Bestial (36 page)

They hadn’t travelled more than a quarter-mile when Renton spotted a dark-skinned man emerging from a thicket and making for the railroad tracks. Shouting for Kevin to stop, Renton jumped from the car and sprinted toward the man.

Spotting his pursuer, the dark-skinned man quickly scaled the railway fence and leapt onto the tracks. Before he could flee, however, Renton had dashed up to the fence with his revolver drawn and ordered him to stop.

The man froze, his hands raised. Quickly, Renton climbed the fence and dropped to the ground, his gun levelled at the suspect.

“Who are you?” asked Renton.

“A farmer,” said the man.

“Where do you farm?”

The man glanced around, then pointed to a big wooden structure not far from the tracks. Renton saw immediately that the building was no barn—though he wouldn’t learn until later that it was the city slaughterhouse.

“Let’s go,” said Renton, motioning with his gun.

As Renton marched his prisoner towards the station, Alfred Wood came running up, followed by a large crowd of Killarney residents, most of them armed. “We’ve got him!” Wood shouted as the others let out a triumphant roar.

For a moment, Renton feared that there might be a lynching. Just then, however, a patrol car swept up. Bundling the prisoner on board, Renton jumped in after him. As the crowd surged towards them, the driver—a provincial constable named George Whitfield—spun the car around, sped toward the station, and drove directly up onto the platform just as the special train was coming to a stop. Flinging open the car door, Renton leapt out, dragged the prisoner after
him, and hustled him onto the coach, where the Winnipeg contingent was getting ready to disembark.

At that moment, it would have been impossible to say who was more startled: Earle Leonard Nelson, who suddenly discovered that the “freight” he’d intended to hop was packed with a large force of armed policemen; or the officers themselves, who had ridden all night from Winnipeg, only to have the fugitive delivered into their hands before they’d even stepped from the train.

†

Manitoba Free Press
, June 17, 1927

On the whole, the temper of the mob was more exultant than ugly. They were there to see a marauding jungle beast safely in the net, his claws trimmed and fangs pulled. School children wriggled ecstatically when the distant hoot of the locomotive whistle announced the approach of the train. To them it appeared to be merely another chapter in a thrilling movie serial. The adults crowded around did so from sheer curiosity, and to taste the pleasure of seeing a maniac trapped.

C
olonel Martin himself snapped a pair of handcuffs on the captive’s wrists. It took Nelson less than thirty seconds to slip out of them. “These aren’t much good,” he said with a smirk, handing the cuffs back to Martin.

The colonel wasn’t amused. He barked a command to one of his men, who immediately produced two sets of manacles. Two brawny constables shoved Nelson into a seat, while a third shackled his ankles and wrists.

As the rest of the officers looked on, Nelson struggled briefly with the restraints, then gave up with a shrug. “Much better,” he said. “It would be damn hard to get out of these.

“Not like that rinky-dink jail,” he added with a snort.

In answer to Martin’s questions, Nelson described how he had jiggled open the locks with the old nail file, then hidden from his pursuers for the rest of the night, first in the woods
behind the town hall, then in the empty barn. He leaned back in his seat as he spoke, his manner as relaxed and expansive as if he were regaling a bunch of cronies at a neighborhood saloon.

Meanwhile, a riotous mood prevailed in Killarney, undampened by the drizzling rain. Thousands of citizens poured into the streets and surrounded the station, shouting for a glimpse of the captive. “Bring him out! Bring him out!” they cried, pounding on the walls of the car and pressing their faces to the windows. Colonel Martin had the shades drawn and posted guards at every doorway. But the people continued to clamor.

Finally, Martin stepped out onto the end of the car and, after quieting the crowd, announced that he had no intention of exhibiting the suspect. “It would not be proper procedure to do so,” he declared. Thanking the citizens of Killarney for their assistance, he urged them to disperse—a request that, with only a few exceptions, was completely ignored by the crowd.

After taking on some provisions, including (as one newspaper reported) “a large box of delicious sandwiches” prepared by “the kind ladies of Killarney,” the train set off from the station at a few minutes past 10:00
A.M.

