Dark Stranger: The Crimes of Earle Leonard Nelson

If you think about the 1920s in the United States, a few things might come to mind—jazz, prohibition, Babe Ruth, and, right at the end, the Wall Street Crash. And if you think of crime, you probably think of Al Capone, bootlegging, and fast-talking wise guys with Tommy guns. But the 1920s were also in some ways the nation’s introduction to crimes that could shock and horrify the entire country. Leopold and Loeb’s thrill killing, the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the utter horror of child-killer and cannibal Albert Fish. And possibly the most prolific killer of the decade was a man whose strange desires sent him on a trail of murder all across a continent.

Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE

Sources:
Bestial by Harold Schechter
The Laughing Gorilla by Robert Graysmith

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows, and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
If you think about the nineteen twenties in the United States,
a few things might come to mind. Jazz, prohibition, Babe Ruth,
and right at the end of the Wall Street crash.
And if you think of crime, you probably think of
al Capone, bootlegging and fast talking, wise guys with Tommy guns.
But the nineteen twenties were also, in some ways the
nation's introduction to crimes that could shock and horrify the

(00:42):
entire country. Leopold and Loeb's thrill killing, the kidnapping and
murder of the Lindburg Baby, the utter horror of child
killer and cannibal Albert Fish, and possibly the most prolific
killer of the decade was a man whose strange desires
sent him on a trail of murder all across the continent.
This is part one of Dark Strangler. The Crimes of

(01:04):
Earl Leonard Nelson, so campers were starting this one at
the end of the story. Winnipeg, Canada, January thirteenth, nineteen
twenty eight. It was a Friday, the thirteenth, in the chill,

(01:27):
gray stillness, just before dawn. The prisoner was brought out
into the cobbled yard of the old Vaughn Street jail,
where the gallows had been erected. He'd been a notoriously
powerful man, but months in a lonely cell with three
solid meals a day had softened his edges. Still, the
jail was taking no chances. His arms were strapped behind

(01:47):
his back, and two tough looking guards walked on either
side of him. Behind them were two priests. After the
hangman put the noose around his neck, the condemned man
offered up his last words. I declare my innocence before
God and Man. I forgive those who have injured me,
and I ask pardon from those I have injured. May
the Lord have mercy on my soul. The executioner was

(02:11):
an efficient man. Right after the last word, he slipped
a black hood over the prisoner's head, stepped back, and
opened the volt on the trap door. The prisoner fell
and bounced and twisted at the end of the rope,
neck broken. This kind of death is rarely quick and neat.
After the body was lowered to the ground, the prison

(02:31):
doctor knelt to check for signs of life. It wasn't
until eleven minutes after the drop that he finally said
it's over, and a black flag was raised over the prison.
Earl Leonard Nelson, the Dark Strangler the Gorilla Man, had
been convicted of two Canadian murders, but they were the
last stops on a journey of mayhem and terror that

(02:53):
had taken Earl all across North America and left dozens
of people dead in his wake. Although he'd grown up
using the name of his mother's family, legally, Earl had
his father's ominously prescient last name, Ferrell. Baby Earl, born
in San Francisco in eighteen ninety seven, had a rough
start in life. When he was nine and a half

(03:14):
months old, his mother died of syphilis. She caught it
from her husband, and he died of the same disease
seven months later. Earle, an orphan before he was two
years old, was taken in by his maternal grandmother, Jenny Nelson,
a widow in her forties, with two surviving children of
her own, both still young twelve and ten years old.

(03:35):
There's a picture of Earl as a baby, perfectly happy, round,
smiling kid, but after his conviction, one journalist wasn't impressed,
describing baby Earl from the picture as quote a loose mouthed,
degenerate infant. Ah the good old days when you could
publicly diss on a baby's appearance in the national media.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Could God, for God forbid you acknowledge that a child
just looks like a child. I think he was cute,
but no, he was evil, evil baby.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
I gotta tell you, I'm putting loose mouth degenerate infant
in my back pocket. We gotta use that one.

Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yeah, we'll use it on an adult, for sure. But yeah,
but uh, maybe maybe I'm like a O'Toole or otistol.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Right, he's very loose mouthing degenerate. That would be perfect.
Raising three kids alone in eighteen ninety nine was not easy,
and missus Nelson was apparently a harried woman with very
little time for the softer side of child rearing. She
was also deeply religious, and young Earl picked up on this,
becoming especially fascinated with all the apocalyptic craziness in the

(04:51):
Book of Revelations. This was not a great period in
history as far as mental health care went, particularly for children.
Young Earl, he never received any care or diagnoses, despite
the fact that something was very clearly up with him.
He would frequently be filled with frantic energy, and just
as often would spend days moping alone in his dark bedroom.

(05:12):
I am not good for anything, he said. I will
never be good for anything. Nobody wants me. I would
be better off out of this world. This kid was
five years old. He'd sit for hours and just stare
into space. He'd walk around the house with his head
on one side like he was listening to voices. Several
times he'd set out for school in neat, freshly laundered

(05:33):
clothes and come back in rags, like he'd traded clothes
with a homeless person or something. When pressed on what
had happened, he'd just shrug like uh. Even more often,
he'd somehow managed to lose his underwear by the time
he came home. Earl's favorite way to eat was to
drench whatever was in front of him in olive oil,

(05:55):
then lift the plate to his mouth and just slurp
and chomp it directly into his mouth, which must have
been real fun to watch. As a mesophonic, I would
be absolutely Oh I couldn't.

Speaker 4 (06:06):
Do it as a As a non mesophonic, I just
that made my stomach turn.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
The slurping noises, Oh no, no, no, just like watching
somebody drench something in olive oil.

Speaker 4 (06:17):
I appreciate. I appreciate a good olive oil, okay, but
drenching it in olive oil nommmm gross. By the time
he was ten, Earle was mostly a passive, silent kid,
but one who would occasionally lash out in wild rages,
hitting both boys and girls. At a school, he started

(06:39):
stealing and soon had a reputation as the kid in
the neighborhood that parents warned their own children away from
the methods. Missus Nelson used to try to correct this behavior.
Definitely didn't do his troubled young mind any favors. She
spanked him, said God would punish him, said that if
he didn't start acting more no normally, she'd throw him

(07:01):
out into the streets to fend for himself. Earle was
a handful for shure, but teaching him that love and
safety were conditional, well, that's not great for a kid
who was probably exhibiting early signs of psychopathy. Also not
great for the state of Earl's reign was what happened
in nineteen oh seven. He tried to impress some older

(07:21):
boys by racing his uncle's bicycle across the tracks of
an oncoming street car, but the street car clipped the
back of the wheel of the bike and spun it around,
knocking Earle down. His head got jammed under the street
car's fender, and he was dragged along, head banging along
the cobbled street for fifty feet before the car stopped.
Young Earle was mostly comatose for a week. When he

(07:45):
finally struggled back to full consciousness, the family doctor asked
him a few questions and declared him just fine, My god,
He obviously wasn't. Although it wasn't like a switch had
been flipped and changed his personality, All his existing weird
behaviors just got switched up to eleven. A year after
his accident, Earl's grandmother died and he moved in with

(08:08):
his nineteen year old aunt, Lilian and her new husband.
Another seismic shift in Earl's emotional foundations, the frosty grandmother
who'd raised him, had, from Earl's twisted point of view,
performed the ultimate act of emotional withholding and left the
world altogether. And his new maternal figure was his pretty
young aunt, who he thought of as his older sister.

(08:31):
This is the kind of stuff that can mess up
a kid of sound mind, never mind a kid like Earl.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
No kid.

Speaker 4 (08:38):
By the time he was fourteen, Earl had dropped out
of school and worked a succession of menial jobs that
he hardly ever kept more than a couple of days.
He never had any trouble finding work, which might surprise
you given the bizarre picture we've painted of him so far.
The thing is, he only acted like a total weirdo
when he was relaxed enough to be himself. When it

(08:59):
was to his advantage. He was absolutely capable of tightening
up his behavior and presenting himself as an intelligent, affable
young man. Later on, newspapers would describe him as a
Jackal and Hyde personality. But nowadays we're much more familiar
with how killers like Earl Nelson work. They don't switch
between different personalities, They just get very skilled at disguising

