“What does that mean?” asked Nelson.
“It means that it’s a five pennyweight ring.”
“Well, what is it worth?”
England fished a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil from his shirt pocket and did a quick calculation, muttering under his breath: “Four cents a karat … seventy-two cents a pennyweight … five pennyweights.” He looked up at Nelson. “About three dollars and fifty cents.”
It was less than Nelson had hoped for, but he wasn’t in a position to haggle. “I’ll take it,” he said, extending a hand.
England stepped to his cash register, removed the money, and placed it in the upturned palm. Without another word, the stranger turned and left the store.
Fred England stood there for a moment, staring out through the display window at the man’s receding form. In his long career as a jeweler, he had taken countless finger-measurements and seen hands of all shapes and sizes.
Never, however, had he encountered hands as grotesquely oversized as the burly, dark-skinned stranger’s.
Shortly after leaving the jeweler’s, Nelson found a little thrift shop, where he swapped his dressy clothes for a khaki shirt and a pair of bib overalls. As he left the store and hurried along the streets, he drew some funny stares from passersby. Pausing at a shop window and peering at his reflection, he saw why.
Instead of looking more nondescript, as he had planned, he cut a distinctly conspicuous figure. In the workshirt and overalls, he might have been a mechanic or a farmhand. On his head, however, he was still sporting his dandy’s fedora. He hated to part with the hat—it was the snazziest one he’d ever owned, a real attention-getter. But, of course, attention was the last thing in the world he needed right now.
Making his way to Broad Street and Eleventh Avenue, he spotted another used-clothing place called The Royal Secondhand Store, where he exchanged the fedora for a black cloth cap, plus fifty cents. He was going to trade his bull-dog shoes for something plainer, too, but the storeowner—who had taken a closer look at the fedora and noticed the “Chevrier’s” label inside—began asking all kinds of goddamn nosy questions: Did he come from Winnipeg? How long had he been in Regina? Was he planning to stay long?
So when another customer entered the store just then and the owner went to wait on him, Nelson slipped out the door and strode away down Broad Street, still wearing his bulldog shoes.
With his simple workman’s garments and four dollars in his pocket, he hit the road. By 10:00 A.M. he had hiked a mile and a half southeast of Regina. He was plodding along the asphalt when he heard a car approaching from behind. He stopped, turned around, and held up his hand. When the car rolled to a halt, he stepped to the driver’s window and asked the man for a lift.
“Where you headed?” asked the driver, a salesman named William Davidson.
“Weyburn,” said Nelson, naming a town about seventy-five miles south of Regina and less than fifty miles from the U.S. border.
Davidson wasn’t going that far, but he offered to take the hitcher partway there. They rode together for over an hour, not speaking much. Nelson told the driver that he’d been unemployed for a while and was travelling south in the hope of finding farmwork.
“You from Regina?” asked Davidson, who had spent a fair amount of time in the city.
Nelson affirmed that he was.
“Whereabouts?”
Nelson, who knew next to nothing about Regina, named the only place he was familiar with—1852 Lorne Street, Mrs. Rowe’s address.
It was almost 11:30 A.M. when the salesman reached his destination, a little town called Davin about twenty-five miles south of Regina. With a grunt of thanks, Nelson climbed from the car and proceeded southward on foot.
It was a hot, cloudless day. Within minutes, sweat was stinging his eyes and darkening the armpits of his long-sleeve khaki shirt. About a mile or so south of Davin, he came to a halt. He was resting by the roadside when a car appeared and pulled up beside him. The driver—another travelling salesman, Lyle Wilcox by name—leaned his head out the window and asked directions to the home of a local farmer.
Nelson explained that he himself was a stranger to those parts. He was making his way to Arcola, about ninety miles away, and wondered if he could hitch a ride with the salesman.
Wilcox was happy to oblige, though he wasn’t driving all the way to Arcola.
That was fine, Nelson said, walking around to the passenger side. In that heat, he’d be glad just to get off his feet for a while.
