Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Finally, on the evening of the sixth day, his delirium subsided. The family physician, an elderly gentleman named Monin, peered into Earle’s eyes, palpated his wound, and put a few questions to the boy. Then, reaching for Mrs. Nelson’s hand, he gave it a comforting squeeze. He assured the anxious woman that she had nothing to worry about. The crisis had passed.

  Little Earle, he declared—in what must surely rank as one of the least prescient prognoses in the annals of medicine—would be “just fine.”

  It would be another ten days before Earle was back on his feet. During his recuperation, his grandmother would sometimes sit at his bedside for hours and read the Bible to him. He especially liked the part in Revelation about the coming of the great beast:

  And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority…. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and that no man might buy or sell, save he that hath the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

  Before he reached adolescence, Earle had committed this passage to memory. He often mulled over its meaning, trying to puzzle out the identity of the beast. In his deepening mania, he came to believe that this biblical abomination was afoot in the modern world.

  Interestingly, there is one connection he seems never to have made. It had to do with his own name. In the history books—books with titles like Chronicle of Crime, Crimes of the Twentieth Century, and A Criminal History of Mankind—the notorious “Gorilla Murderer” of the 1920s is invariably listed under the name “Earle Leonard Nelson.” But “Nelson” was his mother’s name, the name he was given when his grandmother took him in. His father’s name, the one Earle was actually born with, was different. It was Ferral.

  Of course, a name is not destiny, though there have always been some who believe otherwise (one of the messianic delusions of Charles Manson, for example, was that his last name was actually an anagram of “Son of Man”). Still, it is a striking coincidence that the little boy who would grow up to be the dreaded creature known as the “Gorilla Man” was born with a name so close in spelling, and identical in pronunciation, to the word feral. The dictionary definition of feral is “of or characteristic of a wild animal; brutal.” It derives from the Latin fera, meaning “wild beast.”

  As Earle grew older, he came to identify the great beast of Revelation first with Pope Benedict XV and later, after World War I broke out, with Kaiser Wilhelm II

  It seems never to have occurred to him that it was he, not the pope or the kaiser, who was born with the name of the beast.

  3

  †

  Lillian Fabian

  He was just like a child, and we considered him like a child, and of course, we would never go too far with him, because there was always the fear of him.

  Of the members of his grandmother’s household, it was Nelson’s Aunt Lillian who cared for him most. She was only ten when the tiny orphan came to live with her family, and from the very start, she lavished a sisterly love on the boy. To the end of his days she stuck by him, even when the rest of the world proclaimed him a monster. She had a simple answer for those who expressed wonder at her steady devotion. Earle, she would say, was her “own flesh and blood.”

  It is a mark of her fidelity that when her mother died in 1908, one year after Earle’s near-fatal bike accident, Lillian assumed the burden of his upbringing. By then, she was married to a man named Henry Fabian and living in her own house at 3573 20th Street. For the next seven years—though Earle would spend stretches of time apart from the Fabians, either staying with his Uncle Willis or disappearing to places unknown—he was essentially a member of his Aunt Lillian’s household.

  By the age of fourteen he had dropped out of school and launched into a succession of menial jobs—so many that even he quickly lost count of them. He worked as a jeweler’s clerk, hash-house cook, window washer, hotel porter, carpenter’s assistant, bricklayer, upholsterer, and common laborer, rarely keeping a job for more than a few weeks, often for only a day or two. Though he tended to make a favorable first impression on his employers—he could be polite and well spoken, and his physical strength was evident from the spread of his shoulders and the breadth of his chest—his underlying disturbance never kept itself hidden for long.

  A foreman might assign him a simple task, only to discover, twenty minutes later, that Nelson had passed the time staring fixedly skyward, as though riveted by a vision in the air. Or perhaps the peculiar young man, prompted by the secret voices that chattered inside his skull, might simply lay down his tools in the midst of a job and wander off from the worksite, never to return again.

  At his best, there was an endearing, puppy-dog quality about Earle—at least in the eyes of his aunt. Protective of him since birth, she perceived him as an overgrown baby. Certainly, there was something infantile in the way he swilled his food at mealtimes, as well as in his fashion sense. Now that he was earning his own money, it was harder than ever to keep him presentable. He might set out for work in clean, decent clothes, only to return later in the day dressed in frayed yellow pants, a baggy red sweater, leather leggings, and a cowboy hat. What he didn’t throw away on such outlandish garments, he would squander on trinkets—gaudy dime-store rings, stickpins with paste “diamonds,” and cheap, oversized sunglasses.

  His bouts of wild enthusiasm, which alternated with periods of sullen withdrawal, could also be as unrealistic as a child’s. When his aunt informed him that her brother Willis was planning to construct a three-story apartment house, Earle—who was fifteen at the time—exclaimed, “Why doesn’t Uncle Will let me build that house? I could do it all myself, do all the plumbing and everything. He would save so much money!” Lillian just smiled and said nothing. She had a clear recollection of the time, one year earlier, when Earle had volunteered to paint the interior of her own house. After working furiously at the job for a day or two, he had disappeared from home and was gone for three weeks.

