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I have been listening to the Martha's Vineyard Beach and Book Club, which actually Elena recommended to me.
She did not listen to it, but she said, girl, this title sounds so you.
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Visit audible.com slash morbid. I am absolutely obsessed with a sweet treat after dinner, and my favorite sweet treat right now is my mochi.
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It's like a sweet little ice cream dumpling or ravioli.
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My Mochi. Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena.
And this is Morbid. 🎵 It's morbid and it's after Halloween now.
Officially. Officially. Officially. You know what?
It's like weird. I'm excited for the holidays this year.
I get excited for those. I'm always excited for them, but, like, this year, for some reason, I feel like I'm, like, really excited for them.
Oh, maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, I feel like, well, because the past three years, we haven't seen our families.
Like, luckily, we've had each other to hang out with for the holidays, but we literally haven't seen our families on Christmas.
Oh, yeah. In a long time. And we're used to having, like, my parents used to have big Christmas Eve parties growing up.
Yeah. It was always a big event. And then last year, we all had COVID.
Yeah. Mm hmm. Like John and I had covid like in the year before that.
I think somebody else had covid. Yeah. None of us could get together.
So it was just a real bummer. And I have been really looking forward to this year.
Yeah. Thanksgiving and Christmas just have like big blowout.
I said it before. I'll say it again. I am so fucking stoked for Thanksgiving.
Your Thanksgiving is like no other. Thank you.
Absolutely. You know what? My girls are like so excited about Thanksgiving.
They're like not even thinking about Christmas.
They're like, no, Thanksgiving. Yeah, I respect that.
I do too. They live in the holiday moment.
Like, I'm sorry, it's not Christmas time yet.
Everybody being like, November 1st, it's Christmas.
No. It's not. No, it's November 1st. It's actually All Saints Day.
Thank you. We can get comfy. Totally. We can get cozy as fuck in here.
We can throw some white twinkle lights everywhere.
Not quite yet. Oh no, throw them up. not quite yet no throw them up get them up in fact the town is already the town's already putting them up i'm ready for white twinkle lights i would keep white twinkle lights up all year round i think they're so cozy and so delightful i agree with the cozy and delightful i just like having a moment where like my home is my home again yeah and it's between decorated you know yeah but i love my home decorated too exactly No, I think I like that, too, having, like, a little break between decorations.
But, like, you give me, like, a couple weeks, white twinkle lights are going up.
See, that I can get down with. A couple weeks, white twinkle lights.
I feel you. I need a little... A little breather.
A little, ha! A little, okay. A little minute from changing batteries out of all the twinkle lights around the house.
Honestly, I can't even take credit for that, though, because Drew is the fucking master of decorations.
The day after Halloween, that motherfucker had the whole entire shebang packed up.
He was like, Christmas, or not Christmas, he was like, Halloween, you're out of here.
Yeah, see, we haven't even attempted to take ours down yet.
You have three children. It's a little different.
I do. We'll get there. We have three children, too, but...
But it's, like, different. It's a lot different.
They're, like, so quiet. They're, like, so chill.
They, like, sleep all day. And you can pet them.
That's true. You can pet mine, too, but they might find that weird.
Nah, sometimes I do pet yours. Yeah, sometimes they're just great.
Little boop boop on the head. But you know what?
Here we are. We're in that weird lull in holidays.
And we're going to make this weird for you guys.
Because this case... It's not holiday-ish at all.
She says we, but like she means she. I'm going to.
I'm going to make it weird. I'm scared. Hi, it's me.
I'm the problem. It's me. Oh, God. I can't get that out of my fucking head.
I can't either. I don't want to mess with anybody, but like it's just not my jam.
Yeah, no. It's definitely, I've seen it way too many times on TikTok now.
Yeah. I respect Taylor Swift immensely, but I'm not necessarily.
I think she's a badass. I'm just not a Swiftie.
Yeah, it's just not my type of music. I like some of her songs.
Yeah, yeah. I like the old stuff. Like, I don't know.
I don't even know. I like certain songs.
When I hear them, I'm like, yeah, that's a song.
And I think she's great, but I just don't want Swifties yelling at me.
But... Either way, I think she's great.
She's really cool. I agree. So today, this is going to be a two-part.
Two-part, you get in the next part within 48 hours, so don't worry.
But this is going to be part one of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, otherwise known as the Cleveland Torso Murders.
Oh, okay. So that gives you a little bit of a little clue, a little breadcrumb to let you know what this is all about.
The first one makes it sound like the Canterbury Tales.
Yeah, like the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
It's like, ooh, a theater play. Yeah, you feel like there should be knights.
And you're like, oh. Second one, you're like, oh, that's not whimsical at all.
No, it definitely isn't. This is like really bad.
And there's like a lot of body parts and dismembering.
And really just, it's not great. So I just wanted to let you guys know right ahead of time, decapitation, dismemberment, I'm coming at you.
Mutilation. I'm going to throw it all at you.
So just so you know, when you go into this, just sit down, maybe wait to eat that meal you were thinking to eat.
You're a monster. You're a fucking monster.
You are. Well, you know what? This person was definitely a monster.
This murderer beheaded his victims, and most, if not all of them, were actually killed by the act of decapitation.
Oh, my God. Which makes this even worse.
He would dismember them. He mutilated men's genitals.
He dabbled in burning body parts and using some kind of unknown like chemical preservant that turned the skin reddish and leathery at times.
He would leave bodies in open places where they would be found.
And often they were wrapped in their own blood soaked clothing or newspapers.
Jesus. Yeah. This is an intense one, to say the very, very least, I would say.
So in August of 1934, a handyman named Joseph Hayduke was walking along the beach in North Perry, Ohio, which is about 30 miles east of Cleveland, just for reference.
He was minding his own business, just taking in some fresh air.
That's the thing. He's just walking down the beach.
I hate that because I know what's going to happen.
He's just walking down the beach, not doing anything wrong.
Being leisure. The most leisure is what he is experiencing right now.
But suddenly he noticed something strange.
He saw a dead seagull that was lying next to some bones.
And he was like, oh, those are probably animal bones because like seagulls.
They're not. But these bones were what looked to be a vertebrae and a whole ass rib cage.
What? With a little bit of flesh still clinging to the bones.
Like intact ribcage. Like I think it was like in some like a couple pieces, but it was like clear it was a ribcage.
He was shocked and immediately contacted the Lake County Sheriff's Office.
They were not concerned, weirdly. How about a rib cage washing up on the beach?
Yeah, they considered this to be nothing more than a man coming across some animal bones and making a bigger deal out of it than necessary.
Anybody going to like come check it out, though?
Just like be sure. So the deputy sheriff, Melvin Keener, just told him over the phone, just bury the bones on the beach.
Forget about them. They're just animal bones.
Are you shitting my dick? And he was like, I'm not sure.
I think they might be human. He was like, are you an anatomist, sir?
I don't think so. Can we send one out here?
Nah. They didn't do that. They were like, bury him.
Forget about him. What the fuck? So he said, you know.
And I love that he's literally like, bury those bones.
Those boons. Those boons on the beach. Forget you ever saw them.
Bury those boons on the dunes. There you go.
Bury those boons on the dunes. And he just basically, he was like, make your own oubliette on the beach.
Just throw them in the hole and forget about it.
Meanwhile, he's like, I was just walking.
Like, I didn't sign up for manual labor.
He's like, okay, cool. I'll just bury this body, I guess, for you guys.
What if you guys, like, I feel like this is just incriminating myself, sir.
Well, and so Joseph just did as he was told by the police because he thought, he was like, maybe I am just overreacting.
Maybe these are just animal bones. I don't want to cause any trouble.
He wasn't trying to, like, you know, make them allocate resources that they didn't need to.
So he did it and then went on his merry way.
Then two weeks, so nothing happened. Two weeks later, on September 5th, 1934, a man named Frank Lagasse was walking along the shore of Lake Erie.
