The Killer Eliot Ness Couldn't Catch: The Cleveland Torso Murders

In the summer of 1936, the city of Cleveland, Ohio, threw a huge party. The Great Lakes Exposition, a world's fair on the shore of Lake Erie.

Millions of visitors came. There were rides, exhibits and shows.

And there was one exhibit that thousands of people lined up to see. Plaster death masks. Casts of the faces of murder victims whose names nobody knew.

One of them was a man found with six tattoos. The police hoped someone, anyone, would walk by and recognize him.

Nobody did.

He was one of the victims of the man Cleveland called the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. A killer who murdered at least twelve people in the middle of the Great Depression. A killer who was hunted by the most famous lawman in America, Eliot Ness.

He was never caught.

Kingsbury Run

Kingsbury Run is a ravine on the east side of Cleveland. In the 1930s, it was a long, deep gully crisscrossed by railroad tracks.

During the Great Depression, it became home to people who had lost everything. Men who rode the freight trains looking for work. People who lived in shacks built from scrap wood and cardboard, in shantytowns that people bitterly called Hoovervilles, after the President they blamed for the Depression.

Nearby was a rough neighborhood known as the Roaring Third. Bars. Gambling dens. Brothels. Flophouses.

These were the people the killer chose. People who had fallen through the cracks. People who might not be missed.

The first bodies

In September 1934, part of a woman's body washed up on the shore of Lake Erie. She was never identified. Some researchers count her as the first victim. Others do not.

The official series began in September 1935.

On September 23, 1935, two men's bodies were found in a gully at the bottom of a hill in Kingsbury Run, known locally as Jackass Hill. Both had been decapitated.

One of them was identified, from his fingerprints, as Edward Andrassy, a twenty-nine-year-old man who had once worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward. The other man was never identified.

In January 1936, the remains of a woman were found. She was identified by her fingerprints as Florence Polillo, forty-four years old.

Then, in June 1936, two boys found the head of a man near the railroad tracks. His body was found nearby. He had six tattoos, which suggested he might have served in the Navy, Coast Guard or merchant marine. That was the man whose death mask would be shown at the Exposition.

He was never identified.

Eliot Ness

In December 1935, Cleveland got a new Public Safety Director, the official in charge of the city's police and fire departments.

His name was Eliot Ness.

Ness was already famous. In Chicago, he had led the team of federal agents known as the Untouchables, who went after Al Capone's bootlegging empire during Prohibition.

In Cleveland, he set out to clean up a police department riddled with corruption. And he inherited the Torso murders.

The killings became Ness's case, and his curse.

Twelve victims

Over the next two years, the bodies kept coming.

In July 1936, the body of a man was found in the Big Creek area on the city's west side. He was the only victim found on that side of town.

Later that year, another man was found near East 37th Street.

In February 1937, the remains of a woman were found on the beach at Euclid. In June 1937, a woman was found under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. In July 1937, a man was found in the Cuyahoga River. In April 1938, a woman was found in the river.

Most were never identified. Of the twelve official victims, only two were positively identified, Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo. A third was tentatively identified through dental work, but that identification has never been confirmed.

The killer decapitated every victim. Many of the bodies were dismembered. Some were found long after death, which made identification even harder. In most cases, the heads were never found.

Investigators believed the killer had skill with a blade. Some thought he might have medical training.

In view of City Hall

On August 16, 1938, two more bodies were found. A woman in a dump at the end of East 9th Street. And a man on the Cleveland lakefront.

The man's body was found in plain view of Eliot Ness's office window in City Hall.

To many, it looked like a message.

The burning

Two days later, Ness made his most controversial decision.

On the night of August 18, 1938, he led a raid on the shantytowns in Kingsbury Run and the Cleveland Flats. Police rounded up the men living there. And then the shacks were burned to the ground.

Ness said the goal was to fingerprint the people living there, so future victims could be identified, and to drive away the vulnerable people the killer was targeting.

It was widely criticized. People who had nothing lost what little they had left.

A few days later, Ness sent teams of investigators across a wide area of the city, posing as fire inspectors, searching for any place the killer might be doing his work. They found nothing useful. But they did expose hundreds of families living in terrible conditions, without toilets or running water.

The suspects

About nine thousand people were questioned over the course of the investigation.

Two suspects stand out in the record. We are not naming them, because neither was ever convicted of these murders.

The first was a man arrested in 1939 by the county sheriff in connection with one of the killings. He confessed, then took back his confession, saying it had been beaten out of him. Weeks later, he was found hanged in his jail cell. His death was ruled a suicide, though rumors of something worse have persisted. He has since been considered cleared of the Torso murders.

The second was a doctor, a World War One veteran who had performed amputations in the field and later struggled with alcoholism. Ness personally interviewed him, and according to accounts, he failed two lie detector tests. But the evidence against him was circumstantial, and he came from a politically connected family. He later committed himself to a hospital. For years afterward, he sent Ness strange, taunting postcards. He died in 1964.

Nobody was ever charged.

After 1938

After August 1938, the official killings in Cleveland stopped.

But there were possible connections elsewhere. Headless bodies were found in boxcars in Pennsylvania in 1936 and 1940. An investigator named Peter Merylo believed the killer was riding the rails and killing in other places too. Others have linked the case to a long series of unsolved killings near Pittsburgh. None of these connections has been proven.

In 1950, a man was found decapitated in Cleveland. The newspapers connected it to the Mad Butcher. The police treated it as a separate crime.

Ness's career never fully recovered. He left Cleveland in the early 1940s. He died in 1957, never having solved the case.

Giving them their names

There is a new chapter to this story.

In August 2024, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office and a nonprofit called the DNA Doe Project began exhuming the remains of unidentified victims. They are using a technique called investigative genetic genealogy, the same kind of DNA research that has solved cold cases around the country, to try to identify them.

For the first time in almost ninety years, some of these people may get their names back.

What we still don't know

The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was never identified. The official count is twelve victims. Some researchers believe there were twenty or more.

What we know is this. In the worst years of the Great Depression, someone hunted the people society had forgotten. People living in shacks by the railroad tracks. People nobody reported missing. And even the man who took down Al Capone could not stop him.

Who do you think the Torso killer was? And do you think DNA will finally tell us who the victims were?