The Cleveland Torso Murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, was an unidentified serial killer who operated in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, in the 1930s. The killings were characterized by the dismemberment of thirteen known victims and the disposal of their remains in the impoverished neighborhood of Kingsbury Run. Most victims came from an area east of Kingsbury Run called "The Roaring Third" or "Hobo Jungle", known for its bars, gambling dens, brothels and vagrants.

Despite an investigation of the murders, which at one time was led by famed lawman Eliot Ness, the murderer was never apprehended.

Murders

thumb|left|Cleveland police searching for human remains, September 1936.

The official number of murders attributed to the Cleveland Torso Murderer is twelve, although recent research has shown there could have been as many as twenty or more. The twelve known victims were killed between 1935 and 1938. Some investigators, including lead detective Peter Merylo, believed that there may have been thirteen or more victims in the Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh areas between the 1920s and 1950s. Two strong candidates for addition to the "official" list are the unknown victim nicknamed the "Lady of the Lake", found on September 5, 1934; and Robert Robertson, found on July 22, 1950.

The victims of the Torso Murderer were usually drifters whose identities were never determined, although there were a few exceptions. Victims numbers 2, 3 and 8 were identified as Edward Andrassy, Florence Polillo and possibly Rose Wallace, respectively. Andrassy and Polillo were both identified by their fingerprints, while Wallace was tentatively identified via her dental records. The victims appeared to be lower class individualseasy prey during the Great Depression. Many were known as "working poor" who had nowhere else to live but the ramshackle shanty towns, or "Hoovervilles", in the area known as the Cleveland Flats.

The Torso Murderer always decapitated and often dismembered his victims, occasionally severing the victim's torso in half or severing his or her appendages. In many cases the cause of death was the decapitation or dismemberment itself. Most of the male victims were castrated. Some victims showed evidence of chemical treatment being applied to their bodies, which caused the skin to become red, tough and leathery. Many were found after a considerable period of time following their deaths, occasionally in excess of a year. In an era when forensic science was largely in its infancy, these factors further complicated identification, especially since the heads were often undiscovered. Ness contributed to the arrest and interrogation of one of the prime suspects, Dr. Francis Sweeney, and personally conducted raids into shantytowns and eventually burned them down. Ness' reasoning for doing so was to catalogue fingerprints to easily identify any new victims, and to get possible victims out of the area in an attempt to stop the murders. While the search never turned up any new or incriminating information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the Torso Murderer, it did serve to focus renewed public attention on the inadequate and unsanitary living conditions in the downtown area. Teams uncovered hundreds of families living in hazardous fire traps without toilets or running water. The interests of the lower class did ultimately come to light even if those of law enforcement did not.

At one point, the Torso Murderer taunted Ness by placing the remains of two victims in full view of his office at Cleveland City Hall. The man who Ness believed to be the killer would later also provoke him by sending postcards.

Victims

Most researchers consider there to be twelve victims attributed to the Torso Murderer, although some have counted as many as twenty or forty.

Edward Andrassy

thumb|upright|left|Edward Andrassy

Edward Anthony Andrassy (29) was discovered on September 23, 1935, in a gully at the base of Jackass Hill, where East 49th Street runs into a dead-end at Kingsbury Run. Andrassy's head was discovered buried near the rest of his body, which was found to be emasculated and wearing only socks. The autopsy report stated that Andrassy was decapitated in the mid-cervical region, with a fracture of the mid-cervical vertebrae. The coroner also noted that Andrassy had rope burns around his wrists. The cause of death was decapitation; hemorrhage and shock. He had been dead for two to three days.

At one time, Andrassy had been an orderly in the psychiatric ward at Cleveland City Hospital. However, at the time of his death, he was unemployed and had no visible means of financial support.

John Doe I

The decapitated remains of another white male were also located in weeds at the foot of East 49th Street and Praha Avenue next to Andrassy. Evidence suggested that the unidentified victim's body was saturated with oil and set afire after death, causing the skin to become reddish and leathery. It also appeared as though the victim's body hair had either been shaved or burned off. The unidentified male became known as John Doe I.

