Between September 1935 and August 1938, the remains of at least a dozen people were found in and around Kingsbury Run, a railroad ravine that cuts through the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio. All of them had been beheaded, and most had been dismembered. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, published by Case Western Reserve University, counts what were thought to be seven men and five women. Only two were identified with certainty and a third tentatively. Most of the dead were poor and transient, people who lived in the shantytowns of the Great Depression or drifted through the city by train, and no one came forward to claim them.
The press called the unknown killer the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Eliot Ness, the former federal agent who had become Cleveland's director of public safety in December 1935, presided over the largest manhunt the city had seen. In August 1938, after the last two bodies in the usual count were found in a dump within view of his office, he had the shantytowns raided and burned. A year later the county sheriff arrested a bricklayer, Frank Dolezal, who confessed to one of the killings, retracted, and died in his jail cell before he could be tried. Ness's own suspect, a physician named Francis E. Sweeney, was questioned in secret and never charged. No one was ever tried for any of the killings. Nearly 90 years later, the county medical examiner has exhumed some of the unnamed victims in the hope of giving them back their names.
Kingsbury Run is part of a natural watershed that carries creeks and storm water from the eastern suburbs to the Cuyahoga River, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. West of East 79th Street it forms a broad arc and a deep, rugged valley. It was named for an early settler, and from the 1860s it held some of the city's first oil works, including John D. Rockefeller's refinery. Railroads used the ravine from 1857 onward. By the 1930s it was a corridor of tracks, weeds and creek beds, and the encyclopedia notes that its modern fame rests less on its industrial history than on the torso murders.
During the Depression, the run and the Flats along the river filled with tents and shacks where homeless men lived, a Cleveland 19 report recalled in 2018. Many of the people who lived there came and went by freight train. Next to the run lay a district of cheap bars and rooming houses known as the Roaring Third, which the historian James Jessen Badal, writing for the Cleveland Police Museum, describes as the place several victims frequented. Badal has written that the three identified victims all spent time at the same downtown bar, and that he believes the killer found his victims among the shantytowns of the run and the Flats.
Cleveland was then the sixth largest city in the country, according to Mental Floss, and in 1936 and 1937 it held the Great Lakes Exposition on the lakefront for its centennial, a fair that covered 135 acres and drew more than 11 million visitors over two summers. The Republican National Convention also met in Cleveland in the summer of 1936, Badal told Cleveland Scene. The killings ran through these same seasons.
There is no single agreed list. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History dates the series from September 1935 to August 1938 and counts 12 people, about seven men and five women. CBS News, citing the Cleveland Police Museum, reported in 2024 that the killer had dismembered at least 12 people between 1935 and 1938. The DNA Doe Project's case pages refer to at least 12 victims.
Other counts run higher. Time magazine reported in July 1939 that Cleveland newspapers had been covering "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" since 1934, when the first of 13 torsos was found, and that the dead were seven men and six women. That count included a woman found on the Lake Erie shore in September 1934, known as the Lady of the Lake. Badal's account for the Cleveland Police Museum says that this woman was added to the official total about two years after she was found and became known as "victim #0." Cleveland Magazine, in 2014, listed her as Victim No. 0 and noted that police had debated whether she belonged to the series.
Investigators also looked beyond Cleveland. The lead detective, Peter Merylo, believed that similar killings near New Castle, Pennsylvania, were the work of the same man, and in 1940 three bodies found in railroad boxcars near Pittsburgh were linked to the case by investigators at the time, though never officially. The case numbering used by the DNA Doe Project and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner, which calls unidentified victims "Kingsbury Run John Doe" with a number, does not always match the numbering used in news reports.
On September 5, 1934, the lower part of a woman's torso washed up on the Lake Erie shore east of Cleveland, near Euclid Beach, according to Cleveland Magazine. Badal places the find east of the village of Bratenahl. The Chicago Review of Books, describing Daniel Stashower's 2022 book on the case, says a man named Frank LaGassie found the remains on the beach. Badal writes that the woman was in her mid-30s, that her skin had been treated with a chemical that left it red and toughened, and that her head was never found. Other remains found later were connected to her, but she was never identified. Because she was found a year before the usual series began, some accounts start with her and some do not.