He was searching for driftwood. He was going to use it for his fireplace in his home.
He did this often. This was just a regular walk he did.
And as he made his way along the shore, he saw something large that seemed to be partially buried in the sand up ahead of him.
He thought it was just like a very big piece of a tree trunk or like just some log.
But he was curious because he was like, that's a weird thing just to like wash up on the beach.
And as he made his way to it, he was greeted with something he never could have prepared himself for.
This item that he was looking at was not a log, but it was actually part of a woman's torso.
No. Yep. The lower half, to be precise. It had been severed in the middle of the stomach and just below her knees.
Oh, my. So there was just like the top halves of her legs were attached. completely panicked he ran to a nearby home and the police were informed immediately but at this time legassi was going to be late for work and this concerned him oh so he told his wife and this is from um one of the reports i saw so he told his wife as gently as possible why the police would be arriving oh man and then asked her to please just relay the information to them for him How do you make that gentle?
That's marriage right there. That's a good husband.
Like that is... That's like, hey... I know that you're just home right now and you're probably having like a strong cup of coffee waiting for me to bring home some firewood so you can get cozy cozy.
Yeah, like watch a movie today. But like I found a torso on the beach and now you have to wait till the police get here and you have to go bring them to that torso.
Love you so much. About five paces that way.
See you when I get home. What's for dinner?
And there's a lot of things in this case that...
That reminds me of the Jack the Ripper case.
Oh. And this is one of them where the guy is on his way to work.
Yeah, but he's worried he's going to be late for work.
And it's like to all of us, it seems like this is a great excuse to be late for work.
Like, hey, I found a torso. But to them, it is not.
And that is it's just so funny. I feel like back then there was no good excuse.
Oh, yeah. Like finding a torso, finding a dead body.
They did not care. They were like, cool, you found it.
You should have kept going. Right. You have to get to work.
This is the 30s, right? Like, had the depression happened yet?
Oh, yeah. This is like depression era. Yeah.
They're like, get to work. Yeah. They're just like, we don't have time for this.
Yeah. Fuck that. So the police did arrive on scene and the coroner was shortly following them.
The torso was brought in for a postmortem postmortem examination, and it was thought that she had been killed around six months before she was found and had been in the water for about three to four months.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it seemed like she may have been in a container of some sort when she was put into the water.
And eventually through the six months or three months to four months she was in the water, this container opened up somehow at some point and she floated on the shore.
Gotcha. That's why she wasn't waterlogged.
And would it be possible that the whatever that... thing was that was on her skin could have created some kind of barrier?
Probably not that much of a barrier. No.
I think a three to four months in the water with nothing around you, even a preservant wouldn't do that, wouldn't be able to work.
I would think you would become waterlogged at some point.
That's a long time. Yeah, that's many days.
That's many days in the water. And he immediately knew something was off.
And when he read the story, he was like, you know what?
There's something dark happening here. I got to contact them again.
So he called the Lake County Sheriff's Office again and he reminded them of what he had found, which good for him because he could have just been like, well, I didn't do anything true.
But he was like, no, this isn't right. So they contacted the Cleveland police and they got in touch with Joseph, the Cleveland police, and they asked him to bring them where he had buried the bones.
Now, this was not easy. It had been two weeks and they had brought a lot.
There was a lot of stormy weather that had happened in those two weeks.
So the area looks different. The sand moved around.
The tide had gone in and out like that's the thing.
It was just a lot of stuff that made this like things had blown onto the beach, which made the area look different than it had before.
Yeah, the beach is a tough spot. Yeah. And it took a couple of days, actually, for them to locate the area that he had buried them in.
But they were able to get to the place, finally, after a couple of days.
And they brought those bones to the coroner to be examined.
And he looked at them and he said, yep, these are absolutely 100% human remains.
And also, they perfectly matched the torso found by Frank Lagasse.
Oh, wow. So these police officers told him to bury human remains.
And so... The man found a torso and the rib cage was out of it?
Yeah. And if you, so what we know, because there are a lot of pictures from this case, and I'm going to tell you they're rough because there's a lot of body parts, decapitations, just straight up heads.
Some of them are in very poor condition.
This one in particular. Yeah. It is basically a lump of flesh.
Yeah. So I'm sure this flesh, this body definitely decomposed, but just not enough for them to think that it was floating freely in the water for four months.
Right, right. Because I think it would just be almost nothing at that point.
But I think it loosened the skin so much that the bones were able to slip out.
Oh, okay. So this wasn't like a procedure for lack of a better word.
No, it seems like this was maybe done. This happened possibly like separately.
I didn't even think of the possibility that that could ever happen.
Yeah. It's like slippage. Yeah. Right. That makes sense.
I don't know why I didn't think of that.
So, yeah. So that was, that was rough. And then again, you, the pictures are up there, but I'm just warning you there's, it's a lot.
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Now, what is wild about this, and maybe it shouldn't be wild considering that they told this man to bury human remains without even looking at them, their first inclination was to say that this was probably suicide.
Let that sink in. They found the lower torso of a woman and bits of her bones on the beach, and they were like, yeah, that's probably self-inflicted.
I don't know what to say to that. I'm going to need someone to explain to me exactly how she would do that.
Yeah. I'm going to need that. I would like that, too.
What a journey they went on there. Like, take me on that journey with you fellas.
I need to know. Walk me down the path of how you get there.
I don't want to walk down that path, though.
I don't want to know how they got there.
It's truly wild. So... I will play devil's advocate slightly here for a second just to say that they were not like, I'm hoping they weren't complete buffoons because they were in charge of, you know, law and order.
So the theory to their credit was not completely out of the blue because they were saying this because they felt like since the body had been in the water for months, it was likely that it could have encountered a boat propeller or some kind of outside force or animal that could have caused it to wash up in pieces.
All right. So it's not... While it is still a wild conclusion to come to, I guess if you're going to float that... No pun intended.
You're going to float that theory out there, you could be like, okay, I guess that... Okay.
Yeah. Like, sure, it could have encountered some things that could have made it come to pieces.
But like... Let's investigate. It's like that.
I don't know if that's the number one theory I would go to.
But the coroner luckily quickly shot down that theory saying that the cuts to the bone were far too precise and clean to be made by things like a propeller or an animal.
And he said, in fact, it was so precise and so clean that he believed this was the work of someone who had anatomical knowledge.
Very Jack the Ripper-ish. So he believed this person had anatomical knowledge, but probably wasn't like a working surgeon.
Okay. Maybe they could have been a surgeon at some point, but he didn't believe they would be a surgeon that was working right now.
Because they would have access to better tools.
Yeah. And so this also really does, it really reminds me of Jack the Ripper in several ways.
Because they really are going with theories that they were going with back then.
Mm-hmm. This victim became known as the Lady of the Lake, and she was headline news for days.
Oh, yeah. Everyone was shocked and looking for answers, but none came.
And on September 11th, she was buried in a potter's field at Highland Park Cemetery without an identity and without any knowledge of how or why she was killed.
Little did anyone know, a vicious serial killer was only beginning his reign of terror on this community.
Now, she was never identified. Never? And several of these victims were never identified.
Oh, no. And it's wild because a couple of them have very distinguishing marks like tattoos and stuff.
Huh. Never identified. Well, there's still hope.
The Lady of the Dunes was just identified.
That's true. Ruth Marie Terry. How wild was that?
Yeah. Quick sidebar. She's from Tennessee.
Yeah. But that's the thing. We we had faith that that was going to get solved.
We were like, wow, it's been a long time, but you got a long time.
And if you got faith and then I mean, the Somerton man also identified.
There is always hope. Yeah. A cold case is never cold, cold, cold case is just chilling out for a minute.
It's never frozen. It's like Heidi Jones says, if there's hope, there's a way.
Exactly. And now we just have to use her identity to try to figure out who actually killed her.
Exactly. That's that's what I need to know.
I know that's the bigger part. But yeah.
So that's, you know, maybe some of these people can become identified.
