Bestial (37 page)

“I’ll ask him for the two dollars he owes me,” said Mrs. Hill.

†

Manitoba Free Press
, June 18, 1927

In the opinion of Dr. C. M. Hincks of Toronto, director of the Canadian Mental Hygiene Association who is a visitor in Winnipeg, the man who murdered Mrs. Patterson and Lola Cowan is a moral imbecile.

T
he capture of the infamous “Gorilla Man” was widely reported in American newspapers, including the
New York Times
, which ran a story about Nelson’s arrest on Friday morning, June 17. Still, no U.S. city—not even San Francisco, birthplace of the strangler and the site of his earliest murders—devoted as much media coverage to the story as Winnipeg, where the fascination with Nelson remained at a fever pitch for another full week.

Shortly after 10:30
A.M.
on Friday, Nelson—“The Greatest Murderer Since Jack the Ripper,” as the
Winnipeg Tribune
branded him—appeared in the city police court, to be formally charged with the murders of Lola Cowan and Emily Patterson. Outside the building, Rupert Street was jammed with spectators, who had begun gathering hours earlier, hoping for a glimpse of the monster. But police guards posted at the entranceway made sure that only authorized personnel gained admission. As a result, the courtroom was half-empty when the “Gorilla” was escorted to the dock by four armed constables.

Though Nelson’s jaw was still dark with stubble, his hair
had been clipped, and his ratty green sweater replaced with a gray suit jacket and blue, collarless shirt. Head bowed, shoulders slumped, hands manacled before him, he stood by the rail and listened in silence while the court clerk, George Richards, read the charge.

Since Nelson, docile and despondent, looked about as fearsome as a short-order cook, it was left to local reporters to spice up their stories with suitably diabolical details. In the account of the
Tribune’s
correspondent, Nelson’s slate-gray eyes suddenly acquired a demonic “yellowish hue.” And when, following the proceedings, the prisoner was surrounded by officers and ushered back to his cell, a reporter for the
Free Press
was on hand to testify that Nelson had “a walk like an ape.”

One of the courtroom spectators that morning was John Cowan, Lola’s father. Though newsmen pressed him for a quote about Nelson, Cowan had little to say, though he did thank his fellow Winnipeggers, who had begun raising money for the families of the two victims. Started with a contribution of four silver quarters sent in by a young reader of the
Free Press
, the fund had grown to $42.30 by Friday morning.

Several hours after Nelson$s courtroom appearance, Catherine Hill got her chance to confront him. Shortly after 1:00
P.M.
, two detectives picked her up at her boardinghouse and drove her to the central police station. The elderly landlady, who suffered from severe rheumatism, was escorted to the lineup room, where thirty male prisoners were ranged against one wall, hands manacled behind their backs. Near the center of the long row stood Nelson, head thrown back, dark eyes burning (according to the
Winnipeg Tribune
) with a “phosphorescent” glow.

Leaning on the arm of a detective, Mrs. Hill laboriously made her way along the row of prisoners. By the time she reached the center, she was breathing hard with the effort. Taking one quick glance into Nelson$s face, she raised her gnarled right hand and laid it on his sleeve.

“It was the face of him that I knew,” she explained to reporters afterwards. “His hair was brushed different and he needed a shave. But I knew him.” Seated in a little antechamber,
the landlady seemed visibly relieved that she had “done her bit.” She had been under constant strain for the past week, unable to sleep or to eat a proper meal.

“But what’s the use of breaking down when you have a job to do?” she declared as the newsmen scribbled down her every word. “So long as I can do the right thing for my country, I can get along.”

In the view of the
Tribune’s
reporter, the spunky old woman was the very model of “true British courage. Even when most harassed, her greatest thought is of the bereaved ones and not of herself.”

Nevertheless, when asked if she had been tempted to say anything to the prisoner, Mrs. Hill reverted to the subject that seemed most genuinely pressing to her.

“I wanted to ask him when he was coming back to pay me the two dollars he owes me,” she replied. “But the detective said I was not to speak to the man.” She paused for an instant, then emitted a sigh. “I’d like fine to get my money from him, though.”

