Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Gaesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 1: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2: Good Evening. Many decades before Ted Bundy roamed the country,
Speaker 2: there was serial killer Earl Nelson during the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2: This geographically mobile serial killer went from city to city.
Speaker 2: His modus operandi involved getting into a house by pretending
Speaker 2: to be a person looking for a room to rent
Speaker 2: or inspecting a house that was for sale, then strangling
Speaker 2: the landlady, followed by having sex with the dead body.
Speaker 2: Robbery was frequently a secondary motive. After Nelson was captured
Speaker 2: in Canada in nineteen twenty seven, it was commonly reported
Speaker 2: that he had killed twenty one women and a baby
Speaker 2: during the nineteen twenty six nineteen twenty seven period, But
Speaker 2: were these the only cases linked to Nelson. The author
Speaker 2: examines an additional nine unsolved murders of landladies, two of
Speaker 2: which have never been dealt with in previous literature. Based
Speaker 2: on decades of archival research. The author examines all thirty
Speaker 2: one murders, relying on primary sources when available, and a
Speaker 2: wide variety of secondary sources. For each murder. The book
Speaker 2: provides biographical sketches of the victim, outlines the police investigation
Speaker 2: and the various suspect, and covers any subsequent attempts to
Speaker 2: link Nelson to the crime by identification, evidence of witnesses
Speaker 2: or by fingerprints. The book that we're featuring this evening
Speaker 2: is thirty one Murders Following the Trail of serial sex
Speaker 2: killer Earl Nelson, with my special guest, law professor and author,
Speaker 2: Alvin aj Esau. Welcome to the program, and thank you
Speaker 2: very much for this interview. Alvin aj Esau.
Speaker 3: Nice to be here. Thank you Dan for having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. You right that this book not
Speaker 2: only deals with the thirty one murders that you think
Speaker 2: were committed by serial killer Earl Leonard Nelson in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty five to nineteen twenty seven, but the book itself
Speaker 2: took more than thirty one years to research and write.
Speaker 2: You were in nineteen eighty nine the head of the
Speaker 2: University of Manitoba Legal Research Institute and the Dean of
Speaker 2: the law faculty tell us about the genesis of this book.
Speaker 3: The law faculty way back then was trying to have
Speaker 3: a seventy fifth anniversary celebration, and I was asked by
Speaker 3: the dean to identify famous Manitoba trials, and I identified
Speaker 3: nine of them and did a huge amount of research
Speaker 3: on all nine. Three of them were criminal cases and
Speaker 3: murder cases, and over the years I kind of got
Speaker 3: interested in this case, which was a sensational case in
Speaker 3: Manitoba in terms of the trial. I did a lot
Speaker 3: of work in ninety five and presented the story of
Speaker 3: the case to the bar and bench in Manitoba, and
Speaker 3: then I put her aside For many years. I worked
Speaker 3: on all kinds of other stuff, but every once in
Speaker 3: a while I'd pick it up and I'd continue and
Speaker 3: I'd go visit all of the various sites in the
Speaker 3: United States where I thought he had murdered people. Over time,
Speaker 3: I started to develop the book, and then in my retirement,
Speaker 3: I decided to write it. Now. Part of the reason
Speaker 3: that I'm writing it is that a lot of the
Speaker 3: literature that you find on him, he's kind of an
Speaker 3: obscure serial killer. There's not a lot written about him,
Speaker 3: but when you look at stuff that is written about him,
Speaker 3: a lot of the blogs and so on, but we're
Speaker 3: just riddled with all kinds of mythology. And that's one
Speaker 3: of the reasons I continue is that I thought, well,
Speaker 3: you know, the record is terrible. There's a couple of
Speaker 3: books that are okay. Harold Checkter wrote a book and
Speaker 3: I sent a lot of material to him, and that's
Speaker 3: why there's quite a bit of accuracy to it, but
Speaker 3: a lot of the background material is also riddled with
Speaker 3: myth that he included. What I discovered is that, for example,
Speaker 3: a lot of the myths arise from a guy Nash
Speaker 3: who wrote a book called Blood Letters and Badman and
Speaker 3: is just full of all kinds of material that has
Speaker 3: absolutely no basis in fact. And a lot of the
Speaker 3: blogs continue to carry this material which is completely mythological.
Speaker 3: And that's part of the reason that I took the
Speaker 3: time to sort of say, I want to set the
Speaker 3: record straight now, if you don't mind me saying that
Speaker 3: I wrote the book called the Gorilla Man Strangler Case,
Speaker 3: and in that book I deal with the Winnipeg murders,
Speaker 3: the manhunt, and his escape from jail and so on,
Speaker 3: and the trial and legal officials, and that book was
Speaker 3: so large and detailed that I didn't have room to
Speaker 3: deal with the American murders that I think he committed
Speaker 3: before he came to Winnipeg. And so that's where I
Speaker 3: thirty one Murders is a book that I written, wrote
Speaker 3: last year, so that would be added to the record.
Speaker 3: So I don't know if that answers your question or not,
Speaker 3: but that's kind of what's what happened.
Speaker 2: You write that in addition to the two Winnipeg murders
Speaker 2: and the twenty American murders that are on the official
Speaker 2: list from Detective Archie Leonard of Portland, you have added
Speaker 2: nine American murders, bringing the count to thirty one. To
Speaker 2: explain the title of the book, thirty one murders.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, it's kind of interesting that Archie Leonard, who
Speaker 3: was a detective in Portland, and in Portland, there's very
Speaker 3: little doubt that Earl Nelson murdered four landladies, but the
Speaker 3: first three Land Ladies were treated by the police as
Speaker 3: not murders at all, even though the jewels there were
Speaker 3: jewels missing. There were sexual elements to all of the
Speaker 3: bodies as they were found. The Portland people, both the
Speaker 3: coroner and the police, a thought that the first two
Speaker 3: cases were perhaps suicide and the last case was just
Speaker 3: a heart attack. And the Portland police, where I would argue,
Speaker 3: very inept in understanding that these cases should be linked
Speaker 3: to the dark strangler who was killing landladies all the
Speaker 3: way across the West Coast. And so it's ironic that
Speaker 3: Archie Leonard, the Portland detective, was ultimately the one who
Speaker 3: put together a list of twenty two cases and that
Speaker 3: became the official list, and most of the people who
Speaker 3: write about the serial killer Earl Nelson argue that that's
Speaker 3: his body count. Well, in fact, there's good reason, as
Speaker 3: I try to argue, that there are a whole lot
Speaker 3: of other cases, some of which are perhaps suspicious, and
Speaker 3: perhaps we haven't got any definitive argument that he was
Speaker 3: the one who did but there's a good arguments to
Speaker 3: be made that he probably was the one who murdered
Speaker 3: these women across the United States. And so I've expanded
Speaker 3: the list, and I'm not arguing per se that every
Speaker 3: one of these murders was committed by him. I'm saying
Speaker 3: that there's a probable cause to argue that he did
Speaker 3: these murders. But he might have committed more than thirty one,
Speaker 3: you know, and maybe even on the official list, there
Speaker 3: may be some cases where he didn't actually commit the murder.
