True Crime Campfire - Dark Stranger: The Crimes of Earle Leonard Nelson

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

If you think about the 1920s in the United States, a few things might come to mind—jazz, prohibition, Babe Ruth, and, right at the end, the Wall Street Crash. And if you think of crime, you probably think of Al Capone, bootlegging, and fast-talking wise guys with Tommy guns. But the 1920s were also in some ways the nation’s introduction to crimes that could shock and horrify the entire country. Leopold and Loeb’s thrill killing, the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the utter horror of child-killer and cannibal Albert Fish. And possibly the most prolific killer of the decade was a man whose strange desires sent him on a trail of murder all across a continent.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:Bestial by Harold SchechterThe Laughing Gorilla by Robert GraysmithFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. If you think about the 1920s in the United States, a few things might come to mind. Jazz, prohibition, Babe Ruth, and right at the end of the Wall Street crash. And if you think of Crime, you probably think of Al Capone, bootlegging, and fast-talking wise guys with Tommy guns. But the 1920s were also in some ways the nation's introduction to crimes that could shock and horrify the entire country.

Leopold and Loeb's thrill-killing, the kidnapping and murder of the Lindberg baby, the utter horror of child killer and cannibal Albert Fish. And possibly the most prolific killer of the decade was a man whose strange desires sent him on a trail of murder all across a Continent. This is part one of Dark Strangler, the crimes of Earl Leonard Nelson. So, campers, we're starting this one at the end of the story. Winnipeg, Canada, January 13th, 1928. It was a Friday the 13th. In the chill gray stillness just before dawn, the prisoners was brought out into the cobbled yard of the old Vaughn Street jail, where the gallows had been erected. He'd been a notoriously powerful man, but months in a lonely cell with three solid meals a day

had softened his edges. Still, the jail was taking no chances. His arms were strapped behind his back, and two tough-looking guards walked on either side of him. Behind them were two priests. After the hangman put the noose around his neck, the condemned man offered up his last words. 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. The executioner was an efficient man. Right after the last word, he slipped a black hood over the prisoner's head, stepped back, and opened the bolt on the trapdoor. The prisoner fell and bounced and twisted at the end of the rope, neck broken. This kind of death is rarely quick and neat. After the body was

lowered to the ground, the prison doctor knelt to check for signs of life. It wasn't until 11 minutes after the drop that he finally said, it's over, and a black flag was raised over the prison. Earl Leonard Nelson, the dark strangler, the gorilla man, had been convicted of two Canadian murders, but they were the last stops on a journey of mayhem and terror that had taken Earl all across North America and left dozens of people dead in his wake. Although he'd grown up using the name of his mother's family, legally Earl had his father's ominously prescient last name, feral. Baby Earl, born in San Francisco in 1897, had a rough start in life. When he was nine and a half months old, his mother died of syphilis. She'd caught it from her husband, and he died of

the same disease seven months later. Earl, an orphan before he was two years old, was taken in by his maternal grandmother, Jenny Nelson, a widow in her 40s with two surviving children of her own, both still young, 12 and 10 years old. There's a picture of Earl as a baby, a perfectly happy, round, smiling kid, but after his conviction, one journalist wasn't impressed, describing baby Earl from the picture as, quote, a loose-mouth degenerate infant. Ah, the good old days when you could publicly diss on a baby's appearance in the national media. God forbid you acknowledge that a child just looks like a child.

I think he was cute, but whatever. No, he was evil. Evil baby. I got to tell you, I'm putting loose-mouthed degenerate infant in my back pocket. We've got to use that one. Yeah, we'll use it on an adult for sure. Yeah. But maybe on like O'Toole.

or Otis Tool Right He's very loose mouth That would be perfect Raising three kids alone In 1890 was not easy And Mrs. Nelson was apparently a harried woman

With very little time For the softer side of child rearing She was also deeply religious And young Earl picked up on this Becoming especially fascinated With all the apocalyptic craziness In the Book of Revelations This was not a great period in history

as far as mental health care went, particularly for children. Young Earl never received any care or diagnoses, despite the fact that something was very clearly up with him. He would frequently be filled with frantic energy and just as often would spend days moping alone in his dark bedroom. I am not good for anything, he said. I will never be good for anything. Nobody wants me.

