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The Cleveland Torso Killer
33 Plays5 months ago
A mad butcher terrorized the Roaring Third in Cleveland Ohio from 1935 to 1938, leaving a trail of bodies and mystery in his wake. At least twelve victims are attributed to this unknown murderer, and most were never identified. While the killer was never caught, his killings mysteriously stopped in 1938, and the butcher was never heard from again. Join Kayley and Siera as they discuss the Cleveland Torso Killer (also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run) and how this "unsolved case" might've actually been cracked back in 1938.
After listening side note:
As of summer of 2024, DNA testing is underway to identify the victims! The DNA Doe Project is working with the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office to use genetic genealogy testing to attempt to identify those who have for too long been nameless. They've exhumed two victims (one of which is the Tattooed Man, the other believed to be victim #6,). So sorry I didn't mention this in the episode; I researched this back in May of 2024, and this hadn't been reported on at the time. Here's an article about it-take a look!
-Kayley
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/torso-killer-cleveland-dna-testing-victims-identified/
Sources:
https://www.clevelandpolicemuseum.org/collections/torso-murders/
https://case.edu/ech/articles/t/torso-murders
https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/the-read/articles/case-closed-
In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland Torso Murders, Revised and Expanded by James Badal
Recommended
Transcript
Reunion and Podcast Hiatus
00:00:02
Speaker
Kaylee? Is that you? Sierra? I can barely recognize you. It's been so long! What are we doing here? I don't even know it anymore. We don't care if we're here. Our vlog has a bed, old friend. Many, many months. Too many. Oh, is this where we apologize? To all four people listening that aren't related to us?
00:00:30
Speaker
I don't know, because I feel like giving an apology now will set up an expectation for more timely episodes. And I don't think we're at a place in life where we can promise that. But I do feel kind of bad. So sure. I'm sorry. That's true. I mean, I'm also sorry. I feel like it's more my fault than your fault. um But it's been so long that I can't remember who's at fault. So I think we both. Let's split it 50-50.
00:00:59
Speaker
Let's go 60-40 because I'm sure it was some of my fault. Regardless, we are 50-50 sorry. We are 100 sorry for the very long delay. You know, life happens and we both have other... Life happens. Yeah. We both had stuff going on.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, a lot has changed. A lot, a lot has changed. I'm not in your kitchen anymore. I'm back home with my family alone in a dark house. So this is going to be perfect for the topic today. And I don't rent an apartment. I rent a room in someone else's house now because I don't have a job. So you know what? We're doing great. You know, life looks a little different. Just kidding. I freelance now, which is a fancy way to have a job.
00:01:47
Speaker
now No, you do, you do work. Thank you. I'm in between jobs right now, so I'm just chilling till I leave in January, so. Oh yeah, to go do a noble thing and teach overseas. I say freelance work is still noble, you're providing a service for people. That's true, but I left my previous job so I could not have a roommate anymore, so working towards a goal. But yeah, I would say we can't promise more consistency.
00:02:17
Speaker
An attempt at consistency. Yes, we can promise an attempt. And I have a lot more time on my hands to write, so. So you know what? You might even see that consistency, ladies and gentlemen, or lady and gentlemen. I don't know. For those of you who may have also forgotten who we are, hi, I'm Sierra. And I'm Kaylee. And this, believe it or not, is true crime and punishment. Episode, uh. I can't remember. No idea.
00:02:47
Speaker
What was our last episode? I'm going to check Spotify. I actually think we have one that hasn't been edited yet. I think we might have two. I think we have Kitty Genovese, and then we have the Dahlia. That have not been edited? Yeah, because all that. Oh. Hm. I'm actually sitting on two episodes for once. So we really don't know which episode this is. Hold on, let me. We're going to get our ducks in a row. They're somewhere. We haven't uploaded an episode since March.
00:03:16
Speaker
March? It's November. March 3rd, the murder of Tim McLean. Where has the time gone? That's not possible. Actually, it is totally 100% possible, but still. and Before that, we hadn't uploaded since December 3rd, so we're doing
Reintroduction and True Crime Focus
00:03:34
Speaker
poorly. Oh, that's right, because we did an apology in that one too. In the past, almost a year, we've only put out two episodes. Hey, I'm proud of us for those two.
00:03:46
Speaker
round of applause. Anyway, we we come back to you now with a painfully long case file, and we haven't even said what we're talking about. Today we're talking about the Cleveland torso killer.
00:03:58
Speaker
o Why is he called or she called the torso killer? Or is that going to be revealed later? It's revealed pretty soon. This one's a pretty gnarly episode, my man. So this is all the first episode we've ever recorded at night. oh What a bad choice. And I feel like I'm going to be but I'm worried that I'm going to traumatize you and then be like, all right, bye. For context, I still, when I'm in the basement and I'm turning off the last light, I still run up the stairs or go up the stairs backward because I'm expecting something to manifest out of the darkness.
00:04:38
Speaker
And right now I'm doing a part-time job at my church. So like churches, church buildings are creepy when they're empty. You and Naomi told me about Fall of the House of Usher. And all I could see when I went down to the basement was Prospero's face melting off. And I didn't even watch the episode. I just heard about it. I'm just like, he's going to come out from the closet behind the kitchen and like I'm just going to die here in the church building. It was horrible. I mean, the show was pretty good.
00:05:04
Speaker
Um, well, I have thoughts and opinions that we'll get to later, but churches are creepy. When I was a kid, I wanted to write a murder mystery that happened in my, uh, the church I grew up in. And because I remember thinking one day, what if there's just a body in the Baptist tree? Oh, that's actually a really good premise. I mean, so well, yeah, it's a good premise. It was like a locked door situation. It was.
00:05:33
Speaker
I'll tell you about it someday. was Maybe you should just write it. If I could just sit down and write something. Anyway, I've got my case file in front of me. This is a bit of a long case. There's several victims.
Cleveland Torso Killer Case Introduction
00:05:48
Speaker
There's 12 victims. um And we're also kicking it back to the 1930s.
00:05:54
Speaker
Oh, so Great Depression era. Okay. Specifically will be in 1934 to about 1940. And so this serial killer has a lot of names. It was in that era of journalism where everyone who did something wrong had to have a name. And you'll see that journalism actually is ah is a huge part of this case. There were three main newspapers that covered this story as it kind of came out. And this is also in a time where people just said whatever.
00:06:23
Speaker
to the newspaper and forget about the the investigation. we'll just We'll just tell them whatever we want. So ah one thing I want to say off the top is there are some names of detectives that are very relevant to this story that I've chosen not to include because if I listed every name that was relevant, we'd have about 75 different people that we we needed to um keep straight. So I haven't done that to you today. Thank you. I feel like this is something where I need to take notes. Let me grab a piece of paper.
00:06:54
Speaker
Probably not a bad idea. The way I've structured this is we're going to go through the victims, and then we're going to go through ah key details, and we're going to go through suspects. This is an unsolved case. Oh.
Case Details and Challenges
00:07:07
Speaker
In the sense that it's pretty much solved. Oh. But we can't really prove it, so you'll have to tell me what you think at the end. Ooh, I love giving my opinion.
00:07:18
Speaker
A big source I used for this case was In the Wake of the Butcher, Cleveland Torso Murders, The Revise and Expand Editions by James Bedall. Excellent book. very that's a That's a great title. h um I really recommend the book. However, I will say with this case in particular, just a bunch of disclaimers off the top. With this book and with this case, there are crime scene photos in the book. oh um And if you Google it, you'll find them.
00:07:45
Speaker
So I saw a lot of dismembered things. ah No, thank you. um but Yeah, so i I can't really recommend it if you're sensitive to that. I'm sensitive to that and I didn't know that when I went into it because I was like, it's the 30s. How bad can it be? They didn't know how to kill well back then.
00:08:08
Speaker
This guy did anyway. so Do what you do with excellence. so kind That's probably a bad that's a bad joke to make in this context. Probably. um This guy has a couple different names. He's most infamously known as the Cleveland Torso Killer. He's also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. You know, psychopath.
00:08:31
Speaker
couple other names they had for him. But let's start at the top. So this story follows an unknown serial killer who was active between 1935 and 1938. In these three years, 12 victims and maybe more. I'm so sorry. Matt opened my bedroom dog bedroom door. it wasn't shut all the way. You scared the tar out of me.
00:08:56
Speaker
are Are you, are you okay? it happened Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. It was just the dog.
00:09:03
Speaker
That's, that's scary. The other day I was home alone and my roommate's cat opened the bathroom door while I was in the shower and it just kind of like w reeked open. as I'm about to be murdered, but it was, it was just the cat. It was just the cat. Yeah. I would have, I would have screamed bloody murder. I probably would have hit my head on the shower curtain. I mean, shower.
00:09:23
Speaker
head and then then been dead. ah I refuse to die in the shower. I just, I can't be that girl. I don't have the energy. i Well, and I just, I would be worried about the aftermath. I don't want to be found that way. Let's be real. Yeah, me neither. Sorry, this has gone so far off the rails. That's mass butcher. Mass butcher? What was the second name? Mad butcher. Mad butcher.
00:09:54
Speaker
Um, so yeah, in the wake of the butcher, Cleveland Torsummers, excellent book. So I'm just gonna start from the top of that line and I'll probably leave it at the part of the dog scaring the tar. Cause I edit this episode and that's my prerogative. Anyway, so.
00:10:07
Speaker
An unknown serial killer was active between 1935 and 1938. In these three years, 12 victims, maybe more, would be attributed to the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Unfortunately, of these 12, only two victims would be able to be clearly identified, with a third being partially identified, but not confirmed. Hmm. Do they have an idea of who the other victims are? they And they just weren't able to tell for sure? Or no idea at all?
00:10:34
Speaker
they have and i They don't have an idea who many of these people are. They they followed as many leads as they could, but this was the 1930s. As we'll see, the roaring third or the place in Kingsbury Run and in Cleveland where they were found, it's a transient neighborhood. There weren't a ton of people who were there who were financially well-off, who were well-connected. It was it was the party-ish part of town where the you go for some anon anonymous debauchery, you go for the bars.
00:11:03
Speaker
okay the ladies of the night, that kind of thing. So people kind of flitted in and out. It was also the era of the Great Depression. There was a lot of homeless people that lived in Kingsbury Run. And so this guy kind of had his pick of just whoever there would be. While I said there are 12 known victims, there will be 13 in total to be found murdered in Kingsbury Run in these three years. This case is infamous because of the extreme brutality as well as the police's response to try and find the killer.
00:11:33
Speaker
which it was the 30s. Wasn't a good response, really. Starting off, in September of 1934, a young man found a woman's remains on the shores of Lake Erie. When I say remains, i say I say this to mean he found the torso of a woman in her mid-30s. It had been amputated at the knees,
00:11:51
Speaker
And so, since it had been amputated at the knees, we had no lower leg, we had no arms, there was no head. It was just the lower part of the torso. When the remains were examined by the Cuyahoga County coroner, a man by the name of Arthur J. Pierce, Pierce found that the skin had been covered in some sort of chemical preservative. The chemical used caused her skin to turn red and leathery.