(09:21):
their true identity.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, exactly, Doctor Jekyl is just a mask that mister
Hyde puts on sometimes. By this time, Earle was already
a brawny, wide shouldered young guy who looked like he
could work all day long. He didn't, though, a foreman
would tell him what to do, and Earl would nod
and then spend the next twenty minutes just staring straight
up into the sky. Or he'd be in the middle

(09:45):
of working and just lay down his tools and walk
away from the site and never come back. His aunt Lilian,
always cared for Earl, though, right up to the end.
He's my own flesh and blood, she'd say, even though
Earl's actions would take him way way beyond the limits
of end reasonable familiar loyalty. But there would always be
something fundamentally childish about him that made it hard for

(10:07):
Lilian to cut off contact. When he was young, though
he was mainly an embarrassment. If Lilian had friends over,
Earl would sometimes walk in on his hands, moving along
on his knuckles like an orangutan, as if it were
just the most natural thing in the world. Or he'd
bend over and grip the back of a dining chair
in his teeth and lift it up with the power

(10:29):
of his jaws and just get a good mental picture
of that. For a second, You're just sitting there, having
your tea and cookies, gossiping about the neighbors, and suddenly
your friend's weird nephew comes in, walking like one of
the great apes and picks up a chair with his teeth. Well, hello, lady.

(10:52):
So strange. But sometimes if Lilian had one of her
girlfriends over, Earl would just stand there and stare holes
through her with us an intensity that more often than
not made the friend get the hell out of there
as fast as possible. Soon, very few friends were willing
to come over at all. Even more bizarre, Earl would
sometimes vanish for days or weeks at a time and

(11:14):
come back in weird clothes, one time, for example, in
a baggy red sweater, yellow pants, leather chaps, and a
cowboy hat. He was fifteen years old but looked older,
and for at least some of the time he was
traveling through San Francisco's dive bars and brothels. He also
started robbing houses, which eventually won him a two year
stay in San Quentin right after his eighteenth birthday. By

(11:38):
the time he got out in nineteen seventeen, the US
had just entered World War One, and like millions of
other young Americans, Earle was feeling patriotic. He enlisted as
a private in the Army and was sent to training camp,
but one night they wanted him to stand guard duty
in the cold, so he just left. That patriotism only
stretched so far.

Speaker 4 (11:58):
Obviously, well, Whitney, that was hard and uncomfortable and boring
the three cardinal sins for a psychopath.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
He was still fascinated by religions, so he took a
trip to Salt Lake City to see what Mormonism was
all about. But Utah had the same Uncle Sam posters
as San Francisco, and Earl gave the military another shot,
signing up as a cook in the Navy, but they
wanted him to do stuff like peel potatoes and clean pots,
so he just left again. Next, he tried a few

(12:31):
weeks in the medical Corps before deserting because his hemorrhoids
were bothering him. Seems like as good a reason as
any to go a wall right my butts. Finally, in
nineteen eighteen, he tried the Navy again. He didn't desert
this time, but he didn't work, just read his Bible
and spouted off about revelations, or just stared blankly into

(12:52):
space and ignored everyone around him. When he complained about
headaches and refused to get out of his bunk, he
was sent to the Naval Hospital and shortly after that
to the Napa State Mental Hospital, right after his twenty
first birthday. And this is where, like, you know, you
can hear about somebody who is as much of a
nightmare as Earl, and you can look at their younger

(13:15):
years and you can feel some empathy, right, because obviously
there was something wrong. This was the early nineteen hundreds.
There was just no hope of this guy getting the
kind of help he needed, right, and it just got
worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
Yeah, there's it's a it's one of those like you
see to a lesser extent people acting this way and
you're like, oh, he was, like you know, he obviously
had markers of whatever, and we have ways of dealing
with this now that aren't just like beat him and threaten,
threaten to put him on the street.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, and yeah, it's sad, not great, it's sad. Earl
had his normal person mask firmly in place for his
first interview with the hospital psychiatry, when asked if he
experienced any peculiar thoughts, Earle said, well, not exactly, not
more than a first class intelligent person would. They had

(14:11):
an ego. He completely snowed the doctor, who concluded that
Earle was quote not violent, homicidal, or destructive. Boy is
his face going to be read? Later? Earle wasn't happy
about being confined. A few weeks after arriving at the hospital,
Earl escaped. Authorities caught him and brought him back. A
few weeks later, he escaped again, this time staying gone

(14:33):
for three months, and this time, when he was brought back,
his fellow inmates started calling him Houdini. He escaped again
the day after he'd been brought back again for a
few months, and then one fourth and final time. The
war was over by then, and the Navy, who had
been paying for Earl's treatment, chose to save themselves some
money and effort and just discharged him from the service.

