Thinking Sideways: Cleveland Torso Murders

Also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, this mystery circles around a still unidentified serial killer responsible for at least 12 grisly murders in the Cleveland area in the 1930's. The murder's MO? Dismemberment of low-class citizens, making the bodies often impossible to identify.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Hey guys, the Thinking Sideways the podcast. I'm Devin, I
guess as always, yes, joined by hand, Steve, I guess
or whatever. My English name of case you're confused is chow. Okay, okay,
that just like let's just clear things up right there. Today. Um,

(00:40):
we're continuing on our series of Halloween mysteries, and I
guess I should add the caveat that. Um, if you
don't already know about this mystery, unsolved mystery, it's pretty gruesome.
So as we have said before, squeamish or if you
have young children or really like children kind of at all, uh,

(01:02):
maybe this is not an episode for you. And also
before we too far, I guess, um, this is a
listeners suggestion from Hunter. Thank you. We're gonna We're gonna
talk about the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, also known
as the Torso Murders or the Cleveland Cleveland. There's a
lot of different names. Yeah, this this was really difficult

(01:24):
to do research on because it does go by different
a half dozen names, which is annoying. Yes, I agreed,
but it does help with a copy paste issue that
we always complain about on the internet. Yeah, it's true, alright,
yous ready, Yeah, we're so we're going to Cleveland nineteen thirties.
We have to Yeah, in the nineteen thirties, it might
be fun. Roaring thirties. Well, by all accounts, it's a

(01:47):
city on the rise despite the effects of the Great Depression.
Um many many people are doing pretty okay. And we're
going to Kingsbury Run. So prehistoric riverbed running from the
flats which is the backs of the to about East
nineties Street. I know that that doesn't make sense to

(02:07):
most people, but I guess that people in Cleveland it
probably won't make sense. And it's not so much a
river as it is just like a kind Yeah, I
think that people are probably not going to get to
get more go out and google it. It's it's just

(02:28):
a depression in the earth that water flows through. But
it's not a river bed that are proved very attractive
to poor people back in during the Depression. Well, the
train and um any kind of rapid transit tracks still
run through it. But the trains did run through it,
and train tracks especially in the like right around the
Great Depression time. That's that's really popular with vagabonds and

(02:50):
sort of yeah, well just you know, people without a
home or run down on their luck because you can
just hop on a box car and get someplace else.
So that's it's a pretty attractive and as as we
were just kind of saying, I guess it's the people
who are not in that hole like many people doing
well again group, Yeah, they lived in really really awful conditions,

(03:16):
you know, like filth and trash and kind of shantytowns exactly. Yeah.
And most of the people that lived there were transience
and they road box cars mostly to escape Cleveland winters
because Cleveland is not super fun in the winter, which

(03:40):
is a very cold place in the winter. Yes, I wouldn't.
I wouldn't want to be homeless or a transient and
be there. I I would. I would turn into a
snowbird and head south for the winter. You know me too. Uh.
And the area just east of the run is known
well was known as the Roaring Third. It was mostly bars, brothels,

(04:03):
flop houses, and gambling dens, which more fun back in
those days. Yeah. Well, I think that that's kind of
the like transient area, right, Like you've got like people
who are really really out on their luck, hobo has
lost everything, and then you've got the area where people
become really really kind of gray area. Yeah, it's that

(04:25):
like filter zone that people go through. So September of
nineteen thirty four is kind of when this whole mystery starts.
A young man finds the lower half of a woman's
torso thighs still attached but amputated at the knee, washed
up on the shores of ach Leary. That spoiler day,

(04:46):
wouldn't it like erie? Yeah? Sorry? Uh? And as as mentioned,
it's just going to get morgrosome from here. So if
that freaked you out, just stopped. Now. Yeah October it
is October, so are doing the creepy stuff that County corner. A. J.
Pierce noted that there was some kind of chemical preservative

(05:07):
on the skin that had made it turn red, tough
and leathery, and we'll kind of talk about that a
little bit. Yeah, sure, she wasn't just really in the
like sun tanning. It's possible, but in the thirties I
think it was more like don't han They were back
on the non kick. There was a search and they
found just a couple other body parts. It was identified

(05:30):
as a female in her mid thirties. The head to
this body was never found. The woman was never identified.
She is referred to as the Lady of the Lake,
and she is labeled as victim number zero. So the
one thing that disturbs me through and this this one,
there's one thing that disturbs me through all of these

(05:53):
and I know we're going to get into it, but
it's the head factor. The missing heads are the cree
epeist thing in the world. There's a is it. Joe
Pesci was in a movie that he had a head
in a bowling ball bag or something, and I kept
thinking back to that movie because it's just it's that
creepy factor. Anybody who knows that movie, they're gonna understand. Yeah, it's, uh,

(06:18):
the whole idea of just dismembering people and chopping them up.
It's just kind of just in general, Yeah, something I
would care to do, but apparently it's different tastes, you know,
you know, each their own or whatever exactly. You know,
it might have been that the murder had a sense
of humor though she had great legs. Yeah, all right,
yeah that didn't work. Please continue on before I make

(06:40):
a bigger So we're going to do that thing that
we do sometimes where we basically just list the victims.
There's twelve. We're gonna keep it short as possible, but
there are things that differ between each of them, so
please bear with us because and if not fast forward
like fifteen minutes, then we'll probably still be talking about that.
Just skip the next fifteen. Yeah. So John Doe number

(07:05):
one was the second body to be discovered be discovered,
but he was likely the first murder victim. He was
discovered on September five, and he was never identified. He,
like most of the male victims, was emasculated and decapitated.

