He now knows what Ness knew about Sweeney in 1938 - which wasn't enough to take to court. Has Badal solved the murders? Solved is a relative term. Badal also believes he's identified the butcher's laboratory, the place where he disarticulated his victims. His revised, expanded edition of Butcher includes new evidence that connects Sweeney to the story of Emil Fronek, a vagrant who claimed a Cleveland doctor tried to drug him in 1934 - right around the time the murders may have begun. Now Badal has published another revelation.
After writing Twilight of Innocence, about the 1951 disappearance of teenager Beverly Potts, Badal explored the Kingsbury Run case further in two sequels, Though Murder Has No Tongue and Hell's Wasteland. His inability to catch the butcher drove him to draconian acts that belie his heroic reputation.Įighty years later, the Torso Murders have become Cleveland's greatest true-crime legend, and the killer's identity is our greatest unsolved mystery.īadal's 2001 book In the Wake of the Butcher proved the identity of the secret suspect Ness interrogated in 1938: a deranged doctor named Francis E. The case tested Eliot Ness, the legendary Prohibition agent turned Cleveland safety director. He was also known as the headhunter, because he always cut off the victims' heads, and as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run for his habit of leaving bodies in the deep creek valley that runs through Cleveland's East Side from about East 79th Street to the Cuyahoga River. He dismembered most of his victims, cutting them apart with a skill that suggested a knowledge of human anatomy. The torso murderer killed seven men and five or six women. His white moustache rises, and his severe face breaks into a grin.įor 18 years, Badal, 71, has researched the Torso Murders, the spree of decapitation killings that terrified Cleveland during the Great Depression. Today, over black coffee at a cafe in Tremont, the English professor who relishes the macabre speaks the words every murder investigator longs for. Business Hall of Fame and Community Leader of the Year Awards.