In response to this communication, Attorney General Majors composed a letter of his own, mailing copies to both J. W. Dafoe and W. L. MacTavish, editors-in-chief of the Manitoba Free Press and the Winnipeg Tribune:
Dear Sir:
Re Rex vs. Nelson
As you are aware, much publicity has been given to this particular case and the public mind is still very much inflamed.
The prisoner is now committed for trial. The date of trial has been fixed for July 26th.
The comments and news items which are now constantly appearing in the two leading newspapers of our City, if continued, may constitute a ground for postponement of the trial, which you will understand is undesirable. Hence, it is essential in the interests of justice that all further unnecessary publicity should cease until the trial is over.
I take it that the general public is now reasonably well informed about the case and that no interests will suffer if, until the trial is over, the press refrains as far as possible from publishing anything about the matter.
I shall, therefore, be glad if you will give the necessary instructions so that your good paper may, until the trial is over, refrain from publishing anything more than such as is absolutely necessary about this Nelson case.
This appeal worked—at least to an extent. The kind of shrill banner headlines that had run for two solid weeks quickly disappeared from the front pages.
Still, both newspapers continued to feature regular items on the case—no surprise, given the public’s insatiable hunger for any tidbits about Nelson. The very day after Majors sent his letter, the Tribune printed a titillating piece headlined MAN SLEPT IN ROOM WHERE SLAIN GIRL’S BODY LAY.
The story recounted the macabre experience of a railroad conductor named Joe Boner, who had taken a room in Mrs. Hill’s boardinghouse on Saturday afternoon, June 10, the day after Nelson absconded from Winnipeg. As it happened, his room adjoined the one Nelson had occupied.
Several hours after his arrival, Boner went off to the Garrick movie theater to see the new George Jessel comedy, Private Izzy Murphy. Returning after midnight, the bleary-eyed boarder mistakenly entered the room adjacent to his own, tumbled into bed, and immediately fell into a profound slumber. It wasn’t until the following evening—when his fellow tenant, Bernhardt Mortenson, caught sight of Lola Cowan’s hidden corpse—that Boner realized he had spent the night “with the girl’s naked body huddled under his bed” (as the Tribune wrote).
The press also lavished a good deal of attention on the nasty dispute over the $1,500 reward, whose claimants included just about everyone with a connection to the case, from John T. Hanna, the motorist who had given Nelson a lift from Emerson to Winnipeg on Wednesday, June 8, to the Regina landlady, Mary Rowe, to J. W. Whittingham, a section foreman for the Canadian National Railways who had exchanged a few words with Nelson at the Wakopa depot on the day of the latter’s arrest.
The most controversial claimant of all, however, was Roy Armstrong, the Boissevain farmer who, along with Constable Joe Young, had conducted a day-long search for Nelson until his Ford got stuck in a mud hole. Armstrong insisted that he was entitled to a share because he had “trailed the ‘Strangler’ from twelve o’clock noon until almost dark, arousing the countryside to his aid and asking them to telephone in all directions and have the people be on the lookout.”
Armstrong’s claim, however, was bitterly refuted by various witnesses, including several dozen residents of Wakopa, who signed a petition to “protest in the most emphatic manner the rumor or statement that any telephone warning whatsoever was received by them to be on the lookout for the supposed strangler Nelson.” As the precise details of the manhunt were reconstructed in the weeks following Nelson’s capture, it became increasingly clear that, far from having sounded a general alarm, Armstrong and Young had deliberately refrained from “arousing the countryside” in the hope of capturing the suspect themselves and splitting the reward down the middle.
At least two witnesses testified that, when the pair finally showed up in Wakopa and discovered that the “Strangler” was already in custody, Armstrong had bitterly muttered that “$1,500 had supped through his fingers that day.” In the opinion of an editorial writer for the Killarney Guide, Armstrong’s conduct was “more worthy of censure than reward.”
This opinion was ultimately shared by Attorney General Majors, who, concluding that “the reward was the main object of Armstrong’s search,” dismissed the Boissevain man’s claim. In the end, the money was divided eight ways, with varying amounts dispensed to the four Wakopa residents most instrumental in Nelson’s initial arrest, Leslie Morgan, Albert Dingwall, George Dickson, and Duncan Merlin; two Killarney men, Alfred Wood and Guy Ramsay, who had given “valuable help in the subsequent recapture”; and the Winnipeg clothiers, Jake Garber and Sam Waldman, who had provided the police with vital leads.
The suggestion that Nelson might not receive a fair trial in Winnipeg provoked a good deal of wounded protest in the press. Editorial writers insisted that, in wending his way into Canada, the “Gorilla” had found himself in the hands of the most civilized judicial system in the world. Several of these editorials drove home their points by contrasting Canadian justice with American vigilantism.
