Bestial (35 page)

Hoping to find an updated description of the suspect in the evening
Tribune
, Gray headed for the local drugstore to purchase a paper. It was already almost 10:30
P.M.
, however, and the drugstore was closed.

Proceeding to the telegraph office, Gray sent a message to his divisional officer, Inspector James Browne at Brandon, requesting the most recent information on the fugitive. Within minutes, Brandon wired back that the suspect had last been seen wearing blue bib overalls, a khaki shirt, and brown boots with bull-dog shoes.

That clinched it. Crossing the street to his room in Detachment Headquarters, Gray spent a few minutes refreshing himself—washing up, brushing the dust from his uniform. He unbuckled his holstered revolver and slipped a lightweight semiautomatic into his pocket. For the first time, he allowed himself a few minutes of self-congratulation. He had captured the most dangerous criminal on the North American continent, the notorious woman-killer known as the “Gorilla.”

Years before that tabloid tag was applied to him, however, Earle Leonard Nelson had been given another nickname that Constable Wilton Gray knew nothing about:
Houdini
. And even at that moment, while Gray savored his moment of triumph, Nelson was living up to it.

At approximately 11:15
P.M.
—twenty minutes after he was told to keep an eye on the prisoner—William Dunn, the sixty-year-old town constable, burst into Gray’s room, so breathless that he could barely speak.

He didn’t have to. Gray could see from the look on his face that something dreadful had happened.

Dashing back to the town hall, Gray tore down the basement steps, then stopped in his tracks, so stunned by what he saw that his mouth actually dropped open.

The two padlocks he had personally snapped into place lay on the concrete floor. The steel door of the cagelike cell stood wide open. And the “Gorilla” was gone.

†

Manitoba Free Press
, June 16, 1927

In custody but out again. Such is the most recent episode in the hunt for the Strangler—the Gorilla—who has left a trail of death and fear across the continent.

W
hen he’d told William Dunn “to keep an eye” on the captive, Constable Gray wasn’t thinking about a jailbreak. He knew the cell was secure, having fastened the padlocks himself. It was suicide he was worried about—the possibility (as he later testified) that “the prisoner might do bodily harm to himself.”

As for Dunn, it never crossed his mind that anyone could escape from the double-locked cage. And so, when he settled back for a smoke and discovered that he was out of matches, he didn’t think twice about wandering upstairs in search of a light. He wasn’t gone for more than a few minutes. But when he returned, the cell door was open and the prisoner nowhere in sight.

The marks of the fugitive’s bare feet were clearly visible on the dusty floor of the cell. Gray and Dunn followed the trail to the furnace room, where the footprints led across the dirt floor to an open back door. Dashing to the doorway, the two men peered outside. Even in the darkness they could make out a pathway of tramped-down grass that cut across the rear yard and disappeared into the blackness of the surrounding woods.

Racing to the fire hall, Gray sounded the alarm, rousing the entire town. Within minutes, hundreds of people, most of them men, were assembled at the fire hall. Quieting the clamoring mob, Gray explained what had happened and organized a massive hunt. While a fleet of automobiles circled the town, a posse of several hundred men—equipped with lanterns and flashlights and armed with shotguns, revolvers, pitchforks, and ax handles—combed the surrounding woods and lake shore, searched through empty buildings, and patrolled every road within a five-mile radius of Killarney.

Gray, meanwhile, was busy on the telephone. After putting in a call to the electric department—which agreed to keep the street lights burning all night—he notified the Provincial Police Detachments in Crystal City, Deloraine, and Morden, alerted the U.S. border patrol, and got in touch with the constabularies of every town from Portage La Prairie to Hansboro, North Dakota. By midnight—with reinforcements from several neighboring towns aiding in the search—Killarney was (as one witness put it) “an armed camp.”

Gray also telephoned Provincial Police Headquarters in Winnipeg. Hearing the news, Commissioner H. J. Martin immediately set about assembling a contingent of men for an expedition to Killarney. A hard rain had started to fall by then, and Martin—fearing that a convoy of automobiles might get bogged down in the mud—contacted officials of the Canadian Pacific Railway, who promptly made all the necessary arrangements.