(14:55):
Earl Nelson was somebody else's problem now.

Speaker 4 (15:24):
By now he was twenty two, and he moved back
in with Aunt Lilian and quickly got a job as
a janitor at Saint Mary's hospital, and it was there
for the first time ever that young Earl felt the
first stirrings of love, sweet love. He worked with a
woman named Mary Martin, a cleaning lady in the maternity ward.

(15:44):
She was sweet and so shy she would blush and
stammer if she had to talk to someone she didn't
know well, in a twist that would have Sigmund Freud
giving himself a high five. She was also fifty eight
years old, and this wasn't a modern Hollywood fifty eight okay.
Mary had done hard physical work all her life. She

(16:07):
looked like she could have been Earl's mima. Actually, she
was just a little older than Earle's own grandmother was
when she died. Earle pursued Mary like a kid chasing
an ice cream truck when he cleaned up, and wasn't
dressed like a lunatic. He was a decent looking guy,
and when he focused on it, he could be intensely charming.

(16:29):
Mary wasn't used to being the focus of romantic desire.
It was weird to have this twenty two year old
guy after her, but it was also flattering, and Earle
had an obvious vulnerability that touched her. A few months
after they met they got married.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
Damn, I knew that kind of age gap was pretty
common back then, but the genders were usually reversed. I
didn't know they had cougars in the nineteen tens. Would
it something new every day?

Speaker 4 (16:55):
I feel like it's not a cougar. When she was
the one being chased, you know, he.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Was the She was the pursued, not the pursuer verse
cougar like verse cougar.

Speaker 4 (17:05):
I don't know. It didn't take long for Mary to
regret marrying Earl. They moved into a tiny apartment, where
Earl's aversion to bathing quickly became a problem.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeh.

Speaker 4 (17:20):
When she finally talked him into cleaning up, Earl shrugged,
sat on the edge of the bed, and took off
his shoes and socks. He poured a glass of water
over his feet, and that was his bath. My toes
are nice and clean, he told Mary. That's what counts.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Oh, okay, I'm upset now.

Speaker 4 (17:39):
Yeah, I have several questions. Yeah, why does he Why
does he think that's what counts? And like no other
like this is your wife, Do none of your other
bits count? It's just your feet? What's happening?

Speaker 3 (17:55):
Like h.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
H, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (18:00):
And also now you just have a puddle of water
in your bedroom, I.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Know, like were you at least over like a bowl
or something, just pouring one time? Just okay, all done?
Like it must have just been horrific. It's in that place, Hugh.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
Smelled like a boy's middle school boy's locker room times ten.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (18:26):
When they went out to dinner, Earl still liked to
eat directly from his plate, slurping up the food like
a hog at a feeding trough. And just like when
he was a kid, he would sometimes disappear for days
at a time and come back in strange clothes. Sometimes
these were weirdly color coordinated, all white or all yellow
or green. He never had any explanation why, and Earl

(18:51):
was jealous. If Mary chatted for a second with a
trolley conductor, Earle would go all black eyed with rage.
An accuser of flirting, said she cared more about her
female friends than she did about him. He got pissed
off when Mary spoke to her own brother. Wow, he
might have had a good reason there, because, like everyone
else in her life, Mary's brother Frank was telling her

(19:13):
that her new husband was crazy and she needed to
get the hell out. Earl was also horny as hell.
He wanted sex at least once a day, and if Mary,
who worked hard every day, was unwilling to help him,
he'd just lie in bed beside her and you know
yoink it again and again until Mary scuttled off to

