CONTACT USEmail: paranaughtica@gmail.com Twitter: @paranaughtica Facebook: The Paranaughtica Podcast Here you have it folks, part two of our two-parter on Earle Nelson....one cold son of a bitch. There's really nothing to type out here that's of too much importance. We'll say this though, he is known to have murdered, brutalized, and raped the dead bodies of 22 female victims. Enough said. Let's get to it.Sources: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earle_Nelson 2. https://www.crimelibrary.org/serial_killers/history/earle_nelson/8.html 3. https://heathermonroe.medium.com/the-prolific-murders-of-earle-nelson-9bbaf3b79fbb 4. https://allthatsinteresting.com/earle-nelson ***If you’d like to help us out with a donation and you’re currently listening on Spotify, you can simply scroll down on our page and you’ll see a button to help us out with either a one-time donation or you can set up a monthly recurring donation. You can also go to our Facebook page where we have a link to our Ko-Fi account and Pay-Pal account if you'd like to help out the show. We would greatly appreciate it and give you a massive shoutout on the show if you'd like! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The air is unfit to breathe and our phone is unfit to be to peace Watching our TVs while some local newscasts They kill feet today, we had a stiff Homicides in 60s, they fire on crimes Our defense the way it's supposed to be We don't think the man, worse than the man It's like
everything everywhere is going crazy, crazy We don't go on anymore We see it in the house, we're exploring the world Our living is getting smaller and all we say is Please, at least leave us alone Please, please, please Please, please,
please Just leave us alone Well, I'm not clearly I want you to get mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad I want you to write I want you to write to your congressman But you don't know what I want you to write All I know is you first You've
got to get mad Mad I'm a human being God damn it My life has been
This hunter has got his gun.
He's hunting some bear, right?
So he goes to this clearing, sees the bear, points the gun, fires the shot, bear goes down.
So he runs into the clearing.
He's going to grab his prize.
Bear, standing right next to him, puts his arm around his shoulder, and he's like, Hey, man.
I know you thought you got me, but, you know, today wasn't your day.
So I can eat you, or I can fuck you in the butt.
What do you...
I'll leave it to you.
I'm feeling generous.
The guy's like, well, I want to stay alive.
So, you know, indignity ensues.
And the hunter leaves.
And he's alive.
Wait, he took it in the butt?
Yep. I betcha.
So he goes home.
He gets a bigger gun.
Much bigger gun.
Comes back the next day.
He's like, man, I'm gonna get that bear, man.
Sees the bear.
Takes the shot, sees the bear go down.
He's like, that's it.
Goes out there.
Boom! Bear jumps on his back.
He's like, really?
Second time?
All right.
Well, I mean, you know the drill.
Well, I mean, the hunter chooses life.
You know, he doesn't want to get eaten.
So he goes...
Takes it in the butt again.
I mean, yeah.
So anyways, he's pissed.
He leaves.
He goes home.
He gets a bazooka.
This time he orders a military-grade bazooka.
And he's like, I'm going to blow this bear sky high, man.
And he's not getting away this time.
So he goes, he marches, just storms back out to the woods and sees the bear, you know, through some trees and doesn't even get close.
And as the smoke is clearing from the explosion, the bear is standing next to him, again, arm around his shoulder, and he's like, hey, man, you're not out here for the hunting, are you?
That's the joke.
That's great.
That's awesome.
That's how that goes.
Why would you go get bigger guns if he's not out there for the hunting?
I don't know.
He would just go out there without guns.
Bear! Hey, bear!
Hey, big hairy bear!
Where are you?
Where's Barry?
Where's Barry today?
Come here with your old hairy berries.
Get over here.
I'll just bend over for you right now.
Skip the whole...
The whole rigmarole.
He just bends over.
Bear! Bear's like, what the fuck again?
Like, come on, man.
Like, I'm trying to catch some fish.
Like, I need to hibernate.
This guy's just keeping me from hibernating.
Damn, man.
He's telling the other bears.
The other bears are like, oh, yeah, I know how it is.
Was he wearing flannel and a hat?
Yeah, yo, we know him.
Yeah, he comes around quite often.
I know that guy.
Oh, Larry, you got that too.
Yeah, Barry, it's crazy.
Just Larry and Barry.
Just here in the background as the Bears are talking.
Bear! Yeah, they're like, oh, God.
Let's go down by the salmon run.
Maybe he'll lose us.
Yeah, he tracks him.
They never can get away from him.
Yeah, right.
Exactly. The bears are trying to get out of there.
God, man.
Just trying to catch a few fish before I have to go down for the winter.
And they hibernate.
He crawls in the caves.
He cuddles up next to him.
There you are, dear.
No, you thought you could get away from me.
Oh, you're so cute.
It's just in the den, but it's too cold to go out and lose their fat reserves, so they're stuck in there with him for the next three months, you know?
They wake up with him next to him.
It's like, God damn it, Larry!
Oh, man, Larry!
Get out of here!
No, but it's nothing like you've ever seen.
Oh, yeah?
Super dangerous, super sketch, super cool if you escape death.
You ever hear of that Thai sport of fish fighting?
Oh yeah.
They literally raise a certain type of fish until the fish reaches the perfect fish fighting age.
Then they throw them into this tank and basically the two fish apparently fight to the death.
Damn. Money's made.
Wives are lost.
I mean, the fish are pissed.
They're just like, come on, man.
I just want my little handful of food.
I don't want to, like, have to tear this fish's gills off.
Okay, if you insist.
Damn, man.
That's my angry fish fighting noise.
No, man.
I never heard about that.
But, you know, personally, I'm really not a fan of people raising animals to fight, have them fight.
It's true.
It's true.
It doesn't seem to matter, like, whatever it is, you know, because I've seen, you know, like...
Videos of people with scorpions and, you know, like camel spiders trying to fight them off.
And I do feel, I'm going to admit, I'm going to admit this right now, man.
I think I'm a big old softy because it makes me feel a little bit sad.
Yeah, I don't like it, man.
But hey, you know, that's just me.
That's just me.
Well, it makes two of us.
There is this one sport, if you can call it that, that I'm really stoked about, man.
It's called, I think, what is it, Buzkaki or Bukaki or something?
Is it Bukkake?
Yeah, dude.
I think you need to...
I can see you getting on a Bukkake team.
Oh, no.
Oh, I thought this was hockey, man.
No, it's Bukkake.
I read that wrong.
No, I think you're thinking of Buzhkashi, right?
Buzhkashi. It's the Afghanistan one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Buzhkashi. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's how it's played.
Like, you're on a horseback, right?
That one's kind of like polo.
But in the traditional way, the game is played on dry land, and there are two teams, and instead of playing with a ball, you play with the headless carcass of a goat, or a calf, or whatever you have laying around, I guess.
And the aim is to ride by the carcass and pick it up with a stick or something, I don't know, but after you get the carcass in your possession, you need to, or at least the head of a carcass, right?
Or something, is it?
Yeah, I think it's the head.
No, it's just the carcass.
Oh, you're right.
It's the carcass.
So after you get the carcass in your possession, you need to avoid the opposing team and make it to the goal line or whatever they use.
I don't know.
It's a little crazy to me.
Yeah, it's definitely...
Who's Kashi?
Yeah, it definitely kind of takes the pigskin to a whole other level there.
Never heard of that.
That's pretty badass, though.
I mean, I have heard of it.
I've just never played it, but...
I don't know.
I guess depending on the animal, I'd probably give it a shot.
Why not?
It'd be hard to lug a camel up and down the field, but if it was something a little bit spicy, it's like, how do you play this?
But yeah, I think the one I like the most, speaking of crazy games, and I can now officially play this epic game.
But it's called wife-carrying.
Oh! And it's actually more popular per capita than UFC.
Have you ever heard of it?
I have, dude.
It looks so fun, man.
And it seems like it's one of those things where your wife is either going to really hate you or really want to fuck you, you know?
Or both.
That's true.
And I mean, I can't wait to partake myself, but...
I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory, right?
So you got a group of competitive alpha males, which, you know, I would consider myself.
You're an alpha.
And they grab their hapless wives and then they just carry them through this obstacle course and it's timed.
You can throw them over your shoulder or just one-arm it.
I mean, kind of whatever works for you and your stride, I suppose.
But yeah, it's interesting.
For sure, man.
I want to see the wife carrying the husband, though.
I think that would be way cooler.
The husband carrying?
Yeah, totally.
They should come up with that.
You know what?
I bet that's...
I'm sure it's a thing, dude.
It's got to be.
It's probably next.
So they have the wife carrying event, and then directly after, there's the husband carrying event.
I'll bet.
They just switch roles.
Wife's like, oh, you think that was funny?
I just see a bunch of Thor's daughters.
You know, like a bunch of big women with their tiny little men.
Totally. Just putting them on their shoulders.
Get over here!
Yeah, like doing a squat.
