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

  That transformation was not instantaneous. Between headaches and spells of dizziness that sometimes interfered with simple locomotion, Earle lapsed into manic episodes of walking on his hands and lifting heavy chairs with teeth alone. He also took to voyeurism, spying on his female cousin as she got undressed for bed, and masturbated frequently. When not engaged in spying or autoeroticism, Earle displayed a new fondness for neighborhood cellars, creeping into them without permission from the owners, spending hours in the dark solitude. Would therapy at that stage have prevented him from going rogue, claiming nearly two dozen lives? Or was Earle's course in life set from the moment of his birth to syphilis-infected parents, subsequently worsened by near-fatal trauma to his brain? Today, we only know that by age ten, he had revealed the warning signs of a potential lurking predator.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  Earle Nelson's first admitted crimes were of the "victimless" variety. He began to haunt San Francisco's Barbary Coast, a nine-block red-light district centered on a three-block section of Pacific Street (now Pacific Avenue) between Montgomery and Stockton Streets. Originally built to cut through San Francisco's famous hills, from Portsmouth Square to the shipping docks on Buena Vista Cove, the Barbary Coast was transformed during California's Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855, swiftly morphing into a nest of dance halls, casinos, opium dens, saloons, bawdy concert halls, tattoo parlors, and brothels.

  When Nelson hit the Barbary Coast, he went on drinking binges, sometimes absent from home for days on end, not uncommonly returning bruised and cut, as though he had been brawling. Laws concerning liquor sales were lax in those days, generally ignored in the Barbary Coast's covert dives, and Earle was soaking up the booze by age fifteen, in 1912. He also cut a swath through the district's seedy prostitutes, supplementing his own advanced skills at masturbation. Somewhere in his ramblings, he acquired both syphilis and gonorrhea, left untreated until diagnosed years later, during his brief service in the military.

  When not out "sporting," Nelson worked odd jobs, remitting room and board to his Aunt Lillian, spending the rest as he liked on liquor, hired women, and the era's primitive pornography. Those menial jobs he was able to find came and went, made difficult to hold by Earle's laziness, absenteeism, temper flare-ups, and frequent conversations with invisible friends. Though he was large and strong for a teenager, Earle's odd actions were enough to make most employers show him the nearest exit.

  Even Aunt Lillian, praying each night for her wayward nephew, could not help being frightened for herself and her own two children. After Earle's final arrest in Canada, she told a local newspaper, "He was just like a child, and we considered him like a child, and of course, we would never go too far with him, because there was always the fear of him."

  Earle crossed the line in spring of 1915, on one of his unannounced departures from the Fiban home. At Plymouth in Amador County, east of San Francisco—once called "Pokerville" during the Gold Rush—he broke into what he thought was an abandoned cabin, then fled into the forest when its owner unexpectedly returned. Run down and captured by an ad hoc posse, he was charged with robbery and received a two-year sentence to San Quentin State Prison at age eighteen, on July 25, 1915.

  Opened for business sixty-three years earlier, in July 1852, San Quentin occupies 432 acres of prime waterfront real estate on the north side of San Francisco Bay. Today, it houses America's largest death row for male inmates, and the only one in California. It is also the Golden State's oldest prison, whose famous or infamous inmates over time range from country music star Merle Haggard to assassin Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, Black Panthers George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, Nation of Islam founder Wallace Fard Muhammad, "Red Light Rapist" Caryl Chessman, and a host of modern serial killers: "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez, "Freeway Killer" William Bonin, sadist Lawrence "Pliers" Bittaker; "Lake Elsinore Killer" Richard Suff; snuff film aficionado Charles Chitat Ng—the list seems almost literally endless.

  Earle Nelson, by contrast, was a small-time nobody. His time in "Q," ending with his parole on September 6, 1916, was completely unremarkable. Based on events that followed his release, however, we may say with certainty that he escaped any attempts at rehabilitation.