(07:26):
His head was recovered, however, and his skin also had
the chemical agent that had caused it to become red
and leathery. The next one is probably it was the
first body found, but probably the second victim, and he
was found also September five. He was found like nine

(07:48):
meters thirty feet away from John Doe one. He had
also been decapitated and emasculated, and he was identified, which
is rare. Next up is Florence Eneviev. Wait, what was
the name of the last Oh gosh, I'm sorry. It
was Edward anders and Andersey. Yeah, he had a name there.

(08:12):
He was identified, So I wanted to make sure we come. Yes. Uh,
Florence Genevieve Plelio. She was found on January and February seven.
Her body had been dismembered fully, uh, and her head

(08:35):
was never found. It's not clear how they identified her.
That's a good point. I mean, maybe she had tattoos
or something. I think that they correlated some missing person reports.
I don't think she had tattoos, but I think that
it was a missing report, missing person report, if I
remember correctly. And that's the hard part. There's so many

(08:56):
of these people that I'm trying to, you know, rattle
through the card catalog of my brain. But I think
that is how they figured out who she was. So
then John Doe three, this is that particularly disturbing one.
He was the fifth body to be found. Fourth victim, Yeah,
July of dismembered while alive. Yeah, lucky guy. I'm not

(09:23):
sure if this killer drug victims or not, if they
were out. I don't think anybody knows anything about the victims.
Actually I do know that. Um, are you going to
talk about the medical examiners that are involved in this case?
By chance? A little? Okay? Because I can't remember the name,

(09:44):
and maybe you do of the second examiner that came
in near the end of things, but he somehow seemed
to have figured out that there was some kind of
chemical in their system, or at least in one of
the victims, but he couldn't figure out if was because
that person was drugged or if they were a junkie

(10:04):
for lack of a better term. And the fact that
that person's arms were never found to tell if they
had injection points repetitive made it hard. So we don't
know if they were being drugged or not. Well, there's
and there's a lot of kind of stuff about the
corners and how thorough and John Doe three is the

(10:33):
only victim that was found on the west side of Cleveland.
I guess it's my only worth mentioning. John do number
two was the fourth victim to be found, fifth victim
to be murdered. I know, it's a little wonky. It's
hard with these guys. Well this is well, the discovery
dates are the hard part. Yeah, John Do number two,

(10:54):
he was the fourth discovered body five victim. And this
is this is because of the discovery dates. Yeah, it's hard.
I'm I've ordered them by murder date. But I think
It's also important to mention the discovery date because John
Doe number two was discovered before John No. Number three.

(11:15):
Though John Doe number three was murdered before John Doe
number two. That makes sense. They're numbered by discovery date.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will make a real goldburger machine. Yeah,
it doesn't really matter too much. But he was decapitated
while alive as well, and his head was recovered. He

(11:37):
also was had some interesting little bits about him. He
was estimated to be in his mid twenties and had
six unusual tattoos on his body. One included the names
Helen and Paul, and the other had initials W C G.
And his undershorts bore a laundry mark that had his

(11:57):
initials right like in that time, I'm you would write
your initials or your name in your laundry. So if
you were all going in on one bulk laundry order, yeah, absolutely,
And the initials were J D. And since they found
his head, they did what's called the death mask, which
I think we've talked about a little bit, but they

(12:17):
cast the face and they recreate what it might have
looked like alive, and they publicized photos of that apparently
those things that those things are still laying around somewhere
in Cleveland too. Yeah, So despite the fact that they
circulated the death mask and on his unusual tattoos, this
this John Doe was clearly since he's a John Doe

(12:37):
was still never identified. Maybe j d stood for John Doe,
maybe it stood for John Dillinger. There could have been
a lot of things. But they call him the tattooed
man because he's he's one of the few that has
identifying marks. So but since he was wearing is he's
wearing a short, it's presumably was not evasculated. Presumably. Yeah,
I don't see anything here, but I haven't read anything

(12:59):
that's as he was. Okay, So the next victim is
Jane Doe, number six, who was the sixth murder victim.
She was the eight discovery. But um, they didn't they couldn't.
They didn't identify the bodies of the previous women for
the most part until later. So there are a couple

(13:20):
that were Jane Does. While the investigation was ongoing, there
were likely other Jane Does happening. The Jane Does get
a little out of order, actually they get a lot
out of order. There are going to be some more
Jane Does that are weirdly numbered and it's later. It's again,
this is based on not date of it's the confusion

(13:42):
is date of murder versus date of discovery. Yeah, and
the Jane Does are different than the John Does. And
part of that has to do with the fact that
a couple of the Jane Does were in fact identified.
Why can't we just use the Dewey desk fol system, right,
So this one actually is very interesting. She was the

(14:04):
only black victim. She was decapitated, but she was also
missing a rib and her head was discovered, and they
thought perhaps that they had identified her as a woman
named Rose Wallace. Dental work, you know, the like the
tooth records, which is what dental work means, was a

(14:25):
pretty close match. The police said that her son was
very positive that that was his mom. He identified her,
But did they actually show him the head. I'm trying
to think of what that would be like. Suspect seed head. Yeah,
I suspect they did a death mask. Well hopefully they didn't.

