Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

3. Enter Cleveland

Hell’s Wasteland - 32 Region encompassing Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, and New Castle, Pennsylvania. Map by Luke Moussa. enter cleveland - 33 Chapter 3 enter Cleveland Just when the so-called torso murders began in Cleveland is a matter of debate. Some commentators fix the starting date at September 1934, when the rotting lower half of a woman’s torso, thighs still attached, washed up on the shore of Lake Erie east of the city. Others opt for the more traditionally accepted date of September 23, 1935, when a couple of neighborhood boys discovered the naked, decapitated, and emasculated bodies of two men near East 55 at the base of a sixty-foot slope known locally as Jackass Hill. This shockingly gruesome pair of murder-mutilationswouldsoonbefollowedbythesimilardecapitationdismemberment of a woman in January 1936. By summer’s end that year, six victims would be discovered—all decapitated and otherwise disarticulated by a knife-wielding phantom highly skilled at avoiding detection and possessing sufficient surgical skill to dispatch and further mutilate his victims with frightening precision. By the time the cycle of vicious murders stopped in August 1938, twelve officially recognized victims would be uncovered, the infamous “Butcher’s Dozen.” The later months of 1936 were shaping up as an economically crucial period for Cleveland. Not only would the city play host to the Republican National Convention in June 1936 but the Great Lakes Exposition was slated to open at the end of June and run into October. City fathers desperately hoped these events would provide a financial shot in the arm for an industrial area still reeling from the devastation of the Great Depression. Given these hopes, the steady accumulation of decapitated and dismembered bodies was inconvenient, to say the least. Their discovery , just when Cleveland was counting on attracting free-spending Hell’s Wasteland - 34 visitors to the city, alarmed Mayor Harold Burton, prompting him, apparently during the first week of September 1936, to meet with his hand-picked safety director, Eliot Ness, and his chief of police, George Matowitz. While Ness had been on the job since December 1935, initially he had given priority to cracking down on illegal gambling, labor racketeering, and corruption in the police department—“traditional” vices and crimes that would be comfortably familiar to a one-time G man. In a move that probably had as much to do with public relations as it did with investigative efficiency, Burton urged Ness to become far more directly involved in solving the torso murders than he had been up to that point. The mayor also ordered Chief Matowitz to assign his best man to the case full time. Thus Detective Peter Merylo picked up the threads of the baffling cycle of murder-dismemberments, and from his initial assignment until the investigation simply petered out, he and his partner, Martin Zalewski, became the public face of the torso Cleveland’s beleaguered safety director, Eliot Ness. By the summer of 1936, the torso murders in the city’s Kingsbury Run area had become embarrassing national news, and Mayor Harold Burton ordered Ness to take a leading role in the hunt for the killer. When news of similar murders occurring in Pennsylvania reached the city, Ness dispatched his assistant, John R. Flynn, to New Castle to explore a possible link. Photograph courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library. enter cleveland - 35 murder investigation in Cleveland. They were first on the scene for each discovery, they served as point men for the whole police department, and they were the lawmen to whom the local press turned for updates and general comments. The torso murders would occupy Peter Merylo, indeed possess him, for the rest of his professional career and into his retirement. Merylo immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine as a teenager sometime before the start of World War I. Although he joined the United States Army, he never saw any combat. When the war ended in 1919, he joined the Cleveland Police Department and rose steadily through the ranks, achieving that of detective in August 1931. On the job, he was often seen as a bewildering contradiction—a combination of a by-the-book team player and an independent maverick, willing to bend the rules if necessary to get the job done. He was a tenacious bulldog who pursued his assignments with an all-out dedication that would have exhausted his colleagues. Never shy about speaking his mind, he...