Get up there.
Yeah, just powering through.
But yeah, I guess we'll have to tune in.
I might have to look for that.
I'm very curious.
For sure.
Anyways, hello, ladies and gentlemen.
Hello. I am Scott, and with me as always, Coop DeVille!
Hello, everyone.
Great to be here.
Oh, is that like a Vincent Price or something like that?
I don't know, something like that.
So, what do we have for the folks today, Coop?
Well, if you remember from last week, we're going to finish out this two-potter on who is said to be America's first rapist serial killer that gained national media attention.
Now, I know, people are out there slapping themselves silly, saying, but I thought H.H. Holmes was a first.
Well, that's partially correct, but Earl was the first known serial killer who also indulged in necrophilia with just about every victim, at least 22, and who every newspaper coast to coast was writing about at the time.
But the man's name who we are talking about here was Earl Leonard Farrell Nelson, and he was definitely one of modern history's worst.
Yeah, man.
This guy was an arse face.
One of those ones you'd want to use like a doormat.
If you could.
If you could go back in time and you could, you know, if you could make that happen.
You would totally want to do that.
And if you recall, he went AWOL from the Navy, twice actually, and once from the Army.
Because, as he put it, the burning about his anus bothered him.
Hey man, let's not be making fun of something very common.
You know, something that everyone can relate to, I feel like.
I'm just going to project that out there right now.
Hey man, it happens.
So Earl had attempted to murder and possibly rape if he had the chance.
A 12-year-old named Mary Summers, after posing as a plumber, sent to fix a gas leak.
He was caught and was admitted to the Napa State Hospital for the fifth time, where he had finally finished his paltry sentence for the attack on Mary, something like 16 months.
He was also festering with the gifts that keep on giving, a wife's favorite, gonorrhea.
He also had the other one that is arguably a little worse, syphilis.
Ouch. Yeah, I forgot about that one.
Yeah, man.
He had the sif.
He also had his beautiful elderly wife, who was literally a spitting image of his own grandmother.
I need to emphasize the word had, as she had just left him.
And as you can imagine, this angered him greatly.
With his giant mitten hands.
Well, okay.
So what does he do after that?
Let's remind.
Well, I'll get to that right after you give the audience the gold star segment of the show that is Trey Portray.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, indeed.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would please Velcro those sunglasses nice and tight.
Get that visor situated nicely around those shiny scalps.
You could just spit shine them.
Slide into your Akira onesie.
Velcro it on up.
Get it nice and tight.
And shove the catheter in.
Get yourself prepared for a long one.
What the world has been salivating over for at least the last seven days.
Probably longer, honestly.
Probably longer.
I mean, Oprah is trying to get her hands all over it.
Yes, she is.
That's right.
But no!
No! Can't have everything!
But that's right.
Dear listeners, it's time for Trey!
for a trade
Yeah. All right.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
Our first article is about kind of a subject that might be controversial in some circles and very accepted in other circles.
Coop, have you ever heard of vabbing?
Vabbing? No, I have not.
Tell us what vabbing is, Scott.
I have actually heard about this.
So what is vabbing?
Well, according to the article published by womenshealth.com, and this is like a
Actually, earlier this year that this article came out, and now this trend is sort of gathering steam.
But before I go on anymore, let me just describe what it says.
Quote, Although it's exploded with popularity thanks to everyone's favorite time-destroying video sharing app, vabbing is not anything new.
Vabbing, or vaginal dabbing, to be formal, is the art of strategically placing vaginal fluid in key areas.
Key areas, Coop.
Like behind the ear or on the wrists.
And this...
I like the strategically placing...
Yeah, strategically.
This, advocates believe, is a potential way of becoming more alluring to romantic and sexual interests.
Wow. End quote.
So that's what this article is talking about.
This trend that, like I said, apparently is gaining some steam.
But people are now, of course, you know, popular social media and the way it is like TikTok influencers are kind of pushing this a little bit and kind of trying to make it more mainstream.
But yeah, interesting, right?
It's very interesting and it's gross, but I'm intrigued.
So tell me, how does it work?
I'm really glad you asked.
So apparently the thought is that...
Vabbing works with the theory of pheromones, right?
Okay. And I mean, pheromone research has been going on for a long time, and just like the study of human chemical communication.
There's been a lot of investigation, and it was once believed that mammals, including humans, could attract mates through secreting of signals through these pheromones, right?
That's what it's thought.
That's what it's generally thought, for sure.
To this day, it's still unproven.
It's one of those things that we have theories about, especially after watching animal behavior, but we don't have any real proof.
So this article is talking about this trend that's become mainstream.
And on the subject, there are researchers kind of commenting, saying they feel like it could work on a psychological level, but the science behind it just isn't there.
And what I mean by that, and I'm sure you could probably attest to this, They feel like a person who would go to that length as to put vaginal fluid in those places, if they really believed that it would make them more attractive, it might up their confidence in a way that could lead them to be perceived as more attractive by the opposite sex.
Okay. And therefore be more successful.
In those kinds of situations, right?
So it's like a placebo thing and just a confidence thing, like what alcohol does to people.
Basically, yeah.
It's unproven that it would have any actual bearing on that kind of a situation, especially over something that's so subjective anyways.
But it is thought to possibly increase confidence for those who are willing to go that far and therefore up one's social game.
Anyways. That is crazy.
That is fucking crazy.
So, but ladies and gentlemen, you have to remember there's some rules here, right?
So no matter what your stance is, whether or not this is something that you're going to subscribe to or something that you feel like you might be trying, you got, there's some rules.
You have to abide by the rules.
Washing your hands.
That's number one, dude.
Wash the hands.
Not allowing areas you've vabbed to touch.
Anything or anyone.
That's another rule.
Okay. Wiping down gym equipment before and after use.
That's not necessarily a specific rule to this.
That's just kind of a good rule in general.
I feel like people are kind of forgetting.
That's just a gym rule.
I feel like people are forgetting to do that.
So make sure you wipe stuff down.
And refrain from vabbing if it's that time of the month.
It's not a good idea.
Or if you have an STI.
Also not a good idea.
Man. But make sure you get checked by a professional.
If you think you sense an unusual or bad odor.
So these are just PSA, public service announcement.
Man, I smell it already.
I smell it already.
I really don't.
Oh, man.
Don't do this.
Ladies, don't do this.
I feel like...
Don't do this.
Can men do it?
I don't think so.
Like with their sperm?
Maybe. Or pre-cum?
You know, we should try it.
Let's start putting our pre-com behind our ears and our wrists and see if we attract female mates.
Yeah. If they think it works for females, why wouldn't it work for males?
Yeah. All right.
Well, we'll keep track for a week and I'll let you know how it goes at work.
All right.
Perfect. Speaking of what you can smell, the Times of India and indiatimes.com has reported to us.
Another article here.
Apparently, and it's interesting that it comes from that site specifically, but it comes to us from Complex.com, posted on November 9th.
China is now using crazy-ass laser lights to keep drivers from falling asleep.
How do you feel about that?
I've seen the video.
I've seen this video.
I think it's pretty intense.
I don't know.
I can see how it would work to keep people awake.
Because you'd want to watch that light show.
I mean, it's really extreme.
If you look at the videos that have been taken, it's like these huge block lasers shooting out across the sky while you're driving over the highway.
I mean, that's insane.
I mean, it would give you something to focus on, but I feel like it would also tear your eyes from the road.
And cause you to just look up at it.
Which I don't know if that's a good idea.
I feel like there's...
Just be mesmerized by the light show going on above you so you're not watching the road and you get in a car accident.
Exactly. I mean, you know, one, look away, whoa, this crazy laser!
And then bam!
And I feel like another pitfall too, which people actually did comment about in the article, is what about people with epilepsy, man?
Right. What are they gonna do?
They just start seizing out?
Like, fuck, man.
Yeah, because truthfully...
Having a seizure on the road and starting to swerve and go all over the place, arguably just as, if not more dangerous than falling asleep on the road.
So I do feel like there's a little bit of a catch-22.
Absolutely. With this.
Yeah, I don't know about this, man.
I don't know about that one.
I do know back in, like, what, I don't know, five years ago, 2017 or so, Australia actually set up trivia signs on its highways to keep people's minds, like, engaged.
As they drive, keep them awake.
Yeah. So, I mean, that's pretty cool.
I like that.
Yeah, I mean, China...
That's cooler than laser lights.
I'll tell you a little bit about some signs.
So, I was driving around the countryside of Costa Rica.
This is a true story.
And the road signs, and this kept me awake, but I was trying to figure out how far it was to the next city.
I was leaving San Jose, which I believe is the capital.
It is.
But I was leaving.
And I saw the first sign telling me how far it was to my destination.
The next, I swear to God, the next sign that I saw, the distance had increased.
And then the next sign that I saw after that, the distance had decreased again.
And I was like, what the hell's going on here, man, with these signs?
