Between September 1935 and August 1938 the dismembered remains of at least twelve people, and by some counts many more, were found around Cleveland, most of them in Kingsbury Run, a wooded gully carrying railway lines through the east side of the city. Nine were men and three were women. All had been decapitated, and in almost every case the head was recovered separately or not at all. Several had been dismembered with surgical competence, and some had been drained of blood.
Only two of the victims were ever identified. The rest were transients from the shantytowns along the run, people who had come to Cleveland in the Depression and whose absence nobody reported.
The investigation was led by Eliot Ness, then Cleveland's safety director and already famous for his work against Capone. It was the failure of his career. In August 1938, after the eleventh and twelfth bodies were found, Ness ordered the shantytowns in the Flats burned to the ground, ostensibly to deny the killer his hunting ground. It destroyed the homes of hundreds of destitute men and was widely condemned, and no further bodies were found afterwards.
Ness privately believed the killer was a man he called Gaylord Sundheim, generally identified as Francis Sweeney, a surgeon from a politically connected family and a cousin of a sitting congressman, who failed two polygraph examinations administered by Leonarde Keeler in 1938 and then voluntarily committed himself to a veterans' hospital. He could not be prosecuted, and he taunted Ness by postcard for years. Nothing was ever proved. The case is open.