Bestial (33 page)

Whatever the reason—suicidal feelings, hubris, or delusional thinking—Earle Leonard Nelson had left clues in his wake from the moment he arrived in Winnipeg on Wednesday, June 8. And by the following Tuesday, the police had finally picked up his trail.

They had located John Hofer, the man who had struck up an acquaintance with Nelson on the streetcar from Winnipeg. Hofer turned over the beige cap he had gotten from the garrulous stranger—the one Nelson had purchased at Waldman’s and wore until he traded it for the champagne-colored fedora from Chevrier’s. The cap was still redolent of the pomade that Nick Tabor had massaged into Nelson’s hair.

Not long after locating Hofer, detectives tracked down Hugh Elder, the motorist who had picked up Nelson in Headingly and driven him as far as Portage La Prairie. The testimony of the two men, Hofer and Elder, made it clear that the suspect had been headed due west. Knowing the “Gorilla’s” m.o.—his preference for cities, where he could blend with the populace (and find an ample supply of landladies), police deduced that he must have been making for Regina.

The Regina police were alerted at once. Chief Constable Martin Bruton immediately assigned his entire force to the manhunt. At the same time, three carloads of Winnipeg detectives were dispatched to the Saskatchewan capital. One of the cars carried the barber, Nick Tabor, who had volunteered to travel to Regina to identify the suspect, should the “Gorilla” be apprehended in that city.

By Monday evening, the Regina police, canvassing every boardinghouse in the city, had located Mary Rowe. The landlady provided a detailed description of the lodger, “Harry Harcourt,” who had vanished that morning. Inside his room investigators found the clothing he had left behind. Even at a glance, they could see that the garments—pale gray topcoat, gray suit jacket, gray-and-white silk scarf, striped necktie—precisely matched the ones described in the reward bulletin. They also discovered why “Harcourt” had left in such a hurry. Lying on his bed was a copy of that morning’s
Regina Leader
, its front page plastered with accounts of the “Gorilla Man.”

It didn’t take long for the Regina police to turn up a string of other witnesses: Fred England, the jeweler who had paid $3.50 for Emily Patterson’s wedding band; Harry Pages, proprietor of The Royal Secondhand Store, who had traded Nelson a black cap and four bits for the champagne-colored fedora; the owner of the thrift shop where Nelson had acquired the khaki shut and bib overalls.

It quickly became clear that the suspect had hightailed it from Regina. Surmising that he had continued his flight westward, Chief Bruton ordered a carload of his men to the nearest city which lay in that direction, Moose Jaw, about forty miles away.

Meanwhile, new circulars—containing updated information
about the “Gorilla Man’s” change of clothing—were printed up and dispatched to police throughout western Canada, as well as to departments in North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. Customs officials on both sides of the border were asked to assist in the hunt, as were members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The U.S. Border Patrol was put on alert, and agents of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways were urged to keep on the lookout for the suspect.

An army of constables, carrying revolvers and sawed-off shotguns, scoured western Canada from Winnipeg to Calgary. Southern Manitoba in particular was, as one newspaper put it, “practically under police occupation, with every acre being raked for the killer.” Squad cars patrolled the roadways, while ordinary citizens equipped themselves with every weapon at hand—ax-handles, hunting rifles, hatchets, and sheath knives—and banded together in roaming vigilance committees.

Throughout Tuesday, police announcers regularly interrupted the normal radio programming to broadcast the latest description of the suspect, “last seen wearing blue bib overalls sewn with white stitching, a khaki shut, brown boots with bull-dog toes, and an old black cloth cap.” Drivers were warned “to refuse rides to anyone who may resemble the strangler and notify police at once if asked for a lift.”

These bulletins brought dramatic results. On Tuesday evening, a call came in to the Winnipeg Central Police Station from William Davidson, the salesman who had given Nelson a lift from Regina to Davin on Monday morning. From Davidson’s account, it seemed clear that the “Gorilla” wasn’t making his way to Moose Jaw after all but was headed the opposite way, in a southeasterly direction.