On September 23, 1935, two dismembered bodies were found together in Kingsbury Run, at the foot of a slope known as Jackass Hill, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and Badal. Both men had been beheaded.
One was identified by his fingerprints as Edward Andrassy. The encyclopedia gives his age as 29 and describes him as an orderly at a local hospital; Cleveland Magazine also gives 29 and calls him a former hospital orderly, while Badal gives 28. Badal writes that Andrassy was a regular in the Roaring Third. Time magazine in 1939 gave his name as Edward W. Andrassy. He is the first victim in the usual count and one of only two whose identity was ever certain.
The other man was never identified. Badal describes him as a white man of about 40 (Cleveland Magazine says about 45) who had been dead for about two weeks, longer than Andrassy, and whose body had been treated with the same kind of chemical found on the Lady of the Lake. He is listed in the records as an unidentified John Doe.
The finding of two bodies at once, both beheaded, drew wide attention. Ness had not yet arrived in the safety director's office; he was sworn in on December 11, 1935, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, and Badal told Cleveland Scene in 2014 that Ness "really didn't have that much to do with it" at the start, becoming involved in the summer of 1936.
On January 26, 1936, parts of a woman's body were found wrapped and left in baskets behind a manufacturing building near downtown, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and Badal. About ten days later more of her remains were found in a vacant lot. Her head was never found.
Fingerprints identified her as Florence Polillo. Cleveland Magazine gives her age as 42 and describes her as a former waitress who had once been arrested for prostitution; Badal calls her a waitress and barmaid who lived at the edge of the Roaring Third. She was known to friends as Flo. Time magazine in 1939 called her victim "No. 4" in its count of 13. Her death would become the one crime for which anyone was ever charged in the case.
On June 5, 1936, two boys who had skipped school to go fishing found a man's head under a tree near Kingsbury Run, according to Mental Floss. Badal writes that the head was found near a railroad bridge and that the body was found the next day in front of a railroad police building; the DNA Doe Project, which has his case on file, says the head lay about 1,500 feet from the body.
He was a white man in his early twenties; the DNA Doe Project estimates his age at 20 to 23, and Cleveland Magazine gives about 25. He had six tattoos, which police photographed and circulated in the hope that someone would recognize them. The DNA Doe Project lists them: a bird and band with the names "Helen and Paul" on the inner left forearm, a heart and anchor on the outer right forearm, a flag and the initials "W.C.G." on the inner right forearm, a butterfly on the left shoulder, the comic strip character Jiggs on the left ankle, and a Cupid on the right ankle. His clothing carried a laundry mark with the initials "J.D."
Police made a plaster death mask of his face. It was shown, with a chart of the tattoos, at the Great Lakes Exposition, which opened that summer. CBS News reported that more than 100,000 people saw the display and none of them identified him. His mask and those of other victims are now displayed at the Cleveland Police Museum. Cleveland Magazine reported that his death was the one that led investigators to treat the killings as a series. He is still known only as the Tattooed Man, Kingsbury Run John Doe #4 in the medical examiner's files.
On July 22, 1936, a teenage girl found the body of a man in the woods near Big Creek on Cleveland's West Side, close to a railroad line, according to Badal and Cleveland Magazine. He was the only victim in the usual count found on the West Side. Badal describes him as a white man of about 40 (Cleveland Magazine says in his late 30s) who had been dead for about two months, and writes that the evidence suggested he had been killed where he lay. His head and clothing were found nearby. He was never identified.
Later that summer another man was found in Kingsbury Run. Badal writes that a man trying to board a freight train saw part of the body, and that police divers recovered more of the remains from a pool of sewage-filled water in the run. More than 600 onlookers gathered to watch. The man was in his late twenties and was never identified. Sources differ on the date: Cleveland Magazine gives August 10, 1936; the DNA Doe Project, which lists him as Kingsbury Run John Doe #6, gives September 10, 1936; and Badal writes September 1936.
