Episode 61, The Gorilla Man Strangler - Part 3

Welcome to Part 3 of 4 about the Gorilla Man Strangler, Earle Leonard Nelson. Today we track the Dark Strangler into Canada, where he will claim his last victims, and prepare for the downfall of the worst serial killer in US history at the time. 

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Sources: 

Bestial by Harold Schechter

The Big Book of Serial Killers by Jack Rosewood

Serial Killers: Murder Without Mercy by Nigel Blundell

The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter

The Gorilla Man Strangler Case by Alvin A. J. Esau

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earle_Nelson

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/what-is-a-siphonophore-smithsonian-national-museum-of-natural-history/jAUBWbTiXC4kkA?hl=en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae

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Transcript

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This podcast contains murder and mayhem, guts and gore, adult language, and sexual content. Exactly what you came here for. All the listener discretion is advised. Welcome. I am your mistress of the macabre, Sarah Tierra. Grab your Ouija board, light the candles, and grab your jar of teeth because you and I are going to escape for a bit. Pour yourself a cocktail, pull the window shades closed, and find a cool, dark, quiet place. Because right now we delve into the macabre. Hello, my little homicidal maniacs. Welcome back to the Mistress of the Macab podcast. We are gonna, of course, jump right into this shit. We are on part three of the Gorilla Man Strangler, of four total, so we are getting to the end of this. So on the last episode, we left off with Earl Leonard Nelson fleeing the Pacific Coast, and he would be heading to Iowa, the Midwest, and Canada. He is now known as both the Dark Strangler and the Phantom Killer. Police all over the United States now know his physical description and his MO, and they are all looking for him at this point. On the day before Christmas, 1926, Mrs. John Berard of Council Bluffs, Iowa became the Strangler's 12th victim. The 41-year-old woman lived with her husband and their 19-year-old daughter Corrine in a simple two-story house. To supplement Mr. Burrard's modest earnings as a passenger agent for the Burlington Railroad, the couple rented out the two spare bedrooms on the second floor of their home. The larger of these bedrooms had originally been occupied by their older daughter Evelyn, a nurse at the Methodist Hospital in Omaha, who had recently gotten married and moved into a home of her own. For the past few months, Evelyn's former bedroom had been rented out to a 34-year-old fireman for the Burlington Railroad named Robert Moore, who was also an old family friend. The other, smaller room had been vacant for nearly a year. As in most of the previous murder cases, there was a handwritten room-to-rent sign displayed in the front window of the Brevard home. At approximately 3 15 p.m. on December 24th, Moore, the family friend that worked at the railroad, was headed downstairs on his way to work. As he passed by the living room, he saw Mrs. Brevard chatting with someone he had never seen before. Any guesses on the description of this man? You already know. He was a burly, dark-complexioned man dressed in shabby clothing. So Mrs. Berrard beckoned him over and introduced him to the stranger, who called himself Mr. Williams. Moore, who was late for work, shook his hand and was like, nice to meet you, and then hurried off to work. He would never see his landlady and friend alive again. At around 4 p.m. the same day, the Berard's younger daughter, Corrine, returned from her job as a salesperson in a local hat shop and found the house empty. Though her mother was normally home at that hour, preparing dinner, Corrine was not immediately worried. There was a big family gathering planned for the following day in celebration of both Christmas and Mrs. Berard's birthday, which fell on December 28th. This is the second birthday, isn't it? Didn't we have another birthday that someone was killed on their birthday? That is so sad for her family that he killed her around Christmas and also around her birthday. Ugh, that's just tragic. Corrine assumed that her mother must have gone out to do some last-minute grocery shopping. When Mr. Brevard returned from work shortly after 5 p.m., the father and daughter headed out on a shopping trip of their own. It wasn't until they returned to the house an hour later, fully expecting to find Mrs. Berrard in the kitchen that they began to worry. She was still not home. While John went down to the basement, Corine headed upstairs to check the vacant rooms. Moments later, she ran back down the staircase in response to a sound she had never heard before in her life. Her father's screams. She had just reached the ground floor when her father came running up the stairs of the basement, yelling, It's mother, go for help. There was no telephone in the Berard house, so Mr. Berard ran to a neighbor's house to call the police. Within minutes, the sheriff and two of his deputies were at the crime scene where they found John in shock. He was staring at the furnace. Looking behind it, they saw Mrs. Berard's lifeless body wedged between the back of the furnace and the basement wall. She had been strangled with a man's cotton shirt, which apparently had been taken from a clothesline strung across the ceiling beams in her own basement. Though Mrs. Berard was frail and small, she had clearly put up a struggle. Her face and arms were badly bruised, the floor was stained with blood, and there were clumps of her hair stuck to the furnace door. Her husband's neatly organized workbench had been overturned, and his tools were scattered across the basement floor. Oh no. I can just tell. The next sentence is in spite of this evidence, which we know means these cops are gonna fuck it up once again. In spite of this evidence, one local attorney Okay, an attorney's gonna fuck it up. Alright, that's fine. He gave his stupid fucking two cents and told reporters that the victim had recently been discharged from St. Bernard's Isn't her name Bernard? She was discharged from a mental hospital where she had been treated for a nervous disorder. Given her fragile emotional state, he said it was possible that the shirt may have been knotted about her throat in a suicide attempt. This man's deductive skills clearly matched those of the Portland detective who hypothesized that Mrs. Beta Withers had taken her own life by stuffing herself inside the attic trunk. And luckily, he was alone in this stupid opinion. Everyone else believed she had been murdered by the mysterious Mr. Williams, and possibly, of course, a rape was involved as well. So now they needed to know who Williams was. Some investigators believed that he was a former inmate of St. Bernard's who had developed a deadly obsession with Mrs. Bernard. Z. But a search of the hospital's records turned up no one matching the suspect's description. Luckily, the sheriff of Council Bluffs was less stupid. He immediately knew this was the Dark Strangler and issued a warning to all women and landladies in the area through the local newspaper. He warned the local residents that a strangler that has killed women in California, Oregon, and Washington during the past few months could possibly be in their city and warned housewives against admitting men into their homes who matched the description of this Mr. Williams. The description was five feet eight inches, one hundred and eighty pounds, dark complexion, dark eyes, piercing, clothing, a pearl-colored hat, mouse-colored coat, and overshoes. A mouse-colored coat. A pearl-colored hat. We need to bring back these kind of descriptors. Instead of just like white, off-white, brown. No, it's pearl-colored and it's mouse-colored. Come on, clearly, overshoes. I mean, this guy doesn't know how to dress. We all know that. Then another witness came forward after seeing the newspaper report. Mrs. O. H. Brown telephoned the police with a chilling story. Just 30 minutes before the Berard murder, a burly man had appeared on the doorstep of her house, which had a wooden foresale sign in the front lawn. Introducing himself as Mr. Williams, the man was perfectly polite and well spoken, but he was also dressed like shit, and he explained that he was a railroad switchman, originally from Milwaukee and currently living in Omaha. He was about to be transferred to Iowa and was thinking about buying a house in Council Bluffs to be nearer to his work. Mrs. Brown, whose husband was at work in his bakery a few blocks away, invited him inside. After looking at every room in the house, Williams asked to see the basement furnace. By then, however, Mrs. Brown had grown wary of the stranger. Quote, I was afraid of him. His eyes were so black and piercing, with an odd glint in them, that I became afraid and hurried him to the door, asking him to call the store and talk to my husband. End quote. If it had not been for her gut instinct, she and not Mrs. Berard would be lying dead behind a furnace. As it turned out, Mrs. Brown was not the only local woman to have a close brush with the killer. Mrs. J.B. Walters said that a man matching the published description of the suspect had visited her home the previous Thursday afternoon, claiming to be an inspector of furnaces, okay, for the fire department. Mrs. Walters, who was alone at the time, refused to let him into the house. As it happened, this wasn't the first time that authorities had received this tip. The past few days, they had been contacted by at least six housewives who had been approached in exactly the same way by the furnace inspector. The police chief spoke with his counterparts in San Francisco and Seattle and obtained a detailed description of the strangler. The description was exactly the same as their Mr. Williams. A small army of law enforcement agents then scoured every city from Omaha to Des Moines for the suspect. Again, like in other cities, drifters were wrangled up and arrested just to be alibied out and released. Nelson then moved southwards to Kansas City, Missouri, where within 24 hours he added three more victims to his tally. At around 2 p.m. on Monday, December 27th, 28-year-old workman Raymond Pace returned home after cashing his paycheck. The instant he stepped through the front door, he could hear the cries of his son, Victor, a frail six-year-old who suffered from spinal tuberculosis and was bedridden. Mama fell down the stairs, Victor told his father. Pace rushed to the stairwell, but his wife, Bonnie, a slender 23-year-old brunette, was nowhere in sight. He found her in an upstairs bedroom, her body sprawled out on the mattress, her house dress pulled above her hips, and there were bruises around her throat. Later, the deputy coroner confirmed that she had died of manual strangulation. Her body temperature indicated that she had been killed sometime between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. When detectives arrived to question little Victor, the boy said that he had heard someone arrive at the house earlier in the day. The caller was a grown man, judging by the sound of his voice, and he had been admitted by Mrs. Pace, who led him upstairs. Soon after, Victor had heard a muffled commotion above him, then a heavy thud on the staircase. Seconds later, the front door slammed as the man fled the house. Victor called out to his mother again and again, but she did not reply. This is so sad. He knew something bad had happened to her from the noises he heard, but the boy thought that she might have fallen down the stairs. When the detectives asked Victor if he had any idea who the man was, the boy nodded and identified him as a truck driver named Robert McKinley, who was an old friend of the family. Victor hadn't actually seen the man, but assumed it was McKinley since the truck driver, quote, was always coming