00:12:13
Speaker
So kind of almost like a chemical burn, but it was it was preserved, not technically burned. After the torso was found, a search of the area was performed and investigators found a few other body parts. Unfortunately, her head was never recovered. Peers found that the woman had likely been dead for about six months,
00:12:30
Speaker
and had been in the water for probably about three or four. But he believed that she'd been in some sort of container because the skin wasn't waterlogged. So somehow the body had broken free of this container and had floated to the top, which is how
Psychological and Societal Impact
00:12:43
Speaker
it was able to be found. How normal is that for like bodies buried in containers to come out of the container?
00:12:49
Speaker
um It's actually kind of normal if it's not secured well because gas as a body decomposes will expand the container. and so Since that happened and sometimes like they'll s sink and then rise and then break or an animal will get into it, something like that. and ah I have another question. You said this is in 1934. Is this the body that people debate about? Yes.
00:13:16
Speaker
Because this woman was never identified, and it happened a year before the rest of the murders kind of took off, she was given the title of the Lady of the Lake. This is what we what I consider to be victim zero, not victim one, but victim zero, because it would take several years for them to be able to kind of put this together and think, we found that body a while ago. It was just a torso. Perhaps these things are connected. Now, a year later, in September of 1935, two teenage boys found the corpse of a man at the base of Jackass Hill in Kingsbury Run.
00:13:49
Speaker
unfortunate name for the hill. I have a child. That was so funny. I'm sorry. An unfortunate thing that keeps happening in this story is teenagers or children find these bodies because it's the 1930s. They're just out poking around at things. The body was found only wearing a pair of black cotton socks. And strangely, the body had been cleaned and dry and just completely drained of blood.
00:14:15
Speaker
The man had been emasculated and decapitated and there were rope burns present on both wrists. Deputy corner Wilson Chamberlain was able to identify this man and the cause of death. The body belonged to Edward Androssi, a 29 year old man who had been known to visit the roaring third. His cause of death was determined to be decapitation. According to in the wake, yes. Sorry, I have another question. um Yeah. Was he decapitated before everything else happened or like the other body parts were cut up or?
00:14:44
Speaker
They weren't. I didn't see any information regarding that. They assumed. I'm assuming not. Oh heavens. I think I get into it a bit later. Okay, sorry. Yeah. I need to quit asking questions because I thought either one of you answered it like right after. I may not have actually. I had a quote from the book, but one thing they said about Andrasi is that he had those rope burns on his wrist. So at some point he was aware and struggling.
00:15:11
Speaker
um And so the other victims aren't said to have had the same kind of burns or things like that. You also find that most of these people didn't have any drugs in their system. um um So they weren't drugged. And a lot of them, their cause of death was decapitation.
00:15:30
Speaker
That's awful.
00:15:33
Speaker
So according to In the Wake of the Butcher by James Bedall, an unidentified homicide detective present during the autopsy remarked, that's odd. Usually a murderer kills by other means, stabbing, shooting, strangulation, poison.
00:15:47
Speaker
Sometimes not often the heads are removed to prevent identification, but almost never to kill. It's a hell of a job to remove a human head anyway. So this was really odd. It'd be odd by today's standards. It's a brutal way to kill somebody. There's something very, I don't want to say animalistic, but something very violent about that. Like it's usually a way to keep a body from being identified. It's not a way to kill somebody there, not to say better ways, there are easier ways.
00:16:14
Speaker
But this speaks to extreme violence, extreme something. There's something deeply wrong with this person. Yeah. Now, while searching the area where they found Andrasi's body, police would find a second body near where Andrasi had been found. This but body belonged to a man in his 40s who had also been emasculated and decapitated. Also, like Andrasi, Deputy Coroner Chamberlain found that the cause of death was decapitation, specifically in the mid cervical region of the neck.
00:16:43
Speaker
like the Lady of the Lake, his skin was red and leathery, also believed to be covered in the same chemical preservative as the Lady of the Lake. However, later testing from a city coroner said that there was a bucket of oil found near the body and, quote, that that coroner's official report said, appearances together with certain findings seemed to indicate that this body after death was saturated with oil and fire applied. The burning, however, was only sufficient to scorch, hence the peculiar condition of the skin.
00:17:13
Speaker
The initial coroner thought it was some sort of chemical and then a secondary coroner said, no, there was oil near the body. This looks like someone doused this man in oil and tried to burn the body, but it wasn't successful, which I don't know how you can use a chemical burn for a burn burn. Yeah. And I don't know how you could not light a body on fire. Like how is that hard to do? Not that I've ever done it, but like I'd assume it would be pretty easy. Yeah.
00:17:41
Speaker
but they were both killed in the same way by decapitation, and they were both emasculated. This is a ah theory series a theme throughout, but not all his victims follow the same pattern. If you look at the Lady of the Lake, she is much, much more disarticulated than these two men who had been decapitated.
00:17:59
Speaker
They actually found both of these men's heads. They were there as well. um So this is another another picture I saw was both of these men's heads removed, and it was It's kind of disturbing that the base of the neck had been like wrapped in cloth. And a picture of Androssi is also shown. And there's something just so deeply unsettling about seeing just a body with nothing but socks on. There's just something strangely vulnerable about it. It's just very, very disturbing. It's like he's trying to subvert everything. It's really a weird power trip.
00:18:32
Speaker
So the second man they found had been dead for a couple of weeks and he was never identified. So we know who Edward Androssie is, but they never identified the second man. In January of 1936, a woman found a pair of half-bushel baskets behind a supermarket, I believe.
00:18:48
Speaker
Inside this basket, wrapped in newspaper, ah they found that several severed body parts of a woman, specifically the lower half of the torso, the thighs, her right arm and hand. The baskets were left out in the open by the Heart Manufacturing Building on Central Avenue. Ten days later, the rest of the woman's remains were found in a vacant lot nearby.
00:19:09
Speaker
The only thing missing was the woman's head. The coroner was once again able to determine decapitation was the cause of death. He was also able to tell that the killer had waited until the body was in rigor before dismembering the body. Despite not being able to find this woman's head, the Cleveland police used fingerprints to identify this victim as Florence Pallillo. Pallillo was a waitress, barmaid, and suspected prostitute who lived just outside the roaring third.
00:19:33
Speaker
So if we'll look here, we go from September to January. It said that this and and then our next victim was found in June of 36. It said that the torso killer would do a murder every five months. And this is a theme you see every five months another body would be found. Does that work with the timeline if you include Lady of the Lake? No, that was a full year before. Okay.
00:20:04
Speaker
so usually you see some sort of escalation pattern when it comes to murders like this but it also could be is this just when the killer can get away what exactly is the pattern here but just about every five months they're finding another victim. I think he was OCD or something where he had to do stuff and set patterns or sequences. I don't know because instead of it just being a ramp up of victims it's also excuse me, a ramp up of how violent he is. One thing that's noted specifically throughout these killings that I haven't really gotten to yet is how cleanly
00:20:43
Speaker
these people are killed. And by that, the dearticulation, the decapitation, the bisection, it's all done by someone who seems to have experience, who seems to know where to cut, what to do. So it's done cleanly. And another thing they know is that oftentimes these cuts don't have hesitation marks. Typically when someone is dismembering a body, usually for to hide identification purposes, it's not cleanly done because there is hesitation. You you don't want to do it.
00:21:12
Speaker
or it's not that you don't want to do it, you're just kind of unsure or something like that. And to cut through a joint is very difficult. Like, like the detective said, it's hard to, to cut off a human head. ah So there's, there's a skill here that speaks to some sort of prior experience, whether that be a butcher. her Oh, sorry. A butcher. You're right. A butcher or a doctor. Mortician like that. Mortician as well. So they're kind of wondering,
00:21:42
Speaker
Who is this man? What's going on here? What's his skill set? Because this isn't just your average. I don't want to say average, but this isn't just someone who walked off the street. yeah This is someone who knows what they're doing. Yeah, it's calculated. It's not some crime of passion or something like that.
00:21:58
Speaker
right In June of 1936, two young boys found that a decapitated head of a man wrapped in a pair of pants close to the East 55th Streets Bridge in Kingsbury Run, just sitting under a willow tree. The boys said that they went up to this bundle of pants and poked at it because they thought maybe they'd find money in the pockets of the pants um and instead they found um decapitated head. Oh my goodness.
00:22:30
Speaker
That probably messed it up for years. Yeah. Um, it's a crazy thing to even think about just stumbling across something like that. It's something so innocent as to think, well, let's go through the pockets and see if they left any money. The next day police found the body of a man assumed to be between about 20 and 25 years old. Unlike victims from before, the body showed hesitation cuts under the chin and this body was once again cleaned, drained of blood and decapitated.
00:22:59
Speaker
The body was not dearticulated other than the decapitate decapitation, which the coroner would find to be the cause of death. Disturbingly, this body was in full view of the public. It was actually left in front of the Nickel Plate Railroad Police Building, about 1,000 feet away from where the two boys had found the head the day prior, and only 800 feet from where Edward Androssi and the unnamed victim had been found the September before. Do you think he's playing a game with the police?
00:23:30
Speaker
Yes, and then later we'll see that he is whoever this is is taunting somebody. they're They're making a point. It's very calculated because these people usually aren't hidden for very long. The man was able to be fingerprinted and he also had six tattoos.
Killer's Background and Psychology
00:23:48
Speaker
In the book, the tattoos are described as, it says not only was the corpse fresh enough to yield a good set of fingerprints, it bore six different tattoos on various parts of the body. A butterfly on the left shoulder,
00:24:02
Speaker
comic strip character jigs on the outer surface of the left calf, cross flags in the letters WCG on the left forearm, a heart and anchor also on the left forearm, a cupid and anchor on the outer surface of the right calf, and the names Helen and Paul on the right forearm." Helen and Paul? Oh, I'm sorry. Do you think those were like paul but do you think those were his kids' names or something? Maybe. um I don't know what else they would be unless it was like people he'd lost or something. but man it was he was he was a younger man and he was covered in tattoos which in the 30s wasn't I want to say it was no one ever had tattoos but it wasn't terribly common yeah I was wondering about that I also looked up jigs the comic strip character he's just a little balding ginger
00:24:53
Speaker
It's just something so relatable about just getting some sort of beloved character. i would hope I would totally get Snoopy tattooed on me somewhere if I like needles enough, but I don't. That'd be cute. Even though he was able to be fingerprinted, the police were not able to identify the man. This is another picture you can see of this man's head, which he was said to be very a very handsome man. And he was.
00:25:24
Speaker
ah He definitely was someone who looked like he would be memorable, especially with the tattoos. And again, a lot of people, different people described him as young and good looking. So the police made a plaster desk mask of the man and sent pictures of the man's tattoos, as well as a diagram of where the tattoos were located on the body.
