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February 23, 1937: A Second Lady of the Lake
- The Kent State University Press
- Chapter
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108 History was about to repeat itself. On a cold winter afternoon of biting wind and lead-gray sky and water, fifty-five-year-old Robert Smith of 40 Brown Street, Beulah Park—a community close to ten miles northeast of Kingsbury Run—went down to the Lake Erie shore to check on a sailboat he had stored there for the winter. afterward, he wandered along the beach looking for driftwood to burn. Two and a half years before, Smith’s neighbor and acquaintance Frank LaGassie had been walking along the same path on a similar mission when he came upon the lower half of a human torso—the unidentified woman police called the Lady of the Lake. at 1:40 in the afternoon, near the foot of East 156th, Smith noticed a white object just offshore. “at first I thought it was the body of a dog or a sheep,” Smith told the Plain Dealer on February 24, “but then I saw it [was] part of a body, so I notified the police.” The first officer on the beach was Lieutenant William Sargent. Bracing himself against the chilly winds, he saw the upper half of a woman’s torso, headless and armless, grounded a few feet offshore. Soon after, he was joined by Sergeant James T. Hogan, detective Inspector Joseph M. Sweeney, detective Orley May, and three other detectives. as Hogan waded out into the bitter cold waters to retrieve the grisly object, he noted that the only footprints visible in the sand belonged to Robert Smith and Lieutenant Sargent. The torso had washed up on the beach; no one had carried it there. “The piece probably appeared in the last two days,” Hogan mused to the Plain Dealer on the 24th. (Some boys had been on the beach the day before, and it had not been there then.) “If it had floated up when the waves were high it would have been thrown far up on the beach.” Noting the quantity of sand and gravel embedded in the flesh and adhering to February 23, 1937 ASecondLadyoftheLake A Second Lady of the Lake 109 the cut surfaces, Hogan surmised, “With the lake rolling the way it has it is possible the body was placed in the lake anywhere between Beulah Park and Lakewood. and it is possible there are other pieces lodged in the breakwall which runs to E. 79th Street.” a couple of storm sewers emptied into the lake nearby, but blockage from snow and ice prevented any immediate search. (When the sewers became passable several days later, Merylo and Zalewski, accompanied by three workers from the city sewer department and a newspaper reporter, explored a ten-mile stretch but found nothing.) after Hogan had dispatched the torso to the morgue, where County Pathologist Reuben Straus awaited its arrival, he and the other detectives fanned out a mile southwest and northeast along the beach in a fruitless search for other parts of the body. Straus began to work on the torso at 3:30 that same afternoon. The woman had fair skin and light brown hair. From the condition of her lungs, Straus determined that she was a city dweller. He guessed she was between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, weighed about 120 pounds, and stood anywhere from five feet five inches to five feet eight. The dismemberment had been accomplished with a large, heavy knife; all the cut surfaces bore evidence of multiple hesitation marks. The exact cause of death, which had occurred during the last two to four days, eluded Straus. It had not been caused by decapitation; her heart had already stopped beating when the killer removed her head. an interesting set of disagreements arose within both the police department and the morgue. Coroner Gerber believed the development of the breasts indicated the woman had given birth at least once, perhaps twice; Straus thought otherwise and argued that she had never borne a child. Much more to the point, was this yet another victim of Cleveland’s phantom Butcher? detective Inspector Sweeney said “no” to the Plain Dealer on the 24th because “dissection was not marked with the same skill displayed in the others,” and Hogan was inclined to agree with him. after all, the torso half had also been found far away from Kingsbury Run and the other discovery sites, and death in this case could not be attributed to decapitation. after the chaos surrounding the discoveries of three victims the previous...