Cleveland Torso Murderer

The Cleveland Torso Murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, was an unidentified serial killer who was active in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, in the 1930s. The killings were characterized by the dismemberment of thirteen known victims and the disposal of their remains in the impoverished neighborhood of Kingsbury Run.[1] Most victims came from an area east of Kingsbury Run called "The Roaring Third" or "Hobo Jungle", known for its bars, gambling dens, brothels, and vagrants. Despite an investigation of the murders, which at one time was led by famed lawman Eliot Ness, then Cleveland's Public Safety Director, the murderer was never apprehended.[2]

Not to be confused with Richard Cottingham, also known as The Torso Killer and Times Square Torso Ripper.
The Cleveland Torso Murderer
An exposition dedicated to the Cleveland Torso Murderer at the Cleveland Police Museum. (from left to right: Death masks of the victims Edward Andrassy, Florence Genevieve Polillo, "The Tattooed Man", and Jane Doe II).
Other namesThe Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run
Details
Victims13-20+
Span of crimes
September 5, 1934 – August 16, 1938 (Confirmed)
CountryUnited States
State(s)Ohio possibly Pennsylvania and California
Date apprehended
Never apprehended

Murders
Cleveland police searching for human remains, September 1936.

The official number of murders attributed to the Cleveland Torso Murderer is twelve, although recent research has shown there could have been as many as twenty or more.[3] The twelve known victims were killed between 1935 and 1938.[4] Some investigators, including lead detective Peter Merylo, believe that there may have been thirteen or more victims in the Cleveland, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh areas between the 1920s and 1950s. Two strong candidates for addition to the initial list of those killed are the unknown victim nicknamed the "Lady of the Lake," found on September 5, 1934, and Robert Robertson, found on July 22, 1950.[5]

The victims of the Torso Murderer were usually drifters whose identities were never determined, although there were a few exceptions. Victims numbers 2, 3, and 8 were identified as Edward Andrassy, Florence Polillo, and possibly Rose Wallace, respectively.[6] Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo were both identified by their fingerprints, while Rose Wallace was tentatively identified via her dental records. The victims appeared to be lower class individuals – easy prey in Depression-era Cleveland. Many were known as "working poor", who had nowhere else to live but the ramshackle Depression-era shanty towns or "Hoovervilles" in the area known as the Cleveland Flats.[7]

The Torso Murderer always beheaded and often dismembered the victims, occasionally severing the victim's torso in half or severing their appendages.[8] In many cases the cause of death was the decapitation or dismemberment itself. Most of the male victims were castrated. Some victims showed evidence of chemical treatment being applied to their bodies, which caused the skin to become red, tough, and leathery. Many of the victims were found after a considerable period of time following their deaths, occasionally in excess of a year. In an era when forensic science was largely in its infancy, these factors further complicated identification, especially since the heads were often undiscovered.[1][8]

During the time of the "official" murders, Eliot Ness, leader of The Untouchables, held the position of Public Safety Director of Cleveland, a position with authority over the police department and ancillary services, including the fire department.[9][10] Ness contributed to the arrest and interrogation of one of the prime suspects, Dr. Francis Sweeney. In addition, Ness personally conducted raids into hobo shanties and eventually burned down Kingsbury Run, from which the killer took their victims. His reasoning for burning down the shanty towns was to catalogue fingerprints to easily identify any new victims, and stated that it was also done to get possible victims out of the area in an attempt to stop the murders.[11]

Four days after the shantytown burning, on August 22, 1938, Ness launched an equally draconian operation of questionable legality, where he personally dispatched six two-man search teams on a large area of Cleveland, stretching from the Cuyahoga River to East 55th Street to Prospect Avenue under the guise of conducting city fire inspections.[12] While the search never turned up any new or incriminating information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the Torso Murderer, the systemic search did serve to focus renewed public attention on the inadequate and unsanitary living conditions in the downtown Cleveland area. The teams uncovered hundreds of families living in hazardous fire traps without toilets or running water. The interests of social reform did ultimately come to light even if those of law enforcement did not.[13] At one point in time, the killer taunted Ness by placing the remains of two victims in full view of his office in city hall. The man who Ness believed was the killer would later also provoke him by sending him postcards.[1][11]

Victims

Most researchers consider there to be twelve victims, although some have counted as many as twenty or forty.[8] Evidence suggests a woman dubbed "The Lady of the Lake" could be included. There was a second victim who was also considered to be a victim of the Torso Killer in 1950 named Robert Robertson due to the fact that his head was also cut off in a manner very similar to the confirmed victims.[10][8] Only three victims were positively identified; the other ten were six John Does and four Jane Does.[14][15][10]

Edward Andrassy
Edward Andrassy.

