Strange Sight | CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND UNSOLVED CASES

(4) Unsolved Cases

[OVERVIEW]

As much as we wish to believe every victim will get their justice that just isn't the case. There are hundreds of unsolved cases, some as minor as stealing something off your front porch to something major like murder.

With technology getting better many of these cases get reopened but even then some cases just cannot be solved.

[CLEVELAND TORSO MURDERER]

In the 1930s a string of murders happened in the neighborhood of Kingbury Run. The killer became known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer.

The Torso Murderer always beheaded and often dismembered his victims, occasionally severing the victim's torso in half or severing their appendages. In many cases the cause of death was the decapitation or dismemberment itself. Most of the male victims were castrated, and some victims showed evidence of chemical treatment being applied to their bodies. Many of the victims were found after a considerable period of time following their deaths; occasionally in excess of a year.

The official number of deaths is 12 but it is believed to have been 20 victims.

The victims were drifters and people of lower classes. So when found they couldn't be identified because they had no connection to anyone.

Of the 12 known victims only 2 have been identified.

On August 24, 1939, a Cleveland resident named Frank Dolezal, 52, was arrested as a suspect in Florence Polillo's murder; he later died in suspicious circumstances in the Cuyahoga County jail.

Most investigators consider the last canonical murder to have been in 1938. One suspected individual was Dr. Francis E. Sweeney. Sweeney was a veteran of World War I who was part of a medical unit that conducted amputations in the field. Sweeney was later personally interviewed by Eliot Ness, who oversaw the official investigation into the killings in his capacity as Cleveland's Safety Director. During this interrogation, Sweeney is said to have "failed to pass" two very early polygraph machine tests. Both tests were administered by polygraph expert Leonarde Keeler, who told Ness he had his man. Nevertheless, Ness apparently felt there was little chance of obtaining a successful prosecution of the doctor, especially as he was the first cousin of one of Ness's political opponents, Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, who had hounded Ness publicly about his failure to catch the killer. After Sweeney committed himself, there were no more leads or connections that police could assign to him as a possible suspect. From his hospital confinement, threatening postcards with Sweeney's name mocked and harassed Ness and his family into the 1950s. Sweeney died in a veterans' hospital in Dayton in 1964.

In 1997, another theory postulated that there may have been no single Butcher of Kingsbury Run because the murders could have been committed by different people. This was based on the assumption that the autopsy results were inconclusive. First, Cuyahoga County Coroner Arthur J. Pearce may have been inconsistent in his analysis as to whether the cuts on the bodies were expert or slapdash. Second, his successor, Samuel Gerber, who began to enjoy press attention from his involvement in such cases as the Sam Sheppard murder trial, garnered a reputation for sensational theories. Therefore, the only thing known for certain was that all the murder victims were dismembered.

[CHICAGO TYLENOL]

There was once a time where safety deals weren't on every bottle of pills. This was the same time where all Tylenol were in capsules instead of pills. This proved to be a very fatal mistake but caused medicine companies to take more precautions.

In 1982 a total of 7 people died after taking some Tylenol. When they looked into it it was discovered that someone put Cyanide into the capsules.

On September 29, 1982, twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, died after taking a capsule of Extra-Strength Tylenol.