THE
TORSO SLAYER
ŠLee Paul
Eliot Ness, at the age of thirty-two, was the most famous crime-fighter in the world when he agreed to become Cleveland's Public Safety Director in 1934. Only three years earlier, he and his crack team of investigators had managed to bring down the most notorious gangster of all time. Now with Cleveland in the grip of a crime wave, it was hoped he could do the same again. But in Cleveland, Ness encountered the one criminal in his career that he couldn't bust, the "Torso Slayer." It was a case that haunted him for the rest of his life.
Although it seems ludicrous today, in January 1920, lawmakers enacted a law which made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol a Federal crime. The law was called the Volstead Act, but it was better known as Prohibition. It was highly unpopular, and before it could be stricken from the books, thirteen long years had passed. During those Prohibition days, as they were called, speakeasies sprang up on practically every street corner and back alley in cities and towns all across America. Bootlegging was rampant. With police corruption on a wide scale, gangsters and organized crime took control.
In Chicago, the most infamous gangster was Alfonse Capone, nicknamed "Scarface" by his enemies because of the four-inch scar across his left cheek, the two-and-a-half inch vertical scar on his left jaw, and the two-and-a-half inch oblique scar under his left ear. He was born in Brooklyn in 1899, summoned to Chicago by his gangster idol, Johnnie Torrio, and was largely credited with killing Torrio's rival, "Big Jim" Colosimo in May 1922. Two years later, Torrio arranged the assassination of mobster Dion O'Bannion, and the battle for Chicago's North Side began. When one of O'Bannion's lieutenants, George "Bugs" Moran, attempted retaliation in 1925, Torrio fled to Italy, leaving Al Capone in charge.
By 1926, Capone's men had succeeded in killing O'Bannion's chief lieutenant, Hymie Weiss. The escalating mob war became one of the worst in history. It reached its peak in 1929. Since several of Capone's chief lieutenants had been systematically wiped out, Capone ordered Moran's entire gang annihilated. On February 14, 1929---St. Valentine's Day---five of Capone's men, three of them dressed as policemen, marched into Moran's garage at 2122 North Clark Street and lined up seven men (including one innocent bystander) against the wall and shot them all dead. Moran, who narrowly missed being a victim himself, retired. It left Capone the most powerful gangster in Chicago with so many corrupt policemen in his pay that he thought himself above the law...until the arrival of U. S. Treasury Agent Eliot Ness.
Eliot Ness was only twenty-six years old in 1929 when he was hired to smash the gangland rackets that gripped Chicago. He assembled a crack team of nine trusted and virtually incorruptible agents, and in two-and-a-half years, they broke the bootlegging empire of Al Capone. But surprisingly, Capone was never convicted of bootlegging. He had been arrested time and again only to have all charges dismissed, and since Ness realized Capone could control the environment of any state prison system, Ness went after the cocky gangster on income tax evasion. On 24 October 1931, Al Capone was sent to Federal prison for eleven years, eventually ending up in Alcatraz. He would later die from the effects of syphilis in 1947 at his home in Florida.
With the fall of Capone, the corruption in the police department was wiped out, and a grateful public dubbed Ness and his men, "The Untouchables." After the cleanup of Chicago, Eliot Ness moved to another notorious city of sin, Cincinnati, Ohio, where he cleaned up its bootlegging rackets. He stayed in the Federal Government's employment just long enough for Prohibition to be repealed.
In September 1934, he went to Cleveland, Ohio, as Public Safety Director, a position comparable to a modern-day Police Commissioner. Since Cleveland was a known safe haven for all manner of gangsters and street criminals, Ness had his job cut out for him. His main problem here, as in Chicago, was that there was so much corruption in the police department and the District Attorney's office, that he was forced to work with a very small group of people he could absolutely trust, his "Untouchables," who were forced to remain strictly anonymous. Over the next year, under his primary mandate to "clean up the place," arrests went up and crime went down. Then...true evil struck.
