Sunday, January 26, was one more bitterly cold day in the run of miserable weather the city was experiencing
that winter. Butcher Charles Paige, owner of the White Front Meat Market on Central Avenue, called the police
to report a murder. Lieutenant Harvey Weitzel responded to the call at 11:25 A.M. and wrote: "a colored
woman name unknown …informed Charles Paige there was a body of a murdered person laying against a
building on East 21st Place. Paige stated that he investigated and found severed parts of a human body…"

Along with Sergeant Hogan, Detectives Shibley and Wachsman, Weitzel found at the northeast corner of the
Hart’s Manufacturing Company on East 20th Street portions of a human body. Parts of the body were in a half-
bushel basket and parts were wrapped in burlap sacks, along with a suit of two piece white cotton
underwear wrapped in newspapers. Shortly afterwards, Lieutenant David L. Cowles, superintendent of the
ballistic bureau of the police department, was on the scene examining the basket and bags in which the
dismembered body was found.

Joseph Sweeney, Acting Chief of Detectives, said that the body had been placed behind the Hart’s plant
around 2:30 A.M. James Marco, whose home adjoins the plant told police his dog was howling and barking at
that time near the place where the basket and bags were found. The actual discovery came about later that
morning from the insistent barking of a dog named Lady who lives close to the Hart plant.

The detectives presented the coroner with the lower half of a woman’s torso, both of her thighs and her right
upper extremity. Fingerprints from the right hand were given to the police department Bertillon division.

Coroner Pearse determined that the woman had been dead anywhere from 2 to 4 days. Dismemberment was
done with a sharp instrument like a knife. Again, like in the deaths of Andrassy and his unknown companion,
the edges of the skin were sharply and cleanly cut. Whoever did this was very expert at cutting apart flesh.
The Bertillon department came back with the identity of the murdered woman. Florence Saudy Polillo, age 42.
She was a moderately stout woman with dyed reddish hair and a fair complexion. Her pleasant features
reflected her Irish-American heritage.

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Detectives Orley May and his partner Emil Musil did much of the investigation into Flo Polillo’s life. She had
been arrested a couple of times in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., for prostitution which was why the police
had her fingerprints on file.

As May and Musil made their rounds from her landlady to friends and acquaintances, a sad sordid story
emerged. Flo was a friendly woman, liked by most people who knew her. Her landlady liked her very much,
remarking that Flo had been very kind to her three daughters. Flo had a very extensive doll collection in her
modest room and let her landlady’s girls play with the dolls frequently.

But Flo had a serious drinking problem and she became aggressive and combative when she had too much to
drink. For whatever reason, she drifted into relationships that were abusive, ending up on crutches and with
swollen, blackened eyes from the beatings she took at the hands of her lovers.

It hadn’t always been that way. In fact, she had a decent husband once. He drove from Buffalo, N.Y., to
Cleveland to give a statement to police. Andrew Polillo was a forty-year-old respectable man employed as a
mail handler for the U.S. Postal System. They were married in the early 1920’s and stayed together for six
years. Then Flo started to drink heavily and left Andrew to "get herself straightened out." Instead she drifted
from man to man, resorting to temporary waitressing jobs and prostitution to earn a living.
In Cleveland, her associates were at the very bottom of society -- whorehouse madams, prostitutes,
bootleggers, pimps, drug addicts and tavern keepers. All of them knew her, most of them liked her, but none
of them had any idea what happened to her the weekend she died.

The meager forensic evidence found with her body was just as silent as her friends were on the
circumstances of her death. The police traced the burlap bags in which her body was found, but nothing of
value came from that avenue of investigation.

On February 7, 1936, the rest of Flo’s body, with the exception of her head, was found behind a vacant house,
scattered haphazardly against a fence. The cold spell had kept the body parts remarkably well preserved. It
was from this upper torso and thorax that Dr. Pearse announced his chilling discovery. Flo Polillo was
decapitated. The muscles in her neck were retracted which meant that the severing of her head was the
cause of death.

Like the investigations of the Lady of the Lake, Edward Andrassy and his unidentified companion, the flurry of
police activity surrounding Flo Polillo’s murder soon died down as the clues and leads dried up. Certainly a
few officials speculated that three, and a possible fourth, decapitation deaths was very unusual over an 18-
month period, but nobody officially tied these murders together as the work of one killer.

Favorable press, an overhaul of the police department, and the systematic raids on organized crime were
right in line with Mayor Harold Burton's program to build a positive image for the city. All of these newsworthy
events were dovetailing nicely as city was preparing for the Republican National Convention, which was to
start the first week of June, 1936.

During the week before the Republican National Convention, Eliot Ness worked almost continuously as he
personally supervised every tiny detail of the security plan for the candidates. Checking and rechecking each
item in the plan, he was acutely aware that his reputation was on the line if there were any assassination
attempts or violent demonstrations in the coming week.

By Friday, June 5, the delegates were starting to pour into the city to begin a weekend of caucusing and
partying before the convention officially began on Monday. Those political visitors, most of whom had never
seen Cleveland, would take back with them impressions of a dazzling, modern downtown with many new
buildings, magnificently landscaped with trees and fountains. In the years just prior to the Depression,
Cleveland had undertaken an enormous number of public construction projects in the downtown area. The
focal point of this massive urban development program was a large mall with its new city hall and other
splendid examples of classical-style architecture. The most memorable of them all was the Terminal Tower,
a distinguished-looking forerunner of the modern skyscraper, and one of the tallest buildings in the world at
that time. While the front of this splendid tower opened onto Public Square, whose hotels, restaurants, and
department stores were a central attraction for the convention delegates, just behind the tower, the
landscape suddenly dropped into a world far different that most conventioneers never saw.

