Dolezal’s “confession” turned out to be a blend of incoherent ramblings, punctuated with precise details of the crimes which could have been planted by his interrogators. But before he could go to trial, Dolezal was found dead in his cell. Apparently five-foot-eight Dolezal had hanged himself from a hook that was only five feet seven inches from the floor. Gerber’s post mortem revealed that he had six broken ribs, presumably obtained while in the Sheriff’s custody. To this day no one thinks Frank Dolezal was the Torso Murderer. But was Sweeney the killer, or did the killer remain at large?
Although the Torso Murders officially ended in August 1938, that December Cleveland Police Chief Matowitz received a letter mailed in Los Angeles. It read: “You can rest easy now as I have come out to sunny California for the winter.”
Between 1939 and 1942 there were five more torso murders across the state line in Pennsylvania. On 13 October 1939, the headless, decomposing corpse of a man was fished out of the swamp near West Pittsburgh. The victim’s head was found nearby, in an abandoned box car, five days later. Charred newspapers surrounding the remains of the body included month-old copies from Youngstown, Ohio. This was intriguing as the railroad lines from Cleveland to Pittsburgh run through Youngstown. However, decapitated corpses had appeared in that area before. The headless body of a young man was found in a marshy area between New Castle and West Pittsburgh on 6 October 1925. This, again, lay on the railroad track from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. The man was naked and had been dead at least three weeks. His severed head was found two days later but, like the other victim, he remained unidentified.
Soon after, on 17 October 1925, a headless male skeleton was found in the same “murder swamp”. Two days later, the skull was found, along with the skull of a woman killed at least a year before. Her body was never found and neither victim was identified.
Another headless corpse of a man was found dumped on a slagheap belonging to the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad at New Castle Junction on 1 July 1936. His head was never found, and he remains unidentified. However, newspapers spread under the body included editions from July 1933, from both Pittsburgh and Cleveland —tying the corpse to the Cleveland Torso Murders. Detective Merylo concluded that these were the work of the same killer, as were some 20 to 30 other murders, nationwide.
Working some 70 years later, criminologist William T. Rasmussen also tied the Cleveland and Ohio cases to the murders of Maoma Ridings, socialite Georgette Bauerdorf, the Red Lipstick Murders attributed to William Heirens and the famous Black Dahlia case.
On 28 August 1943, Maoma Ridings, the 32-year old daughter of a prominent Georgia family, checked into Room 729 of the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis. She was a corporal in the Women’s Army Corps, but before the war she had been a physiotherapist for Franklin D. Roosevelt in her hometown of Warm Springs, where the president had a summer home.
Stationed at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, she just had arrived in Indianapolis by bus on a weekend pass. On her way from the bus depot, she had bought a fifth of whiskey and went directly to her room in an isolated corner of the seventh floor, flanked by two stairwells.
At 5.30 p.m. she called down to room service for ice and a soft drink. A bellhop came within ten minutes. Later he told police, a woman dressed in black was lying on the bed smoking a cigarette. She had changed out of her uniform apparently. She told him to take a quarter from the dresser. He did so, thanked her and left.
Around an hour later there was another order for ice from Room 729. This time the bellboy saw no one, but a woman’s voice from the bathroom told him to put the ice on the dresser and take 25 cents for his trouble. Again, he did so, thanked her and left.
Meanwhile Corporal Emanuel Fisher, who was also stationed at Camp Atterbury, arrived at the Claypool. He called up to Room 729 from the lobby. Getting no reply, he said, he left the hotel.
At 8 p.m., the housekeeper knocked on the door of the Ridings’ room and called out: “Linen for 729.” There was no answer, so she opened the door to find Maoma Ridings lying dead on the floor near the bed in a pool of blood. A quarter was found next to the body.
She was partially dressed and had just had sex, though the authorities could not determine if this was consensual or she had been raped. The cause of death was a blow to the head with the whiskey bottle, though the body had been slashed repeatedly. Gashes around the neck severed the jugular vein. There were more cuts on her wrists. The body was still warm when she was found. Only 43 cents were found in the room. Fisher was ruled out as a suspect because he called again after the body had been discovered. When a man answered the phone, he hung up. The murder remains unsolved.