On a warm September afternoon in 1935, two boys playing cops and robbers on their way home from school stumbled over a gruesome sight. At the bottom of a sixty-foot, weed-infested knoll, jokingly called "Jackass Hill," in the run-down slum district of Kingsbury Run in the heart of Cleveland, sixteen-year-old James Wagner found the body of a white man. It lay on its back with its legs stretched out and its arms neatly resting by its side as if laid out for a funeral. It was totally naked, except for black socks. But the most chilling aspect was its savage mutilation---the corpse had been beheaded and its genitals cut off.
When the police arrived a few minutes later, they found another white male body less than thirty feet away hidden among the tall weeds. It was that of an older man, and it had also been stripped naked, decapitated, and emasculated. It was also severely decomposed, obviously having been there some time longer than the first.
Assistant Police Chief Emmet J. Potts was called to the scene, and when he arrived, he found the area swarming with police down in the gulley among the weeds and up above with spectators on the bluff. It seemed all of Cleveland was interested in the gory details. He ordered a careful search of the whole area, and eventually the two missing heads were found buried nearby---one head discovered when an astute policeman found tufts of hair sticking up from the ground, and the other buried a few feet away from the first. The genitals of both murdered men were also found discarded in the weeds as if casually tossed aside by the killer. Potts shook his head in disbelief and ordered the removal of the bodies to the police morgue.
Further investigation revealed a relatively evidence-free crime scene---something which should have struck the investigative team as odd, but apparently did not. Although Potts did make note of the absence of bloodstains, either on the ground or the victims themselves, his first instinct was to dismiss the case as a vicious, routine, double homicide. After all, the desolate gully of Kingsbury Run was swarming with vagrants, prostitutes and street toughs, and the locals had used it for years as a rubbish dump. Potts shrewdly guessed the two corpses belonged to the growing fraternity of transients.
Kingsbury Run was an old river bed. Sometime in the remote past, a stream had flowed through it to join with the mighty Cuyahoga River, which had created an industrial valley known as the Flats. Railway tracks ran along its floor, linking the factories and warehouses of the Flats with the rest of the city. Since it was the height of the Depression, hobos and vagrants lived along the tracks in a pasteboard and cardboard shantytown, their numbers swelling daily with the passing of each train.
When the two bodies were found, no one in the police department paid much attention, least of all Eliot Ness. He was far too busy weeding out organized crime and had little inclination to brood on the deaths of two vagrants. Besides, he knew how to smash rackets, not catch psychopaths. And whoever committed the murders was abnormal by his way of thinking. He left the matter to the police.
When Coroner Arthur Pearse performed the autopsies, he found that the younger man had been dead only a couple of days. There were rope marks on the wrists and torn skin, indicating that the victim had put up a desperate struggle. Doctor Pearse also made another chilling discovery. The muscles in the victim's neck were retracted, indicating the man was not only alive, but also conscious, when he was beheaded. The decapitation had been done smoothly and cleanly with a few strokes of a very sharp knife.
Fingerprint analysis revealed the man to be twenty-eight year old Edward Andrassy, and he had a minor police record for carrying a concealed weapon. He apparently lived a double life, living at home with his parents as a dutiful son, and frequenting the sleazy brothels adjoining Kingsbury Run as an apparent pimp. The police also discovered that he was bisexual, and they began to think the two murders were the result of a love triangle in which both men had been murdered by a jealous third party.
Rumor also had it that Andrassy had stabbed an Italian during a recent fight and the Italian's friends were looking for him. Since Mafia killings often involved mutilation of the genitals, and since a woman reported two Italians in Kingbury Run shortly before the two bodies were found, the police thought they had another possible solution near at hand.
Investigation of the second body was much more difficult. The man's age was about forty-five, and he had been dead about two weeks. Decomposition was advanced, fingerprints destroyed, and it was impossible to determine if the man had been dead or alive when decapitated. Another curious aspect of the body was the red twinge of the skin, which had the texture and feel of leather. Doctor Pearse finally speculated that some unknown chemical had been used as a preservative on it. No one ever reported the man as missing, and he was never identified.