  For all her tenderness of feeling, Earle’s freakish behavior could be a source of deep distress to his long-suffering aunt. (How Henry Fabian felt about acquiring—along with a wife—her bizarre, hulking nephew, history does not record.) Lillian found it especially trying when Earle “acted up” around her friends. On several occasions, for example, when company was over for dinner, Earle suddenly looked up from his plate and began spewing obscenities. When Lillian reproached him, he just gave a mischievous grin, then went back to slurping up his food which, as usual, he had soaked in several cups of olive oil.

  At other times, Earle would stroll into the kitchen—where Lillian was enjoying a cup of coffee with a female friend—and, without speaking a word, stare at the visitor in such an unsettling way that, after a few minutes, the woman would grab her belongings and hurry away, stammering an excuse to her embarrassed hostess. Or Earle might come walking into the room on his hands, feet flailing in the air, and position himself in front of the startled guest like a circus acrobat. Or he might step behind an empty chair, bend over and clamp his mouth around the wooden backrest, then lift up the chair with his teeth.

  It wasn’t long before Lillian’s acquaintances began making excuses every time she invited them over to the house.

  Still, she could not help feeling sorry for Earle. He seemed so vulnerable and friendless—a lost soul. As far as she could tell, he had no companions his own age. Even as he grew into late adolescence—a barrel-chested youth, not especially tall but powerfully built—he sought out the company of much younger children, like little Arthur West who lived two doors down from the Fabian house.

  Arthur, nine years old when Earle was fifteen, was in awe of the o
lder boy, who would impress his young admirer by bragging of his exploits in the Barbary Coast or showing off the spoils of his shoplifting. It wasn’t long, however, before Arthur’s father forbade him, on pain of a hiding, from associating with Earle. The Nelson boy was “deranged,” Mr. West declared. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it.

  Shut up inside his room for hours on end, Earle would spend much of the tune poring over his favorite reading matter. Though his formal education had ended after seventh grade, he grew up to be a voracious consumer of dime detective novels, tabloid newspapers, and the tracts of various occult and pseudoscientific beliefs—phrenology, astronomy, palmistry, spiritualism. And always, of course, the Bible.

  Passing by his locked room, Lillian could hear the muffled drone of Earle’s voice as he chanted from the Book of Revelation.

  So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a gold cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.

  Even as an adolescent, however, Earle had a secret life that Lillian knew nothing about. Possessed of a furious sexual hunger that even his compulsive masturbation could not allay, he was frequenting the brothels of the Barbary Coast by the time he was fifteen. He had also begun drinking heavily. His periodic disappearances—those times when he would vanish from home and return days or even weeks later, claiming he had been out searching for work—were, in reality, given over to drunken debauches, binges of whoring and boozing and brawling.

  Though he was a sight when he returned home—his face battered and puffy, his clothes as bedraggled as a derelict’s—his aunt never questioned him closely. He was already beyond her control. She had long ago given up any effort to discipline or improve him. With her deep sense of family loyalty, she simply put up with him, though she had good reason by then to wish that Earle would simply go away—move out of her house and never return.

  She had two good reasons, actually, named Henry Jr. and Rose. They were Lillian’s son and daughter, already in grade school by the time Earle was sixteen. How the children felt about their uncle no one can say. Certainly Earle, in his freakish way, could be generous with them. Sometimes he would empty his pockets after a day’s work and, in spite of Lillian’s protests, hand out his entire salary, five or six dollars, to the children.

  Still, it must have been disturbing to the little ones to see their uncle when he slipped into one of his “moods” and began holding animated conversations with invisible beings, or spouting profanities at the dinner table, or staggering around the house on his hands.

  Lillian, of course, was used to Earle’s peculiarities. But with two little ones in the house, even her feelings underwent a change. Not that she would ever dream of casting him out of her home. He was her kith and kin, and she would always feel responsible for him. But by seventeen Earle was not just an encumbrance but a threatening presence. And for the first time since he came to live in her household, Lillian was afraid.

  4

  †

  Earle Nelson, interview, Napa State Hospital, May 1918

  Well, I have a stronger tendency to seek higher ideals and sensible things than I used to.

  Given her nephew’s wildly erratic work habits, Lillian must have wondered where he got his spending money. Though he rarely managed to hang onto even the most menial job for more than a few weeks, he continued to throw cash around on his usual indulgences—outlandish clothing, flashy gimcracks, and a wide assortment of printed trash, from lurid expos’3;s of white slavery to such pseudoscientific tomes as Professor William Windsor’s Phrenology Made Easy. He was also hitting the bottle harder than ever, returning home some evenings so redolent of booze that he seemed to have splashed it on like cheap cologne.

