Cleveland's Torso Murders, Eliot Ness' Failure

Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run Terrorized Cleveland in the 1930s

Sep 8, 2009 Linda Ashar

Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame was Safety Director of Cleveland, Ohio, from 1935 to 1942. During his tenure he was plagued with the grisly, unsolved Torso Murders.

The first known victims of Cleveland, Ohio's infamous Torso Murders were two headless naked men discovered by boys in the city's Kingsbury Run area, a ravine of discarded garbage and people in Cleveland's underbelly of the Depression. The bodies were leathery, dead 7 to 10 days. The heads were found buried nearby.

Thus started the series of crimes known as the Torso Murders, committed by an unknown person highly skilled with a knife, probably with physician's training, who was christened by the media as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.

Appointment of Eliot Ness

In December 1935 Cleveland's new mayor, Harold Burton, appointed the famous Untouchable, Eliot Ness, as Cleveland's Safety Director. Bringing in the capable Ness was part of the mayor's platform to clean up Cleveland's notorious police corruption. Ness also inherited the Torso Murders, which became his nemesis.

Ness was never to conclusively solve the Torso Murders, so called because bodies were always found in pieces. In all there were at least 12 victims attributed to the Torso killer during 1935-37. Ness also believed another unsolved murder, a decapitation death in 1929, was the work of the same killer. Most of the victims were people who were down and out.

Headless corpses found near train stops in Pennsylvania and New York were also suspected to be the work of the same killer. As the body count rose, so did the blood pressure of the city.

Burning Down Shantytown

Many people lived in paper and scrap shacks in the Kingsbury Run area and nearby shantytowns along the Cuyahoga River in the "flats" below Cleveland's Public Square. A transient in this area claimed to have seen the "Butcher" wielding a knife, escaping him by outrunning him.

These were the dubious homes of the victims of the Depression. In an effort to thwart the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run and in hopes of smoking him out, Ness led a raid in these areas, rounding up the people squatting there and then burning down the entire area to disperse the Butcher's prey. As a result the displaced people had nowhere to go, such homes as they had gone.

This move led to huge public criticism of Ness, and it is said he regretted it ever after. The scourge did not lead to an arrest or discovery of any meaningful clues. His failure to catch the Mad Butcher was now compounded with a high profile political fiasco.

Despite this act of bad judgment, Eliot Ness was no fool. He was successful in other endeavors as Cleveland's Safety Director, doing what the mayor had set him out to accomplish: root out corruption, especially in the police department. But the Torso Murders dogged him.

Unsolved Murders

Eventually some circumstantial evidence and a large measure of suspicion convinced Eliot Ness that the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was Dr. Frank Sweeney, an alcoholic surgeon who was politically connected. Sweeney was an intimidating man and Ness could not break him into confessing.

Without sufficient evidence there could be no arrest of the Torso killer. As for Sweeney, he admitted himself to a sanitarium. Whether the torso killings stopped for this reason, or because the killer died or left town was never conclusively proven. Whatever the reason, the killings mercifully stopped in Cleveland in 1938.

As for Eliot Ness, his career declined, without question another sort of victim of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. He unsuccessfuly ran for mayor of Cleveland in 1947.

Sources and Further Information:

Mansfield News Journal, Sept. 17, 1936

Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer, by Steven Nickel

In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders, by James Jessen Badal

The copyright of the article Cleveland's Torso Murders, Eliot Ness' Failure in Law, Crime & Justice is owned by Linda Ashar. Permission to republish Cleveland's Torso Murders, Eliot Ness' Failure in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Eliot Ness, Cleveland Safety Director

Early Cleveland flats Shantytown Torso Area

Downtown Cleveland, Ohio, Early 1900s