Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Seated on the edge of his cot, he gave a deep, self-pitying sigh. “I’ve been unfortunate from the day of my birth,” he said. “I’ve been handicapped by the sins of my parents, who left a taint in my blood that’s caused me all kinds of agony of body and mind. They blame me for attacking women in my earlier years. But that’s untrue! I never did so. Women as such never even interested me. I was never anxious to be among them.”

  “Is it possible that you committed the crimes when your mind wasn’t functioning normally,” asked the reporter, “and that you’ve completely forgotten the facts?”

  “No, sir,” Nelson replied, shaking his head vehemently. “That’s absolutely impossible. I am innocent—innocent!” Here, he gave the reporter an imploring look. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Well,” said the newsman. “The jury found you guilty. And the evidence against you looked pretty strong.”

  “I know that,” Nelson admitted. “But I was wrongly identified by people who didn’t realize what they were doing.”

  The reporter had just one more question to pose. “Are you afraid to die, Nelson?”

  The condemned man took a moment to reply. “Life is sweet,” he said earnestly. “Like everyone else, I prefer to live—but only long enough to clear my name. I’ve thought everything over and—you know what?—I think God is good to take me away. If I lived, the law would just send me away to the penitentiary for life. Or to an insane asylum. I don’t want that. I’d rather die than be locked up with hardened criminals or madmen.”

  Here, his eyes took on a dreamy look. “Tomorrow morning, I expect to be in Heaven. There are no detectives or policemen up there—only the good. Maybe I’ll finally find the peace and happiness that have been denied me here on earth.”

  Not long after the interview ended, a guard brought Neson his final supper, which he consumed with his usual gusto—grapefruit, liver and bacon, apple pie, and coffee.

  At around 9:00 P.M., an unusual ceremony took place in his cell, when His Grace Archbishop Sinnott arrived to administer the sacrament of confirmation. Never before had this rite been conducted within the precincts of the provincial jail, and various guards and prison officials crowded around the open door of the death cell to watch as Nelson was confirmed.

  Afterwards, the archbishop spent several moments quietly conferring with Nelson. When the cleric departed at around 9:45, Father Webb seated himself on the cot beside Nelson and opened his Bible.

  The two men spent the rest of the night reading and discussing passages from Scripture. From Nelson’s tranquil demeanor, an observer would never have guessed that his death was so near—that, within a few hours, on the morning of Friday the thirteenth, he would mount the thirteen steps of the scaffold and (as the newspapers never tired of pointing out) become “the thirteenth man to be hanged for murder on the gallows of the provincial jail.”

  At 5:00 A.M., Father Webb, assisted by another priest named Holloway, conducted a mass. Nelson received Holy Communion. Another mass was said at 5:30.

  Shortly afterwards, a guard brought Nelson a tray holding a light breakfast of toast and tea. Nelson calmly consumed his last meal.

  A crowd of people—some of whom were authorized witnesses, others who were there simply to satisfy their morbid curiosity—had gathered outside the jail at daybreak. At approximately 7:30 A.M. a prison official appeared to admit the former into the courtyard, where the scaffold, partly enclosed by a tentlike canvas shield, hulked against a grimy, far wall.

  The spectators spoke in hushed whispers as they huddled at the foot of the gallows. Suddenly, their murmuring ceased. The hangman, Arthur Ellis, had materialized. Mounting the scaffold stairs, he made a last-minute inspection of the apparatus, then asked that the condemned man be brought out.

  All eyes turned to the door through which Nelson would emerge. He appeared a moment later, arms strapped behind him, flanked by a pair of burly guards, and followed by the two chanting priests. He was dressed in a collarless shirt, blue serge trousers, tan shoes, and stockings. His face was pale, hair unbrushed, his face unshaven.

  With Father Webb at his heels, he climbed to the top of the scaffold, took his place at the center of the trapdoor, then turned and faced the assembled crowd. After holding out a cross for him to kiss, Father Webb murmured a few final words to Nelson and descended the stairs, while the hangman adjusted the noose around the condemned man’s neck.