I would be better off out of this world. This kid was five years old. He'd sit for hours and just stare into space, he'd walk around the house with his head on one side like he was listening to voices. Several times he'd set out for school in neat, freshly laundered clothes and come back in rags, like he'd traded clothes with a homeless person or something. When pressed on what had happened, he'd just shrug, like, uh-uh. Even more often, he'd somehow managed to lose his underwear by the time he came home.

Earl's favorite way to eat was to drench whatever was in front of him in olive oil, then lift the plate to his mouth and just slurp and chomp it directly into his mouth, which must have been real fun to watch. As a misophonic, I would be absolutely, oh, I couldn't do it. As a non-misophonic, I just, that made my stomach turn. The slurping noises. Oh, no, no, no. Just like watching somebody drench something in olive oil, I appreciate a good olive oil, okay?

But drenching it in olive oil? No, gross. By the time he was 10, Earl was mostly a passive, silent kid, but one who would occasionally lash out in wild rages, hitting both boys and girls at a school. He started stealing and soon had a reputation as the kid in the neighborhood that parents warned their own children away from. The methods Mrs. Nelson used to try to incorrect this behavior

definitely didn't do his troubled young mind any favors. She spanked him, said God would punish him, said that if he didn't start acting more normally, she'd throw him out into the streets to fend for himself. Earl was a handful, for sure, but teaching him that love and safety were conditional, well, that's not great for a kid who was probably exhibiting early signs of psychopathy. Also not great for the state of Earl's reign was what happened in 1907. He tried to impress some older boys by racing his uncle's bicycle. across the tracks of an oncoming street car, but the street car clipped the back of the wheel of the bike and spun it around, knocking Earl down.

His head got jammed under the streetcar's fender, and he was dragged along, head banging along the cobbled street for 50 feet before the car stopped. Young Earl was mostly comatose for a week. When he finally struggled back to full consciousness, the family doctor asked him a few questions and declared him, just fine.

Oh my God. He obviously wasn't, although it wasn't like a switch had been flipped and changed his personality. All his existing weird behaviors just got switched up to 11. A year after his accident, Earl's grandmother died and he moved in with his 19-year-old Aunt Lillian and her new husband, another seismic shift in Earl's emotional foundations. The frosty grandmother who'd raised him had, from Earl's twisted point of view, performed the ultimate act of emotional withholding and left the world altogether. and his new maternal figure was his pretty young aunt, who he thought of as his older sister.

This is the kind of stuff that can mess up a kid of sound mind, never mind a kid like Earl. No kidding. By the time he was 14, Earl had dropped out of school and worked a succession of menial jobs that he hardly ever kept more than a couple of days. He never had any trouble finding work, which might surprise you given the bizarre picture we've painted of him so far. The thing is, he only acted like a total weirdo when he was relaxed enough to be himself. When it was to his advantage, he was absolutely capable of tightening up his behavior and presenting himself as an intelligent, affable young man. Later on, newspapers would describe him as a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

But nowadays, we're much more familiar with how killers like Earl Nelson work. They don't switch between different personalities. They just get very skilled at disguising their true identity. Yeah, exactly. Dr. Jekyll is just a mask that Mr. Hyde puts on sometimes. By this time, Earl was already a brawny, wide-shouldered young guy who looked like he could work all day long. He didn't, though. A foreman would tell him what to do, and Earl would nod, and then spend the next 20 minutes just staring straight up into the sky. Or he'd be in the middle of working and just lay down his tools and walk away from the sight and never come back. his aunt Lillian always cared for Earl though right up to the end he's my own flesh and blood she'd say even though Earl's actions would take him way way beyond the limits of any reasonable familial loyalty but there would always be something fundamentally childish about him that made it hard for Lillian to cut off contact when he was young though he was mainly in embarrassment if Lillian had friends over Earl would sometimes walk in on his hands moving along on his knuckles like a

an orangutan as if it were just the most natural thing in the world, or he'd bend over and grip the back of a dining chair in his teeth and lift it up with the power of his jaws. And just get a good mental picture of that for a second. You're just sitting there having your tea and cookies gossiping about the neighbors, and suddenly your friend's weird nephew comes in, walking like one of the great apes, and picks up a chair with his teeth. Well, hello ladies. It was so strange.

