Some of the most fascinating cases of serial murder are those which, even today, remain unsolved. The Jack the Ripper and Zodiac cases have captured the imagination of millions of people around the world, all of whom will have their own theories as to who committed those terrible crimes.
However, there is a similar case which never seemed to gain the same level of notoriety, despite the killer claiming more victims, and creating much more gruesome crime scenes than Jack the Ripper, and being hunted (and ultimately defeating) the legendary law enforcer Eliot Ness.
The name given to these murders by the press were the “Cleveland Torso Murders” and the killer was christened “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”. For the sake of brevity, the killer will be referred to as the “Mad Butcher” throughout this article.
The setting for these horrific murders was 1930’s middle America. Brought to it’s knees by the Great Depression, the city of Cleveland, Ohio, was at that time awash with transient workers, hobos, and displaced families from all over the US.
In “Dead Men Do Tell Tales”, author Troy Taylor sets the scene with a description of Cleveland, specifically the area of Kingsbury Run at the time of the murders.
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“Kingsbury Run was a barren wasteland on the east side of Cleveland in 1935. It tore through the rugged area, sometimes plunging to depths of 60 feet, and was scattered with overgrown weeds, patches of wild grass, tumbling pieces of old paper, piles of garbage and even the occasional skeletal remains of an abandoned car. Along the edges of the ravine were ramshackle frame houses, built close together and of such shabby construction that they seemed to almost be teetering on the brink of collapse. As the ravine angled toward downtown, it emptied out into the muddy waters of the Cuyahoga River, where concrete and steel bridges, tanks and old factory buildings dotted the banks. Kingsbury Run was a forbidding and shunned place in those days and yet among the refuse and decay were small cities of homeless men, forced into the ravine by the blight of the Great Depression. They squatted there in cardboard boxes and in shacks made from scavenged wood, huddling near small campfires and trying to ignore the lonesome cries of the freight trains that passed nearby.” |
The first body was found in September 1935 by two young boys who were racing along the ravine. The older of the boys, James Wagner, was first to reach the bottom, and must have been terrified to discover the decapitated body of a pale naked man.
When the police arrived to investigate, they also discovered that the victims genitals had been removed. And if this whole situation wasn’t gruesome enough, they soon found another body a short distance from the first.
This was of an older man whose head and genitals had also been severed.
In what must have been one of the most shocking investigations in police history, the heads of the two men were found a short time later. One had been partially buried and was only noticed as it appeared that a shock of hair was protruding from the soil, the other was found thrown into some bushes, along with the genitals of both men.
The corpses appeared to have been moved to the ravine after death and mutilation had occurred, as there were no signs of blood in the vicinity.
More puzzling was that the body of the older man seemed to have been covered in some kind of chemical, as if the killer had tried to preserve is victim, and had discarded the body when the decay became too advanced
The body of the older man was never identified, but police eventually managed to identify the younger victim. He was Edward Andrassy, 28, who had a small criminal record and lived in the Kingsbury Run area.
Another strange clue as to the identity of the killer came when forensic detectives remarked that the decapitations had been carried out extremely neatly and “professionally” suggesting that the killer could be a surgeon or a butcher.
This lead, however, amounted to nothing, and the police began what would be a long and fruitless search for the man the press had nicknamed “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
The next victim wasn’t discovered until December, when a local resident went to investigate the howls of a neighbourhood dog and discovered that it was trying to rip open and eat the contents of a basket left by a fence.
Having told a neighbour the basket contained “hams”, the two peered into the basket to investigate more closely. The “hams” were actually the arm and torso of a woman!
The unfortunate victim was later named as Florence Polillo, an “overweight and unattractive” prostitute who was well known around the neighbourhood.
This discovery caused the police to reassess their line of enquiry, as they had been convinced that the murders had some kind of homosexual motive, now with the body of a woman being discovered, the nature of the case had changed.
This also spurred the memory of some of the investigating officers, who recalled the discovery of a female torso on the banks of Lake Erie the previous year. The victim of this earlier murder was named “victim zero” and was added to the ever-growing list of the “Mad Butcher’s” victims.
The sense of public hysteria was soon to be soothed by the arrival in Cleveland of the legendary law enforcer, Eliot Ness, fresh from having “cleaned up” the streets of Chicago from organised crime.
However, it would soon be apparent that the only person who wasn’t convinced that Ness would get his man was Ness himself!
The killing resumed the next summer, with the head of a young man being found on the 22nd June, again by two young boys, wrapped in a pair of trousers near a bridge in Kingsbury Run. This time the body was found around a quarter of a mile away, and the blood at the crime scene indicated that the victim had been decapitated at the scene.
The victim could not be identified, but was described as being in his mid-twenties, and “heavily tattooed.”
