17. The Cleveland Torso Murders

The Cleveland Torso Murders | The Butcher of Kingsbury Run

​Episode Description:

In the grip of the Great Depression, the soot-choked city of Cleveland was brought to its knees by a phantom. Between 1935 and 1938, a brilliant, meticulous monster turned the shantytowns of Kingsbury Run and the illicit vice district of the "Roaring Third" into his own personal slaughterhouse.

​This week on Homocidal Tendency, we descend into the shadows of the Rust Belt to hunt the Mad Butcher. We explore the gruesome, surgical signature of the killer, the escalating cat-and-mouse game that ultimately broke legendary lawman Eliot Ness, and the chilling parallels to the Black Dahlia.

​But more importantly, we look at who the Butcher chose to dismantle. This killer weaponized the prejudices of 1930s society, specifically targeting the invisible and the unprotected transients, sex workers, and members of the underground queer community. We take a deep dive into the tragic story of Victim Number One, Edward Andrassy, and how the brutal homophobia of the era provided the perfect cover for a monster hiding in plain sight.

​In Memoriam:

We dedicate this episode to the victims who were marginalized in life and violently erased in death. To Edward Andrassy, Florence Polillo, Rose Wallace, and the nine unidentified John and Jane Does forever trapped in the archives. You are not forgotten.

Join the Investigation:

To see the unredacted evidence files, death masks, and historical maps of Kingsbury Run discussed in today's episode, follow us on social media:

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Transcript

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September 23rd, 1935, Cleveland, Ohio. The Great Depression has its claws deep in the city. Down in a place called Kingsbury Run, a desolate sookchoke ravine where the desperate and forgotten build shanty towns out of scrapwood and rusted corrugated metal, a teenage boy is about to make a discovery that'll bring the city to its knees. At the bottom of a steep brush-covered hill, hidden in the tall weeds, are two bodies, both men, both completely naked, both drained entirely of their blood, and their skins washed to an unnatural porcelain white. This isn't simply a robbery gone wrong. This is a horrifying opening act of a phantom, a monster who would turn the industrial underbelly of Cleveland into his own personal slaughterhouse. Outsmart the legendary lawman Elliot Ness and leave behind a trail of butchered, nameless victims that still haunt the city almost a century later. Today we're descending into the shadows of the Rust Belt to hunt the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. Before we dive into the muddy blood soak ravines of 1930s Cleveland, I just have a little bit of housekeeping. If you're a fan of the show and want to make sure you never miss an episode, please take a second to hit follow or subscribe on the platform that you're listening on right now. And while you're there, if you could drop a rating and a review, hopefully a five-star one, it generally helps the show grow and helps other true crime fans find us in the algorithm. Also, make sure you're following us on the socials. You can find us across most platforms at Homicidal Tendency and Homicidal Pod on x/twitter. I'll be posting all the historical crime scene photos, maps of the shantytowns, and visual evidence from today's case. Though fair warning, the photos for the Mad Butcher are definitely not for the faint of heart. Alright, housekeeping out of the way. Grab a flashlight, make sure your doors are locked, and let's hand down to the shadows of Kingsbury Run. To understand how a monster could operate so freely, you have to understand his hunting ground. Cleveland in the 1930s was a city of extreme contrast. It was an industrial powerhouse with the sky perpetually stained with the soot of iron, coal, and money. But when the Great Depression hit, it shattered the Rust Bell. The factories they slowed down, the money it tried up, and a tidal wave of desperate, displaced people flooded the city looking for any scrap of work they could find. The crushing depression gave rise to two distinct, dangerous neighborhoods that became the butcher's twisted playground. The first was the third police precinct, known to everyone on the street as the Roaring Third. Bordered by woodland and Broadway avenues, this was Cleveland's premier vice district. It was sprawling, a chaotic neighborhood packed with the underground gambling dens, speakeasies, brothels, and cheap lop houses. It was a place where people went to disappear either for a night of illicit fun or for good. The Roaring Third was loud, crowded, and dangerous. Detectives assigned to the precincts often had to dress as transients just to blend in with the underwater elements that controlled the streets. But if the Roaring Third was where the butcher sourced his prey, his dumping ground was much, much darker. Just east of the precinct lay a place called Kingsbury Run. Geographically, Kingsbury Run was a prehistoric riverbed, a deep, jagged ravine that cut through the city from Cahouga River all the way to East 90th Street. By the 1930s, it had become a bleak, toxic scar on the landscape, acting as an open dumping ground for the city's industrial waste. But