The Laughing Gorilla Read Online Free PDF Page A

upstairs.
    On Wednesday, February 24, he called on his aunt to see if the furnace had given her further trouble. No one had seen Clara for days. His search ended at the third-floor lavatory, where he found the naked corpse of his aunt. Merton flew downstairs to call the police. When Detective Lieutenant Charles Dullea and Inspector Francis (Frank) LaTulipe climbed the stairs, they had to stop at the door to steady themselves.
    “Once Clara Newman entered the room,” LaTulipe conjectured when he had recovered, “the killer yanked her to him. With one hand he took some sort of cord and twisted it around her neck, leaving behind this ligature imprint.” He pointed out the livid red line on her throat, almost hidden by the black marks of gigantic hands and deep fingernail indentations. “Then he choked her with his hands as she struggled.”
    Dullea imagined Clara fighting, her body automatically convulsing, her legs drawing up in spasms, then dropping and going limp before he stripped her. Could her missing necklace have been the ligature? Autopsy surgeon Shelby Strange would know.
    His postmortem revealed an engorgement of her lungs and the right side of her heart, an unusually long retention of body heat, and an exceptional fluidity of her blood. The trachea was injected and red and the tympanum (the cavity of the middle ear) had been ruptured. When the strangler gripped her throat, the hyoid bone fractured where his broad thumbs met, though just one of his huge hands could have covered her mouth and nose to cause suffocation. Strange was pretty sure Clara’s struggles had contributed to her death. The swift accumulation of fluids, saliva, and mucus in the bronchial tree had choked her as completely as the crushing hands. Through tests, Strange established that she had been raped.
    “Not like any rapist I’ve come across before, there’s a sadistic element to his crime,” he told Dullea. “You won’t believe this, Charlie. She was violently beaten and repeatedly assaulted after being strangled.” The Gorilla Man was a necrophiliac, a perverse creature of abnormal sensuality compelled to copulate with a dead body.
    When Merton viewed the body, he saw the deep fingernail marks on her neck. “They are at least an inch and a half deep,” Dr. T. B. W. Leland, the coroner, told him. Merton then made the connection to the hulking man who had passed him on the stairs and given that long, strange laugh. “I particularly recall those long nails,” he said. “He has to be the man who killed her. Look, I want to accompany her body to Detroit.”
    “I believe you should remain here and I’ll tell you why. As you are the only man who can identify any suspects arrested as the stranger you saw. It might delay the solution of this murder were you to leave.” Reluctantly, Merton agreed.
    “We have narrowed the search,” Dullea told his men at the HOJ, “to the mysterious stranger described by Merton Newman as having confronted him in the house sometime before he discovered his aunt’s body.”
    But the Gorilla Man had only begun his reign of terror against women. On March 2, 1926, Mrs. Laura Beale was found by her husband; she had been strangled with a silk belt and then violated under circumstances similar to Clara’s. The description of Laura’s killer matched that of the Bible-carrying young man known as Roger Wilson. Alarm spread throughout the Bay Area as Dullea intensified his manhunt and staked out pawnshops in case Clara’s necklace should turn up. On June 10, as armed posses combed San Francisco, the Gorilla Man appeared at a rooming house on Dolores Street run by Lillian St. Mary. She joined the others, smothered, her naked body stuffed beneath her house bed. Six days later, a self-righteous young man with a Bible visited a rooming house at 1372 Clay Street. “The man was stocky and well-built, with shifty eyes, strange blue eyes, and the hands of a giant,” said the landlady, Mrs. P. A. Ford, who lived on