Speaker 3: But I think that there's enough circumstantial evidence to argue
Speaker 3: that he is the culprit in these cases.
Speaker 2: Let's get to this most fascinating case, this most fascinating
Speaker 2: murderer as well. You're right that there were five landladies
Speaker 2: murdered in nineteen twenty five, and the list of official
Speaker 2: murders doesn't start till nineteen twenty six, so you say
Speaker 2: that starting in August twenty fourth, nineteen twenty five, a
Speaker 2: widow named Elizabeth Jones was seventy two years old. And
Speaker 2: again this is important, but because this is the mo
Speaker 2: in terms of a man searching for a room or
Speaker 2: a home for sale and older elderly women. So Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Jones was showing apartments and there was someone next door
Speaker 2: who saw the person that she was showing the room.
Speaker 2: To tell us about this story and what the police
Speaker 2: determined after the crime scene is identified, well, this.
Speaker 3: Was again a case where you have to remember that
Speaker 3: Earl Nelson in terms of the time frame. His last
Speaker 3: escape we can talk about that later from the Mental
Speaker 3: Institute for the Asylum was in November nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 3: So when we look at cases, we can say from
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty three on, you know when did he start killing,
Speaker 3: because you know, there's all of nineteen twenty four, in
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty five and twenty six and twenty seven, so
Speaker 3: you know when did he actually begin And what makes
Speaker 3: this case interested in San Francisco, the Jones case is
Speaker 3: you had an elderly lady who was found with pearls
Speaker 3: wrapped around her neck. There was allegedly finger marks on
Speaker 3: her neck, and she was having a room advertised for sale,
Speaker 3: which became the modus operandim a room for rent, which
Speaker 3: became his modus operandi. He would go to houses for
Speaker 3: sale or for rooms to rent and present himself as
Speaker 3: a potential person to rent the room, and when the
Speaker 3: landlady was alone, he would probably strangle her and most
Speaker 3: often have sex with the dead body. And later on
Speaker 3: there was also a lot of robbery as a secondary motive,
Speaker 3: so that he supported himself by stealing jewelry and clothing
Speaker 3: and going to pawn shops and so on. Now this
Speaker 3: case because it was never really looked at very carefully because,
Speaker 3: as you know, doctor Shelby Strange was the person who
Speaker 3: did the autops heat simply said, well, she didn't die
Speaker 3: of strangulation. She died of a heart attack or something,
Speaker 3: or she had you know, the flu or pneumonia. She
Speaker 3: was an elderly lady, and so they closed the case, right,
Speaker 3: So they never had a proper police investigation of saying, what,
Speaker 3: you know, who was walking around of the apartment building
Speaker 3: looking for rooms to rant or whatever. So we don't
Speaker 3: really know. Now what's significant is that the next case
Speaker 3: was also treated that way. This was a case where
Speaker 3: a much younger lady who wasn't didn't appear to be
Speaker 3: sick at all, was found in the room to rent,
Speaker 3: and she was completely naked lying on the bed. There
Speaker 3: was all kinds of initial reports saying that she had
Speaker 3: been sexually attacked. The clothing was in the order of
Speaker 3: somebody who took the clothing off, as opposed to somebody
Speaker 3: like herself who might have, you know, undressed herself in
Speaker 3: a delirium or something. And doctor Shelby Strange said again, well,
Speaker 3: and there was money missing and jewelry missing, and he said, well,
Speaker 3: this is again a case of where she died of
Speaker 3: bronchitis or whatever, right, and she, you know, she took
Speaker 3: her clothes off in a delirium and then the case
Speaker 3: was closed again. And so it was doctor Leland who
Speaker 3: was the coroner ultimately presented these cases. These two cases
Speaker 3: from nineteen twenty five when Rol Nelson was undoubtedly killing
Speaker 3: women in San Francisco. I mean, they didn't know who
Speaker 3: the guy was, but they called him the Dark Strangler.
Speaker 3: He was killing other land ladies in San Francisco area,
Speaker 3: and the last San Francisco murder of Edmunds was murdered
Speaker 3: in the radio room with the house for sale. He
Speaker 3: put those two cases of Jones and Anderson to the
Speaker 3: inquest jury, and the inquest jury at that time said,
Speaker 3: these were two other cases that could be attributed to
Speaker 3: the Dark Strangler. So they're very suspicious in these two
Speaker 3: cases because they involved access to a landlady with a
Speaker 3: room for rent, and suspicious circumstances as to strangulation and
Speaker 3: bodies that might have been sexually attacked, but that was
Speaker 3: never tested for. Although in Anderson at least Shelby did
Speaker 3: send away for a d vaginal smear. I have all
Speaker 3: of the reports of the coroner, but I don't have
Speaker 3: the results of any test. There's nothing on there saying
Speaker 3: what that result might have been.
Speaker 2: That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
Speaker 2: there are other murders in nineteen twenty five that you include.
Speaker 2: You say that the Dark Strangler moves, so tell us
Speaker 2: where his next murders are.
Speaker 3: Well, in nineteen twenty five, there are three murders in
Speaker 3: October and November in Philadelphia. And here is sort of
Speaker 3: more of a weak leak. They're not sure whether these
Speaker 3: murders should be attributed to him or not. We know
Speaker 3: that he travels across the country, you know, nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 3: the first part of the years, he's in America, all
Speaker 3: over the place, Philadelphi, Buffalo, he sends postcards from the East.
Speaker 3: Was he already in the East already then? And it's
Speaker 3: quite possible that he was. What makes these cases interesting
Speaker 3: is that all of them, all three of these cases
Speaker 3: in Philadelphia, in the same kind of neighborhood, were all
Speaker 3: land ladies. Okay, now that's a big clue, but we
Speaker 3: don't have evidence. And by the way, all of Philadelphia
Speaker 3: police reports are destroyed. According to the letter said to me,
Speaker 3: we don't have evidence that these were for sale or
Speaker 3: for rent in the sense that there was a sign
Speaker 3: on the door saying room for rent. But all three
Speaker 3: of the ladies were had rumors, and so they were
Speaker 3: land ladies. All three of the ladies were strangled on
Speaker 3: the main floor and taken up to a bedroom on
Speaker 3: the upper floor. And of course when you take a
Speaker 3: body upstairs, there's a strong sense that maybe you're dealing
Speaker 3: with necrophilia, right, because why would you do that. Why
Speaker 3: would you carry a body upstairs? You know, if you
Speaker 3: just wanted to kill them and steal, then you would
Speaker 3: sort of escape. The third case in Philadelphia of Lena
Speaker 3: Wine or a younger woman, that the person who killed
Speaker 3: her also stole a whole suitcase full of clothing from
Speaker 3: a room. And this is again a very typical part
Speaker 3: of his motus operandi. He was kind of a clothing
Speaker 3: fetish guy. Constantly was stealing clothing and then taking it
Speaker 3: to the pawn shop and trying to get some money
Speaker 3: for the clothing. And so again that's a kind of
Speaker 3: a circumstance that makes it look suspicious, right, And the
Speaker 3: pawnshop operator was found who bought all this clothing, and
Speaker 3: he described the man as dark skinned and swarthy, and
Speaker 3: of course that's typical of the fact that he was
Speaker 3: called his dark skin and his sort of they called
Speaker 3: him an Italian looking person with all of type skin.
