The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Hogan said he did not. The men, he thought, were related. All three had been decapitated and their bodies dumped in Kingsbury Run. The women had been found elsewhere and their bodies more comprehensively dismembered.

  The concept of a serial killer was not well understood in the 1930s and, in a homicide case, the standard method of investigation was straightforward. The detectives should first look for anyone who had a motive for the killing, then concentrate on those who had both the means and the opportunity. It had been assumed that sexual jealousy, or sexual deviancy, was the motive for the first two Kingsbury Run murders, which were clearly related. It was hard to extend this motive to include the other murders, particularly those of the women.

  But Ness, Cowles and the coroner Arthur J. Pierce were convinced that all the killings had been committed by the same man. Like the three men, the cause of death in the Florence Polillo case had been decapitation, which was rare in homicide cases. The bodies were cleaned up and neat, and had been cut by the same expert hand. However, Ness gave very clear instructions that no one should get wind of the fact that they were looking for a single killer—particularly while the convention was going on. Otherwise, Ness wanted nothing further to do with the case. His job was to oversee the security of the Republican National Convention, then go back to cleaning up the police department and cracking down on organized crime.

  Besides Ness had every confidence in his Homicide Division. The newest body had six unique tattoos, which meant that it should be easy to identify the victim and this might easily lead them to the perpetrator. Detectives circulated tattoo parlours and visited the bars where sailors hung out. Hundreds of people traipsed through the morgue to view the body, while the police checked missing-persons’ files and tried to track down the source of the victim’s clothes and the laundry marks in his underwear. Pictures of the tattoos and a plaster cast of the victim’s head were put on display at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936, which was visited by seven million people over the following two years. Despite everything, the so-called “Tattooed Man” was never identified. His death mask is now on display in the Cleveland Police Museum.

  While the search for the “Tattooed Man” was underway, on 22 July 1936, a teenage girl stumbled across the headless corpse of a 40-year-old white man near a hobo camp in the woods to the west of Kingsbury Run near Clinton Road and Big Creek. Again the dead man was naked. His head, partly wrapped in his clothing, was found some 15 feet from the body. The body had been lying there for over two months and was very badly decomposed. The head was little more than a skull. He had died before the “Tattooed Man”, but had only now been found.

  Unlike the “Tattooed Man”, he was a hobo. His hair was long and a pile of cheap bloodstained clothes were found near the corpse. This time a lot of blood had soaked into the ground, indicating that he was killed where he lay. Nevertheless it was plainly the work of the same man. Coroner Pierce pointed out that the head had been separated from the body precisely at the junction of the second and third cervical vertebrae. The ends of the bones showed no evidence of fracture. The expert hand seen in the other murders was at work again and Hogan was forced to concede that all the cases were linked. But the body was so badly decomposed that no fingerprints could be taken. The corpse could not be identified. That left him with precious little to go on. Fortunately, the press could be distracted from what they were now calling the Cleveland Torso Murders by Ness’s high-profile raids on Mob-run gambling dens.

  Cleveland had began to market itself as a convention town and the American Legion was due to hold its convention there in the middle of September. But on 10 September, a hobo tripped over the upper half of a man’s torso while trying to hop a train at East 37th Street in Kingsbury Run. Police searched a nearby creek, which was essentially an open sewer, and found the lower half of the torso and parts of both legs. A search was made in the weeds along the creek and for the rest of the body. The fire brigade dragged the creek with grappling hooks. A small amount of flesh was found on a ledge above the point where the stream emerged from a pipe, indicating that the body had been dumped over the edge. A further search yielded the right thigh. In the surrounding woods a blue work shirt, covered in blood, was found wrapped in a newspaper, along with a dirty grey felt hat, rather dirty, which appeared to be spotted with blood and carried a label saying: “Laudy’s Smart Shop, Bellevue, Ohio”.

