fred French, a minister’s son and the father of her three children, had died suddenly.