Earle Leonard Nelson was born in San Francisco on May 12, 1897. Both his parents died of syphilis before he was two, and he was raised by a grandmother of severe religious habits. At ten he was hit by a streetcar and lay unconscious for six days, and those who knew him dated the change from then. He was committed to the Napa State Hospital as a young man after an attack on a girl, escaped repeatedly, served a short naval enlistment and deserted. He read the Bible constantly and carried one.
From February 1926 he moved across the continent by rail, town to town, looking for the ROOM TO LET cards in front windows that respectable widows put out to make a living. He would present himself as a soft-spoken, well-mannered, deeply religious young man, be shown upstairs, and strangle the woman who was showing him the room, usually with his hands. He assaulted the bodies after death and pushed them under beds, behind furnaces and into cupboards, and he took a change of clothes and moved on the same day. The North American press called him the Gorilla Killer, after his hands and the manner of the killings.
The trail runs through San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Council Bluffs, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago and finally Winnipeg. At least twenty-two people died, the great majority of them landladies in their fifties and sixties, along with a baby and a fourteen-year-old girl. The American press called him the Dark Strangler, and later, on the strength of a witness's description of his hands and shoulders, the Gorilla Man.
He crossed into Manitoba in June 1927 and killed Lola Cowan, a fourteen-year-old selling artificial flowers door to door, and Emily Patterson, a housewife, within two days. He was arrested near Killarney, Manitoba, on June 16, picked out of a crowd by a storekeeper who thought he was behaving oddly. He picked the lock of his cell that night and was recaptured twelve hours later half a mile from the station.
He was tried in Winnipeg in November 1927 for Emily Patterson's murder. The defence ran insanity, calling his family history and the streetcar accident, and the jury took three quarters of an hour. He was hanged at Headingley on January 13, 1928. He was thirty.
He is a landmark case rather than only a large one: a mobile, sexually motivated killer of strangers, moving faster than the police telegraph, whose crimes were only recognised as one man's work because reporters connected them before detectives did.