The body of 29-year-old Edward Anthony Andrassy was found on September 23, 1935, in a gully on the base of Jackass Hill where East 49th Street dead-ends into Kingsbury Run. Andrassy's head was discovered buried near the rest of his body. His body was found to be emasculated and only wearing socks. The autopsy report stated that he was decapitated in the mid-cervical region with a fracture of the mid-cervical vertebrae. The coroner also noted that Andrassy had rope burn around his wrists. The cause of Andrassy's death was decapitation; hemorrhage and shock. Edward Andrassy's death was ruled a homicide. He had been dead for two to three days. At one time, he had been an orderly in the psychiatric ward at Cleveland City Hospital. However, at the time of his death, he was unemployed and had no visible means of financial support.

John Doe I

The decapitated remains of another white male were also located in weeds at the foot of East 49th Street and Praha Avenue next to Andrassy. Evidence suggested that the unidentified victim's body was saturated with oil and set afire after death causing the skin to become reddish and leathery. It also appeared as though the victim's body hair had either been shaved or burned off. The unidentified male became known as John Doe I.

Florence Polillo
Florence Polillo.

Florence Genevieve Polillo, 44, was discovered at 2315 to 2325 East 20th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. Florence was found dismembered and had been wrapped with paper and packed into half-bushel baskets, however, her head was never discovered.

The autopsy report stated that her cause of death was a slit throat. Due to the lack of the head, the coroner could not definitively rule her death a homicide.

John Doe II (The Tattooed Man)

An unidentified victim's decapitated body was located on June 5, 1936 in Cleveland, Ohio near the East 55th Street Bridge. His head was found near the Shaker Rapid Transit tracks. His torso was found between the New York Central and Nickel Plate tracks by an old freight shed in front of the Nickel Plate Railroad Police building.[16]

The Tattooed Man.

The body was nude but unmutilated, and was found only about fifteen hundred feet away from the head. There was no blood on the ground, indicating he had been killed elsewhere and his head and torso then disposed of in Kingsbury Run. A railroad worker testified that the head was not in the vicinity at 3:00 p.m. that day, and an eyewitness described seeing a late-model Cadillac under the Kinsman Road bridge at about 11:00 p.m. that same night.

The physical evidence of the decapitation suggested it had been done while the victim was alive and the autopsy report stated that the body was drained of blood. The head had been cut off between the first and second cervical vertebrae. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in the victim’s body, and nothing to suggest that he had been tortured or bound before being killed.

John Doe II had six tattoos, hence the nickname "The Tattooed Man".[*]

John Doe III

The severely decomposed, decapitated remains of a white male were located on July 22, 1936, in the sparsely populated Big Creek area of Brooklyn near a homeless camp, west of Cleveland. This was the only known West Side victim of the Cleveland Torso Murderer. The police conducted a thorough search of the area and found the man's head, which was a skull at that point. Cheaply made, bloodstained clothing was found nearby. The pathologist discovered a large quantity of dried blood that had seeped into the ground beneath the man's body, indicating he was killed at the location.[16] For the first time, the murderer had gone way across town from Kingsbury Run, and instead of transporting the victim had killed him in the place he was discovered.

The victim's long hair, his poor clothing, and the location of the body near a homeless camp suggested he was one of the many homeless people who rode in and out of the city on the nearby railroad tracks. The victim was dismembered while still alive. His head was recovered. However, the advanced state of decay of the body made it impossible to get any fingerprints, and the head would have been decomposed and unrecognisable by that point. Searches through missing persons reports were unsuccessful.