(19:35):
the bathroom to sleep in peace, and.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
He didn't bathe. Oh God, I'm so upset. Now you
might be thinking, what this guy's personality really needs is
another serious head injury. While he was working for a
landscape gardener, Earle fell from a high branch of a
tree and landed right on his head. He was taken
to hospital with a serious concussion, but it must have

(20:00):
reminded him of the mental hospital, because he ran out
of there after just a couple days and showed up
at home with bandages all over his head. Earl had
always been afflicted with serious headaches, probably migraines. After this
second head injury, they became worse and more frequent. His
moods and behavior, never predictable, became even more erratic. Mary

(20:22):
would find him staring intently at the plaster on the walls.
When she asked what he was doing, Earl would point
and yell out the faces. Don't you see them? Whoa?
Mary tearfully asked her priest for advice. Kindness can cure insanity?
He told her, Yeah, I don't know about that. Father.
Maybe tried like lithium and kindness, maybe both, maybe a

(20:47):
little bo yeah. In nineteen twenty one, the newlyweds moved
to Palo Alto and both got jobs at a private
girls' school, Mary as a cleaning woman and Earl as
a handyman. Not long after they'd started there, Mary was
taking down some laundry from a washing line when the
old dude who worked as the school gardener, stopped by
her a chat. Right away, Earl came barreling out of

(21:09):
the schoolhouse, yelling at him to stay away from his wife.
The gardener three times. Earl's age still had some fire
in the belly and started yelling right back in Earl's face,
good for him. The headmistress, Miss Harker, who had only
recently given Mary and Earl their jobs, had to come
out and break up the fight. A few days later,
in the school dining hall, Earl screamed at Mary in

(21:31):
front of everybody, accusing her of having a boyfriend. Then
grabbed her hand and tore off her wedding ring hard
enough to draw blood. Mary ran sobbing to Miss Harker's office.
You must leave him. The head mistress said, that man
is absolutely insane. Now, as awful as that must have been,
imagine how fascinated those kids were. This is the most

(21:53):
interesting thing that's ever happened at school. They were probably
wishing they had popcorn. Mary decided to Miss Harker's advice.
When she got home that night, Earle said, pack up
your bags. We're leaving this place. They're all against me,
every one of them. Mary screwed up her courage and
told him she was staying. She liked the town and
she liked the school, but she wanted Earle to go.

(22:15):
He didn't say anything, but the look on his face
got suddenly so dark and furious that Mary ran out
of the house and spent the night at a neighbors.
In the morning, Earle was gone, but he came to
see her at the school while she was sweeping the kitchen.
He still looked so strange and angry that Mary dropped
her broom and ran, but Earle cornered her in the pantry.

(22:36):
He begged her to take him back, but Mary refused,
and Earle became even more terrifying, his pupils contracting almost
to pin pricks and his big hands opening and closing.
It's him, ain't it, he growled, oho Mary gasped out him,
the one who's keeping you from me. Mary insisted she

(22:57):
didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but
Earle just not at once and said I'll get you back,
and he meant vengeance, not winning back her heart. He
stepped closer, hands raised and reaching for her throat. Mary
dodged past him with a scream and ran for the
nearest office, which was the school matron's. He's after me,

(23:17):
she said. The matron called the Palo Alto police, just
as Earle loomed in the doorway, panting, hands clenching and unclenching,
looking from one woman to the other. It was a
warm spring day and all the windows in the school
were open, including the one in the hallway behind Earle.
He backed away and started climbing out, pausing to glare

(23:38):
back at his wife. I'll get you, he yelled, I'll
get you yet, then he dropped to the grass and
ran off. Jesus Jones for a.

Speaker 4 (23:47):
Few days, Earle disappeared entirely from the view of anyone
who knew him, as he'd been doing off and on
since childhood. Who knows what he did, but some of
his time must have been spent spying on the house
at fifth teen, nineteen Pacific Avenue in San Francisco, where
Charles Summers and his family lived. On May nineteenth, Earle
knocked on the door with his tool bag, claiming to

(24:08):
be a plumber there to fix a leaky gas pipe.
The Summer's twenty four year old son, Charles Junior, let
him in and Earle went straight down to the cellar
where twelve year old Mary Somers was playing with her dolls.
Earle immediately put down his tool bag and tried to
sexually assault her. Oh no, Mary screamed and clawed at
his face and kicked him. Good for her. Her brother

