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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.
And let me tell you, it did. I've been listening to it while I walk, and I am absolutely loving it.
I love all the different narrators. I love Audible.
There's more to imagine when you listen.
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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.
It's mine, not yours. Just kidding. You can have some too.
This is a cool, creamy scoop of ice cream wrapped in a soft, chewy dough.
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Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Alayna. And this is Morbid.
Minus the monster effect. Yes. So we actually started and got very far into this episode.
Sad face. Sad face, crying emoji. Before we realized that we had some effect on our roadcaster there, which is what we used to record this.
And it's an effect called Monster. We literally like this.
It sounded like a monster was telling you the story.
It was hilarious. It was good. And in fact, you know what?
What I should have done is put like, I should have saved it and I should have put a little clip of it in here.
I almost feel like I should. I could probably.
Can you get it back? Let me see. Okay, I was able to get it back.
Are you guys ready to hear this? I'm excited.
I'm only putting a little clip in, so don't worry, it'll stop.
But you have to hear it. Did anyone just hear my S whistle?
Did you hear that? Is that what that was?
It was a slight little S whistle. It was real slight.
That was embarrassing. Don't be embarrassed.
Okay. We all make sounds with our noises.
Okay, I'm not embarrassed anymore. I fixed that for you, so there you go.
Thanks, brother. We all make sounds with our mouths.
That's just what we do. That was like with my teeth.
I love that. Your whistle. Yeah. Look at that.
I am alive. Did anyone just hear? Don't be embarrassed.
I love her. I love her. Everyone's like, yeah, we just heard it.
It's so good. But yeah, we're going to start this over again.
But there's your little boop of levity before we whoosh, take you right back down.
Your eyebrows look really good right now, though, before we go all the way down.
Wow, thank you. I just filled them in. We love to hear it.
Just for a second, because that's all I need in my life is just filled in eyebrows, and I feel like, whoo.
I'm getting them for you from Sleely Taylor.
You are. You're a very kind human for doing that for me.
You know. Because I usually just do it myself every morning, and it's very annoying.
Not no more. Not anymore. I'm doing the damn thing.
Some self-care. Yeah. Which I literally never do.
John was like, what is happening? Yeah, John was like, what?
And he was like, I've been telling you to do, like, anything you want, like, just to make yourself feel good.
Exactly. He was like, you're not doing anything, like, weird or, like, crazy, are you?
I was like, what's happening? I was like, John, do you not like my eyebrows?
Like, you think I would take her somewhere for weird, crazy eyebrows?
And John said... I love her eyebrows. I know.
It was the sweetest thing. It was so pure.
I was trying to throw hands with this man, and he was like, I'm just in love.
And I was like, I'm going to cry. And I was like, I'm not changing my eyebrows.
I'm just making them filled in permanently.
That's all. Permanently for three months only.
He was like, cool. That's permanently to me.
Yeah. I mean, it's the best when you wake up with your eyebrows on.
You know, speaking of eyebrows. Torsos. Torsos as well are part of the human body.
So there we are. We segued. Transition. We got there.
So when we last talked to you in part one about the Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the torso murders, this rough, rough case, we had Elliot Ness coming on to the case.
Elliot Ness, I said it last time, something about your eyes tells me not to trust this man.
You know, he makes some mistakes. Okay. He makes some mistakes, and we'll see it.
He makes some big ones. He makes some- Big mistakes.
Some medium-sized ones, some small ones.
Huge mistakes. But yeah, I think he had every intention of really doing this, but he went at it completely wrong.
Because Elliot Ness is now lead on the case.
He was working with the prohibition shit, with Al Capone.
He was in Chicago. Now he's got moved to Cleveland.
He's the safety director there. He's been watching this case unfold for like two years now.
And he hasn't been working on it, but he's been seeing it happen.
He knows what's going on. And now they've put him on lead because the mayor is like, well, he's a big crime fighter.
He's famous. Let's throw him on it and see what happens.
Oy vey. So he jumped in with two feet, but he did it in the worst way possible, in my opinion.
He just came at it wrong. He just went full force.
He was rounding people up in Kingsbury Run, just interrogating everybody.
And this, to me, immediately makes these people not, and the whole community, just not trust you.
You are threatening now. You look like the guy who's just coming in here, banging down doors, cracking skulls.
That's not the way to do it. Yeah. If you want this to work, you have to be deliberate.
You have to meticulously talk to these people without being a threat to them.
Because this is a very close-knit community, it seems.
Yeah, and they're already distrusting of investigators at this point because, you know, they're living on the fringes, basically.
Right, right. So it's like, they're already not, like, ready for you guys just to come in here, so coming guns blazing is really not the way to do it.
No. Now, one thing he did do right was he decided to try to understand who the butcher possibly was.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They also, like Ash pointed out in part one, believed he likely had to have somewhere safe and private and isolated where he was able to bring these people, these victims, and he was able to mutilate, torture and murder and dismember them.
Because there was even one where he like froze somebody.
Exactly. And like you said, if he's freezing someone.
He's got a freezer. He's got to have somewhere to freeze them.
This can't be because initially I was like, well, this could just be the woods.
Like, you know, like and maybe he did do a couple in the woods.
But I started coming over to your way of thinking the more I read about this being like, this has to be a building.
Yeah. It has to be somewhere isolated. Yeah.
Because even when you said the thing about the newspapers, like how one of the bodies was found with all the different dated newspapers, I just picture whoever this is just having stacks and stacks of papers in their home.
Exactly. And it's not like he's walking around with these, you know?
Right, right. And that becomes one of his calling cards.
That's when you know it's a butcher victim, when he has the papers, when he does the burlap sacks, the shirts, the wrapping kind of thing.
Yeah. They also theorized, which I don't know why they theorized this particular one, and I'd be interested to find out, but I couldn't find anything of why.
They said that this man might befriend his victims for weeks or even months before using a large, heavy knife on them.
I wonder if that's maybe because this community is so distrusting of like outsiders here and, you know, interlopers that like they're not just going to trust somebody and walk off with them.
Right. So there would have to be some kind of buildup of trust.
Makes sense. Yeah. This isn't exactly like Whitechapel, like 1888, where, you know, it's a little easier to draw someone away because everyone, well, everyone now in this time in Cleveland, it's Depression-era Cleveland, right?
They are in a very desperate place. So there are people and there are communities that are going to be a little more desperate and a little more willing to walk away with the promise of possible money or work or food or something.
But I think it's like a little less than it was in Whitechapel.
So maybe that's what they were thinking.
But again... I don't know if I fully agree with that one, because I really do think, like, this is a desperate place.
These are vulnerable people. Yeah. I do think, like, with the right promises and the right kind of zhuzhing, they could get someone to walk away with them.
I agree. But who knows why they said that.
They also said that this person did show considerable knowledge of anatomy, but like the pathologist had said before, he doesn't believe this is a surgeon or at least a practicing surgeon at the time.
Yeah. He said he believed it was likely more like somebody like a hunter, possibly a butcher.