it was also a home to a massive sprawling, quote-unquote, hobo jungle. Hundreds of the dispossessed stripters, the chronically unemployed, and transients riding the freight trains to escape the brutal winners built a massive shantytown down the ravine. And let me say this next bit. It's not it's not meant to be judging. It's just painting the picture in the unfortunate circumstances these people were living in. It becomes important later. So they lived in appalling, unsanitary conditions, piecing together shelters out of rusted corrugated metal, cardboard, and scavenge wood. There was no electricity, no running water, and it was absolutely lawless. And the air down in the ravine was constantly choked with the smoke of hundreds of trash can fires and stomach-turning stench of raw sewage pooling in the open drains. It was a literal undercity, hidden in plain sight beneath the bridges where the rest of Cleveland drove to work. And this is precisely why the Mad Butcher was so successful. He preyed on the invisible. When he stalked the chaotic bars of the Roaring Third, or the pitchback shadows of Kingsbury Run shantytowns, he wasn't taking prominent wealthy citizens. He was taking the forgotten. He was taking people whose disappearances wouldn't be reported for weeks, if they ever were reported at all. The transients, the sex workers, the men's who hopped off a freight train on a Tuesday and were expected to be gone by a Thursday. Down in Kingsbury Run, uh scream in the middle of the night, it wasn't a call for help. It was just the background noise of survival. And the butcher, he knew it. So who was this phantom hunting the Suchok ravines of Cleveland? When you look at the sheer brutality of the Tor Summers, it's easy to picture a chaotic raving lunatic covered in blood wandering the hobo jungles. But the reality, it's far more terrifying. The Mad Butcher wasn't chaotic. He was terrifyingly organized. He was the 1930s equivalent of a real-life slasher, an unstoppable methodical force who treated human beings like nothing more than a meat on a hook. So, let's break down the profile of the butcher piece by piece. First, let's talk about the physical reality of the crimes. The killer possessed significant physical strength. Decapitating and dismembering a human body is not easy. It requires force, leverage, and stamina. But it wasn't just brute strength, it was precision. The coroner at the time, Dr. Arthur Peirce, noted that the cuts were not jagged, frantic hacks, that of a maniac. They were clean, confident, and expert. The butcher knew exactly where to slice between their vertebrae. This suggests to the investigators that the killer had a background in anatomy, perhaps a surgeon, a medic, a hunter, or maybe a literal butcher. Then there's the chilling logistical profile. The butcher had to have a slaughterhouse. The bodies were found in Kingsmary Brun. They were completely drained of blood. Not a single drop was found at the dump site. This tells us two critical things. First, he killed the victim somewhere else. Second, he had a private, secure, and easily cleanable location where he could take his time. He strung them up, he bled them dry, and dismantled them without the fear of being walked in on. We also know he had patience. Some victims were held for days or even weeks before their remains were dumped. The skin was often washed completely clean, sometimes treated with chemical preservatives or oil, giving the flesh a bizarre leathery texture. This wasn't a crime of passion. It was a morbid, ongoing science experiment. Psychologically, the butcher was a classically organized psychopath with a massive ego. He didn't just hide his victims, he presented them. He dumped the dismembered remains in highly visible areas, sometimes posing them, deliberately taunting the police. Also, by removing the heads and fingertips, he stripped them of their identities, asserting total control over who they were in life and how they would be remembered in death. He was also highly mobile and likely owned a car or a truck, which is a luxury during the Great Depression. He used it to transport the heavy separate torsos across the city on notice. When you put all the pieces together, a terrifying silhouette emerges. The Mad Butcher was likely a middle-aged man, physically strong, highly intelligent, and financially stable enough to own a vehicle in a private workspace. He moved seamlessly between the upper echelons of society and the forgotten underbility of the roaring third. He could lure a victim with a warm meal or a drink and then vanish back into the smog. He was a monster hiding in plain sight. And eventually, he would bring his crucial handiwork right to the doorstep of the city's top cop. Before we bring the untouchable Elliot Ness into the fray, we need to step back and look at the people who were actually bleeding out in the mud of Kingsbury Run. Because to truly understand the butcher, you have to look at who he chose to dismantle. Like we said, the killer wasn't snatching socialites out of their mansions. He wasn't taking politicians or factory bosses. The butcher was targeting the invisible. He preyed on the fringe of society. The victims were a mix of men and women, but they all shared one tragic commonality. They were all forgotten. They were the transients riding