The Unclaimed Victim Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE UNCLAIMED VICTIM

  “Thoroughly grounded in the sparse known facts of the murders, Pulley’s well-paced and, at times, even hair-raising thriller also successfully portrays the gritty social and human realities of Depression-era Cleveland. Her use of a parallel narrative structure is enviably cunning, and her plucky but beleaguered heroines—1930s Ethel and 1990s Kris—will have readers rooting for them from first page to last. A genuine gothic treat, leading me to suspect that what the Torso Murders saga needed all along was a woman’s touch.”

  —John Stark Bellamy II, historian and author of They Died Crawling

  “Architecture speaks to D.M. Pulley, and it tells her the most wonderful stories. Her mysteries are as twisty and strange as the real-world buildings that inspire her. The Unclaimed Victim is a new exploration of Cleveland’s most notorious unsolved mystery: Who was the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run? D.M. Pulley offers a chilling explanation that suggests the murders go on to this day. Has she cracked the case that drove Eliot Ness insane? I think maybe.”

  —James Renner, author of True Crime Addict

  “A murder in the present intertwines with a set of killings from the past in D.M. Pulley’s engaging, addictive thriller. Pulley is both a natural storyteller and a meticulous researcher, and her tale takes us into a fascinating, forgotten corner of 1930s Cleveland. The Unclaimed Victim is a haunting and unputdownable novel!”

  —Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

  “D.M. Pulley dips from past to present with the touch of a master, squaring the bloody circle of two lives with an ending that’s both shocking . . . and perfect.”

  —Matthew Iden, author of The Winter Over

  ALSO BY D.M. PULLEY

  The Dead Key

  The Buried Book

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by D.M. Pulley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542046435

  ISBN-10: 1542046432

  Front cover design by PEPE nymi

  Back cover design by Ray Lundgren

  For Flo, Rose, and all the others

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  HACKED BODY OF WOMAN FOUND ON E. SIDE BEACH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  FINDING OF TORSOS REVEALS SLAYINGS

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  WOMAN SLAIN, HEAD SOUGHT IN COAL BINS

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  HUNT FIEND IN 4 DECAPITATIONS

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  SEEK NAME OF 5TH HEADLESS CORPSE

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  SIXTH HACKED BODY FOUND IN KINGSBURY RUN

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  BABY FARM IS TORSO DEATH CLEW

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  WOMAN, 35, IS 9TH VICTIM OF TORSO SLAYER

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  FIND TORSO SLAYER’S 10TH VICTIM IN RIVER

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  SEARCH RIVER FOR PARTS OF TORSO VICTIM

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  EIGHTH CITY TORSO VICTIM IDENTIFIED

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  HUNT FOR MORE TORSO EVIDENCE

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  75 SILVER SHIRTS RALLY DOWNTOWN

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  DERELICTS WORRY AS CITY PLANS TO BURN SHANTYTOWN

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  BLAMES SLAYING ON FREIGHT RIDER

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  SAYS PELLEY HAD PLANS TO BE ‘KING’

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  PELLEY FACES U.S. TRIAL IN INDIANA

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  HEADLESS BODY OF MAN IS FOUND

  CHAPTER 52

  TORSO KILLER VICTIM COMES FORWARD

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  He who fights with monsters might take care

  lest he thereby become a monster.

  And when you gaze long into an abyss,

  the abyss also gazes into you.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

  HACKED BODY OF WOMAN

  FOUND ON E. SIDE BEACH

  The naked torso of a woman’s body, washed up today on the shore of Lake Erie at the foot of East 156th Street, provided police with the most gruesome and puzzling murder mystery of recent years.

  —Cleveland Press, September 5, 1934, p. 1

  CHAPTER 1

  April 7, 1999

  It wasn’t him.

  She stared at the clear plastic bags lying on the metal table and shook her head. A button-down denim shirt sat in one. A pair of jeans lay folded in another. A sock in a third. White labels had been stuck to each bag with handwritten notes. Case #32-004-A, one of them read. They were all dated April 6, 1999.

  Yesterday, she thought.

  Streaks of mud darkened the fabric. The white sweat sock looked like it had been pulled from a puddle. The stink of rotting leaves, dirt, and animal urine seeped out of the sealed bags.

  “Do you recognize any of these items?” the man across from her asked.

  The braided leather belt next to the jeans looked hauntingly familiar, but she shook her head. The clothes could be anyone’s.

  “We found this in one of the pockets.” He opened a leather wallet and set it in front of her. Her father’s face glared up at her through the yellowed plastic film holding his driver’s license into the framed pocket. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed tight to his scalp as if he might still be in the armed forces. The permanent stubble of beard darkened his hard jaw and cleft chin as he glowered at the camera. He hated pictures. She could see it in the annoyed set of his eyes, pointing at her as though he’d lost his patience, as though she’d done something wrong.