During the return trip to Winnipeg, the prisoner, who continued to give his name as “Virgil Wilson,” seemed so relaxed and unconcerned that a number of the constables wondered aloud if they had captured the right man. For the most part, he alternated between breezy conversation and periods of silent contemplation. In the latter moods, he would turn his face to the glass and stare out at the flat, flowing countryside. In the former, he would chat about his favorite Wallace Beery movies or divert his captors with a dirty joke.

Continually grubbing cigarettes from his guards, he chain-smoked all the way to Winnipeg. His powerful hands lay manacled in his lap, except when he raised them to his mouth to remove a cigarette. He was under the most intense scrutiny during the trip, not from his guards—many of whom dozed for a good part of the journey—but from a newspaper correspondent named C. B. Pyper, who had wheedled his way onto the train just before it departed.

Pyper spent the whole trip studying Nelson. His observations—headlined “A Word Sketch of the Accused”—were published in the June 17 issue of the
Winnipeg Tribune
and offered the public its first extended look at the infamous “Gorilla Man.”

Though remarkably detailed, Pyper’s portrait, like all subsequent descriptions of Nelson, was hardly objective. However bizarre his behavior, Nelson was such an ordinary-looking man that his victims had never thought twice about welcoming him into their homes. In Pyper’s article, however, he emerges as a hulking brute, an apish throwback with all the physical hallmarks of the Lombrosian “born criminal”—narrow forehead, oversized jaw, prominent teeth, powerful hands, dark skin, and thick, “negroid” lips:

He is heavily built, with broad, rounded shoulders, and an exceptionally deep chest… . His forehead is high, narrow and sloping. From the hair to the tip of the nose, the whole face slopes forward.

The lips are red and full, giving him a strong negroid appearance. His teeth are perfect, white, and regular, and strong. His tongue is always in evidence when he talks, and when he smiles, it sticks forward, thick and red, against his upper teeth.

His chin, below the protruding mouth, also juts forward. It has a shallow cleft, and slopes back to two powerful jaws, the breadth of which adds to the impression of narrowness in the forehead.

The eyes are small, slitted, just a little close together. They seem to be grey, but at times the pupils dilate. At these times, they might almost be described as black….

His throat is thick and powerful and covered to the Adam’s apple with a three-days’ growth of beard. When his head is thrown back, the great width of his throat and jaw is evident.

His hands are thick and extremely powerful, with gnarled knuckles and broad, flat fingers…. His complexion is not sallow, but a light chocolate, much like that of the ordinary sun-burned worker of foreign extraction. He is not good-looking but not immediately repulsive in appearance. It would be hard to place his nationality,
except to say that he is not pure British or Canadian stock. The thick, sensual lips give a suspicion of negro blood somewhere.

He was an interesting study on the train. He showed absolutely no concern over his position. But as you looked at him, you knew that he was speculating, with the cunning that has served him so well in the past, on his present chances of escape—or thinking of the other terrible subject with which his mind is obsessed.

Hoping for their own first-hand glimpse of the monster, thousands of people—men, women, and children—gathered along the tracks that stretched between Killarney and Winnipeg. The train bearing Nelson wouldn’t have drawn larger and more excited crowds if it had been carrying a visiting member of the British royal family.

To everyone’s disappointment, the train didn’t make any stops. Still, just seeing it was a thrill. At every platform and crossing, the crowds whistled and cheered as the train swept past—“electrified by the knowledge,” wrote Pyper, “that inside the coach, passing within a few feet, was the man who had terrified a city and a countryside for a week, and who had a score of murders on his head.”

The largest crowds congregated in Winnipeg. Hoping to avoid a mob scene, the police kept the train’s precise destination a secret, from the press and the public alike. But the ploy proved remarkably ineffective. By 3:00
P.M.
, every possible disembarkation point in the city—the Academy Road crossing, the Cement Works at Fort Whyte, the Westside platform on Portage Avenue, and the Canadian Pacific Railway station—was thronged with curiosity seekers.

