The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads, and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.

  — Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Mad Butcher

  Finally, there is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it.

  This imperative is Categorical.

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

  You may agree with my estimation that the forensic facts of this case are much more complex and intriguing, and certainly more savage and horrific, than those surrounding the enigmatic Jack the Ripper (excepting the treatment of Jack’s final victim, Mary Kelly, who, some say, was the one he was hunting for all along, and consequently literally hacked to pieces).

  Yet ‘The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ is practically forgotten, rating hardly a mention in the annals of criminal history. I am now helping to rectify this curious oversight.

  As the ‘Mad Butcher,’ like Jack the Ripper, was never captured, the question as to whether he was clinically mad or not is open to dispute. As is also the sex of the killer/killers — both the police and some commentators conjectured as to gender and the possibility that there might have been more than one killer involved.

  I believe the forensic evidence indicates clearly that there was only one male killer at work.

  In the 1930s, the port of Cleveland, on the shores of Lake Erie in northeast Ohio, was already a centre of major heavy industries. Its network of main railway tracks ran through a mile-long, soot-blackened gulley in the middle of Cleveland known as Kingsbury Run. Makeshift shacks and huts housed a fluctuating population of hoboes and vagrants.

  It was at night that the Run and its environs took on the most sinister, foreboding cast, like a visual projection of Blake’s dark satanic mills. Gaunt, high smokestacks of factories, where the night shifts toiled and sweated, raggedly broke the brooding sky on both sides of the Run, looming in the murk like the decayed teeth of some gigantic beast. Spasmodic tongues of flame belched from the mouths of blast furnaces, occasionally slanting their reflected light even into the dark depths of the Run, where only the bleary flicker of hobo campfires and the dim glow of steam engines being stoked both broke the darkness and added to it with more soot and smoke.

  There was no sense of space in that murk, nothing of breathing room. Seen from above, the Run had a hemmed-in air of suffocation, of hidden rot and stagnation, reminiscent of the slum burial ground described by Dickens in Bleak House. A netherworld subsisting in a metaphor of coiling black fog, channelled sluggishly along the steep gulley of the Run like the river Styx.

  Those derelict denizens forced to inhabit the Run huddled close to their campfires, trying to draw what comfort they could from the vestiges of confined warm light, their rheumy eyes seeking visions of better times past in the flames. Other bundles of rags swigged their dreams from bottles. Some more fortunate enjoyed the solitary solace of sleep, huddled like corpses in whatever crevices they could mould their forms to in uneasy oblivion.

  This was indeed an environment tailor-made to accommodate horrific murder, a stage fit for the dramatic entry of the homicidal phantom who was about to appear and disappear at will, unseen in the acrid haze as though part of it.

  The Run was not only a dumping ground for living refuse but also old cars, sofas, bedsteads and other general detritus of modern civilisation. Therefore, during the hours of daylight, the Run was naturally a favourite haunt for scavenging children to play and escape from boring, bothersome adults.

  So it was quite natural that, in the chilly autumn of 1935, frolicking slum children were the ones to discover the first two victims of the Mad Butcher, thus becoming a footnote in criminal history.

  This childhood discovery would probably be the only mark of modest fame or achievement their drab existence would ever afford, there being no just apportionment of happiness or pain in these infernal environs, only the like arbitrary selection process of the holocaust and an absurd, indifferent Creator.

  It would be left to the Mad Butcher to brighten the lives of these children a little, provide a compensatory spark of fascinating interest, as it were, the relating of which would widen the eyes of their own children-to-be. Even the Mad Butcher was not as merciless and condemnatory as their imaginary God. The killer’s unwitting generosity would long be treasured by them.

  Both victims found were adult males. Both were nude and had been castrated and decapitated by their killer.

  Police conducting a wider search of the area eventually found the missing sexual organs a good distance away along the foot of the craggy side of the gulley, as though casually discarded by the departing killer as he prepared to climb back up to the normal world.

  Eventually the heads of both men were found by the detectives in separate shallow graves some distance from the bodies. Both bodies had been ritualistically arranged by the killer in an orderly manner, lying on their backs, arms straight by their sides, legs also straight and heels together. At attention to meet their maker.

  Although both victims had been drained of blood, there was no trace of blood under or anywhere in the vicinity of the bodies, obviously denoting that both men had been killed elsewhere and conveyed to Kingsbury Run.

  It also became obvious that both bodies had been very thoroughly washed, neither bearing even a smudge of blood.

  The first victim was a stocky man, estimated to be in his late forties or early fifties. The state of decomposition indicated he had been dead for quite some time. The skin of this man had a curiously hard texture, as though it had been tanned or preserved by some chemical process. The second body was that of a much younger man who was estimated to have been dead only a matter of days. Incongruously, his sole apparel was a pair of socks.