around to visit mama when papa was away at work. End quote. Uh-oh, that's not good. McKinley immediately became the prime suspect, but was able to provide an airtight alibi. Raymond Pace also became a suspect after investigators learned that he had known about and been fiercely jealous of his wife's special friendship with McKinley. Pace was such a mess that he had to be sedated, but as soon as he was coherent enough for questioning, he was able to supply a solid alibi at the time of the murder. Now we have a very interesting murder that is discovered in the same town on the following day. It's interesting because it is not the exact same pattern as usual, but it just goes to show what an opportunist Nelson is when committing his crimes. Exactly 24 hours after the discovery of Bonnie Pace's body, a Kansas City man named Marius Harpin returned to his house and found both his 28-year-old wife, Germania, and their eight-month-old son, Robert, dead. The killer had strangled both victims with his bare hands. Nelson had stuffed a rag down the infant's throat. Later, police learned that a family friend, J.F. Grofils, had dropped by the house at around 12 p.m. but was unable to make contact with anyone inside, even though he had rang the doorbell. Grofils had noticed two full milk bottles standing on the front stoop. Since the milkman made his delivery to the Harpin home at around 10 a.m., the killings had evidently occurred between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. Over the next few days, the police received the usual barrage of tips, many of them from disgruntled callers, pointing fingers at their own neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. A string of suspects was brought in for questioning, then released after providing alibis. The Kansas City police were no closer to a solution, but by then they were certain that they were dealing with the infamous Dark Strangler. It wasn't only that all three Kansas City victims had been strangled to death. There were other circumstances linking the murders to the Strangler. While searching the latest crime scene, investigators had found a cigarette butt on the bathroom floor, and neither Marius Harpin nor his wife smoked, but they knew that the Dark Strangler did. More significantly, both the Harpens and the Paces supplemented their incomes by taking in borders and both had room for rent posters displayed in their front window. Of course, the Harpin case did differ in one essential way from the earlier crimes. Up to that point, all the victims had been landladies. Robert Harpin was the first child to die at the Strangler's hands, but he wouldn't be the last. And remember that 12-year-old girl, he broke into the house and tried to kill her, and she and her brother beat the shit out of him. Hashtag whip that ho ass. Yeah, he's not afraid to kill a child. It's kind of surprising it hasn't happened earlier, to be honest. The day after Bonnie Pace was murdered, one of her neighbors, an elderly man named CeCe Buck, called the Kansas City police. Buck reported that around 10 a.m. on December 27th, the approximate time of the murder, he had looked out his bedroom window and seen a Ford Coop pull up in front of the Pace residence. A stocky man had exited the car, ascended the front steps, and rang the doorbell. Mrs. Pace answered the door, exchanged a few words with him, and let him into the house. The stranger had been facing away from Buck, so he didn't get a good look at him, nor did Buck remember much about the car besides it was worn down. Still, his information confirmed the police's growing conviction that Mrs. Pace's killer was the Pacific Coast Strangler, who on at least one prior occasion had been spotted fleeing the crime scene in a beat-up Ford. Sometime in the early spring, Nelson reached the East Coast, where on Wednesday, April 27, he killed his 16th victim. Mrs. Anna Keitschlein was an elderly handicapped woman who lived alone in West Philadelphia, born and raised. Sorry, I won't do it. I won't do it. On a playground. Nope, I'm not. I'm done. Okay. She had spent the afternoon seated by an open front window, enjoying the spring weather. I can't. Not a handicapped woman enjoying the spring weather. Like, fuck off, Nelson. He ruins everything good. At approximately 12.45 p.m., she saw a strange man approach the house of her next door neighbor, a 53-year-old widow named Mary McConnell. Mrs. Keitschlein assumed that the man was there to ask about the house, which had been on the market for a year. Oh my god. Okay, we're going to the neighbor with this murder. Mrs. Keitlein is gonna be fine, and for that we are grateful. Okay, so about 30 minutes later, Mrs. Keitschlein saw the man casually exit her neighbor's front door. This time the woman got a closer look at him, as she would later tell the police he was a dark-skinned white man, maybe Greek or Italian, about 30 or 45 years old, with a stocky build. He was wearing a shitty gray hat and a shitty gray coat that was too big for him. One particular detail caught her eye. There was sticky white stuff that looked like wallpaper paste smeared all over the front of his coat. It was only a few minutes later that Mary McConnell's corpse was discovered. Her son-in-law, John Donovan, who was helping her re-wallpaper an upstairs bedroom, dropped by around 3.30 p.m. to finish the job. As soon as he stepped into the room, he saw an overturned table and a shattered lamp. The paste bucket had been knocked over and its contents were pulled on the floor. He then found his mother-in-law's body stuffed underneath the bed. She had been strangled with a dust rag, knotted so tightly around her throat, that Donovan couldn't undo it with his fingers and had to cut it off with scissors. Stuffed deep inside the victim's throat was a cotton sock. I hate that. Don't you hate when objects are stuffed down a throat? Can you imagine the panic that you would feel knowing that your airway was blocked like that? Horrible to think about. Truly horrible. It only took a few minutes for detectives to respond to Donovan's frantic call for help. After examining the murder scene and interviewing Anna Keitlein, the investigators concluded that the crime was the work of the Pacific Coast Strangler, whose description at that point was known to every major police department in the country. Over the next few days, almost every officer on the Philadelphia police force hunted for the killer. A Mexican laborer named Pedro Garcia was picked up and questioned for no other reason than his rough physical resemblance to the strangler. Meanwhile, the switchboard of the Central Police Station was flooded with the usual rash of strangler sightings. At least 12 housewives called to report that their homes had been invaded by a dark, sinister man while their husbands were away at work. One report came from a woman named Foy. On Thursday, April 28th, Mrs. Foy was hanging out her wash when she saw a swarthy-looking stranger ringing the bell of the house next door. The house was owned by a widow named Sophie Freeman and had a for sale sign in the front window. Mrs. Freeman, however, was vacationing in Atlantic City with her son Franklin, so Mrs. Foy told the man there's no one home. The man was wearing a gray hat and an oversized gray coat, and he then focused his attention on Mrs. Foy and her house, which was identical in design to Mrs. Freeman's. Your place laid out inside the same as this one? He asked her. Mrs. Foy was like, yeah, it is. And then the man asked if he could come over and have a look, and he was smiling pleasantly at her. Mrs. Foy said she was struck by how white his front teeth were in contrast to his olive skin. Suddenly she felt her insides go cold. She had read the morning's newspaper, which had run a front page story about the strangler, along with a warning to all Philadelphia housewives from the police captain. So when the man asked if he could come over and take a look in her house, Mrs. Foy was like, nah, you're not coming in my house. But the man was already heading her direction, and when he was just a few yards away, he lunged at her. Mrs. Foy screamed and ran into her house, slamming the door behind her. Her screams alerted her husband, John, who was a police officer, who had just gotten home from his shift and was upstairs in the bedroom. By the time Foy got a hold of his gun and ran downstairs, however, the stranger was gone. Meanwhile, Mary McConnell's husband, William McConnell, learned of his wife's death in a terrible way. He worked as a traveling salesman and had just arrived in Wilkes Bar, Pennsylvania, on the day of the murder. The following morning, he went down to the hotel dining room, stopping off first at the front desk for a copy of the newspaper. Sitting at the table, he opened the newspaper, and the first thing that caught his eye was a front page headline, all caps, that said, Philadelphia woman found strangled in home. Do I say home weird? I do, right? I hear it. Every time I say it, I'm like, what is wrong with the way I say that? Something's weird. But I don't know how to fix it, because I don't know what's wrong with it. Home. Home. Home. I don't know. Stunned and in disbelief, McConnell ran to a telephone and called his son-in-law, who confirmed the horrific news. Within the hour, McConnell was on a train back to Philadelphia. He was so overcome with grief by the time he'd arrived that he could not bring himself to view his wife's body at the morgue. The police received reports that the Strangler had been spotted traveling along Baltimore Pike. A squad of homicide detectives were dispatched to Delaware County, but they had lost the Strangler's trail. The Dark Strangler's 17th victim was Mrs. Jenny Randolph of Buffalo, New York. Jenny was a 53-year-old widow described as a loving, almost saintly woman. She and her only child, Orville, oh my god, that's so 1920s, Orville, had moved into a two-story house 18 years earlier after the death of her husband, Earl. Six years later, in 1915, Orville was a teenager who had just graduated high school, and unfortunately, he died during an operation to remove a ruptured appendix. Damn, that is really, really rough for Mrs. Randolph. The loss of her son was such a devastating blow to Jenny Randolph that her loved ones were afraid she might have a nervous breakdown. After weeks of anguished mourning, however, she managed to pull herself from the grip of despair. And discover a new purpose in life, dedicating herself to church work and focusing on the welfare of others. I know I've said this before, and I'll say it again. It's often in these horrible stories of murder, the nicest person in the story, the kindest one, the one with like the purest heart is the one who ends up dead, which is so fucking sad. But I'm also like, well, I'm I'll be good. No one's coming for this old salty fucking hag. I should be fine. You know, I'm not full of Jesus' love. I'm not outwalking children in nature. We all know that's not true. It could happen to literally anyone, but sometimes I comfort myself with how fucking salty I am. And I'm like, this means maybe I won't get murdered. I digress. So this lady is, yeah, literally a fucking saint. And how dare he touch her? How dare he touch any of these women? Each week, along with other members of the church, Mrs. Randolph would go into the city's poorest neighborhoods and distribute baby clothes to young mothers in need. I mean, you don't get more saintly than that. That is so sweet. Once a year, the program also sponsored a cradle party at the church, to which all the new mothers of the neighborhood were invited. That is so nice. To make ends meet, Mrs. Randolph worked part-time as a waitress at the YMCA restaurant. She's the best. At the same time, she had begun taking in tenants who provided her not only with supplementary income, but also with friendship, and she has someone to care for now that she doesn't have her son. One of these tenants was her own older brother, Gideon Gillett. Oh, great