00:25:41
Speaker
to the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. Before the body was discovered, so they found the head one day and they found the body the next day, in that one day period, 2,000 people came to look at the head and attempted to identify the man. There's no way 2,000 people knew who that was. No. No one could identify him. I think probably a good portion of it were people interested in in seeing something like that, but And maybe there was a lot of missing people around this time too. So maybe a lot of people were hoping that they would be able to find their missing loved one or something like that because they they didn't have the body yet. They didn't have those tattoos or that information. So unfortunately the man was never identified and is known today as the tattooed man. That's so sad. Thinking of someone's life being like reduced to that, just a title like Lady of the Lake or the tattooed man.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah, or just unnamed victim number two or something like that. You never consider that when you're gone, people won't know what happened to you or who you were. It also said that this man looked like he could be Slavic or Polish or something like that. So they thought maybe he was from out of the country. And again, it was near the roaring third. So it would have been extremely easy yeah to um to not be known. It's not like today where you check in on Facebook or you post on your Instagram story. I sounded about 70,000 years old when I said that, where everyone knows where you are. like
00:27:11
Speaker
find my iPhone or find my friends or whatever it is, you know, have my friends have my location, because I'm not getting murdered without someone knowing where my body was done. Yeah. So it's just as crazy that you can be that disconnected from ah from people just to to never be identified. I want to take a second and talk about how the killer is getting more brazen.
00:27:35
Speaker
this body was found outside of a police station. It was so close to previous dumping grounds and these dumping grounds weren't private. They were just areas, like clear areas too. There's a quote from Badal that says, when he, he being the torso killer, disposed of his victims, the butcher seemed to manifest an odd combination of obsessive neatness and casual sloppiness.
00:27:58
Speaker
which I think really speaks to that this person's state of mind because to continue to dump three bodies in the same area when you know two other bodies were found there in September and to go back It's just very brazen. It shows an escalation. There's some sort of disconnect there. It's not the actions of a sane person, which clearly he's not sane. He's killing people. no But it's it's not a stable reaction. It's sadistic. it's
00:28:30
Speaker
psychotic, but it's just not very measured or calm, which when you did when you think of someone who's expertly bisecting people or dearticulating joint systems and has to be very careful in that capacity to also be so sloppy in some of this, dispo like the way they dispose of remains, something is just, it's it's like something is screaming subhuman. Something's not right. something is very There's a perversion of what is natural here, like you said earlier.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah. He also seems very flippant, like he doesn't care if the cops get on to him or not because he's just going to do what he wants to do. Yeah. I have a question that is probably too late to ask at this point, but I ah kind of just assumed dearticulation was taking the body apart, but then you said dearticulation of the joints. So what exactly makes that different from like bisection and all of that stuff?
00:29:23
Speaker
I mean, I don't buy these too. So bisection is split in two. So when we say bisected, we typically mean it's usually when they, in this case, it's, it's the torso. So the pelvis or somewhere between the navel and the pelvis, there's the body's been split in two. And then to dearticulate a joint, so take an arm off um at the shoulder joint or at the hip joint or something like that, at the knees or something like that. When I say dearticulation, I do mean like at a joint. Okay. So it's still cut, but at a joint. Yes.
00:29:52
Speaker
Okay, thank you. And then amputation would be like somewhere in between joints. Oh, that's my understanding. I'm not a doctor. I'm an idiot with an English degree. Well, we should still know words. You know more about them than I do. Okay, thank you. That helps a lot.
00:30:07
Speaker
Continue. Happy to be of traumatizing assistance.
Eliot Ness and Investigation Efforts
00:30:12
Speaker
On to our next victim in July of 1936. So this is where we're kind of breaking away from that five month period. A teenage girl found the remains of a 40 year old man while she was walking through the woods on the west side of Cleveland. Given the level of decomposition, the coroner was able to say the victim had been deceased for around two months. The man's head and a pile of stained blood stain clothing was found near the body.
00:30:36
Speaker
blood had once again seeped into the ground around the body, which told the authorities that the man had been killed where the body had been found. This man was also never identified. I'm finding it interesting that it's mostly men, except for the one lady and then possibly the lady of the lake. Did the book ever shed light on that? Are we going to get there?
00:30:55
Speaker
There was some speculation from the author and then some general speculation. I didn't really get into some of the speculation about Edward Androssie specifically. ah Some said that there was rumors that he was kind of a philanderer. He slept with married women. He slept with men. There was rumors of that. And then later we have a suspect where at one point someone he was talking to in a bar thought he was trying to come on to him.
00:31:23
Speaker
um so I think it's just that it was easier to lure a man from a bar or something like that, or to get a drunk man somewhere than it would be. Maybe it would be a little bit more little bit more noticeable if he was walking away with a woman.
00:31:42
Speaker
but there's no, it's all just speculation. There's no real theory behind it. There was some, like like I said, there was some speculation. There's actually some speculation that the tattooed man and Edward Androssie knew each other based on, I believe, a photo, but that again is unproven and I don't think it was ever substantiated by any real sort of credible source. It sounds like Androssie had been involved in a couple of things. He said his family, um actually his brother came brother and father had to come down to the morgue and identify his head.
00:32:10
Speaker
And they said that he'd been scared of something for a while, so he was involved in some sort of um situation. and they believe I think they believed it was some sort of gang thing where they thought somebody was after him for because he'd s slept with somebody's wife. so and That's one of the things I didn't really get into because if I did that, this podcast would be three hours long. Fair point. Fair point. In September of 1936, this is the third September in a row where they found a body. A man found two halves of a man's torso floating in a body of water while attempting to hop on a train in Kingsbury Run.
00:32:47
Speaker
Nearby, there was an open sewer and police sent a diver to try and find the rest of the man's remains, assuming that the rest had been thrown in the sewer. They were correct. They found the lower half of the torso and parts of both of the man's legs. There's reports that over 600 people showed up to watch the diver search for remains. The man had been killed by beheading. Like the other victims, it was reported that the head had been removed in two strokes, one in the front and one in the back.
00:33:18
Speaker
The torso had been bisected about two inches above the navel. The corner noted that the cut had been made through the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, slicing through the stomach and both kidneys at the same time.
00:33:31
Speaker
This man had also been emasculated. So sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. There does not seem to be a set kind of rhyme or reason for why he's doing this. Just sometimes he will just decapitate, sometimes he decapulates and dearticulates, sometimes he decapitates and emasculates and dearticulates, or it's just crazy.
00:33:53
Speaker
Pierce commented, this is the coroner from earlier, that there were no hesitation marks on the body, meaning that he believed the killer was confident in his abilities and familiar with human anatomy. Deputy coroner Chamberlain told the Cleveland News that when they examined the victims when they examined the victim's head, it showed that the victim had still been alive when the murderer started to dismember the man.
00:34:15
Speaker
Oh, no. That's different, though, from the last couple of times, right? Because they have been dead first. Ooh. Or that they were, um one woman was not, ah Florence Pallillo, she was not ah dismembered until she had been in rigor. So which means she'd been dead for at least a little while. Did that include her decapitation for Florence? No, decapitation was a cause of death for Florence Pallillo. So that seems to be his MO. That's how he's killing people.
00:34:44
Speaker
um But for some reason this man had been dismembered while he was alive. That reminds me of Vivisection where they it was an old medical practice to dismember animals while they were alive so they could see how different bodily processes worked. It was you know a cruel practice. It was not appreciated by many members of the medical community and it was stopped after a while. but Didn't they do that in ancient Rome too with victims from the Colosseum?
00:35:15
Speaker
I believe so. It's one way to learn, but it's a torturous way to learn. At this point, we have six or seven brutal murders that had occurred in or around Kingsbury Run. People were scared, and the media did what the media does best and started to run many, many articles. This is where we get the name the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the torso killer, so on and so forth.
00:35:42
Speaker
Coroner Pierce told the Cleveland News that the killer is apparently a sex maniac of the sadistic type. This is indicated by the condition of his victims. He is probably a muscular man. The slayer definitely has expert knowledge of human anatomy. it The incisions of his knife are clean and were made in each case without guesswork. He may have gathered his knowledge of anatomy as a medical student or it is possible that he is a butcher. So this is the coroner.
00:36:10
Speaker
saying this to the newspaper. This is being printed. The fear of the people in this town is rising. And there are three different newspapers um that are just kind of like Cleveland News. There's The Post, and then there's one other that I can't remember the name off the top of my head, that are constantly putting out titles. This was like the primary source of news. And then every few months you'd get another victim. And it's this brutal killing. It's not just, I don't want to say you're one of the mill murder, but it's it's something truly horrific. This is just, and it's just growing. So the public is understandably terrified. And the mayor at the time, Harold Burton, began to put pressure on the police to catch the psychopath that was butchering people in Kingsbury Run. He also began to put pressure on the public safety director, who was a man by the name of Elliot Ness, who was known for his work in taking down Al Capone.
00:37:03
Speaker
his name ness his name is synonymous with this case. He was appointed as the safety director in December of 1935, so he didn't quite start looking at this case until it had been about over a year in this 1936 range. He was known for being extremely effective and successful in his role as safety director. He typically focused on gambling and labor racketeering and police force corruption. And again, like I said before, this case he's best known for his part in um taking down Al Capone. On September 12 of 1936, Ness was officially in charge of the torso killings investigation.
00:37:38
Speaker
He ordered officers to sweep through Kingsbury Run, starting at East 34th, and to go through the so-called hobo shanties, which are these shacks set up in Kingsbury Run in this roaring third. And he wanted to round up these people and question them. So he's on the case. We'll talk more about him later, but he's a pretty big name to kind of keep track of. So now we have people going into the roaring third, really paying attention. So there is an attempt to find this man.
00:38:10
Speaker
We've mentioned The Roaring Third a couple of times, but it's important to note that this was just a part of the city where there's a lot of bars, there's a lot of debauchery, um a lot of sex workers were down in that area, so it was not known as a good part of town. So it was an easy place to pick up victims because in pleasant society, they wouldn't have really... no You wouldn't want people to know that you were there. I'm not saying at any capacity these people were more likely to be a victim, it's just that people were less likely to publicly be going down to the bars in The Roaring Third. so It was a good place for migrants or people who maybe you're not telling your wife where you're going that night kind of deal. And then another thing that we'll see later is that something that makes this case so memorable is that whoever is responsible for these murders seems to like taunting police later. They'll really get some sort of pleasure out of specifically taunting Elliott Ness. But I digress.
00:39:01
Speaker
Our next murder, in February of 1937, a man went down to Lake Erie to check on his sailboat. And while he was there, he saw a white object offshore, and he assumed that it was a body, but he thought it was the body of a dog or a sheep. Upon further inspection, he saw that it was part of a human body and notified police. Police found the upper half of a woman's torso missing both the arms and the head.
00:39:24
Speaker
Unlike previous victims, this body had multiple hesitation marks. That would be where maybe they started the and if it started to attempt to um dismember this person and then maybe pull back and made a secondary cut. So maybe they were drunk, maybe they were scared, maybe this is something completely different, but this was a bit off of the torso killer's em MO. Could that one have been a copycat?
00:39:48
Speaker
Like someone killed the woman and then tried to make it look like the torso murderer? Some people um actually did think that maybe it wasn't the same person, but it is officially it is officially attributed to him. And i'll I think substance abuse will be the reason for possibly some of these hesitation marks and we'll discuss that later. But as far as we know, this is um one of the torso killer victims.
00:40:14
Speaker
So we just found the lower half of the torso. The woman was never identified and the rest of her body was never found. Some call this victim the second lady of the lake as the second as the half of her torso was found almost exactly where the first lady of the lake had been found.