But sometimes if Lillian had one of her girlfriends over, Earl would just stand there and stare holes through her with an intensity that more often than not made the friend get the hell out of there as fast as possible. Soon, very few friends were willing to come over at all. Even more bizarre, Earl would sometimes vanish for days or weeks at a time and come back in weird clothes. One time, for example, in a baggy red sweater, yellow pants, leather chaps, and a cowboy hat.

He was 15 years old but looked older, and for at least some of the time he was traveling through San Francisco's dive bars and brothels. He also started robbing houses, which eventually won him a two-year stay in San Quentin right after his 18th birthday. By the time he got out in 1917, the U.S. had just entered World War I, and like millions of other young Americans, Earl was feeling patriotic. he enlisted as a private in the army and was sent to training camp but one night they wanted

him to stand guard duty in the cold so he just left that patriotism only stretched so far obviously well Whitney that was hard and uncomfortable and boring the three cardinal sins for a psychopath he was still fascinated by religion so he took a trip to salt lake city to see what Mormonism was all about, but Utah had the same Uncle Sam posters as San Francisco and Earl gave the military another shot, signing up as a cook in the Navy. But they wanted him to do stuff like peel potatoes and clean pots, so he just left again. Next, he tried a few weeks in the medical corps before deserting because his hemorrhoids were bothering him. Seems like as good a reason as any to go AWOL, right? My butt hurts. Finally, in 1918, he tried the Navy again.

He didn't desert this time, but he didn't work, just read his Bible and spouted off about revelations, or just stared blankly into space and ignored everyone around him. When he complained about headaches and refused to get out of his bunk, he was sent to the naval hospital, and shortly after that, to the Napa State Mental Hospital, right after his 21st birthday. This is where, like, you know, you can hear about somebody who is as much of a nightmare as Earl, and you can look at their younger years. years and you can feel some empathy, right? Because obviously there was something wrong. This was the early 1900s. There was just no hope of this guy getting the kind of help he needed. Right.

And it just got worse and worse and worse. Yeah. It's one of those like you see to a lesser extent people acting this way. And you're like, oh, he was like, you know, he obviously had markers of whatever. And we have ways of dealing with this now that aren't just. like beat him and threatened to put him on the street. Yeah. And

yeah, it's sad. Yeah, not great. It's sad. Earl had his normal person mask firmly in place for his first interview with the hospital psychiatrist. When asked if he experienced any peculiar thoughts, Earl said, well, not exactly. Not more than a first class intelligent

person would. What the hell? Yeah, he had an ego. He completely snowed the doctor who concluded that Earl was, quote, not violent, homicidal or destructive. Boy, is his face going to be red later. Earl wasn't happy about being confined. A few weeks after arriving at the hospital, Earl escaped.

Authorities caught him and brought him back. A few weeks later, he escaped again, this time staying gone for three months. And this time, when he was brought back, his fellow inmates started calling him Houdini. He escaped again the day after he'd been brought back, again for a few months, and then one fourth and final time. The war was over by then, and the Navy, who had been paying for Earl's treatment, chose to save themselves some money and effort

and just discharged him from the service. Earl Nelson was somebody else's problem now. By now, he was 22, and he moved back in with Aunt Lillian and quickly got a job as a janitor at St. Mary's Hospital. And it was there, for the first time ever, that young Earl felt the first stirrings of love, sweet love. He worked with a woman named Mary Martin, a cleaning lady in the maternity. Ward. She was sweet and so shy she would blush and stammer if she had to talk to someone she didn't know well. In a twist that would have Sigmund Freud giving himself a high five, she was also 58 years old. And this wasn't a modern Hollywood 58, okay? Mary had done hard physical work all her

life. She looked like she could have been Earle's me-ma. Actually, she was just a little older than Earl's own grandmother was when she died. Earl pursued Mary like a kid chasing an ice cream truck. When he cleaned up and wasn't dressed like a lunatic, he was a decent looking guy, and when he focused on it, he could be intensely charming. Mary wasn't used to being the focus of romantic desire. It was weird to have this 22-year-old guy after her, but it was also flattering. And Earl had an obvious vulnerability that touched her. A few. months after they met, they got married. Damn, I knew that kind of age gap was pretty common back then, but the genders were usually

reversed. I didn't know they had cougars in the 1910s. You learn something new every day. I feel like it's not a cougar when she was the one being chased, you know? Yeah, she was the pursued, not the pursuer. Reverse cougar? Reverse cougar. I don't know.