Again, very Jack the Ripper vibes. Yeah.
Now, unfortunately, having a guy who was used to working on things like the Al Capone case and prohibition shit was really not going to be the perfect fit here.
Mm-mm. He looked at this very logically, which I'm always in support of, you know this, but there's a really deep psychological component here that you just can't ignore.
Yeah. It's not the same kind of crimes as, like, mafia stuff, you know?
Well, it's like murder is not logical. No, and especially, like, random serial killing.
Yeah. You've got to take it out of this, like, organized crime world because this is a very different beast here.
Like this man is wrapping people in newspapers, leaving them in baskets.
Like this is not logical at all. Exactly.
And like you said, no rational people would do this.
No logical people would do this. There's an unhinged vibe to this whole thing.
And you need to place a certain amount of logic onto the situation, but you also just need to pull it back a bit and look at it from a place, like you said, that this man is ruthlessly butchering and torturing people At random.
Right. And leaving them theatrically posed for everyone to find.
There's no logic here. It's weird. There may be logic to places where they are being left or things that are being left with them or on them, but the act itself, no logic can be placed there.
So he started looking at it like it must be a product of, you know, the shadier parts of Kingsbury Run, the gambling, the sex work, the drugs found there in the surrounding Roaring Third.
And he said, you know what? We just need to crack down on the shady shit and then we'll stop the murders.
First of all, I think he's a killjoy. And second of all, I feel like he went into this like with the A game being cleaning up the streets.
Yeah. And the B game being find the murderer.
Yeah. Because I think his whole shtick is cleaning things up.
Yeah. I mean, this is a guy who was enforcing prohibition.
Right. So it's like he's got a certain set of rules and a moral code going on here that might be a little different than what's going on.
Yeah. Not a good time kind of guy. Not a good time kind of guy.
And this is, he's going in here with tunnel vision.
Right. And that's never good. Because this guy, this butcher, could be as sober as a judge and a father of six.
Yeah. I mean, look at some of the people we've covered with whole ass families.
He could be anyone. Or he could be someone in Kingsbury Run who is a gambler, who, you know, enjoys promiscuity and is dabbling in drugs.
He could be any of these people. He could be in the middle of that spectrum.
He could be anywhere around there. And to narrow the focus without any evidence to make you narrow the focus is pretty wild.
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Standard cashouts take one to two business days with no mandatory fees. expedited transfers available for a fee tips are voluntary and don't affect the service available in select states terms and restrictions apply visit earnin.com for full details download earnin now and take control of your pay why are there ridges on risa's peanut butter cups probably so they never slip from her hands could you imagine i'd lose it luckily risa's thought about that wonder what else they think about probably chocolate and peanut butter So the investigators who had already been working the case for two years were also not very impressed by his approach.
Because even though they weren't really killing the game here, they were aware that this is a unique situation that needed a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking applied to it.
Yeah. You know, like you can't just look at this how it is.
No. Because some men are bad men. Some people are bad people.
Of course. They hurt people because it feels good to them.
Not because they're getting some kind of reward.
They're just bad. And it's like, that's not logical.
That's not something you can wrap your brain around.
That some people just like to hurt people just for the hell of it.
Hopefully you can't wrap your brain around that.
And like, I know Elliot Ness could not wrap, but like we do need an investigator that can wrap their brain around the fact that people are like that at least.
He needs to be like teamed up with someone else.
Exactly. And you know what? People like Al Capone and the like do bad things always because they can profit from them.
Like that's how organized crime works. They're not just doing it to do it.
They're doing it for power. They're doing it for money.
They're doing it for something else that they are getting.
Right. It's not just for the hell of it.
And that is a very different beast. Exactly.
So that's bad. Now, the papers were still being ruthless.
As they do. About how ineffectual the police were in this case.
And the people of Kingsbury Run were really not impressed.
One, with how it had been handled before.
But also, they're not impressed with this new narrow-minded lead investigator and how he is openly clashing with the rest of the investigators.
I'm sure it didn't inspire a lot of confidence that this is going to be fixed.
Yeah, it's just not really working for anyone involved.
It's not really great. So they had to pull something out of their ass to make waves here.
And they were willing to go the distance, the police department.
At this point, we've had issues with them not wanting to believe that this is a serial killer, not taking it to that place, which is really becoming a detriment to solving it.
Mm-hmm. At this point, they are starting to understand that there are connections here.
And we really do have officers and investigators working like 24-7 on this.
But at this point, it's almost like too little too late.
Yeah, because it's been how long now? And it's like, yeah, go for it now.
Glad you're taking this very seriously and that some of you are really like, we'll see.
Detective Peter Murillo, who we're going to talk about in a second in kind of a funny way.
But He really does spend his entire life on this case.
And seems to want to get to the bottom of that and not everything else.
He makes some missteps along the way. But he genuinely, to me, at least from just reading about it, seems like he wanted to make differences in this case.
But after they pulled that last body from the muddy pool in the middle of Kingsbury Run, the torso, it turned up nothing.
No lead, no identification, nothing. So Detective Peter Murillo, who I just mentioned, decided it was time to go big or go home.
He's like, I'm sick of this just like floating around.
He was the longest-running detective on the case, and his idea was, you know what, let's go undercover in Kingsbury Run, see if we can get any intel from basically the depths of the beast, so to speak.
So what he did was he, quote-unquote, grew out his beard and dressed in old clothing.
You showed me a picture of this guy. You guys have to pull out your Google machines at this moment.
It's outrageous. And he just strolled into Kingsbury Run.
And he was hoping just to like mingle about with everybody.
Nobody was going to notice. And he was holding a stick with like some shit tied around the back of it.
Yeah, he's wearing a baggy suit. He's got a five o'clock shadow, not a beard.
Yeah, no. A bowler hat and a stick with a handkerchief attached to the end.
Like, sir, you're being offensive. It's like an old timey Halloween costume.
Sir, you've pressed an incorrect key. That is an incorrect key for sure.
I was like, my goodness. Yeah. It's just the fact that this is such, I mean, again, we're in the 30s.
Yeah. So this is a very different time, very different stuff going on.
But this is just so on the nose for like the stereotype that is like, you know what I mean?
Like the stick with the handkerchief, like you're going to stick out like a glowing beacon when you walk in there.
Like nobody's going to be like, wow, yeah, you're one of us.
Like they're going to be like, what is this guy?
Yeah. They also all know each other, so you're just some random fucking dude.
You're an interloper, basically. Like, if you want to dress chill because, like, you don't want to walk in there, like, suit and tie.
Yeah, like a detective. Sure, exactly. Yeah, there's an easy way to achieve that.
Yeah, walk in plain clothes, brother. Yeah, don't go in there like that.
It didn't work, which I know is shocking that it didn't crack the case, him doing that.
I didn't feel that coming. But he did interview hundreds of people in Kingsbury Run.
All right. He was able to mingle about with them a little bit.
Doing the damn thing. He was able to get some information about who these people are, what they do, how they know each other.
Like, there was some, I guess, good that came out of it.
