The Laughing Gorilla Read Online Free PDF

the fifth floor. “When he asked to see a room on the third floor, I called my husband, and the stranger immediately left, saying he wasn’t interested in an apartment.”
    He didn’t go far, only downstairs to the fourth floor where he knocked on Mrs. Stidger’s door. “I’m here to fix your phone,” he told her.
    When Mrs. Stidger expressed suspicion, the man fled next door to Mrs. Gladys Dunne, manager of an apartment house. A smile played about his lips all the while Gladys was showing him a room. Those huge hands were flexing and cracking, when a janitor appeared and he ran away again.
    The next day, three East Bay women reported a man with a Bible had tried to rent apartments from them. On June 17, in Albany, California, Mrs. Flint Huffart went to bed. Her head was filled with nightmares of the “Gorilla fiend” who had been in all the papers. During the night, she dreamed the strangler had climbed through her window and was choking her. When he seemed about to win, she reached under her pillow and pulled out the revolver she kept there for protection. Firing full into his face, Mrs. Huffart awakened to find she had shot her own hand.
    A number of strangers, trading on the Gorilla Man’s reputation, carried out depredations of their own against terrified landladies and laid the blame at his door to confuse the police. The Santa Cruz police arrested a stockily built foreigner after the brutal rape of Allie Doyle, a young widow, and assaults on two other women. A mob would have lynched him as the Gorilla Man, if Dullea had not driven Merton Newman at high speed to Santa Cruz. “That’s not the Gorilla Man,” Merton said. In Santa Barbara on June 24, the real Gorilla Man strangled landlady Ollie Russell with a curtain cord so tightly that blood gushed from her neck. An LA police bulletin described “the Strangle Murderer” as “probably Greek, rather high cheek bones, dark skin and a thin face.”
    By August 16, he was in Oakland in the East Bay at landlady Mrs. Mary Nesbit’s door. He discarded her in a pool of blood in the bathroom of the apartment she had planned to rent. When several months had passed without another attack, Dullea prayed that the killer had burned himself out. Although Jack the Ripper, a similar random killer, had apparently stopped by his own volition, the Gorilla Man could not. He appeared to be a maniacal sex pervert with a taste for murder driven by religious mania and a compulsive, relentless sexual appetite. “All crimes must have a motive,” said Dullea. LaTulipe was not so sure. The Gorilla Man was a new type of man.
    In Portland, Oregon, on October 19, he reappeared just long enough to throttle and violate three landladies in six days. He crammed Mrs. Beata Withers into an attic trunk filled with love letters from her failed romance. He twisted a scarf around Mrs. Mabel Fluke’s neck and hid her in the attic of her five-room bungalow. He jammed Mrs. Virginia Grant behind her basement furnace and then hitched back to San Francisco on November 10, where he choked Mrs. Anna Edmunds to death. Following his usual pattern he stuffed her brutally violated nude body under a bed in her boardinghouse. Five days later, he was in Seattle, where he squeezed the life out of Mrs. Florence Monks and three days later Mrs. Blanche Meyers in Portland. With so many of Dullea’s men hot on his heels, the random killer fled the West Coast for the Plains States, where it was cooler. Dullea was frustrated that he had come so close to catching the killer.
    “I will tell you this,” said LaTulipe. “Sadistic torture and murder will always follow a prescribed pattern. Not a blunt instrument one time and a knife the next, but always his hands or the cord. His set pattern will never vary: Shortly after getting a shave and a haircut he will call at any house with a ‘Room to Let’ sign in the window. Any landlady he finds alone he will strangle, then rape and leave nude in the offered room,