Bestial (28 page)

Arriving home at around 5:20
P.M.
from her after-school ball game, Lola settled down to her homework. At around 6:15 she changed into a blue, pleated skirt and peach-colored sweater-coat. Then, placing several bunches of the paper flowers in a tin lunch box, she headed out onto the streets.

Two people would later recall seeing her that evening. At around 6:30, she appeared at the front door of a woman named Regina Bannerman, who, after explaining that she had no money to spend on paper flowers, returned to her supper.

Approximately one hour later, a man named William Arthur Fillingham was seated in his drawing room, composing a letter, when someone knocked at his door. The caller turned out to be a pretty young woman, who held out a tin box full of paper flowers and offered them at twenty-five cents a bunch. Fillingham spoke to her for a while, asking her name, her age, her family circumstances. Then, after declining to make a purchase, he advised her to return home.

Precisely when and where Lola Cowan encountered Earle Leonard Nelson will never be known. Possibly, she was waiting at the corner of Graham Avenue and Smith Street—where she sometimes met her mother after work—when her killer passed by. Nor is there any way to determine exactly
how he managed to get her alone, though the likeliest theory is that he offered to buy some of her flowers if she would accompany him back to his lodgings, where he had ostensibly left his money.

The only incontestable fact is that—sometime in the early evening of Thursday, June 9—the dark, malignant man lured the young girl to Mrs. Catherine Hill’s boardinghouse at 133 Smith Street. Then, unseen by any of the other occupants, he led her inside and hurried her upstairs to his room.

At approximately eleven that night, as he was climbing the stairs to his flat, James Phillips passed by the new lodger’s bedroom and noticed that the door was wide open. From the bulb that burned on the landing, he could see that the darkened room was empty.

When Mrs. Hill came upstairs to do her daily housekeeping the next morning, Friday, June 10, the door was still wide open. And nice Mr. Woodcoats was nowhere to be seen.

The landlady thought nothing of his absence. She assumed that he had headed out early for work. As she glanced around the room, she was impressed with his tidiness. There was really very little for her to do. He had been particularly careful in making up the bed, smoothing out the coverlet and making sure that its bottom edge reached down to the floor. She spent a few minutes dusting, left a clean towel on the dresser, and shuffled from the bedroom, closing the door on the undetected horror inside.

†

L. C. Douthwaite,
Mass Murder

The imagination of Zola himself could have conceived of no more overwhelming horror. Patterson was subjected to a trial of faith with which even that of the patriarch Abraham at Jehoval-Jireh is not analogous, for with Patterson there was no last-minute reprieve.

A
few miles away, across the Red River in Elmwood, William Haberman, an elderly widower who resided at 104 Riverton Street, was just coming home from the corner drugstore, where he’d gone to use the pay phone. As he approached his little cottage, he noticed a thickset man in a gray cap and navy-blue coat standing on the front porch of the house next door, which had recently been rented by a family named Patterson.

The Pattersons, a young husband and wife named William and Emily and their two little boys, were Irish immigrants who had moved into the neighborhood just two weeks earlier. Since their arrival, Haberman had caught only a few fleeting glimpses of the husband, who left early for his job at the T. Eaton Company and often returned after dark. And so, when the old man saw the thickset fellow fiddling with the front door of the neighboring house, he took him for Mr. Patterson.

Unlocking his own front door, Haberman entered his kitchen, filled a kettle with tap water, set it on his stovetop,
then repaired to the parlor and put one of his favorite recordings, “My Blue Heaven,” on the gramophone. As Gene Austin’s warbling voice filled the room, Haberman peered out a window at the Pattersons’front porch. The thickset young man was no longer there. Seconds later, the teakettle shrilled, and the old man headed back to the kitchen.

He spent the next forty minutes or so seated at the table, sipping tea, munching on ginger snaps, and reading that day’s edition of the
Manitoba Free Press
. So he didn’t see the Pattersons’front door swing open at around 12:30
P.M.
, nor observe the thickset young man—who was now dressed in completely different clothing—slip outside the house and hurry away down Riverton Street.

Sam Waldman was a licensed secondhand clothes dealer with a little store at 629 Main Street. At approximately 1:15
P.M.
, the bell over his shop door jangled and a short, barrel-chested man entered. Dressed in a threadbare brown suit and badly in need of a shave, the man looked so disreputable that Waldman took him for a hobo who had come to cadge a dime. So the storeowner was surprised when the stranger strode up to the counter and announced that he was there to purchase clothes.

