The Dark Strangler: Serial Killer Earle Leonard Nelson (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked the Nation Book 9) Read online

  THE Dark Strangler

  Earle Leonard Nelson

  Volume IX

  by Michael Newton

  Crimes Canada

  True Crimes That Shocked The Nation

  www.CrimesCanada.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1518660313

  ISBN-10: 1518660312

  Copyright and Published (2015)

  VP Publications an imprint of

  RJ Parker Publishing, Inc.

  Published in Canada

  Copyrights

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written authorization from Peter Vronsky or RJ Parker of VP Publications and RJ Parker Publishing, Inc. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.

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  Chapter 1

  * * *

  North America's most-wanted fugitive of the 1920s strolled across the border separating North Dakota from the Canadian prairie province of Manitoba on June 8, 1927. Behind him, he left a trail of at least twenty corpses, strangled from coast to coast, and a history of flight from mental institutions, but it hardly mattered. If he kept his nose clean—and his hands off women's necks—he would be safe in Canada, which had no extradition treaty with the States and would not for another forty-nine years.

  Avoiding murder was a problem, though, for thirty-year-old Earle Leonard Nelson. It was his passion and obsession, ardently pursued over the past twenty-one months, capping a life of aberration that had marked him as a psychopath. Whether or not he could stop killing was a question left unanswered. Nelson did not want to stop.

  On the day of his escape, a motorist from Winnipeg, one W. E. Chandler, had offered Earle a ride in Michigan and dropped him off to make the border crossing on his own at Emerson. During their ride across two states, Nelson regaled Churchill with stories of his labors on a ranch near Winnipeg. The turn of phrase struck Nelson's benefactor as an oddity: Canadians, in those days, rarely spoke of farms as "ranches." The use of an Americanism pegged Earle as a liar in Churchill's book, but it hardly seemed worth quibbling about before they parted company forever in Pembina, North Dakota.

  Leaving Emerson, Nelson hitchhiked the final sixty miles to Winnipeg, reaching the provincial capital on June 9. Dropped off by his latest driver at the corner of Corydon Avenue and Osborne Street, Earle soon found a Jacob Garbor's second-hand store at 218 Main Street, where he sold a suit of clothes stolen from victim Mary Sietsma's husband in Chicago after Nelson strangled her on Friday afternoon, June 3. From there, he walked along Broadway to Smith Street, stopping at No. 133 when he saw a sign in a window of Katherine Hill's home, advertising a room for rent.

  Landladies were his special weakness, and he had a plan of sorts in mind.

  Nelson introduced himself to Hill as "Mr. Woodcoats," a staunch Christian, and brandished a well-worn Bible to prove it. After viewing Hill's spare bedroom at the southeast upstairs corner of her house, he paid one dollar for the night and promised to remit eleven more for the remainder of the coming week. In fact, he meant to murder Hill, then move on to his next victim in turn, but fate or dumb luck spared the landlady's life.

  Around 10 p.m., still twilight for Winnipeg in June, Nelson left Hill's home to go exploring. On the nearby sidewalk, he met Lola Cowan, age fourteen, a schoolgirl residing with her mother and sister Margaret on University Avenue. Since her father's sudden death from appendicitis, Lola had pitched in to help support the family, selling artificial flowers made by Margaret to strangers on the street.

  Nelson took one look at Lola, liked what he saw, and offered to purchase some of her wares. His money was inside Hill's home, he said. Would Cowan come in with him, while he fetched it from his room?

  She did, and thereby met her destiny. Inside the little bedroom, Nelson clubbed and strangled her, then raped her still-warm corpse and shoved it out of sight beneath his bed. Experience had taught him that the body might remain there, undiscovered, for a period of days.

  Unnaturally calm, Earle slept above the corpse that night, then left with his meager belongings the next morning, walking down Portage Road to Saint Boniface, a neighborhood known as the heart of Winnipeg's Franco-Manitoban community. There, at 100 Riverton Avenue, he spied another "Room for Rent" sign at the home where Irish immigrants William and Emily Patterson had lived with their two children since May 1927. Earle met Mrs. Patterson at 11 a.m., confessing that he had no money to pay for the room, offering instead to work his rent off as a handyman. She agreed, and neighbors soon saw Nelson repairing the Pattersons' screen door.

  Housework was not what Nelson had in mind, however. When his first chore as a tenant was complete, he crept up behind Emily in the kitchen, striking her with a borrowed hammer. Though stunned, she fought back violently, ripping tufts of hair from Earle's scalp before he strangled, stripped and raped her, thrusting her under the bed she normally shared with her husband.

  Ransacking the house, Nelson stole a brown whipcord suit belonging to William Patterson and found seven ten-dollar bills concealed in a suitcase. Leaving the house, he sold William's suit at Sam Waldman's second-hand store, at 629 Main Street, then stopped for a haircut. When barber Nicholas Tabor noted scratches on Earle's scalp, with blood still drying in his hair, Nelson seemed agitated, telling Tabor not to touch the wounds.

