Popular Crime

by Bill James

  In any case, they didn’t find him. Cuyahoga County authorities had for three years refused to get involved in the case, arguing that since the murders were committed in Cleveland, it was Cleveland’s problem. As the crimes continued, pressure mounted on the county sheriff, and the sheriff retained a private investigator to work on the case.

  On July 5, 1939, the private eye and an associate arrested a bricklayer named Frank Dolezal on suspicion of being the Butcher. Hanging around the Roaring Third, the investigator had identified a bar that was patronized by the only two victims who had been positively identified, as well as a third missing person, tentatively identified as a victim. Dolezal was also a patron of that bar. He was a powerfully built man, as the killer surely must have been, and was tied to the crimes by a web of circumstance. He had been seen in the company of one of the known victims shortly before she disappeared. He had once worked in a slaughterhouse, as police suspected the killer might have done. He lived in the Third District, within half a block of where one of the bodies had been dumped. He had had long periods of unemployment, which coincided to a degree with the periods of the murders. He carried knives, and police had reports that he often threatened to use them. An acquaintance claimed that he had once thrown a knife at a woman.

  On July 7, 1939, Dolezal confessed to the murder of Flo Polillo, one of the known victims.

  Immediately thereafter, however, the case against him began to fall apart. Cleveland police, embarrassed at being beaten in the investigation by a part-time johnny-come-lately private detective, set out to discredit the arrest. Blood found in Dolezal’s apartment was discovered not to be blood at all. Details of the confession were found to be in error, while others were discovered to have been coached. His first confession, it was learned, had come after 50 hours of constant questioning and sleep deprivation. Though he repeated his confession numerous times, always adding details, his stories were strange to the point of being unbelievable, he refused to confess to any of the other murders, and he repeatedly failed the crucial test: adding original material which could be verified by further investigation. Like, what did you do with that woman’s head?

  On July 12, Dolezal retracted his confession. On August 24 he committed suicide, hanging himself in his jail cell. An autopsy revealed that he had recently suffered six broken ribs, lending credence to his lawyer’s claim that the confessions had been beaten out of him.

  The case against Dolezal had disintegrated, but there were no more murders—none after he died, none for a year before then. As Nickel wrote, “the mere fact that no more bodies turned up in Cleveland prompted some to suggest that Dolezal really had been the killer … But most people knew better. As Coroner Samuel Gerber later declared, ‘The arrest of Frank Dolezal didn’t stop the murders; they had already stopped.’ ”

  While the murders had stopped in Cleveland, there were numerous similar murders, or somewhat similar murders, committed in the region over the next few years.

  Now, to go back in time and fill in the story. In 1923 and 1924, six bodies were found in a swamp near New Castle, Pennsylvania. Well, some bodies were found, and some heads that didn’t all match up. Altogether, there must have been six people there before somebody started separating the heads from the bodies.

  On July 1, 1936, another headless corpse—a new one—was found in an abandoned boxcar near the swamp in New Castle. By this time the search for the Butcher was in full swing, and New Castle is just across the line from Ohio, within a hundred miles of Cleveland. Eliot Ness sent a team of detectives to New Castle, where they met with the local sheriff. The sheriff took Ness’s men out to the murder swamp and, according to Nickel, “shared his theory that the remains were those of victims of gang murders and that the swamp was used as a dumping ground by mobsters. [The Cleveland police] could not argue … it was infinitely more plausible than believing that the twelve-year-old killings had been the work of the same maniac now terrorizing Cleveland.”

  For much of the twentieth century, “gang-related murder” was a kind of policeman’s code, which could be roughly translated as “I don’t have a chance in hell of solving this crime, and I’m not going to worry about it.” Taken literally, the theory that these were gang-related murders is stupid. Organized mobsters do not decapitate their victims, put the bodies in the trunks of their Oldsmobiles and transfer them out to some small city in the middle of nowhere. It’s just not how it’s done.

  On the other hand, the theory that this was the work of the same maniac, as Nickel argues later in the book, has a great deal going for it. The pattern killings have much in common, including

  • The decapitation of the bodies, a relatively rare feature among serial murderers, and extremely rare in garden-variety crimes.

  • The dumping of the bodies, nude, in the open.

  • The use of railroad right-of-way or land beside railroad right-of-way to dump bodies.

  • The discovery of old newspapers underneath the bodies.

  • The fact that both murderers, if indeed they were separate, were astonishingly successful at abducting victims who would never be missed and could never be identified.

  In opposition to the theory that the killings were all the work of the same man appears to be only the separation in time and space. The distance between New Castle and Cleveland is utterly insignificant, since the killer could obviously transport easily between the two. The dumpsites are united by a single rail line. The separation in time is more significant, between 1923 and 1934, but hardly a prohibitive barrier, particularly since another New Castle murder was committed in 1936. Many serial murderers are known to have committed murders separated by more than fifteen years, and many have had inactive periods because of incarceration and/or confinement in a mental hospital.