(24:31):
ran down the stairs and threw himself at Earle, and
after a scuffle, Earle fled the scene. Charles Junior chased
after him and started beating the crap out of him
in the street until Earle managed to run away and
Charles hurried to the police station. A traffic cop arrested
Earle two hours later. His mugshot is the earliest picture
of Earle as an adult, and you can see that

(24:54):
between them. Mary and Charles Junior gave him a pretty
good going over.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
Good.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
Harold Scheckter, whose book Be Steele was one of our
main sources for this story, wrote, he looks like a
thug who might burst into tears at any second, and
you can kind of see it.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Boy, that's really accurate. Actually, if you look at that picture.

Speaker 4 (25:14):
Our boy, Harold. We love Scheckter, by the way. We
don't use his books often enough, but we will. He
does a lot of vintage cases. He wrote that book
about Bell Gunnis. Ye love the Other Mary. Earl's wife
was shocked to learn about his crime, but that old
Catholic guilt is no joke. She still felt responsible for him.

(25:35):
She took a few days off of work to go
up to San Francisco to visit him in his cell
as often as she could. Earl had been babbling on
about hearing voices since his arrest, and he'd been staring
into space and threatening suicide. He'd also pulled out all
his eyebrow hairs with his fingernails.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yikes.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
When Mary first visited him, he was in a straight
jacket and strapped down to his cot. He didn't seem
to recognize her and just ranted about the faces he
saw on the wall there there, can't you see them.
Mary went to see Earle's young aunt, Lilian, where for
the first time she learned about Earl's previous stint in

(26:13):
a mental institution, as well as his multiple military desertions.
She also learned her husband's real name. Ever since he
met her, Earle had been using the alias Evan Fuller
to try and keep him out of prison. Earle's wife
and aunt asked the judge to declare him insane, and
in June, less than two years since he'd escaped from there,

(26:35):
Earl was back in the NAPA State Mental Hospital. Earle
told a psychiatrist about all of his hallucinations, paranoia, and
suicidal thoughts, but when asked about his future, said I
feel I can do much better now. I am ready
to lead a more evolved life. He tried to escape
the next day, and for the next few weeks was

(26:56):
only allowed out of a cell in heavy restraints. The
psychiatrist diagnosed him as a constitutional psychopath with outbreaks of psychosis.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Constitutional psychopath I think I knew a lawyer once who
was one of those.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
The next four years of Earl's life were spent in
the care of nap Estate, where they treated his body
in addition to his mind. During his teenage sins crawling
through San Francisco's Sea dear Brothels, Earl had contracted the
same disease that had killed his parents, syphilis.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
They treated him for it with intramuscular injections of a
new drug, Salversan, which was based on arsenic and had painful,
nauseating side effects. Earle tried to escape again after his
first dose. He was restless, didn't sleep well, and kept
trying to get out. He did get out once, for
just two days. Mary kept dutifully visiting him. As time passed,

(27:51):
Earl seemed less manic, but also more grim. He still
kept talking about wanting to kill himself. Nevertheless, on March tenth,
nineteen twenty five, his chart held one brief notation discharged
as improved. He was almost twenty eight years old. Other
than the brief period when he'd gotten married to Mary,
he'd been in either prison or a mental institution for

(28:13):
the past ten years. He tearfully begged Mary to give
him another chance, which, bless her heart, she did. Almost
as soon as he got her back, Earle declared that
he was going to go to half Moon Bay to
look for work, and then vanished for four months. A
few weeks after he got back, he was off again,
this time saying he was going to work in Redwood City.

(28:33):
I mean, at least she didn't have to spend much
time around him, right, That's a silver lining, I guess
for her. In fact, Earle spent some of his time
just a little ways away in Palo Alto, working as
a gardener and handyman for a man named Frank Arnold.
Frank thought Earle was very strange. He'd often spend hours
staring into space. One time, he shaved off all his

(28:54):
hair and gave it to missus Arnold in case she
needed to stuff a pillow with it, you know, like
you do. Can you freaking imagine this weird sharden coming
up with a handful of his own hair, you're, missus Arnold, just.

