public: "Do not show your houses or rooms for rent while alone. If necessary, call a policeman to accompany you. Crimes such as these should be prevented and could have been prevented if women had been more careful. I do not wish to unduly alarm the people of Portland. But there is no denying the situation is grave." December 1926April 1927: Midwest and East Coast After leaving Portland in late November 1926, Nelson moved eastward, hitchhiking or stowing away on trains. On December 23, the body of Almira Berard, 41, was found inside her Council Bluffs, Iowa, home; she had been garroted with a shirt. Initially, local police presumed her death a suicide, as Brerard had recently been discharged from a psychiatric institution. This was dismissed after it was discovered that she had been raped. Two days after Christmas, 23-year-old Bonnie Pace of Kansas City, Missouri, was strangled to death and raped in her home, her body discovered in an upstairs room by her husband. On December 28, Germania Harpin, age 28, along with her eight-month-old infant son Robert, was found murdered in her Kansas City home. Both had been strangledRobert, with a diaperand Germania had been raped after death. Both she and Robert were discovered by her husband when he returned from work that evening. Nelson continued to move further east, murdering and raping 53-year-old landlady Mary McConnell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 27. Several articles of jewelry were also stolen from McConnell's residence. The following day, Nelson attempted to sell one of McConnell's gold watches to pawn shop owner Marie Kuhn, but she declined. One month later, on May 27, Nelson arrived in Buffalo, New York, where he rented a room from 53-year-old Jennie Randolph, using the name "Charles Harrison." Three days later, Randolph was discovered strangled to death and raped, her body stuffed under a bed in her home. Randolph's brother, Gideon Gillett, had met "Mr. Harrison" when he first arrived at the residence, and described him as "about thirty-three years old, with a stocky build, dark complexion, and black hair slicked straight back." Fred Merritt, a boarder in Randolph's house, would later positively identify Nelson as "Charles Harrison." On June 1 in Detroit, Michigan, boardinghouse manager Fannie May, along with boarder Maureen Atorthy, were discovered murdered in the boardinghouse May oversaw. Their bodies were found by the building owner, Leonard Sink, who had arrived to collect