Ep. 7 - Cleveland Torso Murders

The thought that some humans could be deemed as the throw away people of society is detestable. Drug addicts, the homeless and sex workers are usually classified in this way. And that, makes them easy victims. Particularly for serial killers. An unknown serial killer that wreaked havoc in the city of Cleveland back during the Great Depression was nicknamed "The Mad Butcher." His victims were the people that society had tossed aside. Their torsos were the only things left behind in this killer's wake. 

 

James Kingsbury was the first resident of Newburgh, which was a township south of Cleveland. An area along the east side of Cleveland near Shaker Heights that stretched westward down to the Cuyahoga River was named for him, Kingsbury Run. This piece of land that separated Cleveland from Newburgh was a booming place. At least for a little while. The industry here collapsed during the Great Depression and poverty moved in hitting the immigrants and minorities the hardest. During this time, shanty towns started springing up in communities and Kingsbury Run was one of them. These "towns" bore ramshackle dwellings made from cardboard, mud and wood. And the residents in these shanty towns here were very vulnerable.

 

Kingsbury Run in the 1930s was a dangerous place. This spot wasn't just home for the poor, but a place for illicit activity. Just east of the Run was "The Roaring Third," which was home for brothels, gambling halls, bars and flophouses. The Mad Butcher made this his hunting ground and his carnage would last for four years. The crimes would be dubbed the Cleveland Torso Murders because the killer mainly left behind torsos. There were thirteen victims and all the bodies were headless and some were missing limbs. Some of these limbs were later located in other places. Only two of the victims would be identified and since these victims were sex workers or transients riding the rails, most weren't missed.

The first victim was discovered on September 5, 1934. The lower half of a female torso with the thighs still attached, washed up on the shores of Euclid Beach at Lake Erie just east of Bratenahl. A young man had been walking on the shore and he ran to get some authorities. Cuyahoga County Coroner A.J. Pierce autopsied what was left of the body. He estimated that the woman was in her mid-30s and Pierce noticed that the skin was very leathery and red colored and he believed that some kind of chemical preservative was placed on the skin. The police began an extensive search to find the rest of the body and they did mange to find a couple of other body parts, but the head was never found to help with identification. They believed that this murder was a one-off and she would not be included as a part of the Torso Murders for two years. This would be Jane Doe 1, but she was mainly referred to as "The Lady of the Lake" and she was buried in a potter's field.  

 

The killer seemed to have satiated whatever was driving him because another body wouldn't be found until the following September. And this wouldn't just be one body. There were two male bodies found. Two teenage boys were walking along the base of Jackass Hill. The street came to a dead end at Kingsbury Run and there they found the emasculated corpse of a white male, which was missing its head. The body was clean and naked with only a pair of socks on the feet. All the blood had been drained from the body. The police deduced that the man had been tied up because he had rope burns on his wrists. This body was also autopsied by Coroner Pierce and he determined that the cause of death was decapitation. The victim had a police record and they were able to identify him with his fingerprints as twenty-eight year old Edward Andrassy. Andrassy was gay and liked to frequent the Roaring Third.

Not far away was a second body that has been identified only as John Doe 1, a forty-year old white male. This body was also decapitated and emasculated. The same chemical preservative as was found on the Lady of the Lake was found on his skin. The state of decomposition was different for this victim, so it is thought that he was dumped two weeks before Andrassy. So clearly, the killer felt comfortable returning to a previous dumping ground. Typical behavior for serial killers.

 

On January 26, 1936, a woman approached two-half bushel baskets sitting next to the Hart Manufacturing Building on Central Avenue that had items wrapped in newspaper in them. To her utter horror, she discovered half of the body of a female wrapped in that newspaper. The parts of the body not in the baskets were found ten days later in a vacant lot. Except for the head. That was never found. Clearly, this killer was keeping heads as a souvenir. The body was fingerprinted and she too had a record, which helped police identify her as Florence Genevieve Polillo, a sex worker who lived on the edge of the Roaring Third. The coroner ruled decapitation as her cause of death and he found something else very peculiar. The body was disarticulated after rigor mortis had set in. Rigor Mortis usually doesn't start until around two hours after death and the initial phases start in the head with the eyelids, neck and jaw. Four to six hours after death, rigor mortis sets into the rest of the body. So the killer was with this body for at least four hours, more than likely.

