Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  To drum up publicity for the movie, exhibitors concocted a stunt whose outright silliness was thoroughly in keeping with the nonsensical tone of Spence’s farce. Special performances were arranged at the monkey houses of several big-city zoos, and well-known scientists were invited to observe the reactions of the simian spectators. As scientific experiments, these screenings were of dubious value, to say the least. But they were a smashing success from a p.r. point of view, eagerly attended by various eminent zoologists and prominently reported in papers throughout the United States, including the New York Times.

  In Pittsburgh, where The Gorilla was shown at the Darwinian Hall of the Highland Zoo, a cageful of South American ring-tailed monkeys let out a howl when the film began to roll, then quickly settled down and returned to their normal routine. “Scientists, keepers at the zoo, and officials of the film company,” wrote the Times, “admitted that, in so far as the monkey audience was concerned, the show was a ‘flop.’”

  The primate reaction was slightly more positive in New York City, where The Gorilla had its official premiere at the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo. Among the scientific luminaries in attendance were Dr. Raymond Ditmars, curator of the Bronx Zoo, and Dr. J. H. McGregor, head of the Zoology Department at Columbia University. Both men were particularly intrigued by the reactions of a chimpanzee named Bessie, who “raised a racket” whenever the projectionist stopped to change reels, then fell into a rapt silence as soon as the film started up again.

  As to the exact significance of this response, there was a difference of scholarly opinion. Dr. Ditmars, according to the Times, believed that Bessie’s behavior “indicated a real curiosity about the figures on the screen.” Dr. McGregor, on the other hand, “was not prepared to say whether [the chimp’s] attention was held by figures recognized as human or merely by the changing lights and shadows on the screen.” Both experts agreed, however, that—at least in one respect—the monkeys “were superior as an audience to some spectators in the movie houses.”

  They didn’t read the title cards out loud.

  Meanwhile, locked in his own cage up in Winnipeg, the real-life “Gorilla” continued to generate news. On November 18, the Winnipeg Tribune ran a page-one story headlined EARLE NELSON TALKS FROM PRISON DEATH CELL. After six months of steadfast silence on his case, the convicted “Strangler” had finally decided to go public with his own version of events.

  Interviewed in his cell, Nelson looked even pudgier than he had at his trial—no surprise, given his torpid existence and caloric intake. The warden of the provincial jail had acceded to Nelson’s request for more varied and plenteous meals. At the start of the interview, a guard arrived with a typical lunch—ham, tomatoes, French-fried potatoes, cheese, bread, and coffee—which Nelson wolfed down with his usual, noisy voracity.

  Besides eating, his main activity seemed to consist of lounging on his cot and knotting strands of silk floss into miniature pouches—“quaint little knick-knacks,” wrote the reporter, “that might well grace a lady’s dressing table.” Nelson proudly showed off a dozen of these trifles to his visitor, explaining that each of them required more than 10,000 knots. The reporter did his best to picture the “Gorilla” at this “fancy work”—the blunt, powerful fingers busily weaving delicate filaments into dainty little gewgaws. But he simply couldn’t envision it; the whole concept seemed almost dizzyingly incongruous.

  Noisily sucking the last shreds of ham from his teeth, Nelson leaned back on his cot and laced his hands behind his head. “Go ahead and ask me what you want to.”

  Prompted by a question about his travels in the months preceding the Winnipeg murders, Nelson launched into a long, disjointed speech that alternated between hazy, highly selective recollections and bitter tirades against the authorities who had ostensibly framed him. According to his story, he had set out from San Francisco, where he’d been working as a carpenter, in March 1927.

  “I left in one of those kind of spells I had, sort of a dream, not knowing where I was going. I got to Sacramento, from there to different towns, reached Truckee, California. From there I went to Nevada, then to Idaho, then to Wyoming—quite a ways I wandered into Wyoming. Then to Montana, into Butte and Helena. And I was at Great Falls, I think.”

  He paused, so that the reporter, who was writing furiously in his notepad, could get down every word. “Go on,” said the latter after a moment.

  “Let me see,” said Nelson, tugging on his lower lip. “I went through South Dakota, over east as far as Sioux Falls, and up to Bismarck. Then I came up past Bismarck through a lot of small places much west of here.”

  “Were you ever in the state of Illinois?” asked the reporter.

  Nelson shook his head emphatically. “No. I have been in just seven states—California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Oh yes—I have been in Salt Lake, Utah.”

  “That makes eight,” said the reporter.

  “Eight, that’s right.”

  “And when did you reach Winnipeg?”

  Nelson, who had been perched on his cot with his back against the wall, suddenly leaned forward and jabbed a finger at his visitor. “I never was here at all!” he exclaimed. “I admit that I am subject to spells of lunacy in which I function the same as in a dream and sometimes find myself in strange places. But I never hurt anyone in these spells. And I was certainly not even near Winnipeg before the police brought me up here. That’s all there is to that.”

  “I see,” said the reporter as he rapidly transcribed Nelson’s remarks. “But what about the witnesses?”