Speaker 3: But the pawn shop operator thought that he was a
Speaker 3: light skinned Negro, and so everything got off the rails.
Speaker 3: At this stage is the police were arresting tons of
Speaker 3: black people, charging them with the offense, and ultimately nothing
Speaker 3: ever came of that. But they were looking for the
Speaker 3: wrong kind of person. Instead of a dark skinned white person,
Speaker 3: they were looking for a lighter skinned, lighter skin dark person.
Speaker 3: In the end, none of those murders, those three were solved.
Speaker 3: But when a lady leader in nineteen twenty seven in
Speaker 3: Philadelphia was murdered and was clearly linked to the dark
Speaker 3: Strangler or at that time what they called the Gorilla
Speaker 3: man strangler, these other three cases were introduced to inquest
Speaker 3: juries and the police, and ultimately the police we were
Speaker 3: told it's kind of ambiguous. Some of the police never
Speaker 3: believed that these three should have been included in the
Speaker 3: list right, and others thought it should be. Some of
Speaker 3: the newspapers suggested that the police concluded, finally in the
Speaker 3: end that these three murders were also part of the
Speaker 3: murderous trail of the Dark Strangler.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about nineteen twenty six and the official beginning
Speaker 2: of the Dark Stranglers murders. February twentieth, nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 2: You talk about Clara Newman, a sixty year old on
Speaker 2: February twentieth, nineteen twenty six, body found in a vacant
Speaker 2: apartment on the third floor, and her nephew Mertin Newman,
Speaker 2: said he had witnessed this person in the presence of
Speaker 2: his act tell us this.
Speaker 3: This is where the Dark Strangler moniker begins. And of
Speaker 3: course the murder itself has all the classic elements, you know,
Speaker 3: going to the door, asking for whom, being shown her room,
Speaker 3: killing the land lady, having sex with the dead body,
Speaker 3: and so on. And he didn't steal anything at this stage.
Speaker 3: But as he's walking out of the house, the nephew
Speaker 3: sees him and it's sort of a fleeting glance. It's
Speaker 3: not like a major kind of confrontation. The guy says, Oh,
Speaker 3: go tell the landlady, I'll be back in an hour
Speaker 3: to rent the room and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: he's waiting for the land for his aunt to come down,
Speaker 3: as she never does. And of course they finally go
Speaker 3: to this locked apartment upstairs and find her lying in
Speaker 3: the kitchen, strangled and dead. And he described this person
Speaker 3: fairly decently in terms of height, I mean, Earl Nelson
Speaker 3: turned out to be five foot six about, and he
Speaker 3: described the dark skin and you know, the sworthy nature
Speaker 3: of the guy. And subsequently, as more and more murders happened,
Speaker 3: this fellow Merton Newman was taken by the police to
Speaker 3: look at all kinds of suspects, you know, you're there
Speaker 3: and everywhere, and of course his mind became totally befuddled
Speaker 3: by post event information because he just looked at a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of different people, you know, so he probably
Speaker 3: can't really distinguish between what he originally saw on who
Speaker 3: all the other people he saw. But he eliminated a
Speaker 3: lot of the suspects by saying, no, that's not the man,
Speaker 3: you know. And very shortly after that, these murders in
Speaker 3: California started to accumulate, and the police right away linked
Speaker 3: them all together like it wasn't as if in today's
Speaker 3: world we talk about, you know, how you know there's
Speaker 3: so many serial killers at one stage, and police officers
Speaker 3: in one jurisdiction don't know what happened in another jurisdiction.
Speaker 3: Back then, this kind of killing was kind of rare,
Speaker 3: and so police officers all up and down the coast
Speaker 3: knew about the fact that some guy was killing landladies
Speaker 3: under the guise of taking a room, and so these
Speaker 3: cases were linked always together, very very quickly, which might
Speaker 3: not have happened in today's world, even when it was
Speaker 3: outside of San Francisco and San Jose or Stockton or wherever.
Speaker 2: Right, you're right that the murders continued. March second, nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty six, Laura Bale, a sixty four year old, again
Speaker 2: a landlady, showed a man in an apartment. June tenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six, lilyan Saint Mary, sixty three year old
Speaker 2: in San Francisco, again renting rooms. This case with Lily
Speaker 2: and Saint Mary where her chest was crushed. Tell us
Speaker 2: a little about the details of this and where the
Speaker 2: gorilla like murderer came from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that was the beginning of the possibility
Speaker 3: of not just calling him the Dark Strangler, calling him
Speaker 3: the Gorilla Man, because of the fact that she was
Speaker 3: found on the bed, fully clothed, ready to go out
Speaker 3: for her afternoon shop. She had, of course a room
Speaker 3: for rent. She was probably strangled and crushed on the
Speaker 3: floor and then lifted onto the bed. And in this
Speaker 3: case she was so frail that her ribs were broken
Speaker 3: on both sides. There's more on one side than the other.
Speaker 3: And so the newspapers, you know, sort of called him
Speaker 3: a very powerful man who could crush the ribs of
Speaker 3: the victim and called him a gorilla But that moniker
Speaker 3: gorilla Man didn't really take off until nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 3: when he was already on the East coast, and that's
Speaker 3: when the newspaper started to call him gorilla Man as
Speaker 3: opposed to the dark Strangler. And when he came to Winnipeg,
Speaker 3: he was called the gorilla Man, and all the newspapers
Speaker 3: you know, called him that the moniker. Gorilla Man itself
Speaker 3: is kind of an adavist moniker, you know, the idea
Speaker 3: that back in the day, in the nineteen twenties, he
Speaker 3: still had kind of a physiological idea that criminals had
Speaker 3: sloped foreheads, large hands, long arms, you know, they could.