The county coroner, Arthur J. Pearse, noted that the head had been removed in a single stroke with no hesitation marks, which he took as the work of a confident killer who knew anatomy, Badal writes. Pearse then called a meeting that the newspapers dubbed the "Torso Clinic," an attempt to build a profile of the killer.
On February 23, 1937, the upper part of a woman's torso washed ashore on the Lake Erie shore east of Bratenahl, according to Cleveland Magazine and Badal. The lower part was found about three months later, Badal writes. Cleveland Magazine describes her as a woman of about 30; Badal says she was in her mid-20s. She was never identified.
On June 6, 1937, a skeleton was found in a burlap bag under a bridge over the Flats, according to Cleveland Magazine. Badal writes that dental work led to an unofficial identification of the remains as Rose Wallace, a small woman of about 40. Her home address gave police their lead, and they followed every lead they had on her, he writes, but none led anywhere. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History lists her as one of the identified victims, and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office describes her identification as tentative, based on dental records. She was the third of the three victims ever given a name.
In July 1937 a member of the Ohio National Guard saw remains in the Cuyahoga River near a downtown bridge, and police recovered the rest of the body over several days, Badal writes. The victim was a man in his mid-to-late 30s. His head was never found, and he was never identified.
In April 1938 a laborer saw part of a leg in the Cuyahoga River, and about a month later two burlap bags were recovered from the river with more of the same woman's remains, according to Badal. Her head and arms were never found. Badal writes that the coroner, Samuel Gerber, found drugs in her body, the first time that had happened in the series, which raised the question of whether she had been sedated or had been a drug user. Gerber had succeeded Pearse as county coroner and held the office from 1937 to 1986, according to Cleveland Magazine.
On August 16, 1938, the remains of two more people were found in a dump on the lakefront downtown, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Badal and Mental Floss. Cleveland Magazine describes them as a woman in her mid-30s and a man in his 30s whose remains were skeletal. Badal writes that some of the woman's remains appeared to have been refrigerated, and that the second body was found a few yards away, within view of Ness's office window. Neither was identified. These two deaths are the last in the usual count of 12.
The torso murders produced what Badal calls the largest investigation in Cleveland history. He writes that two detectives, Peter Merylo and Martin Zalewski, were assigned to the case full time and that police interviewed more than 5,000 people; Mental Floss gives a figure of more than 1,500 questioned. Merylo worked the case for six years, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, which quotes his description of the killer as "coldly efficient" and as relentless as an executioner when in the mood to kill.
Merylo spent long periods undercover in the run and the Roaring Third, Badal writes, often dressed as a hobo on his own time. He came to believe that the killer rode freight trains between Cleveland, Youngstown and New Castle, Pennsylvania, and hid bodies in boxcars, according to Cleveland Magazine and Mental Floss. His papers survived; Badal told Cleveland Scene that Merylo's daughter spent eight hours copying them for his research. Badal also quoted Merylo's memoirs as saying that he had never known anyone to confess to a crime without knowing its details, a remark Badal applied to the later confession of Frank Dolezal.
Medical opinion shaped the hunt from the start. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says investigators concluded that a single person with considerable knowledge of anatomy committed the killings. Gerber believed the precision of the cuts pointed to medical training, according to Mental Floss, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, looking back in 2013, wrote that investigators thought the killer might be a physician, a butcher or a hunter. Time magazine reported in 1939 that a private detective working for the county sheriff had searched the city for a refrigerated room where the killer might have worked, without finding one.
Police also tried to identify the dead. They made plaster death masks of the victims' heads and put them on display, a Cleveland 19 report noted in 2018, but most of the victims were never named. Late in 1938, according to Mental Floss, police received a letter claiming that the killer had gone to California and had buried a body in Los Angeles. A search found nothing.