name. Love that. Very 1920s. Himself a widower who had occupied a room in his sister's house for nearly 10 years. Oh, brother and sister. Both widowed, lived together. So cute. Another was a 22-year-old named Fred Merritt, who was a night watchman in an apartment building. Merritt, an orphan, oh, so she has her brother and an orphan living in her house. That is I I can't. So sweet. So he had been living in the house for over three years, and Mrs. Randolph had come to regard him as a surrogate son. In May of 1927, there were two other rumors staying at the house: a short order cook named Michael Malloy and James Bottinger, a carpenter. That left two rooms available. Damn, that's a big house. Both recently vacated by traveling salesmen. And then I wrote, damn, that's a big ass house. Okay. I got ahead of myself there. I need a big ass house immediately. Shit. Like away from everyone though. I need a big ass mansion. I need a haunted mansion in the woods. I want to be in the forest. I want to be among the wolves and squirrels. Because they're real cute. And I don't want to fucking talk to or see another human unless I'm at work and they're deceased. Am I the problem? Is it me? Hello. Am I the problem? No. I've put up with humans for far too long. Okay. We don't need to get into my job history and uh living in a fucking city for 22 years. We don't need to talk about it. So, back to the story. Alright. So to advertise the rooms that were for rent, Mrs. Randolph had placed a room to let sign in the living room window. She had spent the better part of Thursday morning, May 26th, dusting, mopping, and making the beds with freshly laundered sheets. She had even hung new curtains on the windows. She's getting everything ready for the renters. I love her, she's so precious. Also, like imagine that's the last thing you did. I was dusting. That was the last thing I did. I don't fucking think so. Uh-uh. We're gonna have to go out to eat together and then you kill me or something. Like that cannot be the last thing I do. Like, hold on. First we have to go to Musso and Frank's for Martini. Then we'll come back to my house. Then you can kill me. At around 11 a.m. on Friday, May 27th, a man calling himself Charles Harrison came to the front door, which was answered by Mrs. Randolph's brother, good old Gideon Gillett. The man was about 33 years old by Gillett's estimate, with a, you already know, say it with me, stocky build, dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. He said that he was a house painter from New York City who was thinking of moving to Buffalo. He was looking for a temporary place to stay and had seen the rental sign in the window as he was passing by. In spite of his baggy coat and some yellow paint stains on his fingers, Harrison was presentable enough. To Gillett, the stranger was a flashy dresser wearing a dark tan suit, a blue silk shirt with a blue striped tie, and tan Oxford shoes. I mean, this is probably the least disgusting outfit that he's worn, I would say. I mean I'd have to see it, but like in my head, not as bad as like the mustard-colored suit. Ugh God. And the greasy gray fedora, I can't. Gillett did note that there was something unsettling about the man's dark eyes. When Gillett told him the cost of the room, $5 a week, Harrison made a disappointed sound and replied that the rent was too high for him. Thanking Gillett for his time, he was on the verge of leaving when Jenny Randolph came to the door. Had she just not gone to the door, he would have been out of there, you know? After introducing Harrison to his sister, Gillett explained that the painter had decided to look elsewhere. Harrison, however, suddenly perked up and seemed to reconsider. If it's alright with you, I think I'll have a look at your rooms after all, he said, smiling and showing his white teeth as Mrs. Randolph invited him inside. Never thought white teeth would be so fucking sinister. Harrison had Jenny show in both bedrooms. The one on the ground floor adjacent to the kitchen, the man was not interested in. He did, however, like the upstairs room, though it was smaller than the first one, and located at the far end of a dimly lit corridor. I want a dimly lit corridor. Ugh, sounds gorgeous. When Harrison casually asked about the other tenants, Mrs. Randolph told him a bit about Fred Merritt, Michael Malloy, and James Bodinger. Shortly afterwards, Harrison asked Mrs. Randolph if she would consider reducing the rent by one dollar. Hey, do y'all remember when Earl fucking Nelson was shopping for a house with his new wife and he pulled out a dollar and offered it to the realtor for a house? Do you remember when he did that? That was fucking nuts. This guy is crazy. Sorry, it just popped back into my head that he did that. So Mrs. Randolph is like, nah, the price is five fucking dollars. Get a job. And Earl thanked her and left. But at 6 p.m., he reappeared with a bag in hand and announced that he had changed his mind. He gave Mrs. Randolph a $5 bill and moved into the second floor room. I would also like to note here that he is getting very fucking ballsy. This is a home with four other men in it. One, two, three, yeah, four men and Mrs. Randolph. And he's still like, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and move in here so I can kill that lady. Four grown-ass men, ballsy as fuck. He was waiting around for single women with no one else in the house or whatever, their husbands were out or whatever. Now he's like, nah, I can still do this. I can still get this done. Police later theorized that Harrison had spent that afternoon searching for an easier victim, a rooming house that had a single woman and no male borders. Not finding what he was looking for, he returned to Jenny Randolph's home, assuming that he would have an opportunity to get the 53-year-old widow alone. That opportunity came in the early morning hours of Monday, May 30th. Williams, is that what he's calling himself? No, Harrison. Harrison slept late on Sunday, coming out of his room just before 12 p.m. He spent the rest of the day hanging around the house, making small talk with the other tenants, and literally just waiting for Mrs. Randolph to be alone. He also helped Gillett repair a leaky bathroom faucet. At dinner time, Harrison went with Fred Merritt to a restaurant where the two men chatted over a dinner of corned beef hash and beans. Corn beef hash is good. It's been a long time since I've had it, but that's good. Love beans. I could eat beans at any any time, really. Merritt was slightly taken aback by Harrison's eating habits, particularly the barbaric, disgusting way he shoveled food down his fucking gullet. Still, the house painter seemed decent enough and he could converse on a wide range of topics, wide meaning the Bible. Returning to the house around 6 p.m., the men found Jenny Randolph seated in the living room with Gillett, discussing church-related matters. Merritt went to his room to get ready for work, and Harrison sat down with the landlady and her brother. Soon he was speaking about religious topics. See, he doesn't know a wide range of shit, okay? He just doesn't. And of course, Mrs. Randolph, with all of her actual goodness and church going ways, she was immediately impressed with this man and his knowledge of the scripture. So she invited him to go to church with her that night, but oddly enough, Harrison declined. He was like, You will be dead and I will be four estates away. No, thank you. At around 8 p.m., the landlady departed for church while her brother and the new lodger continued hanging out in the living room. They were still talking when she returned an hour later. Oh god. An hour of listening to Nelson fucking recite scripture. Can you ugh, can you imagine? Torture. I'd rather remove my own teeth with pliers. Thank you. I'm good. After fixing herself a cup of tea, she joined the men in the living room and they all kikied. By then, Fred Merritt had already left for work. Also, what is this? It's like social hour, but all day long with all the tenants. Who has the energy for this much talking and socializing? I could not survive in any kind of communal living situation, including having like one fucking roommate. Can't do it. No, I can't think of anything I would hate more. I I really can't. At approximately 10 p.m., Gillett excused himself and headed upstairs to bed. According to his later testimony, he got up at around midnight to use the bathroom. As he went down the hallway, he could hear the muffled voices of his sister and Harrison, who were still downstairs, still talking animatedly. I'm tired. Returning to his bed, Gillett slept until approximately 3 a.m. when he got up to put the empty milk bottles out on the front porch. Instead of returning to his room, he went back to sleep on the living room sofa. And now the people are just sleeping wherever. They're just gonna sleep all over the house. I can't even go to the living room at 3 in the morning and be alone. So this dude was still sleeping when Fred Merritt returned from his night watchman's job at around 7:30 a.m. Normally, Mrs. Randolph was in the kitchen at that hour making breakfast before going to work at the YMCA. Fred was surprised to find the kitchen empty but assumed that the landlady had stayed up late talking to Harrison and was allowing herself a few extra minutes of sleep. Merritt then walked to a nearby grocery store where he purchased three hard rolls for his breakfast along with the morning paper. Three hard rolls for breakfast. I bet they're better than they sound. When he returned 15 minutes later, Mrs. Randolph was still nowhere in sight. He woke up Gillett, who went into the kitchen and noticed reddish-brown stains on the kitchen floor. Rushing to Mrs. Randolph's room, the men were alarmed to discover that her bed was still made. They went to the staircase where Gillett saw something that made his heart turn cold, a trail of blood leading up the stairs. The bloodstains ended at the locked door of the new lodger's bedroom. Merritt, a muscular youth, battered the door open with his shoulder. What the men saw was horrifying, a pair of women's feet protruding from under the bed. Merritt and Gillett removed the bed that was on top of Jenny Randolph's battered body. It was a horrible assault. Her eyes were bulging and blackened, her nose flattened, and her face was covered in scratch marks. She had been pounded on the side of the head with a blunt object and garotted with a kitchen towel, tied so tightly around her neck that it was embedded in the flesh. She was naked below the waist, her skirt and undergarments having been ripped from her lower body. Later the coroner would determine that Mrs. Randolph had been maltreated after death, which we know means post-mortem rape. As for her killer, the man who called himself Charles Harrison, there was no trace of him. From the moment he learned the details of the case, the Buffalo police knew who the killer was. Harrison was none other than the notorious West Coast strangler who had gone by the name Adrian Harris in Portland. He had recently seen a flyer about the strangler circulated by the Philadelphia police. At a news conference on Monday afternoon, the chief shared his belief with the press, announcing that Jenny Randolph had almost certainly been killed by the Pacific Coast Bluebeard. Convinced that the strangler would strike again, he wired an alert to police departments in every city within a 500-mile radius of Buffalo. Meanwhile, the entire detective squad was assigned to the manhunt. Their only lead came from a man named Wilkinson who owned a pawn shop. According to Wilkinson, a man came into his store looking to sell a bag full of clothes. After a bit of haggling, the man had accepted $4. Wilkinson, who was struck by the man's peculiar eyes and took particular notice of his appearance, which matched the descriptions of Mrs. Randolph's killer. When detectives showed up at the pawn shop to examine the items, they saw that