Dark Strangler: The Crimes of Earle Leonard Nelson Pt 2

Episode Transcript
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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):
In last week's episode, we learned about the troubled early
life of Earl Nelson and witnessed his first steps towards
becoming one of the most prolific serial killers in North
American history. This week, his journey of mayhem across America
really kicks into high gear. This is part two of
Dark Strangler, The Crimes of Earl Leonard Nelson. With panic

(00:51):
over the murders of Clara Newman and Laura Beale fading,
the people of the Bay Area began to think this
grim nightmare was behind them, and then, all of a sudden,
three months later, it wasn't. Lilian Saint Mary was sixty
three years old and had been separated from her husband
for the past twelve She lived with her adult son James,
and rented out rooms for some extra money. Two rooms

(01:14):
were occupied, two were vacant, and every afternoon, Lilian would
go out shopping for supplies to make dinner for her tenants,
par for the course in cities when refrigerators were still
super rare and cost twice as much as a car.
On the afternoon of June tenth, Lilian was clearly ready
to go out for this errand she had on her
coat and hat and held her purse. Investigators assumed someone

(01:36):
rang the doorbell just as she was about to leave,
a prospective lodger who'd seen the room for rent sign
in the front window. Lilian led the caller up to
the furnished room on the second floor. Earl Nelson was
on her as soon as the door closed behind her,
heavy hands clutching her throat as he shoved her down
to the floor. He knelt on her chest as he

(01:58):
choked her. Nine of Lilian's ribs were broken. She was
incapacitated almost immediately. Her glasses didn't even fall off her
head in the struggle. After she was dead, Earle lifted
her body onto the bed and raped her. Then he
placed her hat neatly beside her on the bed, folded

(02:18):
her coat and put it under her feet, and stole
five dollars from her purse, but left the pearl necklace
around her neck. Then he left a Missus Vandersey, who
stayed in the room directly below, had been home all
day and hadn't heard a thing. The panic that had
followed the last Landlady murders surged up again, stronger than ever.

(02:40):
Shortly after the time of the murder, a trolleybus conductor
had given a ride to a fidgety, nervous man who
traveled only one block before jumping off and running down
the street. His description matched the suspect from the previous
two killings, a powerfully built man about five eight with
tan skin. Less than helpfully, the police told everyone to

(03:01):
watch out for someone with quote the smooth, olive complexion
of a man of Italian or Serbian descent, which carried
the obvious implication that the killer might be an immigrant.
This caused a lot of grief for innocent men and
brought authorities no closer to catching Earl Nelson, who was
as American as apple Pie and Lizzie Borden, and whose family,

(03:22):
for what it's worth, was mostly Irish. Two weeks later,
the killer of the Press was now calling the dark
Strangler struck again. Ollie Russell was fifty three, and she'd
worried about crime even before the killing started. Before answering
the front door, she always took off her rings, wrapped
them in a handkerchief, and hid them behind some books

(03:42):
in her sitting room. But a consistent feature of Earl
Nelson's killings was his ability to talk his way inside
to be charming and non threatening. Missus Russell let him in.
One of her tenants, Bill Frainey, worked nights, and he'd
been asleep in the afternoon when some motion from the
vacant room next door woke him up. He tried to

(04:04):
go back to sleep, but the noise kept going. A
locked door connected the two rooms, so Bill bent down
to peek through the keyhole on the bed in the
next room. He saw a man trousers pulled down on
top of a woman. What had woken Bill up was
the headboard banging against the wall. Bill stepped back, embarrassed,

(04:26):
and then a few moments later went back for a
second look. He watched the man get up from the bed,
pull up his trousers, put on his hat, and leave.
The woman was still. The shades were drawn and it
was dim in the room, but Bill thought it was
his Landlady Ollie Russell. Bill knew that her husband, George,
ran a pool hall just a couple blocks away, and

(04:48):
looked nothing like the man he'd seen in the room.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Bill's first thought was this is none of my business.
But when he looked again, the woman on the bed
still hadn't moved, and now Bill thought he saw blood.
He hurried over the pool hall and told George Russell
he should come home and investigate the strange noises coming
from the vacant room. He didn't tell George what he'd
seen through the keyhole. George hunted around for the key,

(05:14):
opened up the room and said, my god. Ollie Russell
lay dead on the bed, her face horribly bruised and
her dress pushed up. She'd been strangled with a length
of cord that had been pulled tight enough to cut
open her throat sprang blood onto the bed.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Jesus.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Like the other victims, Ollie had been raped after death.
The blows to her face had also most likely come
post mortem. The largest manhunt in Santa Barbara history began,
but it was a long way away. In the Mohave
Desert town of Needles, where police picked up the killer
on August eleventh, well, they picked up a twenty eight

(05:52):
year old drifter and heroin addict named Paul Cameron, who
started confessing as soon as he was arrested for vagrancy.
He'd had trouble with about twelve women on the Pacific coast,
he said, and had strangled to death a number of them.
The press and the Santa Barbarade were quick to declare
his guilt, but a lot of people had doubts. Cameron
was thin and linky and scruffy, which didn't match the

(06:15):
witness descriptions at all, and he didn't know any more
about the crimes than he might have read in a newspaper.
Plenty of people thought Cameron was just a weirdo who
falsely confessed, something that's pretty common in high profile cases. Still,
he was charged with Ali Russell's murder, and right away
on August sixteenth, the whole case fell apart. Stephen and

(06:39):
Mary Nisbitt were a couple in their early fifties who
owned a small apartment building in Oakland. When Stephen came
home from work that day, he called for Mary but
got no answer. In the kitchen, sliced vegetables sat on
the cutting board as if Mary had been interrupted in
the middle of making dinner. Stephen figured she'd popped out
to get a missing ingredient and sat down to read

(06:59):
them paper. When there was no sign of Mary after
an hour, though, Stephen started to worry. He asked his
tenants if they'd seen her, but no one had. He
stuck his head inside their one vacant apartment on the
first floor, but didn't see any sign that she'd been
in there. He went down to the local grocery to
ask if she'd been there, but she hadn't. Steven, starting

(07:20):
to get frantic, hurried home and looked all through the
building again. The only place he hadn't searched thoroughly was
the empty first floor apartment. He hurried through it, turning
on lights as he went. As soon as he went
into the bathroom, the upstairs neighbors heard an awful scream
from below.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
Mary Nisbet lay face down on the bathroom tiles, strangled
with the kitchen towel. Her face was bruised, almost black,
and broken teeth sat in the blood below her mouth.
Her killer had knelt on her back as he strangled her,
bashing her face into the floor. She was naked from
the waist down and had been raped again after death.