Mm-hmm. Just nothing that really helped this case.
But I guess something good came out of it.
Yeah. Now, February 23rd, 1937, a man named Robert Smith was walking her along the shore of Lake Erie near Beulah Park on his way to check on his sailboat.
He had stored his sailboat there over the winter, and now it was time to see how she was doing after her winter hibernation.
So like Frank and Joseph at the beginning of this tale, he spotted something floating just off the shore.
Immediately, he thinks it's a big piece of driftwood, so he walks closer and closer to it.
As he gets up to it, he saw this was not driftwood.
It was actually the headless upper torso of a woman.
Oh. I can't imagine coming across these things.
No, I don't want to. He called the police, and this torso, which was missing its head and arms, was brought to the coroner for examination.
Right away, this site is further than normal for the dumping sites that have been going on here.
It's about 10 miles away from the previous site.
So this is at least something to consider here, that it's outside of the normal zone, which can be different.
When the ME looked at the torso, he estimated this woman to be about 25 to 30 years old.
The cuts to the extremities were made, in his opinion, by a very large heavy knife, which matches up with the butcher.
It sure does. But every single cut had hesitation marks associated with it.
Okay. Which he has had before. Yeah. So there's that.
This one just had more than usual, which is strange.
It's like he's having a little breakdown.
But this marked the first victim who was not killed by decapitation.
She was decapitated, but her heart had stopped beating before her head was removed.
Now, this is a different method. But it might not be.
Maybe she had a heart attack before it happened.
Like, this could have been... I'm sure cardiac arrest in this situation is not completely off the table.
I would not say so. That the decapitation wasn't the thing that killed her and it was, in fact, her heart just completely stopping.
Or something else. Maybe he did do something else and didn't realize he killed her.
Maybe, you know, this doesn't check it out as not the butcher because of this different method.
But that, coupled with the location being further than normal...
And all the hesitation cutting. People were starting to question whether this was really the butcher.
Either way, this is labeled victim number seven of the butcher.
I believe it is. Yeah. I don't think we really... I mean, yeah, it's further away, but... 10 miles is not that far.
And then also, he sees that, like, detectives are kind of coming into Kingsbury Run, presumably.
So he's probably just like, let me keep this a little bit out of here.
Yeah, and I think this may be just... Let's... let's make this zone bigger.
Let's terrify more people. I mean, that's what these kind of monsters do.
They want to spread terror. So why not open up this zone into a bigger perimeter that we can start scaring some more people, you know?
And I think the hesitation cutting was looked at a lot back then.
But if you look at it now and you look at a suspect, which I will talk about towards the end of this episode, um, I think it lines up with the suspect and it makes more sense that hesitation cutting was there, but it wasn't necessarily a confidence issue.
Okay. As in like, I don't want to kill this person.
What am I doing? You know, like, am I doing something wrong?
I think it's more associated with a physical thing that was going on with this person.
Okay. So... Oh, that's what I was going to say.
I hate when I do that. I forget the question.
That was the worst. I was keeping it in there as you were explaining something.
No, fuck. I lost it again. Jesus. Oh, no.
No, I got it. I got it. Not this particular person, but in general, when there are hesitation marks, could that also just be the sign of somebody getting tired because their body is exerting a lot of energy by doing…
Absolutely. Absolutely. There's definitely a lot of reasons why there would be quote unquote hesitation marks.
Like you just said, I'm disarticulating an entire body.
I have not done that, like ripped limb from limb.
That's got to be pretty tiring. I know personally that a clinical autopsy is fucking exhausting.
You are pouring sweat at the end of that thing, like pouring.
But just from like an energy standpoint.
Oh, yeah. I would soak through scrubs, like soak through them.
I remember that. And it was like, and using, even using a bone saw is crazy exhausting.
Which obviously this person did not have and wasn't using.
And if they were using a bone saw or some kind of saw, that's tiring.
And it's like, and if they're doing the entire thing themselves, of course they're going to get tired.
Yeah. And they've just killed this person.
Right. So that's going and chopped their head off.
So that's a lot. Right. And you're right.
It could be just I'm tired. Here's my first go at it and I didn't get all the way through so I'm going to do another one.
Right. Or it can be that there was some kind of physical thing where maybe they had – you know, tremors, like physical tremors that they were dealing with, that they didn't get the cut where they wanted it to go.
It could be that they were anatomically knowledgeable, but not a surgeon.
And so they had to find the spot. So it wasn't a hesitation.
It was, I'm trying to cut it at the joint where the joint is.
And I've hit the wrong area. But I've hit the wrong place.
So I have to go over a little bit so that I can get that clean cut.
Right. To me, that seems more like it, that it was like he was trying to get those clean cuts.
And so he fucked up sometimes, which is really fucked up.
All of it. But the press went into overdrive, and the pressure continued to mount on the police to catch this killer.
There were several different wild theories, witness sightings that were pretty bogus, because, you know, this happens.
They're going to get a flood of tips that really mean nothing.
They even had federal postal authorities provide investigators with, quote, a list of Cleveland residents whom they suspected of unbalanced sexual tendencies.
What's that mean? So things were getting invasive.
Yeah. I was like, what? Crazy enough, that method did not provide them their guy.
I don't know. Now, it wasn't until May 5th that victim 7's lower torso was discovered.
Oh, it was. By a man testing a swan boat near East 30th on Lake Erie.
He found it floating in the water, like most.
And unfortunately, no leads came from this discovery and they were still missing a ton of body parts from this particular woman.
But then June 6th, 1937, 14-year-old Russell Lauer was on his way home from the movies.
He was taking a quicker route home By cutting through Stone's Levee, which is an open field along the banks of the Cuyahoga River.
And as he crossed the Lorraine Carnegie Bridge, he saw something shiny under it.
And he was like, ooh. Because, you know.
Treasure. He's 14. That's treasure. So he decided to check it out.
What if it's money? And when he got closer, he realized that the shiny thing was in fact valuable.
It was a gold tooth. and it was still attached to a human skull.
But he hadn't seen the human skull because I think the way the sun was hitting it, it was just gleaming on the skull too.
So once again, cops are called. They dig the skull out of the soil, and they find that it is indeed detached from the rest of the body.
More digging revealed the rest of the skeleton's remains in a, quote, dirty, greasy burlap bag, saturated with a grayish-white powder and held closed with a piece of rotted twine.
What is rotted about twine? Just like nasty, probably just like fraying, like just rotting twine.
You know how rope can look rotted? Yeah, now that you say it, actually, that does make sense.
Like maybe at like a marina or something, it's just like old, rotting.
Like moldy and shit. Yeah, it just looks like it's nasty.
At first, I was like, how can twine even be rotted?
And now I'm like, yeah. No, it makes sense because it's not an organic material.
So what the hell is it? Weird. But no, now that you say that, that does make sense.
Yeah. So it said the skeleton in the bag was actually a torso, which, ooh, wow.