Killer's Methods and Behavior
00:40:30
Speaker
At this point two of the three daily papers began to report that the number of victims was eight not seven so they had found out about the first lady of the lake and had added her into the rotation.
00:40:40
Speaker
So two of the three were saying, oh, well, there's this older case that we think is also this man, which means he's been active for longer and than we think he has been. In June of 1937, a 14 year old boy was riding his bike home from the movies when he came across a strange object half buried under the Lorraine Carnegie Bridge.
00:40:58
Speaker
Upon closer inspection, the boy realized he was looking at a human skull with gold teeth. When police investigated, they found a buried burlap sack under the skull. It was greasy and covered in some sort of grayish powder, um and it was tied with a piece of rotting twine. Inside the sack was a human torso skeleton, missing the arms and legs, and then also there was a piece of paper, a review from a newspaper that had been cut out and put in the sack, and a piece of gray unknown tissue, nearby clothing and a black toupee were found. The police believed the sack had been dumped, not deliberate not deliberately buried, so it was kind of incidentally buried. And it was pretty old. The remains were very fairly old. I was going to say, how long does it take for you to have just the skeleton? Pretty long time. It depends on how um
00:41:48
Speaker
quickly. to comp like It depends on several factors, ah like humidity, heat kind of thing. um It can take a couple of years to just be down to skeleton. It takes a while. And then there was also some sort of like unknown gray tissue that turned out to be human flesh. And so it was partially decomposed, but it was just a piece of it. And it didn't seem, from what I read, wasn't attached to the bones. And let's see, the corner found knife marks on the um the vertebrae.
00:42:15
Speaker
and newspapers linked this body to the torso killer. Based on the pelvis and skull, the coroner decided that this victim was a woman anywhere from 25 to 35 years old. They also found that the gray mass was decomposed flesh and the toupee was actually the victim's scalp, based on the fact that there was dried tissue as well as rusted hairpins found attached to the ah hair. They believed the woman had been dead for about a year, and the powder on the sack was determined to be lime, which you asked about how fast the decomposition is. Remember in the bromonzi horror where they sprinkled lime on the body trying to get it to decompose faster. So, good call back.
00:42:56
Speaker
So the Gleechman Deaf about a year. They attempted to identify the woman based on dental work because, I said gold teeth, she had three gold crowns and some very distinctive bridge work done in her mouth. um On the upper left side specifically, there was very distinctive work done. In June, the skeleton was tentatively identified as Rose Wallace, a 40-year-old woman who had disappeared on August 21st of 1936.
00:43:20
Speaker
Now this kind of goes against where, oh, is she's been dead for at least a year because it's she disappeared back in August. um And this didn't line up with the review.
00:43:32
Speaker
um the sack and about it was ah the review was dated about three months after the estimated time of death which kind of puts us back in the right month bracket and then they couldn't really this is the victim that they couldn't 100% identified because the dentist who had done Wallace's work had been dead for 15 years so they couldn't ask him um apparently that's what they did they'd just bring dental work somebody like is this is this your work and they would say yes because record keeping in the 1930s or yes at that point it would have been the 1920s was abysmal um So that avenue was a bit of a dead end. However, in April of 1938, Wallace's son came to the police station and identified the victim as his mother based on her dental work. So not an official identification, but an unofficial official i ah identification that this woman is believed to be Rose Wallace. On June 6, 1937, the lower half of a male torso was found in the Cuyahoga River.
00:44:28
Speaker
Five hours later, a burlap sack containing the upper half of the torso wrapped in three-week-old newspapers was found in the same river. An hour after that, the right thigh, the left thigh, left lower leg, and left upper arm were all found in the river. The next day, a piece of lung and two forearms of the hands attached were found. The upper right arm was found on in July, and the lower right leg was found on July 14th.
00:44:56
Speaker
The head was never found, and the corner noted that the marks were likely made by someone with anatomical knowledge based on how cleanly they had been done. However, he also noted that there was an increasing level of violence with this murder, and he said that because the organs had been wrenched out, that's a direct quote, wrenched out from the abdomen, and the heart had been removed. Wrenched out like by hand? Oh, no. Oh, my.
00:45:23
Speaker
oh very Jack the Ripper-esque. None of the organs were recovered and there was also considerable more hacking than seen in previous cases. The report also noted that there were marks that suggested that the killer's knife was getting dull. So that might be why there's more hacking. It's not really less anatomical knowledge because it was said that it was done with a lot of anatomical knowledge. It just sounds like he was um not to be whatever. When you cut through bone, your knife gets extremely dull. So it sounds like this is definitely someone who's a bit on a rampage. Yeah. But I feel like if you were committed to it, you would take time to sharpen your equipment.
00:46:11
Speaker
not if you're in a psychotic rage. I was going to say, but he could be just going more insane. So yes. And then he also removed the heart, which if I didn't think this person was absolutely crazy, I would say that seems specific. It seems personal, but I just think this person's slowly losing it more and more. And I i know who I think did it. And I'm going to say, yeah.
00:46:34
Speaker
um The victim was reportedly killed 48 hours before pieces of the body were discovered. and no cause of death was determined. um And the man was never identified. How could they not determine the cause of death? I'm assuming because the some of the body parts were in the water for several days. Okay, yeah, that makes sense, I guess. And one way they see whether or not the one way they know that someone was killed by decapitation is based on how the part has pumped blood through the body. oh And so without the heart being there, that could have caused issues. Again, I'm not a doctor or a pathologist or a coroner. I don't think a pathologist really matters in this case. I'm an idiot with an English degree. Hmm. Okay. Yeah.
00:47:23
Speaker
On April 8, 1937, a man saw what he thought was a dead fish floating about three feet from a sewer outlet. When he poked it with a stick, he found it was the lower half of a human leg cut off at the knee and ankle. On May 2, both a thigh and a burlap sack was found containing both halves of the torso, a thigh, and the left foot. The victim was a woman and the coroner noted the same viciousness and frenzied cut marks on the body and also noting that the back ribs appeared to have been broken by hand.
00:47:57
Speaker
before death
00:48:00
Speaker
Um, they didn't specify, but just that the back ribs had been broken by hand, I'm assuming it would be part of the dearticulation process instead of cutting through ribs, breaking them with your hands. This is the first time that they found drugs in a victim's system. It's a quote from the book specifically from James Vidal's book. It says, examination of the tissue from the liver and the lungs revealed the presence of enough morphine to cause unconsciousness, perhaps even death.
00:48:29
Speaker
Well, I hope for her sake, it was death. Oh my goodness. Yes. And since they didn't have her arms, they couldn't tell if she had been drugged or if she was a user. So if they had been able to see like track marks or something like that, but they were unable to kind of determine that because they didn't have enough of the the victim. So once again, this individual was never identified.
00:49:01
Speaker
Okay, we're on to our last two. On August 16th, 1938, human bones were discovered under a pile of rocks hidden away in a gully. When police began to investigate, they found a female human torso wrapped in brown butcher paper, then wrapped in a striped summer coat, and then wrapped in a homemade patchwork quilt. Under the torso was a brown paper package secured with rubber bands that contained the individual's thighs.
00:49:26
Speaker
five feet away, police found another package containing the head with six inches of matted brown hair still attached. The arms and legs were found in a cardboard box that had been made out of two separate cardboard containers and kind of fashioned into one box. The remains were old, but the box didn't appear to be ah the box appeared to be new. So Recently, these ah remains have been placed there. Some of the skin was mummified and the coroner couldn't tell if the internal organs had decomposed or had been removed.
00:50:01
Speaker
They also found two burlap sacks, a coat label, and a page from march the March 5th, 1938 edition of Collier's Magazine. This victim was never identified. Around the same time, a couple was out walking and passed by the dump site. They'd heard about the latest torso murder, and then they decided that later they would return, and they brought a friend with them. At around 7.30 that night, they the husband noted that they became aware of a foul odor coming from what was described as a shallow depression.
00:50:30
Speaker
When the husband looked down into it, he saw human bones. um Police were called and the pelvis rib and vertebrae of a male victim were found lying on the ground next to a large tin can. Inside the can, the police found a human skull. Now, what's... Yes. I would like to point out that they were lucky because that premise of them knowing where the dumping site was and bringing a friend sounds like the start of a horror movie.
00:50:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. ah Especially like the young couple. Anyway. But remember how I mentioned Elliott Ness earlier? And how this individual seemed to be taunting Elliott Ness? Both victims were left in plain view of Elliott Ness' office window. Oh my goodness. Which is extremely brazen. Yeah. yeah i would If I were Elliott, I'd be worried that would be a warning to me. Like, hey, you're next.
00:51:23
Speaker
And we'll find out why this happened later, because who buddy? ah Many believe this was an intentional taunt from the killer to antagonize Ness. Unfortunately neither victim was identified.
00:51:37
Speaker
So that ends our list of victims.
Ness' Controversial Decisions
00:51:42
Speaker
Let me see if I mentioned something down here about something. Do you have the rundown of female to male again? Because at first I thought it seemed really irregular, but I feel like he almost has an even split now. But I could be wrong. Is there still more male than female? There's still more men than women. Let's see. There was the Lady of the Lake. And then there was Florence Pallillo. Then there was Rose Wallace. And then there was that last woman. And then there was five women.
00:52:08
Speaker
Okay. So yeah, still more men. That's interesting. Cause normally serial killers don't, they pick like one or the other and just go for that. Yes. And you'll notice these people were all of varying ages and varying looks. They're all of different builds. Um, Edward Andrasi and the tattooed man were both younger and conventionally attractive and look similar to each other. But the other men that were found in a 40 year old man who I believe from based on the picture I saw was bald.
00:52:36
Speaker
Florence Pallillo was said to be a little bit heavier set. And then some of these women were said to be petite. Rose Wallace was a black woman. So there's no clear delineation. It just seems to be psychotic opportunity. Hmm. Yeah. So he just enjoyed killing, like, well, I guess all serial serial killers do, but. But typically you're right there. People have a type.
00:53:04
Speaker
It's very, it's abnormal to not have a type because this is usually when you see people who are serial killers, there's something that has not, I don't want to say led them to that because I believe above all, everyone has self control and self and free will. There's something that has happened that has made their mind bend in that way.
00:53:24
Speaker
Yeah. um just like Just like typical attraction, I think. I know taking it out of a psychotic bend, we've talked about the kind of guys that we find personally attractive and they're different types of men. That's true. And then you know our other friends, we've talked about that, but that's shaped by experience and yeah maybe small things that we appreciate.
00:53:45
Speaker
and that's kind of naturally and now you have a type and that's not I didn't I wasn't born like attracted to willowy looking white men who if they read for fun you know like dark hair or whatever it that's just how I grew like into a person. That's what I just like. But I'm sure if I went back with a fine-toothed comb, I could figure out exactly why. I think that's what's appealing to me. so And so when it comes to psychotic behavior, you know there are co-killers who kill people that look like they're mothers or like just they liked blonde women or something like that. So usually there's something there. And the fact that there's not makes it more terrifying because... Because anyone could be a victim.
