Bestial (41 page)

At no point would Nelson display the faultest glimmer of remorse. As far as he was concerned, there was only one real victim in the case. He was certainly capable of feeling sorry—but (like other sociopathic killers before and since) only for himself.

†

Editorial,
Manitoba Free Press
, November 9, 1927

A very real difficulty at the Nelson trial was to connect Nelson, in the mind’s eye, with the murder for which he was being tried…. Nelson is a small, young man, smoothskinned and without a single indication in his appearance that would warn the ordinary observer against him as a dangerous person. The effort which had to be made to see this inoffensive-looking youth engaged in the furious violence of a bestial murder strained the imagination heavily.

C
ourtroom Number One of the Manitoba Law Courts Building on Kennedy Street had enough seating space for 175 spectators. But the Nelson trial was shaping up to be the hottest show in town, with thousands of people clamoring for admission. By Monday, October 31, the day before the scheduled start of the proceedings, officials had been swamped with requests. Every applicant received the same response: apart from the bench space set aside for representatives of the press and assorted local dignitaries, reserved seats were unavailable. The general public would be admitted strictly on a first-come first-served basis.

The sun had barely risen when the crowd began to gather at the Law Courts Building on Tuesday morning, November 1. By noon, nearly 2,000 people had shown up—more than ten times the number that the courtroom could accommodate. The majority of them were women, many teenage girls,
who packed the corridors and spilled out onto the streets, buzzing with anticipation. To more than one observer, they seemed less like a bunch of courtroom spectators than a mob of movie fans at a gala premiere. If Barrymore himself were about to appear, they couldn’t have been more excited.

A reporter from the
Winnipeg Tribune
was on hand to describe the tumultuous scene when the courtroom doors were finally opened at 1:30
P.M.
: “A great shout went up, and the mob lunged forward like a tidal wave. It was like a river trying to pass through a bottle-neck, and policemen on guard at the door were forced to use all their strength to prevent injury to members of the throng.” Within minutes, the room was filled to capacity—every seat taken, every inch of standing space occupied. The doors were shut and locked, with no one permitted to enter or leave until court was adjourned for the day.

The remainder of the crowd continued to jam the hallways and mill in the street, still hoping for a glimpse of the notorious figure whose alleged crimes had (as the
Free Press
put it in in that morning’s edition) “staggered and terrified the civilized world.”

When Nelson was finally led to the prisoner’s dock shortly after 2:00
P.M.
, an excited rumble filled the courtroom, as the spectators half-rose from their seats, craning their necks for a look at the main attraction. But if they were expecting some sort of sideshow monstrosity—a hulking human gorilla, led in chains by his captors—they were gravely disappointed.

In spite of his wrist manacles and the two burly guards at his side, Nelson—who was enjoying his first exposure to the outside world after nearly five months in solitary—seemed relaxed, even cheerful. Passing the witness area, he recognized two of the provincial police officers, Constables Sampson and Outerson, who had accompanied him on the train ride from Killarney to Winnipeg.

“Glad to see you again, boys,” Nelson said with a big grin. “You were awfully good to me when we first got acquainted.”

As the guards led the prisoner to his place and undid his manacles, one pretty young woman exclaimed to her companion, “Why, he’s the best-looking man here!”

“He certainly doesn’t look like a bad man to me,” her friend agreed.

And indeed, freshly groomed and decked out in a gray suit, beige shirt, and polka-dot tie, Nelson looked not merely presentable but downright distinguished. In a photographic portrait taken at the time of his trial, he sits with his chin up, his expression calm and thoughtful, looking less like America’s most notorious killer than a business executive posing for the frontispiece of his company’s annual report.

As the jury selection got underway, Nelson appeared to take a keen interest in matters. But it wasn’t long before he was stifling yawns. For the rest of the day—and indeed, for most of the trial—he seemed thoroughly disengaged, staring off into space when he wasn’t shutting his eyes, tilting his head back against the marble wall behind him, and dozing off. He stirred to life only once on Tuesday, barking out a laugh when one of the spectators dropped a jar of peanut butter she had smuggled in for lunch and its contents spattered the legs of her neighbors.

