Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Still, the officers had no reason to suspect the estimable young man. The newspapers ran a few stories on the case, while the police fruitlessly pursued their investigation. Theo Durrant made a personal visit to Mrs. Noble to offer his own singular brand of reassurance. There was no doubt in his mind, he declared, that Blanche was still alive, though probably imprisoned in a house of prostitution. He would do everything in his power, he vowed, to rescue the poor girl from bondage.

  In the meantime, Durrant turned his attentions to another lady friend. She was a petite, twenty-one-year-old brunette named Minnie Williams, who had come to know and love Theo through their shared involvement in the church.

  On Good Friday, April 12,1895—nine days after Blanche Lamont’s disappearance—Minnie Williams left her boardinghouse at around 7:00 P.M., informing the landlady that she was going off to attend a meeting of the Young People’s Society at the home of its supervisor, Dr. Vogel. She never made it to the gathering. Not far from the Emanuel Baptist Church, she met Theo Durrant. Escorting her to the darkened building, he unlocked the front door with his personal key and led her to the seclusion of the library.

  Later that evening, at around 9:30 P.M., Theo showed up by himself at Dr. Vogel’s house. The young man’s normally pallid complexion was even whiter than usual, his hair was dishevelled, his brow beaded with sweat. Explaining that he had been stricken with a sudden bout of dyspepsia, Durrant hurried to the bathroom. When he emerged a while later, he appeared completely recovered.

  The rest of the evening passed so pleasantly that Theo was sorry to see it end. Still, it had been a tiring day and he needed some sleep—particularly since he was scheduled to leave town early the next morning on an outing with the signal corps. They were heading for Mount Diablo, fifty miles from the city.

  Durrant and his fellow volunteers had already reached their destination when several middle-aged ladies arrived at the Emanuel Baptist Church the following day, April 13, 1895, to decorate it for Easter. After completing their task, they repaired to the church library and immediately spotted a reddish-brown trail that led to a closed-off storage room. One of the women pulled open the door, let out a shriek, and faulted. Others ran into the street, crying for the police.

  The sight that had sent them screaming from the church was Minnie Williams’ mutilated corpse, sprawled on the floor of the storage room.

  The young woman had been subjected to a monstrous assault. The condition of her body was vividly described in a contemporary account.

  Her clothing was torn and disheveled. She had been gagged, and that in a manner indicative of a fiend rather than a man. A portion of her underclothing had been thrust down her throat with a stick, her tongue being terribly lacerated by the operation. A cut across her wrist had severed both arteries and tendons. She had been stabbed in each breast, and directly over her heart was a deep cut in which a portion of a broken knife remained. This was an ordinary silver table-knife, one of those used in the church at entertainments where refreshments were served. It was round at the end, and so dull that great force must have been used to inflict the fearful wounds; indeed, it appeared that the cold-blooded wretch had deliberately unfastened his victim’s dress that the knife might penetrate her flesh. The little room was covered with blood.

  Later, after examining the young woman’s remains, the coroner concluded that Minnie Williams had been raped after death.

  This time suspicion fell immediately on Theo Durrant. That suspicion was confirmed when, searching Durrant’s bedroom, investigators discovered Minnie Williams’ purse stuffed inside the pocket of the suit jacket he had worn to Dr. Vogel’s gathering the evening before.

  By Sunday morning, the San Francisco Chronicle was openly naming Durrant as the killer, not only of Minnie Williams but of Blanche Lament as well—even though there was no definitive proof that the latter had been murdered.

  But that situation was about to change.

  That same morning—Easter Sunday, April 14, 1895—a party of police officers arrived at Emanuel Baptist Church to conduct a search. They had little hope of success. After all, the Lamont girl had been missing for eleven days, and it seemed highly unlikely that a decomposing corpse could have been stashed on the premises without attracting any notice, particularly during the busy week preceding Easter. Still, they wanted to cover every possibility.

