The gully known as Kingsbury Run lies like a scar across the face of downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Sixty feet deep in places, the ancient creek bed is lined with 30-odd pairs of railroad tracks serving local factories and distant cities, bearing cargo to Pittsburgh, Chicago, or Youngstown, whisking commuters to posh bedroom communities like Shaker Heights. During the Depression, Kingsbury Run was also a favorite camp site for hobos, and a playground for children with time on their hands. In the latter 1930s, it became the focal point of America's most fascinating murder mystery - a puzzle that endures to this day - though, in fact the case had its origins elsewhere, on the shores of Lake Erie.

On September 5, 1934, a driftwood hunter found the lower portion of a woman's torso buried in the sand at Euclid Beach, eight miles east of downtown Cleveland. The victim's legs were severed at the knees, her skin discolored by the application of a chemical preservative. A coroner extrapolated height and age from the pathetic evidence available, but victim number one did not resemble any of Cleveland's known missing women. She was never identified, police adding insult to injury by their stubborn refusal to count her as an "official" victim once a pattern of crime became apparent.

A year later, on September 23, 1935, boys playing in Kingsbury Run found two headless male bodies, nude but for stockings worn by the younger victim. Both had been emasculated, and their severed heads were found nearby. The older victim, unidentified, had died at least five days before the younger, and his skin possessed a reddish tinge from treatment with a chemical preservative. The younger man, identified as 29-year-old Edward Andrassy, was a bisexual ex-convict with a long record of petty arrests in Cleveland. Retraction of the neck muscles on both corpses pointed to decapitation as the cause of death.

On January 26, 1936, a Cleveland butcher was alerted to the presence of "some meat in a basket," behind his shop. Investigating, he was stunned to find two human thighs, one arm, and the lower half of a woman's torso. The upper torso, lower legs and missing arm were found behind a vacant house on February 7, several blocks away, but fingerprints had already identified the victim as Florence Polillo, a 41-year-old prostitute. Her severed head was never found.

Four months later, on June 5, two boys found the severed head of a man in Kingsbury Run, a mile from the spot where Andrassy and his nameless companion were found in September 1935. Railroad workers found the matching body on June 6, but victim number five remained anonymous, despite publication of numerous distinctive tattoos. His fingerprints were not on file in Cleveland, and he had not been reported missing.

On July 22, 1936, the naked, headless body of an unknown man was found beside Big Creek, in the suburb of Brooklyn, across town from Kingsbury Run. The only victim slain on Cleveland's southwest side, this new "John Doe" would also be the only victim killed where he was found. Decomposition foiled all efforts to identify the corpse.

A hobo spotted number seven - or, a portion of him - in Kingsbury Run, on September 10, 1936. The dismembered remains were floating in a stagnant pond, and police divers were called to retrieve two halves of a torso, plus the lower legs and thighs. The severed head, along with arms and genitals, was never found. Decapitation had not been the cause of death, but medical examiners could not identify another cause.

Soon after the discovery of victim number seven, Detectives Peter Merylo and Martin Zalewski were assigned to the "torso" case full-time. Over the next two years, they investigated hundreds of leads, cleared scores of innocent suspects, jailed dozens of perverts and fugitives - all without bagging their man. The press, meanwhile, ran banner headlines on the futile search for Cleveland's "Mad Butcher," speculating endlessly on motives, the identity of victims, and the killer's supposed surgical skill.

On February 23, 1937, the upper half of a woman's torso was found at Euclid Beach, almost precisely where the first (and unacknowledged) victim was discovered in September 1934. The lower trunk was found in Lake Erie, off East 30th Street, on May 5, while the head, arms, and legs remained forever missing.

On June 6, the skeleton of a black woman - missing one rib; plus the bones of arms and legs - was found beneath the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. The victim was decapitated, and Coroner Samuel Gerber placed her death some time in early June of 1936. In April 1938, the son of Rose Wallace "identified" his mother's remains on the basis of dental work , but problems remained. Wallace had disappeared in August 1936, two months after the victim's estimated date of death, and her Cincinnati dentist was also deceased, his files destroyed, rendering positive identification impossible. Detective Merylo accepted the shaky I.D., but it brought him no closer to the arrest of a suspect.

Exactly one month after number nine was found, the lower torso of a man was sighted in the Cuyahoga River, underneath the Third Street Bridge. Police retrieved the upper trunk and severed thighs that afternoon, and other pieces surfaced in the days to come. By July 14, authorities had everything except the nameless victim's head, and that was never found.

