Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  One local resident, an early arrival on the scene, held forth with an air of smug authority, passing along the few reliable facts that had filtered from the house. A girl, apparently dead for several days, had been found stuffed beneath a bed, just like that unfortunate Patterson woman in Elmwood. Clearly, the same maniac was responsible for both atrocities.

  One of the listeners declared that another Winnipeg woman would undoubtedly die before the madman was caught. After all, murders, like every other kind of bad accident, always came in threes.

  Meanwhile, a little boy engaged in a make-believe reenactment of the crime, playfully throttling his little sister until she broke away and ran screaming for her mommy. Nearby, a cluster of teenage girls spoke in spellbound whispers about the titillating rumors of rape. And a sullen-looking stranger, slouching on the outskirts of the crowd, drew more than one suspicious stare from bystanders who wondered if he might possibly be the killer himself, inexorably drawn back to the scene of his heinous crime.

  John Hill, in the meantime, was completely unaware of the crisis at his home. After stopping off at the Central Station to convey his wife’s suspicions, he had proceeded to church. He had spent the next hour engrossed in the service, while thousands of his fellow Winnipeggers, who preferred the convenience of radio prayer, were being alerted to the latest homicide.

  As a result, when Hill stepped off the trolley at around 7:30 P.M. and saw the crowd around his house, he felt a sharp pang of fear, which grew into something like panic when he heard an onlooker refer to “the murdered woman.”

  Pushing his way through the crowd and into his house, he mounted the stairs, exclaiming with relief when he caught sight of his wife. Pale but clearly unharmed, she was talking to a policeman in the little front room on the second floor. Hill’s pleasure, however, was quickly undercut by the sight that assaulted him as he entered the room.

  The bed, which normally stood in the southwest corner, had been moved aside. Curled on the floor was a naked female body, stiff and livid. The slender corpse lay on its left side, turned towards the wall, knees slightly flexed, right arm bent, left stretched flat beneath the body. From where he stood, Hill could see a patch of dried blood caked on the left thigh, just below the girl’s buttocks.

  A man in a brown business suit, who turned out to be Coroner Cameron, was crouched beside the body, while several policemen hovered nearby, conferring in hushed voices. Even with the window wide open, the stench of death was thick in the room.

  Hill averted his eyes from the ghastly thing on the floor and, hit with a sudden wave of dizziness, sank onto the straight-backed wooden chair beside the bureau.

  At that moment, no one knew who the murder victim was. Constable B. L. Payne, the first officer to arrive on the scene, had made a thorough search of the room. But he had found none of the girl’s clothes or anything else that might help with an identification.

  Now, after asking Mrs. Hill where her telephone was located, he headed downstairs to put in a call to the Central Station and find out if there had been any recent reports of missing teenage girls.

  When Lola Cowan failed to return home on Thursday night, her parents were at a loss. Their first thought was that she had stopped off at a friend’s house while making the rounds with her paper flowers. They phoned around to all her acquaintances, but none of them had seen Lola since she’d left for home after participating in the after-school ball game.

  Doing their best to stay calm, they wondered if Lola might have gone to visit a schoolchum they weren’t familiar with. Mr. Cowan decided to call their daughter’s teacher, Miss Morrow, and get the names of all of Lola’s classmates. But Miss Morrow, who happened to be away for the evening, didn’t answer the phone.

  Early the next morning, after a completely sleepless night, John Cowan went off to the Mulvey school, walking into Miss Morrow’s classroom just as she finished calling attendance. There was a geography exam scheduled for that day, and Miss Morrow herself was surprised that Lola, one of her best students, was absent. The moment she saw John Cowan’s haggard face, she knew that something was wrong.

  Addressing the class, he asked if anyone knew where his daughter might be. No one had the slightest idea.

  Before returning home, Cowan stopped at the Central Station to report that his daughter had gone off the previous afternoon to sell artificial flowers and had never come home.

