One Decapitation From Murder

One Decapitation From Murder So, this is one of those episodes where we give you a gruesome alert. Some details of this story are pretty retched, so you’ve been warned. Cleveland Ohio in the mid to late 1930’s was in the beginnings of a boom. Despite the Great Depression, people in Cleveland were starting to pull themselves out of the ashes. The population was growing with a melting pot of laborers needed for the manufacturing of steel in the area. At the time, it was the 6th biggest city in the US and dubbed itself, the “city of conventions,” boasting a new union train station, fancy hotels and a state-of-the-art auditorium. However, even though the city was coming into its own financially, there was a deadly monster rapidly approaching. SE of the Cuyahoga River that spills through Cleveland is Kingsbury Run, known as “the run,” is a prehistoric, dried up riverbed that runs through the area, criss-crossed by railroad tracks. In the 1930’s, it was dark and oppressive, not to mention dangerous. Not everyone had yet escaped the depression, and those who were destitute lived here. The conditions were horrific and disgusting, covered in trash and human filth. The homeless, referred to as “hobos” at the time, (reminds me of Wreck it ralph where Penelope says, “are you a hobo?”) lived in the run, which was called “hobo jungle” by the locals. The hobos that lived here, often hopped train cars to escape the freezing winters or to try their luck elsewhere. Also, is this still possible, because maybe I should start riding the rails to get away from the cold too, but I’d probably pick the wrong train and end up in Alaska. Just East of Kingsbury Run is an area that was known as “the roaring third,” which was popular for it’s bars, brothels, flophouses (which are super cheap hotels), and gambling dens. Shockingly, this area became super dangerous and would soon see it’s unfair share of brutal killings. In September of 1934, a young man on the edge of Lake Erie, comes across the lower half of a woman’s torso with the thighs still attached, but the legs amputated at the knees, which had washed up on shore. During examination, the coroner discovered some sort of chemical preservative on the skin of the body which had made it red, with a leathery texture. Authorities searched the area where the body was found for more remains and they did find a few more body parts, but no head. They didn’t have many resources to identify the woman, who they determined was in her 30’s, and she became known as the lady of the lake and later, victim zero. In September 1935, roughly a year later, two teen boys stumbled upon their own awful discovery at the bottom of jackass hill. They didn’t find a jackass, but they did find a body which had been decapitated and with the man bits removed. The body was completely naked except for socks and it was totally clean and all the blood had been drained. Rope burns were visible on the wrists and because the hands were present, fingerprints were taken. The victim was identified as Edward Andressy, a 28 year old white man with an arrest record which was why he was able to be identified. Edward was known to frequent the roaring third area. During their search of the area, police discovered another body, also decapitated and de-manned. (I like saying that more than emasculated for some reason.) This body was also covered in the same chemical preservative as the lady of the lake. It was determined this body was that of a 44 year old white man and had been dead for at least 2 weeks. He couldn’t be identified. A few months later, In January of 1936, a woman walking alongside a manufacturing building came across a sickening sight. In 2 half-bushel baskets, about half of a female’s body parts were neatly wrapped in newspaper. The rest of the body, except for the head were found 10 days later in a vacant lot nearby. Cause of death was determined to be … wait for it … decapitation. It was discovered during autopsy that the killer had waited until after rigor mortis set in to cut off the other body parts. Through fingerprints, the victim was identified as Florence Polillo who was a waitress, bar maid and prostitute. At the time of her death, she had lived right at the edge of the roaring third which was probably convenient for her professions. Then in June of 1936 in the early morning on Kingsbury Run, two boys found a pair of trousers with something inside of them. It was a head. The next day, police came upon the body of an early twenties male belonging to the head dumped the boys had found, but the body was in front of the Nickel Plate Railroad police station. The body had been cleaned and drained of blood. Again, the cause of death was decapitation. In spite of being able to pull fingerprints off of the victim and despite him having recognizable tattoos in a variety of places all over his body, police weren’t able to identify him. A death mask made of plaster was made of his face along with a diagram with the descriptions and locations of his tattoos. It was even displayed at the Great Lakes Exposition that year in 1936 where over 100,000 people saw the exhibit of “the tattooed man” as he was called but no one claimed to recognize who he was. Just a month after the tattooed man was found, in July of 1936, a teen girl was walking in some woods in the area when she came across a headless white male’s body in his late 30-s to early 40’s. This victim seemed to have been deceased for about 2 months. When a search of the area was conducted, his head and a pile of blood-encrusted clothing was found nearby. The clothing and the area around it was pooled with dried blood meaning that the man was likely killed in that spot unlike the other bodies which seemed to have been placed at their locations. In September of 1936, a transient is trying to hop a train in Kingsbury Run when he trips over the upper half of a man’s torso. Investigators once again went on a scavenger hunt to find the rest of the body. They swept a water basin which was basically a large open sewer. There they found the lower half of the torso and parts of both legs. This one guy – who probably