The Unknown Beloved(41)

The remains of the official Victim #8—tentively identified as Rose Wallace—were found by another kid. Kids meandered. Kids explored. Kids played where adults rushed. Her torso, not much more than a skeleton, was found in a partially buried burlap bag under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Her skull had been set atop it. It was her three gold teeth, winking in the late-day sun, that caught the eye of the boy traipsing across the trash-littered field beneath the bridge.

The coroner estimated time of death to be about a year earlier, though Rose Wallace had only been missing ten months, according to those who had last seen her. But the height, weight, age, and ethnicity of the remains all matched up to missing Rose Wallace. Forty-year-old Rose was a tiny Negro lady, barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds, and according to her dental records, she had three gold crowns. In the reports the police used words like “allegedly Rose Wallace,” but it was her. The coroner had just gotten the death estimate wrong. Maybe it was the advanced decomposition of the skeleton; lime was found in the bag, which aided the breakdown of the body.

Rose Wallace had purportedly been doing her laundry at home when a friend dropped in and told her someone was asking for her at a nearby bar. Wallace left her laundry and went straight away. Various sightings of Rose with different men were made that night, but no one seemed to know any of them by name, and no one saw Rose again.

That was August of 1936. She was discovered June 6, 1937, but authorities didn’t believe she’d died in the trash-strewn field, and they didn’t know when her remains had been placed there.

Exactly one month later, on July 6, 1937, another body turned up, floating in the Cuyahoga, taking the attention from Rose Wallace, and shining it on a man still known only as Victim #9.

Like Victim #6, who was found in the pond, Victim #9 was discovered bit by bit. A burlap bag was spotted and fished out of the water first. The bag, which had once held chicken feed, now contained a woman’s silk stocking and the top half of a man’s torso wrapped in newspapers dated three weeks earlier. The bottom half of the torso was dragged out a few hours later after multiple sightings. One man saw it while watching a tugboat pass beneath the West Third Street Bridge.

A day later, the forearms with their hands still attached were found. A few days after that, the upper part of the right arm, and on July 14, the lower part of the right leg was recovered. And that was all. No head. No clothes. No other identifying items. The fingerprints they were able to get from the hands didn’t match any records.

From the pieces they discovered, a general description was formed: white man, about forty years old, approximately five foot eight or nine with a good build, genitals intact. The coroner’s report claimed that this victim had been “hacked up” in new ways, however. His heart had been removed. Lower organs too. And not neatly. The pathologist used the word “wrenched.” The cut marks at the neck and joints were not nearly as precise or deliberate either. Ness had speculated that the Butcher was losing control.

Maybe so. But it was now March of 1938, and no bodies had been discovered in the last eight months. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run hadn’t completely gone mad. Not mad enough to make a blunder that would reveal him.

Malone arranged his bare descriptions in a row of ten pages across his bedroom floor and stood over them, his hands in his pockets, his eyes jumping from sheet to sheet.

One of the difficulties with having so many unidentified victims was that police couldn’t retrace their steps. When something was lost, thinking back to where you had it last was usually the most effective strategy for finding it. But nobody knew where the majority of the victims had been.

Rose Wallace was believed to have been at a bar on Scovill and East Nineteenth, not far from where she lived the last time she was seen. Flo Polillo had left the rooming house where she lived on Carnegie at about eight thirty in the morning the day before her remains were found, according to her landlady. Both women had lived very similar existences. Lots of alcohol, lots of addresses, lots of unsavory men. One-Armed Willie, the suspect Ness had mentioned, had been involved with both women, but a dirtbag didn’t a murderer make.

Unfortunately, the connections between the two women hadn’t turned up another viable suspect, not one with the characteristics to implicate him in the murder of all the others as well.

The benefit—Malone used the word loosely—of having ten murders was that patterns emerged. The most glaring consistency was that all the victims had been found headless. The men weren’t all emasculated, and they weren’t all dismembered. The women were, though, every one of them. But they were all decapitated.

Malone added another thing to his list of consistencies. They had all been found naked, though Edward Andrassy had still been wearing his socks.

They weren’t all the same age, sex, or race. Rose Wallace had been the outlier on race. But none of them were old and none of them were children. Between twenty and forty seemed to be the general age range. That was a pattern, though a minor one.

Most had been found in and around the Run, but not all.

The only other thing that remained consistent across the ten dead was that all of them appeared to be alone in the world. It might be argued that Andrassy was the exception, with a family who loved and mourned him, but he too was alone, if only due to his habits and his choices.

More than anything else, and it was something Malone kept circling around, the murders didn’t feel personal. Vicious, yes. Horrific, absolutely. But he didn’t think the murders were about the slain themselves. They were nobodies. To the killer, they were nobodies, chosen specifically for that one detail.