Bestial (15 page)

This disclosure certainly seemed to bolster the case against Cameron. But even as Mrs. Kenney was making her way to Santa Barbara to view the suspect, another key witness, Merton Newman, was casting doubt on his guilt. After studying Cameron’s mug shots, which had finally arrived from San Bernardino, Newman met with reporters and declared absolutely that the suspect was
not
the Dark Strangler. “This is nothing like the man. The man I saw was very short, heavy, and erect, with somewhat foreign-looking features. This man is just the opposite of that type.”

Cameron himself added to the confusion by repudiating the confessions he had been making for the past several days. After being formally charged on Thursday afternoon with the murder of Ollie Russell, he spoke to reporters and insisted that he was not guilty of any crime. “They told me to say those things,” he growled before being led back to
his cell. Though D.A. Ward scoffed at this accusation, other officials remained openly doubtful of Cameron’s guilt. The biggest problem, the papers reported, was the “condition of the prisoner’s mind. He will start a recital of his travels and crimes and then switch to unimportant topics. His conversation is ragged and his statements are hazy at times. He apparently is incapable of consecutive thought or narration. The police do not believe that this mental deficiency is assumed.”

Over the next few days, the police continued to pour all their efforts into the investigation of Cameron’s maddeningly indefinite story, attempting to establish its validity once and for all.

And then, on the afternoon of Monday, August 16, while the suspect remained locked up in the Santa Barbara city jail, the matter was settled with one sudden, brutal stroke.

†

Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self, drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.

S
tephen and Mary Nisbet, both in their early fifties, owned a small apartment building at 525 Twenty-seventh Street in Oakland. At around 4:50
P.M.
on August 16, Mr. Nisbet, who also held a job as a school custodian, arrived home from work. Entering his second-floor flat, he called out to his wife but received no response. Inside the kitchen, he found the ingredients for a stew—sliced carrots, chopped onions, quartered potatoes—heaped on a cutting board, as though his wife had been interrupted in the midst of her dinner preparations. He assumed that she had stepped out on a sudden, unexpected errand—perhaps to borrow a needed ingredient from a neighbor—and would return momentarily.

Placing his jacket and hat on the hallway coattree, he spent a few minutes puttering around the apartment. In the bedroom, he found his wife’s purse sitting on her bureau. Obviously she couldn’t have gone far. Carrying his newspaper into the living room, he settled down in his easy chair
and began to read. The big story of the day was the condition of movie idol Rudolph Valentino, who had been stricken with appendicitis on Saturday afternoon and was in acute danger from spreading peritonitis.

When Nisbet looked up from his paper, it was nearing six and his wife still hadn’t returned. Where in the world could she have gone? As far as he knew, there was only one errand she had intended to accomplish that day—to travel downtown to the offices of the
Oakland Tribune
and take out a classified, advertising the vacant flat on the first floor of their building. But she had planned to do that before noon.

He decided to check with the neighbors, but no one had seen Mary Nisbet all afternoon. Margaret Bull—one of the second-floor tenants, who was entertaining a pair of friends when Stephen Nisbet came to her door—suggested that he walk to the corner grocery. Perhaps his wife had needed to make a last-minute purchase.

After taking a peek inside the vacant first-floor flat to make sure that his wife wasn’t inside, Nisbet hurried to the grocery. But the proprietor, who was just closing up his store, hadn’t seen Mrs. Nisbet all day.

Returning to his apartment, Nisbet sat at the kitchen table and, forcing himself to stay calm, tried to run through all the possibilities. But as 7:30
P.M.
came and went, he couldn’t sit still any longer.

Fifteen minutes later, he was at the police station. His wife, he reported to the desk sergeant, was missing. The officer listened sympathetically, then tried to allay Nisbet’s fears. It was not quite 8:00
P.M.
, just three hours since Nisbet had arrived home to find the apartment empty. Though Mrs. Nisbet’s absence was puzzling, particularly since she had gone off without her purse, it was too soon for alarm. The sergeant advised Mr. Nisbet to return to the apartment and wait another hour. If his wife wasn’t back by then, the police would look into the matter.

