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.