The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases by John Marlowe

fled the hospital, arriving home with a turban of gauze around his head. Mary’s brother encouraged her to divorce Nelson, but as a devout Catholic she would not hear of it. Before the end of the year, they had moved in with his Aunt Lillian. Back in the house, Nelson resumed some of his old habits, among them disappearing without explanation for days on end.
    In the spring of 1921, the couple relocated to Palo Alto, where they both found jobs cleaning and maintaining a private girls’ school. Within days, Nelson had demonstrated to all concerned that he was unbalanced. After one particularly frightening and violent scene, witnessed by the girls eating in the school dining hall, Mary asked her husband to leave their home. The next day, Nelson returned to the school and threatened his wife. He ran off before the police arrived.
    Now without a job or a home, his marriage for all intents and purposes over, Nelson was adrift. Within a few days, on 19 May 1921, he attempted to commit his first murder. The intended victim was a 12-year-old girl named Mary Summers. Nelson had gained access to the Summers’ home by pretending to be a plumber sent to fix a gas leak. Not more than a few minutes into his visit, Nelson’s hands were around the young girl’s neck. Mary Summers’ cries quickly brought her 24-year-old brother, who fought the assailant. Although he managed to flee the scene, Nelson was soon captured by police. The next month he was declared ‘dangerous to be at large’ and was sent to Napa State Mental Hospital. It was the very same facility from which he had escaped three times; the last time only two years earlier.
    Diagnosed as a psychopath, he appeared impervious to treatment. Early in his third year at the hospital, he gave warning that he would soon escape. On 23 November 1923, he did just as he’d promised, showing up in the middle of the night at his Aunt Lillian’s house. She gave her nephew some clothing and, arguing that he would be tracked down to the house, urged Nelson on his way. The aunt then called the authorities.
    Within two days of his fourth escape, Nelson had been captured and was back at the hospital. He received a further 16 months of treatment, after which he was released. The date was 13 June 1925, nearly four years to the day since he’d tried to murder Mary Summers.
    Now 29 years old, a seemingly remorseful Nelson managed to convince his wife Mary to accept him back into her life and home. Although he appeared nonviolent, she still found it difficult to deal with her husband’s eccentricities. It must therefore have seemed something of a blessing when he again began to roam. What she couldn’t have known was that these absences often brought with them death.
    The victim of Nelson’s first murder was Clara Newman, a 60-year-old spinster who operated several rooming houses in the San Francisco area. On 20 February 1926, he gained entrance to one of her houses by pretending to be a prospective renter. As she showed Nelson an attic room, he attacked, strangling the landlady and raping her corpse. Ten days later, another landlady, Laura Beal, suffered a similar fate.
    Newspapers picked up on the common features of the two murders and, on the basis of witness descriptions of the suspect, dubbed the murderer ‘The Dark Strangler’. Several months passed without incident; both police and reporters had assumed that the murderer had left the Bay area when, on 10 June, he struck again. The victim this time was Lillian St Mary, a 63-year-old widow who had begun accepting boarders in her expansive San Francisco home. Strangled then raped, her body was found lying on a bed in one of the vacant rooms.
    Two weeks later, Nelson killed and raped the proprietress of another rooming house, Ollie Russell. In doing so he had pulled a cord so tightly around her neck that it had torn through the skin, leaving the mattress bloody. Mrs Russell’s rooming house was located in Santa Barbara, 540 kilometres