  When Saturday arrived with no sign of Lola, Mrs. Cowan, more out of desperation than any particular faith in the occult, paid a visit to a neighborhood fortuneteller who, after performing some mumbo-jumbo over her tea leaves, announced “that a dark man in a blue suit would bring news of Lola before Monday.”

  At around 7:30 P.M. Sunday evening, John Cowan went off to church to say a prayer for his missing daughter. He was riding home on a streetcar an hour or so later when he overheard two other passengers talking about a murdered girl whose body had just been discovered earlier that evening. Cowan’s heart quailed.

  Disembarking near Smith Street, he found an enormous crowd milling around a three-story house at Number 133. From one of the bystanders he learned that the body of the murder victim, an unidentified teenage girl, had just been removed from the building and was on its way to Thompson’s undertaking parlor.

  Within minutes, Cowan himself was at Thompson’s. As he hurried through the front entrance, he saw something that made his insides turn to ice. His wife, Randy, was being led into an antechamber by two close family friends.

  Mrs. Cowan could not bring herself to view the body. She remained in the antechamber in an agony of suspense, still hoping against hope that the victim was not her child, while her husband followed a coroner’s assistant into the morgue. Five minutes later, he staggered out again. He was immediately surrounded by a crowd of clamoring newsmen.

  “Yes,” Cowan rasped in answer to the question they all seemed to be shouting at once. “It is all too true. It’s Lola. There is no mistake.”

  Then, while the newsmen scrambled to file their stories, he made his way into the antechamber to break the news to his stricken wife.

  It was only later that Cowan found out how his wife came to be at Thompson’s before him.

  After telephoning the Central Station and learning that a man named John Cowan had filed a missing-persons report on Saturday morning, Constable B. L. Payne had gone directly from the Hills’ to 3 University Place. Mrs. Cowan had opened the door and, at the first glimpse of Constable Payne, had gone deathly pale.

  The fortuneteller had been right after all. Randy Cowan had received news about Lola from a man in a blue suit—a uniformed police officer, come to tell her that a teenage girl, quite possibly her missing daughter, had been found murdered that evening at a Smith Street boardinghouse.

  30

  †

  Winnipeg Tribune

  It was then that the legend of a human gorilla being abroad in the land gained currency.

  As darkness came on, the crowd around the Hills’ boardinghouse began to disperse. Adolescent girls, hugging themselves against the chill, hurried away down the street, mothers dragged their reluctant children home to bed, elderly couples shuffled off to their rooms. Still, a hundred or so diehards continued to mill around, as though determined to extract every last drop of horror from the scene.

  As the throng thinned out, the atmosphere around the boardinghouse underwent a palpable change. At the height of the stir, Smith Street had been enveloped by an almost carnival air. Now, as a reporter for the Winnipeg Tribune moved among the remnants of the crowd, he noted a shift in their mood, from “buzzing excitement” to “sullen dread.”

  Walking by one small cluster of women, who were gossiping in tense whispers, the reporter was struck by a phrase he heard passing among them. Already, with the discovery of the second Winnipeg victim just a few hours old, the women were wondering if the killer could possibly be the same homicidal maniac who had left a trail of strangled corpses across the United States.

&
nbsp; One of the women in the little group referred to the unknown killer by a nickname the reporter had never heard before. He jotted down the phrase in his notepad. In his story that appeared in the next day’s Tribune, he quoted the phrase. Within a week, it would become permanently attached to the killer, replacing the “Dark Strangler” as the nickname by which Earle Leonard Nelson would forever be known: the “Gorilla Man.”

  The strangler was not the first “Gorilla Man” to send shivers through Jazz Age America. Indeed, the grotesque figure of the savage, lust-crazed ape-man was a fixture of 1920s culture. The fantasy sprang from several sources. Foremost among these, of course, was Darwin, whose theories on the kinship between humans and primates entered pop lore so rapidly that, by the early 1870s, rakish New Yorkers were already sporting “Missing Link” tie tacks and chuckling at W. S. Gilbert’s comic lyrics about a lovesick gorilla who, in order to impress a “Lady fair,” decked himself out in white tie and boots and “christened himself Darwinian Man.”