  Divers were sent to search the garbage-strewn bottom of the creek and a high-pressure fire hose was used to flush it out in the hope of finding more key parts. All this activity could hardly escape attention and a crowd numbering over 600 watched the creek being scoured. The comprehensive dismemberment of this body linked the decapitated men’s bodies with the women victims and the Cleveland Press, the Cleveland News and the Cleveland Plain Dealer now dubbed the perpetrator “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”. They put pressure on Mayor Harold Burton to get the high-profile Eliot Ness more involved in the case and reported Coroner Pierce’s calls for a “Torso Clinic”—a meeting of the city’s top law officers to “profile” the fiend responsible for the killings.

  Once again the victim had been dispatched by an expert decapitation, which had occurred a day or two before the body was found. It belonged to a white man aged between 25 and 30, of medium height and a muscular build. The head and hands were never found, so no identification from fingerprints could be made. However, the hair on the body indicated that the victim had light brown hair, but he matched no description in the missing-persons’ files and could not be identified.

  Hogan inadvertently told a reporter that he believed the murderer lived in or around Kingsbury Run. This created local hysteria, with residents afraid to go out. There was a huge increase in the population of guard dogs in the vicinity. To calm locals’ fears, Eliot Ness was pulled off the largest corruption case in the history of Cleveland and he set about cleaning up Kingsbury Run. Every hobo in area was brought in for questioning and told that they had better find somewhere else to live.

  Despite the paucity of clues, 20 detectives were permanently assigned to the case. They were inundated with tip-offs concerning anyone seen carrying a large package, or who had large knives, or kept irregular hours, or was in any way peculiar. Ness insisted that every tip, no matter how flimsy, was to be followed up. Detectives also visited hospitals for the insane and monitored recently discharged patients. Meanwhile the head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau urged the police seek out marijuana users as, he maintained, smoking induced “both the desire for a thrill and a homicidal obsession” and the weed grew wild in Kingsbury Run.

  Among the detectives working on the case were Peter Merylo and his partner Martin Zelewski. Merylo used his position in the police department to persecute gay men—homosexuality was illegal in Ohio. It was said that he filled an entire jail wing with gay men he had arrested in flagrante. He brought the same zeal to the Mad Butcher investigation, roaming The Roaring Third, sometimes in his own time and often dressing the part. He amused his colleagues parading up and down Kingsbury Run in his long johns in an effort to entice the killer.

  Merylo and Zelewski interviewed more than 1,500 people in what would be the biggest murder investigation in the history of Cleveland. These included a crazed giant who stalked Kingsbury Run carrying a large knife, a “voodoo doctor” who claimed to have a death-ray and “Chicken Freak”, who hired prostitutes to strip naked and behead chickens while he masturbated. Merylo’s adventures were a popular source of copy for reporters and his antics kept the Cleveland Torso Murders in the newspapers.

  The Cleveland News offered a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the capture of the Mad Butcher. Cleveland City Council voted to match that amount. Newspapers right across the Midwest became obsessed with the killer. He was plainly a clever man, who never left the merest scrap of a clue. The police department now believed that he was taunting them by leaving the bodies in Kingsbury Run where they could be expected to be keeping a special look-out—just as he had
mocked the Nickel Plate Railroad police, dumping the Tattooed Man within sight of their headquarters.

  Newspaper speculation ran wild. Some thought that the killer was a religious nut who was bent on ridding the world of prostitutes, homosexuals, wastrels and hobos. Others thought he was a wealthy doctor who killed lower-class people for sport. Others still thought he was an outwardly normal person who occasionally lapsed into madness.

  Elliot Ness knew that the man they were seeking was no ordinary one. Eventually he took Coroner Pierce’s advice and held a “Torso Clinic”. Those present included Police Chief Matowitz, County Prosecutor Frank Cullitan, Inspector Joseph Sweeney, Lieutenant Cowles, Sergeant Hogan and Dr Reuben Strauss, the pathologist who had performed many of the victims’ post mortems, along with several outside medical consultants. They pieced together what they knew about the killer. Firstly, they agreed that one perpetrator working alone was responsible for all the murders. The murderer was strong to have overpowered his victims. To carry their bodies considerable distances over rough terrain meant that he was a large man they—pretty much ruled out the possibility that the perpetrator was a woman.

