OH OH - Cleveland, WhtMale 20-30, 121UMOH, decapitated, Jiggs/"Helen-Paul" tattoos, Jun'36

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Have you seen the letter sent to the chief of police by the killer/someone claiming to be the killer? Source here, scroll down to read the letter.
He wrote 'I felt bad operating on these people, but science must advance' and he also wrote this about his victims: 'Just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street. No one missed them when I failed'.
That makes me think he was some mad scientist playing god, thinking he has the right to take other people's lives. He targeted vulnerable people to run some pseudo experiments on them (decapitation, pouring all sorts of chemicals on some of his victims, emasculation, just to name a few). It looks like he was quite successful with his choice of victims as many of them remain unidentified to this day.
As for this victim, I wonder what made him a suitable target in the eyes of the killer? He doesn't exactly strike me as the transient type, but of course anything is possible. If we entertain the military theory, maybe he was stationed somewhere nearby and then declared AWOL after he failed to return and the military never found out he was murdered? If so, are there any lists of people who went AWOL/MIA in the 1930s?
Another theory that came to my mind is that the tattooed guy could've been a part of the LGBT community, possibly disowned by his family for this reason and that's why nobody seemed to look for him. I can only imagine how tough things must've been for that community back in 1936. Maybe this is how the killer met this John Doe.
All speculation and my own opinion of course.
 
Tempst said:
I still can't believe this guy was never identified. They got the face, the fingerprints, cloth and all the tattoos .
Click to expand...

It definitely seems like it should have been solved.

But as we've seen from the Somerton Man case in the same era, sometimes these seemingly obvious identifications just slipped through the cracks.

I'm surprised DNA hasn't been done on this yet. Even if the body is buried and difficult to find, surely there are DNA traces on the death mask?
 
Melquiades said:
It definitely seems like it should have been solved.

But as we've seen from the Somerton Man case in the same era, sometimes these seemingly obvious identifications just slipped through the cracks.

I'm surprised DNA hasn't been done on this yet. Even if the body is buried and difficult to find, surely there are DNA traces on the death mask?
Click to expand...
We know where he was buried, here's what @PatLaurel wrote a few posts ago:
PatLaurel said:
He was buried in Potter's Field Section of Highland Park Cemetery, Highland Park, Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

MOO JMO
Click to expand...
With that being said, I'm also surprised a DNA sample wasn't collected from this Doe yet, but I imagine cold cases aren't exactly high on the priority list for LE.

@othram I don't know if you still accept case suggestions, but it'd be great to see this guy reunited with his relatives. It's been 86 years since he was murdered. If he has children and they're still alive, they're very elderly now.
 
Triss said:
We know where he was buried, here's what @PatLaurel wrote a few posts ago:

With that being said, I'm also surprised a DNA sample wasn't collected from this Doe yet, but I imagine cold cases aren't exactly high on the priority list for LE.

@othram I don't know if you still accept case suggestions, but it'd be great to see this guy reunited with his relatives. It's been 86 years since he was murdered. If he has children and they're still alive, they're very elderly now.
Click to expand...
Do Othram need to be contacted by the LE in order to take on a case or do they sometimes themselves contact the LE to propose a collaboration? In any case, I also posted a thread on DNAsolves on Facebook about this case ; hopefully it gets a bit of attention.

I also asked for help on HistoryHub about how to get merchant marine personnel files, supposing his initials are W.C.G. Personnel files are supposed to have pictures, so you never know. Apparently having only one anchor tattooed could mean he was in the merchant marines. Found a bunch of WCGs on Ancestry military files, but nothing that fits this guy so far.
 
MsKnief said:
Do Othram need to be contacted by the LE in order to take on a case or do they sometimes themselves contact the LE to propose a collaboration? In any case, I also posted a thread on DNAsolves on Facebook about this case ; hopefully it gets a bit of attention.

I also asked for help on HistoryHub about how to get merchant marine personnel files, supposing his initials are W.C.G. Personnel files are supposed to have pictures, so you never know. Apparently having only one anchor tattooed could mean he was in the merchant marines. Found a bunch of WCGs on Ancestry military files, but nothing that fits this guy so far.
Click to expand...
Maybe he wasn't really a WCG member? Just has a friend or wanted to be one?
 
