The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

1936.

On 5 June, the Friday before the convention began and as delegates came rolling into town, two young boys set off to go fishing and took a shortcut through Kingsbury Run. They saw a pair of trousers rolled up under a bush near the East 55th Street bridge. They poked the pants with their fishing rod and a man’s head rolled out.

The next morning the body was found. The naked, headless corpse of a man in his twenties had been dumped almost directly in front of the Nickel Plate Railroad police building. The policemen there were hired by the railroad company to secure the area and keep hobos out of the freight cars. The killer seemed to be taunting them.

The victim was a tall, slender man with a handsome face—not unlike Andrassy. His fingerprints were not on file, but he had six distinctive tattoos on his body. The police thought he might be a sailor—one of the tattoos showed a cupid riding an anchor; another flags. The others depicted a butterfly, a cartoon figure called “Jiggs”, a heart with an arrow through it and a dove with the linked names “Helen-Paul” over it, but these did not match the tattooed initials “W. C. G.”. Nor did they match the initials “J. D.” on a pair of undershorts found in a pile of bloodstained clothes nearby.

Although he had been found in Kingsbury Run, the victim was no hobo. The clothes were new and expensive. He was clean-shaven, well nourished. Again, the body had been drained of blood and washed clean. No blood was found soaked into the ground near where the head and body had been dumped. So, again, the victim had been killed elsewhere and his body brought to Kingsbury Run.

That Sunday, the day before the convention started, with news of the new killing filling the papers, Eliot Ness held a top-level meeting with his forensics chief Lieutenant David Cowles and the newly appointed head of the Homicide Division, veteran detective Sergeant James Hogan. Ness wanted to know if Hogan thought all four— possibly five—cases were connected.

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