Speaker 1: Hey guys, the Thinking Sideways the podcast. I'm Devin, I
Speaker 1: guess as always, yes, joined by hand, Steve, I guess
Speaker 1: or whatever. My English name of case you're confused is chow. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: that just like let's just clear things up right there. Today. Um,
Speaker 1: we're continuing on our series of Halloween mysteries, and I
Speaker 1: guess I should add the caveat that. Um, if you
Speaker 1: don't already know about this mystery, unsolved mystery, it's pretty gruesome.
Speaker 1: So as we have said before, squeamish or if you
Speaker 1: have young children or really like children kind of at all, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe this is not an episode for you. And also
Speaker 1: before we too far, I guess, um, this is a
Speaker 1: listeners suggestion from Hunter. Thank you. We're gonna We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, also known
Speaker 1: as the Torso Murders or the Cleveland Cleveland. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of different names. Yeah, this this was really difficult
Speaker 1: to do research on because it does go by different
Speaker 1: a half dozen names, which is annoying. Yes, I agreed,
Speaker 1: but it does help with a copy paste issue that
Speaker 1: we always complain about on the internet. Yeah, it's true, alright,
Speaker 1: yous ready, Yeah, we're so we're going to Cleveland nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: We have to Yeah, in the nineteen thirties, it might
Speaker 1: be fun. Roaring thirties. Well, by all accounts, it's a
Speaker 1: city on the rise despite the effects of the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: Um many many people are doing pretty okay. And we're
Speaker 1: going to Kingsbury Run. So prehistoric riverbed running from the
Speaker 1: flats which is the backs of the to about East
Speaker 1: nineties Street. I know that that doesn't make sense to
Speaker 1: most people, but I guess that people in Cleveland it
Speaker 1: probably won't make sense. And it's not so much a
Speaker 1: river as it is just like a kind Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that people are probably not going to get to
Speaker 1: get more go out and google it. It's it's just
Speaker 1: a depression in the earth that water flows through. But
Speaker 1: it's not a river bed that are proved very attractive
Speaker 1: to poor people back in during the Depression. Well, the
Speaker 1: train and um any kind of rapid transit tracks still
Speaker 1: run through it. But the trains did run through it,
Speaker 1: and train tracks especially in the like right around the
Speaker 1: Great Depression time. That's that's really popular with vagabonds and
Speaker 1: sort of yeah, well just you know, people without a
Speaker 1: home or run down on their luck because you can
Speaker 1: just hop on a box car and get someplace else.
Speaker 1: So that's it's a pretty attractive and as as we
Speaker 1: were just kind of saying, I guess it's the people
Speaker 1: who are not in that hole like many people doing
Speaker 1: well again group, Yeah, they lived in really really awful conditions,
Speaker 1: you know, like filth and trash and kind of shantytowns exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And most of the people that lived there were transience
Speaker 1: and they road box cars mostly to escape Cleveland winters
Speaker 1: because Cleveland is not super fun in the winter, which
Speaker 1: is a very cold place in the winter. Yes, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to be homeless or a transient and
Speaker 1: be there. I I would. I would turn into a
Speaker 1: snowbird and head south for the winter. You know me too. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the area just east of the run is known
Speaker 1: well was known as the Roaring Third. It was mostly bars, brothels,
Speaker 1: flop houses, and gambling dens, which more fun back in
Speaker 1: those days. Yeah. Well, I think that that's kind of
Speaker 1: the like transient area, right, Like you've got like people
Speaker 1: who are really really out on their luck, hobo has
Speaker 1: lost everything, and then you've got the area where people
Speaker 1: become really really kind of gray area. Yeah, it's that
Speaker 1: like filter zone that people go through. So September of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four is kind of when this whole mystery starts.
Speaker 1: A young man finds the lower half of a woman's
Speaker 1: torso thighs still attached but amputated at the knee, washed
Speaker 1: up on the shores of ach Leary. That spoiler day,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it like erie? Yeah? Sorry? Uh? And as as mentioned,
Speaker 1: it's just going to get morgrosome from here. So if
Speaker 1: that freaked you out, just stopped. Now. Yeah October it
Speaker 1: is October, so are doing the creepy stuff that County corner. A. J.
Speaker 1: Pierce noted that there was some kind of chemical preservative
Speaker 1: on the skin that had made it turn red, tough
Speaker 1: and leathery, and we'll kind of talk about that a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah, sure, she wasn't just really in the
Speaker 1: like sun tanning. It's possible, but in the thirties I
Speaker 1: think it was more like don't han They were back
Speaker 1: on the non kick. There was a search and they
Speaker 1: found just a couple other body parts. It was identified
Speaker 1: as a female in her mid thirties. The head to
Speaker 1: this body was never found. The woman was never identified.
Speaker 1: She is referred to as the Lady of the Lake,
Speaker 1: and she is labeled as victim number zero. So the
Speaker 1: one thing that disturbs me through and this this one,
Speaker 1: there's one thing that disturbs me through all of these
Speaker 1: and I know we're going to get into it, but
Speaker 1: it's the head factor. The missing heads are the cree
Speaker 1: epeist thing in the world. There's a is it. Joe
Speaker 1: Pesci was in a movie that he had a head
Speaker 1: in a bowling ball bag or something, and I kept
Speaker 1: thinking back to that movie because it's just it's that
Speaker 1: creepy factor. Anybody who knows that movie, they're gonna understand. Yeah, it's, uh,
Speaker 1: the whole idea of just dismembering people and chopping them up.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of just in general, Yeah, something I
Speaker 1: would care to do, but apparently it's different tastes, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, each their own or whatever exactly. You know,
Speaker 1: it might have been that the murder had a sense
Speaker 1: of humor though she had great legs. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: yeah that didn't work. Please continue on before I make
Speaker 1: a bigger So we're going to do that thing that
Speaker 1: we do sometimes where we basically just list the victims.
Speaker 1: There's twelve. We're gonna keep it short as possible, but
Speaker 1: there are things that differ between each of them, so
Speaker 1: please bear with us because and if not fast forward
Speaker 1: like fifteen minutes, then we'll probably still be talking about that.
Speaker 1: Just skip the next fifteen. Yeah. So John Doe number
Speaker 1: one was the second body to be discovered be discovered,
Speaker 1: but he was likely the first murder victim. He was
Speaker 1: discovered on September five, and he was never identified. He,
Speaker 1: like most of the male victims, was emasculated and decapitated.
Speaker 1: His head was recovered, however, and his skin also had
Speaker 1: the chemical agent that had caused it to become red
Speaker 1: and leathery. The next one is probably it was the
Speaker 1: first body found, but probably the second victim, and he
Speaker 1: was found also September five. He was found like nine
Speaker 1: meters thirty feet away from John Doe one. He had
Speaker 1: also been decapitated and emasculated, and he was identified, which
Speaker 1: is rare. Next up is Florence Eneviev. Wait, what was
Speaker 1: the name of the last Oh gosh, I'm sorry. It
Speaker 1: was Edward anders and Andersey. Yeah, he had a name there.