Eighteen hundred miles away in Los Angeles, 20-year-old oil heiress Georgette Bauderdorf was doing her bit for the war effort by dancing with enlisted men at the Hollywood Canteen. After lunching with her father’s secretary on 12 October 1944, she planned to fly to El Paso to see her boyfriend. The following morning the maid found Bauderdorf’s partially clothed body face down in the bathtub in her apartment. She had been strangled. It was thought that a man was awaiting her when she returned home that night. She put a up a tremendous struggle but was overwhelmed. The case remains unsolved.
In Chicago, 43-year-old Josephine Ross was found dead on 5 June 1945; as was 30-year-old Frances Brown on 10 December 1945; and six-year-old Suzanne Degnan on 7 January 1946 in the so-called “Red Lipstick Murders”. Said to be the victim of the “Mad Butcher of Kenmore Avenue”, Degnan was strangled and her body was cut into seven pieces. Six months later, 17-year-old University of Chicago student William Heirens was arrested for burglary and became a suspect in the Red Lipstick Murders. Throughout his interrogation he maintained his innocence but, after being charged with the crimes, he agreed to plead guilty to avoid the electric chair. Sentenced to four terms of life, he protested his innocence ever since. Rasmussen maintains that there was another Red Lipstick Murder in Los Angeles on 10 February 1947. The victim: Jeanne Axford French. That links to the Black Dahlia Murder, where the body of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in Leimert Park in Los Angeles on 14 January 1947, less than a month before. Like the women in the Cleveland Torso case, Elizabeth Short’s body had been cut in two. It was said that Short was “terribly preoccupied with the details of the Degnan murder”. The murders of both Jeanne Axford French and Elizabeth Short remain unsolved, though Merylo believed that the Cleveland Torso Killer was responsible for Short’s death.
Rasmussen has placed Jack Anderson Wilson in Indianapolis and Los Angeles at crucial times. He spent his early years in Canton, Ohio less than 50 miles south of Cleveland. He was at Cleveland for the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, during the Cleveland Torso Murders. He was in Los Angeles at the time Cleveland Police Chief Matowitz got the letter from the killer saying he was in sunny California and when Elizabeth Short and Jeanne Axford French were killed, and he was in Indianapolis when Maoma Ridings was slain. Los Angeles Detective John St John—aka “Jigsaw John”—was convinced that Wilson was the killer in the Black Dahlia case and was about to arrest him in 1982 when Wilson’s hotel in downtown Los Angeles burned down.
The Connecticut River Valley Killings
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two serial killers stalked the scenic Connecticut River Valley between New Hampshire and Vermont. One, Gary Schaefer, was captured. The other remains at large.
The unknown slayer’s first victim was probably 26-year-old Cathy Millican. Her body found on 25 September 1978, in a wetlands preserve near New London, New Hampshire. She had been viciously stabbed to death. A hitchhiker named Mary Elizabeth Critchley disappeared from Interstate 91 in Massachusetts in 1981. Her body was found in New Hampshire. By then Gary Schaefer had got to work.
A native of neighbouring Vermont, Schaefer was a member of the fundamentalist Christadelphian Church. He first fell foul of authority while serving in the US Navy, where he was charged with arson and possession of illegal drugs. He entered a plea of insanity, but the Navy psychiatrists found him competent to stand trial. Discharged, he managed to convince his family and friends that he was both sane and responsible. However, under his quiet exterior, he was seething with violent sexual obsessions.
In 1979, Schaefer kidnapped, raped and murdered 13-year-old Sherry Nastasia, whose family lived in a Springfield apartment complex managed by Schaefer’s brother. Theresa Fenton suffered the same fate in 1981. However, in 1982, 17-year-old Deana Buxton survived an attack in Brattleboro on the border with New Hampshire. The description of her attacker she gave focused police attention on Schaefer, but there was little hard
