On Thursday, June 2, two narcotics addicts well-known to police, Charles Washington of 1943 Wilkins Street and Jacques Helberg of 567 Napoleon Street, were brought in for questioning. Both men, however, were able to account for their whereabouts at the time of the murders. Nor did either of them conform to the description of a mysterious visitor glimpsed by one of Mrs. May’s neighbors, Gloria Hopkins, on the day of the slayings.
Mrs. Hopkins had been hanging out her laundry on Wednesday afternoon when she noticed “a man of medium build and dark complexion” ringing her neighbor’s bell. A few moments later, Mrs. May came to the door and, after exchanging a few words with the stranger, admitted him to the house. “That was the last I ever saw of her,” Mrs. Hopkins told the police.
Several more days went by before Detroit homicide detectives began to entertain a different theory—that the “dark-complexioned” caller seen by Mrs. Hopkins was the “Pacific Coast Bluebeard” who had recently shifted his operations to the East. By the time they came to this realization, however, the strangler was already heading westward again.
On Friday, June 4, he killed a twenty-seven-year-old landlady named Mary Cecilia Sietsema in the living room of her home at 7501 South Sangamon Street, Chicago. At first, two suspects were arrested—Michael Hirsch, a butcher known to have made a delivery to the victim on the day of the murder, and a car mechanic named Jack Grimm, who worked in a garage a short distance from the Sietsema home. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “Suspicion was cast upon Grimm when it was learned that he disappeared from work Friday afternoon and failed to return home that night.”
Both Hirsch and Grimm would quickly be cleared. Hirsch, who had fallen under suspicion partly because of some blood on his shoes, was able to prove that it had come from a wound he had sustained while opening a tub of butter in his father’s shop. And Grimm’s claim that “he had been out getting drunk” at the time of the murder was substantiated by a number of witnesses. The men were released from the Cook County jail on Monday, June 6, while the real perpetrator was moving up into northern Minnesota.
Since the previous February, he had slain twenty victims: nineteen women and one infant boy. Detectives in a dozen different cities, from San Francisco to Philadelphia, were hunting him. Though he had so far managed to elude capture—through a combination of cunning, luck, and the still-primitive state of American police work—the country was becoming a risky place for him.
And so—sometime on the morning of June 8, 1927—Earle Leonard Nelson crossed the border into Canada.
PART 4
THE GORILLA
27
†
Conrad Aiken, “And in the Human Heart”
For brief as water falling will be death …
brief as the taking, and giving, breath.
By the time he reached Winnipeg, he was tired, hungry, and desperate for cash. He had gotten a lift early that morning from a man named Chandler, who had picked him up near Warren, Minnesota, and driven him as far as Noyes, in the northwest corner of the state. From there he had made his way into Manitoba. Just outside Emerson, he had hitched a ride from another motorist, John T. Hanna, who had dropped him off in Winnipeg at around 1:15 P.M.
He spent one of his few remaining nickels on a trolley ride to Main Street, then trudged along the sidewalk until he spotted what he was looking for, a dingy little shop that peddled secondhand clothes.
The store smelled of mildew and was lit by a single bare bulb. It was so gloomy inside that it took him a moment to locate the proprietor, a balding old man named Jake Garber, who was perched on a stool behind the rear counter.
With barely a nod of hello, he launched into his story. He had just arrived from the country and was flat broke. He planned to look for a construction job in the morning but in the meantime needed some cash to pay for a room.
“Tell you what,” he said to the old man. “These clothes are too fancy anyways.” Here he gestured toward his outfit-red-striped sweater, blue woolen pants, gray felt cap, and tan loafers. “I’ll trade them for anything you got, plus a dollar.”
Garber appraised the clothes for a moment. Then, with a grudging sigh, as though he were granting an enormous favor, he eased himself off the stool and shuffled around the counter. After rooting around on his shelves for a few minutes, he returned with an armful of musty old clothes, which he laid on the counter. The dark-complexioned stranger changed hurriedly while Garber made his way to the cash register and removed a dollar.