  And, as the murders may not have started in Cleveland, they may not have ended there, either. On June 30, 1939 (one week before Dolezal’s confession), the bones of a dismembered woman were found in a dump near Youngstown, Ohio, which is halfway between New Castle and Cleveland, on the same rail line. On October 13, 1939, a nude, headless man was found resting on an old newspaper, in the weeds, near the train tracks in New Castle.

  On May 3, 1940, three decapitated bodies were found in an abandoned train in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. From various evidence, it was determined that the victims had been murdered while the cars were in a yard in Youngstown in December, 1939.

  The remains of a headless woman, dead about a year, were found in the New Castle swamp in 1941.

  A headless man was found near a train track in Pittsburgh in 1941.

  Do the murders go on? The pattern breaks up, leaving Cleveland, leaving the area, winding into a rat’s nest of could-bes and look-alikes. A headless man was found near the railroad tracks in Cleveland on July 22, 1950. Old newspapers were found with the body.

  I have as much respect for the tradition of the literary detective as you have (none whatsoever), but this is a situation that cries out for the treatment. While the identity of the Butcher of Kingsbury Run is unknown, there are a few things that may be safely inferred about him:

  • He was a man of impressive physical strength.

  • He had a house.

  • He had a car, or had access to a car.

  • He lived in the area.

  The police investigating the case thought that the Butcher unquestionably had an automobile, and this became a key to their investigation. I wonder if a more accurate summation might not be that the evidence shows that the murderer had limited access to an automobile. Some of the bodies were dumped in places that almost certainly argue for the use of an automobile, it is true—but many of the dumpsites suggest nothing of the sort. Several victims were dumped within blocks of where they were last seen. There is no consistent description of an automobile, consistent from one case to another. Various vehicles are described in places possibly associating them with various bodies. The murderer can be more conclusively tied to trains than he can to automobiles.
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  In the case of Andrei Chikatilo, in Russia, the police concluded, based on similar evidence, that the murderer had to have an automobile. They then wasted a vast amount of time and effort tracking down automobiles, when in fact Chikatilo did not drive—which, since they were at one point calling him the “Railway Station Killer,” they might actually have guessed. Something similar may have happened here.

  I would bet that from 1934 to 1938 the Butcher lived within one mile of the intersection of Broadway and Carnegie, in eastern Cleveland. (If you plot the bodies in a serial murder case on a map and draw a circle around them, the murderer normally lives somewhere near the center of the circle. Also, since several victims were found within a few blocks of the place from which they disappeared, it seems very unlikely that the murderer would have taken the victims out of the area, then put their corpses in his car and driven them back to where he picked them up.)

  This much was relatively evident to the men who investigated the crime, but by standing on the shoulders of Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and the others who developed criminal profiling, we can see a little more. For one thing, it seems extremely apparent, from the work of Ressler, that the individual in question had killed before the first definitely “known” victims, the two headless corpses found in Kingsbury Run on September 23, 1934. This is apparent for several reasons. It is enormously unlikely that an inexperienced offender would begin by killing two people almost simultaneously, then ceremonially placing their bodies on a hillside. This is the act of an experienced murderer, in control of his actions. The victims found in Kingsbury Run

  a) had been decapitated by a single blow from a long, heavy knife, and

  b) had been mutilated by an individual showing knowledge of human anatomy.

  Either of these factors would be uncommon in an inexperienced criminal.

  The placement of the bodies reveals what I think Ressler would describe as “extremely advanced staging” of the crime scene. The murderer washed the bodies, drained the blood from them, carried them to the scene, placed them down carefully, spread out on the ground as if sunning themselves, wrapped their heads in their clothes and left the package somewhere in the area, in a paper bag. Ressler argues that the “staging” of the crime scene reflects the experience of the criminal. A first-time murderer dumps the body and runs. An older, more experienced criminal takes his time, savoring his experience and arranging the scene the way he wants it to be found. This was very advanced staging, as if the killer had committed numerous previous crimes.

  We might also infer from this, from the unusual extent to which the murderer was in control of himself and in control of the situation, that he was not too young. Most serial murderers begin killing in their mid-twenties; this guy may have been in his mid- to late thirties.

  This brings us back to the New Castle murders, and to the question of whether the Kingsbury Run crimes were a distinct crime spree, or the work of the same man. Leaving aside the silly idea that the New Castle murders were mob-related, there really are only two possibilities:

  1) That the crimes were all related, or

  2) That there were two separate serial murderers, using similar methods in an overlapping time frame.

  The second thesis should not be hastily rejected, as there have been numerous times when police confused the crimes committed by different serial murderers, to the detriment of a solution. Nonetheless, the first thesis, that the crimes are all related, is

  a) much more tenable on its surface, and

  b) even more so if we accept the proposition that the Cleveland police were dealing, from the beginning, with an experienced murderer.

  Let us assume, just to see where that takes us, that the crimes were all committed by the same individual. If so, the individual would likely have been born between 1895 and 1900. (Most serial murderers begin killing in their mid-twenties. This man began killing in 1922 or 1923. If he was born before 1895, he would have been almost 50 by the end of the crimes to which he is tied, which is less likely.)

