Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

4. The Darkest Circles of Hell

the darkest circles of hell - 45 Chapter 4 tHe darkest CIrCles oF Hell Ben Grinder, a switchman for the P&LE Railroad, reported for work along the rail lines near West Pittsburg at 3:35 p.m. on September 29, 1939. Sometime between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m., he noticed something glimmering in the coal-black darkness, and he glanced toward the edge of the notorious Murder Swamp less than two hundred yards away. He watched with casual interest as a small fire flared up, burned, and then suddenly flickered out.A hobo bonfire, perhaps—but why did it die so quickly? A few days later, car inspector George (Paddy) McCart and pump station worker Jim Carroll watched curiously as crows circled and clustered in the same general area where Grinder had first noticed the fire. Bird sightings over the swamp were not unusual, but there was something strange about this particular gathering of noisy crows. Any New Castle or West Pittsburg residents with long memories must have come to dread the month of October. Not only had the 1925 discovery of three bodies and the subsequent march through Murder Swamp taken place during that month, but the 1934 discovery of another body in the same general area had also occurred in October. Now during the same month—on Friday, October 13, 1939, to be exact—three young men left West Pittsburg with nothing more serious on their minds than gathering walnuts, only to find that this Friday the 13th would live up to its grim reputation. At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Robert Durning, Carl Kos, and William Kessler were searching for nuts about a mile north of West Pittsburg along the edge of Murder Swamp when they made an exceptionally ghastly discovery—the headless, naked, decaying body of what seemed to be a young man, lying on its chest over Hell’s Wasteland - 46 the remains of a fire. Obviously, someone had done his best to destroy the corpse by burning it with newspapers and gasoline or, at the very least, to frustrate any attempts at identification. To foil any attempt to lift fingerprints, the fingers had been burned by placing paper in the clutched hands and then igniting it. As the boys headed for a nearby gas station to phone authorities, they chanced to meet Merle Papa, a railroad employee and neighbor of young Kos, who, after hearing of the boys’ grim find, notified Walter Bannon. The constable immediately headed for the scene, along with the coroner, Charles P. Byers, two state patrolmen, and three deputy sheriffs. The coroner examined the cut that had removed the victim’s head, but was unable to determine whether it had been made by a large knife, a saw, or maybe even an Region encompassing Stowe Township, McKees Rocks, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Map by Luke Moussa. the darkest circles of hell - 47 axe .As the assembled lawmen combed the area for clues, the body was transported to the Leyde Mortuary in New Castle, where Dr. David Perry determined that the victim—a young man five feet, six inches tall, weighing 120 pounds and being about eighteen or nineteen years of age—had been dead for about two weeks, a conclusion subsequently borne out by the discovery of a newspaper on the scene—the September 28 edition of the Youngstown Vindicator. When the body finally arrived at the morgue, Perry tried unsuccessfully to get a set of useable fingerprints from the charred hands. As with all the previous victims found in Murder Swamp, clues were few and frustrations quickly mounted. No local reports had been filed of missing persons, and the few pieces of recovered evidence (an ankle bracelet, a pair of shoes, a partly burned blue work shirt collar, and some pieces of heavy paper) were of no help in identifying the body. Ever since Eliot Ness’s assistant John R. Flynn had first visited New Castle in late 1936 or early 1937 in order to learn more about the Murder Swamp killings, Cleveland’s law enforcement fraternity had kept a watchful eye on events in western Pennsylvania. Local authorities may not have shared Detective Peter Merylo’s unshakable conviction that Cleveland’s Mad Butcher was also responsible for the atrocities, but they were wary: some of the details surrounding the earlier Pennsylvania murders had borne just enough resemblance to the local killings to keep lingering suspicions alive...