Speaker 1: He was identified, So I wanted to make sure we come. Yes. Uh,
Speaker 1: Florence Genevieve Plelio. She was found on January and February seven.
Speaker 1: Her body had been dismembered fully, uh, and her head
Speaker 1: was never found. It's not clear how they identified her.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. I mean, maybe she had tattoos
Speaker 1: or something. I think that they correlated some missing person reports.
Speaker 1: I don't think she had tattoos, but I think that
Speaker 1: it was a missing report, missing person report, if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly. And that's the hard part. There's so many
Speaker 1: of these people that I'm trying to, you know, rattle
Speaker 1: through the card catalog of my brain. But I think
Speaker 1: that is how they figured out who she was. So
Speaker 1: then John Doe three, this is that particularly disturbing one.
Speaker 1: He was the fifth body to be found. Fourth victim, Yeah,
Speaker 1: July of dismembered while alive. Yeah, lucky guy. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if this killer drug victims or not, if they
Speaker 1: were out. I don't think anybody knows anything about the victims.
Speaker 1: Actually I do know that. Um, are you going to
Speaker 1: talk about the medical examiners that are involved in this case?
Speaker 1: By chance? A little? Okay? Because I can't remember the name,
Speaker 1: and maybe you do of the second examiner that came
Speaker 1: in near the end of things, but he somehow seemed
Speaker 1: to have figured out that there was some kind of
Speaker 1: chemical in their system, or at least in one of
Speaker 1: the victims, but he couldn't figure out if was because
Speaker 1: that person was drugged or if they were a junkie
Speaker 1: for lack of a better term. And the fact that
Speaker 1: that person's arms were never found to tell if they
Speaker 1: had injection points repetitive made it hard. So we don't
Speaker 1: know if they were being drugged or not. Well, there's
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of kind of stuff about the
Speaker 1: corners and how thorough and John Doe three is the
Speaker 1: only victim that was found on the west side of Cleveland.
Speaker 1: I guess it's my only worth mentioning. John do number
Speaker 1: two was the fourth victim to be found, fifth victim
Speaker 1: to be murdered. I know, it's a little wonky. It's
Speaker 1: hard with these guys. Well this is well, the discovery
Speaker 1: dates are the hard part. Yeah, John Do number two,
Speaker 1: he was the fourth discovered body five victim. And this
Speaker 1: is this is because of the discovery dates. Yeah, it's hard.
Speaker 1: I'm I've ordered them by murder date. But I think
Speaker 1: It's also important to mention the discovery date because John
Speaker 1: Doe number two was discovered before John No. Number three.
Speaker 1: Though John Doe number three was murdered before John Doe
Speaker 1: number two. That makes sense. They're numbered by discovery date.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, we will make a real goldburger machine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter too much. But he was decapitated
Speaker 1: while alive as well, and his head was recovered. He
Speaker 1: also was had some interesting little bits about him. He
Speaker 1: was estimated to be in his mid twenties and had
Speaker 1: six unusual tattoos on his body. One included the names
Speaker 1: Helen and Paul, and the other had initials W C G.
Speaker 1: And his undershorts bore a laundry mark that had his
Speaker 1: initials right like in that time, I'm you would write
Speaker 1: your initials or your name in your laundry. So if
Speaker 1: you were all going in on one bulk laundry order, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And the initials were J D. And since they found
Speaker 1: his head, they did what's called the death mask, which
Speaker 1: I think we've talked about a little bit, but they
Speaker 1: cast the face and they recreate what it might have
Speaker 1: looked like alive, and they publicized photos of that apparently
Speaker 1: those things that those things are still laying around somewhere
Speaker 1: in Cleveland too. Yeah, So despite the fact that they
Speaker 1: circulated the death mask and on his unusual tattoos, this
Speaker 1: this John Doe was clearly since he's a John Doe
Speaker 1: was still never identified. Maybe j d stood for John Doe,
Speaker 1: maybe it stood for John Dillinger. There could have been
Speaker 1: a lot of things. But they call him the tattooed
Speaker 1: man because he's he's one of the few that has
Speaker 1: identifying marks. So but since he was wearing is he's
Speaker 1: wearing a short, it's presumably was not evasculated. Presumably. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't see anything here, but I haven't read anything
Speaker 1: that's as he was. Okay, So the next victim is
Speaker 1: Jane Doe, number six, who was the sixth murder victim.
Speaker 1: She was the eight discovery. But um, they didn't they couldn't.
Speaker 1: They didn't identify the bodies of the previous women for
Speaker 1: the most part until later. So there are a couple
Speaker 1: that were Jane Does. While the investigation was ongoing, there
Speaker 1: were likely other Jane Does happening. The Jane Does get
Speaker 1: a little out of order, actually they get a lot
Speaker 1: out of order. There are going to be some more
Speaker 1: Jane Does that are weirdly numbered and it's later. It's again,
Speaker 1: this is based on not date of it's the confusion
Speaker 1: is date of murder versus date of discovery. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the Jane Does are different than the John Does. And
Speaker 1: part of that has to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: a couple of the Jane Does were in fact identified.
Speaker 1: Why can't we just use the Dewey desk fol system, right,
Speaker 1: So this one actually is very interesting. She was the
Speaker 1: only black victim. She was decapitated, but she was also
Speaker 1: missing a rib and her head was discovered, and they
Speaker 1: thought perhaps that they had identified her as a woman
Speaker 1: named Rose Wallace. Dental work, you know, the like the
Speaker 1: tooth records, which is what dental work means, was a
Speaker 1: pretty close match. The police said that her son was
Speaker 1: very positive that that was his mom. He identified her,
Speaker 1: But did they actually show him the head. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think of what that would be like. Suspect seed head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I suspect they did a death mask. Well hopefully they didn't.
Speaker 1: But well, but she'd been dead for a long she'd
Speaker 1: been dead for here when they found her, and the
Speaker 1: dentist who carried out her dental work. Who could like
Speaker 1: look at it and be like, yes, that's my handiwork
Speaker 1: and she was my patient died years before, So the
Speaker 1: police never officially identified her as Rose Wallace despite so
Speaker 1: that's why there's no official stuff. And additionally, her body
Speaker 1: had been estimated to have been dead for a year,
Speaker 1: but Rose Wallace had only been reported missing for ten months.