The unidentified male became known as John Doe III.[**]

John Doe IV

A homeless person discovered two halves of a human male torso and lower legs floating in an oily, coffee-coloured stagnant pool in Kingsbury Run near East 37th Street while waiting for an eastbound freight. The torso was removed and sent to the County Morgue. The coroner notes the body was severed between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae as well as between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae.[17] A search was made for the rest of the body. Police found a dirty Gray felt hat labelled 'Laudy's Smart Shop, Bellevue, Ohio', which appeared to have blood spots on the top.[16] A blue work shirt, covered with blood, was found wrapped in newspaper along the bank of the creek where the body was found. The fire rescue squad dragged the water in the creek in Kingsbury Run in attempt to locate more parts of the body.[18] The head was never found nor the body identified. The victim's kidneys and stomach were cut and he was emasculated as well. The Coroner declared the probable cause of death as decapitation.[17]

The unidentified male became known as John Doe IV.

Jane Doe I

The upper portion of an unidentified female victim was found washed up on Euclid Beach on the Lake Erie shore on 156th Street, on February 23, 1937. The legs, arms, and head were never found, likely because they were less buoyant than the torso and possibly sank to the bottom of the lake.[18] Three months later the lower half of her torso washed ashore at East 30th Street.[16] The upper extremities were disarticulated at the level of the glenoid fossa, better known as the socket of the shoulder joint. The neck and head were also disarticulated between the seventh cervical and first thoracic vertebrae. Multiple hesitation knife marks at the surface of the skin were present. There was considerable water and gravel found in both pleural cavities. The probable cause of death was officially undetermined via the coroner's case file.

The unidentified female became known as Jane Doe I.

Jane Doe II
Jane Doe II.
Rose Wallace.

The eighth victim was located beneath the Lorain-Carnegie bridge on June 6, 1937. Lying in a rotting burlap bag, along with a newspaper from June 1936, was the partial skeleton of a woman who had been dead approximately one year. The body was decapitated and missing a rib. She was tentatively identified as 40-year-old prostitute Rose Wallace, who had vanished from the same bar Polillo had, but this could not be confirmed. Wallace was known to have disappeared ten months earlier on August 21, 1936, while it was estimated that the victim had been dead for one year when found.

Officially the victim remains unidentified and is known as Jane Doe II.[***]

John Doe V

On July 6, 1937, the upper portion of a man’s torso wrapped in a burlap sack for chicken feed, plus his two thighs, were discovered floating in the Cuyahoga River in the Cleveland Flats just below Kingsbury Run. The head as well as the internal organs within the abdominal cavity and the heart were never found. The unidentified man had his abdomen gutted, and his heart ripped out.[16]

The unidentified male became known as John Doe V.

Jane Doe III

A woman's leg was located in the Cuyahoga River in the Cleveland Flats on April 8, 1938. A month later on May 2, two burlap bags containing a woman’s nude bisected torso; thighs and feet were discovered floating in the river to the east of the West 3rd Street bridge. Her head and arms were never found.[16] She was the only victim to have morphine in her system.[19] The amount of morphine was estimated at 0.002 gm. per 100 gm. sample.

The unidentified female became known as Jane Doe III.

Jane Doe IV and John Doe VI

On August 16, 1938, a dismembered body was found at a dump at the end of East Ninth Street in Columbus, Ohio by men combing for pieces of scrap metal. The body of a woman was wrapped in rags, brown paper and cardboard. Uncharacteristically, the head and hands were found with the rest of the body.[16] The victim's head had been disarticulated at the level of the third intervertebral disc.

The unidentified female became known as Jane Doe IV.[20]

On the same day, the body of John Doe VI was discovered at a nearby location on the lakefront in plain view of Safety Director Eliot Ness's office. Similar to the other victims, the head was severed from the body and the victim today still remains unidentified. The head was disarticulated at the level of the third inter-vertebral disc and had knife marks on the dorsum of the second and third cervical vertebrae. Extremities at all the major joints were all disarticulated as well. The coroner ruled the cause of death as undetermined though he noted it was probably a homicide.