They travelled only a few miles together, until they came to an intersection about three-and-a-half miles southeast of Davin. Wilcox was heading south, down an unpaved country road. “Stick to the main road,” he told the hitcher. “It’s more travelled. You’ll get a lift for sure.”
Wilcox was right. Nelson had barely begun trudging along the roadside when he flagged down an east-bound car driven by a junk dealer named Isadore Silverman, who was canvassing the local farms for scrap metal.
Silverman and Nelson, who gave his first name as “Virgil,” hit it off at once. When Silverman explained what his business was, Nelson offered to help him out in exchange for nothing more than transportation and meals. Silverman leapt at the offer. Collecting old lead and scrap iron was heavy work, particularly during a heat wave, and the sturdy young man at his side had an impressive set of shoulders.
The two spent the remainder of Monday together, travelling around the backroads of southeastern Saskatchewan, purchasing, packing, and loading the car full of scrap metal. At around 10:30 that night, they arrived in Arcola where they checked into the local hotel, Nelson signing the register with the name “Virgil Wilson.” They shared a spacious room with two single beds, paid for in advance by Silverman. Early the next morning, Tuesday, June 14, they hit the road again and spent another day buying scrap metal. That night, they shared a hotel room in Deloraine, Manitoba.
After breakfast the following morning, the two set out once more, travelling east towards Winnipeg, where Silverman made his home. Nelson, of course, had compelling reasons to steer clear of Winnipeg, though he couldn’t exactly share them with Silverman. Instead, he told the junk dealer that he was broke and wanted to look for farmwork in the countryside.
They parted ways a few hours later. Silverman dropped his travelling companion off in the town of Boissevain, Manitoba. The time was approximately 10:30 A.M., Wednesday, June 15, and Earle Leonard Nelson was less than twenty miles away from the U.S. border.
34
†
James H. Gray, The Roar of the Twenties
If the wanted man had deliberately set out to put the police on his trail, he could hardly have left more clues.
According to criminologists, the typical mass murderer—the seemingly normal man who suddenly snaps and goes on a wildly destructive rampage—is motivated not just by homicidal impulses but by suicidal ones as well. The disgruntled worker who shows up at the office one morning and guns down everyone in sight is a kind of human time bomb, erupting in insane, random violence. When the explosion is over, there are corpses scattered everywhere—his own included, since most killers of this kind either take their own lives to avoid capture or die in a barrage of police gunfire. Essentially, these are men who—having reached some psychological breaking point—decide to go out in an apocalyptic blaze, taking as many people with them as they possibly can.
The case tends to be different with serial killers. To be sure, some of them are actively self-destructive. In the view of many crime historians, Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror ended abruptly when the notorious harlot butcher—overwhelmed with revulsion after his final enormity-took his own life. And other homicidal maniacs have clearly wished to be stopped—most famously, the 1940s “Lipstick Killer,” William Heirens, who left a desperate message scrawled at one crime scene: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more, I cannot control myself.”
For the most part, however, serial murderers aren’t interested in stopping. They
try to keep killing as long as they can, for a very simple reason: they enjoy it. Lust murder is their ultimate thrill. Even when their behavior borders on the reckless (on one occasion, for example, Ted Bundy abducted two young women from a crowded public beach in broad daylight), pleasure is their primary motivation. The risk-taking only adds to the excitement.
Earle Leonard Nelson typified this pattern. Since embarking on his deadly spree in early 1926, he had done everything possible to avoid arrest—keeping constantly on the move, assuming a string of false identities, changing his wardrobe every time he hit a new town. Endowed with the usual traits of his breed—cunning, intelligence, and an abnormal sangfroid—he had managed to elude pursuers throughout the United States.
From the moment he crossed into Canada, however, his behavior almost guaranteed his capture. Though it is possible that he was possessed by self-destructive impulses—a secret desire to be punished for his crimes—there are other, equally plausible explanations for his actions. Arrogance is one—the disdainful belief that, after failing to nab him for a year and a half, the police were simply no match for him. It is also the case that, as far back as 1921, Nelson (then known as Ferral) had been diagnosed as a “constitutional psychopath with outbreaks of psychosis,” a man with a profoundly disordered mind.