the clothing matched the ones that Charles Harrison had with him during his stay at Mrs. Randolph's house. The fact that the killer had settled for such a small amount of cash suggested that he was desperately low on funds and needed to flee the city. It was also apparent that he was no longer traveling in his Ford Coup. Wilkinson had seen him attempting to hitch a ride with a passing motorist. On the following day, Jenny Randolph was buried alongside her husband and son in Elm Lawn Cemetery. Afterwards, dozens of visitors came by the house to offer condolences to her brother. Gillett, previously a fit and young 60 years old, seemed to have aged 20 years overnight. The double slaying of two middle-aged women on June 1st received a little attention even in Detroit where the murders took place. The indifference stemmed from the perceived character of one of the victims, a woman of alleged questionable morals, who, as the newspapers initially implied, had brought the tragedy on herself. Go fuck yourself. Her name was Mrs. Naresh Chandra Atorthy, though she had been using her maiden name, Marine Oswald. What? Okay. Ever since her divorce, her ex-husband, described in the paper as a Hindu physician, had since moved to London to do postgraduate work in medicine. According to her divorce papers, Dr. Atorthy had severely mistreated his wife, beating her routinely, refusing her money for food, and subjecting her to various forms of public humiliation. Okay. And she's the one with a questionable background. Not this doctor who's beating his wife and not allowing her to eat and publicly embarrassing her. Naresh said during a divorce proceeding, quote, After our marriage, I found that Dr. Atorthy had married me for spite. He had been going with another girl for four years, and when she jilted him, he married me. I now realize that he never loved me. Dr. Atorthy forced me to carry 50-pound blocks of ice up two flights of stairs and made me split big chunks of coal for the furnace. He seemed to despise me and made his patients think I was the scrub woman. End quote. That is fucking sad. Dr. Atorthy had charged that his wife was both an alcoholic and a drug addict who had stolen narcotics from his office. Later investigation into the life of Mrs. Atorthy revealed that while serving with the women's auxiliary army in the Great War, she had been wounded at Vime Ridge and had become addicted to morphine. Following the breakup of her marriage in February 1927, she had taken a room at a boarding house owned by an absentee landlord named Frank Sink and managed by a 53-year-old widow, Mrs. Fanny C. May. On the 1st of June, Sink came by to collect the rent, but no one appeared to be home. He tried again on the following afternoon. This time he rang the bell and knocked on the door for five minutes before giving up. When he failed to get a response on the third day and saw the pile of mail stacking up on the front porch, he became alarmed. At the police station, Sink identified himself as the owner of the house and told the sergeant that he believed the occupants were in some sort of difficulty. Two officers accompanied him back to the house. After trying the doorbell with no success, all three men entered with Sink's key. They found Mrs. May first. She was lying face down on the tiled floor of the upstairs bedroom. Her white cotton house dress shoved above her hips, an electric cord knotted around her neck. Mrs. Atorthy's corpse was stretched out on the floor of the adjacent bedroom. She had been garotted with a black ribbon, the front of her blouse had been ripped open, and her brown cotton skirt was pulled up to her waist. Her coat and hat were lying on the floor. From the way the victims were dressed, the landlady in house clothes, and her tenant in street attire, the officers thought that the killer had found Mrs. May alone, attacked her, then awaited the return of Mrs. Atorthy. A rooms for rent sign had been placed in the front door of the house, and it would have been easy for a stranger to have gained entrance without suspicion. The bedrooms had been ransacked, the contents of the bureau drawers spilled onto the floors. After learning about Mrs. Atorthy's background, the police surmised that she had been killed by one of her unsavory acquaintances, a dope fiend who had come to the house to steal her supply of drugs and had killed both women to prevent them from identifying him. On Thursday, June 2nd, two narcotics addicts that were well known to the police were brought in for questioning. Both men were able to account for their whereabouts at the time of the murders. On top of that, they didn't fit the description of a mysterious visitor seen by one of Mrs. May's neighbors, Gloria Hopkins, on the day of the murders. Mrs. Hopkins had been hanging out her laundry on Wednesday afternoon when she noticed a man of medium build and dark complexion ringing her neighbor's doorbell. Mrs. May came to the door and after exchanging a few words with the man, she had led him into the house. That was the last I ever saw of her, Mrs. Hopkins told the police. Several more days went by before Detroit homicide detectives began to entertain a different theory that the dark-complexioned caller seen by Mrs. Hopkins was the Pacific Coast Bluebeard, who had recently begun killing on the East Coast. By the time they came to this realization, however, the strangler was already heading west again. On Friday, June 4th, he killed a 27-year-old landlady named Mary Cecilia Sietsema in the living room of her home in Chicago. At first, two suspects were arrested: Michael Hirsch, a butcher known to have made a delivery to the victim on the day of the murder, and a car mechanic named Jack Grimm, who worked in a garage a short distance from the Sietsema house. Grimm came under suspicion because it was learned by police that he had disappeared from work Friday afternoon and then failed to return home that night. But both Hirsch and Grimm would be quickly cleared. Hirsch was under suspicion because of some blood on his shoes, but he was able to prove that it was from a wound he had sustained while opening a tub of butter in his father's shop. What? How? How do you wound yourself opening a tub of butter? But okay, I guess that was a true story. And Grimm turns out that he was just out getting drunk. Classic. And this was substantiated by a number of witnesses from the bar. The men were released from jail, and the real perpetrator was moving up into northern Minnesota. So the death toll now is at 22. 21 women and one infant child. I just want to interject that the pace and severity of this murder spree is insane. He is on a fucking rampage. And the fact that this is not a well-known case is absolutely crazy to me. So now the entire country is looking for this piece of shit, and at this point there are thousands of witnesses. Everyone has seen this man, and everyone knows his description. As do we at this point. He has dark hair, a stocky build, a sloping forehead, protruding lips, and grotesquely oversized hands. There was something ape-like about this man's appearance, according to witnesses. The press at this point gave a new moniker to the phantom killer, the gorilla murderer. At this point, Earl Leonard Nelson is getting a taste of fame. Accounts of his murders were in the newspapers across the country. The American public had never seen anything like it. This was a monster on the loose, choosing female victims at seemingly random. The phrase serial killer was still 50 years in the future. To the terrified public, this crazed psycho seemed like something from a horror story by Edgar Allan Poe. Nelson was known as the Dark Strangler or Jack the Strangler, but his most infamous title was Guerilla Man. And this was, of course, because of his huge, freakish hands and his long, monkey-like arms. Interestingly, Earl's MO had a chilling resemblance to the horrors in one of Poe's most famous tales, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The victims in that story are a pair of Parisian women, a widowed mother and her grown daughter, who are hideously murdered in their apartment. The mysterious assailant, a being of great strength, disposes of the daughter's body by stuffing it feet first up the chimney. Thanks to the brilliance of Poe's hero, see Auguste Dupin, the fictional precursor of Sherlock Holmes, the culprit is ultimately identified. It turns out to be the work of an ape, or more specifically, an orangutan that has escaped from its owner, a French seaman who had brought the animal back from Borneo as a pet. The true life horrors that started in the winter of 1926 seemed like the terrifying story was brought to life. Women murdered in their homes by a creature of terrifying strength and savagery, corpses grotesquely wedged into tiny spaces in an effort to conceal them. It was as if the homicidal ape, dreamed up by Poe, had come to life. But back to Nelson, this motherfucker was loving all of the attention, but it did also spook him. He had been lucky thus far not being caught due to, you know, his Houdini-like antics and his cunning. And also the state of American police work at the time. Or like the lack of it. On the morning of June 8th, 1927, Nelson crossed the border into Canada. He had hitchhiked from Minnesota and was dropped off in Winnipeg at around 1.15 p.m. The first thing he did was barter for a new set of clothes from a secondhand shop. Next, he needed to find a house to hole up in, and it had to be his kind of place. Cheap, out of the way, and ideally run by a landlady. He soon came upon a big wooden house with a room for rent sign in the window. He rang the doorbell. It was just before 5 p.m. on Wednesday, June 8th, 1927. The door was opened by a white-haired woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Hill. He gave his name as Woodcoats and said he was looking for a quiet room in a quiet house. My house is quiet, Mrs. Hill said, with a note of indignation in her voice. I don't allow any drinking on the premises. And if you're looking to bring any girls into your room, you better go elsewhere. She's sassy. Woodcoats then said, Good. All I want is quiet surroundings. I don't like to be bothered while I'm studying my Bible. Which was enough to make Mrs. Hill immediately trust him. He then told her that a man with Christ in his heart has nothing in this life to worry about. Though she had been a little put off by his shitty clothing and appearance, Mrs. Hill was like, Hell yeah, he's a Christian. Let him in. She then led him upstairs and showed him a second floor room. It was clean and simply furnished, but the price was $12 per month, which we know his broke ass can't afford, even though he'd be stealing shit, so he haggled for a cheaper room and only one dollar down payment after lying about being employed in construction. Then Mrs. Hill, who is a social lady, sat with Nelson and they talked for about 20 minutes, which was enough time to get a good look at the man. He had black hair, dark eyes, and swarthy skin, and she believed him to be foreign, possibly Greek or Italian. He was dressed like a laborer, with muddy boots, a frayed coat, and cheap pants. He was clearly poor and owned nothing but the clothes on his back. He didn't even have a small bag with him. Some fucking how, Mrs. Hill said he struck her as a young man of character, high ideals, as she later put it. All he had to say was Bible, and these people, all of them, are like, let him live, let him live here. He's good, he's fine. They mainly talked about religion, as we know. He said he was a Roman Catholic and liked to spend part of each day studying scripture. He then lied about having a previous business and construction and that it had been driven into bankruptcy by a business partner. It was almost 6 p.m. by the time she got up to leave. Now, no liquor in the room and no girls, she reminded him. No need to worry, I'm a straightforward and good living man who never wants to do wrong by anyone, he said. Which is