The colonel wasn’t amused. He barked a command to one of his men, who immediately produced two sets of manacles. Two brawny constables shoved Nelson into a seat, while a third shackled his ankles and wrists.
As the rest of the officers looked on, Nelson struggled briefly with the restraints, then gave up with a shrug. “Much better,” he said. “It would be damn hard to get out of these.
“Not like that rinky-dink jail,” he added with a snort.
In answer to Martin’s questions, Nelson described how he had jiggled open the locks with the old nail file, then hidden from his pursuers for the rest of the night, first in the woods behind the town hall, then in the empty barn. He leaned back in his seat as he spoke, his manner as relaxed and expansive as if he were regaling a bunch of cronies at a neighborhood saloon.
Meanwhile, a riotous mood prevailed in Killarney, undampened by the drizzling rain. Thousands of citizens poured into the streets and surrounded the station, shouting for a glimpse of the captive. “Bring him out! Bring him out!” they cried, pounding on the walls of the car and pressing their faces to the windows. Colonel Martin had the shades drawn and posted guards at every doorway. But the people continued to clamor.
Finally, Martin stepped out onto the end of the car and, after quieting the crowd, announced that he had no intention of exhibiting the suspect. “It would not be proper procedure to do so,” he declared. Thanking the citizens of Killarney for their assistance, he urged them to disperse—a request that, with only a few exceptions, was completely ignored by the crowd.
After taking on some provisions, including (as one newspaper reported) “a large box of delicious sandwiches” prepared by “the kind ladies of Killarney,” the train set off from the station at a few minutes past 10:00 A.M.
During the return trip to Winnipeg, the prisoner, who continued to give his name as “Virgil Wilson,” seemed so relaxed and unconcerned that a number of the constables wondered aloud if they had captured the right man. For the most part, he alternated between breezy conversation and periods of silent contemplation. In the latter moods, he would turn his face to the glass and stare out at the flat, flowing countryside. In the former, he would chat about his favorite Wallace Beery movies or divert his captors with a dirty joke.
Continually grubbing cigarettes from his guards, he chain-smoked all the way to Winnipeg. His powerful hands lay manacled in his lap, except when he raised them to his mouth to remove a cigarette. He was under the most intense scrutiny during the trip, not from his guards—many of whom dozed for a good part of the journey—but from a newspaper correspondent named C. B. Pyper, who had wheedled his way onto the train just before it departed.
Pyper spent the whole trip studying Nelson. His observations—headlined “A Word Sketch of the Accused”—were published in the June 17 issue of the Winnipeg Tribune and offered the public its first extended look at the infamous “Gorilla Man.”
Though remarkably detailed, Pyper’s portrait, like all subsequent descriptions of Nelson, was hardly objective. However bizarre his behavior, Nelson was such an ordinary-looking man that his victims had never thought twice about welcoming him into their homes. In Pyper’s article, however, he emerges as a hulking brute, an apish throwback with all the physical hallmarks of the Lombrosian “born criminal”—narrow forehead, oversized jaw, prominent teeth, powerful hands, dark skin, and thick, “negroid” lips:
He is heavily built, with broad, rounded shoulders, and an exceptionally deep chest… . His forehead is high, narrow and sloping. From the hair to the tip of the nose, the whole face slopes forward.
The lips are red and full, giving him a strong negroid appearance. His teeth are perfect, white, and regular, and strong. His tongue is always in evidence when he talks, and when he smiles, it sticks forward, thick and red, against his upper teeth.
His chin, below the protruding mouth, also juts forward. It has a shallow cleft, and slopes back to two powerful jaws, the breadth of which adds to the impression of narrowness in the forehead.
The eyes are small, slitted, just a little close together. They seem to be grey, but at times the pupils dilate. At these times, they might almost be described as black….
His throat is thick and powerful and covered to the Adam’s apple with a three-days’ growth of beard. When his head is thrown back, the great width of his throat and jaw is evident.
