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Unidentified Black Female

Vital Statistics

  • Approximate Height and Weight: Less than 5'0" tall. 
  • Distinguishing Characteristics: Black, curly and kinky hair. On examination there is an extremely wide nasal aperture. The alveolar ridges are quite prominent with considerable prognathism. The texture of the bone is quite fine. Due to this, the wide nasal aperture and the prominent alveolar prognathism together with the penchant for gold crowns prominently displayed on the teeth suggest the victim to be a black female.
  • Dentals: Extensive dental work; gold crowns.

Case History
The victim was located beneath the Lorain-Carnegie bridge on June 6, 1937. Lying in a rotting burlap bag, along with a newspaper from June of the previous year, was the partial skeleton of a woman who had been dead approximately one year.

She was tentatively identified as Rose Wallace, however, it was estimated that victim number 8 had been dead one year when found, which casts some doubt that the victim was Wallace, who was known to have disappeared only ten months earlier. Dental work was considered a close match both by police experts and by her son, who felt certain that the victim was his mother. A definitive identification was not possible however, since the dentist who performed the work had died years before.

The skeleton had been wrapped in a piece of newspaper that carried an advertisement for a certain performance at the Palace Theater in June of 1936. Detective Orley May contacted the manager at the theater. The manager confirmed that the Nils T. Grantlund girls performed a review at the theater in June of 1936 and that they were playing in New York City at the time this victim was discovered. He did not recall any of the girls missing from the company while they were in Cleveland. The police were sent a letter referencing a long-dead dentist and proposing that the victim was a prostitute named Rose Wallace. After a lengthy investigation of Rose Wallace’s life and her August 1936 disappearance, both Dr. Gerber and Sergeant Hogan rejected the identification. Detective Merylo however firmly believed the victim to be Rose.

The unidentified female became known as "victim 8". The Cleveland Torso Murderer was an unidentified serial killer active in the Cleveland, Ohio, area in the early 20th century. The official toll of the murderer was 12, killed between 1935 to 1938, but some believe that there may have been as many as 40+ victims in the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Youngstown, Ohio, area between the 1920s and the 1950s. Two strong candidates for addition to the list of those killed are the unknown victim nicknamed the Lady of the Lake, found on September 5, 1934, and Robert Robertson, found on July 22, 1950.

The serial killings officially stopped in 1938. The last victim, Victim Ten, was killed in April of 1938 even though remains of Victims Eleven and Twelve were found in mid-August of that year.

Investigators
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Agency Case Number:
"Victim 8"

Source Information:
Kinsbury Run Murders
The Crime Library
Kinsbury Run
Wikipedia