Speaker 4 (29:10):
In case it's so creepy Like it seems like they
reacted in of like oh haha, thank you, instead of
like a we need to fire him and move our house,
like we need to like, not even just move houses,
We need to pick up steaks from.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
The house, change your name and flee the country. And
you know he didn't bathe, so you know that hair must.

Speaker 4 (29:32):
Have just been It was like, oh it was oily
and just it wasn't strands of hair with little spikes
of hair.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Oh god, so gross. But Frank apparently had some affection
for Earl, who he chucklingly referred to as a simple
fool and described as kindly and tractable. Yeah right, But
both his wife and a friend who was staying with them,
missus Casey, found Earl increasingly unsettling. They wanted Frank to

(30:01):
fire him, which he finally did, presumably while rolling his
eyes and saying, women, Am I right? Frank was not right?
The women were right, because by this point Earl Nelson
was already a murderer. Clara Newman was almost certainly not
the first person Earl Nelson killed. The nineteen twenties were
a violent time, and police forces were stretched thin. Most

(30:24):
American police departments were a long way behind their European
counterparts in the rapidly advancing field of criminal forensics. Lots
of crimes went unsolved, Lots of crimes, in fact, went
completely uninvestigated. As we'll see a little later in the story,
it could be hard to get police to take seriously
the violent deaths of even a quote respectable woman. For

(30:45):
vulnerable populations like transients or sex workers, it was unlikely
the police would devote much or any effort to their deaths.
Earl had vanished for days and weeks at a time
since his early teenage years, and spent a lot of
time in the Sea Deier parts of town. Is that
where he'd started killing. This is only speculation, but I

(31:06):
absolutely think the answer is yes. By the time he
met Clara Newman, he knew exactly what he was doing.
Clara was sixty years old and had managed to turn
a small inheritance into a lot of wealth through smart
investments in real estate. She owned properties in several cities
and lived on the ground floor of the one on
Pierce Street in San Francisco. The newspapers would charmingly describe

(31:29):
Clara as an aged spinster, nice so nice. She had
never married, but her nephew, Merton, lived on the second
floor with his wife and son. The top floor of
the house was divided into two small apartments that Clara
rented out. A couple by the name of Brown lived
in one and Clara had been trying to rent out
the other one since the start of nineteen twenty six,

(31:51):
hand lettering a room to let sign to put in
the big bay window at the front of the house.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
On the morning of Saturday, February twentieth, Merton Newman was
reading the new paper in his room. He heard the
doorbell ring, and a few moments later he heard his
aunt Clara talking to someone downstairs, although he couldn't make
out any of the words. He went back to his paper.
About fifteen minutes later, he decided to go down to
the cellar to take a look at the furnace. It

(32:16):
did been plang up and the radiators were stone cold.
The door to the cellar was in the kitchen, and
Merton noticed a sausage half cooked on a pan on
the cold stove. He figured his aunt had been starting
to make her lunch when the doorbell rang and had
turned off the gas before answering. Merton puttered with the
furnace for another fifteen minutes, then headed back upstairs. As

(32:38):
he came out of the kitchen, he saw a stocky
man walking quickly toward the back door. Can I be
of assistance, Merton called out. The man stopped his hand
on the doorknob and looked back. The corridor was dimly
lit and Merton couldn't see much of his face. Tell
the landlady, I'll return in an hour. The strange man said,
I would like to rent that empty apartment. Then he

(33:00):
opened the door and was gone. Merton went out to
try and get a better look at it, but the
man was already out of sight around the corner. Merton
went back upstairs to do some bookkeeping work, then around
two pm, went looking for Aunt Clara to try and
talk her into replacing the ancient furnace. He noticed, puzzled
that the half cooked sausage was still on the stove.

(33:22):
The door to Clara's bedroom was open, but she wasn't inside,
and she wasn't in any of the other rooms on
the first floor. Merton went upstairs and knocked on the
Brown's door. Charles Brown told him he and his wife
had both heard Clara talking to some one in the
next room, presumably a prospective tenant. Merton tried the door
to the other apartment. It was locked. That was strange

(33:45):
with no one living there. It was never locked. He
hammered on the door but heard nothing. Within a sudden,
surprising panic rushed through him, and Merton kicked the door
as hard as he could, sending it flying open. The
apartment had just a small bedroom room in an even
smaller kitchen. Clara Newman's frail body lay on the kitchen floor,
curled up on her left side, naked from the waist down,

(34:09):
with her house dress pushed high above her waist. Oh
my god, her neck was horribly bruised. Beads from her
necklace had scattered all over the floor. Merton shouted for
Charles Brown to call the police, and knelt by Clara
to try and shake her awake, but it was no use.
She was already dead. The autopsy took place that same evening.