His hands are thick and extremely powerful, with gnarled knuckles and broad, flat fingers…. His complexion is not sallow, but a light chocolate, much like that of the ordinary sun-burned worker of foreign extraction. He is not good-looking but not immediately repulsive in appearance. It would be hard to place his nationality, except to say that he is not pure British or Canadian stock. The thick, sensual lips give a suspicion of negro blood somewhere.
He was an interesting study on the train. He showed absolutely no concern over his position. But as you looked at him, you knew that he was speculating, with the cunning that has served him so well in the past, on his present chances of escape—or thinking of the other terrible subject with which his mind is obsessed.
Hoping for their own first-hand glimpse of the monster, thousands of people—men, women, and children—gathered along the tracks that stretched between Killarney and Winnipeg. The train bearing Nelson wouldn’t have drawn larger and more excited crowds if it had been carrying a visiting member of the British royal family.
To everyone’s disappointment, the train didn’t make any stops. Still, just seeing it was a thrill. At every platform and crossing, the crowds whistled and cheered as the train swept past—“electrified by the knowledge,” wrote Pyper, “that inside the coach, passing within a few feet, was the man who had terrified a city and a countryside for a week, and who had a score of murders on his head.”
The largest crowds congregated in Winnipeg. Hoping to avoid a mob scene, the police kept the train’s precise destination a secret, from the press and the public alike. But the ploy proved remarkably ineffective. By 3:00 P.M., every possible disembarkation point in the city—the Academy Road crossing, the Cement Works at Fort Whyte, the Westside platform on Portage Avenue, and the Canadian Pacific Railway station—was thronged with curiosity seekers.
As it turned out, the ones who opted for Portage Avenue made the right choice. Not that it did them much good. When the train finally arrived at around 5:30 P.M., the platform and surrounding streets were so densely packed with people (as many as 4,000, according to one estimate) that almost no one managed to see the main attraction, who was hustled directly from his coach into a waiting police car. A cameraman for the Free Press, who was positioned just a few yards from the platform, was able to photograph nothing more than the back of the prisoner’s head as a trio of detectives maneuvered their man through the ocean of gawkers.
From the Portage Avenue crossing, the captive was driven to the Central Police Station on Rupert Street, where another horde of people had assembled. Again, all but a handful of them came away disappointed. “Fearing that some sort of demonstration might be made by the mob,” the Free Press reported, “officers threw open the wooden double-doors of the garage, situated at the rear of the police station. The crowd—which had waited expectantly for hours in order to get a glimpse of the much-wanted man—was nonplussed, only a dozen or so seeing the prisoner’s car turn onto Louise Street, then swing sharply into the lane behind the police station, pull straight into the garage, and come to a squealing halt.”
No sooner had it stopped than six officers sprang from the car. Before the prisoner could emerge from the car, the heavy garage doors were swung shut with a bang.
Hauling their captive from the car, the constables marched him up the stairway, through the parade room, and into the elevator that led to the cells. Before being locked up, he was fingerprinted, then handed a stubby pencil and a blank sheet of paper, and asked to print his true name. Without hesitation, he wrote, “Virgil Wilson, Vancouver,” the identity he’d been claiming since his arrest in Kill
arney.
Then he did something interesting. After contemplating the paper for a moment, he took his pencil and put a heavy line through the words he’d just written. Then—as if to acknowledge that he was finally, irrevocably caught and that further subterfuge was futile—he revealed, for the first time, who he really was.
“Earle Nelson,” he wrote. “Born in San Francisco, 1897.”
Less than forty-five minutes after his arrival in Winnipeg, Nelson was picked from a lineup by two witnesses: W. E. Chandler, the motorist who had given him a lift from Warren, Minnesota, to the International Boundary Line on Wednesday, June 8; and Sam Waldman, the secondhand clothes dealer who had sold him a complete outfit two days later.