the rails, the working poor living day-to-day in the shantytowns. Sex workers trying to survive the depression, and folks running in the underground, illicit circles of the roaring third. They were the people whose disappearances wouldn't raise any alarms. If they didn't show up to the soup kitchen or the local speakeasy, people just assumed they had hopped a freight train out of town looking for better luck. Out of the twelve official victims attributed to the Mad Butcher, we only know the definitive identity of two, maybe three, if you count a highly debated dental record. The rest, they were just John and Jane Does, forever trapped in police archives as victim number four or victim number seven. Think about that. Twelve human beings butchered, and nine of them went completely unclaimed. But looking at the few we do know tells us everything we need to know about the butcher's hunting habits. Take Edward Andressi. He was one of the two men found at the bottom of the hill in September 1935. Edward was 28 years old, and by all accounts he was incredibly handsome. He had sharp features, dark hair, and a charm that let him talk his way into and out of any trouble. He had briefly been an orderly at City Hospital working in a psychiatric ward. Ironically enough, he couldn't hold the job down. He was once married, very briefly, and he even had a child. But the conventional, straight, picket fence life of the 1930s was a costume Edward simply could not wear. The marriage violently fell apart, and Edward drifted away from his family and straight into the neon-lit shadows of the Roaring Third. You see, Edward was bisexual, and in the 1935, that wasn't just a scandal, it was criminalized. And it was a highly dangerous way to exist. To survive, Edward lived by his wits and his looks. He sold illicit magazines, he ran bootleg liquor, and he became deeply embedded into the queer underground, the cruising scene of Cleveland. This was a world of secret passwords, dark alleys, and illicit speakeasies. It was a community built entirely on the necessity of staying hidden. Men like Edward couldn't openly date or express themselves, so they met in the shadows, in the parks at night, in the back booths of Mob Run Taverns, and the the run-down railroads. And our poor Edward, he wasn't he wasn't naive. He knew exactly how dangerous his world was. He carried a strait razor in his pocket for protection because he knew that if he was attacked while trying to meet other men, he couldn't go to the police. If he went to the cops, he would just be thrown in the cell for indecency. He and every other queer man in Cleveland were entirely unprotected by the law. Which unfortunately brings us to his final nights in September 1935. Edward was flat broke. He had been bouncing between cheek flop houses and the street. When you're starving in the middle of the Great Depression and you run in the underground queer scene, survival often means taking risks. It means engaging in sex work or taking a ride from a wealthy older man offering a hot meal and a few dollars. This is exactly the scenario that modern profilers believe led Edward to the butcher. He was cruising. He likely met a man who looked safe. Someone wealthy, someone well dressed, maybe even a prominent doctor who knew how to navigate the same secret bars Edward did. Edward got into that car willingly, thinking it was just another transaction, another secret hookup to get through the week. He never had a chance to use the straight razor in his pocket. Edward's death wasn't just a random act of violence. It was targeted exploitation. The mad butcher weaponized Edward's sexuality against him. He used the very closet society forced Edward into as a trap, knowing full well that no one would witness them leaving together and no one would look too hard for a queer hustler once he disappeared. Edward's story is terrifying because it highlights the butcher's true genius. The killer just didn't understand human anatomy, he understood the lethal anatomy of 1930 society. He knew he could dismantle someone without any consequence. Then we have Florence Pelillo. She was a waitress, a barmaid, and sometimes sex worker who lived in a string of cheap grooming houses. She was just trying to keep her head above water in a city that could completely collapse economically. When the butcher took her, he dismantled her with such precision that her remains were packaged into half-bushel baskets and left behind a downtown business. The butcher didn't just take their lives, he actively erased them. By removing their heads and often destroying their fingerprints with acid or fire, he ensured they could never be returned to whatever family they had. He weaponized their marginalization. He knew society didn't care about the people of Kingsbury Run while they were alive, and he banked on the fact that society wouldn't fight for them too hard once they were dead. To understand the complete mess and nightmare that Elliot Ness walked into, we have to rewind the clock. We have to look at the butcher's early work before the city even realized that serial killer was operating in its shadows. The timeline doesn't actually start in the soot and ash of Kingsbury Run. It starts a year earlier, on the shores of Lake Erie. September 5th, 1934. A man is walking along the beach