  After making a thorough, fruitless search of the main part of the building, they ascended to the steeple. Overlooking Bartlett Street, the steeple had a strictly ornamental function, since it housed no bell. In fact, it was completely boarded up from inside. Few members of the church had ever entered it.

  As they pushed open the steeple door, however, the investigators were immediately assaulted by a putrid stench. One of the officers struck a match, and its flickering light revealed the source of the fetor.

  “Upon the floor of the lower room of the tower, just inside the door,” wrote one reporter, “lay the outraged, nude, and bloated remains of what had once been a beautiful and cultivated girl, Blanche Lamont. A glance told the experienced searchers how the unfortunate young lady had met her death. About her neck were blue streaks, the marks of the strong, cruel fingers that had been imbedded in her tender flesh, choking out her young life. The face was fearfully distorted, the mouth being open, exposing the pearly teeth, and attesting the terrible death the poor girl had died.”

  That the outrage was the work of a medical student seemed confirmed by the singular position of the corpse. Its head “had been raised by placing a piece of wood under it, or ‘blocked,’ in the parlance of medical students, who so arrange cadavers on the dissection table.” As with Minnie Williams, the autopsy revealed that Blanche Lamont had been the victim of a necrophiliac assault.

  News of the discovery quickly spread thoroughout the Bay Area. By noon on that glorious April day, it seemed, one contemporary has recorded, as though “the entire city had poured into the streets. Thousands crowded around the church, while the streets in front of the newspaper offices were packed with masses of humanity, all struggling to get a view of the bulletin boards.”

  Telegraphs were dispatched to every sheriff’s office in the vicinity of Mount Diablo. At 5:00 P.M., the San Francisco police received a message from one of their own, a detective named Anthoney, who had set out from the city as soon as Blanche Lamont’s corpse was found. He had tracked down and apprehended Durrant at a place called Walnut Creek, not far from Mount Diablo.

  By the time Anthoney and his captive were headed back to San Francisco, the city was in an uproar. An enormous mob assembled at the ferryhouse to await their arrival from Oakland. Only the presence of a large police contingent prevented a lynching.

  Durrant’s trial, which commenced in September 1895, was a nationwide sensation. For the three weeks of its duration, the courtroom was packed to overflowing, mostly with young women who couldn’t seem to get enough of the accused. One pretty, blonde-haired fan—dubbed “The Sweet-Pea Girl” by the press—presented him daily with a bouquet of the flowers.

  Much to the dismay of his female admirers—and the disappointment of his lawyers, who did their best to cast suspicion on the church’s pastor, the Rev. John George Gibson—it took the jury only five minutes to convict Durrant. He was sentenced to die without delay.

  His attorneys, however, managed to postpone his execution for three years. Finally, on January 7, 1898, Durrant was led to the gallows. He died insisting that he was “an innocent boy.”

  The psychological specialists who examined him, however, had formed a very different opinion, declaring him a “moral idiot.” Those who sought explanations for this deficiency in his family background were tantalized by his parents’ behavior on the day of his execution.

  Immediately after the hanging, the prisoner’s corpse was placed in an open coffin and carried into a waiting room. Durrant’s formerly handsome face was a ghastly sight—skin blackened, eyes bulging, tongue jutting grotesquely from his gaping lips.


  When his parents arrived to claim the body, a prison official, as a gesture of courtesy, asked if they might not care for some tea. Mr. and Mrs. Durrant leapt at the offer whereupon a tray, loaded not only with tea but with a complete roast-beef-and-potato dinner, was brought into the room.

  Then, with their dead child’s body stretched out only a few feet away, Theo’s parents sat down to enjoy their midday repast. Even the convict who had carried in the tray shook his head in disgust when he overheard Mrs. Durrant ask her husband for a second helping of beef.

  Fortified by their meal, Durrant’s parents were now faced with a dilemma: how to dispose of their son’s corpse. Public detestation of Durrant was so intense that no cemetery would accept him. His parents were finally forced to transport the remains to Los Angeles for cremation.