How does that work?
I don't know if I just drove out.
I mean, I swear I was on a straight highway, but those signs will keep you awake because you're like, dude, how far am I?
Am I just going to arrive?
Where am I?
Of course, in between cities, too, it's just jungle.
It's just farms and jungle.
So it's kind of important to know where you're going to be.
Yeah, needless to say.
You get past your destination and the road signs are like negative 5. The further you go, negative 7, negative 10. You've gone past your destination.
Yeah, exactly.
So anyways, well good luck China.
Good luck with the lasers.
Hopefully that proves to be a solution.
Because driving fatigue, I mean that is serious.
It is serious.
Many, many people are afflicted with, especially with More things to cram into your day and more social media things to keep you awake and people getting up early for their jobs.
It's going to happen.
I've definitely been there where I had to pull over and literally take naps.
Same. Because driving just gets to you.
Totally. Absolutely.
Well, for our last article, speaking of Costa Rica, we're going to hang around in the Latin Americas for a little bit.
Our last story of Trey for Trey today comes to us from elespectador.com.
Love that website.
This story is based out of Colombia.
Mis amigos y las amigas.
This is posted on the 14th of November of this year.
A woman faked a kidnapping of her son and asked for millions of dollars as a reward from the estranged father of the boy, her ex, in order to free him.
Which is absolutely insane.
Now, this woman is being prosecuted out of Barranquilla.
She faked the kidnapping of her two-year-old son and asked the father for millions of dollars in the exchange for his release.
Apparently, on the night of November 12th of this year, the 25-year-old mother went to the police to report that several armed men who were on motorcycles had intercepted her son.
So, like, she's saying these guys showed up, took her son.
She doesn't know who they are, what group they belong with.
So the police, once they got the report, started putting the image out and a description of the boy.
And the father reported in that he received a call from the woman who was faking it, the mother of the child, saying, I don't know, these men took your son.
We need $60 million to get him back.
Well, the whole thing blew up in her face because she had actually entrusted her son to this 17-year-old teenager that she knew.
Apparently there's some interaction there, like some kind of a...
I don't know if it's babysitting, but this teenager is well known to this woman.
She asked him to take care of the boy for a couple days in order to carry this ruse off.
And the boy's mom noticed that the kid that he had just brought home matched the exact description that the police were putting out.
So she called the police and said, Hey, I got this kid here.
He's not my kid.
Is this the kid you're looking for?
And it was.
So then the whole thing came tumbling down, and now the woman's being prosecuted.
Wow. The boy, thankfully, is safely back in the hands of the father.
And yeah, we'll have to just see how that shakes out.
I don't think it's going to go very well.
I don't know if it's the same as America when it comes to filing a fake police report, false imprisonment, or just whatever they're going to try to hit her with.
Yeah. She's going to go down, man.
I think that's a pretty...
Pretty hefty charge down in Brazil.
Yeah, well, it's a big deal.
I mean, I feel bad.
This kid's just caught up in the middle like, oh, I'm just hanging out with a friend.
Meanwhile, he doesn't know.
He's quote-unquote been kidnapped.
Yeah, that's crazy, dude.
It's crazy.
Happens a lot, man.
Parental alienation and kids are always caught in between, dude.
Used as tools against the other parent.
It sucks.
It's really shitty, man.
It happens too much in the United States, for one.
Well, I for one hope she gets prosecuted and at least doesn't try to do it again.
Some cockamamie scheme.
Yeah. Well, hopefully the news reporters will be standing by to give me some fodder for our next Trey for Trey.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us on this one.
That is it.
That's our last story for this week's Trey.
That's right.
That's right.
It's unbelievable how many people fake their own kidnapping.
That's crazy.
Yeah, I don't think it generally works as well as people think it does.
No, no, dude.
You remember seeing that documentary about the rich oil tycoon and his nephew?
Owing money to drug dealers over in Europe, just partying around too much.
So he gets with some of these drug dealers who are trying to get the money out of him.
They're like, hey, you gotta pay, man.
We know who your uncle is.
He's super rich.
Actually, it's Grant.
It was his grandpa, and he's the grandson.
It's not even like an uncle-nephew relationship.
It's like direct descendant, I'm your grandkid.
So he's like, hey, don't worry, I'll get you guys this money.
My uncle's loaded, or my grandpa's loaded.
I'll just pretend that I've been kidnapped.
Right. And Geddy, he's no fool.
He didn't get rich by giving out money to people, and he was like, nope, sorry, I'm not giving you anything.
So it's...
There's more pressure being put on the grandson.
They're like, hey, you said you'd get us this money.
What's going on?
So he's like, no, don't worry.
They're threatening to kill him and saying he'll never get back to his family.
Wow. So he even goes so far as to cut his own ear off and sends it to try to make it more real.
And it's just this great story about how he refused to come off of any money.
I think they made a movie about that.
They did.
Yeah. I think I saw that.
Yeah, they did.
It's crazy.
That's real life, man.
Yeah. It's real life.
It didn't turn out well.
No, it didn't.
Yeah, it did not go well.
Like, what happened?
Like, did they...
They didn't get the money, but he cut off his ear, and then he got found out?
He survived.
Yeah, he escaped and survived.
And the fixer that had been hired by Getty to...
Basically, he's communicating with these kidnappers and also...
Using clues to figure out where this kid is and he's just going to grab him himself.
But I believe ultimately he finds him and brings him back.
That's nuts.
Yeah. But he had to escape from the Italian or Sicilian countryside and make a long journey to get back to where he was supposed to be.
It's pretty insane.
That's a crazy story.
Pretty intense, man.
Pretty crazy.
Well, how about we get on with today's show?
Let's. Let's.
Let's get back to it.
Alright, so Earl's wife would leave him for one thing or another.
In fact, she was scared shitless of the guy.
Plus, the guy smelled like shit and was a grade A asshole.
Earl got all sad about it and ran back to her, crying his eyes out for her to take him back.
But she would downright refuse.
And this combination of rejection and embarrassment and total lack of any positive human attribute would culminate into something absolutely detestable.
And something that the country had never seen.
On February 20th, 1926, Earl would approach the residence of Clara Newman, a wealthy 52-year-old widow at 2037 Pierce Street in San Francisco.
This residence was one that Clara had transformed into a boarding house so she could make some scrilla by renting rooms out to people who were coming and going.
She was a fairy woman, but also a safe one at that, and she would not allow sailors or any of them drinking men to rent from her.
On this day in question, there had been...
A rooms-to-rent sign in the front window.
Earl walked to the door to inquire and presented himself as a charming potential tenant with the name of Roger Wilson.
Clara was interested, as the man seemed decent enough, and she invited the man inside.
With a stroke of luck for Earl, the only other person of the residence was Clara's nephew, who was in the second-floor apartment.
It didn't take long for Earl to rough up Clara, murder her, rape her dead body, and then hide it.
Because her nephew's wife and child were only out to see one of those sound films, you know, one of those old talkies.
Oh yeah, those were the best.
I miss them.
But Claire's nephew had gone down to the basement to fiddle with the furnace a bit and noticed that Claire was not in the kitchen when she had been cooking some sausages.
On his way down, he noticed a man by the front door who was in the process of opening it to leave.
This witness said that the man had a hat pulled low over his eyes and the collar of his coat turned up so as to hide his identity, which worked.
The only descriptor the witness had was that the man was Caucasian with a darker skin tone and large hands.
Right, right.
So he's dressed just like forgettable enough to not leave an impression.
The description that you're left with isn't enough to differentiate them from any other person just out there walking on the street.
Right. Basically.
Splendid in.
Not much to go off of, for sure.
The nephew asked the man if he needed help, but the man...
Who was Earl, slightly turned his head to the side and responded by saying, Tell the landlady I will return in an hour.
I wish to rent the bedroom.
He then walked out of the door, closing it behind him.
The nephew went and fiddled with the furnace for a while, and after messing with it for a good deal of time, he went back upstairs and noticed that nothing was different in the kitchen.
The sausages that Clara was supposed to be cooking were just left there in congealed fat.
That's when he ran around to get the other tenants so they could go look for Clara, and they'd find her several hours later.
There are different accounts of how she was found, but in one they say that she was found propped up on a toilet seat with her genitals exposed, and the other said that she was found in a vacant apartment, but also with her genitals exposed.
Clara had clearly been beaten up before she was murdered, and an autopsy would show that she had been strangled with bare hands.
Yeah, so they had enough information to start building this MO, right?
This thing that this guy would become well known for.
And, like, this is...
Gonna be like a hallmark of how he treated his victims.
Yeah, yeah, dude.
So everybody was shocked for a multitude of reasons, but one being simply because this was the first homicide of this kind that anyone had seen this side of the pond, and no one would have the slightest clue that this guy was only getting started.
Earl was on the move and would wind up in nearby San Jose about two weeks later.