00:54:29
Speaker
I'm surprised we're not hearing more about public outcry from all of this, because this has been going on for a while, and like you said, it's so random, anybody could. Yes, we're going to talk about Eliot Ness next and that's a really good transition um because Eliot Ness had a lot, let me pull my laptop closer, um had a lot of pressure put on him from the governor, from the public, and then some rash decisions were made that were made, I believe, because he had public pressure to solve this. It's been three years, 12, 13 people are dead.
00:55:03
Speaker
Like, fix this. Elliot, fix this. Poor Elliot. The weight of the world is on his shoulders. Yeah, and he made some bad choices. Let's just say that. So, Elliot Ness was a well-known man before the Cleveland torso murders. He was pretty well-liked. Newspapers loved him. The public liked him.
00:55:21
Speaker
He had done a good job, but now he was kind of given the impossible task to solve this murder. Because one thing you'll notice throughout all of this, the only thing we know about this man is that he's a sadist. They think this might be sexually motivated and he likes, he might be a doctor or a butcher or something. They also believe that he was a middle-aged man. um There was some middle-aged man of gli quiet confidence or something like that, but there wasn't concrete anything to go off of. It was all speculation because no one's ever seen this man.
00:55:53
Speaker
It's just, and we're saying man, of course it's a man. We're saying man, but the the the um suspects all men. There were several suspects. I chose to focus on two um because the others are kind of far fetched and there weren't there wasn't a ton of information and I knew this episode was going to be long anyway. So I didn't, I just focused on two. But first let's talk about Ness. So Ness made some questionable decisions when trying to find the murderer.
00:56:20
Speaker
At 1 a.m. on August 18th of 1938, Ness and a squad of police officers went down to the roaring third. They went into Kingsbury Run down to the roaring third and they started knocking on doors. They started banging on doors of those shack houses in the roaring thirds, specifically in the hobo jungle. That's what they called it. And they woke these people up um and they dragged them out and they said, you need to you need to leave your home.
00:56:45
Speaker
your your shack, your shanty, whatever you want to call it. He and his men searched 30 or so huts. And then after that, Ness demanded that all of these shacks be burned to the ground. ah Excuse you? Yep, he demanded they all be burned. People were not allowed to get their personal belongings from inside these shacks. And then Safety Director Ness ordered the people whose homes he just ordered to be burned, he ordered that they be arrested for the crime of homelessness.
00:57:14
Speaker
Was that really a crime on the books at that time? Mm-hmm. Oh, my word. I think it was probably one of those things that they really didn't enforce. Yeah, because how can you? Now, Ness did say that he wanted these people arrested because he wanted them to be fingerprinted, in case that they were the next victim. And they needed to be able to identify them. Couldn't they just... They wanted their fingerprints off. Did they have to arrest them to do that, though?
00:57:44
Speaker
to force them to do it, yeah. okay um I don't think that's a good reason. No, I agree. Ness believed that the victims were being plucked from Kingsbury Run. you know Before this, Ness was well-liked. He was praised in the papers. Then after this, he was subjected to openly
Suspects and Doubts
00:58:02
Speaker
hostile press coverage. and I have a quote about that the press, the Cleveland Press chastised him saying,
00:58:09
Speaker
This is a direct quote, but the commercial hill dwellers are not thanking Mr. Ness for his concern about their remaining and about their remaining unidentified if their heads should be chopped off. Nor do they thank him for burning down the village. Yeah, he earned that one. However, even though Ness was criticized for burning down the roaring third and doing this, after he did this, there were no more murders. That is interesting.
00:58:38
Speaker
yep because on august 16th that's when they found those final bodies and then on august 18th he went in um and burnt down the roaring third and then after that no more murders So there's a reason for this. But then there's just some strange things. Again, it was never officially solved and it was investigated for years and years and years. And the nest didn't publicly speak about something that happened for 20 years. And then it took another 15 years after those 20 years for that story to be corroborated. We'll get to that here in a second. But I'm going to read this note because I thought it was interesting.
00:59:10
Speaker
The note says, Chief of Police, Mattowitz. You can rest easy now, as I have come out to sunny California for the winter. I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance. I shall astound, and that's just, there's a, that's a spelling error, the medical profession, a man with only a DC. What did their lives mean in comparison to hundreds of sick and disease-twisted bodies, just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street? No one missed them when I failed. My last case was successful.
00:59:41
Speaker
I now know the feeling of Pasteur, Thoreau, and other pioneers. Right now, I have a volunteer who will absolutely prove my theory. They call me mad and a butcherer, but the truth will out. I have failed once here. The body has not been found and never will be, but the head, minus the features, is buried on Century Boulevard between Western and Crenshaw. I feel it is my duty to dispose of the bodies as I do. It is God's will not to let them suffer.
01:00:08
Speaker
I'm sorry, not to let them suffer? Yep. What about the people that he hurt before he killed them? Well, clearly that was the will of this mad doctor. And you think he's claiming that it was, you know, God's will for them not suffer. However, this note was um attributed to a quote unquote quack doctor by the name of Charles Auguste de Vere. And they said he's the probable author.
01:00:38
Speaker
And there's no link between him and the Cleveland butchers. So I thought it was an interesting note and I wanted to read it. That is very interesting. Now letters are a big part and I do believe the real butcher did send letters.
01:00:53
Speaker
But that was not one of them. That was too coherent. Interesting. So I'm going to get into our main suspects. There were two. The first suspect, technically there's three. We have Frank Dolezal and then we have Ness's secret suspect. And then we have the one I think did it. So I won't give you his name. Oh my goodness. The intrigue.
01:01:18
Speaker
This is secret suspect? Secret suspect. Secret interrogation, too. Do tell me more. I will, but first we have to talk about Frank Dolezal. All right, go ahead. Frank Dolezal. Dolezal was a 52-year-old bricklayer who had previously worked in a slaughterhouse. He is suspected specifically in the murder of Florence Pallillo, and he actually confessed to Pallillo's murder.
01:01:48
Speaker
However, there was not a trial levied against anyone. um There was an arraignment and he was to be tried for this, but he would pass away before they were able to take him to court. And that also is a gray area. But let's start from the top. Okay. No one was ever charged because they thought it was Dolezal and then they never charged anyone else because they didn't have enough evidence to make a case work against any other subject. They really didn't have enough evidence to make a case work against Dolezal.
01:02:18
Speaker
Here's why we think Dolezal did it. He confessed. He knew victims. Polillo, Andrasi, and Rose Wallace, allegedly. And it's some spec that he was in an intimate relationship with Polillo, who again was a suspected prostitute.
01:02:32
Speaker
Dolezal would confess that he had murdered and dismembered Pillow in his apartment the Friday before her remains were discovered. He said they'd argued because she'd tried to take money from him, but that he had not killed her. Later, Dolezal would confess that he had hit her after she'd allegedly tried to snap him with a butcher knife. She'd fallen and hit her head on the tub in his bathroom, and he'd assumed she was dead. So he put her in the tub and dismembered her.
01:02:59
Speaker
Remember, Paolo was killed by decapitation. This was the coroner's um belief. So they said that he assumed she was dead because she was killed by decapitation. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah, I think so. um He then dumped the body, sunk her head and light and sunk her head in Lake Erie because they never recovered her head. um Seeming to corroborate the story were the blood stains found in Dolezal's bathroom.
01:03:29
Speaker
Oh, okay. The police share with the press that they'd finally found their killer and there's a quote for this as well. Whoa, did he confess to the other murders though? Nope, just pillows. Okay. And then in
01:03:48
Speaker
In the wake of the butcher, it was like this is a direct quote, some of Dolezal's former neighbors had seen Pallillo, Rose Wallace, Edward Androssi, an unidentified sailor, perhaps the tattooed victim number four, in his apartment. A neighbor at his former address on East 19th reported that Dolezal went out nights and brought homeless men he had picked up at public square back to his apartment. And they believed that the tattooed man might be a sailor because he had a multiple, he had multiple anchor tattoos.
01:04:18
Speaker
Well, I went through a phase when I had Eiffel Towers all over my room and I'm not from France, so. One never knows. There's a lot of reports about Dolezal from neighbors or random people. One woman claimed that she tried to kill her or that he tried to kill her and she had to jump out of his apartment window. And the only thing she had to prove it was a broken high heel.
01:04:42
Speaker
From jumping out of his window, that's all that she broke? Interesting. Yeah, least didn't really police didn't really buy that. Yeah. i I hear a lot of hearsay, and he still hasn't confessed to the other ones. No. Did they find bloodstains from multiple victims? Wait, could they prove that the bloodstains were from Florence?
01:05:03
Speaker
ah No. They also couldn't prove that the bloodstains were bloodstains. We'll get to that. Oh, boy. However, the case was weak. um There was a lot of reports about Dolezal also being a good person, and Dolezal's own confession didn't corroborate with what was um being said.
01:05:25
Speaker
Uh, remember how he said he discarded polo's head in Lake Erie? That's not possible because it had been frozen on the day that he said he had discarded a January 26 of 36. Oh my goodness. So. Yeah, I don't think he did it either. Yeah. There's a quote here, uh, from a detective that says, this was my first experience where a man is making confession to a murder or any other serious crime and does not know the details of the crime, which he is alleged to have committed.
01:05:58
Speaker
Oh boy. Androssi's father also weakened the case further by saying, I've never seen that fellow before in my life when shown a picture of Frank Dolezal. And remember, there was a ah it was alleged that he knew Androssi, Rose Wallace. He's like, I've never seen that man. Do you think it's possible the neighbors said those people were there because those were the only named victims by the newspapers? Probably.
01:06:24
Speaker
Okay, interesting. And with ah with Androssi being named, they had pictures of him. They knew what he looked like. The others you really couldn't tell is he's especially the ones whose heads were never found.
Secret Suspect and Sweeney
01:06:34
Speaker
um Let's see why we think he didn't do it because he recanted his own confession on July 8. But he didn't recant and say he didn't do it. He said that no, I didn't throw her head in Lake Erie. I actually burned her head on my way to work at the American Steel and Wire Company.
01:06:52
Speaker
somewhere those all had never worked or been employed at. Interesting. um He also stated later that he was beaten and pressured by police into giving a confession. I was wondering if some of that was going on because you said this was 1930s, right? So, yeah.
01:07:08
Speaker
He also sustained six broken ribs whilst in police custody. His confession appeared to be coached and he later did not have the basics of the murders he apparently committed. He was held for days, he was denied food, and he wasn't allowed to rest for more than 10 minutes at a time. oh i'm I'm going to be fully on his side now because I really don't think he killed anybody. It was also reported that Dolezal was well-liked in his neighborhood that Until his neighbors wanted to rat him out for the clout. Yeah. Well, there were several unsubstantiated stories about horrible things. Dolezal supposedly did. People and officers who had interacted with Dolezal maintained that he was a simple, honest man who was good to his neighbors and the neighborhood children. It was literally said that he loved having people around him and he didn't invite people over for dinner and he'd buy like neighborhood kids candy and ice cream because he just liked kids. Aww. Justice for Frank. But wait, you said he passed away. Was this natural?