Speaker 1: That's that's not a big so weird because I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, a year, come on, that's that's a rounding thing,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like ten months. So absolutely, yeah, especially
Speaker 1: in this climate with all this stuff happening, he totally
Speaker 1: could have been here. So it's likely that that Jane
Speaker 1: Doe was in fact Rose Wallace, but we don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Next is John Doe. Four, John Doe. He was the
Speaker 1: seventh murder victim, sixth body to be found. Uh and
Speaker 1: only half of his torso was found nothing below the hips,
Speaker 1: no head, no head. Yeah, so he did not have
Speaker 1: great legs. He maybe he had such great legs that
Speaker 1: the murder had to keep them. Maybe. Yeah, he almost
Speaker 1: a trophy. Yeah. I almost wonder if he took some
Speaker 1: of these parts back to wherever and reassembled him into
Speaker 1: a sort of fat kind of thing, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: some sort of weird no no, because that's that's a
Speaker 1: really disturbing Stein Trophy wall thing. Yeah, we're moving forward.
Speaker 1: It is Halloween. Jane Doe. Number five still grosses me
Speaker 1: out in it a little gross. Eighth victim, seventh body
Speaker 1: to be found, was found in the same spot that
Speaker 1: the Lady of the Lake was found. And this is
Speaker 1: like a year after the Lady of two years two
Speaker 1: years later, yeah about and her head was never found.
Speaker 1: John No. Number seven kind of typical body found no
Speaker 1: head so they can identify him. He was ninth murder
Speaker 1: victim and also the ninth found and they pulled him
Speaker 1: out at the river. Now, that's one of the things
Speaker 1: we haven't really talked about is and I think maybe
Speaker 1: it is a little important for people to know. Some
Speaker 1: of these bodies are found in fields, some are found
Speaker 1: on the banks of the river. Some because they're found
Speaker 1: on the banks of the river, they find some of
Speaker 1: the other body parts because they're dredging them out of
Speaker 1: the river. But it's really inconsistent as to where they're
Speaker 1: showing up, and it's kind of willy nilly. Yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: if you're but if you're the killer. You don't want
Speaker 1: to be like you don't want to be totally consistent,
Speaker 1: because that's a way to catch you. Well it works
Speaker 1: for Dexter. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, Okay. The
Speaker 1: next one is John Doe ten, who was found at
Speaker 1: the same time as Jane Doe nine. He was the
Speaker 1: tenth victim, twelfth found. Jane do nine was the eleventh victim,
Speaker 1: eleventh found. Uh. He was a decapitated body. His head
Speaker 1: was found in a can close by. She was a
Speaker 1: decapitated female body. Her head was also found. Now let's see,
Speaker 1: he was were I'm sorry, and they were found in
Speaker 1: the Lake Shore dump. I found it and and it's
Speaker 1: and they it's believed they weren't actually murdered at the
Speaker 1: same time, though, I think again this goes back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that where they're found is that like the murder or
Speaker 1: the whoever the perpetrator is dumps two bodies in one place,
Speaker 1: but there's months apart between the killings. Yeah. So John
Speaker 1: Doe ten was estimated to have died seven to nine
Speaker 1: months prior to his discovery, and Jane Doe nine was
Speaker 1: four to six months. So within the span of a
Speaker 1: couple of months, this person dumped two decapitated bodies at
Speaker 1: the same spot, at the same spot. But you know,
Speaker 1: since since it hadn't hit the news that John Doe
Speaker 1: X or John Doe ten had been found, then he
Speaker 1: probably realized that was a safe place to go back to. Well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the thing is, it's not as if the bodies
Speaker 1: were laid on top of each other. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it was a dump walked into a dump. I know
Speaker 1: that some of these it was it was his. Uh,
Speaker 1: I mean they go to extensive roll them into a
Speaker 1: rug and then roll that into a quilt and then
Speaker 1: throw them in the dump. I mean, it wasn't like
Speaker 1: these bodies were just cast out and blatantly naked human
Speaker 1: being parts and pieces laying around for a lot of times.
Speaker 1: Some of them are rolled up and hidden in things
Speaker 1: like the can that you talked about that the head
Speaker 1: was in. So these whoever is doing this and I
Speaker 1: want to say guy, just because the violent nature of it,
Speaker 1: But the person that's doing this is attempting to disguise
Speaker 1: what they're doing and hiding the remains, you know, whether
Speaker 1: it be a poor job of rolling it in the
Speaker 1: rug or tossing it in the river. They're still trying
Speaker 1: to to hide them. It's not as if they're just
Speaker 1: laying on the sidewalk. So, by the way, did did
Speaker 1: they like go through all the piles of trash out
Speaker 1: there and see if there were any more bodies? I
Speaker 1: have no idea, I would assume I m okay. The
Speaker 1: searches were very extensive after every single one of the findings.
Speaker 1: I imagine they poured a lot of resources into this one. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And the last victim, last canticonical victim is what they
Speaker 1: they're calling them. She's the twelfth victim, the tenth body
Speaker 1: to be discovered, Jane do eight. She's found in April
Speaker 1: of nineteen and on that day only the lower leg
Speaker 1: one lower leg, so like her thigh or her calf,
Speaker 1: was found. And a month later, a human thigh was
Speaker 1: discovered floating in the river west of a bridge in Cleveland.
Speaker 1: Police officers, of course decided, oh well, we better search uh,
Speaker 1: And they found a burlap sack containing a headless torso
Speaker 1: cut in half, another thigh, and a left foot, all
Speaker 1: belonging to the same body, and the head and the
Speaker 1: rest of the body were never found. But this is
Speaker 1: the victim that Steve was talking about a little bit
Speaker 1: with the um the second corner who's kind of involved
Speaker 1: in this case. He found drugs in her system, and
Speaker 1: again there's not a whole mess of information, but we
Speaker 1: don't Yeah, we don't really, we don't totally know. And
Speaker 1: this guy, uh, we will probably talk about a little
Speaker 1: bit later, was like, really there was a lot of
Speaker 1: crime happening in Cleveland at the time, and he was
Speaker 1: like getting pretty famous on like testifying and these like
Speaker 1: really people and so how much he just sensationalized it
Speaker 1: and said, oh yeah, no, yeah, there were drugs in
Speaker 1: her system. But how much of it was true? It's
Speaker 1: it's hard to tell. So they when you find a
Speaker 1: body that's been dismembered, there's obviously not going to be
Speaker 1: any blood left. It's all going to over run out.
Speaker 1: How do you test for drugs? And I think it
Speaker 1: depends on how when they were dismembered. This is so gross,
Speaker 1: it doesn't I mean I think that blood kind of
Speaker 1: thickens and settles and if it's not a fresh body. Um, well, no,
Speaker 1: the way I the way I understand it I would
Speaker 1: think about it is okay, Well, blood is the circulatory
Speaker 1: system that pushes the drug through your body. But your body,
Speaker 1: the tissues in locations, has to absorb that drug, so
Speaker 1: it's absorbed into the tissue of let's say your liver
Speaker 1: or your brain, or you know, whatever organ it might be.
Speaker 1: So if the blood is all gone, the remnants or
Speaker 1: the traces of that should still be in the organs
Speaker 1: because they've absorbed whatever chemical that is or whatever drug
Speaker 1: that is. Regard list of the presence of blood. Do
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. It's like, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: like ink and water on paper. I've got ink and
Speaker 1: I mixed water with it, and I drip it on paper.
