Happy Valentine’s Day! 3 Pairs of Doomed Lovers From San Francisco History

As we all know, Valentine’s Day is intrinsically designed to make single people feel bad about their lives. So, in the interests of bringing balance back to the world, here are some stories of lovers from Bay Area history that could make anyone swear off coupledom for life. Theirs are tales of passion, mayhem and — oh yes — a little bit of murder.

Behold these messy lovebirds!

Belle and Charles Cora (1850s)

Adventurous couple Charles and Belle Cora found each other in New Orleans in 1848. He was a wealthy gambler and high roller. She was the daughter of a minister, hailed from Baltimore, and had fled to New Orleans after falling pregnant out of wedlock. After her baby died, Belle went to work for a local madam. When Charles saw and approached Belle for the very first time, she is said to have uttered the phrase, “It is destiny.”

Together, the two briefly tried their luck in Sacramento before settling in San Francisco in 1849, where Belle ran a high-end brothel in what is now Chinatown. The duo stood out in the city as a handsome, if controversial, couple. In 1890, the San Francisco Chronicle recalled that Charles was instantly “struck by her beauty — she was a voluptuous creature.” Charles, a volunteer fireman, was a good match for Bella too. The same article described him as “always dressed neatly and well supplied with money. He had dark hair, dark mustache and dark eyes.”

The trouble for these two began one Thursday night at Maguire’s Opera House. A rule of the venue was that “the demi-monde” — any customers not of proper social standing — must only sit (according to a 1910 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin) in “the parquet behind the dress circle, secluded in boxes.” When Belle and Charles sat in the dress circle, directly behind the wife of U.S. Marshal William H. Richardson, the lawman was incensed. Richardson loudly attempted to get the offending couple removed. When his request was denied, Richardson was left feeling both furious and publicly humiliated.

The following day, Charles and Richardson had a run-in at the Cosmopolitan Saloon on Montgomery and Clay (where the Transamerica Pyramid stands today) and harsh words were exchanged as Charles defended his wife. After yet another altercation on Saturday, Charles wound up shooting and killing Richardson in the street. Charles swore up and down that it was self-defense (and the position of a knife and gun next to Richardson seemed to confirm that). Regardless, Charles was arrested and put in jail.

Belle tried desperately to get Charles released, paying a fortune to a prestigious lawyer known as Colonel D. D. Baker. It was all for naught. Belle soon heard that vigilantes planned to take Charles’ fate into their own hands. She rushed to Charles’ side, so the pair could be married by a Father Maraschi. Within an hour of the union, Charles — alongside another prisoner named James Casey — was taken away by vigilantes and hanged on Sacramento Street.

Rumor has it that after Charles’ death, Belle was pressured to leave town by the same Vigilance Committee that had killed her husband. She refused to do so, dying in 1862 in the same house she had shared with Charles on Waverly Place (then known as Pike Street). Today, Belle and Charles are buried side-by-side in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores cemetery.

Albert McVicar and Emma LeDoux (1900s)

Emma and Albert met in Bisbee, Arizona, fell in love, relocated to San Francisco and … then it all went horribly wrong.

Despite being described by Albert as “a lovely little woman” in letters to his family, Emma wasn’t exactly who she seemed. She had a taste for San Francisco’s nightlife and had already been married twice when Albert met her. Emma’s second husband William Williams died under mysterious circumstances that resulted in her receiving a sizable payout from his insurance company.

Without divorcing Albert, Emma met and married another man (Eugene LeDoux), and Albert soon found himself on the receiving end of a murder plot. Emma lured Albert to a hotel room, spiked his whiskey with morphine and bundled his incapacitated body into a large trunk where he was left to suffocate. Emma intended to stick the trunk on a train, never to be seen again, though reports on her intended final destination are unclear. After being mislabeled, the trunk wound up stuck on a platform at Stockton’s Southern Pacific Railroad.

Suspicious railway employees called the cops after noticing the trunk’s weight, smell and the thunking noise it made every time they moved it. After police found Albert’s body inside, they quickly traced the trunk back to Emma, who was subsequently arrested in Antioch. “What kind of a woman is she?” Albert’s brother John asked the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record on Mar. 31, 1906. “She must be a regular human tigress.”

Emma’s trial for Albert’s murder created a huge scandal at the time and resulted in her being the first woman ever sentenced to death in California. In a final plot twist, however, Emma managed to escape her date with a San Quentin noose after a successful appeal to the Supreme Court. In the end, the murderess wound up getting paroled after serving just 10 years.

Jimmy Ferrozzo and Teresa Hill (1980s)

He was a burly and beloved North Beach bouncer. She was a 23-year-old dancer at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, recently arrived in San Francisco from Seattle.

Despite Jimmy being 17 years her senior, Teresa was smitten with the door guy and, at midnight every night, after her shift at the O’Farrell, Teresa would rush to the Condor to close out Ferrozzo’s shift with him. On Nov. 23, 1983, the new couple stayed behind in the club after hours to have a private party of their own.

The following morning, at around 7 a.m., a janitor unlocked the Condor’s front door only to find a scene of horror. Teresa and Jimmy were pinned to the ceiling by the club’s famous hydraulic baby grand piano. (The piano was installed to dramatically lower North Beach’s first topless dancer Carol Doda from her dressing room upstairs onto the floor of the club.) Jimmy was dead from “compression asphyxia” and Teresa, still partially trapped underneath him, was alive but extremely distraught. It took more than three agonizing hours to free her.

A homicide inspector on the scene, Whitey Gunther, told the San Francisco Examiner that the switch that raised and lowered the piano could “easily be kicked” by Jimmy from his position on top of the piano. The paper also reported that “dancers at the club said the motorized lift was very slow and someone distracted could conceivably not notice the upward movement.” Gunther’s fellow inspector Marvin Dean also believed Ferrozzo’s death looked accidental.

The 2024 documentary Carol Doda: Topless at the Condor had other ideas, suggesting Jimmy’s death may have been a mob hit. No one will ever know for sure — Teresa told the SFPD she had been drinking too heavily to remember anything about the night her boyfriend died.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! May those of you in couples live to see March.