The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (13 page)

In response to growing public concern, the police began dragging in suspects. Each, in turn, had to be released due to lack of evidence. However, there was one particular man that they wanted to talk to. He was stocky and heavily bearded, and he had turned up at the gully where Louise Mueller had been found. Seen wringing his hands, he cried out: “It was an accident!” According to other witnesses, a man of a similar description had was seen at the vacant lot where Alma Steinigewig’s body was dumped. But he eluded the police and was never identified. The killer then took a six-year sabbatical and the murders were slowly forgotten.

The first victim of his second spree was 43-year-old Anna Lloyd. A secretary at a local lumber yard, she left work at 5.30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1909. Her body was found a short distance from the office a few hours later. Her skull had been crushed and her throat slashed. It was clear that she had put up fierce resistance. The killer had gagged her with a cheap black muffler. Clutched in her fist, investigators found a single strand of black hair, but this was of little use in identifying the perpetrator, given the primitive state of forensic science in those days. At first, the police initially claimed that Anna Lloyd’s murder was a contract killing, but no motive presented itself and it became clear that this was the work of the Cumminsville serial killer who had last operated in 1904.

There was another long hiatus until 25 October 1910. It was then 26-year-old Mary Hackney was found in her cottage on Dane Street. Her skull had been fractured and her throat slashed. The police initially suspected her husband, but they then established that his wife was still alive when he got to work. Although she was the only victim to get found indoors, the police concluded that she was another victim of the mysterious Cumminsville killer.

The police then received a series of letters from someone claiming to know about the murders. They were signed with the initials “S. D. M.”, but detectives eventually dismissed them as a prank. The investigation then faltered.

However, in December 1913, the Burns Detective Agency were called in to investigate acts of violence associated with a recent strike by streetcar staff. Detectives from the agency told the mayor that they believed that a former conductor, now incurably insane and confined to an asylum was responsible for the death of Anna Lloyd. When searching his rooming house, they had found a menacing letter, addressed to persons “who saw him in the act of December 31”. However, there was no evidence to tie him to the other murders and the Cumminsville murderer seems to have escaped justice.

Cleveland’s Torso Murders

Kingsbury Run is a prehistoric river bed, some 60 feet deep in parts, that runs across the east side of Cleveland. It was once a beauty spot that ran down to the clear waters of the Cuygahoga River, a wooden area filled with secluded lakes. But as the city grew up it became home to a number of quarries that provided Cleveland’s stone. Rapid industrialization in the 19th century polluted the river, which was lined by steel works and factories, and Nickel Plate and Erie Railroads ran eastwards out of Kingsbury Run.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when poverty drove farmers off the land, the freight lines brought itinerant workers into Cleveland in the slim hope that they would get one of the increasingly rare jobs in the mills. Most of them ended up in a squalid, shanty town next to an area called “The Roaring Third”, home of bars, brothels, flophouses and gambling dens. This backed onto the hobo jungle of Kingsbury Run. It was there, at the height of the Depression, that a bizarre series of murders gripped Cleveland.

On the afternoon of Monday 23 September 1935, two teenage boys were making their way around the foot of an embankment where East 49th Street ends at Praha Avenue, known locally as Jackass Hill, when one of them saw something sticking out from the undergrowth. They went to investigate and found a headless corpse.

When Detectives Orly May and Emil Musil reached the crime scene, they found not one headless corpse, but two. According to the police report the victims were two white men. Both were naked though one retained his socks.

After an extensive search the heads of both men were found. One was 20 feet away from one body. The second was buried some 75 feet away from the other. Both men’s penises had been cut off and were left near one of the heads. Searchers also found a pair of blood-stained long johns, a light cap and an old blue coat.

Both bodies had been washed and drained of blood, indicating that the murders had not taken place where they were found. The detectives noticed that the flesh appeared scorched, either by acid or some corrosive chemical, or oil had been poured over them in an attempt to set them on fire. A metal bucket containing a small quantity of oil and a torch had been found nearby. The attempt to destroy the corpses had been unsuccessful as the bodies had remained more or less intact. But as they had been there several days, they had begun to decompose.

