The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (17 page)

The two victims of August 1938 proved to be the Butcher’s last – at least in Cleveland. In Pittsburgh in 1940 three decapitated bodies were found in old boxcars. Members of Ness’s team went to investigate, but no clue to the treble murder was ever discovered. The Mad Butcher was also blamed for the Black Dahlia killing in Hollywood in 1947, when an aspiring film actress named Elizabeth Short was dissected, like victim number seven. It seems highly unlikely, however, that the Mad Butcher survived that long; a large percentage of sadistic killers commit suicide.

Steven Nickel’s book on the case,
Torso
(1989), makes it clear that there were many suspects in Cleveland who might have been capable of committing the murders. One man, nicknamed the “Chicken Freak”, was known to the prostitutes of the third precinct because he could achieve orgasm only when watching a chicken being decapitated; he would go to a brothel with two live chickens and a large butcher knife. Naked prostitutes would be asked to behead the chickens while he looked on and masturbated; if he failed to reach a climax, the bloody knife had to be rubbed against his throat. Finally arrested, the “Chicken
Freak” proved to be a truck driver who admitted that he made a habit of intercourse with chickens. But he was so obviously nauseated when shown photographs of the Torso victims that he was allowed to go.

Why have the Torso murders never achieved the same grim celebrity as the crimes of Jack the Ripper? The reason is that Cleveland in the mid-1930s was a far more violent city than London in the 1880s and the crimes made far less impact on the public imagination than the Ripper’s sadistic murder of prostitutes in Victorian London. Ten years before the Cleveland murders began, six decapitated male bodies were found in a swamp near New Castle, a small town ninety miles southeast of Cleveland. The victims were never identified; the local police concluded that they had been killed by gangsters in the course of bootleg wars and that the swamp was a convenient dumping ground.

Sadly, the last decade of Eliot Ness’s life – he died in 1957, at the age of fifty-four – was full of poverty and disappointment. He resigned as Cleveland’s Safety Director in April 1941, after a scandal involving a hit-and-run accident. In 1947 he was heavily defeated when he ran for the post of mayor of Cleveland. A year later he was even turned down for a sixty-dollar-a-week job. “He simply ran out of gas” said one friend. In 1953, after five years of obscurity and poverty, he became involved with a paper-making company tottering on the verge of bankruptcy. But it was through a friend in the company that Ness met a journalist named Oscar Fraley and began telling him the story of his anti-bootlegging days. In the course of their conversations, Ness told Fraley that he was reasonably certain that he knew the identity of the Torso killer and that he had driven him out of Cleveland.

Ness told Fraley the following: He had reasoned that the killer was a man who had a house of his own in which he could dismember the bodies and a car in which he could transport them. So he was
not
, after all, a down-and-out. The skill of the mutilations suggested medical training, or at least a certain degree of medical knowledge. The fact that some of the victims had been strong men suggested that the Butcher had to be big and powerful – a conclusion supported by a size-12 footprint near one of the bodies.

Ness had three of his top agents, Virginia Allen, Barney Davis, and Jim Manski, make inquiries among the upper levels of Cleveland society. Virginia was a sophisticated woman with contacts among Cleveland socialites, and it was she who learned about a man who sounded like the ideal suspect. The suspect, whom Ness was to call “Gaylord Sundheim”, was a big man from a well-to-do family who had a history of psychiatric problems. He had also studied medicine. When
the three “Untouchables” called on him, he leered sarcastically at Virginia and closed the door in their faces. Ness invited him – pressingly – to lunch, and he came under protest. He refused either to admit or deny having performed the murders. Ness persuaded him to take a lie detector test, and “Sundheim’s” answers to questions about the murders were registered by the stylus as lies. When Ness finally told him he believed he was the Torso killer – hoping that shock tactics might trigger a confession – “Sundheim” sneered, “Prove it”.

Soon after this, “Sundheim” had himself committed to a mental institution. Ness knew
he
was now “untouchable”, for even if Ness could prove his guilt, he could plead insanity.

Ness went on to collabourate with Fraley on a book entitled
The Untouchables
. It came out in 1957 and was an immense success, becoming a bestseller and leading to a famous TV series. But Ness never knew about its success; he had died of a heart attack on 16 May 1957, six months before
The Untouchables
was published.

10

Crop Circles

UFOs, Whirlwinds, or Hoaxers?

On 15 August 1980, the
Wiltshire Times
carried an odd report concerning the apparently wanton vandalism of a field of oats near Westbury in Wiltshire, England. The owner of the field, John Scull, had found his oats crushed to the ground in three separate areas, all within sight of the famous White Horse of Westbury, a hillside figure cut into the chalk. It seemed obvious to Scull that the crops had been damaged by people rather than natural phenomena since the areas were identical in shape and size: almost perfect circles, each sixty feet in diameter.

It was also noted that the circles had apparently been produced manually rather than mechanically, since there was no sign that any kind of machinery had been moved through the field. In fact, there seemed to be no evidence of
anything
crossing the field; the circles were surrounded by undamaged oats, with no paths that would indicate intruders. One speculation was that the vandals had used stilts.

Close examination of the flattened cereal revealed that the circles had not been made at the same time – that in fact, the damage had been spread over a period of two or three months, probably between May and the end of July. The edges of the circles were sharply defined, and all the grain within the circles was flattened in the same direction, creating a clockwise swirling effect around the centres. None of the oats had been cut – merely flattened. The effect might have been produced by a very tall, strong man standing in the centre of each circle and swinging a heavy weight around on a long piece of rope.

