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

  Other childhood practices Earle shared with the imprisoned interviewees include chronic masturbation (81 percent), isolation (71 percent), chronic lying (71 percent), rebelliousness (68 percent), stealing (56 percent), temper tantrums (48 percent), being accident prone (29 percent), suffering headaches (29 percent), and eating problems (28 percent). Growing older, he also matched the survey sample with regard to dropping out of high school (47 percent), erratic employment (69 percent), a criminal record in the military (42 percent), and an undesirable or medical discharge from the service (58 percent). Finally, as an adolescent and adult, Earle became assaultive toward adults and children, traits shared respectively by 50 and 56 percent of the FBI's sampling.

  However Nelson may have viewed or misremembered his own blighted childhood, he was clearly on the path toward later violence at an early age.

  Most serial killers thrive on fantasy and some degree of ritual, both traits that Nelson clearly shared. A childhood preoccupation with sex—first displayed by chronic masturbation and spying on his cousin as she undressed, later carried into hiring prostitutes when he was barely fifteen years of age, carried on through the remainder of his life, from the attempted rape that sent him to San Quentin in 1915 to the later murders wherein sex expressed itself as necrophilia. His fixation on landladies seems to combine a matter of convenience—easy access to their homes—with a taste, in a majority of cases, for women decades older than himself. If Earle's wife was, in fact, "four decades his senior," as one source reports, that completes the pattern, victimizing Mary Martin with his sexual excesses, to the point of assaulting her in her hospital bed.

  Psychological profilers pay close attention to the behavior and stress factors preceding a serial killer's attacks, ranking antecedent behavior and planning as the first phase of murder. Among the FBI's sampling of caged killers, pre-crime stress factors included conflict with females or parents, marital and employment problems, plus additional factors including legal difficulties (28 percent), conflict with another male (11 percent), physical injury (11 percent), death of a significant person, or birth of a child (8 percent for each).

  Victim selection by serial killers may be determined by many factors—sex, age, race, appearance (such as hair style or a choice of clothing), occupation, mode of transportation, even a particular address. In the early 1980s, Jerome Spraggins struck three times at the same Montclair, New Jersey, apartment—Number 31 in the Cranetown Apartments, at 77 Orange Road—killing female tenants who were unacquainted with each other and with him. Was Earle's selection of landladies influenced in some way by an impression that he had spent his formative years as a boarder, first with his grandmother, then with the Fibans? Or was it just a matter of convenience? His targets were not high-risk victims, in the mold of prostitutes or even taxi drivers, but they did make themselves and their homes accessible to strangers drawn to their doors by posted "For Rent" signs.

  Serial killers often indulge in various forms of ritualized behavior before an attack, but only one has been noted for Nelson. Information gleaned from witnesses after his arrest, describing his personal appearance, suggests that he typically visited a barbershop before killing, having a haircut and shave. Afterward, he cared less for his grooming, allowing himself to appear more shabby and unkempt. While that might be interpreted as ritual, another easy answer is that Earle simply liked to spruce himself up before approaching a new landlady, thereby supporting his façade as a man of culture and refinement. Later, most particularly when his pace of killing accelerated and his murders came closer together, he would have less time or need for barber's visits in between attacks.

  Post-crime behavior is another fertile field for speculation by forensic profilers. Patterns in disposal of the bodies may reveal some aspect of the slayer's psyche, or they may hinge on simple convenience. In Seattle, Gary Ridgway dumped many of his victims in or near the Green River, where running water helped erase clues and forests concealed the corpses. At the same time, though, he also took time to insert small pyramidal stones into several of his victims' vaginas—a clear presentation of ritualistic behavior.

  Nelson's pattern, as we have seen, was to conceal the bodies of his victims in their homes, sometimes beneath a bed, behind a furnace, in the attic, but he also left a few displayed where they were easy to discover. Was concealment of a given victim's corpse simply designed to buy more time, while Nelson looked for other prey or fled the area? His mind is closed to us by death and protestations of his innocence, offset by teasing hints at what he may have thought or done, refusing to reveal specifics.

  Some serial killers confound police by slaying their victims in one place, then transporting their bodies to another location for disposal. If detectives cannot find the murder sites, a shortage of forensic evidence may hamper their search for suspects, ultimately foiling their attempt to build a case. Nelson's murders posed no such problem for authorities, but forensic science was so primitive during the 1920s, as compared to modern times, that officers had relatively little evidence to work with. No published report links Earle's fingerprints to any crime scene, although his prints were taken and filed at various times by the U.S. Army and Navy, police who arrested him on sundry charges over time, and by the institutions where he was confined, including San Quentin Prison and Napa State Hospital.

  As for blood typing gathered from semen recovered at crime scenes, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) profiling was unknown to forensic science before 1988, sixty years after Earle's execution in Manitoba. At best, semen samples from a crime scene or a victim's corpse could tell police the offender's blood group: A, B, AB, or O. Narrowing the sample down to a specific person—now possible with an accuracy exceeding 99.9 percent—was unimagined at the time Earle cut his swath across the continent.

