Murder in America Presents: Creepy Places - The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run
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Stop! Had enough? Kick out mucus and quiet the cough with Mucinex 12-Hour DM for long-lasting cough and chest congestion relief. Buy Mucinex 12-Hour DM at your local retailer. Use as directed. Hi, this is John Grylls, the host of Creepy Places, the podcast where we explore true crimes that have led to a legacy of supernatural sightings, hauntings, and lurking evil.

We're also a part of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast Network along with Murder in America. And I can't tell you how happy I am to be working alongside Murder in America. Courtney and Colin are amazing podcasters. Legitimately some of the best around. So when given the opportunity to share one of our stories on their feed, the first story that came to mind was The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Road. One of my personal favorite stories. If you like what you hear, please make sure to like and follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks.

My name is John Grylls, and you are listening to Creepy Places, the podcast where we explore true crimes that have led to a legacy of supernatural sightings, hauntings, and lurking evil. Lake Erie, September 1934. The lake is cold and quiet, the din of high tourist season winding down. These shores are not unaccustomed to uninvited guests.

Bodies have washed up upon them for years. Sailors caught in storms, tourists who swam out too far, the occasional drunkard who slipped from a pier. But in 1934, the lake's currents carried deeper secrets to the unassuming banks. Secrets that would shock a city and bring a man once championed as an American hero to his knees.

The industrial boom of the late 1800s gave the Kingsbury-run area of Cleveland, Ohio, a stable economic status. It was a nexus for the railroad industry. John Rockefeller built a crude oil refinery, William Halsey Doan an oil and naphtha plant. The area grew. Migrants and laborers flocked to the work, enjoying a relatively steady income and the promise of achievement and advancement.

Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish and Irish neighborhoods sprung up on the fringes of the city. The Roaring Twenties seemed to be an era of endless prosperity, and Cleveland, like most of the United States, enjoyed an age of skyrocketing population growth, lavish entertainment, flourishing arts and culture, and excess.

But this would soon come crashing down, literally. In September 1929, when the stock market crashed and the world economy was plunged into the economic darkness of the Great Depression, Kingsbury Run was hit particularly hard by the Depression. Cleveland's workforce suffered mightily as the economy crashed.

Those same migrants and vagrants who had settled in search of jobs and the promise of prosperity now faced a wave of crippling poverty that dashed all of these hopes. Homes and land were abandoned. Factories and refineries shuttered. The once thriving railroad passing through without stopping.

The area around Kingsbury Run soon became a collection of shanty towns, rickety makeshift shacks constructed on abandoned properties where homeless workers struggled, many falling into lives of crime, addiction, and debauchery. As more and more laborers struggled, losing jobs, their livelihoods, and in many cases, their entire life savings, other shanty towns sprung up around Cleveland.

As the city removed other lakefront shanty towns in an effort to curb their growth, an enormous wave of people found their way to Kingsbury Run, which sat on what was then the outer limits of Cleveland. The area in the east of Kingsbury Run was even more dangerous still, called the Roaring Third or Hobo Jungle.

These were the gathering places for vagrants, the homeless, and the criminal element in brothels, bars, gambling dens, and flop houses. It was here that a predator stalked unwitting prey, finding opportunity among the transients, drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, gamblers, and other creatures of the night.

Many of these people floated in and out of the roaring third, hopping railroad cars from Cleveland to Pittsburgh and back in search of work. A young man wanders the banks of the soothing lake near Bratton Hall in Cleveland, its calm ripples lapping the sandy shores. He pauses, catching sight of something strange just ahead. Too small to be a sheep's head.

He continues slowly, picking his way across an equilibrium of stone and sand, each footstep upsetting the balance beneath, leading to an unnatural crunch on the landscape. He nears the object, standing completely still, aghast at what he has found. Instead of a dead fish, he has stumbled upon the remains of a woman. She has been carved from head to toe, decapitated.