I hope so. I mean, this is from the 1930s.
It's a little harder, but not impossible.
Yeah. So the time period and location that this took place is important here.
It was in the mid-1930s Depression era in a small community of self-built homes in Kingsbury Run, which was located along the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.
I'm very sorry if I said that wrong. I actually think you said that right.
Did I? Because I think I had to say that a few weeks ago for one of my Ohio cases.
Hey, look at that. But I could be, I maybe said it wrong.
I hope so. Just spreading the word of saying it wrong.
Yeah, I'm doing my best here. So this area had a bustling railway system that during the hardest of times of the Depression era became a method for people to travel from place to place kind of looking for work or any kind of sanctuary of any kind, really.
Because it was real bad. That's where the fucking big, huge peninsula python comes from.
There you go. Oh, my goodness. Yes, there it is.
I knew this was connecting somewhere. Now, there were various places around Cleveland where people completely down and hit hardest by the Depression would take up residence on abandoned land plots and they would build little shanties.
And if enough did this in a plot, they became like a shantytown, just like all self-built homes, like a community living together.
That's cool. Police would often destroy these.
That's not cool. But these people would just move on to live in Kingsbury Run, where they created even more of those buildings.
Apparently right near Kingsbury Run was a place the police called the Roaring Third.
And it was a place with many, and this is a quote, many bars, brothels, flop houses, and gambling dens.
Sounds fun. So kind of feels like the Roaring Third was like the White Chapel.
Yeah. If we're really going to go there.
If we're going to jack the ripper it. And Kingsbury Run was kind of like right on the outskirts of Whitechapel, if you want to say this, if you really want to make the reference.
Now, apparently by the end of the 1930s, when things were beginning to be on a slow but kind of steady uptick, Kingsbury Run had more than 100 of these self-built shanties and contained a population in the shanty town of more than 300 people.
These were the most vulnerable people. They were marginalized and a killer took full advantage of this, which is why I think some of them are so many of them aren't identified because they think he took full advantage of the fact that these people were the most down on their luck and the most like they were probably not from there in some cases.
So they didn't have family there, like really preyed on the vulnerability of these people.
Again, very Jack the Ripper, very Jack the Ripper ish.
Now, September 23rd, 1935, which was a year later after the Lady of the Lake is discovered, 16-year-old James Wagner and 12-year-old Peter Costura were tossing a ball back and forth as they walked along the side of Kingsbury Run.
This was a place actually called Jackass Hill.
Awesome. Which great name. The ball got away from the boys and 12-year-old Peter ran into some brush just to go retrieve it.
As he searched, he came across a corpse instead.
This was a man. He was headless and nude wearing only black cotton socks.
There is a photograph of this man. When you see it, I cannot imagine a 12 year old coming across this while looking for a fucking ball.
Oh, the most horrifying. I mean, it's just a naked dead man in black socks laying on the ground with no head.
Like, there goes your childhood. That's it.
Right there. Like, not, it would be, it would be even horrific just if he was a naked dead man in black socks with a head.
Yeah. This guy doesn't have a head. That's a whole different, like, and there was no blood on the ground or around the corpse.
And again, I can't even think of how this poor kid thought, like what went through his brain when he found this.
They immediately ran and got their parents who called the Erie Railroad Police to report it.
The body was brought to the coroner who noted that the man's wrists showed signs that he had been bound with rope.
There were clear rope burns in his skin.
Hate that. His head was removed and it was also discovered that one of his testicles was missing and his genitals were mutilated.
Part of them removed. The body had signs that it had been thoroughly washed, and it was clear he wasn't killed or beheaded where he was found.
This was a secondary site, and this was a dumping ground, clearly.
This is also strange. We don't cover that many cases where a serial killer will kill both men and women.
That's very important in this case. It's also men, women, and the age is kind of all over the place.
So anybody. Yeah, he doesn't seem to have a type, to be quite honest.
A type. I can't actually even think of a serial killer or killer that we've covered.
Richard Ramirez, I would say, is the only one that didn't have a clear victim profile that he would go through.
I'm sure there might be another one that I'm just not thinking of.
Yeah, but we haven't covered many. But no, they're they're rare.
Like, I think usually you find that there's that there it's a men killing women or, you know, like there's there's at least a clear victim pattern.
Yeah, yeah. But not here. So strange and so much more scary.
So much more. And it's very rare to hear of, like, the murder being because of decapitation.
Yeah. Like, that these people are killed by having their head cut off.
Right. Like, that's so on another level.
Sick. And the amount of work he went through with each of these bodies, it's just very intense.
So clearly... Whoever this was had a good amount of space, I would think, and like a private space where they could do this.
That's what you would think. Because when again, I know I'm comparing this a lot to Jack the Ripper, but you can't deny the parallels.
Right. It's kind of similar to Jack the Ripper where they immediately were like, he has to have a place where he's doing this.
Right. But like, maybe not. I know, that is the thing.
Maybe it's, like, in a very secluded area, you know?
Like, he must have some kind of place, but it's, like... Not necessarily, like, a home or anything, right?
Maybe it's, like, somewhere just isolated.
Maybe it's shanty. Maybe. You never know.
Now, this was bad enough that we just found a headless naked body of a man.
A 12-year-old just found this. But one hour later after this body was found, another was discovered in the same area.
Oh, my. Police were looking around for evidence for the first man...
When they ran into the body of another man, an older male, heavier set, who was also missing his head and one testicle, and he also had mutilation to his genitals as well.
So same kind of MO. And sorry, did you say he was also decapitated?
Yep, missing a head. Right away, they could see that there was some kind of liquid covering his body, and the skin had turned reddish, tough, and leathery.
Like the first woman. Like the first torso.
As they continued their search of the area, they found the first man's head. like half buried near the second man's body.
And as they continued the search, near the second body as well was the head of the second body.
And how would they be able to determine whose head is whose?
I think, well, this one might have been a little easier because one was a younger, what we find out to be, I think, a 23-year-old male or 28-year-old male.
And the second one was in his late 40s, mid to late 40s.
One was a thinner athletic build. The other one was a heavier set guy.
Okay. It made sense, I think. Okay. So they found the second man's head.
They found the first man's head, both next to the second body.
Weird. They both have all the same kind of things, the missing testicles, the genital mutilation.
Near the body, they also found a bunch of rags and a bucket of oil.
Yeah. So the first victim was quickly identified because they were able to get fingerprints off him.
Oh, okay. The second body was a little more decomposed.
Ah. Now, because of this, they were able to identify the first body as 28-year-olds, Edward Andrasi.
He had worked previously as a hospital orderly, but was also involved with a lot of the shadier elements of life.
He was a petty criminal and was known to... He was known in the Roaring Third, like, a lot.
Okay. Police said that he was always having run-ins with them, was basically into whatever vice you can dream of.
He was just really going for it. He was slithering, okay.
He was known around town for brawling, drunkenness, always having a concealed weapon around him.
He was a ladies' man, always had a lady on his arm.
That's awesome. Sounds like a good time to me.
He would go after like other men's wives.
Like he was just like he was living like really just like a cart like a. He's true.
He really he's like a caricature. He is.
Yeah. That's that's actually the exact word I was looking for.
Thank you. Because I literally said I couldn't think of it.
That's why I knew I was like, I think this is what you're saying.
Thank you. You're welcome. The coroner said he had been dead only two to three days. and his cause of death was decapitation yikes now again the cuts were precise and clean on this guy the second man was more decomposed so they couldn't get fingerprints from his body and the coroner had him probably around his mid-40s in age and his time of death death was his time of death was thought to be a few weeks prior this body was also partially burned, which they figured was maybe why that oil and rag bucket were next to the body.
Maybe he had used that to try to light him on fire.
Jesus. But they thought that may be why that reddish leathery appearance was there, but they weren't sure.
Now, the theories, because they figured maybe that was like oil on his body.
Right, right. Because they don't know what the substance is.
