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

  Nelson's pattern—infiltration of a home, murder and rape of the proprietress, occasional concealment of her corpse, and theft of clothing for sale—would persist as he moved on, from east to west across the continent and back again, killing repeatedly to satisfy his brutal lust and fill his pockets with some money for the road.

  What drove Earle out of Philadelphia after only three murders, abandoning a city whose population was quickly edging toward the two million mark? He may have feared arrest or simply sensed that it was time to go, before he made some careless error and was captured, this time hastened to the state's electric chair—adopted to replace the gallows ten years earlier—instead of lounging in a hospital or county jail from which he could escape at will.

  Whatever drove him out, Earle turned toward home with murder foremost on his mind.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  No one missed Earle in San Francisco: not police or Napa State Hospital staffers who had forgotten him; not members of his family; and least of all the short-term former wife he had terrorized until she nearly lost her sanity in Nelson's madness. Traveling under a list of pseudonyms, he could have faded into his hometown's ever-growing population, already exceeding 500,000, many of them transients. But, while he did his best to keep a low profile, it was not Nelson's style to simply disappear.

  It did not meet his darker needs.

  On Saturday, February 20, 1926, Earle rang the doorbell of Clara Newman's home on Pierce Street in San Francisco, drawn as ever by a "Rooms to Let" sign in a downstairs window. The sixty-two-year-old widow shared lodgings with her nephew, his wife and daughter, but she still had extra room and always needed money. When the door opened, Earle tipped his stylish homburg hat and introduced himself using an alias never reported. Impressed with his appearance and his courtesy, she asked him in to see the room and Earle expressed his interest.

  When Nelson entered Clara's home, her nephew, Merton Newman Sr., was planning to repair a faulty furnace in the basement. On his way downstairs from his second-floor apartment, Merton smelled sausage cooking in the kitchen and looked in, expecting to find his aunt, but saw only a frying pan at rest on the stove, with the burner turned off. Proceeding toward the basement's access door, he met a stranger just about to exit from the house. When Merton asked his business, the man—a "sallow-faced" Caucasian, with his hat pulled down and collar raised—replied, "Tell the landlady I will return in an hour. I wish to rent the bedroom."

  Merton descended to work on the furnace and was returning upstairs when he remembered the cooking sausage, now grown cold on the stove in its pan. Concerned now, he moved through the house, rousing other boarders and asking his aunt's whereabouts. A search began, revealing Clara Newman's body in a bathroom, propped up on the toilet seat, strangled, with her clothing hoisted up above her hips.

  Police, immediately summoned, found that Clara had been raped and manually strangled. An autopsy proved the rape had been post-mortem. Officers withheld the fact of necrophilia from journalists, something to screen suspects who might confess. Further investigation demonstrated that the maniac had picked a fairly wealthy victim: Clara Newman owned not one, but several boarding houses in the city, which she ran by certain rigid rules: no drinking men or sailors need apply. That said, there was no evidence of robbery. Her murder went into the city's unsolved file.

  Clara Newman

  From San Francisco proper, Earle moved on to San Jose, forty-eight miles to the south in Santa Clara County. Today, San Jose—the county seat—is California's third largest city by population, and tenth largest in the country. On Tuesday afternoon, March 2, sixty-year-old Laura E. Beale opened her door to a potential roomer and died in a fashion similar to San Francisco's victim four days earlier. Her husband, a real estate agent, returned from work that evening to find Laura missing and, like Merton Newman before him, called other boarders in the house to help him search for her, making a grim discovery.

  Laura Beale lay inside a vacant room she'd advertised for rent, nude from the waist down, strangled with the silk sash from her dressing gown. The murderer had used sufficient force to break the skin, and once again, Beale had been posthumously raped.

  Even with certain grim details withheld from their reporters, Bay Area newspapers drew the obvious conclusion: two landladies in their sixties, strangled and molested in their homes within four days, marked the beginning of a murder spree. Front-page articles branded the unknown slayer the "Dark Strangler," and while that spawned goose bumps for potential members of the victim class, passage of time invites forgetfulness. Police made no arrests, had no suspects, and advanced no likely theories.

