Amazon.com
Earle Leonard Nelson may well have been America's first serial killer. In the winter of 1926, he began a string of murders that spanned the U.S. and Canada, horrifying and confounding both the public and the police. Bestial tells the story of Nelson's life--from his bizarre childhood to his ignoble end--sparing no graphic detail in the process. If there is an answer to the question of why this man murdered, it is in this book somewhere. Everything about Nelson seems bizarre, from his family to his eating habits to his religious obsessions. But strangest of all was his compulsion to kill--for no imaginable reason. He killed women of all ages, from all walks of life, seemingly with no remorse.
Bestial reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing. The book is compelling and elegantly written, and the story provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killing's sake. --Lisa Higgins
Review
Journal Star (Peoria, IL) Unflinching....fascinating....macabre.
Book Description
Harold Schechter, who delivers "must reading for true crime buffs" (Ann Rule), unravels one of the most gruesome and historically significant cases of American serial murder in Bestial. Violent crime was on the rise in the Jazz Age, and gangland carnage made flashy headlines. But few could conceive of who -- or what -- orchestrated the acts of barbaric murder and unimaginable defilement that commenced in San Francisco in the winter of 1926. The savagery of Earle Leonard Nelson -- a hulking creature dubbed "the Gorilla Man" -- shocked a nation weaned on the fictional nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe and distant legends of the Whitechapel murders. A child of unnatural obsessions and an aberrant sex drive, he grew to become a social outcast whose perverse behavior erupted in a sixteen-month spree of butchery that would not be equaled until decades later, by the likes of John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
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