The rest of the year passed without further incident, except for the usual murders and deaths characteristic of every large city. Then on the snowy Sunday morning of 26 January 1936, a black woman resident of East Twentieth Street on the edge of the Flats went to investigate the howling of a neighbor's dog. She found the dog straining at its leash to get at a basket leaning against a nearby factory wall. Peeping under the burlap cover of the basket, she saw raw butcher's meat. Walking away, she told a neighboring butcher that the basket contained hams.
The butcher was curious. It was the height of the Depression and he didn't think people would leave food lying around, let alone outside, forgotten in the snow. He went to investigate, wondering if the hams could have been stolen from his own butcher shop. He lifted the burlap and removed one of the hams. It proved to be the severed arm of a human.
The first police officers on the scene uncovered a disturbing sight. The basket contained the dismembered remains of a woman, and they did not think she had been dead long. Indeed, one of the thighs was wrapped in newspaper bearing the previous day's date. Further investigation revealed that some of the body parts were missing. Among the missing pieces was the woman's head.
Fingerprints identified her as forty-one year old Florence Polillo, a woman with a long police record of prostitution and barroom brawling. When the police began checking up on her whereabouts for the previous week, they discovered that her friends had last seen her two days before her body was found.
The police were also inclined to dismiss any connection between her death and that of Edward Andrassy four months earlier. But when the coroner discovered the muscles in her neck were still retracted as if she had been alive when decapitated, city officials began to smell a connection.
When the new head of Homicide, Sergeant James T. Hogan, read the autopsy report, he found himself in a quandary. If the latest dismembered body was another victim of the "Head Hunter of Kingsbury Run," then the love triangle theory of the Andrassy murder could be tossed in the trash can. Furthermore, might not a female torso, known as "the Lady of the Lake" found at Euclid Beach on Lake Erie, be a victim of the same killer?
The Euclid Beach torso had been found 5 September 1934, a full year before the current madness had started. It had been neatly severed at the waist and the legs had been chopped off at the knees. The upper part of the torse, minus the arms and head which were never found, was discovered some miles away. The victim's age was thought to be in the mid- to late thirties. One curious aspect that Doctor Pease had noted in his autopsy report was the leathery texture of the skin, which he finally concluded had been preserved in chloride of lime.
It appeared to Sergeant Hogan that the "Head Hunter" had claimed four victims that the police knew about, and possibly some they didn't. Everything suggested that they should be looking for a psychopathic killer who might now be looking for more prey.
Hogan's worst fears were confirmed 5 June 1936, three days before the opening of the Republican Convention which was to be held in Cleveland. Two black children walking through Kingsbury Run found a severed head wrapped in a discarded pair of men's trousers. The rest of the corpse was found the next day less than a mile from the head. The victim was a tall, good-looking young man in his mid-twenties, sporting several tattoos. He had been dead about forty-eight hours.
Again the coroner discovered retracted neck muscles, indicating the victim was alive when decapitated. But how the killer had managed to decapitate the victim without a struggle, since the corpse showed no evidence of being tied or restrained in any manner, was a mystery. The coroner finally decided the man had been asleep when the killer had struck. With one single sweep, the killer could have allowed the victim to bleed to death and then finish the decapitation at his leisure.
The killer's methods brought up another point. No blood or bloodstains had ever been found anywhere the bodies had been found. In fact, all the victims had been scrubbed clean of any trace elements that could have been used as evidence. It meant the killer was conducting his macabre operations elsewhere and transporting the bodies to where they were found. The police began to suspect that one of the sleazy apartments in the district or one of the abandoned warehouses in the Flats held the laboratory of a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde-type madman.