Speaker 1: The ink of or the water evaporates, but I've still
Speaker 1: got remnants of ink on that piece of paper because
Speaker 1: the ink has been absorbed by the paper, though the
Speaker 1: water is no longer press it. But I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that it really seems likely to me that the
Speaker 1: killer probably drugged all of those victims because as a
Speaker 1: way too, because otherwise overpowering somebody and decapitating, especially a
Speaker 1: man while still alive, well, it's not necessarily an easy
Speaker 1: thing to do well, and not everything lass in the system.
Speaker 1: That's that's one of the things I questioned about this.
Speaker 1: The drugs in the system. These a lot of things
Speaker 1: don't let they break down regardless of being alive or hut,
Speaker 1: the copy just break down. And also, you know, I
Speaker 1: think it's worth mentioning that these these were unidentified people
Speaker 1: because how for horrible this sounds. By and large, people
Speaker 1: didn't care about them, you know. I mean, like, if
Speaker 1: you've got alone in the world, Yeah, if you've got
Speaker 1: a family who really cares about you, they're going to
Speaker 1: be really litigious and like really search out anybody that
Speaker 1: might be you, like family, like a prostitute or a
Speaker 1: homeless guy. Nobody cares. I mean, or maybe one person does,
Speaker 1: but they don't they don't know how to really explore
Speaker 1: that or for whatever reason, I don't think that we
Speaker 1: can really with any kind of certainty say these people
Speaker 1: weren't doing drugs like that just on their own, like
Speaker 1: voluntarily putting those drugs in their body. Well, and you know,
Speaker 1: the thirties were a weird time for drugs. Well, and
Speaker 1: what I was going to say is, I'm not casting
Speaker 1: any negative on any of the victims, but if you're
Speaker 1: in what equates to a skid row situation and you're
Speaker 1: turning to alcohol and hugs, to make the days go
Speaker 1: by and to make them easier, You're going to do
Speaker 1: whatever alleviate your pain. So it's quite likely that all
Speaker 1: of these people were doing drugs of some sort, whether
Speaker 1: it was what was administered to them by our killer,
Speaker 1: or if they just went down and they found this
Speaker 1: new drug that's called heroin, because heroin had just come out,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to try this heroin thing, and wow,
Speaker 1: I really feel better about myself. Yeah, I have fun
Speaker 1: stuff out hear. I've never tried it myself, so I can.
Speaker 1: I don't know that it's really actually fun stuff based
Speaker 1: on the stories that we've heard. So it's fun to
Speaker 1: start out with, but after that it kind of goes downhill.
Speaker 1: There are a number of lis or like maybe other
Speaker 1: victors connection. Yeah, there it's interesting. Um So. On July
Speaker 1: one of nineteen thirty six, a headless unidentified mail was
Speaker 1: found in a box car in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. Then three
Speaker 1: headless victims were found in box cars near McKees Rock, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: um in May of nineteen forty. They all kind of
Speaker 1: had similar injuries as those that were attributed to the
Speaker 1: Cleveland Killer or the Kingsbury Run killer murderer lots of
Speaker 1: dismembered bodies were found in the swamps near Newcastle, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: between the years of night one and nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: and then again between nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. And then in September of nineteen forty an
Speaker 1: article in the Newcastle News refers to um this killer
Speaker 1: as the murder swamp killer, which is the worst name
Speaker 1: I've ever and credits him with I think it was
Speaker 1: seventeen murders in Newcastle over the years. The and the
Speaker 1: victims were like, what was inflicted on them was almost
Speaker 1: identical to what was going on in Cleveland's Kingsbury Run,
Speaker 1: which conveniently were connected directly by a Baltimore and Ohio
Speaker 1: railroad line, which, as you will remember, runs right through
Speaker 1: Kingsbury Run. But apparently the Cleveland detective Peter Merlo went
Speaker 1: and ll Marillo Yeah sorry, he was pretty sure that
Speaker 1: the Newcastle murders were in fact the work of the
Speaker 1: mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. But these were just headless corpses, right,
Speaker 1: you know, it's hard. I couldn't find a whole lot
Speaker 1: of information some of them. I think we're headless corpses.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of them were otherwise dismembered as well.
Speaker 1: The railroad in question here ran twice a day every
Speaker 1: day between the two cities. Um. And in fact, how
Speaker 1: did we just say decide that we're saying that name?
Speaker 1: Marilla rode that train undercover like all the time to
Speaker 1: try and identify the killer, and he never never could. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's it's possible, actually, um all we know. And then
Speaker 1: in uh July of nineteen fifty, the body of a
Speaker 1: forty one year old man named Robert Robertson was found
Speaker 1: in a business in Cleveland, and police said that he
Speaker 1: had been dead for like six to eight weeks, but
Speaker 1: he had been intentionally decapitated, and apparently he seemed to
Speaker 1: kind of fit the profile of the other victims. He
Speaker 1: was a stranger from his family, he had an arrest record,
Speaker 1: he had a drinking problem, he was kind of on
Speaker 1: the fringes of society, and the police decided to not
Speaker 1: link it to them. The mad Butcher of Kingsbury run
Speaker 1: murder time. It was twenty years of essential well, I
Speaker 1: was twenty years Oh yeah, I guess ten years twelve
Speaker 1: twe twelve years long enough. They don't want to dredge
Speaker 1: up that case they couldn't figure out right and get
Speaker 1: the egg back on their faces. Yeah not not everybody
Speaker 1: who gets their head chopped off is necessarily related to
Speaker 1: this thing. It does happen, But I think that it
Speaker 1: is odd that and worth note, I guess since I
Speaker 1: did note it that in Baltimore just you know, a
Speaker 1: box car hop away a bunch of people. Around that time,
Speaker 1: we're also showing up decapitated or otherwise dismembered. So suspects.
Speaker 1: This is where we get even more frustrated, right, like,
Speaker 1: not only can we not identify most of these bodies,
Speaker 1: and like we don't have a whole lot of information,
Speaker 1: but also there's like two suspects. This is what this
Speaker 1: is the part of the story the infuriate. Apparently they
Speaker 1: had like a lot of suspects. They held a lot
Speaker 1: of people in for questioning. Yeah, well there's only two
Speaker 1: like viable, but yeah, they probably beat the crap out
Speaker 1: of a hell of a lot of people. Confession. Let's
Speaker 1: just say that police interrogative techniques at the time, we're
Speaker 1: not at Geneva convention. Yeah, alright, so the first one
Speaker 1: is X or frank adults all how would you say so?
Speaker 1: In um January of nineteen thirty nine, the Cleveland Press
Speaker 1: got a letter from a man who claimed to be
Speaker 1: the killer and identified himself as X. He said that
Speaker 1: he was in California and that he had been killing
Speaker 1: people for medical experiences, experiments, not experiences, and he actually
Speaker 1: referred to the body as quote, laboratory guinea pigs unquote.