Eliot Ness was born in Chicago on April 19, 1903, to Norwegian immigrant parents and joined the federal Prohibition Bureau there in 1929, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. He came to Cleveland in 1934 after his work against Chicago's bootleggers, Mental Floss reports. Mayor Harold Burton recruited him in 1935 to clean up a police department marked by scandal, and on December 11, 1935, at 32, Ness was sworn in as the city's youngest director of public safety, the encyclopedia says. He held the post for about seven years, until 1942.
His public focus was police corruption. The Chicago Review of Books, describing Stashower's book, says Stashower portrays Ness as more concerned at first with firing corrupt officers and with his public image than with the torso case. Badal told Cleveland Scene that Ness recognized the case lay outside his experience as a federal agent, because the killer had none of the usual motives; the term "serial killer," Badal noted, did not come into use until the mid-1970s. Badal writes that Ness became more involved under pressure from Mayor Burton.
Ness's methods drew criticism. Cleveland Magazine lists them as holding his suspect in secret, hiring undercover investigators off the books, ordering warrantless searches across about ten square miles north of Kingsbury Run, and burning the shantytowns and arresting the people who lived there.
Two days after the last two bodies were found, Ness acted. At 12:40 a.m. on August 18, 1938, he led about 35 officers into the shantytowns of Kingsbury Run, Badal writes. They detained 63 men, and on Ness's orders the shacks were set on fire and burned to the ground. Mental Floss describes dozens of arrests. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says Ness ordered the shantytowns burned "immediately," and a Cleveland Scene photo collection drawn from the Cleveland Memory Project at Cleveland State University dates the burning to August 18, 1938.
The press criticized the raid, Badal writes, and critics argued that it would do nothing to catch the killer. Cleveland Magazine reports that the Cleveland Press condemned Ness's "misguided zeal." The encyclopedia's entry on Ness says the burning was one of the steps that began his fall from favor in Cleveland. Police also searched every building in a ten-square-mile area, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in its 2013 account.
The usual count ends with the bodies found two days before the raid. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and Cleveland Scene say the burning ended the torso murders. Other writers tie the end of the series to the departure from the city of Ness's chief suspect. Badal's account notes that Ness claimed to have solved the crimes, but that no suspect was ever officially identified or tried.
The only person ever arrested in the case was not a doctor. In July 1939, Cuyahoga County Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell arrested Frank Dolezal, a 52-year-old bricklayer, for the killing of Florence Polillo, Badal writes. Dolezal was an immigrant of Bohemian origin who had lived with Polillo and knew Andrassy and Rose Wallace, according to Badal and Mental Floss.
Time magazine reported the arrest on July 17, 1939. The sheriff had hired a private detective, Lawrence J. "Pat" Lyons, who worked his way into the circles of Polillo and Andrassy and found that Dolezal had known both and had been with Polillo on the night police believed she was killed. Time described Dolezal as a heavy drinker who liked knives and who had once worked as a butcher. Lyons said he had found traces of human blood between the floorboards behind a bathtub in rooms Dolezal had lived in. After about 40 hours of questioning, Time reported, Dolezal said, "Yes, I cut her up." Time added that the sheriff hoped Dolezal would prove responsible for all 13 deaths, which would give him a political victory over Ness.
The confession did not hold. Badal writes that it mixed rambling with precise details, a pattern he reads as a sign of coaching. Dolezal later recanted, saying deputies had beaten him, according to Cleveland Magazine and Mental Floss. Reporters saw him with a black eye, and he said he had been beaten in custody, Cleveland Magazine reported in 2010. Badal told Cleveland Scene that Dolezal made three confessions and that none of them held up. Cleveland Scene reported in 2010 that he was charged; Badal's 2013 book on the Pennsylvania killings is described by its publisher's catalog on Project MUSE as calling him the only man ever charged in the Cleveland killings.
In August 1939 Dolezal was found hanged in his cell at the Cuyahoga County jail, before he could be tried, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and Cleveland Magazine. The coroner, Samuel Gerber, ruled the death a suicide. Badal writes that Gerber's autopsy also found six broken ribs, injuries Dolezal had suffered while in custody. Cleveland Magazine reported that his death came shortly before he was due to appear before a grand jury.
