Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Speaking in a brisk, businesslike voice—as though to suggest that the facts were so clear he could dispense with eloquence—Graham laid out a plain, step-by-step chronology of Nelson’s movements from the time he arrived in Winnipeg until his recapture in Killarney.

  After a brief examination of Lewis B. Foote—the professional photographer who had taken pictures of Emily Patterson’s body—Graham began to build his case with painstaking care. Over the next day and a half, he called nearly forty witnesses to the stand, beginning with William Chandler and John T. Hanna, the motorists who had driven Nelson from the United States to Winnipeg, and finishing up with Detective Sergeant James H. Hoskins, who had been on board the special train dispatched to Killarney following the—Gorilla Man” ’s escape. The obvious intention of the prosecutor, as one commentator noted, was to present a straightforward—statement of facts, each one a link which, when connected one with the other, would furnish a chain so finished and complete as to render [Nelson’s] guilt unassailable.”

  The nearest thing to drama during this part of the trial occurred on Wednesday afternoon when William Patterson took the stand. As the entire roomful of spectators strained forward to catch every word, Patterson repeated the same wrenching tale he had related at the inquest in June. In a choked, barely audible voice, he described the devastating moment when, moments after begging God for the strength and guidance to find his missing wife, he found her violated corpse shoved beneath the bed he was praying beside.

  When Graham asked him to identify a photograph of his murdered wife, Patterson nearly broke down. The poor man’s suffering was so painful to see that several female spectators broke into sobs, and when Patterson was finally excused from the stand, the audience let out a collective sigh of relief.

  In his cross-examination of the witnesses, Nelson’s defense counsel, James Stitt, did his best to raise doubts about their testimony. He tried to discredit Sam Waldman by suggesting that the clothier, who had already applied for his share of the reward money, had a vested interest in seeing Nelson convicted. He brought out inconsistencies between the testimony of various witnesses. (Catherine Hill, for example, insisted that Nelson had arrived at her rooming house shortly before 5:00 P.M., wearing a shabby blue coat, baggy brown trousers, and floppy gray cap—clothes that the secondhand dealer Jake Garber testified he had sold to Nelson at 5:30 P.M.) But Stitt, who had absolutely no evidence to offer in rebuttal, was obviously grasping at straws.

  By Thursday afternoon, the prosecution rested what was clearly an impregnable case.

  46

  †

  “Now then, Mrs. Fuller, doesn’t it just come down to this: he was jealous, and he was eccentric?”

  “He was what?”

  “Eccentric-odd.”

  “He was absolutely insane.”

  From the cross-examination of Mary Fuller

  Since the verdict appeared to be a foregone conclusion, the most suspenseful issue at the trial had to do with the defense strategy. From the start of the proceedings, observers had been wondering if the “Gorilla” would be put on the stand.

  As soon as the defense opened its case, however, it became clear that attorney Stitt had no intention of having Nelson testify. Beyond a stubborn assertion of innocence, Nelson simply had nothing to offer in the way of an alibi. Stitt’s only recourse, therefore, was an insanity plea, and this tactic provided some of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

  Everyone in the courtroom, with a single exception, was riveted by the sight of the witness who made her way up to the stand on Thursday morning, November 3-a small, white-haired old woman wearing a black dress with whitelace cuffs and collar. Though Nelson hadn’t laid eyes on his wife for over a year, he was the only person there who seemed utterly indifferent to her presence. Throughout her emotional testimony, he yawned, dozed, or let out an occasional, low-throated chuckle—vivid proof of the bizarre affect and behavior Mary Fuller had come to bear witness to.

  Stitt lost no time in showing that Nelson had already been deemed insane by experts. “I believe,” he began, “that you once gave evidence in court concerning a matter hi which your husband was involved?”

  In a hushed, tremulous voice, Mary confirmed that she had indeed been a witness once before, in May 1921, when her husband—under his birth name, Earle Ferrai—7had been arrested for attacking a young girl in San Francisco and was subsequently committed to Napa State Hospital.

  “What is the hospital used for?” asked Stitt.

  “For mental cases,” Mary replied. “It is the state hospital for the insane.”

  When Stitt inquired if Mary had seen her husband following his arrest, she told of visiting him at the Detention Hospital in San Francisco, where she found him strapped into a straitjacket and babbling “about seeing faces on the wall.” At a later point in her testimony, she recounted her visits to Napa and described the other patients on Earle’s ward: the young man who had cut out his tongue because “he imagined that his father and mother despised him,” the former attorney who delivered strange impassioned speeches, as though he were addressing a jury.

  Having established the defendant’s long history as a mental patient-and offered both his commitment papers and psychiatric records as evidence-Stitt proceeded to ask Mary about her day-to-day life with Nelson.

  “Well,” she sighed, “he always seemed to me to be of a type having no moral responsibility whatever.” Then, guided by Stitt’s queries, she offered example after example of the outlandish, bewildering, and occasionally terrifying behavior her husband had displayed from the earliest days of their marriage.