(14:45):
But well, but she'd been dead for a long she'd
been dead for here when they found her, and the
dentist who carried out her dental work. Who could like
look at it and be like, yes, that's my handiwork
and she was my patient died years before, So the
police never officially identified her as Rose Wallace despite so

(15:08):
that's why there's no official stuff. And additionally, her body
had been estimated to have been dead for a year,
but Rose Wallace had only been reported missing for ten months.
That's that's not a big so weird because I mean,
you know, a year, come on, that's that's a rounding thing,
you know, it's like ten months. So absolutely, yeah, especially

(15:29):
in this climate with all this stuff happening, he totally
could have been here. So it's likely that that Jane
Doe was in fact Rose Wallace, but we don't know. Yeah.
Next is John Doe. Four, John Doe. He was the
seventh murder victim, sixth body to be found. Uh and

(15:50):
only half of his torso was found nothing below the hips,
no head, no head. Yeah, so he did not have
great legs. He maybe he had such great legs that
the murder had to keep them. Maybe. Yeah, he almost
a trophy. Yeah. I almost wonder if he took some
of these parts back to wherever and reassembled him into

(16:11):
a sort of fat kind of thing, you know, maybe
some sort of weird no no, because that's that's a
really disturbing Stein Trophy wall thing. Yeah, we're moving forward.
It is Halloween. Jane Doe. Number five still grosses me
out in it a little gross. Eighth victim, seventh body

(16:32):
to be found, was found in the same spot that
the Lady of the Lake was found. And this is
like a year after the Lady of two years two
years later, yeah about and her head was never found.
John No. Number seven kind of typical body found no
head so they can identify him. He was ninth murder

(16:55):
victim and also the ninth found and they pulled him
out at the river. Now, that's one of the things
we haven't really talked about is and I think maybe
it is a little important for people to know. Some
of these bodies are found in fields, some are found
on the banks of the river. Some because they're found
on the banks of the river, they find some of

(17:16):
the other body parts because they're dredging them out of
the river. But it's really inconsistent as to where they're
showing up, and it's kind of willy nilly. Yeah, actually,
if you're but if you're the killer. You don't want
to be like you don't want to be totally consistent,
because that's a way to catch you. Well it works
for Dexter. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, Okay. The

(17:40):
next one is John Doe ten, who was found at
the same time as Jane Doe nine. He was the
tenth victim, twelfth found. Jane do nine was the eleventh victim,
eleventh found. Uh. He was a decapitated body. His head
was found in a can close by. She was a

(18:02):
decapitated female body. Her head was also found. Now let's see,
he was were I'm sorry, and they were found in
the Lake Shore dump. I found it and and it's
and they it's believed they weren't actually murdered at the
same time, though, I think again this goes back. Yeah,
that where they're found is that like the murder or

(18:22):
the whoever the perpetrator is dumps two bodies in one place,
but there's months apart between the killings. Yeah. So John
Doe ten was estimated to have died seven to nine
months prior to his discovery, and Jane Doe nine was
four to six months. So within the span of a

(18:43):
couple of months, this person dumped two decapitated bodies at
the same spot, at the same spot. But you know,
since since it hadn't hit the news that John Doe
X or John Doe ten had been found, then he
probably realized that was a safe place to go back to. Well. Yeah,
and the thing is, it's not as if the bodies

(19:03):
were laid on top of each other. I mean, it's
it was a dump walked into a dump. I know
that some of these it was it was his. Uh,
I mean they go to extensive roll them into a
rug and then roll that into a quilt and then
throw them in the dump. I mean, it wasn't like
these bodies were just cast out and blatantly naked human
being parts and pieces laying around for a lot of times.

(19:26):
Some of them are rolled up and hidden in things
like the can that you talked about that the head
was in. So these whoever is doing this and I
want to say guy, just because the violent nature of it,
But the person that's doing this is attempting to disguise
what they're doing and hiding the remains, you know, whether

(19:50):
it be a poor job of rolling it in the
rug or tossing it in the river. They're still trying
to to hide them. It's not as if they're just
laying on the sidewalk. So, by the way, did did
they like go through all the piles of trash out
there and see if there were any more bodies? I
have no idea, I would assume I m okay. The

(20:12):
searches were very extensive after every single one of the findings.
I imagine they poured a lot of resources into this one. Yeah. Um.
And the last victim, last canticonical victim is what they
they're calling them. She's the twelfth victim, the tenth body
to be discovered, Jane do eight. She's found in April
of nineteen and on that day only the lower leg

(20:38):
one lower leg, so like her thigh or her calf,
was found. And a month later, a human thigh was
discovered floating in the river west of a bridge in Cleveland.
Police officers, of course decided, oh well, we better search uh,
And they found a burlap sack containing a headless torso

(21:00):
cut in half, another thigh, and a left foot, all
belonging to the same body, and the head and the
rest of the body were never found. But this is
the victim that Steve was talking about a little bit
with the um the second corner who's kind of involved
in this case. He found drugs in her system, and
again there's not a whole mess of information, but we

(21:23):
don't Yeah, we don't really, we don't totally know. And
this guy, uh, we will probably talk about a little
bit later, was like, really there was a lot of
crime happening in Cleveland at the time, and he was
like getting pretty famous on like testifying and these like
really people and so how much he just sensationalized it

(21:44):
and said, oh yeah, no, yeah, there were drugs in
her system. But how much of it was true? It's
it's hard to tell. So they when you find a
body that's been dismembered, there's obviously not going to be
any blood left. It's all going to over run out.
How do you test for drugs? And I think it
depends on how when they were dismembered. This is so gross,

(22:08):
it doesn't I mean I think that blood kind of
thickens and settles and if it's not a fresh body. Um, well, no,
the way I the way I understand it I would
think about it is okay, Well, blood is the circulatory
system that pushes the drug through your body. But your body,

(22:30):
the tissues in locations, has to absorb that drug, so
it's absorbed into the tissue of let's say your liver
or your brain, or you know, whatever organ it might be.
So if the blood is all gone, the remnants or
the traces of that should still be in the organs

(22:54):
because they've absorbed whatever chemical that is or whatever drug
that is. Regard list of the presence of blood. Do
you know what I'm saying. It's like, I mean, it's
like ink and water on paper. I've got ink and
I mixed water with it, and I drip it on paper.
The ink of or the water evaporates, but I've still
got remnants of ink on that piece of paper because

(23:17):
the ink has been absorbed by the paper, though the
water is no longer press it. But I mean, I
think that it really seems likely to me that the
killer probably drugged all of those victims because as a
way too, because otherwise overpowering somebody and decapitating, especially a
man while still alive, well, it's not necessarily an easy
thing to do well, and not everything lass in the system.

