in the history of Cleveland. These included a crazed giant who stalked Kingsbury Run carrying a large knife, a “voodoo doctor” who claimed to have a death-ray and “Chicken Freak”, who hired prostitutes to strip naked and behead chickens while he masturbated. Merylo’s adventures were a popular source of copy for reporters and his antics kept the Cleveland Torso Murders in the newspapers.
The
Newspaper speculation ran wild. Some thought that the killer was a religious nut who was bent on ridding the world of prostitutes, homosexuals, wastrels and hobos. Others thought he was a wealthy doctor who killed lower-class people for sport. Others still thought he was an outwardly normal person who occasionally lapsed into madness.
Elliot Ness knew that the man they were seeking was no ordinary one. Eventually he took Coroner Pierce’s advice and held a “Torso Clinic”. Those present included Police Chief Matowitz, County Prosecutor Frank Cullitan, Inspector Joseph Sweeney, Lieutenant Cowles, Sergeant Hogan and Dr Reuben Strauss, the pathologist who had performed many of the victims’ post mortems, along with several outside medical consultants. They pieced together what they knew about the killer. Firstly, they agreed that one perpetrator working alone was responsible for all the murders. The murderer was strong to have overpowered his victims. To carry their bodies considerable distances over rough terrain meant that he was a large man they—pretty much ruled out the possibility that the perpetrator was a woman.
While the killer was clearly psychopathic, he was probably not obviously insane. The genital mutilation of the first two corpses might be an indication that the killer was a homosexual. However, in other cases there had been other non-genital mutilation. Some of this had been performed to thwart identification or to transport the body more easily. But some of the mutilation seemed to have been purely gratuitous.
Cutting the head off a living person is necessarily a messy business. Once the carotid artery and jugular vein are cut, blood spurts all over the place. That meant that the killer had private premises where the victims could be slaughtered, cleaned up and stored—perhaps even in preservatives—until they could be dumped. This could be a doctor’s office, a butcher’s shop or private home where unsuspecting victims could be lured by the promise of food, shelter or sex. This would be near Kingsbury Run and the killer had clearly an intimate knowledge of the area.
The killer also had specialist knowledge of anatomy. However, the medical men at the meeting were adamant that this did not necessarily mean he was a doctor. After all, a butcher or hunter who cut up game would have enough anatomical knowledge to decapitate and dismember the corpses.
He usually picked victims from the lower strata of society, perhaps on a crusade to rid the city of “undesirables”. By and large he dumped their bodies in Kingsbury Run. Perhaps this was an attempt to ward off the hobos who lived there.
Selecting victims from the lower strata of society also meant they were more difficult to identify. And he was clearly getting more cunning. Only the early victims Andrassy and Polillo had been identified. Even the “Tattooed Man” had been picked with care as, despite all his distinguishing marks, the police were unable to discover who he was. Latterly, the heads and hands were missing or too badly decomposed to render fingerprints. Nobody came forward to claim these victims as missing persons. Plainly he picked his victims for their anonymity.
The Mad Butcher gave Eliot Ness a seven-month break, allowing him to return to his crack-down on corruption in the police department and go after organized crime. As a result, in November 1936, Harold Burton was returned to office as mayor. However, Arthur J. Pierce was replaced as coroner by the young Democrat Samuel Gerber. Qualified both in medicine and law, he was to make the Mad Butcher case his own.
His first opportunity to move the case forward came on 23 February 1937 when the upper half of a woman’s torso washed up on the beach at 156th Street, east of Bratenahl, in virtually the same place as the Lady of the Lake had surfaced. She had only been dead for between two and four days and had been in the water not more than three. Three months later the lower half of her torso washed ashore at East 30th Street. Again the question was asked whether she had been washed down the Cuyahoga River into Lake Erie from Kingsbury Run.
Her head and arms had been removed with the murderer’s usual expertise and her legs were amputated with two “clean sweeping” strokes of a heavy knife. However, the bisection of the torso was more amateurish and showed marks of hesitation. There was something else different about the corpse. She had not been killed by decapitation. The blood clots in the heart indicated that her head had been cut off after she was dead. And there was a bizarre new touch. Her anus was enlarged and the killer had inserted the pocket from a pair of trousers inside her rectum.
The woman’s clothes were never found. Nor were her head and limbs. However, from the parts that reached the morgue, it was possible to ascertain that she was in her mid-twenties, had a light complexion and medium brown hair, and weighed around 100 to 120 pounds. She had been pregnant at least once and she had lived in the city as there was dirt in her lungs, causing moderate emphysema. But that was all that was known of Victim Seven. Her identity was never discovered.
Nevertheless the forensic work brought the new Coroner Sam Gerber a great deal of favourable publicity— oxygen for an elected official. Gerber then devoted his time to writing up his conclusion which he published in March 1937. Again he deduced that all the killings were the work of one man. The killer was right-handed and used a sharp, heavy knife rather than a medical instrument. As to motive, Gerber believed the killer to be a sexual psychopath, the first on record to murder both sexes. His knowledge of anatomy was also clear and Gerber pushed the idea he was a medical student, male nurse, surgeon or veterinary practitioner.
Gerber’s report brought him into conflict with Eliot Ness. While Gerber aimed to hog the limelight with his theories, Ness asked the newspapers to scale down their coverage on the grounds that the exposure was inflating the killer’s ego and might encourage him to kill again. The sensationalism surrounding the murders was also bringing in thousands of useless tips, everyone of which had to be followed up. Much to Gerber’s annoyance, the newspaper editors agreed to curtail their coverage.
However, they could not keep a lid on public interest when, on 6 June 1937, Victim Eight appeared. A teenager named Russell Lawer had been watching the Coast Guard boats on the Cuyahoga River when, on his way home, he found a human skull about 400 feet west of Stone’s Levee under the fifth span of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Next to it was a rotting burlap bag, containing skeletal remains, wrapped in a newspaper from June 1936. The lab agreed that the victim had been dead for around a year.
Although the arms and legs were missing, the victim’s delicate bones showed she was a petite woman, less than five feet tall and around 40 years old. The skull showed extensive dental work a several of her teeth had been crowned with gold. She had had a wide nose and a prominent mouth. Her hair was kinky and fastened to it with a rusty hairpin was a black wig. Gerber concluded that she was an African-American.
Although the skull was found separate from the rest of the skeleton, it was impossible to tell whether the cause of death had been decapitation. There was little cartilage and flesh left as the body had been treated with quicklime. However, there was “considerable hacking and cutting of the 3rd, 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae”— indicating that the perpetrator had not demonstrated the Mad Butcher’s normal level of skill.
The skull’s dental work led to the unofficial identification of the victim as a prostitute named Rose Wallace of Scovill Avenue who had disappeared in August 1936. A lengthy investigation led nowhere, leading Sergeant Hogan and Coroner Gerber to believe that the victim was not Rose Wallace at all, though Detective Merylo continued to believed that it was.
There were labour problems in the Cleveland in the summer of 1937 and the Ohio National Guard were called in to maintain order. On 6 July, a young guardsman on watch by the West Third Street bridge saw the upper part of a man’s torso bobbing in the water in the wake of a passing tugboat. Over the next few days, police recovered most of the body parts from the waters of the Cuyahoga River, though the head was missing. The victim had been dead a couple of days when the first parts were found. The man was in his mid to late 30s. He was around five foot eight, weighed around 150 pounds and had well-groomed fingernails.
The cause of death was, once again, decapitation. But this time some of the surgery had been sloppy and some was very skilful. For the first time, the internal organs including the heart had been ripped out, indicating a new element of viciousness in the killer’s modus operandi. None of the internal organs were ever found and the