Wild. And it was missing arms and legs, and there was, quote, a fairly large piece of blackish-gray tissue-like material and an undated advertisement and partial review of a show called the Niles T. Grantland and His Girls Review at the Palace Theater.
That. Yeah. Very specific. It had been cut from the Plains Dealer newspaper.
Okay. So newspapers are very butcher-like at this point.
Right. He is leaving very specific newspapers and he's cutting out things and putting them there.
None of them are really making sense. They're not really pointing to anything, but it is a specific thing he's doing.
It's clearly intentional. And there's a burlap bag here.
That's his shit. We've seen burlap bags.
What do you think of the white powdery substance?
That I don't know, and they couldn't figure it out either.
So I don't know what that was. And the burlap bag, too, it harkens back to Florence Palio.
They also found near the body a white wool cap with a tassel, part of a dress, and a quote-unquote toupee of black hair.
Huh. Now, these remains were taken to the coroner, who at this point is probably like, really?
Can you guys do something about this? I used to work on whole humans.
What is happening here? Can we put a stop to this?
Yeah, this must be so hard. You're only getting body parts.
Everybody's like, figure it out, dude. It's like, I don't even know how to identify this.
Especially way back then. Yeah, they don't have the same stuff.
It would be hard now. Never mind then. Mm-hmm.
But his examination showed that this was a black female between the ages of 30 to 40 years old.
She was tiny, around 100 pounds, 5 feet tall.
A further look showed that there was a lot of hacking and cutting marks to the vertebrae, which seemed to confirm the idea that this was indeed a butcher victim and she was decapitated, which likely caused her death.
Right. They couldn't be sure. Horrifically, that toupee they found...
That wasn't a toupee. That was the woman's scalp with her hair still attached to it.
Oh, my God. Yeah. I did not even think of that possibility.
Oh, my God. I was horrified reading that.
The gray, blackish matter found in the bag was indeed human tissue, and they believed she was killed a year earlier than she was found because the state of her body and also the significance of putting that review in there, which was from a year earlier.
Um, what happens to, does your hair, uh, like disintegrate over time?
It will like slaw off, which I know is a gross word.
Because of the slippage. Yeah. Like there'll be slippage.
It'll like kind of just slaw off. Cause hair is found a lot, way long after death.
Cause it's protein. You know, those kinds of things last way longer.
So yeah. So this was over a year and it was a full scalp of hair.
Right. Right. Now, still completely over their heads and lacking any leads, the police began really combing through now the missing persons reports in the area to see if anything would jump out at them.
Detective Murillo, our undercover man, actually was the only one to come across a particular missing person who matched the latest victim.
It was Rose Wallace, and she had gone missing in August of 1936, so the year before.
The gold tooth was really a help here, because they were able to look into Rose's dental records and see that she had some gold bridge work done.
Then her son actually confirmed that the remains were indeed his mother's, although she was skeletal.
So, tough. This one has been debated. They've never been able to fully confirm this was her.
A lot of it matches up. I think it might be her, but they don't have a full confirmation on it.
We can't definitively say. But this was huge.
Yeah. Now that they finally got what they felt was an identified victim, they could look into her life and see if they could maybe make a connection to someone who possibly could have done this to her or the other people.
So they started digging and asking around, and witnesses stated that Rose was last seen doing laundry the day she disappeared.
And that she was told by someone that an unidentified man wanted to meet with her at a bar on East 19th Street.
Somebody had seen that happen. That's weird.
Other witnesses they spoke to said they saw her that day with, quote, a dark-skinned white man named Bob.
And she was on her way to a party on Cleveland's West Side when they saw her.
Oh, great. A white man named Bob. How easy to identify.
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The town of Agde in France is famous for sun, sand, sea and sex.
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So this was all interesting, but the most interesting part was yet to come because Murillo dug really deep.
I like this guy. He's giving it his best shot.
Yeah. Like, he really is. Like, he seems like he's really in there.
He was really making, like, trying to form connections between Rose and Florence because they were in the same area.
Yeah. He was like, what's going on here?
So he found that Rose was also working as a sex worker at times, which Florence also was.
And Rose was also seen at the bar where Florence worked as a barmaid and waitress.
Oh, interesting. So it's likely they knew each other.
It would be strange if they didn't. At least in passing.
Exactly. Also, Rose was known to have hung around with a man known as One-Armed Willie.
Oh. Obsessed. Yep, and he should be easy to find.
And it was known that Florence also hung out with this guy.
Okay, so they knew each other probably. Which makes me think that this is Rose.
It makes me think there is some kind of connection here.
Unfortunately, this all kind of sounds great in pieces, but it adds up to nothing.
Like it really doesn't give them any physical evidence.
It doesn't give them any... real leads to track down like they couldn't find one armed willie like it just it's all kind of just he's trying so hard but other than establishing a connection between these two women they honestly weren't even sure this was definitely rose wallace so it didn't really pan out unfortunately but there was some like this optimism sprang up and then it was like yeah July 6th, only one month later, Private John Smith was patrolling the shore of the Cuyahoga River.
He was actually there with the National Guard who had been called in to calm the chaos that had erupted when steel workers went on strike.
So his beat was along the shores of the river.
And as he walked along, he saw something floating in the river after a tugboat went by, like it was in the wake of the tugboat.
At the same time, Private Edgar Steinbrecher, who was patrolling the West 3rd Street Bridge, saw the same thing.
He immediately thought it looked like a man's torso.
Like he was like, oof. No one called anyone yet.
Good. They both spotted this and just like went on their way.
Knowing full well that there is a torso murderer on the loose.
Not sure about that. But then hours later, Private Charles Demesne saw a burlap sack floating in the river.
And after hearing the other sightings from someone else, because they must have talked to people, someone called to report all of this finally.
Good. This was truly a chaotic scene. So they ended up pulling so many body parts from so many parts of the river that night, like wild.
They pulled out the upper and lower halves of a man's torso.
The upper half was in a burlap sack with a Purina chicken feed logo on it and wrapped in three-week-old newspapers.
Next to this torso in the bag was a woman's stocking, just one.
Upon closer inspection of this stocking, they were able to pull one black and white dog's hair and several short blonde human hairs.
Also, they pulled out of the river the left upper arm of a man, the right leg, the left lower leg, and the left thigh.
All different parts. And they all had hack and cut marks like the butcher victims.
They searched out a bit further and found a piece of lung.
Jesus. But the search had to be suspended until the next day.
When they commenced the following day, they found two hands and two forearms.
My God. Oh, my God. Luckily, unshaken, the coroner said, I got this.
And he said that he believed this victim to be about 40 years old, was a man, had likely been killed about 48 hours prior.
Wow. That's not the first time that's happened.
Yeah, there's been a couple of times where it was within 48 hours.
Yeah. And he had a pretty distinguishing scar on his thumb and his left leg.
Okay. Again, he was sure this person knew anatomy very well, but was a very brutal killer.
Actually, in this particular case, he felt like there was much more force and aggression in his cuts and dismemberments.
He noted that the killer had, quote, had sliced open the lower half of the torso and wrenched everything from the abdominal cavity.