Lara Beal was a 63-year-old woman who was home alone on this day.
Her husband was away at work and would arrive home After a long day, only to find his wife was missing.
Upon searching for her, the search party would discover her dead body in a vacant apartment.
She was nude from the waist down, and the autopsy would show that a length of silk was cut from her clothing and used to strangle her.
It had been pulled and wrapped around her neck so tightly that it cut into the skin.
The autopsy would show that she was raped after she had died.
The media became a frenzy as they wasted no time in connecting the two murders.
In the case of Laura Beal, one witness would say that they saw a sallow-faced man hurrying from the house.
So now they have a sallow-faced man who is Caucasian with a dark complexion, large hands.
Not a lot to go off of.
Yeah, that could be, you know, every other person that you see out on the street.
There's just not a lot to go off of there, so I'm sure the police did not find that helpful whatsoever in the slightest.
Nope. And this is when the papers did that thing that they became infamous for.
They gave the mystery murderer a name.
Oh, nice.
Is that the Dark Gorilla Strangler Mankiller?
Well, no, that's just a mashup of all the different names that was given to him by the different paper people trying to get their name to stick.
Oh, sure.
Right, right.
But this was the moment that they gave him the first name.
The Dark Strangler.
Dude. But after that second murder.
Earl laid low for a little bit, meaning that he didn't lash out, and after about a month of no other murders or leads or anything, the general public slowly started to forget about the murders as life went on for those still living.
The police and the paper people alike simply assumed that this clearly dangerous person just got up and left the area to go terrorize some other community.
Not a big deal.
Nothing to see here.
Go back to your lanterns and wooden spoons.
Everything is fine.
Right, right.
Everyone's like, ah, there's no way it could happen to us.
Earl would lay low for a few months until on June 26, 1926, he attacked Lillian St. Mary, also in San Francisco.
He found her by looking through the classified ads in the back pages of newspapers, which is how he targeted the majority of the women he murdered and desecrated.
Earl, posing as a possible tenant, was invited in by Lillian and promptly shown a vacant room.
Once inside the room, Earl gripped Lillian's neck with his oversized hands and quickly brought her to the floor.
The autopsy suggested that he had sat on her chest as he squeezed the life out of her.
He then carried out his MO and raped her lifeless body.
When he was finished, he left her body nude from the waist down and with her legs spread open for that maximum shock value.
The police concluded that whoever attacked her was very quiet while they did so, as the tenant below the murder didn't hear a thing.
They also concluded that this attack was related to the other two.
Again. There was a single witness who could only say that the man was fairly large and had a darker complexion with large hands.
It was after this attack that the police would issue a public warning to all women who operated a boarding house.
Well, I mean, good call.
Good call.
Start there, at least.
And exactly two weeks later, he went to Santa Barbara, California, where he attacked Ollie Russell, who was a 53-year-old woman who also ran a boarding house.
Santa Barbara is just a short jaunt of about 326 miles south of San Francisco and about 92 miles north of Los Angeles.
Beautiful place, beautiful people, beautiful grains of sand.
That's true.
That's true.
Charming place to visit if you ever get the chance.
Well, on this particular night, a railroad worker, William Franey, who was one of the tenants, was awoken by the loud sound of rhythmic banging coming from the room next door to his.
And we all know how fucking annoying that can be, right?
Absolutely. Come on!
Just going to town.
Jeez. So, William woke up, and being frustrated by it all, he walked over to the door that linked the two rooms.
He bent down and took a looky-loo through the keyhole.
And remember, this was the 20s.
Things were different.
For sure.
And those keyholes were massive.
You could, like, fit your whole arm, pretty much.
Put your whole arm in there, dude, and unlock the door.
So, William is peeking in and is like, Oh.
Oh. Oh.
Oh, boy.
Oh, that's my bad.
My bad.
Should not be looking at that.
No, sir.
No siree, Bob.
That's a private affair between a man and a woman with no clothes on and just glistening with sweat.
Boy, it's hot in here.
Okay. All right.
I should stop looking.
Yeah. He's like telling himself like, oh, this is not.
Meanwhile, he's just still just eye glued to the keyhole.
Oh, man.
But what William recalled seeing when he took a second look was a man in a shoddy gray suit with his pants around his ankles as he was ruthlessly thrusting his pelvis into the woman who laid on the bed below him.
William watched as the man continued his assault on the woman who never moved other than the man's thrusting.
And once the man finished, he bent over to pull his pants up and then put on his hat and turned to leave the room.
Once this man left, William focused on the woman who laid motionless on the bed.
Her face was turned away from him, but he could tell from the shape of the body and the expensive clothes that she was wearing that it was his landlady, Ollie Russell.
This struck William as being highly odd because, for one, Ollie was married.
Two, Ollie didn't get down like that.
And three, he was sure he could see blood on the bed next to the body that was not even slightly moving, not even from breathing.
William ran from his room to find Mr. Russell, Ollie's husband, who wasn't far away.
The two would return to the room and open the door.
There, they found the lifeless body of Ollie Russell.
She had been strangled with a piece of cord that was pulled so tight that it ripped chunks of skin from her neck.
I mean, clearly, for any of the authorities that would be following this, or anybody that was paying attention to the story, I mean, no doubt.
Same person doing things the same way.
I mean, it's very clear, but...
Yeah, the strangling part especially.
Like, this person is angry.
Like, what an angry individual.
Yeah. Fucking angry, dude.
So yeah, like you said, the police had no issue in making the connection to a single perpetrator.
And on August 16th, another horror would be discovered.
50-year-old Mary Nisbet, another boarding house owner, would be found dead by her husband in a bathroom of a vacant room in a building they owned in Oakland, California.
It appeared that Miss Nisbet had fought back more than the previous victims because she had been battered far worse than the others.
Her face had been repeatedly slammed into the bathroom tiles, which caused several of her teeth to shatter, and the pieces were scattered all over the floor.
Her blood was said to have been splattered on every surface.
Earl had used a dish towel that Miss Nisbet had most likely been holding as she answered the door to strangle her with, and he used it with such force that it ripped the towel that he left tied around her fragile neck.
Later, there would be witness reports that a smiling stranger had been lurking around Nisbet's apartment before Mary's body had been found.
And that sounds scary as shit, man.
Imagine some creepy smiling stranger just lurking around your house, bro.
Yeah, the fact that multiple people saw him too and later reported it.
Just like, oh, we saw something that wasn't right with this person.
Nobody had seen him before and he was just smiling like that.
That's pretty terrifying, honestly.
Just walking around the building.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Rubbing his hands together, just smiling.
Imagine looking out your window.
Remember that mailman that used to fucking chill around your house all the time?
Just imagine that guy.
Rubbing his hands, just smiling.
Yeah, no.
Rather not.
Whatever happened to that mailman anyway?
Did he ever come back?
Was he even the real mailman?
Probably not.
It was probably, yeah.
I haven't followed, but...
Probably not.
Scary, dude.
Scary. He's just bringing you the neighbor's mail.
He's like, mail for you?
So anyway, at this point, Earl had killed five women in a matter of about seven months.
All in California.
And this is also when the newspapers started to either call him the Gorilla Man, the Gorilla Killer, or the Dark Strangler.
And the reason they gave him those names is because of the noted size of the killer's hands, which were abnormally large.
And Earl must have been getting a little bored of Southern California.
Maybe he had a bit of an itch to travel, or maybe he was feeling the heat.
But whatever the reason may have been, come September of 1926, Earl would travel north and settle in the breathtaking and colorful community of Portland, Oregon.
And a huge shout out to Old Rip City, which in the 1920s was a bustling city of about 260,000 people just crushing it.
It was also one of the many legendary locations where the illicit practice of shanghaying took place on the regular.
It was practically expected if you were a sailor and stopped in this port.
Oh yeah.
No, that's for real.
I mean, the way it would work is...
But in the Portland Underground, there's a series of rooms that used to be under taverns, and people would go down there in these opium dens and do opium.
And there were certain people who were paid, and they would be like, yeah, come do some more, do some more.
And then when the person would pass out, they would wake up the next day, but they wouldn't be in the opium den anymore.
They'd be on a ship headed out to sea.
And that happened all the time.
Wouldn't they lure the people into a certain room where there'd be a locked door or something like that?
And they would pass out in there, and then there would just be a trap door, and it would drop down.
The people on the ships would kidnap them.
Yeah, the people would...
I read stories like that.
There'd be like a trap door where they'd fall and like the people from the ships would come get them.
I don't know.
There were all kinds of ways.
But the easiest was with drugs.
Oh, definitely.
You know, you got hardworking people in a hardworking town.
They're doing drugs, passing out.
But yeah, that's pretty crazy in the Portland underground.
Shanghai, dude.
That'd be fucking scary.
Oof, could you even imagine?
You're just a slave, man.
That's... Ugh.
Damn. Can't leave.
You're out to sea.