01:08:04
Speaker
It depends on how you look at it. However, Dolezal would never be tried, as he would hang himself in his cell before a trial no on well on August 24th. He was found dead in his cell 11 on cell block B4. A cell block he had all to himself, there were no witnesses. The guards that were posted outside of his door were gone for about three minutes, they said. um And they said that he'd used a piece like a towel or something to hang himself on a hook that was five feet and seven inches off the ground. Dolezal was five feet, eight inches tall.
01:08:39
Speaker
Interesting. yeah Did he at all he actually hang himself? It depends on what you believe. I do believe it is possible to hang yourself um from a height that you're not quite as tall as, because you can just let your body weight do the work. However, here's a quote from Adolf Schuster, one of the two deputies charged with guarding Dolezal, who openly wondered why a man planning to end his life would eat all of his lunch beforehand.
01:09:09
Speaker
Hmm...
01:09:12
Speaker
There's a lot of hearsay about this, but it is implied that it was not natural that he did not choose to do this and that somebody silenced him. But we don't know for sure. Am I smelling conspiracy within yeah the police ranks? Oh my goodness. Because they're pressured to find who's doing this. And so if Dolezal can't be tried, and honestly, I think if they brought him to trial, there wasn't enough. I mean, there was this confession, but he was recanting his confession and it was proven that they had brutalized him.
01:09:42
Speaker
Were any of them ever punished for that? Nope. So that's Frank Dolezal. I don't think he did it. Many people don't think he did it. it's pretty I believe he was um publicly exonerated of any guilt at some point. um And no one believed that he did it. People don't even believe he murdered Florence Plow, though.
01:10:00
Speaker
that blood that was on his bathroom floor was later identified as just dirt. Okay, who messed that up? It was the 30s. They just looked at it and said, that looks like blood. Oh my goodness. All right, well poor Frank. Poor Frank. Now who you is the secret suspect? Is he the next one? Yes. Ness had a secret suspect.
01:10:25
Speaker
The suspect was someone with a medical background who also had a cousin who was a congressman. And so he could not be publicly questioned or arrested because it looked real bad for that congressman.
01:10:36
Speaker
o
01:10:39
Speaker
So what Ness decided to do was apparently he kept this secret suspect in a hotel for two weeks. How? hating him He was interrogating him. He was under arrest, but he was at a hotel. ah There, it was Ness and then a psychologist and then some other doctor all knew about this. And they would interrogate him for hours every day. Actually, Ness wouldn't speak about this for 20 years. He had mentioned this to Oscar Frawley, an author. And then 15 years later, somebody else would say, yeah, we did that. And so it would corroborate the story. um And Ness never actually named his suspect because he um he believed he did it.
01:11:23
Speaker
And he, we do know who it is. Don't worry. I do. but We can, we haven't mentioned him yet, so. Okay. But they do have an idea of who his secret suspect was. So according to Ness, the man he had arrested was, or arrested, was a known alcoholic and barbiturate addict. Before actually interrogating the man, he had to wait three days for him to sober up so he could actually speak to him.
01:11:52
Speaker
Apparently, this man had been hospitalized in 1933 for alcoholism, which Ness did mention to this author that he was speaking to. They interior this man for about eight hours every day. And then at one point,
01:12:04
Speaker
um a Dr. Leonard Keeler came to Cleveland. Dr. Leonard Keeler had invented the Keeler polygraph test, which was a reputable early polygraph machine. So lie detector test.
01:12:20
Speaker
which I don't think of when I think of the 30s, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, me neither. They can't even find bloodstains on a bathroom floor, so. And then, quoting from In the Wake of the Butcher, Dr. Keeler gave this polygraph test, and when the session was over, Keeler drew Ness and Cowles as one of the envelopes who was there aside. In 1983, the 86-year-old David Cowles reflected, when Keeler got through, he said he was the man, no question about it.
01:12:50
Speaker
I may as well throw my machine out the window if I say anything else," he said. In all his laboratory tests, keeler was reputed peter repeat yeah repeat answer Keeler was reputed never to have found an innocent man guilty.
01:13:07
Speaker
According to Cowles, there were other unspecified tests, some conducted by an unidentified official from the Detroit court system, all of which pointed to the same conclusion. These tests all said Ness's secret suspect was the guy.
01:13:23
Speaker
So how did he get away if he was the guy? They had him. Well, they didn't have enough evidence. The man refused to confess. They said that he was belligerent. He was like near incoherent. He would sometimes talk plainly and sometimes he would just be kind of kooky. At one point, Ness said he was alone in the room with him and the man just glared at him and he'd never been as afraid of his for his life as he was in that moment because he realized he was alone.
01:13:53
Speaker
with a man that they thought had brutally butchered 13 people. um Unfortunately, despite the secrecy, the news would catch wind of Ness's secret suspect. And they would publish that apparently there was a man that they were interrogating and that they'd been interrogating for a couple weeks and that he was someone of high regard and so they could involve, ah but so the the news had some sort of clue. They didn't have someone's name, but they had an idea that somebody was being questioned for it and that the police weren't telling them who it was.
01:14:24
Speaker
So apparently, Ness released the man, however reluctantly, only for the man to turn around and voluntarily commit himself to a mental institution. Meaning he was no longer able to be prosecuted. That's smart and very shady. Yep.
01:14:42
Speaker
It's also likely that Ness and his little interrogation techniques didn't have enough information or enough legally obtained information to press charges, um but Ness felt that he had his man. So who was this random man that Ness believed did it, that Keeler believed did it, Cowles believed did it, everyone believed did it? Well, let me introduce you to Dr. Francis Sweeney. Oh my word like Sweeney Todd.
01:15:11
Speaker
Yes, he actually at one point referred to in a letter to Ness referred to himself as the American Sweeney believed to be referencing Sweeney Todd. Oh my goodness. You're so smart.
01:15:25
Speaker
Let's go into Sweeney's Dr. Francis E Sweeney, a doctor, an ex army man with a horrible, but sorry, an ex army man with an honorable discharge from the army in 1919.
01:15:37
Speaker
Francis Sweeney had a turbulent life. um His family kind of fell apart. His father died in a mental institution. His mother passed away when she was pretty young. Two of his brothers passed away, one when he was a child and one when he was in his early 20s. So there's a history of mental illness in the family, a history of just degenerative health in general.
01:16:01
Speaker
So Sweeney would marry in 1927 to a woman named Mary and they moved back to Cleveland in 1928. Sweeney graduated from medical school in 1928 as well and received his certificate to practice medicine and surgery in 1929. Oh my goodness. and Sweeney would go straight to work.
01:16:25
Speaker
According to Sweeney's wife, who filed for divorce in 1934, Sweeney began to drink heavily and over the next couple of years began to both act both erratically and violently. He started disappearing, not returning home for several days at a time, and never giving any indication of where he was going or what he'd been doing. Did these disappearances happen about five months apart? They happen really often. oh And by the time these murders really picked up, she had left him.
01:16:54
Speaker
ah Oh, I forgot to mention at one point Ness's secret suspect was ranting about his ex-wife spending all of his money.
01:17:06
Speaker
Let's see, Sweeney became physically and mentally abusive to his wife and to his children. He had two sons. He was apparently constantly drunk and would hallucinate. On December 1st, 1933, Mary, fearing for her safety, her children's safety, and her husband's safety, would file an affidavit that she feared for her husband's sanity. This led Sweeney to being committed to City Hospital on December 2nd, the next day, 1933, for observation and treatment for his alcoholism. Just like Ness's secret suspect was hospitalized in 1933 for alcoholism.
01:17:45
Speaker
Oh, wait a second. So Ness never revealed the name of his suspect? Right. Oh, so you think this is who his suspect was? Did I mention that his cousin was a congressman? Oh, my word.
01:18:04
Speaker
Sweeney was then discharged into his wife's custody on January 3rd, 1934, and they were officially divorced in 1936 when that first murder happened. They were divorced and she sued for custody of their children, alimony, I believe, and then ah she wanted to change her name back to her maiden name, and she was granted all three things. Oh my goodness. So that means the courts really agreed with her like he was not a good man. Oh yeah, he was career crazy. He was certifiable. Oh boy.
01:18:33
Speaker
I have a document here. This is from Ness's files. I'm going to read it twice. Once with just Ness's information and then filled in with all of the other information. So Ness wrote, there was a suspect in those murders. I won't mention any names. He was born and raised as a boy on the edge of the run.
01:18:55
Speaker
That'd be Kingsbury Run. He later went into the service. In the service, he was in the medical corps. He came back and went to college and went through medical school and married a nurse. he came back, did his internship at St. Alexis Hospital out on Broadway and kept going down and down and down with the booze. We played on him for a long time, a relative of his was a congressman. And we had to be very careful how we handled him. However, we had a detail on him and we picked him up. He had been drinking heavy too, picked him up, didn't bring him to jail, we took him right to the Cleveland Hotel. Now let's fill in some details there, shall we? There's a c suspect suspect in those murders, Frances Sweeney. I won't mention any names.
01:19:32
Speaker
He was born and raised a boy on the edge of Kingsbury Run. He was born and raised on Jesse Avenue, now East 79. He later went into the service and the service he was in the medical corps. He came back and went to college at Western river rest western Reserve and John Carroll Universities and went through medical school, the University of St. Louis Medical School, and became an MD, married and nurse, which would be Mary Josephine Sokol in 1927.
01:19:54
Speaker
came back and did his internship yada yada yada we go back down here a relative of his was a congressman democratic congressman martin l swiney from cleveland's 20th district was francis's cousin so this sounds like the guy Yep, Sweeney was committed to a mental hospital after all this, and he was eventually found by medical staff to be considered incompetent. Now, there were some back and forth where it said when he checked himself into this metal medical hospital, it was for ah veterans, it was for people who had been in the service. And it said when he checked himself in, he was voluntarily there, and that he was able to leave in his own recognizance, but if he did, the police were to be contacted.
01:20:33
Speaker
Now, I believe later down the line, the record keeping is not straight. Obviously, it's not linear. He died in a mental institution many years later. um He was diagnosed with like manic depressive disorders, schizophrenia, a lot of hallucinogenic type things. um I believe at some point, and it is widely believed that at some point his voluntary incarceration there became involuntary.
01:20:56
Speaker
because again, ah the medical staff found him to be considered incompetent. That was the word they used. He hated, ah Sweeney hated Ness, hated him. He would write letters to Ness and to other people railing against this man. At one point he wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, you know, the FBI director about Nessism is what he called it and how much he hated this man. He sent Ness a series of postcards with clips from newspapers pasted to them with like incoherent route rambling.
01:21:25
Speaker
um I'll have to send you some of these pictures because it'd be in the margins and written like around the pictures. And this is when he at one point referred to himself as the American Sweeney. So he like signed off a card saying, good cheer, the American Sweeney. Yeah, this guy is certifiable. Literally certifiable. And you know just like with the newspapers found with all the bodies, he would clip newspapers and post them to the cards.
01:21:55
Speaker
All of this is largely circumstantial, but I feel we can safely assume Ness's secret suspect was Francis Sweeney. I think you're incorrect. And after Sweeney committed himself to the mental institution, wouldn't you know all those killings stopped? It lines up directly, and he would commit himself after this two-week interrogation. Interesting.
