Hell's Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders

by Badal

Did the Mad Butcher of Cleveland also strike in Pennsylvania? From 1934 to 1938, Cleveland, Ohio, was racked by a classic battle between good and evil. On one side was the city’s safety director, Eliot Ness. On the other was a nameless phantom dubbed the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who littered the inner city with the remains of decapitated and dismembered corpses. Never caught or even officially identified, the Butcher simply faded into history, leaving behind a frightening legend that both haunts and fascinates Cleveland to this day. In 2001 the Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal’s In the Wake of the Cleveland’s Torso Murders, the first serious, book-length treatment of this dark chapter in true crime history. Though Murder Has No The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher ―a detailed study of the arrest and mysterious death of Frank Dolezal, the only man ever charged in the killings ― followed in 2010. Now Badal concludes his examination of the horrific cycle of murder-dismemberments with Hell’s The Pennsylvania Torso Murders . During the mid-1920s, a vast, swampy area just across the Ohio border near New Castle, Pennsylvania, revealed a series of decapitated and otherwise mutilated bodies. In 1940 railroad workers found the rotting remains of three naked and decapitated bodies in a string of derelict boxcars awaiting destruction in Pennsylvania’s Stowe Township. Were all of these terrible murders the work of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher? Many in Ohio and Pennsylvania law enforcement thought they were, and that assumption led to a massive, well-coordinated two-state investigation. In Hell’s Wasteland , Badal explores that nagging question in depth for the first time. Relying on police reports, unpublished memoirs, and the surviving autopsy protocols―as well as contemporary newspaper coverage― Badal provides a detailed examination of the murder-dismemberments and weighs the evidence that potentially links them to the Cleveland carnage. Hell’s Wasteland is the last piece in the gigantic torso murder puzzle that spanned three decades, covered two states, and involved law enforcement from as many as five different cities.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Crime

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[K.A. Krisko · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very clinical analysis of a series of decapitation/dismemberment-style murders in Pennsylvania in the 1920s - 1950s. Detailed, with as much information as could possibly be pulled together at this late date, it includes a statistical analysis of victim characteristics that takes up a large part of the last quarter of the book. I found it a little difficult to read due to the text-book like quality of the writing, and while true crime often must rehearse dry facts and background, usually the author makes a little more effort to ease the presentation. I also found it somewhat, dare I say...disjointed.

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really interesting read, about a series of torso murders in PA that overlapped with the ones in OH. I really disagreed with a lot of the author's conclusions and I could not even follow the statistical analysis at the back of the book, but the read was very worthwhile, frustrating mostly because so little documentation of any kind has survived to give me -- or the author! -- something we can sink our teeth into. The book needed a final copyedit -- "reek" and "wreak" are NOT interchangeable words -- but I want to thank the author in front of the whole Internet for never once using the idiotic phrase "decapitated head" in his book.

[David Vinther · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent read for anyone with an interest in true crime in general, or the Cleveland Torso Murders in particular. The author makes the most out of seemingly very little remaining information about the murders in PA that are constantly tied to the ones in Cleveland, but the book does feel a little sparse. This is the authors third trip into the crimes and he only mentions the other two books he's written on the subject about a hundred times. Those admittedly minor gripes aside, the book in interesting and informative.