Her arms have been cut off at the shoulders, her legs severed at the knees. Her torso has been dyed with a chemical that has turned it leathery, giving it a peculiar red hue. The young man wastes no time, calling the police, and in the days that followed, a dive team managed to find the woman's arms, but the head was never found, the woman becoming known as "The Lady of the Lake."

An investigation ensued, and although it was unsolved, as days stretched into months, the public began to see it as an isolated incident. The body of the unidentified woman taken to the morgue where it remained, unclaimed and forgotten. That was until June 5th, 1935, when two boys who had reportedly skipped school to go fishing stumbled upon a new nightmare.

While they were heading to their fishing spot, they trudged down Jackass Hill, the area where 49th Street once hit a dead end. Just beyond that dead end, Kingsbury Run and its collection of ramshackle buildings loomed. The boys discovered a pair of pants beneath a tree, and their curiosity peaked. They decided to investigate. Hidden within the pants, the boys found the severed head of 28-year-old Edward Andrussey.

A thorough search of the surrounding areas yielded the rest of Andrusy's body, wearing only socks. Police records revealed in addition to Andrusy's head, his genitalia were also severed from his body. The body was clean. It had been drained of blood and had rope burns on his wrists from his binds. His fingerprints were only matched given his previous criminal record, a record he had earned by carrying a concealed firearm.

Andrusi had been an orderly at a local psychiatric hospital. However, at the time of his death, he was unemployed and well known to frequent the Roaring Third. Within close proximity to Andrusi's body, authorities located yet another body following the same pattern. The head and genitalia were severed from the body, and the body had been drained of blood.

The same chemical substance was again present, giving the torso the same reddish hue as the Lady of the Lake. Some reports suggest that the reddish hue was actually a procedure whereby the killer saturated the body in oil and set it ablaze after death. This victim was never identified, but once these two bodies were discovered, both the police and local journalists hotly debated whether there was some connection to the Lady of the Lake.

given how similar the bodies looked after the murders took place. Authorities struggled to reconcile that they may have a serial killer on their hands. The two bodies alone sent a wave of horror rippling through the general public, but if they were connected, and this was a third, public anxiety reached a feverish level, demanding swift resolution.

Already known for its questionable safety, Kingsbury Run, particularly the Roaring Third, quickly became a geographical pariah in Cleveland. The rest of the city gripped by what promised to be only the beginning of this gruesome killer. Just six months after the discovery of two male bodies, in January 1936, mysterious baskets were left outside of the Hart Manufacturing Building.

A woman happened upon them, and within them, discovered the dismembered body parts of a female victim. The killer had struck again, following a very similar pattern as before, first decapitating, then dismembering the body. The investigation continued, adding yet another victim to the list, and the pace was quickening. Officially, this was the third victim,

The Lady of the Lake still not officially counted among the death toll. The Lady of the Lake was killed roughly one year before Edward Androsy. This killing was only six months later, this investigation yielding a positive ID. The victim was 44-year-old Florence Polillo, also having been identified through fingerprints given her previous criminal record. She was a waitress and barmaid, who was also reportedly known to work as a prostitute.

She lived on the edge of and frequented the Roaring Third in Kingsbury Run. This further solidified that the killer was targeting individuals in and around this area. But given its transient population, authorities faced challenges developing any substantive leads. The autopsy report concluded that she had been killed by having her throat cut. Her head was then decapitated from her body.

The police report also indicated that Florence's body was dismembered after rigor mortis had set in, denoting cuts that were clumsier than was the case with the previous victims. Florence's head was never found. Perhaps the killer was practicing, experimenting, trying new ways to murder.