And in truth—though the trial would dominate the news and keep the public transfixed for the remainder of the week—it offered very little in the way of drama or suspense. The flat, almost perfunctory, tone of the proceedings was set by the opening statement of prosecutor R. B. Graham, delivered on Wednesday, November 2, following the full empanelment of the jury. The courtroom was absolutely silent as Graham addressed the twelve jurymen: seven farmers, a machinist, a steel worker, a warehouse superintendent, a fireman, and a chauffeur.

Speaking in a brisk, businesslike voice—as though to suggest that the facts were so clear he could dispense with eloquence—Graham laid out a plain, step-by-step chronology of Nelson’s movements from the time he arrived in Winnipeg until his recapture in Killarney.

After a brief examination of Lewis B. Foote—the professional photographer who had taken pictures of Emily Patterson’s body—Graham began to build his case with painstaking care. Over the next day and a half, he called nearly forty witnesses to the stand, beginning with William Chandler and John T. Hanna, the motorists who had driven Nelson from the United States to Winnipeg, and finishing
up with Detective Sergeant James H. Hoskins, who had been on board the special train dispatched to Killarney following the—Gorilla Man” ’s escape. The obvious intention of the prosecutor, as one commentator noted, was to present a straightforward—statement of facts, each one a link which, when connected one with the other, would furnish a chain so finished and complete as to render [Nelson’s] guilt unassailable.”

The nearest thing to drama during this part of the trial occurred on Wednesday afternoon when William Patterson took the stand. As the entire roomful of spectators strained forward to catch every word, Patterson repeated the same wrenching tale he had related at the inquest in June. In a choked, barely audible voice, he described the devastating moment when, moments after begging God for the strength and guidance to find his missing wife, he found her violated corpse shoved beneath the bed he was praying beside.

When Graham asked him to identify a photograph of his murdered wife, Patterson nearly broke down. The poor man’s suffering was so painful to see that several female spectators broke into sobs, and when Patterson was finally excused from the stand, the audience let out a collective sigh of relief.

In his cross-examination of the witnesses, Nelson’s defense counsel, James Stitt, did his best to raise doubts about their testimony. He tried to discredit Sam Waldman by suggesting that the clothier, who had already applied for his share of the reward money, had a vested interest in seeing Nelson convicted. He brought out inconsistencies between the testimony of various witnesses. (Catherine Hill, for example, insisted that Nelson had arrived at her rooming house shortly before 5:00
P.M.
, wearing a shabby blue coat, baggy brown trousers, and floppy gray cap—clothes that the secondhand dealer Jake Garber testified he had sold to Nelson at 5:30
P.M.
) But Stitt, who had absolutely no evidence to offer in rebuttal, was obviously grasping at straws.

By Thursday afternoon, the prosecution rested what was clearly an impregnable case.

†

“Now then, Mrs. Fuller, doesn’t it just come down to this: he was jealous, and he was eccentric?”

“He was what?”

“Eccentric-odd.”

“He was absolutely insane.”

From the cross-examination of Mary Fuller

S
ince the verdict appeared to be a foregone conclusion, the most suspenseful issue at the trial had to do with the defense strategy. From the start of the proceedings, observers had been wondering if the “Gorilla” would be put on the stand.

As soon as the defense opened its case, however, it became clear that attorney Stitt had no intention of having Nelson testify. Beyond a stubborn assertion of innocence, Nelson simply had nothing to offer in the way of an alibi. Stitt’s only recourse, therefore, was an insanity plea, and this tactic provided some of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

Everyone in the courtroom, with a single exception, was riveted by the sight of the witness who made her way up to the stand on Thursday morning, November 3-a small, white-haired old woman wearing a black dress with whitelace cuffs and collar. Though Nelson hadn’t laid eyes on his
wife for over a year, he was the only person there who seemed utterly indifferent to her presence. Throughout her emotional testimony, he yawned, dozed, or let out an occasional, low-throated chuckle—vivid proof of the bizarre affect and behavior Mary Fuller had come to bear witness to.

Stitt lost no time in showing that Nelson had already been deemed insane by experts. “I believe,” he began, “that you once gave evidence in court concerning a matter hi which your husband was involved?”