My theory on the killer collecting heads comes to a screeching halt with the discovery of victim number five who would only be identified as John Doe 2. His head was found wrapped in a pair of trousers by two young boys in June of 1936 near the East 55th Street Bridge at Kingsbury Run. The police would find his body the next day. They didn't have to go far because it was right outside the Nickel Plate Railroad Police Building. The body was clean and drained of blood. The coroner found decapitation to be the cause of death and he estimated the man was in his 20s. His fingerprints had no matches and despite having six unique tattoos, no one could figure out who he was. The police made diagrams of the tattoos and locations on the body and they made a death mask of the head, which were put on display at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. More than one hundred thousand people saw the display, but the police received no tips. This death mask, along with three others from victims of Mad Butcher, are now on display at the Cleveland Police Museum.

The sixth victim was another white male in his 40s. This would be John Doe 3 and he was discovered in July of 1936 by a teenage girl who was walking through the woods near Big Creek and Clinton Road by the B & O Railroad. The head had been removed from the body, but was still at the crime scene. The MO had changed a bit with this victim. All previous victims had been killed in one location and dumped at another. This victim was killed where he was found and it was believed that he was dismembered while still alive because a large quantity of blood was found at the scene. The victim's bloody clothes were in a pile at the scene as well. The police believed that John Doe 3 had been dead for two months.

 

The grisly discoveries continued. In September of 1936, the seventh victim was discovered at East 37th Street in Kingsbury Run. A transient tripped over the upper half of a twenty-year old man while trying to hop a train car. The police found the lower half of the body and parts of both legs in a nearby pool that was full of sewage. Six hundred spectators watched the recovery. This victim was not identified and labeled John Doe 4.  His head wasn't found and decapitation was the cause of death once again.Coroner Pierce said that the killer was getting very good at what he was doing. Previous victims had hesitation marks at points of disarticulation, but not this one. The head was freed in one stroke.

There were no more victims through the rest of 1936. Things needed to change. This would be the biggest murder investigation in Cleveland's history and still is to this day. The police had no clues despite interviewing thousands of people and the outrage of the Press and residents of Cleveland was growing. Mayor Harold Burton was feeling pressure to do something. He spoke with Coroner Pierce and a Torso Clinic was set-up, which would be a meeting of the police and experts to come up with a profile of the Mad Butcher. Mayor Burton also appointed a new Safety Director and had him get more involved with the case. This was Eliot Ness. At this point in his career, Ness was well known. In 1930, Ness had hand picked his group of Prohibition Agents that came to be known as The Untouchables. The team's efforts led to the apprehension and eventual conviction of Al Capone for tax evasion. Ness would not be successful with the Cleveland Torso Murders. Two police detectives, Peter Merylo and Martin Zelewski, went undercover in the Roaring Third and interviewed fifteen hundred people. Coroner Pierce lost his election and was replaced by Sam Gerber.

 

The Mad Butcher's second female victim would be found in February of 1937. Her torso was found in the same place as The Lady of the Lake and she was dubbed Jane Doe 2. The other parts of her body would wash up in May, but her head was never recovered. Coroner Gerber didn't rule decapitation as the mode of her murder. He felt that it happened after she was already dead. She was white and in her twenties. The killer branched out into another race, choosing a forty-year old black sex worker as his next victim. This would be victim number nine and her dental work led the police to unofficially identify her as Rose Wallace. She was found by a teenage boy. He first discovered a human skull under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge and then he found Wallace's headless skeleton in a burlap bag under the skull. There was a rib missing.
 

The Cuyahoga river would give up John Doe 5 in July of 1937. The National Guard had been deployed to the city to maintain order during some labor strikes and one of the guardsman was keeping watch by the West 3rd Street Bridge. A tugboat passed by and he thought he saw something strange in its wake. He realized it was part of a human body and called for the police. It took several days, but the police managed to find all the parts of the body, except for the head. The killer had upped his game with this one by ripping out the heart and gutting the abdomen. 

 

The lower half of a woman's leg was found on the banks of the Cuyahoga River by a man walking to work in April of 1938. The police found the rest of victim eleven in two burlap bags that they fished out of the river a month later. Her head and arms were missing and never recovered. This victim was found to have been drugged, which was the first time drugs were detected in a victim. She would only be known as Jane Doe 3.