  Checking fingerprint files, the detectives soon managed to identify this body as being that of Edward Andrassy, a twenty-eight-year-old small-time thief with a criminal record including sexual deviance. Rope-burns on his wrists indicated that he had struggled ferociously for his life.

  The police pathologist later deduced from the retracted neck muscles that both men had been decapitated while alive and, perhaps, fully conscious.

  The body of the older man eluded all attempts at identification due to decomposition. The pathologist deduced that the strange leathery texture of this man’s skin had been brought about by the body having been preserved, for a lengthy period of time, in chloride of lime (more commonly known as bleaching powder).

  Another interesting connection was found.

  A year earlier, in September 1934, half of a headless female torso had been washed up on Cleveland’s Euclid Beach, and a search discovered the other half several miles away. The skin of the victim had the same peculiar texture denoting preservation in chloride of lime. The arms had been cut off; there was no way to identify her.

  Detectives painstakingly examined the scene where the two male victims had been found, and meticulously reconstructed the methodology the killer must have used to convey the two bodies to where they had been carefully deposited in the Run. First, according to police conclusions, it was believed that the killer would have had to carry the bodies down the steep slope of the Run in total darkness, as the local topography dictated that he would have been immediately spotted during daylight hours. Next, after a thorough inspection of the craggy line of descent, they decided that the two bodies had not been rolled or thrown down into the Run but actually carried there by the killer for seventy-odd precipitous feet.

  Why had the killer been so apparently considerate and respectful of the dead?

  The superhuman strength the murderer would have had to possess to twice perform such a task, chilled the detectives. Presumably the killer would then have had to carry down the severed heads and sexual organs separately.

  Again
, the unavoidable question: why had a man with so little regard for the living ostensibly taken so much trouble over the butchered remains?

  Personally, I do not believe he did; the contemptuous manner in which he dumped his other dismembered corpses, and their severed parts, demonstrates that such humane consideration would have been out of character, reinforcing my theory that the police misinterpreted as respect certain actions that the killer had daily performed simply from habit, mere reflex, thus subconsciously leaving, by his orderly conduct, very significant clues. I shall explain more fully in due course.

  Another find the detectives made near the rail tracks is worth a mention, as it demonstrates the rather basic forensic methodology the police employed in those days, and their inability to read a crime scene both clinically and psychologically, charting every action the killer must have made, and the reasons why.

  The item found was a rusty old bucket half-filled with dirty oil, in which the police discovered small traces of blood and human hair — though no allusion is made as to whether either the blood group or the hair matched that of either of the two victims, it is reasonable to assume that they did, the coincidence being too great.

  The expressed police theory was that the killer had brought the bucket of oil with him to burn the two bodies. Neither of the bodies bore any traces of attempted destruction by fire or any other method, so why the police chose that hypothesis is entirely a mystery. There is no reference as to whether or not the police found any fingerprints on the bucket.

  Here is my theory and explanation:

  1.The killer would not have thoroughly washed the bodies had he intended to burn them, and would not have bothered to bury the heads either.

  2.Half a bucket of dirty oil would have been entirely useless for burning the two bodies or the heads, even in the unlikely event of the killer being able to ignite the oil at all with a match or lighter.

  3.Even if it had been petrol instead, the perfect fuel for such a grisly task, that small amount would only have slightly charred the surface flesh.

  4.There was no trace of oil on either of the two bodies or the heads. It is unlikely the killer would have made an extra arduous journey, down into the Run in the darkness, with half a bucket of oil and then not have at least tried to use it.

  5.Such an obviously meticulous murderer would hardly have left the bucket at the scene of the crime had it belonged to him and perhaps bore forensic evidence or could be traced to him.

  6.The bucket was rusty, which means it had been out in the open for weeks, more probably months, whereas the younger victim had been dead only a matter of days.

  From these facts I interpret the scenario as follows:

  The killer, having placed the two bodies where they were found and buried the heads, peered around in the darkness for something or somewhere to clean or wipe his soiled hands. Searching in the darkness he stumbled across the rusting bucket. In the moonlight its contents gleamed like water. Not until he had immersed his hands and begun to clean them did he identify the slippery substance as oil. No matter. It served just as well to rid his hands of evidence such as blood and hair.

  Afterwards, he probably wiped the oil from his hands with grass or a handkerchief, putting the latter back into his pocket.

  In January 1936, the Mad Butcher delivered another victim. The dismembered body of a woman was discovered, piecemeal, in a sack dumped openly in a snow-covered street above Kingsbury Run. The head was missing, but again the telltale retracted muscles of the neck indicated that she had been alive when beheaded.

  Fingerprint records identified her as a prostitute, Florence Genevieve Portillo. This raises self-evident questions.

  If this murder, which bore the same killing M.O. used on his previous victims, was committed by The Butcher, why had he this time also cut the body into pieces? To make it easier to transport to the Run? If so, why had he then dumped the dismembered body in a public street? Had someone seen him and forced him to make a hurried retreat? If so, why had no witness come forward? Alternatively, had he been running behind schedule and simply ditched the body at the nearest convenient spot?