In 2010 Badal published a book on Dolezal, Though Murder Has No Tongue (Kent State University Press). He argued that Dolezal was neither the killer nor a suicide. He cited a deep mark on the neck that forensic experts told him did not match the soft cloths Dolezal was said to have used, along with newly found photographs and an inquest transcript, Cleveland Magazine reported. "Isn't it convenient he should die before going to trial?" Badal quoted a police source as asking at the time. Badal also said it was "very, very clear that a number of people" had been lying. Cleveland Magazine noted in 2014 that Dolezal lacked any obvious surgical skill.
That summer, about 70 years after his death, the Cleveland Police Historical Society and the Euclid Public Library placed a marker on Dolezal's grave, which had been unmarked, Cleveland 19 and Cleveland Scene reported. Badal told Cleveland Scene that Dolezal "was not the mad butcher, nor did he commit suicide." A great-niece told Cleveland 19 that the family felt his name had been cleared and that they could "hold our heads high now." No court or official body has ever ruled on his guilt or innocence; he died charged and untried.
Ness believed he knew who the killer was. For decades he kept the name to himself. Badal told Cleveland Scene that Ness used a pseudonym, "Gaylord Sundheim," when he described the suspect to his biographer years later, and that the suspect was a surgeon who had become an alcoholic and a drug user. Some people dismissed the story, Badal said, as Ness's way of avoiding the admission that he had failed.
The man was Francis E. Sweeney, a physician from a prominent Cleveland family, according to Cleveland Magazine, CBS News and Mental Floss. His cousin, Martin L. Sweeney, was the congressman for Ohio's 20th District; Mental Floss calls the two first cousins. Sweeney practiced with other doctors from an office near Kingsbury Run, close to St. Alexis Hospital and to where the first bodies were found in 1935, Cleveland Magazine reported in 2014. Probate records show that his drinking grew worse in the early 1930s, that he neglected his practice and disappeared for days, and that in 1933 his wife went to probate court to have him picked up and evaluated; she later sued for divorce.
The secret interrogation is known mainly from David Cowles, who led Cleveland's scientific identification bureau. In a 1983 interview with the Cleveland Police Historical Society, when he was 86, Cowles said Sweeney had been held in a room at the Cleveland Hotel downtown for about ten days to two weeks in 1938, and that it took about three days to sober him up, Cleveland Magazine reported. Ness called on a contact from his Chicago days, Leonarde Keeler, a developer of the modern polygraph, who brought his machine to Cleveland in secret and tested Sweeney. Sweeney failed, and Keeler reportedly told Ness that this was the man. CBS News, citing the police account, reported that Sweeney was questioned for a week and never confessed. There was not enough evidence to take to court, and Ness let him go.
After the interrogation police kept Sweeney under frequent watch. About a week after the last bodies were found in August 1938, he checked himself into the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Sandusky, Ohio, a veterans' home, and the staff told police whenever he left, Cleveland Magazine reported. Badal writes, and CBS News repeats, that the killings in Cleveland stopped once he had committed himself. Cleveland Magazine reported that a detective was told in 1940 that Sweeney was staying with his sister. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1956 and died in 1964.
For years Sweeney sent Ness cryptic, taunting postcards. Ness's papers, donated in the 1970s, included one signed "F.E. Sweeney, paranoidal nemesis," according to Cleveland Magazine. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History holds an image of a postcard sent to Ness in 1954 by an asylum inmate who some people believe may have been the torso murderer.
Sweeney's identity stayed confidential even after Ness died in 1957. Cleveland Magazine reported that in the 1970s the writer Marilyn Bardsley found the name herself after former investigators refused to give it, citing promises to Ness, and that Badal's first book, In the Wake of the Butcher (2001), confirmed both the interrogation and the name. Sweeney was never arrested and never charged with any crime connected to the killings. The case against him rests on Ness's belief, the polygraph result, his medical skill, where he worked and the timing of his departure from Cleveland. No physical evidence has ever linked him to any victim, Badal writes.