  While the killer was clearly psychopathic, he was probably not obviously insane. The genital mutilation of the first two corpses might be an indication that the killer was a homosexual. However, in other cases there had been other non-genital mutilation. Some of this had been performed to thwart identification or to transport the body more easily. But some of the mutilation seemed to have been purely gratuitous.

  Cutting the head off a living person is necessarily a messy business. Once the carotid artery and jugular vein are cut, blood spurts all over the place. That meant that the killer had private premises where the victims could be slaughtered, cleaned up and stored—perhaps even in preservatives—until they could be dumped. This could be a doctor’s office, a butcher’s shop or private home where unsuspecting victims could be lured by the promise of food, shelter or sex. This would be near Kingsbury Run and the killer had clearly an intimate knowledge of the area.

  The killer also had specialist knowledge of anatomy. However, the medical men at the meeting were adamant that this did not necessarily mean he was a doctor. After all, a butcher or hunter who cut up game would have enough anatomical knowledge to decapitate and dismember the corpses.

  He usually picked victims from the lower strata of society, perhaps on a crusade to rid the city of “undesirables”. By and large he dumped their bodies in Kingsbury Run. Perhaps this was an attempt to ward off the hobos who lived there.

  Selecting victims from the lower strata of society also meant they were more difficult to identify. And he was clearly getting more cunning. Only the early victims Andrassy and Polillo had been identified. Even the “Tattooed Man” had been picked with care as, despite all his distinguishing marks, the police were unable to discover who he was. Latterly, the heads and hands were missing or too badly decomposed to render fingerprints. Nobody came forward to claim these victims as missing persons. Plainly he picked his victims for their anonymity.

  The Mad Butcher gave Eliot Ness a seven-month break, allowing him to return to his crack-down on corruption in the police department and go after organized crime. As a result, in November 1936, Harold Burton was returned to office as mayor. However, Arthur J. Pierce was replaced as coroner by the young Democrat Samuel Gerber. Qualified both in medicine and law, he was to make the Mad Butcher case his own.

  His first opportunity to move the case forward came on 23 February 1937 when the upper half of a woman’s torso washed up on the beach at 156th Street, east of Bratenahl, in virtually the same place as the Lady of the Lake had surfaced. She had only been dead for between two and four days and had been in the water not more than three. Three months later the lower half of her torso washed ashore at East 30th Street. Again the question was asked whether she had been washed down the Cuyahoga River into Lake Erie from Kingsbury Run.

  Her head and arms had been removed with the murderer’s usual expertise and her legs were amputated with two “clean sweeping” strokes of a heavy knife. However, the bisection of the torso was more amateurish and showed marks of hesitation. There was something else different about the corpse. She had not been killed by decapitation. The blood clots in the heart indicated that her head had been cut off after she was dead. And there was a bizarre new touch. Her anus was enlarged and the killer had inserted the pocket from a pair of trousers inside her rectum.

  The woman’s clothes were never found. Nor were her head and limbs. However, from the parts that reached the morgue, it was possible to ascertain that she was in her mid-twenties, had a light complexion and medium brown hair, and weighed around 100 to 120 pounds. She had been pregnant at least once and she had lived in the city as there was dirt in her lungs, causing moderate emphysema. But that was all that was known of Victim Seven. Her identity was never discovered.

  Nevertheless the forensic work brought the new Coroner Sam Gerber a great deal of favourable publicity—oxygen for an elected official. Gerber then devoted his time to writing up his conclusion which he published in March 1937. Again he deduced that all the killings were the work of one man. The killer was right-handed and used a sharp, heavy knife rather than a medical instrument. As to motive, Gerber believed the killer to be a sexual psychopath, the first on record to murder both sexes. His knowledge of anatomy was also clear and Gerber pushed the idea he was a medical student, male nurse, surgeon or veterinary practitioner.

  Gerber’s report brought him into conflict with Eliot Ness. While Gerber aimed to hog the limelight with his theories, Ness asked the newspapers to scale down their coverage on the grounds that the exposure was inflating the killer’s ego and might encourage him to kill again. The sensationalism surrounding the murders was also bringing in thousands of useless tips, everyone of which had to be followed up. Much to Gerber’s annoyance, the newspaper editors agreed to curtail their coverage.