“What do you need?” asked Waldman.

“Everything,” replied the stranger. “Top to bottom.”

Waldman gestured towards his crowded shelves. “Have a look.”

Perched on his stool, Waldman watched while the grubby young man, whose old whipcord suit looked as though it had been retrieved from a trash barrel, wandered around the store, poking through merchandise. About fifteen minutes later, the stranger approached with an armful of stuff, which he dumped on the counter.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m a little strapped at present. Give me a good price, and I’ll take the whole load off your hands.”

Waldman began going through the pile: light gray topcoat, two-piece gray suit, blue shirt, fawn-colored cardigan, gray-and-white silk scarf, beige cap, leather belt, gray gloves, grayish-brown socks, tan boots with bulging (or “bull dog”) toes, and a pair of BVDs.

“Thirty’s about as much as I can afford,” said the stranger.

Waldman gave a little shrug. “So make it thirty.”

Reaching into the pocket of his ragged brown pants, the young man pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off half of them, three crisp tens.

“Mind if I change in here?” he asked.

Waldman pointed to a spot in the rear of the store. While the young man was unbuttoning his clothing, Waldman cast a glance in his direction and noticed that his hands were shaking badly.

“You sick or something?” he asked.

“Cold. I just got in from the country.”

Waldman could believe it—the bull-necked young man might have easily been a farmhand.

After changing into his new purchases, the stranger rolled his old clothing—suit, shirt, socks, briefs, everything—into a bundle and handed it to Waldman.

“Want me to dump it out back?” asked the storeowner.

“Leave it,” said the other. “I’ll come by for it in a day or two.” Reaching up a hand, he rubbed the bristles on his jaw. “Know where I can get a shave?”

“Come,” said Waldman.

Ushering the stranger outside, the obliging clothier walked him across Main Street to a place called Central Billiards. Occupying one end of the cavernous pool hall was a row of barber chairs. Waldman introduced the stranger to one of the barbers, a man named Nick Tabor.

“Fix this fellow up good, Nick,” said Waldman. Then, while the stranger settled into the chair and Tabor whetted his blade on the leather strop, Waldman returned to his store, taking note of the time when he got back—precisely 2:05
P.M
.

Though Tabor was not a particularly voluble man, he was curious about his customer, never having set eyes on him before. For his part, the stranger seemed happy to talk. In fact, he kept up a steady stream of chatter, almost as if he were “hopped up” on something (as Tabor later reported).

He told Tabor that he was from the States, “born and bred in Frisco,” though he’d spent time “all over” the country.
He had recently made a trip to several cities in the East—Philadelphia, Buffalo, Washington, B.C. He worked as a commercial traveller, selling “small articles.”

When Tabor asked what kind of car he drove, the man said a Studebaker. “I need to travel fast,” he explained with a grin.

Daubing lather onto the man’s swarthy face, Tabor asked how he came to be in Winnipeg.

He was passing through North Dakota, the stranger replied, and, never having been in Canada before, decided to take a look. “Not much to see, though,” he added.

Tabor, a lifelong Winnipegger, bridled at the aspersion.

“There’s as much to see here as in the States,” he answered.

The dark-skinned man smirked. “Maybe.”

He remained in the barber chair for nearly an hour, getting the full treatment—shave, haircut, hot towel, facial massage. At one point, while combing back the stranger’s black, receding hair, Tabor noticed that there was blood on his forehead, right by the hairline. There seemed to be some open sores on the man’s scalp, or possibly scratches. Tabor wasn’t sure. But one thing was obvious. The blood was still fresh.

Rising from the chair at around 3:00
P.M.
, the stranger settled with Tabor, tipping the barber four bits. Then he went into the café next door for a bite.

Later that day, as he was passing the display window of a haberdashery store called Chevrier’s, his eye was caught by a champagne-colored fedora with a gaudy, detachable band. Ducking into the store, he asked the price.

“Four-fifty,” said the salesman, Thomas Carten.

He decided to splurge. Removing the cap he had just purchased at Waldman’s, he had Carten bag it up in a brown paper sack and wore his flashy new hat out of the store.