  Asked if he had any last words, Nelson—speaking in a clear, firm voice—said, “I declare my innocence before God and man. I forgive those who have injured me and I ask pardon from those I have injured. May the Lord have mercy on my soul.”

  No sooner were these words out of his mouth than Ellis slipped a black hood over the prisoner’s head, stepped away from the trap, and drew the bolt. The trap crashed open, and Earle Leonard Nelson plunged through the hole.

  The hooded, pinioned figure fell, bounced, dropped again. Neck broken, head cocked at a grotesque angle, he spun lazily in the shadows beneath the scaffold, his limbs giving an occasional spasmodic twitch.

  Stepping up to the body, hangman Ellis removed the leather straps from Nelson’s wrists. In spite of his long experiece, he seemed strangely unsettled, his hands shaking visibly as he undid the restraints.

  When the straps were off, the prison physician, Dr. J. A. McArthur, strode up to the body and felt Nelson’s pulse. Though the evening papers would report that “death was instantaneous,” it wasn’t until 7:52 A.M., eleven full minutes after Nelson took the plunge, that Dr. McArthur turned to the witnesses and said, “It’s over.” A black flag was promptly hoisted on the prison tower to signal that the execution had been carried out.

  Minutes after the corpse was cut down and transported to the prison morgue, the coroner’s jury returned its verdict. The official cause of Earle Nelson’s demise, fittingly enough, was “death by strangulation.”

  EPILOGUE

  †

  Less than nine hours before Nelson’s execution, a pair of onetime lovebirds named Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, the principal figures in one of the most sensational murder cases of the twentieth century, were put to death in the electric chair of New York’s Sing Sing prison.

  At the time of her arrest, Snyder—a voluptuous blonde with baby blue eyes and a lantern jaw—had been unhappily married for thirteen years to an overbearing art editor named Albert. A perennial “party girl” who looked much younger than her thirty-odd years, she had been seeking solace from her domestic misery in the arms of assorted lovers.

  In 1925 she was introduced to a mousy, myopic, thirty-two-year-old mama’s boy named Judd Gray, who made his living as a corset salesman. Before long, they were involved in a torrid affair—meeting clandestinely in Manhattan hotel rooms, exchanging love letters composed in cloying baby talk, addressing each other by saccharine nicknames. To Judd, the domineering, brazenly sexual Snyder was his “Momsie”; she called her Milquetoast paramour “Lover Boy.”

  One year after meeting Gray, Snyder resolved to do away with her detested husband. After tricking him into taking out a $48,000 Me insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, she set about trying to kill him: spiking his whiskey with bichloride of mercury, sprinkling poison on his prune whip, piping gas into his bedroom while he slept. Snyder not only survived these attempts; in spite of his wife’s barely disguised abhorrence, he apparently never suspected her.

  Finally, the “Granite Woman” (as the tabloids would eventually dub her) decided to enlist her lover’s help. Though Gray was genuinely appalled when his “Momsie” first broached the subject, he was helplessly in her thrall. (The tabloids would brand him the “Putty Man.”) In the early hours of Sunday, March 20, 1927, they put their plan into effect.

  Fortified with enough bootleg liquor to intoxicate a dray horse and armed with a heavy iron sash weight, Gray snuck into the Snyder home after dark, entering through a side door Ruth had left unlatched. When the victim was soundly asleep, Gray crept into the Snyders’ bedro
om and brought the bludgeon down on the sleeping man’s head. The blow was so weak, however, that it only caused Albert Snyder to sit up with a roar and grab his assailant by the necktie.

  “Momsie!” screamed Gray. “For God’s sake, help!”

  Rushing to the bedside, Ruth grabbed the sash weight from her “Lover Boy’s” hand and delivered a crushing blow to her husband’s skull. Albert Snyder subsided onto the bed with a shuddering moan. For good measure, the assassins garrotted him with a wire and stuffed chloroform-soaked rags up his nostrils.

