The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run

Kingsbury Run is a neighborhood on the southeast side of Cleveland Ohio whose main feature is a natural basin that empties into the Cuijahoga River. During the 1930s, devastated by the Great Depression, the area was primarily filled with slums that housed transient addicts. and other vulnerable people. people condemned to reside on the bottom rung of society, unfortunately these characteristics also make them easy targets for anyone looking for victims, you see, Cleveland also had a monster, he was flesh and blood in real life, like you and me , and his wild actions would make the mark. -Believing that fairy tale monsters pale in comparison to who he was, why he did what he did.

We still don't know that he was never identified or captured, but he left behind a dark legacy that forever stained Cleveland's history and one that we will explore. Today, as we take a look at the crazy

butcher

of Kingsbury Run, the horror began on September 23, 1935, when two boys were spending a pleasant sunny afternoon climbing an embankment on Kingsbury Run called Jackass Hill. The sight they encountered when they reached the top caused them both to scream and flee in terror looking for the nearest adult. It was the naked body of a man and he had no head.

Detectives Ollie Mae and Emil Muscle were the first to arrive at the scene. While investigating the area they quickly made another horrifying discovery. It was a second victim who, like the first, had also been decapitated, washed and bled. The official police report described the scene as such. The bodies of two white men, both decapitated, lay in the brush. Both bodies were naked, except one of them was wearing socks. After an extensive search, the heads of both men were found buried in separate locations, one about 20 feet away from one of the bodies and the other head was buried about 75 feet away from the other body.

The genitals of both men had been separated from their bodies and were found near one of the heads. We also found an old blue coat, light cap and a blood-stained union suit. Nearby was a metal bucket containing a small amount of oil and a blowtorch, it was evident that acidic oil or some chemical was poured onto one of the heads. The bodies were largely burned, it was also evident that both bodies had been there for several days as they had begun to decompose. The first victim was named Edward Andrasi. He was a 28-year-old former orderly who used to work in the psychiatric ward. from Cleveland City Hospital at the time of his murder, although he was unemployed and his wife had abandoned him, he ended up being one of the few victims of the mad

butcher

who were ever identified, the police had his fingerprints on file already that andrassy had several executions. he is in the law, as his father put it, Edward got involved with people of questionable character.

He had been arrested once on a concealed weapons charge and arrested for intoxication several times. He trafficked pornography. He got into trouble with gangsters in Detroit and even had an angry husband out for blood after sleeping with his wife. In other words, no one was too surprised that Andrassi eventually ended up murdered, although the circumstances were a bit surprising, the second victim remains an unidentified John Doe or Victim 1, as he is known in The investigation was a middle-aged man between 40 and 45 years old, approximately five feet six tall, 165 pounds with dark brown hair, which is believed to be established was that he was the Mad Butcher's likely first victim while Edward Andrassi had been sitting in the grass for two or three days before he was discovered, initial estimates for John Doe said he had been murdered seven to ten days earlier.

These estimates were further revised and they concluded that he had been killed and abandoned weeks before Andrassy, ​​but the chemical agent that his body's laboratory analysis also revealed another gruesome detail. Both men were still alive when they were beheaded, as Andressi was the only one of the two victims who was identified. Police focused their investigation on his last days. He left his home on Thursday afternoon and was murdered the following night and his body was discovered on Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, detectives were unable to locate anyone who saw or spoke to Andrassy after he left home nor could they find any connection to another missing person. who could have been a victim after a few weeks of investigations the authorities reached some conclusions about the case both men were murdered by the same person this person used a sharp knife for the dismemberment and made clean cuts demonstrating knowledge and experience these were crimes of passion and They were not related to any criminal enterprise, they were committed elsewhere and the victims were taken to Kingsbury Run after the fact, the killer being strong enough to carry the bodies up the steep embankment of Jackass Hill, as a car could not go up that road.

While this may have had the makings of a decent start to a criminal profile, it wasn't good enough to identify the killer with no clues to follow. The police had only one option: wait for another body, as it turns out they may already have one. Traditionally, 12 victims are attributed to the mad butcher, but some researchers believe he may have murdered more and the first actually predates the two bodies found in Jackass Hill on September 5, 1934. The lower half of a woman's torso appeared on the shore near Euclid. Beach Park on Lake Erie had been in the water for three or four months and had a strange coloration that resulted from chemical treatment.