  Life—and Death--moved on.

  No one knows where Nelson was or how he spent his time over the fourteen weeks before he struck again, returning to his San Francisco roots. Armchair psychologists may speculate that a similarity of given names drew him to his third Bay Area victim, but such theories are as puerile as the dialogue invented to describe Earle's interaction with his prey, during a murder totally devoid of witnesses.

  The certain facts are these: On Thursday, June 10, 1926, he entered the home of sixty-three-year-old Lillian St. Mary, a widow who shared her house with a grown son, unmarried, and several boarders. Whether Earle noted or pondered her first name—the same as aunt Lillian Fiban's—is anyone's guess. St. Mary had a room to rent, recently vacated, and led Nelson upstairs to see it. Author Mark Gribben tells his readers, " On their way up the stairs, Nelson told Lillian he had just moved to the Bay area and was looking for an inexpensive room because he was saving money to get married," but Gribben names no witnesses supporting that account. Upstairs, his tale—published online—grows even more dramatic:

  Lillian opened the vacant second-floor apartment and stepped inside, talking about weekly rent and towels and what time dinner was served. Hearing a click like the sound of a lock being set, she turned and in an instant Nelson was upon her, his thick hands easily fitting around her neck, throttling the life out of the unfortunate woman. If she tried to cry for help, no one ever heard her.

  Indeed, and as Gribben concedes a few paragraphs later, "The entire attack had been so quiet that the man living below the second-story room had never heard a thing." He also dates the murder as occurring "toward the end of March 1928," a discrepancy of twenty-seven months.

  Speculation aside, we know that another of St. Mary's boarders was climbing the stairs to his third-floor room on June 10, when he saw the vacant apartment's door standing ajar. Curious, he peered inside and found his landlady, sprawled on the neatly-made bed, clothing torn and raised above her hips, legs spread, eyes bulging from the strangulation that had killed her.

  Once again, police descended on the scene, collecting evidence and packing off St. Mary's body to the morgue. The officers surmised that she was on her way out of the house when she was waylaid by her murderer, since he had folded her overcoat and placed it underneath her feet after he strangled her. Her spectacles remained in place when she was killed, and she had never felt the rape that followed death.

  No one in San Francisco doubted that St. Mary had been murdered by the same "Dark Strangler" who had slain Clara Newman and Laura Beale, but that knowledge brought manhunters no closer to their quarry. He was still at large, and left no clues that helped identify him, given the 1920s' relatively primitive forensic skills. Police and journalists expected more murders, wondering if the elusive ghoul might be caught red-handed during his next attack.

  The answer, as they quickly learned, was "No."

  Nelson was on the move again, traveling 337 miles southward from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, a resort town and the seat of Santa Barbara County, with boarding houses to spare. Two weeks after killing Lillian St. Mary on Thursday, June 24, Earle called at the home of Alma Russell to inquire about a room she advertised for rent.

  Published accounts of Russell's murder are confused, one claiming she was fifty-three years old, another fifty-eight; they also tinker wit
h the first name of her husband, who shared landlord duties, alternately labeling him "George" or "Ollie."

  We are on firmer ground where Alma's murder is concerned. One of the Russells' lodgers, publicly identified as "Franey," worked the night shift as a railroad fireman and was catching up on sleep when pounding noises from the room adjoining his disturbed him. Stepping out into the common hallway, Franey knelt before the keyhole of the next-door flat and peered inside, spying a large man with his back turned toward the door, pants lowered to his knees, thrusting away at a female companion on the bed, its headboard hammering the wall. As the stranger rearranged his clothes, Franey tried to identify the woman. Even though her face was turned away from the keyhole, he noted a resemblance to his landlady. A closer look revealed apparent bloodstains on the bedding.

