Cleveland Torso Murderer

[1] Most victims came from an area east of Kingsbury Run called "The Roaring Third" or "Hobo Jungle", known for its bars, gambling dens, brothels, and vagrants.[2] In 2024, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office teamed up with the DNA Doe Project to exhume some of the victims and use investigative genetic genealogy to identify them.[5] Some investigators, including lead detective Peter Merylo, believed that there may have been thirteen or more victims in the Cleveland, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh areas between the 1920s and 1950s.[10][11] Ness contributed to the arrest and interrogation of one of the prime suspects, Dr. Francis Sweeney, and personally conducted raids into shantytowns and eventually burned them down.[12] Four days after the burning, on August 22, 1938, Ness launched an equally draconian operation where he personally dispatched six two-man search teams on a large area of Cleveland, stretching from the Cuyahoga River to East 55th Street to Prospect Avenue, under the guise of conducting city fire inspections.[13] While the search never turned up any new or incriminating information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the Torso Murderer, it did serve to focus renewed public attention on the inadequate and unsanitary living conditions in the downtown area.[14] At one point, the Torso Murderer taunted Ness by placing the remains of two victims in full view of his office at City Hall.[17] Edward Anthony Andrassy, age 29, was discovered on September 23, 1935, in a gully at the base of Jackass Hill where East 49th Street dead-ends into Kingsbury Run.Evidence suggested that the unidentified victim's body was saturated with oil and set afire after death, causing the skin to become reddish and leathery.A railroad worker testified that the head was not in the vicinity at 3:00 p.m. that day, and an eyewitness described seeing a late-model Cadillac close to the crime scene at about 11:00 p.m. that same night.[*] On July 22, 1936, the severely decomposed, decapitated remains of a white male were located near a homeless camp in the Big Creek area of Brooklyn, west of Cleveland.A pathologist discovered a large quantity of dried blood that had seeped into the ground beneath the man's body, indicating he was killed at that location.The victim's long hair, poor clothing and location near a homeless camp suggested he was one of the many vagrants who rode in and out of Cleveland on the nearby railroad tracks.[**] A homeless person discovered two halves of a male torso and lower legs floating in a stagnant pool near East 37th Street while waiting for an eastbound freight train.Police found a dirty felt hat labelled 'Laudy's Smart Shop, Bellevue, Ohio', which appeared to have blood spots on the top.[***] On July 6, 1937, the upper portion of a man's torso wrapped in a burlap sack for chicken feed, plus his two thighs, were discovered floating in the Cuyahoga River in the Cleveland Flats just below Kingsbury Run.A month later on May 2, two burlap bags containing a woman's nude bisected torso; thighs and feet were discovered floating in the river to the east of the West 3rd Street Bridge.On August 16, 1938, a dismembered body was found at a dump at the end of East Ninth Street in Cleveland, Ohio, by men combing for pieces of scrap metal.[22] On the same day, the body of John Doe VI was discovered at a nearby location on the Cleveland lakefront, in plain view of Safety Director Eliot Ness's office at City Hall.The lower half of a woman's torso, thighs still attached but amputated at the knees, washed up on the shores of Lake Erie just east of Bratenahl on September 5, 1934.[25][26] In December 1938, the Torso Murderer allegedly sent a letter to Ness, claiming that he had moved to California and killed a woman there and had buried the head in Los Angeles.[29][30] A decade later, this "confession" resulted in authorities considering the possibility that the Torso Murderer had some connection to the Black Dahlia case, in which the bisected remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short were found in the unfinished Leimert Park housing development of Los Angeles on January 15, 1947.[34] The other lead suspect, Dr. Francis Edward “Frank” Sweeney (May 5, 1894 – July 9, 1964),[25][35] was a veteran of World War I who was part of a medical unit that conducted amputations in the field and at one point suffered nerve damage from a gas attack.In addition to Dolezal and Sweeney, authorities also considered Willie Johnson, an African-American male who committed a similar murder in June 1942.It was claimed that Johnson was acquainted with Wallace and, possibly, Polillo, but, while Coroner Samuel Gerber touted him as a suspect, he was never conclusively linked to the Torso Murders.[47][48] American author John Peyton Cooke wrote a fictionalized account of the murders in his novel Torsos, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Mystery for 1993,[49][50][51] and was noted by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review for its atmospheric depiction of Cleveland, Ohio, during the Great Depression.[56] General: ^ *: The victim, found at Morgan Run, near E 55th Street, Cleveland, was estimated to be 20-to-23-years-old, light complexion, reddish brown hair, chestnut colored eyes, stood 5 foot 10" or 11" tall, slender build, weighed 165 lb.Clothing was muddied and piled up next to the head, ten feet from the nude body, in an isolated East Side woodland section.