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1 Introduction When I took american history in the eighth grade, our teacher rounded off the academic year by reading us John Bartlow Martin’s 1949 Harper’s Magazine article “Butcher’s dozen: The Cleveland Torso Murders” over a two-day period. Just why he thought twelve decapitation murders from the mid-1930s were fit company for the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson, and the Great depression, I never knew. It was history, I suppose—local history that he, perhaps, felt we should know something about. Maybe he had just been bitten by the same bug that infects Jack the Ripper fans and devotees of other horrendous but unsolved crimes. Then as now, murder in Cleveland meant the Sheppard case—not just for city residents but for the entire country as well. But the story in that old issue of Harper’s released a dark, frightening shadow from the city’s past, a tale so mysterious, so gruesome and compelling that it effectively obscured dr. Sam and his brutally murdered wife, Marilyn. To a group of eighth graders just hitting their early teens, the battle between good and evil that emerged from Martin’s recounting of those long-ago crimes immediately assumed epic, indeed mythological proportions—a classic confrontation worthy to stand with Beowulf and Grendel, God and Satan. On one side stood Cleveland’s safety director, Eliot Ness, the man who finally got Capone and had since added to his legendary status by cleaning up a city crippled by corruption and labor racketeering; on the other side roamed an unknown psychopath who littered the inner city with a dozen decapitated and otherwise mutilated bodies over a three-year period and vanished as mysteriously as he appeared, leaving virtually no clues to his identity. It was a case that placed the city in an embarrassing national spotlight as it struggled to climb out of the Great Depression and handed the seemingly invincible Ness a humiliating defeat from which his law enforcement career never fully recovered. It was also the story of a city—how its people, press, and social institutions reacted to a situation virtually without precedent in In the Wake of the Butcher 2 modern american history and how they ultimately responded when the forces of good seemed inexplicably unable to prevail. Rather than having our seats lined up in traditional rows, our teacher favored a horseshoe arrangement with his desk standing between the two legs; as he read the lengthy article, I could look around the incomplete circle and wonder if the details of those terrible murders were burning as deeply into the imaginations of my classmates as they were in mine. Edward andrassy. Flo Polillo. Frank dolezal. Those names have haunted the niches of my memory ever since. There were, however, some flashes of black humor to lighten the somber classroom atmosphere. a popular song of the day had a first line that ran, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill”; and in a sly burst of creativity, our teacher had adapted it to fit the present circumstances: “I found my thrill on Jackass Hill” and “I found my fun in Kingsbury Run.” It seemed to me that he had actually composed some wicked little ditty about the crimes— his own personal version of “Lizzie Borden took an ax,” but I had to check with some of my contemporaries to make sure my memory was accurate. “Floating down the river, chunk by chunk by chunk; / arms and legs and torsos, hunk by hunk by hunk!” years later, I bought donald Rumbelow’s book The Complete Jack the Ripper. 1 was hooked. His murders possessed those two qualities guaranteed to compel enduring fascination: they were unspeakably horrible, and they remained unsolved. Mary ann Nichols, annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Catherine Eddows, Mary Jane Kelly—these brutally slashed women joined their butchered Cleveland counterparts in my imagination. The antiquity of the case actually became part of its appeal; the gulf of years created a dense fog that I was always trying to penetrate. Clues could only be traced so far before the century-old mists obscured the threads. The truth always lay just out of reach behind the faded and grainy photographs of murder sites, investigators, victims, and suspects. I envied those amateur sleuths who lived near the scenes of those infamous crimes or had the time and money to travel there simply to soak up the atmosphere of Buck’s Row, Miller’s Court, Hanbury Street, and Mitre Square. Then...

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