  Franey instantly retreated to his own room while the stranger left the house, then finished dressing, and ran in search of Alma's husband. When the pair of them returned and raced upstairs, they found Alma dead, her face beaten bloody, strangled with a cord pulled tight enough around her neck to cut the flesh. More blood stained the doorjamb, presumably left by the killer in passing.

  Santa Barbara police, while previously unaffected by the "Dark Strangler's" crimes, instantly recognized his handiwork. Unlike their counterparts in San Francisco and environs, they hid little from the press. The word was out: California's roaming maniac enjoyed raping his victims after death.

  That news was frightening to all prospective victims and their families. It also stirred police in California cities where the strangler had not yet struck and never would. Los Angeles, for instance, issued the following bulletin on July 1, 1926:

  LOOK OUT FOR MURDER SUSPECT: Following is latest description of suspect wanted for murder in Santa Barbara: is also suspected of committing murders in San Francisco and San Jose, and is known as the "Strangle Murderer." Nationality probably Greek, age about 35 years, height 5 feet 7 or 8 inches, medium build, rather high cheek bones, dark skin, rather thin face; long wavy sandy hair; hair not long on sides, but on top; looks like a laborer; was dressed in a dark gray suit and rather shabby. Wore a tan colored J. B. Stetson hat, size 71/5 or 7¼ , made for the Maxwell Company, of either Fresno or Stockton; hat bears initial 'G. W. R.' punched on inside band, and also has a Masonic emblem posted in crown of hat. Hat is probably large for him. Arrest and notify Homicide Detail, Detective Bureau, Central.

  LAPD offered no source for its description, including the incredibly specific treatment of the killer's hat, but it hardly mattered. If Earle ever passed through the City of Angels, he left no corpses there.

  Instead, he returned to the Bay Area, stopping off in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, twelve miles due east. The seat of Alameda County and eighth largest city in the state by population, Oakland was acquainted with the Strangler from a distance, via headlines, but its people were about to get a closer look.

  On Monday, August 16, 1926—seven weeks and four days after strangling Alma Russell in Santa Barbara—he called on fifty-two-year-old Mary Nesbit. When her husband, Stephen, returned from work that evening and found her missing, he presumed Mary had stepped out for a moment, leaving her purse behind in their bedroom. Hours later, when she still had not returned, neighbors mindful of the Strangler's depredations on the far side of the Bay helped Stephen search the house. Inside a vacant bedroom on the second floor, offered for rent, they found Mary in the small flat's bathroom, strangled with a kitchen dishtowel that had shredded in the killer's hands. Blood stained the walls and floor, where some of Mary's broken teeth lay scattered, knocked out when her slayer slammed her into the linoleum.

  As usual, police determined that the victim had been raped after she died. A further search revealed some items of her jewelry were missing from the house. Earle had collected them in hopes that they would pay his way as he approached another hunting ground.

  His choice, for reasons yet unknown, was Portland, Oregon, 630 miles north of Oakland in the Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest, between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains. Portland was, and is today, Oregon's largest city and the seat of government for Multnomah County, founded in 1843 and incorporated as a city eight years later. Its population had grown rapidly, from 90,426 in 1900 to 207,214 in 1910, and continued to rise in the 1920s. Far enough from California's heat to feel at ease, Earle resumed his hunt on Tuesday, October 19, 1926—nine weeks and one day since he'd killed Mary Nesbit in Oakland.

  The latest victim was Beata Withers—called "Beatrice" in some reports—a thirty-five-year-old divorcée with a fifteen-year-old son living at home, who made ends meet by renting rooms. After strangling and raping Withers in his usual style, Earle stuffed her body in a trunk, stashed in the attic of her home. That unusual precaution delayed discovery of her corpse until Nelson had time to kill again. When she was found, Portland police initially regarded Beata's death as self-inflicted, although suffocation in a trunk is not a normal mode of suicide by any means. Only when two more bodies surfaced did they take a closer look, determining that she was "outraged" after death.