Yeah, they don't know what the hell is going on.
So the theory started that this was multiple killers.
Right. Which, okay. Multiple killers decapitating everyone.
Yeah. Now remember, serial killers were not a thing that people knew about back then.
Right, because when did that term come around?
It wasn't until like the 80s. Oh shit, I always forget that.
Or at least I think it was the 80s. People think it's the 70s, but I'm pretty sure that's like one of those, you know, myths.
Yeah, I think it's like probably because of Mindhunter.
Yeah, I don't know. It was the 70s or 80s.
Yeah, yeah. A while after this. That's all we know.
Yeah, quite some years. But they didn't connect the dots a lot and assume like in any cases like this.
So they just assumed it was just multiple assholes. doing similar things in similar areas.
Yeah. Which is wild that we all just were like, yeah, that's fine.
They assumed that Edward, the victim that was identified, was just killed by possibly a jealous husband of one of the women that he was known to be with.
Or they went the, you know, homophobic route and they said that he must be gay.
Oh, totally. Because since his genitals were mutilated, it was a lover who emasculated him in a fit of passion.
Oh, yes. Us gays just love to mutilate genitals.
I was going to say, because that is such a gay person thing to do.
Just gay things. Just gay things, everybody.
Yeah. There was a lot of that. And with this case, that comes up a lot.
It's just like in Jack the Ripper, everyone was blaming Jewish people.
There's always a group of people that they're going to point to and say, it must be you.
Scary. It can never just be us. So they spoke to Edward's mother, actually, who said that the family had last seen him September 19th in the evening.
And that night he was seen in a large dark car resembling one that, quote, a gangster would own.
And he was, no, like a mafia person. No, I know.
I love when you say gangster. It's my favorite thing.
And he was with another man in this car.
Now, his mother also said he had been a little on edge lately because recently a man had become very angry and had come to their home looking for Edward because he had paid too much attention to his wife.
So Edward's sister Edna also said Edward Edna also said he was very he was kind of off and a little upset in the weeks leading to leading up to his murder.
She said he had gotten into some fights with what they said was an Italian man at the corner of East 9th and Boulevard.
And he had told his sister that he had actually stabbed this man.
But there was no evidence that this crime ever occurred.
Huh. So they never like no one was murdered.
Just a quick stab. Yeah. Like there's no evidence in any hospitals that this man went to that like no one could really identify this man.
It just never it seems like it didn't happen.
So I don't really know what that was about.
Or maybe it didn't. It was just like normal.
Yeah, I don't know. I stopped him. Bye. Now, the thing is, too, that he is he was and still is in like newspapers about this.
He's used a little bit as a scapegoat in the press.
And especially now when the murder case is discussed, it can happen, too.
It's like it's presented that he brought it on himself.
Nice. And it's very victim-blamey, the way that this happens.
Usually one brings it upon themselves to be decapitated.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can definitely bring that upon yourself.
It's so stupid. No, you do not. Like, who says that?
In the book In the Wake of the Butcher, Cleveland's Torso Murders by James Badal, he says this about Edward.
Quote, Certainly, he was no altar boy, and his lifestyle clearly distressed his parents.
But much of his totally negative image is based solely on the often sensational contemporary accounts of his brutal murder.
And the authorities were looking for someone who had reasons to kill him, not those who cared about him.
So that's what they're saying. They're like, what you're seeing is them talking about the things that would have made him a likely victim instead of looking at it as, well, who was he?
Right. You know, and like, yeah, maybe he clearly hung out with the shadier aspects of the town.
You can tell that. But like that doesn't necessarily like.
It also sounds like he was close with his mom and his sister.
Exactly. So let's show that side of him.
And again, like like they said in this, you're looking for people who have a reason to kill him.
Right. So you're looking at the worst parts of him.
Yeah. And it's like that doesn't define a person.
Of course it doesn't. And again, he was brutally murdered.
Yeah, at the end of the day. That's just bad.
Now, unfortunately, even with Edward being identified, no leads were turning up for this case.
They couldn't get a hold of any of these people that supposedly were mad at him about sleeping with their wives.
They were never able to even identify the second man's body.
Like with his head and they had his head.
So we have two unidentified to this. So now we have two and we have way more than that.
Only four out of what is about 12 were identified.
Wow. Yeah. So this is a rough one. Now, the second guy's body, like I said, it was so decomposed that they couldn't even get fingerprints.
So even though they had a head, they had everything else.
He was never identified. And it's really sad.
Yeah. Wild that they couldn't do teeth.
Yeah. I don't know if his, I don't know back then how dental records.
I know. How great they were. I know that they were used in one victim in this case.
They were. But it was one victim, and we'll get to it in part two, that they haven't officially identified as this person, but they used the dental records to identify her.
Okay. It's like a shade, which makes me think that dental records were not exactly up to what they are today.
Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. So they couldn't look at them back then and go, absolutely, that's the person.
And also it's the depression era. So like how many people are going to the dentist?
Thank you. That's the other thing is a lot of these people, and it seems like a lot of these people are taken out of some of the poorest places, these shanty towns where, like you said, people are probably not able to get regular health care.
So they probably don't have a dental record to even look at.
Yeah, or one that's up to date. Why are there ridges on Reese's peanut butter cups?
Probably so they never slip from her hands.
Could you imagine? I'd lose it. Luckily, Reese's thought about that.
Wonder what else they think about. Probably chocolate and peanut butter.
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Now, it was 11 a.m. on January 26, 1936, when an unidentified woman was in her apartment and she could just hear dogs howling outside of it.
She said they were always, you know, outside of her apartment was always loud.
It was near Kingsbury Run. And she said, but these dogs were like howling at something.
And so she was like, what is getting them all riled up?
So she angrily headed outside and started looking around the heart manufacturing building.
It was like an alley behind this building.
And it was only a few blocks away from the run.
As she peeked through the bushes nearby next to the alley, she saw two strangely placed half bushel baskets.
Now, I had no idea what a half bushel looked like.
To me, I was thinking like a picnic basket.
I don't even know what a whole bushel looks like.
Well, that's the thing. I don't know what a whole bushel looks like, so a half bushel to me, I was like, I don't know.
And when you say basket, I think of like a picnic basket.
Same here, yeah. But no, I looked it up, and they're those kind of big round baskets, almost that you would put like huge mums in.
Oh, okay, okay. But like the big ones. I put blankets in there.
There you go. Like something like that. They're fairly big.
Yeah. They really are. So this was even stranger for her to just find in this alleyway.
She found two. And they were in half? No, they're just like half bushel.
Oh, okay. Like that's the size of them. Okay.
And it had been snowing and they're just sitting there in the snow in the bushes.
And she's like, what the hell is that? Clearly these belong to someone.
So she just like peeked in there because like, what's going on in there?
And it was not what she expected. Oh, okay.
There in the basket were pieces of fresh meat that had been wrapped in newspaper.
Oh. Like a butcher would. Not cow. And she was confused.
But there was a butcher shop called White Front Meat Market only around the corner.
So she went there because she was like, did someone like leave these here when they got them at the butcher shop?
Like, why would they leave them here? So she went there and she tells the butcher what she's found.
And she had described them as what she thought was like hams.
She was like, I don't know. I think they're like full hams in there.
And the butcher was suspicious because he was like, who would abandon fresh meat right now?
Like two half bushel things of fresh meat.
So he's like, you know what? Will you show me?
Like, I just want to know what kind of meat this is.
Yeah. Like that's wild. Well, then he could maybe figure out like who bought.
Yeah, exactly. So he followed her to the supposed hams.
And when he examined them, he was horrified because he said, these are not hams, ma'am.
These are pieces of flesh from a human body and they have been frozen.
Oh. Yeah. So he called the police. And when they arrived, the details were even worse than people could even imagine.
Because inside of the baskets, they found the lower half of a female torso, two thighs and a right arm and a hand.
Yeah. All neatly wrapped up in newspaper with burlap over the tops.