Speaker 1: And there were apparently no clues, but somehow the police,
Speaker 1: I don't totally know how, it's super unclear, but somehow
Speaker 1: the police linked this to Frank Dout, Frank whatever. His
Speaker 1: last name is um and he was a fifty two
Speaker 1: year old Slavic immigrant. So on August nine, Frank was
Speaker 1: arrested as a suspect in Florence's murder. You remember she
Speaker 1: was like victim number like three, Yeah, and sorry, he
Speaker 1: had been already. He was in jail. Um, and he
Speaker 1: died under really suspicious circumstances. It's not no, no, this
Speaker 1: is not suspicious in my mind. But explain this. How
Speaker 1: did he die or what are the conditions of his death? Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: after his death, it was discovered that he had suffered
Speaker 1: six broken ribs, injuries that his friends say he definitely
Speaker 1: didn't have when he was arrested by the sheriff six
Speaker 1: weeks prior. Uh. And also he hung himself. Okay, do
Speaker 1: you have the details about him and the hanging. I
Speaker 1: gotta be honest with you. I just skimmed right over
Speaker 1: that because I didn't want to even think about. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing was. Evidently Frank was five ft nine and
Speaker 1: he was in a cell that had a ceiling that
Speaker 1: from Florida ceiling was five ft seven inches, and and
Speaker 1: he hung himself. Now I thought I thought the ceiling
Speaker 1: was higher than that, but the nail he was five
Speaker 1: seven in the sea and the room was five nine.
Speaker 1: You're right, I got it backwards. But it's a two
Speaker 1: inch span, which is really really hard to hang yourself from.
Speaker 1: I didn't hang himself from the ceiling, though, I mean
Speaker 1: the ceiling. What I understood is that the nail or
Speaker 1: whatever it is that hung himself, I'm protruded from the wall,
Speaker 1: and that was five ft seven inches from the floor,
Speaker 1: and that he was, and that he was five nine. Okay,
Speaker 1: still possible to hang yourself from that, because I's forgot
Speaker 1: the five extremely difficult. Someone bends their legs and they
Speaker 1: are suspended, but this. This is a very suspicious hanging,
Speaker 1: is what I'm getting at. What people have actually hung
Speaker 1: themselves and some of their circumstances. But also remember five
Speaker 1: ft nine is the distance from the floor to the
Speaker 1: top of his head, not to his neck, right, not
Speaker 1: to his neck, So he actually had a few inches
Speaker 1: of play there to hang himself on that peg or
Speaker 1: whatever he hung himself on. He could have done it, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they were determined to kill it. I don't. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm suspicious, tokay, thank you. That's what I'm getting at
Speaker 1: is it's a very serioious hanging. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: suicide and suspicious suicide. That's where I'm heading. What plays
Speaker 1: into this too is the fact that he apparently confessed
Speaker 1: to killing her in self defense six broken ribs wouldn't
Speaker 1: be yeah, and then a week before his hanging recanted
Speaker 1: and said no, actually I didn't, and in fact said
Speaker 1: that he had been beaten into submission to confessing by
Speaker 1: the police. Yeah. And then he killed himself apparently after
Speaker 1: he said, oh no, the police made me that. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's a little suspicious to me. Suspicious, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like the not him not being guilty way right,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna move on to somebody who has a
Speaker 1: lot of suspicious stuff in the opposite way. Dr Francis E. Sweeney.
Speaker 1: Sweeney not related to Sweeney Todd. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 1: he might be actually be the inspiration for the play. Yeah,
Speaker 1: except that he's like way too late. Yeah, well there's that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he worked during World War One in a medical
Speaker 1: unit that conducted amputations in the field. He was later
Speaker 1: personally interviewed by Elliott ness Man, who is a bit
Speaker 1: of a character in himself. He um oversaw the official
Speaker 1: investigation of the killings in his capacity as Cleveland's safety director,
Speaker 1: which safety director at that point was like leader of prohibition,
Speaker 1: not actually like any real police stuff. Yeah, it's hard
Speaker 1: to say exactly how involved next really hard to say
Speaker 1: it is. What is own is that ness got really
Speaker 1: obsessed with this investigation at length. He cut it, and
Speaker 1: he cut some grief for the fact that the one
Speaker 1: offered so long without. Yeah, so it's it's a bit
Speaker 1: of a mystery. In terms of his actual involvement. I
Speaker 1: will say that Elliott nest did go on to become
Speaker 1: al Capones literal nemesis, because this is real life and
Speaker 1: this is a real story and that really happened. It
Speaker 1: actually happened. The thing about Ness and his involvement is
Speaker 1: depending on the iteration that you read. Some of them
Speaker 1: say that Ness was involved at the ground roots level
Speaker 1: all the time, and some say, oh, no, he didn't
Speaker 1: have anything to do with it except press releases and
Speaker 1: yelling and other cops to figure it out. Let's be
Speaker 1: fair here, Like this is this comes almost straight from Wikipedia, right,
Speaker 1: So you read through the Torso murders slash mad Butcher
Speaker 1: of Kingsbury Run and they're like, oh and then Elliott
Speaker 1: now and you're like, okay, fine, I'll click on the
Speaker 1: Elliott Nest link and like see what's going on. They
Speaker 1: don't mention these murders at all in his Wikipedia. Nowhere
Speaker 1: in there is his involvement ever made like it's a
Speaker 1: footnote that he worked in Cleveland for a couple of years. Well,
Speaker 1: that's not what he's really known for and not And also,
Speaker 1: you know the thing about Wikipedia is people can go
Speaker 1: in and edit it and descendants, members of his family
Speaker 1: might decide that this wasn't his finest hour and they
Speaker 1: just go in there. Whenever somebody posts something about this stuff,
Speaker 1: they go in and they chop it out. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: I mean, I think Wikipedia is a little more sophisticated
Speaker 1: at this point than that. It's not like anybody can
Speaker 1: just go in and add things that has to be
Speaker 1: vetted and all that stuff. But in fairness, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit of a mystery in terms of what he
Speaker 1: actually was involved in. And I've gotta I gotta tell
Speaker 1: you that personally, from what I can gather, I get
Speaker 1: the impression that Ness was consulted a little bit on
Speaker 1: this case and basically was you ever watched the cop
Speaker 1: show and the cops supervisor comes in and yells at
Speaker 1: a bunch of people to figure it out and get
Speaker 1: off their butts and blah blah blah blah blah. I
Speaker 1: get the feeling that was his involvement, Like he was
Speaker 1: not involved. He was, Hey, Bill and Joe and Bob
Speaker 1: and and Danny figured this out and stop messing around
Speaker 1: because I'm catching grief from my boss to not have
Speaker 1: this figured out. And that was it. It's the manure
Speaker 1: flow chart, right, And I think you know again, part
Speaker 1: of it is he now is kind of seeing as
Speaker 1: somebody who was involved a lot, because he did write
Speaker 1: this book, and he did talk about it. But I
Speaker 1: think that if you worked in any capacity on an
Speaker 1: unsolved mystery of this kind of magnitude, you would probably
Speaker 1: carry some lifelong stuff about it, probably anyway, the exposure
Speaker 1: to it, so anyway anyway. But but it is at
Speaker 1: one point about Ness and Francis Sweeney is that And
Speaker 1: I know you're going to mention the postcards in Nest's favor,
Speaker 1: I will say that Francis Sweeney seemed to actually considered
Speaker 1: Nest very important to it's the investigation, because he was
Speaker 1: he committed himself and I believe nineteen we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about in the second and we're gonna talk about that.
