The story that ran in the October 28 edition of the Manitoba Free Press, therefore, came as a blow—and not just to the average sensation-loving citizen. WIFE is NOT ABLE TO COME, read the headline. MRS. NELSON WILL NOT BE WITNESS AT WINNIPEG MURDER TRIAL.
The article cited an Associated Press dispatch from San Francisco, where the prisoner’s uncle, Willis Nelson, was quoted as stating that Mary Fuller was too ill to travel. “She is suffering from shock and is under the care of a physician,” he told reporters. “The only way she could go to Winnipeg would be on a stretcher.”
Nelson’s attorneys, James Stitt and Chester Young—who were completely unaware of this development until they read about it in the papers—were especially dismayed by the news. After firing off a telegram to the San Francisco police, requesting an immediate investigation of the report, Stitt announced that, should the story prove true, he would seek a postponement of the trial, since Mrs. Fuller’s testimony was so central to the defense.
As it turned out, the whole story appeared to be a deliberate ruse on the part of Nelson’s family to divert attention from Mary Fuller’s arrival—to permit the excruciatingly shy woman to slip into Winnipeg without being besieged by the press. Even as Willis Nelson’s announcement was travelling over the telegraph wires, the prisoner’s wife—accompanied by his aunt, Lillian Fabian, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Rose—was on her way to Winnipeg. Arriving at the railway station on Thursday morning, October 27, the trio hurried into a taxi and proceeded directly to the McLaren Hotel, where they took a room under an assumed name.
In spite of these efforts at secrecy, it wasn’t long before the press got wind of their arrival. Early Saturday morning, a reporter for the Free Press knocked on then” hotel-room door. It was opened a crack by a tall, handsome woman in her mid-thirties, who peered out nervously at the newsman.
When he asked if she was Nelson’s wife, the woman shook her head. “I am his aunt,” she said. “Mrs. Lillian Fabian. And who might you be?”
As soon as he identified himself, Mrs. Fabian became highly agitated. “We don’t want to talk about it!” she half-shouted at the reporter.
“But perhaps,” he prodded, “if you could just bring yourself to tell something about your nephew’s earlier life under normal home conditions, it might help create a better impression of him.”
Mrs. Fabian seemed to detect something accusatory in this suggestion. “You can’t blame us for what has happened,” she cried. “We had nothing to do with it! We are in a terrible position!”
“Are you going to testify in favor of the accused?” asked the reporter, trying to peer over Mrs. Fabian’s shoulder in the hope of catching a glimpse of Nelson’s wife.
“I have nothing to say about that!”
“Have you any new evidence to introduce?” he persisted.
“It’s no use,” she exclaimed. “We have been told by our attorney not to talk, and we don’t intend to.” Then, without another word, she stepped back from the door, shut it slowly but decisively in the reporter’s face, and threw the inside lock.
Undeterred, the newsman headed downstairs and repaired to his automobile, parked directly across from the hotel. Climbing into the front seat, he kept his eyes on the main entrance, like a cop on a stakeout. His patience was rewarded. About forty-five minutes later, Mrs. Fabian emerged from the hotel, accompanied by a pretty adolescent girl and a frail-looking, white-haired woman with thick-lensed spectacles and pinched, if kindly, face.
As the reporter jumped from his car and hurried toward the trio (who had decided to leave their room for a bit of sightseeing), he called out, “Mrs. Fuller!”
Reflexively, the white-haired old woman jerked her head in his direction, a bewildered look on her face. Seeing the newsman approach, she gave a little gasp and ducked behind Mrs. Fabian, like a toddler taking refuge behind its mother’s skirt.
“Go away!” shouted Mrs. Fabian. “She won’t talk to you.”
Even as Mrs. Fabian spoke, the old lady turned and, with a determination that belied her fragile appearance, strode back into the hotel lobby.
The reporter never did manage to speak to Mary Fuller that day. But he had gotten his story anyway.
In folklore, film, and pulp fiction, women who find themselves in the grasp of dark, hulking creatures are invariably young and lovely. But Winnipeg’s true-life beast-man—in a twist that seemed entirely in keeping with the grotesque nature of the case—wasn’t wed to a beauty.