Back at his building, Nisbet decided to take another look inside the one place he hadn’t searched thoroughly, the vacant ground-floor apartment. Opening the unlocked door, he moved quickly through the living room, bedroom, and kitchen, turning on lights as he went. But the flat seemed completely vacant. The only place left to check was the bathroom,
though what his wife would be doing in there he couldn’t imagine. Still …

Crossing to the end of the hallway, he swung open the bathroom door and switched on the light.

Upstairs, Margaret Bull and her two male visitors, Joseph Hill and Rawley DeBaw, were startled by a fearful scream from below. They were just heading to the door to investigate when Stephen Nisbet, ashen-faced and hysterical, came bursting into the flat, crying wildly for help.

When a wife is murdered, suspicion immediately alights on the husband, and so it was in the case of Stephen Nisbet. Still, he seemed like a most unlikely suspect. Everyone who knew the Nisbets—friends and family members, neighbors and tenants—attested to their deep devotion for each other. They were, according to all accounts, a “perfect couple” who basked in each other’s company and had never been known to quarrel. And, indeed, the double portrait that ran in Wednesday’s paper seemed to offer vivid proof of their closeness. The juxtaposed photographs showed a handsome, middle-aged pair whose faces, through years of loving intimacy, had grown so alike that they might have belonged to siblings.

That Nisbet truly loved his wife seemed confirmed by his reaction to her death. His grief was so violent that he appeared to be on the brink of a nervous collapse. Fearing that he might do physical harm to himself, the police kept him under close surveillance in the hours following his awful discovery.

Of course, even a man less attached to his wife might have been thrown into shock by the horror of what he had seen. Of the five landlady-killings committed to that date, the murder of Mary Nisbet was, in many respects, the most brutal. Her husband had found her sprawled facedown on the tiled floor of the bathroom. She had been garrotted with a kitchen towel, knotted around her throat and pulled with such savage force that the fabric had frayed. The ferocity of the attack had puckered her neck as though it were a tightly squeezed pastry tube. Her blackened face had been slammed against the tiles as the killer knelt on her back. Fragments of her shattered front teeth lay in a bloody pool that seeped
from her mouth. Her hair was wildly dishevelled, her clothing badly torn, her lower body naked and bruised.

Though Nisbet was held in custody for almost forty-eight hours while police checked his alibi, there seemed little doubt that the killing was the work of the “Dark Strangler,” a supposition that was confirmed when the autopsy revealed evidence of postmortem rape. The press, however, didn’t bother to wait for this finding. On Wednesday morning, hours before the autopsy, the
San Francisco Chronicle
had already run the dual portrait of the Nisbets under a headline that declared:
STRANGLER BRINGS SORROW WHERE HAPPINESS REIGNED
.

Throughout the Bay Area, the news that the “Dark Strangler” had struck once again overshadowed every other story, even the medical status of Rudolph Valentine (who would finally succumb on August 23, setting off a nationwide frenzy among his female devotees that seemed like a large-scale magnification of Stephen Nisbet’s suicidal grief). Under the supervision of Chief Drew, Oakland police launched a massive search, focussing on proprietors of boardinghouses and apartment buildings to see if anyone had been approached by a dark, suspicious stranger inquiring after a room.

Their investigation turned up two witnesses who appeared to have set eyes on the suspect. One of these was David Atwood, postman for the Nisbets’ neighborhood, who told police that he had seen a strange man loitering outside the Nisbets’ apartment building at around 2:00
P.M.
on the day of the murder. Atwood described the man as about forty years old, five feet six inches tall, wearing a dark gray suit and a dark fedora hat. Unfortunately, Atwood hadn’t gotten a very good look at the man’s face, though he had been struck by one, peculiar feature—the stranger’s unsettling half-smile.

The same “smiling stranger”—as the tabloids immediately tagged him—had been seen by Miss Charlotte Jaffey, one of the Nisbets’ tenants, when she left her apartment to do some shopping at around 2:20
P.M.
on Monday. The man, who was standing on the front steps of the building when Miss Jaffey emerged, had muttered something inaudible to her as she passed. Glancing over at him, she had been so
unnerved by his weird little smile that she had quickly looked away and hurried down the street.