Chief Constable Christopher Newton quickly convened a late-night meeting at Winnipeg headquarters. After conferring with his subordinates—Chief of Detectives George Smith and Assistant Chief Constable Philip Stark—Newton decided to dispatch several carloads of reinforcements to Saskatchewan. Shortly after midnight, a convoy carrying Inspector William Smith of the Manitoba Provincial Police, two city detectives, three provincial officers, and six men
from the Morality Department headed out of the city and sped towards Arcola.

On Wednesday morning, the
Winnipeg Tribune
—which only twenty-four hours earlier had published such discouraging news about the investigation—ran a headline whose tone was positively triumphant:
POLICE CLOSING IN ON SLAYER
, the paper trumpeted.
PURSUERS DRAWING NARROWING CIRCLE AROUND MAD KILLER. POLICE OFFICIALS SAY HE CANNOT ESCAPE
.

The story quoted Chief Detective George Smith, who expressed his belief that the “Gorilla” might attempt to “break back toward Winnipeg, where a thickly settled territory would offer him more hiding place than the prairie country to the west.

“If he tries this tactic, he will run dead into our hands,” Smith assured the reporters. “We have taken every possible precaution to head him off.”

Here, Smith—who had sounded so grim at his previous press conference on Monday—allowed himself a little smile. “The Gorilla’s career of strangling is about to end suddenly,” he declared. “He has blundered along a road that will take him to the gallows.”

†

Hon. W. J. Major, attorney general of Manitoba

My opinion is that Armstrong was anxious to secure the reward for himself.

A
few hours after Smith’s press conference†at around 11:30
A.M.
, Wednesday, June 15†a man named Roy Armstrong was driving to his farm a few miles southeast of Boissevain when he spotted a thickset stranger hiking along the roadside. Pulling up beside him, Armstrong offered him a lift.

“Where you headed?” asked Armstrong as the man settled into the passenger seat.

There was a momentary pause before the stranger answered, “Sparting.”

Armstrong’s brow furrowed. “Sparting? Never heard of it.”

The stranger said nothing.

“Who’re you working for?” From the man’s dress—khaki workshirt, bib overalls, and wide-brimmed straw hat—Armstrong assumed he was a farmhand.

“Nobody,” the stranger replied. “Me and a pal own a ranch down there.”

“Ranch? What kind of ranch?”

The stranger shrugged. “Just a ranch.”

Armstrong was struck by his choice of words. It was more characteristic of the western United States than of Manitoba, where people spoke of farms, not ranches.

The drive didn’t last long. When Armstrong reached his front gate just a few miles away, the stranger thanked him, climbed out of the car, and headed eastward along the unpaved country road.

By then, Armstrong’s suspicions were fully aroused. Like virtually everyone else in southern Manitoba, he was on the lookout for the “Gorilla,” having been alerted by the police bulletins coming over the radio every few hours. Putting his foot to the accelerator, he sped to his farmhouse, brought his car to a stop, and dashed inside to the telephone.

A few calls to his neighbors would have alerted the entire community and brought dozens of armed men converging on the suspect. But Armstrong knew about the $1,500 reward. The way he figured it, the fewer people involved in the “Gorilla Man’s” arrest, the better.

Still, he wasn’t about to try capturing America’s most dangerous killer all by himself. So Armstrong placed a single call—to Constable Joe Young at the Boissevain police house. Young, whose automobile was out of commission, told Armstrong to pick him up immediately. Leaping back into his Ford, Armstrong made it to town in record time. Then, with Young seated beside him, he turned his car around and roared back in the direction of his farm.

Since the suspect was travelling on foot, the two men felt confident that they could overtake him without any difficulty. Allowing for the tune it had taken Armstrong to drive to Boissevain and back, they calculated on finding their man about a mile or so east of Armstrong’s front gate. When they arrived at the spot, however, the thickset stranger was nowhere in sight.

A big grain elevator stood just off the road. Armstrong stopped his car, and he and Young got out to make a thorough search of the area. After satisfying themselves that the stranger was not hiding in the vicinity of the elevator, they got back into the Ford and proceeded to a nearby schoolhouse, where they asked the teachers and pupils if anyone had seen a man answering to the stranger’s description. No one had.

Their next stop was the farmhouse of a man named Reg Noble. Neither Noble nor his housekeeper had seen the stranger that morning. Just north of Noble’s house stood a
thick grove of trees, a perfect hiding place for the fugitive. Armstrong and Young spent almost an hour prowling through the grove. But they turned up no trace of the stranger.