near Bartenthal, a wealthy enclave just east of Cleveland. When he sees something washed up in the sand. At first glance, it looks like a piece of driftwood or discarded debris. But as he gets closer, the grim reality it sets in. It's the lower half of a woman's torso, amputated at the knees. The police, the pool, they pull the remains from the lake. The cuts are clean, precise, and made by someone who clearly knows their way around a blade. But the strangest detail is the skin. It's tough, leathery, and reddish in color. The coroner discovers that the body has been treated with some kind of chemical preservative. They call her the Lady of the Lake, and that's kind of tragically beautiful. It's like some kind of M9 Shalomon movie or a Guillermo del Turo flick. But they never find her head. They never find the rest of her body. And because serial killers aren't a concept in 1934 Cleveland, and the police aren't prepared for it, they they write it down as a a one-off bizarre incident. A horrific anomaly. But it wasn't an anomaly. It was a prologue. Then fast forward exactly one year. September 23rd, 1935. This brings us back to the bottom of that steep brush-covered hill in Kingsbury Run, where those two teenage boys made that discovery we talked about at the top of the episode. This is the moment that the butcher officially announces himself back to the city of Cleveland. The two men left in the weeds are officially designated as victim one and victim number two. Victim number one is the man we discussed earlier, Edward Andrassi. He had been dead for about two or three days. But victim number two? He's a complete mystery. A John Doe. He is an older man, maybe in his forties. And the coroner determines something terrifying. John Doe hasn't been dead for days. He's been dead for weeks. His skin has been treated with a chemical preservative, turning it leathery and red. Exactly the same chemical signature found on the Lady of the Lake a year earlier. The butcher had killed John Doe, treated his remains, stored him somewhere for weeks, and then killed Edward. He washed both their bodies clean of blood, emasculated them, and then dumped them together in the ravine to be found. At this point, the Cleveland police are completely paralyzed. They have three dismember victims, two distinct chemical signatures, zero blood at the dump sites, and absolutely no suspects. The press catches wind of the savagery, and the newspaper starts screaming about a mad butcher stalking the hobo jumpers. The city is a powder cake of poverty, corruption, and now unbridled terror. The public is demanding answers the local precinct simply cannot provide. Three months later, in December 1935, the city makes a desperate move. They bring in a 32-year-old hotshot from Chicago. Elliot Ness unpacks his bags in Cleveland, thinking he's there to bust up underground casinos and fire dirty cops. He has no idea that waiting for him in the shadows of the run is a monster who will consume him for the rest of his career. If his name sounds familiar, it should. Ness was the ultimate American Boy Scout. Just a few years earlier, he was the untouchable golden boy of Chicago. The federal agent who famously smashed Al Capone's bootlegging empire. He was incorruptible. He was media savvy, and just at 32 years old, he was sworn in as the youngest safety director in Cleveland's history. Ness was essentially given the keys to the city. He commanded the police and the fire departments, and his mandate was simple. Clean up Cleveland. At first, Ness was terrifying. He was a force of nature. He fired corrupt cops by the dozen. He raided underground casinos in the Roaring Third. He modernized the police force, bringing in two-way radios and establishing a dedicated traffic division. He was a creature of logic, order, and absolute justice. He understood how to dismantle the mob because the mob made sense. Bootlegers were driven by money, territory, and greed. You could track them. You could follow their ledgers. But Elliot Ness was completely, fundamentally unprepared for the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. The FBI's behavioral science unit was decades away. Ness was a man who fought rational criminals, and suddenly he found himself hunting a ghost, a predator, who killed without a discernible motive, who didn't care about money or territory, and who treated the human body like a canvas for his own sick compulsions. For the butcher, the arrival of the famous Elliot Ness wasn't a deterrent, it was an invitation to a game. As Ness poured his pristine reputation into the investigation, the butcher responded by escalating. The decapitated bodies began appearing closer and closer to the center of the city. The Phantom of the Shannot was no longer just preying on the forgotten. He was directly challenging the untouchable Eliotness, dragging the golden boy of law enforcement down into the mud and the blood of the ravine. And it was a descent that would ultimately break the great detective. Like we mentioned, Elliot takes the oath of office in December 1935. He immediately goes into war with the city's corrupt police force, firing officers, raiding illegal casinos in the Roaring Third, and making hemlines. He is trying to bring order to chaos. But the mad butcher operates outside of order. Less than a month