Earle Nelson


Earle Leonard Nelson, also known as the Gorilla Man, the Gorilla Killer, and the Dark Strangler, was an American serial killer, rapist, and necrophile who killed at least twenty women in various U.S. states and two in Canada between 1926 and 1927. He is perhaps the first known serial sex murderer of the twentieth century.
Born and raised in San Francisco, California, by his devoutly Pentecostal grandmother, Nelson exhibited bizarre behavior as a child, which was compounded by head injuries he sustained in a bicycling accident at age 10. After committing various minor offenses in early adulthood, he was institutionalized in Napa several times before his final discharge in 1925.
Nelson began committing numerous rapes and murders in February 1926, primarily in the West Coast cities of San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. In late 1926 he moved east, committing multiple rapes and murders in several Midwestern and East Coast cities before moving north into Canada, raping and killing a teenage girl in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After committing his second murder in Winnipeg, he was arrested by Canadian authorities, convicted of his final murder only - that of Emily Patterson - and sentenced to death. Nelson was executed by hanging in Winnipeg in 1928.
In undertaking his crimes, Nelson had a modus operandi: Most of his victims were middle-aged landladies, many of whom he would find through "room for rent" advertisements. Posing as a mild-mannered and charming Christian drifter, Nelson used the pretext of renting a room in the landladies' boarding houses to make contact with them before attacking. Each of his victims were killed via strangulation, and many were raped after death. His penultimate victim, a 14-year-old girl named Lola Cowan, was one of three victims to be significantly mutilated after death.
At the time, Nelson's confirmed victim count of twenty-two was the largest number of murders attributed to one person in United States history. The crimes committed by Nelson were a source of inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt.

Early life

Earle Nelson was born Earle Leonard Ferral on May 12, 1897, in San Francisco, California, the son of an Iowa-born mother of Danish and Irish descent, Frances Nelson, and a father whose ancestry was Jewish, James Carlos Ferral. Both of his parents died of syphilis before he reached two years of age. Nelson was subsequently sent to live with his maternal grandmother Jennie Nelson, a devout Pentecostal who raised him alongside her two younger children, Willis and Lillian, who were ten and eight years his senior, respectively. Nelson exhibited self-loathing and other "morbid" behavior at a young age, and was expelled from the Agassiz primary school in San Francisco at age 7. Around age 10, he collided with a streetcar while riding his bicycle and remained unconscious for six days. After he awoke, Nelson's behavior became erratic, and he suffered from frequent headaches and memory loss.
Described as a "psychotic prodigy," Nelson exhibited increasingly bizarre, manic behaviors in his childhood, such as talking to imaginary people, compulsively quoting Biblical passages, and watching female family members undress. His grandmother noted occasions where Nelson would go to school in freshly-cleaned clothes and return home in rags, as though he had exchanged clothes with a homeless person. Nelson's strong religious upbringing remained a pervasive influence in his life, and he obsessively read the Book of Revelation as a teenager.
In his early teenage years, Nelson began frequenting brothels and bars in San Francisco's Barbary Coast red-light district, and contracted a venereal disease. As he progressed through puberty, Nelson grew into a stocky, physically fit young man. He would sometimes entertain his family with his physical talents, such as walking on his hands or lifting heavy objects with his teeth.

Crimes

Early offenses; institutionalization

Nelson began his criminal activities at a young age, and was sentenced to two years in San Quentin State Prison in 1915 after breaking into a cabin in rural Plumas County, which he believed had been abandoned. He was paroled for this offense on September 6, 1916, but was arrested again in Stockton on March 9, 1917, for petty larceny. Nelson spent another six months incarcerated before being discharged, after which he was arrested in Los Angeles on burglary charges. After spending approximately five months in Los Angeles County Jail, Nelson escaped.
Sometime in late-1917, Nelson enlisted in the U.S. military, but deserted after six weeks. He repeated this pattern on several occasions, enlisting in different military branches under different names before deserting. In 1918, Nelson was committed to the Napa State Mental Hospital after behaving oddly and erratically during one of his brief stints in the United States Navy. A Navy psychologist noted that Nelson was "living in a constitutional psychotic state."
Upon his arrival at Napa State Mental Hospital, a psychologist who observed Nelson on May 21, 1918, noted that he did not appear "violent, homicidal, or destructive." William Pritchard, a psychiatrist who conducted a preliminary interview with him, noted that Nelson spoke of hallucinations and other paranoid delusions: "He has seen faces, heard music, and at times believed people were poisoning him. Voices sometimes whisper to him to kill himself. Says that if he were kept in jail, he would get something sharp and cut the veins in his wrists." Pritchard also indicated that Nelson had experienced occipital headaches, fainted several times, and felt dizzy during their interactions.
During his institutionalization, Nelson managed to escape at least three times before staff eventually stopped trying to locate him. His frequent escapes earned him the nickname "Houdini" among the hospital's employees. Nelson was formally discharged from the Navy in absentia on May 17, 1919, and his file with the hospital was closed with a note indicating he had "improved."
Nelson subsequently acquired a job working as a janitor at St. Mary's Hospital, using the pseudonym "Evan Louis Fuller." There, he met 60-year-old Mary Martin, an administrative worker. The two began to date, and were married in August 1919. Their marriage, however, was short-lived, as Nelson "made her life a living hell" with his jealous rages, bizarre sexual demands, religious delusions, and increasingly violent behavior, leading her to separate from him after cohabiting for only six months. Martin would later recall various bizarre behaviors she witnessed while living with Nelson, which included protracted disappearances from their home and unusual bathing practices that entailed him pouring glasses of water over his toes.
On May 19, 1921, Nelson posed as a plumber to enter the residence at 1519 Pacific Avenue in San Francisco and attempted to molest 12-year-old resident Mary Summers in the basement. His attempt was thwarted when she screamed and attracted help from her nine-year-old brother. Nelson fled, but was captured hours later while riding a trolley. At a competency hearing, he was deemed dangerous and recommitted to Napa State Mental Hospital. He would escape again on two occasions before being discharged from the institution in 1925.