James Jessen Badal, an English and journalism professor at Cuyahoga Community College and a board member of the Cleveland Police Historical Society, had researched the case for about two decades by 2010, Cleveland Scene reported. He first heard of the killings in the eighth grade, when a teacher read aloud from a November 1948 Harper's Magazine article, he told Cleveland Scene. He drew on newspaper coverage, police materials and Merylo's papers.
In a 2014 revised edition of In the Wake of the Butcher, Badal set out new evidence. Cleveland Magazine reported that a drifter had told police that in November 1934 a doctor in an office near Kingsbury Run had offered him a meal, that he felt drugged and fled, and that he later could not find the office again. In August 1938 Merylo was sent to Chicago to bring the man back, but the man could not pick out the building. A reader later sent Badal photographs of a group of doctors that included Sweeney and of the building where they practiced, which had a medical office below and living quarters above; Badal suggested that the drifter had climbed the back stairs of that building. Next door stood a funeral home whose facilities, Badal argued, could have served as a place to work unseen. Badal said all of this was circumstantial and that a personal letter or diary would be needed to prove it.
Badal told Cleveland Magazine he was not 100 percent certain but called the evidence "about as close as we're going to come." He told News 5 Cleveland in 2018 that he was 99.9 percent sure of the killer's identity. Badal suggested that the killer lured people from the bars and drugged them.
Other writers are less sure. Cleveland Magazine reported that Steven Nickel, author of Torso (1989), found the drifter's story convincing but still believed the New Castle killings were by the same hand, which in his view would rule out Sweeney, since the odds of two killers using the same method within 100 miles were "pretty astronomical." John Stark Bellamy, author of The Maniac in the Bushes (1997), agreed that Sweeney was the top suspect for some of the killings but said Badal had not proved it, and thought more than one killer might be responsible. Merylo himself was open to the idea of a doctor but dismissed Sweeney as too heavy and out of condition to ride freight trains; he never knew of the 1938 interrogation, which was kept from him. Stashower's 2022 book, American Demon, offers its own conclusion, which the Chicago Review of Books called no better grounded than the earlier theories, resting on "inconclusive hearsay."
Merylo was not alone in looking east. In the mid-1920s, beheaded bodies had been found in a swampy area near New Castle, Pennsylvania, just across the Ohio border, according to the Project MUSE catalog description of Badal's 2013 book, Hell's Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders (Kent State University Press). The description says that many law enforcement officials in both states believed the Pennsylvania killings were the work of the Cleveland killer, which led to a coordinated investigation involving agencies from as many as five cities. Badal argues in that book that the evidence suggests the New Castle killings were not by the same person, Cleveland Magazine reported.
In early May 1940, a worker at the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad yards near McKees Rocks, outside Pittsburgh, noticed a smell coming from an old boxcar that was waiting to be scrapped, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recounted in 2013. He and his supervisor found a man's remains inside, and a search of other cars found two more. All three were headless. Detectives estimated the men were 30 to 40 years old. Only one was identified: fingerprints showed him to be David Nicholson, 30, from Illinois, a man with a burglary conviction. Investigators in Pittsburgh and elsewhere quickly connected the bodies to the Cleveland killings, the Post-Gazette wrote, but no official link was ever made, and the deaths were never solved.
Time magazine's count of 13 in 1939, Merylo's theories and the Pennsylvania cases explain why some accounts of the case give totals well above 12. None of those higher totals rests on any finding by a court, coroner or police department that the deaths were the work of one person.
Over the years many other people were considered. The Chicago Review of Books lists the theories that Stashower examines: a man who killed his lover, the Slovak bricklayer who confessed under duress (Dolezal), transients in the shantytown, gravediggers playing a joke, a doctor or butcher who began killing in Pennsylvania, and the cousin of a prominent politician who later entered an asylum. All of them, the review said, rest on circumstantial evidence.
One of the men investigated was Willie Johnson, who was convicted of a 1942 murder in Cleveland and executed in 1944, Cleveland Magazine reported. Witnesses claimed he had known Rose Wallace, but he denied killing any of the torso victims, and he was never charged with any of them.