7

Florence Polillo

thumb|upright|left|Florence Polillo

Florence Genevieve Polillo (44) was discovered at 2315 to 2325 East 20th Street on January 26, 1936. Polillo was found dismembered and had been wrapped with paper and packed into half-bushel baskets, but her head was never discovered. The autopsy report stated that her cause of death was a slit throat. Due to the lack of the head, the coroner could not definitively rule her death a homicide.

John Doe II (The Tattooed Man)

thumb|upright|left|The Tattooed Man

The decapitated torso of an unidentified man was located on June 5, 1936, between the New York Central and Nickel Plate Road tracks next to an old freight shed, in front of the Nickel Plate Road police building. His head was found near the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit tracks.

The victim's body was nude but unmutilated and found only about fifteen hundred feet away from the head. There was no blood on the ground, indicating he had been killed elsewhere. A railroad worker testified that the head was not in the vicinity at 3:00 p.m. that day, and an eyewitness described seeing a late-model Cadillac close to the crime scene at about 11:00 p.m. that same night.

The physical evidence of the decapitation suggested it had been done while the victim was alive, and the autopsy report stated that the body was drained of blood. The head had been cut off between the first and second cervical vertebrae. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in the victim's body, and nothing to suggest that he had been tortured or bound before being killed.

John Doe II had six tattoos, hence the nickname "The Tattooed Man".

John Doe III

On July 22, 1936, the severely decomposed, decapitated remains of a white male were located near a homeless camp in the Big Creek area of Brooklyn, west of Cleveland. This was the only known West Side victim of the Torso Murderer. Police conducted a thorough search of the area and found the man's head, which was a skull at that point. Cheaply made, bloodstained clothing was found nearby. A pathologist discovered a large quantity of dried blood that had seeped into the ground beneath the man's body, indicating he was killed at that location. Exact identification could not be achieved because the dentist who carried out the work had died years before. Doubts remained because the body was estimated to have been dead for a year, whereas Wallace had only been reported missing for ten months since August 1936.

Between 1921 and 1942, nine people, eight of them unidentified, were found dead and dismembered in swamps or around train yards near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The so-called "Murder Swamp Killings" have been theorized to be additional victims of the Torso Murderer. The almost identical similarities between the Pittsburgh victims to those in Cleveland, both of which were directly connected by a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line, were enough to convince Cleveland investigator Peter Merylo that the Pittsburgh murders were related.

The headless body of an unidentified male was found in a boxcar in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1936. Three headless victims were found in boxcars near McKees Rocks on May 3, 1940. All bore similar injuries to those inflicted by the Torso Murderer. Dismembered bodies were also found in the swamps near New Castle between 1921 and 1934 and between 1939 and 1942.

A decade later, this "confession" resulted in authorities considering the possibility that the Torso Murderer had some connection to the Black Dahlia case, in which the bisected remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short were found in the unfinished Leimert Park housing development of Los Angeles on January 15, 1947. Both Short and the Torso Murderer victims had been thoroughly cleaned after death, and a butcher knife was believed to have been used in both cases. However, Short was not decapitated, as was a signature for the Cleveland victims. Furthermore, the murder took place nearly a decade after the letter was received. Aside from circumstantial evidence and sheer speculation, there is nothing connecting Short to the Torso Murderer.

Suspects

Authorities interrogated around 9,100 people during the search to find the Torso Murderer. There were only two main suspects: Frank Dolezal and Francis Sweeney.

Frank Dolezal

On August 24, 1939, a Cleveland resident named Frank Dolezal (May 4, 1887 – August 24, 1939), who at one point lived with Polillo and also had connections to Andrassy and Wallace, was arrested as a suspect in Polillo's murder. Dolezal initially confessed to killing Polillo in self-defense, but later retracted the confession, claiming it had been beaten out of him. Soon after, Dolezal was found hanged in his cell at Cuyahoga County jail, while in the custody of Sheriff Martin O'Donnell. Officially labelled a suicide, rumors persist that he was murdered. Dolezal was later posthumously exonerated of involvement in the Torso slayings.