(23:39):
That's that's one of the things I questioned about this.
The drugs in the system. These a lot of things
don't let they break down regardless of being alive or hut,
the copy just break down. And also, you know, I
think it's worth mentioning that these these were unidentified people
because how for horrible this sounds. By and large, people

(24:03):
didn't care about them, you know. I mean, like, if
you've got alone in the world, Yeah, if you've got
a family who really cares about you, they're going to
be really litigious and like really search out anybody that
might be you, like family, like a prostitute or a
homeless guy. Nobody cares. I mean, or maybe one person does,

(24:23):
but they don't they don't know how to really explore
that or for whatever reason, I don't think that we
can really with any kind of certainty say these people
weren't doing drugs like that just on their own, like
voluntarily putting those drugs in their body. Well, and you know,
the thirties were a weird time for drugs. Well, and

(24:45):
what I was going to say is, I'm not casting
any negative on any of the victims, but if you're
in what equates to a skid row situation and you're
turning to alcohol and hugs, to make the days go
by and to make them easier, You're going to do
whatever alleviate your pain. So it's quite likely that all

(25:10):
of these people were doing drugs of some sort, whether
it was what was administered to them by our killer,
or if they just went down and they found this
new drug that's called heroin, because heroin had just come out,
and I'm going to try this heroin thing, and wow,
I really feel better about myself. Yeah, I have fun

(25:32):
stuff out hear. I've never tried it myself, so I can.
I don't know that it's really actually fun stuff based
on the stories that we've heard. So it's fun to
start out with, but after that it kind of goes downhill.
There are a number of lis or like maybe other
victors connection. Yeah, there it's interesting. Um So. On July

(25:55):
one of nineteen thirty six, a headless unidentified mail was
found in a box car in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. Then three
headless victims were found in box cars near McKees Rock, Pennsylvania,
um in May of nineteen forty. They all kind of

(26:16):
had similar injuries as those that were attributed to the
Cleveland Killer or the Kingsbury Run killer murderer lots of
dismembered bodies were found in the swamps near Newcastle, Pennsylvania,
between the years of night one and nineteen thirty four,
and then again between nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty two.

(26:37):
That's interesting. And then in September of nineteen forty an
article in the Newcastle News refers to um this killer
as the murder swamp killer, which is the worst name
I've ever and credits him with I think it was
seventeen murders in Newcastle over the years. The and the

(27:01):
victims were like, what was inflicted on them was almost
identical to what was going on in Cleveland's Kingsbury Run,
which conveniently were connected directly by a Baltimore and Ohio
railroad line, which, as you will remember, runs right through
Kingsbury Run. But apparently the Cleveland detective Peter Merlo went

(27:28):
and ll Marillo Yeah sorry, he was pretty sure that
the Newcastle murders were in fact the work of the
mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. But these were just headless corpses, right,
you know, it's hard. I couldn't find a whole lot

(27:48):
of information some of them. I think we're headless corpses.
I think a lot of them were otherwise dismembered as well.
The railroad in question here ran twice a day every
day between the two cities. Um. And in fact, how
did we just say decide that we're saying that name?
Marilla rode that train undercover like all the time to

(28:11):
try and identify the killer, and he never never could. Yes,
it's it's possible, actually, um all we know. And then
in uh July of nineteen fifty, the body of a
forty one year old man named Robert Robertson was found

(28:31):
in a business in Cleveland, and police said that he
had been dead for like six to eight weeks, but
he had been intentionally decapitated, and apparently he seemed to
kind of fit the profile of the other victims. He
was a stranger from his family, he had an arrest record,
he had a drinking problem, he was kind of on
the fringes of society, and the police decided to not

(28:56):
link it to them. The mad Butcher of Kingsbury run
murder time. It was twenty years of essential well, I
was twenty years Oh yeah, I guess ten years twelve
twe twelve years long enough. They don't want to dredge
up that case they couldn't figure out right and get
the egg back on their faces. Yeah not not everybody

(29:18):
who gets their head chopped off is necessarily related to
this thing. It does happen, But I think that it
is odd that and worth note, I guess since I
did note it that in Baltimore just you know, a
box car hop away a bunch of people. Around that time,
we're also showing up decapitated or otherwise dismembered. So suspects.

(29:40):
This is where we get even more frustrated, right, like,
not only can we not identify most of these bodies,
and like we don't have a whole lot of information,
but also there's like two suspects. This is what this
is the part of the story the infuriate. Apparently they
had like a lot of suspects. They held a lot
of people in for questioning. Yeah, well there's only two
like viable, but yeah, they probably beat the crap out

(30:02):
of a hell of a lot of people. Confession. Let's
just say that police interrogative techniques at the time, we're
not at Geneva convention. Yeah, alright, so the first one
is X or frank adults all how would you say so?