Despite clear similarities, police at the time never investigated this as part of the Butcher Murders. mad, the woman was only retroactively named as possibly the first victim who became known as the lady of the lake or victim zero, the next murder occurred in late January 1936. It was another woman who proved that the mad butcher had no preference when it came to their gendered body parts. Carefully wrapped in newspaper and left on the street in half-bushel baskets, the other parts were found days later in a vacant lot, carelessly thrown against a fence. Her head was never recovered but was identified by her fingerprints.

She was Florencia Flo Pelillo, 42, a waitress. who had been arrested multiple times for prostitution and also the only other victim, besides Andrasi, who was positively identified. To those who knew Flo liked her, she was generally friendly and kind, with the exception of when she drank a lot, which apparently happened quite often because of this. The marriage fell apart and she had to turn to prostitution to make ends meet, like Andrassi. She mainly surrounded herself with shady characters like pimps, bootleggers, and drug addicts, and none of them were able to provide the police with clues about what happened to Flo before her disappearance.

After his death, he soon hit a wall like the others, perhaps because the idea of ​​a serial killer was still relatively new, the authorities did not yet treat these murders as the work of the same culprit because they lacked a common motive that the two men found in Jackass. hill were murdered by the same person but as far as they were concerned, flo moth and the lady of the lake were unconnected crimes with no clues, it was only a matter of time before the killer struck again on the morning of June 5, 1936 Two boys were passing through Kingsbury, running on their way to fish when they saw a pair of pants piled up and thrown into a bush, they stabbed it with fishing rods and a man's head rolled out.

The next day, authorities found the body of the man. man placed in some bushes. very close to a railway police office, whether this was a coincidence or the way the killer taunted the police, we do not know that the victim was a man in his mid to late twenties, despite being found nearby from marginal neighborhoods, he didn't look like him. He belonged there, he was well-groomed, clean, well-fed and wore nice new clothes that were piled up next to his naked body. His underwear bore the initials JD more clearly, although the young man had six tattoos, some of them with elements.

That suggested he might have been a sailor in a highly unusual move: Police made a death mask of the victim and displayed it along with a graphic of his tattoos in an exhibit at the Great Lakes Exposition, the world's fair that took place in cleveland a few years ago. Weeks after the murder their thought was that his face would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people and hopefully someone would recognize him unfortunately they had no luck despite the death mask despite the tattoos and initials and fingerprints the victim remained without identify and became known as the tattooed man also at this time the police were being increasingly forced to face the unpleasant reality that there was a single madman in cleveland who was killing all these people by cutting off their heads, it was the office of the coroner who first took this position, the decapitations. the precision of the cuts, the cleaning and disposal of the bodies, all suggested a culprit;

However, again, serial killers were still a novel concept at the time, one that investigators led by Sergeant James Hogan, head of the homicide division, did not consider or make more likely. they preferred to ignore that they wanted their murders to fall into neat little boxes the two men found dead in Jackass Hill one woman had to be involved in some way the bodies dumped near slums clearly part of some kind of criminal activity like drugs or prostitution was with extreme reluctance that they finally admitted that the crimes were all the work of a crazed murderer persuaded by a man with an untouchable character without a doubt as if the cruelty of the murders were not enough another element that extinguished the flames of public interest was the participation of elliot ness A former prohibition agent and leader of the Untouchables, by now he was already famous in the country for his role in the defeat of Al Capone in Chicago, although he was still in his early 30s, Ness was clearly considered the new up-and-coming golden character Boy, once Prohibition ended, Cleveland Mayor Harold Burton hired him as the city's safety director, giving him authority over the police and fire departments.