Still unwilling to summon reinforcements, the two men continued their search of the district. They questioned everyone they encountered—farmers, housewives, travellers, a group of Bible students out for a midday jaunt.

But none of them had set eyes on the thickset stranger.

Even as Armstrong and Young were scouring the countryside to the south, the “Gorilla’s” two most recent victims, Emily Patterson and Lola Cowan, were being laid to rest in Winnipeg.

An enormous crowd—more than a thousand people, according to one estimate—packed Old St. Andrew’s Church on Elgin Avenue for Mrs. Patterson’s funeral service. Her simple gray casket—topped by a single spray of red and white flowers, a farewell token from her stricken husband—rested at the front of the church. It was surrounded by scores of floral tributes from the many citizens who had been stirred to their depths by the tragedy, her “sacrificial death at the hands of the most horrible murderer of modern times” (in the words of the
Manitoba Free Press
).

The service was conducted by Rev. J. S. Miller, pastor of the church. He was assisted by Rev. W. L. Reese of the Church of Christ’s Disciples, who offered the opening prayer. Following the reading of Scripture, the choir sang an anthem, “The Souls of the Righteous in the Land of God.” Then the Reverend Miller spoke.

Taking as his text the second verse from the fifteenth chapter of Jeremiah—“Her sun is gone down while it is yet day”—he referred to the “suddenness with which the dead has been snatched from the midst of her loved ones,” and how the “horror of the deed has exposed the awful depths to which a human being may sink when his life is lived in disregard of God and his fellow man.

“Her passing has stirred the city as it has never before been stirred,” the Reverend continued. “You have been drawn here because you feel in your hearts that had chance
brought you or yours face to face with the miscreant, you or they would be in her place.”

Following the sermon, Miss Agnes McCullough sang “Shadows,” an old hymn that had been a favorite of Mrs. Patterson’s. Other hymns, sung by the entire congregation, included “God Moves in Mysterious Ways,” “Lead Kindly Light,” and “Forever with the Lord.”

When the service was over, the coffin was borne to Elmwood Cemetery, while thousands of spectators lined the route, watching in silence as the motorized cortege made its solemn way along the streets.

At the same time, a simple service was taking place for fourteen-year-old Lola Cowan in the little chapel of Thompson’s funeral home on Broadway. Only relatives and immediate friends had been invited, including a dozen or so of Lola’s schoolmates who huddled on the benches, weeping unrestrainedly. Outside the funeral home, at least 400 people milled about on the curbstones, waiting to pay their respects.

The Rev. G. A. Woodside, minister to St. Stephen’s congregation, officiated, taking for his text the Twenty-third Psalm. Following the service, the people that had gathered on Broadway were permitted inside. Forming a somber line that snaked around the block, they filed into the chapel and, heads bowed, moved silently past the flower-heaped bier. It took more than an hour for the entire crowd to view the teenage victim in her open coffin.

Afterwards, the casket was driven to the Elmwood Cemetery, where a brief service was held at the gravesite. Once again the Reverend Woodside spoke. Like Chief Detective Smith, he expressed absolute confidence that the “Gorilla” would be brought to justice. The reverend’s remarks made it clear, however, that his faith was entirely in the Lord, not in the local constabulary.

“I know what is in the minds of those present,” he proclaimed. “They have a thousand questions. I am not going to say what is going to be the outcome of the one who brings tragedy to a home. I am satisfied that God will deal with that person. No one shall escape His eye. They may flee successfully from the law. But they cannot evade the reckoning day.”

* * *

Lola Cowan’s body had just been interred when Roy Armstrong and Joe Young finally picked up the suspect’s trail.

After refueling the Ford in Boissevain, they came upon a farmer named Pettypiece, who had seen the stranger walking eastward at around 1:30
P.M
. Another farmer named Hawkings was driving his team home at around 2:30 P.M. when he was approached by a dark-skinned man in bib overalls and a straw hat who asked to borrow some matches. According to Hawkings—who couldn’t oblige, since he wasn’t a smoker—the man had immediately headed off eastward. Hawkings had watched until the stranger disappeared around a hill.