  She began by giving instances of his “insane jealousy”—the times he would accuse her of making eyes at everyone from passing pedestrians to streetcar conductors, or berate her for caring more about her female friends than she did for him. She described her fury at him when he destroyed her prized photograph of the British politician John Dulon and her utter mortification when, during her stay at St. Mary’s Hospital, he loudly accused her of flirting with her doctor. And she repeated her brother’s assessment of Nelson: “That man is crazy!”

  She recounted other humiliations she had suffered at Earle’s hands: the time they had gone househunting in Oakland and Earle had offered the real-estate agent a two-dollar down payment; the occasion when he had shown up at Miss Marker’s school at midday, wearing a tux, a pleated dress shirt, and a safety pin instead of a tie; his appalling manners at restaurants, where, after drenching his food in olive oil, he would stick his face in the plate and slurp up his dinner, much to the disgust of the other customers.

  And then there were his other weird and disturbing tendencies: his taste for “freakish clothes”; his “childlike” behavior; his bizarre bathing method (which consisted of pouring a glass of water over his toes); his periodic and protracted disappearances; his religious delusions; his morose, even suicidal moods; his devastating headaches; his vicious threats and violent outbursts.

  Mary remained on the stand for over an hour. When Stitt concluded his questioning at around 3:00 P.M., Graham offered a cursory cross-examination, in which he tried to suggest that Nelson’s erratic behavior amounted to little more than “eccentricity.”

  But Mary was adamant. “He was absolutely insane.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she climbed down from the stand and returned to her seat. She had managed to paint a vivid picture of a seriously unbalanced personality. But as Stitt well knew, her looks were just as telling as her words. That the sturdy young man seated in the prisoner’s dock had chosen such a grizzled wife was, perhaps even more than anything Mary had said, eloquent testimony to his aberrant mind.

  Following Mary Fuller’s testimony, court was recessed for the day. When the trial resumed at ten the next morning, Friday, November 4, the defense called its second—and final—witness: Nelson’s unfailingly loyal aunt, Lillian Fabian.

  Fighting back tears throughout much of her testimony, Lillian confirmed Mary’s accou
nt of Earle’s bizarre fashion sense, table manners, and work habits. She also supplied additional details, largely about her nephew’s childhood.

  Earle had been a “morbidlike” little boy, she declared, who “never cared to play with other children” and whose behavior grew even more disturbed after he injured his head in a bike accident. She described Earle’s disconcerting effect on her friends, who were so unsettled by the young boy’s behavior that, after a while, they found excuses to avoid the Nelson home.

  “He had a habit with all my friends,” Lillian recalled. “He would sit there and he would never speak to them. He would sit looking up at the wall with his eyes turned up, just like he was looking in space all the time, and he wouldn’t speak to my friends and say good day or hello or anything, which used to cause me to feel humiliated a great deal.” And then there were the times when “without anybody asking him, he would get up and walk on his hands and pick very big chairs up with his teeth. He would pick them up and hold them up straight in his teeth.”

  As Earle grew into manhood, his “crazy disposition” became even more extreme. There was something endearingly childlike about some of his habits: his fondness for outlandish clothes and “dinky trinkets,” his pleasure in playing hideand-seek and ring-a-levio with her own little ones, his bursts of boyish enthusiasm (like his offer to build a three-story apartment building for his Uncle Willis—“with plumbing and everything”—all by himself). But his darker tendencies—his morbid moodiness, religious ramblings, sullen withdrawals, and outbursts of profanity—became increasingly dismaying even to the ever-devoted Lillian, particularly after Earle’s first confinement to Napa.

  In one of her most extended bits of testimony, Lillian described her relationship with Earle following his discharge from Napa in 1919. “He was with me a great deal off and on, a great deal for days at a time, and he was painting the ulterior of our home. We thought it would be good work for him to do to keep his mind off his condition and keep him around us. And he would paint quite hard for a few days, and all of a sudden he would walk out of the house and be away for three weeks at a time. And he would walk in on me, and we would say, ‘Where have you been?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I have been looking for work.’ I thought it was foolish. And he would then start right in, and he would smile about it, as if nothing had happened at all, and I understood how he was and kept quiet, because I wouldn’t say anything to aggravate him, as I always lived in constant fear of him. And I was always careful, as I had two children and would have him sleep away from home. I would give him money to sleep in the hotels, and he would come the next day. But I was always in fear of him, on account of him being in the hospital, in Napa State Asylum for the Insane.”

  By the time Lillian was dismissed at around 11:00 A.M., she was unable to contain her emotions. “He is my own flesh and blood, and I love him,” she sobbed as she stepped from the witness box. “I have known him all the days of his life, and I will continue to love him.”

  So geniune and moving was this outburst that it provoked sympathetic tears in more than one female spectator. Meanwhile, the object of Lillian’s affection reclined in his chairarms folded, head tilted back, snoozing peacefully.

  47

  †

  “A person is killed—that is killed by strangulation or by a blow by a knife. That is murder; that is criminal. But when you add to that murder an anti-social repulsive act of such enormity as we have evidence of in this case, what would you say?”

  “I say I would be willing to believe, if no more evidence than you have given, that that kind of conduct was the act of a mind that was certainly not an average mind.”

  “It is way below the normal mind, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it is different.”