  Putting the second phase of their scheme into action, the pair proceeded to ransack the house to make it look as if Snyder had been killed in the course of a break-in. They upended furniture, opened drawers, even ripped the stuffing out of pillows. Ruth wanted Gray to make off with her jewels but, for unexplained reasons, he refused. They settled for hiding her valuables under her mattress and stashing her fur coat in a bag inside her closet. Their clever idea for disposing of the bloody murder weapon was to rub it with ashes and stick it in Albert Snyder’s basement tool chest.

  Though Ruth urged Gray to knock her unconscious, he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. Instead, he bound her wrists and ankles, gagged her with cheesecloth, and made off into the night.

  A few hours later, at around 7:30 A.M., Ruth dragged herself to her sleeping daughter’s bedroom and managed to rouse the eleven-year-old child, who immediately summoned help. Though Ruth stuck to her prerehearsed story, police were wise to her from the start. All the evidence was against her. Burglars are not known for knocking over armchairs and tearing open pillows in their search for booty. And Ruth’s claim of being knocked unconscious by the intruder failed to persuade the medical examiner, who was unable to detect a single contusion on her scalp. Her cause wasn’t helped when detectives turned up her “stolen” jewelry underneath her mattress, found the blood-stained murder weapon in her husband’s tool chest, and discovered a tie tack with the initials “J.G.” at the foot of Albert Snyder’s bed. The bumbling conspirators were in custody within twenty-four hours.

  The Snyder-Gray case, which broke just a few months after the conclusion of the Hall-Mills murder trial, became an immediate cause célèbre, not only in America but throughout the world. Ruth Snyder instantly became the most reviled woman of her time—the Whore of Babylon in the guise of a buxom Queens housewife. The Snyder-Gray trial—attended by such Jazz Age celebrities as David Belasco, D. W. Griffith, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the Rev. Billy Sunday, Damon Runyan, Will Durant, and others—received almost as much attention as the Lindbergh flight and was rich in both lurid melodrama and coarse comedy, particularly when Ruth was on the stand. (In one memorable exchange, Assistant District Attorney Charles W. Froessel—trying to establish Ruth’s earlier affair with a man named Lesser—asked, “Did you know Mr. Lesser carnally?” “Yes,” Ruth replied. “But only in a business way.”)

  Public sentiment was so inflamed against Ruth that after she and Gray were convicted and sentenced to death, every member of the Court of Appeals received a copy of the following postcard:

  COURT OF APPEALS, QUEENS COUNTY JUDGES:

  We will shoot you if you let that Snyder woman go free. She must be electrocuted. The public demands it. If she is not done away with, other women would do the same thing. She must be made an example of. We are watching out.

  THE PUBLIC

  The public got its wish. Shortly after 11:00 P.M. on Thursday, January 12, 1928, Ruth went to the chair, followed eight minutes later by Gray. As it happened, one of the witnesses, a New York Daily News reporter named Thomas Howard, showed up at the execution with a small camera secretly strapped to his ankle. Casually crossing his leg, he waited until the executioner threw the switch, then released the shutter button with a cable that ran down his pants leg. The resulting photograph, a blurry shot of Ruth Snyder’s body stiffening as the current coursed through it, was featured on the front page of the Daily News, becoming the most infamous picture in the history of tabloid journalism.

  So all-consuming was the public’s obsession with the “Granite Woman” and her hapless “Lover Boy” that, in spite of Earle Nelson’s own notoriety, his death was barely noted by the U.S. news media. The “Gorilla Man’s” hanging had been completely overshadowed by the two most highly publicized and eagerly anticipated executions of the twentieth century.

  In Canada, however, the situation was different. Though the electrocution of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray was frontpage news even in Manitoba, the “Gorilla Man’s” death was the main story of the day. Indeed, the Nelson case would continue to stir the passions of Winnipeggers for several weeks after his execution.

  Immediately after the hanging, the Reverend Father Webb, acting on behalf of Lillian Fabian and Mary Fuller, claimed Nelson’s corpse and arranged for its transportation to a funeral home called Barker’s, where, after receiving the usual ministrations, it was laid in an open gray coffin and displayed in the parlor chapel. Affixed to the coffin, at Lillian Fabian’s request, was a small brass plaque engraved with the dead man’s real name, Earle L. Ferral.