It didn't take long for Mary to regret marrying Earl. They moved into a tiny apartment where Earl's aversion to bathing quickly became a problem. Ew. When she finally talked him into cleaning up, Earl shrugged, sat on the edge of the bed, and took off his shoes and socks. He poured a glass of water over his feet, and that was his bath. My toes are nice and clean, he told Mary, that's what counts. Okay, I'm upset now. I have several questions.

yeah why does he why does he think that's what counts and like no other like this is your wife do none of your other bits count it's just your feet no what's happening like uh uh i don't know and also now you just have a puddle of water in your bedroom i know like were you at least over like a bowl or something just pouring one time just Okay, all done. Like, it must have just been horrific in that place. It smelled like a boys' locker, a middle school boys' locker room. Times 10.

Yeah. When they went out to dinner, Earl still liked to eat directly from his plate, slurping up the food like a hog at a feeding trough. And just like when he was a kid, he would sometimes disappear for days at a time and come back in strange clothes. Sometimes these were weirdly color-coordinated, all white or all yellow or green. He never had any explanation why. And Earl was jealous. If Mary chatted for a second with a trolley conductor, Earl would go all black-eyed with rage and accuse her of flirting. He said she cared more about her female friends than she did about him.

He even got pissed off when Mary spoke to her own brother. Wow. He might have had a good reason. in there because like everyone else in her life, Mary's brother Frank was telling her that her new husband was crazy and she needed to get the hell out. Earl was also horny as hell. He wanted sex at least once a day and if Mary, who worked hard every day was unwilling to help him, he'd just lie in bed beside her and, you know, yoink it again and again until Mary scuttled off to the bathroom to sleep in peace.

And he didn't bathe. Oh, God, I'm so upset. Now, you might be thinking, what this guy's personality really needs is another serious head injury. While he was working for a landscape gardener, Earl fell from a high branch of a tree and landed right on his head. He was taken to hospital with a serious concussion, but it must have reminded him of the mental hospital because he ran out of there after just a couple days and showed up at home with bandages all over his head. Earl had always been afflicted with serious headaches, probably migraines. After this second head injury, they became worse and more frequent. His moods

and behavior never predictable became even more erratic. Mary would find him staring intently at the plaster on the walls. When she asked what he was doing, Earl would point and yell out the faces. Don't you see them? Whoa. Mary tearfully asked her priest for advice. Kindness can cure insanity, he told her. Yeah, I don't know about that. Father, have you tried, like, lithium? And kindness, maybe both. Maybe a little of both. Yeah. In 1921, the newlyweds moved to Palo Alto and both got jobs at a private girl's school. Mary as a cleaning woman and Earl as a handyman. Not long after they'd started there, Mary was taking down some laundry from a washing line when the old dude who worked as the school gardener stopped by for a chat. Right away, Earl came barreling out

of the schoolhouse, yelling at him to stay away from his wife. The gardener, three times Earl's age, still had some fire in the belly and started yelling right back in Earl's face. Good for him. The headmistress, Miss Harker, who had only recently given Mary and Earl their jobs, had to come out and break up the fight. A few days later in the school dining hall, Earl screamed at Mary in front of everybody, accusing her of having a boyfriend, then grabbed her hand and tore off her wedding ring hard enough to draw blood. Mary ran sobbing to Ms. Harker's office. You must leave him, the headmistress said. That man is absolutely insane. Now, as awful as that must have been, imagine how fascinated those kids were. This is the most interesting thing that's ever happened.

