GORILLA MAN’S TRAIL

Evening Star, Issue 19639, 19 August 1927, Page 2

GORILLA MAN’S TRAIL

EIGHTEEN MURDERS IN TWO YEARS .WAS IN ASYLUM. SAN FBANCISCO, August 12. Eighteen murders of women and girls 3rr the United States and Canada in the last two years, nine of them on the Pacific Coast, are charged against Earle Nelson, the “Gorilla Man,” who will shortly be tried in Winnipeg. Arrested in that city on June 17, after a long search by police of both countries, he was charged with two murders in the vicinity. Ho escaped, and after a further search was traced to Alberta, and there rearrested after a desperate fight. The victims were usually women managing -residentials, the first being a San Francfsco woman who was brutally done to death on February 20, 1926. Police allego he left a trail of murder along the coast in California, Oregon, and Washington, then headed cast, and finally entered Canada. In each case the victims were strangled hy compression over the larynx, hut several bodies boro marks of other violence. Arrested in 1921 for an attack on a twelve-year-old San Francisco _ girl, Earle Nelson was sent to an insane hospital. He escaped, and the charge was later dismissed.' Nelson was born in San Francisco in 1897. His father was an Englishman and his mother was a Spaniard.