exactly, mind you, what a murderer would say. He stayed in his room until after dark, coming out to chat with another lodger, James Phillips, who was sitting outside enjoying the night air. The two men made small talk for a while, mostly about the weather. Then Mr. Woodcoats said goodnight and went to his room. No one saw him again until the next day, Thursday, June 9th. Mrs. Hill was sitting at the kitchen table with her husband when the lodger appeared in the doorway. Seeing her husband there, the man did a double take, as though he had expected to find the landlady alone. Thrown off, Woodcut stammered an apology and told Mrs. Hill that he did not have the $2 he owed her, but would have it by Friday. Mrs. Hill was like, yeah, that's fine. And he left. Lola Cohen was 13 years old. On the afternoon of Thursday, June 9th, around the time that Earl Nelson was leaving the Hill House, Lola was on the playground of the Mulvey School to play baseball with some of her fifth grade classmates. It was almost 5 p.m. when she picked up her school books and headed home. None of her friends would see her alive again. The Cohen family had four children ranging in age from 5 to 25 and lived in a little bungalow. Several weeks earlier, Mr. Cohen, a salesman, had come down with pneumonia. After a slow recuperation, he was finally getting back on his feet, though he was still not able to work. With her husband unemployed and the family savings dwindling quickly, Mrs. Cohen had taken a job at the St. Regis Hotel. Lola had also decided to do what she could to help the family. For the past few weeks, she had been going out in the evening to sell artificial sweet peas that her older sister, Margaret, made out of colored paper. Oh my god, that is so sweet and so wholesome. And also sad that they have to do that. And also sad because it reminds me, of course, of the song Artificial Flowers by Bobby Darren, the singer, not my dog. That song is so fucking dark and sad, and that's exactly what's going on here. Really? No, it's sweet and wholesome, not dark and sad. They're just like trying to help out the family. So they're making these little colored paper flowers, and Lola's going out after school to sell them. Arriving home at 5.20 p.m. from her after school ball game, Lola settled down to do her homework. At around 6.15, she changed into a blue pleated skirt and a peach colored sweater coat. Cutest outfit ever. I love that for her. I know that that's what she'll be murdered in, which is horrible, but I hope like in that moment when she was getting dressed to go out and sell these flowers. I hope she was happy and I hope she felt so cute. Because that outfit sounds adorable. Then placing several bunches of the paper flowers into a tin lunchbox, she headed out onto the streets. Oh, a tin lunchbox of flowers. That is so friggin' precious. I will kill this man. I would kill him for touching this angel if he was still alive for me to kill. But he has been rotting for a long time. Fuck Nelson, and I love Lola so much. Two people would later recall seeing Lola out that evening. At around 6 30, she was seen at the front door of a woman named Regina Bannerman, who told her that she didn't have any money to spend on paper flowers and went back to her dinner. About an hour later, a man named William Fillingham was in his living room writing a letter when someone knocked on his door. It turned out to be a young girl who held out a tin box full of paper flowers and offered them at 25 cents a bunch. Fillingham spoke to her for a while, asking her name, her age, and her family circumstances. Then, after declining to make a purchase, he told her to return home. Which is fucking rude. To grill her and keep her there and ask her all this shit and then to not even buy any flowers? What an asshole. Exactly when and where Lola Cohen encountered Earl Leonard Nelson will never be known. Maybe she was waiting at the corner where she would meet her mother after work when her killer passed by. We don't know exactly how he managed to get her alone, although one theory is that he offered to buy some of her flowers if she would accompany him back to the boarding house, where he had conveniently left his money. This seems the most probable due to what happens next. The only hard fact is that sometime in the early evening of Thursday, June 9, Earl Nelson lured the young girl to Mrs. Catherine Hill's boarding house. Then, unseen by any of the other occupants, he led her inside and upstairs to his room. At approximately 11 p.m., boarder James Phillips passed by the new lodger's bedroom and noticed that the door was open. From the light bulb on the landing, he could see the dark room was empty. When Mrs. Hill came upstairs to do her daily housekeeping the next morning, Friday, June 10th, the door was still wide open. Mr. Woodcoats was nowhere to be seen. She assumed that he had headed out early for work. As she looked around the room, she was impressed with his tidiness. There wasn't much for her to do. He had been particularly careful in making up the bed, smoothing out the bedspread, and making sure that it was properly placed. She spent a few minutes dusting, left a clean towel on the dresser, and left the bedroom, closing the door behind her. A few miles away in Elmwood, an elderly widower named William Haberman was just coming home from the corner drugstore. He noticed a thick-set man in a gray hat and navy blue coat standing on the front porch of the house next door, which had recently been rented by a family named Patterson. The Pattersons were a young husband and wife named William and Emily and their two little boys, and they were Irish immigrants who had moved into the neighborhood two weeks earlier. Since they arrived, Haberman had only caught a few glimpses of the husband because he left early for work and then often returned after dark. So when Haberman saw this dude trying to enter the front door of the neighboring house, he thought that it was Mr. Patterson. What he didn't see was the same man leaving the house at 12.30 p.m. wearing a different set of clothing. Nelson then does what he always does and goes directly to a pawn shop to get another change of clothes, with lots of lying and haggling involved. The only thing different this time was that he had a big wad of new dollar bills. So then he goes to the barber getting a full treatment, a shave, a haircut, hot towel, facial massage. The last motherfucker on the planet that deserves it. At one point while combing back the stranger's black receding hair, the barber noticed that there was blood on his forehead by the hairline. There seemed to be some open sores on the man's scalp or possibly scratches. The blood was still fresh. Next, Nelson went to eat at the cafe next door and then bought a flashy new hat which he wore out of the store. He then took a trolley where he chatted with a passenger about religion and then hitchhiked where he talked to the driver about any guesses? Religion. If you can only talk about one thing that will get people to immediately trust you, Nelson chose wisely. He really did. At approximately 6.25 p.m., around the time that this man named Walter Woods was boarding the trolley, William Peterson returned to his house in Elmwood. The house was empty. He found his sons, James and Thomas, ages 3 and 5, at the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Evelyn Stanger, whose own little boys were Jim and Tommy's friends. Mrs. Stanger had no idea where Patterson's wife was. She hadn't seen Emily since early that morning when the two women chatted briefly while walking their kids to school. Patterson was surprised but not concerned. He assumed his wife had paid a visit to a friend and had gotten held up for some reason. Thanking Mrs. Stanger, he took his sons back home, fed them dinner, and put them to bed. By 10.30 that night, however, Patterson was growing frantic. His wife had never shown up. Returning to the Stanger's house, he used their phone to check with Emily's friends, but no one had seen or spoken to her all day. When he got back to his own house shortly after 11 p.m., he was sick with worry. Pacing the hallways, he glanced into the bedroom of his sleeping boys and noticed something that he had not noticed earlier when he'd put his sons to bed. In one corner of the room was a locked suitcase where Patterson kept his life savings of $60. Now he could see that the lock had been tampered with. He crouched by the suitcase and lifted the lid. His money was gone. In its place was a claw hammer. Chilling. Patterson later testified that he went to his son's bed and prayed on his knees, asking the Lord to direct him to where his wife was. As he started to rise, one of his knees caught the fabric of the bedskirt, exposing the bottom of the bed. There was something poking out from under the bed. It looked like the sleeve of his wife's sweater, the one she liked to wear around the house. Patterson reached beneath the bed. What he felt terrified him. Running to the Stanger's house, he managed to call the police before collapsing. Catherine Hill reacted with horror to the lead story in the newspaper on Saturday. The front page told the story of how 27-year-old William Patterson, seconds after asking the Lord to direct him to his missing wife, had discovered her strangled and raped corpse beneath the bed of their sleeping child. It sent chills through Mrs. Hill. She was like, this is horrible. The article went on to describe the horrible night of the discovery. When police arrived at the scene, someone had shoved the bed about two feet away from the wall. Patterson was being comforted in another room by his neighbor, while another looked after his two young crying children. Clearing everyone from the crime scene, police dismantled the bed, exposing Emily Patterson's corpse. She was sprawled on her back, the lower half of her body twisted sideways. She was still fully clothed, though her skirt had been pulled up above her hips and her stockings rolled below her knees. Her face was smeared with blood from her beaten nose and mouth, and there was a savage bruise on her forehead. The coroner determined that Mrs. Patterson had been struck on the head with a blunt instrument, possibly the hammer that her husband had found inside his suitcase, then asphyxiated by smothering and strangulation. She had also been raped postmortem. The coroner found dried seminal fluid on the front of her right thigh. Detectives conducted a search of the house and they made several discoveries. A suit belonging to the husband was missing from his bedroom. It had been stolen by the killer who discarded his own clothes, a blue jacket and brown pants that were found tossed in a corner of the room. Inside the pocket of the pants, the detectives found some crumpled newspaper classifieds torn from the rooms to let section of the Winnipeg Tribune. From this clue, along with the thumb marks on the victim's throat, detectives quickly deduced that the killer was none other than the infamous Strangler, who had already murdered 20 victims in the United States. The Winnipeg PD had recently received a bulletin describing the homicides from the Buffalo police. Mrs. Patterson hadn't been a landlady, but in every other respect, her murder had all the earmarks of the killer's MO. They knew that if the Strangler struck again, he would probably seek out his favorite type of victim. The police chief immediately dispatched all available personnel to visit every rooming house in Winnipeg. Okay, so here is where shit is gonna get crazy because if you thought we abruptly were done with little tiny baby angel Lola Cohen, remember, she was 13 selling the paper flowers. We're not done. However, this sequence of events is fucking wild. So knowing about all of this from her morning newspaper, Catherine Hill was not surprised when on Saturday, June 11th, detectives showed up at her home. She invited them into her parlor where they questioned her about her lodgers. Had any suspicious-looking