  One post-crime trait Earle shared with others of his kind was the collection of personal objects from victims or other members of their families. Profilers often refer to such items as trophies or souvenirs, but it seems Earle had a more practical motive in mind. When he purloined male clothing from a victim's home, he generally wore those clothes and sold or pawned them later, or proceeded from the crime scene to a vendor who would take them off his hands at once for cash. Likewise, when he stole women's jewelry, he inevitably sold the items or employed them as down payments on a rented room. There seemed to be no sexual attachment to the stolen objects, as with other slayers who keep victims' underclothing, shoes, driver's licenses, jewelry, or even teeth and body parts in order to relive their crimes after the fact.

  My research on serial murder, spanning forty-odd years and several thousand cases, divides repeat killers into three broad categories. Nomadic killers travel widely, between states and even internationally. Localized slayers confine themselves to smaller areas—a given county, city, neighborhood, or stretch of highway—where they strike repeatedly. The rarest breed are stationary murderers, "trapdoor spiders" habitually claiming victims at one specific place: their homes, a workplace, or another site selected for some reason best known to themselves, like the apartment raided three times by Jerome Spraggins, though he had never lived there and knew none of its inhabitants.

  Earle Nelson, roaming as he pleased from coast to coast and back again, then traipsing northward into Canada, was clearly a nomadic killer. Given cities held no personal allure for him, beyond concealing him within their growing populations and the ease with which he turned up boarding houses. Earle was smart enough to move on when the heat grew too intense, and for the most part spared himself clumsy mistakes that have betrayed some other famous slayers: "Scorecard Killer" Randy Kraft, stopped for speeding with a dead man in the passenger seat of his car; "Joel the Ripper" Rifkin, likewise caught with a corpse in the bed of his pickup, driving without license plates; or David Berkowitz, New York City's "Son of Sam," traced through a parking citation that placed him near his final murder scene.

  Incessant travel permits nomadic killers to escape detection through what criminologist Dr. Steven Egg
er calls "linkage blindness" between law enforcement agencies. Even today, despite access to the computerized National Crime Information Center maintained by the U.S. Department of Justice, some state and local police departments fail to connect similar—or identical—crimes from diverse jurisdictions. More surprisingly, perhaps, agencies of various sizes still resist suggestions that a serial killer may be operating on their turf, to the point of ignoring forensic evidence and refusing to cooperate with other departments that share the same problem.

  Multiple reasons for such "linkage blindness" exist. Some agencies resent any suggestion that they may have missed clues at the start of a murder series, implying that their officers and methods are somehow deficient. Others balk at collaboration with other departments they despise, such as the longstanding rivalry between city police and county sheriff's deputies in Los Angeles, California. In L.A., the FBI once maintained two separate squads to investigate bank robberies—one working with LAPD, another with the county sheriff's department—since the two agencies were not on speaking terms.

  And speaking of the Bureau, federal involvement in a case often creates more problems than it solves. FBI headquarters has a century-long history of arrogance and intrusion in local affairs, compounded after 1919 by passage of the federal Motor Vehicle Theft Act, under which the Bureau claimed credit—and annual budgetary rewards—for "recovery" of stolen cars driven across state lines, then found by state or local police. Resentment of "the feds" was not relieved by passage of the "USA Patriot Act" and creation of a Homeland Security Department after September 11, 2001; if anything, it was exacerbated. Even when the FBI tries to help, as with creation of VICAP—its Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—in 1985, original questionnaires on individual crimes were so long and cumbersome that many local agencies had neither time nor patience to complete and submit them.

  The worst, most reprehensible reason for police failure to identify serial killers is a mindset marking their victims as "less dead"—another phrase coined by Dr. Steven Egger. As defined by Egger, "less dead" victims are those marginalized and generally disregarded by society—prostitutes, drug abusers, homosexuals, poor nonwhites, the homeless, itinerant farm workers, even hospital patients and the elderly. Examples are plentiful throughout history, from West End prostitutes killed by London's "Jack the Ripper" in 1888 to those slain by a host of serial killers in modern times; migrant farm workers butchered by Juan Corona during 1971; male "hustlers" slain by John Wayne Gacy between 1972 and 1978; or runaways tortured and killed by various predators, including Dean Corll and Elmer Henley between 1970 and 1973, and "Freeway Killer" William Bonin and his pack of accomplices during 1979 to 1980. Homosexual victims fell prey to such monsters as California "Trash Bag Killer" Patrick Kearney and the still-unidentified "Doodler," who trolled San Francisco gay bars between January 1974 and September 1975. Nationwide and around the world, serial slayers dubbed "angels of mercy" commonly prey on patients, often elderly or gravely ill, in hospitals and rest homes.

  Police categorization of "less dead" victims reaches its nadir when those slain are literally dehumanized. Some detectives dismiss murder of gays as "homocides," unworthy of investigation, and the initials "NHI" have been applied by various departments to cases in which police find "no humans involved." One such case, involving Lonnie David Franklin Jr.—the so-called "Grim Sleeper" of Los Angeles, dragged on from 1985 through 2007, leaving twelve African American women slain and dozens more missing, presumed dead by their families and by authorities. In that case, police not only shrugged off the successive crimes—which targeted crack-addicted prostitutes nicknamed "strawberries"—but also actively lied to victims' relatives and the media concerning their efforts to solve the murders. In 2014, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield produced a documentary film about this Lonnie Franklin for HBO, titled Tales of the Grim Sleeper, which perfectly illustrates how mishandling of "less dead" victims foils apprehension of serial slayers.