Speaker 3: They physically showed that they were kind of a throwback
Speaker 3: of the evolutionary chain. Of course, their moral degeneracy showed
Speaker 3: how terrible they were. They weren't really human beings. They
Speaker 3: were somebody other than us. You know, there was a
Speaker 3: I think I mentioned in one of my books that
Speaker 3: there was, you know, a person who worked with gorillas
Speaker 3: who thought that the use of the word gorilla man
Speaker 3: was kind of a defamation of gorillas who were actually
Speaker 3: gentle folks, who were vegetarians and didn't really do anything
Speaker 3: unless they were disturbed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Very interesting you say that part of the gorilla
Speaker 2: thing was that they reported early on that he had
Speaker 2: gorilla like hands. Yeah, and also that there was a
Speaker 2: you include a profile that was done early on by
Speaker 2: four experts, and one was very very interesting, mister Chauncey
Speaker 2: McGovern and he had the most interesting What did he
Speaker 2: have to say in terms of conclusion of the profile
Speaker 2: of this killer.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the profiles were actually quite insightful in
Speaker 3: the sense that, you know, they were talking about somebody
Speaker 3: who today we would call a psychopath, somebody without conscience,
Speaker 3: somebody who never had regrets, lied through their teeth. I mean,
Speaker 3: he had a million aliases constantly lying probably a fairly
Speaker 3: high hubris in the sense of narcissism. Also in terms
Speaker 3: of mode, we'd have to talk about Earld Nelson's background
Speaker 3: to talk about motive, you know, the idea of perhaps
Speaker 3: displaced anger at not being accepted in society, or taking
Speaker 3: out anger at his grandmother or his dead mother, and
Speaker 3: so a lot of this insight was pretty dead on,
Speaker 3: you know, and this is way back when he had
Speaker 3: only supposed to be killed two or three people.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about just briefly about some of that background.
Speaker 2: You had mentioned that he had escape from a mental
Speaker 2: institution insane asylum in nineteen twenty three, but also you've
Speaker 2: just mentioned the talk of his mother dying when he
Speaker 2: was very very young, and then his father died when
Speaker 2: he was very young, and then he went into the
Speaker 2: custody of relatives. Tell us also about the gonorrhea and
Speaker 2: syphilists that plagued this man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, thank you. Earl Nelson was born in eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety seven, and he was born in his paternal grandparents' house.
Speaker 3: His mother and father were married, you know, when they
Speaker 3: were like she was seventeen and I was nineteen when
Speaker 3: he was a baby. His mother died when he was
Speaker 3: about ten months old, and his father died a little
Speaker 3: bit later than that. We have no evidence that at
Speaker 3: the time that he was born the parents who were
Speaker 3: living together. Father was actually a shipped seaman, was out
Speaker 3: in the Panama Coaster or whatever, and he came down
Speaker 3: with Panama fever and he ultimately was blind and he died.
Speaker 3: And the obet doesn't even mention his wife and child.
Speaker 3: We think that they were probably estranged from each other.
Speaker 3: Now at trial, we have evidence that she died of
Speaker 3: syphilis allegedly got from that she received from her husband.
Speaker 3: It may be that husband received it from her. We
Speaker 3: don't know any of the facts like that. But he
Speaker 3: lost both his parents as an infant, and of course
Speaker 3: throughout his life he talks about syphilis being a curse
Speaker 3: in the blood, as if he was born with it
Speaker 3: or whatever, which I'm not sure about it at all,
Speaker 3: because as a young teenager after puberty he was he
Speaker 3: had gone around syphilis himself and and and there's evidence
Speaker 3: in the record of the Insane Asylum that he was
Speaker 3: sexually active, both homosexually and peterosexually at that time and
Speaker 3: had syphilis then and varia. But anyway, the trauma of
Speaker 3: losing one's parents is important. Now. He was brought up
Speaker 3: in the Nelson household, household of his mother, and unlike
Speaker 3: all the mythology that says she that the grandma was
Speaker 3: a widow, he was brought up in a house that
Speaker 3: included the grandfather, the grandmother, and included three older men
Speaker 3: who were still sons living at home, unmarried, and a
Speaker 3: sister called Lillian was like when he was born was sixteen,
Speaker 3: and we get this from all the census data. So
Speaker 3: it's a myth to say that some widow grandma grew
Speaker 3: him up with no men around. But what happened is
Speaker 3: that the trauma of losing parents was increased when his
Speaker 3: grandfather died when he was seven and a half, and
Speaker 3: then his grandmother died when he was ten, and so
Speaker 3: that would be an added trauma. And of course I
Speaker 3: say that the trauma of the great San Francisco fire
Speaker 3: that came right up to the house where they lived
Speaker 3: was another trauma. And he illustrated very early that he
Speaker 3: had tendencies of irresponsibility. He failed schooling, he started to
Speaker 3: wander off as a young boy away from home, and
Speaker 3: Uncle Willis took over the house one of the brothers,
Speaker 3: and he was supposedly living there, but he was gone
Speaker 3: most of the time. And we have an astonishing amount
Speaker 3: of criminality at a very early age. For example, when
Speaker 3: he was barely fourteen, he was picked up by the
Speaker 3: police along with a younger boy after they had been
Speaker 3: robbing all sorts of stores along the Mission Avenue area,
Speaker 3: and they were caught with all kinds of tools and
Speaker 3: money and so on, and they claimed that they were
Speaker 3: trying to get enough money to leave town and hold
Speaker 3: up trains. You know. This is at age fourteen, right right.
Speaker 3: And then at you know, when he was barely eighteen,
Speaker 3: he and another young man in Plumas County held up
Speaker 3: a train station house and they robbed that house, and
Speaker 3: then somebody came along to try to arrest him. They
Speaker 3: beat up the guy and then they were ultimately arrested
Speaker 3: diacon to Quincy, and after pete and guilty, they were
Speaker 3: put in jail for two years at San Quentin. At
Speaker 3: Earl Nelson at this young age of eighteen, went to
Speaker 3: San Quentin. He was released after fourteen months or something.
Speaker 3: Because the war was on, probably joined the army for
Speaker 3: a bit, but he deserted and then of course he
Speaker 3: joined the Navy. And what's interesting is I have the
Speaker 3: complete Navy reports on him because I received all the documents.
Speaker 3: He was using the name Earl Ferrell, his birth name,
Speaker 3: which was the name of his father. You know. He
Speaker 3: was trained in Mayor Island in San Francisco, but he
Speaker 3: went on leave. But he never came back after leave,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean he was away for four months.
Speaker 3: He was actually in jail and stalked him for stealing
Speaker 3: a bike. And then he comes back to the Army stage,
Speaker 3: to the Navy station with his Navy uniform. Lottie does
Speaker 3: as if nothing happened. Well, of course, he was tried
Speaker 3: for desertion by court martial and he was sentenced to
Speaker 3: jail for two years in the army jail. Well, in
Speaker 3: the army jail, he started to act really crazy, you know,
Speaker 3: he refused to work. He was talking really religious stuff
Speaker 3: about being the Antichrist or maybe the Kaiser, and he
Speaker 3: stared off into space. And the Navy official said, some's
Speaker 3: wrong with this guy, and they sent him to the hospital.
Speaker 3: And at the hospital he was diagnosed as a constitutional
Speaker 3: psychopath and was sent for the first time to the
Speaker 3: NAPA Institute for the Insane. At the NAPA Institute for
Speaker 3: the Insane, he claimed that he wasn't insane. He was
Speaker 3: tested for syphilis, and of course he had syphilis, and
Speaker 3: he was started to get syphilis treatments, but he hated
Speaker 3: it and he escaped. And he wasn't there very long.