On April 8, 1938, a woman's lower left leg was fished out of the Cuyahoga, behind Public Square. The missing left foot, both thighs, and two halves of the torso were hauled ashore, wrapped in burlap, on May 2, but the victim's head, right leg, and arms remained at large.

The last "official" victims - male and female, killed at different times - were found on August 16, 1938, by workmen at a lakeside rubbish dump. The new "John Doe" was nothing but a skeleton, decapitated in familiar style, missing two ribs, plus both hands and feet. Murdered no later than February 1938, he might have died as early as December 1937. The female victim was cut into nine pieces, but all were accounted for. She had been killed some time between February and April 1938, her identity forever disguised by advanced decomposition.

In January 1939, the Cleveland Press reprinted this letter, mailed from Los Angeles:

Chief of Police Matowitz:

You can rest easy now, as I have come to sunny California for the winter. I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance. I shall astound the medical profession, a man with only a D.C.

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. I know now 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 butcher, but the truth will out.

I have failed but 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 my duty to dispose of the bodies as I do. It is God's will not to let them suffer.

(Signed) "X"

No buried heads were found in Los Angeles, and the manhunt shifted back to Cleveland. On July 5, 1939, sheriff's deputies arrested a Slavic immigrant, 52-year-old Frank Dolezal, and launched a marathon interrogation of their suspect. Dolezal eventually confessed to murdering Andrassy and Polillo, fumbling numerous details that were "corrected" in later "confessions." He later retracted his statements, charging detectives with third-degree tactics, and suspicious stains found in his flat were identified as animal blood. On August 24, Dolezal "hanged himself' in his cell, suspended from a wall hook shorter than he was, and the autopsy revealed four ribs broken by beatings in jail. Today, no one regards him seriously as a suspect in the "torso" case.

On May 3, 1940, three male corpses were discovered in abandoned box cars at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. All had been decapitated, and the heads were missing; one was otherwise intact, while two had been dissected at the hips and shoulders. Killed in the cars where they lay, the men had been dead from three to six months, and all three bodies had been scorched by fire. The most "complete" victim was identified as 30-year-old James Nicholson, a homosexual ex-convict from Wisconsin. The killer had carved the word "NAZI" on Nicholson's chest, inverting the "Z" by accident or design. Authorities unanimously blamed the crimes on Cleveland's butcher, tracing movements of the box cars to pinpoint the murders in Youngstown, Ohio, during December 1939.

In 4 Against the Mob, journalist Oscar Fraley contends that Eliot Ness - then Cleveland's director of public safety - not only identified the Butcher in 1938, but also brought him to a semblance of justice. Dubbed "Gaylord Sundheim," in defense against libel suits, the suspect was described as a homosexual pre-med student and member of a prominent Cleveland family. Interrogated by Ness in autumn 1938, "Sundheim" escaped prosecution by committing himself to a mental hospital where he died around 1940 or '41. In the interim, he tormented Ness with a barrage of obscene, menacing notes, that terminated with his death.

The tale deserves consideration, inasmuch as Ness preserved the "greeting cards" - all carefully anonymous - and they are viewable in Cleveland archives. But, do taunting notes provide a viable solution in the torso murders? Why did experts on the case insist the Butcher claimed three victims in December 1939, when "Sundheim" had been out of circulation for a year or more? If Ness was certain of the killer's whereabouts, why did he allow "suspect" Frank Dolezal to be abused (and possibly murdered) by sheriff's officers in 1939? If the case was solved in 1938, why did Detective Merylo pursue the Butcher into retirement, blaming his elusive quarry for 50-odd murders by 1947? Tantalizing as it is, the Fraley story falls apart on close examination, failing every test of common sense.

There is a grisly post script to the Butcher's story. On July 23, 1950, a man's headless body, emasculated and dismembered, was found in a Cleveland lumber yard, a few miles from Kingsbury Run. The missing head turned up four days later, and the victim was identified as Robert Robertson. Coroner Samuel Gerber, responsible for handling most of the Butcher's "official" victims, reported that "The work resembles exactly that of the torso murderer."

In retrospect, it is clear that the headhunter murdered at least 16 victims between 1934 and 1939. He may have slaughtered the 1950 victim, as well, and speculation links the Butcher with a series of decapitation murders around New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1925 and 1939. No firm connections were established in that case, and the number of New Castle victims has been widely inflated by sensational journalists, but the crimes were committed in close proximity to rail lines serving Cleveland and Youngstown. None of the New Gristle victims were ever identified, and the identity of their killer - like the whereabouts of the Butcher's eight trophy heads - remains a mystery. (See also: New Castle, Penn. - Unsolved Murders)