Possible victims

Lady of the Lake

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 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio on September 5, 1934. A subsequent search yielded only a few other body parts. The head was never found. She was nicknamed the Lady of the Lake. She had an abdominal scar from a likely hysterectomy which was common and made it more difficult to identify her. After she was found, several people reported seeing body parts in the water, including a group of fisherman who believed to have seen a head.

The Lady of the Lake was found virtually in the same spot as Jane Doe I.[21][18] Both victims had on their skin a chemical which was believed to have been lime chloride. It is supposed that the killer meant to use a quickening lime to decompose the bodies quicker but mistakenly used lime that would preserve bodies instead.

Robert Robertson

On July 22, 1950, the body of 41-year-old Robert Robertson was found at a business at 2138 Davenport Avenue in Cleveland. Police believed he had been dead six to eight weeks and appeared to have been intentionally decapitated. His death appeared to fit the profile of other victims. He was estranged from his family, had an arrest record and a drinking problem, and was on the fringes of society. Despite widespread newspaper coverage linking the murder to the crimes, detectives investigating Robertson's death treated it as an isolated crime.[22][2]

Between 1921 and 1942, nine people, eight of them unidentified, were found dead and dismembered in the swamps or around the train yards of New Castle and West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The murders, being dubbed the Murder Swamp Killings, have been theorized to be additional victims of the Cleveland Torso Murderer. The almost identical similarities between the victims in New Castle to those in Cleveland, Ohio, both of which were directly connected by a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line, were enough to convince Cleveland Detective Peter Merylo that the New Castle murders were related.[23][24]

The headless body of an unidentified male was found in a boxcar in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1936.[25] Three headless victims were found in boxcars near McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, on May 3, 1940. All bore similar injuries to those inflicted by the Cleveland killer.[26] Dismembered bodies were also found in the swamps near New Castle between the years 1921 and 1934 and between 1939 and 1942.[23][24]

In December 1938, the Torso Murderer allegedly sent a letter to Eliot Ness, claiming that he had moved to California and killed a woman there and had buried the head in Southwest Los Angeles. In the letter, the killer referred to himself as a "DC" or Doctor of Chiropractic. An investigation uncovered animal bones.[27][28]

A decade later, this "confession" resulted in authorities considering the possibility that the Cleveland Torso murder case had some connection to the Black Dahlia murder. The mutilated remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short were found in a vacant lot in the unfinished Leimert Park housing development of Los Angeles on January 15, 1947.

Both Elizabeth and the Torso Murderer victims had been thoroughly cleaned after death and a butcher knife was believed to have been used in both cases. However, Short was not decapitated, as was a signature for the Cleveland victims. Furthermore, the murder took place a near decade after the letter was received. Aside from circumstantial evidence and sheer speculation, there is nothing connecting the "Black Dahlia" case with the killings in Ohio.[29]

Suspects

Authorities interrogated around 9,100 people during the investigation to find the Torso Murderer. The case became the biggest police investigation in Cleveland history: many were investigated and 1,000 crimes were solved from the dedicated police investigations. There were only two main suspects of the Torso Murders: Frank Dolezal and Francis Sweeney.[30] On August 24, 1939, a 52-year-old Cleveland resident named Frank Dolezal (May 4, 1887 – August 24, 1939), who at one point lived with Polillo and also had connections to Andrassy and Wallace,[31] was arrested as a suspect in Florence Polillo's murder; he later died in suspicious circumstances in the Cuyahoga County jail[32] while in the custody of Cuyahoga County Sheriff Martin O'Donnell. Dolezal was posthumously exonerated of involvement in the Torso slayings.