The tattooed man was still unidentified when yet another body was discovered. On 22 July 1936, a seventeen-year-old girl hiking in the woods south of the city discovered a naked, headless body sprawled in a gully. It was badly decomposed, having been in the gully before the tattooed man had been found in Kingsbury Run in June. But this time, blood had soaked into the ground, indicating the man had been killed where he lay. Cheap clothing found nearby indicated the victim might have been living in one of the nearby hobo camps. Again the coroner theorized the man had been killed while asleep with one stroke of a very sharp knife.
Two months later on 10 September, a hobo about to swing aboard a slow moving freight train in Kingsbury Run, tripped over a headless and armless torso lying along the tracks. When the police arrived, they found the lower half of the torso, minus the legs, lying nearby in the weeds. It appeared both parts had been washed in the sewer, which drained into a foul-looking pool nearby. Fragments of flesh lying beside the pool suggested more body parts in the water. Dragging the pool with grappling hooks, the police uncovered the legs, but the head and arms were not recovered, and without them, identification was impossible. An autopsy revealed the body had been dead only five hours.
Among some torn and bloody clothing found a few feet away was a worn hat still bearing the identity of the manufacturer. The police were able to trace the hat to a housewife who claimed she had given it to a young vagrant in his mid-twenties only two weeks earlier.
The city exploded. The press and the public now had no doubts that there was a serial killer loose in the city, a killer who would keep killing until he was stopped. The press began calling him "The Mad Butcher of Cleveland," and headlines screamed for action.
The unrest pressured Eliot Ness into doing something before all his good publicity at ridding the city of organized crime became swamped by the bad publicity surrounding the unsolved murders. He decided the best way to thwart the killer was to deprive the madman of victims. He ordered the police to visit all the hobo camps, especially Kingsbury Run, and order the vagrants to leave. He also ordered railway police to search every train entering Cleveland---one train alone contained more than two hundred tramps.
During the roust of Kingsbury Run, one hobo came forward with a fascinating tale. He told of sitting alone at the edge of the hobo camp one dark night while those around him slept. Throwing dried grass on his dying fire, he suddenly became aware of a man dressed all in black. The stranger approached, but when the tramp saw a huge carving knife in the stranger's hand, the tramp fled. Although the hobo was unable to give the police a description of the man with the carving knife, his tale did appear to confirm what the police already suspected---the murderer was preying among the "down and out" vagrants of the city.
Patrolling the hobo camps seemed to work. As the months went by without further gruesome discoveries, Clevelanders hoped the terror had passed. That hope was dashed when another female torso was found. On 23 February 1937, a headless and armless torso of a young woman in her mid-twenties was found close to the same spot on the shores of Lake Erie that the mysterious "Lady of the Lake" had been found almost three years earlier. Despite an intensive search, no other body parts turned up. An autopsy also revealed one major difference: the woman had been dead before her head had been removed.
Four months later, a teenager discovered a skull under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River. Nearby, the police found fragments of a female skeleton in a rotting burlap sack. Also inside the sack was a scrap of newspaper bearing a date from the previous June. It suggested the woman had been slain before the discovery of the tattooed man.
The coroner had very little to go on. The skull contained scraps of black hair which he determined came from a black woman approximately thirty-five years old. The pathologist circulated descriptions of her teeth among the area's dentists, and soon the woman's identity was fixed as that of Rose Wallace. She was a prostitute who had vanished the previous August. Moreover, she had lived close to Florence Polillo and the two women had even once shared a lover. The trail ended there.
In July, when Ness's attention was centered on a strike in the Flats---strikers and strike-breakers were known to violently oppose each other---a watchman at one of the factories spotted something white floating in the Cuyahoga River below the West Third Street bridge. When the watchman went to investigate, he discovered the legless lower torso of a man.
Police found the upper half floating in a burlap bag. It was minus the head. The legs, which were separated into halves, were found nearby as were the arms and feet. The victim had been in his mid-thirties, short, and again, death was due to decapitation. This time, however, the killer had gone further. The dead man had been disemboweled, and his heart had been ripped out. The police listed him simply as "Victim No. 9."