He was married to a crone.
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Jonathan Swift, The Logicians Refused
Of beasts, it is confess’d the ape
Comes nearest us in human shape;
Like man he imitates each fashion
And malice is his ruling passion.
On Friday morning, October 28, the day after Nelson’s family members reached Winnipeg, a medical specialist arrived at the provincial jail to X-ray the “Gorilla Man’s” brain. Nelson’s attorneys, who were planning an insanity plea, were hoping to find some physical basis for their argument: evidence either of the dire head injury he had sustained as a child or of a syphilitic brain lesion, the morbid legacy of the disease both his parents had died from.
Admitted into the cagelike “condemned cell,” the physician set up his apparatus in the center of the floor and proceeded to take several plates of the prisoner’s head. Nelson—with his crude, omnivorous curiosity—submitted wiffingly, even eagerly, to the procedure, asking a steady stream of questions about the technique. When the physician was interviewed by reporters later that day, he confessed that he had rarely dealt with a more cooperative patient.
That cooperation was typical of Nelson’s behavior in captivity. For the past five months, he had been the most carefully guarded prisoner in the history of the provincial jail. Locked inside the steel-and-concrete cell, he was under round-the-clock surveillance. Six guards shared sentinel duty, working two at a time in eight-hour shifts. One guard sat inside the cell, while the second remained posted just outside the door.
But in spite of the “Gorilla’s” fearsome reputation, he had proved to be a model prisoner. Indeed, captivity seemed to agree with him. Supplied (at a cost of twenty-four dollars per day) with the standard jailhouse amenities, “three hots and a cot,” he had put on a little weight and seemed quietly content, passing much of his time in casual conversation with his guards or immersed in his favorite reading matter: sensational novels, pseudoscientific tracts, and Scripture.
There was only one area in which he remained utterly intransigent. He refused to say a word about his alleged crimes. Virtually from the day of his arrest, a steady stream of American detectives had travelled to Winnipeg, seeking to clear up various unsolved killings in their jurisdictions. In the minds of police officials throughout the United States and Canada, there was not a shred of doubt that Nelson was the homicidal maniac who had strangled (and in most cases sexually assaulted) twenty-two victims in a sixteen-month span:
Clara Newman, San Francisco, February 20, 1926
Laura Beal, San Jose, March 2, 1926
Lillian St. Mary, San Francisco, June 10, 1926
Ollie Russell, Santa Barbara, June 24, 1926
Mary Nisbet, Oakland, August 16, 1926
Beata Withers, Portland, October 19, 1926
Virginia Grant, Portland, October 20, 1926
Mabel Fluke, Portland, October 21, 1926
Mrs. William Anna Edmonds, San Francisco, November 18, 1926
Florence Monks, Seattle, November 23, 1926
Blanche Myers, Portland, November 29, 1926
Mrs. John Brerard, Council Bluffs, Iowa, December 2, 1926
Bonnie Pace, Kansas City, Missouri, December 27, 1926
Germania Harpin, Kansas City, Missouri, December 28, 1926
Robert Harpin, Kansas City, Missouri, December 28, 1926
Mary McConnell, Philadelphia, April 27, 1927
Jennie Randolph, Buffalo, May 30, 1927
>
Fannie May, Detroit, June 1, 1927
Maureen Oswald Atorthy, Detroit, June 1, 1927
Mary Sietsma, Chicago, June 4, 1927
Lola Cowan, Winnipeg, June 9, 1927
Emily Patterson, Winnipeg, June 10, 1927
But during this same period, there were other brutal murders that bore a striking resemblance to the nearly two dozen atrocities attributed to the “Dark Strangler/Gorilla Man.” On the evening of August 23, 1925 (not long after Nelson was discharged from Napa State Hospital), a sixty-year-old widow named Elizabeth Jones was found strangled to death in the bedroom of her home at 3565 Market Street in San Francisco. According to several witnesses, Mrs. Jones, who had recently put her house up for sale, had been visited on the day of her death by a stocky, dark-skinned man who professed an interest in buying the property.