Just a few blocks away from the elegant and sophisticated Public Square, the vast industrial belly of
Cleveland stretched out for many miles around its lifeblood, the Cuyahoga River. This stinking, oily river was
used to feed iron ore and other raw materials to the blast furnaces and mills, while a huge network of railroad
tracks, fanning out like capillaries in every direction, took the finished metal products to every part of the
country.

This was the ugliest part of the city; filthy from the black soot of the coal fires, overpowering in its sulfurous
stench, and strewn with trash and industrial waste. Almost symbolically here, too, was the dumping place for
the city's human refuse, the thousands of men who once lived in rural Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana, made
homeless by the Depression. This inexhaustible supply of unwanted labor, "hobos" as they were called, rode
the freight trains into Cleveland, looking for nonexistent jobs in the mills. In back of the splendid Terminal
Tower, the hobos camped in squalid, corrugated metal shacks, creating a city of their own.
It was there at the Cuyahoga River where the long, deep gully called Kingsbury Run began and cut through the
city's East Side. Kingsbury Run had been a beauty spot long ago when the only the stone quarries were there
and the area was dotted with lovely, sylvan lakes. But many years later on the bed of this ancient ravine, cut
into the earth by some long-dead stream, were the tracks of the Erie and Nickel Plate railroads. At the far end
of the ravine, some fifty blocks east of Public Square, sat the office of the Nickel Plate railroad police who
patrolled the track area, trying to keep the hobos off the trains.

That Friday morning before the convention began, two young boys had set off to go fishing and took a shortcut
through Kingsbury Run. They saw a pair of pants rolled up under a bush and when they poked at the bundle
with their fishing pole, a man's head rolled out. Terrified, they ran back to the older boy's house and waited all
day until his mother came home and called the police.

Later that afternoon, the police found the head and began a search for the man's body. The next morning they
found the naked, headless corpse, almost directly in front of the Nickel Plate police office, hidden in some
sumac bushes. Whoever had put it there seemed to be playing a grim joke on the railroad police, whose job it
was to keep the area secure.

The victim had been a tall, slender man with a sensitive, handsome face, estimated to be in his mid-twenties.
There were six distinctive tattoos on his body, which suggested he might have been a sailor: a cupid
superimposed on an anchor; a dove under the words "Helen-Paul;" a butterfly; the cartoon figure "Jiggs"; an
arrow through a heart and a standard of flags; and the initials "W.C.G." A pile of expensive bloodstained
clothing was found near the body. On the pair of undershorts was a laundry mark indicating the owner's
initials were J.D.

Even though he was found in the heart of the hobo country, the young man was probably not one of them.
Unlike the hobos, he was clean-shaven, well nourished, and very well dressed in almost new clothing. As the
police investigated, it seemed likely the man was killed somewhere else and brought to Kingsbury Run. For
one thing, there was no evidence of blood soaked into the ground near the places where the head and body
were laying. The body had been drained of blood and washed clean, an impossible task in that area of
Kingsbury Run.

Coroner Pearse became distinctly uncomfortable when he examined the victim. Apparently, the man had
been killed by act of decapitation itself, just like the prostitute murdered in January of 1936, two men found in
Kingsbury Run the year before, and perhaps even that woman who washed up on the lakeshore back in 1934.
Death by decapitation was a most difficult thing to do and very, very rare in the history of crime. Pearse saw a
terrifying pattern emerging, even though the police wanted to ignore it.

By Sunday, the day before the convention was to start, stories of a psychopathic maniac on the loose were in
every newspaper. Ness quietly met with Sergeant James Hogan, his newly appointed head of the Homicide
Division, and David Cowles, the head of the crime lab. Ness wanted Hogan, the tall, white-haired veteran police
detective, to give him the background of these decapitation murders that were filling the newspapers. Ness
had already spoken to the coroner who mentioned four, possibly even five, decapitation murders going back
as far as 1934.

Ness wanted to know if Hogan thought all the cases, including the Lady of the Lake and Flo Polillo, were
connected. The veteran policeman was reluctant to voice too strong an opinion, in case Ness had an entirely
different one.

The deaths of the three men found in Kingsbury Run seemed different, Hogan said. They had all been laid out
where they were sure to be discovered in a day or two. There was a different pattern to the mutilations, too.
Except for the emasculation of Andrassy and his companion, the bodies were whole from the neck down. But
the two women, Hogan pointed out, Florence Polillo and the Lady of the Lake had been dismembered as well
as decapitated and their bodies were not found in Kingsbury Run.

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Then there was the issue of motive. Police science in the 1930's dictated that to solve a murder you tracked
down everybody who had a motive for the killing until you had the person with the means and opportunity. The
motives proposed for the Kingsbury Run double murder, whether it was jealousy, revenge or sexual deviation
did not fit well if the victims were female.

Ness seemed lost in thought for several minutes, remembering the opinion that David Cowles had shared
before Hogan had arrived. Cowles was convinced it was a single killer, but hadn't been able to get Hogan to
agree. Hogan sat quietly, waiting for his boss to speak. "Jim, you've got a real problem on your hands," Ness
concluded. "The same guy did them all. Too much similarity to be coincidental. Death by decapitation. The
expert hand with a knife. Bodies all cleaned up and neat. I can't tell you why he kills women one way and men
another, but it's the same man, I guarantee you."
Next Page
Cleveland Torso Murders, Ohio's
Jack The
Ripper
Twelve Butchered, Body Parts strewn over
Cleveland