(08:00):
Starting with Clara Newman in February, five women had now
been brutally strangled and assaulted in just six months. The
Bay Area was in a panic. Whether Earl Nelson felt
the heat or just a little wanderlust, we don't know.
But without a word to his wife, he left town
and headed north in his beat up Ford. And while
Earl's on the road, we should take a moment to

(08:22):
try and figure out what was going on here. These
five crimes are startlingly similar, even by the standards of
serial killers, who tend to stick to a fairly rigid pattern.
All the victims were much older than Earl Nelson, who
was still in his twenties. Often, when older women are
sexually assaulted, the perpetrator is young and sexually inexperienced. In fact,

(08:43):
the original profilers used to have a sort of rule
of thumb, the older the victim, the younger the perpetrator.
I'm not sure if they still believe that or if
that's held up, but I remember reading that in mind
Hunter like years ago.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
I think I watched some crime show where they still
use that as a earle thumb. That the victim was
like eighty something, so they started looking for like a
very young perpetrator.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
I think it does happen a lot, for sure, but
that wasn't really the case with Earle. Serial Killers usually
target victims from whatever group they're sexually attracted to, and
Earle genuinely had the hats for older ladies. He'd married one,
after all, and was constantly pestering her for sex. And
while we always have to be careful about drawing direct

(09:30):
lines from A to B, I don't think you have
to look too deeply into Earl's life to see the
likely genesis of that fixation. Remember, Earl had been raised
by his grandmother, Jenny Nelson, a chilly woman whose child rearing,
at least with Earle, leaned more towards spankings and threats
than hugs and praise. To what extent Missus Nelson became

(09:51):
a conscious focus of little Earl's sexual interests, We'll never know,
but we do know he always had a habit of
peeking through inappropriate keyholes at home. He had an unusual
mind and an early voracious interest in sex. As horrifying
a thought as it is, I don't think it would
have taken too many peaks at me maw getting out

(10:11):
of the shower to set some wheels in his brain
spinning in really unfortunate directions. But rape, of course, is
an act of violence much more than it is about
sexual desire. Earle's murders showed deep, burning anger, and that
line is easier to draw back to Earl's grandmother. Earle
never truly felt safe or wanted in her home, and

(10:34):
her death was to him the ultimate desertion. As to
why Earle only raped his victims after they were dead,
we can only speculate. Maybe he needed to pretend they
were willing participants. Maybe he felt some fundamental shame about
what he was doing and didn't want anybody else to see.
Earle wasn't the type of killer who enjoyed causing his

(10:56):
victims fear and pain. As brutal as his attacks were,
they were about killing as quickly as possible. In some ways,
Earle was sensitive about what people thought of him, and
the distress of his victims might have actually made him uncomfortable.
Better to just reduce them to objects as quickly as possible,
kind of like Dahmer. Actually, and Earle wasn't sneaking in

(11:19):
and jumping on these women. He talked his way in.
Even in the heights of a panic, He managed to
convince his victims that he was harmless, harmless enough that
they invited him inside their homes to show him a room.
This aspect of trickery fooling people with his mask is
such a constant feature of Earl's crimes that it's probably

(11:39):
best to think of it as a signature aspect. Talking
his way in wasn't just something that helped Earle get
what he wanted. It was part of what he wanted,
and over the course of about sixteen months, he killed
a lot of people. Earl Nelson was one of the
most prolific serial killers in North American history, and that
means we have to speed things up a little bit.

(12:00):
But we want to be clear. This doesn't mean that
the victims we only mentioned briefly are any less important
than the others, right.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
The fact is, given the age of these cases, we
often only have the flimsiest outline of many of his
victims' lives if we haven't outlined at all, and most
of Earle's murders closely follow the pattern we've seen in
the five killings we've already discussed. They're no less important,
but they don't necessarily add to our understanding of the case.

(12:28):
Earl's next victim, though, was unusual. Beta Withers was thirty
two years old, just a few years older than Earle.
Although she had recently taken out an ad in the
paper advertising a room to let. Bida was divorced and
lived with her fifteen year old son, Charles. On October nineteenth,
nineteen twenty six, Charles came home from school and his

(12:50):
mother was nowhere to be found. This wasn't that weird.
Bida was a lively, pretty woman who was often out
with friends or running errands, so Charles did whatever fifteen
year olds did for fun in nineteen twenty six, probably
listening to baseball and thinking real hard about what it'd
be like to kiss Clara Bow on the mouth. Beida

(13:11):
still wasn't home by dinner time, and Charles called her friend,
Bob Frenzel, who lived a couple blocks away. Bob called
around to Beata's friends, but no one had seen her
all day. Charles slept alone in the empty house that night,
and as soon as he woke up, he went to
the police station to report his mother missing, He still
went to school, hoping his mom would be there when

(13:33):
he got home, but she wasn't. He called Bob Frienzil again,
and Bob called in another friend named Cook. They knew
Beata's coat and hat were missing, presumably with her, and
thought it'd be useful to figure out what she was
wearing so they could give a good description to the authorities.
Charles looked through Beata's bedroom closet to see what might
be missing, but she kept most of her clothes in

