Hell’s Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

Epilogue: Apocrypha

epilogue - 122 epilogue apoCrypHa In the years since Cleveland’s most notorious murders rocked the city, a cottage industry has sprung up devoted to giving the Mad Butcher ever more victims in an ever-expanding geographic area of activity. Regrettably, Peter Merylo must take responsibility for getting the whole process started in the late 1930s. He never wavered in his belief that a single murderer was responsible both for Cleveland’s torso murders and for many of those in Pennsylvania, and an eager local press willingly gave him a pulpit for preaching his opinions. Confusion in the numbering of victims outside Ohio began literally with the first visit by Cleveland officials to New Castle in 1937. What follows is a consideration of other murder-dismemberment victims whose deaths have been attributed, at one time or another, to Cleveland’s Mad Butcher. It should be pointed out that Merylo did not believe all the murders in Pennsylvania were the work of the Butcher and even initially considered some to be legitimate victims, only to reject them later. addItIonal murders attrIbuted to tHe Cleveland butCHer: 1941–1947 May 26–31, 1941 The discovery of two amputated male legs in the Ohio River. No other body parts found; victim never identified. epilogue - 123 Hopping off a freight train at Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Albert H. Smoot and John Omuska were almost immediately confronted by an amputated male leg on a bank of the Ohio River near the Sewickley Bridge and the P&LE Railroad. Allegheny County detectives Sam Grahm and Lester Leonard, the first law men on the scene, examined the cleanly severed limb and immediately dismissed the notion that the dismemberment could have been caused by the paddlewheel of a passing steamboat. As they stared at the gruesome find, the minds of both men wandered back to May 3, 1940, and the horrible discoveries made in a string of boxcars in Stowe Township. Had the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run struck again? Five days later, two nineteen-year-old men—William Kraus and Eugene Lewicki—were rowing in a back channel of the Ohio River near Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, when they came upon a second male leg; authorities surmised that it probably came from the same body as the first one found. Again, investigators’ thoughts immediately turned to the boxcar murders of 1940 and to Cleveland’s Mad Butcher. Cleveland police were duly alerted, and on June 1, Peter Merylo and John Sullivan arrived in Pittsburgh to consult with local authorities. Ironically, the pair spoke with Samuel Riddle, the same officer who had reported formally on the Stowe Township discoveries the year before. The rest of the body was never found, and no official paperwork dealing with these two legs has survived in the files of the Allegheny County coroner’s office. The Pittsburgh Press mentioned the apparent skill with which the disarticulation had been managed, but this totally uncorroborated speculation is hardly enough to tie them to Cleveland’s Mad Butcher. September 24, 1941 Body of a decapitated white male discovered in a dump near the P&LE Railroad tracks along the Monongahela River. Head found about thirty feet away; victim identified as Wallace L. Brown. In a scene eerily reminiscent of the discovery in Cleveland of victims 11 and 12 three years before, three men foraging for scrap iron in a Pittsburgh dump found the shoeless, headless corpse of Wallace Brown, covered with wrapping paper and wooden planks. The police immediately dismissed the possibility that Brown had been decapitated by a epilogue - 124 passing train and pointed to the lack of blood on the site as proof that his murder and beheading had occurred somewhere else, most likely across the river on the Hazelwood side. The thirty-five-year-old victim was a rather unsavory character himself, an ex-convict sporting a rap sheet that extended back to 1933 and included arrests for burglary and larceny.After his release in January from the County Workhouse, where he had been serving a sentence for receiving stolen goods, Brown had been supporting himself by working at a series of odd jobs (although the Coroner’s Jury Verdict listed his profession as janitor) and had last been seen two or three days before his death by Grace Neuman, a woman for whom he had been working. She had summarily ordered him off her property when he had showed up drunk and suddenly turned abusive. Pittsburgh police also dismissed...