|
January 1936: A woman discovers about half the body of a female neatly
wrapped in newspaper and packed in two half bushel baskets. The baskets
were left alongside the Hart Manufacturing building on Central Avenue
near E.20 Street. Everything except the head was recovered
about ten days later in a vacant lot on nearby Orange Avenue. As in the
case of Edward Andrassy, the cause of death had been decapitation. For
some reason, however, the killer had waited for rigor mortis to set in
before disarticulating the rest of the body. Fingerprints again would
allow the identification of one Florence Polillo, waitress, bar maid,
prostitute. At the time of her death she resided at E. 32 Street and Carnegie, right on the edge of the Roaring Third.June 1936: Early one morning in Kingsbury Run, two young boys discovered
the head of a white male wrapped in a pair of trousers close to the E.
55 Street bridge. |
Flo Polillo
|
| Police found the body of the
twenty-some-year-old man the next day dumped in front of the Nickel
Plate Railroad police building. Clean and drained of blood, the corpse
was intact except for the head. Pierce again determined the death had
been caused by decapitation. In spite of a fresh set of fingerprints and
the presence of six distinctive tattoos on various parts of the body,
police were never able to identify the victim. A plaster reproduction of
the man’s head, along with a diagram of the kind and location of the
tattoos, were made to display at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936.
More than one hundred thousand people saw the “Death Mask” and
tattoo chart. The “Tattooed Man” was never identified. (The original
Death Mask, along with three others from the case are on display at the
Cleveland Police Museum)
|
3