  She shook her head and whispered, “No. Someone must’ve taken it.”

  “These items were found in the same vicinity as the . . .” The man across the table paused, catching himself. “As the remains. I understand this is difficult, but the evidence strongly suggests the victim was Alfred Ray Wiley. When was the last time you spoke with him?”

  The remains? A buzzing numbness spread down her arms and legs. A manila file folder sat closed on the table next to the evidence bags. The edge of a photograph peeked out from the side of it with a hint of blood. Her father’s picture watched from behind the plastic
as she tried to remember, to think at all. The victim was Alfred Ray Wiley. “Uh, I’m sorry, what was the question?”

  “When did you last speak with your father?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Christmas?” It sounded terrible coming out of her mouth. She was a terrible daughter.

  “Did he mention anything to you? Anything he was worried about? Anything strange?”

  She shook her head. “No. We just . . . we had an argument.”

  “What about?” He pulled her father’s driver’s license from its holder and handed it to her as though it would help her remember.

  She held it between her shaking hands. It felt wrong to be holding something that was his, something that belonged in his back pocket. “School . . . He . . . he wanted me to move back home.”

  Her father’s eyes drilled into her from the photograph. This whole college thing was a mistake, Goddammit! I don’t care about your grades. No daughter of mine has any business livin’ in that city. Shacked up with a man no less . . . Don’t you lie to me. The landlord told me . . . I don’t care if he is just a friend. He could be as queer as a three-dollar bill, you’re still livin’ like a Goddamned prostitute . . . Lookit. If you can’t afford the place, you don’t belong there.

  “Is that all? Did he mention any problems at work? Any money trouble?”

  “No . . . he just . . .” She wiped away a stray tear before it brought on a flood of them. The license fumbled between her fingers and fell to the table with an awkward clap. “He was mad about the money. School’s expensive and uh . . . he didn’t think I was getting good enough grades.”

  She didn’t explain that she had gotten a roommate without his permission to help pay the bills. Or that he’d hung up on her in a rage and they hadn’t talked since.

  An arm wrapped around her shoulders and gave her limp limbs a squeeze. She felt herself collapsing inward under its weight.

  Her interrogator pressed on. “Did he have any enemies? Anyone that might wish him harm?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t . . . This is crazy. It can’t be him!”

  “Show her the tattoo,” the man holding her whispered.

  The police officer opened the manila folder and flipped through several large glossy photographs. Fragments of pink skin, black hair, crusted blood, and white bone flashed between his fingers. He stopped and pulled out a large close-up image of a man’s shoulder marked with a dark gray skull with wings. Death from Above, it said. Her father had one just like it from the war. He always kept it covered up by his shirtsleeves. A familiar scar and dark mole muddled the ink.

  Dad?

  “That’s enough,” the man next to her said.

  “We’re going to need a signed statement. Without prints or dental, it’s going to be tough to make a positive ID any other way. There’s DNA, but getting a match . . . Was he a blood donor?”

  Without prints or dental. The photograph of the tattoo didn’t show the rest of him. His hands. His mouth. Her eyes flitted between the lone sock and the closed folder in the officer’s hand.

  “Just give us a minute.” The man gripping her shoulders held up a hand. It was her father’s best friend, Ben.

  The metal chair screeched against the floor as the officer pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “Take all the time you need.”

  He left with the file of photographs under his arm.

  Kris Wiley blinked her eyes clear as though waking from a trance. She was sitting in the Auglaize County Sheriff’s Office. Her shirt was inside out.

  “I’m so sorry, Kritter. I know he’d never want you to see all of this, but there was nothing I could do.” Ben let go of her shoulders and grabbed both her hands. Water welled in his eyes. His face had gone red. She’d known Ben all her life and had never once seen him cry, except from laughing too hard. He was wearing his deputy sheriff’s uniform. Growing up, she knew Ben was a cop, but he never wore his uniform when he came over to watch the games with her dad. It felt like Halloween. He squeezed her palms. “We just have to get confirmation from the family. For the official records.”

  “What do you want me to say?” she heard herself ask in a small voice. It didn’t even sound like her own. Her real voice wanted to scream Stop! so she could think, so she could make sense of it. So she could prove to everyone that none of this was really happening, that whatever they had found wasn’t him. But time kept careening by as she sat there. It had all happened so fast—the phone call from the Auglaize County Sheriff’s Office at 6:00 a.m., her waking her roommate, asking him to explain it to her professors. The words family emergency rattling through her head the entire drive from Cleveland back home.

  She watched it all unfold like it was happening to somebody else. And she couldn’t stop an evil voice in her head from whispering, Does this mean I can stay in school? Does this mean I’m free? She shook the thought away and pulled her hands back, digging her fingernails into her palms as penance. I’m a terrible daughter. Ungrateful. Stupid. I deserve to be the one that’s missing.