after Nest takes the job, the butcher makes his next move. And this time, he brings the whore out of the ravine and right into the city streets. January 26, 1936, Florence Pelillo, who we talked about earlier, is found butchered behind a shop downtown. The killer has dismembered her with his signature surgical precision and packed her remains into half bushel baskets. The press explodes. The mad butcher of Kingsbury Run is no longer a myth whispered by transients. He is in the front page a nightmare. Front page nightmare news. And over the next two years, the killer emerges the city in a gruesome, escalating game of cat and mouse. Summer of 1936, June 5th, two boys skip school to fish in Kingsbury Run. Instead, they find the decapitated head of a young man wrapped in a pair of trousers. The next day, police find his body dumped near the local Nickel Plate Railroad. This victim becomes known as the Tattooed Man because of the six distinct tattoos on his body. Ness and the police are so desperate to identify him they make a plaster death mask of his face and put it on display at the Great Lakes Exposition, alongside sketches of his tattoos. Over a hundred thousand people view the mask. Not a single person comes forward with a solid identification. The butcher has completely erased him. By 1937, the butcher expand his jumping grounds, and the city realizes that there is no safe haven. In February, the upper half of a woman washes on the shores of Lake Erie. In June, a teenage boy finds the skeletonized remains of a woman hidden beneath the Lorraine Carnegie Bridge. In July, the torso of a man is found floating down the Cahouga River in upper lepsac. Ness is throwing everything he has at the case. He assigns a secret squad of undercover detectives to sweep the shantytowns. They pose as hobos, riding the rails, drinking in the speakeasies, trying to draw out the monster. But the butcher, he's a ghost. He leaves no blood, no fingerprints, and no witnesses. Between the summer of 1936 and the spring of 1938, the butcher turned the entire city of Cleveland into his personal graveyard. The police were drowning in bodies, the public were completely unhinged, the press was screaming for blood. The butcher wasn't just uh killing the forgotten anymore, he was suffocating the entire city in terror. And Elliot Ness, he's running out of time. And then comes the ultimate breaking point, the ultimate taunt. August 16th, 1938. Scrap collectors are digging through a massive makeshift dump site on East 9th Street. They pull away a piece of corrugated metal and uncover an absolute horror show. There are two victims. One is a woman wrapped in a double-breasted men's coat. Her body is frozen in Regamortis. Nearby are the remains of a man, scattered and wrapped in butcher paper. Both have been decavitated and both have been drained to blood. But it isn't just the sheer brutality that shakes the city, it's the location. If you stood at the exact spot where these bodies were dumped and looked across the street, you would be staring directly at Cleveland City Hall. Directly at the window of the safety director's office. The Mad Butcher had just dropped two mutilated bodies in the front yard of Elliot Ness. Like we said, the Mad Butcher had just dropped two mutilated bodies in plain sight of Elite Ness's office window. The message was clear. You can't stop me. And Ness was pushed to the absolute breaking point. The pristine, untouchable lawman realized that playing by the book wasn't going to catch a monster who lived entirely in the shadows. If he couldn't find the butcher in the maze of Kingsbury Run, then he was gonna wipe the maze off the map entirely. In the dead of the night, Ness amassed a small army. Dozens of police officers, armed with shotguns and billy clubs, flanked by fire trucks, they descended into the dark, the toxic ravine of Kingsbury Run. It was a raid of unprecedented aggression. The police ripped men and women from their sleep, dragging them out of the shacks of correlated metal and cardboard. Over 60 people were rounded up, arrested, and hauled off to the station to be aggressively questioned and fingerprinted. Ness told the press it was for their own protection to get them out of the bushers' hunting ground. But Ness didn't stop at the arrest. Once the run was cleared, he gave the order to the fire department. Burn it down. Ness stood in the ravine and watched as the entire sprawling shanty town was set ablaze. He burned the homo juggle to the ash. He destroyed the disease-ridden, unpoliced underbility of the city where the butcher had operated with total impunity for years. The next morning, the press was divided. Some hailed Ness as a hero for taking the extreme necessary action. Others condemned him, pointing out that he had just rendered the poorest, most vulnerable citizens of Cleveland entirely homeless in the middle of the Great Depression. But here's the most chilling detail of the Kingsway Run raid. After the fires burned out, the official torso murders in Cleveland, they stopped. But Elliot Ness knew better than anyone that burning the grass did not kill the snake. The murders may have ceased in Cleveland, but the killer was still out there, and the pressure on the police to produce a physical suspect was becoming catastrophic. The public didn't want Ash. They