thought he had the coolest job in the world as a diver, was sent into the cesspool to recover the parts. A crowd gathered to watch and it was estimated that over 600 looky-loos came to gawk, potentially with the murderer among them. The body was that of a 20-something and cause of death was… decapitation. In this killing, the coroner noted that when the body was cut apart, it was done without hesitation marks meaning it had probably been committed by someone familiar with human anatomy. The head had been removed in one clean stroke. Like many of the others, this victim was not identified. The newspapers dubbed the killer the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run and the press was having a field day with it. Almost daily articles were published about the slayings which further helped to panic the residents. Eliot Ness, the man who worked to take down Al Capone in the epic battle with gangsters in Chicago, now lived in Cleveland. The Mayor of Cleveland, Harold Burton had recently appointed Eliot Ness as the public safely director for Cleveland due to Ness’s untouchable reputation. He had been appointed to try to transform the corrupt police department into a professional, well-reputed establishment. So, as the murders are becoming such a persistent presence, the mayor told Eliot Ness to get more involved with finding the killer and saving face for the city. To try to help push the case along, a meeting between police, the coroner and other experts was set up to create a profile of the killer. Newspapers referred to the meeting as a “torso clinic.” Two detectives, Peter Merylo and Martin Zelewski were assigned to the case full time and they decided to kind of go undercover in the seedy dregs of the Run and the Roaring Third, dressing the part and even working on their off hours to try to collect intel. I have a photo of one of these guys dressed up as a hobo and it’s so hilarious. It’s like a depiction from a cartoon of what people thought hobos looked like. He literally had the long stick with a bandana attached to the end. November elections rolled around and though the mayor retained his position, Cleveland voters appointed a new Coroner who would become legendary in his own right, Sam Gerber. Sam was not only a physician, he also had a law degree. Overachiever. BREAK The former wasn’t the last of the victims of the mad butcher, unfortunately. In February of 1937, the upper half of a woman’s torso washed up on the shore of Bratenahl, a suburb of Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie. Her cause of death WAS NOT decapitation. She had been cut up after death. The lower half of her torso washed ashore 3 months later in another area. She was never identified but they were able to determine that she was in her mid twenties. In June of 1937, a teen boy found a severed human skull under the Lorain Carnegie bridge with a burlap bag next to it. In the bag were the skeletal remains of a black woman who had been around 40 at the time of her death. She was tentatively identified as Rose Wallace by her dental work. Following leads about her were a dead end as well. The next month, July of 1937, the National Guard had been deployed in the area. Not because of the killings, but because of what was referred to as “labor problems.” I’m guessing there must have been some rioting or picketing of some sort by unhappy workers. Anyway, a National Guardsman on watch on a bridge saw something float up in the wake churned up by a passing tugboat in the Cuyahoga River. It was a body part, and over the next few days, police were able to recover more of the body… all except for the head. The unidentified body of the victim, a mid to late 30’s male, had been gutted, and the heart removed. A young labor worker on his way to work on an April day of 1938 was passing the banks of the Cuyahoga river and something caught his eye. At first he thought it was just a fish but something about it made him go closer to inspect it. It was the lower half of a woman’s leg. A month later, police fished out 2 burlap bags from the river containing the torso and the rest of the legs of this victim. The coroner was able to find something that hadn’t been present in the previous murders. This victim had drugs in her system which brought up the questions: was this poor soul an addict or had drugs been used to incapacitate her? Unfortunately, that question would remain unanswered since they never did recover her arms or her identity. The death seems to carry on mercilessly when on August 16 of 1938, scrap collectors who were digging in a dump site found the torso of a female wrapped in a man’s blazer that had then been wrapped in an old quilt. Once again, investigators and police descended upon the site and found a pretty new box wrapped in butcher paper and secured with rubber bands. Inside were arms and legs belonging to the torso the scrap collectors had found. The head was also found wrapped in the same way, like a present. Coroner Gerber was able to determine that some of the parts had been refrigerated at one point. While searching for more clues and/or body parts, police found a second body just yards from this one. What was most striking about the location of these bodies was that they had been placed in plain view from Eliot Ness’s office window. Both of these victims were also unidentified. Just a couple of days later, on August 18 of 1938, Eliot Ness along with a troop of 35 officers and detectives raid the hobo jungles of the Run. The makeshift shacks were in a large cluster that were set up where the Cuyahoga River runs behind the public square. The raid gathered up 63 transients and took them away. The troop searched through the shanties, wondering if the killer could be a hobo. Then, by order of Eliot Ness, everything these transients had and their shacks were set on fire and turned to ashes. Peter Merylo, one of the lead investigators thought that the torso murders closely resembled other dismemberment murders that had taken place in Pennsylvania. The thought that the killer could be hopping trains, so this part of what led police to do the raid, thinking that the killer could be a