I came across the book entitled "Torso" by Steven Nickel. It tells
the story of the torso murderer who terrorized Cleveland, Ohio in
the 1930s. He was never caught. Even legendary lawman Eliot Ness,
Cleveland's safety director, was unable to crack the case.

The book is creepy, chilling. Someone got away with murder, many
times. Brutal, grisly killings, probably for necrophilic purposes,
according to the author. How many? Thirteen, most likely 14, in the Cleveland
area, and probably more in western Pennsylvania. One investigator at
the time thought the body count was at least 34, perhaps closer to 40.

All of the victims had been beheaded. Two had some sort of preservative
applied to the skin to retard decomposition, indicating the killer had
kept the bodies for some time. Some of the male victims had been
emasculated. Most had been dismembered with surgical skill and
precision. The cause of death, for those bodies fresh enough for this
to be determined, was decapitation, for all but one. Which raises
the question of how the killer was able to overpower the victims, who
did not have defensive wounds or other signs of a struggle. Most had
been killed elsewhere, their bodies drained of blood and washed, and then
deposited in public places. Only two of the Cleveland victims
(or three if one counts the 1950 case) were positively identified.
They all appeared to have come from the lower stata of society: vagrants,
prostitutes, petty criminals, perverts, and drunks, people who were
neither missed nor mourned.

The monster's first murders were probably committed in or near New Castle,
Pennsylvania in 1923-24. Assuming he started killing in his early
twenties, as is now known to be the pattern for this type of
psychopath, he was probably born around 1900. The Cleveland murders
started in 1934. Where was he for 10 years? Perhaps in prison, perhaps
traveling around the country. Twelve more bodies bearing his signature
butchery appeared over the next four years in Cleveland. Then he
apparently returned to the Youngstown-Pittsburgh area from 1939-1942
to commit more murders, and then vanished. Why did he leave Cleveland?
Maybe he had a job that took him out of the area; the fact that many
of the bodies were found near railroad tracks suggested that he might
have been a railroad worker. Or maybe he had a close call that convinced him
to leave Cleveland before he got caught, although there were apparently
no police records to suggest that.

His last probable killing occurred in 1950 in Cleveland. The
previous year an article was published in Harper's Magazine about
the 1930s torso murders. Some observers at the time wondered if
the killer, reading this article, sought to revive his reign of terror
over the city by killing again. Incredibly, this time he may have been
seen. Two workers in a factory near where the body was found reported a
large man (which was what the killer was assumed to be) had been sunbathing
on the steel girders under which the dismembered remains were later found,
starting at about the time the body was thought to have been placed there.
He sunbathed there daily for over a month, then disappeared about a week before
the body was found. He was described as about 50 years old, which would
fit for someone born in 1900. Was he flaunting the crime, or spending
time with his dead victim/lover, or both? Maybe this time he did not have
a dwelling in the city where he could keep the remains, as he apparently
had in the 1930s, so that was the only way he could commune with his
victim.

He did not kill again, at least not in Cleveland, and there were no
similar crimes reported elsewhere, according to the book. Why did he stop?
Maybe it was becoming harder for him to kill, or to find easy victims,
with age. Or maybe with age he had less of a need to kill. Some
criminals do mellow with age. Or maybe, because he had risked being seen
sunbathing over the latest victim's corpse, he felt it was too dangerous
to kill in Cleveland again. Or perhaps because his latest murder did
not provoke the public fear and outrage that his 1930s crimes had.
People had largely forgotten the torso killer, and the authorities did
not definitively link the 1950 slaying to the 1930s monster. In addition
to the necrophilia, perhaps part of his motive was the sick satisfaction of
inflicting paralyzing fear over an entire community. But wouldn't
a second similar murder in 1950 have ignited the terror again? Perhaps he
did intend to resume the carnage, but was incarcerated on other charges
before that could happen. Or maybe he died.

