The Kingsbury Run Murders

During the 1930s Cleveland was a city on the rise. The population continued to grow  and became a melting pot of laborers needed to support our economically powerful steel and manufacturing base. Millionaire’s Row was in its heyday. The Great Lakes Exposition and the Republican National Convention were slated for 1936 as were many other conferences and conventions. Despite the effects of the Great Depression, many people were again doing well.

Against this backdrop one of the most prolific and gruesome serial killers of all time carried out his acts of horror, distracting the citizens of our city from the pride and prosperity of the times. Thirteen people were brutally murdered over the course of four years beginning in 1934-all of them decapitated-most of them while they were still alive. Although then Safety Director Eliot Ness claimed to have solved the crimes, no suspect was identified, and no one was brought to trial. The murders ended as abruptly as they had begun. To this day the Kingsbury Run Murders remain one of the most sensational and intriguing unsolved crimes in our nation's history.

Kingsbury Run is a prehistoric riverbed running from the flats to about E 90 Street. The train and rapid transit tracks still run through it. Bordered on the north by Woodland Avenue, and on the south by Broadway Avenue, Kingsbury Run was a dark, dreary and dangerous place in the 1930's. The dispossessed of the Great Depression lived in appalling conditions; trash and filth dominating the makeshift “hobo jungle” that occupied much of the Run. These people, most of them transients, often rode the rails to escape the brutal Cleveland winters or simply to keep moving. The area just to the east of the Run was known as “The Roaring Third”, home to bars, brothels, flophouses and gambling dens. In this grim setting, the most notorious murder case in Cleveland’s history would begin to unfold.

September 1934: A young man finds the lower half of a women’s torso, thighs still attached, but amputated at the knees, washed up on the shores of Lake Erie just east of Bratenahl. Cuyahoga County Coroner A.J. Pierce noted some sort of chemical preservative on the skin which had turned it red, tough and leathery. The subsequent search yielded only a few other body parts. The body was that of a female in her mid thirties. The head was never found. The woman was never identified. She is only referred to as “The Lady of the Lake”. It wasn’t until two years later that this find was included in the official killing total and thus became known as victim #0. It would be another year before the case began officially, and then it would be in another part of the city-the now infamous Kingsbury Run.

September 1935: Two teenage boys discover the decapitated, emasculated corpse of a white male at the base of Jackass Hill where E.49^th Street dead ends into Kingsbury Run. The body, naked save for a pair of socks, was clean and drained of blood. There were rope burns around both wrists. Coroner Pierce determined the cause of death had been decapitation. Fingerprints identified this victim as Edward Andrassy, a twenty-eight-year old white male. Andrassy had an arrest record, was rumored to be a homosexual, and frequented the Roaring Third. Police discovered a second body nearby, also decapitated and emasculated.It appeared to be covered with the same chemical preservative as the Lady of the Lake. This body apparently had been dead for at least a couple of weeks. The forty-year old white male was never identified.

January 1936: A woman discovers about half the body of a female neatly wrapped in newspaper and packed in two half bushel baskets. The baskets were left alongside the Hart Manufacturing building on Central Avenue near E.20 Street. Everything except the head was recovered about ten days later in a vacant lot on nearby Orange Avenue. As in the case of Edward Andrassy, the cause of death had been decapitation. For some reason, however, the killer had waited for rigor mortis to set in before disarticulating the rest of the body. Fingerprints again would allow the identification of one Florence Polillo, waitress, bar maid, prostitute. At the time of her death she resided at E. 32 Street and Carnegie, right on the edge of the Roaring Third.

June 1936: Early one morning in Kingsbury Run, two young boys discovered the head of a white male wrapped in a pair of trousers close to the E. 55 Street bridge.

Police found the body of the twenty-some-year-old man the next day dumped in front of the Nickel Plate Railroad police building. Clean and drained of blood, the corpse was intact except for the head. Pierce again determined the death had been caused by decapitation. In spite of a fresh set of fingerprints and the presence of six distinctive tattoos on various parts of the body, police were never able to identify the victim. A plaster reproduction of the man’s head, along with a diagram of the kind and location of the tattoos, were made to display at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. More than one hundred thousand people saw the “Death Mask” and tattoo chart. The “Tattooed Man” was never identified. (The original Death Mask, along with three others from the case are on display at the Cleveland Police Museum.)

July 1936: A teenage girl came across the decapitated remains of a forty-year-old white male while walking through the woods near Clinton Road and Big Creek on the near west side. The victim had been dead about two months and his head, as well as a pile of bloody clothing, was found nearby. Judging by the enormous quantity of blood that had seeped into the ground, this man apparently had been killed where his body was found.

September 1936: A transient trips over the upper half of a man's torso while trying to hop a train at E. 37 Street in Kingsbury Run. Police searched a nearby pool, which was nothing more than a big open sewer, and found the lower half of the torso and parts of both legs. Police sent a diver in to make the recovery. The number of onlookers that turned out to watch the grim spectacle was estimated at over six hundred. Ironically, the killer may well have been among them. Victim number six was in his late twenties, and the cause of death, yet again, was decapitation. Coroner Pierce noted that the lack of hesitation marks in the disarticulation of the body indicated a strong, confident killer, very familiar with the human anatomy. The head had been cut off with one bold, clean stroke. The victim died instantly. Identification was never made. Six brutal killings in one year and the police had neither clues nor suspects. The Cleveland Press, The Cleveland News and The Cleveland Plain Dealer all reported almost daily on the killings and the lack of a suspect. Tension was high. Who was the "Mad Butcher" of Kingsbury Run?

