Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

Introduction and Acknowledgments

IntroduCtIon and aCknoWledgments It’s a story I have told many times. During the last two days of the semester in my eighth-gradeAmerican history class, our teacher, John Gillett, decided to regale us with the tale of Cleveland’s infamous, unsolved torso murders from the mid-1930s, as told in John Bartlow Martin’s article from the November 1949 issue of Harper’s Magazine—a fascinating piece that bore the grimly alluring title “Butcher’s Dozen: The Cleveland Torso Murders.” Eighth grade was not exactly my finest hour as a student, but if my thirteen-year-old ears remained almost permanently deaf to the wonders of America’s past, they certainly perked up as our teacher read Martin’s vivid account of the brutal series of decapitation murders that pitted Cleveland’s safety director, Eliot Ness, against the unseen and unidentified Butcher perpetrating horrible crimes in the central city, right under the noses of the police. I was fascinated, although as I eagerly soaked up the details of those unspeakable murder-dismemberments, the thought that I might one day write a book about this local fiend, dubbed by some city pundits “Cleveland’s Jack the Ripper,” never entered my mind. But write it I did. And when the Kent State University Press published In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders in 2001, I thought that was the end of it: my long-standing debts to author John Bartlow Martin, to my American history teacher, John Gillett, and to the specters that still haunt Kingsbury Run had been paid. In 2001, I certainly did not anticipate a second book on Cleveland’s sensational butcheries. However, my nagging doubts about the “official ” version of events, particularly concerning the arrest and death - ix - introduction and acknowledgments - x of Frank Dolezal, together with a sudden influx of information on that particular aspect of the case, led me to expand what had been a single chapter of In the Wake of the Butcher into a new book, Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher (2010). The reasons behind this third book are a little more complex. In the midst of the cycle of murder-dismemberments going on in Cleveland came news from New Castle, Pennsylvania—a small industrial city southeast of Cleveland and north of Pittsburgh—that killings with remarkably similar modes of operation (MOs) had been going on there at least since the mid-1920s. Various officials from Cleveland made the relatively short trip to New Castle over the next couple of years to explore the possibility that all these grisly murders in both cities were somehow linked. Opinion was split: some cautiously hinted that there might be a connection, while others were more skeptical. Initially, the Cleveland press establishment gave scant attention to Pennsylvania’s troubles. After all, local officials were divided about any possible link, and Cleveland was wrestling with its own ongoing nightmare of murder and mutilation. Decapitated and otherwise dismembered bodies had continued to appear at various points in the inner city despite the largest and most intense investigation in Cleveland history, and law enforcement seemed no closer to an answer than it had been when the killings officially began in September 1935. As far as the press was concerned, the Pennsylvania atrocities were an interesting footnote to the murderdismemberments occurring in Cleveland.Although in my first book, In the Wake of the Butcher, I devoted some space to a discussion of the New Castle killings, I treated them as the local press had in the 1930s—as an intriguing sidelight to what was happening in Cleveland. In 2003, Chuck Gove—an enterprising detective with an entrepreneurial flair in the Cleveland Police homicide unit—put together a three-hour bus tour with the catchy title of “Mystery, Mayhem, and Murder Tour,” an odyssey that took Clevelanders with a yen for the city’s dark past to all the sites and landmarks associated with the torso murders that had not been plowed under or built over, as well as to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office. The final attraction in this tour through the city’s underbelly was the rather extensive and grisly display on the torso murders in the Cleveland Police Museum. When Gove inaugurated the tours, In the Wake of the Butcher had been gracing bookstore shelves for two years, and he asked me if I would [3.144.113.30] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10:52 GMT...