Most investigators consider the last canonical murder to have been in 1938. One suspected individual was Dr. Francis Edward “Frank” Sweeney (May 5, 1894 – July 9, 1964).[23][33] Sweeney was a veteran of World War I who was part of a medical unit that conducted amputations in the field. After the war, Sweeney became an alcoholic due to pathological anxiety and depression derived from his wartime experiences.[34] His heavy drinking began in 1929; by 1934 his alcoholism led to a separation from his wife. Additionally, during his military service, Sweeney was gassed in combat, which resulted in nerve damage.[35] Sweeney was later personally interviewed by Eliot Ness, who oversaw the official investigation into the killings in his capacity as Cleveland's Safety Director.[36][9] Before the interrogation, Sweeney was detained, and he was found to be so intoxicated that he was held in a hotel room for three days until he sobered up.[34]

During this interrogation, Sweeney is said to have "failed to pass" two very early polygraph machine tests. Both tests were administered by polygraph expert Leonarde Keeler, who told Ness he had his man.[16] Ness apparently felt there was little chance of obtaining a successful prosecution of the doctor, especially as he was the first cousin of one of Ness's political opponents, Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, who had hounded Ness publicly about his failure to catch the killer.[33][37] After Sweeney committed himself, there were no more leads or connections that police could assign to him as a possible suspect. From his hospital confinement, Sweeney sent threatening postcards and harassed Ness and his family into the 1950s; the postcards only stopped arriving after his death.[33][38] Sweeney died in a veterans' hospital in Dayton on July 9, 1964.[33]

Sweeney was considered a viable suspect, but the evidence against him was purely circumstantial. In 1929, he was a surgical resident at St. Alexis Hospital in the Kingsbury Run area. He also had an office on the same street where a man named Emil Fronek claimed a doctor had tried to drug him in 1934. Fronek's story was ultimately discounted as he could not relocate the building with police the following day. Upon finding a victim with drugs in her system and looking through buildings it was found that Sweeney did have an office next to a coroner, in the area where Fronek had suggested he had been drugged. He would practice in their morgue which would have been a clean and convenient location to kill victims.

In addition to Dolezol and Sweeney, authorities also considered Willie Johnson, an African-American male who committed a similar murder in June 1942, as a suspect. Johnson had been spotted by a young girl while disposing of a trunk, which was later found to contain the torso of 19-year-old Margaret Frances Wilson. Wilson's head and arms were found in nearby bushes, while her legs would be found at Johnson's home two weeks later. It was claimed that he was acquainted with Rose Wallace and, possibly, Florence Polillo, but, while Coroner Samuel Gerber touted him as a suspect, he was never conclusively linked to the Torso Murders. Johnson was tried and convicted of Wilson's murder and, after a lengthy psychological evaluation, was executed by electric chair on March 10, 1944.[39][40]

In 1997, another theory postulated that there may have been no single Butcher of Kingsbury Run—that the murders could have been committed by different people. This was based on the assumption that the autopsy results were inconclusive.[41][42] Detective Peter Merylo believed that the Torso Murderer could be a transient who was riding the rails. Most of the murders occurred within the vicinity of railroad tracks. Merylo went undercover as a hobo to investigate this idea. He believed that this was the reason why there were murders in other states that were similar to the Torso Murders in Cleveland.

The 2018 film The Kingsbury Run was based on a modern copycat of the murders.[43] The murders and the hunt for the perpetrators were covered in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.[44]

See also
  • Black Dahlia, a Los Angeles murder case that some investigators have suggested may have been committed by the same killer.[33]
  • Orley May, detective who worked on the case.
  • Thames Torso Murders, another series of murders in which the torsos of victims were left behind.

General:

References

Notes

^ *: The victim, found at Morgan Run, near E 55th Street, Cleveland, was estimated to be 20-to-23-years-old, light complexion, reddish brown hair, chestnut colored eyes, stood 5 foot 10" or 11" tall, slender build, weighed 165 lb. He had six unusual tattoos on his body: a bird and band and the names "Helen and Paul" on the inner side of his left forearm, a heart and anchor in red and blue on the outer side of his right forearm, a flag and the initials "W.C.G." on the inner side of his right forearm, a butterfly on his left shoulder, the head of the comic character "Jiggs" on his left ankle, and an image of Cupid on his right ankle. His undershorts bore a laundry mark indicating the owner's initials were J.D. Despite morgue and death mask inspections by thousands of Cleveland citizens in the summer of 1936 at the Great Lakes Exposition, the victim known as the "tattooed man" was never identified[45]
^ **: The victim was believed to be a 40-year-old man. Clothing was muddied and piled up next to the head, ten feet from the nude body, in an isolated East Side woodland section. There were bloodstains on the coat and blue polo shirt, part of the clothing found with the head. Coroner A.J. Pearse said that the preliminary investigation disclosed that there was some doubt that the man was murdered. Not a single clue was found with the body other than the clothing.
^ ***: Dental work was considered a close match by police and her son, who said he was certain that the victim was his mother.[46] Exact identification could not be achieved because the dentist who carried out the work had died years before. Doubts remained because the body was estimated to have been dead for a year, whereas Wallace had only been reported missing for ten months since August 1936.[46]