wanted a monster in handcuffs. The investigation shifted from the physical street to the closed door investigation rooms. Ness and his detectives began looking inward, pulling on every thread, every rumor, every piece of circumstantial evidence they had gathered over the last three years. They needed a scapegoat, or they needed the genius behind the blade. And as the smoke cleared over Kingsbury Run, the police found themselves staring at two very different men. One was an easy target, a bricklayer who lived on the fringes. The other was an untouchable phantom hiding behind a wall of immense political power. So it's time to meet the suspects. By the summer of 1939, the city of Cleveland was starving for an arrest. Elliot Ness had burned Kingsbury Run to the ground, but the phantom remained uncaught. And in the word of 1930's law enforcement, when you can't find a real monster, the pressure to build a scapegoat becomes overwhelming. So, enter Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell. Sheriff O'Donnell was a political rival of Elliott Ness. He watched Ness take the extreme measures and fail to produce a body. And O'Donnell saw an opportunity. If he could be the man to catch them at Butcher, he would be a hero. He didn't need the mastermind. He just needed someone who fit the build. And in July 1939, O'Donnell's deputies found the perfect target. A 52-year-old bricklayer and former slaughterhouse worker named Frank Dolazel. Frank was a target waiting to happen. He was a Bohemian immigrant who lived deep in the gritty heart of the Roaring Third Precinct. He was a heavy drinker, a man who haunted the exact same cheap taverns and plop houses at the victims. In fact, Frank actually knew two of the victims. He had been an acquaintance of Edward, victim number one, and he occasionally shared an apartment with Florence. The woman's whose remains were found in the half-bushel baskets. To Sheriff O'Donnell, this was the smoking gun. On July 5th, 1935, deputies kicked in the door of Frank's apartment, dragged him into the Cougar City's jail, but they didn't officially book him right away. In the 1930s, police had a terrifying tactic known as the sweatbox. Frank was held in secret, isolated from the world, and subjected to grueling round-the-clock interrogations. For nearly a week, they battered this 52-year-old bricklayer, and eventually, broken and exhausted, Frank gave them what they wanted. He confessed. He told police that he had killed Florence in his apartment during a drunken argument. He claimed he hit her. She fell and hit her head, and in a panic, he dragged her body to the bathtub and dismembered her with a meat cleaver before dumping her remains. Sheriff O'Donnell proudly drugg Frank in front of the police. The city breathed a massive sigh of relief. The butcher was caught. But for anyone actually looking at the evidence, the confession was a complete fabricated joke. First, there's the timeline. Frank only confessed to killing Florence, who died in 1936. When pressed about the other 11 victims, he wept and swore he knew nothing. Then there's the physical evidence. Frank claimed that he cut Florence apart with a meat cleaver, but the coroner, Dr. Arthur Pierce, had already established that the butcher's cuts were surgical, precise, and made with a scalpel or an incredibly specialized blade, not the jacket and messy hacks of a butcher's cleaver. Furthermore, police completely tore apart Frank's apartment. They repped up the floor bloids and tested the bathtub. If he had bled a woman dry and dismember her in that bathroom, there would be blood. Even years later. They found absolutely nothing. The profile didn't fit. The evidence, in fact, Frank was not the meticulous calculating monster of Kingsbury Run. He was just another marginalized, vulnerable man from the Roaring Third that exactly fit the type of person the real butcher preyed upon. Frank would never get his day in court, though. Just a month after his arrest, he was found dead in his cell. He was hanging from a clothes hook, from a rope that was fashioned from a torn window shade, and it was wrapped tightly around his neck. The sheriff's office immediately rolled at suicide. He was a guilt-ridden killer taking his own life. Case closed. Except almost nothing about this scene made sense. Frank was five foot eight. The hook he allegedly hung himself on was only five foot seven inches from the floor. And when the coroner performed an autopsy, they discovered something horrifying that Sheriff O'Donnell had desperately tried to keep quiet. Frank had six fractured ribs, ribs that were completely intact when he was arrested. He had been brutally beaten while he was in police custody. Before his death, Frank had been trying to retract his confession, crying to anyone that would listen to him that the deputies had beat it out of him, his confession, that is. Whether he was murdered by the police to keep their false narrative alive, or whether he took his own life to escape their relentless torture, one thing is certain. Frank was the final victim of the Kingsbury Run madness. The scapegoat was dead, but only Ness knew the real butcher was still breathing. And Ness had his eyes fixed on a man who was the exact opposite of a poor immigrant bricklayer. Ness was hunting a wealthy, brilliant surgeon