  Earle missed his second Portland target, one day after Withers died. That Wednesday afternoon, Mrs. M. D. Lewis was working around a small house she had listed for sale in the Sellwood district of Southeast Portland, overlooking the Willamette River. As she later told reporters and police, an old car pulled up to the curb, driven by a "small man" with a dark complexion and black hair. Almost scowling as he read her posted sign and muttered, "House for Sale," the stranger went inside and soon called out to her, "Come upstairs and see what's wrong with this door!"

  Put off by his brusque attitude, Mrs. Lewis remained in the foyer while the walk-in continued his exploration, next shouting from the basement, "Come down here and see what's wrong with this furnace!" Refusing to be lured downstairs, she called back for the visitor to come outside and see her newly planted flowers. Storming back into daylight, he barked, "To hell with your flowers!" and leaped back into his car, departing with an angry squeal of rubber.

  Frustrated by the near miss, Nelson went in search of other Portland prospects. Before the day was out, he met and murdered Mabel McDonald Fluke, a thirty-seven-year-old widow living several blocks from the vacant Lewis home in Sellwood. Earle strangled Fluke and raped her afterward, hiding her body in a corner of her attic crawlspace. Her father was concerned when he could not reach Mabel, but he waited two days before summoning police, who found the corpse and soon discovered that some of her jewelry was missing.

  Mabel Fluke

  Virginia Grant, age fifty-nine, died on Thursday, October 21, hidden behind the basement furnace in a house she hoped to rent. Portland police at first suspected simple heart failure, but with two other corpses found before hers was discovered, they applied themselves more diligently, finding that she, too, had been raped after she was slain. Various items had been stolen from her home, as well.

  Even maniacs need rest, and Earle seems to have been satisfied with murdering three women in as many days. Perhaps his private demons had some limit to their appetite. Before departing Portland, he booked rooms with several other landladies who fit his "normal" pattern but refrained from throttling them. Instead, he charmed them with his courtesy, lulled them with quotes from scripture, and used bits of Mary Nesbit's stolen jewelry as a down payment on his rooms before he skipped, leaving the balance of his bills unpaid. At that, the women who lost only money, rather than their lives, were blessed.

  At long last, officers in Portland put a name to the "Dark Strangler." He was Earle Nelson, certified sex deviate and perennial escape artist. Interviews with his aunt, Lillian Fiban, fleshed out the profile, including Earle's hand-walking, chair-lifting, basement-lurking escapades, and he received a new name in the press: "the Gorilla Murderer."

  That label harked back to a story penned by Edgar Allan Poe for Graham's Magazine, in April 1841, titled "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Hailed today as the first detective story, Poe's tal
e introduced fictional Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, stalking the brutal killer of a woman and her daughter, their bodies stuffed into a chimney. Analysis of hairs found at the murder scene lead Dupin to conclude the slayer is a bloodthirsty orangutan from Borneo, which has escaped from the sailor who imported it to France.

  While Portland's finest scoured their city, Nelson doubled back to San Francisco, traveling by means unknown. He may have still possessed the car recalled by Mrs. M. D. Lewis—which would never be officially retrieved—or else he might have fallen back on his preferred method of hitching rides for free. Whatever mode he chose, Earle reached the City by the Bay in time to strangle Wilhelmina Edmunds, fifty-six, and hide her body underneath a bed on Thursday, November 18, one day short of four weeks since he'd slain Virginia Grant.

  Husband William Edmunds found his wife's corpse in their home that night. Again, the victim had been violated after death. And once again, police ramped up their manhunt for the Strangler—all in vain.

  Mobility was Nelson's friend. He understood that fact and would not be tied down to any given territory in his quest for prey. Doubling back on his own trail again, Earle covered 807 miles within five days, reaching Seattle, Washington, in time for his next homicide.

  Seattle is a coastal seaport city, seat of King County, largest city in the State of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest at large. Native Americans occupied its site no later than four thousand years ago, with the first white settlers putting down their roots in 1851. By 1926 the city's population had topped 350,000 and was growing daily.