Ten of the Twelve Have No Name: Cleveland's Torso Murders

2026-09-09 · People Without a Name · 7 min read

On the afternoon of September 23, 1935, two boys were running down the slope known as Jackass Hill, on the eastern edge of a gully called Kingsbury Run, when one of them saw something white in the weeds at the bottom. It was a man's body. It had no head. About thirty feet away lay a second body, also headless, older, the skin discoloured and leathery in a way the coroner would later attribute to a chemical preservative. The heads were found buried nearby. Both men had been decapitated, and in both cases the decapitation had been the cause of death, which meant they had been alive when it began.

Kingsbury Run is a natural ravine that cuts through the east side of Cleveland, carrying railway lines down towards the Cuyahoga River. In 1935 it was a corridor of embankments, tracks, weeds and shanties, and the Depression had filled it with men who had nowhere else to be. It was the kind of place where a body could lie for weeks. Over the next three years the police would keep coming back to it.

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