Bestial (32 page)

Later that afternoon, sometime around 4:00, Mrs. Rowe decided to take a break from her housework. Stepping onto the veranda, she found Mr. Harcourt seated out there on an Adirondack chair. They fell into a conversation, and she learned that he was originally from the United States, a native of San Francisco.

They remained outside for over an hour. By the time Mr. Harcourt rose to go inside, it was nearing suppertime. Though he and the landlady had engaged in a perfectly pleasant conversation, there was something about him that made her uneasy. With the other tenants away for the day, she felt reluctant to be alone in the house with him. Fetching
her purse from her bedroom, she called to Jessie and took her out to eat at a nearby restaurant.

Harcourt was on the veranda again when they returned. “Glad you’re back,” he said. Stroking his stubble, he asked if there was a barbershop in the neighborhood. “Yes,” said Mrs. Rowe, but she doubted that it would be open on Sunday evening.

“Hope you’re wrong,” he said, rising from his chair. “I’ve got a hot date. Met her just last night.” He gave Mrs. Rowe an insinuating wink. “I’m a quick worker, you know.” Then he hopped down the steps and headed off along Lorne Street.

Sure enough, he was freshly shaven when he returned about forty-five minutes later. When Mrs. Rowe expressed surprise that the barbershop had been open, Harcourt explained that, after grabbing a bite at “Chink’s restaurant” on Twelfth Street, he had struck a deal with the owner. For the price of two cigars, he had borrowed the Chinaman’s razor and shaved himself in the kitchen.

Proceeding upstairs, he donned his overcoat, gray silk gloves, and gray-and-white silk scarf, then went off to meet his date. Less than twenty minutes later, he was back. Mrs. Rowe could see from the look on his face that something had gone wrong with his plans.

“Stood me up,” he said with a scowl when she asked what had happened. Without another word, he disappeared up to his room.

She didn’t see him again until early the next morning, Monday, June 13. She was eating breakfast at the kitchen table at approximately 7:50
A.M.
, when she noticed him pass down the hallway on his way to the front door.

Twenty-five minutes later, he burst back into the house and hurried to his room, taking the stairs two at a time. Though Mrs. Rowe couldn’t see it, he was clutching a copy of that morning’s
Regina Leader
. Shortly afterwards, he descended the stairs again, dressed in his blue shirt, fawn-colored sweater, gray trousers, and flashy fedora. Mrs. Rowe had just buttered a slice of sourdough bread and was raising it to her lips when she saw him headed for the front door.

Since he had left his other belongings behind, it never occurred to Mrs. Rowe that he wouldn’t return. By the end
of the day, she would learn the startling truth about the foreign-looking stranger who called himself Harry Harcourt. But at that moment—approximately 8:30
A.M.
Monday, as she sat in the kitchen enjoying her breakfast—the young widow had no way of knowing just how lucky she was to be alive.

†

Chief of Detectives George Smith

He is the fastest ghoul that ever wore shoe leather.

W
hen Earle Leonard Nelson had arrived in Regina on Saturday afternoon, his two most recent atrocities had not yet been brought to light. William Patterson hadn’t made his appalling discovery while praying at his child’s bedside, and Lola Cowan’s naked corpse still lay undetected in Mrs. Hill’s boardinghouse. From Nelson’s unhurried behavior on Sunday—the leisurely way he passed the hours, lounging on the veranda of Mrs. Rowe’s rooming house and taking long strolls around the neighborhood—it seems clear that he felt no particular sense of urgency. Apparently, he was biding his time, waiting for an opportunity to ambush another victim—the landlady or Grace Nelson or possibly nine-year-old Jessie Rowe.

Everything changed on Sunday night, however, after the discovery of Lola Cowan’s body. By Monday morning, the entire population of western Canada was on the lookout for the “Gorilla Man,” alerted by periodic radio bulletins and blaring newspaper headlines. When Nelson went out to purchase the
Regina Leader
early Monday morning and saw the front page, he made a sudden change of plan. Regrettable though it may have been to forgo the pleasures available at Mrs. Rowe’s rooming house, he had little choice. It was time to clear out of Regina.

*    *    *

His first stop after leaving the rooming house was a jewelry shop called England’s. Approaching the counter, he shoved a hand inside his pocket and extracted a plain, eighteen-karat gold wedding band. He had taken it from Emily Patterson’s finger just before stuffing her outraged corpse underneath her younger son’s bed.

