Bestial (38 page)

Unfortunately one of the star witnesses in the case—Merton Newman of San Francisco, whose sixty-year-old Aunt Clara had been murdered at the start of the Strangler’s eighteen-month spree—was unable to provide a positive identification. Shown Nelson’s mug shots, Newman, who had not only seen but spoken to the killer, didn’t recognize the face in the photographs.

In spite of this disappointment, however, California authorities remained convinced that the Winnipeg prisoner was the “Strangler.” Within twenty-four hours of his arrest, San Francisco police had not only discovered the suspect’s real name, Earle Leonard Ferral, but had dug up his police, military, and psychiatric records. The picture that emerged from this material—of a violently unstable man who had been in and out of jails and mental institutions for years, was known to be an accomplished breakout artist, and had been incarcerated for a vicious sexual attack on a young girl—certainly matched the profile of the “Dark Strangler.”

Much to the gratification of the gossip-hungry public, investigators had also discovered that the “Gorilla” was a
married man. Meek, long-suffering Mary Fuller suddenly found herself identified on the front page of newspapers up and down the Pacific Coast as the wife of America’s most monstrously perverted killer.

In spite of the mortification this exposure must have caused her, however, she remained her usual steadfast self, protesting that Earle could not possibly be the culprit. “I don’t see how my husband could be this Dark Strangler,” she told a reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “I know he was mentally deranged, but he was not violently insane and he was always good to me.”

When she was interviewed by San Francisco detectives, however, she revealed information that only added to the weight of evidence against Earle. Speaking of their life together, she described his abrupt disappearances in early 1926, not long after she had taken him back into their Palo Alto home. He had vanished for the first time on February 19, saying that he was going to Halfmoon Bay in search of work, and had not returned until June 25. It was during this precise period that the “Strangler’s” earliest confirmed murders took place, beginning with Clara Newman’s death on February 20 and climaxing with the slaying of Mrs. George Russell of Santa Barbara on June 24.

Nelson had remained at home with Mary until August 15, when he suddenly departed again, explaining that he was going to Redwood City. Less than one week later, two more West Coast women were slain, Mrs. Mary Nisbet on August 20 and Mrs. Isabel Gallegos the following day.

Detectives also located Nelson’s aunt, Lillian Fabian, interviewing her at her San Francisco home on Monday, June 20. Like Mary Fuller, Lillian refused to believe that Earle was the “Strangler.” Though she acknowledged that her nephew was prone to “queer streaks,” she insisted that he was a “very mild” person, incapable of murder.

When asked about Earle’s wife, Lillian responded with nothing but praise. “Mrs. Fuller is, of course, greatly worried over this,” she said, her voice full of sympathy. “She is just as loyal to Earle as possible but hates all the publicity. She’s almost a mother to him, you know, as she’s nearly twice his age. Often he would leave her flat, and she wouldn’t see
him for months at a time. But she understands Earle, and he is much better off married to her than to a flapper.”

Before the week was out, Nelson would be identified by another forty-odd witnesses. On Monday evening, June 20, the inquest into the deaths of Lola Cowan and Emily Patterson was conducted at the police court on Rupert Street. For a little over two hours, the twelve-member coroner’s jury listened intently to the testimony of twenty-six people, including Dr. W. P. McCowan, who performed the postmortems on the victims; Bernhardt Mortenson, the boarder who first glimpsed the Cowan girl’s body under the bed in Mrs. Hill’s rooming house; Lewis B. Foote, the photographer who shot pictures of the victims; the clothier, Sam Waldman; the barber, Nick Tabor; and—most dramatically—William Patterson, who kept the courtroom transfixed as he recalled the moment when, kneeling at his sleeping son’s bedside, he discovered his wife’s savaged corpse.

The only person who seemed indifferent to Patterson’s testimony was Nelson himself, who sat through the entire proceedings with a look of supreme unconcern on his coarse, stubbled face. Wearing dark-blue trousers, a gray jacket, collarless shirt, and gaping, laceless boots, he sat unmanacled in the prisoner’s dock, staring absently at the wooden railing and stifling an occasional yawn. When the jury foreman, E. R. Frayer, read the verdict, finding the suspect responsible for the two murders, Nelson displayed not the slightest trace of emotion.

