May 12, 1897 - Earle Nelson
His killing campaign unfolded across nearly two years and two countries, making him one of the most geographically mobile serial killers of the 1920s — a period when coordinated interstate law enforcement barely existed. He targeted landladies responding to room-for-rent advertisements, a method that gave him access to victims while evading suspicion for months. The breadth of his movements, from the West Coast through the Midwest and into Canada, repeatedly outpaced local investigations until Canadian authorities finally closed the net.
From Wikipedia
Earle Leonard Nelson (né Ferral; May 12, 1897 – January 13, 1928), also known as the Gorilla Man, the Gorilla Killer, and the Dark Strangler, was an American serial killer, rapist, and necrophile who killed at least twenty women in various U.S. states and two in Canada between 1926 and 1927. He is perhaps the first known serial sex murderer of the twentieth century.
Born and raised in San Francisco, California, by his devoutly Pentecostal grandmother, Nelson exhibited bizarre behavior as a child, which was compounded by head injuries he sustained in a bicycling accident at age 10. After committing various minor offenses in early adulthood, he was institutionalized in Napa several times before his final discharge in 1925.
Nelson began committing numerous rapes and murders in February 1926, primarily in the West Coast cities of San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. In late 1926 he moved east, committing multiple rapes and murders in several Midwestern and East Coast cities before moving north into Canada, raping and killing a teenage girl in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After committing his second murder in Winnipeg, he was arrested by Canadian authorities, convicted of his final murder only—that of Emily Patterson—and sentenced to death. Nelson was executed by hanging in Winnipeg in 1928.
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