  On March 9, 1917, still in San Francisco, police arrested Earle for petit larceny. He listed his surname as "Clark" and was sentenced to six months in jail. Free again by May 21, 1918, Earle attempted his first known sex crime in San Francisco, talking his way into the home of Charles Summers while posing as a plumber. Descending to the basement, he found twelve-year-old Mary Summers playing with dolls and attempted to rape her. Her screams brought an older brother rushing to save her, and while Earle escaped after a scuffle, police nabbed him later that day. Convicted of assault, he was sentenced to a prison farm for two years, but failed to adjust, successfully escaping in his third attempt, on December 4, 1917.

  He remained at large until March 23, 1919, when Los Angeles police arrested him for burglary under the surname "Farrell." Confined to the L.A. County jail on that charge, he escaped in August and fled northward.

  By the time Earle escaped from Los Angeles, the United States was finally embroiled in World War I. That conflict had begun in Europe in July 1914, but two-term President Woodrow Wilson had staked his 1916 reelection campaign on a promise to keep America out of the mess "Over There," declaring a foreign policy of "neutrality in thought and deed." Wilson kept that stiff upper lip in May 1915, when a German submarine sank the British passenger ship Lusitania with 1,198 persons aboard, including 128 Americans. Rather than retaliate, Wilson declared that "America is too proud to fight," demanding cessation of U-boat attacks on passenger ships. Germany's government agreed, but its saboteurs were suspected of blowing up a munitions dump on Black Tom Island, New Jersey, thirteen months later, killing seven persons. The last straw came in early 1917, with publication of a telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman to his ambassador in Mexico City, announcing plans to resume unrestricted submarine warfare and inviting Mexico to join the war as a German ally, to recapture land lost to America in the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848. Atlantic U-boat attacks resumed in February, and Congress declared war against Germany on April 6, followed by a declaration of war against the allied Austro-Hungarian Empire in December.

  Public outrage on the home front did not translate into mass enrollment for military service overseas. Congress authorized conscription for the first time since the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, passing the Selective Service Act of 1917 on May 18. All able-bodied men aged twenty-one to thirty were initially required to register for twelve months' service, with the age range expanded by September 1918 to include men aged eighteen through forty-five.

  While accounts of Earle Nelson's military record are confused, it seems that he left prison and enlisted in the U.S. Army under his birth name, Earle Ferral. So recently incarcerated, he was put off by more uniforms and discipline, absconding one night when he was assigned to guard duty and fleeing to Salt Lake City, Utah, where he briefly entertained thoughts of becoming a Mormon. That phase was barely any longer than his army stint. Upon capture by military police, Earle allegedly listed his chief complaint as a "burning around his anus."

  Cashiered on the spot for dereliction of duty, Earle drifted around the Bay Area for two months, then signed up with the U.S. Navy for another try at life in uniform. Reports differ as to whether superiors made him a cook or a medical corpsman. In either case, his various employers from civilian life could have predicted what came next: Earle balked at orders and was generally found sprawled on his bunk, Bible in hand, raving about the "great beasts" whose apocalyptic future advent is predicted in the Book of Revelation. Earle's commanders, not amused, adjudged him mentally unfit for military service and packed him off to California's Napa State Hospital.

  California's first state-run psychiatric hospital—now one of five—Napa opened on November 15, 1875, receiving two San Franciscans as its first patients. Standing on 192 acres of land, wi
th a seventeen-acre "campus," by 1960 the facility accommodated five thousand patients. Due to the nature of those committed, the hospital receives frequent complaints from state labor unions concerning extreme patient violence and assaults on staff members.

  At his intake, Earle was diagnosed and treated for his two venereal diseases. He admitted frequent masturbation between ages thirteen and eighteen, "but not since then." He also confessed heavy drinking, but declared that he'd been "dry" for seven months before committal to the hospital. Examining psychiatrists found him suffering from a "constitutional psychopathic state," impervious to treatment. Left to pass his time with other hopeless cases, Earle still showed his initiative for breakouts, earning the nickname "Houdini" from Napa staffers as he escaped at roughly six-month intervals. On his third attempt, in 1919, doctors threw up their hands and "discharged" him on paper, noting in his file that he was "not violent, homicidal, or destructive."

  So much for medical opinions.

