After committing the series of 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 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."