Speaker 3: He just one day. The second attempt to escape, he
Speaker 3: escaped and nobody knew where he was, and he ended
Speaker 3: up being in Los Angeles. And in Los Angeles he
Speaker 3: was living with somebody and he went and stole all
Speaker 3: the clothes in a suitcase, and he stole some guns
Speaker 3: and he sold the guns, you know, typical stealing stuff.
Speaker 3: And the guy who he was living with actually saw
Speaker 3: him on a car and Earl Nelson, he didn't use
Speaker 3: that word Pharaoh jumped off the car and a police
Speaker 3: officer ended up tackling him and he was arrested for robery.
Speaker 3: But the authorities, instead of you know, dealing with him
Speaker 3: and putting him in jail in Los Angeles, sent him
Speaker 3: back to the Navy because he was a deserter. And
Speaker 3: so again the Navy authorities examined him and said, this
Speaker 3: guy is insane and put him back in the NAPA Institute,
Speaker 3: and in the NAPA Institute this time he was there
Speaker 3: for about I can't remember two years. He was given
Speaker 3: treatment for syphilis. He tried to make several escapes, but
Speaker 3: then in the end he was quite cooperative. Restraints were
Speaker 3: taken off of him, and he ended up in his
Speaker 3: first year being the reports were quite positive that he
Speaker 3: was doing well. But then suddenly it shifted. In the
Speaker 3: second year that he was there, he was constantly trying
Speaker 3: to make escapes, and ultimately he escaped. As I said,
Speaker 3: I've got the sequence a bit wrong because I've failed
Speaker 3: to mention that after they put him back an the asylum,
Speaker 3: he escaped the next day from the Los Angeles arrest.
Speaker 3: And of course what's really important here is that in
Speaker 3: nineteen nineteen, as an escapee, this is before anything else happened,
Speaker 3: he got married. And he got married to a woman
Speaker 3: that was working in a hospital with him, and she
Speaker 3: was at that stage twenty seven years older than he was.
Speaker 3: So he was twenty two and she was forty nine.
Speaker 3: And of course, you know, he used all kinds of lies,
Speaker 3: and so I'm saying that he was thirty seven. She
Speaker 3: was attracted to him because of his religiosity, and then
Speaker 3: of course they were married for six months. I mean
Speaker 3: they were together for six months, and the marriage was
Speaker 3: a disaster. We have all kinds of evidence about what
Speaker 3: happened about bizarre behavior and moral irresponsibility and so on.
Speaker 3: But what's important is that they ultimately moved to Alto,
Speaker 3: to Palelto Palo Alto, where Stanford is, and got a
Speaker 3: job in a school where they lived. And he was
Speaker 3: incessantly jealous of his wife, threatening her she talked to
Speaker 3: people or whatever. He was threatening her all the flirting
Speaker 3: with people or whatever, and he ultimately left in the
Speaker 3: early nineteen twenty. He left, and he ultimately came back
Speaker 3: several times tired get her back together, threatening her life.
Speaker 3: But that's an important point, is that in nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 3: maybe the beginning of nineteen twenty, she was married to
Speaker 3: this woman, and she continued to be married to her.
Speaker 3: She was a strict Catholic and wouldn't get a divorce.
Speaker 3: But they never lived together after that, although they saw
Speaker 3: each other quite often.
Speaker 2: Let's stop to hear these messages. Now you talk about
Speaker 2: the background. You've introduced Mary Fuller, his wife. He used
Speaker 2: an alias. She found out the lies that he had
Speaker 2: told her to get married in the first place. Let's
Speaker 2: talk about let's pick up back again, the Dark Strangler
Speaker 2: and the murders that ensue. You say he travels in
Speaker 2: the US, So other than San Francisco, where does he go?
Speaker 2: We haven't we mentioned the Portland murders. So let's talk
Speaker 2: about the hunt for this Dark Strangler. There are many
Speaker 2: people that have witnessed this person, so there is a
Speaker 2: general description early on, and then a continued description that
Speaker 2: the police are using when finally all of these crimes
Speaker 2: are linked and the manhunt that ensues.
Speaker 3: Probably the biggest. You know, all of these murders taking
Speaker 3: place in the West Coast. I mean, they don't really
Speaker 3: know who the guy is. But before he goes, before
Speaker 3: he goes to the east, things get very hot. In
Speaker 3: the end of nineteen twenty six. The reason for that
Speaker 3: is that he allegedly murders a woman in Seattle. This
Speaker 3: is Monks, and he steals a bunch of jewelry from her. Now,
Speaker 3: the big breakthrough is that immediately after murdering her, he
Speaker 3: goes back to Portland and he calls himself Adrian Harris,
Speaker 3: and he goes to a beaten down room house where
Speaker 3: there are three ladies living there. And he spends a
Speaker 3: whole lot of time with these three ladies, okay, and
Speaker 3: he might have even a bit of a romantic interest
Speaker 3: in one of them. He buys them groceries as a big,
Speaker 3: huge Thanksgiving dinner with them. He spends the next day
Speaker 3: or two talking to them, and he gives jewelry to
Speaker 3: one of the ladies, and he gives jewelry to another
Speaker 3: of the ladies. And then one day these two ladies
Speaker 3: discover allegedly that one of them got more jewelry than
Speaker 3: the other. And he wakes up and he hears them arguing.
Speaker 3: He comes into the kitchen and he says, oh, you
Speaker 3: guys are arguing. I got to get out of here.
Speaker 3: You're going to call the police. I'm going to go
Speaker 3: off to Vancouver, you know, Washington. And of course, that
Speaker 3: very day after he gets his suitcase, there's another murder
Speaker 3: in Portland of Myers, and there is a long story there,
Speaker 3: but the police leave without a doubt that the guy
Speaker 3: left the rooming house and went to the Meyers rooming
Speaker 3: house and then killed her. Now, after Nelson was arrested,
Speaker 3: the pictures of him were sent presented to one of
Speaker 3: the ladies who he presented jewelry too, and she said,
Speaker 3: without a doubt, this is the guy we dealt. She
Speaker 3: had three days to deal with him. It's not like
Speaker 3: in a fleeting image or whatever. This is Adrian Harris,
Speaker 3: as he called himself. And in addition to that, even
Speaker 3: without that that id later on they could describe what
Speaker 3: the guy talked about, They could describe exactly what he
Speaker 3: looked like, his mannerisms and so on. So the police
Speaker 3: had a lot of information there and what you know,
Speaker 3: the description of the guy because they were pretty sure
Speaker 3: that this was the murder, because the jewelry turned out
Speaker 3: to be, without a doubt, the jewelry that was taken
Speaker 3: from Missus Monks in the murder in Seattle. Right, So
Speaker 3: there's no question the guy Adrian Harris murdered Missus Monks.