Speaker 1: But in the seventies, Elliott ness is grant or excuse me,
Speaker 1: her daughter in law donated his papers to the Western
Speaker 1: Reserve Historical Society wherever they are, and they found a
Speaker 1: whole collection of bizarre postcards that were sent to Nest
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties by Dr Sweeney and uh and
Speaker 1: they were mostly incoherent, but they were They were signed
Speaker 1: on one card F. E. Sweeney paranoidal Nemesis. So apparently
Speaker 1: he considered Nest to be an important character in this
Speaker 1: whole drama. Yeah, I think he did. So backtrack a
Speaker 1: little bit from where show just went. Um. Sweeney was
Speaker 1: brought in for investigation for interrogation and apparently they're like
Speaker 1: polygraph tests existed at this time, and he failed to
Speaker 1: pass two early polygraph tests. They were both administered by
Speaker 1: an expert at the time named Leonard Keeler, who essentially
Speaker 1: apparently told Ness, this is the dude who did it, like,
Speaker 1: this is the guy who killed all these people. However,
Speaker 1: Francis Sweeney was the first cousin of one of Ness's
Speaker 1: foremost political opponents and Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, who had
Speaker 1: actually been hounding Ness publicly for not having caught the
Speaker 1: killer yet. Really, yeah, you're kidding. Okay, I caught the
Speaker 1: relation between the two, but I didn't know he's case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's this bit of a like honestly, I know
Speaker 1: I talked about this a lot, but it's a bit
Speaker 1: of this like true detective situation where like spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: like the congres Smith is coming in and he's like,
Speaker 1: why haven't you caught the killer yet? When he's like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not done with the season, don't don't screw this up.
Speaker 1: For me, I'm not done with the season. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well what about it? What about our listeners out there?
Speaker 1: I said, spoilers, But anyway, it's very similar. I'm sorry, okay,
Speaker 1: fine whatever for you guys, just would hurry up. It's
Speaker 1: like a year old I no, I apologize anyways. Also
Speaker 1: of like a suspicious kind of vein. The killings um
Speaker 1: stopped for all intents and purposes after Francis Sweeney voluntarily
Speaker 1: committed himself to a mental institution where the postcards, the
Speaker 1: aforementioned postcards were sent from. Yeah, and it might be
Speaker 1: that perhaps he committed himself because he realized that he
Speaker 1: was on the path to perdition and he might might
Speaker 1: need to get himself locked up so he couldn't do
Speaker 1: this anymore. And that's but the other thing about it
Speaker 1: is is that Ness obviously felt like he had to
Speaker 1: have an air tight case against Sweeney, and he never
Speaker 1: did because I mean, you know, in those days, I
Speaker 1: mean a lot of people got sent away or sent
Speaker 1: to the gallows on as much evidence or less than
Speaker 1: they had against Sweeney. Right, But he has some powerful
Speaker 1: patronage on his side. He did, Yeah, he had some
Speaker 1: some heavy hitters in his side. Of the ring, and
Speaker 1: it's fair to say that the murders, at least the
Speaker 1: ones that are like strongly attributed to the butcher. The
Speaker 1: Mad Butcher of Kingsbury run ended in nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: which is exactly when he committed himself, and he harassed
Speaker 1: nests from the institution that he committed himself to. He
Speaker 1: died in a veterans hospital eventually in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: I think it was in Daytona. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: defending Sweeney because I think Sweeney was kind of an
Speaker 1: odd character. The things that I've read about him. He
Speaker 1: was not straight in the head. But then again, he
Speaker 1: spent he was in the war, so that will do
Speaker 1: things to a guy. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about is that these bodies, when they
Speaker 1: were caught up and dismembered, there's disputing accounts that say
Speaker 1: that either a it was done by somebody who had
Speaker 1: surgical knowledge or someone who had been a butcher at
Speaker 1: one point and understood physiology. And then there's also the
Speaker 1: counterpoint that people say, oh, no, it was just mad
Speaker 1: slashing that happened to cut these bodies a little bit ahead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's just like one more thing that I know
Speaker 1: Joe wants to talk about in terms I didn't kind
Speaker 1: of like evidence towards Sweeney, and then we will absolutely
Speaker 1: sorry about that situation. Yeah. So, Joe, I know that
Speaker 1: you had some stuff about Sweeney, that there was an
Speaker 1: incident that you were talking about where somebody maybe survived
Speaker 1: the mad Butcher or Sweeney or something possible. It's it's
Speaker 1: possible that this. Can you just real quick? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: this is this guy who was a vagrant guy that
Speaker 1: came through in the trains, just like a lot of people.
Speaker 1: His name was Emil Fronic that's E. M I. L
Speaker 1: H so Fronick. In November ninety four, he was homeless
Speaker 1: and a vagrant, and he was hungry, and he was
Speaker 1: walking up Broadway Avenue in Cleveland and apparently he found
Speaker 1: himself and the details are scarce here found himself in
Speaker 1: the second floor of the doctor's office, and the doctor
Speaker 1: offered to feed him because he was starving. So he
Speaker 1: started eating the food and then he started, you know,
Speaker 1: since she was starting to feel woozy. So he started
Speaker 1: to suspect that he had been drugs. So he beat
Speaker 1: feet random the steps, got out of there, went down
Speaker 1: to the rail yard. Terms. Yeah, and now I got us,
Speaker 1: wandered to a box car and fell asleep and woke
Speaker 1: up three days later, and yeah, and so anyway, this
Speaker 1: guy decided to leave Cleveland, decided that was bad mojo,
Speaker 1: so he went to Chicago, got a job, was a longshoreman.
Speaker 1: In August nine, his story got back to Cleveland and
Speaker 1: the same detective we talked about previously, Peter Murillo, I
Speaker 1: want to Chicago to bring him back. So Mrillo and
Speaker 1: another policeman drove Frownick up Broadway to try to find
Speaker 1: to say if the good place, the place that he
Speaker 1: had gone to, and what his doctor's office was. When
Speaker 1: they got to the area between East fiftieth and East
Speaker 1: East fifty fifth Street, he said, it's here, somewhere, so
Speaker 1: he remembered that spot. So they got out of the
Speaker 1: car and they walked up and down the street. But
Speaker 1: he couldn't find He couldn't find the spot that he would. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he couldn't find. It had been a few years, have
Speaker 1: been four years actually, and and Nest interviewed him. Also,
Speaker 1: Elliott Nest interviewed him, but they decided it didn't have
Speaker 1: anything to do with the butch. But here's an interesting factory.