happened at school. They were probably wishing they had popcorn. Mary decided to follow Ms. Harker's advice. When she got home that night, Earl said, pack up your bags, we're leaving this place. They're all against me, every one of them. Mary screwed up her courage and told him she was staying. She liked the town and she liked the school, but she wanted Earl to go. He didn't say anything, but the look on his face got suddenly so dark and furious that Mary ran out of the house and spent the night at a neighbors. In the morning, Earl was gone, but he came to see her at the school while she was sweeping the kitchen. He still looked so strange and angry that Mary dropped her broom and ran, but Earl cornered her in the pantry. He begged her to take him back,

but Mary refused, and Earl became even more terrifying, his pupils contracting almost to pinpricks and his big hands opening and closing. It's him, ain't it? He growled. Who? Mary gasped down, him, the one who's keeping you from me. Mary insisted she didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but Earl just nodded once and said, I'll get you back. And he meant vengeance, not winning back her heart. He stepped closer, hands raised and reaching for her throat. Mary dodged past him with a scream and ran for the nearest office, which was the school matrons. He's after me, she said. the matron called the Palo Alto police just as Earl loomed in the doorway panting hands clenching and unclenching looking from one woman to the other it was a warm spring day and all the windows in the school were open including the one in the hallway behind Earl he backed away and started climbing out pausing to glare back at his wife I'll get you he yelled I'll get you yet then he dropped to the grass and ran off Jesus Jones For a few days, Earl disappeared entirely from the view of anyone who knew him, as he'd been doing off and on since childhood.

Who knows what he did, but some of his time must have been spent spying on the house at 1519 Pacific Avenue in San Francisco, where Charles Summers and his family lived. On May 19th, Earl knocked on the door with his tool bag, claiming to be a plumber, there to fix a leaky gas pipe. The summer's 24-year-old son, Charles Jr., let him in, and Earl was, went straight down to the cellar, where 12-year-old Mary Summers was playing with her dolls. Oh. Earl immediately put down his tool bag and tried to sexually assault her. Oh, no. Mary screamed and clawed at his face and kicked him. Good for her.

Her brother ran down the stairs and threw himself at Earl. And after a scuffle, Earl fled the scene. Charles Jr. chased after him and started beating the crap out of him in the street until Earl managed to run away and Charles hurried to the police station. A traffic cop arrested Earl two hours later. His mugshot is the earliest picture of Earl as an adult. And you can see that between them, Mary and Charles Jr. gave him a pretty good going over. Good.

Harold Schechter, whose book Beastiel was one of our main sources for this story, wrote, He looks like a thug who might burst into tears at any second. And you can kind of see it. That's really accurate, actually, if you look at that picture. Our boy, Harold, we love Schecter, by the way. We don't use his books often enough, but we will. He does a lot of vintage cases. He wrote that book about Bell Gunniss.

Yeah. We love him. The other Mary, Earl's wife, was shocked to learn about his crime, but that old Catholic guilt is no joke. She still felt responsible for him. She took a few days off of work to go up to San Francisco to visit him in his cell as often as she could. Earl had been babbling on about hearing voices since his arrest. and he'd been staring into space and threatening suicide. He'd also pulled out all his eyebrow hairs with his fingernails.

Yikes. When Mary first visited him, he was in a straight jacket and strapped down to his cot. He didn't seem to recognize her and just ranted about the faces he saw on the wall. There, there, can't you see them? Mary went to see Earl's young Aunt Lillian, where for the first time she learned about Earl's previous stint in a mental institution. as well as his multiple military desertions. She also learned her husband's real name.

Ever since he met her, Earl had been using the alias Evan Fuller. To try and keep him out of prison, Earl's wife and aunt asked the judge to declare him insane. And in June, less than two years since he had escaped from there, Earl was back in the Napa State Mental Hospital. Earl told a psychiatrist about all of his hallucinations, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts. but when asked about his future, said, I feel I can do much better now. I'm ready to lead a more evolved life. He tried to escape the next day,

and for the next few weeks, was only allowed out of his cell in heavy restraints. The psychiatrist diagnosed him as a constitutional psychopath with outbreaks of psychosis. Constitutional psychopath. I think I knew a lawyer once who was one of those. The next four years of Earl's life, were spent in the care of Napa State, where they treated his body in addition to his mind.