Pocketing the money, the stranger hurried out of the store without another word. Dressed in the secondhand clothing—shabby blue coat with missing buttons, baggy brown trousers, floppy gray hat, and oversized black boots—he looked about as ragged as he felt. He needed to find a house to hole up in, and it had to be his kind of place: cheap, out-of-the-way, and—ideally—run by a nice, defenseless landlady.
From the outside at least, the big wooden house at 133 Smith Street, with its weatherbeaten air and “Rooms for Rent” sign in the window, appeared to be just what he was looking for. He mounted the veranda and pressed the door buzzer. The time was just before 5:00 P.M., Wednesday, June 8, 1927.
The door was opened by a stout, white-haired woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Hill. He gave his name as “Woodcoats” and said that he was looking for a “quiet room in a quiet house.”
“My house is quiet,” Mrs. Hill replied, a note of indignation in her voice. “I don’t allow any drinking on the premises. And if you’re looking to bring any girls into your room, you’d better go elsewhere.”
“Good,” said the young, dark-complexioned man. “All I want is quiet surroundings. I don’t like to be bothered while I’m studying my Bible.”
Mrs. Hill was impressed. “So you’re a religious person, are you?”
“Always have been,” the stranger said. “A man with Christ in his heart has nothing in this life to worry about.”
Though she’d been a little put off by his uncouth appearance, Mrs. Hill liked what she heard. Inviting him inside, she led him upstairs to the second floor and ushered him into the vacant room.
It was clean and simply furnished and suited his needs just fine. But the price, twelve dollars per month, was a little steeper than he’d hoped.
When he asked if she had anything cheaper, she explained that, yes, there was another, smaller room that rented for ten dollars a month. It was currently occupied by a young dry-goods salesman, but he would be gone in a week, at which point Mr. Woodcoats could have it.
“All right,” said the man who called himself Woodcoats. In the meantime, he would remain in the costlier room and pay her one week’s rent in advance, three dollars.
“Trouble is,” he said, looking somewhat abashed, “I’m down to my last dollar.” He was working on a construction job just across the river in St. Boniface and expected to get paid the next day. Could he give her a dollar now and the balance tomorrow—maybe Friday at the latest?
“That will be fine,” said the landlady, taking the preferred bill and slipping it into her apron pocket.
The young man was in a talkative mood, so Mrs. Hill, who always liked to learn something about her guests, settled herself on the edge of his bed and had a chat. She remained there for another twenty minutes or so, ample time to make a close inspection of the young man. His black hair, dark eyes, and swarthy skin led her to believe he was of foreign extraction, possibly Greek or Italian. He was dressed like a laborer—mud-encrusted boots, frayed serge coat, cheap cottonade trousers. He was clearly destitute, bereft of everything but the clothes on his back. He carried no luggage at all, not even a small travelling bag.
Still, though he cut an unprepossessing figure, he struck her as a young man of character—“high ideals,” as she later put it. They talked mainly about religion. He was a Roman Catholic, he said, and liked to spend part of each day studying Scripture. At another point, by way of explaining his straitened circumstances, he told her that, until recently, he had done a thriving
business in construction but had been driven into bankruptcy by an unscrupulous partner.
Mrs. Hill clucked her tongue. “Ah, well. A young man like you is better off on your own anyways.”
It was almost six by the tune she got up to leave. Pausing at the door, she repeated the house rules. “Now mind. No liquor in the room. And no girls.”
“No need to worry,” he said, smiling. “I’m a straightforward and good-living man who never wants to do wrong by anyone.”
He stayed shut up in his room until after dark, when he wandered onto the veranda. He found another lodger, James Phillips, seated outside, enjoying the night air. Like Mrs. Hill, Phillips took the new arrival for an Italian laborer, a “Dago bricklayer,” as he would later tell the police. The two men made inconsequential talk for a while, mostly about the weather. Then, explaining that he was “dog-tired” from a long day of travelling, “Woodcoats” wished Phillips good night and repaired to his room.
