Laura Beale, was strangled in her home in nearby San Jose on March 2. The silken cord which had been used to strangle Beale had reportedly been wound so tightly around her neck that it had embedded in her flesh. Nelson strangled and raped 63-year-old Lillian St. Mary, also in San Francisco, on June 26, 1926. Exactly two weeks later, south in Santa Barbara, 53-year-old Ollie Russell was strangled with a cord in her boardinghouse. An autopsy confirmed that Russell had been sexually assaulted after death, and the similarities in the modus operandi between her murder and the San Francisco area slayings led police to assume they were connected. On August 16, 52-year-old Mary Nisbet, an apartment building proprietor in Oakland, was found by her husband, strangled to death and raped in the bathroom of a vacant apartment. Initially, local law enforcement questioned Nisbet's husband in her death, but he was shortly cleared of suspicion. Witnesses later told police they had seen a "smiling stranger" lurking outside Nisbet's apartment building the day of her murder. Others who claimed to have seen Nelson at the various boardinghouses described him to police as a dark and stocky man with "long arms and large hands." Because of this, newspapers began referring to him as the "Dark Strangler," the "Gorilla Man," or "Gorilla Killer." In the fall of 1926, Nelson relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he raped and murdered 35-year-old landlady Beata Withers on October 19, her body found by her teenage son, stuffed beneath clothing inside a steamer trunk in the attic of her home. The following day, 59-year-old Virginia Grant was murdered in a vacant property she owned on East 22nd Street, her body hidden behind the home's basement furnace. On October 21, landlady Mabel Fluke disappeared from her home in Portland; her body was discovered several days later in the attic, strangled with a scarf. Despite the subsequent similar murders of Grant and Fluke, a coroner's jury of four men and three women was appointed on October 28 to evaluate the "mysterious" death of Withers. The jury's decision was split in half, with three believing her death was a suicide and the other three believing it murder. After committing the three murders in Portland, Nelson briefly returned to San Francisco, where he raped and murdered 56-year-old widow Anna Edmonds on November 18. Initially, police were hesitant to attribute the crime to