Hell's Wasteland , livre ebook

185

pages

English

Ebooks

2013

Écrit par
Jessen Badal James

Publié par
The Kent State University Press

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185

pages

English

Ebooks

2013

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

The Kent State University Press

Date de parution

30 mai 2013

EAN13

9781612776736

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

14 Mo

Did the Mad Butcher of Cleveland also strike in Pennsylvania? From 1934 to 1938, Cleveland, Ohio, was racked by a classic battle between good and evil. On one side was the city's safety director, Eliot Ness. On the other was a nameless phantom dubbed the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," who littered the inner city with the remains of decapitated and dismembered corpses. Never caught or even officially identified, the Butcher simply faded into history, leaving behind a frightening legend that both haunts and fascinates Cleveland to this day. In 2001 the Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal's In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders, the first serious, book-length treatment of this dark chapter in true crime history. Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland's Mad Butcher-a detailed study of the arrest and mysterious death of Frank Dolezal, the only man ever charged in the killings-followed in 2010.Now Badal concludes his examination of the horrific cycle of murder-dismemberments with Hell's Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders. During the mid-1920s, a vast, swampy area just across the Ohio border near New Castle, Pennsylvania, revealed a series of decapitated and otherwise mutilated bodies. In 1940 railroad workers found the rotting remains of three naked and decapitated bodies in a string of derelict boxcars awaiting destruction in Pennsylvania's Stowe Township. Were all of these terrible murders the work of Cleveland's Mad Butcher? Many in Ohio and Pennsylvania law enforcement thought they were, and that assumption led to a massive, well-coordinated two-state investigation. In Hell's Wasteland, Badal explores that nagging question in depth for the first time.Relying on police reports, unpublished memoirs, and the surviving autopsy protocols-as well as contemporary newspaper coverage- Badal provides a detailed examination of the murder-dismemberments and weighs the evidence that potentially links them to the Cleveland carnage. Hell's Wasteland is the last piece in the gigantic torso murder puzzle that spanned three decades, covered two states, and involved law enforcement from as many as five different cities.

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Publié par

The Kent State University Press

Date de parution

30 mai 2013

EAN13

9781612776736

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

14 Mo

True crime

HELL’s WàstELàND

™ Black Squirrel Books

™

an imprint ofThE KENt StàtE UNIvERsIty PREss

Kent, Ohio 44242 www.KentStateUniversityPress.com

Hell’s Wasteland

The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

J a m e S J e S S e n B a d a l

Frontis: A lonely stretch of deserted railroad track south of New Castle, Pennsylvania. The empty desolation of spots like this made them ideal dumping grounds for butchered murder victims. Photograph by Mark Wade Stone; courtesy of StoryWorks.TV.

B l a c K S q U i r r e l B o o K S ™ ™ Frisky, industrious black squirrels are a familiar sight on theKent State University campus and the inspiration for BlackSquirrel Books™, a trade imprint of The Kent State University Press. www.KentStateUniversityPress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Badal, James Jessen, 193– Hell’s wasteland : the Pennsylvania torso murders / James Jessen Badal. p. cm. “Black squirrel books.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ŝ 978-1-60635-153-6 1. Serial murders—Pennsylvania—New Castle. . Homicide investigation—Pennsylvania—New Castle. 3. Serial murders—Ohio—Cleveland.. Homicide investigation—Ohio—Cleveland. I. Title. HV653.N38B33 013 36.15'3097893—dc3 01039

17 16 15 1 13 5  3  1

For Paul, with deepest gratitude

“A puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma.”

—Winston Churchill on the Soviet Union

Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgments ix

1 Murders Most Foul 1

 The Triple Mystery of 195 19

3 Enter Cleveland 33

 The Darkest Circles of Hell 5

5 Odyssey into the Abyss 69

6 “My Name Is Legion, For We Are Many” 85

Epilogue: Apocrypha 1

Appendixby Luke G. Moussa133

Bibliography 155

Index 157

IntroduCtIon and aCknoWledgments

It’s a story I have told many times. During the last two days of the semester in my eighth-grade American history class, our teacher, John Gille, decided to regale us with the tale of Cleveland’s infamous, unsolved torso murders from the mid-1930s, as told in John Bartlow Martin’s article from the November 199 issue ofHarper’s Magazine—a fascinating piece that bore the grimly alluring title “Butcher’s Dozen: The Cleveland Torso Murders.” Eighth grade was not exactly my înest hour as a student, but if my thirteen-year-old ears remained almost permanently deaf to the wonders of America’s past, they certainly perked up as our teacher read Martin’s vivid account of the brutal series of decapitation murders that pied Cleveland’s safety director, Eliot Ness, against the unseen and unidentiîed Butcher perpetrating horrible crimes in the central city, right under the noses of the police. I was fascinated, although as I eagerly soaked up the details of those unspeakable murder-dismemberments, the thought that I might one day write a book about this local îend, dubbed by some city pundits “Cleveland’s Jack the Ripper,” never entered my mind. But write it I did. And when the Kent State University Press publishedIn the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murdersin 001, I thought that was the end of it: my long-standing debts to author John Bartlow Martin, to my American history teacher, John Gille, and to the specters that still haunt Kingsbury Run had been paid. In 001, I certainly did not anticipate a second book on Cleveland’s sensational butcheries. However, my nagging doubts about the “of-îcial” version of events, particularly concerning the arrest and death

- ix -

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