Several more people were brought down to the central police station that afternoon to identify the suspect: John Hofer, the “clean-faced” fellow who had struck up a brief acquaintance with Nelson on the trolley ride from Winnipeg exactly one week earlier; James Phillips, the lodger who had chatted with Nelson out on Mrs. Hill’s veranda on Thursday evening, June 9; and Grace Nelson, the boarder at Mary Rowe’s house in Regina, who had been reading a magazine in bed on the morning of Sunday, June 12, when Nelson abruptly barged into her room. All of them picked him from the lineup without hesitation.

It was close to suppertime before the prisoner was finally led back to his cell. Though Nelson, according to several observers, had appeared “cowed and crushed” during his courtroom appearance that morning, he seemed remarkably carefree by the time he was locked up for the night, chatting lightly with his guards about some of his favorite topics: baseball, Buster Keaton movies, and religion. Indeed, he seemed so indifferent to his circumstances that he had yet to request a lawyer.

To at least one journalist covering the case, Nelson
seemed like a perfect prospect for the most celebrated attorney of the day: Clarence Darrow, savior of the Chicago thrill-killers, Leopold and Loeb, and the champion of Darwinism during the celebrated Dayton “Monkey Trial.” When asked if he had any interest in defending the “Gorilla Man,” however, Darrow demurred—though he took advantage of the interview to put in a word for two of his pet causes, the abolition of the death penalty and the treatment of criminals as maladjusted individuals who deserved enlightened psychiatric care instead of punishment.

“I couldn’t take the case,” he told the reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
. “I am not doing anything nowadays. I haven’t read much about Nelson. Of course, I am against capital punishment. I don’t think anyone should be legally killed by the state, regardless of the nature of the crime or crimes charged. I don’t believe this man, Nelson, should be hanged.

“If we look carefully enough, we will find some mental taint or environmental defect which causes men to commit the crimes they do. Criminals should be confined and treated.”

Though months would pass before Nelson underwent a psychiatric evaluation, his mental state was a matter of public speculation from the moment of his arrest. Like Clarence Darrow, Dr. C. M. Hincks of Toronto, director of the Canadian Mental Hygiene Association, believed that faulty parenting was at least partly to blame for creating killers like Nelson. Dr. Hincks, who was visiting Winnipeg on business at the time of the “Gorilla Man’s” capture, offered his opinion in an interview with the
Manitoba Free Press
.

Hincks diagnosed the suspect as a “moral imbecile”—the term used to describe Theo Durrant, the “Demon of the Belfry,” who had provoked such fierce outrage in San Francisco just a few years before Nelson’s birth. “Not mental disease but lack of development in one part of his make-up is responsible for his horrible crimes,” Hincks explained. Such criminals were psychologically stunted: grown men with the crude amorality of vicious boys, the kind who take pleasure from plucking the wings off flies.

“Many children like to kill things,” said Hincks, “to dismember insects or stone birds. This is usually only a passing
phase.” In the case of certain individuals, however, these tendencies “become exaggerated and fixed.” Such children grow up to be men unfettered by conscience, immune to remorse, “perverts” who kill not out of conventional motives—rage, jealousy, revenge—but to “gratify their abnormal lusts. To a man like this, what is repulsion to a normal human being is appetite. In all other respects, he may be quite plausible, with nothing to indicate the freak in his nature. He is able to talk over his crimes rationally and without a trace of emotion, then go right out and commit another.”

In the course of his career, Hincks had encountered several of these deviants, though he hastened to assure his interviewer that “such cases” were “rare in the world.” There was, for example, an “eight-year-old boy who seared his baby sister’s face with a red-hot poker and killed pigeons without any feeling” and “a man who took delight in disembowelling cattle.”

And what was the cause of such monstrously warped behavior? asked the interviewer.

Hincks was forced to concede that science had yet to provide an entirely satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon, though “faulty upbringing” was certainly a factor. Once a person became a “moral imbecile,” the condition was incurable. But “had the Strangler been subjected to proper influences as a boy,” Hincks maintained, “he might have developed normally.”

From a present-day perspective, most of Hincks’ comments still make a great deal of sense, though his language has a dated and distinctly unscientific ring. The phrase “moral imbecile,” which sounds more like a Victorian slur than a clinical category, has long since been abandoned by psychologists. Nowadays, we call such people
sociopaths
. And Hincks’ remarks about the frequency of the phenomenon are almost touchingly antique.