He was equally impassive three days later, when the preliminary hearing was held in the same place, the police court in the Rupert Street station. By 8:00
A.M.
, hundreds of would-be spectators, most of them women, had already gathered outside the building. Police guards posted at the entranceway kept the crowd under control. By the time the hearing began at noon, every inch of seating-space was occupied, while the hallway outside the courtroom was packed to the point of impassability. Though denied admission, a hundred or so people continued to mill on the sidewalk until the hearing was over.

More than sixty witnesses testified during the proceedings:
everyone from W. E. Chandler, the motorist who had picked Nelson up near Warren, Minnesota, to William Haberman, the old man who had seen the suspect fiddling with the Pattersons’ front door on the day of the murder. Thomas Carten—the clerk at Chevrier’s haberdashery, who had sold Nelson the champagne-colored fedora—was there, as were the Regina landlady, Mary Rowe; her boarder, Grace Nelson (who had been reading in bed when Nelson barged into her room); Leslie Morgan, the Wakopa storekeeper who had alerted the Provincial police; and several dozen more. Under questioning by Crown Prosecutor R. B. Graham, witness after witness added links to the long evidentiary chain connecting Nelson to the corpses in Winnipeg.

Guarded by four armed police officers, Nelson sat through the proceedings with an expression (as one reporter put it) “of unusual calm.” He looked a good deal more presentable than he had at the inquest. His face was freshly shaven, his hair was neatly combed into a pompadour, and his scruffy clothes had been replaced with a new, forest-green suit But his manner was just as detached. “Not a quiver of an eyelid nor the slightest change of expression was shown by Nelson throughout the trial,” the reporter observed.

His expression remained completely unruffled when—after the final witness, Chief Detective George Smith, testified—Magistrate R. M. Noble committed Earle Leonard Nelson for trial on two charges of murder.

The following morning, Friday, June 24, Nelson was transferred from his cell in the Rupert Street police station to the provincial jail.

From the moment of his arrival in Winnipeg one week earlier, the police had been inundated with calls from anxious citizens, worried that the “Gorilla”—who had broken out of the Killarney jail as though the locks were made of tin—might escape again. As a result, extraordinary precautions were taken when the transfer was made on Friday.

Shackled, handcuffed, and surrounded by ten heavily armed constables, he was loaded into a patrol wagon and whisked off to the provincial jail. Immediately upon his arrival he was hustled into the “death cell,” a heavily fortified structure customarily reserved for the condemned.

“There is not the slightest chance that he will get out,” Warden J. C. Downie declared, giving reporters a look at Nelson’s new accommodations—a cramped, steel enclosure surrounded by solid cement. “It is a tightly locked cage within another tightly locked cage, and several constables will be on constant guard.”

It was the first time in the prison’s history, Downie pointed out, that a man not yet convicted of murder (or, indeed, even tried) had been kept in the cell.

Later that day, Nelson, who had said nothing at either the inquest or preliminary hearing, made his first public statement. Under the circumstances, it would have been reasonable for him to show some concern. After all, though his trial date hadn’t even been set, he had already been consigned to death row.

Nelson, however, remained so completely unperturbed that he continued to shrug off the need for a lawyer. Interviewed by a reporter for the
Manitoba Free Press
, he flatly denied his guilt. Indeed, he insisted that a man like himself could never commit such heinous crimes.

“I’m charged with two murders,” he declared. “But I’m not the one who done it.”

But what about all the witnesses, asked the reporter—the sixty-plus people throughout the United States and western Canada who had positively identified him as the “Strangler”?

Nelson had a simple answer for that one. “All of ’em are wrong,” he explained. “Murder just isn’t possible for a man of my high Christian ideals.”

†

Manitoba Free Press
, June 18, 1927

This man, by being caught in Canada, is as fortunate as any man charged with such crimes could be. The more desperate the crime, the more scrupulous and exacting will be the evidence demanded to convict him.

D
uring the week of June 27, two important developments occurred in the Nelson case. The start of his trial was fixed at July 26. And the court finally appointed two defense lawyers, James H. Stitt and Chester Young, who immediately set about seeking a postponement.

The basis of their petition was twofold. Though Stitt, in particular, felt that he’d been saddled with a thankless task, he also believed that Nelson, like everyone else, was entitled to the best possible defense. A month, Stitt argued in his motion for postponement, “is not sufficient to prepare for trial of the accused.”

