PRAGMATIC ISSUES

 

Why the Cleveland Torso Killer, Glasgow’s Butcher, and the Black Dahlia Murder May Share One Hand

for Pragmatic Issues

Just in time for Halloween, we thought it would be fitting to revisit three old, and by old i am talking the 1930’s old unsolved crimes. Some would lead you to believe that they are not connected however, if you study enough true crime you can clearly see that maybe, just maybe they are.

It starts in the smoke-choked riverbeds of 1930s Cleveland, drifts through the rain-slick alleys of pre-war Glasgow, and resurfaces in the sterile sunlight of post-war Los Angeles.

Three crimes.

Three cities.

Three continents’ worth of horror yet one strikingly similar hand, precise, bloodless, surgical, and cruel.

The question is no longer whether these killings were similar.

It’s whether the killer or someone trained exactly like him crossed the Atlantic to continue his work.

Cleveland — the Anatomy of a Debut

Between 1934 and 1938, the working-class districts of Cleveland, Ohio, became the hunting grounds of a phantom.

At least twelve victims, many transients, laborers, or sex workers living in the shantytowns of Kingsbury Run  were found decapitated and dismembered. The torsos were dumped along the Cuyahoga River and the Lake Erie shoreline, stripped of identifiers, often drained of blood.

The coroner’s reports were chillingly consistent, clean dissections through vertebrae and joints, cuts so anatomical they could have been done in a medical theater. There was no blood at the dump sites meaning the victims had been killed and drained elsewhere.

Whoever did this had time, privacy, and skill.

Public Safety Director Eliot Ness yes, that Ness, of “Untouchables” fame led the investigation. He ordered shantytowns burned in a desperate effort to flush the killer out. It didn’t work.

Then the killings stopped abruptly in 1938, leaving Ness haunted and the city scarred.

Among Ness’s prime suspects was Dr. Francis Sweeney, a World War I surgeon known for bouts of alcoholism and psychosis. He failed two lie detector tests, voluntarily committed himself to a veterans’ hospital, and spent the rest of his life sending Ness mocking postcards from inside the asylum. The messages always read: “You’ll never catch me.”

Sweeney was never charged. But the precision of his wartime field surgeries performed in muddy trenches under chaos bears a haunting echo in the Cleveland corpses, bloodless, efficient dismemberment, an almost academic detachment.

The “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” as the press named him, vanished after 1938.

Or perhaps, he just booked passage.

The Transatlantic Echo

Across the ocean, Britain was still catching its breath between wars when Scotland met its own monster. In 1935, the “Jigsaw Murders” rocked Dumfriesshire, two women, their dismembered remains wrapped in newspaper and scattered along a river. The killer turned out to be Dr. Buck Ruxton, a physician in Lancaster who had murdered his wife and housemaid.

Ruxton’s surgical precision mirrored Cleveland’s killer  disarticulations at the joints, blood drained, bodies scrubbed. Forensic scientists in Glasgow pieced the corpses together like puzzles (hence the name “Jigsaw Murders”) and caught Ruxton, who was executed in 1936.

Yet Ruxton’s crime didn’t end the phenomenon. In 1937 and 1938, Scotland particularly the River Clyde and the backstreets of Glasgow saw two more torso discoveries, both of women, both mutilated with surgical care.

Unlike Ruxton, no one was ever charged.

The Glasgow torso cases, as they’re now called, occurred exactly as the Cleveland killings were winding down and they share more than coincidence, both involve bisected torsos, body parts dumped in waterways, and evidence of anatomical skill.

It’s not impossible that Ruxton inspired imitators but it’s also not implausible that the Cleveland killer himself crossed the Atlantic. Steamship routes from New York to Liverpool or Glasgow in 1938 were cheap, fast, and teeming with soldiers, doctors, and emigrants. A disgraced American medic, eager to escape mounting police pressure, could vanish easily into wartime Europe.

By late 1938, Ness received a cryptic letter from someone claiming to be the Cleveland murderer, writing that he had “moved to California” and “buried a head there.” Historians tend to dismiss it as a hoax.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if it was a breadcrumb, a hint of transit?

A man skilled enough to dissect twelve people and never leave a trace could just as easily cross an ocean unnoticed.

Los Angeles — The Exhibition

Eight years later, January 15, 1947. Los Angeles.

A woman out for a morning walk in Leimert Park discovered what she thought was a mannequin tossed in the grass.

It wasn’t. It was Elizabeth Short, the 22-year-old aspiring actress whom history now calls The Black Dahlia.

Her body had been cleanly bisected at the waist, a surgical hemicorporectomy, the kind performed in hospitals when lower-body trauma demands amputation.

The cut was textbook.

The body had been washed, drained of blood, and posed. The mouth had been slashed from ear to ear, forming what journalists morbidly dubbed a “Glasgow smile.”

No blood at the scene.

No evidence of struggle.

The killer had worked elsewhere, then delivered his “masterpiece” for the public to see.