Burton himself had been elected on a platform of fighting crime and corruption, so obviously no one fit the role better than Eliot Ness. It happened in December 1935, by which time the mad butcher had already claimed several victims who were still being investigated as separate murders due to Elianes' high profile, his involvement in the Torso murders had been exaggerated over the years. position was mainly administrative he rarely took an active role in the case, not to mention the fact that his focus was on tackling large scale problems such as corruption, drugs and gambling, not a lunatic with a knife, even so, The coroner convinced him that the beheadings were the work of a single man and gave him instructions. the homicide division to investigate the crimes as committed by a single killer meanwhile the killer continued his spree unhindered another male victim was found just a month and a half after the tattooed man although he had actually been murdered months earlier was in an advanced state of decomposition and remained unidentified, but there were two unique elements to this crime: one occurred in the Big Creek area of ​​southwest Cleveland, very far from Kingsbury Run;

Two, there was a large puddle of dried blood under the corpse, which was where he had been. murdered while the other victims had been dumped in different locations for some reason we still don't know, on this particular occasion the killer deviated quite a bit from his original modus operandi, although he ultimately didn't yield any useful clues to the authorities. At the time the police were looking for a murderer but the press and people still didn't know, although there were newspaper headlines speculating that the city had a madman whose strange god is the guillotine, for the moment Eliotness was giving them all the information. information. headlines and snapshots they needed to raid gambling dens and take down corrupt officials.

However, the next victim alerted the entire nation that Cleveland had a serial killer in their midst. The body was found on September 10, 1936 when a homeless man saw two halves of a torso. floating in a pool of stagnant water by the stream, police and rescue units soon arrived at the scene and used long hooks to try to recover other body parts and clothing. As the hours passed, hundreds of curious people gathered to see the morbid spectacle of Then They Camethe media to ask questions and take photos. There was no longer any way to hide the story of the torso murders.

Soon the newspapers even had a name for the murderer. The mad butcher of Kingsbury from that moment on Elliot Ness became more involved in the case. something that bothered him a little since it was not what he had signed up for and because it took him away from his other functions in which he was noticeably more successful although today he is famous for his work as an agent of the prohibition against al capone thanks to The book, television series and film called The Untouchables in his own time, this success faded from public memory and was remembered primarily for his failure to catch the Mad Butcher in his position, there was little Ness could do other than dedicate In the case, he assigned a unit of 20 detectives working full time to catch the killer, plus countless patrolmen, told them to investigate every lead no matter how trivial or crazy, and offered a reward for information leading to to the arrest of the mad butcher. he went undercover as a homeless man, while others posed as gay men in bars and steam rooms in hopes of getting lucky in the killer's hunting grounds.

Of particular note here was a detective named Peter Merlow, he was considered intelligent but eccentric, he spoke several languages ​​and was tenacious in his activities. Sometimes bordering on the obsessive, he and his partner personally interviewed more than 1,500 people for this case, which included the strangest suspects whose profiles ended up on their desks, including a giant man walking down Kingsbury Run.con a kitchen knife, another man who claimed to be a voodoo doctor and who possessed a death ray and, last but not least, a man who liked to hire prostitutes and pleasure himself while watching them cut off chicken heads.

Despite their efforts, the police did nothing. Progress was made in his case and the mad butcher claimed three more victims the following year. The first was a woman found in February 1937 on the shore of Lake Erie, in almost the same place as the Lady of the Lake in 1934. The second victim was primarily a skeleton because although she was found in June 1937 she had been murdered a year ago. Previously despite this she had been officially identified as a missing woman named Rose Wallace thanks to her dental work but again this went nowhere promising the third and final victim of the year was a man whose headless remains were pulled from the Cuyhoga River a A month later, the last three victims were found, all in 1938.

They were two women and a man. All of them remained unidentified. The last two were discovered on the same day, very close to each other, although they had been murdered months apart. They were officially attributed to the mad butcher, but there were thoughts that he simply started killing somewhere else. Every time a murderer suddenly stops, there are three common possibilities that they died, they were imprisoned on an unrelated charge. or they moved detective peter merlot believed that the mad butcher jumped boxcars and started a new spree in pennsylvania the city of newcastle pennsylvania had a nearby swamp that had been used since the 1920s as a dumping ground for bodies during the late 1930s early 1930s In the 1940s several headless victims were found at that location and people like Merillo concluded that the so-called Swamp Killer and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run were one and the same.