Speaker 3: He had, he had the jewelry, and probably by circumstances,
Speaker 3: is very likely that he would have been the murder
Speaker 3: of Myers. So what happened is that now the police
Speaker 3: in Portland had the best description they'd ever have of
Speaker 3: this guy, and they sent out bulletins all over the
Speaker 3: place describing him and also putting out a huge reward
Speaker 3: for his capture. So things were so hot then in
Speaker 3: the Portland area and the West Coast generally that after
Speaker 3: that he disappears. He's now traveling at the end of
Speaker 3: the year, he's going east. So he murders a woman
Speaker 3: in Council Bluff and then he's on his way to
Speaker 3: the East coast, and you know, before he knows that
Speaker 3: he's murdering people in Kansas City, and then he's you know,
Speaker 3: murdering people in Buffalo. He's murdering higand lady in Buffalo
Speaker 3: and so on, and so there's an example of heat
Speaker 3: heat that he's a cross country traveler.
Speaker 2: How big is this story in the US itself? Once
Speaker 2: he is identified, surprisingly not.
Speaker 3: You know, nobody knew who this guy was until he
Speaker 3: was captured in Winnipeg and identified with his real name.
Speaker 3: You know, people talked about Adrian Harris, they talked about,
Speaker 3: you know, trying to catch the guy, but the Americans
Speaker 3: never caught him. The urban environment of America was easy
Speaker 3: for him to just disappear, change his identity, call himself
Speaker 3: something else, change jobs.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about this manhunt. Once he's recognized, you say
Speaker 2: that it takes quite a while for all of the
Speaker 2: jurisdictions to realize that it's the same person, all they
Speaker 2: have is a description of various aliases, including Harris Woodcote.
Speaker 2: So there are various people you talk about that he
Speaker 2: finally ends up in Chicago. Tell us about this border
Speaker 2: crossing into Canada.
Speaker 3: It's a bit weird to say, like why did he
Speaker 3: come to Canada, Like, we have no evidence he ever
Speaker 3: left the United States in the past. My own theory
Speaker 3: might be that there he was given a ride, perhaps
Speaker 3: from Chicago, you know, in Minnesota somewhere he was picked
Speaker 3: up by Chandler, a man from Winnipeg. And it may
Speaker 3: be that because the man was from Winnipeg, maybe he thought, well,
Speaker 3: maybe I'll visit Winnipeg. You know. I don't think he
Speaker 3: woke up in the morning saying, oh, I'm going to
Speaker 3: go to Canada, you know, because he was an impulsive
Speaker 3: kind of guy, you know, whatever, if he had ten
Speaker 3: dollars in the morning, he had nothing at night, right
Speaker 3: wander at all. And so it may be that that's
Speaker 3: what happened. Now Chandler took him to the border, but
Speaker 3: he jumped out of the car because he didn't cross
Speaker 3: at the border. Crossing and have officials check your passport.
Speaker 3: He crossed the border, sneaked across the border and went
Speaker 3: north by walking, or maybe he jumped on the train
Speaker 3: a bit, and then he was picked up north of
Speaker 3: the border by some more people from Winnipeg. The Hannah
Speaker 3: family took him into Winnipeg. And in Winnipeg, he you know,
Speaker 3: he arrived with pretty nice clothes, and he took his
Speaker 3: clothes to a second hand dealer and he sold his
Speaker 3: clothes for a dollar because he didn't have any money,
Speaker 3: so he sold his clothes for a dollar and put
Speaker 3: on shabby clothes that the guy gave him. He went
Speaker 3: to a rooming house on Smith Street very close by
Speaker 3: with a room to rent sign and he talked to
Speaker 3: the land lady and he rented a room for three
Speaker 3: dollars a week, but he gave her a dollar deposit,
Speaker 3: saying he'd have the money then next day. We don't
Speaker 3: really know what he did the next day very much.
Speaker 3: During the day, I guess he didn't get a job,
Speaker 3: because he talked again to the landlady. Later's thing, I
Speaker 3: don't have two dollars. Then he went out and surprisingly
Speaker 3: the next morning the landlady went to his room and
Speaker 3: found that the bed was made and everything looked fine.
Speaker 3: But the real tragedy of is that that evening, which
Speaker 3: was the Thursday night, a girl, a twelve year old
Speaker 3: Lola Collen, almost twelve, She was out selling artificial flowers
Speaker 3: in the neighborhood and you know, made by her sister,
Speaker 3: and she never came home at night. You can imagine
Speaker 3: the trauma of a family waiting for the kid to
Speaker 3: come home and she doesn't come home at night, and
Speaker 3: the next day she didn't come home, and so nobody
Speaker 3: knew what happened. But on the Friday morning after this
Speaker 3: I'm not coming home, Nelson went to another house, Patterson
Speaker 3: House in Elmwood, and he murdered a twenty seven year
Speaker 3: old housewife. And it had all the typical signs, you know,
Speaker 3: she strangled hidden under the bed, she was knocked on
Speaker 3: the head, strangled, hidden under the bed, sexually assaulted, and
Speaker 3: then he went after that, he made his way out
Speaker 3: of town, as it was typical. But in this case
Speaker 3: of Patterson, what he did is he left as ugly
Speaker 3: closed on the scene, at the scene of the crime,
Speaker 3: and he took one of mister Patterson's suits, not very
Speaker 3: nice one and put it on at the scene of
Speaker 3: the crime. Now, I don't think in any of the
Speaker 3: other thirty cases I've dealt with did Nelson ever change clothes.
Speaker 3: He always stole clothes off, but he never changed clothes. Well,
Speaker 3: here he actually left his clothing there and took another
Speaker 3: suit and put it on, and he made his way
Speaker 3: down to Main Street to it. He also opened a
Speaker 3: box at the Patterson house a suitcase and found a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of six or seven crisp ten dollar bills
Speaker 3: that the family savings, and he took that. He took
Speaker 3: the ring off the victim's finger, and he went to
Speaker 3: this shop on Main Street and he bought a whole
Speaker 3: new suit of clothes, I mean, you know, from underwear
Speaker 3: to socks, to top coat to whatever, sweater, suit, hat,
Speaker 3: and he paid for it for with thirty crisp ten
Speaker 3: dollar bills. Then he wanted to shave, and the guy
Speaker 3: took him across the street and Nick, the barber, you know,
Speaker 3: shaved him and he got ten dollar ten dollar mill.
Speaker 3: And then as he was making his way out of town,
Speaker 3: he actually found a really another hat shop and he
Speaker 3: found that one of a kind hat that he wanted.
Speaker 3: He bought that with the ten CHRISP dollar mill and
Speaker 3: the old hat was put in a box for him
Speaker 3: Waldman Hat you call. And he was making his way
Speaker 3: out of town. He ran into a hutter rag couple
Speaker 3: on the bus and had a long converse with them,
Speaker 3: and ultimately, to make a long story short, he gave
Speaker 3: this earlier hat that he bought at Waldman's store to
Speaker 3: the hunter at the couple. He made his way out
Speaker 3: of town and he ended up the next day overnight.
Speaker 3: He maybe took a train for a part of the way.
