A “run” is an old-timey word for a creek or stream, like Bull Run.  Kingsbury Run is a winding creek and valley in southeastern Cleveland, Ohio.  It fed into the Cuyahoga River near the city’s main industrial and railroad area, the “Flats.”  The valley had served as a transportation route, an industrial site, a drainage route for rainwater, and as a kind of boundary between different communities on the higher ground.  By the late 1920s, it had returned to Nature to some extent.  Up on the east side above the “run,” there grew up a working-class entertainment district: bars and brothels, gambling joints and cheap hotels.  When the Depression hit, Kingsbury Run became home to one of Cleveland’s shanty towns housing poor people. 

            Between 23 September 1935 and 16 August 1938, all or parts of ten dismembered bodies were discovered.  Most were in the area of Kingsbury Run, one on the city’s west side, and one in Columbus, Ohio.  Only three of them could even be tentatively identified.  Six men and four women who shared anonymity in a grisly fate.[1] 

            To make matters worse, other murders in other places and at other times bore a marked resemblance to the Cleveland killings.  In September 1934, part of a dismembered woman’s body had been fished out of Lake Erie outside the Cleveland city limits.  At various times between 1921 and 1942, dismembered or decapitated bodies were found in waste ground near railroad yards in western Pennsylvania.  A Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line (B&O) connected Pittsburg with Cleveland (and with Columbus).  The police were willing to consider the possibility that all these were the handywork of one person.[2]  All things considered, it might be better for the public’s peace of mind if only one uncatchable demented killer existed. 

            The manhunt for the killer dragged on.  Although the police never caught the killer, their investigation solved 1,000 other crimes.[3]  Perhaps reasonably, perhaps out of desperation, some detectives focused on Dr. Francis Sweeney (1894-1964).  He fit the bill for a demented disassembler of humans.  Sweeney was a doctor who had worked at a hospital near the Run; an apparently “shell-shocked” (PTSD) veteran of the First World War, where he had served in a medical unit doing lots of amputations; a gas casualty suffering nerve damage; a severe alcoholic who had ruptured many relationships; and the cousin of a bitter critic of Cleveland Public Safety Director Eliot Ness.[4]  Confronted by Ness in 1938, Sweeney checked himself into a veterans hospital.  The killings specific to Kingsbury Run stopped. 

            One of the lead detectives wasn’t so sure.  Both the murders in Cleveland and the similar ones elsewhere along the B&O lines suggested to him that the killer might be one of the many hobos or tramps “riding the rails” during the Depression.[5]  Equally possibly, the killer might have been a railroad man, the “Headless Brakeman of Demon Run” so to speak. 

[1] Daniel Stashower, American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (2022). 

[2] Elizabeth Short–the “Black Dahlia”–killed in Los Angeles in 1947, also suffered wounds very similar to those of the Cleveland victims.  Perhaps the killer, like so many other people, had gone West to help with the war effort. 

[3] Sort of like in “M” (dir. Fritz Lang, 1930). 

[4] Ness had made a name for himself fighting Al Capone and organized crime in Chicago in the 1930s.  In 1936, Ness became the Public Safety Director in Cleveland.  Cleveland wasn’t Chicago, but it was bad enough and in the same ways.  There was multi-ethnic organized crime running gambling and prostitution, while both the police and the city government were riddled with corruption.  Ness got to work on all fronts, making many enemies. 

[5] On “Tramps,” see: Tramp – Wikipedia; on “Hobos,” see: Hobo – Wikipedia