Another body was found three weeks later by a hiker, again it had been decapitated, but it was in a more advanced state of decomposition than the previously discovered corpse and was impossible to identify. Police ascertained that this victim had been killed some time before the previously discovered cadaver.
Later that year, another body was found which bore all the hallmarks of the earliest victims. A man of around thirty had been decapitated and his genitals removed. This body was also sliced neatly into two pieces. A hat lying nearby gave police a rare clue, as it contained initials. It was identified by a local housewife as one which she had given to a homeless man who was living in a nearby “hobo camp.”
The trial went cold for a while, but the mood in the city was certainly hotting up, with the press whipping the residents into a frenzy of fear and mistrust. The police and local government bore the brunt of the criticism.
In February 1937 another body was found. In a very similar crime scene to that of “victim zero”, a young woman was found dismembered, again on the banks of Lake Erie. She was never identified, but the discovery of another body soon after brought some much needed luck to the weary investigators.
Like the body found by the hiker, this was another previously undiscovered victim who was also badly decomposed, but her distinctive teeth led to her being identified as Mrs Rose Wallace, a local woman.
The ninth victim also seemed to have brought some luck to the police, as the body of an unidentified young man was found in a river, decapitated and badly mutilated (the head was never found). This time, witnesses claimed to have seen two men in a boat the night before the discovery, near to the area where the body was found. This lead, however, also failed to produce any results.
Again the killer went to ground, but resurfaced after several months as the body parts of a young woman, wrapped in burlap sacks, were fished out of the river.
This time, the killer would go for more than a year without leaving any more corpses.
The final two victims were found the next year, the dismembered body of a young woman was found in a lakeside dump, and the body of a decapitated man wrapped in a quilt was found during the investigation.
Neither victim was ever identified.
This appeared to be the final straw for Ness in his fruitless search to bring the killer to justice. He was convinced that the killer was selecting victims from the transient hobo camps, and was possibly living there himself, so Ness took the bold step of ridding Cleveland of these camps, burning down the shanty villages and forcing the vagrant population to move on.
Whether by luck or good judgement, this seemed to do the trick, and the murders would finally cease.
However, the murders had been stopped, but the killer had escaped from the clutches of the most famous lawman in US history.
Once again, the story can be taken up by Troy Taylor.
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“The Cleveland Torso Murders were officially never solved, but that has not stopped scores of crime historians and curious readers and investigators from speculating as to who the “Mad Butcher” actually was. Detectives in the case believed that they were close to catching the killer several times. They spent many hours searching for the killer’s “laboratory”, believing that the Butcher was slaughtering his victims in a convenient location and then dumping the bodies somewhere else. At one point, they believed they had found it. They found a photographic negative that had been left behind by one of the early victims, Edward Andrassy, and when it was developed, it showed Andrassy reclining on a bed in an unknown room. The photo was published in newspapers and was identified as being the bedroom of a middle-aged homosexual who lived with his two sisters. Detectives searched the house and blood on the floor of the room and a large butcher’s knife hidden in a trunk. Unfortunately though, the blood turned out to be the suspect’s (he was prone to nosebleeds) and the knife showed no traces of blood on it. To further prove the man’s innocence, another Butcher victim turned up while the man was in jail for sodomy and it became obvious he was not the killer.” |
To taunt Ness further, a letter was sent from Los Angeles to the Cleveland Press newspaper, which read;
You can rest easy now, as I have come to sunny California for the winter. I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance. I shall astound the medical profession, a man with only a D.C.
What did their lives mean in comparison to hundreds of sick and disease-twisted bodies? Just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street. Nobody missed them when I failed. My last case was successful, I now know the feeling of Pasteur, Thoreau and other pioneers.
Right now I have a volunteer who will absolutely prove my theory. They call me mad and a butcher, but the truth will out.
I have failed but once here. The body has not been found and never will be, but the head, minus its features is buried on Century Boulevard, between Western and Crenshaw. I feel it is my duty to dispose of the bodies as I do, it is God’s will to not let them suffer.
X
Despite no head ever being found in the give location, amny believe that the letter is genuine, and was sent simply to taunt Ness in front of the the baying public and the hostile press.
Ness was adamant until his death that he was “reasonably certain” he knew who the “Mad Butcher” was, and despite a trickle of bodies being found in the city over the next couple of decades, none of them bore the unmistakeable characteristics of the “Cleveland Torso Murders.”
There are many theories as to the identity of the killer, some of these can be found in the excellent article by Troy Taylor which was the inspiration for my work. The article can be found at http://www.prairieghosts.com/torso.html
Below is a link to radio show which discusses the case of the Cleveland Torso Murders.
Red Ink Letters 