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"I only do my ladykillings
on Saturday nights"
Nelson
was an odd-looking man, with the receding forehead,
protruding lips, and huge hands that led to his nickname,
'The Gorilla Murderer'. He had been born in Philadelphia in
1897, though his mother died of venereal disease contracted
from his father when Earle was less than one-year-old, and
he was fostered out to his aunt Lillian. She was a devoutly
religious woman, a trait which she instilled into her
impressionable young nephew, with whom religion would become
a Bible-thumping obsession. At the age of ten Nelson
suffered a severe head injury when he was hit by a moving
streetcar, and this trauma left him with physical and mental
problems throughout his life. In fact as early as 1918,
Nelson was admitted to a mental hospital after attempting to
rape a neighbour's daughter. He absconded several times' and
was readmitted; the following year he contracted a marriage
which was fated to last a mere six months; he was now
calling himself Roger Wilson. Between February 1926, and
June 1927, as the Gorilla Murderer, Nelson went on a rampage
which left twenty-two known victims dead, all women, all
boarding-house landladies, all raped and strangled.
The first victim was found in the attic of her rooming-house
in San Francisco on 20 February 1926; sixty-year-old Clara
Newman had been displaying a 'Rooms to Let' sign in her
downstairs window, Earle Nelson had come to inquire about
one.
Between this brutal attack and his last, in Winnipeg,
Canada, Nelson managed to evade justice by continually
moving around and changing his name.
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Earle Nelson's known victims
20 February 1926 Clara Newman 60 San Francisco
2 March 1926 Laura E. Beale 60 San Jose
10 June 1926 Lillian St Mary 63 San Francisco
24 June 1926 Anna Russell 58 Santa Barbara
16 August 1926 Mary Nesbit 52 Oakland
19 October 1926 Beatrice Withers 35 Portland
20 October 1926 Virginia Grant 59 Portland
21 October 1926 Mabel Fluke ? Portland
15 November 1926 Blanche Myers 48 Oregon City
18 November 1926 Wilhelmina Edmunds 56 San Francisco
24 November 1926 Florence Monks ? Seattle
23 December 1926 Elizabeth Beard 49 Council Bluffs
? December 1926 Bonnie Pace 23 Kansas City
28 December 1926 Germania Harpin * 28 Kansas City
27 April 1927 Mary McConnell 60 Philadelphia
30 May 1927 Jenny Randolph 35 Buffalo
1 June 1927 Minnie May 53 Detroit
Mrs Antwerp (a lodger) ? Detroit
3 June 1927 Mary Sietsema 27 Chicago
8 June 1927 Lola Cowan 14 Winnipeg
9 June 1927 Emily Paterson ? Winnipeg
* Nelson also throttled Mrs Harpin's eight-month-old baby.
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On 8 June 1927, Nelson crossed over the border into Canada
and hitch-hiked to Winnipeg, where he took a room in a
boarding-house in Smith Street. Here Nelson broke his
pattern and the landlady was unharmed; instead Nelson
murdered fourteen-year-old Lola Cowan and, as part of a
regular formula, hid her body under a bed in a spare room
where it was found four days later.
In a separate incident on the evening following Lola Cowan's
murder, William Paterson arrived home to find his wife Emily
missing, and later to discover a suitcase rifled and money
stolen from it. Fearing the worst, Paterson telephoned the
police, anxious over his wife's whereabouts, but no
accidents had been reported. A religious man, Paterson knelt
by his bed to pray for strength before retiring, and that is
when he found his wife, who had been raped and bludgeoned to
death before being pushed under her own bed.
It was calculated that Mrs Paterson had been killed at
approximately eleven o'clock that morning; shortly
afterwards, Nelson walked into a second-hand clothes shop
where he sold items stolen from the Patersons. Then he
visited a hairdresser's for a shave where the barber noticed
blood on Nelson's hair. Two days later he was heading back
to the United States, but that forty-eight hours had given
the Canadian police time enough to circulate a detailed
description of Nelson which was recognised at a post office
in Wakopa when Nelson himself walked in.
On I November 1927, Nelson was tried at Winnipeg before Mr
Justice Dysart for the murder of Emily Paterson. Nelson
pleaded insanity as a defence, in which he was greatly
supported by testimony from Aunt Lillian and his former wife
but, after a four-day trial, he was found guilty and, on 13
January 1928, hanged at Winnipeg.
Although the victims listed in this account were certainly
attributed to Earle Nelson, there is some reason to suppose
that he was also responsible for a triple murder committed
in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926. Rose Valentine, Margaret
Stanton and Laura Tidor were all landladies, all raped and
strangled, and in two cases the body had been pushed under a
bed.
This bio was taken from "The
Encyclopedia of Serial Killers," by Brian Lane and Wilfred
Gregg.
As a point of interest Earle struggled for over 11 minutes
after his hanging begun.
For a good read on Earle Nelson check out Harold Schechters,
"Bestial"
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