Hincks diagnosed the suspect as a “moral imbecile”—the term used to describe Theo Durrant, the “Demon of the Belfry,” who had provoked such fierce outrage in San Francisco just a few years before Nelson’s birth. “Not mental disease but lack of development in one part of his make-up is responsible for his horrible crimes,” Hincks explained. Such criminals were psychologically stunted: grown men with the crude amorality of vicious boys, the kind who take pleasure from plucking the wings off flies.
“Many children like to kill things,” said Hincks, “to dismember insects or stone birds. This is usually only a passing phase.” In the case of certain individuals, however, these tendencies “become exaggerated and fixed.” Such children grow up to be men unfettered by conscience, immune to remorse, “perverts” who kill not out of conventional motives—rage, jealousy, revenge—but to “gratify their abnormal lusts. To a man like this, what is repulsion to a normal human being is appetite. In all other respects, he may be quite plausible, with nothing to indicate the freak in his nature. He is able to talk over his crimes rationally and without a trace of emotion, then go right out and commit another.”
In the course of his career, Hincks had encountered several of these deviants, though he hastened to assure his interviewer that “such cases” were “rare in the world.” There was, for example, an “eight-year-old boy who seared his baby sister’s face with a red-hot poker and killed pigeons without any feeling” and “a man who took delight in disembowelling cattle.”
And what was the cause of such monstrously warped behavior? asked the interviewer.
Hincks was forced to concede that science had yet to provide an entirely satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon, though “faulty upbringing” was certainly a factor. Once a person became a “moral imbecile,” the condition was incurable. But “had the Strangler been subjected to proper influences as a boy,” Hincks maintained, “he might have developed normally.”
From a present-day perspective, most of Hincks’ comments still make a great deal of sense, though his language has a dated and distinctly unscientific ring. The phrase “moral imbecile,” which sounds more like a Victorian slur than a clinical category, has long since been abandoned by psychologists. Nowadays, we call such people sociopaths. And Hincks’ remarks about the frequency of the phenomenon are almost touchingly antique.
In an age when sadistic lust murder has become so prevalent that the run-of-the-mill sex slayer barely rates a mention in the press, the world that Hincks describes—one in which “such cases are rare”—seems like a faraway dream.
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Mary Fuller
I don’t see how my husband could be this Dark Strangler. I know he was mentally deranged, but he was not violently insane and he was always good to me.
Any doubts that the burly little man locked up in the Winnipeg jail was the transcontinental killer of twenty-two victims were dispelled within days of his arrest. Nelson’s mug shots and fingerprints were distributed to police departments throughout the United States. By Saturday, June 18, he had been positively identified by various witnesses.
In Portland, Mrs. Sophie Yates, the tenant at the rooming house where Nelson had lodged for several days in November, confirmed that the face in the photographs belonged to the man she had known as “Adrian Harris,” who had bestowed such lavish gifts on herself and the landlady, Edna Gaylord. Grocer Russell Gordon also identified Nelson as the “nice-mannered fellow” who had purchased fourteen-dollars’ worth of provisions from him on Thanksgiving eve.
When Marie Kuhn of Philadelphia was shown Nelson’s photograph, she clutched both hands to her bosom and let out a gasp. “That is the man,” she told Detectives Peter Sheller and Frank Cholinski. “I can never forget those eyes. They seem to haunt me day and night.”
The proprietress of a bake shop located not far from the home of Mary McConnell, the fifty-three-year-old widow killed by the “Dark Strangler” in late April, Mrs. Kuhn had been standing behind her counter on the afternoon of the murder when the swarthy stranger entered her shop. He had an odd, rolling walk, “as though he had on tight shoes and his feet were hurting him,” Mrs. Kuhn recalled. Doffing his hat, he extracted a gold lady’s wristwatch from a pocket and held it across the counter.
“Interested in buying this?” he asked. “You can have it for two bucks.”
Taking the watch from his hand, Mrs. Kuhn examined it briefly before giving it back with a shake of her head. The watch (one of several valuables Nelson had stolen from Mary McConnell’s bedroom) was a handsome object, clearly worth the asking price. But Mrs. Kuhn wanted nothing to do with the stranger, who—though freshly barbered and redolent of eau de cologne—struck her as a “bum.”