Uh-huh. So they discovered most of the newspaper that it was wrapped in was from August, but then there were some that was from only the day before.
Oh. Which told them some time frames here.
Right. As they searched the crime scene, they found another bundle near the baskets, and it was also wrapped in newspaper and burlap.
This newspaper was from November 19th, the year prior.
Oh, wow. So that's interesting. And this package had a two-piece set of white underwear in it.
And there was a small tag that said William Danchy's Poultry Store.
Yeah. So they were like, what the hell does this mean?
And the coroner said they were brought to the coroner.
The coroner examined the remains. They were able to pull fingerprints from the hand.
She was soon identified as Florence Polillo.
Now, she had worked as a waitress and a barmaid.
She was also working as a sex worker on the side.
She was living a hard life and was residing in the Roaring Third at the time of her death.
She had been in a lot of trouble with police several times for solicitation, drugs, and alcohol-related crimes.
Sorry, I can't talk today. That's okay. She was always moving around.
She was known to have a string of kind of terrible and abusive relationships with men.
All of this, of course, was used very salaciously when describing her in the press.
Of course. And I was able to find some background on her at eeriehistory.com.
And she was born Florence Genevieve Soddy on December 6, 1891 in Ashtabula County, Ohio.
And her parents were Nellie Eliza Robinson Soddy, and her father was Fred Othello Soddy.
They moved around a lot because her father was a day laborer, and it's kind of unpredictable work.
And when she came into adulthood in the 1920s, this is when it became clear that she was struggling a bit and not hanging out with the best crowd.
In 1923, she met Andrew Polila, who was a postal worker.
They eventually married. They lived in Buffalo together until 1928 when she apparently told Andrew, according to him, that she needed to get some help for her addictions and she was going to stay with her mother in Ashtabula for two weeks to do so.
She was like, I just want to get right. And she didn't end up returning home.
But her husband and her husband was like, she ran away.
Right. But he ended up seeing her very shortly after that in Buffalo again with another man.
Oh, that's a bad hit. Yeah, that's rough.
So the divorce was pretty clear. So she returned to Erie and had a couple of arrests for solicitation.
She moved to Cleveland by 1930 and several more arrests followed for solicitation and things of that nature.
Isn't solicitation so hard to say? It is.
It's very hard. I'm like solicitation. Me too.
Because you feel like you should say solic-
Salish. Just call it Salish. For Salish.
Solicitation, it's like, all right, just call it Salish.
I know, I like to shorten words anyways.
I'm just Salish-ing. Arrested for Salish.
I'm not Salish-ing. No, but she was arrested for it several times.
And she left for Washington, D.C. at one point, was arrested there too for Salish.
And the charges were actually dropped there, but it was on the promise that she never returned to Washington, D.C., So she came back.
Yeah, they were just like, don't come back.
Not even to look at the monuments? No, not even for that.
So she was like, okay. What if she didn't salish?
I don't know. I guess she got the raw end of the deal there.
She sure did. But she came back to Cleveland and unfortunately the pattern continued until she unfortunately came into contact with the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run.
So not a great end of that story. No, just not a great story overall.
She had a tough life and the newspapers reflected such.
But what they didn't focus on was the fact that her landlord at the time where she was staying when she died said she was a very sweet woman.
And she said when she was drinking, she was pecky, quarrelsome, but she never gave us any trouble.
Paid her rent on time. Yeah. And the landlord said she was actually very kind and sweet to her young daughters, the landlord's young daughters, and even let them have a doll collection that she loved.
And it was one of the only things of value that she owned and she let them have it.
These are the things that you don't have to leave out all the rest.
Like that was part of her too. Exactly. But these are the things you add because they are also part of her.
Exactly. Like that's who she was. Right.
She was all of those things. Exactly. You can be all of those things at once.
Multifaceted, you know? So there's that.
So she went through it, but she was a kind-hearted person.
She by no means deserved what she got. Now, after talking to the landlord, they went to William Danchy's poultry store, which was what that tag said.
But no one there remembered seeing Florence or could identify her as coming in at all.
So they were like, I don't know why that was in there.
Like, he put it in there, maybe, I don't know.
Just to fuck with people? Yeah. Now, there were interesting features to this body.
Like, there was cinder and coal dust embedded into her skin.
Like, it had been rubbed into her skin. Ouch.
This is hearkening back to Jack the Ripper again, this next one, because Florence was missing her reproductive organs.
Oh. And her appendix, which maybe she had her appendix out before.
Yeah, you never know. I don't know. But either way, the reproductive organs were taken out and they were not found.
Interesting. So these cuts were like all the others.
They were very clean, very precise, with a knowledge of where to slice and where to remove.
So I don't know. And this was it was evident that like whoever had killed her had removed her reproductive organs.
It wasn't. Yeah, there was no evidence of a hysterectomy.
Wow. So this person had definitely done it.
That's fucked. And there's actually no evidence that she had her appendix removed before this either.
So we can likely the same. Now, the coroner said he believed she had been killed two to four days before she was found and her cause of death was decapitation.
It's awful. It is. Now, a second examination was done by another medical examiner.
And like Jack the Ripper, we kind of got a different perspective on the same corpse, which did happen in that case, too.
This coroner said he actually believed the cuts were pretty violent.
And he said that her limbs had been wrenched from the sockets.
What? So to me, this may be a little confusion of descriptions here instead of two different ideas of what happened.
I think you can do precise cuts and be clean, but also probably be aggressive with how you disarticulate the limbs.
Yeah. So I think this is like, it was noted a lot as like, these are two different views on what happened here.
And it's like, no, I don't know about that.
Two different procedures. I think they have two different perspectives, but it's the same act.
Yeah. And I think it makes... sense with who this person is.
He's obviously a very bad person. Unhinged.
Who is very unhinged and would wrench a socket out.
I don't have to say it again, though. Now, two weeks after this discovery, there was another call to return to the area where they had found Florence.
This time, they were called to an abandoned house a few blocks away from the Hart Manufacturing Building, in the bushes where her partial remains were found.
When they arrived at this call, they found Florence's upper torso, which was missing her head, her legs, and an arm.
And around her was piled charcoal, hay, and chicken feathers. charcoal hay and chicken just like scattered around like a pile of charcoal and then just scattered around hay and chicken feathers maybe the person lived on a farm maybe i don't know i don't know but the investigation was leading nowhere no leads just stories about this woman's life that's all they had It also doesn't feel like they're really investigating.
They end up really investigating, but you're right.
It seems like they were kind of like, yeah, I don't know.
They weren't connecting them. That's the problem.
They're not connecting any of these. How are you not connecting, what do we have, four headless bodies now?
Yeah, and that's the thing. Those don't connect to you?
How do you not sit there and go, that's weird, at the very least?
Right. But finally, the Cleveland News actually wrote a story where they pointed out that the Lady of the Lake murder from the previous year bore a pretty strong resemblance to Florence's murder.
They wrote, quote, the speedy solution of the identity of Mrs. Polila recalled the still unsolved torso murder of a woman, the dismembered pieces of whose body was washed ashore at the foot of East 156th Street early in September 1934.
And the newspapers were seeing these things, that the bodies were dismembered in identical ways.
They were left to be found by people, but not right out in the open.
It was like well-trafficked areas. They knew someone would stumble upon it, but it was like they didn't want right in the center of everything.
It was pretty like on the nose. But the police were just like, nah, I think this, I don't know.
I think, ah, okay. No. I don't understand how you're not thinking these are connected.
They literally refused to acknowledge a connection at this point.
So it just went by the wayside as a one-off murder that weirdly was identical to three others before it.
It's also just weird to me. Like, that's sus.
That is weird. It's sus. Even though you don't have like the serial killer name, you don't have you really don't have like the studies into the psychology of like somebody who would do this kind of thing.
You do have to look at just straight up cold hard logic here and be like, this is weird.
There's a I mean, like, did you not know patterns existed in life?