Triss said:
Have you seen the letter sent to the chief of police by the killer/someone claiming to be the killer? Source here, scroll down to read the letter.
He wrote 'I felt bad operating on these people, but science must advance' and he also wrote this about his victims: 'Just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street. No one missed them when I failed'.
That makes me think he was some mad scientist playing god, thinking he has the right to take other people's lives. He targeted vulnerable people to run some pseudo experiments on them (decapitation, pouring all sorts of chemicals on some of his victims, emasculation, just to name a few). It looks like he was quite successful with his choice of victims as many of them remain unidentified to this day.
As for this victim, I wonder what made him a suitable target in the eyes of the killer? He doesn't exactly strike me as the transient type, but of course anything is possible. If we entertain the military theory, maybe he was stationed somewhere nearby and then declared AWOL after he failed to return and the military never found out he was murdered? If so, are there any lists of people who went AWOL/MIA in the 1930s?
Another theory that came to my mind is that the tattooed guy could've been a part of the LGBT community, possibly disowned by his family for this reason and that's why nobody seemed to look for him. I can only imagine how tough things must've been for that community back in 1936. Maybe this is how the killer met this John Doe.
All speculation and my own opinion of course.
Click to expand...
I don't think it was really written by him. Mostly someone else tried to get attention.
 
Triss said:
That's certainly a possibility, I'm afraid we will never know for sure.
Click to expand...
The killer never bothered to speak to the police, and tend to dump corpse without letting the police found the head. I really doubt he would write anything years later.
 
Tempst said:
The killer never bothered to speak to the police, and tend to dump corpse without letting the police found the head. I really doubt he would write anything years later.
Click to expand...
The killer did get bolder as time passed, though. First he dumped the bodies in desolate places like a lake (Lady of the lake), then he switched to dumping bodies in plain sight (this Doe was left in front of the police station IIRC). I wouldn't put it past the killer to write a letter to the police for sh*ts and giggles.
 
Snip it from the story which is very interesting. Talks about all of the victims in detail. ***POSTMORTEM PHOTO BELOW***

The Tattooed Man — The Cleveland Torso Murders by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run the Crime Library. — Crime Library

Eliot Ness became head of the Cleveland Police Department and faced a very devious serial killer called the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" or the "Cleveland Torso Murderer. " Ness determined that a politically well-connected alcoholic surgeon was the killer and got him off the street but not...
web.archive.org


Later that afternoon, the police found the head and began a search for the man's body. The next morning they found the naked, headless corpse, almost directly in front of the Nickel Plate police office, hidden in some sumac bushes. Whoever had put it there seemed to be playing a grim joke on the railroad police, whose job it was to keep the area secure.



The Tattooed Man

The Tattooed Man


The victim had been a tall, slender man with a sensitive, handsome face, estimated to be in his mid-twenties. There were six distinctive tattoos on his body, which suggested he might have been a sailor: a cupid superimposed on an anchor; a dove under the words "Helen-Paul;" a butterfly; the cartoon figure "Jiggs"; an arrow through a heart and a standard of flags; and the initials "W.C.G." A pile of expensive bloodstained clothing was found near the body. On the pair of undershorts was a laundry mark indicating the owner's initials were J.D.

Even though he was found in the heart of the hobo country, the young man was probably not one of them. Unlike the hobos, he was clean-shaven, well nourished, and very well dressed in almost new clothing. As the police investigated, it seemed likely the man was killed somewhere else and brought to Kingsbury Run. For one thing, there was no evidence of blood soaked into the ground near the places where the head and body were laying. The body had been drained of blood and washed clean, an impossible task in that area of Kingsbury Run.

Coroner Pearse became distinctly uncomfortable when he examined the victim. Apparently, the man had been killed by act of decapitation itself, just like the prostitute murdered in January of 1936, two men found in Kingsbury Run the year before, and perhaps even that woman who washed up on the lakeshore back in 1934. Death by decapitation was a most difficult thing to do and very, very rare in the history of crime. Pearse saw a terrifying pattern emerging, even though the police wanted to ignore it.


The Tattooed Man — The Cleveland Torso Murders by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run the Crime Library. — Crime Library

Eliot Ness became head of the Cleveland Police Department and faced a very devious serial killer called the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" or the "Cleveland Torso Murderer. " Ness determined that a politically well-connected alcoholic surgeon was the killer and got him off the street but not...
web.archive.org
 
With the body of the latest victim in such good condition, plus the six unique tattoos, Hogan was cautiously optimistic about learning his identity. While some detectives checked fingerprint files and recent missing person reports, others took the young man's photo to tattoo parlors and sailor hangouts.
The face and tattoos received even more exposure on display at the morgue. Two thousand people looked at him the first night and thousands more after that. Detectives put in countless hours of footwork checking out the laundry marks and tracing the clothing they found. A death mask, along with photographs of his face and tattoos, was exhibited to the seven million visitors who came to the Great Lakes Expo over the next two years. In spite of all that effort, the "Tattooed Man" remained nameless.