On October 19th, the body of 35-year-old Beta Willers would be discovered by her son, who was 15 years old himself.
He would find her body stuffed into a steamer trunk with clothes packed inside and hidden in the attic of their home.
Her body was also raped post-mortem.
But despite this, Scott, a coroner's jury of three men and three women would be put together to evaluate her death.
And they were split on whether her death was a homicide or a suicide.
That's pretty ridiculous.
If they can prove that she was raped post-mortem, and then they're gonna say that she killed herself?
And stuck herself in a trunk?
What's the point?
Put clothes on her?
No. No, that's just so ridiculous.
I don't get it.
Absolutely. I don't get it.
But, basically, one day later.
One day later, the body of Virginia Grant was discovered stuffed behind a furnace in the basement of her home, which she also ran as a boarding house.
Her body was raped, and she was robbed of whatever valuables Earl could quickly gather before he fled.
And just a few days after Virginia's murder, the body of Mabel Fluke would also be discovered hidden in the attic of her home.
She was also strangled and then raped post-death.
After having carried out three brutal murders in Portland, Earl traveled back to San Francisco, where he proceeded to murder and rape 56-year-old Anna Edmonds, who was a widow on November 18th.
A few days later, a friend of Edmonds told police that they saw Anna talking to a strange man about selling her house.
The descriptions of his appearance matched those of the descriptions given earlier by others, notably those gigantic, unnatural Leviathan behemoths he had for hands.
He's not stupid, obviously, because he knows what to be talking to these people about to lure them in.
But, yeah, spooky.
The whole thing's just spooky.
The following day, November 19th, a man pretending to be a potential buyer of a home being sold by a 28-year-old pregnant woman named Miss H.C. Murray would arrive in Burlingame, California to meet the owner at her house.
While showing the house to this well-dressed and well-spoken man who stood about 5 feet 8 inches, Miss HC would later recount that the man did not come off threatening, but she had noticed that he was often making remarks on the designs of the ceiling.
Oh, interesting.
Like, as a ploy to get her to look up or something like that?
Yeah, I think so.
So, yeah, so he could, like, more easily swoop in with those grotesquely oversized hands and wrap them tightly around her delicate neck.
Luckily, this woman survived the attack.
Whoa! One of the few.
Yeah, I don't know what happened there.
There isn't much information on it, but I wonder why he left her alive.
Maybe he got spooked and had a run or something.
But Earl would travel back up to Portland, Oregon.
And ten days later, on November 29th, he would claim Blanche Myers as his next victim.
Blanche had been eating lunch with a male friend of hers when Earl stopped by to ask about renting a room.
This time, he mentioned that he was a lumberjack looking for work in the area.
Blanche was more than happy and quickly accepted her $4 fee for the room, ignoring the baseball mitts that appeared to be replacing his hands, and went back to eating her lunch with her friend.
Later that evening, Blanche was nowhere to be found, and neither was Earl.
But soon, Blanche's lifeless body would be found stuffed underneath the bed that she had just rented to Earl hours before, and her body had been raped.
He would take the diamond ring that she had on her finger and the $8.50 that was in her purse, This guy's a cold motherfucker, man.
One of the worst, man.
One of the worst.
Her murder would ignite a madhouse of investigators taking phone calls and memos and telegraphs and Morse codes and all sorts of shit.
With Blanche Myers, Earl proved to have been the sloppiest he had ever been in any of his other heinous crimes.
Police were able to recover fingerprints from a bedpost in Blanche's bedroom.
And side note, Fingerprinting had been used by police in the United States since 1903, so by this time, 1926, they were getting the good hang of it.
Yeah, you would imagine, after they had had 20 years of practice, that it was something that they could do well.
But not long after Blanche's body was found, a local woman would go to the police to make a report.
She said that a suspicious man stayed at her own boarding house for a few days following the Thanksgiving parade.
She said the man used the name Adrian Harris.
This woman told the police that on the day of Blanche's murder, this man she spoke to told her and other residents that he would be taking a train to Vancouver, Washington, and pretty much said that he was never coming back.
She found it odd because the man allegedly paid for multiple days of rent in advance.
But what really caught her eye was the jewelry that the guy gave her and another female tenant, pieces of jewelry that were later confirmed to have been owned by a wealthy widow, Florence Monks.
who was found murdered and raped in her Seattle home on November 23rd.
So technically, Florence Monks would be the 10th victim and Blanche Myers would be the 11th.
Anyway, multiple jurisdictions in California and Oregon began issuing public safety announcements warning women.
One such announcement was the following.
Do not show your houses or rooms for rent while alone.
If necessary, call a policeman to accompany you.
Crimes such as these should be prevented and could have been prevented if women had been more careful.
I do not wish to unduly harm the people of Portland, but there is no denying the situation is grave.
End quote.
Yikes. That's kind of shitty that he turns it around and kind of makes it seem like it's the women's fault.
Yeah. That's pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, crimes such as these should be prevented and could have been prevented if women had been more careful.
Yeah. Come on, man.
Yikes. That's ridiculous.
Ridiculous. So the time would come when Earl decided that he was bored of the West Coast and thought it would be a great idea for him to journey out east for a new start.
Like all of us do.
And Earl would make it all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa by hitchhiking and train hopping.
And dude, I wonder if he ever met Carl Panzram.
Like if they ever crossed paths.
Do you ever wonder that?
Like if serial killers ever crossed paths and unknowingly hung out with each other?
And, you know, gave each other blowies and handies or whatever?
You ever wonder that?
I mean, maybe not the blowies and handies, but do you think serial killers has ever, like, crossed paths, like, on trains?
It would have been interesting because if they have the same MO and they're bouncing from place to place looking for similar victims and it's the same time frame in the same area, you would think that there's a possibility that they've, you know, crossed paths.
Yeah. And, like, I do know that...
And Scott, I think you know this too, but two serial killers, Otis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas, both their own, in their own right, both serial killers, they actually would get together and do killings as well.
So there is that pair.
True, true.
Yeah. But I mean, they knowingly hung out with each other.
They knowingly knew what they were doing, you know?
But I wonder if others did not know.
Exactly. And they could have thought about, oh, I'm going to kill this guy.
Oh, I'm going to kill this guy.
But then they never had the chance.
That would be crazy, right?
Absolutely. Or if they were just...
They could just tell.
Like, there was an unwritten, like, they were like, hmm.
I know, he's one of me.
Yeah, exactly.
He's just like me.
Crazy. But let's get back to the story.
By December 23rd, 1926, he would attack Elmira Berard, who was 41 years old and lived alone.
Her body was found on that day.
The police would automatically assume that it was a suicide.
They believed it to be a suicide because she had recently been released from a psychiatric hospital.
So, A plus B. Come on.
Again, so ridiculous.
Who's heading up these investigations?
It's like, come on, man.
Shit. But then, after a better investigation, it was found that Elmira had been raped.
So then you can start to point to the MO, right?
I mean, at least that's something to help them down the path of, like, catching whoever this person was.
They're like, oh look, she looks like she was actually strangled and looks like she was raped.
Not a suicide.
Yeah, they're like, definitely not a suicide.
Yeah, exactly.
But just four days later, December 27th, Earl was strangled to death and raped the body of 23-year-old Bonnie Pace in Kansas City, Missouri.
Her body was found in an upstairs bedroom by her shocked husband.
And just the following day, December 28th, 28-year-old Germania Harpin and her 8-month-old son, Robert were discovered in Germania's home.
Germania had been strangled manually, while Robert had been strangled with a diaper.
It is expected Earl then raped Germania's corpse, and as far as I could find, he did nothing further to the infant.
Robert would be the first male victim as well as the first child of Earl's senseless acts.
Their bodies would be found by the husband and father later that evening when he returned home from a hard day's work.
Ugh, man, that's terrible.
So he's becoming more and more callous with his acts that he's carrying out.
Didn't even spare a young life.
He didn't care.
He did not care.
Now it seems Earl cooled off again for a few months or so.
But it seems highly unlikely that he straight up stopped his crime doing altogether.
And then we come to Earl's 15th victim.
The traveling, homicidal psychopath continued on his rampage, continuing to head east.
He stopped in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 27, 1927, where he murdered and raped 53-year-old Mary McConnell, who was also a landlady.
Earl would carry out his usual repulsive behavior and then steal several pieces of jewelry, which he then attempted to sell to a pawn shop the following day.
The owner of the pawn shop was named Marie Kuhn.
And she was not interested in the items that Earl brought around.
So she told him to kick rocks.
Yeah, so he's still just, now he's really bouncing around to throw off the trail.
These people may not have necessarily heard about this serial boarding house murder on the West Coast.
So, I mean, as far as him and his modus operandi, it was a smart move for him to go over there and get some distance between his initial killing ground.
would make it really difficult for police to track it.
Absolutely. And Earl would carry on his destruction.
