2 – The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run (12-20 Victims)
Also known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer, this unidentified serial killer butchered at least 12 people in the Cleveland area in the 1930s. Peter Merylo was the lead Cleveland detective at the time and he believed the Mad Butcher was the same man responsible for up to 13 murders in Cleveland, Ohio and Pittsburgh in the 1920s.
Officially, the Cleveland Torso Murderer claimed his first victim in 1935. The decapitated and castrated corpse of Edward Andrassy was found by two teenage boys where the E.49th Street hits a dead end and goes into Kingsbury Run in September. The body was naked barring a pair of socks and it was also drained of blood and clean. However, another body was found by police nearby which had also been decapitated and castrated. The corpse belonged to a man approximately 40 years of age who was never identified. This body had remained uncovered for weeks and possibly predated the murder of Andrassy.
Interestingly, the second victim was covered in a preservative that had also been discovered on a decapitated female victim found in the shores of Lake Erie in September 1934. The head was never located and it is possible that the killer was the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run although this was not proven. The legendary Eliot Ness was the Safety Director of Cleveland at this time but even he failed to uncover the identity of the killer.
The Mad Butcher became bolder as the years went by and in 1936, a basket containing the body parts of Florence Polillo was found in several baskets outside a manufacturing building in Cleveland. Further decapitated bodies were found in the area over the next couple of years and in 1938, the killer dumped the torso of a woman in a location where she could be seen from the window of Ness’ office window. Ness was irate and on 18 August 1938, he led a team to Kingsbury Run on a detailed search and ultimately burned the shanty towns of the area to the ground. Although this draconian measure was widely condemned, it did seem to stop the killings. Frank Dolezal was arrested for two of the murders in 1939 but he died before standing trial.
Writer James Badal claims to have solved the mystery and suggests the killer was a man named Francis E. Sweeney, a deranged doctor who committed himself to a psychiatric hospital in 1938. Ness is said to have interrogated Sweeney and believed the doctor was the Mad Butcher. Sweeney allegedly sent postcards to Ness from the hospital and taunted him over his failure to close the case. Badal says he has an excellent circumstantial case but acknowledges that Sweeney probably wouldn’t have been found guilty if this evidence was presented to a court in the late 1930s.
Badal also claims that Dolezal, the other suspect, was murdered by his jailers. As for Ness, he never recovered from the case. The tactics he used to try and catch the Mad Butcher hurt his political career as seen in his failure to become Mayor of Cleveland.