Giving in to mounting pressure from Mayor Harold Burton, recently appointed Safety Director Eliot Ness gets more involved in the case. Coroner Pierce calls for what the newspapers dub a “Torso Clinic”: a meeting of police, the Coroner and other experts to discuss information and to “profile” someone who could be responsible for these gruesome killings.

The police department put detectives Peter Merylo and Martin Zelewski on the case full time. They move deftly through the seedy underworld that constitutes the Run and the Roaring Third, often dressing the part, often on their own time. By the time the case had run its course, the two had interviewed more than fifteen hundred people, the department as a whole more than five thousand. This would be the biggest police investigation in Cleveland history.

The November elections return Harold Burton as Mayor, but Coroner Pierce is replaced by the young democrat, and now legendary, Sam Gerber. Gerber’s fierce dedication to medicine, along with his degree in law, put him at the forefront of the investigation.

February 1937: A man finds the upper half of a woman's torso washed up on shore east of Brahtenahl. Unlike all previous victims, the cause of death had not been decapitation; this had happened after she was already dead. The lower half of the torso washed ashore three months later at about E. 30 Street. The woman was in her mid-twenties. She was never identified.  

June 1937: A teenage boy discovered a human skull under the Lorain-Carnegie bridge. Next to it was a burlap bag containing the skeletal remains of what turned out to be a petite black women about forty years old. Dental work allowed for the unofficial identification of one Rose Wallace of Scovill Avenue. Police followed every lead they had on her-they led nowhere.

July 1937: There were labor problems in the Flats that summer and the National Guard had been called in to maintain order. A young guardsman standing watch by the W. 3^rd Street bridge saw the first piece of victim #9 in the wake of a passing tugboat. Over the next few days, police recovered the entire body, except for the head, from the waters of the Cuyahoga River. The abdomen had been gutted and the heart ripped out, clearly indicating a new element of viciousness in the killer’s approach. The victim was in his mid to late thirties; he was never identified.      April 1938: A young laborer on his way to work in the Flats saw, what he at first thought was a dead fish, along the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Closer inspection revealed it to be the lower half of a women’s leg, the first piece of victim #10. A month later police pulled two burlap bags out of the river containing both parts of the torso and most of the rest of both legs. For the first time Coroner Gerber detected drugs in the system. Were the drugs used to immobilize the victim or was she an addict? The answer might come when they found the arms; they never did. She was never identified.

August 16, 1938: Three scrap collectors foraging in a dump site at E 9 and Lakeside found the torso of a woman wrapped in a man’s double breasted blue blazer and then wrapped again in an old quilt. The legs and arms were discovered in a recently constructed makeshift box, wrapped in brown butcher paper and held together with rubber bands. The head had been similarly wrapped. Gerber noted that some of the parts looked as if they had been refrigerated.  While searching for more pieces, the police discover the remains of a second body only yards away. Ironically, these two bodies had been placed in a location that was in plain view from Eliot Ness’s office window, almost as if taunting him.  Both victims, #11 and #12, were never identified.

August 18, 1938: At 12:40 A.M., Eliot Ness and a group of thirty-five police officers and detectives, raid the hobo jungles of the Run. Eleven squad cars, two police vans and three fire trucks descend on the largest cluster of makeshift shacks where the Cuyahoga River twists behind Public Square. Ness’s raiders worked their way south through the Run eventually gathering up sixty-three men. At dawn, police and fireman searched the deserted shanties for clues. Then, on orders from Safety Director Ness, the shacks were set on fire and burned to the ground.         

The press severely criticized Ness for his actions. The public was afraid and frustrated. Critics said the raid would do nothing to solve the murders. They were right, but for whatever reason, they did stop.

July 1939: County Sheriff Martin O’Donnell arrested fifty-two-year-old Bohemian brick layer Frank Dolezal for the murder of Flo Polillo. Dolezal had lived with her for awhile, and subsequent investigation revealed he had been aquainted with Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace.

His “confession” turned out to be a bewildering blend of incoherent ramblings and neat, precise details, almost as if he had been coached. Before he could go to trial, Dolezal was found dead in his cell. The five foot eight Dolezal had hanged himself from a hook only five feet seven inches off the floor. Gerber’s autopsy revealed six broken ribs, all of which had been obtained while in the Sheriff’s custody. To this day no one thinks Frank Dolezal was the torso killer. The question is: why did Sheriff O’Donnell?

The Kingsbury Run Murders remain one of the most perplexing cases in our nation’s criminal history. Rumors abound as to who may have been the killer. One thing is very clear: Eliot Ness had a suspect who he believed was undoubtedly the killer. This suspect continuedto taunt Ness for years after the killings had stopped. All official police records on this case have been lost, destroyed, or removed.

Recent findings: Only within this past year, the daughter of the late Peter Merylo contacted the Cleveland Police Museum with the information that she had copies of her father’s files on this case. Other recently discovered documents, including autopsies, hospital records, lunacy hearings and interviews, have shed new light on what really happened. To read more on this fascinating story order In the Wake of the Butcher, Though Murder Has No Tongue, and a documentary called The Fourteenth Victim - Eliot Ness and the Torso Murders from the on-line Cop Shop.