(That Nelson looked and smelled as if he’d just come from the barber’s was consistent with the m.o. he later used in Winnipeg. Police suspected that Nelson would typically wait until his hair was shaggy and his face covered with a heavy stubble before committing a crime. Then, after trading his clothes at a secondhand shop, he would hurry to a barbershop for a shave and a trim, thus altering his appearance.)
Three other Philadelphia women—Margaret Currie, Rose Egler, and Sarah Butler, neighbors of Mary McConnell who had seen Nelson on the day of the slaying—were brought down to police headquarters and asked to pick his photograph from a batch of mug shots. All three identified him without any trouble.
Mrs. Butler, who supported herself by taking in lodgers, let out a scream when she laid eyes on his picture. Nelson had shown up at her door on the morning of the murder, asking to see a room, but her boardinghouse was full. Mrs. Butler felt certain that, had there been any vacancies, she might well have ended up like poor Mary McConnell.
Throughout the country—in Burlingame and Buffalo, Seattle and Detroit—people who had encountered the “Strangler” confirmed that Nelson was the man. Fred Merritt—the young boarder (and surrogate son) of the Buffalo landlady, lady, Jennie Randolph—took one look at the mug shots and announced, “That’s him!” Mrs. H. C. Murray, the Burlingame mother-to-be who had managed to fight off the “Strangler” in November, was equally emphatic.
Sergeant J. A. Hoffmann of Detroit, who had travelled to Canada to interview the suspect, was able to link him to the “Strangler” murders through a key piece of evidence, discovered by Winnipeg detectives in the pants Nelson had sold to the secondhand clothes dealer, Sam Waldman. The incriminating object was a jackknife with a big nick in the blade. The steel surrounding the nick was burnt, as though the blade had been used to slice through a live electric wire.
One of the “Strangler’s” Detroit victims, the landlady, Mrs. Fannie C. May, had been garrotted with an electric cord, cut from a plugged-in lamp. Following the discovery of the murders, Sergeant Hoffmann had predicted that, when the killer was caught, he would probably be carrying a jackknife with a singed nick in the blade—exactly like the knife that had been recovered from the pocket of Earle Nelson’s old pants.
Unfortunately one of the star witnesses in the case—Merton Newman of San Francisco, whose sixty-year-old Aunt Clara had been murdered at the start of the Strangler’s eighteen-month spree—was unable to provide a positive identification. Shown Nelson’s mug shots, Newman, who had not only seen but spoken to the killer, didn’t recognize the face in the photographs.
In spite of this disappointment, however, California authorities remained convinced that the Winnipeg prisoner was the “Strangler.” Within twenty-four hours of his arrest, San Francisco police had not only discovered the suspect’s real name, Earle Leonard Ferral, but had dug up his police, military, and psychiatric records. The picture that emerged from this material—of a violently unstable man who had been in and out of jails and mental institutions for years, was known to be an accomplished breakout artist, and had been incarcerated for a vicious sexual attack on a young girl—certainly matched the profile of the “Dark Strangler.”
Much to the gratification of the gossip-hungry public, i
nvestigators had also discovered that the “Gorilla” was a married man. Meek, long-suffering Mary Fuller suddenly found herself identified on the front page of newspapers up and down the Pacific Coast as the wife of America’s most monstrously perverted killer.
In spite of the mortification this exposure must have caused her, however, she remained her usual steadfast self, protesting that Earle could not possibly be the culprit. “I don’t see how my husband could be this Dark Strangler,” she told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “I know he was mentally deranged, but he was not violently insane and he was always good to me.”
When she was interviewed by San Francisco detectives, however, she revealed information that only added to the weight of evidence against Earle. Speaking of their life together, she described his abrupt disappearances in early 1926, not long after she had taken him back into their Palo Alto home. He had vanished for the first time on February 19, saying that he was going to Halfmoon Bay in search of work, and had not returned until June 25. It was during this precise period that the “Strangler’s” earliest confirmed murders took place, beginning with Clara Newman’s death on February 20 and climaxing with the slaying of Mrs. George Russell of Santa Barbara on June 24.
Nelson had remained at home with Mary until August 15, when he suddenly departed again, explaining that he was going to Redwood City. Less than one week later, two more West Coast women were slain, Mrs. Mary Nisbet on August 20 and Mrs. Isabel Gallegos the following day.
