'The Laughing Killer': The Bay Area serial killer who wasn't

Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz jokes around with photographers at the San Mateo County jail. Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz jokes around with photographers at the San Mateo County jail. Photo: Archival Image Via San Francisco Chronicle Photo: Archival Image Via San Francisco Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close 'The Laughing Killer': The Bay Area serial killer who wasn't 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

A few hours after Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz led police to the shallow grave of a dead woman, he staged a photoshoot for the press.

As he posed in the San Mateo County jail, he answered reporters’ questions.

“How many women did you kill?” one asked.

“I wouldn’t say,” Selz said. He smiled coyly. “How many did they find?”

Someone handed him a fire poker so he could reenact the crime. He thwacked it up and down, demonstrating how, on June 13, 1935, he hit Mrs. Ada French Rice so hard that she fell to the ground. Once he was sure photographers got a good shot, Selz took another drag from his cigarette and grinned.

“All this publicity ought to get me to Hollywood,” Selz said. “I guess I haven’t any conscience — but, say! Don’t put that in the papers. People might think I’m cruel.”

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“For a brief, fleeting period in 1936, Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz was right up there with such big names of the era as John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly and Ma Barker,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 1970. And indeed, Selz dominated the daily headlines as the nation devoured stories about the stranger-than-fiction murderer.

Not much is known about Selz’s early life. Census records indicate he was born in San Francisco around 1909 to European immigrant parents. In his twenties, he joined the Army and was stationed in Central America, but ship logs show he was arrested for deserting in El Salvador in 1931. Selz was shipped back to California and sentenced to hard labor at Fort Winfield Scott in the Presidio. By 1932, he was back in the world — and ready to start grifting everyone he came into contact with.

His first scheme was to drum up a little notoriety. One day in 1932, he strode into the Chronicle offices and declared he, Slipton Fell, was a world traveler who wanted to share his adventures with San Francisco readers.

The paper printed his tale, claiming Mr. Fell had traveled from Alaska to New Orleans to Mexico to Guatemala on $10.48. And they wrote a follow-up the next year, when Slipton Fell’s “friend,” Faran Wide, called for his return.

“Wide is here, but he hasn’t the slightest idea where his buddies are,” the story read. “He has appealed to The Chronicle to help him locate them.”

“There was about him the air of a soldier of fortune who had plotted a revolt that failed,” wrote Chronicle reporter Allan R. Bosworth in 1947. Everyone knew he was a liar, but he’d charmed the whole office, Bosworth recalled.

“He laughed and his mirth was infectious. Anybody, we said, who would adopt the name of Slipton Fell was worth a story and never mind his real name.”

Selz’s buffoonery was about to take a malicious turn, however. Although not yet 30, he racked up quite the rap sheet by 1935. He repeatedly lost jobs for stealing from his employers or pretending to lose paychecks and double-dipping. In the summer of 1935 Selz got a job working at an auto repair shop in Burlingame, and was tasked with fixing the car of 58-year-old Ada French Rice.

Mrs. Rice, twice divorced, lived alone in Woodside Glens in Woodland, and was seemingly enamored with Selz. He was tall — six feet even — with dark hair and cheerful cheeks. The Chronicle reported that he was handsome, and according to a truly mind-blowing headline after his arrest, “Personable Except for Lips Being Too Thick.”

After he fixed her car, Rice invited Selz to move into the cottage on her property. Within 10 days, she was signing property over to him. She transferred him the deed to her home, some property on Skyline Boulevard and a parcel in El Cerrito. Along with the property, Selz gained another important asset: her signature.

Around the time Selz moved in, neighbors stopped seeing Ada Rice. When anyone asked, Selz said she was on a trip. Though someone was regularly cashing checks, signed by her, at a Palo Alto bank.

In December, Selz did an odd thing: He went to police to report his car missing. It took a few months, but in early 1936 police tracked it down. Inside was ammonia and rope, along with a few items that tied Selz to Rice. A quick check into Selz’s past pulled up his criminal record — and many questions.

In March, San Mateo County Sheriff James J. McGrath hauled Selz in. Selz played dumb at first. He’d dropped Rice off in San Francisco ages ago because she wanted to elope with a stranger, he said. He hadn’t seen her since last June, but he figured she was happy wherever she was.

This implausible story didn’t impress detectives, but it wasn’t long before Selz changed his tune.