  A pattern had begun to develop. Two of the three victims of the Mad Butcher had criminal records in Cleveland, so perhaps the third, the decomposed man, had a criminal record in another city or state. This line of inquiry, if it was followed at all, provided no fresh clues.

  The famed Eliot Ness, founder of ‘The Untouchables’ who caged Al Capone, had become Cleveland’s Public Safety Director. However, for the time being, he was keeping himself aloof from such a sordid murder investigation. The public hue and cry over the murders had not yet reached its peak, and Ness was otherwise fully occupied investigating the more politically sensitive problem of corruption in Cleveland’s Police Department.

  In the sweltering summer of 1936, the body of another beheaded, castrated male was found by two more slum children amongst the junk in Kingsbury Run.

  The retracted neck muscles and lack of blood at the murder scene again related their legend.

  Police were unable to identify the body. The victim had the appearance of having been a hobo, so perhaps he had been riding the rails from Pittsburgh and, unfortunately for him, jumped from the freight cars at Kingsbury Run only to meet his murderer there.

  Police inquiries were leading nowhere, and yellow press sensationalism was frantically whipping up public hysteria.

  At night people were now walking in pairs or in groups and keeping well away from Kingsbury Run, irrationally ignoring the strong indication that the Mad Butcher did his slaughtering elsewhere in the city and simply used the Run as a convenient area in which to dispose of the bodies.

  But perhaps this purblind, atavistic reaction by the public was subconsciously justified to some degree.

  The fact that the severed heads were discovered at some distance from the bodies in Kingsbury Run, and that all the victims so far were itinerant tramps and prostitutes, could well mean that the murders had been committed in some of the thousands of freight cars travelling through the Run every night.

  Significantly, as already mentioned, there were no signs that the bodies had been dragged to their final resting places but carefully carried in dark, dangerous terrain. So either the killer possessed abnormal strength or two men were involved — the fact that victims of both sexes were chosen could well support a theory that two killers with different sexual preferences, or fixations, were working together.

  The travelling freight car theory would also explain the absence of blood at the sites where the bodies were found. Could one man or two have then tossed the bodies a good distance from the freight car? That would not explain the ritualistic neatness in which most of the bodies had been found, nor the fact that some victims had been chemically preserved for an extended period.

  Only a map of the 1930s rail network through Kingsbury Run, and the precise locations of where some of the bodies and matching heads were discovered, could provide an answer to the possibility that some of the murders themselves had been committed in a rail-truck, the bodies drained of blood, then washed and carried into the Run.

  But unless the trucks were used for cattle or slaughtered meat, surely some railway worker would have reported a truck extensively stained with blood? There were no such reports on record.

  All sorts of theories were broached by police and public. Could The Mad Butcher have been a uniformed policeman, a railway worker or a woman, as was speculated by some? Definitely not a woman. I personally believe, from the forensic evidence, that it is extremely unlikely the killer was a policeman or railway worker. And, as evidenced earlier, I am firmly convinced that the Mad Butcher was one man, not two.

  The ritualistic beheading and methodical dismemberment of the victims characterises a single pair of strong, skilled hands and a solitary, obsessive mind at work.

  Decapitation was probably the killer’s ultimate method of depersonalising the victim, and he then logically extended the pathological co
mpulsion by carrying the severed heads some distance from the bodies before burying them. The element of sadistic contempt involved in this practice is reinforced by the way he castrated his male victims and pitched the organs aside like scrag-meat.

  The use of restraints, namely the severe rope burns on one of the male bodies, suggests that he castrated him while he was alive and conscious. The theory that this particular victim had been struggling against being decapitated is medically erroneous — in the process of beheading, the unavoidable, immediate severing of the carotid artery in the neck, halting the flow of blood to the brain, renders the victim unconscious almost instantly.

  The Mad Butcher, according to forensic evidence, had the curious habit of washing his victims before conveying them to the Run. The most logical explanation for this cleansing ritual would be that he intended the victims to be discovered, and therefore went to great pains to cleanse them of all forensic evidence.

  One promising line of thought that did occur to me was that the killer, having lured a vagrant to his house or place of business with promises of a hot meal, then also offered (in reality to erase traceable forensic clues or evidence of sexual assault) the opportunity of a bath — either before or after a meal — autopsy reports having shown that undigested food was found in the stomachs of some of the victims.

  If the killer did use this method, the bathroom door would obviously have had no lock or bolt, which would hinder a quick, surprise entry and attack. As the victim bathed, the killer would have entered swiftly and, with the heavy, sharp knife forensic experts said he employed, sliced deeply through the carotid artery of the neck rendering the victim immediately unconscious. This method of killing the victim in a bath would also offer a possible explanation as to how the Butcher was able to deal with the immediate deluge of pumping blood with which such an incision would present him.