Speaker 3: He ended up overnight in Regina. So before the body,
Speaker 3: you know, while the bodies are being while the body
Speaker 3: is being discovered of missus Patterson, he's in Regina. Mister
Speaker 3: Patterson comes home from work. And this is a truth story.
Speaker 3: It's not myth. He's, you know, obviously anxious, like crazy,
Speaker 3: where's my wife? Where's my wife? It's his kids to bed,
Speaker 3: where's my wife? Well, at midnight he actually yeels down
Speaker 3: beside the bed and praise to God to help him
Speaker 3: find his wife. And providentially, he puts his hand on
Speaker 3: the floor, touches the sleeve of something under the bed.
Speaker 3: He looks under the bed, there's his dead wife. And
Speaker 3: so you know, in Regina, as the police are investigating
Speaker 3: this murder in Winnipeg and Regina, he stays at a
Speaker 3: rooming house Laurence Street rooming house, and there's a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of close calls. I mean, he talks to the
Speaker 3: landlady lost. There's a lot of people at the rooming house.
Speaker 3: He doesn't have an opportunity to kill her, I guess,
Speaker 3: but he takes his ten year old daughter of this
Speaker 3: rooming house lady out for ice cream without her permission.
Speaker 3: And he's talking to this girl, and he asked her
Speaker 3: to come to the movies, you know, and wow, and
Speaker 3: the girl says there's no movies on Sunday here in
Speaker 3: Regina or whatever. And ultimately, you know, the landleader looks
Speaker 3: for them and finds them, but she continues to talk
Speaker 3: to the guy all day. Basic So on Sunday night
Speaker 3: back in Winnipeg, all of a sudden, after being you know,
Speaker 3: the room being empty for two or three days, the
Speaker 3: original rooming house on Smith Street, the body of Lola
Speaker 3: Collen that the fourteen year old girl is found. She's
Speaker 3: completely nude under the band and you know, there's all
Speaker 3: kinds of myths here. You know, other books say that
Speaker 3: she was mutilated and all this. Well, I have a
Speaker 3: picture of her, and there's no question there's indignity on
Speaker 3: she was raped, you know, there's no questions indignity on
Speaker 3: her lower parts. But she wasn't cut up or raped.
Speaker 3: I mean some of them people talk about her being
Speaker 3: cut up pieces and and but but you know, the
Speaker 3: panic in Winnipeg really started at this stage. Two women
Speaker 3: were murdered in Winnipeg. Where is the guy and maybe
Speaker 3: he's still in Winnipeg and people are buying walks and
Speaker 3: it's just huge panic, you know. To make a long
Speaker 3: story short, the police here in Winnipeg were very lucky
Speaker 3: to have a lot of citizen call operation because the
Speaker 3: guy who sold that suit, you know, who did the
Speaker 3: complete change, next day contacts the police. The police go
Speaker 3: to the shop and they find the clothes from mister
Speaker 3: Patterson in the shop and other items that had been
Speaker 3: left there by the murderer. You know, the shop keeper
Speaker 3: can give a full description of what the guy looks
Speaker 3: like and what he's now wearing. And on top of that,
Speaker 3: the barber can give a full description of what the
Speaker 3: guy's wearing and what he's like, and so the police
Speaker 3: have a good lead, but they don't know at this
Speaker 3: stage that he's in Regina. Then the next day or whatever,
Speaker 3: the hunter right couple comes with their hat. Then they
Speaker 3: you know, look at the hatter's a slip there for
Speaker 3: this other fancy hat, and the the right couple says,
Speaker 3: this guy was asking about going to Regina. And so
Speaker 3: before you know it, in Regina Monday morning, Earl Nelson
Speaker 3: buys a newspaper and he sees a full description in
Speaker 3: Regina of what he's wearing and that he's committed two
Speaker 3: orders and it's full, you know, the description of his
Speaker 3: of him, and he says, Holy Dina, I guess I
Speaker 3: better get out of here. And he goes in the
Speaker 3: morning and he goes and sells Missus Patterson's wedding ring
Speaker 3: for three point fifty and then he goes and exchanges
Speaker 3: his clothes. He goes and buys blue bib overwalls in
Speaker 3: a kaki shirt and working clothes, and he leaves all
Speaker 3: his fancy clothes that he bought and with a pen
Speaker 3: in his apartment and he leaves. He just sticks off.
Speaker 3: He's picked up by several drivers in Saskatchewan and then
Speaker 3: ultimately he's picked up by a junk dealer and he
Speaker 3: spends the next two days trap pacing through the country
Speaker 3: picking up lead and stuff at farmers' houses for the
Speaker 3: junk eater. And he stays overnight in Marcola, Saskatchewan one night,
Speaker 3: and he stays in Dela Raine in Manitoba another right,
Speaker 3: so instead of heading straight south for the borrier to escape,
Speaker 3: he's on the prairie going back kind of in Winnipeg direction.
Speaker 3: And then he leaves the junk dealer on a Wednesday
Speaker 3: morning and he makes his way to the border. He's
Speaker 3: walking and there's a lot of story here that I'm
Speaker 3: not going to be able to cover, but he's ultimately
Speaker 3: arrested about three miles from the American barrier. The reason
Speaker 3: he's arrested again is because of the fact that he's
Speaker 3: on a prairie. The police have issued lots of bulletins
Speaker 3: and mister Morgan and the little town of Walkupol a
Speaker 3: merchant sold the guy, you know, some cheese and cigarettes
Speaker 3: and right away recognized him as the guy who is
Speaker 3: the wanted man, and a bunch of the people in
Speaker 3: that town followed him until the provincial police could come
Speaker 3: But then things get even more dramatic because he's taken
Speaker 3: to Killarney, which is the hometown of the provincial police
Speaker 3: in that area, and he's locked in jail with a
Speaker 3: double lock. And before you know it, five minutes later
Speaker 3: when they leave the guy, he has escaped from jail.
Speaker 3: He's picked both the locks and he's out of leaving
Speaker 3: the town. And so you can imagine the trauma of
Speaker 3: that town overnight. It's an escaped serial killer, probably the
Speaker 3: worst criminal in North America that stage loose in the town.
Speaker 3: Hundreds of people looked for him. The town was geared
Speaker 3: to action. And then I talk about how you know
Speaker 3: the next morning he comes up to a man and
Speaker 3: asks for the making of a cigarette, and he's a
Speaker 3: dressed suspiciously and the man thinks he's the guy and
Speaker 3: he fallows in. To make a long story short, in Winnipeg,
Speaker 3: when they found out that he escaped from jail, the
Speaker 3: roads are impassable and the police chartered a special train
Speaker 3: to go to Chloriny bloodhounds and officers to find a guy.
Speaker 3: He was actually arrested by the provincial police before that
Speaker 3: train ever arrived. But there's a lot of mythology about
Speaker 3: how he hid under the train station and then he
Speaker 3: ran to the train to escape, only to find the
Speaker 3: train was there for him. So that's how he was
Speaker 3: arrested and brought back to Winnipeg.