Selz’s new story was this: On the night of June 13, he came home to the little cottage behind Rice’s main house. It was pitch black inside, but he heard rustling. Suspecting burglars were about, he picked up a poker and slammed it into the shadows. When he turned on the lights, Rice was on the floor, dead. He also claimed there was a “Bulgarian army officer” named Baronovich who used the murder to blackmail him for a while, but then Selz killed him too. Investigators would later find him at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

He agreed to take police and reporters to where he’d buried Rice. Just 20 feet from the road, along the San Lorenzo River, was the body of a woman. As photographers snapped pictures, Selz leaned over and laughed, “If you guys want a sensation, try hauling a corpse around in a car with the hoot owls hooting at night!” When the story went to press the next day, he’d been dubbed “The Laughing Killer.”

Selz loved every moment of his newfound infamy. Reporters trailed him to the jail, to the San Mateo Bridge (he stoically pointed out where he’d tossed Baronovich’s body as cameras clicked), and to the county morgue.

Photo: Archival Image Via San Francisco Chronicle Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz in a March 1936 photo, showing...

“It is as if he wrote his own mystery thriller, cleverly concealing the denouement so he alone could supply the key and then reserved for himself the role of hero in his miserably sordid play,” the Chronicle mused.

Each day brought new, strange revelations. Selz apparently wasn’t living alone after all; a 19-year-old hitchhiker he’d picked up days before had moved in. The poor girl was maligned succinctly by the 1930s press: “Perhaps no better description of her general character could be given than a plain recitation of the fact that she wears bell-bottom trousers instead of a skirt.”

Selz asked the press to hold off on reporting their relationship. “That will ruin my social prestige when you say I was living with a hitchhiker,” he complained.

For her part, the teen was shocked to learn the cheerful man who invited her to stay had recently put a book on hold at the Redwood City library called “A Manual of Toxicology.” It was about poison.

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As investigators dragged the bay, police from around the state started pinning unsolved murders on Selz. Cops from San Diego arrived to question him in the death of a woman six years prior. A hotel clerk in San Francisco swore Selz was the man he’d seen with Betty Coffman, the victim in a brutal slaying the year before. Police racked up a list of unaccounted-for persons: Selz’s uncle, a possible ex-wife, several former co-workers and that damned Bulgarian officer who no one had ever heard of.

He “killed at least ten or 11 people in the Bay Area and six or seven in other parts of California,” the confident San Mateo County sheriff declared.

Selz’s mood turned mercurial. One moment, he was laughing and asking reporters, “Do you fellows think I’m screwy?” The next, he was gravely analyzing his personality.

“I found that I am sulky, whine, cry too much and am inclined to outbreaks of brutality,” he said.

On March 12, he made what began as a routine court appearance. By the day’s end, he was headed to San Quentin: In a few hours’ time, he’d been arraigned, pleaded guilty and sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. His lawyers said he just wanted to be done with it all.

But Ralph Jerome von Braun Selz wasn’t done making news. As the years went by, he was cleared in every other missing persons case. He admitted he’d made up the entire story about Baronovich. And he kept escaping from prison.

During World War II, he was moved to a lower-security facility in Chino. He made a run for it in 1945 and got all the way to Minnesota, where — in a burst of wartime patriotism — he enlisted in the Army. His fingerprints got a routine check by the FBI, which realized they matched those of a wanted fugitive. They found him in Canada; he was living there under the name of Sergeant “Tiny” Morgan.

In 1962, now 54, Selz disappeared from the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo. His pockets stuffed full of candy bars, he was found three miles away a few days later.

The last record of Selz came in the early 1970s. He claimed he was being denied legal counsel, but a look at the jail log books quickly refuted that; several visits from attorneys were noted. Selz then disappears from history. There is no death record for a Ralph Selz (or any of his other many name variations) in the state of California.

All that remains are his many legal filings, years and years of appeals that ultimately ended in rejection at the U.S. Supreme Court.

He often claimed his laughter was a result of hallucinations, sometimes allegedly induced by a “truth serum” police gave him.

“The only release from the hallucinatory fears was the pretense of infectious humor whose parallel is akin to a small boy, shouting or whistling as he passes a graveyard at night,” Selz wrote in one of his appeals.

These claims were repeatedly disputed by prison doctors — and, if you believe this anecdote, Selz’s own behavior.

A few days after Rice’s body was found, the sheriff took Selz to the morgue, clearly hoping to shake him. Because the body was so badly decomposed, dental records had not yet confirmed it was Rice.

The sheriff asked Selz to take a good, long look at the body. Did he think it could be his former friend?

“It might be,” Selz said with a grin. “You got her from the place I put her, didn’t you?”

Katie Dowd is a senior digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com