men rented rooms from her recently? Did she have any boarders that checked out in a hurry in the past few days? To both of these questions, Mrs. Hill was like no. And as far as she knew, she was not lying. Her only new lodger was Mr. Woodcoats, but he was such a devout and religious young man that it never occurred to Mrs. Hill he might be a murder suspect. And though she hadn't seen him since Thursday evening when he unexpectedly appeared in her kitchen doorway, she believed that he was still residing at her house. He had never checked out with her, and she was still expecting the two dollars that he owed for rent. By the following day, however, which is Sunday, June twelfth, Mrs. Hill had begun to have her doubts, which grew stronger as the day went on with no sign of Mr. Woodcoats. Finally, at around 4 30 p.m., after knocking on his door and not receiving a response, she let herself into the room. Two things struck her immediately. One was the state of the room which had clearly not been occupied since Friday morning when she had come upstairs to clean. The bed had not been slept in, the fresh towel she had put on the dresser was not touched. The other thing that struck her was the smell. A thick, horrible odor, like the stench of decay. Mrs. Hill assumed that she was smelling the lingering smell of the unbathed Mr. Woodcoats, which had intensified in the closeness of the closed room. So she threw open the windows and left the door wide open to try to air that shit out. Downstairs she filled in her husband about her concerns and also the smell in the room. She was afraid that she might have inadvertently lied to the police. She now believed that Mr. Woodcoats had, in fact, left without paying his rent. Mr. Hill promised that he would stop at the police station on his way to church that evening. He left the house at around 5.30 p.m. and arrived at the station 20 minutes later, where he was interviewed by the chief of detectives, who was very interested in what he had to say. Hoping that the landlady might be able to identify the men's clothing found at the Patterson house, Detective Smith ordered one of his men to bring them to the Hill home, meaning them the clothing, them. Even as the detective was on his way to the Hill residence, a discovery was taking place there that almost matched the horror of William Patterson's experience. One of Mrs. Hill's lodgers was a man named Bernthart Mortensen. Mortensen and his wife rented a room just off the parlor, one of the nicest ones in the house. Its only disadvantage was its distance from the bathroom, which was located on the second floor landing. After returning from a midday outing with his wife at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Mortensen went upstairs to use the bathroom. As he walked back towards the stairwell afterwards, he passed the little room at the head of the landing, the one that had been recently rented to Mr. Woodcoat's. For the past few days, the door had been shut, but now it was open. As Mortensen began descending the stairs, he happened to glance over into the room. In the late afternoon sunlight, he thought he could make out something strange underneath the bed. He squinted at the thing and then gasped. He was so startled that he had to grab a hold of the banister to keep his balance. Running downstairs, he shouted for the landlady. What's wrong? she said. Mrs. Hill, upstairs. Somebody there. When the landlady froze, he grabbed her by the elbow and escorted her upstairs. Inside the room where Mr. Woodcoats had been staying, Mortensen gestured wildly towards the bed. Under there, he shouted. Mrs. Hill then lowered herself to one knee and peered beneath the bed. Wedged beneath the bed was the body of a naked young girl. The slender corpse was curled on its side, turned towards the wall. Oh God, yelled Mrs. Hill. It's dead. Quick, the police. Mortensen went to the neighbor's house and called the police. By 6 p.m. on Sunday, a bulletin had been drafted. Before it could be broadcast over the radio, word had arrived at Central Station that another victim had been found in a boarding house. The discovery of the second killing confirmed the worst fears of the police. The bulletin was quickly revised. At approximately 6.30 p.m., an announcer broke into the weekly broadcast of the Sunday evening church service with news that two local women had been strangled to death by a killer, believed to be the same notorious murderer, wanted for 20 similar murders in the United States. Also, interjection, there were not two women killed. There was a woman and a child. The sources keep calling Lola a woman, but she was 13 years old and therefore absolutely a child. The bulletin advised quote, all women with rooms to let or for sale signs on houses are cautioned. This man may have taken a Room from you in the last few days, or he may come to your house for a room or to see the house. Do not admit him if you are alone. Keep your door locked and put him off. Watch where he goes and notify the police as soon as you can. Don't get excited. If you have a for sale or for rent sign on your house, this man will seek a pretext to enter your home. Do not admit any stranger, you will then be safe. Do the same as we are asking the rooming keepers to do. Put him off and notify the police. End quote. Listeners were warned to be on the lookout for a man who was 26 to 30 years old, 5'6 or 5'7 inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds, with large dark eyes, a full face, sallow complexion, clean shaven, dark brown hair, and broad shoulders. Evidently a transient of Jewish or Italian appearance, but might be any nationality, speaks good English. Even before the Sunday evening radio broadcast was interrupted by the police bulletin, word of the latest murder had swept through the Hills neighborhood. Before the evening ended, more than 500 people, men, women, children, and a mob of reporters would gather at the scene. While law enforcement guarded the entrance, the crowd milled about the boarding house, exchanging gossip and straining to see through the second story window where grim blue-coated figures moved about the room. The atmosphere was charged with shock, disbelief, and morbid excitement. Very few reliable facts made their way outside of the crime scene. A girl, apparently dead for several days, had been found stuffed beneath a bed, just like that unfortunate Patterson woman in Elmwood. Clearly the same person was responsible for both crimes. First, Nelson had stunned 13-year-old Lola by hitting her over the head, then wrapped a cloth around her neck and strangled her. He removed all her clothing and repeatedly sexually assaulted her before savagely mutilating the body. It is reported that the manner of mutilation was reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. I cannot find any more information about exactly what is going on here with these mutilations, what took place, anything on an autopsy report or the coroner's report. It's driving me crazy. I want to know what was done and why all of a sudden there's this deviation from a very consistent MO. From what I found, her cause of death is listed as ligatures slash manual strangulation with postmortem sexual assaults and decomposition. I can't confirm that any postmortem mutilation or organ removal occurred. Some sources say she was mutilated, but not all of them. So we really don't know for sure. Maybe because she was younger than his other victims that inspired the mutilation. Or maybe the newspapers or crime historians added this in later. Or possibly did they mistake some of the decomposition as mutilation. I think that that's possible also. I just really wish I knew for sure, but I couldn't find anything. Surprise! It's future me, and I obsessed over this detail for months and months and months, and I found the fucking answer. So, turns out there was no mutilation of Lola Cohen's body. My main source for figuring this mystery out was the book The Gorilla Man Strangler Case by Elvin A. J. Isau. While numerous modern sources describe Lola Cohen as having been mutilated after death, the postmortem findings reproduced in the Gorilla Man's Strangler case book do not describe dismemberment, evisceration, or extensive cutting injuries. Rather, the autopsy documents bruising associated with the homicide, asphyxia, and genital trauma associated with sexual assault. The exact origin of later claims comparing the injuries to those of Jack the Ripper remains unclear, but I'm pretty sure we can point the finger at the press. There is an actual statement from police chief Stark who stated, quote, she had been choked and raped, her private parts being covered in blood, end quote. Which might have been the inspiration for the later Jack the Ripper comparisons. But, of course, as I love to do, I found the autopsy report. The coroner on the case was Dr. Cameron, who arrived at 8 p.m. the evening Lola's body was found and concluded that the body had been in the room for several days. Shortly after that, the body is removed, sent to the coroner's office, and identified as Lola Cohen. Now I'm gonna read you her autopsy report. The autopsy was performed by a Dr. W.P. McCoan, who performed the examination at the Undertaker's. Quote: She had bruises about the nose and mouth, severe bruises at the outer side of each elbow, a bruise over the left shoulder blade at the back. She had severe bruising of the neck in the midline just over the Adams apple, and on the left side a little higher up, just at the angle of the jaw. She had bruises over the right shoulder on the outer side, and a bruise over the right hip on the outer side. There were four or five streaks of blood across the front of the left thigh in the middle. On the top of the head, there was hemorrhage of the scalp, but there was no wound found outside the scalp. This bruising in the scalp would have been about three inches in diameter. The skull was not fractured. There was marked edema of the brain. The lungs showed typical condition of asphyxiation. The blood was very dark and fluid, no clots present. The condition of the hymen entering the vagina showed it had recently been torn. Death would be due to smothering and asphyxiation due to smothering. End quote. Later it was confirmed by R.B. Graham that the sexual assault had taken place after death. This is gonna be another medical staff member or someone involved in the autopsy. So now we know that is not true. That is not a deviation from his MO. We don't have to marinate on it further. Case closed, and I can stop obsessing over it. I'm so glad I found the autopsy, honestly. So yeah, that settles that mystery. Moving on. John Hill, in the meantime, was completely unaware of the crisis at his home. After stopping off at the police station to tell them about his wife's suspicions, he then went to church. He spent the next hour at church and then got on a trolley to head home at around 7 30 p.m. When he got off the trolley, there was a giant crowd of 500 people around his house, and he had a stab of terror when he heard an onlooker refer to the murdered woman. Pushing his way through the crowd and into his house, he found his wife and was immediately relieved. Pale but unharmed, she was talking to a policeman in the front room on the second floor. Hill's relief was short-lived when he saw what was inside that room. The bed, which was normally in the corner, had been moved aside. Curled on the floor was a naked female body, stiff and livid. The small corpse lay on its left side, turned towards the wall, knees slightly flexed, right arm bent, left stretched flat beneath the body. From where he stood, he could see a patch of dried blood caked on the left thigh just below the girl's buttocks. The coroner was crouched beside the body while several policemen hovered nearby, speaking quietly. Even with the window wide open, the smell of death was thick in the room. At that moment, no one knew who the murder victim was. A thorough search of the room had not