THE MAD MAN. Cleveland, Ohio
 |
| Sept. 1936, Kingsbury Run (Pubic Domain) |
In 1926 the
body of young woman was found cut to pieces just north of Medea,
Pennsylvania. It was part of a rash of
bodies discovered ranging from 1923 to 1939, with an interesting pause during
the early 1930’s. These western
Pennsylvania crimes were often around an area dubbed “Murder Swamp” in Lawrence
County near Pittsburgh. Victims included
men, women, and children.
During the early 1930’s ,
however, the papers across the country were filled with the recent discoveries
of the work of someone killing in a gory fashion in Ohio. Called the “Cleveland Torso Killer”, “The
Bloody Butcher” or “The Mad Killer of Kingsrun” this individual operated from
1935 to 1938. In that, nearly two dozen
body parts were found in Ohio bearing a surprising similarity to those found
earlier in Pennsylvania. The connection was not well recognized at the
time. In this time, law officers often
suffered from tunnel vision and failed to make “big picture” connections to
crimes beyond their jurisdictions. Those Pennsylvania deaths seemed, in retrospect,
almost prototypes for the Ohio killings.
The terms used by various
newspapers differed radically based on the sensibilities of the community and
the tension between the fervor to sell papers and the need to maintain the
community’s confidence in its safety.
Sure to sell issues terminology included “mangled”, “butchered”, and
similar fear instilling terms. As a
result of the Cleveland cases, the more scientific term “torso” would be able
send chills down the spines of most people and provided an added term to the
newspaper vocabulary.
Several of the Ohio murders
featured decapitations (as cause or post death action), many were missing arms
and legs and unlike what was then known about so called “sex fiends”, the
victims were male and female. It was
generally believed that taking the head and the hands was a means of hiding
identification and thus delaying capture. The action may have had other, more
ritualistic, meanings for the killer. Some bodies were bisected or cut through
between the hips and the rib cage where there is only the spinal column to
provide significant resistance.
The list of the victims of such a
killer, or set of killers, as the one roaming Ohio may never be able to be
complete. There may be victims buried in
isolated areas that will never be found, their mortal remains may have been so
destroyed as to make them unidentifiable, or taken to a place a great distance
from the place where other victims had been taken. That being said, the list of most of his
accepted victims is long and sadly filled with little beyond the tale of their
last and violent moments.
There is the nameless, “Lady of the Lake”, a title given to a body
found along Lake Eerie in September of 1934.
Edward Andrassy’s decapitated and
emasculated body was found Sept. 23, 1935 on Jackass Hill in the Kings run area
of Cleveland.
Two in 1937 are also interesting
in view of other cases to be seen elsewhere.
On June 6, 1937, part of the skeleton of “Victim 8” was discovered. It
was in a burlap bag and contained parts of the body of a woman wrapped in a
newspaper from the previous year. Then, in July of 1937, parts of a man’s body
floated down stream and, for the first time, internal organs and heart had been
removed. These were never found.
There would be at least 13 murders
credited to this mysterious individual (although some did suggest it might have
been two men) but most are considered to be copycats past 1938. There is one 1950 murder of a male in Cleveland bearing the
hallmarks of the killer that has not been totally ruled out.
A killer as vicious as the one
roaming Cleveland, in most cases, does not simply stop. So what happened to
him? Some suggest a local doctor was responsible but others do not agree and so
the subject remains open for debate.
There are also always ‘copycats’ – these are deaths caused as the result
of someone reading about a crime and hoping to cover their own crime using
similar methods. Several stories from
this era fit the profile of getting an idea from a newspaper story. These ranging from husbands getting rid of
tiresome wives to victims of botched abortions being discarded in a manner
hoping to conceal the true cause of their death.
If the killer was in his 20’s or
30’s during these murders he could easily have continued to roam the
countryside seeking those whom he could destroy to meet his bizarre and twisted
need to kill. If that was the case, it
would be plausible he would not become elderly until as late as the 1960’s or
early 1970’s. This leaves a possible twenty
to thirty years of murder.
This work in no way suggests that
the mad killer of Cleveland was responsible for all the missing women, murdered
people and dismembered victims spread across the country in that ensuing time,
but it does encourage the consideration of looking at some clusters of crimes
for similarities. Finally, could so many murders have occurred using such a
messy means and leave both killer and victim anonymous all these years?
Interestingly, in April 1939 in
Baltimore, a brutally ‘dissected’ body of a woman was found in the East
Baltimore sewers. Her head and parts of her upper torso were found later. It was believed the killer might have buried
the head at one time.
In October 1939, the bodies of
several men, dead for some time, where found in some boxcars in an area of
Pennsylvania known as “Murder Swamp”. They had been dismembered and on the
chest of one was carved the word “Nazi.”
It is possible the killer left
Ohio when too much attention was being paid to his capture. He could have easily have drifted somewhere
and killed repeatedly. The dogged
detective of the killer, Merylo, believed he might have been active in at least
three other locations. If he was, would
there be evidence of where he might have gone and what might that evidence look
like?
---Marilyn A. Hudson, 2014
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