  Since the logical conclusion was hard to avoid—that her nephew was deriving his income from an illicit source—it seems likely that Lillian simply preferred to ignore the truth. Stubbornly loyal to her “flesh and kin,” she did not want to know the worst about Earle. From the day he was born, she had helped raise him; he was almost like one of her own children. A cynic might also surmise that she was motivated at least partly by another, less selfless motive. After all, Earle was contributing to his upkeep, and whatever cash he didn’t squander on himself generally ended up in the household coffers.

  As he grew into manhood, moreover, he was becoming increasingly unpredictable and hard to control. Lillian had good reason to fear that her bizarre, brooding nephew might not take kindly to prying. All in all, it was best to leave well enough alone.

  Sooner or later, however, the truth was bound to come to light. It happened in the spring of 1915. Just a month or so before, Earle had been hit with one of his periodic spells of wanderlust and had disappeared from home—much to the relief of both Lillian and her husband, who always welcomed these respites from Earle’s discomforting presence. Making his way northwards, he supported himself by picking up odd jobs on construction sites and ranches. He was also supplementing his income, as he’d been doing for a while, through petty thievery, shoplifting, and the occasional ransacking of a conveniently untended house.

  While passing through Plumas County, a rugged, sparsely populated area in the northeast corner of the state, Earle broke into an isolated cabin and was absconding with some booty just as the owner returned. Earle, who was travelling on foot, took flight into the forest but was apprehended by a posse before he made it across the county line. Two days later, Lillian’s self-willed ignorance about Earle’s criminal activities ended abruptly when she received a telegraph from the Plumas authorities, notifying her of her nephew’s arrest.

  At his trial, Lillian testified on his behalf. Her nephew was a “poor, unfortunate boy,” she tearfully declared, “orphaned when just a baby.” But her plea was unavailing. Deep-chested, thick-muscled, with a prematurely hardened air, Earle didn’t seem much like a boy. Besides, he had been caught red-handed.

  In the late summer of 1915, just a few months after his eighteenth birthday, Earle Leonard Nelson entered San Quentin prison to begin a two-year sentence for burglarly.

  One year earlier, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip gunned down a visiting dignitary, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, and plunged the Western world into chaos. Less than two months after the assassination, Europe was at war.

  The United States declared its neutrality, but during the years of Earle’s imprisonment the country was drawn inexorably closer to the maelstrom. In May 1915—the very month of Earle’s arrest—a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 passengers, including 128 Americans. This “act of piracy” (as former President Theodore Roosevelt branded it) provoked a widespread clamor for war.

  President Woodrow Wilson, however, managed to resist the outcry, and in June 1916—just weeks before Earle’s first anniversary behind bars—he was renominated by the Democrats under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” By then, however, even Wilson had begun to acknowledge that the United States could not remain “an ostrich with its head in the sand” forever.

  The turning point came in February 1917, when Germany launched a ruthless campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping, including American merchant vessels. On the third of the month, President Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany. Around the same time, the British Secret Service intercepted a coded telegram from the German foreign minister, Dr. Alfred von Zimmermann, to his ambassador in Mexico. Zimmermann, who clearly foresaw America’s impending involvement, wante
d Mexico to enter the war on Germany’s side. In return, the kaiser’s government would reward its new ally not only with “generous financial support” but with the reacquisition of Mexico’s “conquered” territories—Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—once the United States suffered its inevitable defeat.

  The outrage provoked by the “Zimmermann telegram”—which was blazoned on front pages from coast to coast—proved to be (in the words of one historian) the final nail “in the coffin of American neutrality.” Clearly there were no limits to German perfidy. On April 2, 1917, President Wilson, proclaiming that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” asked Congress for a declaration of war.

  When Earle Leonard Nelson emerged from San Quentin just a few weeks later, George M. Cohan’s rousing ditty seemed to be on everyone’s lips:

  Over there—over there—

  Send the word, send the word

  Over there—

  That the Yanks are coming,

  The Yanks are coming,

  The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere!

  Like millions of his contemporaries, Earle was infused with patriotic fervor. No sooner was he released from prison than—using his birthname, Ferral—he enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army and was sent to a training camp in northern California.

  It would seem, however, that Earle was not cut out for the rigors of military life. Across the sea, millions of young men were enduring the terrors of humanity’s first mechanized war—the hell of the trenches, where soldiers wallowed in foul slime while rats gorged on the flesh of the unburied dead; the horror of mustard gas, which left its victims drowning in the bloody fluid that inundated their lungs; the unspeakable mutilations caused by machine-gun fire and artillery shells. As one medical orderly wrote, recalling the aftermath of a typical engagement, “It was difficult to select the most urgent cases. Men had lost arms and legs, brains oozed out of shattered skulls, and lungs protruded from riven chests; many had lost their faces and were, I should think, unrecognizable to their friends… . One poor chap had lost his nose and most of his face, and we were obliged to take off an arm, the opposite hand, and extract two bullets like shark’s teeth from his thigh, besides minor operations.”