  “The Durrant murders and the shocking disclosures that followed stirred the people of the Pacific coast as nothing did before,” wrote one of his contemporaries, “and the rejoicing at his death was almost universal.”

  Indeed, the people of the Pacific coast had gone to extraordinary lengths to expunge every trace of Durrant’s existence. Nothing, not even his corpse, was suffered to remain. By refusing him even a burial plot, the citizenry of San Francisco were sending a message—that creatures like Theo Durrant would never be allowed to defile their fair city.

  It’s a grim irony then that, even before it had purged itself of one monster, San Francisco had already become the birthplace of another.

  He was born there on May 12, 1897, while Durrant’s lawyers were mounting a last, desperate effort to save their client from the gallows. Like Durrant he would grow up to take a lively interest in religion (though he would never be mistaken for a choirboy). Their sexual proclivities were similar, too, since they shared a taste for postmortem rape.

  There was, however, a major difference between the criminal lives of the two men. Appalling as it was, Durrant’s violent career was mercifully brief. It lasted only nine days, the time between his first and final atrocities.

  Earle Leonard Nelson would also savage two women—one in San Francisco, one in San Jose—during a nine-day period.

  In his case, however, that was only the beginning.

  2

  †

  Donald J. Sears, To Kill Again

  The early home life of many serial killers is often one in which a stable, nurturing atmosphere is sorely lacking.

  Earle Leonard Nelson wasn’t the kind of child people cooed over. His only known baby picture—according to one observer, a writer named Douthwaite—showed “a loose-mouthed degenerate infant with the abstracted vacancy of expression which is one of the hallmarks of degeneracy.”

  Of course, Douthwaite’s description owed a great deal to hindsight. At the time it was written, Nelson had already grown up to be a monster—a killer so terrifying that, to his Jazz Age contemporaries, he seemed like a creature of myth. Homely as it was, Nelson’s infant face couldn’t possibly have foretold his future pathology.

  Still, there is no doubt that, from a very early age, little Earle had a deeply unsettling effect upon people. He was the sort of youngster that parents warn their own children to stay away from. Not that his peers required such admonitions. They could sense his abnormality all by themselves.

  He was only nine and a half months old when his young mother, Frances, died of syphilis. His father, James, followed her to the grave seven months later, a victim of the same disease.

  The tiny orphan was taken in by his mother’s family and grew up in the home of his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Jennie Nelson, a widow in her mid-forties. There were two other youngsters in the household—Mrs. Nelson’s surviving children, Willis and Lillian, who were twelve and ten respectively when their older sister, Earle’s mother, died.

  Little is known about Mrs. Nelson. She appears to have been a hard-pressed, unimaginative woman who sought solace from the burdens of her life in a particularly zealous brand of Protestantism. She instilled in her young charge a lifelong fascination with Scripture, particularly with the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation. If asked, she would have insisted that she felt an unqualified devotion for little Earle. Certainly, she failed to perceive the full extent of his disturbance, though whether her blindness was a function of love or intellectual limitation is impossible to say.

  This is not to suggest that she was oblivious to his peculiarities. They were, after all, impossible to miss. From his earliest years, Earle was strikingly different from other children. Often possessed of a manic energy, he would, at other times, slip into a profound melancholy, withdrawing into his darkened room for days. He would sit for hours in a kitchen chair staring blankly into space or roam about the house with his head cocked in a listening attitude, as though attending to voices audible only to himself.

  In spite of Mrs. Nelson’s efforts to make him presentable, Earle’s personal habits bordered on the bizarre. His slovenliness far exceeded the normal negligence of boyhood. On various occasions, he would set out for school wearing freshly laundered garments and return in a different and dreadfully bedraggled outfit, as though he had traded clothes with a street urchin. In the winter, his grandmother would dress him in warm woolen underwear. By the time he reached home, he had somehow contrived to lose it.