  When William Patterson came home from work that evening, he found his wife missing, their home in disarray. He called police, but they could offer no advice on Emily's whereabouts. It remained for William to find her bruised body that night, as he knelt in the master bedroom to pray for Emily's safe return.

  Around the same time on June 10, Katherine Hill found Lola Cowan's body hidden in her home. The two calls, coming one behind another, told police they had a madman on their hands—but where could he be found?

  After his strange haircut, Earle Nelson had walked to Portage Avenue and caught a streetcar bound for Headingley, thirteen miles due west of Winnipeg. From there, he hitched a ride with motorist Hugh Elder to Portage La Prairie, another fifty-three miles farther on, in Manitoba's Central Plains Region. Another driver carried him from there to Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, three hundred miles farther west.

  In Regina, Nelson rented a room as "Henry Harcourt" in the home of Mary Rowe. Behind him, with two fresh bodies in the morgue, Winnipeg Chief of Detectives George Smith reviewed assorted fliers circulated throughout the United States and Canada, describing America's elusive "Dark Strangler," also dubbed "The Crusher" and the "Gorilla Killer" by journalists in widely-scattered cities. Smith had no doubt that he was in pursuit of the same maniac—but where would he strike next?

  Newspapers hyped the story from Winnipeg, westward through the Prai
rie Provinces, with headlines prompting panic in Regina, Saskatoon, and Calgary, Alberta. Earle woke on June 13 to find his exploits ranked as front-page news in the Regina Leader.

  Leaving Mrs. Rowe's house, his first stop was at a department store, where he purchased a cap, a khaki shirt, and blue denim overalls. Next, he sold the other clothes he'd collected in Winnipeg at Regina's Royal Second Hand Store. It was a mistake, since the clerk noted Winnipeg labels inside the garments, compared his customer's appearance to descriptions of the Dark Strangler, and telephoned the Regina Police Service.

  Nelson, meanwhile, was on the move again. He hitched a ride with scrap metal dealer Isidore Silverman from Regina to Boissevain, Manitoba, 255 miles southeast of the capital, on the way back to North Dakota. From there, several other drivers helped him cover another twenty miles to Wakopa, five miles from the U.S. border. There, he entered Leslie Morgan's general store, purchasing cheese and a soft drink. Morgan, an avid newspaper reader, noted Earle's resemblance to the fugitive at large and phoned the Manitoba Provincial Police station in Killarney, finding Constable W. A. Gray on duty alone.

  Gray covered the twenty miles between Killarney and Wakopa in something close to record time, but Nelson was back on the road. Gray overtook him on the highway, hiking toward the border, and arrested Earle without incident, driving him back to Killarney's small provincial jail. While Nelson occupied a holding cell, Gray placed an urgent call to Chief of Detectives George Smith, announcing capture of the long-sought fugitive.

  Chief of Detectives George Smith

  Earle was not idle in the meantime, though. Searching his solitary cell, he found a piece of wire or a rusty nail file underneath his cot—published accounts vary—and picked the lock on his cage, absconding before Gray returned from his nearby office.

  Once again, the search resumed. While officers scoured the countryside, Nelson made his way to a railroad yard and hid inside a grain elevator, watching for a southbound train to help him make his getaway from Canada. The whistle of a train approaching brought him out of cover on June 16, straight into the path of Constable William G. Renton, from the Manitoba Provincial Police detachment in Crystal City. As Officer Renton later told reporters, "I spotted him going around the edge of the bush. I stopped the car, jumped the fence and ran through the bush to intercept him. On going up to him, I asked who he was, and he said he was a farmer. I asked him where he farmed and he pointed to some building by the side of the railway, which I afterwards learned was the slaughterhouse."

  Winnipeg Police Service, Constable William G. Renton

  Trapped by another clumsy lie, Earle soon found himself behind bars once again, at the Killarney station house. There, Detective James Hoskins noted he was wearing clothes he had exchanged for stolen property at Sam Waldman's Winnipeg store on June 10, now seized as evidence of murder. Four thousand rowdy citizens awaited Nelson's train in Winnipeg, when he arrived at the depot, handcuffed and ringed by police. His long and bloody run was over at last—but how and why had it begun?

  Earle Nelson Arrest Mugshot

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  If some men seem to lead charmed lives from birth, Earle Leonard Nelson's life was surely cursed. The only child of James Ferrel and wife Frances (née Nelson), Earle was born in San Francisco, California, on May 12, 1897. Nine months later, his mother died from the effects of tertiary syphilis, described in some reports as an unwelcome gift from her philandering spouse. Whoever first contracted the disease, it also claimed James Ferrel's life in August 1898, leaving Earle a fifteen-month-old orphan.

  Before proceeding with the tale of his strange childhood, a word is in order concerning syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum. If left untreated at the onset, when it may be cured with an injection of penicillin or some comparable antibiotic, it progresses naturally through four stages. The terminal or tertiary stage typically occurs between three and fifteen years after infection, when, no longer infectious, it may inflict in blindness, deafness, dementia, paralysis, and death. The end-stage disease, dubbed paresis, attacks the brain's frontal and temporal lobar cortex, plaguing its victims with symptoms including grandiose, melancholia, or paranoid delusions; bizarre hypochondriacal complaints; poor speech articulation; overactive reflexes and seizures. Near the end, patients are commonly bedridden, emaciated, and completely disoriented.