  Ben winced as though someone were squeezing his fingers in a vise. “We need you to confirm it’s him.”

  She kept her eyes on the pile of clothes. “That what’s him? These clothes? The wallet? Anybody could’ve stolen them, right? They don’t prove anything.”

  “They found him, hon. And you don’t want to see what they found, alright?”

  She opened her mouth to protest but nothing came out. He’s not dead. He’d never let himself be dead.

  “I know it’s hard, Kris. No one understands that better than me. Your dad was a like a brother to me . . . We’re trying to make this as easy as we can.”

  “A tattoo doesn’t make it him,” she protested. Oh my God. Did it? What would I even do? “What if it’s not him, Ben?”

  “No one’s seen him in four days, Kritter,” Ben pushed back gently. “He’s been missing at the train yard all week.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe he went hunting or . . .” She stared at the ugly gray speckled linoleum. He would never leave me all alone like this. Would he? The question swelled in her chest.

  “They found his truck.”

  “What?” she heard herself ask. “Where?”

  “Along the Auglaize River outside Fort Amanda.”

  He’d taken her there before, back when he was still trying to teach her to fish. Before she hit puberty and he started treating her like an alien. What is that pink stuff on your face? She felt herself falling off a cliff. “When did you find it?”

  “Last night.” Ben kneaded his hands together. “I talked to the boys at the canoe livery myself. He headed upstream Saturday afternoon and no one’s seen ’im since. Kris, I need you to believe that if there was any chance in the world that he was still out there somewhere, I’d be the first one lookin’ for him.”

  Kris watched him rub the tears back into his eyeballs as she plummeted further away. “There has to be some mistake.”

  “I know. But they found ’im, and . . .” He cleared his throat and shook his head.

  “What?” All Ben had said on the phone was, There’s been an accident, Kritter. You have to come home. Can somebody give you a ride? She’d said no. Her only friend at school was her roommate and he had to work. Then take it nice and slow, girl. Be safe. Everything’s going to be just fine. He’d lied to her. Nothing was going to be fine. “What did they find?”

  He breathed in a shaking breath and shook his head. “Fishermen pulled a piece of him out of the river. It was only a few miles from where they found the truck. Hunters found the clothes in the woods. It’s him, Krit . . . We’re still looking for the rest of him, but I’m afraid the facts don’t lie.”

  “A piece of him?” Her stomach shrank at the thought of an arm or a leg floating in the water.

  “Yeah. I know . . . Might’ve been a bear.” He rubbed his face.

  “No. That doesn’t make any sense. A bear? In Ohio?”

  “We’re not ruling anything out just yet.”
Ben gently patted her knee like she was six years old again. He gave it a squeeze and shut his eyes to think a moment. When he opened them, he said, “We don’t have to do this today, kiddo. I’ll have them run the DNA. You give us a sample, just a swab of saliva, and we’ll have something to work with. It’ll take a while. A week or two even, but we’ll do whatever we have to. Alright?”

  She nodded. His tone of voice told her she was being ridiculous, refusing to make the ID, but she could picture her father storming into the room, furious with them both for giving up too easily. Just couldn’t wait to be rid of me, huh? Couldn’t be bothered to even look?

  “You don’t have to decide anything right now.” Ben squeezed her shoulder and went to speak with the other officer out in the hallway. Their hushed voices drifted in through the open door.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get that ID today. We’ll have to run the DNA.”

  “Against what? Alfred Wiley’s not in the system.”

  “Yeah, but his daughter’s sittin’ right in there and she’s willing to give a spit sample. That’s gotta be good enough, right?”

  The other officer didn’t respond right away. “If we pull a positive, it works fine, but you know as well as I do that a negative doesn’t mean . . . I really should get confirmation from the family. Once we begin the autopsy, it’ll be harder to get an ID.”

  “Dammit,” Ben hissed. “She’s only nineteen years old. She needs some time to process all this. I’ll take the heat if this comes back on you. Alright?”

  “There’s no other family?”

  “Nope . . . Not unless you count me.”

  The quiet voices of the two men echoed off the cracked linoleum and yellowed ceiling panels of the tiny conference room. Kris picked her father’s driver’s license up off the table again. His unsmiling lips and impatient eyes daggered up at her from under the hard laminate. The fluorescent lights overhead cast a ghostly sheen over the evidence bags. She squinted at the spots of blood dotting the front of the button-down denim shirt. It didn’t prove anything. From the smell of it, the clothes had been lying in the woods for weeks. She stared at his unyielding face and could hear him talking.

  Don’t be stupid, Kritter! You know damned well that there’s another explanation for all of this. Do you really think I’d leave you to your own devices? That I’d just up and die and let you go off to some hippie art school for Christ’s sake?