About one month later, May 27th, Earl stopped in Buffalo, New York, and he would locate a boarding house owned by 53-year-old Jenny Randolph and would rent a room under the assumed name Charles Harrison.
Exactly three days later, Jenny's dead body would be discovered.
She had been strangled to death and then raped and then stuffed underneath one of the beds of the boarding house.
Jenny's brother, Gideon Gillet, would meet this Charles when he first checked into the room, and it was Gideon who would give the police a more complete description of the culprit.
He described the man to be about 35 years old with a stocky build, dark complexion, And black hair slicked straight back, as well as just dragging wheelbarrows he had for hands behind him as he walked.
Right, the description of his hands just gets more and more fantastical.
Just dragging as he walks.
Yes, it's behind him.
Distinctive features include, you know.
And aside from Gideon being a witness, there was another tenant named Fred Merritt, who also saw the man known as Charles.
And would later positively identify Earl Leonard Farrell Nelson as Charles Harrison.
Only a day or two later, after Jenny's body was discovered, there would be another brutal attack about 260 miles to the west in the 313.
The D!
Yeah, Detroit!
Shout out to the D!
Lots of listeners there.
Everyone enjoys a little D in their lives.
Vitamin D, man.
Vitamin D. Vitamin D. Motor City.
Hell yeah.
Motor City, baby.
So... Now, his next attack would be a bit different than his usual attacks.
So on June 1st, the owner of this particular boarding house, Leonard Sink, had stopped by to collect his monies for rent.
He would discover the bodies of both Fannie Mae, 53 years old, and that of Maureen Oswald, who was 29. Both had been strangled to death using a cord cut from a lamp.
The women's bodies were found in separate rooms and neither had been hidden from sight.
Just left out in the open.
Police would later speculate that the perpetrator used a knife to slice the cord while it was still powered on, and that if they ever found a knife in the killer's possession, it would show signs of an electric burn.
And just two days later, Earl would head over to Chicago, Illinois, where he'd find 27-year-old Mary Cecilia Seitzma.
He would strangle her with an appliance cord and do his regular routine with her dead body.
When he was finished with that, he would take several items of clothing that belonged to her husband, who would be the person who would find her body.
During the attack, Mary was able to throw a large metal cigar stand at Earl which cut him.
His blood would be found all over the crime scene.
But this wasn't a time for DNA profiling.
Not quite.
Not for another 50 years or so.
Yeah, they were still a long ways out of being able to do anything useful with something like that.
But at least they might be looking for a wound or potentially some other kind of identifying factor of this person.
Plus, it was probably like a, yeah, for the police to be like, this motherfucker's hurt.
You know?
Mary Seisman would be Earl's last American victim and the 19th victim.
Earl decided that it was time to head north to Canada.
Oh, great country, great people, great poutine.
But Trudeau is kind of a park bench.
Total park bench.
One that nobody sits on, by the way, because they know that that's where all the homeless people shit and piss.
All the homeless people that Trudeau made homeless with this insane spending and just inflation is crazy.
It's probably worse than the United States right now, actually.
But, you know, I read some articles about how so many Canadians are leaving Canada entirely or are in the process of trying to leave Canada.
All because of Trudeau's horrible, horrible handling of the country.
Which, you know, maybe those of us here in the United States who want out can just switch places with those in Canada who want out of Canada.
Who's down?
Who's down?
We can all put our names in a toque and we'll each pull a name to match.
And then we'll just do the old diplomatic switcheroo.
And we can make a TV show about it.
Absolutely. And, yeah, it'll just, like, follow the exploits of the people that switch.
Yeah. Just move into their houses.
It's probably been done.
Like a housing swap or whatever.
Yeah, it's probably been done, honestly.
I don't know.
Do I want to go to Canada anymore?
It's probably not that great up there.
Probably not much better, bro.
No. So Earl would enter into Canada from Minnesota, and he headed toward Winnipeg, Ontario.
He first stopped at a thrift store where he picked up some workman clothes and sold his own set of clothes for a loonie.
From there...
He headed to a boarding house owned by Catherine Hills where he rented a room under the presumed name of Mr. Woodcoats.
Mr. Woodcoats?
Yeah, Mr. Woodcoats.
That's like they asked him for his name and he actually didn't have anything prepared for once.
So he's trying to come up with a fake one.
He's looking around desperately.
He's using the things around the room as inspiration.
Oh yeah, Mr. Wood!
Mr. Wood Coates!
That's right, Mr. Wood Coates.
My name is Mr. Wood Coates.
I swear it, Mr. Wood Coates.
Pleasure to meet you.
I swear it.
Yep, so Earl was out, taking a stroll, looking for a new victim.
And he'd find her.
She would be 14-year-old Lola Cohen.
Lola was just a schoolgirl who helped her family supplement their income by being a door-to-door sales lady selling paper flowers.
And her 15th birthday was only days away.
Somehow, Earl would escape any detection as he was able to get Lola into his room at the boarding house.
She would be strangled, raped, and some accounts say that Earl mutilated her corpse.
Apparently, some papers reported that her body had been mutilated in a manner quote-unquote reminiscent of the victims of Jack the Ripper.
So, I'm sure you can imagine what that would look like.
And her body would be stuffed under the bed in Earl's room, which she never slept in, and discovered about three days later after the discovery of Earl's 21st victim, Emily Patterson.
Now it is significant that Jack the Ripper is being thrown around as a, you know, a comparison at this point because he was so extremely brutal that his exploits have carried down through history, you know.
And so it says something about the level that Earl was reaching in his killings and the level that he was going to.
It's so horrible, man.
I always wondered, like, he has a knife and he, like, never really uses it, but he must use it.
He uses it on her.
Yeah. I mean, he was getting more and more, probably not over it per se, but you know what I mean, like, just more closed off to the whole thing, I would imagine, in a lot of ways.
Well, it's like these serial killers, you know, they start off being pretty mellow and then they, over time, they get more and more brutal.
Exactly. And they want to explore different avenues of like just...
Yeah, they're not doing it the same way, exactly the same way every single time.
But let's talk about 26-year-old Emily Patterson.
She was the 21st victim.
Yeah. So she was also only days away from her own birthday.
She was cleaning her own house, which she and her husband also ran as a boarding house, when Earl stopped by and gave a knock on the door.
Emily answered it and let the men in where they apparently talked about the Bible, according to some accounts.
It was at some opportune time that Earl would lift a claw hammer that he had with him into the air and would bring it down upon Emily's skull multiple times.
Her death would come due to strangulation, though.
And after her death, Earl raped her corpse and then stuffed her body underneath a bed that belonged to her son.
Later that evening, William Patterson, Emily's husband, couldn't find Emily anywhere.
And by 11.30pm that night, William would put the crying son to sleep in his bed and reassured him that his mother would come home soon.
William later said that he had knelt down next to his son's bed and asked God to direct him to where his wife was.
After his prayer, he stood up, which also lifted the draped bedsheet that was stuck to his pants leg, and it was then that he spotted his wife's favorite wool sweater underneath the bed.
William instantly reached underneath the bed and indeed felt the cold hand of his wife's lifeless body.
Terrible. Can you imagine?
And the thing is, too, a lot of these stories are told from the eyes of the victims, of course, because they were essentially right there.
These weren't estranged people living out on their own that nobody gave a shit about.
These were family people that had husbands and kids.
Yeah, terrible.
Yeah, what a way to discover your wife's fucking body.
Underneath your son's bed, he's laying there about to go to sleep.
What the fuck, man?
Next level twisted.
Yeah, absolutely.
The police were promptly notified and they did what they usually don't do.
They literally wasted no time in thinking that the crazed American dark gorilla strangler man killer guy had made his way into Winnipeg and was causing quite a ruckus and instantly went to work by making a sweep of every known boarding house on either side of the Red River.
And they did a fantastic job, too.
So when they came upon Catherine Hill's boarding house to do a sweep, No,
Lola Cohen.
Oh yeah.
Because she was found after Emily Patterson, but murdered before Emily Patterson.
The day after Earl killed Emily Patterson, he went to a local jeweler and sold Emily's wedding ring.
Other stolen items were found at a different thrift store, and both store owners were able to positively identify Earl Nelson as being the man who sold them the hot items, making note of the fact that they were dumbfounded at how the man was even able to sign his name with hands that looked like hockey goalies gloves.
Yeah, he's just standing there, just, like, got this tiny, keeps breaking pens, like, oh, can I get another one?
You know?
They're like, what?
What is up with this guy?
No, but on a real note, though, yeah, he's starting to, now people are starting to recognize him.
Like, who he is?
It's happened enough times now that people are starting to hear about who this man is.
And you gotta, like, one of this guys gotta look crazy.
Oh, for sure.
He's gotta look pretty nuts.
Yeah. I mean, you can't kill this many people and, like, look normal.
Absolutely not.
I don't know, maybe you can.