All attempts at finding the killer went fruitless. He struck, mutilated, and disappeared, leaving no clues. Although most of the victims remained unidentified, the police suspected all were prostitutes and vagrants living on the edge of society. The new County Coroner, Samuel Gerber, was inclined to believe that the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" or the "Torso Slayer," as he was now being called, was a man with medical training, and that he probably drugged his victims before killing them. This theory seemed to bear weight with the discovery of the next victim.
On 8 April 1938, the lower part of a leg was caught in a tree root along the Cuyahoga River below Kingsbury Run. It was declared to be that of a woman in her early thirties. One month later, two burlap bags were pulled from the river---bags containing the rest of the body, minus the head. Traces of drugs were found in the body. No identification was possible.
By this time, Eliot Ness was the one in a quandary. Press criticism screamed for his action, yet he didn't know what action to take. When he learned that an ex-hobo living in Chicago had claimed to have seen the killer, he had the man brought to Cleveland. Careful questioning revealed that the man (while still a hobo) had once visited a doctor near Kingsbury Run on the pretext of a free meal. But after eating, he had felt drowsy, and thinking he had been drugged, he had lurched to his feet and managed to escape. The ex-hobo described the doctor as being short with reddish-colored hair.
The police rushed to the doctor's address on East Fifty Fifth Street, but they were too late. A local bartender vaguely remembered the short doctor, but the bartender had not seen him in two years. One detective later pointed out that the doctor's description matched that of the victim dragged from the water below the West Third Street bridge, the one simply tagged, "Victim No. 9." It suggested the doctor himself was a victim rather than the killer.
Eliot Ness was now devoting almost full-time to finding the killer. But accustomed as he was to smashing gangland crime, Ness didn't quite know how to proceed with the Torso Slayer. Finding the Butcher wasn't like finding a brewery or a mobster's hideout and then smashing a way into it. The Butcher was a different type criminal altogether.
Ness decided to make a profile of the killer. Using the scant clues found at the murder scenes coupled with imaginative intuition on his own part, he determined from the way the bodies were dissected that the killer had to be someone with a certain amount of medical knowledge. He then decided that carrying the bodies all over and dumping them where they were found took a strong man. Lastly, preying on vagrants and prostitutes made the killer appear to be a Jack-the-Ripper-type butcher. Ness determined that his profile called for a "big, strong madman expert with a scalpel."
It was one thing to make a profile and quite another to enforce it with a search party. Although Ness was determined to search every dwelling in the Kingsbury Run area for the killer, he had no legal grounds to swear out search warrants for the premises. The solution was vintage Eliot Ness. He cleverly paired his detectives with fire officials and ordered wide-spread safety inspections.
Ness and other police officials thought there was a strong possibility that the Butcher either lived in or worked in the area, and Ness hoped to find an apartment or laboratory with blood-splattered walls. According to one researcher, officials fully expected to find "arms and legs laying over in a corner and maybe a cache of heads in another corner."
The men spent almost a full week searching every apartment, dwelling, and unoccupied place they could find in the Kingsbury Run district. They turned up nothing. Ness then pinpointed every doctor and hospital worker in Cleveland. Even the County Coroner was not above suspicion. Hundreds of people were put under surveillance, questioned, and detained. Nothing.
Public criticism reached an all-time high when two more bodies were found on the same day. This time the corpses were right under the nose of City Hall---in plain view as seen from the windows of Eliot Ness's own office.
Black teenagers scouring through a rubbish heap on a vacant lot less than 200 yards from City Hall uncovered a female torso wrapped in an old quilt. When the police searched the lot, they found her head wrapped in brown paper and her arms and legs crammed into a cardboard box. Nearby, they found the half-buried skeletal remains of a man. His head was stuffed into a tin box.
Autopsy reports indicated the woman had been in her mid-thirties when she had died. Furthermore, the hardened parts of her flesh that remained suggested she had once been kept in a refrigerator. Although the police had all of her body, it was impossible to identify her.