In a hushed, tremulous voice, Mary confirmed that she had indeed been a witness once before, in May 1921, when her husband—under his birth name, Earle Ferrai—7had been arrested for attacking a young girl in San Francisco and was subsequently committed to Napa State Hospital.

“What is the hospital used for?” asked Stitt.

“For mental cases,” Mary replied. “It is the state hospital for the insane.”

When Stitt inquired if Mary had seen her husband following his arrest, she told of visiting him at the Detention Hospital in San Francisco, where she found him strapped into a straitjacket and babbling “about seeing faces on the wall.” At a later point in her testimony, she recounted her visits to Napa and described the other patients on Earle’s ward: the young man who had cut out his tongue because “he imagined that his father and mother despised him,” the former attorney who delivered strange impassioned speeches, as though he were addressing a jury.

Having established the defendant’s long history as a mental patient-and offered both his commitment papers and psychiatric records as evidence-Stitt proceeded to ask Mary about her day-to-day life with Nelson.

“Well,” she sighed, “he always seemed to me to be of a type having no moral responsibility whatever.” Then, guided by Stitt’s queries, she offered example after example of the outlandish, bewildering, and occasionally terrifying behavior her husband had displayed from the earliest days of their marriage.

She began by giving instances of his “insane jealousy”—the times he would accuse her of making eyes at everyone from passing pedestrians to streetcar conductors, or berate her for caring more about her female friends than she did
for him. She described her fury at him when he destroyed her prized photograph of the British politician John Dulon and her utter mortification when, during her stay at St. Mary’s Hospital, he loudly accused her of flirting with her doctor. And she repeated her brother’s assessment of Nelson: “That man is crazy!”

She recounted other humiliations she had suffered at Earle’s hands: the time they had gone househunting in Oakland and Earle had offered the real-estate agent a two-dollar down payment; the occasion when he had shown up at Miss Marker’s school at midday, wearing a tux, a pleated dress shirt, and a safety pin instead of a tie; his appalling manners at restaurants, where, after drenching his food in olive oil, he would stick his face in the plate and slurp up his dinner, much to the disgust of the other customers.

And then there were his other weird and disturbing tendencies: his taste for “freakish clothes”; his “childlike” behavior; his bizarre bathing method (which consisted of pouring a glass of water over his toes); his periodic and protracted disappearances; his religious delusions; his morose, even suicidal moods; his devastating headaches; his vicious threats and violent outbursts.

Mary remained on the stand for over an hour. When Stitt concluded his questioning at around 3:00
P.M.
, Graham offered a cursory cross-examination, in which he tried to suggest that Nelson’s erratic behavior amounted to little more than “eccentricity.”

But Mary was adamant. “He was absolutely insane.”

Fifteen minutes later, she climbed down from the stand and returned to her seat. She had managed to paint a vivid picture of a seriously unbalanced personality. But as Stitt well knew, her looks were just as telling as her words. That the sturdy young man seated in the prisoner’s dock had chosen such a grizzled wife was, perhaps even more than anything Mary had said, eloquent testimony to his aberrant mind.

Following Mary Fuller’s testimony, court was recessed for the day. When the trial resumed at ten the next morning, Friday, November 4, the defense called its second—and final—witness: Nelson’s unfailingly loyal aunt, Lillian Fabian.

Fighting back tears throughout much of her testimony, Lillian confirmed Mary’s account of Earle’s bizarre fashion sense, table manners, and work habits. She also supplied additional details, largely about her nephew’s childhood.

Earle had been a “morbidlike” little boy, she declared, who “never cared to play with other children” and whose behavior grew even more disturbed after he injured his head in a bike accident. She described Earle’s disconcerting effect on her friends, who were so unsettled by the young boy’s behavior that, after a while, they found excuses to avoid the Nelson home.

“He had a habit with all my friends,” Lillian recalled. “He would sit there and he would never speak to them. He would sit looking up at the wall with his eyes turned up, just like he was looking in space all the time, and he wouldn’t speak to my friends and say good day or hello or anything, which used to cause me to feel humiliated a great deal.” And then there were the times when “without anybody asking him, he would get up and walk on his hands and pick very big chairs up with his teeth. He would pick them up and hold them up straight in his teeth.”