No one saw him again until teatime the next day, Thursday, June 9. Mrs. Hill was seated at the kitchen table with her husband, John, when the new lodger appeared at the doorway. Seeing the couple together, the burly young man did a little double take, as though he had expected to find the old lady alone.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, stammering slightly. After an embarrassed pause, he explained that he still did not have the two dollars he owed her but expected to have it by Friday. Mrs. Hill assured him that Friday would be “just fine.” Muttering a thanks, he turned on his heels, made for the front door, and headed outside for a prowl.
Lola Cowan was still a few days shy of her fourteenth birthday, which would fall on Sunday, June 12. But with her bobbed hair, shapely legs, and woman’s body, she could have passed for twenty.
She still acted like a child, though. On the afternoon of Thursday, June 9, at roughly the tune that Earle Leonard Nelson was leaving the Hill house, she lingered in the playground of the Mulvey school to play baseball with some of her fifth-grade schoolmates, a group that included her friends Chrissie Budge, Peggy Robertson, Florence Reid, Douglas Palk, George Little, James and Billy Clement, Arthur Hermans, and Edgar Betson. It was nearly 5:00 P.M. when she scooped up her schoolbooks and headed home. None of her friends would see her alive again.
The Cowan family—mother, father, and four children ranging in age from five to seventeen—shared a little bungalow at 3 University Place. (Another child, the oldest—twenty-five-year-old Archie Cowan—lived in the Manitoba mining area.) Several weeks earlier, Mr. Cowan, a salesman, had been stricken with pneumonia. After a slow recuperation, he was finally getting back on his feet, though he was still too debilitated for work.
With her husband unemployed and the family savings dwindling at an alarming rate, Mrs. Cowan had taken a menial job at the St. Regis Hotel. Lola had also resolved to do what she could. For the past few weeks, she had been going out in the evening to sell the artificial sweet peas that her older sister, Margaret, fashioned out of colored paper.
Arriving home at around 5:20 P.M. from her after-school ball game, Lola settled down to her homework. At around 6:15 she changed into a blue, pleated skirt and peach-colored sweater-coat. Then, placing several bunches of the paper flowers in a tin lunch box, she headed out onto the streets.
Two people would later recall seeing her that evening. At around 6:30, she appeared at the front door of a woman named Regina Bannerman, who, after explaining that she had no money to spend on paper flowers, returned to her supper.
Approximately one hour later, a man named William Arthur Fillingham was seated in his drawing room, composing a letter, when someone knocked at his door. The caller turned out to be a pretty young woman, who held out a tin box full of paper flowers and offered them at twenty-five cents a bunch. Fillingham spoke to her for a while, asking her name, her age, her family circumstances. Then, after declining to make a purchase, he advised her to return home.
Precisely when and where Lola Cowan encountered Earle Leonard Nelson will never be known. Possibly, she was waiting at the corner of Graham Avenue and Smith Street—where she sometimes met her mother after work—when her killer passed by. Nor is there any way to determine exactly how he managed to get her alone, though the likeliest theory is that he offered to buy some of her flowers if she would accompany him back to his lodgings, where he had ostensibly left his money.
The only incontestable fact is that—sometime in the early evening of Thursday, June 9—the dark, malignant man lured the young girl to Mrs. Catherine Hill’s boardinghouse at 133 Smith Street. Then, unseen by any of the other occupants, he led her inside and hurried her upstairs to his room.
At approximately eleven that night, as he was climbing the stairs to his flat, James Phillips passed by the new lodger’s bedroom and noticed that the door was wide open. From the bulb that burned on the landing, he could see that the darkened room was empty.
When Mrs. Hill came upstairs to do her daily housekeeping the next morning, Friday, June 10, the door was still wide open. And nice Mr. Woodcoats was nowhere to be seen.
The landlady thought nothing of his absence. She assumed that he had headed out early for work. As she glanced around the room, she was impressed with his tidiness. There was really very little for her to do. He had been particularly careful in making up the bed, smoothing out the coverlet and making sure that its bottom edge reached down to the floor. She spent a few minutes dusting, left a clean towel on the dresser, and shuffled from the bedroom, closing the door on the undetected horror inside.