Speaker 1: This is this information is actually I got a lot
Speaker 1: of this from a guy I had not personally from him.
Speaker 1: But there's a guy named James Padel who has written
Speaker 1: three books about the Butcher and and this appears. There
Speaker 1: was an interview in the July fourteen issue of Cleveland
Speaker 1: Magazine where he talks about this guy a little bit
Speaker 1: so um. He said that he gives talks on this
Speaker 1: stuff every now and again, on the Butcher. And at
Speaker 1: one of these talks, a guy came up to him
Speaker 1: after his Torso talk and showed him a photograph of
Speaker 1: six doctors, one of whom was Dr Sweeney, the other
Speaker 1: the other six. One of them was this guy's great uncle,
Speaker 1: whose name was Edward Perturka. And the six doctors at
Speaker 1: one point had a medical practice together on Broadway in Cleveland.
Speaker 1: And I got a map right here, actually, let me
Speaker 1: show you. So. It was at the corner of Broadway
Speaker 1: and Pershing Avenue. Is let me show you the map
Speaker 1: right here, all right, So Broadway it's a it's at
Speaker 1: Broadway and Persing Avenue now and and you can see
Speaker 1: two to the right Avenue to the left forty ninth Avenue,
Speaker 1: that's where the office was. So the guy that showed
Speaker 1: him the picture of the six doctors also sent and
Speaker 1: sent him a picture of the old office. The old
Speaker 1: office was a two story used to be a house.
Speaker 1: It was, it had been converted the ground floor had
Speaker 1: been converted into medical offices, and then adeli had been
Speaker 1: built onto the front of it, which kind of blocked
Speaker 1: the kind of blocked off the office a little bit.
Speaker 1: And so it's quite possible if this guy was walking
Speaker 1: down Broadway and then he saw the side of the
Speaker 1: deli and didn't even see the front of the building
Speaker 1: at all, you know what I'm saying. So if he
Speaker 1: had approached it from one side, sees deli, thinks hey,
Speaker 1: there's garbage cans in the back, there might be some
Speaker 1: started food back there, he went back there, back behind
Speaker 1: the deli is where the stai way to the second
Speaker 1: floor of the house, which was still a residence was,
Speaker 1: and where the doctor was probably staying at the time,
Speaker 1: because he was actually at this time of strange from
Speaker 1: his wife because of his alcoholism and his erratic behavior.
Speaker 1: So that adds a little bit of credibility to the
Speaker 1: possibility that never one he was drugging, and that's one
Speaker 1: way to deal with it. It's just to drug people
Speaker 1: and then you can do whatever you want with them.
Speaker 1: Another interesting point is that there was a funeral home
Speaker 1: right next to this office, which apparently he had access to,
Speaker 1: and in the basement they had you know that the
Speaker 1: you know, the whole thing, the metal tables with the
Speaker 1: drains and everything for dealing with the blood and all
Speaker 1: that stuffs stuff. So it's interesting, possible adds to the story,
Speaker 1: but maybe doesn't. It doesn't well nobody And then like this,
Speaker 1: this guy, James Biddell, who I said, it's written three
Speaker 1: books about it and and has spent more time combined, like
Speaker 1: a thousand times more than all of us put together,
Speaker 1: investigating this. And he says he's not He says he's
Speaker 1: pretty sure it's a doctor, but he can't stay for
Speaker 1: nobody can. And it might it might be sold someday
Speaker 1: if if somedays somebody stumbles across the doctor's diary or
Speaker 1: something like that, you know, perhaps it'll be solved, but
Speaker 1: maybe probably not. So I want to just quickly touch
Speaker 1: on what Steve was talking about, and it's this theory
Speaker 1: I guess it was like in the mid nineties that
Speaker 1: this theory kind of surface, and it was that perhaps
Speaker 1: it was just like there's no such thing as a
Speaker 1: single butcher of Kingsbury Run, that it was a lot
Speaker 1: of people. There were a lot of crazy people there
Speaker 1: at the time, and it was time. It was a
Speaker 1: crazy time, and that you know, it wouldn't be so
Speaker 1: hard for like stories to start surfacing of like, oh,
Speaker 1: this person got dismembered and somebody to like, who's crazy,
Speaker 1: be like, oh that sounds like fun, yeah, or somebody
Speaker 1: like you know, if if you really, if you want
Speaker 1: to murder somebody, and that's a great time to do it,
Speaker 1: because the problem with trying to commit murder is there's
Speaker 1: usually a finger pointing right back. Actually, you've usually got
Speaker 1: a big, solid motive this way. It's like, hey, people
Speaker 1: are getting murdered left and right, I can go take
Speaker 1: care of this guy. Yeah, it's not it's not just copycat,
Speaker 1: but you're using it as as a cover for your
Speaker 1: own act. Yeah. And the reason that this comes up
Speaker 1: is because autopsy results were um inconclusive on a lot
Speaker 1: of these murders. I forget, we're a year old when
Speaker 1: they found well, yeah, that's a big issue right there. Right,
Speaker 1: and the original corner Arthur Pierce. He may have been
Speaker 1: a little inconsistent in his results as far as Steve
Speaker 1: was kind of implying earlier, not saying like, well, these
Speaker 1: were precise cuts and these were hacks on marks. You know,
Speaker 1: he was just he just said, but their arms were
Speaker 1: cut off. And again, you know it's hard because like
Speaker 1: after a year, like, can you really tell, well, animals,
Speaker 1: animals have been chewing on the corpse, bugs have been
Speaker 1: chewing on the corps just stay in age. I could say, yes,
Speaker 1: we could probably figure that out. But at that time,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties, I don't think nobody had gone
Speaker 1: into forensics into that detail to ever be able to say,
Speaker 1: this is what tissue looks like a year later here
Speaker 1: after a sharp n this is tissue a year later
Speaker 1: after a no. I think after a year you say
Speaker 1: the arm we cut off? The no, I don't know. Um.
Speaker 1: And the second factor in this is that his successor,
Speaker 1: who was Samuel Gerber, we kind of talked about him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he gained a lot of popularity around the like
Speaker 1: Sam Shepherd murder trial. He kind of had a reputation
Speaker 1: for sensationalized theories. He was not he was not a
Speaker 1: super reputable source, which he was kind of the Golden Boy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is weird for to say about a corner, you know.
Speaker 1: So him saying, oh, there were drugs in her system
Speaker 1: for the last Jane Doe, like, who knows if he
Speaker 1: was just like trying to continue to sensationalize this story
Speaker 1: or what. Um, But that is all we know? What
Speaker 1: why why we that face? Steve? Like what I just said?