There was also a barber, Nicholas Tabor, who owned a shop right next to one of the stores and he told police that he had given a man that resembled Earl Nelson a shave
What? He didn't touch them.
Oh, sure.
He did his job as a barber and didn't ask questions.
Yeah, I guess.
Yep, yep.
Right after Lola Cohen's body was found, the Winnipeg City Council put up a $1,500 reward for any information leading to the conviction of the criminal degenerate who was responsible for these heinous acts.
And now, every eye for miles around was suspicious of every unfamiliar face.
They were also alert for any strange behavior from these unfamiliar faces.
For instance, A man who matched Earl's description was arrested on June 14th in the border town of Warroad, but the man gave the customs officers a different name, that being Mike Mouskie, which threw the officers off, and before they knew it, the man escaped.
Earl continued on his way hitchhiking and was picked up by two men who were headed south toward the border of the United States.
On the way, the men conversed, and when one asked what the man was doing in Canada, he said that he was working on a ranch near Winnipeg.
This gave the two Canadian men a bit of a sphincter squint as they looked at each other with quizzical bewilderment, because, as everyone knows...
No dang Canadian-blooded creature in the king's land would ever call a farm or ranch.
Stupid American hoser.
Exactly. And so, yeah, that made them look at this weirdo hitchhiker with some rightful suspicion.
Yeah, they were probably like, oh, he's not from around here.
Wait a minute, what are these hands that this guy can't even fit inside of our door, you know?
It's in the seat next to him with the seatbelt just for the hands.
You ever have one of the hand models?
They actually get their hands insured so if anything happens to them, they get money.
Yeah, it's the same situation.
He's just like, I'm getting a big payoff after this.
Earl was dropped off at some point and continued on by foot.
He was about five miles from the U.S. border and stopped in a little mercantile to buy some food.
The store owner recognized the son of a bitch and called authorities who pounced to action.
But not before Earl was already on his way south.
Earl was walking along the railroad tracks, and that is when a local constable popped out of nowhere with his revolver drawn like a true Mountie.
The jig was up.
Earl Leonard Farrell Nelson gave no fuss.
He simply raised his gigantic hands in the air and could barely hold them there as he surrendered himself to the almighty RCMP.
Man, and that was it.
He was just like, yep, you got me, finally.
And these hands.
And these hands.
Earl didn't crack, though.
He maintained that his name was Virgil Wilson, a day laborer with no idea about whoever or whatever this gorilla strangler guy was.
Virgil was charismatic and had the ability to give a certain biblical charm to the policemen who began to doubt that they actually had the right guy.
All the other details seemed to fit.
His complexion, his height, the weird scratches all over his face, but the clothes threw them off.
Because they were too nice.
At any rate, before just letting the man walk free, they decided to put him into a holding cell in the Killarney Jail without his shoes, socks, or a belt.
For his comfort, because nobody likes to sleep in socks and shoes or their belt.
Plus, he knew that if he slept in his shoes, he'd wake up with dicks drawn in permanent marker all over his face.
I mean, that's a rule.
I don't think that...
I think Canada's well aware of that rule as well.
You don't fall asleep with your shoes on.
So while in the jail cell...
Earl would just lay down on the straw-filled sack on the iron-framed bed which hung from the wall in silence and take a nappy poo while everything was just smoothed over.
The constable on duty was the sole jailer.
He made sure the cell door was locked securely and then made his way off to send a telegraph to Winnipeg of the news about his captive.
After sending that telegraph, the constable then went to buy a sweet, sweet stogie and a fold of newspaper and then headed back to his newest prisoner.
Upon getting back to his desk set about dim lighting in the far corner, he tossed his stuff down and began to speak to the prisoner without actually looking at him as he himself sat down into his rickety old chair.
He continued to talk to the prisoner, but everything he was saying was more about himself than the prisoner's situation, such as his love life at home and his ongoing issues with emotional vulnerability.
You know, things like that.
And while he spoke as he stared off into nothingness, he began to focus on Eden Meyer, the tight but delicate wrap of the cigar he had just purchased.
He then placed the cigar in his mouth, lit the son of a bitch with a match he just struck off the corner of his desk, and began to puff voluminous plumes of smoke.
Hmm. Duped him again.
He probably used his huge hands and just bent the bars and walked out.
He's like, yeah, I just needed a nap, but I think I've been here long enough.
Headed out.
Pretty much.
So while the constable was out taking care of his errands, Earl was able to procure a wire from somewhere and pick the double lock on the jail cell door and was then able to collect his shoes and all that and then make another hasty escape.
You'd think, how was he able to hold the wire in those gigantic hands?
Yeah, that's insane.
And at this point, every constable in the immediate area started to really consider if the man they arrested, the guy that was really calm and nice, but who escaped under impossible circumstances, was just possibly the dark gorilla man strangler killer after all.
The constable in charge, Wilton Gray, quickly formed a massive posse, and they set off to find the escaped killer.
Earl had ran and ran and ran some more, and eventually found an old barn that he hid inside overnight.
And guess what he found inside?
It's gone.
I'm thinking maybe he found, like...
Maybe like a candy cane.
He's trying to get the wrapper off and just never could get it off.
So he just ate it with the wrapper on.
Things we all struggle with.
Well, he would search for anything that he could wear.
Hopefully a change of clothes.
And he would find exactly what he was looking for.
Oh, lucky guy.
Yeah, he'd find an old sweater, rips and all, and also a pair of hockey skates.
So what, is he going to run around in hockey skates?
Well, he'd end up taking the blades off of the skates and then use them as shoes, which just looked ridiculously good, you know?
Oh, I can't even imagine.
Yeah, oh yeah.
And in the morning, Earl would continue to head south in hopes to get across the border.
On the way, he crossed paths with another dude who tossed him a couple darts, and they went on their way.
Tossed him a couple darts.
I know, sorry, that's just really funny.
Can you imagine?
Like, the look on that guy's face, and he sees this dude jogging along in hockey skates, and he's all like, Oh my god.
Oh, who's this lady coming at me here looking like a prime moose on a winter morning?
Yeah, then Earl was just like, I used to work on a ranch over there in Winnipeg.
Oh yeah, and then he'd be like super suspicious and be like, You damn hosers, your fake accent can't even fool a dried up moose turd.
Take your ranches.
Go back to the States, you damn Yankee doodle dandy.
Oh, hey, look at that tree over there.
It's just Canada.
It's just so beautiful.
Oh, Canada.
What's the rest of that song?
I always forget.
It's like...
Or something.
It's the national anthem.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
Earl continued on and reached the train tracks, which he then started to follow.
Soon, though.
That every growing posse that was after him would catch up.
And it just so happened that the guy who gave Earl a couple cigarettes was a farmer who immediately went to the police.
What also didn't help Earl buy more time was the fact that he tried to hop a train that was carrying a large number of Winnipeg police officers.
I mean, honestly, it seems like most of the time so far, things have been coming up for him.
So there had to be something, at least, that didn't go his way.
Right, man.
He hops on a train full of Winnipeg police officers.
That's crazy.
Realizing that he was on a train full of cops, Earl took off like a bat out of hell and was able to elude the police for another 12 hours.
But when those 12 hours were up, Earl would be found hiding in some bushes and was once again in police custody.
Earl was brought to the Rupert Street Police Station back in Winnipeg, where he would be photographed, fingerprinted, measured, and booked in again.
And this time, the police were adamant that they had their guy dead to rights.
But Earl was just as adamant that his name was Virgil Wilson.
Copies of his fingerprints were sent off to San Francisco to see if they matched those found at many of the crime scenes.
They also took imprints of his teeth and sent those off as well.
Which is really crazy, because that's how they caught fucking Ted Bundy.
Teeth imprints.
That's how they got him.
Yeah, I mean, they were obviously getting good at this.
This was in 1926, man.
That's pretty crazy.
And within weeks, the match was made.
Earl's fingerprints matched those found at numerous crime scenes, and his teeth marks matched those left on many of his victims.
Ooh, man.
In the meantime...
While work was being done on that, the police would prepare for Earl to be placed in a lineup for photographs.
In the end, over 40 people were able to definitively say that Earl Nelson was either at or near the scene of a murder at or around the exact time the murder was believed to have occurred.
The police dug deeper.
They questioned his fearful wife, Mary, and she would report that Earl was never at home whenever a murder had happened.
Another piece of evidence was the knife that he used to cut an electrical lamp cord that he used to strangle Fannie Mae and or Maureen Oswald in Detroit with.
When the police were investigating those murders, they saw that the cord had been cut with a knife while the lamp was on, which they predicted would have caused a small electrical burn on the blade of the knife.
And sure enough, that burn was present on the knife in Earl's possession, which, if the evidence wasn't so stacked against him, I'd be pretty iffy.
Yeah, that one's kind of a...
Very thin.
That's a bit thin.
And the police would gather enough evidence to support the fact that Earl was Earl and not any of the other aliases that he used.