Several weeks later, on October 1, another San Francisco woman was strangled and raped after death—a strikingly attractive, thirty-two-year-old divorcée named Elma Wells. Her naked, outraged corpse was found jammed into the clothes closet of a vacant apartment at 628 Guerrero Street, one of several buildings she managed.
The most sensational unsolved cases of all occurred in Philadelphia in early November—a string of killings that set off a wave of panic among the female population of the city. On Saturday, November 7, 1925, a waitress named Mary Murray was strangled in the kitchen of her house at 1811 Judson Street by an unknown fiend, who carried her lifeless body up to a second-floor room, carefully deposited it on a bed, then sexually violated the corpse. Just four days later, a thirty-three-year-old housewife named Lena Weiner of 2421 Napa Street was murdered and outraged in precisely the same way. An overcoat and two suits belonging to Mrs. Weiner’s husband, Hyman, were stolen from the home.
A third Philadelphia victim (whose death received significantly less attention in the press) was a young woman dismissively identified in the papers as “Ola McCoy, colored,” who was strangled to death in the parlor of her Montgomery Avenue house, just a few blocks away from the Murray home. As in the other cases, Mrs. McCoy’s body was carried to an upstairs bedroom and subjected to postmortem rape.
A swarthy, thickset stranger—described as either “a dark-skinned white man or a light-skinned Negro”—was seen lurking in the vicinity of Lena Weiner’s house on the day of her murder. But though several dozen suspects (nearly all of them black) were rounded up and questioned, the perpetrator of the three atrocities managed to escape.
There were other strangulation victims during this period, too: a fifty-year-old wardrobe mistress named Mae Price, slain in a Boston hotel room while touring with a show called The Brown Derby; a sixty-nine-year-old landlady named Rose Valentine, murdered in her apartment at 195 Norfolk Street in Newark, New Jersey; another elderly Newark woman named Lena Tidar, garrotted with a man’s necktie in the bedroom of her Bergen Street house.
Hoping to close the books on these and other killings, detectives from around the United States made the trip to Winnipeg to interview Nelson and urge him to confess. But their appeals were always answered with the same disdainful response: “Why should I get myself hung to help you?” He had never even been to Newark, he would declare. Or to Philadelphia. Or Buffalo. Or Detroit.
He was innocent of every accusation. Others might be capable of murder. But not a man of his devout religious beliefs.
Copious as they are, the existing documents on the Nelson case contain very little psychiatric information. Still, it is possible to draw certain inferences about the workings of his deeply disordered mind.
Shortly before the start of his trial, one of his guards was struck by the intensity with which Nelson was poring over a certain passage in the Bible. When the guard asked what he was reading, Nelson glanced up and said, “Proverbs, Chapter 23, Verse 26.”
“What’s it about?” asked the guard.
Nelson, who normally welcomed any opportunity to hold forth about religion, began to reply. Suddenly, he clamped his mouth shut, as though struck by second thoughts. He looked at the guard with a strange little smile, then returned to his reading.
Back home that evening, the guard, out of curiosity, consulted his own family Bible. This is what he read:
My son, give me thine heart,
and let thine eyes observe my ways.
For a whore is a deep ditch;
and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
She also lieth in wait as for a prey,
and increaseth the transgressors among men.
That Nelson was so taken with these lines suggests that he fell into an all-too-familiar criminal category: the type of sex-killer that sees his victims as “whores,” filthy man-traps who get exactly what they deserve. Even in the face of overwhelmingly incriminating evidence, he vehemently denied his guilt. And after all, if every “strange woman” was a “deep ditch,” a “narrow pit,” a foul creature waiting to prey on unwary males and turn them into “transgressors,” then how could he be held to blame?
At no point would Nelson display the faultest glimmer of remorse. As far as he was concerned, there was only one real victim in the case. He was certainly capable of feeling sorry—but (like other sociopathic killers before and since) only for himself.
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Editorial, Manitoba Free Press, November 9, 1927
A very real difficulty at the Nelson trial was to connect Nelson, in the mind’s eye, with the murder for which he was being tried…. Nelson is a small, young man, smoothskinned and without a single indication in his appearance that would warn the ordinary observer against him as a dangerous person. The effort which had to be made to see this inoffensive-looking youth engaged in the furious violence of a bestial murder strained the imagination heavily.