An even more compelling reason was the unbridled behavior of the press, which had already done its best to convict Nelson in print. To prove his point, Stitt assembled a sheaf of clippings from the
Manitoba Free Press
and the
Winnipeg Tribune
—stories with such inflammatory headlines as
FRISCO POLICE CERTAIN PRISONER “THE GORILLA,” NELSON IDENTIFIED AS MAN WHO KILLED BUFFALO WOMAN, PHOTOGRAPH IDENTIFIED BY WOMAN. NELSON BELIEVED TO BE PHILADELPHIA STRANGLER, and PRISONER IS “HARRIS,” HUNTED KILLER, CHIEF SMITH INSISTS
.

These were just a few egregious examples of “trial by newspaper instead of trial by jury,” Stitt maintained. Given the overheated atmosphere generated by such publicity, it would be “impossible to obtain a jury impartial to the accused.” Delaying Nelson’s trial until the fall assizes would, at the very least, allow public opinion to cool off a bit.

As it happened, other members of Winnipeg’s legal establishment shared Stitt’s concern, most notably Chief Justice T. H. Mathers. At a meeting with a colleague on Monday, June 27, Mathers voiced his opinion in the most vehement terms. “I was astounded when I heard that it was fixed for the twenty-sixth of July,” he exclaimed. “You cannot get a jury to give him a fair trial now. No jury would dare acquit him, even if he is innocent.”

Firing off a letter to Attorney General W. J. Majors, Mathers blamed the Winnipeg press for having worked “the public mind into a state of excitement and indignation which renders a calm consideration of the evidence against him impossible. The newspapers have conducted a campaign during which he has been condemned over and over again…. The trial of a man for his life is a most solemn event and should be conducted in an atmosphere freed from all emotional prejudice, so far as that can be done. The trial should begin with a presumption in favor of innocence, but if Nelson is placed on trial before the press excitement has time to subside, his trial will begin with the presumption in fact that he is guilty.”

In response to this communication, Attorney General Majors composed a letter of his own, mailing copies to both J. W. Dafoe and W. L. MacTavish, editors-in-chief of the
Manitoba Free Press
and the
Winnipeg Tribune
:

Dear Sir:

Re Rex vs. Nelson

As you are aware, much publicity has been given to this particular case and the public mind is still very much inflamed.

The prisoner is now committed for trial. The date of trial has been fixed for July 26th.

The comments and news items which are now constantly
appearing in the two leading newspapers of our City, if continued, may constitute a ground for postponement of the trial, which you will understand is undesirable. Hence, it is essential in the interests of justice that all further unnecessary publicity should cease until the trial is over.

I take it that the general public is now reasonably well informed about the case and that no interests will suffer if, until the trial is over, the press refrains as far as possible from publishing anything about the matter.

I shall, therefore, be glad if you will give the necessary instructions so that your good paper may, until the trial is over, refrain from publishing anything more than such as is absolutely necessary about this Nelson case.

This appeal worked—at least to an extent. The kind of shrill banner headlines that had run for two solid weeks quickly disappeared from the front pages.

Still, both newspapers continued to feature regular items on the case—no surprise, given the public’s insatiable hunger for any tidbits about Nelson. The very day after Majors sent his letter, the
Tribune
printed a titillating piece headlined
MAN SLEPT IN ROOM WHERE SLAIN GIRL’S BODY LAY
.

The story recounted the macabre experience of a railroad conductor named Joe Boner, who had taken a room in Mrs. Hill’s boardinghouse on Saturday afternoon, June 10, the day after Nelson absconded from Winnipeg. As it happened, his room adjoined the one Nelson had occupied.

Several hours after his arrival, Boner went off to the Garrick movie theater to see the new George Jessel comedy,
Private Izzy Murphy
. Returning after midnight, the bleary-eyed boarder mistakenly entered the room adjacent to his own, tumbled into bed, and immediately fell into a profound slumber. It wasn’t until the following evening—when his fellow tenant, Bernhardt Mortenson, caught sight of Lola Cowan’s hidden corpse—that Boner realized he had spent the night “with the girl’s naked body huddled under his bed” (as the
Tribune
wrote).