He had similarly split the chest and removed the heart by a clean incision across the base of the aorta.
Damn. Like, what? Yeah. Come on. Like, this is the Catherine Eddowes.
Yeah. Of this case, where he just goes for it.
He said there were lots of cuts and wounds on the hands and forearms, indicating a struggle and some defense wounds.
I bet. And that he had used, quote, considerably more hacking than had been seen in previous torso cases.
There were more hesitation marks, quote unquote, at various places on the body, which makes me think when I was like reading this in the moment while I was reading this, I was like, this feels like some kind of like tick for him and not a hesitation so much, which was what we were talking about.
Chillingly, the ME noted that he also believed there was evidence that at one point during his torture and dismemberment of this particular victim, the knife had got dull.
Oh. He had dulled the knife during this.
Because he was going so intense. It started off sharp and did dull.
Oh. That is so intense. Like, that is, I can't even think of another word for it.
Do you think that he was, like, using the knife to also cut through bone?
I wonder. Yeah. There had to have been some of that.
Right. And just, like, this fury here. Yeah.
Like, very intense anger and fury. Again, the police dove into the investigation headfirst, came up empty-handed.
Yeah. Now, they were willing to try anything at this point.
They were really pushing. They were putting down a lot of effort, chasing any leads they could, but they were literally running into walls every time.
It's like this guy was a ghost. Yeah. I was just thinking, like, is this a fucking phantom?
Is it just a phantom? Like, is this just a wraith out there killing people?
Yeah. Because I'm also like, this is like a pretty small community.
Like, can we station some officers outside and just see what the fuck is up, Kyle?
What is up, Kyle? Now, after the constant bodies turning up in pieces at every turn, seemingly every other month, every other week, suddenly a year went by with nothing.
No heads, no torsos. Nothing. Weird. There was a strange report from a tugboat captain in the Cuyahoga River at the end of March 1938.
He reported that he had seen two burlap sacks floating in the river, and he had tried to get them, but he failed, and they floated into a place where he couldn't get to them.
I'm unsure why after he reported this that the river wasn't searched.
Yeah, it looks like everyone just ignored this guy.
They would regret that. So, because at first, on April 8th, 1938, just as everyone was trying to return to their lives without the constant threat of stumbling upon one of these, like, gruesome tableaus, everything changed again.
That morning, Steve Mirosky was strolling along the shore of the Cuyahoga River to go visit his friend Joe.
And this was very close to where the last victim had been discovered.
And as he looked into the water, he noticed something in the water near a storm drain.
He thought it was a large fish at first, but looking closer, he saw it was actually the bottom part of a human leg.
The police are called again. They're like, not over yet.
They're like, oh, good. And they searched, but found no other body parts in the river.
So the bottom half of the leg was taken to the coroner, who at this point must have been like, that's a leg.
Really? I can tell you that's a human leg.
That's all I got. But he did... I just hit my microphone.
I'm sorry, everybody. I'm getting really into this.
But he did say that he saw it and he said it was white and delicate and distinctly feminine.
Okay. So he was able to tell you that. He's like, that's what I've got for you today.
That's all I've got. Doing whatever he could to make this some kind of valuable piece of evidence, he did end up finding six long blonde hairs stuck to the leg.
So, this time he said the knife marks did appear to be more crude and indicated that this was a rushed job to him.
It was not clean, not as precise as the others.
But he said, without anything else, I can't really give you a whole picture here.
What do I have? Because he's like, maybe he just was really quick on this one part.
Right. Now, as this is happening, the police are still fighting within themselves because no one can put their ego away for the sake of one of the most gruesome serial killer cases ever.
Why is that always the case? It always is.
So Elliot Ness's assistant, Robert Chamberlain, because Elliot Ness is starting to do his own like private shit because he's like butting heads so much with the other investigators.
So Robert Chamberlain came forward and he told the press that he was not convinced the leg was female.
And he said that the last victim pulled from the lake was missing a leg and he was a man.
So he said he was basically saying the coroner is not doing a good job.
It's also like, dude, he's been able to identify how many bodies thus far.
And also, what knowledge do you have to say that about a leg?
But about a bottom half of a leg. Like, sir, it's not even a whole ass leg.
Like knee down. Are you kidding me? Right.
This also is not going to make you any friends.
No. You're already openly clashing with these, like, the investigators.
Like, now you're going after the Emmy. So things got made worse for Elliot Ness and his cronies there.
Good. When May 2nd, more human remains were pulled from the West 3rd Street Bridge.
Not good. A human thigh and a burlap sack with wheel brand potatoes stamped on it were discovered.
When the bag was opened, there were two halves of a torso.
Here he is again, folks. Two halves? Oh, yeah.
He cuts the torsos in half. He bisects. Okay.
A left foot and a left thigh. The coroner determined these were also female remains, and the foot matched the bottom half of the leg that they were arguing over.
Ha, says the coroner. Seriously? He was now able to get a bigger picture of this victim because he was like, this is awful, but now I have a better picture because I have more parts.
He was able to see more about their death and he estimated she was killed within the week before she was found in the water.
So he is ramping the fuck up. He's going for it.
Again, there were more of those hesitation marks on the various parts of the body.
He reported they were, quote, more numerous and irregular than seen in the previous torso murder.
So that's interesting. There was also a noted escalation in the brutality and viciousness of this one.
He even stated that it looked like, quote, and this is wild, so get ready.
He said it looked like, quote, the killer had snapped the back ribs with his bare hands.
What? Yeah. What? The force that it would take to do that.
The force and the anger. Yeah. Like just the rage.
How do you even do that? Wild. He believed the likely cause of death was decapitation in this one.
And when he examined the liver, he noticed that it had levels of morphine in it that would cause unconsciousness and maybe even kill someone.
And remember, that tugboat captain reported seeing burlap bags and everyone ignored him.
Yeah. He was telling the truth. These are the burlap bags he saw.
Yeah. Of course, things went cold again with no leads, no identification, or head found for this latest woman.
August 16th, 1938, four months later, three men were searching the dump for scrap metal.
One of the men saw what he thought was a coat in a gully, but when he jumped in, he was struck with a horrific odor.
And he saw a cloud of flies, so he was like, what is going on there?
It became clear that this was a pile of human remains.
This was a dramatic scene. This was the theatrics that we're used to with The Butcher.
When Detective Murillo showed up, he found a torso wrapped in butcher paper, then a man's coat wrapped around that, and then a third layer, which was a homemade patchwork quilt.
When they moved this package, underneath it was another package wrapped in a similar way and held together with rubber bands, which contained, and this package had thighs in it.
A few feet away, they found another package wrapped the same way, but this one had a human head in it.
Further search of the scene revealed a homemade box that was made from two boxes put together.
Inside of the box were the arms and lower legs.
This scene was definitely the butcher. Yeah.
They found burlap bags and a page specifically torn from March 5th, 1938 issue of Collier's Magazine.
So again, more of those like specific cutouts.