In an age when sadistic lust murder has become so prevalent that the run-of-the-mill sex slayer barely rates a mention in the press, the world that Hincks describes—one in which “such cases are rare”—seems like a faraway dream.

†

Mary Fuller

I don’t see how my husband could be this Dark Strangler. I know he was mentally deranged, but he was not violently insane and he was always good to me.

A
ny doubts that the burly little man locked up in the Winnipeg jail was the transcontinental killer of twenty-two victims were dispelled within days of his arrest. Nelson’s mug shots and fingerprints were distributed to police departments throughout the United States. By Saturday, June 18, he had been positively identified by various witnesses.

In Portland, Mrs. Sophie Yates, the tenant at the rooming house where Nelson had lodged for several days in November, confirmed that the face in the photographs belonged to the man she had known as “Adrian Harris,” who had bestowed such lavish gifts on herself and the landlady, Edna Gaylord. Grocer Russell Gordon also identified Nelson as the “nice-mannered fellow” who had purchased fourteen-dollars’ worth of provisions from him on Thanksgiving eve.

When Marie Kuhn of Philadelphia was shown Nelson’s photograph, she clutched both hands to her bosom and let out a gasp. “That is the man,” she told Detectives Peter Sheller and Frank Cholinski. “I can never forget those eyes. They seem to haunt me day and night.”

The proprietress of a bake shop located not far from the home of Mary McConnell, the fifty-three-year-old widow
killed by the “Dark Strangler” in late April, Mrs. Kuhn had been standing behind her counter on the afternoon of the murder when the swarthy stranger entered her shop. He had an odd, rolling walk, “as though he had on tight shoes and his feet were hurting him,” Mrs. Kuhn recalled. Doffing his hat, he extracted a gold lady’s wristwatch from a pocket and held it across the counter.

“Interested in buying this?” he asked. “You can have it for two bucks.”

Taking the watch from his hand, Mrs. Kuhn examined it briefly before giving it back with a shake of her head. The watch (one of several valuables Nelson had stolen from Mary McConnell’s bedroom) was a handsome object, clearly worth the asking price. But Mrs. Kuhn wanted nothing to do with the stranger, who—though freshly barbered and redolent of eau de cologne—struck her as a “bum.”

(That Nelson looked and smelled as if he’d just come from the barber’s was consistent with the m.o. he later used in Winnipeg. Police suspected that Nelson would typically wait until his hair was shaggy and his face covered with a heavy stubble before committing a crime. Then, after trading his clothes at a secondhand shop, he would hurry to a barbershop for a shave and a trim, thus altering his appearance.)

Three other Philadelphia women—Margaret Currie, Rose Egler, and Sarah Butler, neighbors of Mary McConnell who had seen Nelson on the day of the slaying—were brought down to police headquarters and asked to pick his photograph from a batch of mug shots. All three identified him without any trouble.

Mrs. Butler, who supported herself by taking in lodgers, let out a scream when she laid eyes on his picture. Nelson had shown up at her door on the morning of the murder, asking to see a room, but her boardinghouse was full. Mrs. Butler felt certain that, had there been any vacancies, she might well have ended up like poor Mary McConnell.

Throughout the country—in Burlingame and Buffalo, Seattle and Detroit—people who had encountered the “Strangler” confirmed that Nelson was the man. Fred Merritt—the young boarder (and surrogate son) of the Buffalo landlady,
lady, Jennie Randolph—took one look at the mug shots and announced, “That’s him!” Mrs. H. C. Murray, the Burlingame mother-to-be who had managed to fight off the “Strangler” in November, was equally emphatic.

Sergeant J. A. Hoffmann of Detroit, who had travelled to Canada to interview the suspect, was able to link him to the “Strangler” murders through a key piece of evidence, discovered by Winnipeg detectives in the pants Nelson had sold to the secondhand clothes dealer, Sam Waldman. The incriminating object was a jackknife with a big nick in the blade. The steel surrounding the nick was burnt, as though the blade had been used to slice through a live electric wire.

One of the “Strangler’s” Detroit victims, the landlady, Mrs. Fannie C. May, had been garrotted with an electric cord, cut from a plugged-in lamp. Following the discovery of the murders, Sergeant Hoffmann had predicted that, when the killer was caught, he would probably be carrying a jackknife with a singed nick in the blade—exactly like the knife that had been recovered from the pocket of Earle Nelson’s old pants.