Whatever the reason—suicidal feelings, hubris, or delusional thinking—Earle Leonard Nelson had left clues in his wake from the moment he arrived in Winnipeg on Wednesday, June 8. And by the following Tuesday, the police had finally picked up his trail.
They had located John Hofer, the man who had struck up an acquaintance with Nelson on the streetcar from Winnipeg. Hofer turned over the beige cap he had gotten from the garrulous stranger—the one Nelson had purchased at Waldman’s and wore until he traded it for the champagne-colored fedora from Chevrier’s. The cap was still redolent of the pomade that Nick Tabor had massaged into Nelson’s hair.
Not long after locating Hofer, detectives tracked down Hugh Elder, the motorist who had picked up Nelson in Headingly and driven him as far as Portage La Prairie. The testimony of the two men, Hofer and Elder, made it clear that the suspect had been headed due west. Knowing the “Gorilla’s” m.o.—his preference for cities, where he could blend with the populace (and find an ample supply of landladies), police deduced that he must have been making for Regina.
The Regina police were alerted at once. Chief Constable Martin Bruton immediately assigned his entire force to the manhunt. At the same time, three carloads of Winnipeg detectives were dispatched to the Saskatchewan capital. One of the cars carried the barber, Nick Tabor, who had volunteered to travel to Regina to identify the suspect, should the “Gorilla” be apprehended in that city.
By Monday evening, the Regina police, canvassing every boardinghouse in the city, had located Mary Rowe. The landlady provided a detailed description of the lodger, “Harry Harcourt,” who had vanished that morning. Inside his room investigators found the clothing he had left behind. Even at a glance, they could see that the garments—pale gray topcoat, gray suit jacket, gray-and-white silk scarf, striped necktie—precisely matched the ones described in the reward bulletin. They also discovered why “Harcourt” had left in such a hurry. Lying on his bed was a copy of that morning’s Regina Leader, its front page plastered with accounts of the “Gorilla Man.”
It didn’t take long for the Regina police to turn up a string of other witnesses: Fred England, the jeweler who had paid $3.50 for Emily Patterson’s wedding band; Harry Pages, proprietor of The Royal Secondhand Store, who had traded Nelson a black cap and four bits for the champagne-colored fedora; the owner of the thrift shop where Nelson had acquired the khaki shut and bib overalls.
It quickly became clear that the suspect had hightailed it from Regina. Surmising that he had continued his flight westward, Chief Bruton ordered a carload of his men to the nearest city which lay in that direction, Moose Jaw, about forty miles away.
Meanwhile, new circulars—containing updated information about the “Gorilla Man’s” change of clothing—were printed up and dispatched to police throughout western Canada, as well as to departments in North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. Customs officials on both sides of the border were asked to assist in the hunt, as were members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The U.S. Border Patrol was put on alert, and agents of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways were urged to keep on the lookout for the suspect.
An army of constables, carrying revolvers and sawed-off shotguns, scoured western Canada from Winnipeg to Calgary. Southern Manitoba in particular was, as one newspaper put it, “practically under police occupation, with every acre being raked for the killer.” Squad cars patrolled the roadways, while ordinary citizens equipped themselves with every weapon at hand—ax-handles, hunting rifles, hatchets, and sheath knives—and banded together in roaming vigilance committees.
Throughout Tuesday, police announcers regularly interrupted the normal radio programming to broadcast the latest description of the suspect, “last seen wearing blue bib overalls sewn with white stitching, a khaki shut, brown boots with bull-dog toes, and an old black cloth cap.” Drivers were warned “to refuse rides to anyone who may resemble the strangler and notify police at once if asked for a lift.”
These bulletins brought dramatic results. On Tuesday evening, a call came in to the Winnipeg Central Police Station from William Davidson, the salesman who had given Nelson a lift from Regina to Davin on Monday morning. From Davidson’s account, it seemed clear that the “Gorilla” wasn’t making his way to Moose Jaw after all but was headed the opposite way, in a southeasterly direction.