  From the testimony of Dr. Alvin Mathers

  Mrs. Fabian was followed to the stand by the prosecution’s main rebuttal witness, Dr. Alvin T. Mathers, head of the psychopathic ward of the Winnipeg General Hospital.

  Though Mathers had a mild, almost self-effacing manner, he was a person of formidable energy and determination. As a young man, he had planned to pursue a career in internal medicine. In 1918, however, when Mathers was thirty and already regarded as one of the foremost physicians in western Canada, he agreed to take charge of the Psychopathic Hospital and spearhead the modernization of mental health services in Manitoba.

  After an intensive course of psychiatric study at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Michigan, he returned to Winnipeg and took up the post of Provincial Psychiatrist. Besides his private practice (the only one of its kind in Manitoba), he helped effect a number of sweeping changes, from the passage of a pioneering Mental Diseases Act to the improvement of psychiatric facilities in hospitals throughout the province. He also provided psychological evaluations of criminals, offering his services, gratis, to both the defense and prosecution.

  At the time of Nelson’s trial, Dr. Mathers was thirty-nine-a soft-spoken, scholarly, distinguished-looking man who radiated an air of quiet authority and was viewed as the most gifted medicolegal expert in western Canada. His opinion carried so much weight that, when he took the stand on Friday, Crown Prosecutor Graham felt the need to solicit only a single assertion from him.

  After establishing that Mathers had examined Nelson five times between July 27 and October 24, Graham simply asked, “And what was the result of your examinations?”

  “I did not find any evidence that to me would constitute insanity,” Mathers declared.

  “ No further questions, my Lord,” said Graham, reseating himself at the prosecution table.

  Since lunchtime was approaching, James Stitt, who clearly intended to keep Mathers on the stand for a while, asked permission to put off his cross-examination until the afternoon session. Judge Dysart granted the request. At 2:00 P.M., following the recess, Mathers was back in the witness box, this time facing an interrogator with a reputation for tenacity that matched his own.

  For more than an hour, Stitt hammered away at the witness. But Mathers was unflappable, calmly insisting that, though Nelson’s actions were certainly symptomatic of a disordered personality, they did not add up to insanity.

  “And what is the supreme test of insanity?” asked Stitt.

  “The supreme test of insanity is the social test,” Mathers explained. “The ability or not of a person to live in conformity with the rules and regulations of Me. We ordinarily consider insanity as an entirely social concept. It is not a disease.”

  “Is disordered conduct a sign of insanity?” Stitt asked. “Well, not any disorder of conduct.”

  “Well now,” said Stitt, folding his arms, “such conduct as this: if an individual was rather inclined to be melancholy, and would sit in a chair and look for hours at the wall, and not speak to people coming in or people going out, and stay in that staring condition, what would you say?”

  Mathers lifted his eyebrows. “I would want a lot more information than that before I would say he was insane.”

  Stitt’s tone grew more challenging. “And if he would do these things: if he was inclined to disappear without any notice to his relatives and reappear and make no explanation; if he lacked, for instance, a sense of the social fitness of things; if he would eat gluttonously in company; if he would mix up his food and pour lavish amounts of olive oil on it; if he would, for instance, appear at a public school in the afternoon in a full dress suit without any collar on, or without any tie, and with just an ordinary steel pin in his collar; if he was a man who was insanely jealous of his wife to the point that it aroused his anger when she paid her fare to a streetcar conductor; if this individual had never held a job for any considerable time; if he was filthy and dirty in his habits; and if all this followed after concussion of the brain, and a sufficient concussion at ten or eleven years of age to render him unconscious for four or five days with the frequent reoccurrence of tremendous headaches, what would you say? And also with a very decided nomadic tendency and extremely melancholic
episodes, sometimes punctuated with what you might call exalted moods and sickly piety?”

  Mathers took a moment to absorb this lengthy hypothetical question before responding. “I don’t think anybody could say as to that particular man just what the influence of that accident or that concussion was,” he said in the same mild tone that had characterized his entire testimony. “Symptoms such as you have mentioned, or at least modes of life such as you have mentioned might readily occur, and do occur in people who have no concussion whatever.

  “As to the number of different episodes that you have mentioned,” he continued, “not any of those would to my mind constitute or make me willing to declare that such a person was insane. I think I know people who have done every one of those things and who would be horribly incensed, and their families and everybody else would be highly incensed, if they were considered insane. They are willing enough to have them considered perhaps a little queer and eccentric∪unstable. But as to having them declared insane, which carries with it the presumption that their liberty must be curtailed, I doubt very much if that could be done.”

  The remainder of Stitt’s cross-examination proceeded in much the same way, with Mathers maintaining that—in spite of Nelson’s “viciously anti-social conduct,” his extreme “sexual abnormalities,” and his weird beliefs (including his conviction that the guards at the Provincial Jail had been using some sort of sinister “electrical device” on him)—there was no justification for regarding him as legally insane.

  “But, Doctor,” Stitt protested, waving Nelson’s medical records from Napa. “As he has been previously found to be a constitutional psychopath with psychosis, you would agree, wouldn’t you?”