Yeah, like calling cards. Yeah. These remains were brought to the coroner and he believed this was a female victim, 30 to 40 years old.
She was in an advanced state of decomposition, which made this one very tough.
He couldn't even find organs, and he reported that he, quote, could not be sure whether the internal organs had been removed or simply decomposed.
Okay. So, unfortunately, there was no identifying marks for this victim either.
But interesting about the boxes some of the remains were found in was that they found out that they were made from two bulk food boxes put together.
And these particular boxes had only arrived in the area a couple of months before she was discovered here.
So she was killed much longer than two months earlier.
So that means she could have been killed and held somewhere else before being brought to the dump in those boxes.
Where was she held? In his house. She obviously wasn't preserved.
So it's like, was she in a freezer? Yeah.
Well, he froze somebody previously, so I wouldn't be shocked.
So this really ramped up the idea that, like, he's got somewhere.
Yeah. Like, he kept her for a little while.
And I wonder, I mean, obviously he could have been prescribed morphine, but I'm like, hmm.
Well, the fact that he has morphine, you're like, Yeah.
I don't know about that. And he's got access to a freezer.
Yeah. I immediately was like, he's a doctor.
Yeah. Of some kind. I kind of think maybe.
So these scenes were now becoming kind of like a macabre tourist attraction.
Everyone would gather and see what the mad butcher had done that day.
Yeah. Newspapers continued their assault on the investigators who were now years into this with not even a hint of a lead.
A Well, I mean, that's the thing. Years in and nothing, you have nothing to give this community ease or comfort.
And at first it was for lack of trying. Of course.
And now it's not for lack of trying. It's just like, but the Orleans Chronicle wrote, quote, the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run, a surgically skilled maniac who apparently has no other motive except a fiendish desire to dissect human bodies.
They were very salacious in their headlines.
Yeah. So at this scene at the dump, people would just drop in as they went by just to see what was going on.
And one of these curious onlookers was Todd Bartholomew and his wife.
They were looking in at what was happening, and they happened to be standing next to a drainage pipe.
And he couldn't help but notice a really bad smell coming from that pipe and not from the scene in front of him.
And when he looked into it briefly, he noticed there were human bones in there.
We have a second body at the same scene.
Classic Butcher. So when investigators gathered what they found, it was a pelvis, vertebrae, and ribs just out there.
And then in a can next to it was a skull.
So the coroner could get very little from this one.
He said it was pretty skeletal. And he said it was a male, 30 to 40 years old, he believed, and probably dead at least seven to nine months.
He did find that he had a broken nose, which was interesting.
And they found pieces of newspaper with him.
Mm-hmm. So although there was no real clues to come from that second victim's body, another interesting thing came from the first victim at the dump.
After figuring out that those boxes told them she was held somewhere after being killed for a while, they were also able to determine some interesting things about the quilt that her torso was wrapped in.
They put photos of it out to the public, which is smart, and a barber, Charles Damon, said it was his, but he said he had sold it to a junk man earlier in the summer.
So already we're getting more of a timeline here.
Yup. And they were able to track this junk man down.
His name was Elmer Cummings. And he said he sold the quilt to the Scoville Rag and Paper Company, which was in the same neighborhood where Florence Palio was found.
Oh, it keeps going back to Florence. Florence is a big part of this. weirdly, now that the press was beginning to see some movement in at least some aspects of the case, they started reporting it a little less harshly.
More optimism that the butcher was going to be found was coming through.
This is when more people started coming forward and saying, oh yeah, I found something weird or I saw something weird.
Like suddenly tips started flowing in and it's like, why now?
Why weren't you guys saying this before?
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Now, one man literally came forward and was like, oh, yeah, I found hair in a fucking tin box in a field.
Sir, you're just coming. Like what? Don't be tardy to the.
Yeah, to that party. It's not a party. Don't do that.
Jesus. And another found a stained dress, a stained slip and stockings that were stained and only reported them after the latest bodies were found.
It's like these could belong to a victim.
Do you think that it was just a distrust in the police?
I think it could have absolutely been. Yeah.
I think because they were being told by the media that the police simply just weren't investigating this.
So they're like, why am I going to give them my information?
It's still fucked. And I think it's a lot of...
Like we saw in the Jack the Ripper case, too, that people don't want to come forward because they don't want the police in their business.
They don't want them looking into what they're doing.
So they're like, forget it. Until they have shady dealings.
But unfortunately, these things still didn't move the case in either way.
The hopeful tone of the press and the renewed vigor of the community to bring forth tips and witness statements was quick, and it turned back the other way even quicker. because nothing concrete came out of any of this.
So a story from the United Press actually ended up writing, detectives admitted that the search was wholly fruitless and that they were as far away from discovering the killer as at any time during the Torso series.
So right away the press is like, well, fuck them.
They're still not going to get it done. Now at the urging of Elliot Ness, this is where it gets very interesting, Robert Chamberlain, the guy who unsuccessfully questioned the coroner's ability to determine a female leg from a male's leg.
Yeah, you gotta go, sir. He was working behind the scenes on kind of a private investigation of his own into these murders.
And in the summer of 1938, he made a shocking statement to the media.
And I'm sorry, this is the assistant? Robert Chamberlain, yeah.
He said, quote, they had a suspect under surveillance whom they labeled Dr. X.
Yeah. See? Who's Dr. X? Why don't we know who this guy is?
But doctor, that's the thing. Ready to hear a primo suspect who I think is the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run?
Oh, shit. Because – and just before I forget it –
Obviously, doctors have autonomy. No, not autonomy.
They do have autonomy. Anatomy knowledge.
Anatomy knowledge, but not the knowledge that a surgeon would have.
Exactly. It's like a different kind of knowledge.
Right. So it kind of makes sense. It does.
Hit me. So according to Elliot Ness and The Mad Butcher by Max Allen Collins and Brad Schwartz – I'm linking all these in the show notes –
It was soon revealed that Dr. X was not a Marvel character, like you might be thinking, like I was thinking, but was actually Francis Edward Sweeney, who was a 44-year-old doctor.
Sweeney the butcher. Yeah, there you go.
Sweeney Todd. He had grown up near Kingsbury Run, and he had served as a medic in World War I.
He ended up receiving a pretty gnarly head injury there and was involved in a gas attack, which saw him discharged with a lot of issues following.
In fact, it was soon after coming home from battle that he was suffering pretty severely with signs of psychosis.
Ooh. I looked around and found a paper that stated, according to the World Health Organization's Internationally Peer-Reviewed Chemical Safety Information Division, soldiers that were exposed to gas attacks during World War I could deal with a myriad of physical symptoms, but could also come back with apathy issues. mental disturbances, and anxiety attacks.
It is well documented that there can be very severe and detrimental effects after this kind of experience.
As a result of this, it was reported that Sweeney began drinking very heavily.
So heavily. I saw you Googling that a couple weeks ago.
You did. It all comes full circle. It's all coming back to you.
So heavily, in fact, to the point where he had alcoholic neuropathy, where the nerve endings in the hands and feet get messed up and he was in constant burning pain.
