Almost a century after a serial killer known as the “Torso Killer” stalked Cleveland, Ohio, authorities are using DNA testing to identify his victims. 

The killer, who was also known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” murdered and dismembered at least 12 people between 1935 and 1938, according to the Cleveland Police Museum. Many of the bodies were decapitated and the heads never found, making identification difficult. Bodies were rarely found whole, and just two of the victims were ever identified. 

The killer was never formally identified or arrested, but police believe it was a surgeon named Francis E. Sweeney, who would have had access to facilities to dismember bodies and known how to do so. Sweeney was interrogated by police for a week, but he never confessed to the crimes, according to the Cleveland Police Museum. However, after he committed himself to a sanitorium, the murders stopped. 

The DNA Doe Project, a non-profit organization, is now working with the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office to try to identify some of the 10 unidentified victims. Two bodies have been exhumed. One, known as the “Tattooed Man,” is the “most famous victim” of the killer, according to CBS affiliate WOIO-TV. 

The “Tattooed Man” was found decapitated near railroad tracks in the summer of 1936. His head was found about 1,500 feet away, but an identification was never made even as police fingerprinted him and widely distributed images of his six tattoos. The tattoos included the names “Helen” and “Paul,” and the initials “W.C.G.,” according to the DNA Doe Project. A plaster recreation of the man’s head and images of his tattoos were even featured at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936, but none of the more than 100,000 people who saw the display could identify the man, according to the Cleveland Police Museum.  

The second body being exhumed is believed to be the killer’s sixth victim, who was found dead on Cleveland’s lakefront in the summer of 1938. 

Both sets of bodies are undergoing testing, the DNA Doe Project said. A single donor is currently funding the lab costs, according to the non-profit. 

WOIO-TV reported that the remains may be contaminated or degraded because of their age, but Jennifer Randolph, the executive director of case management and operations for the organization, said that the non-profit has made positive identifications from older remains before. The goal is to develop a DNA profile from the victims, which can then be used to start building a family tree and identify others who may have known the person. 

“We’ll figure out who the DNA relative matches are, we’ll build their trees, find those common ancestors and then, you know build forward or maybe look a little bit back, to see who the unidentified individual is,” Randolph told WOIO-TV. 

“So there could still be living people who know, you know that these are individuals who were missing from their family and nobody knew whatever happened to them,” Randolph added. “And regardless of that piece, especially given how you know, they died, they deserve the dignity and justice of being memorialized with their names.”