The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run: The Remarkable True Account of the Cleveland Torso Murderer
It's one of the most infamous unsolved cases of all time...a mad butcher in Cleveland who decapitated and mutilated several victims in the 1930s and was never caught.
When the famous Untouchable Elliot Ness is brought in the killer is tracked down and the verge of being arrested. So why was this killer allowed to walk free and never be arrested? Find out in this page-turning book!
When the famous Untouchable Elliot Ness is brought in the killer is tracked down and the verge of being arrested. So why was this killer allowed to walk free and never be arrested? Find out in this page-turning book!
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: The Lady of the Lake
Deputy Keener took one look at the broken ribcage and spinal column, and with the absolute certainty that always seems to come with small town authority, declared them to be animal bones. It was a great relief to Joseph Hejduk, the handyman from North Perry, Ohio who had found the remains washed up on the shore of Lake Erie that August morning in 1934. He was glad to know that they weren’t human as he had feared, but he was a little embarrassed about having called the police over what had just turned out to be the carcass of a coyote or a bobcat. The deputy ordered him to bury the bones in the sand so the local dogs wouldn’t get into them, then trudged up through the sand, back to his car. Hejduk did as he was told, then went about his day, more or less forgetting about the whole thing by dinnertime.
Thirty miles southwest and two weeks later, on September 5th, 1934, a carpenter named Frank LaGassie was looking for driftwood on Euclid Beach, just like he did every morning before work, when he spotted something strange in the surf. At first, he thought he’d hit the mother lode and stumbled upon a good-sized section of a tree trunk, but when he jogged up and got a better look, his excitement turned to horror. What he had mistaken for a piece of bark-stripped wood was actually the mutilated and dismembered lower half of a woman’s torso.
Cleveland police responded, at first speculating that the woman had been a suicide victim whose body had been torn apart by a boat propeller, but when Coroner Arthur J. Pearse examined the remains at the Cuyahoga County morgue, that theory was quickly dismissed. For one thing, she had been dead about six months but only in the water for the last four. For another, her flesh had been treated with some sort of chemical preservative, turning it tough and leathery, preventing it from taking on water and slowing decomposition. And for a third, the cuts that had bisected her torso and removed her legs at the knee were too clean, too precise to be written off as accidental. The woman had been murdered.
News of the gruesome, tragic mystery spread fast, and when Joseph Hejduk read about it in the paper the next day, he put in another call to the Lake County police, convinced that the bones he had buried in the sand weeks ago belonged to the same woman. A pair of Cleveland detectives drove out to North Perry to investigate, but when Hejduk tried to take them to the makeshift grave, he couldn’t remember exactly where along the beach it was. It took a handful of men a couple of days of digging through the sand, but eventually they found the bones and turned them over to Coroner Pearse. Hejduk had been right—the bones were indeed human and they matched up perfectly with the lower torso of the woman found on Euclid Beach, some thirty miles away.
The imaginations of the people of Cleveland had been captivated, and for the next few days, police were inundated with reports of more pieces of the woman’s body turning up all up and down the coast of Lake Erie. A little girl had seen a hand waving to her from underwater, a fisherman had hooked and almost landed a human head, two men pulled strips of flayed skin out of the waves and a couple of boys found a brain washed up on the sand. None of these reports proved to be true, however, and except for a small section of one arm, no other pieces of the woman’s body were ever recovered.
Without a face to take a picture of or a hand to fingerprint, trying to identify her proved to be an exercise in futility. All the police could tell was that she had been in her thirties and of average height and weight. The only distinguishing characteristic they had to work with was a hysterectomy scar, which was common enough and did little to narrow down the field. Since she had no name, she became known only as “the Lady of the Lake.”
No one ever learned who she had been or what had happened to her, and she was buried in a potter’s field, unmourned and quickly forgotten. It would be almost two years before Cleveland police realized that she had very likely been the first victim of one of the earliest and most prolific serial killers the country has ever known.
Deputy Keener took one look at the broken ribcage and spinal column, and with the absolute certainty that always seems to come with small town authority, declared them to be animal bones. It was a great relief to Joseph Hejduk, the handyman from North Perry, Ohio who had found the remains washed up on the shore of Lake Erie that August morning in 1934. He was glad to know that they weren’t human as he had feared, but he was a little embarrassed about having called the police over what had just turned out to be the carcass of a coyote or a bobcat. The deputy ordered him to bury the bones in the sand so the local dogs wouldn’t get into them, then trudged up through the sand, back to his car. Hejduk did as he was told, then went about his day, more or less forgetting about the whole thing by dinnertime.
Thirty miles southwest and two weeks later, on September 5th, 1934, a carpenter named Frank LaGassie was looking for driftwood on Euclid Beach, just like he did every morning before work, when he spotted something strange in the surf. At first, he thought he’d hit the mother lode and stumbled upon a good-sized section of a tree trunk, but when he jogged up and got a better look, his excitement turned to horror. What he had mistaken for a piece of bark-stripped wood was actually the mutilated and dismembered lower half of a woman’s torso.
Cleveland police responded, at first speculating that the woman had been a suicide victim whose body had been torn apart by a boat propeller, but when Coroner Arthur J. Pearse examined the remains at the Cuyahoga County morgue, that theory was quickly dismissed. For one thing, she had been dead about six months but only in the water for the last four. For another, her flesh had been treated with some sort of chemical preservative, turning it tough and leathery, preventing it from taking on water and slowing decomposition. And for a third, the cuts that had bisected her torso and removed her legs at the knee were too clean, too precise to be written off as accidental. The woman had been murdered.
News of the gruesome, tragic mystery spread fast, and when Joseph Hejduk read about it in the paper the next day, he put in another call to the Lake County police, convinced that the bones he had buried in the sand weeks ago belonged to the same woman. A pair of Cleveland detectives drove out to North Perry to investigate, but when Hejduk tried to take them to the makeshift grave, he couldn’t remember exactly where along the beach it was. It took a handful of men a couple of days of digging through the sand, but eventually they found the bones and turned them over to Coroner Pearse. Hejduk had been right—the bones were indeed human and they matched up perfectly with the lower torso of the woman found on Euclid Beach, some thirty miles away.
The imaginations of the people of Cleveland had been captivated, and for the next few days, police were inundated with reports of more pieces of the woman’s body turning up all up and down the coast of Lake Erie. A little girl had seen a hand waving to her from underwater, a fisherman had hooked and almost landed a human head, two men pulled strips of flayed skin out of the waves and a couple of boys found a brain washed up on the sand. None of these reports proved to be true, however, and except for a small section of one arm, no other pieces of the woman’s body were ever recovered.
Without a face to take a picture of or a hand to fingerprint, trying to identify her proved to be an exercise in futility. All the police could tell was that she had been in her thirties and of average height and weight. The only distinguishing characteristic they had to work with was a hysterectomy scar, which was common enough and did little to narrow down the field. Since she had no name, she became known only as “the Lady of the Lake.”
No one ever learned who she had been or what had happened to her, and she was buried in a potter’s field, unmourned and quickly forgotten. It would be almost two years before Cleveland police realized that she had very likely been the first victim of one of the earliest and most prolific serial killers the country has ever known.