This made it difficult for him to perform his duties as a doctor to the best of his ability, and it frustrated him, and he took it out on his wife, but also others.
Huh. So he was using office space on Broadway Avenue, which was only about a mile from Kingsbury Run.
Office space with a freezer. Oh, not even the best part.
And it was right next to a funeral parlor.
This parlor was catering to the people in the area who could not get, you know, could not have proper burials or embalming.
Yeah. And the funeral director... had given Sweeney permission to work on corpses to practice his surgical skills and also to, quote, indulge a frustrated desire to operate by practicing on unclaimed bodies.
Yeah. So I'm going to get into the bit by bit why this makes sense.
Ness and Chamberlain. I don't think you have to.
I know. Ness and Chamberlain were on Sweeney.
So this is where they got it right. Where did they lose him?
They interviewed him multiple times. And in some of those interviews, it is clear something sinister is boiling beneath his very carefully crafted exterior.
Oh, my God. I am on the edge of my actual seat.
In 1933, in early 1934, his wife had petitioned twice to have him committed by the court.
And he was committed both times, but was released both times as well.
But these times he was committed, he was at the Cleveland City Hospital.
And guess who worked there as an orderly?
Edward Andrasi, one of our victims from the Jackass Hill.
Yes! Yes, that's where they could have met.
Yup. The year after these hospital stays, in the fall of 1934, his wife actually left him because he had been extremely abusive to her and horrific to her.
And she wasn't willing to subject herself to that bullshit anymore.
No. Interestingly, this was right at the time the original Lady of the Lake was discovered, in fall of 1934.
Dude. There are many reasons he fits the bill here, and I'm going to lay them out.
One, he's a doctor. Knowledge. And was a combat medic.
He has seen some shit, and he has likely helped with amputations a lot.
A lot of limbs he has either amputated or at least assisted in it.
He was a doctor, but not a surgeon. This is important.
He wanted to be a surgeon and was frustrated that he wasn't.
This explains how he knew anatomy, but was still kind of clunky with the amputation.
He had hesitation cuts because he wasn't experienced, not because he wasn't confident as a killer.
Three, he would have had access to morphine and other chemicals like the ones found on some of the bodies.
Yep. Four, those hesitation cuts were likely a mix of him not being a surgeon and also him dealing with neuropathy from alcoholism.
Yes! He likely didn't have a steady hand.
Five, he had an office. He had a home where his wife had left him.
He had free run of a fucking funeral parlor with a freezer in it.
He had places to do this. Six, he grew up near Kingsbury Run and he lived near there as an adult as well.
Seven, there were many instances where he was committed or people attempted to commit him because of psychosis signs and unpredictable mood swings and rage.
Rage. He is the butcher of Kingsbury Run, in my opinion.
I'm just gonna like have a little call you out moment.
Yeah. So earlier we were talking about this and I was like, so do you think like you know who did it?
And you were like, yeah, I think I know who did it.
I have like a pretty good suspect, but you know, like I'm not totally completely sure.
And then we sit down here today, and you're like, I am completely fucking sure that it's this dude.
I couldn't let you guys know. I had to keep you on the edge of your seat.
You guys? I'm you guys now? You're you guys.
You're part of the community. Gwerly girl.
Yeah, I couldn't let it go. She punked me.
And also, I had to get a few more things that really solidified it for me, and now I feel.
I feel punked. I feel like Sweeney is the guy.
Ashton? Is he here? Hello? Chamberlain was convinced, and so was Ness, that this guy is the guy.
Me too. Ashkel as well. That's why I said, like, method's not great.
Made a lot of mistakes. And Ness is going to make another monumental mistake that's going to take him out of the running for me giving shit about him with this.
Uh-oh. But this was the guy. But there were issues here.
What? There was no physical evidence they could gather to tie him to this.
I mean, it's 1930s. Which made it completely impossible to even form an investigation into this guy.
Apparently, there was a report that they discovered in 1938, and this was found by Murillo.
And it was originally documented in 1934, which was when the Lady of the Lake was found when this whole thing started.
A man named Emil Fronick said he had been invited to a home near Kingsbury Run by a man who was a doctor, and he said he was poisoned there.
What? He was able to escape, and when Ness's team caught up with him, he had moved out of the area.
He caught up with him in 1938. They tried to get him to find the house, but he couldn't locate it.
But he said he also knew of another man who had told him he almost got cut up in that home, too.
What? And he could never find the home. You forget that home?
Yeah. Trauma. That's a trauma response. Yeah, I was going to say.
There was also another issue getting Sweeney.
His cousin was Martin Sweeney, who was a congressman and was a political nemesis slash very large critic of Elliot Ness.
So they were worried that if they went after Sweeney, Martin Sweeney would just accuse Ness of quote unquote political persecution and that would go bad.
Like, dude, it's because your cousin's the murderer?
Like, no. He's just trying to get a murderer off the streets.
And also, it's like, I guess a dozen tortured and dismembered murder victims.
They just don't matter. They get the shit under the stick because no one wants to forego their political career, right?
I fucking hate when politics get involved in things like this.
And Elliot Ness didn't want to deal with the blowback because he wanted a career.
So he didn't want to deal with Martin Sweeney trying to, like, smear him in the press.
Fucking male egos. I'm sorry, but like, come on.
So things were really at a boiling point.
So many victims now and no evidence, even with a suspect that looks pretty damn great, they can't scrounge up any physical evidence to get a warrant.
So Elliot Ness decided to go big, and he probably should have just gone home.
Two days after the latest two victims were discovered in the dump on August 18th, just after midnight, Ness and 25 officers arrived at the perimeter of Kingsbury Run.
This is after midnight. This was a raid.
They had fire trucks flick on floodlights around the edges of the settlement.
They came with hammers, flashlights, and other crude weapons, and on the go-ahead, they invaded the run.
For hours, they banged down doors, tore apart people's shacks, taking in anyone they thought could be the butcher or know who he was.
He had a really wild thought process with this, too.
Like... What? This is... Because you're like, why?
Right. What is the thought process behind this?
Like, you know... You are pretty sure you know who this is, and you're just going to destroy people's homes for no fucking reason?
Because remember, this guy came from Prohibition, Al Capone, Bada Bing-style justice, right?
He raided and he went big because he was working with the mafia.
What are you even raiding for? Well, I mean like he was raiding with like Al Capone and stuff because that's really your only choice in that arena.
It's like you go big. But then it seems like he's like going through raiding these people's homes.
That's what I mean. Right. But here, I always said before, there needed to be some kind of finesse and some patience here.
Some real nose to the grindstone kind of investigatory work.
And he just wasn't willing to do it. And it's a shame because he had a great logical mind.
He had a suspect that if he just fucking dug harder and put away his own goddamn ego and own political shit, he probably could have got that guy behind bars.
Right. I know he could have. Why wouldn't you just stake him out for a little while instead of ravaging through these people, these innocent people's homes?
He was thinking that this must have been someone who is only going after people in the run.