Nelson asked the proprietor, Fred England, to weigh the ring and tell him what it was worth. Bringing out his scales, England placed the ring on one tray and laid several small metal weights, one at a time, on the other. “Five pennyweights,” he announced when the trays were evenly balanced.

“What does that mean?” asked Nelson.

“It means that it’s a five pennyweight ring.”

“Well, what is it worth?”

England fished a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil from his shirt pocket and did a quick calculation, muttering under his breath: “Four cents a karat … seventy-two cents a pennyweight … five pennyweights.” He looked up at Nelson. “About three dollars and fifty cents.”

It was less than Nelson had hoped for, but he wasn’t in a position to haggle. “I’ll take it,” he said, extending a hand.

England stepped to his cash register, removed the money, and placed it in the upturned palm. Without another word, the stranger turned and left the store.

Fred England stood there for a moment, staring out through the display window at the man’s receding form. In his long career as a jeweler, he had taken countless finger-measurements and seen hands of all shapes and sizes.

Never, however, had he encountered hands as grotesquely oversized as the burly, dark-skinned stranger’s.

Shortly after leaving the jeweler’s, Nelson found a little thrift shop, where he swapped his dressy clothes for a khaki shirt and a pair of bib overalls. As he left the store and hurried along the streets, he drew some funny stares from passersby. Pausing at a shop window and peering at his reflection, he saw why.

Instead of looking more nondescript, as he had planned, he cut a distinctly conspicuous figure. In the workshirt and
overalls, he might have been a mechanic or a farmhand. On his head, however, he was still sporting his dandy’s fedora. He hated to part with the hat—it was the snazziest one he’d ever owned, a real attention-getter. But, of course, attention was the last thing in the world he needed right now.

Making his way to Broad Street and Eleventh Avenue, he spotted another used-clothing place called The Royal Secondhand Store, where he exchanged the fedora for a black cloth cap, plus fifty cents. He was going to trade his bull-dog shoes for something plainer, too, but the storeowner—who had taken a closer look at the fedora and noticed the “Chevrier’s” label inside—began asking all kinds of goddamn nosy questions: Did he come from Winnipeg? How long had he been in Regina? Was he planning to stay long?

So when another customer entered the store just then and the owner went to wait on him, Nelson slipped out the door and strode away down Broad Street, still wearing his bulldog shoes.

With his simple workman’s garments and four dollars in his pocket, he hit the road. By 10:00
A.M.
he had hiked a mile and a half southeast of Regina. He was plodding along the asphalt when he heard a car approaching from behind. He stopped, turned around, and held up his hand. When the car rolled to a halt, he stepped to the driver’s window and asked the man for a lift.

“Where you headed?” asked the driver, a salesman named William Davidson.

“Weyburn,” said Nelson, naming a town about seventy-five miles south of Regina and less than fifty miles from the U.S. border.

Davidson wasn’t going that far, but he offered to take the hitcher partway there. They rode together for over an hour, not speaking much. Nelson told the driver that he’d been unemployed for a while and was travelling south in the hope of finding farmwork.

“You from Regina?” asked Davidson, who had spent a fair amount of time in the city.

Nelson affirmed that he was.

“Whereabouts?”

Nelson, who knew next to nothing about Regina, named
the only place he was familiar with—1852 Lorne Street, Mrs. Rowe’s address.

It was almost 11:30
A.M.
when the salesman reached his destination, a little town called Davin about twenty-five miles south of Regina. With a grunt of thanks, Nelson climbed from the car and proceeded southward on foot.

It was a hot, cloudless day. Within minutes, sweat was stinging his eyes and darkening the armpits of his long-sleeve khaki shirt. About a mile or so south of Davin, he came to a halt. He was resting by the roadside when a car appeared and pulled up beside him. The driver—another travelling salesman, Lyle Wilcox by name—leaned his head out the window and asked directions to the home of a local farmer.

Nelson explained that he himself was a stranger to those parts. He was making his way to Arcola, about ninety miles away, and wondered if he could hitch a ride with the salesman.

Wilcox was happy to oblige, though he wasn’t driving all the way to Arcola.