uncovered the girl's clothing or anything else that could help with identification. So next police are like, are there any reports of missing teenage girls? When Lola Cohen failed to return home on Thursday night, her parents were at a loss. They didn't know what to do. Their first thought was that she had maybe stopped at a friend's house while making the rounds selling her paper flowers. They called around to her friends, but none of them had seen Lola since the baseball game. Doing their best to stay calm, they wondered if Lola might have gone to visit a friend they didn't know very well. Mr. Cohen decided to call their daughter's teacher, Mrs. Morrow, to get the names of all of Lola's classmates. But Mrs. Morrow, who was not home at that time, didn't answer the phone. Early the next morning, after a completely sleepless night, John Cohen went to the school walking into Mrs. Morrow's classroom just as she finished roll call. There was a geography exam that day, and Mrs. Morrow was surprised that Lola, one of her best students, was absent. The moment she saw John Cohen's face, though, she knew something was wrong. He asked the class if anyone knew where his daughter was, but no one had seen or heard from her. Before returning home, Cohen stopped at the police station to report his daughter missing. At around 7.30 p.m. on Sunday evening, John Cohen went off to church to say a prayer for his daughter. He was riding home on a streetcar an hour later when he overheard two other passengers talking about a murdered girl whose body had just been discovered earlier that same evening. Cohen's heart went cold. Getting off the trolley, he found a massive crowd milling around a three-story house. From one of the bystanders, he learned that the body of the murder victim, an unidentified teenage girl, had just been removed from the building and was on its way to Thompson's undertaking parlor. Within minutes, Cohen was at Thompson's. As he hurried through the front door, he saw something that made his insides turn to ice. His wife Randy was being led into the room by two family friends. Mrs. Cohen could not bring herself to view the body. Her husband went with a coroner's assistant into the morgue. Five minutes later, he staggered out again. He was immediately surrounded by a crowd of newsmen. Yes, it's all too true, it's Lola, there's no mistake, he told reporters. Cohen then had to break the news to his wife. The crowd around the Hills boarding house began to disperse, except a hundred or so people with nothing else to do that continued to hang around. As a reporter moved among what was left of the crowd, he noted a shift in their mood from buzzing excitement to dread. Walking by one small group of women, the reporter was struck by a phrase he heard in passing. With the discovery of the second Winnipeg victim just a few hours ago, the women were wondering if the killer could possibly be the same homicidal maniac who had left a trail of corpses across the United States. One of the women in the group referred to the unknown killer by a nickname the reporter had never heard before. He jotted down the phrase in his notepad. In his story that appeared in the next day's paper, he quoted the phrase, Within a week, it would become permanently attached to the killer, replacing the Dark Strangler as the nickname by which Earl Leonard Nelson would forever be known: the Gorilla Man. There was now a manhunt underway in Winnipeg and the city's residents were living in fear. The entire city was driven to a frenzy by the headlines, the radio bulletins, and the hearsay. When hardware stores opened for business on Monday, every padlock, deadbolt, and door chain in the city sold out. Overnight, locksmithing became the busiest occupation in Winnipeg. Every handyman capable of installing a deadbolt suddenly found himself with all the work he could handle. Throughout the city, housewives barricaded themselves inside their homes while their husbands were away at work, refusing to open their doors to anyone, even delivery men they had known for years. Milkmen who would normally take a few minutes to chat with a customer simply left their bottles on the front stoop and walked away. Some women even stopped answering their phones, fearing that the strangler might be on the other end. Others kept their children home from school. House-to-house salesmen, bill collectors, and vegetable peddlers gave up trying to sell to customers, declaring a holiday until the gorilla man was caught. Boarding house owners were particularly cautious, turning away every stranger that came to their door. Visitors to the city were forced to look elsewhere for accommodations. Within 48 hours, every hotel in Winnipeg, even the most expensive, was fully booked. To the rooming houses that were already full of lodgers, some landladies worked out secret codes with their guests, like whenever a rumor returned from an outing, he had to knock in a pre-arranged way in order to be let back into the house. Others had a house key made up for each boarder so that they themselves would never have to answer the front door. More than one landlady who had recently rented a room to a burly young stranger became convinced that she was harboring the gorilla man and immediately notified the police. In general, it was a bad time to be a stocky, dark-complexioned male in Winnipeg. It probably still is. On at least one occasion, a threatening mob surrounded an olive-skinned homeless man in a shabby gray suit who had to be rescued by the police. Local authorities threw themselves into the search for the guerrilla man. Since the discovery of Lola Cohen's body, every member of the Winnipeg force had been on duty. In the rural districts, provincial police scoured the countryside with bloodhounds on the trail of the elusive killer. Once again, they rounded up men left and right, like in all the other cities, but again, like the other cities, they were alibied out and released, or arrested for vagrancy. A $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the guerrilla man was put forth by the Attorney General. The following day, the city council added another $500, bringing the reward to $1,500. At first, police made progress. Officers canvassing Main Street had located William Patterson's stolen suit in a secondhand clothing store. The owner, Sam Waldman, had given the investigators a complete description of the dark-skinned stranger who had visited his store and the clothing he had sold to him. Waldman then led the officers to the barber shop down the block where the owner provided them with additional physical details. With this new information, the police chief made an updated reward bulletin that described the suspect. And it's basically the fucking same as the other ones, except for now. They add that he has very thin hair on top and that it was brushed back in a long pompadour, newly barbered, and inclined to be curly. They also added to this bulletin that Nelson had very bad corns or bunions on his feet. Did the barbers have to do stuff with the feet back then? Because that's rough if they did. How else would they have added that weird detail unless like barbers in 1920 gave pedicures? They also included a detailed list of the clothing purchased from the secondhand store, which were a blue shirt, grayish-brown socks, tan boots with bulldog toes, a fawn-colored cardigan, love that, fawn-colored, let's go, a leather belt with a green and white stripe in the center, a gray and white silk scarf, a gray overcoat, and a secondhand two-piece suit, very light gray, plain with no visible stripe. He loves a gray suit, this motherfucker. Also, what are bulldog toes? It's almost like a leather doily is put over the toe of the shoe. Kind of like the toe of a wingtip. Anyways. The bulletin continued. This man has a very pleasing manner in presenting himself when entering houses. Upon entering, he does not have the appearance of being vicious. He reads and speaks of religious missions. Is a cigarette smoker, usually Lucky Strike, or other American cigarettes. He has been beating his way by freight, walking, and getting lifts from Ottoists, stopping at rooming houses. He goes over lists of advertisements for rooms in local papers, and then commences visiting them. Other houses with for sale or for rent signs, he enters on some pretext. This man is the most dangerous criminal at large today. I ask every police officer to help bring this man to justice. There is ample evidence to convict. End quote. Obviously, the description of Nelson's clothing at the time is not particularly useful because once he commits a crime, he immediately goes to a secondhand store and buys new clothing and sells the old clothing. So that's not super helpful. The police chief told the newspapers that the strangler was, quote, a clever man. He is different from any criminal with whom we have ever been called on to deal. He is a man with absolutely no moral sense. He can commit the most atrocious crime and a minute afterwards go on his way without showing the slightest mental trace of the frightful act he has just done. End quote. And even with the entire police force pursuing him, Earl Nelson, aka Houdini, was not going to be easy to catch. Nelson then traveled to Regina, Saskatchewan, about 350 miles west of Winnipeg. As always, his first order of business was to purchase a copy of the local paper and check out the Rooms to Let section of the Classifieds. One ad in particular caught his attention. Nelson found his way to this particular address at around 3 p.m. Mrs. Mary Rowe answered her front door to a stocky, smiling man who explained he had read her ad in the newspaper and come to see about the room for rent. Inviting him inside, the young widow led him up a flight of stairs and into a spacious room furnished with a single bed, oak bureau, wooden chair, and night table. The stranger asked if Mrs. Rowe had something smaller and more secluded, possibly in the rear of the house. Mrs. Rowe told him no, this was her only vacancy, and the rent was $4 a week. The man spent a few more minutes looking around, said he'd think it over, and left the house. Twenty minutes later, he was back. He decided to take the room after all. He introduced himself as Harry Harcourt. Mrs. Rowe had another lodger, a 23-year-old woman who happened to also be named Nelson. Her name was Grace Nelson. At around 10.30 a.m. on Saturday, June 12th, Miss Nelson, still dressed in her nightclothes, was in bed reading a magazine. She did not hear the door open. Suddenly she became aware that there was someone in her room. She looked up from their magazine and a stocky, dark-skinned man was lurking in the doorway. Grabbing her blanket and pulling it up to her chin, she tried to speak, but the strange man said, beg pardon, and hurried away. Miss Nelson was frozen in place, but after a few minutes she began to calm down. No harm had been done. The dark-skinned man was undoubtedly a new lodger who had opened the wrong door in his search for the bathroom. Still, there had been something disconcerting about the way he had stared at her. Grace quickly crossed the room and locked the door before returning to bed. At around 11 a.m. the next day, Mary Rose stepped outside to enjoy the nice weather. She watched her nine-year-old daughter, Jessie, chase a butterfly in the backyard garden. Suddenly the back door swung open and the new lodger, Mr. Harcourt, emerged from the house. Spotting Mrs. Rowe, he came over for a chat. The pair spent a few minutes discussing automobiles, and Mrs. Rowe told him that her Ford was for sale. He replied that he had no need for a car since he owned a six-cylinder studabaker that he kept on his ranch. As they spoke, he kept his eyes fixed on Mrs. Rowe's daughter. At around 2 p.m., Mrs. Rowe suddenly realized that she had not seen her daughter for several hours. She went out onto the porch, but Jessie was nowhere in sight. Mrs. Rowe ran out of the house and made her way to a nearby park that Jessie