  Nelson snorted. “The Crown’s witnesses are mistaken, wrong, and prejudiced,” he declared. “It seems to me, they have been pretty well-coached in their parts. An investigation would reveal this. Their testimonies made me look unfavorable, and the jury was probably swayed by some force—some influence unfair but strong. They were so prejudiced that they could give me no benefit of the doubt. If they would have brought in insanity, just for doubt’s sake, there would have been no blood on their hands.”

  Suddenly agitated, he sprang to his feet and began pacing in front of the reporter. “My innocent blood is on the hands of those who have done me up or who were instrumental in the identification parade!”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked his interviewer.

  “Whenever I was called out for identification, they dressed me up in clothes similar to those found in the secondhand clothes store, like those that belonged to the man who was supposed to have done the crime. And they made me comb my hair back, even though I generally wear it parted. That blond detective, Smith, was managing it. I dreamed one night that he was telling witnesses when bringing them in for identification, ‘He’s the fourth man or the sixth man in line. Pick him out.’”

  “But why,” asked the reporter, “would the police behave so unscrupulously?”

  Nelson gave him an incredulous look. “Because by getting me done up quickly, they have a chance to make themselves look like the captors of a real desperado. Me—a proven subject to lunacy. What better material did they need to work on, being that they didn’t have the real culprit?”

  “These are serious charges,” said the reporter.

  “That’s right,” said Nelson in indignant tones. “And I demand an investigation of the whole case. I am a native American citizen and have been promised a square deal like a man gets in America. If I was treated square from the start, I never would have been arrested at all.”

  “What you are describing is not consistent with British justice,” said the reporter, whose patriotic sensibilities had evidently been piqued by Nelson’s imputations.

  “Well, I’m glad of that,” Nelson replied as he reseated himself on the edge of his cot. “Anyway, I have nothing against the country. But the police up here want to get a feather in their hat, see. Anything that Smith and his aides could do to make me look like the ‘Gorilla Man,’ it means a lot to them. I
think they will go as far as they can.”

  “So you still hope to win a reprieve?”

  “Of course!” Nelson exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t I? I am innocent. Lots of people know it, too.”

  To support the latter assertion, Nelson dug under his mattress and extracted a fat bundle of letters tied together with string. “I get mail all the time,” he explained, undoing the knot and flipping through the envelopes. “Mostly from women.” Locating the envelope he was looking for, he passed it to the reporter.

  Inside was a note from a woman named Martingale, asserting her faith in Nelson’s innocence—a belief based not only on his “gentlemanly demeanor” but on well-known astrological principles. After all, wrote Mrs. Martingale, Nelson was born in May 1897, and “the zodiacal signs for May are conclusive that a man born in that month is incapable of murder.”

  “And what do you believe are your chances?” asked the reporter, handing the letter back to Nelson.

  “I have some hope,” Nelson allowed. “But I am not betting on it.” Leaning forward, palms pressed together between his knees, he fixed the reporter with an earnest look. “Do you know what I would do if my sentence was commuted?”

  The reporter raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  “I would devote the rest of my life,” Nelson said with a little catch in his voice, “to an exhaustive study of religion.”

  51

  †

  Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man

  We see in the criminal a savage man and, at the same time, a sick man.

  Nelson wasn’t the only one incensed over his impending execution. True, most people heartily endorsed his sentence. The prevailing attitude was summed up by one Winnipegger who, interviewed outside the courthouse shortly before the trial ended, declared that Nelson should be put to death “whether sane or insane. Why all the fuss? Why don’t they just get through and hang him?”

  Not everyone, however, shared that feeling. In the weeks following the trial, some highly articulate people spoke out against the verdict. To these dissenters, it was a matter of outrage and sorrow that, in a nation dedicated to the traditions of “British justice,” a criminal so clearly deranged had been condemned to the gallows.

  In mid-November, for example, a man named Fred Robinson, an avid follower of the Nelson case, wrote a letter to the Free Press, taking Judge Dysart to task for using the phrase “moral imbecility” in his charge to the jury. “What has imbecility got to do with insanity?” Robinson asked. The first was a form of “feeblemindedness … a mental deficiency caused by arrested mental development.” By contrast, the latter was a “disorder of the mental faculties.”

  “There is quite a difference between a disordered mind and a deficient mind,” Robinson pointed out. Among other things, imbecility was a constant condition, whereas the symptoms of insanity were, in certain cases, intermittent or “cyclic.”

  That Nelson was capable of rational moments didn’t mean that he was sane. “Does the fact that the accused knows right from wrong at the present moment, or at any previous time, prove conclusively that he is and always was sane?” Robinson wrote. “Is not cyclic insanity attended with similar lucid intervals as the accused may now have? The twelve good men and true had to bring in a verdict—but did they comprehend what insane or not insane meant?”

  Like other observers, Robinson was forced to conclude that—if not exactly a travesty—Nelson’s trial was hardly a shining example of “British justice.” “While the evidence proving the identity and crimes committed by the accused may have been perfect,” he allowed, “the plea of insanity, in my estimation, was not treated as seriously as it should have been, the enormity of the crimes and maybe public opinion taking first consideration.”