Citations
  1. VanTassel, David D.; Grabowski, John J.; Schill, Megan (2020) [1987]. "Torso Murders". In Stavish, Mary B.; VanTassel, David D.; Grabowski, John J. (eds.). Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Public Safety (3rd ed.). Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  2. DeRoos, Dan (31 October 2018). Smith, Robert; Finch, James; Zurik, Lee (eds.). "A Halloween discussion of Cleveland's most gruesome, unsolved crime". CBS 19 (WOIO-TV). Shaker Heights, Ohio, United States of America: Gray Television Inc. (Gray Media Group, Inc.). Archived from the original on 1 November 2018.
  3. DeMarco, Laura (19 September 2019). Quinn, Chris; Johnston, Laura; Toke, Colin; Wernowsky, Kris (eds.). "Cleveland's infamous Torso Murders: 80 years later, the fascination endures (vintage photos)". Cleveland.com. Cleveland, Ohio: Advance Local Media. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  4. Jones 1990, p. 86-95.
  5. Badal 2014, p. 164, July 22, 1950: An Echo from the Past.
  6. Jones 1990, p. 103.
  7. Jones 1990, p. 96.
  8. Monroe, Jasmine (31 October 2017). Mitchell, Russ (ed.). "Cleveland's unsolved torso murders subject of new book". 3 News (WKYC-TV). Cleveland, Ohio: Tegna Inc. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  9. Heimel, Paul (2000) [1997]. Eliot Ness: The Real Story (2nd ed.). Coudersport, Pennsylvania: Knox Books. ISBN 9781581821390.
  10. Calder, James D. (22 January 2014). "Ness, Eliot". In Albanese, Jay S.; Arrington, Christina Barnes; Blowers, Anita N.; Brennan, Pauline K.; Brewster, Mary P.; Bumgarner, Jeffrey B.; Cencich, John Robert; Cordner, AnneMarie; Dodge, Mary; Joseph, Janice; Kurlycheck, Megan C.; McConnell, Elizabeth H.; Nasheri, Hedi; Roth, Mitchel P.; Schneider, Jacqueline L. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Hoboken, New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (Wiley & Sons). pp. 1–5. doi:10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj335. ISBN 9780470670286. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  11. Badal, James Jessen (2011). Armelli, Tom; Reynolds, Pat; McFarland, Rebecca; Patena, Shelley (eds.). "The Kingsbury Run murders, aka "the Torso murders"". Cleveland Police Museum. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Police Historical Society. Archived from the original on 3 August 2017.
  12. Meli, James (1938). Cole, Joseph E. (ed.). Fire in shantyville, Kingsbury Run (JPEG). Cleveland Memory Project (Michael Schwartz Library) (Photograph). Cleveland Press Collection. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University. torso066. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  13. Badal 2014, p. 156.
  14. Badal 2014, p. I, Introduction.
  15. DeMarco, Laura (31 October 2017). Swartz, Steven R.; Pruitt, Gary (eds.). "Cleveland's notorious Torso Murders revisited (photos)". The Plain Dealer. Associated Press. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  16. Cawthorne, Nigel (2011). The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large. United Kingdom: C & R Crime. p. 111. ISBN 9780786719747.
  17. Badal 2014, pp. 79–81.
  18. Badal 2014.
  19. Badal 2014, p. 126-133, April 8, 1938: Drugs and the Maiden.
  20. Badal 2014, pp. 150–151.
  21. Badal 2014, p. 22-28, September 5, 1934: The Lady of the Lake.
  22. Badal 2014, p. 161-165, July 22, 1950: An Echo from the Past.
  23. Guerrieri, Vince (29 September 2002). Weiss, Sharon; Rozov, Zeev; Peled, Asaf (eds.). "The Cleveland Torso Murderer: The Scariest Serial Killer You've Never Heard Of". Mental Floss. Tel Aviv, Israel: Minute Media (Pro Sportority (Israel) Ltd). Archived from the original on 1 October 2020. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  24. Martinelli 2011, pp. 37–50, Chapter 3: The Torso Murderer.