Right. I think we were all aware in the 30s that like patterns happen sometimes.
So like, wouldn't you look at this and say, well, well, gee whiz, this is a pattern.
It seems like like maybe something is connected here.
I'm like changed as a human from your children, because all I could think of when you said pattern was pattern power. fucking umizumi yep that's all i can think of like i'm a changed gal yeah you are we all are in the best way i mean i would not go back to the gal i was before to yell pattern power whenever you hear a pattern fuck yeah the best so here we bring us to june 5th 1936 and we have a season there you go and another gruesome discovery was made oh yeah This time by an 11-year-old boy named Louis Cheely and his friend, 13-year-old Gomez Ivy.
Oh, how cute of a name. Absolutely adorable.
The two of them had skipped school to go fishing together at a spot near Kingsbury Run.
Pure. The purest, the most wholesomest. And they went along the New York Central Railroad tracks and near the East 55th Street Bridge.
That's when they noticed a pair of brown pants rolled up in like a ball under a willow tree.
Don't unroll them. Of course they were like, we got to know what those are because they are preteen boys skipping school.
Adventure is what that is all about. You have just come across a strange package.
You need to look in it. Yeah, I get it. So they made their way toward the package of pants and using their fishing rods, they just kind of started like poking it a bit.
You got it. Like you got to poke at a package with whatever you got on hand.
Maybe not once you hear what's in this package, I feel.
This is not great. But like, I get it. I would have done the same thing.
Would have. Yeah, would have. Won't do it now.
As they poked it, it began to unravel since it was just crudely tied together, made of men's pants.
Yeah. And as it unraveled, a human fucking head rolled out.
Oof. Yeah, these poor little boys. Yeah.
11 and 13. That's fucked. They ran the hell out of there.
So far away. They went to get help, but no one was at home at their house.
And remember, they were skipping school, so their parents were just at work.
Like, they were supposed to be at school.
So they waited at home until 5 o'clock when Gomez's mom returned home from work.
They told her what they found. Imagine this woman.
She comes home from a hard day's work. Her kids are there and her kid is there and his friend.
And he's like, hey, mom, I skipped school.
One. You're like, damn it. They never skipped school.
Never. That was a lesson learned. Absolutely.
And then you immediately follow that with.
And we found a head wrapped in some pants.
Yeah. You just came home from work. Yeah.
That's a lot to digest all at once. I just feel like that's the classic, like, talk to your father.
Yeah, that really is. Like, I don't know what to do with this.
Go talk to your father. But you know what?
This woman, this woman's a real one. I felt that about her.
Right? You just know Gomez's mom is a real one.
Duh. Because they told her and she contacted the police right away and she was like, where did you find that head, guys?
You got to tell us. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, this was kind of a tough scene in many ways.
They were so scared and shocked by this.
I mean, they're babies finding this severed head.
They had fled so quickly that they were not super keen on the details of where exactly they had found this head.
Yep. So it was like the initial discovery of the Lady of the Lake and Joseph, who had to remember where he buried the bones on the beach.
It took a while for them to locate the bundle, but they did eventually find it.
It was just kind of hard going for a little bit.
They found the head wrapped in the pants.
The pants had been ripped in the back. It was also a completely blood-soaked white polo shirt that had the label Park Royal Broadcloth.
Okay. Another dress shirt that was also soaked in blood and thought to be brown striped.
But now I'm wondering, like, with the beauty of hindsight, if I'm like, that might have not been brown striped.
Like, blood turns brown when it oxidizes.
Sure does. This had a Desmond's label in it and a pair of men's boxer shorts with blue stripes on them, also soaked in blood.
There was a black leather belt and a men's handkerchief that was described as soiled.
As they searched the area nearby, they found a pair of old size seven and a half Oxfords with dark striped socks just like stuffed and balled up inside.
They also found a ton of cinders around about 30 feet from the head.
And it had a dirty, oily brown cap like in the middle of the cinders.
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All you can hope is that it was quick.
But when you're thinking about a human decapitating another human without the use of like a guillotine, because I'm assuming that whoever this was didn't have one.
Yeah. You're like, what are you using to decapitate someone?
That's one of the really the most chilling parts of this case is knowing that they were decapitated and that was the method of murder.
Right. Like, oof. Also, do you guys say guillotine or guillotine?
Yeah, we were talking about this recently.
Because I grew up saying guillotine. I think I say guillotine now.
Ash says guillotine. Yeah, I've always said guillotine.
John doesn't know what he says. He thinks he says both.
He probably doesn't say guillotine very often.
Yeah, and so I'm just curious because I think you can say it both ways, but let us know.
I'm just really curious. Yeah. That was my little corner there.
If you're from France, let us know. Yeah, let us know, you French people.
You Francophiles. You Frenchies. You love France.
France. I just love France. I'm so American.
We truly are, unfortunately. So his head was brought to the coroner's office, and the coroner believed him to be about 20 to 35 years old.
He thought he had been killed pretty recently, somewhere actually within 48 hours before his head was found, which is so chilling to think that this murderer dumped this head there just hours before those kids came across it.
It's just something about that. It's like, yeah, it's really scary because like what if I had chose to skip school a day earlier?
Yeah. And it's like it almost makes you feel like the air should be changed with that kind of, you know, like it's like the energy is probably still like hanging there.
Oh, it definitely was evil energy of this person being there.
I don't know. It's just like, you know, that's probably what kind of brought them to that area.
Yeah. Maybe it just was like leading them to it.
Now, this time he noted that there were multiple cuts, and this is interesting.
There were multiple cuts under the chin where it appeared the killer had hesitated to make the deadly cut.
Oh. So that's interesting that there were hesitation cuts here.
Was it hesitation or was it like torture?
Was it intentional? Because this one, like some of them did, they weren't cut in a, like in the middle of the neck.
Some of them were cut like further down kind of thing.
Oh. Yeah, which is not great. Is that even like decapitation at that point?
Yeah, I don't even know what that would be called.
Dismemberment. But what he did do, which was smart, was the coroner ended up making a plaster cast of his head and face for reference.
So if they were to, you know, he was going to have to be buried at some point, and especially if they found some kind of family member or anything.
But he wanted to be able to have this for reference.
So they put the cast, and actually they put the head on display to see if anyone, like in the morgue, to see if anyone recognized this poor man and could identify him.
They did that often back then. And even after an estimated 2,000 people came through the morgue to see it in 24 hours, no one could identify him.
Wow. So everybody was just like going for something to do.
Oh, yeah. Which is really sad. We see this a lot.
The town of Agde in France is famous for sun, sand, sea and sex.
But lately, life on the coast has taken a strange turn.
The town's mayor, a respected pillar of the community, has been arrested for corruption.
His wife claims he's been bewitched by a beautiful clairvoyant.
Then there's the mysterious phone calls that local people have been getting.
I am the Archangel Michael. the whole town has been thrown into chaos.
As the mayor is unable to carry out his duties, I would like to address you all.
Legal proceedings have been initiated. Join me, Anna Richardson, and journalist Leo Schick for The Mystic and the Mayor as we investigate a story of power, corruption, and magic.
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Now, June 6th, one day after the head was discovered and one day after 2,000 people tramped through the morgue to look at it, a crew of crane operators discovered a nude and headless corpse on the boundary between the New York Central Railroad tracks and the Nickel Plate Railroad tracks.
This was very close to the location that the head was found, which was interesting that they didn't find it in their search the previous day.
Yeah. And it makes you wonder if it was put there within that 24-hour period.
I was just going to say that. Which, whoa.
Terrifying. Bold. Like, very bold. The coroner received this headless body and was able to get fingerprints from it, luckily.
And they also recorded that he had, he seemed to have a small amount of food in his stomach and a blood alcohol level of about 0.03%.
Not very much. Very, very low. That's like all a drink.
I think that actually might be like the first register of like you've had any alcohol.
But they put it in his report. Now, unfortunately, the coroner also kind of fucked this up a little because he waited until June 8th to do the autopsy.