During his teenage sins, crawling through San Francisco Cedar brothels, Earl had contracted the same disease that had killed his parents, syphilis. They treated him for it with intramuscular injections of a new drug, salversan, which was based on arsenic and had painful, nauseating side effects. Earl tried to escape again after his first dose. He was restless, didn't sleep well, and kept trying to get out. He did get out once, for just two days. Mary kept dutifully visiting him. As time passed, Earl seemed less manic, but also more grim. He still kept talking about wanting to kill himself. Nevertheless, on March 10, 1925, his chart held one brief notation, discharged as improved. He was almost 28 years old. Other than the brief period when he'd gotten

married to Mary, he'd been in either prison or a mental institution for the past 10, years. He tearfully begged Mary to give him another chance, which, bless her heart, she did. Almost as soon as he got her back, Earl declared that he was going to go to Half Moon Bay to look for work and then vanished for four months. A few weeks after he got back, he was off again, this time saying he was going to work in Redwood City. I mean, at least she didn't have to spend much time around him, right? That's a silver lining, I guess, for her. In fact, Earl spent some of his time just a little ways away in Palo Alto, working as a gardener and handyman for a man named Frank Arnold. Frank thought Earl was very strange. He'd often spend hours staring into space.

One time, he shaved off all his hair and gave it to Mrs. Arnold in case she needed to stuff a pillow with it. You know, like you do. Can you freaking imagine this weird gardener coming up with a handful of his own hair? It's so creepy. You're Mrs. Arnold. Just a case. It's so creepy. It seems like they reacted and are like, oh, ha ha, thank you. Instead of like a we need to fire him and move our house. Like we need to not even just move houses. We need to pick up stakes from our house and move it. Change your name and flee the country. And you know

he didn't bathe so you know that hair must have just been gnarly. It was oily and just it wasn't strands of hair. It was little spikes of hair. Oh, God, so gross. But Frank apparently had some affection for Earl, who he chucklingly referred to as a simple fool and described as kindly and tractable. Yeah, right.

But both his wife and a friend who was staying with them, Mrs. Casey, found Earl increasingly unsettling. They wanted Frank to fire him, which he finally did, presumably while rolling his eyes and saying, women, am I right? Frank was not right. The women were right because by this point Earl Nelson was already a murderer. Clara Newman was almost certainly not the first person Earl Nelson killed. The 1920s were a violent time and police forces were stretched thin. Most American police departments were a long way behind their European counterparts in the rapidly advancing field of criminal forensics.

Lots of crimes went unsolved. Lots of crimes, in fact, went completely uninventive. investigated. As we'll see a little later in the story, it could be hard to get police to take seriously the violent deaths of even a, quote, respectable woman. For vulnerable populations like transients or sex workers, it was unlikely the police would devote much or any effort to their deaths. Earl had vanished for days and weeks at a time since his early teenage years and spent a lot of time in the seedier parts of town. Is that where he'd started killing? This is only speculation, but I absolutely think the answer is yes. By the time he met Clara Newman, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Clara was 60 years old and had managed to turn a small inheritance into a lot of wealth through smart investments in real estate. She owned properties in several cities and lived on the ground floor of the one on Pierce Street in San Francisco. The newspapers would charmingly describe Clara as an aged spinster. Nice. So nice. She'd never married, but her nephew Merton lived on the second floor with his wife and son. The top floor of the house was divided into two small apartments that Clara rented out. A couple by the name of Brown lived in one, and Clara had been trying to rent out the other one since the start of 1926, hand-lettering a room-to-let sign to put in the big bay window at the front of the house. On the morning of Saturday, February 20th, Merton Newman was

reading the newspaper in his room. He heard the doorbell ring, and a few moments later he heard his aunt Clara talking to someone downstairs, although he couldn't make out any of the words. He went back to his paper. About 15 minutes later, he decided to go down to the cellar to take a look at the furnace. It didn't playing up, and the radiators were stone cold. The door to the cellar was in the kitchen, and Merton noticed a sausage half-cooked on a pan on the cold stove. He figured his aunt had been starting to make her lunch when the doorbell rang and had turned

off the gas before answering. Merton puttered with the furnace for another 15 minutes, then headed back upstairs. As he came out of the kitchen, he saw a stocky man walking quickly toward the back door. Can I be of assistance? Merton called out. The man stopped, his hand on the doorknob, and looked back. The corridor was dimly lit, and Merton couldn't see much of his face. Tell the landlady I'll return in an hour, the strange man said. I would like to rent that empty apartment.

Then he opened the door and was gone. Merton went out to try and get a better look at it, but the man was already out of sight around the corner. Merton went back upstairs to do some bookkeeping work, then around 2 p.m. went looking for Aunt Clara to try and talk her into replacing the ancient furnace. He noticed, puzzled, that the half-cooked sausage was still on the stove. The door to Clara's bedroom was open, but she wasn't inside, and she wasn't in any of the other rooms on the first floor.

