Maybe the killer really did get the last ‘Laugh’
Everything was a joke to Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz — even murder.
His unique brand of humor and booming laugh raised many eyebrows in March 1936, as police questioned Selz, 27, about Mrs. Ada French Mengler Rice, 58, a rich divorcee who disappeared seven months earlier.
“If you guys want a sensation, try hauling a corpse around in a car with the hoot owls hooting at night,” reporters quoted him as saying. At the time, he was cheerfully leading police to the remains of his one-time lover. She was decomposing in a shallow pit of quicklime on the mountain road near Woodland, Calif.
“Say, I haven’t had any breakfast yet,” he wisecracked as they found the makeshift grave. “You guys got any gum?”
He was dubbed “The Laughing Killer.” Five years before Rice vanished, Selz’s elaborate stories were already making local headlines.
“Castaway Relates of Adventure,” was how one newspaper put it in December 1931. At that time, Selz, who was born in California around 1909, was with the U.S. Army Air Corps stationed in Texas.
During a one-day leave, Selz said, he got blown out to sea while fishing off Galveston. Rumrunners rescued him and left him to wander around Central America for months before hitching a ride on a Los Angeles-bound steamship.
The Army called it desertion and sent him to Alcatraz.
As soon as he was freed, Selz was back at it. In 1932, he offered a tall tale about his adventures to a San Francisco newspaper. Selz introduced himself as “Slipton J. Fell.”
In early 1936, Selz called police to report a robbery at the gas station where he had worked for a few months. He said the crook swiped $28 and escaped in Selz’s car.
The officers asked what the robber looked like.
Never one to pass up a good gag, Selz offered a detailed physical description of the robber. The problem was it fit him to a tee. Police took notice and made an arrest.
Selz confessed that the holdup was a hoax and got 30 days.
While he was in jail, investigators looked into his background and found a long record of such crimes as theft and forgery. They also located the car.
A year earlier, Selz reported the vehicle stolen and collected the insurance money. Some disturbing items were inside — a rope, adhesive tape and Rice’s photo and passport.
Selz met Rice while he was working as an auto mechanic, in the spring of 1935. She needed repair work done on a car at her cottage in Woodland, romance bloomed, and he moved in.
He told police the last time he saw Rice was June. She was running off to elope with a new flame — Michael Baronovich, a Bulgarian cavalryman.
Selz later changed his story. He confessed to killing Rice but insisted it was an accident.
He went to Rice’s cottage on the night of June 13, 1935. When he entered, a man leaped out of the darkness and punched him. Selz grabbed a heavy fireplace poker and started swinging blindly. He heard a thud as someone fell to the ground. Then he saw his rival Baronovich dashing out the door.
When he turned on the lights, he found Rice dead on the floor, dressed only in her “scanties.”
Later, he told detectives that he also killed Baronovich and tossed him into the Bay.
Selz remained his exuberant self, seemingly unconcerned that he was facing the death penalty.
When investigators tried to connect him to several unsolved murders, he made jokes. A reporter asked how many he had killed. “I wouldn’t say,” he responded. “How many did they find?”
His trial started on March 12 and ended an hour and 45 minutes later in what the San Francisco Examiner called “the most incredibly swift administration of legal justice” ever seen in the state, if not the nation.
Abundant evidence pointed to his guilt, including incriminating results of a newly introduced test — the polygraph. In a bid to avoid the noose, Selz pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life.
All efforts to find a trace of Rice’s Bulgarian lover failed. Selz later admitted the man was “all hooey,” another figment of his fertile imagination. Selz was never linked to any other murders.
In 1945, Selz escaped. Authorities traced fingerprint records to catch the California fugitive in Calgary, Alberta, where he was calling himself R. J. “Tiny” Morgan of the Canadian Army. Fellow soldiers were shocked.
“He was one of the most popular guys on the station and a brilliant instructor,” one soldier told the Edmonton Journal.
After he returned to captivity, Selz started angling for his freedom. “I am innocent of the charge,” he told reporters. Drugs, beatings, sleep deprivation, and intimidation by police had forced him to confess to a murder he said he didn’t commit.
In 1966, he was paroled. Two years later, he was behind bars again as a welfare cheat. Using at least 14 aliases, he received welfare and old-age assistance from four California counties.
In 1971, he was granted a second parole. That lasted four years.
“‘Laughing Killer’ Back in Jail—Again,” noted the San Mateo Times on June 3, 1975.
This time it was Social Security fraud, in which he applied for benefits using so many disguises and aliases — at least 20 — that even the FBI couldn’t sort it out, according to the Times.
That appeared to be his last skit. After that, the Laughing Killer vanished from the public record, at least under the name of Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz.
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