(34:30):
The police surgeon, a doctor Strange, who as far as
we know, was not any kind of wizard or super villain,
determined Clara's death was murder by strangulation, and noted that
the killer probably had unusually large, strong hands. Her death
made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle the
next day fiend murder of Spinster, but there were a

(34:52):
lot of other juicy crimes, and the murder of Clara
Newman was rarely mentioned after that first day. It would
have probably caused more of a serve. Doctor Strange hadn't
kept back one detail from the press. Clara had been
raped post mortem.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Oh no, oh god. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:12):
Ten days later, in San Jose, Harvey Beale kissed his
wife goodbye and headed to the office downtown. It was
just after one pm. His wife, sixty three year old
Laura Beale, owned the building. They lived in a four
story apartment building on East Santa Clara Street. Only one
apartment was unoccupied, a furnished one bedroom on the third floor.

(35:34):
Laura had put out a room to let sign a
couple of days ago. She was a sweet lady known
for her generosity and kindness.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
Harvey got back home just before six. The door to
their apartment was open. He called out for Laura, but
got no reply. He figured she'd gone to see a neighbor,
so he went into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich.
An hour passed and Harvey started to worry. He asked
the building's ten if they'd seen his wife, but nobody had,

(36:02):
Although one woman had noticed the Beeal's apartment door standing
open back at four p m. Now, Harvey started to panic.
He and the other tenants searched all through the building
in neighborhood, but couldn't find Laura. The only place they
hadn't looked yet was the empty apartment on the third floor,
which was kept locked. Harvey hurried down to get the
spare key and was shaking fingers opened the door. Laura

(36:27):
Beale's body was on the bare mattress in the bedroom,
her face terribly bruised. The silk cord from her dressing
gown pulled so deeply into the throat that it was
almost fully embedded in her skin. Her clothes had been
pushed up past her waist. The coroner would determine that she,
like Clara Newman, had been raped after being murdered. The

(36:50):
two murders were startlingly similar, and the owner of an
ice cream parlor across the street from the Beeal's apartment
building reported seeing a man hurriedly leaving and walking away
at around four thirty pm. He was stocky, tanned, and
powerfully built. That matched the description Merton Newman had provided
of his aunt's killer. Clara Newman's death might have been

(37:10):
shrugged off, but with a carbon copy killing barely a
week later. The story was a sensation, one only amplified
by the entirely fictitious close encounters being called into the papers,
and the police women of the Bay Area were in
fear for their lives. Nowadays, the media and most of
their consumers are all too familiar with what was happening here.

(37:31):
A serial killer was on the hunt, But in nineteen
twenty six, crimes of this kind still had an otherworldly,
unthinkable edge. The touchstone was still Jack the Ripper from
forty years ago, who always had a demonic vibe in
the popular imagination. But panic can't last forever. As days
and then weeks passed with no more similar crimes, other

(37:54):
stories took over the news. Other cares and fears occupied
people's hearts. Maybe the murder of Clara Newman and Laura Beale,
as shocking and awful as they had been, were isolated cases.
Maybe the killer was done, having satisfied whatever dark passion
drove him. That was not the case. More often than not,

(38:14):
serial killers have a cooling off period between their crimes.
In fact, until relatively recently, this was one of the
characteristics the FBI used to categorize a killer as serial.
The time between murders can vary a lot, especially when
the killer has a disordered mind, like Earl Nelson. Three
months after Laura Bale's death, he'd kill again and again

(38:36):
and again and again. Earl Nelson, who would in short
order be dubbed the Dark Strangler, was just getting started.
We've got to leave it there for part one, campers,
but you know we'll have part two for you next week.
For now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay
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(38:58):
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(39:20):
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