Francis Sweeney

The other lead suspect, Dr. Francis Edward “Frank” Sweeney (May 5, 1894 – July 9, 1964), After the war, Sweeney became an alcoholic due to pathological anxiety and depression derived from his wartime experiences. His heavy drinking began in 1929; by 1934 his alcoholism led to a separation from his wife.

Sweeney was personally interviewed by Ness. Sweeney died in a veterans' hospital in Dayton, Ohio, on July 9, 1964.

While Sweeney was considered a viable suspect, the evidence against him was purely circumstantial. In 1929, Sweeney was a surgical resident at St. Alexis Hospital in the Kingsbury Run area. He also had an office on the same street where a man named Emil Fronek claimed a doctor had tried to drug him in 1934. Fronek's story was ultimately discounted as he could not relocate the building with police the following day. Upon finding a victim with drugs in her system and looking through buildings, it was found that Sweeney did have an office next to a coroner, in the area where Fronek had suggested he had been drugged. Sweeney would practice in their morgue, which would have been a clean and convenient location to kill victims.

Willie Johnson

In addition to Dolezal and Sweeney, authorities also considered Willie Johnson, a black male who committed a similar murder in June 1942. Johnson had been spotted by a young girl while disposing of a trunk, which was later found to contain the torso of Margaret Frances Wilson (19). Wilson's head and arms were found in nearby bushes, while her legs would be found at Johnson's home two weeks later. In addition to Wilson's murder bearing similarities to the Torso killings, Johnson was alleged to have had connections to at least two of the Torso Murderer's identified victims. Charles Sadoti, who operated a bootleg joint, identified Johnson in a line-up as being the partner of Rose Wallace. Sadoti stated that the pair had entered his store in August 1936, two weeks before Wallace's disappearance, and that he'd had to stop Johnson from beating Wallace in the car park. Johnson may also have known Florence Polillo; an informant claimed Polillo had argued with a black man nicknamed "one-armed Willie" the day before her murder, and a man of the same nickname was alleged to have been in a relationship with Rose Wallace.

Other suspects

On August 11, 1937, Merylo dubbed an unnamed suspect as a "likely and best suspect in the murders". Merylo believed that the Torso Murderer could have been a transient who was riding the rails, as most of the murders occurred near railroad tracks, and believed this was why there were murders in other states that were similar to the killings in Cleveland. Merylo went undercover as a hobo to investigate this idea.

The 2018 film The Kingsbury Run was based on a modern copycat of the murders. The murders and the hunt for the perpetrators were also covered in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. The award-winning graphic novel Torso written by Brian Michael Bendis tells the hunt for the killer by Eliot Ness.

American author John Peyton Cooke wrote a fictionalized account of the murders in his novel Torsos, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Mystery for 1993, and was noted by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review for its atmospheric depiction of Cleveland, Ohio, during the Great Depression.

The Unknown Beloved by Amy Harmon is a fictionalized treatment of the Cleveland Torso Murders.

American Demon, written by author Daniel Stashower, details the murders and the subsequent investigation by Eliot Ness.

Trail of Cthulhu, a tabletop role-playing game inspired by the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, contains an introductory adventure in the first edition rulebook entitled The Kingsbury Horror which is based on the Torso Murders.

The 1998 video game Black Dahlia, despite its name, was inspired by the murders but moved the setting to 1941 involving Nazis and the occult. The famous Eliot Ness and Cleveland lead Detective Peter Merylo, who both investigated the murders, appears in the game.

See also

  • Orley May – detective who worked on the case.
  • Thames Torso Murders – another series of murders in which the torsos of victims were left behind.

General:

  • List of fugitives from justice who disappeared
  • List of serial killers in the United States

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

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  • Paperback, second edition 2002.
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  • Cleveland Torso Murders
  • Google Map of the Torso Murders
  • The Kingsbury Run Murders