That was fine, Nelson said, walking around to the passenger side. In that heat, he’d be glad just to get off his feet for a while.

They travelled only a few miles together, until they came to an intersection about three-and-a-half miles southeast of Davin. Wilcox was heading south, down an unpaved country road. “Stick to the main road,” he told the hitcher. “It’s more travelled. You’ll get a lift for sure.”

Wilcox was right. Nelson had barely begun trudging along the roadside when he flagged down an east-bound car driven by a junk dealer named Isadore Silverman, who was canvassing the local farms for scrap metal.

Silverman and Nelson, who gave his first name as “Virgil,” hit it off at once. When Silverman explained what his business was, Nelson offered to help him out in exchange for nothing more than transportation and meals. Silverman leapt at the offer. Collecting old lead and scrap iron was heavy work, particularly during a heat wave, and the sturdy young man at his side had an impressive set of shoulders.

The two spent the remainder of Monday together, travelling around the backroads of southeastern Saskatchewan,
purchasing, packing, and loading the car full of scrap metal. At around 10:30 that night, they arrived in Arcola where they checked into the local hotel, Nelson signing the register with the name “Virgil Wilson.” They shared a spacious room with two single beds, paid for in advance by Silverman. Early the next morning, Tuesday, June 14, they hit the road again and spent another day buying scrap metal. That night, they shared a hotel room in Deloraine, Manitoba.

After breakfast the following morning, the two set out once more, travelling east towards Winnipeg, where Silverman made his home. Nelson, of course, had compelling reasons to steer clear of Winnipeg, though he couldn’t exactly share them with Silverman. Instead, he told the junk dealer that he was broke and wanted to look for farmwork in the countryside.

They parted ways a few hours later. Silverman dropped his travelling companion off in the town of Boissevain, Manitoba. The time was approximately 10:30
A.M.
, Wednesday, June 15, and Earle Leonard Nelson was less than twenty miles away from the U.S. border.

†

James H. Gray,
The Roar of the Twenties

If the wanted man had deliberately set out to put the police on his trail, he could hardly have left more clues.

A
ccording to criminologists, the typical mass murderer—the seemingly normal man who suddenly snaps and goes on a wildly destructive rampage—is motivated not just by homicidal impulses but by suicidal ones as well. The disgruntled worker who shows up at the office one morning and guns down everyone in sight is a kind of human time bomb, erupting in insane, random violence. When the explosion is over, there are corpses scattered everywhere—his own included, since most killers of this kind either take their own lives to avoid capture or die in a barrage of police gunfire. Essentially, these are men who—having reached some psychological breaking point—decide to go out in an apocalyptic blaze, taking as many people with them as they possibly can.

The case tends to be different with serial killers. To be sure, some of them are actively self-destructive. In the view of many crime historians, Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror ended abruptly when the notorious harlot butcher—overwhelmed with revulsion after his final enormity-took his own life. And other homicidal maniacs have clearly wished to be stopped—most famously, the 1940s “Lipstick Killer,” William Heirens, who left a desperate message scrawled at one crime scene: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more, I cannot control myself.”

For the most part, however, serial murderers aren’t interested in stopping. They try to keep killing as long as they can, for a very simple reason: they enjoy it. Lust murder is their ultimate thrill. Even when their behavior borders on the reckless (on one occasion, for example, Ted Bundy abducted two young women from a crowded public beach in broad daylight), pleasure is their primary motivation. The risk-taking only adds to the excitement.

Earle Leonard Nelson typified this pattern. Since embarking on his deadly spree in early 1926, he had done everything possible to avoid arrest—keeping constantly on the move, assuming a string of false identities, changing his wardrobe every time he hit a new town. Endowed with the usual traits of his breed—cunning, intelligence, and an abnormal sangfroid—he had managed to elude pursuers throughout the United States.

From the moment he crossed into Canada, however, his behavior almost guaranteed his capture. Though it is possible that he was possessed by self-destructive impulses—a secret desire to be punished for his crimes—there are other, equally plausible explanations for his actions. Arrogance is one—the disdainful belief that, after failing to nab him for a year and a half, the police were simply no match for him. It is also the case that, as far back as 1921, Nelson (then known as Ferral) had been diagnosed as a “constitutional psychopath with outbreaks of psychosis,” a man with a profoundly disordered mind.