  That said, we must admit that Earle Nelson's victims did not fall into any category commonly overlooked and swept under the nearest rug by lazy detectives. Two cases were initially described as death by suicide or natural causes, but belated autopsies proved otherwise. All of Earle's victims were white, mostly members of the economic middle or upper class, and rated sensational media attention as the crimes multiplied. Police did respond energetically, within their scientific limits at the time, but Nelson outran and outmaneuvered them until his trip to Canada, combined with his need for successive, rapid-fire crimes, brought him down.

  And then?

  Was Earle insane within the rule of law, deserving of exemption from the gallows? In March of 2014, Internet blogger Bob Miller reviewed Nelson's case under the headline "Strangler of 22 Deemed Not Insane: Was It Fair?" Miller described Earle's case as a failure of the insanity defense, noting Nelson's multiple confinements to a mental hospital before he ever claimed a life, coupled with aberrant behavior dating from his childhood, as detailed in the preceding chapters. Miller dismissed Dr. Mathers, from Earle's trial, as one "who fancied himself as a pioneer in the emerging field of psychiatry" but missed the glaring signs in Nelson's case. For what it may be worth, Dr. Mathers later became an associate editor for the American Journal of Psychiatry and Dean of Faculty at the University of Manitoba Medicine School, but that appointment cast a shadow on his medical and academic reputation.

  As reported by Allan Levine in the Winnipeg Free Press on May 11, 2009, "One of the most significant episodes of anti-Semitism in Manitoba’s history was the exposure of the University of Manitoba faculty of medicine’s notorious quota system" between 1932 and 1944, when Dr. Mathers ruled the school as Dean of Faculty. Prior to his appointment, in the 1920s, some 25 percent of all newly admitted faculty members were Jewish. After 1932, Levine writes, "Any element of fairness [in hiring] vanished with the appointment of Dr. Alvin T. Mathers as dean of the faculty." Mathers established strict quotas for hiring Jews and Poles, rejecting 80 percent of such applicants, and Jewish women found it virtually impossible to gain employment with the university. Mathers required each applicant to designate his or her "racial origin," whereupon they were assigned to "preferred" and "non-preferred" lists for consideration. Levine found no evidence that Mathers himself was a raving anti-Semite, yet reports that "he argued without hesitation that 'certain nationalities and groups' would never be welcomed as physicians and he saw no point in providing them with a medical education." In 1944, when a provincial government commission was organized to investigate the quota system, Mathers "cautioned that if his procedures were not followed, the university could become too 'Jewish.'" Five years later, the grateful university rewarded Dr. Mathers for his sterling service with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Coincidentally or otherwise, during that same period, Justice A. K. Dysart—the presiding judge at Nelson's trial, who sentenced him to die—served as chairman of the university's board of governors. The provincial commission conceded that "We have not progressed so far in this country, or this community, that our Jewish citizens are completely amalgamated and looked upon simply as Canadians," but still deemed that racial "concentration, such as is taking place in medicine, can only lead to more and bitter animosity."

  Anti-Semitism played no role in Earle Nelson's trial, conviction, or sentencing, since neither he nor his victims were Jewish, but the ugly interlude does hint at possible collaboration between Justice Dysart and Dr. Mathers as academic colleagues. We must stop short, however, of suggesting that their friendship actively discriminated against Earle's plea of insanity at trial.

  More likely, as with the reaction in America to John Hinckley Jr.'s 1981 attempt to kill President Ronald Reagan, for which jurors deemed him not guilty by reason of insanity, it sprang from fear of releasing a dangerous character. In reaction to Hinckley's controversial verdict, Congress and several states passed new laws governing when insanity may be raised as a defense in criminal proceedings; Idaho, Montana and Utah abolished the defense altogether. Three
years after the botched assassination, the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984 amended United States federal laws governing defendants with mental diseases or defects and making it significantly more difficult to obtain a verdict of not guilty only by reason of insanity. Under the new statute, prosecutors no longer have to prove a defendant's sanity. Rather, that burden shifts to the defense, requiring "clear and convincing evidence of mental incompetence." It also limited the scope of expert testimony on ultimate legal issues, eliminated the defense of diminished capacity, created a special verdict of "not guilty only by reason of insanity" which triggers a commitment proceeding, and provided for federal commitment of persons who become insane after being convicted or while serving a federal prison term.

  Was Earle Nelson legally insane? Proponents of that theory cite the high probability of his birth with congenital syphilis, two major brain traumas, and a lifetime of bizarre, irrational behavior to support their case. Likewise, compulsive serial killings—some committed while police were almost literally breathing down Earle's neck—argue against a natural penchant for self-control. To that, as well, add the apparent negligence of psychiatrists at Napa State Hospital, who not only failed in their attempts at treating Earle (if any), but also eventually "discharged" him in absentia after his last escape, thereby washing their hands of the problem.