At 2:30
A.M.
a special train departed from Winnipeg. On board were Colonel Martin himself, six Provincial and four Canadian Pacific Railway constables, seven Winnipeg city officers, and a pair of bloodhounds. To expedite the trip, railway officials had dispatched emergency signals, instructing all other trains to make way.

The special train had a clear line to Killarney, with an anticipated arrival time of approximately 8:30
A.M
.

There was a little wooden shelf bracketed to the basement wall, about a foot from the cell. Nelson had spotted it as soon as the steel door slammed shut behind him. Stretching
himself out on the narrow bunk, he laced his fingers behind his head and waited for his chance.

It came sooner than he expected. Just a few minutes after Gray and his partner left, the old man named Dunn rolled himself a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. After checking his pockets for a match and coming up empty, he rose from his chair and made for the stairway.

The instant he was gone, Nelson had leapt to his feet, shoved a hand through the grillwork, and groped around the shelf. Almost immediately, his fingers closed around a small, slender object that felt like rusty metal. Even
he
couldn’t believe his good luck when he saw what he was holding—an old nail file. The Lord was surely with him.

It took him less than two minutes to pick both locks. Swinging open the cell door, he hurried barefoot through the basement, crossed the furnace room, and slipped out the unlocked back door. A cold drizzle had begun to fall, soaking the grass. By the time he reached the woods, just twenty yards away, he felt as if he’d been wading in ice water.

In the cloudy, moonless night, he couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of him. He knew the Canadian Pacific Railroad stopped in Killarney (he had caught a glimpse of the station when the police car brought him into town). If he could manage to hide out until daybreak, he might be able to slip onto a southbound freight car and make it safely across the border.

The trick would be to keep from getting caught. He knew the whole town would be after him before long. Sure enough, he was still standing near the edge of the woods, trying to decide which way to go, when an alarm bell began to clang. A few minutes later, he could hear the sound of muffled voices and see the sweep of flashlight beams as a search party rounded the rear of the town hall and moved in his direction.

There was an ancient tree at his back, with big, solid branches sprouting from its trunk. With a little jump, he grabbed hold of the bottommost branch and pulled himself upward. Then, just like the monkey-man they said he was, he clambered up the tree as high as he could go.

Straddling a branch about twenty feet above the ground, arms hugging the massive trunk, he remained as still as possible
until the searchers were gone. Then he made his way down the tree and cautiously emerged from the woods. Moving in a crouch, he headed in the general direction of the railway station, ducking into an empty shed or outbuilding whenever he saw an approaching light.

Eventually, he came to a vacant barn not far from the railroad tracks. Slipping inside, he made his way carefully across the hay-littered floor to the opposite end. By now, his eyes had adjusted themselves to the darkness, and he could make out a heap of discarded clothing in one corner of the barn.

Again, the Lord seemed to be smiling on him. Rummaging through the pile, he came upon an old pair of hockey skates. Grunting with the effort, he managed to tear the blades off the leather soles, then shoved his bare feet into the boots. He also found a moth-eaten wool cardigan, large enough to fit him.

Crawling into an empty stall, he huddled in a corner, keeping his ears open for the sounds of the manhunters. He managed to remain awake for most of the night, though he fell into a doze towards daybreak.

It was already after 8:00
A.M.
when something roused him from his sleep. He listened hard, then heard it again, a sound that made him scramble to his feet in excitement—the piercing whistle of an approaching train.

A local handyman named Alfred Wood was out early Thursday morning, doing some yard work for a neighbor, Herbert Monteith. At around 8:10
A.M.
, Wood had just started mowing the front lawn when he looked up and saw a stranger leaning over the waist-high picket fence.

“Can I bum a cigarette?” said the man.

Leaving his mower upright, Wood walked over and, after fishing a little pouch and a roll of papers from his hip pocket, handed them over to the man.

As the fellow rolled his smoke, Wood took a closer look at him. He was squat and swarthy and dressed in a raggedy green sweater with little bits of dried hay stuck all over it. His hair was dishevelled, his face unshaved, and his feet were shod in a most peculiar fashion—in what looked to be old hockey skates with the blades removed.