Of the dozen or so people in the usual count, only Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo were identified by fingerprints, and Rose Wallace only tentatively, through dental records, Cleveland 19 reported in 2024. The rest were buried without names. They lie in unmarked graves in a potter's field at Memorial Park Cemetery in Highland Hills, according to Cleveland 19 and WKYC.
In July 2024 the Cuyahoga County Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Thomas Gilson, confirmed that his office was working with the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit, to exhume some of the unidentified victims and try to name them through investigative genetic genealogy, Cleveland 19 reported. The project approached the office and agreed to fund the work, and a single donor offered to cover laboratory costs. Gilson called the exhumations "tricky," because the victims had lived "on the periphery of society," were buried in a potter's field, and were documented in records about 90 years old. "Never caught, never identified," Gilson told WKYC of the killer. He cautioned that DNA alone would not produce a name: "It's not like I do DNA and I suddenly get a name." Still, he said, identifying even a few of the victims "would be a win for me."
Jennifer Randolph, the DNA Doe Project's executive director of case management and operations, told Cleveland 19 that volunteers had brought the case to the group because it was well known nationally, and that a team of about four genealogists would work on each victim. The plan was to obtain a DNA profile, find relatives through genetic databases, build family trees and trace them back to common ancestors. Some of the victims may have living relatives who never knew what became of them, she said, and they "deserve the dignity and justice of being memorialized with their names."
Cleveland 19 reported on August 9, 2024, that exhumation was under way at Memorial Park Cemetery. On August 21, 2024, it named the first two cases sent for testing: Kingsbury Run John Doe #4, the Tattooed Man, and Kingsbury Run John Doe #6. CBS News reported the next day that both sets of remains were being tested and that their age might have left the DNA degraded or contaminated.
As of the DNA Doe Project's case pages, last updated on October 20, 2025, for John Doe #4 and on June 2, 2026, for John Doe #6, both cases were still listed as "undergoing testing," and neither man had been identified.
The number of victims. Counts range from 12 (the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the Cleveland Police Museum's usual series) to 13 (Time magazine, 1939, and the police museum's count including the Lady of the Lake) and higher if the New Castle and McKees Rocks deaths are included. Whether those Pennsylvania deaths were the work of the same person has never been settled; Merylo and Nickel thought so, and Badal thinks not.
The first victim. A 2018 Cleveland 19 report said that children found the first head in Kingsbury Run in 1932. Other reports do not date any find to 1932, and the usual accounts begin with the Lady of the Lake in 1934 or with Andrassy and the unknown man in 1935.
The end of the killings. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and Cleveland Scene say the burning of the shantytowns ended the series. Badal and CBS News connect the end to Sweeney's entry into the veterans' home in Sandusky. Both events fell within days of each other in August 1938, so the sources cannot separate them.
Frank Dolezal's guilt and death. Dolezal confessed and retracted, was charged and never tried. His death was ruled a suicide; Badal's research argues that he was killed in custody, but no official finding has changed the coroner's ruling. Cleveland Scene's 2010 report puts his arrest in 1938, while Time magazine, Badal and Cleveland Magazine put it in July 1939.
Francis E. Sweeney. Sweeney was never arrested, charged or tried. The case against him consists of Ness's belief, a polygraph test that is not evidence of guilt, his medical skills and drinking, the location of his office, his taunting postcards, and the timing of his departure from Cleveland. Badal believes he was the killer; Bellamy and Nickel are not convinced; Merylo dismissed him.
Medical skill. Investigators and the coroners Pearse and Gerber thought the killer had anatomical knowledge, and the Post-Gazette notes that a butcher or hunter was also considered. This is an inference from the remains, not a proven fact.
The dates of some finds. The man found in Kingsbury Run in 1936 and listed as John Doe #6 is dated August 10 by Cleveland Magazine and September 10 by the DNA Doe Project. CBS News described the second exhumed victim as found on the lakefront in the summer of 1938, which does not match either date.