  But it would not do,

  The scheme fell through—

  For the Maiden Fair, whom the monkey craved,

  Was a radiant Being,

  With a brain far-seeing—

  While a Darwinian Man, though well-behaved,

  At best is only a monkey shaved!

  Of course, Darwin’s deflating view of human origins was no laughing matter to millions of people, many of them congregated in the American Bible Belt, where the controversy over evolutionary theory reached its hysterical pitch with the 1925 trial of Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes. Just one year before the “Gorilla Man” made his appearance in Winnipeg, Scopes—an affable twenty-four-year-old who taught high school biology—allowed himself to be arrested in Dayton, Tennessee, for the crime of exposing his young charges to Darwin’s sacrilegious ideas. The Dayton “Monkey Trial”—which pitted famed attorney Clarence Darrow (fresh from his triumph in the Leopold and Loeb case) against Fundamentalist champion William Jennings Bryan—captivated the country, generating millions of words of newsprint and scores of satirical cartoons. In one typical drawing, published in the Detroit News, Darrow reaches out to embrace a treed chimpanzee while exclaiming with delighted recognition: “Papa!”

  Freudian theory, which (as cultural historian Ann Douglas has written) “seemed to blur the distinction between man and beast,” also helped fuel the fantasy of the rapacious ape-man. By the mid-1920s, psychoanalysis had become all the rage among urban sophisticates. After diverting themselves with humorist Robert Benchley’s “All Aboard for Dementia Praecox!” in the New Yorker, Manhattanites could take in John Barrymore’s heavily Oedipal Hamlet on Broadway, then cap off the evening by interpreting one another’s dreams at a “Freuding party.”

  Freud’s view of the primitive instincts roiling in the undermind of civilized men and women also began to pervade American literature, from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (which portrayed the thwarted urges seething beneath the surface of small-town life) to Eugene O’Neill’s Hairy Ape, whose brutish protagonist, Yank, identifies so closely with a caged gorilla that he releases the beast (which promptly crushes him to death). “Yuh think I made her sick, do yuh?” Yank rants at one point, after encountering a slumming heiress. “Just lookin’ at me, huh? Hairy ape, huh? I’ll fix her! I’ll tell her where to get off! … I’ll show her who’s a ape!”

  The belief that primitive ape-men still stalked the modern world was also reinforced by the theories of Cesare Lombroso, now considered a crackpot but widely esteemed in his own day. In his influential study L’Uomo Deliquente (Criminal Man), Lombroso, an Italian physician, argued that criminals were “atavisms”—savage, Stone Age beings born, by some evolutionary quirk, in the modern world. Because they were throwbacks to a prehistoric past, these “born criminals” could be identified by certain physical traits. They actually possessed the anatomical features of apes—thick skulls, big jaws, high cheekbones, jutting brows, long arms, thick necks, etc. As Lombroso wrote, describing the “flash of inspiration” that led to his theory,

  I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.

  Between Darwin, Freud, and Lombroso, it’s no wonder that “ape-men” kept popping up in the culture of the twenties, from The Hairy Ape to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ hugely popular Tarzan series to horror movies like A Blind Bargain, in which Lon Chancy is transformed into a simian beast-man by a botched “monkey gland operation” (a surgical fad of the 1920s, in which chimpanzee glands were transplanted into male patients in an effort to boost their virility).

  One of the most popular entertainments of the twenties was Ralph Spence’s Broadway smash The Gorilla, which received a tumultuous, five-minute ovation when it premiered in May 1925. A high-spirited mystery farce (which was eventually made into three movie versions), the play cheerfully exploited every cliché in the book, from a stereotypical “feets-don’t-fail-me-now” servant named Jefferson, to a wisecracking woman reporter, to a pair of bumbling gumshoes.