Speaker 2: That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: So now he's arrested, You right at some point in
Speaker 2: this book too, that he's arrested in Winnipeg and the
Speaker 2: trial is rushed. He has a appointed lawyer eventually or
Speaker 2: soon enough, and that person postpones the trial till for
Speaker 2: a couple months to prepare. Why you explained that there
Speaker 2: was little interest in this story even though there was
Speaker 2: this huge manhunt in America. And why the American press
Speaker 2: lost interest in this story, It's.
Speaker 3: Curious to me. I mean, here you've got an American
Speaker 3: citizen who is alleged to have killed you know, lots
Speaker 3: of people in the States. If the trial had been
Speaker 3: held in America, I think it would have been country
Speaker 3: to country coverage of something like this. But because it
Speaker 3: was Canada, for some reason, the story just didn't matter.
Speaker 3: You know. I say that here in Winnipeg, in Manitoba,
Speaker 3: it was a sensation. I mean, they had him put
Speaker 3: into the death cell. Before the trial they had him.
Speaker 3: The official legal officials were searching for the way that
Speaker 3: they would hang him even before he was ever found guilty.
Speaker 3: They had some idea that the reward could be paid
Speaker 3: before he was even tried, And of course the newspapers
Speaker 3: were just absolutely chock full that this was the American strangler.
Speaker 3: Every time there was some kind of an identification made
Speaker 3: in the States, they'd say yeah, and then you know,
Speaker 3: they'd have stories about how he killed twenty women in
Speaker 3: the States, you know, the conventional list, And so he
Speaker 3: had all kinds of pre trial publicity. And while the
Speaker 3: trial itself was relatively fair in the sense that it
Speaker 3: was postpone to a later date, you could at least say,
Speaker 3: look at the evidence, and even if there is the
Speaker 3: jury's even contaminated by all of this, there's still all
Speaker 3: of this evidence of clothing, money, scratches on the head,
Speaker 3: people who identify him and had periods of time to
Speaker 3: so he's put into the story, and the circumstances all
Speaker 3: pretty strongly indicate that he in fact is the guy
Speaker 3: who killed Missus Patterson. But when you know, even when
Speaker 3: he was hanged in Manitoba and January thirteenth. Most of
Speaker 3: the American jurisdictions didn't even talk about this guy being
Speaker 3: hanged because it was the big story. There was jud
Speaker 3: Gray right, the sort of double indemnity murder because they
Speaker 3: were put in the electric chair the same day January
Speaker 3: thirteenth that this guy was hong Here in Winnipeg.
Speaker 2: You write about a very interesting man who had some
Speaker 2: questions for Earl Nelson just before his execution, and he
Speaker 2: went to the jail to get those answers. Potentially twice
Speaker 2: tell us who this was. It's a very dramatic, I think,
Speaker 2: scene in this book with this person wanting answers to
Speaker 2: his questions.
Speaker 3: Back in April, one of the murders in the East
Speaker 3: Coast was in Philadelphia and Missus McConnell was strangled in
Speaker 3: her upstairs bedroom. She had her house for sale and
Speaker 3: her daughter and steps her daughter and son in law
Speaker 3: came home and couldn't find her, and after searching the house,
Speaker 3: they found her. On a believer it was under the bed,
Speaker 3: strangled and he was a coffee salesman. He wasn't home
Speaker 3: at the time. But that was pretty much right away
Speaker 3: attributed to the Gorilla man because of the modus operandi.
Speaker 3: But when Earl Nelson was in jail along death row,
Speaker 3: mister McConnell was given permission by the police to go
Speaker 3: into the cell with Earl Nelson and actually talk to him,
Speaker 3: which is kind of unusual because a lot of the
Speaker 3: American detectives weren't allowed to go in, certainly not till
Speaker 3: after the trial. And Earl Nelson would simply deny everything anyway,
Speaker 3: and of course the same with mister McConnell. Earl Nelson
Speaker 3: denied that he had ever been to Philadelphia, and of
Speaker 3: course we have proof that he was in Philadelphia. He
Speaker 3: sent coastal cards to his cousin Evan from various places
Speaker 3: in the East Coast, including Philadelphia. So he was lying
Speaker 3: through his teeth saying, oh, I've got nothing to do
Speaker 3: with this. Of course, mister McConnell didn't believe it. And
Speaker 3: then mister McCall came back the day before the hanging
Speaker 3: and actually talked to him again. And mister McConnell pulled
Speaker 3: out a watch because at the original murder scene, again
Speaker 3: jewelry was stolen. That watch was very distinctive with the
Speaker 3: initials of his daughter in the back of it was
Speaker 3: taken to a pawn shop in New York, and the
Speaker 3: pawn shop owner had been given a picture of Earl Nelson,
Speaker 3: had had an id to Earl Nelson as the guy
Speaker 3: who had in fact upon that watch. And when he
Speaker 3: pulled out the watch, Earl Nelson denied that he had
Speaker 3: anything to do with the watch. He'd never seen it before.
Speaker 3: And of course when he pulled out the postal codes,
Speaker 3: you know that he had postal writing that he had
Speaker 3: written from Philadelphia, he denied that it was his handwriting.
Speaker 3: I can tell you I've looked at the handwriting of
Speaker 3: Earl Nelson. It's very distinctive, big loopy handwriting. There's no question.
Speaker 3: I find it very very doubtful that you could ever
Speaker 3: deny the handwriting of biscuit. And so anyway, he attempted
Speaker 3: to get a confession out of Earl Nelson. Ron Nelson
Speaker 3: never confessed. Typical psychopathic, you know whatever. You always blame
Speaker 3: everybody house, and you were reframed, and you were at
Speaker 3: dizzy spells or you were you know whatever, never took responsibility.
Speaker 3: He went to his hanging as an innocent man, acting
Speaker 3: like a martyr.
Speaker 2: Yes, I want to thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: on and talking about your extraordinary book, thirty one Murders
Speaker 2: Following the Trail of serial Killer Earl Nelson. For those
Speaker 2: people that might want to find out more about this
Speaker 2: book and your previous book about the Gorilla Man Strangler,
Speaker 2: can you tell us about your website and if you
Speaker 2: do any social media.
Speaker 3: Yes, my website is simple. It's Alvin Esau ALVII n ESA.
Speaker 3: There's no gap between the first and last name dot com,
Speaker 3: and information about my books would be on there, including
Speaker 3: about ten murders that were suspicious that were sometimes attributed
Speaker 3: to him that I haven't included in my book. Further
Speaker 3: ten murders, many of which I've concluded weren't done by him,
Speaker 3: but some of them are suspicious, and they're also on
Speaker 3: the web page. They're under the tab murders. I do
Speaker 3: have a Facebook page, Alvin Esau, but I don't do
Speaker 3: any other social media at this stage. So thanks for
Speaker 3: having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Alvin Ajau thirty one Murders Following
Speaker 2: the Trail of serial Killer Earl Nelson. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for this interview, and you have a great evening
Speaker 2: and good night, good day, night,