Merton went upstairs and knocked on the Brown's door. Charles Brown told him he and his wife had both heard Clara talking to someone in the next room, presumably a prospective tenant. Merton tried the door to the other apartment. It was locked. That was strange. With no one living there, it was never locked. He hammered on the door but heard nothing within.

A sudden, surprising panic rushed through him, and Merton kicked the door as hard as he could, sending it flying open. The apartment had just a small bedroom in an even smaller kitchen. Claire and Newman's frail body lay on the kitchen floor, curled up on her left side, naked from the waist down, with her house dress pushed high above her waist. Her neck was horribly bruised. Beads from her necklace had scattered all over the floor. Merton shouted for Charles Brown to call the police and knelt by Claire to try and shake her awake,

but it was no use. She was already dead. The autopsy took place that same evening. The police surgeon, a doctor strange who, as far as we know, was not any kind of wizard or supervillain, determined Clara's death was murder by strangulation and noted that the killer probably had unusually large, strong hands. Her death made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle the next day. Feigned, murder of spinster. But there were a lot of other juicy crimes, and the murder of Clara Newman was rarely mentioned after that first day.

It would have probably caused more of a stir if Dr. Strange hadn't kept back one detail from the press. Clara had been raped, post-mortem. Oh, no. Oh, God. Yeah. Ten days later, in San Jose, Harvey Beale kissed his wife goodbye and headed to the office downtown. It was just after 1 p.m. His wife, 63-year-old Laura Beale, owned the building they lived in, a four-story apartment building on East Santa Clara Street.

Only one apartment was unoccupied, a furnished one bedroom on the third floor. Laura had put out a room to let sign a couple of days ago. She was a sweet lady known for her generosity and kindness. Harvey got back home just before six. The door to their apartment was open. He called out for Laura but got no reply. He figured she'd gone to see a neighbor, so he went into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. An hour passed, and Harvey started to worry.

He asked the building's tenants if they'd seen his wife, but nobody had, although one woman had noticed the Beale's apartment door standing open back at 4 p.m. Now Harvey started to panic. He and the other tenants searched all through the building in neighborhood, but couldn't find Laura. The only place they hadn't looked yet was the empty apartment on the third floor, which was kept locked. Harvey hurried down to get the spare key, and was shaking fingers open the door. the door. Laura Beale's body was on the bare mattress in the bedroom. Her face terribly bruised. The silk cord from her dressing gown pulled so deeply into the throat that it was almost

fully embedded in her skin. Her clothes had been pushed up past her waist. The coroner would determine that she, like Clara Newman, had been raped after being murdered. The two murders were startlingly similar, and the owner of an ice cream parlor across the street from the Beale's apartment building reported seeing a man hurriedly leaving and walking away at around 4.30 p.m. He was stocky, tanned, and powerfully built. That matched the description Merton Newman had provided of his aunt's killer. Clara Newman's death might have been shrugged off, but with a carbon copy killing barely a week later, the story was a sensation, one only amplified by the entirely fictitious as close encounters being called into the papers and the police.

Women of the Bay Area were in fear for their lives. Nowadays, the media and most of their consumers are all too familiar with what was happening here. A serial killer was on the hunt. But in 1926, crimes of this kind still had an otherworldly, unthinkable edge. The Touchstone was still Jack the Ripper from 40 years ago, who always had a demonic vibe in the popular imagination, but panic can't last forever. as days and then weeks passed with no more similar crimes other stories took over the news other cares and fears occupied people's hearts maybe the murders of clara newman and laura beale as shocking and awful as they had been were isolated cases maybe the killer was done having satisfied whatever dark passion drove him that was not the case more often than not serial killers have a cooling-off period between their crimes in fact until relatively recently, this was one of the characteristics the FBI used to

categorize a killer as serial. The time between murders can vary a lot, especially when the killer has a disordered mind like Earl Nelson. Three months after Laura Beale's death, he'd kill again and again, and again, and again.

Earl Nelson, who would in short order be dubbed the Dark Strangler, was just getting started. We've got to leave it there for part one, campers, but you know, we'll have part two for you next week. For now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And if you haven't booked your spot on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November 3rd through November 7th, get on it, y'all. Join Katie and me, plus last

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