  His dietary habits were equally eccentric. At dinner, he would drench his food in olive oil, put his face to the plate, and slurp up his meal like a caged beast at feeding time—much to the disgust of his little tablemates, his Uncle Willis and Aunt Lillian. They began referring to their nephew as “The Wild Man of Borneo,” the name of a famous freakshow attraction of the time.

  Their taunt had no effect on his etiquette, though it seemed to confirm some deep, inner sense of worthlessness. From his earliest years, Earle would sink into abject moods of self-loathing, an especially disconcerting phenomenon in a child so young. “I am not good for anything,” the little boy would sob. “I will never be good for anything. Nobody wants me. I would be better off out of this world.”

  His grandmother attributed his “morbid disposition” to his early misfortunes. After all, Earle’s syphilitic parents had not only left him an orphan but bequeathed him a legacy of degradation and disease. It would have taken a person of far greater insight and sophistication than Mrs. Nelson to see little Earle’s peculiarities—his stupors, strange habits, social isolation, and impaired sense of self—for what they were, the signs of an incipient psychosis.

  His conduct became even more troubling as he grew older. By the age of seven, he had already been expelled from Agassiz primary school for his uncontrollable behavior. Though he was often passive and withdrawn—avoiding the standard rough-and-tumble squabbles of boyhood—he was subject at other times to wild fits of rage, lashing out violently at his schoolmates, girls as well as boys. He took to stealing small items from neighborhood shops. Before he reached the age of ten, he had acquired a neighborhood reputation as a serious troublemaker, a young boy destined for reform school—or worse.

  Mrs. Nelson grew increasingly desperate in her efforts to deal with her grandson. She resorted to physical punishment, though this expedient grew less practical by the year as Earle matured into a deep-chested, broad-shouldered youth with powerful arms and improbably large hands. Knowing his obsession with Scripture, she attempted to appeal to his religious sensibilities, warning that the Lord would surely punish him for his transgressions.

  Nothing seemed to work. In her desperation, she took to reminding him that he was living in her home only through her good graces, and that her patience was not without limits. Unless he began to behave more normally, she would cast him into the streets and let him fend for himself.

  It is no wonder, then, that Nelson grew up feeling like a perennial outsider. His grandmother’s home often seemed less like a loving refuge than a lodging house, a place where he resided not as a cherished family member but as a temporary, barely tolerated guest.

  On April 18, 1906, one month befor
e Nelson turned nine, San Francisco was rocked by a massive earthquake measuring 8.25 on the Richter scale. In less than a minute, the awesome tremor, its energy “greater than all the explosives used in World War II” (according to one historian), toppled buildings, buckled streets, and ruptured virtually every water main in the city, leaving the hydrants dry and the firefighters helpless. In the three ensuing days, the city was devastated by a great conflagration. By the time the fire had run its course, almost 500 city blocks lay in ruins, 25,000 buildings were in ashes, and more than 450 lives had been lost.

  To the mind of little Earle, steeped as it was in Scripture, the cataclysm seemed like a biblical story, the fall of Jericho or the Lord’s vengeance on Sodom and Gomorrah. The sights and sounds and smell of destruction filled him with a strange exhilaration. Like everyone else who lived through the great San Francisco earthquake, he would remember it for the rest of his days, though his imagination tended to linger on one particular facet of the event.

  At the height of the catastrophe, the city was swept by rumors of armed marauders who were reportedly outraging women at gunpoint. Earle always would enjoy recalling the fearful look on the faces of his Grandma Jennie and Aunt Lillian, a pretty young woman of nineteen at the time, as they cowered behind the locked door of their house, barricaded against the shadowy prowlers outside.

  One year later, while trying to impress some older boys with his daring, Earle raced across the tracks of an oncoming trolley on a beat-up two-wheeler he had inherited from his Uncle Willis. The trolley caught the rear wheel of the bike, and Earle, sent flying, landed headfirst on the cobblestones.

  He was carried back home unconscious. His grandmother nearly collapsed when she saw the ghastly wound on his right temple. For nearly a week, the boy slipped in and out of consciousness, raving wildly when he was awake.