In the County Morgue was it was discovered that the John Doe now known as Victim One had been dead between seven to ten days. He weighed 165 pounds, was around 5 feet 6 inches tall and had dark brown hair. It was determined that he was between 40 and 45 years old. One testicle was missing. The clean edges of the incision showed that a sharp instrument had been used. The muscles of the neck were retracted, indicating that the man had been decapitated while still alive and the cause of death was established as “decapitation, haemorrhage and shock”.

According to the coroner’s report the skin appeared leathery and tanned as if it had been treated with acid. On closer examination, it was “a reddish yellow colour” and hard “not unlike bacon rind”. The hair had been removed and the tissue was dead.

A lab examination of the contents of the bucket revealed that it contained oil from a crankcase, along with human hair and partially decomposed human blood. The conclusion was that, after death, the body had been treated with a chemical preservative, then doused with oil and set on fire. But the oil only burnt well enough to scorch the flesh, rather than burn it. Coroner Arthur J. Pierce’s verdict was: “Homicide by person or persons unknown.” The advanced state of decomposition prevented fingerprints being taken and Victim One remained unidentified.

Victim Two had only been dead two or three days. He was in his 20s with brown hair and blue eyes. Around 5 feet 11 inches tall, he weighed approximately 150 pounds. He had eaten a meal of vegetables shortly before he died and was naked except for his black cotton socks.

Again the cause of death was decapitation. There were rope marks on his wrist, indicating that he had been castrated and beheaded while still conscious with his hands tied behind him.

Fingerprints identified him as Edward A. Andrassy of 1744 Fulton Road. He had been arrested several times for being drunk and had spent time in Warrensville Workhouse after being arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.

Tall, slim and handsome, he was 28 when he died. Earlier he had worked at Cleveland City Hospital as an orderly on the psychiatric ward. In 1928 he married a nurse from the hospital. They split up soon after, though she bore him a daughter some time after the separation.

Andrassy left the hospital in 1931 and sold magazines for a while. But when he died, he had no job or visible means of support and was know to associate with unsavoury company in The Roaring Third. A policeman who remembered him from the area called him “snotty punk . . . the kind of fellow gives a cop a lot of lip when he’s questioned” and claimed that he had to knock him down once.

The Andrassy family were Hungarian immigrants, one of the many aristocratic families displaced by the collapse of the Austro–Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. His father and brother John identified the body at the morgue. They had last seen Edward four days earlier. Helen Andrassy, the victim’s mother, told detectives that a middle-aged man came to the house two months earlier and said he was going to kill her son for “paying attentions to his wife”.

A strange story circulated about Andrassy. He had once claimed to be a gynaecologist and offered to examine a childless acquaintance’s wife. Then he had used the opportunity to sodomize her. He then told them that, if he could go home and get his instruments, he could fix her problem so that she could have children. They declined his offer.

Others said that Andrassy was gay, or at least bisexual. It was said that he smoked marijuana and dealt in pornography. And there were rumours that he had fled Detroit briefly earlier that summer after crossing an Oriental gangster.

Before leaving home on the Thursday before the bodies were found, he was seen to be nervous at venturing out and he had told his sister that the Mob were after him because he had stabbed an Italian in a fight. He did not return that night. The post mortem report assumed he had been killed on Friday, but no one came forward to say where he had stayed on Thursday night.

The obvious conclusion was that the two men had been killed by the same individual. Victim One had been killed first, then preserved in some chemical solution until Andrassy had been caught and slain. The perpetrator must have been strong as they had carried the bodies at least 30 yards from the nearest road then down the steep embankment. This was presumably done at night and the slope would have been hard to negotiate in darkness. The murder weapon was thought be a sharp butcher’s knife and detectives believed that a woman had played some part in the case. But, with no further clues, the investigation hit a brick wall.