Detectives also located Nelson’s aunt, Lillian Fabian, interviewing her at her San Francisco home on Monday, June 20. Like Mary Fuller, Lillian refused to believe that Earle was the “Strangler.” Though she acknowledged that her nephew was prone to “queer streaks,” she insisted that he was a “very mild” person, incapable of murder.
When asked about Earle’s wife, Lillian responded with nothing but praise. “Mrs. Fuller is, of course, greatly worried over this,” she said, her voice full of sympathy. “She is just as loyal to Earle as possible but hates all the publicity. She’s almost a mother to him, you know, as she’s nearly twice his age. Often he would leave her flat, and she wouldn’t see him for months at a time. But she understands Earle, and he is much better off married to her than to a flapper.”
Before the week was out, Nelson would be identified by another forty-odd witnesses. On Monday evening, June 20, the inquest into the deaths of Lola Cowan and Emily Patterson was conducted at the police court on Rupert Street. For a little over two hours, the twelve-member coroner’s jury listened intently to the testimony of twenty-six people, including Dr. W. P. McCowan, who performed the postmortems on the victims; Bernhardt Mortenson, the boarder who first glimpsed the Cowan girl’s body under the bed in Mrs. Hill’s rooming house; Lewis B. Foote, the photographer who shot pictures of the victims; the clothier, Sam Waldman; the barber, Nick Tabor; and—most dramatically—William Patterson, who kept the courtroom transfixed as he recalled the moment when, kneeling at his sleeping son’s bedside, he discovered his wife’s savaged corpse.
The only person who seemed indifferent to Patterson’s testimony was Nelson himself, who sat through the entire proceedings with a look of supreme unconcern on his coarse, stubbled face. Wearing dark-blue trousers, a gray jacket, collarless shirt, and gaping, laceless boots, he sat unmanacled in the prisoner’s dock, staring absently at the wooden railing and stifling an occasional yawn. When the jury foreman, E. R. Frayer, read the verdict, finding the suspect responsible for the two murders, Nelson displayed not the slightest trace of emotion.
He was equally impassive three days later, when the preliminary hearing was held in the same place, the police court in the Rupert Street station. By 8:00 A.M., hundreds of would-be spectators, most of them women, had already gathered outside the building. Police guards posted at the entranceway kept the crowd under control. By the time the hearing began at noon, every inch of seating-space was occupied, while the hallway outside the courtroom was packed to the point of impassability. Though denied admission, a hundred or so people continued to mill on the sidewalk until the hearing was over.
More than sixty witnesses testified during the proceedings: everyone from W. E. Chandler, the motorist who had picked Nelson up near Warren, Minnesota, to William Haberman, the old man who had seen the suspect fiddling with the Pattersons’ front door on the day of the murder. Thomas Carten—the clerk at Chevrier’s haberdashery, who had sold Nelson the champagne-colored fedora—was there, as were the Regina landlady, Mary Rowe; her boarder, Grace Nelson (who had been reading in bed when Nelson barged into her room); Leslie Morgan, the Wakopa storekeeper who had alerted the Provincial police; and several dozen more. Under questioning by Crown Prosecutor R. B. Graham, witness after witness added links to the long evidentiary chain connecting Nelson to the corpses in Winnipeg.
Guarded by four armed police officers, Nelson sat through the proceedings with an expression (as one reporter put it) “of unusual calm.” He looked a good deal more presentable than he had at the inquest. His face was freshly shaven, his hair was neatly combed into a pompadour, and his scruffy clothes had been replaced with a new, forest-green suit But his manner was just as detached. “Not a quiver of an eyelid nor the slightest change of expression was shown by Nelson throughout the trial,” the reporter observed.
His expression remained completely unruffled when—after the final witness, Chief Detective George Smith, testified—Magistrate R. M. Noble committed Earle Leonard Nelson for trial on two charges of murder.
The following morning, Friday, June 24, Nelson was transferred from his cell in the Rupert Street police station to the provincial jail.
From the moment of his arrival in Winnipeg one week earlier, the police had been inundated with calls from anxious citizens, worried that the “Gorilla”—who had broken out of the Killarney jail as though the locks were made of tin—might escape again. As a result, extraordinary precautions were taken when the transfer was made on Friday.