(13:54):
a big trunk in the attic, and Frenzell and Cook
climbed up there to look. They opened the trunk. On
top was a partition tray, and under that, crammed tight,
was a big mess of clothing That was unusual. Beta
was kind of a neat freak, definitely the type who
folded clothes before putting them away. Bob Fritzl took out

(14:16):
a few pieces of clothing, then cried out and stepped back.
He just revealed a pair of bare female legs.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
To your guy. Can you freaking imagine? Oh my god? Ah.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Beta Withers was curled up in a fetal position, naked
except for a slip that had been pushed up to
her armpits. Okay, now hold up your hand. If your
first thought would be well, she obviously killed herself.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1 (14:47):
I wish I were. That was the conclusion Detective James
Takaberry came to after he noticed a bit of inspirational
poetry hanging on the wall of Beta's kitchen. The poeming
courage people to bottle up all their unpleasant emotions, repression
being one of the great engines that kept the nineteen
twenties society running. God that's awful, Detective Takabarry, is I mean,

(15:17):
oh my God. Specifically, the poem called then Laugh encouraged
the reader to pack their troubles and cares into an
imaginary box, then sit on the lid and laugh. As
soon as he read this, Detective Takabarry thought he'd cracked
the case because because life is exactly like an Agatha

(15:37):
Christie novel Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, he really thought he was frigging poor Roh in
that moment.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Although I really doubt that Agatha Christie would would do
something that elementary, she would not know pun intended. Beata
Withers had been so overcome by the power of poetry
that she'd gone upstairs and buried herself in her trunk
till she suffocated.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Oh my god, because of some cliche shit, you'd find
it like Hobby Lobby. This great detective decided it was
suicide unbelievable to prove that this was possible, because of
course you want to prove You want to prove your theory,
not test it. To prove it was possible, Tacaberry got

(16:25):
his skinniest constable to squeeze into the trunk, pull clothes
over himself, set the tray back in place, and then
shake himself around till the lid of the trunk fell
down and closed. This accomplished two things, and they both sucked.
It convinced Tackaberry his ridiculous theory was right, and it
ruined a potential source of physical evidence. Now, if we

(16:46):
want to be to be fair to the Portland PD,
Tackerberry was out on his own with this angle. Others
were suspicious of Bob Frenzel beat. His diary revealed they
were a little more than friends, and that at the
start of their affair he'd lied to her about being married.
But it didn't take long for all current theories of
Beta's death to be proven wrong. The day after Beata's

(17:07):
body was found, the body of fifty nine year old
Virginia Grants, a landlady, was found in the basement of
one of her properties, her body stuffed behind the furnace
and two diamond rings missing from her fingers. The Portland pdee,
who apparently would rather do anything other than investigate a murder,
initially declared she'd died of a heart attack. God Gejesus Murphy.

(17:33):
Two days later, the family of wealthy widow Mabel Fluke
asked officers to check on her at the Portland property
she was trying to sell. They found her in the attic,
strangled with her own silk scarf. The condition of her
body suggested she'd been killed days ago. As with Beta Withers,
some detectives immediately assumed she killed herself. Guys, oh my god,

(17:57):
stop what do you just hate investigating? Isn't that what
detectives want to do? I just can't get over this.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
So three women killed and their bodies hidden in the
same week convinced even the sluggish Portland authorities finally that
something was up. Although there was still plenty of heated
debate about how closely the cases were related to each other.
Detective Takabarry had changed his tune and decided they were
looking for what the Chief of police described as a
methodically working pervert. But there were plenty of others, especially

(18:29):
in the coroner's office, rigidly insisting they were dealing with
two suicides and a heart attack. None of these bodies
showed signs of sexual assault. If you have confidence in
the Portland Coroner's office, that is, which I don't know
if you should. Earl Nelson was operating at the beginning
of what was something of a golden age for American

(18:49):
serial killers. The ready availability of automobiles meant they could
travel quickly and easily, and there was no kind of
quick and rigorous exchange of information between different police departments.
Investigators in Portland hadn't gotten any detailed information on the
California killings, but they read the papers and some started
to wonder if the dark strangler had come north, and

(19:12):
one officer at least had a good idea of who
to watch for. This was James Russell, coincidentally the cousin
of George Russell, whose wife Ollie had been murdered in
Santa Barbara and June. George had just sent his cousin
a letter with a thorough, if not quite accurate description
of the killer. Thirty five years old, five feet eight
or ten inches tall, heavy build, especially shoulders and chest,

(19:36):
and very dark, said to be of Greek nativity, though
speaking excellent English. Officer Russell recalled seeing a man just
like that the previous Tuesday in the Selwood neighborhood, where
Mabel Fluke lived. The Oregonian newspaper published the description as
quickly as they could, but Earl Nelson had already left town.

(19:56):
He'd come home to San Francisco. Anna Edmonds was fifty
six years old, a widow living alone in a big,
empty house, and had recently put a for sale sign
up in a window. On November eighth, her son, Raoul,
found her body in her radio room, her neck bruised
and her skirt pushed up. She'd been strangled, then raped.

