On the morning of June 8, 1927, a family named Chandler, driving through Minnesota, picked up a well-dressed hitchhiker in a blue suit, a colorful sweater, a gray cap and tan shoes, carrying nothing, and dropped him at the Canadian border. Nobody yet knew his name. Across the United States newspapers were calling the man who had strangled some twenty women since the previous winter the Dark Strangler, and later the Gorilla Man. Within two days of reaching Winnipeg, he had killed two more.
He was born Earle Leonard Ferral in San Francisco on May 12, 1897. His mother and father both died of syphilis before he was two, and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, a devout Pentecostal. At about ten he rode his bicycle into a streetcar and lay unconscious for six days; afterward, by later accounts, he had headaches, memory loss and erratic behavior. When his grandmother died he went to live with an aunt, Lillian. In 1915 he was sent to San Quentin for two years for breaking into a cabin he said he thought was abandoned. He married Mary Martin in 1919; they separated the next year. He was committed to the state hospital at Napa and escaped. He carried a Bible and quoted it.
The killings began on February 20, 1926, in San Francisco and followed the rail lines: San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Council Bluffs, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago. He looked for the room-to-let cards in the windows of widows and landladies who made their living taking in lodgers, presented himself as a soft-spoken and religious young man, and strangled the woman when she showed him upstairs. He raped the bodies, hid them under beds, behind furnaces or in trunks, and was usually gone the same day under one alias or another, Charles Harrison, Adrian Harris, Virgil Wilson. Most of the dead were women in middle or later life. The count usually given is twenty-two, with estimates running as high as twenty-nine; a Winnipeg police history puts it at twenty-six.
In Winnipeg he took a room in a boarding house. Lola Cowan, fourteen, was selling paper flowers door to door, and on June 8 he killed her, assaulted her body and pushed it under the bed in his room, then slept the night on that bed. The next day, June 9, he killed Emily Patterson, a housewife, in her home. Her husband, coming home to find her missing, knelt beside the bed to pray for her safe return and found her body beneath it. Nelson took clothes from the house and left the city.
He was arrested on June 15 or 16, depending on the account, near Killarney in southern Manitoba, having given his name as Virgil Wilson. That night he picked the lock of his cell and escaped. He was caught again the next day, by one account as he tried to board a train. Fingerprints and other evidence then tied him to the Winnipeg killings, and American police linked him to the series in the United States.
His trial for the murder of Emily Patterson opened on November 1, 1927, in Courtroom Number One of the Manitoba Law Courts Building. His lawyers argued he was insane, calling his aunt and his former wife, but the jury convicted him. There was no appeal. He was hanged at the Vaughan Street Jail in Winnipeg on Friday, January 13, 1928, at the age of thirty.