28
†
L. C. Douthwaite, Mass Murder
The imagination of Zola himself could have conceived of no more overwhelming horror. Patterson was subjected to a trial of faith with which even that of the patriarch Abraham at Jehoval-Jireh is not analogous, for with Patterson there was no last-minute reprieve.
A few miles away, across the Red River in Elmwood, William Haberman, an elderly widower who resided at 104 Riverton Street, was just coming home from the corner drugstore, where he’d gone to use the pay phone. As he approached his little cottage, he noticed a thickset man in a gray cap and navy-blue coat standing on the front porch of the house next door, which had recently been rented by a family named Patterson.
The Pattersons, a young husband and wife named William and Emily and their two little boys, were Irish immigrants who had moved into the neighborhood just two weeks earlier. Since their arrival, Haberman had caught only a few fleeting glimpses of the husband, who left early for his job at the T. Eaton Company and often returned after dark. And so, when the old man saw the thickset fellow fiddling with the front door of the neighboring house, he took him for Mr. Patterson.
Unlocking his own front door, Haberman entered his kitchen, filled a kettle with tap water, set it on his stovetop, then repaired to the parlor and put one of his favorite recordings, “My Blue Heaven,” on the gramophone. As Gene Austin’s warbling voice filled the room, Haberman peered out a window at the Pattersons’front porch. The thickset young man was no longer there. Seconds later, the teakettle shrilled, and the old man headed back to the kitchen.
He spent the next forty minutes or so seated at the table, sipping tea, munching on ginger snaps, and reading that day’s edition of the Manitoba Free Press. So he didn’t see the Pattersons’front door swing open at around 12:30 P.M., nor observe the thickset young man—who was now dressed in completely different clothing—slip outside the house and hurry away down Riverton Street.
Sam Waldman was a licensed secondhand clothes dealer with a little store at 629 Main Street. At approximately 1:15 P.M., the bell over his shop door jangled and a short, barrel-chested man entered. Dressed in a threadbare brown suit and badly in need of a shave, the man looked so disreputable that Waldman took him for a hobo who had come to cadge a dime. So the storeowner was surprised when the stranger strode up to the counter and announced that he was there to purchase clothes.
“What do you need?” asked Waldman.
 
; “Everything,” replied the stranger. “Top to bottom.”
Waldman gestured towards his crowded shelves. “Have a look.”
Perched on his stool, Waldman watched while the grubby young man, whose old whipcord suit looked as though it had been retrieved from a trash barrel, wandered around the store, poking through merchandise. About fifteen minutes later, the stranger approached with an armful of stuff, which he dumped on the counter.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m a little strapped at present. Give me a good price, and I’ll take the whole load off your hands.”
Waldman began going through the pile: light gray topcoat, two-piece gray suit, blue shirt, fawn-colored cardigan, gray-and-white silk scarf, beige cap, leather belt, gray gloves, grayish-brown socks, tan boots with bulging (or “bull dog”) toes, and a pair of BVDs.
“Thirty’s about as much as I can afford,” said the stranger.
Waldman gave a little shrug. “So make it thirty.”
Reaching into the pocket of his ragged brown pants, the young man pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off half of them, three crisp tens.
“Mind if I change in here?” he asked.
Waldman pointed to a spot in the rear of the store. While the young man was unbuttoning his clothing, Waldman cast a glance in his direction and noticed that his hands were shaking badly.
“You sick or something?” he asked.
“Cold. I just got in from the country.”
Waldman could believe it—the bull-necked young man might have easily been a farmhand.
After changing into his new purchases, the stranger rolled his old clothing—suit, shirt, socks, briefs, everything—into a bundle and handed it to Waldman.
“Want me to dump it out back?” asked the storeowner.
“Leave it,” said the other. “I’ll come by for it in a day or two.” Reaching up a hand, he rubbed the bristles on his jaw. “Know where I can get a shave?”
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