Probably one of the reasons, according to the author, the fiend eluded
capture was that he was America's first serial killer. The authorities
had never encountered anything like this before, and didn't know what to make
of it. Serial killers were rare before WWII. Now, we have all heard of
butchers such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer,
Richard Ramirez, the Boston Strangler, the Green River Killer, the Skid Row
Slasher, the Son of Sam Killer, and the Zodiac Killer. A well-read person
of today knows more about serial killers and how they operate than the
Cleveland police did in the 1930s.

Probably the closest modern parallel to the torso killer was Jeffrey
Dahmer, and to a lesser extent, Ted Bundy. The main difference was
that Dahmer preyed exclusively on males, and Bundy on females,
whereas the torso killer attacked both. He may have been bisexual, or
maybe his fetish was simply a headless corpse, and gender didn't
matter. Maybe he made his selections on the basis of convenience
rather than sexual preference. However, his three identified male victims
(assuming one can count the 1950 case and the 1940 Train of Death cases)
were said to be homosexuals, suggesting that the killer was familiar with that
lifestyle.

To me, a crucial question is why were these killers rare before WWII
and have increased in number since? Is there something about modern
society that is producing these monsters?

Or have they always been with us, but their crimes went undetected?
Was it a case that advances in police and forensic science, along
with increased media and communication abilities, enabled the
authorities to find patterns that previously were unidentified? And
for the crimes to be widely reported in the news media, which, post-WWII,
included the new medium of television? Was it a case that, in centuries
past, early death was more common, and a dismembered body could easily
be blamed on an attack by a wild animal? Or even attributed to the
supernatural, perhaps the work of a demon? Are our legends of vampires,
werewolves, and other supernatural predators really the embellished,
distorted memories of early serial killers? If the never-captured
Cleveland torso murderer had been active in the Dark Ages, it would be
quite probable for his crimes to be blamed on a supernatural being, some
sort of phantom, which is what some called the killer in the 1930s.

Or is there something about modern society that makes it easier for
these monsters to find victims? Does an industrial society with urban
slums and an underclass provide a perfect hunting ground? This certainly
appears to have been the case with the torso murderer, operating in the
economic squalor spawned by the Great Depression. But this doesn't
explain the manner in which Ted Bundy or Albert DeSalvo found their
victims, although other sociological changes might.

Maybe the answer is all of the above.

Could the torso killer's identity be determined today with the resources
of the Internet? Here is a distillation of the clues: a large, strong
white male, probably well over six feet tall; with blond hair in his younger days,
gray and thinning hair at age 50; who wore a size 12 shoe; described as
heavyset at age 50; was right-handed; probably never married or had failed
marriages; born around 1900, maybe in the Youngstown to Pittsburgh region,
assuming he started killing near where he grew up; a necrophile who may also
have been bisexual or homosexual; may have been a railroad worker; may have
had medical training or worked as a butcher; may have had periods of
incarceration from 1924-34, and from 1942-49; probably lived in Cleveland
in the 1930s; may have died in the early 1950s (after July 22, 1950, when
the last victim was found), although that is conjecture. One of his female
victims, Flo Polillo, claimed to have been married to a tall, blond,
good-looking man named Harry Martin, although the authorities could not
verify the marriage, nor could they find the man.

I will leave it to Internet sleuths with more free time than I have to
comb the databases on ancestry.com and elsewhere. I admit there is a
lot of speculation and conjecture written here. But that is all anyone
can do, both back in the 1930s and today, make educated guesses. No one
can ever be sure of the killer's identity. Perhaps it is a moot point,
as he is certainly dead by now. But sadly, his psychopathic type will surely
rise again in the future, again stalking some city, just as Jeffrey
Dahmer can be said to have walked in the footsteps of the torso killer.
Maybe that's where the legends of a supernatural, immortal predator
came from: different serial killers, never caught, committing similar
crimes, across generations and centuries, crimes so similar that, to a
superstitious mind, they must have been done by the same, immortal being.