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

August 16, 1938: Double Murder Again?

141 The most grotesque public spectacle the city had seen since Sergeant James Hogan led the unsuccessful search for the arms and head of victim no. 6 in Kingsbury Run two years before, began to unfold in the late afternoon of august 16. James dawson, Edward Smith, and James McShack, african americans who eked out a meager existence by scavenging for reusable scrap and junk they could sell to dealers, were searching through a dump close to the southwest corner of the newly completed Lake Shore drive and East 9th where much of the refuse from the Great Lakes Exposition had been discarded. at about 4:00 in the afternoon, dawson left his companions to get a truck. “I was getting ready to gather some of the iron together so we could sell it to a junk yard,” he told the Plain Dealer on august 17, “when I passed a little gully and saw what looked like a coat sticking out of the rocks.” as dawson descended into the five-foot depression, stumbling over pieces of broken concrete, he realized that the coat was actually a bundle covered with a neat pile of rocks. alerted by the buzz of flies circling the area, he pushed aside some of the rocks and concrete debris, then recoiled from the putrid smell. He called for his two companions to join him, and as he carefully began removing some of the rocks from the bundle, Smith saw what looked like human bones. The three men scrambled out of the gully and hailed the first policeman they saw—Patrolman Martin Conners doing traffic duty near the Lake Shore-East 9th intersection. at 4:30 Conners put in the call to the detective Bureau, and within minutes, a sizable contingent of police, including James Hogan and Peter Merylo, as well as Coroner Gerber, gathered at the trash dump. Even to these veterans of the torso investigation, the grisly scene at August 16, 1938 DoubleMurderAgain? In the Wake of the Butcher 142 the corner of Lake Shore and East 9th must have come as a shock. Under a small pile of rocks and chunks of concrete lay a human torso wrapped first in the sort of heavy brown paper used by butchers (perhaps a grim joke), then in a man’s torn, striped summer coat, and finally in a tattered, colorful , homemade patchwork quilt. Jammed among the rocks under the torso rested a package wrapped in the same brown paper containing the thighs held together with a rubber band. Five feet away lay a similarly wrapped package containing a severed head with some matted, silky, light brown hair about six inches long still attached to the scalp. Strangest of all, police Inspector Charles Nevel and Sergeant James Hogan search the rubble at the East 9th-Lake Shore dump site where victims no. 11 and no. 12 were found, august 16, 1938. Police made no attempt to cordon off the crime scene. Courtesy of Marjorie Merylo dentz. Double Murder Again? 143 located the arms and lower legs in a brown cardboard box fashioned from two different containers—one from the Independent Biscuit Company of Cleveland, the other from the General Seafoods Corporation of Boston, Massachusetts. For the first time since victim no. 5, the killer had left the entire body behind. The makeshift box looked new and clearly had not been exposed to the elements for very long. In stark contrast, the enclosed limbs and the rest of the corpse were in such an advanced state of decay that Gerber could not be sure whether the internal organs had been removed or had simply decomposed. Parts of the skin appeared mummified, and the coroner even wondered if some of the body pieces had been frozen. He judged the remains to be those of a female. as usual, the police uncovered tantalizing but inconclusive bits of evidence—two burlap bags, a label from the coat, and a page from the March 5, 1938, issue of Collier’s Magazine. To homebound commuters on Lake Shore drive late that afternoon, the sight of so many uniformed and plainclothesed police officers combing through the rocky, trash-strewn field while others photographed the area could only mean that the Butcher had struck again. Many slowed down as they passed; others stopped to join a steadily growing crowd of onlookers. according to the Plain Dealer on august 17, a couple hundred people...