1THE LADY IN THE LAKE
“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this.”
Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake
Before leaving for work each morning, Frank LaGassie, a thirty-four-year-old photostat operator, often wandered up and down the southern shore of Lake Erie looking for driftwood. On that particular morning—September 5, 1934—LaGassie found himself near the familiar stone archway of the Euclid Beach amusement park. Euclid Beach, patterned on New York’s Coney Island, was a Cleveland institution. It featured an iconic wooden roller coaster called the Thriller, an elegant carousel with hand-carved horses and chariots, and a beloved line of concessions featuring handmade “Humphrey’s Kisses” and sugar-coated popcorn balls. At this stage of its long history, the park operated under an uplifting slogan: “Nothing to depress or demoralize.”
For several days, Cleveland’s weather had been both depressing and demoralizing, with heavy banks of low clouds pressing in to trap the greasy smoke from nearby factories. In the Cleveland Press, a local weatherman explained that there hadn’t been enough wind to disperse the city’s industrial gloom, creating conditions that all but repelled the sun’s rays. Cleveland, according to the Press, might soon be known as “The Dark City.”
Shortly before eight, Frank LaGassie caught sight of something—a tree trunk, perhaps—half buried in the sand. Moving closer, he saw that the object was in fact a large rotting slab of human flesh. Repulsed, LaGassie took a step back and struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. The blanched, grisly mass appeared to be the lower half of a woman’s torso, severed midway through the spine. The legs, still attached, had been hacked off at the knees. From a distance, it might have been a broken mannequin. A closer view brought horrifying angles of bone, viscera, and loose flaps of skin.
Gathering himself, LaGassie turned and ran to a nearby house to call the police. Within hours, the remains had been transported to Cuyahoga County’s two-story brick morgue on Lakeside Avenue, where Coroner Arthur J. Pearse took charge. At fifty-one, Pearse had a reputation for a cool head and a sharp eye for detail. Many recalled his decisive courtroom testimony during the sensational 1931 murder trial of “Pittsburgh Hymie” Martin, a rumrunner accused in the vicious slaying of a city councilman named William E. Potter, whose injuries included a skull-crushing blow from the butt of a revolver. Pearse not only offered compelling detail about powder burns and hair samples, but also described the painstaking manner in which he had unscrewed the wooden grips from the suspected murder weapon, finding blood on the interior surfaces. A Republican in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, Pearse objected to the necessity of playing politics to hold on to his job, but he was shrewd when the need arose, especially during the Roosevelt landslide of 1932. At one political rally, he drew thunderous applause by insisting that his services were offered without regard to political leaning—or at least, the coroner added slyly, “no one ever complained.”
Now, examining the hideously butchered remains on his table, Pearse worked quickly to gather the vital data. He realized at once that the likelihood of establishing the woman’s identity—in the absence of a head or hands—was remote at best. Without facial features, dental work, or fingerprints, Pearse had little to go on. He took note of an abdominal scar, indicating a hysterectomy performed “a year or more before death,” but admitted that the observation offered only scant hope of identification.
Working methodically through the afternoon, Pearse fixed the time of death within a window of six to eight months prior to the discovery—but, he added, the remains had been in the water “only a short time.” He estimated the woman’s height at five foot six, and her weight at roughly 125 pounds. Her age, he determined, would have been somewhere from the mid- to late thirties. Curiously, Pearse noted “unmistakable evidence” that the body had been doused in some sort of chemical preservative, giving the skin a hardened, leathery quality described in some accounts as “reddish.” He sent a skin sample to local experts, who tentatively identified the chemical as a form of slaked lime. Pearse theorized that the killer might have intended to hasten the decomposition of the body with a caustic quicklime compound, but instead inadvertently applied a preservative. “There are many persons,” he told a reporter, “who mistake slaked lime for quick lime and try to do away with bodies in that way.”
One thing was clear in Pearse’s mind. The woman, whoever she was, had been a victim of foul play. The coroner took pains to rule out the possibility, however remote, that a “prankishly inclined” medical student was pulling a stunt of some kind, using a discarded cadaver to create a stir. Early on, Pearse consulted a local anatomy professor who assured him that such a thing was unlikely, as all “experimental material” was subject to strict cataloging and numbering procedures. When a theory surfaced that the dead woman might instead have been a suicide whose floating corpse was later ground up in the propeller of a passing boat, Pearse batted the idea aside. Close examination of the severed vertebrae, he said, showed the work of a delicate, sharp knife rather than a large, blunt propeller blade. “There is no question,” he said, “but this case is a murder.”
