the "Dark Strangler"; however, several days after her murder, a friend of Edmonds told police she had stopped by her home on the day of her murder and found Edmonds talking to a "strange man" in her parlor about a business deal that involved her selling her house. The woman's descriptions of the unknown man matched those of the "Dark Strangler." The following day, November 19, in nearby Burlingame, California, a 28-year-old pregnant woman was attacked while showing her home to a man posing as a potential buyer. She survived the attack, and described the man as being around tall, well-dressed and well-spoken. The woman later told reporters that, though she hadn't felt threatened initially, she realized in retrospect that the man had peculiarly commented on the home's intricate details, particularly the ceilings: "I realize now that he was trying to get me to look up towards the ceiling, so that he could get behind me and grab my throat," she said. Ten days later, on November 29, Nelson murdered and raped Blanche Myers in her Portland home. Police were able to recover foreign fingerprints from Myers' iron bedpost. The Portland murders ignited a public frenzy, and The Oregonian reported that the third floor of the Portland Police Bureau had become "a veritable madhouse," with clerks taking hundreds of phone calls and reports of "suspicious characters." One local woman called police, claiming that a suspicious man had stayed in her boardinghouse for several days after the Thanksgiving holiday, using the name "Adrian Harris." On November 29, the day of Myers' murder, she stated the man told her and other residents that he was leaving to take a train to Vancouver, Washington, and indicated that he would not be returning. She found this suspicious given that he had paid multiple days' worth of rent in advance. Before departing, he gave her and another female boarder pieces of jewelry as a gift, which were later confirmed by police to have been owned by Florence Monks, a wealthy widow who had been murdered and raped in her Seattle home on November 23. In hopes of preventing further murders, law enforcement in California and Oregon issued public safety announcements to citizens: in the San Francisco Bay area, elderly women were advised to take precautions while renting rooms and inviting strangers into their homes. Meanwhile, the Portland Police Bureau issued the following statement to the