Courtroom Number One of the Manitoba Law Courts Building on Kennedy Street had enough seating space for 175 spectators. But the Nelson trial was shaping up to be the hottest show in town, with thousands of people clamoring for admission. By Monday, October 31, the day before the scheduled start of the proceedings, officials had been swamped with requests. Every applicant received the same response: apart from the bench space set aside for representatives of the press and assorted local dignitaries, reserved seats were unavailable. The general public would be admitted strictly on a first-come first-served basis.
The sun had barely risen when the crowd began to gather at the Law Courts Building on Tuesday morning, November 1. By noon, nearly 2,000 people had shown up—more than ten times the number that the courtroom could accommodate. The majority of them were women, many teenage girls, who packed the corridors and spilled out onto the streets, buzzing with anticipation. To more than one observer, they seemed less like a bunch of courtroom spectators than a mob of movie fans at a gala premiere. If Barrymore himself were about to appear, they couldn’t have been more excited.
A reporter from the Winnipeg Tribune was on hand to describe the tumultuous scene when the courtroom doors were finally opened at 1:30 P.M.: “A great shout went up, and the mob lunged forward like a tidal wave. It was like a river trying to pass through a bottle-neck, and policemen on guard at the door were forced to use all their strength to prevent injury to members of the throng.” Within minutes, the room was filled to capacity—every seat taken, every inch of standing space occupied. The doors were shut and locked, with no one permitted to enter or leave until court was adjourned for the day.
The remainder of the crowd continued to jam the hallways and mill in the street, still hoping for a glimpse of the notorious figure whose alleged crimes had (as the Free Press put it in in that morning’s edition) “staggered and terrified the civilized world.”
When Nelson was finally led to the prisoner’s dock shortly after 2:00 P.M., an excited rumble filled the courtroom, as the spectators half-rose from their seats, craning their necks for a look at the main attraction. But if they were expecting some sort of sideshow monstrosity—a hulking human gorilla, led in chains by his captors—they were gravely di
sappointed.
In spite of his wrist manacles and the two burly guards at his side, Nelson—who was enjoying his first exposure to the outside world after nearly five months in solitary—seemed relaxed, even cheerful. Passing the witness area, he recognized two of the provincial police officers, Constables Sampson and Outerson, who had accompanied him on the train ride from Killarney to Winnipeg.
“Glad to see you again, boys,” Nelson said with a big grin. “You were awfully good to me when we first got acquainted.”
As the guards led the prisoner to his place and undid his manacles, one pretty young woman exclaimed to her companion, “Why, he’s the best-looking man here!”
“He certainly doesn’t look like a bad man to me,” her friend agreed.
And indeed, freshly groomed and decked out in a gray suit, beige shirt, and polka-dot tie, Nelson looked not merely presentable but downright distinguished. In a photographic portrait taken at the time of his trial, he sits with his chin up, his expression calm and thoughtful, looking less like America’s most notorious killer than a business executive posing for the frontispiece of his company’s annual report.
As the jury selection got underway, Nelson appeared to take a keen interest in matters. But it wasn’t long before he was stifling yawns. For the rest of the day—and indeed, for most of the trial—he seemed thoroughly disengaged, staring off into space when he wasn’t shutting his eyes, tilting his head back against the marble wall behind him, and dozing off. He stirred to life only once on Tuesday, barking out a laugh when one of the spectators dropped a jar of peanut butter she had smuggled in for lunch and its contents spattered the legs of her neighbors.
And in truth—though the trial would dominate the news and keep the public transfixed for the remainder of the week—it offered very little in the way of drama or suspense. The flat, almost perfunctory, tone of the proceedings was set by the opening statement of prosecutor R. B. Graham, delivered on Wednesday, November 2, following the full empanelment of the jury. The courtroom was absolutely silent as Graham addressed the twelve jurymen: seven farmers, a machinist, a steel worker, a warehouse superintendent, a fireman, and a chauffeur.
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