  25. Martinelli 2011, p. 50, Chapter 3: The Torso Murderer.
  26. Badal 2014, p. 29-48, September 23, 1935: Double Murder.
  27. Los Angeles Police Department (1939). Cole, Joseph E. (ed.). Detective Lloyd Hurst and Chemist Ray Pinker inspecting bones of murder victim in Los Angeles (JPEG). Cleveland Memory Project (Michael Schwartz Library) (Photograph). Cleveland Press Collection. Los Angeles, California, United States of America: Cleveland State University. torso008. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  28. Mellon, Steve (30 October 2013). Burns, Keith C.; Block, John Robinson (eds.). "Possible 'Mad Butcher' victims in McKees Rocks". The Digs (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette photo library). Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America. ISSN 1068-624X. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  29. https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/famous-murders/the-black-dahlia-murder/
  30. Badal 2014, p. 5.
  31. "Torso Murders". Cleveland Police Museum. Retrieved 2022-05-26.
  32. "PRISONER ADMITS ONE TORSO SLAYING; Leads Cleveland Officers to Where He Threw Woman's Body". The New York Times. Vol. 88, no. 54. The Associated Press. 8 July 1939. p. 14. ISSN 0362-4331. OCLC 1645522. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  33. Badal 2014, p. 166-174, Portrait of a Killer.
  34. Trickey, Eric (19 June 2014). Schneider, Kim; Bigley II, James; Capas, Arbela; Palatella, Henry; Stewart, Dillon (eds.). "Case Closed?". Cleveland Magazine. Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America: Great Lakes Publishing Company. Archived from the original on 8 March 2017. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  35. Maggie Coomer, "The Cleveland Torso Murders," Unresolved: The Cleveland Torso Murders, Podcast. Published on July 11, 2021, Accessed on May 26, 2022.
  36. Tucker 2011, p. 11-45, One: The Real Eliot Ness.
  37. Congressman Sweeney's daughter married the son of Cuyahoga County Sheriff Martin O'Donnell (1886–1941) (See Dolezal case)
  38. Bovsun, Mara (30 June 2013). York, Robert (ed.). "Pile of bones: Eliot Ness hunted Cleveland serial killer, but mystery remains". New York Daily News. New York City, New York, United States of America: Daily News Enterprises/Tribune Publishing (Digital First Media). OCLC 9541172. Archived from the original on 2 July 2013. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  39. "The Cleveland Torso Murderer". 21 June 2019.
  40. "Solving the Cleveland Torso Murders".
  41. Bellamy II, John (31 October 1997). The Maniac in the Bushes: More True Tales of Cleveland Crime and Disaster (1st ed.). Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America: Gray & Company, Publishers. ISBN 978-1886228191.
  42. Guerrieri, Vince (26 April 2021). Ley, Tom; Wang, Jasper; Petchesky, Barry; Kalaf, Samer (eds.). "Torso Murders, An Olympic Sex Scandal, And The Cleveland World's Fair That Wasn't". Defector. Archived from the original on 26 April 2021. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  43. Feran, Tom (20 June 2013). Quinn, Chris; Johnston, Laura; Toke, Colin; Wernowsky, Kris (eds.). "Film about the Cleveland Torso Murderer, who decapitated and mutilated 13 bodies: Whatever happened to?". Cleveland.com. Cleveland, Ohio: Advance Local Media. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  44. Ferri, Jessica (23 March 2018). "9 Episodes of Unsolved Mysteries That Still Give Us Nightmares". The Lineup.com.
  45. In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders ISBN 0-873-38689-2 p. 4
  46. Still Unsolved: Great True Murder Cases ISBN 1-854-80030-2 p.95

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