  While on the lam from Napa—albeit with no one hunting him—Nelson, now twenty-two, met and wed Mary Martin in San Francisco on August 12, 1919. Stories of their union differ radically: one calls Mary "a young school teacher," while another pegs her age at "forty-four years [Earle's] senior." The reports also diverge on whether he identified himself to Mary as "Roger Wilson" or "Evan Louis Fuller." Such discrepancies aside, the marriage was ill fated from the start, lasting a mere six months.

  Earle's many problems doomed the marriage. Migraine headaches, impervious to painkillers, were not improved when Nelson tumbled from a ladder on a part-time job and suffered his second major head injury. Although hospitalized, he refused to stay put and escaped from the ward, his skull still swathed in bandages. From that point onward, he reported visions and remarks from disembodied voices no one else could hear.

  Sex remained his chief preoccupation, and while Mary satisfied him for a while, at their home in Palo Alto, Earle's frequent and diverse demands exhausted her, driving her to the point of a nervous breakdown. As he degenerated, Earle reverted to his pattern of adolescent behavior, leaving home to "look for work" and returning, still unemployed, dressed in clothing Mary did not recognize. When challenged, he denied leaving the house and sometimes threatened her life. When Mary checked herself into a hospital for rest, Earle tracked her down and attempted to rape her in bed. Orderlies answered her screams, and although he eluded them, police soon plucked him off the street.

  With Mary's tale in hand, and Earle at last identified as an escapee from Napa, psychiatrists suggested his return to the state hospital. The Superior Court of San Francisco concurred, on grounds that his behavior was "erratic, violent, and dangerous" to others. Sadly, the Napa staff had no more luck containing Earle the second time around than they had during 1918 and 1919. On November 2, 1923, Earle strolled away from the none-too-secure facility, turning up at Aunt Lillian Fiban's home in the middle of the night. As she later told reporters, "He had his face right against the glass with a horrible crazy hat on, and I let out one terrible scream because he looked so awfully insane. His eyes were just black, glaring at me, and the children rushed up to me and of course I opened the door because he was my own flesh and kin, and I loved him."

  Earle remained in touch with Lillian over the next eleven months, making his last appearance at her home in October 1925. Seven months earlier—again, unknown to Nelson or his family—administrators at Napa State Hospital had officially "discharged him in absentia," essentially admitting that they could not find their man and did not care to try. Police, likewise, had better things to do than hunt for Earle, if they were even privy to his getaway. His last goodbye to Lillian that autumn severed Nelson's family ties. He would return to San Francisco and environs in good time, but first he traveled eastward by whatever mode of transportation was available for free, covering 2,878 miles on a trek to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In his twisted mind, a vital mission had emerged, and he was starting it in the City of Brotherly Love.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  Despite certain erroneous published claims that Earle Nelson was born in Philadelphia, he first set foot inside the city in October 1925. Whether or not he realized it, in his sometimes addled state, his first selected hunting ground was steeped in history and also rife with modern crime.

  Quaker William Penn founded the city in 1682 as the capital of Pennsylvania Colony. The colony's name translates to English as "Penn's woods," while Philadelphia took its name from a minor city in the Old Testament, literally the "city of brotherly love." When America's colonies cut their ties to England in 1776, Philadelphia served as the new republic's temporary capital and hosted its Constitutional Convention from May through September in 1787. It is the birthplace of the U.S. Marine Corps and claims an impressive list of other American "firsts": the first library, first zoo, first stock exchange, first hospital and medical school. In 1793 the largest yellow fever epidemic in U.S. history killed some 10 percent of the city's population, an estimated five thousand citizens, prompting some twenty thousand more to flee for their lives.

  The advent of national Prohibition, in January 1920, turned Philadelphia into a sinkhole of crime on par with every other large city from coast to coast. Americans wanted to drink alcohol, and while the federal government fielded only 1,520 agents to enforce the ban nationwide, formerly disorganized neighborhood gangs and ethnic cliques of ruffians saw epic profits to be made from rum-running and bootlegging, beginning their ultimate transformation into a powerful National Crime Syndicate.