(20:17):
After death, he attacked again the next day. An eight
months pregnant woman recorded only as missus H. C. Murray
had also recently put up a for sale sign. Around
five p m. While her husband was still at work,
a stranger knocked on the door. He'd seen the sign
and was interested in the house. He was polite and

(20:38):
well spoken, and wore a blue suit and a brown hat.
Missus Murray wasn't threatened by him at all, but she'd
made it a habit to keep at least six or
eight feet away from strangers. When she showed them the house,
she led him in and showed him around.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
The prospective buyer was an oversharer. He said he was
going to get married in three days. This will be
my third time marriage, he said. The first time, my
wife nagged me to death. The second one I took
to dances and would find sitting on the laps of
other men. I couldn't stand that well. And he even
in his fantasies, he's like a bad husband, like his

(21:17):
made up story. He's like, yeah, I treat my I
treat my women bad.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
See.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
And he apparently knew a lot about building construction. He
kept pointing out details on the ceiling. He was trying
to get her to look up and expose her neck.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Ah, so creepy.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
He started to leave. Then suddenly he said he wanted
to take another look at the screened and porch out back.
Out there, he suddenly pointed and said, what sort of
roof is that on the garage? It came so quick
that for the first time, Missus Murray took her eyes
off him and turned to look. His big, squeezing hands

(21:55):
closed around her neck. An instant later, I suspect Earle regretted,
sticking to his usual pattern of attacking older ladies. Missus
Murray was a healthy twenty eight year old. She screamed
and scratched at his hands with her nails, so he
loosened his grip enough for her to break free. She
spun around and clawed at his face, then threw herself

(22:16):
through the screen door out into the yard, face and
hands bleeding. Earl raced through the house and out the
front door, still yelling. Missus Murray ran around the side
of the house and yelled at a passing driver, stop
that man. The man slowed down instead, and Missus Murray
leaped into the running board, pointing and yelling that man
he attacked me, he's the strangler. As neighbors burst out

(22:39):
of their homes, Earl fled, and the whole experience caught
up with Missus Murray in a rush, and she collapsed,
but she survived. And as far as we know, she
was the only one of Earl's victims to make it
out alive. A massive manhunt failed to track down the
Dark Strangler. The San Francisco Chronicle tried out a new nickname,
Jack the Strangler, but it didn't catch on. A little

(23:02):
played out, and from now on stories about the Strangler
would come from far away. Earl had finally left the
Bay Area for good, heading north once again. Missus Florian
Monks of Seattle liked to keep her wealth with her
when she went out, even for a trip to the
grocery store. She'd wear at least four diamond rings, matching

(23:23):
diamond bracelets and earrings, a triple strand pearl choker, and
a diamond sunburst brooch. She even kept a small sack
of diamonds secretly strapped to her right leg. Wow, I'm
guessing this wasn't because she was anticipating running into a
sudden need for diamonds. She just didn't want to leave
her valuables home when she went out, and she scoffed
at warnings that this wasn't exactly the safest behavior. She

(23:46):
was forty eight years old, widowed twice by wealthy men,
and she'd recently taken out ads to try and sell
one of her properties in Capitol Hill.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
On November twenty fourth, Thomas Raymond, the caretaker of Florian's
country estate, hadn't heard from her in a couple of
days and was worried she suffered from dizzy spells, and
he thought she might have fallen down some stairs in
the Capitol Hill house where she sometimes stayed overnight. After
showing it, Raymond looked through the house, then down in
the cellar. As soon as he turned on the light,

(24:40):
he could tell something heavy had been dragged across the
dirt floor. He followed the tracks and found Florian Monk's
body strangled and shoved tightly behind the coal furnace. Her
jewels were missing, and the chief of detectives was convinced
Florian's habit of flaunting her wealth had led to her death.
Come and take them, he said to reporters. That's what

(25:02):
these women are saying to every cut purse and sneak
thief that comes along. Earl Nelson often took jewelry from
his victims. In common with many other serial killers, he
liked to take little mementos trophies from his victims. As
we'll see soon, he didn't care at all about their
monetary value. It was all about remembering the crime. Five

(25:23):
days later, in Portland, the body of landlady Blanche Myers
was found by police after her son called to report
her missing. Her body had been jammed under a bed.
She'd been strangled with her aprons so hard that blood
had leaked from her ears. She'd been raped after death.
With this fourth death in their city, the Portland police

(25:44):
finally got their shit together and took things seriously. They
sealed off the scene and did some proper forensics, which
revealed three clear fingerprints on the bed's iron headboard, where
some one might hold on during sex. These would turn
out to be a perfect match for taken from the
Bay Area killings. The big break, though, came via two

(26:04):
elderly widows, Edna Gaylord and Sophie Yates, landlady and longtime
tenant of a Portland boarding house. A week earlier. A
polite man, a perfect gentleman, the lady said, had come
to stay with them, a carpenter in Portland for work.
He stayed with them over Thanksgiving, and when Edna admitted
she couldn't afford to offer them much in the way

(26:25):
of a meal. He'd gone out and come back laden
with grocery bags. Tomorrow we'll have a real holiday feast,
he said. Edna said he looked like a boy on
wrapping birthday presents as he unpacked the groceries. The only
price for their great Thanksgiving dinner was listening to their
guests bang on about the Bible, but that wasn't so bad.
The next day, against their protests, he insisted they take

(26:47):
several pieces of expensive looking jewelry he happened to have.
I have no use for it, and you have so little,
he said. He left a few days later. A couple
days after that, Edna read in the newspapers a description
of the Dark Strangler which closely matched her recent tenant.
She called the police and a pair of detectives arrived.

(27:08):
Initially without a whole lot of hope of a breakthrough.
There'd been no shortage of supposed strangler sightings that led nowhere.
But as soon as Edna and Sophie showed them the
jewelry their tenant had left, they got excited. This looked
just like and would prove to be the jewelry taken
from Florian Monks. Soon a fingerprint found on Florian's pocketbook

(27:30):
would match those from Blanche Meyers's headboard, with the Seattle
and Portland murders definitively linked. Another massive manhunt was underway,
and yet again it would fail because Earl Nelson had
left the West Coast for good. He stopped in Council Bluff's,
Iowa First where on December twenty third, the body of
a Missus Burrard was found jammed between the furnace and

(27:53):
a basement wall. She had been strangled with a shirt
ripped from a clothesline. Her face and arms were bruised,
and clumps of her hair were stuck to the furnace
door where she'd been bashed against it.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
Despite this, the county attorney declared she'd probably killed herself
due to her being recently discharged from a mental institution
for a nervous disorder. Fortunately no actual detective shared this opinion,
but it would take more deaths for them to realize
what they were dealing with. In Kansas City, on December
twenty seventh, Bonnie Pace was strangled to death and then raped.