hiding behind a wall of political armor. While the city of Cleveland was busy washing its hands with the Frank Dulzall tragedy, Elliot Ness was quietly hunting a ghost. Ness knew Frank was not the butcher. The cuts on the body were too clean. The logistics were too complex. The real killer wasn't a drunken bricklayer, he was a surgical genius. And Ness, he had a name. And that name? Dr. Francis E. Sweeney. If you were gonna build the perfect suspect for the torso murders from the scratch, you would build Dr. Sweeney. Let's start with his background. Sweeney was a brilliant medical man, but he was fundamentally broken. During World War I, he served in a medical unit overseas. He spent his time in the blood-soaking trenches, performing rapid, high-pressure amputations on shattered soldiers. He knew exactly how to dismantle a human body with speed and precision. But the war took its toll. Sweeney returned to Cleveland, suffering from severe shell shock, what we now know as PTSD. To cope with his nightmares, he turned to heavy drinking and prescription drugs. His life began to spiral. He lost his medical practice. His wife divorced him. He became a high-functioning phantom, drifted between his wealthy family connections and the darkest corners of the city. And this is where the profile of the Mad Butcher aligned perfectly with Sweeney's hidden knife. Dr. Sweeney was a prominent man from a good family, but his appetites drew him down into the roaring through it. Sweeney was known to be a bisexual, and in this aggressively homophobic climate of the 1930s, this meant leaving a double life. In that era, being gay or bisexual wasn't just a taboo. It completely forced you off the grid. If you wanted to find a community or companionship, you couldn't do it in plate society. You had to go into the shadows. You had to go into the roaring third. The Roaring Third wasn't just a bunch of gambling dens and brothels that we talked about before. It was a haven for illicit underground gay bars and secret meetups. It was a place where people of all social statuses could blend together, where the homeless drifters and the wealthy politicians would cross paths in the dark. And this is where the profile of the monster and the victim violently collide. This is the exact same underground scene frequented by victim number one, Edward Androssi. As we said, Edward was also a bisexual and ran in the same exact head circles. It gave Sweeney the perfect hunting ground. And this changes the entire dynamic of the killer. Sweeney didn't just stumble into Kingsbury Run to hunt blindly. He used his wealth and his status as a bait in a community that was already forced into hiding. Think about it. How easy it would have been. A wealthy, educated doctor flashing cash in a depression-era underground bar. He could offer a young man like Edward money, a warm place to stay, alcohol, and because of the aggressive homophobia of the time, the victims they had to meet in secret. He got into the car willingly. In the dead of the night, no one saw them leave together. Like we said, Sweeney weaponized the closet. He preyed on the marginalized community because he knew the police weren't looking out for them, and he knew his victims couldn't scream for help without exposing themselves. But here is the terrifying reality of Dr. Francis Sweeney. Even if Elite Ness had a mountain of circumstantial evidence, he couldn't touch him. Because Francis Sweeney was the first cousin of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney. Congressman Sweeney was Elliot Ness's single biggest political rival. He hated Ness. He used this platform to constantly attack Ness's failure to catch the mad butcher. If Ness public accused the Congressman's cousin of being the most horrific serial killer in American history without an airtight, undeniable set of physical evidence, it would look like a desperate, malicious political hit job. It would end Nessa's career overnight. Sweeney was wrapped in an impenetrable suit of political armor, and you know what? He knew it. Ness was paralyzed, but he was also desperate. In 1938, in a highly classified off-the-books operation, Ness had his men quietly apprehend Dr. Sweeney and bring him to a secret room at an upscale Cleveland hotel. So, waiting in the room was Leonard Keller, the co-inventor of the early polygraphic machine. As we know now today, that polygraphs are not admissible but bra. This is like the literal inventor of the machine. For hours, Ness and Killer locked themselves in the hotel room with the doctor. They strapped Sweeney to the machine and grilled him on the most gruesome, unreleased details of the torso murders. They pushed him on the amputations. They pushed him on Edward. According to Keller, who was an expert at reading the physiological signs of deception, Sweeney didn't just fail the polygraph, he failed it spectacularly. Keller reportedly turned to Ness and said, That is your man. But Dr. Sweeney didn't break. He didn't confess. He sat in that chair, completely unbothered, and smiled at Elliot Ness. Sweeney knew exactly how the game was played. He knew Ness couldn't arrest him based on a secret polygraph test in a rented hotel room. He mocked the untouchable lawman to his face. Ness had finally found his monster. He had to let him go and walk right out the door. And