I mean, everything was matching up.
There were eyewitnesses.
I mean, they had the evidence to proceed.
He would be rebooked into the jail using his real name, and the charges were officially read, and a trial date would be set, then postponed, and then set again.
The day would be November 1st, 1927.
While he waited and went over his case with his public defender, James H. Stitt, reporters were clamoring around on the daily trying to get whatever they could find, and they'd get Earl openly saying, quote, I only do my lady killings on Saturday nights, end quote.
His attorney flipped shit and immediately set up an interview with the Manitoba Free Press and had Earl say, quote, I'm charged with two murders, but I'm not the one who done it.
End quote.
Yeah, he's all just like...
Taking it real casual.
The lawyer's like, what are you doing, man?
Don't say that shit!
Now you have to go out and say this!
Yeah. That's crazy.
Within the weeks leading up to his trial, he would be indicted for the murders he committed in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Detroit, Portland, and San Francisco.
Unfortunately for him, he was being tried for two murders in Manitoba, Canada, which still had the death penalty at the time.
And it seemed pretty unlikely that he would ever be extradited to the United States to face those other crimes.
And the day would come, November 1st, 1927.
Some say it was the trial of the Canadian century.
Others say it was just another day and the world gone mad.
Over 60 people would take the stand to testify against old Earl Early Bird Leonard Farrell Nelson, including his wife.
who I believed had divorced him by this point.
But yeah, she would testify against him and had no qualms about doing so.
She told everyone that he was absolutely insane, which, yeah, he was pretty fucking crazy.
And even the prosecution psychiatrist who looked Earl over would say that he was a, quote, constitutional psychopath, end quote.
But also that he was legally sane and could face the death of the law.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean...
You can tell this guy's not, like, driveling around, like, saying weird stuff, like, preaching to people.
He's just a classic psychopath serial killer, you know?
So on November 5th, the trial would come to a close.
After 40 minutes of deliberation, the jury would find him guilty of murder, times two, and he would receive the mandatory death sentence by hanging.
His lawyer petitioned for clemency on the grounds that Earl was legitimately insane, but...
Nothing they tried worked.
The judge would set his execution date for the second Friday in January of the following year.
Only about nine weeks away.
Nine weeks, dude.
Whoa. You get sentenced nine weeks later, that's your day.
Crazy. Yeah, man, I always thought about how fucked it would be to be on death row in, like, Japan.
You know, because unlike in the United States, if you're on death row over there...
They don't give you a set date to murder your ass.
It's like they just pick a name out of a hat one day and it's like, well, that's the guy.
And then they just lead that guy to death.
It's pretty fucked.
Whoa, wild.
Psychological element to it.
That's crazy.
Any day could be your day.
You never know.
Fucking crazy, dude.
But Earl did not sit around and simply wait for his death.
He was adamant that he was innocent and stopped at no length within his means to voice it.
He appealed his sentence until he exhausted his remedies, and he appealed to the newspapers in an attempt to win sympathy from the general public.
But alas, none of this would work for him.
He never once wavered from his claim of innocence, even as he was led to the law.
Good. Riddance.
Scott. Yeah?
Let me ask you a question.
Yeah. Scott.
Yeah? What is it that kills someone in a state-sanctioned hanging?
Oh. I believe it is the strangulation, right?
Well, let's get into this.
There is a common misconception that the condemned dies due to a broken neck or a cervical dislocation where the spinal cord is severed from the brainstem.
That isn't entirely correct.
In Delaware's, quote, Delaware hanging protocol, end quote, which is the hanging 101 for executions, the actual method of death is through strangulation, which, as we all know, can take around four minutes.
So, the ideal hanging, how they, quote, unquote, want it to happen, is for the person to drop, causing the cervical dislocation, which pretty much instantly causes you to go unconscious, and then you strangle to death.
But you're already unconscious, so it's super cool.
So that's how it should be done.
But the experts say that it very rarely ever happens the way it's supposed to, and people are actually strangled by their own weight while they are fully conscious.
Which is far from super cool.
And I think maybe that's why they put a sack over your head, so people can't see that you're still alive.
Yeah, what's even crazier is that there used to be a public thing, like people would gather to watch the hanging, and that actually didn't end until just recently.
It wasn't that long ago that the last public hanging ever happened.
Pretty crazy.
It might have even been in the state of Oregon.
Didn't they re-establish hanging as a form of execution?
I do not believe so.
There is a state recently that...
I reinstated that as a form of execution.
I think you may be right about that, but I'd have to look into it.
I'm going to look it up really quick.
Let's see.
What state...
Some states still use hanging and firing squads for their executions.
Firing squads are still allowed in Utah, Oklahoma, and Mississippi, but Utah is the only one to have performed one in the last 10 years.
Wow. New Hampshire is currently the only state that allows hanging as a means of execution.
Hanging was practiced in the United States up until 1972 when the United States Supreme Court found capital punishment to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
It was overturned in 1976 and re-legalized.
The hanging of Billy Bailey is likely to be the final hanging in the United States, considering that all three of the states that maintain hanging as a secondary method of execution alongside lethal injection.
After 1976, restoration, death penalty data has been now established.
Delaware.
Ended it in 2016.
Washington ended it in 2018.
New Hampshire ended it in 2019.
The last man on death row in the United States was Michael Addison in New Hampshire after murdering a police officer in 2006.
He may be executed by hanging if lethal injection is unconstitutional or inefficient, or if he chooses to be executed by hanging.
Wow. Crazy.
There's a little history on hanging.
Yeah, I don't know why I thought it was Oregon.
That's pretty crazy that it actually happens in other places.
It's wild.
Yeah, man.
So Earl Nelson was hanged at 7.30am on January 13th, 1928 at the Vaughn Street Jail in Winnipeg, Canada.
His last words rang out in the silence.
Quote, I forgive those who have wronged me.
End quote.
What a bitchy motherfucker.
It's so crazy.
Man, yeah.
Earl's crime spree started on February 20th, 1926 and ended on June 9th or 10th, 1927, a total of about 17 months.
And in that 17 months, he killed at least 22 people.
The rate of murder that he carried out averaged to slightly more than one person each month, except he would kill in clusters over a period of a few days and then lay low for a while and then do the same thing.
It was just fucking gnarly, man.
This fucking guy.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, so it's like, even though you could say that it was about one a month, he would just do it in tight groups, and then it'd be a while before the next tight group.
And Scott, Earl was suspected of killing many others.
Obviously, you would assume that, right?
And he certainly assaulted many more than the official number states.
Oh, of course.
Like, these are just the ones that were found, right?
So, I mean, the odds are...
Good, because he was such a prolific killer that there were more people that never made the record.
Right. Yeah, or they just didn't fit his M.O., so they didn't even attach it to him.
I mean, he claimed innocence the whole time, so he wasn't like, yeah, that's mine, that's mine, I killed that person too.
Right, exactly.
So he probably killed a lot more.
This was the first serial murderer in American history whose crime sent shockwaves all over the place.
His shit was getting widespread media attention on all platforms, newspapers, magazines, and radio.
And it was just being blasted everywhere.
And his crimes were getting crazy attention in Australia for some reason.
Oh, random.
Yeah. But Earl's kill count was the record high for a single murderer in the United States up until the discovery of serial killer Juan Coronas' crimes that came to a head in 1971.
Juan Corona, who himself was a migrant worker, would kill other migrant farm workers and bury their bodies in peach orchards along Feather River in Sutter County, California.
He was convicted of killing 25, but as we all know, they are always suspected of killing more.
Juan would chop his victims with machetes or stab them.
Oh, man.
That's pretty wicked.
Horrible. Horrible, motherfucker.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So anyway, what else?
What else do we have here?
Oh, well, let's see.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
So there was a jail guard who watched over Earl during the trial, and he made note of a particular biblical verse from the Book of Proverbs.
I'm going to read it, Scott.
I want you to interpret for me.
Alright, shoot.
It reads, My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways.
For a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men.
What the hell does that mean?
Yeah, I mean, basically it's just talking about how this particular transgression, to be specific, leads you down a path of unrighteousness.
And it increases the amount of unrighteous things that you will be participating in if you go that route.
It's out of context, but yeah, it's basically what it's saying.
Wow, what is it saying?
How does it...
How do you think that relates to him and his murders?
I'm sure however it related to him in his mind, I mean, let's be honest, the meaning would have been contorted.
Totally. Yeah, it doesn't mean to him what it means for someone who's taking it in context with the rest of the world.
Right, right, right.
There's no way.
He perverted it, he corrupted it to fit whatever he was doing.
Exactly. Yes.
Yeah, okay.
Well, that's good to know.
So that will be the end of this story on Earl Leonard Farrell Nelson, America's first serial killer rapist whose crime spanned the United States and into Canada.
It was a truly horrific tale, but a true one nonetheless.
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