liked to play at, but she didn't see her daughter. Suddenly, through the trees, she spotted something that looked like her daughter's favorite powder blue parasol that she carried with her on sunny days. Mrs. Rowe ran towards it and emerged onto a main street. Sure enough, there was her daughter strolling along the sidewalk, her open parasol resting on one shoulder. Beside her was Mr. Harcourt. When Mrs. Rowe walked up to them, the man greeted her with a big, innocent smile. I was just bringing her home, he said. Mrs. Rowe didn't say anything in reply. This woman was fucking fuming, that's why. Taking her daughter by the hand, she led her home in silence. It wasn't until they were seated alone in the kitchen that Mrs. Roe began lecturing Jessie, telling her that she should never ever go off with a strange man. But he's not a stranger, she said. He's one of our guests. Where did he take you, Mrs. Roe demanded? Jessie told her that Harcourt had taken her to a local candy store. He bought me an ice cream soda, she said. This situation makes me think of Grace Bud and Albert Fish, obviously with a way better ending, but I'm so glad that Jessie was unharmed. This could have gone very differently. After repeating her warning, Mrs. Rowe sent her daughter out to play. Later that afternoon, around 4 p.m., Mrs. Rowe decided to take a break from her housework. Stepping onto the porch, she found Mr. Harcourt seated out there on a chair. And she did not let him fucking have it, which is shocking. She should have. But also he's a tenant and he's paying her, so there's that aspect of their relationship. Maybe they needed the money enough to not scream at him, but in my head, in this story, I really wish she did. Instead, they had an hour-long chat about where he was from and his background, which she was probably digging for information. Good for her. And we also know that whatever he did tell her was total and complete bullshit. Though he and the landlady had a perfectly pleasant conversation, there was something about him that made her uneasy. Oh see, she's a Nancy Drew ass bitch. She's like, uh uh uh, there's something wrong with this man. The other tenants were away for the day, and she felt reluctant to be in the house with him, so she grabbed her purse and took Jesse out for lunch at a nearby restaurant, which was a smart move, Mrs. Roe. Harcourt was on the porch again when they returned. Glad you're back, he said. He told Mrs. Row that he had a hot date that night, L O L with a woman he had met the night before. Which is Earl Leonard Nelson, code for I've found a victim and there will be homicide and necrophilia tonight. He asked her if there was a barber shop in the neighborhood. Uh-huh. I'm sure he did. Later that night, he allegedly went off to meet his date. Less than 20 minutes later, he was back. Mrs. Roe could see from the look on his face that something had gone wrong. Stood me up, he said angrily when she asked what had happened. Without another word, he disappeared up into his room. Like the man child he is. Honestly, to me, I think this means that a victim didn't pan out for him, either someone else was at home or the victim wasn't home when he thought she would be. We know there was no hot date, and the hot date was, as I said before, murder and necrophilia. So whoever he planned on killing that night got off lucky. She didn't see Harcourt again until early the next morning, Monday, June 13th. She was eating breakfast in the kitchen at approximately 7.50 a.m. when she noticed him pass down the hallway on his way to the front door. Twenty five minutes later, he ran back into the house and upstairs to his room, clutching a copy of that morning's newspaper. Shortly afterwards, he descended the stairs again, dressed in his gross blue shirt, brown sweater, excuse me, it's fawn, gray pants, and flashy fedora and headed out the door. Since he had left his other belongings behind, it never occurred to Mrs. Rowe that he wouldn't return. By the end of the day, she would learn the startling truth about the stranger who called himself Harry Harcourt. And at that very moment she had no way of knowing just how lucky she was to be alive. When Earl Leonard Nelson arrived in Regina on Saturday afternoon, his two most recent atrocities had not yet been discovered. William Patterson hadn't made his appalling discovery while praying at his child's bedside, and Lola Cohen's tiny corpse still lay undetected in Mrs. Hill's boarding house. From Nelson's unhurried behavior on Sunday, the leisurely way he passed the hours lounging on the porch of Mrs. Rowe's house and taking long walks around the neighborhood with Jesse, it was clear he had no sense of urgency. Apparently he was waiting for an opportunity to ambush another victim, the landlady Mrs. Rowe or Grace Nelson, or possibly nine-year-old Jesse Rowe. Everything changed on Sunday night after the discovery of Lola Cohen's body. By Monday morning, the entire population of Western Canada was on the lookout for the gorilla man, alerted by radio bulletins and newspaper headlines. When Nelson went out to purchase the newspaper early Monday morning and saw the front page, he made a sudden change of plans. It was time to get the fuck out of Regina. His first stop after leaving the rooming house was a jewelry shop. He had an 18 karat gold wedding band that he had taken from Emily Patterson's finger just before stuffing her body underneath her youngest son's bed. Nelson was offered $3.50 for the ring. The jeweler remembered one specific thing about the man during this transaction. In his long career as a jeweler, he had taken countless finger measurements and had seen hands of all shapes and sizes, but he had never encountered hands as grotesquely oversized as this man's. I bet by this point, you can guess where he went next. Yes, that is correct. He went to the local pawn shop to swap the clothes he was wearing for different ones. This time he chose overalls and a work shirt, hoping to fit in and look like a normal man, which he is not, a mechanic or a farmhand. He even exchanged his fancy fedora hat, although he didn't want to. He wanted to keep it, but he wanted to stay out of jail even more. He then hit the road looking to hitchhike towards the United States. After three different men picked him up, he was less than 20 miles away from the US border. And that's it for this episode. We will finish up this series next time. We have one more episode to go. We are going to finally catch this motherfucker, which we've all been looking forward to. And yeah, there's a trial, there's the consequences, there's more stuff with his family, lots of interesting interviews with police, I'll tell you that much. And of course, before we go today, it's time for nature. It's fucking cool. The siphonophores are an order of marine animals in the phylum Nidaria, which is the same phylum containing jellyfish. There are about 200 species of siphonophores known. Although they superficially resemble jellyfish, each siphonophore animal is actually a colony of many genetically identical individuals called zooids. Each zooid is specialized to serve a particular function, such as swimming, feeding, prey capture, or reproduction within the colony, so much so that individual zooids cannot survive alone. The infamous and venomous Portuguese manowar is a member of this order. It lives at the water's surface, trolling the depths for suitable prey with its long tentacles. Most siphonophores live in the deep ocean where there is no light other than light emitted by organisms. Some siphonophores themselves can emit light. A species found off the coast of Monterey, California has stinging cells that glow red, probably to attract the small fish upon which it preys. While many sea animals produce blue and green bioluminescence, this creature is only the second life form found to produce a red light, the other one being the scaleless dragonfish. Zooids are the multicellular units that build the colonies. Each single bud, called the probud, initiates the growth of a colony by undergoing fission. Each zooid is produced to be genetically identical, however, mutations can alter their functions and increase diversity of the zooids within the colony. Siphonophores are unique in that the probud initiates the production of diverse zooids with specific functions. The functions and organizations of the zooids in colonies widely vary among different species. However, the majority of colonies are bilaterally arranged with dorsal and ventral sides to the stem. The stem is the vertical branch in the center of the colony to which zooids attach. Currently, the World Register of Marine Species identifies 175 species of siphonophores. They can differ greatly in terms of size and shape, which largely reflects the environment that they inhabit. Smaller, warm water siphonophores live in the shallower depths and they use their tentacles to capture zooplankton. Larger siponophores live in deeper waters and they are generally longer and more fragile and must avoid strong currents. These mostly feed on larger prey. They can be found in all of the oceans. Carl Linnaeus described the first siphonophore, the Portuguese man of war, in 1758. The discovery rate of siphonophore species was slow in the 18th century as only four additional species were found. During the 19th century, 56 new species were observed due to research voyages conducted by European powers. The majority of new species found during this time period were collected in coastal surface waters. During the HMS Challenger expedition, various species of siphonophores were collected. Ernest Heichel attempted to conduct a write-up of all the species of siphonophores collected on this expedition. He introduced 46 new species. However, his work was heavily critiqued because some of the species that he identified were eventually found not to be siphonophores. Nonetheless, some of his descriptions and figures are considered useful by modern biologists. During the 20th century, 10 new species per decade were discovered. Considered the most important researcher of siphanophores, A.K. Totten, introduced 23 new species during the mid-20th century. In 2020, the Schmidt Ocean Institute announced the discovery of a giant siphonophore in submarine canyons near Nungalu coast, measuring nearly 400 feet in length, making it longer than a blue whale. Siphonophores are called superorganisms because of the zooids that make them up. Honestly, they look like aliens underwater, like most things do, under the water, but they are majestic, they are ghostly, they are beautiful, and they are crazy super organisms, and I love them. There is no fossil record of siphonophores, though they have evolved and adapted for an extensive time period. Their phylum, Nideria, is an ancient lineage that dates back to over 640 million years ago. Once again, of course, I will have photos of everything, including siphonophores, if you want to go check it out on social media or on my website, which is mistress of the macabre podcast.com. And yeah, we're gonna round things out next week. Finish this series up strong, catch this motherfucker, and take him out. Hope you're here for it. And that's it. I'll talk to you next time. Okay. Bye. Full source notes are available at mistress of the macabrepodcast.com as well as photos pertaining to each episode. Follow along on Instagram for all the insane and gory photos at Mistress of the Macab Podcast. Please leave a five-star rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps the show grow, and I will love you forever. And tell a friend if you even have any. Bonus content is available at patreon.com or on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. I'm just one young teenage girl writing, researching, producing, editing, and recording the show. Your support goes a long way. If you have topic ideas, questions, comments, animal facts, or unsettling stories you'd like to share, email me at mistress of the macabre podcast at gmail.com.