Max Collins - Butcher's dozen

Wild's smirk dissolved and he stared at Ness with a curious blankness. "Aren't you afraid?"

"Not really."

"Don't shit me, Eliot. Don't you realize what you've done?"

"Sure. I'm risking embarrassment… maybe a career setback.. if I don't pull this one off."

"Embarrassment? Career setback? You've come out and publicly made the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run your personal public enemy number one! That sick fucking son of a bitch is into wholesale human slaughter."

"I noticed," Ness said, taking Wild's arm, leading him into the lab, where the men were settling into their chairs, to one of which Ness led Wild. "Now sit down and get out your notepad. You ain't seen nothing yet."

"I haven't been covering this ghoulish damn story-"

"Well, you are now," Ness said, and sat him down.

He walked down the aisle and turned and faced the assemblage of men, many of whom were trusted colleagues, such as Cullitan and Matowitz, while others-such as the various doctors who'd been asked in as experts-he knew only by reputation.

"Again, my thanks to all of you for rallying at such short notice," he said. "This is an emergency measure, as with the recent discovery of Butcher victim number nine, it's clear that these inhuman killings have reached epidemic proportions. It's my hope that this conference will channel various expert opinions-pointing the way toward a solution to this mystery. I'd like to turn the proceedings over to Coroner Gerber."

There was polite applause as Coroner Gerber, a small, sallow man, rose from the front row and began by taking off his suit coat. Most others in the room followed the coroners lead, as the several wall-mounted fans weren't nearly up to combating the warmth of this summer night. Ness, who left his coat on, sat in the front row.

Gerber, eyes large and dark and mournful behind wire-frame glasses, was a man of forty who looked older, white beginning to overtake his dark hair, including his mustache, lines creasing his face.

Nonetheless, he had great energy as he spoke, moving restlessly before his audience.

"This mass-murder mystery is the equal of any of the famous mass-murder cases known in history," Gerber said with a strange combination of enthusiasm and dread. "Equal in interest, gruesomeness, and-most important, gentlemen-ingenuity on the part of the murderer." He glanced toward the back of the room and said, "Lights."

And the lights went out and the projector came on. In photos sometimes larger than life, the sorry parade of dismembered bodies began.

Of the victims whose bodies were found by the two boys at the bottom of Jackass Hill on September 23, 1935, one had been identified, through fingerprints: the younger man, Edward Andrassy, twenty-eight years old, a minor street tough in the so-called Roaring Third precinct, the seedy, crime-ridden area adjacent to Kingsbury Run. Possibly a homosexual, Andrassy had once been employed at Cleveland City Hospital as an orderly. The older, stocky victim had not been identified.

On January 26, 1936, in the Roaring Third itself, the next victim emerged, in several installments. First, a local butcher, attracted by the insistent barking of a dog behind a nearby factory, found various body parts of a white woman-lower torso, right arm, both thighs-wrapped in newspaper, left in two burlap bags and a half-bushel basket. Thirteen days later, the left arm and lower legs turned up behind an empty building on Orange Avenue, SE, near East Fourteenth Street. Though the head had not yet turned up, identification was made by fingerprints, an identification confirmed by the woman's ex-husband, who recognized an abdominal scar. The woman was Florence Polillo, a forty-one-year-old, heavyset, heavy-drinking prostitute.

On June 5, 1936, two colored youngsters playing hooky from school were wandering Kingsbury Run much as had those two other boys in 1935. Just half a mile from Jackass Hill, the boys noticed a pair of trousers balled up and stuck under a tree on the embankment. One of the boys grabbed a stick and poked at the pants, and a head rolled out and tumbled to their feet.

This was the head of the handsome young man, thought to be a sailor, whose heavily tattooed body had turned up intact in bushes nearby; the elaborate body markings seemed to insure prompt identification. While the sailor's fingerprints were not on file, a poster detailing his tattoos and including a photo of his handsome, almost pretty, dead face had been widely circulated to the press (and was still on display at the expo). To date, he remained unidentified.

On July 22, 1936, a man's head had been found separated from his body; the two lay fifteen feet apart in the weeds near railroad tracks and a hobo camp, in the dismal, desolate Big Creek region on the West Side of town. This victim-like the tattooed apparent sailor-had not been emasculated. He remained unidentified, his death mask on display at the expo.

On September 10, 1936, a hobo hopping a freight spotted two halves of a male torso bobbing in the fetid, stagnant pool where the sewers flowed out from under Kingsbury Run into the Cuyahoga. Police fished out the torso halves, then with grappling hooks brought up the lower legs and thighs. Then they provided a diver with the thankless job of the decade: to go exploring for the arms and head in the pool of excrement. When this task proved as fruitless as it had been unpleasant, the pool was drained, flushed with a fire hose. No head. No arms. No identification. Also no genitals: the Butcher had, with this victim, reverted to his emasculating ways.

February 23rd of this year, the upper torso of a young woman washed up on Euclid beach from the icy waters of Lake Erie, where it had apparently drifted from the Cuyahoga. The woman was not identified, but the discovery caused police to recall another similar incident.

Two and a half years before, on September 5, 1934, a man gathering driftwood on that same beach had discovered the lower torso of a woman; a few days later, a suitcase containing the headless upper torso was fished out of the same waters. Prior to the February 23rd discovery, Gerber conceded, this slaying had not been connected to the Mad Butcher. It had not yet been officially added to the roster.

On June 5th, a fourteen-year-old boy walking under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, kicking stones, kicked a skull. The rest of the skeleton was nearby. The body had probably been under the bridge for nearly a year, Gerber said; the victim had been decapitated, but the skeleton was otherwise intact-including bridgework with three gold teeth. From the formation of the jawbone and the skull, Dr. Watterson, professor of anatomy at Western Reserve University School of Medicine, had deduced the victim was a colored woman.

"Which brings us to the most recent victim," Gerber said as slides of the Third Street Bridge discovery began filling the screen, "who has yet to be identified. What we know about this deceased gentleman is that he was approximately six feet tall, weighed one hundred and eighty-to-ninety pounds… and his heart, liver, and various other vital organs were removed. Lights."

As the lights came up, the men on the folding chairs winced as their eyes got used to the light. Ness glanced around at them; this was a somber group, sickened and perhaps numbed by the shocking, dismaying material they'd viewed in Gerber's wall display and his slide presentation. Overkill on Gerber's part, perhaps; but overkill on the part of the Butcher, most certainly.

Ness rose, turned, and spoke to his audience. "Seeing this panoply of the Butchers handiwork should bring home to us just what it is we're facing-just what it is we have to put an end to. Now, I've asked Dr. Strauss, our county pathologist, to say a few words."

Strauss, a dignified, heavyset man, displayed on an easel a large chart of the crimes, comparing them as to dismemberments, condition of bodies, clothing, and other factors. He mentioned that the decapitations were invariably made between the third and fourth vertebrae of the neck.