  However, they could not keep a lid on public interest when, on 6 June 1937, Victim Eight appeared. A teenager named Russell Lawer had been watching the Coast Guard boats on the Cuyahoga River when, on his way home, he found a human skull about 400 feet west of Stone’s Levee under the fifth span of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Next to it was a rotting burlap bag, containing skeletal remains, wrapped in a newspaper from June 1936. The lab agreed that the victim had been dead for around a year.

  Although the arms and legs were missing, the victim’s delicate bones showed she was a petite woman, less than five feet tall and around 40 years old. The skull showed extensive dental work a several of her teeth had been crowned with gold. She had had a wide nose and a prominent mouth. Her hair was kinky and fastened to it with a rusty hairpin was a black wig. Gerber concluded that she was an African-American.

  Although the skull was found separate from the rest of the skeleton, it was impossible to tell whether the cause of death had been decapitation. There was little cartilage and flesh left as the body had been treated with quicklime. However, there was “considerable hacking and cutting of the 3rd, 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae”—indicating that the perpetrator had not demonstrated the Mad Butcher’s normal level of skill.

  The skull’s dental work led to the unofficial identification of the victim as a prostitute named Rose Wallace of Scovill Avenue who had disappeared in August 1936. A lengthy investigation led nowhere, leading Sergeant Hogan and Coroner Gerber to believe that the victim was not Rose Wallace at all, though Detective Merylo continued to believed that it was.

  There were labour problems in the Cleveland in the summer of 1937 and the Ohio National Guard were called in to maintain order. On 6 July, a young guardsman on watch by the West Third Street bridge saw the upper part of a man’s torso bobbing in the water in the wake of a passing tugboat. Over the next few days, police recovered most of the body parts from the waters of the Cuyahoga River, though the head was missing. The victim had been dead a couple of days when the first parts were found. The man was in his m
id to late 30s. He was around five foot eight, weighed around 150 pounds and had well-groomed fingernails.

  The cause of death was, once again, decapitation. But this time some of the surgery had been sloppy and some was very skilful. For the first time, the internal organs including the heart had been ripped out, indicating a new element of viciousness in the killer’s modus operandi. None of the internal organs were ever found and the victim was never identified.

  At Gerber’s instigation, the investigation now began to concentrate on medics. Detectives combed the records for doctors that had a weakness for drink, drugs or illicit sex—particularly of a homosexual nature. They soon happened upon Dr Frank E. Sweeney, a physician who fitted the physical profile of the murderer that the Torso Clinic had come up with. Sweeney was very tall, large and physically strong. He had grown up in the Kingsbury Run area and, at various times, had practised there.

  At one time Sweeney had been a resident surgeon at St Alexis, a hospital close to Kingsbury Run. But he had lost his job because of drunkenness. At the same time he had been separated from his wife and sons. He was violent when drunk and there were rumours that he was a bisexual. It seemed that, at last, the police had a suspect.

  But soon the police dropped Dr Sweeney from their investigations because he had an alibi. He was often out of town at the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, a veterans’ hospital 50 miles to the west of Cleveland, when the Mad Butcher was at work. And although Dr Sweeney was not related to Inspector Joseph Sweeney, the chief of detectives on the case, he was a first cousin to the outspoken US Congressman Martin L. Sweeney.

  A Democrat, Martin L. Sweeney was a fierce critic of Mayor Burton and his Republican administration. Earlier that year he had launched a scathing attack on Mayor Burton’s “alter ego, Eliot Ness” who, he said, spent all his time persecuting cops that took $25 bribes from bootleggers years before while doing nothing to catch major criminals such as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. This meant investigating Dr Sweeney would be politically embarrassing. With municipal elections in the offing, the Congressman was urging voters to “send back to Washington the prohibition agent who is now safety director”. However, with the help of the Ohio National Guard, Ness chalked up a considerable victory against “labour racketeers”. His job was safe, but he still had little time to devote to the Torso Murders.