The most compelling of these was a piece in the Manitoba Free Press, written by someone identified only by the initials “T.B.R.” In language whose understated tone only amplified his outrage and contempt, the writer recounted a visit he had recently received from “a quiet-looking, pleasant, elderly gentleman” who had lived for a time in the American Deep South. When the talk turned to race relations, this “twinkling-eyed, cheery old caller” began regaling his listener with a description of the “various lynching parties at which he had been a guest; and what he had seen with his own eyes on several fetid, blood-splashed nights in little towns south of the Mason and Dixie [sic] line”:
One pretty summer evening, he told us, a negro was arrested in a southern village on a serious charge and put in jail…. When the news got around that a “nigro” had been caught, the villagers, in a body, turned out and crowded around the jail…. This “nigro” apparently had been “identified” as the culprit. He, the crowd was convinced, was the offender. An elderly gentleman, standing near our friend, had a parcel, and he opened it, and there was “Oh, a fine, beautiful new rope.” Great stuff for “nigroes.”
A new telephone line was being put up through the village, and the long, enormous poles were lying by the roadside. One of these poles was lifted by about a hundred men. They carried it into the prison yard … and pushed the pole through the door, and went in and brought out the “nigro”….
And then the old gentleman’s beautiful, clean new rope was looped over the “nigro’s” head, and the other end tied to a saddle-horn, and a mounted rider galloped off with the “nigro” leaping behind, flailed and pounded and ground and broken at the end of the taut rope—over rough road and bush and brier to a tall tree, and there our old friend saw the “nigro”—dead and pulp by now—hanged from a branch—“and about a thousand bullets shot into him as he swung.”
And then they all went home to bed.
After relating this appalling tale, the editorialist compared the behavior of the Southern lynch mob to the comportment of the crowd that had gathered at the Winnipeg train station to catch a glimpse of the “Gorilla” upon his arrival from Killarney. “The arrested man is charged with being the most abominable character that ever injured this community…. What our old friend’s ‘nigro’ did was mild compared to what this man is accused of doing.” And yet, wrote “T.B.R.,” when you look at the published newspaper photographs of “the crowd through which he is being led, you see it is the calmest, least excited, least revengeful-looking crowd in the world. They are standing in almost frozen calm, watching him being taken off. There is no lynching-instinct in our people: which is something to be very proud of…. Our people do not go insane with revenge and excitement and tear in pieces the prisoner
whom the police arrest…. And we are saved, in consequence, the horrors of such scenes as those in that village in the Southern States.”
This same note was sounded again and again by commentators who praised “the steady temper of the Canadian people,” the “absolute fairness” of the “British system of justice,” and the “becoming dignity, impressiveness, and strict impartiality” with which “all Canadian murder trials” were conducted.
Even as the papers were offering these paeans to Canadian justice, however, an exchange was taking place behind the scenes which suggested that, at least in the view of certain officials, Nelson’s fate had already been sealed. On June 21—just a few days after the “Gorilla” was brought in chains to Winnipeg—John Allen, Deputy Attorney-General of Manitoba, sent a letter to M. McGregor, Sheriff of the Western Judicial District.
“It is expected that the trial of Nelson, the alleged double murderer, will take place in July at Winnipeg,” Allen wrote. “If he is sentenced to be hanged, the question arises as to where the execution should take place. The Winnipeg Gaol is unfortunately situated for executions, and it has been suggested that the execution might take place at Portage la Prairie or at Brandon Gaol. Can you advise me as to what faculties you have for taking care of a dangerous criminal such as this man Nelson?”
Sheriff McGregor’s response was not very encouraging. “In respect to the situation of the Gaol for executions,” he wrote, “I do not think it is more fortunately situated than the Winnipeg Gaol, as a public school is over-looking the Gaol, a City Park is immediately North of the Gaol, and residential houses are immediately East of the Gaol. There are no residences on the block immediately West, but on the next block it is fairly well built up and the General Hospital is situated two blocks West and one block South.”
With Brandon ruled out, Attorney General Majors himself sent an inquiry to the Deputy Minister of Justice in Ottawa, W. Stuart Edwards. Dated June 23 (just one week after Nelson’s recapture in Killarney), the letter explained precisely why the Winnipeg Gaol was so “unfortunately situated” for executions. “It adjoins the University buildings,” wrote Major. “The University authorities have complained bitterly in the past because executions have taken place so close to the University buildings. As you can understand, the sight of the gallows being erected, etc., is not a pleasant one for the University students.”
Edwards’ reply was as disappointing as Sheriff McGregor’s. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the considerations hereinafter set out preclude the possibility of having the execution, if one takes place, carried out upon the penitentiary property. By section 1065 of the Criminal Code, judgment of death to be executed on any prisoner shall be carried into effect within the walls of the prison in which the offender is confined at the time of execution. So far as I am aware, the Court would have no power to commit the prisoner to the penitentiary, so that he could not be lawfully detained therein.”
There is something grimly ironic about these letters, particularly in light of the self-congratulatory editorials running simultaneously in the Winnipeg press. Publicly, the media was busy proclaiming Nelson’s good fortune in having been arrested in Canada, where he was certain to receive a fair, impartial trial, based on the presumption of innocence.
In private, meanwhile, the Attorney General and other high officials were already trying to decide where to hang him.