The man's skeleton was also inconclusive. By reconstructing the face, all the police were able to determine was that the man had suffered a broken nose. Then one of the detectives remembered that Edward Andrassy was often seen in the company of a man named Eddie who had a broken nose and who was also about the same build as the skeleton. But all attempts to trace Eddie failed.
The body count in the Kingsbury Run murders now stood at twelve, and as many as eighteen other murders in the Greater Cleveland area were thought to be connected to the case. The police had no clues. The killer primarily stalked the outcasts and vagrants of society, and both men and women fell prey. All victims were skillfully dissected, and all were decapitated. In some cases, the butchery occurred while the victim was still living. Five of the victims were found floating in water, the blood drained completely out of their bodies.
The last two bodies officially ascribed to the Torso Slayer, numbers eleven and twelve, were found in August 1938. It was evidenced from their location that the killer was becoming more bold, more daring. It was as if the killer were playing a cat and mouse game, a "catch me if you can" type dare, and it began to consume Ness.
It didn't help knowing that because of his reputation from smashing the Chicago underworld, the public thought him larger than life---Ness was supposed to be able to do anything. After he took over as Public Safety Director, Cleveland had even bragged that it was one of the safest cities in the United States. With the twelfth victim, though, the citizens now mocked that Cleveland was one of the safest cities only if people didn't mind becoming a statistic, didn't mind being fodder for the maniac, didn't mind having their heads chopped off and their bodies cut up.
Eliot Ness knew he had to do something to stop the insanity. People were frightened, and their storm of public criticism drove him to drastic action. Less than forty-eight hours after the discovery of the two latest victims, he ordered the police to descend upon Kingsbury Run's hobo jungles, round up every vagrant and stray in the area, and burn the shantytown to the ground. He hoped the Butcher was among the transients, but if not, at the very least, he knew he could remove some of the people the killer preyed upon.
It was typical "Untouchables" tactics, and although it had worked for Ness in Chicago, it backfired on him in Cleveland. There was a great wave of public indignation claiming that his act was that of a desperate man---that his methods had been brutal and didn't really solve anything. Furthermore, of the more than sixty transients arrested that night, none turned out to be the killer. Although no one knew it at the time, Ness's method did work, albeit not in the way he anticipated.
With the destruction of the shantytown, the murders in Cleveland mysteriously stopped. But the case was not over for Eliot Ness. He remained listless and dissatisfied, and according to some experts, was all the more frustrated because he believed he knew the killer's identity. He thought his suspect was a member of a prominent Cleveland family, but he did not have enough evidence to make an arrest. When brought in for questioning, the suspect had sneered, "Prove it," even after failing a lie-detector test. Even more aggravating, the suspect committed himself to a state mental institution.
According to Eliot Ness's biographer, Oscar Fraley, Ness believed that he had caught the killer, primarily because the killing stopped after the suspect committed himself to the mental hospital. The suspect also fit the profile that Ness had made, but Ness didn't have enough evidence for an arrest. If Ness had accused the suspect, whose family was socially prominent, without conclusive evidence, he could have been libelous and been sued. Ness was nobody's fool. He was "a very cautious guy as far as covering the letter of the law."
In April 1941, Eliot Ness resigned as Public Safety Director after a scandal involving a hit-and-run accident. Five years later, he ran for Mayor of Cleveland. He lost the election by a landslide and left Cleveland, never again returning to law enforcement. When questioned about the torso slayings during the campaign, he enigmatically replied, "That case has been solved."
More than a decade after the torso murders stopped, Ness received a number of postcards from a patient in a mental institution. The cards taunted him with references to the brutal slayings. Although the man sending the cards might have been just another eccentric, Ness was convinced the man was the murderer. But it no longer really mattered. The horror was over for Cleveland.
Eliot Ness never fully recovered from his disappointment in being unable to close the case. He died 16 May 1957, six months before Oscar Fraley's best-selling biography of his life, The Untouchables, was published.