While a team of detectives tried to track down the “smiling stranger,” others pursued the physical leads. At first, the towel seemed like a promising clue. Presuming that it belonged to the killer, investigators believed that they might be able to trace it by its laundry marks. But that hope was dashed when Stephen Nisbet identified the murder weapon as a towel from his own kitchen. Nisbet’s information raised a whole new set of questions. Why had his wife been carrying the towel while showing the stranger the vacant flat? Wouldn’t she have left it in the kitchen when she went downstairs to answer the door? And if she
hadn’t
been carrying it, then how did the strangler get hold of it?

In the meantime—though Mary Nisbet’s murder seemed to prove that he’d been lying all along—the self-confessed strangler, Paul Cameron, continued to languish in jail. His claims, already highly suspect, were further eroded when investigators determined that on June 24, the day Mrs. Ollie Russell was strangled in Santa Barbara, Cameron had been in Los Angeles, living and working at Salvation Army headquarters. Nevertheless, having declared so unequivocally that Cameron was guilty, District Attorney Clarence Ward appeared loathe to let him go.

And then, on Thursday, August 19, just three days after Mary Nisbet’s murder, another landlady was strangled.

This time, the killing took place in Stockton. The victim was Isabel Gallegos, a seventy-six-year-old widow who rented rooms in her weatherbeaten home on Channel Street, not far from the railroad tracks. She was found by a former tenant named C. C. Parlett, who had dropped by the house to pick up his mail.

As soon as Parlett stepped inside, he saw that something was wrong. The place had been turned upside down—closets ransacked, bureaus emptied, clothes and household objects scattered all over the floors. He found Mrs. Gallegos crumpled in the bedroom, face blue, eyes bulging, a cotton pillowcase twisted tightly around her neck.

The immediate assumption—shared by the police, press, and public alike—was that the murder was the work of the “Dark Strangler,” who had been lured by the “Room to
Let” sign in the victim’s parlor window. That same afternoon, a Stockton landlady named Sadie Powers reported another attack to the police. According to Mrs. Powers, who managed an apartment building at 100 Union Street, a “dark-complexioned” stranger with “bushy eyebrows” had come to the front door, inquiring about the vacancy sign posted on the front of the building. As soon as they were alone in the flat, the man had grabbed her by the arms, then attempted to wrap his hands around her throat. Mrs. Powers, however, put up such fierce resistance that the assailant—whom she described as approximately twenty-five years old, five feet seven inches tall, and weighing 150 pounds—fled.

Even as police followed up on this lead, however, they were beginning to wonder whether Isabel Gallegos had, in fact, been the victim of the strangler, since the state of the crime scene suggested robbery, not rape-murder, as the main motivation. Mrs. Gallegos’ daughter, Mrs. Jack Meaney of Petaluma, reinforced this theory when she revealed that her mother had a local (and totally erroneous) reputation as a woman of wealth, the type of eccentric old lady who stuffs wads of cash inside her mattress. When the autopsy revealed that Mrs. Gallegos had not, in fact, been subjected to a sexual assault, Police Chief C. W. Potter and other members of the Stockton force were even less inclined to attribute her death to the strangler.

Once again, the investigation had hit a dead end. However, on Saturday, August 21, another suspect was identified. John Slivkoff was a Russian immigrant whose squat build, swarthy complexion, and sullen looks matched the widely broadcast descriptions of the strangler. A police detective named John Greenhall had spotted Slivkoff loitering on a Sacramento street corner and, noting his resemblance to the mystery killer, had picked him up for vagrancy.

Greenhall’s suspicions seemed confirmed when—after seeing Slivkoff’s photograph in the newpapers—two landladies, one in Sacramento, the other in San Francisco, came forward to recount frightening encounters with the suspect. According to Mrs. Mary Kent, Slivkoff had showed up at her rooming house the previous year and, after ascertaining that the sixty-year-old woman was all alone, had “attempted to embrace her.” When she fought off his efforts, he threatened
her with violence. “Do you know how easily I could choke you to death?” he had growled. The quick-thinking landlady had scared Slivkoff away by persuading him that there were workmen right outside the house.