Speaker 1: That's all. I mean, that's everything, right? Yeah? No, no, okay.
Speaker 1: So there's there's one thing that we haven't really talked about,
Speaker 1: and that is on at least the first three victims,
Speaker 1: there was and you mentioned it briefly, something about the
Speaker 1: chemical that they thought had been put onto the bottle,
Speaker 1: that their skin was red and leathery. I didn't say
Speaker 1: there were chemicals. Their skin was red and leathery, and
Speaker 1: according to some of the autopsy reports, they thought that
Speaker 1: some kind of chemical had been put onto them. We're
Speaker 1: going there, and I'm gonna keep this brief because I
Speaker 1: know that this is just kind of a bit of
Speaker 1: a footnote on the story. But I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out I spent some time trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what the deal is as to what would do that? Uh,
Speaker 1: and and trying to find what chemicals were in use
Speaker 1: at the time. And that's that. It's just as we say,
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole, as it was very hard to go
Speaker 1: down and it it really didn't yield any results. But
Speaker 1: I came back to I stepped back to more of
Speaker 1: a simple idea, which is what what what do we know?
Speaker 1: That's obvious that when you're hiding or getting rid of bodies,
Speaker 1: would you put on them? And that's kind of an
Speaker 1: alkali solution. No alkali because I supposedly makes them decompose
Speaker 1: a lot faster. Alkali It breaks him down fast. Obviously,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be great at getting rid of body.
Speaker 1: But a book on how to get rid of bodies? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is, and believe it or not, of all places,
Speaker 1: what I'm about to go through, part of it I
Speaker 1: got from the c d c's website. Okay, that's that's
Speaker 1: that's a little life that you click on. I says
Speaker 1: how to get rid of dead bodies. Okay, Okay, there
Speaker 1: there is there. There's three things that can happen to
Speaker 1: skin when it comes into contact with a chemical. There
Speaker 1: is what is called de fatting, which it literally means
Speaker 1: just taking the fatty oils off the top of your skin. Okay.
Speaker 1: There's irritants which irritate the skin, which make a rash,
Speaker 1: and then there's caustic things that would make you have
Speaker 1: boils or you know, sores or something like that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so those are the three levels. Well, alkali, if you
Speaker 1: get a small dose, it's an irritant. So if you
Speaker 1: think of somebody who's ever worked with concrete, their hands
Speaker 1: are dry and crusty and kind of tough, and then
Speaker 1: as they do it more they get worse than they
Speaker 1: get kind of rash like. So that's the only thing
Speaker 1: that I can think of is that, well, alkali is something,
Speaker 1: as we said before, somebody would use to help break
Speaker 1: down a body fast. So if they throw it on
Speaker 1: the body and there's a big concentration of it, why
Speaker 1: immediately just before or just immediately after death, it would
Speaker 1: be absorbed by the skin, which would create the kind
Speaker 1: of red, weird, leathery texture situation. Now, it doesn't help
Speaker 1: us figure anything out, but a lot of the accountings
Speaker 1: go to that, and there was a chemical board on
Speaker 1: the body. We don't know how much. We don't know
Speaker 1: how big of an area. But it seems you know,
Speaker 1: when I say dispose of body and chemical, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the direction that my mind went. And I think
Speaker 1: it's it's it's kind of you know, I mean, Joe,
Speaker 1: you and I were talking and Joe said, well, it
Speaker 1: could be that where the body was dumped. We're talking
Speaker 1: the thirties, we're not exactly ecologically frontly. Absolutely, that's true,
Speaker 1: and let's be fair. I think that two of the
Speaker 1: bodies that were found with that kind of skin thing,
Speaker 1: we're found in very similar places. So it may just
Speaker 1: be that, like the there was just crap sitting and
Speaker 1: they fell into it and it was absorbed just through osmosis.
Speaker 1: I mean, osmosis happens on all materials, whether alive or dead,
Speaker 1: and that just had that reaction. So it could have
Speaker 1: been as simple as that, or it could be as
Speaker 1: a nefarious is where I was going, and yeah, well
Speaker 1: I know when I get rid of the body, I
Speaker 1: usually some smack, we're done. Yeah, So that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's all we know about this whole thing. You know,
Speaker 1: We've got those two like fairly solid theories about who
Speaker 1: might have done this, which bothers me because there's only
Speaker 1: two of them. Two seems too easy, and I have
Speaker 1: a favorite, I mean I was your favorite. I mean
Speaker 1: the doctor obviously, Yeah, I think so. The signs are
Speaker 1: too easy for me. Yeah, the doctor. Okay, I didn't
Speaker 1: know what Joe brought up. I will admit the stuff
Speaker 1: that you brought up, Joe, that you found in your research,
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen. So that kind of corroborates a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff about the doctor. But again, the way that
Speaker 1: the police went about their investigations, and we've just got
Speaker 1: these two main subjects. What if who happens to have
Speaker 1: accident he killed himself in while being held quote included, yes,
Speaker 1: air quotes, thank you. Um, it just seems a little
Speaker 1: too easy, and I'm not sold, especially if we go
Speaker 1: with the swamp murders and there was the what was
Speaker 1: the other location? Newcastle? Newcastle? Yeah, I mean that that's
Speaker 1: true though, I mean that you're having that whole thing
Speaker 1: going on up there. But yeah, so Sweetie, Sweetie wasn't
Speaker 1: a traveling doctor Sweeney. A lot of those happened after
Speaker 1: he was committed before well they were befores and after
Speaker 1: so okay, well, that to me washes him out as
Speaker 1: a candidate. I think, I mean, I just like him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just like the name because you like the play maybe, yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I guess. Um. If you were interested in more links
Speaker 1: to this story, um, you can of course check them
Speaker 1: out as always on our website, Thinking sideways podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: You may be listening to us there. You are probably
Speaker 1: listening to us on iTunes. If you are, feel free
Speaker 1: to leave us a comment and a rating. We love
Speaker 1: those things. That's how other people find us, that's how we,
Speaker 1: you know, continue to gain listenership, which we just keep
Speaker 1: getting fantastic love them. Do we have a Facebook page, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we do. We have a Facebook page and a Facebook
Speaker 1: group which you should like and join, um respectively. If
Speaker 1: you forget to download the show, or you don't have
Speaker 1: time to download show, you can always stream it on Stitcher,
Speaker 1: and you can always send us an email, particularly, you know,
Speaker 1: like if you are the Med Butcher or you know
Speaker 1: who he is, or you're a victim of Med Butcher. God,
Speaker 1: I hope none of those things. Please, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: Email Yeah, I don't know the email addresses as always
Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. And I think
Speaker 1: with that we're done with this weird creepy thing until
Speaker 1: next week. That is, it is October. You know, I
Speaker 1: really regret that we're doing these creepy stories this month,
Speaker 1: but okay, sorry guys. We'll talk to you next week. Yeah, Tulu,
Speaker 1: and I remember keep your head. Yeah about you. Yeah,