(28:27):
The next day, Germania Harpin suffered the same fate, and
if we needed anything to prove Earl's total disregard for
human life. After killing Germania, he murdered her eight month
old son, Robert, strangling him with his own diaper.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Oh my god, Oh.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
There was no reason to do it. I'm guessing Earl
just wanted to shut the poor kid up. These were
not people to him in any meaningful way. On April
twenty seventh, nineteen twenty seven, Earl killed and raped Mary
McConnell in Philadelphia. On May thirtieth, he killed Jenny Randall
in Buffalo. On June first, he murdered landlady Fanny May

(29:04):
in Detroit, then her tenant, Marine Atorthy. On June fourth,
in Chicago, he strangled Mary Sietzma with an appliance cord.
In a little over a year, Earl Nelson had killed
at least twenty people, nineteen women and one young boy.
Detectives all over the country were looking for him, so

(29:24):
he decided to try a different country, and on the
morning of June eighth, he crossed the border from Minnesota
into Canada. He hitchhiked to Winnipeg. In fact, he'd been
hitchhiking since Chicago and was tired, hungry, and downed just
a few dollars. He needed a cheap place to stay.
At this point, there was probably no one in North
America more adept at evaluating boarding houses and landladies and

(29:47):
Earl Nelson. He found a large, but shabby place on
Smith Street run by a starchy lady named Missus Hill.
My house is quiet, she told him. I don't allow
any drinking on the premises, and if you're looking to
bring any girls in room, you'd better go elsewhere. All
I want is quiet surroundings. Earl told her, I don't
like to be bothered while I'm studying my Bible. After

(30:09):
she'd showed him to his room, Missus Hill said again,
now mind, no liquor in the room and no girls.
No need to worry, Earl said, with a smile. I'm
a straightforward and good living man who never wants to
do wrong by anyone.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Oh right.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
The next afternoon, Earl went out to prowl around his
new neighborhood. Around the same time, fourteen year old Lola
Cowan was finishing up school. She and some buddies hung
around the playground to play baseball, and she walked home
to do her homework. She wasn't done After that, her
dad had been off work for weeks with pneumonia, and
Lola wanted to help with the family finances. Her older

(30:47):
sister made paper flowers from colored paper, and Lola went
door to door to sell them. After her homework, she
grabbed a few bunches and headed out to work.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
We don't know exactly where she crossed paths with Earl Nelson,
but it wouldn't have been hard to lure her to
his room in the boarding house. Maybe he'd said he'd
buy her flowers, but had to get the money from
his room first. None of the other tenants saw him
and the girl come in, and no one heard anything
as he strangled her, then raped her and hid her
body under his bed. It was his most impulsive murder.

(31:20):
In fact, it was reckless and feels a lot like
when Ted Bundy started to go really off the rails
towards the end, a lot like as a matter of fact,
because one of the victims that week was a young girl,
like much younger than he ever went for, so it
was like he was just spiraling. Some sources say this

(31:41):
was the only victim that Earle mutilated after death in
a manner. Quote reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. Harold Scheckter,
whose book Bestial was our primary source for this case,
doesn't mention this, and says later that many modern reports
get details of the case wrong, most likely because they
treat contemporary news story gospel truth. What probably happened is

(32:03):
that some cop said Earle reminded him of Jack the Ripper,
and through a quick game of telephone, this turned into
a reporter printing that this victim had been mutilated. I mean,
it was a hundred years ago. No one who was
there is still alive, so who knows. But that would
be a radical change in criminal psychology. That's an entirely
different kind of killer. Earle had never been a cutter,

(32:24):
had never shown any interest in the insides of people.
His victims were just dolls to him. The inside of
a doll doesn't matter. Earle left early the next morning.
When Missus Hill came in to do her housekeeping, she
was impressed by how neatly he'd made the bed. He
had even smoothed out the coverlet to make sure it
reached all the way down to the floor. By this time,

(32:47):
Earle was a few miles away on the other side
of the Red River. A neighbor spotted him on the
porch of William and Emily Patterson, a young Irish immigrant
couple who just moved into the neighborhood with their two
young boys. The neighbor didn't know William Patterson well. He
left early for work every morning, so he assumed the
man fiddling with the front door lock was him. An

(33:09):
hour or so later, the same man left the Patterson house,
but in a different suit and with sixty dollars in
his pockets. Earle didn't keep his new clothes for long.
The Pattersons weren't wealthy, and the suit he'd stolen was
threadbare at best. He went to his second hand clothes
store and bought a gray suit, a beige cap, and
new shoes for thirty dollars. Then asked where he could

(33:30):
get a shave. The clothier directed him across the street
to Central Billiards, where a row of barber chairs sat
against the far wall, past all the pool tables. Earle
got a shave and a hair cut, and managed to
make himself memorable to the barber, Nick Taber. When Nick
asked what brought Earle north, Earle said he'd been going
through North Dakota and just decided to take a look

(33:51):
at Canada. Not much to see, though, he said, there's
as much to see here as in the States. Nick
said maybe, Earle said, smirking. You know me personally, I
wouldn't piss off somebody with a razor to my throat.
But nobody ever accused Earl Nelson of making good decisions. Nick, anyway,
took note of fresh scratches on his customer's scalp and

(34:14):
filed the information away. Flushed with cash and looking spiffy,
Earl's fancy was caught by a champagne fedora in a
shop window. He bought it and gave away the cap
he'd just bought to a stranger. On a trolley to Headingley,
just outside of Winnipeg, he started hitchhiking again, and looking
respectable now didn't have to wait long for a ride