The concerned citizenry began referring to the killer as the Cleveland Torso Killer, or the Mad Butcher, given the killer's proclivity for decapitation and dismembering the victims. Authorities had no choice but to admit that they had a serial killer in their midst, one whose compulsions were uniquely horrifying. While there was some comfort that staying safe simply meant staying away from the Roaring Third,

The citizenry held its breath, waiting for the killer's next strike. And strike again, the killer did, just six months later. On June 5th, 1936, another torso was discovered in a conspicuous location, directly in front of the Nickel Plate Road police station near the Roaring Third. As if the killer was toying with the authorities, becoming more bold with every kill,

The victim was beheaded and exsanguinated, but he had not been mutilated like the previous victims. His head was later found along a rapid transit line leading into the city, roughly 1,500 feet from the body. The most grisly aspect of this particular kill is that the autopsy revealed that the man was decapitated while alive. The body then completely drained of blood and dropped in front of the police building.

Based on the victim's six tattoos, authorities hoped that they could gain an identity as all of their leads had led nowhere. He was referred to as the tattooed man, and images of his death mask and tattoos were widely broadcast. In fact, authorities placed these images and death mask at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936, Cleveland's answer to the World's Fair.

Nearly 100,000 people passed through the exhibition of the tattooed man, but the man was never identified. Just one month later, a teenager discovered the decomposed remains of a man near an encampment of the homeless, seemingly a vagrant. While several of the details differed from previous killings, including the geographic location away from Kingsbury Run and the fact that the man had been killed on sight, the

Authorities included it in the caseload for the mad butcher, perhaps, given the advanced decomposition. This was an earlier kill, the killer still honing his skills and precise approach. Autopsy reports indicated that the beheading was expertly executed, matching the precision of most of the previous victims. This victim was also never identified.

The discovery marked the shortest amount of time between bodies, and the general public sounded the alarm. Just two months thereafter, a homeless man discovered the most grisly killing yet: a fresh death. While waiting to hop an eastbound freighter, the homeless man discovered the headless, eviscerated remains of a human torso and severed legs in a stagnant pool of muddy water.

This victim was also drained of blood, and although some bloody clothing was found in proximity to the body, the victim's head was not. This man's genitalia, stomach, and kidneys had also been removed. The scene was so heinous, the public outcry so distinct, that the authorities had no choice but to call in its biggest gun, its newly minted Director of Security, Elliot Ness.

Having gained notoriety as an American hero for his work at countering police corruption and battling mobsters like Al Capone with his force of six untouchables in Chicago, Elioness arrived in Cleveland in 1934 as a celebrity. He was a beacon of hope towards professionalizing what had become a corrupt and lazy police department, uttering phrases like, and we can have someone else do this if you want,

I hope to take necessary action first and talk about it later. To everyone who asked. And he made good on that reputation in his first years in Cleveland, taking down scores of criminals while weeding out corruption from the police force. He would be elected as Cleveland's security director in 1935, and while he had exhibited success in finding and eliminating corruption, when 1936 yielded four Mad Butcher murders,

Ness was tasked with a new sort of case, a case that was, admittedly, outside of his normal wheelhouse. He soon found himself on a battlefield that was completely foreign to him, one of life and death. The general public looked to him as a hero, the savior that would finally close this harrowing case. But in this particular case of detective work, he was woefully and wholly outmatched.

While Ness worked with his team, the late detective, Peter Miralow, and coroner, Samuel Gerber, the killer struck again. In early 1937, another severed torso washed up near Euclid Beach, almost in the exact area as the Lady of the Lake. Her legs, arms, and head were never found.

Just six months later, another body was found, reduced to a decayed skeleton given the length of time it had laid buried. The body was also decapitated, and was estimated to have been killed roughly a year before the body was discovered. Although the identification was tentative, authorities noted that it could have been the body of Rose Wallace, a prostitute who frequented and had vanished from the same bar as Polio. However,

This is unsubstantiated, a fact that had become important during Ness' unrelenting hunt for suspects. While Ness reeled, searching for clues, sending his chief detective into undercover operations with the vagrant community in the Roaring Third, the killer struck again, another unidentified victim, this time dismembered and wrapped in sacks of chicken feed.

The killer furthered the dissection, removing all of the internal organs from the torso and, as always, beheading the victim. The head was never found, and yet another identified man was lost to the mad butcher. Angry now, but without leads, Ness and his team churned, pining over what steps to take.