It was only later that these two murders were related to an incident that had occurred a year before. On 5 September 1934, a young man had found the lower half of a woman’s torso that had washed up near the Euclid Beach amusement park in Bratenahl just east of Cleveland along the shore of Lake Erie. The thighs were still attached to the pelvis, but the legs had been severed at the knees. Coroner Pierce had estimated that the remains had been in the water some three to four months. The skin was discoloured like Victim One’s, suggesting that she, too, had been treated with the same chemical preservative. The upper half of her torso had been washed up 30 miles away, two weeks before, though it was so badly decayed it was not immediately identified as part of a corpse. The head was never found.

The woman had been about 30. She did not fit any missing person’s report and she was never identified. The newspapers called her “The Lady of the Lake”. It was only two years later that she was recognized as a victim of the same killer and became “Victim Zero”. The question was then asked: had her body been dumped in Kingsbury Run, then floated down the Cuyahoga River into Lake Erie?

Located just across Lake Erie from Canada, during prohibition, Cleveland became a haven for bootleggers and mobsters, and police corruption was rife. In November 1935, Republican Harold Burton won mayoral election on the promise of cleaning up the city. His first act in office was to hire Eliot Ness, whose Untouchables had cleaned up Al Capone’s Chicago, as director of public safety. After two years in Washington, heading the alcohol-tax unit of the US Treasury, Ness was raring to get back into action. He lost no time in launching a major attack on gambling and police corruption. But soon he was confronted with a case that he was not equipped to handle.

On Sunday 26 January 1936, Charles Paige, a butcher and the owner of the White Front Meat Market on Central Avenue, phoned to report a murder. An African-American woman had told him that there was a dead body on Central Avenue at East 20th Street. When he went to investigate he found parts of a woman’s body wrapped in newspaper and packed into two half-bushel baskets. The police responded in force.

When Lieutenant Harvey Weitzel, Detective Sergeant James Hogan and Detectives Wachsman and Shibley arrived on the scene, they found further body parts in burlap sacks along with some white cotton underwear wrapped in newspapers outside the premises of Hart’s Manufacturing Company. Soon after, Lieutenant David L. Cowles, head of the crime lab, arrived on the scene.

James Marco, who lived next door to the Hart’s factory, said that he had heard dogs barking at around 2.30 a.m. and Acting Chief of Detectives Joseph Sweeney concluded that that was when the body was dumped. It was discovered some time later thanks to the insistent barking of a dog named Lady. The victim had been dead from two to four days so, again, she had been killed elsewhere before her body was dumped.

As before the cause of death was decapitation. The woman’s head was found some ten days later in an empty lot nearby on Orange Avenue. Strangely, though, the killer had waited until rigor mortis had set in before he dismembered the rest of the body. Once again a sharp knife had been used and the killer seemed to be an expert at cutting flesh – indicating that the murderer was either a surgeon or a butcher.

Although her lower legs and most of her upper torso were missing, her right arm was intact and her fingerprints revealed that she was 42-year-old Florence Saudy Polillo, a waitress and barmaid, who had been arrested a couple of times in Cleveland and Washington, D. C., for prostitution. Her former husband, 40-year-old mail man Andrew Polillo, drove from the 180 miles from his home in Buffalo, New York, to speak to the police. He said that they had been married in the early 1920, but after six years Florence had begun drinking heavily and had left him ostensibly to get herself straightened out. Though everyone who met her liked her, due to her drinking, she slipped inexorably to the bottom of society. The men she took up with beat her up and, at the time she died, she was living in a rooming house at East 32nd Street and Carnegie Avenue, right on the edge of The Roaring Third. Her landlady said she was a kind woman, but she numbered among her acquaintances numerous prostitutes, whorehouse madams, pimps, bootleggers and bar owners. However none of them had seen her the weekend she died. There were few clues and the investigation stalled once again.

The coverage of the murders was quickly overshadowed in the press by Eliot Ness’s purge of the police department and his systematic attack on organized crime. Meanwhile Mayor Burton was busy buffing up the city’s image ready for the Republican National Convention, which Cleveland was hosting in the second week of June 1936.