(34:35):
to Portage Le Prairie, forty miles away. Around six thirty
p m. William Patterson came home from work to an
empty house. He quickly found his boys playing with friends
at a neighbor's house, but there was no sign of Emily.
He figured she'd been out with a friend and got
held up by something or other, but by the time
it was dark he was really starting to panic. He

(34:57):
went to a neighbor's house to use their phone to
call Emily's fri friends. No one had seen her all day.
He went home and paced up and down the hallway.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
There was a night light in the room his son shared,
and as he glanced in, William noticed something. He kept
a small locked suitcase in the corner of this room
where he kept his savings sixty dollars and ten dollars bills.
The latch, he saw, had been twisted and sprung. He
hurried over and opened the case. There was no sign
of the money, and in its place set a clawhammer.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
William was alarmed and confused. He was very religious. He
knelt by his son James's bed and prayed. When he stood,
his knee lifted the coverlet and he saw what looked
like the sleeve of a woolen sweater lying under the bed.
He reached under and his fingers touched cold clammy skin.
William looked under the bed where his son slept, then

(35:54):
raced to his neighbor and called the police. Then he fainted.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Oh bless his heart.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Twenty three year old Emily Patterson lay on her back
beneath her son's bed, with an ugly bruise on her
forehead and blood on her face from blows to her
nose and mouth. Her skirt had been pushed up above
her waist and her stockings were down below her knees.
She'd been struck with a blunt object, probably the claw hammer,
and strangled to death and raped Jesus. A cheap suit

(36:20):
belonging to William Patterson was missing, and a pile of shabby,
discarded clothes was found in the corner of the bedroom.
In a pocket, detectives found several scraps of paper torn
from the Winnipeg Tribune, all from the rooms to let
section Geez Louise. The Winnipeg police were on the ball.
Not long ago. They'd received a circular from the Buffalo

(36:41):
PD describing the continent spanning crimes of the dark strangler,
and right away they thought the killer had come north.
Emily Patterson hadn't been a landlady. There's a good chance
earl had broken in looking only for money in a
change of clothes and had just taken advantage of finding
her there. But landladies were clearly preferred target, so officers

(37:01):
were sent to visit every boarding house in the city
to see if there were any suspicious looking characters, especially
anyone who'd just checked out. Missus Hill answered no to
both questions. Her new lodger was a polite, devout young man,
and as far as she knew, he was still a resident.
She hadn't set eyes on him for the past couple
of days, but he hadn't checked out. She was sure

(37:21):
about that. He still owed her two dollars. The next day, Sunday,
she was less certain. There was still no sign of
her new lodger. She looked in his room and it
clearly hadn't been slept in since she'd last seen it
on Friday morning, and there was a smell. She'd noticed
that the polite, devout young man wasn't a big fan

(37:43):
of soap, so she opened the window and left the
door open to try and clear out the funk. Missus
Hill spoke to her husband and he said he'd stop
off at the police station on his way to the
evening service at church. As mister Hill was talking to
the cops, another tenant, a Danish guy named BurrH Morton,
was headed downstairs from the second floor bathroom part way down.

(38:05):
With his head at the same height as the floor
on the second floor landing, he happened to glance in
through the open door of the new tenant's room just
as sunlight through the window shone on something under the bed.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
He squinted, then gasped, and raced downstairs to Missus Hill.
His English, never strong, abandoned him in his panic, and
he grabbed her elbow and all but dragged her upstairs.
Under there, he said, Filled with dread, Missus Hill crouched
and looked under the bed. She saw the thin naked
body of a young girl on her side, facing the wall.

(38:40):
Missus Hill screamed, Oh God, she's dead. Quick the police.
A city wide alert went out, the authorities now in
no doubt that the notorious American strangler was in town.
Five hundred people gathered at the Smith Street boarding House,
a crowd that threatened to turn into a mob. If
Earl Nelson had been caught, they might have killed him

(39:00):
right then and there. A reporter for the Winnipeg Tribune
moved through the crowd and heard a woman refer to
the killer by a name that he'd use in his
story in the next day's paper. It would ultimately replace
the Dark Strangler as Earl Nelson's most well used nickname.
The Gorilla Man Panic gripped Winnipeg, but Earl Nelson was

(39:21):
long gone five hundred miles away in Regina, Saskatchewan, but
he made a quick getaway. When he read Monday's newspaper
his most recent crimes, plus a very accurate physical description
of himself and what he was wearing, was on the
front page. He'd been in Canada less than a week
and it was already too hot for him. Earle traveled

(39:42):
by the power of his thumb, again, hitching south and
east to the tiny town of Boysvon, Manitoba, in the
middle of a whole lot of that flat prairie nothing
and barely fifteen miles north of the US border. Authorities
quickly tracked Earl to Regina, but lost his scent there,
although they did find the second hand store where Earl
had again changed his clothes into a workman's khaki shirt

(40:05):
and bib overalls. Officers armed with revolvers and shotguns swarmed
the roads of southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, while locals armed
themselves with hunting rifles and axe handles. There was a
fifteen hundred dollars reward for the killer's capture. Descriptions of
Earl and his new clothing were broadcast on the radio,

(40:25):
which reached the ear of one of the guys who'd
given him a ride towards the border and narrowed the
focus of the search. Earl's thumb took him to the
even smaller and now completely vanished town of Wacopa, just
five miles from the border. There were fewer than ten
houses in Wacopa, and any stranger walking into the general
store is going to get attention. And Leslie Morgan, the

(40:48):
store's owner, had been listening to the radio all morning.
He thought his customer was the guerrilla man the second
he walked in. When Earle left with his purchases a
brick of cheese, two cokes, and cigarettes, Leslie called the
provincial police ten miles away in Killarney. Not long after,
Constable Wilton Gray spotted the suspect beside a muddy ravine

