Nigel Cawthorne - The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

The normally peaceful Cincinnati suburb of Cumminsville was home to a grisly series of killings in 1904 and 1910. Five women were mercilessly hacked to death within a mile of the intersection of Winton Road and Spring Grove Avenue.

The first victim was 31-year-old Mary McDonald, who had something of a reputation. After an ill-starred affair with the widower of her late sister, she had turned to drink. However, things seemed to have turned a corner for Mary. In the spring of 1904 she got engaged. On the night of 3 May, she had been out with her fiancé. Soon after 1.30 the following morning, they had left a local bar. He walked her to the nearest streetcar stop and put her on board an “owl car” that ran all night and would take her home.

At dawn, the switchman on a train near Ludlow Avenue saw a body by the tracks and called for help. It was Mary. She was still alive but incoherent. One leg had been severed and she had a fractured skull. A few hours later, she died from her injuries. At first, her death was thought to be accidental. A drunken woman had fallen in front of a streetcar. However, the police deduced that she had been beaten before she was pushed in front of a tram. This was clearly a deliberate act of murder.

On 1 October 1904, 21-year-old Louise Mueller went out for a walk. The following morning her body was found in a ditch beside some disused railway tracks. Her skull had been battered to pulp. Her killer had made some effort to conceal her body. In the soft earth nearby, he had dug a shallow grave. But the cadaver had not been put in it, suggesting that the killer had been disturbed before he could bury her.

Eighteen-year-old Alma Steinigewig was last seen alive when she left her job as an operator at the local telephone exchange at 9 p.m. on 2 November. However she never reached home. A streetcar conductor spotted her body the following morning in a vacant lot nearby. Ferocious blows had crushed her skull. In her hand was a streetcar transfer ticket. It had been stamped at 9.40 p.m. on the day she had gone missing. She had been dragged across the lot and her clothes were caked with mud. This time, the police discovered a clue that might help them identify the killer. In the mud of the lot, they found footprints that seemed to belong to the suspect. But, in the end, this took them no further forward.

In response to growing public concern, the police began dragging in suspects. Each, in turn, had to be released due to lack of evidence. However, there was one particular man that they wanted to talk to. He was stocky and heavily bearded, and he had turned up at the gully where Louise Mueller had been found. Seen wringing his hands, he cried out: “It was an accident!” According to other witnesses, a man of a similar description had was seen at the vacant lot where Alma Steinigewig’s body was dumped. But he eluded the police and was never identified. The killer then took a six-year sabbatical and the murders were slowly forgotten.

The first victim of his second spree was 43-year-old Anna Lloyd. A secretary at a local lumber yard, she left work at 5.30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1909. Her body was found a short distance from the office a few hours later. Her skull had been crushed and her throat slashed. It was clear that she had put up fierce resistance. The killer had gagged her with a cheap black muffler. Clutched in her fist, investigators found a single strand of black hair, but this was of little use in identifying the perpetrator, given the primitive state of forensic science in those days. At first, the police initially claimed that Anna Lloyd’s murder was a contract killing, but no motive presented itself and it became clear that this was the work of the Cumminsville serial killer who had last operated in 1904.

There was another long hiatus until 25 October 1910. It was then 26-year-old Mary Hackney was found in her cottage on Dane Street. Her skull had been fractured and her throat slashed. The police initially suspected her husband, but they then established that his wife was still alive when he got to work. Although she was the only victim to get found indoors, the police concluded that she was another victim of the mysterious Cumminsville killer.

The police then received a series of letters from someone claiming to know about the murders. They were signed with the initials “S. D. M.”, but detectives eventually dismissed them as a prank. The investigation then faltered.

However, in December 1913, the Burns Detective Agency were called in to investigate acts of violence associated with a recent strike by streetcar staff. Detectives from the agency told the mayor that they believed that a former conductor, now incurably insane and confined to an asylum was responsible for the death of Anna Lloyd. When searching his rooming house, they had found a menacing letter, addressed to persons “who saw him in the act of December 31”. However, there was no evidence to tie him to the other murders and the Cumminsville murderer seems to have escaped justice.

Kingsbury Run is a prehistoric river bed, some 60 feet deep in parts, that runs across the east side of Cleveland. It was once a beauty spot that ran down to the clear waters of the Cuygahoga River, a wooden area filled with secluded lakes. But as the city grew up it became home to a number of quarries that provided Cleveland’s stone. Rapid industrialization in the 19th century polluted the river, which was lined by steel works and factories, and Nickel Plate and Erie Railroads ran eastwards out of Kingsbury Run.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when poverty drove farmers off the land, the freight lines brought itinerant workers into Cleveland in the slim hope that they would get one of the increasingly rare jobs in the mills. Most of them ended up in a squalid, shanty town next to an area called “The Roaring Third”, home of bars, brothels, flophouses and gambling dens. This backed onto the hobo jungle of Kingsbury Run. It was there, at the height of the Depression, that a bizarre series of murders gripped Cleveland.

On the afternoon of Monday 23 September 1935, two teenage boys were making their way around the foot of an embankment where East 49th Street ends at Praha Avenue, known locally as Jackass Hill, when one of them saw something sticking out from the undergrowth. They went to investigate and found a headless corpse.

When Detectives Orly May and Emil Musil reached the crime scene, they found not one headless corpse, but two. According to the police report the victims were two white men. Both were naked though one retained his socks.

After an extensive search the heads of both men were found. One was 20 feet away from one body. The second was buried some 75 feet away from the other. Both men’s penises had been cut off and were left near one of the heads. Searchers also found a pair of blood-stained long johns, a light cap and an old blue coat.

Both bodies had been washed and drained of blood, indicating that the murders had not taken place where they were found. The detectives noticed that the flesh appeared scorched, either by acid or some corrosive chemical, or oil had been poured over them in an attempt to set them on fire. A metal bucket containing a small quantity of oil and a torch had been found nearby. The attempt to destroy the corpses had been unsuccessful as the bodies had remained more or less intact. But as they had been there several days, they had begun to decompose.

In the County Morgue was it was discovered that the John Doe now known as Victim One had been dead between seven to ten days. He weighed 165 pounds, was around 5 feet 6 inches tall and had dark brown hair. It was determined that he was between 40 and 45 years old. One testicle was missing. The clean edges of the incision showed that a sharp instrument had been used. The muscles of the neck were retracted, indicating that the man had been decapitated while still alive and the cause of death was established as “decapitation, haemorrhage and shock”.