  One of the most striking things about the Butcher, which so far as I know no one has ever commented on, is that he never dumped a body in a rural area. Most serial murderers dump their bodies in isolated areas, for obvious reasons, and isolated areas often mean rural areas. The Butcher never used rural areas; he always dumped his bodies in brushy, isolated areas in or near cities, or towns of some size. He is never known to have killed anyone in a rural area, or a truly small town.

  From this, we can infer two things. First, the Butcher almost unquestionably grew up in a city or a town of some size. Serial murderers dump their bodies in places where they feel comfortable. The Butcher felt uncomfortable out in the country, as city people often do. He felt exposed, vulnerable.

  This is significant, because 80% of our population lived on farms or in small towns in 1900–1920. The Butcher didn’t. This takes the focus away from a large portion of the persons we might otherwise be inclined to look at.

  Second, this supports the argument that the Butcher may not have been a driver. He may have used a vehicle on occasion, but probably not routinely. He wasn’t accustomed to getting behind the wheel and hitting the road. He didn’t know where the isolated rural areas were. He wasn’t comfortable putting a body in the trunk, and heading for the hills.

  The Butcher was most likely raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania, although he may have been born in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Cleveland. (New Castle was growing fairly rapidly in that era. Most serial murderers have unstable childhoods that involve moving from place to place. The Butcher may have moved to the town early in his life. Had the murderer not had strong ties to the New Castle area, he would not have remained there through a series of killings in 1922 and 1923, but would probably have moved on after the first crime. Even more markedly, had he not had strong ties to the New Castle area, he would not have returned to New Castle to commit additional murders later on, during his most active period.)

  After committing several murders in New Castle in 1922–23, the individual was probably arrested for some unrelated crime, a serious crime such as burglary, arson, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, rape, murder, or attempted murder. He was given a substantial prison sentence, and was in prison until late 1933 or early 1934.

  (He would not have become inactive from 1923 to 1934 unless he was confined. While it is certainly possible that he was confined to a mental hospital, I regard this as less likely. Highly Organized Murderers are not obviously insane. They’re not people who rant, rave, bite off their tongues and burst out laughing at funerals. They recognize that their private fantasy lives are forbidden, and conceal them effectively.

  On the other hand, virtually 100% of serial murderers are thieves. They always steal things, anything. Often they are also arsonists. Since the Butcher was a large, powerful man who may have had a deep-seated hatred of his father, he might at any time have gotten drunk and beaten the hell out of somebody. It must have been a serious crime, because he wouldn’t have been locked up for ten years for running a red light, but there is a large range of crimes that such an individual might have committed in New Castle in 1923 or 1924, without being associated with the bodies in the swamp.)

  Upon being released from prison in late 1933 or early 1934, the individual moved to Cleveland, and resumed his killing within a period of months. (Subsequent experience with serial murderers who are incarcerated in the middle of their run, such as Arthur Shawcross, Charles Hatcher, Ted Bundy, Larry Eyler, Kenneth McDuff and Robert Hansen, shows that they virtually always resume killing within months of their release, and in many cases within hours of their release. The Butcher probably was obsessed with murderous fantasies while he was in prison, and probably left Pennsylvania as soon as he got out because he knew that if he returned to New Castle and resumed killing there, he would, as an ex-con, immediately be associated with the crimes.)

  By his own peculiar lights, the Butcher was getting his life back together. He moved to Cleveland, got a
job, got a house, perhaps got a car, and got back to killing people. During this four-year period he killed with impunity, gradually beginning to feel that he was invincible, that the police would never catch him. Ressler describes this phenomenon in Whoever Fights Monsters, that organized serial murderers, if uncaught, become increasingly bold, and may begin to dump their bodies in more and more incriminating places, almost as if to taunt the police. The Butcher’s last two victims in 1938 were dumped together by the side of the lake, a ten-minute walk from Public Square in downtown Cleveland, almost within view (perhaps literally within view) of the city and police office building where Eliot Ness had his headquarters.

  After this crime, however, came the Raids, the raids for which Eliot Ness was so harshly criticized. Ness and his men made a house-to-house search of the Third District, where the Butcher almost certainly resided. They must have come to his house, seen something suspicious, and perhaps taken him to the police station for questioning, as they took in dozens of others. This shattered the Butcher’s conviction that he was invulnerable, and prompted him to pick up quickly and run, probably within hours after being questioned by the police.

  (This is another reason why I believe that the Butcher must have been in a prison, rather than a mental hospital, from 1924 to 1934. The police must have interviewed the Butcher in August or September, 1938, but without discovering his secret. If the Butcher had had the telltale signs of an unstable personality—the nervous eyes, the excessive hand gestures, the high, cracking voice—the police would have recognized these, and might have focused upon him. Instead, the Butcher came away from the interview un-scored upon. He realized how close he was to being caught—but the police did not realize how close they had come to catching him.

  An almost equally good possibility is that the Butcher may actually have been arrested at this time, and may have served a short prison sentence in late 1938 and early 1939.)