(30:24):
In um January of nineteen thirty nine, the Cleveland Press
got a letter from a man who claimed to be
the killer and identified himself as X. He said that
he was in California and that he had been killing
people for medical experiences, experiments, not experiences, and he actually
referred to the body as quote, laboratory guinea pigs unquote.

(30:47):
And there were apparently no clues, but somehow the police,
I don't totally know how, it's super unclear, but somehow
the police linked this to Frank Dout, Frank whatever. His
last name is um and he was a fifty two
year old Slavic immigrant. So on August nine, Frank was

(31:08):
arrested as a suspect in Florence's murder. You remember she
was like victim number like three, Yeah, and sorry, he
had been already. He was in jail. Um, and he
died under really suspicious circumstances. It's not no, no, this
is not suspicious in my mind. But explain this. How

(31:30):
did he die or what are the conditions of his death? Yeah, So,
after his death, it was discovered that he had suffered
six broken ribs, injuries that his friends say he definitely
didn't have when he was arrested by the sheriff six
weeks prior. Uh. And also he hung himself. Okay, do

(31:50):
you have the details about him and the hanging. I
gotta be honest with you. I just skimmed right over
that because I didn't want to even think about. Here's
the thing was. Evidently Frank was five ft nine and
he was in a cell that had a ceiling that
from Florida ceiling was five ft seven inches, and and

(32:11):
he hung himself. Now I thought I thought the ceiling
was higher than that, but the nail he was five
seven in the sea and the room was five nine.
You're right, I got it backwards. But it's a two
inch span, which is really really hard to hang yourself from.
I didn't hang himself from the ceiling, though, I mean
the ceiling. What I understood is that the nail or

(32:32):
whatever it is that hung himself, I'm protruded from the wall,
and that was five ft seven inches from the floor,
and that he was, and that he was five nine. Okay,
still possible to hang yourself from that, because I's forgot
the five extremely difficult. Someone bends their legs and they
are suspended, but this. This is a very suspicious hanging,

(32:54):
is what I'm getting at. What people have actually hung
themselves and some of their circumstances. But also remember five
ft nine is the distance from the floor to the
top of his head, not to his neck, right, not
to his neck, So he actually had a few inches
of play there to hang himself on that peg or
whatever he hung himself on. He could have done it, yeah,
but they were determined to kill it. I don't. I mean,
I'm suspicious, tokay, thank you. That's what I'm getting at

(33:16):
is it's a very serioious hanging. Yeah, and you know,
suicide and suspicious suicide. That's where I'm heading. What plays
into this too is the fact that he apparently confessed
to killing her in self defense six broken ribs wouldn't
be yeah, and then a week before his hanging recanted

(33:37):
and said no, actually I didn't, and in fact said
that he had been beaten into submission to confessing by
the police. Yeah. And then he killed himself apparently after
he said, oh no, the police made me that. Um. Yeah,
So that's a little suspicious to me. Suspicious, Yeah, it

(33:59):
doesn't seem like the not him not being guilty way right,
So we're gonna move on to somebody who has a
lot of suspicious stuff in the opposite way. Dr Francis E. Sweeney.
Sweeney not related to Sweeney Todd. I don't know. Maybe
he might be actually be the inspiration for the play. Yeah,
except that he's like way too late. Yeah, well there's that. Yeah.

(34:22):
So he worked during World War One in a medical
unit that conducted amputations in the field. He was later
personally interviewed by Elliott ness Man, who is a bit
of a character in himself. He um oversaw the official
investigation of the killings in his capacity as Cleveland's safety director,

(34:47):
which safety director at that point was like leader of prohibition,
not actually like any real police stuff. Yeah, it's hard
to say exactly how involved next really hard to say
it is. What is own is that ness got really
obsessed with this investigation at length. He cut it, and
he cut some grief for the fact that the one

(35:09):
offered so long without. Yeah, so it's it's a bit
of a mystery. In terms of his actual involvement. I
will say that Elliott nest did go on to become
al Capones literal nemesis, because this is real life and
this is a real story and that really happened. It
actually happened. The thing about Ness and his involvement is

(35:33):
depending on the iteration that you read. Some of them
say that Ness was involved at the ground roots level
all the time, and some say, oh, no, he didn't
have anything to do with it except press releases and
yelling and other cops to figure it out. Let's be
fair here, Like this is this comes almost straight from Wikipedia, right,

(35:53):
So you read through the Torso murders slash mad Butcher
of Kingsbury Run and they're like, oh and then Elliott
now and you're like, okay, fine, I'll click on the
Elliott Nest link and like see what's going on. They
don't mention these murders at all in his Wikipedia. Nowhere
in there is his involvement ever made like it's a
footnote that he worked in Cleveland for a couple of years. Well,

(36:15):
that's not what he's really known for and not And also,
you know the thing about Wikipedia is people can go
in and edit it and descendants, members of his family
might decide that this wasn't his finest hour and they
just go in there. Whenever somebody posts something about this stuff,
they go in and they chop it out. Yeah, let's
I mean, I think Wikipedia is a little more sophisticated
at this point than that. It's not like anybody can
just go in and add things that has to be

(36:36):
vetted and all that stuff. But in fairness, it's a
little bit of a mystery in terms of what he
actually was involved in. And I've gotta I gotta tell
you that personally, from what I can gather, I get
the impression that Ness was consulted a little bit on
this case and basically was you ever watched the cop

(37:00):
show and the cops supervisor comes in and yells at
a bunch of people to figure it out and get
off their butts and blah blah blah blah blah. I
get the feeling that was his involvement, Like he was
not involved. He was, Hey, Bill and Joe and Bob
and and Danny figured this out and stop messing around

