On September 23, 1935, two boys found the body of Edward Anthony Andrassy, twenty-nine, in a gully at the foot of Jackass Hill, where East 49th Street dead-ends at Kingsbury Run, a ravine carrying railroad tracks through the east side of Cleveland. He was wearing only socks. He had been castrated, and his head was buried nearby. There were rope burns on his wrists, and the coroner found that the beheading itself had killed him; he had been dead two or three days. He had once worked as an orderly in the psychiatric ward at Cleveland City Hospital and at his death had no job and no visible means of support. Beside him lay a second headless man whose body had been soaked in oil and set alight after death, turning the skin red and leathery. That man was never identified and went into the record as John Doe I.
Over the next three years the remains of at least ten more people turned up in the run, in the Cuyahoga River, on the Lake Erie shore and in the Flats. The killer always beheaded his victims and often cut them into pieces, sometimes cutting the torso in half. Most of the men were castrated. Several bodies had been treated with a chemical that left the skin tough and red, and many were found months, in some cases more than a year, after death. Florence Genevieve Polillo, forty-four, was found on January 26, 1936, on East 20th Street, cut apart, wrapped in paper and packed into half-bushel baskets; her head was never found. A tattooed man found on June 5, 1936, beside the Nickel Plate Road tracks could not be named even after his death mask was shown to thousands of visitors at the Great Lakes Exposition. The one West Side victim was found near a homeless camp at Big Creek in Brooklyn on July 22, 1936. A woman's upper torso washed up at Euclid Beach on February 23, 1937, and the lower half three months later. In May 1938 a woman's bisected torso was found in burlap bags in the river by the West 3rd Street Bridge; she was the only victim with morphine in her system. Only Andrassy and Polillo were identified by fingerprints, and a third woman, Rose Wallace, tentatively by her teeth.
The victims came from the Roaring Third, also called the Hobo Jungle, a district east of the run of bars, gambling dens, brothels and shacks, and from the Hoovervilles of the Flats, where the working poor of the Depression lived because they had nowhere else. Most were never missed. Some researchers count a thirteenth, the Lady of the Lake, the lower torso of a woman found on the Lake Erie shore near Bratenahl on September 5, 1934, and a later possible victim, Robert Robertson, found beheaded in 1950. The lead detective, Peter Merylo, believed there were more around Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh from the 1920s to the 1950s, and some counts run to twenty or forty.
Eliot Ness, famous for his work against Al Capone's organization, was Cleveland's public safety director throughout the official series. On August 16, 1938, men combing a dump at the end of East Ninth Street for scrap metal found the last two official victims, a woman and a man, laid out within view of Ness's office at City Hall. Two days later Ness led raids on the shantytowns of the Flats, had the men in them fingerprinted and burned the shacks to the ground, saying he wanted to be able to identify future victims and to move potential ones out of the killer's reach. On August 22 he sent six two-man teams through a large area of downtown under the guise of fire inspections. They found nothing on the killer and hundreds of families living in firetraps without toilets or running water. The burning drew heavy criticism. No further bodies in the official series were found.
About 9,100 people were questioned. On August 24, 1939, Frank Dolezal, who had lived with Polillo and had connections to Andrassy and Wallace, was arrested for her murder. He first confessed to killing her in self-defense, then said the confession had been beaten out of him, and he was found hanged in his cell at the Cuyahoga County jail while in the custody of Sheriff Martin O'Donnell. The death was ruled a suicide; rumors that he was killed have never gone away, and he was later cleared of the torso killings.
The suspect Ness believed in was Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney, born May 5, 1894, a World War I veteran who had served in a medical unit that amputated limbs in the field and had been gassed. He drank heavily from 1929, and his wife left him in 1934. In 1929 he had been a surgical resident at St. Alexis Hospital in the Kingsbury Run area. Ness had him held in a hotel room for three days to sober up before questioning him, and the polygraph expert Leonarde Keeler told Ness that Sweeney had failed two tests and was the killer. Ness judged he could not win a prosecution on circumstantial evidence against a first cousin of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, a political opponent who had attacked him publicly over the case. Sweeney committed himself to an institution, and from there sent threatening postcards to Ness and his family into the 1950s. They stopped after Ness died in 1957. Sweeney died in a veterans' hospital in Dayton, Ohio, on July 9, 1964. Nothing against him was ever proved.
Beginning in August 2024 the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office worked with the DNA Doe Project to exhume some of the unidentified victims and try to name them through genetic genealogy. The killer has never been identified.