  Philly's contribution to that growing network was Salvatore Sabella, born at Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, in July 1891. Apprenticed to a local butcher at age fourteen, Sabella soon rebelled against his master's violent outbursts and killed him. Convicted of murder in 1908, he spent three years imprisoned at Milan, where he was sworn in by his fellow inmates as a member of the Mafia. Upon release, he wasted no time sailing for America, landing in Brooklyn, New York, where he joined Salvatore D'Aquila's criminal "family" of Castellammarese immigrants. In 1919, the mob sent him to organize a branch in Philadelphia, posing as a wine and cheese merchant who also ran a café peddling soft drinks in the soon-to-be-"dry" metropolis.

  Sabella's import business was a natural cover for smuggling liquor from New York's "Rum Row," while his soda fountain doubled as a "speakeasy" saloon. He expanded from there into gambling, drugs, prostitution and "Black Hand" extortion, spawning hostility from envious would-be South Philadelphia rivals, the six Lanzetta brothers: Leo, Pius, Ignatius (also called "Frank Pius"), Willie, Lucien, and Todd (a.k.a. "The Baby"). Police suspected Sabella of killing Leo Lanzetta, shot outside his barbershop at Seventh and Bainbridge Streets in 1925, but they never charged him with the crime, and two more years elapsed before federal officials secured Sabella's deportation to Sicily as an undesirable alien, leaving successors in charge of the city's chaotic underworld.

  Enter Major Smedley Butler, a Pennsylvania native, born in 1881, who spent thirty-four years in the U.S. Marine Corps and emerged with its then-highest rank of major general. He was also the Corps' most decorated warrior, with sixteen medals, ranked as only one of nineteen men to win two Congressional Medals of Honor. In 1924, Butler's father—newly elected as Philadelphia's mayor—persuaded him to accept the thankless post as director of public safety. Adrift in a swamp of civic corruption, Butler launched raids against more than nine hundred speakeasies within two days of taking office, padlocking or destroying them. In true Marine Corps style, he also offered to promote the first policeman who killed a lawbreaker, declaring, "I don't believe there is a single bandit notch on a policeman's guns [sic] in this city. Go out and get some."

  While corrupt and thirsty locals panned Butler's campaign as a sideshow, the commissioner closed more than 2,500 saloons by year's end, up from 220 closed in 1923. Even so, big-time operators rarely saw the inside of a jail cell and were almost never sent to prison. Political bosses, paid to accommodate the mobs and their hard-drinking consti
tuents, lobbied nonstop for Butler's removal, and they finally succeeded. After two years of crusading, he resigned on January 1, 1926, to resume duty with the Marine Corps, telling journalists that "cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in."

  Earle Nelson liked his liquor and found plenty of it still available when he reached Philadelphia during October 1925. If he was conscious of the shoot-to-kill order issued on "bandits," he ignored it and was never troubled by police as he began to stalk his chosen prey.

  In Philly, Earle employed the scam that would carry him across country and back again, unscathed by manhunters until the bitter end in Canada. He trolled the city streets, looking for rooms to rent, and introduced himself to landladies, often with a Bible tucked beneath his arm, touting his modest habits and earnest devotion to Jesus. Inside him surged a lust for strangulation and—a new twist to the best of any crime reporter's knowledge—necrophilia performed on still-warm corpses.

  The clean-cut Bible-carrying Nelson

  The first to die was Olla McCoy, found strangled and raped after death in her home on Sunday, October 18. Nineteen days later—on Friday, November 6—Mary Murray died in similar fashion. Only three days passed before discovery of Lillian Weiner, slain, raped posthumously, and left sprawled across her bed on Monday, November 9.

  In each case, Smedley Butler's officers discovered that the victims had displayed signs in their windows advertising rooms for rent. Additionally, strips of cloth tied with a "complicated sailor's knot" secured the victims' wrists. Finally, articles of clothing had been stolen by the killer from each victim's home, later recovered from a pawnshop on Philadelphia's North Side, bounded by Cheltenham Avenue to the north, 35th Street to the west, Adams Avenue to the east, and Spring Garden Street to the south.