Jane Doe 4 was found at a dump site at East 9th and Lakeside by three scrapers on August 16, 1938. The torso had been wrapped in a man's blue double-breasted blazer that was wrapped in an old quilt. The arms and legs were wrapped in brown butcher paper and rubber-banded together and the head was also wrapped in the paper. They were placed in a makeshift box. Coroner Gerber believed that some of the parts had been refrigerated. At this point, I'm really thinking that the police should have called on every butcher shop in the nearby area. The killer seems versed in butchering and possibly had a large refrigerator available. As the police searched the dump site for more clues, they found that the female victim wasn't alone. John Doe 6 would also be found on this day. These would be victims twelve and thirteen and most historians and officials believe that these were the last two victims. 

It's important to note that Eliot Ness' office window faced this dump site. The killer more than likely knew this fact and was taunting Ness. Ness had had enough and gathered a group of officers and detectives that numbered around thirty-five and headed down to the shantytown in Kingbury Run two days later on August 18th. The group gathered up sixty-three men and then searched the makeshift shelters for clues. When they were done, Ness ordered the shantytown to be burned. This did nothing in solving the case, but the murders did stop. The citizens of Cleveland were fairly outraged with the act and felt more scared. The public demanded that the police give them someone, so County Sheriff Martin O’Donnell arrested fifty-two-year-old Bohemian brick layer Frank Dolezal in July 1939. Dolezal and victim Flo Polillo had lived together for awhile and he admitted to knowing Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace.

Now, we know that cohersed confessions have been the source of many false imprisonment cases. With the numbers of those we have had in our modern era, its not hard to believe that the 1930s would also have this issue, particularly with such a high profile case where the police were getting no traction. Frank Dolezal confessed to the crimes and this confession was described by the Cleveland Police Museum as "a bewildering blend of incoherent ramblings and neat, precise details, almost as if he had been coached." To make matters worse Dolezal ends up dead in his cell like Epstein. He apparently hanged himself from a hook only five feet seven inches off the floor. The coroner did an autopsy and found that Dolezal had been beaten, which left him with six broken ribs. No experts on the case believe that Dolezal committed the crimes.

The Cleveland Torso Murders was never solved and most victims remain unidentified. The killings did stop however. But it is not certain that the killer just went away and stopped murdering. Rumors persist that Eliot Ness was taunted by the killer for years. And for modern day sleuths to take on the case, their efforts would be in vain because the official police records have been lost or destroyed. The daughter of Detective Peter Merylo contacted the Cleveland Police Museum in 2011 and shared copies of her father's files. Some hospital records and autopsy records have been more recently discovered.

What drives someone to kill people in this way? What drives someone to butcher bodies? Was this the work of one man or many? Theories abound with some believing these were gangland murders and retaliation. Others think someone was riding the rails and possibly butchering people around the nation. The grisly nature of the murders and the fact that victims never received justice has possibly left some spirits connected to the torso murders at unrest.

Apparitions have been seen walking up and down Riverbed Road. One such spirit seems to belong to one of the female victims who had her legs removed. She had been found at the Columbus Street Bridge. It's not surprising that this apparition is only seen from the waist up. The dive bars that now stand where the shanty towns once stood are reportedly haunted by the victims. Doors are slammed. A woman in black haunts The Great Lakes Brewing Company where Eliot Ness loved to drink. Some believe she is the ghost of Flo Polillo who was upset with Ness for not finding the killer or protecting people from the butcher. Others believe that she wants to help find her killer and that is why she haunts the place.

The railroad is not immune to hauntings either. One of the railmens’ dogs would act very strangely around the railyard. He would growl at unseen beings. Objects are moved about inexplicably and disembodied voices have been heard. Rail cars feature the sounds of scratching and banging and an EVP answering, “I don’t know” when asked who the murderer was have been recorded more than once. Full bodied apparitions have made themselves seen at the B and O Railroad Roundhouse. Kingsbury Run is right near the railyard. Amy Cobb is someone who works out at the railroad museum and had her own experience of hearing a slamming noise so loud, she broke into a run to get away from the source. She strongly believes that the killer was connected to the railroad. Could he be the one still hanging out here in the afterlife?

The 55^th Street Bridge is the scene of the ghost of the victim known as the tattooed man. A paranormal investigator once asked the spirit what kinds of tattoos he had and the investigator felt something touch him lightly on his arm where he had a tattoo. The tattooed man wanders, possibly looking for answers. Answers that are never going to come.