He waited until, you know, a very special day to do the autopsy.
So decomposition had set in. Was he just...
I don't know. But I was like, I don't know.
You should maybe make some time for these headless torsos.
That's all I'm saying. I think those should be priority one.
That's what I was going to say. One might assume that that could be top priority.
Yeah. Like, I don't know. But I think because they're really not looking at these for some weird reason as connected, they're like, whatever.
Yeah. But decomposition kind of messed things up and it made some of the evidence that they maybe could have collected disappear.
And this man had only been killed within the last couple of days.
So if he had autopsied right away, maybe he would have got something more useful.
Yeah. I don't know. Either way, it was just a strange thing to do.
But there is one lucky and unique thing here when the body was discovered.
The body had many tattoos, which are great for identification purposes.
That's why I do it. There you go. That's the only reason.
Sole reason. Just kidding. This man had six tattoos.
On his outer calf, he had a character called Jigs from a comic strip, Jigs and Maggie.
Cute. He had a butterfly on his left shoulder.
I love it. He had a heart and an anchor on his left forearm.
Very sailor chic. Two flags crossed over each other and the letters WCG on his left forearm as well. and a Cupid and anchor tattoo on his outer right calf.
And on his right forearm were the names Helen and Paul above a dove.
Which makes me think, like, do you have kids?
Yeah. Are those your kids? I hope not. And they drew all of these tattoos so they could use them as reference along with the plaster cast of his head.
Nice. They actually did a ton of plaster casts of all these victims, which are very spooky.
And they're on display at a museum, which I will tell you about.
But it seemed like the investigators were at least starting to scratch their heads at this point at the clear similarities between the cases.
That's good. Yeah. But they still were not going to say that this was one killer committing various horrific homicides.
That's bad. They did a press conference where Detective Inspector Charles Neville said this killer was, quote, a maniac with a lust to kill.
You don't say. Duh. And said they believed that his latest victim had, and this was a theory that they came up with out of the pure blue.
I was like, wow, what a tale. They said they believed his latest victim had been found sleeping, but the killer had cut his throat while he was sleeping. very quickly, then hacked his head off.
And he believed that the killer then took off his clothing and said he undressed him because people at the press conference were like, why did he do that?
Like, why would he undress him? And he said, that's the maniac's trick.
Okay, my dude. I don't... Yeah. All right, you're trying.
Seems like the police force was really doing great.
They were doing something. They were making a lot of sense.
They were not muddying the waters at all or confusing people.
They were providing a clear outlook on this case.
Absolutely. That's exactly what I've been thinking this whole time.
You're like, wow. Wow. What work. Yeah. Wow.
Top notch police work here. My goodness.
So they were getting desperate at this point to find the maniac and they decided to display the plaster head cast and the tattoos at something called the Great Lakes Exposition.
This was over the summers of 1936 and 1937.
So two full years. which these were the only years that this expo happened, apparently.
This exposition was a huge fair where they basically celebrated all the technological and scientific advancements and achievements from the Great Lakes area.
Even then, nothing. No identification, no leads.
How? Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. How?
Even with the tattoos. Yeah, I don't understand that.
Like someone had to know this man. He has six tattoos.
Six very distinct tattoos. And like with names as well.
Like who's Helen? Yeah. Like what's going on?
Now, he's known still now today as victim number four or tattooed man.
Wow. That's it. That's so sad. I know. Now, maybe we got to get him identified, man.
I know. July 22nd, 1936, two months after the tattooed man was found, another body was discovered.
17-year-old Marie Barkley was walking in the woods near her home in Kingsbury Run.
She was just on a stroll, just walking through the woods, when she came across a naked, headless man lying face down in a small ravine near a place called Big Creek in the Cleveland suburb of Brooklyn.
Oh. Yeah. Just on a stroll. Alrighty. She ran to let somebody know.
Not quite sure who. You can't find that information.
Just ran, ran, ran. She just ran. And luckily, apparently, remembered where she had found the body.
The police arrived two hours after the discovery.
Such a good job. Which seems like a long fucking time.
They were watching a movie. Like, my guys.
A long motion picture. She found these severed Like a body with a severed head.
Yeah. Hop to it. Hop to it. Knees to chest.
What are you doing taking your time? I don't know why it took that long, but whatever.
They searched the perimeter of where the body was found and they did discover the man's severed head only about 10 to 20 feet away from the body.
The head was covered by completely soaked in blood clothing, including a dark gray suit with clear cuts to the sleeves.
A light blue polo, blue socks to match, white underwear, a brown leather belt, old size eight black Oxfords, and a black hat with gray stripes.
Okay. So a whole outfit. Yeah, a lot of clothes.
Now the scene showed that there was a massive amount of blood that had seeped into the ground.
This is very different from all the other ones.
Every other case, when they found the body, there was blood on the clothing, but not on the ground.
It was very clear that they had been dumped there, killed somewhere else.
This time, massive amounts of blood at the scene.
Killed there? Yeah. So they think, again, this is very different, but like you said, very clear that he was killed there, not dumped there.
This is different. It's weird. And he was also dismembered there, which is like, whoa.
Well, maybe whoever this was was getting so confident because they hadn't been caught yet that they were like, eh, I might as well just up my game a little here.
Well, and that's the thing. You would think that, but this is a more isolated place than what the other ones are normally found.
So it's like he took a step backwards. Hmm.
But then, so this is just not, it wasn't found in the, it was found in the vicinity of Kingsbury Run, but not close to it as the other ones were.
The other ones were like in Kingsbury Run or right on the outskirts.
This one was a little further out, like in the woods.
So it was just a strange little, little change in the, in the system.
Yeah. Do you think that it's possible that whoever that was was going to be moved closer to Kingsbury?
That's what I'm wondering. And I'm wondering, is this where he does this stuff?
Right in the woods? Yeah. Like is that and he just like you said, didn't get to move this one?
Because that kind of makes sense. It's a very it's a possibility to me.
And is that the only one that wasn't found in or on the outskirts of Kingsbury?
Yeah, this one so far is the only one. And I think most of them are found pretty close to Kingsbury.
Yeah. So that's interesting. Interesting.
But he was brought into the coroner and he noted that the man was about 40 years old.
He was murdered by decapitation. This man was very badly decomposed and had likely been killed about two months earlier.
So then that's weird. He would have had a chance to move him, you would think.
Well, and this is what's weird, too, is this meant that this man was killed a couple of days at least before the tattooed man was killed.
So the tattooed man who they just found was killed after this guy.
And that's weird because he had time to move the tattooed guy.
And the tattooed guy was out in the open kind of thing and he moved him.
So it's not like he switched. It's not like this is a sudden switch.
It's like, when was this guy? It's a very weird scenario.
But like we said, the scene is different.
It's more isolated. He was killed at the scene.
What's going on here? But September 10th night and again, no leads for this one.
No identification. September 10th, 1936, 25 year old Jerry Harris was just enjoying a quiet moment sitting next to some water in Kingsbury Run.
I say some water because I don't really know what the description of this would be.
It's not a river. It's not a creek. It's not a pond.
It's just a giant stagnant body of dirty water next to some mud piles.
It's a something. Essentially, it's water.
Some water. I think there's water in there somewhere.
There you go. In the mud. But not super chill to hang out, but Jerry was hanging out.
Like, he was fine. Whenever I'm sitting by some water, I've usually had a day.
Yeah, so I think, and he was waiting. He said, this will do.
He said, you know what, this is water. Water.
And you know what, he said later he was waiting for a freight train to take him to find some work.
So I think he was just taking a pause. Yeah.
And he was like, well, that's water. But as he gazed out over the mud, he noticed a white thing floating in the water.
Upon closer inspection, he realized he was looking at half of a severed torso of a human being.
The torso had no head, no legs, no arms.
Police were immediately called and they sent the torso to the coroner.
Remember, there were no hands, no head, so no identifying this man.