By the time Pearse finished his initial examination, the story was front-page news: “Hacked Body of Woman Found on E. Side Beach,” read the headline in the Press, one of the city’s afternoon papers. Eager reporters gathered at the morgue, where Pearse provided the facts in unsparing detail. “The torso was severed between the second and third lumbar vertebrae,” the coroner said, “apparently with a surgical instrument. The lower limbs were severed at the knee joints.” His official report, later reprinted in several newspapers, provided readers with unusually graphic details: “Part of the spinal column had been hacked away,” it read. “The head and shoulders were missing.”
The following day, as a handyman named Joseph Hejduk read the story in his morning paper, he felt a shock of recognition. Two weeks earlier in North Perry, thirty miles east of the city, he had made a similar discovery. As the Press would report, Hejduk had come across “what he believed to be the vertebrae and ribs of a human body.” The bones had “a scant amount of flesh remaining,” and beside them lay a dead seagull. Hejduk reported the find to a local deputy sheriff, who mistook it for an animal carcass and instructed him to bury it in the sand.
Now, following the reports of LaGassie’s discovery, Hejduk realized that he might have inadvertently buried evidence of a crime. He phoned the police and was soon leading a group of detectives on a search of the beach. Coroner Pearse, apprised of the development, acknowledged that Hejduk’s description “fitted roughly” with the missing portion of the torso discovered earlier. The coroner’s interest was piqued by the dead seagull Hejduk had spotted beside the bones. The specimen in the morgue, he told a reporter, had been treated with a powerful chemical of some kind, and “it was possible for such a chemical to kill a seagull.” Since the remains in his possession appeared to have been in the water only a short time, Pearse now speculated that the body parts might have been packed into containers and set adrift in the lake. “It was the coroner’s theory,” reported the Plain Dealer, the city’s leading morning paper, “that the trunk, box or other container might have been ripped open by stormy weather and the torso released, to float ashore.” At Pearse’s urging, Cleveland police announced a plan to drag the lake near the sections of shoreline where the remains had washed ashore.
For the moment, however, it appeared that Joseph Hejduk’s promising lead had sputtered out. Heavy rains had battered the shore in recent days, making it difficult to find the spot where he had buried the bones two weeks earlier. Hejduk and a pair of detectives searched for more than two hours but were forced to suspend their efforts as darkness fell.
The following morning, under brighter conditions, Hejduk had better luck. The handyman soon led a group of officials to a set of buried remains that included “three lumbar and 12 dorsal vertebrae of the spine, the ribs, a section of the right shoulder blade and most of the flesh of the upper back.” The gruesome find was carefully wrapped and transported to the morgue, where Coroner Pearse declared that it was “indisputably” a match with the earlier remains. “The spinal cut corresponded,” the Press reported, “and the flesh on both pieces was whitened and hardened by a preservative.”
Given that neither set of remains showed much damage from exposure to lake water, Pearse’s theory that the body had been packed into one or more containers and set adrift now seemed all the more plausible. Even so, the coroner came no closer to identifying the victim: “Head, arms and lower legs are still being sought,” noted the Press. Worse, the discovery of the additional body parts appeared to inject a note of uncertainty into Pearse’s conclusions. Previously, upon examining the first section, Pearse claimed that it had been “expertly dismembered” by a practiced hand, possibly that of a surgeon. The legs, he explained, had been “unhooked at the knee joints,” and the spine had been precisely severed with a delicate knife “between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.” Now, as he examined the second section, Pearse seemed to revise his judgment, noting that a cruder instrument—a saw—had been used to sever the right arm, cutting directly through the shoulder blade. “No surgeon would have used a saw,” he now insisted. “He would have known how to manipulate a knife around the joint.”
Chillingly, Hejduk’s discovery appeared to have sparked a trend. “Reports of stray bits of flesh and bone, floating boxes and old trunks—all cast up by Lake Erie—kept detectives busy today,” noted the Press at the end of the week. At a west-side marina, a ferryboat operator claimed to have seen something that looked like a human head bobbing near a breakwall. Not far away, a pair of fishermen found a clump of what appeared to be blond hair on a snagged line. Another man spotted “two fleshy objects” bouncing in the surf, and even poked at one of them with a stick. “It wasn’t a fish,” he insisted. “It was flesh of some kind.” In each case, police and volunteers carried out a search, but found nothing.