01:22:19
Speaker
One thing that I didn't really mention earlier was that the investigators in this case, since we didn't really get a ton into the investigation, they were pretty solid on the fact that they believed the killer had to have some sort of lab where the killer was doing the bulk of the dismembering. Sweeney practiced with four other physicians at 5026 Broadway in a bottom floor practice. Now after his wife divorced him, and I'm assuming took the house, he began to live on the second floor of this medical house.
01:22:50
Speaker
And the way it was connected to a deli, so it was just like on the street, which this honestly wasn't that strange. There's this hospital museum in Foley, Alabama.
01:23:03
Speaker
called the Holmes Medical Museum that I've been to a couple times. And they also were like adjacent to a deli and their surgery room is upstairs. Super interesting place. Makes sense. The family can get a snack while they wait for their loved one to be done. Exactly. It also sounds more and more like Sweeney Todd though. You need to check those deli meats. This is why I'm a vegetarian.
01:23:26
Speaker
and then Any instance to mention it, I'll take it. So he lived on the second floor of this building. Now, Sweeney probably wouldn't have gotten away with murdering and dismembering people in a shared medical space. However, there was a funeral home next door. And to get into the basement, this the family lived in like the top floor of the funeral home. And then there was a basement where that's where the cadavers could be
Media's Role and Challenges
01:23:56
Speaker
stored. there was like lab tables and, ah you know, convenient drains in the floor and things to lift bodies. And to get into this, there was a cement slab in the back that went down. So, hypothetically, be super easy to usher his drunk or drugged victims through the back ramp and into that building.
01:24:22
Speaker
have all the necessary tools he would need. And there's also some speculation that maybe he was allowed to go down and practice on cadavers. That might've been something that he'd worked out with the funeral home director um because he was a doctor. And ah dissection was actually a pretty big part of, the is it still is a really big part of the learning process for for medical schools. um However, Badal had a second theory these funeral directors owned a second um second facility specifically for unclean bodies or for the poor. Typical practice for this was in um was you would send unclaimed unclaimed remains to medical schools for anatomy classes or they'd be buried in a potter's field. It was the 1930s and record keeping wasn't great. um they also The author also also mentioned that in the time of the Great Depression, people would be found dead in alleys a lot.
01:25:16
Speaker
It may not be identifiable because maybe they'd come for work there and hadn't just no one really knew who they were or they were so poor they really couldn't afford afford that. So in Kingsbury Run and Jackass Hill were mere blocks away from this building. And it was unlikely that the funeral directors were there very often because this was a secondary business to their primary business, which was their funeral home.
01:25:39
Speaker
So it'd be really easy for Sweeney to usher people from the wrong third to this other building where he would have relative privacy and the tools he needs to do what he did.
01:25:56
Speaker
Um, I also read somewhere, I believe, I think it was in, in the wake of the butcher, but I read that victim 11, that woman that was found pointing at Elliott Ness's office, um, was actually found to have been embalmed. So it's believed that it was the torso killer's work, but not a torso killer victim. I was going to say it could have just been one of those bodies from the morgue. Yep. Could've been one of the bodies that he wanted to get back at Ness quickly.
01:26:27
Speaker
and kind of left a little calling card for him there. ah and it makes sense it Oh, sorry. Yep, sorry. Well, it just makes sense that since Sweeney hated Ness so much that he would do something outside his office, too. Yep. So that is the unsolved case of the Cleveland torso killer. It's pretty much solved. It's kind of like the Black Dahlia in that regard where we all know who did it. Oh, yeah, we can't say who did it.
01:26:55
Speaker
um But it was a horrific, horrific murder. And there's nothing really substantial. ah
01:27:02
Speaker
Ness would pass away seven years before um Sweeney would. Sweeney would pass away in a mental hospital custody where he spent most the remainder of his life. And apparently, even now, every once in a while, they'll get some more details about the torso killer. I wonder if The thing is, i'm I'm sure the record keeping wasn't good enough to know where these bodies were, because even I was reading about how the bodies would be sent back and forth between coroner's offices. So I wonder if it's possible for them to do genetic testing now, maybe use genetic genealogy to see if they can um figure out who some of these people are. Yeah, but a lot of their families are probably dead at this point. So I don't know who would. I mean, they probably have descendants, but like,
01:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, but to be able to to put a name to who these people were and like remember who they were and just figure it out would be. That's true. It would be nice for them to have their names back and not just, you know, victim number this or lady of the lake that.
01:28:10
Speaker
yeah And recently they've identified um a couple of different, I see recently in the last couple of years, they had um the lady of the dunes has been identified through genetic testing like that. And then the, um I can't remember what they called him beforehand. Anyway, there was a man whose body was found on the beach in Australia and it was kind of a mystery. People thought he was a spy, but they were able to identify who he was. That's going to bother me if I can't remember who he is.
01:28:43
Speaker
But yeah that is the story of the Cleveland torso killer. There's a lot of people, a lot of details. And that was actually me keeping it as compact as I can. Oh my goodness. Anyway, any questions, comments, queries, concerns? I do have some comments. um ah You can't see it, but she's got a paper of comments. I do. I i realized I was interrupting Kaylee so much and I really didn't want to. So I was like, I'll just jot things down and then come back to it later.
01:29:12
Speaker
So you mentioned, some of these are super random, sorry, but you mentioned the diver having to search for the remains. And I was thinking like, what a terrible job that would be to be a diver and you have to go and find somebody's body. Like obviously it's important because you want to know who they are. You want to find them, but also like, Oh, I could not, I could not do that job. it It was a sewer. So, you know, it's murky waters and oh, heaven's no.
01:29:39
Speaker
ah For this case, I just had a question about the media. Do you think it helped or hindered the investigation, their amount of like the names and all the information they were spreading? like Was it helpful? Was it good for public safety? Or was it you know too much? I think it was too much because it put a lot of pressure on Ness and the police force, which on some level can be good. But ABC, how it all panned out.
01:30:05
Speaker
I think it hindered investigation. There wasn't really excuse me there wasn't really much to investigate, um and it was a lot of fear-mongering, which people should be scared. This was a scary situation, but in general, the way it was approached was very sensationalized. and I think it just wasn't done well, but I don't really think it's the media's fault. I think they were reporting on what people wanted to hear about.
01:30:30
Speaker
but it was like daily articles for months. like The amount of media coverage was crazy, which makes sense because this was a crazy circumstance, but I don't think it was really helpful. And people were talking to the media who shouldn't have been talking to the media, um and they were taken as people who should be talking to the media. I didn't think it was really another problem. So it's not really the media's fault, but it was a little bit too sensationalized. I think sometimes the media, even now they do that. like I know in my home state, we have had a recent slew of political ads where one person was trying to discredit a candidate's claim and saying that he lied about something that happened to him in his military service, but a bunch of other people that were in his unit came forward and said, no, that other guy who was also in our unit is lying. So I think the media is too quick to take witnesses sometimes and not actually fact check because then they can just say, oh, our witness gave us inaccurate information and blame it on the witness instead of actually doing their work.
01:31:22
Speaker
I feel like media always has to have that fine line between you know provide providing facts, but they're also still a business. They still have to sell papers. so I feel like the Cleveland torso murder murders, that's like a good way to guarantee money, unfortunately. yeah That's the hard line. yeah Because some of the headlines you see are absolutely just sensational and they're true when it comes to this case. um And in general, the role of a journalist is it's ah it' a trusted role. You're supposed to be able to read the news and trust it. And nowadays we hear a lot about...
01:31:54
Speaker
I mean, it's an election here. So everything you hear, it's like, okay, let me do about 20 minutes of research for this article that took me two minutes to read to make sure that I'm not being lied to. Yeah, you have to read like other articles all from different perspectives to even begin to get the bare facts because everybody puts their opinion in it. There are too many journalists, both back then, I think probably in this case and today, who were meant to be creative writers, but they got stuck in journalism and they don't belong there. That's my opinion.
01:32:23
Speaker
yeah There's too much of a fanciful bend on things and you're writing about the sensational, but there's a reason that when you like listen to like news stations, sometimes they'll seem very clipped. It's because you really shouldn't put a ton of emotion into something that's not proven. Yeah. That's the other thing. It's so much emotion that gets into journalism and I'm like, I'm sorry. I think it should be boring because you want to just have the most relevant information and the most accurate that you can find. Obviously you're still going to make mistakes or have incomplete information, but Yeah, and there's a time and place um for it and I just think the mass reportage of things is just it's heinous. And I'm going to get on a soapbox here. Get on it. A few seconds. um The way that people have been writing recently outside of politics has really, really disgusted me.
01:33:15
Speaker
Talk about it. I was like, this is kind of pathetic, but like when Liam Payne died, TMZ released photos of his body. Oh my word. Immediately. They absolutely should not have done that. His sister found out, Liam Payne's sister found out her brother had died from a news notification on her cell phone.
01:33:33
Speaker
And TMZ. Isn't that a rule? Aren't you supposed to like wait until the police have gotten to contact the family? Is that not a rule? Am I just making that up in my mind? It was internationals. i don't i I feel like it's common courtesy. I'm not sure if it's like a law. Okay. And if it is, it's probably Americans. We're trained in American journalism. um True, true.
01:33:51
Speaker
But they might have, maybe they contacted one of his, like his parents or something, but TMZ posted photos of his body. And now those photos are circulating on the internet because they wanted to, the they did not care about anything other than wanting to be the first person to break the story. And I feel like that's kind of how these headlines went where you just had of a sensationalist story, the first person to break the story without the consideration for the people behind it.
01:34:21
Speaker
And so just like from a journalistic perspective, that was deeply, deeply upsetting to me to see. Absolutely. And also, like as a teenager who loved One Direction, it was also deeply upsetting to have to keep having that thrown in your face. And then just some of these headlines are crazy. like playing the like A journalist's job is not to assign blame. That is the police's job. Yeah. um So when you see headlines like kind of taunting things, um especially in true crime cases or in the the event of a celebrity death or something like that,
01:34:48
Speaker
um Like you said, they're not really meant to be emotion that you write emotion in an obituary. You write emotion into a memorial piece. You do not write it into news reportage. Anyway, that is my soapbox. That's so true. And even I was thinking about like pictures when you were, I was thinking back to what you were mentioning about the book earlier. And I honestly don't think unless you are taking like a forensics course, you're in the police field. I don't think that a common everyday person needs to see The gore from these crime scenes, like these victims in this story, these people were already disrespected so much by the killer. There's no reason that their memory should be further disrespected by news media or books about it. I don't think we need to see those pictures. I think as human beings, we kind of get desensitized to violence. Like we were talking about the fall of the House of Usher and Prospero's face being melted off by acid rain.
01:35:43
Speaker
spoiler alert for Follow the House of Us or it came out over here but we're fine. But we don't need to see that. We kind of get desensitized to it and I was a little bit surprised um because I had been reading articles and I'd seen a couple of pictures and I wasn't really expecting it. Like I saw disembodied arms like just sitting on table and they're all in black and white and it's just very like you think that's somebody. Yeah.