This claim was investigated by the coroner's office and police, but was never proven to be the case. As for Eliotness, he became distraught and reckless due to growing public pressure to arrest the killer. On August 18, 1938, just two days after the last victims were discovered, he organized a massive raid on the neighborhoods Kingsbury slums, he made all the homeless people run. They cornered him and then burned the place to the ground so they couldn't return. It was the last act of a desperate man with no other cards to play. Ness was severely condemned in the newspapers for this extreme action but the thing is, the mad butcher never came back. attack, we're not saying there's a direct correlation between the two, we're just pointing out that the mad butcher may have eluded capture, but as far as Eliot Ness and a few other detectives were concerned, they identified his killer, they just couldn't find him. evidence to take it to court.

A major topic of conversation during the investigation was the extent of the killer's anatomical knowledge. He always made precise cuts on his victims' bodies knowing exactly where to cut. So was it someone with medical experience or maybe? someone with more basic training, like a real butcher, at one point, the coroner working on the case, dr. Samuel Gerber expressed his belief that the killer was probably a doctor, so the investigation began to focus on them. Detectives began searching for medical professionals in Cleveland with a history of any type of licentious behavior, such as arrests for substance abuse or prostitution, which is how they landed on dr.

Francis Sweeney was an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts when drinking. He grew up in Kingsbury Run and had lost his marriage and job because of his drinking problem. He physically fit the profile of the mad butcher because he was very tall and strong. On several occasions the murderer had to carry the bodies of his victims uphill, so the police were convinced from the beginning that he had to be a man of imposing stature. All this seemed promising, but the investigators had two factors against him. : One, Francis Sweeney, was the cousin of a congressman, Martin Sweeney, the latter was a political opponent of Mayor Burton and Elliot Ness and allegedly used his influence to impede his cousin's investigation.

The second problem was that Sweeney was often admitted to a VA hospital due to his alcoholism and some of his stays coincided with the Mad Butcher murders. This was enough to divert sweeney's attention for a while at least until a detective thought to investigate the veterans hospital. alibi in more detail, he discovered that because Sweeney was a doctor and because he always admitted himself voluntarily, he was practically free to come and go as he pleased and no one was watching him closely, so the investigation again concentrated on him, but never turned up anything. solid apart from a failed polygraph test and a supposedly tense interrogation between Ness and Sweeney where the former flatly said that he believed Sweeney was the killer, causing the defendant to grin from ear to ear, standing up to show off his enormous frame and then simply telling ness prove it for reasons still unknown today frances sweeney began checking into hospitals on a more permanent basis from august 1938 until her death she moved from hospital to hospital around the country and occasionally returned to sending incoherent postcards to eliot ness this happened shortly after the last victims of the mad butcher were found, although this was pure speculation, some believed that his family forced him to do it to stop the murders and at the same time avoid the scandal of a trial.

There was another suspect worth mentioning, a 52-year-old bricklayer named Frank. Dolezal, who was arrested in 1939 for the murder of Flo Polillo, gave a very strange confession that was part rambling and part specific details that were later implied to have been coerced while Dolezal was in the custody of the county sheriff's department. He was later found dead. in a cell supposedly for hanging himself and an autopsy revealed numerous bruises and broken ribs, no one is really sure why the sheriff's department was so hard on the dollars, almost no evidence, some even floated the idea that they were under someone's orders higher up the food chain. who wanted another suspect other than francis sweeney well if that's true they didn't get it no one else seriously bought dolazol as a suspect for the mad butcher even his supposed confession only admitted to killing flo polillo and in self defense when she attacked . him with a knife the investigation lost steam shortly after the murders arrested elliot ness and many men on his team had no doubt that sweeney was his killer so apart from monitoring him they moved on to new cases others like peter merlot continued investigating the possibility of the killer launching another killing spree in a different city as the years and then decades passed, the Cleveland Torso Murders became more and more forgotten, for some reason the mad butcher didn't enjoy the same eternal infamy like other unidentified murderers like Jack the Ripper. or the zodiac, but he entered local law as Cleveland's most notorious killer, so I'm not going to ask if you enjoyed that video, but I hope you found it interesting, if so, hit the thumbs up button below, no forget it. to subscribe and thanks for watching