PART 5
BY THE NECK
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Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday
One of the striking characteristics of the era of Coolidge Prosperity was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles—a heavyweight boxing match, a murder trial, a new automobile model, a transatlantic flight. Most of the causes célèbres which thus stirred the country from end to end were quite unimportant from the traditional point of view of the historian. The future destinies of few people were affected by the testimony of the “pig woman” at the Hall-Mills trial or the attempt to rescue Floyd Collins from his Kentucky cave. Yet the fact that such things could engage the hopes and fears of unprecedented numbers of people was anything but unimportant.
By the end of June, Nelson had been indicted for first-degree murder in five U.S. cities—Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco. But Winnipeg prosecutors were determined to win a conviction in Canada.
As to when the trial would take place, that issue was finally settled in early July, when Nelson’s lawyer, James Stitt, appeared before Mr. Justice MacDonald to request a delay. Stitt based his motion on two considerations, the same ones he had raised at the time of his appointment: that public opinion, inflamed by the media, would militate against a fair trial, and that the defense did not have sufficient time to prepare its case.
After listening to opposing arguments by Deputy Attorney-General John Allen, MacDonald offered his ruling. Stitt’s first point carried little weight with the judge, who saw no reason why the public’s mood, “aroused by the savagery of the crimes and intensified by the sensationalism of the press,” should be any different in three months’ time. “Criminal trials in our courts are not governed by public feeling or the excitement created by the public press,” MacDonald proclaimed, “and I have no fear of the danger to the accused or any trouble in the selection of twelve fair, honest men into whose judgment his case will be cast.”
Furthermore, MacDonald believed that there were compelling reasons to try Nelson “without delay, because if he is not the man, then the human tiger is still at large and should be run to earth. So long as this trial is delayed, so long will police vigilance lie dormant and the lives of our womenkind be in a state of unrest.”
Still, there was no denying that Stitt and his co-counsel hadn’t been given much time to mount a defense. To ensure that the accused was “surrounded by all the safeguards of a British court of justice,” MacDonald had no choice but to rule in Stitt’s favor, adjourning Nelson’s trial until the fall assizes, scheduled to convene in early November.
The postponement was the last major news story about Nelson to appear for a while. From time to time in the succeeding weeks, the papers would print an item related to the case. In late September, Emily Patterson’s father-in-law, a Belfast factory foreman who had never missed a day of work in sixty-three years, retired from his job. When he suffered a fatal heart attack less than forty-eight hours later, the Free Press ran a notice headlined FATHER-IN-LAW OF ONE OF “STRANGLER’S” VICTIMS DIES.
A few weeks later—in an episode that revealed just how far-flung Nelson’s notoriety had become—the same paper published a squib headlined “Queerest of Letters Reaches Winnipeg Police.” According to the story, Chief Constable Christopher Newton had recently received “the strangest letter ever delivered in Winnipeg”: a query from a young man in Rotterdam, Holland, eager to know whether Nelson was “of Dutch, Spanish, or Italian nationality.” What made this communication so bizarre, however, wasn’t the letter itself but the envelope it came sealed in, which was addressed, “Chief Officer of Justice in Winnipeg, United States of America, State of Utah, Ohio.” Somehow, the letter actually made it to Winnipeg, where a postal employee forwarded it to the Chief of Police.
For the most part, however, coverage of the “Strangler” case dwindled away, as the Canadian public, having gorged on the story for weeks, finally turned its attention to other matters: an election campaign in Manitoba; a gold strike in the northeast comer of the province, up around Hudson Bay; a visit from the Prince of Wales, accompanied by his brother, Prince George, and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
In the United States, a host of matters, large and small, diverted the newspaper-reading public: the furor over Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution; President Coolidge’s stunning decision not to run for reelection in 1928; Babe Ruth’s record-shattering sixtieth home run of the season; the pre
miere of Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer, the first motion picture “talkie”; Gene Tunney’s controversial win over Jack Dempsey in their historical heavyweight rematch. Even in those cities most affected by the “Strangler’s” crimes—San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Detroit—the story vanished from the papers.
And then, in the last week of October, the “Gorilla” roared back into the headlines.
Throughout the world, stories of nubile maidens beloved by and mated to ravening beasts are so common that folklorists have a special name for them—tales of the “Monster Bridegroom.” In our own era, when oral folklore has largely been replaced by mass entertainment, this fantasy has been the stuff of countless movies, from grade-Z horror films like Bride of the Gorilla to certified masterpieces like the original King Kong. Clearly, there is something about the idea of a beautiful young woman embraced by a beast that captivates—and titillates—the popular imagination.
So it is no surprise that Earle Nelson’s wife, a real-life “bride of the Gorilla,” was the object of intense curiosity in Winnipeg. Though Mary Fuller had been tracked down and interviewed by San Francisco reporters, no information about her, beyond her existence, had appeared in the Canadian press. The public—its dormant interest in the Nelson case revived by the approach of the trial—was burning to get a look at the monster’s bride, who was slated to testify on her husband’s behalf. According to published reports, she was scheduled to arrive on Saturday, October 29, three days before the start of the trial.
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