Shackled, handcuffed, and surrounded by ten heavily armed constables, he was loaded into a patrol wagon and whisked off to the provincial jail. Immediately upon his arrival he was hustled into the “death cell,” a heavily fortified structure customarily reserved for the condemned.
“There is not the slightest chance that he will get out,” Warden J. C. Downie declared, giving reporters a look at Nelson’s new accommodations—a cramped, steel enclosure surrounded by solid cement. “It is a tightly locked cage within another tightly locked cage, and several constables will be on constant guard.”
It was the first time in the prison’s history, Downie pointed out, that a man not yet convicted of murder (or, indeed, even tried) had been kept in the cell.
Later that day, Nelson, who had said nothing at either the inquest or preliminary hearing, made his first public statement. Under the circumstances, it would have been reasonable for him to show some concern. After all, though his trial date hadn’t even been set, he had already been consigned to death row.
Nelson, however, remained so completely unperturbed that he continued to shrug off the need for a lawyer. Interviewed by a reporter for the Manitoba Free Press, he flatly denied his guilt. Indeed, he insisted that a man like himself could never commit such heinous crimes.
“I’m charged with two murders,” he declared. “But I’m not the one who done it.”
But what about all the witnesses, asked the reporter—the sixty-plus people throughout the United States and western Canada who had positively identified him as the “Strangler”?
Nelson had a simple answer for that one. “All of ’em are wrong,” he explained. “Murder just isn’t possible for a man of my high Christian ideals.”
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Manitoba Free Press, June 18, 1927
This man, by being caught in Canada, is as fortunate as any man charged with such crimes could be. The more desperate the crime, the more scrupulous and exacting will be the evidence demanded to convict him.
&nb
sp; During the week of June 27, two important developments occurred in the Nelson case. The start of his trial was fixed at July 26. And the court finally appointed two defense lawyers, James H. Stitt and Chester Young, who immediately set about seeking a postponement.
The basis of their petition was twofold. Though Stitt, in particular, felt that he’d been saddled with a thankless task, he also believed that Nelson, like everyone else, was entitled to the best possible defense. A month, Stitt argued in his motion for postponement, “is not sufficient to prepare for trial of the accused.”
An even more compelling reason was the unbridled behavior of the press, which had already done its best to convict Nelson in print. To prove his point, Stitt assembled a sheaf of clippings from the Manitoba Free Press and the Winnipeg Tribune—stories with such inflammatory headlines as FRISCO POLICE CERTAIN PRISONER “THE GORILLA,” NELSON IDENTIFIED AS MAN WHO KILLED BUFFALO WOMAN, PHOTOGRAPH IDENTIFIED BY WOMAN. NELSON BELIEVED TO BE PHILADELPHIA STRANGLER, and PRISONER IS “HARRIS,” HUNTED KILLER, CHIEF SMITH INSISTS.
These were just a few egregious examples of “trial by newspaper instead of trial by jury,” Stitt maintained. Given the overheated atmosphere generated by such publicity, it would be “impossible to obtain a jury impartial to the accused.” Delaying Nelson’s trial until the fall assizes would, at the very least, allow public opinion to cool off a bit.
As it happened, other members of Winnipeg’s legal establishment shared Stitt’s concern, most notably Chief Justice T. H. Mathers. At a meeting with a colleague on Monday, June 27, Mathers voiced his opinion in the most vehement terms. “I was astounded when I heard that it was fixed for the twenty-sixth of July,” he exclaimed. “You cannot get a jury to give him a fair trial now. No jury would dare acquit him, even if he is innocent.”
Firing off a letter to Attorney General W. J. Majors, Mathers blamed the Winnipeg press for having worked “the public mind into a state of excitement and indignation which renders a calm consideration of the evidence against him impossible. The newspapers have conducted a campaign during which he has been condemned over and over again…. The trial of a man for his life is a most solemn event and should be conducted in an atmosphere freed from all emotional prejudice, so far as that can be done. The trial should begin with a presumption in favor of innocence, but if Nelson is placed on trial before the press excitement has time to subside, his trial will begin with the presumption in fact that he is guilty.”
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