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22 Thirty-four-year-old Frank LaGassie of 21 Brookfield in Beulah Park was searching the beaches of Lake Erie for driftwood to burn. It was a regular part of his morning ritual, something he did every day before leaving for his job as a photostat operator at the dodd Company. But this day would be different—one that would give Francis Xavier LaGassie a story to tell for the rest of his life. The morning of September 5 was overcast and still; billowing dark cloud formations rolled low over the broad expanse of the lake. The cries of gulls punctuated the continuous, soft murmur of lapping waves. LaGassie was walking the shore just east of Bratenahl near Euclid Beach Park. Shortly before 8:00 a.M., he stood quietly, scanning the beaches, when something in the distance caught his eye. at first he thought the waves had washed up a major piece of good fortune. He saw what he initially identified as a piece of tree trunk, partly buried in the sand and stripped of its bark, in a pile of debris at the foot of East 156th. When he came nearer to claim his prize, he realized with horror that he was looking at the rotting lower half of a woman’s torso, legs amputated at the knees. LaGassie knew he had to summon the police, but not wanting to alarm his pregnant wife, he ran to neighbor Charles armitage’s house and frantically asked him to place the call. LaGassie’s apprehension grew as he nervously waited for the authorities. Finally, he could wait no longer; he had to get to work. He told his wife as gently as possible why the police would be arriving soon and implored her not to become upset. Twenty-one-year-old virginia LaGassie, however, succumbed to the grim excitement around her and prematurely delivered her son Richard at home two days later. September 5, 1934 theLadyoftheLake The Lady of the Lake 23 Two weeks earlier and thirty miles east in North Perry, Joseph Hejduk, a handyman on a lakeshore estate, found what looked like the vertebrae and ribs of a human torso with some moldering flesh still clinging to the back. a dead gull lay beside the gruesome remains like some voodoo charm or evil talisman. Special Lake County deputy sheriff Melvin Keener judged Hejduk’s discovery animal bones and ordered him to bury them in the sand along the shore. Close by a young boy hauled a box with a lid—three feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep—out of the lake and idly sat on it as he lazily tossed his fishing line into the lapping waves. Later on the morning of September 5, authorities finally collected Frank LaGassie’s grim discovery and handed it over to Cuyahoga County coroner arthur J. Pearce at the morgue. He immediately determined that this was not a medical specimen discarded by students as a prank; cataloging and numbering procedures at both the Western Reserve Medical School and the Ohio School of Embalming were too strict to allow for such a thing. Though he had precious little with which to work, a staff pathologist methodically began examining the grisly object. The woman had been dead for perhaps six months, and her body, at least this piece of it, had been in the water for about three or four. But the flesh was not waterlogged, suggesting that the piece had been packed in some sort of container when it was tossed into the lake. Pearce estimated her to have been about five feet six, 115 pounds, and in her mid- to late thirties. The only distinguishing mark on the torso was an abdominal scar, indicating that her uterus had been removed about a year before, but Pearce realized that this feature would be of little help in identifying the woman because the operation was so common. a preservative of some kind had been poured or spread over the torso and had turned the skin reddish, tough, and leathery, thus explaining why it was not more decomposed. Pearce called in city chemists on September 6 to examine the skin in an effort to identify the mystery substance, which E. B. Buchanan initially speculated was probably one of approximately fifteen different forms of calcium salts. By the next day, W. H. Hay, director of City Chemical Laboratories, determined it was either calcium hypochloride or chloride of lime. The next day, September 6...

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