Perhaps the most macabre episode came when a young girl, swimming in the waters of an east-side beach, reported seeing a ghostly hand “waving” at her from below the waves. “Badly frightened, she ran home and told her father,” reported the Press. “He smiled indulgently and promised to take a look the next day. He kept his promise, and while looking, stepped on the thing his daughter had seen.” The police were summoned and dutifully waded out to search below the waterline. Again, they found nothing. The girl’s father, badly shaken, was adamant in his statement to a homicide detective: “I’m sure it was a human hand.”
These sightings kept the police on high alert for several days. As the Press noted, however, “their labors brought no further clew to the identity of the woman or the manner and place in which she met her death.” At the morgue on Lakeside Avenue, Coroner Pearse renewed his efforts to identify the body, painstakingly combing through the city’s lengthy list of missing women, ranging in age from sixteen to seventy-four. As officers fanned out across the city to question the next of kin, Pearse expressed doubt that the net had been cast wide enough. “Heavy storms this summer could have washed the body from almost any part of the lake,” he noted, “or it might have been thrown from a boat or dropped from an airplane.” It was reported at one stage that, in the hope of improving the odds, the Boy Scouts might be enlisted, setting aside woodcraft and clove hitches to hunt for missing body parts.
It would have been a big job even with the aid of the Scouts. Because Lake Erie is so vast, stretching to three other states as well as Canada, authorities knew it would be all but impossible to cover the entire shoreline, much less pinpoint the scene of the crime. At the morgue, a frustrated Coroner Pearse was forced to acknowledge that he could not even be certain of the cause of death. Even more puzzling, perhaps, was the motive for the dismemberment. Pearse speculated that the woman might have been killed under conditions that made it difficult to dispose of the corpse without attracting attention—a crowded apartment building, perhaps. By cutting the body into pieces, the killer might have hoped to get rid of the evidence in small, nondescript packages.
Cleveland’s “Lady of the Lake,” as the newspapers dubbed her, began to fade from the headlines after a week of fruitless effort from the city’s police force. Authorities had worked every available lead, questioned hundreds of people, and sloshed through miles of sewers in search of additional body parts. Finally, on September 11, the remains were quietly interred in a potter’s field. One detective, asked by a reporter if the murder had been a perfect crime, offered a dispirited response: “No,” he said, “but so close to being perfect that we don’t know what to do next.”
That same day, a team of federal “dry agents” and state officials smashed up an illicit liquor still on Cleveland’s east side, the latest chapter in a “vigorous campaign to dry up northern Ohio bootlegging at its source.” A few days later, readers of the Plain Dealer were introduced to the leader of the federal team: “He is Eliot Ness, 31-year-old University of Chicago graduate, who headed the small band of young men known as the ‘Untouchables.’” For several weeks, readers were told, Ness had been in the city working “quietly but effectively” on behalf of the alcohol tax division of the federal government. “Unless Cleveland’s bootleg fraternity considers itself bigger and stronger than the Al Capone gang,” wrote reporter Charles Lawrence, “it may as well get out of the illegal liquor business now and save itself trouble.” On average, he continued, Ness was knocking off at least one still per day, much as he had “wrecked the backbone” of the Capone empire. The article went on to sketch the outlines of Ness’s Chicago days, complete with crashing his battering-ram truck through brewery doors, spurning bribes, and calmly brushing aside death threats. “That’s just a starter,” Lawrence insisted, “to give the Cleveland underworld an idea of what it is in for.” The expected result was spelled out in the article’s headline: “Gangs Here Face Capone Waterloo.”
Ness likely had misgivings over the headline. Capone had been behind bars for more than two years, and in that time Ness had learned to show restraint in his dealings with the press. In Chicago, there had been complaints about his showboating. Now, he made an effort to tamp down the reporter’s enthusiasm and present himself as a team player. “I am just finding my way around Cleveland now,” he told Lawrence, “and would rather talk about what we can do here after we have accomplished it.” As for his work in Chicago, Ness carefully “corrected the general impression” that he and the Untouchables had nailed down the evidence that sent Capone to prison. “We did our part, of course,” he said. “But the real work of sending Capone to prison was done by the tax investigators. Our job was more spectacular, that was all.”
Spectacular or not, his efforts had already made an impression at the highest levels. Though Ness insisted that he was merely “getting acquainted” with Cleveland, the city had big plans for him.
Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Stashower