Dead End — The Cleveland Torso Murders by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run the Crime Library. — Crime Library

Eliot Ness became head of the Cleveland Police Department and faced a very devious serial killer called the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" or the "Cleveland Torso Murderer. " Ness determined that a politically well-connected alcoholic surgeon was the killer and got him off the street but not...
web.archive.org
 
The theory that this young man might have been a sailor seems to be a good one. While he likely served in the US Navy for at least one hitch (usually 4 years), it is also possible that at the time of his murder he was working in the Merchant Marine on one of the ore freighters which sailed the Great Lakes from Duluth, Minnesota to Cleveland, Ohio.

If he were an active serving US Navy sailor, he would have been declared UA and then declared a deserter when he failed to show up at his duty station. But if he was working as a merchant marine sailor, his disappearance probably would not have been noticed, since those men would hire on for specific trips and would switch ships often.
 
The initials "J.D." on his skivvie shorts are probably his initials. Marking clothing is a regular practice in the US Navy especially on board ship to ensure a sailor gets his own clothes back from the ship's laundry.
 
If he was decapitated with one blow, according to the autopsy, I wonder what pose or position he was in for the coroner to say it was a clean decapitation. He did have alcohol in his system so he may have just fallen asleep and the killer took advantage of that.

Also, as much as I think he is the spitting image of Eetu Vainonenm, imo, I don't think it's him. EV lived in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) so he could have gotten a job working the Great Lakes on any manner of ship either as a merchant marine (Canadian) or just on a commercial vessel. That being said, his tattoos don't support that; the western names, the image of Jiggs, and the crossed American flags don't translate into a Finnish man who emigrated to Canada.

I also found this image of some American sailors on the USS Villalobos, circa 1907, that shows a sailor with a tattoo of a butterfly on his arm. So I guess it's possible that not all seamen had tattoos that only represented their profession. Plus it's only recently that the US military has allowed tattoos to show on the forearm, the hands and the neck because of recruitment issues. Which is kind of weird since I've seen lots of images of military members sporting tattoos on their forearms and most of them reference their profession so it's not as if the member had tattoos before they signed up or were drafted.

A Short History of Military Tattoos

As the largest and oldest war veterans service organization, we have a long history of supporting service members, veterans, and their families. Learn more about us.
www.vfw.org www.vfw.org

So I think this JD has spent time in the military, specifically the US navy. Back in the 1930s homosexuality was a criminal issue and if this man was gay it's possible he was discharged. Would records of dishonourably discharged individuals be easier to find than someone who was discharged?

www.militaryonesource.mil

LGBTQ in the Military | Military OneSource

Learn about the history of and policies affecting LGBTQ people in the military. And, how you can help your service member feel comfortable.
www.militaryonesource.mil www.militaryonesource.mil
 

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Triss said:
Have you seen the letter sent to the chief of police by the killer/someone claiming to be the killer? Source here, scroll down to read the letter.
He wrote 'I felt bad operating on these people, but science must advance' and he also wrote this about his victims: 'Just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street. No one missed them when I failed'.
That makes me think he was some mad scientist playing god, thinking he has the right to take other people's lives. He targeted vulnerable people to run some pseudo experiments on them (decapitation, pouring all sorts of chemicals on some of his victims, emasculation, just to name a few). It looks like he was quite successful with his choice of victims as many of them remain unidentified to this day.
As for this victim, I wonder what made him a suitable target in the eyes of the killer? He doesn't exactly strike me as the transient type, but of course anything is possible. If we entertain the military theory, maybe he was stationed somewhere nearby and then declared AWOL after he failed to return and the military never found out he was murdered? If so, are there any lists of people who went AWOL/MIA in the 1930s?
Another theory that came to my mind is that the tattooed guy could've been a part of the LGBT community, possibly disowned by his family for this reason and that's why nobody seemed to look for him. I can only imagine how tough things must've been for that community back in 1936. Maybe this is how the killer met this John Doe.
All speculation and my own opinion of course.
Click to expand...
This almost sounds like 1936's version of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Maybe this person was yet another victim of the Cleveland Torso Killer(s)?
 
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