  Within a short time, word had spread throughout the city that the “Gorilla Man’s” corpse was available for viewing. By 6:00 P.M., more than 1,000 people had gathered at the funeral home. Special constables were dispatched to the scene to maintain order. It was almost midnight before the last of the curiosity seekers filed past the coffin.

  By eight the next morning, Saturday, January 14, 1928, a fresh crowd had assembled at Barker’s, eager to get a final glimpse of “the man whose crimes had repulsed the world” (as one reporter wrote). A front-page article about the viewing appeared in that morning’s edition of the Manitoba Free Press. “Never before in the history of Winnipeg has such widespread curiosity been manifested by the public to view a criminal’s body,” the article stated.

  Reading the newspaper at his desk that morning, Attorney General W. J. Major was deeply distressed by this report. Summoning Deputy Attorney John Allen to his office, Major vented his feelings in the most emphatic terms.

  Allen immediately repaired to his office and telephoned Mr. Barker to convey the attorney general’s displeasure at the “revolting practice.”

  “I am only giving the public what it wants,” Barker protested.

  “Surely you must understand that you have no such right,” Allen said firmly. “The body does not belong to you. It belongs to Nelson’s estate, and I feel certain that if his wife were here, she would not permit this ghoulish exhibition.”

  “That may well be the case,” Barker acknowledged.

  Allen’s tone grew stern. “Are you, perchance, charging the public any money for an opportunity to view the body?”

  “I resent that question,” Barker huffed.

  “I am sure you do. But you still haven’t answered it.”

  Barker indignantly denied that he was charging an admission fee.

  “Mr. Barker,” said Allen, “the attorney general and I will expect you to prevent the public from viewing Nelson’s body. Otherwise, the police will be sent to your premises at once.”

  After reporting this conversation to Attorney General Major, Allen telephoned Chief Constable Newton. Within minutes, a special contingent of constables was at Barker’s. This time, however, the police were there not to keep the crowd under control, but to disperse it. By noon, the morbid show had been shut down for good.

  The incident, however, continued to reverberate. For the next two weeks, the city’s newspapers were swamped with letters from outraged citizens, decrying the “awful show that was made of the notorious Nelson.” A typical example appeared in the January 18 issue of the Winnipeg Tribune:

  To the Editor:

  Sir,—Can it be possible that the authorities allowed the body of the notorious criminal who was hanged last week to be made a sordid show of here? Can this be allowed in Canada?

  Of course, a lack of Christian feeling and fine breeding can do a great many unheard-of things. But that t
he body of a criminal should be treated rather as that of a hero is a blot on our city which should not be allowed to pass without protest.

  The authorities should have seen to it that this man’s remains were sent as speedily and quietly as possible to his relatives in the United States. It is to be hoped our mayor will prohibit any further copying of sordid, morbid fashions in this city in the future. I hope many protests will be sent by our citizens and societies so that such a blot can never besmirch our British city again.

  “DISGUSTED CITIZEN”

  Many other letters objected to the hanging itself, condemning the practice as a “relic of the Dark Ages” and urging that, as one citizen put it, “some other, less barbaric method be found. If a murderer resorts to the most terrible way of killing his victim or victims, is it becoming to the State to pay him back in savage kind? I do not think so. Kill the murderer, if the state so decrees, but electrocute him, or shoot him; almost any method, save the brutality of hanging with all its attendant gruesomeness.”

  By the time these letters were published, however, the corpse that had prompted them was long gone from Canada. Placed in a metal-lined box and loaded onto a train at the Union depot, the plain gray coffin had departed from Winnipeg late Saturday afternoon, one day after the execution. “Back over the long trail which he left strewn with death and misery” (in the words of one reporter), the “Gorilla Man’s” body had been carried by rail to his birthplace, San Francisco.

  There, in the early morning hours of Sunday, January 15, 1928, it was received by Lillian Fabian and Mary Fuller, Earle Leonard Ferral’s only mourners.

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS