In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland'd Torso Murders, Authoritative Edition, Revised and Expanded

July 22, 1936: Murder without a Clue

71 Marie Barkley was an attractive seventeen-year-old who had no idea she would earn a small niche in the history of Cleveland’s most notorious murders. She had simply decided to take advantage of the pleasant summer weather by hiking through a wooded area close to where she lived. In the late morning of July 22, 1936, she left her home at 7808 Hope avenue and walked south, probably down West 73rd; she crossed denison and the Baltimore & Ohio railroad tracks—a trek that took her outside Cleveland proper to Brooklyn. The north end of the southwestern suburb was a sparsely populated area dotted with a few homes, small farms, and industrial plants. She headed toward a patch of woods south of Clinton Road near Big Creek, perhaps passing the remnants of the hobo campfires that the police would later investigate. Whether she first noticed the terrible stench or actually caught sight of the sickening corpse is not known; but at about 11:30, she came upon the naked, headless body of a white male in an advanced state of decomposition lying on its chest in a gully near West 98th and the Rayon Plant. Sergeant James Finnerty, the first Cleveland policeman on the scene, did not arrive until 1:20, nearly two hours after Barkley’s discovery. (Brooklyn police may have been summoned first, but there is no existing record of whether they ever responded to such a call or, indeed, even received it. There is also no record of how Cleveland police became involved. Brooklyn authorities may have alerted them when they recognized the similarity between Marie Barkley’s discovery and the previous killings in the city proper.) Initially, Finnerty did not see the head but ultimately found it between ten and eighteen feet away, lying on top of and partly hidden by the victim’s clothing, some articles stained with blood: a single-breasted, dark gray suit July 22, 1936 Murderwithoutaclue In the Wake of the Butcher 72 (the arms of the jacket turned inside out, a slash in the right sleeve), a dark brown leather belt with a plain nickel buckle, well-worn size 8 black oxfords, a light blue polo shirt, light blue socks, a black cap with gray stripes, and white underwear. The man had apparently been killed where his body lay. at 1:30, Sergeant James Hogan and detectives Orley May and Thomas F. McNeil joined Finnerty and members of no. 10 Cruiser in the isolated spot. Hogan and May were savvy, experienced veterans of the force. Orley May had been one of the first Cleveland detectives at the base of Jackass Hill the previous September when Jimmy Wagner and Peter Kostura discovered Edward andrassy’s body, and he had worked on every torso case since. He had seen solid leads in the andrassy and Polillo murders evaporate. after exploring the area, both men realized that there were few clues and no leads at all: only an isolated crime scene—later determined to be about two months old—and a rotting corpse. Because the body lay in a spot surrounded by railroad tracks and dotted with the remains of hobo camps, police assumed the victim had been a vagrant. a more thorough investigation of the area turned up nothing. Without a bit of luck in this case, victim no. 5, the only one found on Cleveland’s west side, had been dead for two months when his body was found on July 22, 1936. Courtesy of Marjorie Merylo dentz. Murder without a Clue 73 authorities realized their efforts would be futile. Since the skin of the face was so badly decomposed, fingerprinting and missing person reports were the only possible ways to identify the victim. Given the condition of the remains, the former method would have been next to impossible; but the police tried to take a set anyway. after Bertillon assistant James Benacek photographed the body, county undertaker Frank G. Nunn took it to the morgue, where Coroner Pearce declared the man legally dead at 5:20 p.M. The victim weighed about 145 pounds, was five feet five, and possessed longish brown hair. Pathologist Reuben Straus judged him to be approximately forty years old. Straus’s autopsy report reads like a catalog of horrors : the skin on the back and legs remained intact but was hardened and brownish, an observation borne out by Benacek’s photograph. The viscera...