The tables had turned on him, and now he struggled with maintaining his sterling record with the frustration that abounded given the killer's torrid pace and their lack of clues. Then there was a pause, 1938 beginning slowly and quietly, an air of hope that somehow Ness and his team had applied enough pressure to convince the killer to stop.

Months passed, and Ness chased any and all leads he could find, building on the hope that he was closing in, that he had the killer on the run or boxed in. But that was not the case, and on April 8th, 1938, another body was discovered in the Cuyahoga River. Over the course of nearly a month, the victim's nude, bisected torso, a leg, thighs, and feet were found.

Her head and arms were not. This thrust Ness into a fever, and he redoubled his efforts. His team interrogating hundreds of individuals in the Roaring Third and Greater Kingsbury Row area, it had little effect. And on August 16th, 1938, the murders reached their climax. The first body discovered on August 16th belonged to an unidentified woman.

It was discovered by scavengers hunting for saleable scrap metal. Following the same pattern as the others, the woman had been dismembered and beheaded. As if that discovery was not harrowing enough, a second body was soon found. This victim was beheaded and dismembered as well. However, shockingly, it was strategically placed within full view of Elliot Ness' office at City Hall. The killer was laughing at Ness.

And with this discovery, both Ness and the public knew it. This was the last straw for Ness, who saw this action as a declaration of war. Ness and his team rounded up and interrogated thousands of people, but they had yielded little by way of results.

In what could be considered Ness' final stand, he and his team evacuated the shanty towns in Kingsbury Run, arresting and fingerprinting 63 individuals in an effort to at least be able to more easily identify future bodies. His next step was a bridge too far for the general public. Ness burned the shanty towns to the ground, leaving Kingsbury Run a veritable wasteland.

He had hoped that this tactic would prompt satisfaction or praise from the Cleveland community, but instead, he found himself eviscerated in his own way. The press was relentless, the general public turning on Ness, striking out against targeting individuals who had already been beaten down by the now almost decade-long depression.

He was painted as desperate and succumbing to the very corrupt tactics that he once sought to eliminate. Depressed slaughtered Ness, comparing his searches of every house within a 10-mile radius to the north of Kingsbury Run, arresting scores of homeless and burning the shanty towns to the ground as the worst civil rights violation since Cleveland's 1920s mass arrest of its Chinese immigrant population.

He had bent the rules, his tactics were becoming exposed, and he fell from his lofty perch as an untouchable and incorruptible authority. Yet, despite the public outcry and Ness's sharp decline from hero to villain, Ness's approach, which was akin to a small-scale total war against the Roaring Third, seemed to work. There were no more murders near Kingsbury Run.

No additional bodies washed up on the shores of Eucla Beach, and the city was no longer plagued by dismembered, eviscerated, and exsanguinated John and Jane Does. Once the arrested were processed, the Roaring Third destroyed, and the smoke quite literally heaven cleared, Ness doubled down on identifying a suspect. Despite criticisms,

Ness did demonstrate that even under the microscope, he could still flex the muscles that made him famous in Chicago. He discreetly investigated several key suspects, even as he was authorizing the burning of the shanty towns in Kingsbury Row. After having interrogated more than 9,000 people during the investigation, Ness and his team managed to pinpoint two prime suspects. The first suspect was a man named Frank Dolezal.

Dolezal was acquainted with several of the victims, and had, in fact, lived with Florence Polio. While police eventually reveled in what they called a confession, evidence shows that he was likely under extreme duress, yet more rules bent under Ness' watchful eye. After the confession, Dolezal hanged himself in his cell, putting a tidy bow on the case.

but his autopsy revealed six broken ribs suffered while in the custody of a local sheriff, who was convinced that he was guilty. Dolezal would later be exonerated for his connection to the murders. The other primary suspect was a doctor named Francis Sweeney, arrested only a few days after the raid had laid waste to the Roaring Third. He was interrogated in secret by Ness himself.

but apparently only after having been held for days given his deep state of extreme intoxication. Once he had dried out, Ness then held him captive for days of interrogation, yet again bending acceptable practices of the time. Sweeney was a World War I veteran who had been in a medical unit and conducted amputations among the population of wounded soldiers.

