At the coroner’s inquest, several witnesses’ statements were so
unsatisfactory that Sheriff Ross took the Gilroyans into custody
and hauled them off to San Jose. Even as the murdered man’s body
was being embalmed at Parmalee and Barshinger’s Funeral Parlor, the
swirl of controversy grew to whirlwind force. By the time Paul Doak
lay cold in his grave at St. Mary Cemetery, two days after his
senseless and unexplained murder at the Toscano Saloon, outraged
citizens were eager to avenge the murder of the grandson of one of
San Ysidro’s earliest settlers.
At the coroner’s inquest, several witnesses’ statements were so unsatisfactory that Sheriff Ross took the Gilroyans into custody and hauled them off to San Jose. Even as the murdered man’s body was being embalmed at Parmalee and Barshinger’s Funeral Parlor, the swirl of controversy grew to whirlwind force. By the time Paul Doak lay cold in his grave at St. Mary Cemetery, two days after his senseless and unexplained murder at the Toscano Saloon, outraged citizens were eager to avenge the murder of the grandson of one of San Ysidro’s earliest settlers.
The crime, which occurred on the night of Sunday, March 9, 1906, had stunned the community. After all, Doak hadn’t even lived in the area for five years. An engineer by training, he had moved to San Francisco along with his firm’s growing business.
The Doak name in Old Gilroy dated all the way back to 1822 when Massachusetts native Thomas Doak, credited with being the first American in the area, arrived at San Ysidro. He married Maria Lugarda Castro, a daughter of pioneer Mariano Castro, and the pair settled on a tract of her father’s Las Animas Rancho near the Carnadero Creek. In 1863, after cattle baron Henry Miller purchased Maria’s interest in the old grant, the property became a dairy farm on the Bloomfield Ranch.
Calling Paul Doak’s death “a fearful tragedy in a disreputable resort,” and “one of the foulest crimes that can be found on the records of Gilroy,” the
Advocate ran a full front-page account of the murder. The Toscano Saloon was situated on the back of a lot facing the railroad tracks at the northeast corner of Monterey and Old Gilroy streets. The saloon entrance used by Doak that night was located down a narrow, dimly-lit, 25-foot long passageway at the approximate site of the present card room.
Doak was not known as a drinker, nor was he a frequenter of saloons. Friends speculated that, around 9 p.m. that night, he’d merely stopped by to use the men’s room, and had ordered a glass of wine as a courtesy. In paying at the bar, it was thought, he’d inadvertently displayed a large sum of money, intended to pay some bills. Perhaps someone had followed him into the toilet to shoot and rob him. The theory seemed valid after the sheriff inspected the saloon and found three bullet holes in the men’s room.
Soon, the tide turned. Doak’s body had not been found in the lavatory, but outside, in the center of a vacant lot facing Monterey Street. On hearing the shots that Sunday evening, John Rea, from the depot, ran over, saw Doak, and took off in search of the shooter. After a crowd gathered, someone ran across to the Milias Hotel and called Constable White and Marshal Ward.
Doak’s body was lying face down on an ash and refuse heap, was positioned as if he was trying to run toward Monterey Street. Officers at the scene questioned the 12-year-old son of Toscano Saloon owners, Mary and Adolpho Dellanini. He told them that Doak had not been shot at the lot but within his parents’ saloon. Just then, from the doorway, the parents ordered the boy to stop speaking and come inside.
When police entered the Toscano Saloon to interview patrons, the customers refused to talk about the incident and later deliberately hampered investigative attempts to determine the night’s events. Coroner Kell noted it was “the worst case of mendacity he’d come across.” Besides lying, the witnesses suddenly couldn’t remember any English. “The inquiry this week has been something like holding an investigation in a foreign country,” Kell remarked.
The official inquiry into Paul Doak’s murder was conducted in Judge Willey’s courtroom. Manuel Gilroy testified that Pablo Doak had been born in 1866 at San Ysidro, was single, and an engineer by profession. Dr. Thayer testified that Doak was killed by bullet wounds to the heart. Maria Dellanini testified that she’d seen Doak about 15 minutes before hearing the shots. Adolfo Dellanini claimed he had seen Doak but didn’t know him, that Doak had gone out the back door alone that night, and that he did not see, or know, who shot him. Son Peter Dellanini, who had earlier told officers Doak was shot inside his parent’s saloon, later revised his statements, claiming he’d only seen Doak once, around 8 p.m. Others said Doak had arrived by train at 5:15 that night, had gone to dinner and then to the Toscano. He’d left out the back door with friend Jean Vacarisi, who later returned alone. Still others said that a man and a woman were seen standing in the vacant lot where Doak’s body was found.
“From first to last, it was a case of determination to know nothing,” the coroner announced. The jury concluded that Paul, born Pablo, Doak, came to death by gunshot wounds inflicted by a person or persons unknown.
Incensed at the jury’s inconclusive findings, town sentiment turned on the Dellaninis and the Toscano Saloon. A delegation from Doak’s fraternal orders issued a $250 reward and stated, “In the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, there isn’t a worse or more scandalous dive than in Gilroy. I would be afraid to go there alone during daytime … [the saloon] ought to be out of business for the sake of decency.”
The next Sunday, Rev. J.C. Williams of the Christian Church spoke on notorious wrongdoings in Gilroy as a whole and decreed the town was wide open, “The moral conditions are fast becoming a stench to a large number of our people and a hiss and a byword among neighboring towns. Wherever I go, these conditions are thrown in my face until I am almost ashamed to own my own town.”
After Mayor Dunlap suggested the Dellaninis should be pressured, sheriff’s deputies making a second saloon search found a revolver inside a brine keg near the bar. This confirmed the officers’ suspicions that patrons knew the man who shot Doak, and were keeping quiet. The Dellaninis were taken back to San Jose for further questioning.
At last, three weeks following Doak’s murder, the sheriff announced that the murder suspect was 23 year-old Pasquina Cordelli of Lucca, Italy, a common laborer: the .38 pistol found in the brine keg was his. The Engineer’s Union of Santa Clara County upped the reward to $300 for information leading to his arrest.
In a last-ditch effort to force information out of both patrons and owners, the City Council revoked the Toscano Saloon’s liquor license. The effort was in vain. As time dragged on with no resolution to the grisly murder, Gilroy citizens wondered if they would ever know who gunned down the grandson of Gilroy’s first American immigrant.
