Earle Leonard Nelson ( Ferral; May 12, 1897January 13, 1928), 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 ‌that of Emily ‌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," 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. His second victim, 63-year-old Laura Beale, was strangled in her home in nearby San Jose on March 2.

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." 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. Both had been strangledRobert, with a diaperand Germania had been raped after death. Both she and Robert were discovered by her husband when he returned from work that evening.

Nelson continued to move further east, murdering and raping 53-year-old landlady Mary McConnell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 27. Several articles of jewelry were also stolen from McConnell's residence. The following day, Nelson attempted to sell one of McConnell's gold watches to pawn shop owner Marie Kuhn, but she declined. One month later, on May 27, Nelson arrived in Buffalo, New York, where he rented a room from 53-year-old Jennie Randolph, using the name "Charles Harrison." Three days later, Randolph was discovered strangled to death and raped, her body stuffed under a bed in her home. Randolph's brother, Gideon Gillett, had met "Mr. Harrison" when he first arrived at the residence, and described him as "about thirty-three years old, with a stocky build, dark complexion, and black hair slicked straight back." Fred Merritt, a boarder in Randolph's house, would later positively identify Nelson as "Charles Harrison."

On June 1 in Detroit, Michigan, boardinghouse manager Fannie May, along with boarder Maureen Atorthy, were discovered murdered in the boardinghouse that May oversaw. Their bodies were found by the building owner, Leonard Sink, who had arrived to collect rent funds from May. May had been garrotted with an electrical cord cut from a table lamp. Police determined that the cord had been cut while the electric current was still circulating, and that the knife with which it had been done would show visible burning as well as a nicked blade. On June 10, another local woman, Emily Patterson, went missing. She was discovered later that evening by her husband, raped and strangled to death under her son's bed. She had also been bludgeoned with a claw hammer. Patterson's husband discovered her body while kneeling at the bedside to say evening prayers.

Upon investigation, police determined that several items were missing from the Patterson home, including a whipcord suit, Patterson's gold wedding ring, the family Bible, and C$70 in ten-dollar bills. A knife bearing burn marks and nicks was also left behind in the home. Police found the knife to be consistent with that which had cut the lamp cord used in the May and Artorthy murders the week prior. Upon a search of his room, the decaying, nude corpse of Cowan was discovered under the bed. On June 16, 1927, constables in Killarney, Photographs of Nelson taken by Winnipeg police were shortly sent out to police departments throughout the U.S.; this resulted in positive identifications from witnesses in Illinois and California who claimed the man was the same unknown renter they had had encounters with.

Initially, Nelson admitted to his crimes, bluntly telling reporters: "I only do my lady killings on Saturday nights." However, he would subsequently retract his admission and claim he was innocent. He was also charged with two counts of attempted molestation and one count of burglary.

Trial

thumb|upright=1|right|Nelson's trial took place at the Winnipeg Law Courts Building

Nelson's trial was scheduled to begin June 27, 1927, but postponed at the request of his attorney, and instead began on November 1 at the Winnipeg Law Courts Building. The case was prosecuted by R. B. Graham, and overseen by Justice Andrew Dysart.

Nelson was defended by court-appointed attorney James H. Stitt. Nelson's ex-wife Mary Martin testified against him, claiming that he was "absolutely insane." Additionally, over sixty individuals from both Canada and the U.S. testified, many placing Nelson at the scenes of the various crimes or linking him to property stolen from victims' homes. A jail guard who oversaw Nelson throughout his trial noted that he had become particularly obsessed with a certain Biblical passage from the Book of Proverbs, which read:

Closing statements in Nelson's trial were completed on November 5, 1927. After forty minutes of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of murder and he received a mandatory death sentence. When asked whether he'd like to make a statement, Nelson responded, with a nonchalant tone, "No, not that I know of". Relatives of victims McConnell and Cowan visited Nelson in prison after his conviction, and he continued to proclaim his innocence.

Execution

Nelson spent two months on death row. During his imprisonment, he attempted to persuade officials away from carrying out his execution, claiming that if he was given another chance he would turn to religious studies. In late December, Stitt submitted a thirty-page document to Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe, petitioning for clemency on the grounds that Nelson was insane and that his personal history had been unfairly presented to the jury via the press.

The "eloquent, even moving" document consisted of twenty affidavits from persons who had known Nelson throughout his life who swore they were "in a position to know full well the character and mentality of the said Earle Nelson that [they] verily believed without exaggeration or mental reservation [that he had] been for a long period of time a person of unsound mind." In one of the affidavits, Mrs. L. J. Casey, who had employed Nelson as a groundskeeper in 1926, attested to this, noting that she "hear[d] him laughing and talking to himself all the time. One day while I happened to be there, he sat right outside in the drenching rain, looking at the sky, without a coat, until he was soaked through." Despite the abundance of affidavits, the appeal was denied, and Nelson's execution was scheduled for the second Friday of January.

Nelson was executed by hanging at 7:30 a.m. on January 13, 1928 at the Vaughan Street Jail in Winnipeg. His final words were: "I forgive those who have wronged me."

Aftermath

Nelson was the first serial murderer in American history whose crimes were subject to widespread media attention in newspapers, national magazines, and the then-new medium of radio. His crimes and trial received international media attention, appearing in newspapers across the United States, Canada, and Australia. Nelson's confirmed murder count, which exceeded twenty, remained a record high for nearly fifty years until the discovery of Juan Corona's crimes in 1971. According to crime historians Harold Schechter and David Everitt, Nelson was the first serial sex murderer in twentieth-century America.

Modus operandi

When his identity was still unknown, law enforcement surmised that Nelson was a predator who "possessed a dual personality," likening him to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. However, his modus operandi was clear even to investigators at the time of the crimes' occurrences.

Nelson's victims were mostly landladies, whom he would approach on the pretext of renting a room. Many of these victims were targeted after having placed "room for rent" advertisements in local newspapers. Nelson, well-versed in Christian theology, often studied his worn Bible, using it to keep his victim at ease and off-guard. Once he had gained their trust and was able to access their homes, he would kill them (almost always by strangling) and sometimes engage in necrophilia with the corpse.

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| November 7, 1925 || Mary Murray || || Philadelphia, Pennsylvania || Strangled in kitchen; found deceased in upstairs bedroom. Body had been raped after death. || style="background:#D3BECF;" align="center"| Deceased || align=center|

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| November 11, 1925 || Lena Weiner || || Philadelphia, Pennsylvania || Found deceased in bedroom by husband. Body had been raped after death. Articles of clothing from husband's wardrobe also missing. || style="background:#D3BECF;" align="center"| Deceased || align="center"|

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| November 1925 || Ola McCoy || || Philadelphia, Pennsylvania || Strangled in parlor of her home; found deceased in upstairs bedroom. Body had been raped after death. McCoy's home is located only blocks from that of Mary Murray. || style="background:#D3BECF;" align="center"| Deceased || align="center"|

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| August 18, 1926 || Isabelle Gallegos || 50 || Stockton, California || Russian immigrant John Slivkoff was arrested in Gallegos' murder but subsequently ruled out after witnesses failed to pick him out of a lineup. || style="background:#D3BECF;" align="center"| Deceased || align="center"|

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Nelson's murder spree served as a source of inspiration for the 1943 Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt, which focuses on a serial killer, the "Merry Widow Murderer" (portrayed by Joseph Cotten), who targets elderly widows.

See also

  • List of serial killers in the United States
  • List of serial killers by number of victims

Notes

References

Works cited

  • Historical account of Nelson's arrest from the Winnipeg Police Service