(41:10):
like he was trying to work out the best way
to cross it. Gray snuck up, then jumped out with
his revolver ready. Earle stuck his hands up in the
air and said, honest to God, sir, I'm not trying
to cross the line. Gray asked him his name, Virgil Wilson,
Earle said. When asked what he was doing in the area,
Earle said he was working on the ranch of someone

(41:30):
called George Harrison. Can't really overstate how empty this corner
of Canada was. Gray knew all the local farmers, and
none of them was called George Harrison. Gray arrested him
and started back on the long and winding road to
the Killarney Jail. On the ride, Earle was so friendly
and funny that Gray started to have real doubts that

(41:51):
he could be the killer. But he put Earl in
the jail cell below the town hall. He told the
town constable, William Dunn, to keep an eye on Earle
then went to the telegraph office to report his capture
of the continent's most wanted criminal. Feeling pretty full of himself,
he went to his office afterwards to clean himself up
a little bit in case anybody wanted to take his picture.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
It's so cute, hey, remember in part one where Earl
escaped from Napa State Mental Hospital so often that the
other inmates started calling him Hoodini hm hmm. Well, twenty
minutes after being told to keep an eye on the prisoner,
Town Constable Done burst into Gray's office and told him
the gorilla man was gone. See done It thought keeping

(42:34):
an eye on Earl meant making sure he didn't try
to kill himself. Surely there was no way he could
escape with the locked cell, So when Doun wanted a
cigarette and realized he needed matches, he just went upstairs
to find some.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah. I feel like an important part of keeping an
eye on like a dangerous prisoner is staying in the
same room with him, at least on the same floor
of the building. Yeah, Whoopsie.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
The Killarney jail was, if anything, easier to get out
of than nap estate. When they'd shoved him toward the cell,
Earl had noticed a little wooden shelf on the wall
beside it. As soon as the old man went looking
for his matches, Earle jumped up and shoved a hand
through the bars, feeling blindly for whatever might be on there.
It was exactly what he needed, an old, rusty nail file. Oh,

(43:27):
no need to smuggle files inside cakes in the Killarney jail.
They'll just leave one for you right outside the door,
Like i'd so considerate like a late nineties video game.
It probably like Sparkled.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
It absolutely is right.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
Earl picked both locks. Inside of two minutes, Gray had
taken his shoes and his belt, so he ran barefoot
through the basement in the furnace room to the back door,
which wasn't locked. It was just before eleven to fifteen
pm and a cold rain had started falling as he
ran across the wet grass into darkness.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
You know, this is even more Bundy like, because you know,
Bundy escaped from jail twice, two different jails, in a
really similar way. Actually in one case.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Anyway, Yeah, do you think do you think they'd be
homies or do you think they'd get into cat fights?

Speaker 2 (44:14):
They probably get in a cat fight.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah, probably, Yeah, Bundy was Bundy was a little bit
of a mean girl.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
I think, definitely a little bit.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
Soon a mob of armed locals were scouring the woods
and barns by lantern and flashlight. Then Gray made a
tough phone call to Commissioner Martin at Provincial Police headquarters
in Winnipeg. Martin decided to lead a posse of heavily
armed officers down to Killarney, but with the rain picking up.
He worried cars would get stuck on the dirt roads.

(44:45):
He requisitioned a special train instead, and they set off
with emergency signals ahead of them, so other trains made way.
Earle was thinking about trains too. He knew there was
a railway station in Killarney, and he knew the border
was close. If you just hit out until a southbound
freight train came by, he could jump onto it and

(45:06):
across the border. He heard the town hall bell behind him,
and he saw the beams of approaching flashlights. We clambered
up a big tree and waited until the searchers had
gone right past him. Then he snuck back toward the
station and into a vacant barn, And here he found
a pile of discarded clothes, including some old ice skates,
and a baggy cart. Again, he tore off the blades

(45:28):
and put on the boots of the skates. He snuck
into the stall and stayed awake most of the night,
but eventually dozed off. Around eight. He was woken by
the sound he had hoped for a train whistle.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
That image to me of everybody with their lanterns and
flashlights and weapons searching for him in the dark is
so chilling, Like, imagine how terrifying that would be to
be one of those searchers, and how brave you'd have
to be to do that, because you know, this man
is a prolific murderer and a big dude too. And

(46:01):
just the thought of those swinging lanterns. Oh, it's so
really it gives me the chilies.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
Oh yeah. Among his many many flaws, Earle had an
overpowering need for an early morning smoke, and with his
escape from jail and avoidance of his hunters, he was
feeling bulletproof. At ten past eight, Alfred Wood was mowing
a neighbor's lawn when ear leaned over the picket fence.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Can I bum a cigarette? Earle said. Alfred walked across
and handed over his tobacco pouch and rolling papers and
took a close look at the stranger, who looked exactly
like he'd just slept in a barn, his hair a mess,
and hay stuck to his ragged cartigan. He looked to
be wearing ice skates with the blades taken off. You've
been out searching for that fellow who broke out of jail,

(46:46):
Alfred asked, already thinking that that fellow was standing right
there in front of him. Earl nodded, Yeah, been up
all night, tore my clothes in the bushes. Must be
a damn smart man to escape the way he did. You,
little cass Hoole, had to get that little dig in.
I'm so smart. Alfred lit the guy's cigarette, then watched

(47:07):
him walk off toward the railroad tracks. He looked around
and saw two teenagers, Kevin and Brian Bess, walking to
their dad's car with school books in their hands. He
hurried over and told them to drive downtown and tell
the police the gorilla man was here by the station.
The boys raced downtown and found Constable W. A. Renton,
who was waiting for the police garage to fix his car.