“You been out searching for that fellow who broke out of jail?” Wood asked.

The man—who was fumbling with the paper, as though unaccustomed to rolling his own—nodded. “Yeah. Been up all night. Tore my clothes in the bushes.” Here he gave a little grunt of admiration. “Must be a damn smart man to escape the way he did.”

Wood noticed that, beneath the old cardigan sweater, the man was wearing a khaki shirt and a pair of bib overalls.

While Wood was staring at him, the dark-skinned man, who had completely mangled the cigarette, tossed it away in disgust. “Mind giving me the makings of another?” he asked with a sheepish look. “I kind of messed that one up.”

Wood obliged. After succeeding with his second try, the fellow stuck the clumsily rolled cigarette between his lips, accepted a light from Wood, then strode down the road in the direction of the railway tracks.

Staring after him, Wood felt convinced that the dark-skinned stranger was none other than the “Gorilla” himself. The way he had come right up to Wood, as bold as day, and asked for a smoke was completely consistent with the published reports of the man’s almost incredible audacity.

Glancing around, Wood spotted Kevin and Brian Best, the teenage sons of the neighborhood physician, as they emerged from their house just across the road. They had their schoolbooks in hand and were heading for the family car, a Chevrolet Coach. Hurrying over to the boys, Wood quickly filled them in on his encounter with the stranger and urged them to drive downtown and alert the police.

As the Best brothers jumped into the car and sped away, Wood ran back to the road and hurried after the stranger, determined to keep him in sight.

As it turned out, the barn Nelson had taken refuge in belonged to a family named Allen that had vacated their premises the previous night. Mr. Allen had joined the searchers after ensconcing his wife and children at a neighbor’s. As a result, Nelson had no problem leaving the barn undetected after awakening to the sound of the approaching train.

By sticking close to the bushes that grew alongside the
railway embankment—and ducking for cover whenever he felt in danger of discovery—he had managed to make it within a half-mile or so of the train depot by 8:25
A.M
. In a few more minutes, he would be on his way to the border. Nelson was an old hand at riding the rails, having relied on the method many times during his journeys, whenever he couldn’t hitch a ride or steal a car.

By the time he reached the house where the workman was mowing, Nelson—who was starving for a smoke, having gone without one since the previous afternoon—was so full of confidence that he felt no hesitation about approaching the man for a cigarette. Indeed, what he felt was even stronger than confidence. It was more like omnipotence, the sense that he could get away with anything, that nothing could touch him—as though he were the chosen instrument of an irresistible power that was using him for its own unimaginable ends.

Immediately after receiving the urgent midnight call from Wilton Gray, Constable W. A. Renton of the Crystal City Detachment had set off by car with a colleague named Lett. Upon their arrival, they were assigned to patrol the eastern section of Killarney. A local man named Maxwell volunteered to be their guide.

Sometime around 5:00
A.M.
, as he was negotiating a bumpy dirt road, Renton drove the car over a rock and tore the guard off the flywheel. Returning to town, he pulled into the police garage for repairs.

While the mechanic worked on the car, Renton joined Constable M. Maclean of the Morden Detachment and about twenty local men, who were setting off to search the heavy undergrowth on the north side of Killarney Lake. The group spent several hours combing the area. At one point, Renton thought he saw a burly man dash into a thick clump of bushes and spent nearly an hour searching for him before giving up.

By the time he returned to check on his car, it was already after 8:00
A.M
. He was just about to enter the garage when a Chevrolet Coach roared up and a teenage boy leapt from the passenger side and began going on about someone named Wood, who had just been approached by a suspicious
looking stranger. Renton, who was having trouble following the boy, asked him to slow down.

Pausing for a breath, the boy exclaimed, “Mr. Wood thinks he’s the man everyone’s hunting for!”

“Come on!” Renton said, grabbing the boy by the arm and pulling him into the car. As the Chevrolet sped westward, Renton got the full story from the driver, who gave his name as Kevin Best. “We have to hurry,” said Kevin. “We have to be at school by nine for examinations.”