(37:23):
because I'm catching grief from my boss to not have
this figured out. And that was it. It's the manure
flow chart, right, And I think you know again, part
of it is he now is kind of seeing as
somebody who was involved a lot, because he did write
this book, and he did talk about it. But I
think that if you worked in any capacity on an

(37:46):
unsolved mystery of this kind of magnitude, you would probably
carry some lifelong stuff about it, probably anyway, the exposure
to it, so anyway anyway. But but it is at
one point about Ness and Francis Sweeney is that And
I know you're going to mention the postcards in Nest's favor,

(38:06):
I will say that Francis Sweeney seemed to actually considered
Nest very important to it's the investigation, because he was
he committed himself and I believe nineteen we're going to
talk about in the second and we're gonna talk about that.
But in the seventies, Elliott ness is grant or excuse me,
her daughter in law donated his papers to the Western
Reserve Historical Society wherever they are, and they found a

(38:27):
whole collection of bizarre postcards that were sent to Nest
in the nineteen fifties by Dr Sweeney and uh and
they were mostly incoherent, but they were They were signed
on one card F. E. Sweeney paranoidal Nemesis. So apparently
he considered Nest to be an important character in this
whole drama. Yeah, I think he did. So backtrack a

(38:50):
little bit from where show just went. Um. Sweeney was
brought in for investigation for interrogation and apparently they're like
polygraph tests existed at this time, and he failed to
pass two early polygraph tests. They were both administered by
an expert at the time named Leonard Keeler, who essentially

(39:15):
apparently told Ness, this is the dude who did it, like,
this is the guy who killed all these people. However,
Francis Sweeney was the first cousin of one of Ness's
foremost political opponents and Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, who had
actually been hounding Ness publicly for not having caught the

(39:39):
killer yet. Really, yeah, you're kidding. Okay, I caught the
relation between the two, but I didn't know he's case. Yeah,
So it's this bit of a like honestly, I know
I talked about this a lot, but it's a bit
of this like true detective situation where like spoiler alert,
like the congres Smith is coming in and he's like,

(40:01):
why haven't you caught the killer yet? When he's like, no,
I'm not done with the season, don't don't screw this up.
For me, I'm not done with the season. So yeah,
well what about it? What about our listeners out there?
I said, spoilers, But anyway, it's very similar. I'm sorry, okay,
fine whatever for you guys, just would hurry up. It's

(40:22):
like a year old I no, I apologize anyways. Also
of like a suspicious kind of vein. The killings um
stopped for all intents and purposes after Francis Sweeney voluntarily
committed himself to a mental institution where the postcards, the

(40:43):
aforementioned postcards were sent from. Yeah, and it might be
that perhaps he committed himself because he realized that he
was on the path to perdition and he might might
need to get himself locked up so he couldn't do
this anymore. And that's but the other thing about it
is is that Ness obviously felt like he had to
have an air tight case against Sweeney, and he never
did because I mean, you know, in those days, I

(41:06):
mean a lot of people got sent away or sent
to the gallows on as much evidence or less than
they had against Sweeney. Right, But he has some powerful
patronage on his side. He did, Yeah, he had some
some heavy hitters in his side. Of the ring, and
it's fair to say that the murders, at least the
ones that are like strongly attributed to the butcher. The

(41:28):
Mad Butcher of Kingsbury run ended in nineteen thirty eight,
which is exactly when he committed himself, and he harassed
nests from the institution that he committed himself to. He
died in a veterans hospital eventually in nineteen sixty four.

(41:51):
I think it was in Daytona. I'm not I'm not
defending Sweeney because I think Sweeney was kind of an
odd character. The things that I've read about him. He
was not straight in the head. But then again, he
spent he was in the war, so that will do
things to a guy. But one of the things that

(42:12):
we haven't talked about is that these bodies, when they
were caught up and dismembered, there's disputing accounts that say
that either a it was done by somebody who had
surgical knowledge or someone who had been a butcher at

(42:33):
one point and understood physiology. And then there's also the
counterpoint that people say, oh, no, it was just mad
slashing that happened to cut these bodies a little bit ahead. Yeah,
And there's just like one more thing that I know
Joe wants to talk about in terms I didn't kind

(42:54):
of like evidence towards Sweeney, and then we will absolutely
sorry about that situation. Yeah. So, Joe, I know that
you had some stuff about Sweeney, that there was an
incident that you were talking about where somebody maybe survived
the mad Butcher or Sweeney or something possible. It's it's
possible that this. Can you just real quick? Yeah, So

(43:16):
this is this guy who was a vagrant guy that
came through in the trains, just like a lot of people.
His name was Emil Fronic that's E. M I. L
H so Fronick. In November ninety four, he was homeless
and a vagrant, and he was hungry, and he was
walking up Broadway Avenue in Cleveland and apparently he found

(43:38):
himself and the details are scarce here found himself in
the second floor of the doctor's office, and the doctor
offered to feed him because he was starving. So he
started eating the food and then he started, you know,
since she was starting to feel woozy. So he started
to suspect that he had been drugs. So he beat
feet random the steps, got out of there, went down
to the rail yard. Terms. Yeah, and now I got us,

(44:02):
wandered to a box car and fell asleep and woke
up three days later, and yeah, and so anyway, this
guy decided to leave Cleveland, decided that was bad mojo,
so he went to Chicago, got a job, was a longshoreman.
In August nine, his story got back to Cleveland and
the same detective we talked about previously, Peter Murillo, I