Upon his return, and likely scarred based on the horrors he experienced during the war, he turned to drinking, his addiction becoming so bad that it led to separation from his wife in 1934. He would reportedly go missing for days at a time, his alcoholism was running rampant, and that he spent much of his time in Kingsbury Run.

Although the conditions were not conducive to objectivity, Ness was seemingly convinced that Sweeney was guilty. Ness set up an early polygraph test administered by its co-inventor, Leonard Keeler. Sweeney was tested twice, and he failed both times, further convincing Keeler and Ness of his guilt. Additionally, a failed attempted murder seemed to corroborate Sweeney's guilt.

A local man, Emil Franec, claimed that he had been drugged by a doctor in Kingsbury Run. Although his testimony was ultimately dismissed, as he could not pinpoint the location where he had been drugged, it was later discovered that Sweeney had an office in the vicinity and that he practiced in a nearby morgue. However, even as Ness was engaging in a ferocious, questionably legal interrogation of Sweeney,

He realized that he would be unlikely to bring Sweeney to trial. Sweeney himself was from a prominent Cleveland family and was a cousin of one of Ness' political rivals, a U.S. Congressman, Martin Sweeney. Martin Sweeney had been exceedingly critical of the job Ness had done on the case, chastising Ness for his repeated failure to find the killer.

Although a story's end that led to the conviction of his cousin would have been a fitting turn of tides for Martin's aggressive and sultry remarks against Ness, it was not to be. Sweeney was protected and was eventually released without being charged. Immediately following the interrogation, Sweeney checked into a mental hospital and authorities could not make any additional evidence stick to him, all of which was deemed circumstantial.

The defeat soured Ness, and over the next year, he fell from his previous grace, becoming a philanderer, drunkard, and failed public official. He resigned his post of safety director amid a drunk driving scandal, failed in his attempt to run for mayor of Cleveland in 1947, and faded into Cleveland's netherworld underbelly, dying in 1957 an unemployed drunk.

No one was ever arrested or charged with Cleveland's bloodiest serial killer case in history, a fact that haunted Ness, and he spoke of the Mad Butcher. But Sweeney was not yet finished with Ness, sending him postcards from the mental institution that seemingly harassed and taunted Ness and his family. He also received a letter from California, in it,

This self-professing killer told Ness that he could "rest easy" as he had relocated to California for better weather in the winter. In the letter, this potential killer admitted to having killed in the name of science and that he had killed and buried a body that was never found. Interestingly, he did claim that he had been successful in whatever surgical procedure he was attempting.

that the deaths were failed attempts conducted on individuals who would not be missed. Sadly, aside from a few identified bodies, this seemed to be the case, the killer correct in his assessment. Ironically, in 1947, the same year that Ness lost his mayoral bid, an eerily similar murder took place in California, one that has become LA's most famous unsolved murder.

The Black Dahlia. The aspiring actress, Elizabeth Short, was eviscerated, her intestines removed, drained of blood, and dumped in Leimert Park. While it is possible the Cleveland's torso murderer relocated to California, there is little evidence that the two are connected.

In fact, several individuals connected with the case even argue that there was not one killer, but that the mad butcher could have been multiple mad butchers. Given some of the differences in what were otherwise similar cases, we may never know the truth about the Cleveland Torso murders. Ness seemed to have been convinced that it was Sweeney, a conclusion that has been supported by numerous authors and scholars.

Still others believe that the mad butcher murdered far more individuals than were found. Nine similar cases in what have been deemed the murder swamp, in and around train yards and swampy marshes in the greater Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region, seem to link the crimes together as the pattern is almost undeniably similar.