transient. However, the coroner believed the killer had some medical training due to his precision with dismemberment. Could it be though, that he just got better with experience? The burning of the shanty town caused outrage in the community, and it ended up ruining Ness’s career. But, something to note… the killings stopped after the raid. Ness claimed (in what I felt was kind of a weak plea) that the raid had been done in part to get those most vulnerable to the killings off the streets and to keep them safe. The hobo jungle residents were all fingerprinted as a kind of way to better identify future casualties of the torso killer. Late 1938, police received a letter from someone claiming to be the torso killer. It read, “you can rest easy now. I have come out to sunny California for the winter.” The letter writer also proclaimed to have killed someone and buried the body in LA, giving the area they had left the body. However, no body was ever found where the writer said it was. There was one man that had been arrested in suspicion of being the torso murderer. He was a 52 year old Bahamian brick layer named Frank Dolezal who had lived with the vicim, Flo Polillo for a short while. He had also been acquainted with Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace, 2 other victims of the butcher. However, being the types of professions and interests of those in this exact area, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they would know many that lived and or worked in the same neighborhood as one another? Frank did eventually confess to the murders, but it turns out he had suffered some physical coercion of some kind from the police to give the confession and he later recanted. Before Frank could go to trial, he was found dead in his cell. He had somehow hung himself from a hook that was five feet 7 inches from the floor even though he was 5’ 8” tall. He was given an autopsy and the same coroner who had to study the victims of the butcher also examined frank. The autopsy showed that Frank had 6 broken ribs that had only happened while in police custody. Unbeknownst to the public, Eliot Ness had a suspect in mind that he was sure was the killer. Francis Sweeney, a doctor born of a prominent family in Cleveland (one of whom was Martin Sweeney, a congressman), looked good for the killings to Ness. Sweeney was a heavy drinker whose wife said would become violent and disappear for days when on a bender. She was so afraid of him that she was able to get the court to grant her what sounds like the equivalent of a protection order, later a divorce and full custody of their two sons. Sweeney was in and out of the soldiers and sailors home for a couple of years and in March of 1938, a dog walked into the soldiers and sailors home with a severed human leg in its mouth. Prior to the veteran’s home matter, Ness was also made aware of an incident a man named Emil Fronek had in Cleveland in November of 1934 where a physician beckoned him inside, offering him some shoes. He said before he would give him the shoes, he should have something to eat. The doctor brought out some meat and potatoes along with some hot coffee. Emil was hungry, but while eating the food, he suddenly got sick. He followed his instincts and ran the fuck out the door. He made it to box car before passing out and was woken by transients 3 days later. He reported the incident to the police and investigators had him take him back to where he thought he had met the doctor. Not a resident of Cleveland (he lived in Chicago), Emil took officials to where he thought the assault had occurred, but he couldn’t point out the exact building. Interestingly, Francis Sweeney shared a medical building with another doctor in the exact area Emil had led authorities. In fact, Ness believed so strongly that Francis Sweeney was his man, he basically kidnapped him and holed him up in a hotel, questioning him for weeks and giving him one of the very first polygraphs with the inventor himself of the polygraph machine. The polygrapher said that it showed without a doubt that Sweeney was the killer, but that was inadmissible. Nothing Ness could do would persuade Sweeney to confess, and without any evidence, he had to be released. Ness would receive taunting postcards from Sweeney for years to come. I don’t think the public knew for many many decades about Francis Sweeney being a suspect. There were a lot of references in the news to the likely suspect would be a doctor who had anatomy knowledge A writer, named James Badal is now the foremost expert on the torso murders case. He’s written a few books on it. He was the one to kind of unearth the secrets behind the case, which were Eliot Ness’s beliefs about Sweeney being the culprit. There were other suspects, one of whom I mentioned before and who hung himself, or as many believed, was killed – Frank Dolezal. Another was Willie Johnson. He had actually been caught while dumping dismembered remains of a woman in Kingsbury Run in 1942 (so this was a little while after the initial bodies were found). He was convicted that murder and though he was sentenced to death, he swore he didn’t do the other murders. He was executed in 1944. In 1947, the now disgraced Eliot Ness ran for Cleveland Mayor but he lost. That same year, Elizabeth Short, the black dahlia, was found cut in half and drained of her blood in Los Angeles. Her murder was so similar to the torso murders that many believed she had been another victim of the same killer. Despite his failure to make a definitive arrest of the torso murderer, Ness had made great strides in the police department outside of the torso murders. He cleaned up the police department and got rid of a lot of the corruption. Through his work, background checks on future officers became the norm. In the end, more than 1500 men had been questioned. It is the largest police investigation in Cleveland history. clevelandpolicemuseum.org, Cleveland.com, case.edu, mentalfloss.com, theclio.com, historyofyesterday.com in an article called Eliot Ness’ Pursuit of the Cleveland Torso Murderer by CS Voll, clevelandmagazine.com an article called Case Closed? By Erick Trickey