As it turned out, the ones who opted for Portage Avenue made the right choice. Not that it did them much good. When the train finally arrived at around 5:30
P.M.
, the platform and surrounding streets were so densely packed with people (as many as 4,000, according to one estimate) that almost no one managed to see the main attraction, who was hustled directly from his coach into a waiting police car. A cameraman for the
Free Press
, who was positioned just a few yards from the platform, was able to photograph nothing
more than the back of the prisoner’s head as a trio of detectives maneuvered their man through the ocean of gawkers.

From the Portage Avenue crossing, the captive was driven to the Central Police Station on Rupert Street, where another horde of people had assembled. Again, all but a handful of them came away disappointed. “Fearing that some sort of demonstration might be made by the mob,” the
Free Press
reported, “officers threw open the wooden double-doors of the garage, situated at the rear of the police station. The crowd—which had waited expectantly for hours in order to get a glimpse of the much-wanted man—was nonplussed, only a dozen or so seeing the prisoner’s car turn onto Louise Street, then swing sharply into the lane behind the police station, pull straight into the garage, and come to a squealing halt.”

No sooner had it stopped than six officers sprang from the car. Before the prisoner could emerge from the car, the heavy garage doors were swung shut with a bang.

Hauling their captive from the car, the constables marched him up the stairway, through the parade room, and into the elevator that led to the cells. Before being locked up, he was fingerprinted, then handed a stubby pencil and a blank sheet of paper, and asked to print his true name. Without hesitation, he wrote, “Virgil Wilson, Vancouver,” the identity he’d been claiming since his arrest in Killarney.

Then he did something interesting. After contemplating the paper for a moment, he took his pencil and put a heavy line through the words he’d just written. Then—as if to acknowledge that he was finally, irrevocably caught and that further subterfuge was futile—he revealed, for the first time, who he really was.

“Earle Nelson,” he wrote. “Born in San Francisco, 1897.”

Less than forty-five minutes after his arrival in Winnipeg, Nelson was picked from a lineup by two witnesses: W. E. Chandler, the motorist who had given him a lift from Warren, Minnesota, to the International Boundary Line on Wednesday, June 8; and Sam Waldman, the secondhand clothes dealer who had sold him a complete outfit two days later.

Though Nelson looked considerably grubbier than he had when they’d first seen him, neither witness had any trouble identifying him. “A peculiar thing happened when I picked him out in the police station,” Chandler told reporters afterwards. “As I laid my hand on his shoulder to let the police know that he was the man, he flinched under the pressure of my touch.” Chandler also offered a vivid description of Nelson’s hitchhiking technique. As Chandler’s Ford approached, “Nelson walked towards the center of the road and raised his hand until the car slowed down, then jumped onto the running board and asked for a ride. Almost without waiting for permission, he vaulted over the side of the car onto the seat. When we got to the border, he vaulted out again, landing on the ground. He never opened the door of the car either to enter it or leave it.”

Two other witnesses were preparing to identify the prisoner: Mr. and Mrs. John Hill, the proprietors of the boardinghouse where Nelson had strangled Lola Cowan. Early Thursday evening, a reporter for the
Free Press
visited the elderly couple at their Smith Street home and interviewed them in their kitchen.

“Will I be able to identify him?” Mrs. Hill exclaimed in response to the reporter’s question. “Why it’ll be as easy as picking out that stove from the wash boiler. Me and Mr. Hill both got a good look at the brute. Those black eyes alone will give him away!”

As the old lady talked, she grew increasingly incensed—though Nelson’s failure to come through with his rent seemed to bother her more than his rape-murder of the fourteen-year-old girl.

“Imagine,” she clucked. “Taking a room for a week and never paying for it! And he has upset my home and probably injured my business. I’ve always kept a good clean home, and I always will. I’ve never kept any evil persons about. I tell them to leave the minute I get suspicious.”

“Better watch out when you go identify him,” her husband admonished as his wife continued to fume. “Keep your hands off him. Don’t try to hit him.”

“Hit him!” the old lady scoffed. “Why, I’d crucify him if I could.”

“Now, now,” said her husband, who seemed genuinely taken aback. “Don’t talk that way.”

“You’re right,” said Mrs. Hill, slightly abashed. “Tell you what I
will
do, though.”

“What’s that?”