That was his whole thought process. He is targeting people in the run.
So now I'm taking away his supply. By detaining these people, all of these innocent people in the middle of the night, I'm taking away the supply.
No, you're just displacing them. So he's going to have to go somewhere else and I'm going to be able to catch him.
What? He then ordered, and this gets worse.
How? He ordered the fire department to burn those people's shacks to the ground.
Oh my God. So those people were now homeless.
Literally burned about a third of the homes in Kingsbury Run.
Oh my God. In the name of catching the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run.
I just like that. You're a logical man and that's what your fucking brain comes up with.
As soon as I read this, I was like, my guy, there's no coming back from this one.
You could have had it. I don't understand the thought process.
You could have had it. What? He zigged when he should have zagged so hard the other way.
When you didn't get rid of a place for him to hunt people, but now these people are all displaced and way easier to hunt.
Exactly. You've just made them even more vulnerable.
What the fuck? Yeah. You just burned down people's homes?
And this raid went on for days. That's disgusting.
And nothing came from it. Of course not.
Nothing. What was going to come from it?
Not a shred of evidence came out of them ripping apart people's homes in the middle of the night and then burning a third of them to the ground.
Nothing came from it. That's just a whole ass other crime.
Yeah. Truly. Elliot Ness looked like a stupid asshole in this instance.
I don't even... Like, words don't even describe what he looked like.
And honestly, the critique is warranted.
This was the stupidest move for a very smart guy.
And that's what's really, like, really frustrating in this is... Wow.
Dude, like, you had him. Francis Sweeney is the guy.
Yeah. He is the guy. And it's like, you had him.
You just had to put some shit aside. You had to work a little harder.
You had to... It just... But as if the police were not already looking like incompetent rookies, this just sealed the deal for them.
It really sealed Ness's reputation. It ruined any positive thing he had done before this.
It was a major mistake. And what makes it worse is it seemed like he and Chamberlain were really on the right track with Sweeney.
But again, they just let that political shit sit in the way.
And instead, they just do this. They had so many contacts with Sweeney and were so close to nabbing him.
They interviewed him a ton. Right. At one point, they were able to keep him in a hotel room for like days.
And it's like, if you're getting closer and closer and closer, just keep fucking going.
And what's frustrating is Francis Sweeney was the type who liked that Elliot Ness was paying attention to him.
Right. Like, he was very much that kind of guy.
He would have fucked up at some point. So he would have fucked up.
You could have used that hubris and you would have been able to turn it against him.
But instead, you just destroyed people's homes and displaced them.
But again, you just went like... crush, smash, like, I'll just take away his supply.
What? What does that even mean? Like, this isn't cocaine.
This is a home. Exactly. Like, these are people.
They're not a supply. Like, what the fuck?
Whose idea was it to bring this fucker in?
Oh, so December 1938, Detective Murillo got word that a Cleveland postal inspector had found a letter, and it was in the dead letter office that, like, where they go when they can't go anywhere else, that was addressed to Cleveland Police Chief George Matowitz.
It was dated December 23rd, 1938, and this is what it said.
Dear boss. This is a very weird letter. It says, Chief of Police Matowitz, you can rest easy now as I have come out to sunny California for the winter.
I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance.
I shall astound the medical profession, a man with only a D.C., What did their lives mean in comparison to hundreds of sick and disease-twisted bodies?
Just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street.
No one missed them when I failed. My last case was successful.
I now know the feeling of Thoreau and other pioneers.
Right now I have a volunteer who will absolutely prove my theory.
They call me mad and a butcherer, but the truth will be out.
I've failed, but once here, the body has not been found and never will be.
But the head minus the features is buried on Century Boulevard between Westard and Crenshaw.
I feel it my duty to dispose of the bodies as I do.
It is God's will not to let them suffer.
X. That sounds like Sweeney. So he went straight to the press with this and was vocally convinced it was real.
He even contacted authorities in Los Angeles, but there was no head where he said there was.
There was no leads. Nothing came out of this.
It was pretty widely determined to just be a hoax a la Jack the Ripper.
Unfortunately, after nothing came out of it, even Detective Murillo had to admit it was probably bullshit.
Probably a hoax. For years, the officers that have been on the case since the beginning continue to work and try to catch the butcher, like day and night.
And they literally never came close, unless it was Sweeney.
Sweeney, excuse me. That was the only time that they came close.
But Detective Murillo never stopped trying.
It actually began to really take a toll on him physically and emotionally.
And in 1942, his family even said he was just not there.
He was always thinking about the case, how to solve it.
And that year, the department started taking him off the case bit by bit.
Just got dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, until he was taken off of it completely in October of that year.
That's sad. So he actually turned in his last official report on the case in March 1943, but he said he would never give up his work on the torso murders and said as long as the killer is alive and out there, he will be caught.
In 1942, Elliot Nest resigned from his position in Cleveland.
Yeah, get fucked. After a hit and run where no one was actually hurt, but he was inebriated and he tried to cover it up.
So he had to resign. Elliot was inebriated.
Yeah. Pot meet kettle. Exactly. Are you shitting me?
Yeah. I fucking hate this guy. He was inebriated.
I fucking hate him. And he got a job in Washington, D.C. after that.
Shocking. Hit someone with your car while inebriated and go on over to D.C.
Yeah. Even then, Sweeney continued to contact Elliot Ness, sending him weird and cryptic postcards.
Yeah. He was the fucking dude. Yeah. The department's last interview with Sweeney was in 1938, and interestingly, this was the last year they found victims associated with the butcher.
Even more interesting was the fact that this was also the year that Sweeney checked himself into an institution in Dayton.
It was Sweeney, guys. Where he ended up being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
He died in 1964 and was sending postcards to Elliot Ness until the very end.
Yeah, it was Sweeney. The times, like, they add up perfectly.
The killing stopped when he checked himself into a place.
Like, come on. Like, come on. They started when his wife left him.
And, like, one of the victims worked where he was.
It all just makes perfect sense. It does.
It all adds up. All of the pieces of the puzzle are right there.
Fuck Elliot Ness. Yeah, he doesn't come out great here.
Fuck that guy. He does not come out great here.
And he had such a, there was a moment where you were like, oh, he's on it.
And then it was like, ooh, shit, I'm down.
Yeah, that shit arced. Yeah, it arced a lot.
But that is the story of the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run.
How maddening, though. Very mad. That he was never caught, technically.
I know. It's infuriating. I truly think that it was Sweeney after everything you said.
Yeah. This isn't like a Jack the Ripper thing where you're like, this sounds good.
It's pretty cut and dry. No, this is, I believe this is Francis Sweeney.
Wow. Also, that was really poor choice of words.
I'm sorry. You're like, wow. But yeah. I'm just like pissed at fucking Ness there.
Not great. Wow. Wow. Wow. I'm just like shook right now.
Truly. But we hope that you keep listening.
And we hope you keep it. Oh, fuck. Sorry.
Weird. Like I'm shook right now. Goodbye.
Bye. Bye. 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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