01:36:09
Speaker
I don't need to see that. i don't I don't want to say like, oh, I'm just like, it didn't scare me or like disgust me. It just made me feel like I don't need to see that. yeah It does it just feel kind of...
01:36:22
Speaker
disrespectful in a way, which is weird because I'm not really against a lot of like, I said before, I'd love to go see the catacombs and things like that. Yeah. Well, there's context too, I guess. Like yeah the situation, like even the other day is kind of going a little off on a tangent, but Oren, I started showing him the movie Schindler's List. And that's a very, wait, have you seen it yet? I haven't.
01:36:47
Speaker
kale I'm sorry I hate whenever people have that reaction to things but it is such a good movie but they it's a depiction of the Holocaust in World War II and Oskar Schindler saved several Jewish individuals but it does get pretty graphic as a film it's R rated it it definitely shows some things and Oren was like I didn't want to see that. And so there is this level of how much, but you're communicating the story and showing the horror of it. But that I feel like is also different because that was a picture of suffering that people went through versus these things. This is death after the fact. I guess it's not really that different, but I don't know. Well, like you said, um it's these people have been disrespected. And there's a way to say this that coming across like, oh, I'm such a good person.
01:37:30
Speaker
but It was included for context or accuracy, I guess. And i don't I'm not judging someone for including that in the book um because he was a research writer. That's what he did. And so of course he came across these pictures, but at the same time as just a common person, I didn't need to see the emasculated, decapitated body of somebody.
01:37:57
Speaker
Yeah, like it wasn't it wasn't like like horribly graphic, um but but like that just feels disrespectful. um and i You don't need to gawk at things like that. If I ever get murdered, do not let anybody put my body on any news platform or social media.
01:38:16
Speaker
It's just like there's a reason that Disrespect of a corpse is a charge. Yeah, because there's a sacredness to Mm-hmm to the end of someone's life. There's a vulnerability there like they're no longer there They can't take care of their own body like but they still deserve that respect. They still reserve deserve to be respected And again, I don't think it's disrespectful of the author or the intention of the author to include these pictures like you said there there's a time and place for that for forensic investigation for knowledge and but it was just and even as ah as a way to kind of communicate how extreme this was at one point they were talking about how they found the the lower half of a torso and the upper half of the torso and there's a picture of the two pieces sitting on a table how they fit together and i could see like i understand why you included that but i didn't need to say that but anyway yeah just be careful you can find stuff like that and it's just there are some things you cannot unsee
01:39:12
Speaker
Yeah. So, and then I think anyway, my other thought was on the topic of names, because at first when you were talking about like going back and finding the victim's identities part, the practical part of me was like, well, there's no point in doing that now because, you know, there are current cases with people who are still alive or victim's families that are still alive that we could be solving. But at the same time, as I was thinking about it more and stuff that you were saying,
01:39:37
Speaker
I feel like, kind of like you going back to there's a sacredness to someone being dead and not able to protect their body anymore. And I think it's kind of like that with their name and their identity too. Like they're dead. They can't speak for themselves. They can't protect themselves anymore. So there is something valuable when you can find or reveal their name. Like you're making it more than just, Oh, here's this corpse that got dissected. It's here was this person. yeah You're, you're giving humanism, like they're, they're human rights and not human rights. like
Personal Reflections and Life Changes
01:40:07
Speaker
just giving that back to them, giving their ability to be seen as a human being, like their realness back. And i it's not something that I maybe shouldn't be prioritized in the sense that it should be given precedent over other cases um that have more dire consequences to be solved earlier, but definitely worth doing because they might have descendants. yeah And that's what it was for.
01:40:36
Speaker
the lady of the lake and then lovely like the lady of the dunes and then the man found on that beach. I cannot remember what they called him. They had descendants that were able to be found and told what had happened. But yeah, any other questions? I don't think so. Are you going to be able to sleep tonight? I think so. I don't know. I'm going to play a podcast or something to listen to as I fall asleep.
01:41:03
Speaker
not a true crime podcast, something different. Not this episode. Well, it'll take us like six months to edit this. Most likely. And our other two that we have, are we going to release them after this one now that we've mentioned the both of this one, but this is our one that we officially recorded after coming back from a break? Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. Because the other two episodes, ah we'll just reverse it. We'll do
01:41:28
Speaker
Torso, Dahlia, and then Katie Genovese. Perfect. Well, yeah, perfect. So it's still me, you, me. And then next time we record, begin it'll be your case. I don't know what we have on the docket if we have any specific story. I don't know either. I wrote it down, but I don't know where my notebook is that I wrote it down in. so But I will find it before next week.
01:41:51
Speaker
or else we'll make up something new. and say we I wrote it down on a notebook, but I moved and I'm pretty sure I don't have it anymore. I think it's in storage. I still haven't unpacked all my stuff from when I moved back. So yeah.
01:42:05
Speaker
Anyway. So on to our, oh yes, go ahead. On to our, the more lighthearted. I was going to say that we were both like transitioning, exiting the murder highway, uplifting thought for the week.
01:42:19
Speaker
Um, I just talked for two hours. Do you want to go first? Sure. Um, well, today was, well, the day that we are recording this now is the Sunday before Veterans Day. So today in church, we did um a little video presentation because we have a lot of veterans in our congregation and dad was able to find old pictures of when they were in the military. And he found this really beautiful song. Um, and so he played that today. So it was very,
01:42:47
Speaker
you know it's just a good reminder like we have all these people in our country that served and we don't we don't know it they just went they served they did their thing they came back they don't really make a big deal about it at least all the veterans i've known have not made a big deal about having served in the military and they saw combat like they were you know vietnam i think one of them no he wasn't world war two it was like vietnam or the korean war other wars like that. And then one who was a specialist, I think ah in the war against Iraq, I think but he was like special forces, but never, never talks about it. So it's, it's humbling. Like it's encouraging me to think because they're like humble examples of duty and, and bravery. Cause like, even if you don't see combat, just the knowledge that you could be pulled for combat at any moment, like, and I know it's a job, but I know there are benefits, but still it's a big job. Yeah.
01:43:42
Speaker
So just thankful for people that are willing to do that for us and that I don't have to do it. Yeah. Well said. Anything I say will not be on the same level as this. ah I don't know. Anything uplifting. like you made a big transition in switching to freelance. So how do you, are there any like positive lessons you're learning from that experience, a new lease on life, anything like that? Um, a new lease on life. I i realized that it was really nice to switch to freelance cause I used to work in an office and I worked in the education field, say it that way. And towards the end I have a couple of chronic health conditions.
01:44:33
Speaker
um chronic and iconic as I always I've never said that in my life um but I realized how much I was doing and when I slowed down and now I work from home um and I set my own hours how much it was affecting my health and so by being able to slow down and kind of reprioritize the way i I live my life it's been a lot better for my health some things have improved for me and I've I enjoy working um more than I did previously and it just kind of has let me
01:45:15
Speaker
take a step back for the first time, probably in like six years and just think about what I want to do. Like long-term, short-term, whatever. And so it's been, it's been eyeopening to, it feels like for the first time in my life, I'm fully in control of everything that's going on, not to be like, whatever. I mean, working for myself and even though I'm not living in the situation that I would prefer to be living in,
01:45:43
Speaker
Um, now that it's a bad situation or anything, it's a good situation. I just, I can see the pathway forward for the first time in a long time. And that's really cool. That's great. Yeah. And about 20 minutes, we'll probably be having a panic attack about not having insurance, but, but yeah, just some, some peace and clarity, some, something to work toward.
01:46:11
Speaker
Oh, and when I split dyed my hair and I've really been enjoying that because I wasn't able to do that in my old job. So now I'm half blonde, half, but I don't know what color you call this, but brunette-ish, brownish red. Looks good. Thank you. I look mentally ill. I love it.
01:46:31
Speaker
So I think that wraps it up for this week. I think so. um I won't say we'll be back next week, because clearly we're liars. We're, yeah, we're liars. but I was trying to think of ah of a nicer way to put it and I could, we're not intentional liars.
01:46:49
Speaker
We are accidental liars. I don't know if that's much better, but we had no ill health. Yeah, you can I was just ill. Yeah. Sierra was busy getting her third degree. And then I was in Alaska, so we didn't have Wi-Fi or anything. And then I moved back and home and I was temporarily dead. So really, we're doing great.
01:47:17
Speaker
It's wonderful. Everything's great. So we will be back at some point in the future. We're hoping to be more consistent. Um, cause I have more free time, even though I'm trying to work the same amount of hours as I was before. Something about not having to actually wear like office professional clothes and go to work just makes life easier. who Yeah.
01:47:40
Speaker
That being said, I've not worn like a pair of, I haven't worn like a pencil skirt like four months. Do you miss it? No. I don't even wear skirts to church anymore. I just wear dress pants. I am like, I cannot bring myself to put them on.
01:47:58
Speaker
But dress pants are so comfortable. They are. I love them. I live in like bike shorts and oversized t-shirt. It's like a glimpse into my life right now. My t-shirt is like a 6x. So it's like ah it's like wearing a comfortable tent. And it says, bite me. And it glows in the dark. I love that. And people used to think that I was a serious person.
01:48:27
Speaker
But no, this is who I am. Embrace it. Glow. Yes. Glow like the star that you are. I i will. You're working right now. Ha. Yeah. Yep, yep.
01:48:44
Speaker
So next week, or not next week, next episode, we're going to start saying next episode. Yeah. We'll be Sierra's case and it'll be, uh, the Black Dahlia. Yes. And it's one that we did already record. It just has not been edited by me and put out on time, obviously. So for two cases in a row, you'll get to hear us say the words bisected. Yeah. That's right. that's It started to come back to me now.
01:49:15
Speaker
no
01:49:17
Speaker
Yeah, you have some gnarly ones that we're talking about. Yeah, you can always tell who picked the cases. You picked Black Dahlia too, I think, didn't you? I did. This is the case I ended up with. I feel like a little apprentice on this journey. Kaylee just tells me, here's the case you're going to look at. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds good. And then I read it and I'm like, oh. And that's not in a bad way. It's just because I don't know information. So she's just like, this is a good one.
01:49:45
Speaker
What? We're going Tim McLean, torso, Dalia. And then what's, what is the one that you did again? Kitty Genovese. That was the case about, um, is the bystander. That was kind of like a more, yeah. And then, oh, I think we were doing Zodiac. Weren't we going to do Zodiac? Is that the next one we're doing? Mm-hmm. That's supposed to be a split situation.
01:50:15
Speaker
Well, we can work out those details later. Anyway, so thanks for tuning in. If you're all still here, if not, we understand. Yeah, it's okay. We don't hold it against you at all. Clearly, we can't keep up with anything either. We don't stay here either. so Anyway, hi to my dad who's probably listening to this. um Love you.
01:50:38
Speaker
and Yeah, let me see. Who in my family do I know would still be hanging on? Maddie might listen to it. Tori might listen to it. Love you guys.
01:50:47
Speaker
Like to thank my family. Like to thank my friends. Naomi's probably listening. Thank you, Naomi. She's actually out. She's got a bombastic side eye. Mom's side eye. But anyway, until next time, be aware. Take care. And we'll see you next time.