Murder spree

FebruaryNovember 1926: California, Portland, and Seattle

Nelson began his killing spree early in 1926. His first known victim was Clara Newman, a wealthy 60-year-old San Francisco landlady. Nelson entered her boardinghouse at 2037 Pierce Street on February 20, 1926, posing as a potential tenant named "Roger Wilson." Sometime after entering the home, Nelson strangled Newman before raping her dead body and hiding her corpse in a vacant apartment in the house. His second victim, 63-year-old Laura Beale, was strangled in her home in nearby San Jose on March 2. The silken cord that had been used to strangle Beale had reportedly been wound so tightly around her neck that it had embedded in her flesh.
Nelson strangled and raped 63-year-old Lillian St. Mary, also in San Francisco, on June 26, 1926. Exactly two weeks later, south in Santa Barbara, 53-year-old Ollie Russell was strangled with a cord in her boardinghouse. An autopsy confirmed that Russell had been sexually assaulted after death, and the similarities in the modus operandi between her murder and the San Francisco area slayings led police to assume they were connected. On August 16, 52-year-old Mary Nisbet, an apartment building proprietor in Oakland, was found by her husband, strangled to death and raped in the bathroom of a vacant apartment.
Initially, local law enforcement questioned Nisbet's husband in her death, but he was shortly cleared of suspicion. Witnesses later told police they had seen a "smiling stranger" lurking outside Nisbet's apartment building the day of her murder. Others who claimed to have seen Nelson at the various boarding houses described him to police as a dark and stocky man with "long arms and large hands." Because of this, newspapers began referring to him as the "Dark Strangler," the "Gorilla Man," or "Gorilla Killer."
In the fall of 1926, Nelson relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he raped and murdered 35-year-old landlady Beata Withers on October 19, her body found by her teenage son, stuffed beneath clothing inside a steamer trunk in the attic of her home. The following day, 59-year-old Virginia Grant was murdered in a vacant property she owned on East 22nd Street, her body hidden behind the home's basement furnace. On October 21, landlady Mabel Fluke disappeared from her home in Portland; her body was discovered several days later in the attic, strangled with a scarf. Despite the subsequent similar murders of Grant and Fluke, a coroner's jury of four men and two women was appointed on October 28 to evaluate the "mysterious" death of Withers. The jury's decision was split in half, with three believing her death was a suicide and the other three believing it murder.
After committing the three murders in Portland, Nelson briefly returned to San Francisco, where he raped and murdered 56-year-old widow Anna Edmonds on November 18. Initially, police were hesitant to attribute the crime to the "Dark Strangler"; however, several days after her murder, a friend of Edmonds told police she had stopped by her home on the day of her murder and found Edmonds talking to a "strange man" in her parlor about a business deal that involved her selling her house. The woman's descriptions of the unknown man matched those of the "Dark Strangler."
The following day, November 19, in nearby Burlingame, California, a 28-year-old pregnant woman was attacked while showing her home to a man posing as a potential buyer. She survived the attack, and described the man as being around tall, well-dressed and well-spoken. The woman later told reporters that, though she hadn't felt threatened initially, she realized in retrospect that, peculiarly, the man had commented on the home's intricate details, particularly the ceilings: "I realize now that he was trying to get me to look up towards the ceiling, so that he could get behind me and grab my throat," she said.
Ten days later, on November 29, Nelson murdered and raped Blanche Myers in her Portland home. Police were able to recover foreign fingerprints from Myers' iron bedpost. The Portland murders ignited a public frenzy, and The Oregonian reported that the third floor of the Portland Police Bureau had become "a veritable madhouse," with clerks taking hundreds of phone calls and reports of "suspicious characters."
One local woman called police, claiming that a suspicious man had stayed in her boardinghouse for several days after the Thanksgiving holiday, using the name "Adrian Harris." On November 29, the day of Myers' murder, she stated the man told her and other residents that he was leaving to take a train to Vancouver, Washington, and had indicated that he would not be returning. She found this suspicious, given that he had paid multiple days' worth of rent in advance. Before departing, he gave her and another female boarder pieces of jewelry as a gift, which were later confirmed by police to have been owned by Florence Monks, a wealthy widow who had been murdered and raped in her Seattle home on November 23.
In hopes of preventing further murders, law enforcement in California and Oregon issued public safety announcements to citizens; in the San Francisco Bay area, elderly women were advised to take precautions while renting rooms and inviting strangers into their homes. Meanwhile, the Portland Police Bureau issued the following statement to the public: "Do not show your houses or rooms for rent while alone. If necessary, call a policeman to accompany you. Crimes such as these should be prevented and could have been prevented if women had been more careful. I do not wish to unduly alarm the people of Portland. But there is no denying the situation is grave."