  Similar sentiments were voiced by an anonymous editorial writer for a Winnipeg weekly, who summed up his view of the Nelson affair in the title of his essay, “A Double Tragedy.” Like Robinson, this writer recognized that “the evidence against Nelson was overwhelming. Seldom has such a web of circumstantial evidence been woven around a prisoner. Well might the jury say to Nelson as Nathan said to David: ‘Thou art the man.’”

  The question of sanity, however, was far more complicated. While acknowledging that “there were attempts to give this ogre a fair trial,” the writer could only conclude that the verdict was largely determined by emotional factors: “fear as to what Nelson might do if he escaped from custody … profound horror at his frightful deeds … a primitive desire for revenge.”

  “Was it humanly possible for this general attitude to be kept out of the courthouse?” he asked. “Probably not. There is no reason why it should be. Administration of justice, like all other human institutions, is approximate and imperfect. It cannot possibly, in the long run, be better than the people themselves. Passion and prejudice penetrate the walls of a courthouse almost as easily as waves from a wireless station.”

  It was “passion and prejudice,” suggested the writer, that accounted for the jury’s decision. After all—in spite of Dr. Mathers’ testimony—it seemed glaringly evident that no sane, no “morally responsible” man could have committed such atrocities.

  “Consider what this man Nelson did,” the writer exclaimed. “He comes to Canada on June 8 after, it is alleged, strangling two women in Detroit on June 1 and another in Chicago on June 3. If that is true, he must have come up to Winnipeg, a strange city in a strange country, like a flaming fiend. He arrives here on June 8, and on June 9 strangles an innocent and defenseless child and ravishes it.

  “The following day, June 10, he starts off for Elmwood. It is June, the time of year when everything is suggestive of life, of new life. Longfellow has a line: ‘A morning of June with all its music and sunshine.’ On such a morning, Nelson goes to the humble home of a young couple, finds a young mother alone, a young mother who has done him no manner or shadow of wrong. He strangles her and outrages her.

  “If this is the act, the procedure, of a sane man, of a man knowing right from wrong, accountable and responsible, then what must we think of those who hold up their hands in horror at the thought of being descended from monkeys?”

  To be sure, it was hard to blame the jury for its decision, given the enormity of Nelson’s crimes. The writer himself conceded that there was “an argument for doing away with beings like Nelson, even if insane.” Still, he added dryly, “this is not yet a recognized procedure.”

  From the writer’s point of view, the whole case was shaping up to be a “double tragedy.” By executing Nelson, society was throwing away the chance to learn something invaluable. “It would seem highly desirable,” he maintained, “that the last bit of knowledge to be derived from this fearful affair should be obtained. The whole history of Nelson should be studied as thoroughly as possible by the best alienists on the continent and every fact securable secured. How did this man come to be what he is today? What produced this monstrosity? Are the same causes at work and to what extent? Could anything have been changed or prevented?”

  Such scientific study of the maniac’s mind might prove to be of immeasurable social benefit. For, while “cases like Nelson’s” were “happily rare” at the moment, there was reason to fear that they might become more common in the future.

  Whoever this editorialist was, his words weren’t heeded. And for a perfectly understandable reason: he was fifty years ahead of his time. His vision of a future filled with “cases like Nelson’s” must have seemed impossibly grim in 1927. A systematic study of sociopathic killers wouldn’t be undertaken until the late 1970s, when agents of the FBI’s Behaviorial Science Unit would begin visiting prisons throughout the United States to interview the likes of Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy—the beings who would (as the unknown editorialist foresaw) follow in the “Gorilla Man’s” wake.

  Needless to say, the anonymous author of “A Double Tragedy” was not articulating a widely popular attitude. If anything, the average Winnipegger regarded the coming ex
ecution as a cause for celebration. But James Stitt, Nelson’s attorney, certainly shared the editorialist’s viewpoint.

  Stitt (who would go on to have a distinguished legal and political career, winning election to the Dominion Parliament in 1930) was a man of notable integrity and compassion. Another lawyer, assigned to represent such a despised (and foredoomed) defendant, might have contented himself with a perfunctory job. But Stitt—who had grown convinced that Nelson was, in fact, the victim of a severe mental disorder—believed that the verdict was a tragic miscarriage of justice. From the moment the trial ended, he had focussed his energies on saving Nelson’s life, applying himself to this task with an ardor that (in the view of many observers) the “Strangler” scarcely deserved.

  No sooner had the verdict been returned than Stitt announced his intention to “make representations to the Justice Department at Ottawa for remission of the death sentence, based on the plea of insanity.” Over the next few weeks, he collected a batch of affidavits from Nelson’s relatives and acquaintances, all of them testifying to Earle’s lifelong peculiarities.

  According to the deposition of Arthur Edward West, who grew up “two doors from the Nelson residence” and had known Earle for eighteen years, “I … was forbidden as a child to associate with him for reason that he was mentally deranged, was confined to a reform school and would boast to boys of the neighborhood how easy he could steal. He was branded by neighbors as ‘crazy’ and no good would ever come of him, which proves that he was and continues to be of unsound mind.”