  Providing the thrills were both a criminal mastermind nicknamed “The Gorilla” (“the most ruthless criminal this country has ever known,” according to the script) and an actual gorilla (played by an actor in a monkey suit) who, in the boisterous climax of the play, leaps off the stage and lumbers up and down the aisles. The gorilla is ultimately revealed to be a runaway pet named “Poe,” an homage to the classic detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

  The “Gorilla Man” nickname had actually been used as far back as November 1925, when it first appeared in a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. The phrase seemed chillingly apt for a dark, brawny killer who (like Poe’s murderous monkey) often shoved his victims’ bodies into tight, concealed spaces.

  Bay Area authorities, however, did their best to squelch it, believing that it created a serious, and potentially fatal, misimpression of the killer’s appearance. Immediately after the murder of Mrs. William Anna Edmonds, Chief O’Brien of the San Francisco police had called a press conference to warn local landladies that it was “a mistake to believe that [the killer] has the appearance of an ape or gorilla, or that he is uncouth in speech or manners.” Partly as a result of these efforts, U.S. newspapers had stuck with the “Dark Strangler,” an equally sinister and less dangerously misleading epithet.

  Up in Canada, however, the situation was different. The “Gorilla” nickname—which had filtered up from the States and circulated among the crowd outside Catherine Hill’s boardinghouse on the night of Sunday, June 12—immediately caught on. On Monday the thirteenth, the biggest story in America was the massive ticker-tape parade thrown in Manhattan for Charles Lindbergh. In the Manitoba Free Press, however, news of the aviator’s frenzied reception would occupy a single column buried on page nine, while the eight-column screamer plastered across the front page read:

  KILLER IS STILL

  AT LARGE

  Identify Strangler As

  Much Wanted Gorilla Man

  AMERICAN POLICE

  JOIN IN HUNT FOR

  ELUSIVE SLAYER

  31

  †

  J. H. Stitt

  Fear stalked in every unprotected home in Winnipeg during the week of the manhunt, and from not a few vicinities there was a general emigration of womanhood.

  Not since 1913, when a vicious killer named Krafchenko was on the loose, had such an all-pervad
ing panic gripped Winnipeg. By Monday morning, the entire city was “seething with fear and excitement” (as the Free Press reported), whipped to a frenzy by the blaring headlines, hourly radio bulletins, and rampant hearsay, like the alarming—and wholly unfounded—rumor that a third woman had been found murdered on Lipton Street.

  No sooner did the hardware stores open for business on Monday than every padlock, deadbolt, and door chain in the city sold out. Wholesalers quickly ran through their supply, and lock manufacturers as far away as Detroit found themselves besieged with emergency orders.

  Overnight, locksmithing became the busiest occupation in Winnipeg. Every handyman capable of installing a deadbolt suddenly found himself with all the work he could handle, often repairing or replacing locks that had been broken and unused for years. The Winnipeg Tribune described one local mechanic who—after receiving “a hurry-up call from a terrified spinster”—spent the better part of the morning equipping her house with a half-dozen new doorlocks. Married men—who suddenly seemed “to think that their wives are more valuable than ever before,” in the words of one sardonic hardware salesman—took a few hours off on Monday to install chains on their doors.

  Throughout the city, housewives barricaded themselves inside their homes while their husbands were away at work, refusing to open their doors to anyone, even deliverymen they had known for years. Milkmen who would normally take a few minutes to chat with an old customer simply left their bottles on the front stoop and hurried away. Some women even stopped answering their phones, fearing that the strangler might be on the other end. Others kept their children home from school. After spending all of Monday knocking futilely on bolted doors, frustrated callers—house-to-house salesmen, bill collectors, vegetable peddlers—simply gave up the effort, declaring a holiday until the “Gorilla Man” was caught.