Like most of what he had told Nick Tabor, the bit about the Studebaker was a lie. At around six that evening, he boarded a trolley headed west. On the ride, he struck up a conversation with a man named John Hofer, introducing himself as “Walter Woods.” Their talk took a strange turn when he asked if Hofer was a minister.

Hofer was taken aback. “No. Why?”

“You’ve got a clean face.”

Hofer didn’t know what to say.

“Are you apostolic?” asked the stranger.

Again, Hofer was at a loss, since he didn’t know the meaning of the word. Before he could think of a reply, the man said, “You look like a religious person.”

“How can you tell?”

“I am the champion of the world at telling faces,” said the man, letting out a self-satisfied chortle.

Sometime later, he confessed that he occasionally overindulged in drink.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said Hofer.

“I know,” he sighed. Then, shaking his head sadly, he added, “Satan has too much power over educated men like me.”

Before they parted at Headingly, “Woods” handed Hofer the brown paper bag he was carrying. “You can have this if you want it.”

“What is it?” asked Hofer.

“Look and see.”

Hofer opened the bag, peered inside, then reached in and extracted the cream-colored cap.

“It’s yours if you want it,” the other man said again.

“Well, sure, if you don’t have any use for it,” said Hofer.

They parted at Headingly, where “Woods” stopped off at a soda fountain and drank a Coca-Cola. Outside again, he flagged down a car driven by a man named Hugh Elder, who offered him a lift to Portage La Prairie. Along the way, they spoke about religion.

At approximately 6:25
P.M
., around the time that “Walter Woods” was boarding the Portage Avenue trolley, William Patterson returned to his house at 100 Riverton Street in Elmwood.

The house was empty. He found his sons, James and Thomas, ages three and five, at the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Evelyn Stanger, whose own little boys were Jim and Tommy’s playmates. Mrs. Stanger had no idea where Patterson’s wife was. She hadn’t seen Emily since early that
morning, when the two women chatted briefly while walking their five-year-olds to school.

Patterson was mildly surprised but not concerned. He assumed his wife had paid a visit to a friend and gotten held up for some reason. Thanking Mrs. Stanger, he took his sons back home, fed them supper, and put them to bed.

By 10:30 that night, however, Patterson was growing frantic. His wife had never shown up. Returning to the Stangers’ house, he used their telephone to check with Emily’s friends. But no one had seen or spoken to her all day.

When he got back to his own house shortly after eleven, he felt almost sick with anxiety. Pacing the darkened hallways, he glanced into the bedroom of his sleeping boys and, by the glow of the nightlight, noticed something that had escaped his attention earlier, when he’d put his sons to bed.

In one corner of the room stood a little locked suitcase, where Patterson stashed his nest egg—sixty dollars in new ten-dollar bills. Now, he could see that the lock had been tampered with—the latch was twisted and sprung, as though it had been pried open. Hurrying across the room, he crouched by the case and lifted the lid.

His money was gone. In its place was a claw hammer.

Patterson felt dizzy with confusion. A deeply religious man, he made his way to the bed of his younger son, James, and knelt on the carpeted floor. Palms pressed together, elbows propped on the mattress, he implored God for guidance, praying (as he later testified) that the Lord “would direct him to where his wife was.”

As he started to rise, one of his knees caught the low-hanging coverlet and thrust it aside, exposing the bottom of the bed. There was something poking out from under the bed. It looked like the sleeve of his wife’s woolen sweater, the one she liked to wear around the house.

Patterson reached beneath the bed. What he felt made his throat clench with fear. Fleeing to the Stangers’ house, he managed to put in a panicked call to the police before collapsing in a faint.

†

Mrs. Catherine Hill

I drew up the blinds when I felt the smell in the room.

L
ike countless Winnipeggers, Catherine Hill reacted with both wonder and dread to the lead story in Saturday’s
Free Press
. Spread across four front-page columns, it told how twenty-seven-year-old William Patterson, seconds after entreating the Lord “to direct him to his missing wife,” had discovered her strangled and violated corpse beneath the bed of their slumbering child. The scene, evoked in all its horror and pathos, sent a shudder through Mrs. Hill. Clearly, when it came to grotesque tragedy, there was nothing in gothic fiction that could match the monstrosities of real life.