Though Nelson looked considerably grubbier than he had when they’d first seen him, neither witness had any trouble identifying him. “A peculiar thing happened when I picked him out in the police station,” Chandler told reporters afterwards. “As I laid my hand on his shoulder to let the police know that he was the man, he flinched under the pressure of my touch.” Chandler also offered a vivid description of Nelson’s hitchhiking technique. As Chandler’s Ford approached, “Nelson walked towards the center of the road and raised his hand until the car slowed down, then jumped onto the running board and asked for a ride. Almost without waiting for permission, he vaulted over the side of the car onto the seat. When we got to the border, he vaulted out again, landing on the ground. He never opened the door of the car either to enter it or leave it.”
Two other witnesses were preparing to identify the prisoner: Mr. and Mrs. John Hill, the proprietors of the boardinghouse where Nelson had strangled Lola Cowan. Early Thursday evening, a reporter for the Free Press visited the elderly couple at their Smith Street home and interviewed them in their kitchen.
“Will I be able to identify him?” Mrs. Hill exclaimed in response to the reporter’s question. “Why it’ll be as easy as picking out that stove from the wash boiler. Me and Mr. Hill both got a good look at the brute. Those black eyes alone will give him away!”
As the old lady talked, she grew increasingly incensed—though Nelson’s failure to come through with his rent seemed to bother her more than his rape-murder of the fourteen-year-old girl.
“Imagine,” she clucked. “Taking a room for a week and never paying for it! And he has upset my home and probably injured my business. I’ve always kept a good clean home, and I always will. I’ve never kept any evil persons about. I tell them to leave the minute I get suspicious.”
“Better watch out when you go identify him,” her husband admonished as his wife continued to fume. “Keep your hands off him. Don’t try to hit him.”
“Hit him!” the old lady scoffed. “Why, I’d crucify him if I could.”
“Now, now,” said her husband, who seemed genuinely taken aback. “Don’t talk that way.”
“You’re right,” said Mrs. Hill, slightly abashed. “Tell you what I will do, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll ask him for the two dollars he owes me,” said Mrs. Hill.
40
†
Manitoba Free Press, June 18, 1927
In the opinion of Dr. C. M. Hincks of Toronto, director of the Canadian Mental Hygiene Association who is a visitor in Winnipeg, the man who murdered Mrs. Patterson and Lola Cowan is a moral imbecile.
The capture of the infamous “Gorilla Man” was widely reported in American newspapers, including the New York Times, which ran a story about Nelson’s arrest on Friday morning, June 17. Still, no U.S. city—not even San Francisco, birthplace of the strangler and the site of his earliest murders—devoted as much media coverage to the story as Winnipeg, where the fascination with Nelson remained at a fever pitch for another full week.
Shortly after 10:30 A.M. on Friday, Nelson—“The Greatest Murderer Since Jack the Ripper,” as the Winnipeg Tribune branded him—appeared in the city police court, to be formally charged with the murders of Lola Cowan and Emily Patterson. Outside the building, Rupert Street was jammed with spectators, who had begun gathering hours earlier, hoping for a glimpse of the monster. But police guards posted at the entranceway made sure that only authorized personnel gained admission. As a result, the courtroom was half-empty when the “Gorilla” was escorted to the dock by four armed constables.
Though Nelson’s jaw was still dark with stubble, his hair had been clipped, and his ratty green sweater replaced with a gray suit jacket and blue, collarless shirt. Head bowed, shoulders slumped, hands manacled before him, he stood by the rail and listened in silence while the court clerk, George Richards, read the charge.
Since Nelson, docile and despondent, looked about as fearsome as a short-order cook, it was left to local reporters to spice up their stories with suitably diabolical details. In the account of the Tribune’s correspondent, Nelson’s slate-gray eyes suddenly acquired a demonic “yellowish hue.” And when, following the proceedings, the prisoner was surrounded by officers and ushered back to his cell, a reporter for the Free Press was on hand to testify that Nelson had “a walk like an ape.”
One of the courtroom spectators that morning was John Cowan, Lola’s father. Though newsmen pressed him for a quote about Nelson, Cowan had little to say, though he did thank his fellow Winnipeggers, who had begun raising money for the families of the two victims. Started with a contribution of four silver quarters sent in by a young reader of the Free Press, the fund had grown to $42.30 by Friday morning.