just imagine how like humiliating and terrifying that is. Shortly after that secret interrogation, the official torso murders abruptly stopped. And the timing? It's chilling because you we know why. And then, right around the time the bodies stopped dropping in Kingsbury Run, Dr. Francis Whinney voluntarily committed himself to a Veterans Administration Hospital in Sandusky, Ohio. He locked himself away in an asylum completely out of Ness's reach. But the cat and mouse game didn't end there. For the rest of Ellenes' life, as his career collapsed and he descended into his own battle with severe alcoholism, he would perceive taunting, cryptid postcards. They arrived at his office and his home, often signed with pseudonyms or just a single mocking initial. The Mad Butcher never faced the judge. He never saw the inside of a prison cell. He lived his days in a hospital bed, sending souvenirs to the man who knew exactly who he was. The man that couldn't do a damn thing to stop him. The story of the Mad Butcher doesn't end with a dramatic courtroom verdict or an execution. It ends the way it began, and the shadows, quietly eroding the people it touched. For Elliot Ness, the torso murders were a fatal blow. The untouchable Golden Boy of Chicago was broken by Cleveland. His failure to officially close the case, combined with his controversial decision to burn down Kingsbury Run, it destroyed his political aspirations. He ran for mayor of Cleveland and lost spectacularly. The man who once smashed Al Capone's empire descended into severe alcoholism. He spent his final years working on jobs deeply in debt, his legacy seemingly in ruins. Ness died of a sudden heart attack in 1957 at the age of 54. Tragically, he passed away just months before the publication of his memoir, The Untouchables, a book that would posthumously returnect him as an American hero. But he went to his grave haunted by the ghost of Dr. Sweeney. Sweeney, on the other hand, outlived Ness by seven years. The prime suspect, the brilliant surgeon who mocked the law, died peacefully in a veterans hospital in 1964. He took his secrets and his sick victories to the grave. When you look back at the butcher's handiwork, it's impossible for anyone deeply invested in true crime not to see the glaring, horrifying parallels between the Cleveland Torsi. Murders and another infamous American nightmare that occurred a decade later. So I'm talking about, of course, about the Black Dahlia. And just like anyone else that's immersed in true crime, I'm fucking obsessed with the Black Dahlia case. In January 1947, 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was found dead in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. And the signature of her killer is chillingly identical to the phantom of Kingsbury Run. First, there's a surgical precision. Elizabeth Short wasn't just murdered. Her body was perfectly bisected at the waist, entirely severing the spine with a kind of antomical expertise that baffled the LAPD. Just like Dr. Arthur Pearce noted in the Cleveland cases, these weren't frantic hacks of a maniac. They were deliberate strokes of a scalp. Second, there's a dumb sight. When Schwartz's body was discovered, she was completely drained in blood. She had been washed methodically clean, posed deliberately from maximum shock, and left in a public area. Her killer had a private slaughterhouse, just like the butcher. Then you have the psychological game. The Black Dahlia killer notoriously mailed Elizabeth Short's belongings and taunting letters to the Los Angeles press and police. They played a massive game of cat and mouse with the authorities. It's the exact same pathological ego that drove Dr. Sweeney to send the mocking postcards to LA NS for over a decade. And then finally, you have the prime suspects. In Cleveland, Elliot S was paralyzed by Dr. Francis Sweeney, a wealthy protected medical professional living a dark double life. In Los Angeles, one of the most compelling modern suspects for the Black Dahlia is Dr. George Hodell, a wealthy, highly intelligent surgeon running in the elite Hollywood circles while allegedly hosting a horrific illicit underground life. Both killers preyed upon vulnerable people navigating their fringes of society. Both killers used their anatomical genius to erase their victims, and both killers, shielded by their status and limitations of early forensics, walked away completely free. The legacy of the Cleveland torture murders is a dark stain on the history of American law enforcement. But most importantly, it's a tragedy of the forgotten. To this day, the vast majority of the butcher's victims remain nameless. They were marginalized in life, and they were erased in death. They didn't get justice, and they didn't even get headstones with their own names. But pulling their stories out of the ash of the shanty towns, we can at least make sure they aren't completely forgotten by history. Thank you for joining me in the shadows this week. If you want to see the unredacted history of this case, head over to our socials where I've uploaded the map of King's Ray Ron, the death mask, and the remaining evidence files. Until next time, keep your doors locked, watch the shadows, and remember that sometimes the monsters they get away. I'm Matt, and this has been Homicidal Tendency.