(44:23):
want to Chicago to bring him back. So Mrillo and
another policeman drove Frownick up Broadway to try to find
to say if the good place, the place that he
had gone to, and what his doctor's office was. When
they got to the area between East fiftieth and East
East fifty fifth Street, he said, it's here, somewhere, so
he remembered that spot. So they got out of the

(44:44):
car and they walked up and down the street. But
he couldn't find He couldn't find the spot that he would. Yeah,
he couldn't find. It had been a few years, have
been four years actually, and and Nest interviewed him. Also,
Elliott Nest interviewed him, but they decided it didn't have
anything to do with the butch. But here's an interesting factory.
This is this information is actually I got a lot

(45:05):
of this from a guy I had not personally from him.
But there's a guy named James Padel who has written
three books about the Butcher and and this appears. There
was an interview in the July fourteen issue of Cleveland
Magazine where he talks about this guy a little bit
so um. He said that he gives talks on this

(45:28):
stuff every now and again, on the Butcher. And at
one of these talks, a guy came up to him
after his Torso talk and showed him a photograph of
six doctors, one of whom was Dr Sweeney, the other
the other six. One of them was this guy's great uncle,
whose name was Edward Perturka. And the six doctors at
one point had a medical practice together on Broadway in Cleveland.

(45:52):
And I got a map right here, actually, let me
show you. So. It was at the corner of Broadway
and Pershing Avenue. Is let me show you the map
right here, all right, So Broadway it's a it's at
Broadway and Persing Avenue now and and you can see
two to the right Avenue to the left forty ninth Avenue,

(46:18):
that's where the office was. So the guy that showed
him the picture of the six doctors also sent and
sent him a picture of the old office. The old
office was a two story used to be a house.
It was, it had been converted the ground floor had
been converted into medical offices, and then adeli had been
built onto the front of it, which kind of blocked

(46:38):
the kind of blocked off the office a little bit.
And so it's quite possible if this guy was walking
down Broadway and then he saw the side of the
deli and didn't even see the front of the building
at all, you know what I'm saying. So if he
had approached it from one side, sees deli, thinks hey,
there's garbage cans in the back, there might be some
started food back there, he went back there, back behind
the deli is where the stai way to the second

(47:00):
floor of the house, which was still a residence was,
and where the doctor was probably staying at the time,
because he was actually at this time of strange from
his wife because of his alcoholism and his erratic behavior.
So that adds a little bit of credibility to the
possibility that never one he was drugging, and that's one
way to deal with it. It's just to drug people
and then you can do whatever you want with them.
Another interesting point is that there was a funeral home

(47:22):
right next to this office, which apparently he had access to,
and in the basement they had you know that the
you know, the whole thing, the metal tables with the
drains and everything for dealing with the blood and all
that stuffs stuff. So it's interesting, possible adds to the story,
but maybe doesn't. It doesn't well nobody And then like this,

(47:44):
this guy, James Biddell, who I said, it's written three
books about it and and has spent more time combined, like
a thousand times more than all of us put together,
investigating this. And he says he's not He says he's
pretty sure it's a doctor, but he can't stay for
nobody can. And it might it might be sold someday
if if somedays somebody stumbles across the doctor's diary or
something like that, you know, perhaps it'll be solved, but

(48:06):
maybe probably not. So I want to just quickly touch
on what Steve was talking about, and it's this theory
I guess it was like in the mid nineties that
this theory kind of surface, and it was that perhaps
it was just like there's no such thing as a
single butcher of Kingsbury Run, that it was a lot
of people. There were a lot of crazy people there
at the time, and it was time. It was a

(48:28):
crazy time, and that you know, it wouldn't be so
hard for like stories to start surfacing of like, oh,
this person got dismembered and somebody to like, who's crazy,
be like, oh that sounds like fun, yeah, or somebody
like you know, if if you really, if you want
to murder somebody, and that's a great time to do it,
because the problem with trying to commit murder is there's
usually a finger pointing right back. Actually, you've usually got

(48:50):
a big, solid motive this way. It's like, hey, people
are getting murdered left and right, I can go take
care of this guy. Yeah, it's not it's not just copycat,
but you're using it as as a cover for your
own act. Yeah. And the reason that this comes up
is because autopsy results were um inconclusive on a lot
of these murders. I forget, we're a year old when

(49:12):
they found well, yeah, that's a big issue right there. Right,
and the original corner Arthur Pierce. He may have been
a little inconsistent in his results as far as Steve
was kind of implying earlier, not saying like, well, these
were precise cuts and these were hacks on marks. You know,
he was just he just said, but their arms were

(49:34):
cut off. And again, you know it's hard because like
after a year, like, can you really tell, well, animals,
animals have been chewing on the corpse, bugs have been
chewing on the corps just stay in age. I could say, yes,
we could probably figure that out. But at that time,
in the nineteen thirties, I don't think nobody had gone
into forensics into that detail to ever be able to say,

(49:57):
this is what tissue looks like a year later here
after a sharp n this is tissue a year later
after a no. I think after a year you say
the arm we cut off? The no, I don't know. Um.
And the second factor in this is that his successor,
who was Samuel Gerber, we kind of talked about him. Yeah,

(50:22):
so he gained a lot of popularity around the like
Sam Shepherd murder trial. He kind of had a reputation
for sensationalized theories. He was not he was not a
super reputable source, which he was kind of the Golden Boy. Yeah,
which is weird for to say about a corner, you know.

(50:43):
So him saying, oh, there were drugs in her system
for the last Jane Doe, like, who knows if he
was just like trying to continue to sensationalize this story
or what. Um, But that is all we know? What
why why we that face? Steve? Like what I just said?
That's all. I mean, that's everything, right? Yeah? No, no, okay.