(47:30):
Brian Bess jumped out and hurriedly told him what mister
Wood suspected. Renton jumped into their chevy and told Kevin
to drive back the way he'd come. We have to hurry,
Kevin said, we have to be at school by nine
for exams. A quarter mile down the road, Renton spotted
Earl stepping out of a thicket and heading for the
railroad tracks. He shouted at Kevin to stop and jumped

(47:53):
out of the car, sprinting towards Earl. Seeing him coming,
Earle climbed the railway fence and got onto the tracks,
but before he could go any further, Renton was at
the fence with his gun out and yelled at him
to stop. Earle stopped, hands up. Rutton climbed over the
fence and pointed his gun at Earle. Who are you,
he said, A farmer? Earle said, where do you farm?

(48:15):
Renton said. Earle looked around and pointed to a big
wooden building close to the railroad tracks. To a kid
from San Francisco, it probably looked like a barn, but
it was actually the town slaughter house. Let's go, Renton said,
and walked Earle at gunpoint towards the station. A big
mob of locals had gathered, many of whom had been

(48:36):
out all night searching for Earle. There was an ugly
air about them, and Renton worried his prisoner might be killed.
A patrol car sped in as the crowd closed, and
Renton bundled Earle in. They drove right up onto the
platform as a train pulled into the station, and as
soon as it stopped, Renton pulled Earl out of the
car and into one of the train coaches. The train

(48:59):
Earl had been hoping to jump the border On turned
out to be the one Commissioner martin In requisition to
take his posse down to Killarney, and Earl stared in
astonishment as he was bundled into a train car full
of heavily armed cops. Was like wamp The cops were
similarly surprised. They'd rode the rails all night and didn't
even have to leave the train to have their prey delivered.

(49:22):
Commissioner Martin put the cuffs on Earl's wrists. Maybe twenty
seconds later he'd slipped free of them and handed them
back to Martin. These aren't much good, he said, smirking,
you little asshole. Also dumb because if you want to
escape again, probably not the greatest idea to demonstrate right
in front of them that you can get out of handcuffs. Right,
like his ego, it's always the fatal flaw on these guys.

(49:46):
Martin ordered two officers to hold Earl down in his
seat while a third fixed heavy manacles to his wrists
and ankles. Houdini would not be making any more escapes.
Back in Winnipeg, at the Vaughan Street Jail, he was
kept in their most secure cell, the one usually reserved
for prisoners condemned to death. He was kept under constant

(50:07):
supervision by armed guards who knew what keep an eye
on him actually meant. When Earle went to trial for
the murders of Lola Callan and Emily Patterson, his wife
Mary and aunt Lilian came to support him. Mary was
sixty six years old by now, and Lillian thirty seven.
When reporters tracked them down, they inevitably confused which one

(50:28):
was their wife and which one was the aunt. By
support him, I mean try to convince the jury Earle
was insane so he wouldn't be put to death. I
will freely admit to not being an expert on Canadian
criminal law in the twenties. I know it's a terrible
character flaw, and I hope you can forgive me, But
as far as I know, it follows the same principles

(50:48):
as US and British law, as far as insanity goes right.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
If Earle was able to control his actions, and he
was aware that what he was doing was wrong, then
he was culpable and both of those things were definitely true.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging,
scheduled for January thirteenth, nineteen twenty eight. A few days
before that date, a final plea for clemency was denied.
On January eleventh, a gray haired, neat little man in

(51:16):
gold rimmed spectacles checked into a hotel room in downtown Winnipeg.
He used a false name when he traveled for work,
but this was Arthur Ellis, the executioner for the Dominion
of Canada.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
The next day, he visited the jail to check on
the gallows and briefly visit Earl. This was, in small
part a professional courtesy and mainly to get a first
hand look at Earl's build and wait. The Winnipeg Free
Press interviewed Ellis afterwards, regarding Nelson's crimes as the most
horrible he has ever known. The hangman expressed keener anticipation

(51:50):
at carrying out this execution than any other in history.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Wow, that's kind of messed up. I mean, obviously Earl
deserves it like a hundred times over. But is the
guy who pulls the switch really supposed to be all he?
I can't wait, like that's just his whole description kind
of creeps me out. Little the little gray man in
the spectacles, little neat suit, and he's just delighted that
he gets to pull the Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
I don't know if the description so kind of like
very like nineteen twenty speaks, So I don't know if
he's he's excited or if he's like, yeah, if anyone
deserves this, it's this guy, you know. So it could
be could be both, but little gray men man, little
gray men. And if you'll remember, this is where we
started in the story. In the pre dawn light of

(52:39):
Friday the thirteenth, Earl Letter Nelson swung from the gallows.
Eleven minutes later, he was pronounced dead. His official number
of victims is twenty two over a sixteen month span,
but he is considered a strong suspect and at least
seven more killings, mostly between his second release from Napa
State and his first recorded victory, Clara Newman. And that's

(53:02):
probably not the full count, maybe not even close. Even
serial killers who supposedly confess to their crimes often either
over or understate the number of victims. Shockingly, these are
not people you can trust and Earle just kept quiet,
proclaiming his innocence right up until the last words left
his mouth. Earle didn't change much between his teenage years

(53:26):
and adulthood, and as we mentioned last week, there's every
chance he started his murders among the vulnerable sex workers
in San Francisco, crimes that probably wouldn't even be investigated.
And after Clara Newman, he was killing every two or
three weeks except for four months between his last murder
and Missouri and his first on the East Coast. It

(53:48):
would be bizarre for a serial killer to take a
pause like that in the middle of intense activity like that.
We know he wasn't incarcerated. Most likely there were murders
that were never linked to him, as we've seen plenty
of authorities we're willing to write off suspicious deaths to suicides.
So as much as we've learned about killers like him

(54:09):
and what drives them to do what they do, the
Dark Strangler's real impact will probably always be a mystery.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
So that was a wild one, right, campers. You know
we'll have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until
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(54:37):
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And as always, we want to send a grateful shout
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(54:58):
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If not, tell me and I will do it again. Stephanie, Charlene,
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(55:41):
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Dark Strangler: The Crimes of Earle Leonard Nelson Pt 2

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