In this Book
- Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: The Kent State University Press
Now Badal concludes his examination of the horrific cycle of murder-dismemberments with Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders. During the mid-1920s, a vast, swampy area just across the Ohio border near New Castle, Pennsylvania, revealed a series of decapitated and otherwise mutilated bodies. In 1940 railroad workers found the rotting remains of three naked and decapitated bodies in a string of derelict boxcars awaiting destruction in Pennsylvania’s Stowe Township. Were all of these terrible murders the work of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher? Many in Ohio and Pennsylvania law enforcement thought they were, and that assumption led to a massive, well-coordinated two-state investigation. In Hell’s Wasteland, Badal explores that nagging question in depth for the first time.
Relying on police reports, unpublished memoirs, and the surviving autopsy protocols—as well as contemporary newspaper coverage— Badal provides a detailed examination of the murder-dismemberments and weighs the evidence that potentially links them to the Cleveland carnage. Hell’s Wasteland is the last piece in the gigantic torso murder puzzle that spanned three decades, covered two states, and involved law enforcement from as many as five different cities.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Quote
- pp. ii-vii
- Introduction and Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xx
- 1. Murders Most Foul
- pp. xxi-17
- 2. The Triple Mystery of 1925
- pp. 18-32
- 3. Enter Cleveland
- pp. 33-44
- 4. The Darkest Circles of Hell
- pp. 45-67
- 5. Odyssey into the Abyss
- pp. 68-84
- Epilogue: Apocrypha
- pp. 122-132
- Bibliography
- pp. 155-156
- Back Cover
- p. BC