Chief Constable Christopher Newton quickly convened a late-night meeting at Winnipeg headquarters. After conferring with his subordinates—Chief of Detectives George Smith and Assistant Chief Constable Philip Stark—Newton decided to dispatch several carloads of reinforcements to Saskatchewan. Shortly after midnight, a convoy carrying Inspector William Smith of the Manitoba Provincial Police, two city detectives, three provincial officers, and six men from the Morality Department headed out of the city and sped towards Arcola.
On Wednesday morning, the Winnipeg Tribune—which only twenty-four hours earlier had published such discouraging news about the investigation—ran a headline whose tone was positively triumphant: POLICE CLOSING IN ON SLAYER, the paper trumpeted. PURSUERS DRAWING NARROWING CIRCLE AROUND MAD KILLER. POLICE OFFICIALS SAY HE CANNOT ESCAPE.
The story quoted Chief Detective George Smith, who expressed his belief that the “Gorilla” might attempt to “break back toward Winnipeg, where a thickly settled territory would offer him more hiding place than the prairie country to the west.
“If he tries this tactic, he will run dead into our hands,” Smith assured the reporters. “We have taken every possible precaution to head him off.”
Here, Smith—who had sounded so grim at his previous press conference on Monday—allowed himself a little smile. “The Gorilla’s career of strangling is about to end suddenly,” he declared. “He has blundered along a road that will take him to the gallows.”
35
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Hon. W. J. Major, attorney general of Manitoba
My opinion is that Armstrong was anxious to secure the reward for himself.
A few hours after Smith’s press conference†at around 11:30 A.M., Wednesday, June 15†a man named Roy Armstrong was driving to his farm a few miles southeast of Boissevain when he spotted a thickset stranger hiking along the roadside. Pulling up beside him, Armstrong offered him a lift.
“Where you headed?” asked Armstrong as the man settled into the passenger seat.
There was a momentary pause before the stranger answered, “Sparting.”
Armstrong’s brow furrowed. “Sparting? Never heard of it.”
The stranger said nothing.
“Who’re you working for?” From the man’s dress—khaki workshirt, bib overalls, and wide-brimmed straw hat—Armstrong assumed he was a farmha
nd.
“Nobody,” the stranger replied. “Me and a pal own a ranch down there.”
“Ranch? What kind of ranch?”
The stranger shrugged. “Just a ranch.”
Armstrong was struck by his choice of words. It was more characteristic of the western United States than of Manitoba, where people spoke of farms, not ranches.
The drive didn’t last long. When Armstrong reached his front gate just a few miles away, the stranger thanked him, climbed out of the car, and headed eastward along the unpaved country road.
By then, Armstrong’s suspicions were fully aroused. Like virtually everyone else in southern Manitoba, he was on the lookout for the “Gorilla,” having been alerted by the police bulletins coming over the radio every few hours. Putting his foot to the accelerator, he sped to his farmhouse, brought his car to a stop, and dashed inside to the telephone.
A few calls to his neighbors would have alerted the entire community and brought dozens of armed men converging on the suspect. But Armstrong knew about the $1,500 reward. The way he figured it, the fewer people involved in the “Gorilla Man’s” arrest, the better.
Still, he wasn’t about to try capturing America’s most dangerous killer all by himself. So Armstrong placed a single call—to Constable Joe Young at the Boissevain police house. Young, whose automobile was out of commission, told Armstrong to pick him up immediately. Leaping back into his Ford, Armstrong made it to town in record time. Then, with Young seated beside him, he turned his car around and roared back in the direction of his farm.
Since the suspect was travelling on foot, the two men felt confident that they could overtake him without any difficulty. Allowing for the tune it had taken Armstrong to drive to Boissevain and back, they calculated on finding their man about a mile or so east of Armstrong’s front gate. When they arrived at the spot, however, the thickset stranger was nowhere in sight.
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