The Laughing Gorilla: The True Story of the Hunt for One of America's First Serial Killers

by Robert Graysmith

Overview

During the 1920s, in more than a dozen cities, over four years, and across two continents, women were being butchered. Eyewitneses claim the perpetrator was a hulking Bible-carrying brute who lumbered on all fours, and laughed maniacally with each new slaughter.

The crimes haunted San Francisco Police Captain Charles Dullea, the last honest cop in one of the most notoriously corrupt departments in the country. But nothing could have prepared Dullea for where the case- and the truth-would take him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101145180
Publisher:	Temple Publications International, Inc.
Publication date:	10/06/2009
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	543 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Graysmith is the New York Times bestselling author of seven true crime books including Zodiac, Zodiac Unmasked, The Sleeping Lady, Auto Focus, and Amerithrax. He was a San Francisco Chronicle Journalist and cartoonist for twenty years, during the time of the Zodiac killings. In addition to being a bestselling author, he has been a Foreign Press Club Award winner, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a prize winning syndicated political cartoonist, and a gold medal illustrator. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Editorial Reviews

A sprawling tale of police corruption and a horrifying series of bizarre, gruesome murders. True-crime vet Graysmith (Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, 2003, etc.) paints a vivid portrait of a dynamic era, a Dick Tracy-esque world of gritty cops enforcing order in a fog-shrouded port city. Out of this milieu came the Gorilla Men-a breed apart with broad shoulders, barrel chests, long arms and huge, grasping hands, who drifted across the country and laughingly indulged the murderous impulses flashing behind their vaguely simian features. One was a brain-damaged, Bible-thumping necrophiliac who strangled and dissected his victims. Others autopsied their victims in seedy motels or littered the fringes of society with dismembered torsos. Graysmith includes plenty of sordid details. The book is a vast reservoir of information about dozens of killings and the investigating agents, suspects and witnesses, plus details about labor disputes, graft, Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the construction of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, prohibition, newspaper and radio production, local architecture, a solar eclipse and more. The story's hero is Captain Charles Dullea-the lead investigator on the original Gorilla Man case and one of the few honest cops on the SFPD-but Graysmith covers so much ground and draws so heavily from the stilted language of official documents that the narrative suffers from repetition and a lack of depth. A compellingly wicked web hard-boiled in broad but shallow waters. Agent: Joel Gotler/IPG

Kirkus Reviews