  America's most famous victim of the dreaded disease, who feared a doctor's needle more than blazing submachine guns wielded by his gangland adversaries in the Roaring Twenties, is Chicago mobster "Scarface" Al Capone.

  Aside from those infected by their own negligent promiscuity, unborn children may also contract syphilis in the womb, inherited from their infected mothers. Congenital syphilis may affect its young victims with the same maladies as physicians observe in adults, plus the additional curse of visible birth defects. Other symptoms, as the tiny patients age, may include social inhibitions or asocial behavior; impairment of judgment, concentration and short-term memory; euphoria, mania, depression, or apathy. Physically, observers may note subtle shivering, minor speech defects, and on rare occasions development of small bilateral Argyll Robertson pupils in the eye that do not constrict when exposed to light.

  No published account of Earle Nelson's life and crimes seems to regard congenital syphilis as a contributor to his later mood swings, obsessive behavior, or violent outbursts, but given the closely spaced deaths of both parents from the disease, it should not be ruled out as a contributing factor.

  After his father's death in 1898, Earle was passed on to his widowed maternal grandmother, Jennie Nelson, in San Francisco. All reports agree that Jennie was a religious fanatic, though stories differ as to whether she was "Puritan" or "Pentecostal." In either case, Jennie's faith demanded strict and literal adherence to the Bible, from the Genesis creation fable through the final passages of Revelation, wherein Christ returns to reign on Earth and sinners are consumed by hellfire.

  Widowhood left Jennie Nelson with two adolescent children, both years older than the new arrival in their home. Her attitude toward sex, drilled into Earle before he learned to speak coherently, regarded "fornication" as a necessary evil for survival of the human race, but otherwise a "filthy sin." We may only imagine her reflections on the fact that both of Earle's parents had died from a venereal disease. Her carping criticism, coupled with a distance spawned by any single mother's weariness from overwork, soon molded Earle into a "quiet and morbid" youth, vacillating between depression and bouts of hyperactivity.

  And there was much to criticize, it seems, when young Earle came to join his relatives. His table manners were atrocious, described by biographer Harold Schechter as including a habit of drenching his plate with olive oil, then gobbling the resultant mess like a hog at the trough, without using his hands or utensils. He likewise cared little for personal hygiene, despite Jennie Nelson's insistence that "cleanliness is next to godliness." Stranger still, upon entering school, Earle sometimes left home in clean clothes but returned in other garments—torn and dirty, as if worn by a homeless derelict—refusing to say where he got them. He embarrassed his adoptive siblings—in fact, his aunt and uncle—which created further problems in the Nelson home.

  While appearing to share his grandmother's religious obsession, soon learning to quote Bible verses from memory, Earle diverged sharply from her standards of strict Christian behavior. His temper tantrums were ferocious and he was a budding kleptomaniac, caught repeatedly while stealing small items from neighborhood shops. At the tender age of seven, in 1904, Earle's grade school principal expelled him as "incorrigible." Author Mark Gribben suggests that Earle somehow inherited those traits, in effect living up to his surname—"Ferral," a variation of the Irish "Farrell" or "O'Farrell," traceable to legendary King Fergal of Conmaicne in 1014 A.D. As used today in common English, "feral" is defined as "of, relating to, or resembling a wild beast," frequently describing a family pet lost or ab
andoned and returned to a primitive state.

  Two years after Earle's expulsion from elementary school, in April 1906, a devastating earthquake shattered San Francisco, igniting fires that burned for days, consuming some 80 percent of the city's buildings. Casualty estimates range from three thousand to six thousand dead, ranking the earthquake as America's all-time second-worst natural disaster (after the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900). Whatever his distractions by internal fantasies or scripture, Earle could not escape the scenes of death and ruin all around him.

  Two years later, while riding his young uncle's bicycle, Earle crossed paths with one of San Francisco's famous streetcars. The massive vehicle struck and dragged him for the best part of a block, leaving a gruesome open hole in Nelson's skull. He lay comatose for six days, during which time physicians despaired of his survival. When his eyes opened again, he suffered from memory loss and cruel headaches persisting throughout the rest of his life. Besides random quotations from the Good Book, apropos of nothing, he sailed off into bouts of coprolalia—from the Greek for "feces talk"—seeming involuntary swearing or inappropriate derogatory remarks, commonly labeled today as Tourette syndrome.

  The combined effects of nursing Earle and his new tendency toward random profanity proved too much for Jennie Nelson. She died soon after his surprise survival of the streetcar accident, bequeathing Earle to aunt Lillian Fiban and her husband. A relatively young wife, only ten years older than Earle's eleven years, Lillian shared Jennie's religious faith but proved to be less critical of her aberrant nephew. Devoted to family first, she sympathized with Earle—and, some said, made excuses for him as his strange behavior drifted from simply bizarre into the outright criminal.