To investigators, it was the work of someone comfortable with anatomy. Coroners noted a “clinical” level of precision. LAPD detectives quietly reached out to Cleveland police they were already aware of the old torso cases and wondered if the killer had resurfaced.

Their inquiry went nowhere. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, no photographs of the suspect and too much time had passed.

Decades later, former LAPD detective Steve Hodel accused his father, Dr. George Hodel, a prominent Los Angeles surgeon, of being the killer.

His reasoning?

His father had both the surgical expertise and a mansion with a tiled basement suitable for “clean work.” He’d also been investigated for the sexual assault of his own daughter, fled the country in 1950, and once said “Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia, they couldn’t prove it now.”

Steve Hodel’s theory made headlines. But even he noted something striking, the similarities between the Black Dahlia and Cleveland’s murders.

The same types of cuts.

The same draining.

The same medical coldness.

If George Hodel was indeed the Dahlia killer, could he also have been the Cleveland killer? Or, perhaps more plausibly, did he inherit the technique from someone else another doctor, another veteran, perhaps one who’d trained in Europe or served alongside American medics in the 1930s?

That link, the transatlantic movement of surgeons, field medics, and pathologists between wars may be the connective tissue between the three horrors.

The Atlantic as Accomplice

It’s tempting to see these crimes as local aberrations, each born of its city’s darkness, Cleveland’s Depression-era despair, Glasgow’s industrial poverty, Los Angeles’s broken-dream glamour.

But viewed together, they chart a single, chilling migration.

From 1934 to 1947, the world’s medical professions were in flux. War and reconstruction moved doctors across borders like chess pieces. American and British surgeons shared training programs, wartime hospitals, and research exchanges. Passenger lists from 1937–1939 show dozens of doctors traveling between New York, Glasgow, and London including several Cleveland practitioners seeking wartime placements.

The Mad Butcher could easily have been one of them, a man trained to heal but obsessed with cutting, hiding among colleagues in wartime medicine.

A transfer to the UK would have placed him in the right geography for the Glasgow torso cases. A post-war relocation to California, the booming center of aerospace and medical research, would complete the triangle.

There’s circumstantial precedent. Dr. Francis Sweeney, the Cleveland suspect, was institutionalized but not confined, his records show travel permissions and visits.

The letter Ness received mentioning California came in 1938 before America entered WWII but when many American doctors volunteered or relocated to Europe.

By the time the war ended, the migration pipeline flowed the other way, skilled European doctors seeking American residency, often under aliases.

Whether by ship’s manifest or wartime credential exchange, a killer with a medical background had every opportunity and motive to cross the ocean undetected.

The Signature That Doesn’t Fade

Three continents, same signature:

• Anatomical mastery. every cut controlled, every joint disarticulated properly.
• Absence of blood, indicating pre- or post-mortem drainage in a sterile setting.
• Body posing, from Cleveland’s dumps to LA’s manicured lawns, an evolving artistry of exposure.
• Marginalized victims, people whose disappearances drew little attention until their remains forced the public to look.

By the Black Dahlia’s time, the killer wasn’t hiding. He was performing.

If Cleveland was a training ground and Glasgow a rehearsal, Los Angeles was the grand exhibition, a theater of horror crafted for newspapers.

And if it was the same man, the arc of his crimes suggests something beyond mere murder. It suggests a surgeon’s narcissism, a pathological need for precision, and perhaps the final expression of a lifelong experiment in dismemberment.

Why This Theory Still Matters

Skeptics will scoff. No fingerprint, no DNA, no signed confession.

But the pattern is undeniable, and the opportunity was there.

When we examine the timeline Cleveland (1934-38), Glasgow (1937-38), Los Angeles (1947) the gaps align perfectly with transatlantic travel and wartime displacement.

The cutting style, the drainage, the psychological coldness all identical.

To dismiss it is to underestimate how porous the world already was before the jet age. Ships and medical residencies carried men and their obsessions farther and faster than we think.

And beyond the forensic intrigue lies a moral one. Each case reminds us how society overlooks the forgotten until a headline makes them visible.

The Cleveland victims were shantytown ghosts.

The Glasgow women were poor and unnamed.

Elizabeth Short was mocked by tabloids before she was mourned.

The killer didn’t just prey on anonymity he relied on it.

His transatlantic journey mirrors a darker truth that the powerless can vanish across oceans without consequence, and only their mutilated remains force us to notice.

A Surgeon’s Shadow

So maybe it wasn’t a coincidence.

Maybe it was a career.

A surgeon turned killer, a doctor turned butcher, traveling with the tide of history, Cleveland’s Great Depression, Glasgow’s industrial decay, Los Angeles’s post-war glitter  leaving perfect dissections as his calling cards.

If he did cross the Atlantic, he didn’t just carry scalpels and gloves.

He carried a method, a mania, a manifesto written in flesh.

And though his name may never surface, his handwriting remains unmistakable carved across three cities, two continents, and a decade of human failure.

That’s the terrible beauty of the theory, it isn’t about proof.

It’s about pattern.

And when you lay the bodies end to end, the cuts line up too cleanly to ignore.