It was going to be pretty impossible if he didn't have any really distinguishing marks or tattoos, which he didn't.
As we saw with the tattooed man, too, even that isn't a guarantee to help you out.
But what he could tell, he noted that the man would likely be around 25 to 30 years old.
He had an average build and he was killed by decapitation with what he described as, quote, two powerful cuts, one from the front, the other to the back.
Which, whoa. That also to me is like... What position did this guy have these people in?
That's what I was just thinking. To do one to the front and one to the back?
Did he do front, roll over, and hit the back?
Or was he hung up on something? Right. That's what I wanted.
Those were my exact thoughts. Yeah, it's...
To even have to think about that is really horrifying.
But he was missing part of his genitals, like Edward and the unidentified man in the bushes earlier.
And this one was a little different as well, where the torso was bisected.
Because it wasn't in a place that the killer likely intended to do it, because he had sawed right through the kidneys and the stomach, which is messy as fuck.
And this guy... was messy but like his cuts were pretty clean okay so this would be a weird place to bisect someone it just causes a lot of havoc cutting through a stomach is a no-no do you think that he wanted to create more of a mess possibly that's the thing it could and it could be that he just by chance didn't cut through it before and maybe this was not like he wasn't that perfect it was just maybe he just got away with it before but still it was weird So these cuts were, again, strong, precise, and not hesitant, like had been found on the tattooed man's chin.
And again, there was a strong knowledge of anatomy that was noted in the pathology report.
And he said this was a very confident killer.
Like he could tell these were strong cuts, no hesitation.
Now, one of the things that absolutely destroyed me while reading about this particular murder was that the coroner discovered and wrote in his report that this man's heart was still beating as he was being dismembered, meaning he was alive as he was being bisected and taken apart.
What? Mm-hmm. What? So he was bisected first and then decapitated?
Mm-hmm. Oh, my God. And the death was by decapitation.
So he was tortured. Yeah. Which I was... That one, like... Holy shit.
Yeah. Now, firefighters were brought in and they dragged the water and found the lower part of the torso with the upper legs attached.
So same kind of cut, too, right below the knees.
And it's just like the lady in the lake where it was like the torso was cut that way.
It's just like the other ones. And those were also sent to the morgue, but they weren't particularly helpful in identification either.
And in their search of the area, they came across, of course, the victim's clothing.
They found a blood-soaked denim shirt wrapped in newspaper from September 4th, and this shirt had several knife slices in the neck area, which is horrifying.
Yeah, like what? They also found faded green underwear with the label JW, but it didn't help figure out who he was.
So during the search, they were methodically dredging the disgusting water with their hands and hooks for evidence, which must have been next level horrific.
Yeah, not good. Meanwhile, thousands of spectators kept gathering to watch.
What? It got so bad that they were flowing into the morgue to try to see the body parts.
The coroner had to officially close the morgue to the public.
Jesus. So looky-loos couldn't keep coming in with no helpful intentions.
People are so weird. Like, come on, humans.
Right. Like, go get a hobby. I would say be better, but we know that we don't get better.
Like, this is the 30s. I could go back there and be like, yeah, guys, we don't get much better.
We're almost at the 30s again. We still suck.
And we still are not killing it. We still haven't learned to be better.
Nor. So they ended up – I always say boring.
I almost turned Canadian for a second. Borrowing.
They ended up borrowing pumps from the East Ohio Gas Company to drain the water.
And then they restarted the dredging through the mud again, hoping to find the head or hands.
But it was leading to nothing. Yeah. Obviously, by evidence of the massive amount of spectators, this victim was in a very open spot.
It's like the killer was escalating the theatrics of the crime scenes because this water pool was in the center of Kingsbury Run.
Not on the outskirts, not in the woods, not on a railroad track.
It was right in the middle. Now, apparently, up to 600 spectators crowded around to watch them remove these two torso halves from the water.
And the newspapers went wild. They now dubbed this killer.
Remember, they're the only ones that are trying to say this is a serial killer without actually using the term.
They named him the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
And reports were lambasting the police, saying they were on a path to nowhere with no leads and unwilling to see any true connections that everyone else saw.
Spot the... Lie. Exactly. Spot the lie.
Exactly. It was getting bad in the press, and they were really holding the police to the fire.
They were starting to be like, what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to actually get on it? Are you?
When this happens, though, it's like, yeah, it needs to happen, but it's also, it can sometimes create a situation where the investigators feel like they just have to get a suspect.
That's true. And they have to arrest somebody just to shut everything up.
This can lead to West Memphis 3 Gary Getchell.
How solid is the case on a scale of 1 to 10 with him answering 11 vibes?
Yeah. If you know what I mean. You know.
In this case, they started just detaining and arresting anyone they thought looked like they could physically carry a dead man's body or, you know, have a saw that could cut through bone.
Like they just started arresting. They were like, you big man over there.
I think you could do it. So they started detaining all these people, which this is a bad move because I can physically carry a dead man's body and wield a saw to cut through bone.
I would have just floated through this place completely undetected if they were going by someone who looks strong.
Yeah, I do not. Don't judge a book by its cover.
They also started the classic move of thinking it was people who just escaped from institutions.
Oh, totally. Obviously. Weirdly, none of this was working to turn up any kind of workable lead.
How strange. Yeah. Then only four days after the discovery of the man's body floating in the stagnant muddy pool at the center of Kingsbury Run, two younger boys discovered human bones sticking out of the ground in a field.
They told their parents and the police came to dig them up and they found a headless woman's skeleton.
And part of the skeleton was in a box that had been hastily buried.
And the label said LD Menel on it. And when they traced this, it was a Cleveland school teacher.
So they spoke to this man and he said, yeah, those are mine.
And they were like, what? And he said, yeah, that's a teaching skeleton that I received from my father-in-law years ago, but I didn't want it.
So I buried it in the field. Okay. Weird move, but wow.
Why couldn't you just, like, throw it out?
Yeah, I don't really know. Give it to another teacher.
But of course, what this did was, as soon as these quote-unquote remains were found, the newspaper had the headline that said, Headless body of woman taken from shallow grave near spot where killer has left six others.
No, it's just it's a fake skeleton, I guess.
Just a skelly. So that didn't help things.
It's just like everyone's going crazy now.
Now, it was at this point that they decided to call in some big guns to help get literally even one shred of evidence that would lead to this case.
They called in Elliot Ness, who you may recognize that name, you may not.
He was one of the untouchables who went head-to-head with Al Capone and his gang.
Well, shit. Eventually playing a pivotal role in securing Capone's indictment on nearly 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act and tax evasion.
That'll do it. Just a note, the Volstead Act, because I was like, what is that?
I know that. You might have known it from history class and junior high.
Remind me. The Volstead Act was what made prohibition an enforceable law here in the U.S.
Worst. So Capone's many operations were in definite violation of it.
And after this huge win, Elliot Ness was in the national spotlight.
But when prohibition was repealed in 1933, he was just kind of bopping around dropkicking moonshiners until his unit was split up and he was actually sent to Cleveland.
So this was during the torso murder case.
He was there. That's crazy. He sounds like a squid.
Well, he became the city, he became Cleveland's safety director in December of 1934.
All right. There you go. And he was not on the torso case initially until after this last body was found and there were no leads to be found, like not one single shred of anything to be found.
He had a reputation as a pretty iconic investigator and the mayor of Cleveland himself asked him to lead the case on the Mad Butcher.
Does he do a good job? I guess you'll have to see in part two.
I felt it coming. That's a really good way to end that.
I know. You helped me. That was good. I kind of did it on purpose.
I love that. So we got many other bodies coming your way.
We are not done. We are about halfway through those.
Oh, I think we are because I think you said 12-ish.
Yeah, I think we're halfway through. It's gnarly.
It's awful. And I can't wait to tell you about more.
And with that being said, we hope you keep listening.
And we hope you keep it weird. But not so weird that this.
Yeah, I don't know. If you like Morbid, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
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