Several hours after Nelson$s courtroom appearance, Catherine Hill got her chance to confront him. Shortly after 1:00 P.M., two detectives picked her up at her boardinghouse and drove her to the central police station. The elderly landlady, who suffered from severe rheumatism, was escorted to the lineup room, where thirty male prisoners were ranged against one wall, hands manacled behind their backs. Near the center of the long row stood Nelson, head thrown back, dark eyes burning (according to the Winnipeg Tribune) with a “phosphorescent” glow.
Leaning on the arm of a detective, Mrs. Hill laboriously made her way along the row of prisoners. By the time she reached the center, she was breathing hard with the effort. Taking one quick glance into Nelson$s face, she raised her gnarled right hand and laid it on his sleeve.
“It was the face of him that I knew,” she explained to reporters afterwards. “His hair was brushed different and he needed a shave. But I knew him.” Seated in a little antechamber, the landlady seemed visibly relieved that she had “done her bit.” She had been under constant strain for the past week, unable to sleep or to eat a proper meal.
“But what’s the use of breaking down when you have a job to do?” she declared as the newsmen scribbled down her every word. “So long as I can do the right thing for my country, I can get along.”
In the view of the Tribune’s reporter, the spunky old woman was the very model of “true British courage. Even when most harassed, her greatest thought is of the bereaved ones and not of herself.”
Nevertheless, when asked if she had been tempted to say anything to the prisoner, Mrs. Hill reverted to the subject that seemed most genuinely pressing to her.
“I wanted to ask him when he was coming back to pay me the two dollars he owes me,” she replied. “But the detective said I was not to speak to the man.” She paused for an instant, then emitted a sigh. “I’d like fine to get my money from him, though.”
Several more people were brought down to the central police station that afternoon to identify the suspect: John Hofer, the “clean-faced” fellow who had struck up a brief acquaintance with Nelson on the trolley ride from Winnipeg exactly one week earlier; James Phillips, the lodger who had chatted with Nelson out on Mrs. Hill’s veranda on Thursday evening, June 9; and Grace Nelson, the boarder at Mary Rowe’s house in Regina, who had been reading a magazine in bed on the morning of Sunday, June 12, when Nelson abruptly barged into her room. All of them picked him from the lineup without hesitation.
It was close to suppertime before the priso
ner was finally led back to his cell. Though Nelson, according to several observers, had appeared “cowed and crushed” during his courtroom appearance that morning, he seemed remarkably carefree by the time he was locked up for the night, chatting lightly with his guards about some of his favorite topics: baseball, Buster Keaton movies, and religion. Indeed, he seemed so indifferent to his circumstances that he had yet to request a lawyer.
To at least one journalist covering the case, Nelson seemed like a perfect prospect for the most celebrated attorney of the day: Clarence Darrow, savior of the Chicago thrill-killers, Leopold and Loeb, and the champion of Darwinism during the celebrated Dayton “Monkey Trial.” When asked if he had any interest in defending the “Gorilla Man,” however, Darrow demurred—though he took advantage of the interview to put in a word for two of his pet causes, the abolition of the death penalty and the treatment of criminals as maladjusted individuals who deserved enlightened psychiatric care instead of punishment.
“I couldn’t take the case,” he told the reporter for the Chicago Tribune. “I am not doing anything nowadays. I haven’t read much about Nelson. Of course, I am against capital punishment. I don’t think anyone should be legally killed by the state, regardless of the nature of the crime or crimes charged. I don’t believe this man, Nelson, should be hanged.
“If we look carefully enough, we will find some mental taint or environmental defect which causes men to commit the crimes they do. Criminals should be confined and treated.”
Though months would pass before Nelson underwent a psychiatric evaluation, his mental state was a matter of public speculation from the moment of his arrest. Like Clarence Darrow, Dr. C. M. Hincks of Toronto, director of the Canadian Mental Hygiene Association, believed that faulty parenting was at least partly to blame for creating killers like Nelson. Dr. Hincks, who was visiting Winnipeg on business at the time of the “Gorilla Man’s” capture, offered his opinion in an interview with the Manitoba Free Press.
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