The Murder Marsh: A century later, killer's shadow still looms

Nov. 5—LAWRENCE COUNTY — On a hot July day in 1936, two workers with the Pennsylvania and Lake Erie Railroad approached an open boxcar at a rail yard in New Castle Junction.

The car had been closed when last inspected a month or so earlier. Inside, the rail workers were faced with a horrifying sight: the nude, decapitated body of a man, covered in burlap, three bloodied newspapers lying nearby.

"It's just a terrible scene," local researcher Bob Presnar said. "If a dead body is decapitated, there's blood. But if the heart is still beating, it's a geyser."

The amount of blood present proves the body hadn't merely been dumped there, says Presnar, as many local people still believe.

"This was obviously a murder scene," he said.

Just shy of a year before the discovery of what Presnar calls "the bloody boxcar," two men were found beheaded and mutilated at the bottom of a slope near East 49th St. on the northeast side of Cleveland. Sadly, the Jackass Hill and New Castle Junction crime scenes were only the tip of a very gruesome iceberg.

A 100-year legacyLawrence County has seen a lot of history since it was cobbled together from portions of neighboring Mercer and Beaver counties in 1849. It's also been haunted by the specter of a long-unidentified killer.

— Oct. 6, 1925: The decapitated body of a man is found in the West Pittsburg swamp, about three-quarters of a mile from the road. The man is believed to have been killed some two to three weeks prior; his head was found later, prompting inquiries from "more than half a hundred" local residents who feared the corpse might belong to a missing relative or loved one. In the end, none were able to identify him.

— Oct. 17, 1925: Just 11 days later, four men from West Pittsburg find the decapitated skeleton of a man covered by a blue work shirt near where the previous remains were discovered; three others find a skull missing its lower jaw two days after that. Two suits of men's clothing found near the scene are displayed in the window of the Cooper & Butler department store in New Castle, but the identity of the headless skeleton is never determined.

The skull, meanwhile, is believed to be that of an elderly woman, also unidentified; it certainly didn't belong to the skeleton, at any rate, as — while the latter still had "some bits of flesh" clinging to the exposed bones, the skull "was dry and hard, and had apparently lain out in the weather for a year or more," according to a story in the New Castle News printed a few days later.

Over the next 10 years things were quiet in western Pennsylvania. But in nearby Cleveland, the city's poor and indigent population was being terrorized by a predator who would come to be known as the Cleveland Torso Killer. Or more colorfully, as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.

Several men, and a handful of women, were murdered and dismembered in Cleveland between 1935 and '38. The remains of one victim, Flo Polillo, were "wrapped neatly in newspaper," placed in bushel baskets, and left behind a building on Central Avenue downtown. During a blizzard, no less.

Then, after Eliot Ness — the legendary lawman who took down gangster Al Capone in 1931 and Cleveland's safety director at the time — "[burned] out the hobo encampments" in Kingsbury Run, headless bodies started turning up in Pennsylvania again.

— July 1, 1936: The "Bloody Boxcar" is discovered at New Castle Junction. Issues of the Pittsburgh Press and Cleveland Plain Dealer dated July 1933 are found nearby.

— Oct. 13, 1939: The headless body of a man is found, again, in the West Pittsburg swamp. Partially burned newspapers, including pages from the Youngstown Vindicator dated Sept. 28, 1939, are found near, and on, the body.

— May 19, 1952: A skeleton is discovered on Shaw Island in the Beaver River. Investigators believed the remains had been there for about 10 years.

Read between the lines of these already disturbing reports and the story becomes even more chilling. The Bloody Boxcar had been out of service since about 1931. Newspapers date the body's presence there to no earlier than 1933. The car was closed in June of 1936, then opened again a month later. Had the killer returned to admire his handiwork?

The Murder Marsh

Drive south out of New Castle on West Pittsburg Road, said Presnar, and you'll see the tip of an old smoke stack rising above the trees. That stack is part of a building once owned by the Universal-Rundle Corp., a local manufacturer of bathroom fixtures and related products.

"You can see it for miles," Presnar says.

At least one decapitated body was found near that building, says Presnar, and another near where the NRG power station now stands; others were discovered on a property marked on old maps as "the Lou Hawthorne farm," smack in the middle of the surrounding swamp.

Other sites related to the case are less visible to the casual observer.

Railroad tracks run close alongside Route 168 for a stretch between New Castle Junction and the NRG New Castle Generating Station. About a mile west of these tracks is the Beaver River, and in-between sits the patch of swampland once known to newspaper readers across the country as the Murder Marsh.

Much of the area has been taken over by industrial sites belonging to CSX, the R.W. Elliott Co. and others over the ensuing hundred years, and much of that is largely hidden from the road by a concealing wall of trees and other foliage. Large wet and wooded patches can still be seen via Google Earth, however; as can lonely Shaw Island, nestled between two branches of the Beaver River just east of Wampum Road in Willow Grove Township.

'Society's dark underbelly'

"This was an exceptionally violent period, when law enforcement was not capable of taking care of these very complex investigations," Presnar said of the time and place in which the bodies in the Murder Marsh came to light.

Men came from all over the country to help build the railroads, said Presnar, some urgently seeking work in a time of nationwide hardship.

"You had hobos and itinerant workers; young men on the move, living together in close quarters," Presnar said. "It was a desperate time that brought forth, in some cases, the absolute worst in humanity."

Legions of working poor roving across the country in search of employment contributed to the kind of disconnection which allowed killers like the one in Lawrence County, and possibly Cleveland, to seek victims with impunity, Presnar said.

"If you live a normal life, people miss you. Someone's gonna notice you're gone," he said. "People who don't live a normal life are easy to lose in society's dark underbelly."

Compounding these issues was the fact that rural areas like Lawrence County often had little access to police resources. Investigations tended to be short-lived, and the local coroner, if there was one, might not even hold a medical degree.

"There's a Sherlock Holmes story called 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,'" Presnar said. "Holmes and Watson are out in the country, working on a case, and Watson says, 'Isn't this nice, leaving the city?'"

Holmes doesn't agree, however.

"At least in London, there's the detectives," Presnar says, paraphrasing the famous literary investigator. "There's no eyes on the bad guys out here."

Presnar, who's been researching the murders in West Pittsburg and Cleveland for years and hopes to eventually write a book about the case, is quick to point out that he doesn't expect to learn the killer's identity after so many decades. But he does hope that publishing the information he's uncovered will help preserve the record for future amateur sleuths.

"I will not solve the case. But I will develop a very good understanding of it, and I'll get my research material out to the public for those who want to take it a step further," Presnar said. "There's a lot of detail here, and those details are gonna tell the tale."