Ness's career in Cleveland declined. A 1942 car accident in which he was involved tipped the balance for those who wanted him removed, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, and he took a job in Washington as national director of the federal Social Protection Program. In 1947 he ran for mayor of Cleveland and lost to the incumbent, Thomas A. Burke. He moved to Coudersport, Pennsylvania, in 1956 to run a paper company, and died there of a heart attack on May 16, 1957, at 54, in debt. His book The Untouchables, written with the sportswriter Oscar Fraley, was published a few months after his death and was a great success. His ashes stayed with his family for four decades before being scattered at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, where a monument now stands.
The case has stayed in print. Steven Nickel's Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer appeared in 1989 and is the work the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History lists for further reading. Badal's In the Wake of the Butcher (2001, revised 2014), Though Murder Has No Tongue (2010) and Hell's Wasteland (2013) were all published by Kent State University Press. Stashower's American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America's Jack the Ripper (Minotaur Books, 2022) drew mainly on the Plain Dealer, the Cleveland News and the Cleveland Press, according to the Chicago Review of Books.
The Cleveland Police Museum displays the victims' death masks, and the Cleveland Memory Project at Cleveland State University keeps a collection of photographs from the case. Kingsbury Run itself remains a deep, rugged valley west of East 79th Street, the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History notes. The killer was never caught and never identified.
1857: The first railroad line runs through Kingsbury Run.
September 5, 1934: The Lady of the Lake is found on the Lake Erie shore near Euclid Beach (later counted by the Cleveland Police Museum as "victim #0").
September 23, 1935: Edward Andrassy and an unidentified man are found in Kingsbury Run.
December 11, 1935: Eliot Ness is sworn in as Cleveland's director of public safety.
January 26, 1936: The first remains of Florence Polillo are found; more are found about ten days later.
June 5, 1936: The head of the Tattooed Man is found; his body is found the next day.
Summer 1936: The Great Lakes Exposition opens; the Tattooed Man's death mask is displayed there.
July 22, 1936: A man is found near Big Creek on the West Side.
August 10 or September 10, 1936: A man is found in Kingsbury Run (dates differ by source); the "Torso Clinic" follows.
February 23, 1937: Part of a woman's body washes ashore east of Bratenahl.
June 6, 1937: Remains later tentatively identified as Rose Wallace are found under a bridge.
July 1937: A man's remains are recovered from the Cuyahoga River.
April and May 1938: A woman's remains are recovered from the Cuyahoga River.
August 16, 1938: Two bodies are found in a lakefront dump within view of Ness's office.
August 18, 1938: Ness leads a raid on the Kingsbury Run shantytowns; 63 men are detained and the shacks are burned.
1938: Francis E. Sweeney is held and questioned in secret and fails a polygraph test; about a week after August 16 he enters the veterans' home in Sandusky.
July 1939: Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell arrests Frank Dolezal, who confesses to killing Polillo and later recants.
August 1939: Dolezal is found hanged in his cell before trial; the coroner rules it a suicide.
May 1940: Three headless bodies are found in boxcars near McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania; no official link to Cleveland is made.
1942: Ness leaves the safety director's office.
1954: A postcard is sent to Ness by an asylum inmate believed by some to be the killer.
May 16, 1957: Eliot Ness dies in Coudersport, Pennsylvania.
1964: Francis E. Sweeney dies.
1983: David Cowles describes the Sweeney interrogation to the Cleveland Police Historical Society.
1989: Steven Nickel publishes Torso.
2001: Badal publishes In the Wake of the Butcher (revised edition 2014).
2010: A marker is placed on Frank Dolezal's grave; Badal publishes Though Murder Has No Tongue.
July 2024: The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner confirms plans with the DNA Doe Project to exhume unidentified victims.
August 2024: Exhumation begins at Memorial Park Cemetery in Highland Hills; John Doe #4 and John Doe #6 are sent for testing.
June 2, 2026: The DNA Doe Project's case page for John Doe #6 still lists the case as undergoing testing.