Dr Terence Meaden, an atmospheric physicist from nearby Bradford-on-Avon and a senior member of the Tornado and Storm Research Organization (TORRO), suggested that the circles had been produced by a summer whirlwind. Such wind effects are not uncommon on open farmland. But Dr Meaden had to admit that he had never seen or heard of a whirlwind creating circles. Whirlwinds tend to scud about
randomly, pausing for only a few seconds in any one place, so one might expect a random pathway through the crop.

Another interesting fact was noted by Ian Mrzyglod, editor of the “anomaly” magazine
The PROBE Report
. The “centre point” on all three circles was actually off centre by as much as four feet. The swirling patterns around these points were therefore oval, not circular. This seemed to contradict the vandal theory – vandals would hardly go to the trouble of creating precise ellipses. It also made Meaden’s whirlwind explanation seem less plausible.

Almost exactly a year later, on 19 August 1981, another three-circle formation appeared in a wheatfield below Cheesefoot Head, near Winchester in Hampshire. These circles had been created simultaneously and, unlike the widely dispersed circles in Wiltshire, were in close formation – one circle sixty feet across with two twenty-five-foot circles on either side. But the sides of these circles had the same precise edges as the Wiltshire circles, and again, the swirl of the flattened plants was slightly off-centre, creating ellipses. And again there were no paths through the grain to indicate intruders.

The new evidence seemed to undermine the natural-causes theory. Instead of a neat, stationary whirlwind creating only one circle, Meaden now had to argue the existence of an atmospheric disturbance that hopscotched across the landscape and produced circles of different sizes. Meaden suggested that perhaps peculiarities of terrain created this effect – the field in question was on a concave, “punchbowl” slope, and this might indeed have caused the vortex to “jump”.

There were a few isolated reports of similar incidents in 1982, but they were unspectacular and excited little attention. As if to make up for it, a series of five-circle phenomena began in 1983, one of them at Bratton, again close to the White Horse of Westbury. These were clearly not caused by whirlwinds, for they consisted of one large circle with four smaller ones spaced around it like the number five on a die. A “quintuplet” appeared in Cley Hill, near Warminster – a town that, in earlier years, had had more than its share of “flying saucer” sightings. Another appeared in a field below Ridgeway near Wantage in Oxfordshire. Quintuplets were no longer freaks but were virtually the norm.

Now the national press began to cover the phenomena. The British press often refer to the summer as the “silly season” because, for some odd reason, there is often a shortage of good news stories in the hot months of the year, and newspapers tend to make up for the deficiency by blowing up trivia into major news stories. Crop circles answered the need perfectly, with the result that the British public soon became
familiar with the strange circle formations. UFO enthusiasts appeared on television explaining their view that the phenomena could be explained only by flying saucers. Skeptics preferred the notion of fraud.

This latter view seemed to be confirmed when a second quintuplet found at Bratton turned out to be a hoax sponsored by the
Daily Mirror
; a family named Shepherd had been paid to duplicate the other Bratton circles. They did this by entering the field on stilts and trampling the crops underfoot. But, significantly, the hoax was quickly detected by Bob Rickard, the editor of an anomaly magazine, the
Fortean Times
, who noted the telltale signs of human intruders, which had not been present in earlier circles, and the fact that the edges of the circles were quite rough and imprecise. The aim of the hoax was to embarrass the competing tabloid, the
Daily Express
, which had originally scooped the cropcircle story.

Over the next two years the number of circles increased, as did their complexity. There were crop circles with “rings” around them – flattened pathways several feet wide that ran around the outer edge in a neat circle. Some were even found with two or three such rings. At the same time the quintuplet formations and “singletons” also continued to appear.

It began to look as if whoever – or whatever – was creating the circles took pleasure in taunting the investigators. When believers in the whirlwind theory pointed out that the swirling had so far been clockwise, a counterclockwise circle promptly appeared. When it was suggested that a hoaxer might be making the circles with the aid of a helicopter, a crop circle was found directly beneath a power line. When an aerial photographer named Busty Taylor was flying home after photographing crop circles and mentioned that he would like to see a formation in the shape of a Celtic cross, a Celtic cross appeared the next day in the field over which he had been flying. And, as if to rule out all possibility that natural causes could be responsible, one “sextuplet” in Hampshire in 1990 had keylike objects sticking out of the sides of three circles, producing the impression of an ancient pictogram. Another crop “pattern” of 1990 (at Chilcomb) seemed to represent a kind of chemical retort with a long neck, with four rectangles neatly spaced on either side of it, making nonsense of Meaden’s insistence that the circles were caused by “natural atmospheric forces”.

Rickard brought together a number of eyewitness descriptions of the actual appearance of circles:

The high-pitched humming sound may be significant. It was noted on another occasion, on 16 June 1991, when a seventy-five-foot circle (with a “bull’s-eye” in the centre) appeared on Bolberry Down, near Salcombe in Devon. A local ham-radio operator named Lew Dilling was tuned into a regular frequency when strange high-pitched blips and clicks emerged. He recognized the sounds as being the same as others that had been heard in connection with crop-circle incidents. “The signals were so powerful”, said Dilling, “that you could hear them in the background of Radio Moscow and Voice of America – and they would normally swamp everything”.

The landlord of the local pub, Sean Hassall, learned of the crop circle indirectly when his spaniel went berserk and began tearing up the carpet, doing considerable damage.

The owner of the field, Dudley Stidson, was alerted to the circle by two walkers. He went to the six-acre hayfield and found a giant circle in the centre. But this one differed from many such circles in that the hay was burned, as if someone had put a huge hot-plate on it. Stidson emphasized that there was no sign of intrusion in the field, such as trampled wheat.