In all cases, the victims were decapitated, many dismembered and dropped in boxcars along train lines or in the marshy swamps. Interestingly, Pittsburgh and Cleveland were linked together on the Baltimore-Ohio railroad line, suggesting that this one line could have been the real life's blood of the killer's hunt. The killer identifying vagrants to come to the Roaring Third on the promise of entertainment,

or simply killing them wherever the opportunity arose. Proponents of this theory suggest that the killer preyed on vagrants that would travel east and west on the railroads connecting two of America's great cities of the 1920s in search of work. The Pennsylvania Torso murders also remain unsolved, and in the absence of concrete evidence, a trial or conviction, it is unlikely that they will ever be.

Less than 20 years after Ness had Kingsbury Run burned to the ground, the city of Cleveland attempted to revitalize the area, building low-income housing. It created Garden Valley, an urban renewal project that continued in the tradition of pushing marginalized populations to the fringes of the city. Built on a slag dump, Garden Valley was the beginning of waves of change and urbanization in the area.

But among locals, the violent history is still present. Despite the fact that the buildings no longer stand, is it possible that the harrowing nature of these killings has led to a supernatural presence? Paranormalists argue that it can and does. The ghosts of the victims haunt the Euclid Beach shores, the area around the Roaring Third, and the tracks and trellises where the remains were found.

Headless apparitions are said to linger by the sideways bridge, while the screams of the horrified victims are heard on the lake winds. The Cleveland Torso Murders are a feature of ghost and true crime walks across Cleveland and its Lake Erie communities. It's a case that still fascinates and confounds, and by the accounts of those who have witnessed them,

is still tormenting the souls who lost their lives in a harrowing Depression-era shanty town. While not as famous as some of the other places that we will explore, Kingsbury Run and the ghosts that may inhabit it have found their way through the years into popular culture. Numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been written about the killer, killings, and more recently, Elliot Ness's role in the case.

Modern scholars have mixed reviews of Ness' handling of the case, some suggesting that investigating a case of this kind was not part of his skill set, and that from day one, he made mistakes that cost time, money, and more importantly, lives.

Others have argued that although the tactics were harsh, they seemed to be successful, as despite the fact that the killer was never successfully tried, the killings did stop. Ness was also convinced that Sweeney was guilty. He had him followed for weeks before the interrogation, had his emissaries check up on the hospital into which he had had himself interred, and was bitter about Sweeney's relationship to the congressman.

In the absence of that relationship, Ness may have arrested and tried Sweeney of the crimes. Several films and graphic novels similarly trace the facts of the case. A role-playing game called Trail of Cthulhu included it as one of its Lovecraftian adventures. Of course, it has been featured by true crime enthusiasts of one of the most baffling cases in American true crime history.

Some even going as far as calling the mad butcher, the American Jack the Ripper. The case was even featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Still other books and films depict Elioness, and while most focus on his greatest triumphs in convicting Al Capone, several more recent works chronicle this case as the marker and potentially the very reason for his decline, and ultimately, his death.

His biography was published, almost immediately scooped up by the silver screen. There was no mention of the Mad Butcher and the Cleveland Torso Killings, underscoring this case as a weak spot for Ness, a failure that struck him so deeply he could not rebound from it. Perhaps understanding that the Mad Butcher had pushed him over the edge, breaking him,

convincing him to engage in practices that he would have fought to eliminate just a decade before. In the end, he was ostracized, unemployed, and addicted to alcohol, not unlike many of the individuals whose shacks he had burned in the shanty towns of Kingsbury Run. While we may never be able to prove that a direct connection exists between the real actions of killers and the supernatural imprint they leave behind,

Stories such as this have captured the imagination for centuries, so that at least in this way, their ghosts will live forever, haunting the shores of a serene lake and the tumultuous area of Cleveland, once known as Kingsbury Run. Thank you for tuning in. I'm your host, John Grylls. Join us next time as we explore more creepy places.