(51:09):
So there's there's one thing that we haven't really talked about,
and that is on at least the first three victims,
there was and you mentioned it briefly, something about the
chemical that they thought had been put onto the bottle,
that their skin was red and leathery. I didn't say
there were chemicals. Their skin was red and leathery, and

(51:32):
according to some of the autopsy reports, they thought that
some kind of chemical had been put onto them. We're
going there, and I'm gonna keep this brief because I
know that this is just kind of a bit of
a footnote on the story. But I was trying to
figure out I spent some time trying to figure out
what the deal is as to what would do that? Uh,

(51:55):
and and trying to find what chemicals were in use
at the time. And that's that. It's just as we say,
a rabbit hole, as it was very hard to go
down and it it really didn't yield any results. But
I came back to I stepped back to more of
a simple idea, which is what what what do we know?

(52:16):
That's obvious that when you're hiding or getting rid of bodies,
would you put on them? And that's kind of an
alkali solution. No alkali because I supposedly makes them decompose
a lot faster. Alkali It breaks him down fast. Obviously,
I'm not going to be great at getting rid of body.
But a book on how to get rid of bodies? Yeah,

(52:38):
there is, and believe it or not, of all places,
what I'm about to go through, part of it I
got from the c d c's website. Okay, that's that's
that's a little life that you click on. I says
how to get rid of dead bodies. Okay, Okay, there
there is there. There's three things that can happen to
skin when it comes into contact with a chemical. There

(53:01):
is what is called de fatting, which it literally means
just taking the fatty oils off the top of your skin. Okay.
There's irritants which irritate the skin, which make a rash,
and then there's caustic things that would make you have
boils or you know, sores or something like that. Okay,
so those are the three levels. Well, alkali, if you

(53:25):
get a small dose, it's an irritant. So if you
think of somebody who's ever worked with concrete, their hands
are dry and crusty and kind of tough, and then
as they do it more they get worse than they
get kind of rash like. So that's the only thing
that I can think of is that, well, alkali is something,
as we said before, somebody would use to help break
down a body fast. So if they throw it on

(53:47):
the body and there's a big concentration of it, why
immediately just before or just immediately after death, it would
be absorbed by the skin, which would create the kind
of red, weird, leathery texture situation. Now, it doesn't help
us figure anything out, but a lot of the accountings

(54:09):
go to that, and there was a chemical board on
the body. We don't know how much. We don't know
how big of an area. But it seems you know,
when I say dispose of body and chemical, that's kind
of the direction that my mind went. And I think
it's it's it's kind of you know, I mean, Joe,
you and I were talking and Joe said, well, it

(54:29):
could be that where the body was dumped. We're talking
the thirties, we're not exactly ecologically frontly. Absolutely, that's true,
and let's be fair. I think that two of the
bodies that were found with that kind of skin thing,
we're found in very similar places. So it may just
be that, like the there was just crap sitting and

(54:54):
they fell into it and it was absorbed just through osmosis.
I mean, osmosis happens on all materials, whether alive or dead,
and that just had that reaction. So it could have
been as simple as that, or it could be as
a nefarious is where I was going, and yeah, well
I know when I get rid of the body, I
usually some smack, we're done. Yeah, So that's I mean,

(55:18):
that's all we know about this whole thing. You know,
We've got those two like fairly solid theories about who
might have done this, which bothers me because there's only
two of them. Two seems too easy, and I have
a favorite, I mean I was your favorite. I mean
the doctor obviously, Yeah, I think so. The signs are

(55:39):
too easy for me. Yeah, the doctor. Okay, I didn't
know what Joe brought up. I will admit the stuff
that you brought up, Joe, that you found in your research,
I hadn't seen. So that kind of corroborates a lot
of stuff about the doctor. But again, the way that
the police went about their investigations, and we've just got
these two main subjects. What if who happens to have

(55:59):
accident he killed himself in while being held quote included, yes,
air quotes, thank you. Um, it just seems a little
too easy, and I'm not sold, especially if we go
with the swamp murders and there was the what was
the other location? Newcastle? Newcastle? Yeah, I mean that that's

(56:20):
true though, I mean that you're having that whole thing
going on up there. But yeah, so Sweetie, Sweetie wasn't
a traveling doctor Sweeney. A lot of those happened after
he was committed before well they were befores and after
so okay, well, that to me washes him out as
a candidate. I think, I mean, I just like him. Yeah,

(56:44):
you just like the name because you like the play maybe, yeah, so,
I guess. Um. If you were interested in more links
to this story, um, you can of course check them
out as always on our website, Thinking sideways podcast dot com.
You may be listening to us there. You are probably

(57:05):
listening to us on iTunes. If you are, feel free
to leave us a comment and a rating. We love
those things. That's how other people find us, that's how we,
you know, continue to gain listenership, which we just keep
getting fantastic love them. Do we have a Facebook page, Yeah,

(57:25):
we do. We have a Facebook page and a Facebook
group which you should like and join, um respectively. If
you forget to download the show, or you don't have
time to download show, you can always stream it on Stitcher,
and you can always send us an email, particularly, you know,
like if you are the Med Butcher or you know
who he is, or you're a victim of Med Butcher. God,

(57:46):
I hope none of those things. Please, I'm so sorry.
Email Yeah, I don't know the email addresses as always
Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. And I think
with that we're done with this weird creepy thing until
next week. That is, it is October. You know, I

(58:06):
really regret that we're doing these creepy stories this month,
but okay, sorry guys. We'll talk to you next week. Yeah, Tulu,
and I remember keep your head. Yeah about you. Yeah,