Cleveland's Butcher

''The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" is a character with whom Cleveland newspapers have curdled their readers' blood since 1934, when the first of 13 dissected torsos was discovered in the city's purlieus. Neatly beheaded, arms and legs deftly removed, the grisly remains of seven men and six women suggested the work of a fiend acquainted with the meat-chopping profession. As one killing after another came to light periodically, Cleveland's harried sheriff hired a private detective named Lawrence J. ("Pat") Lyons to work on the case.

Last spring Pat Lyons found something. Having looked for but failed to discover a refrigerated slaughter chamber where the Butcher might have worked, he made friends with a circle of human scum in which two of the identified victims had moved: Mrs. Florence Polillo (No. 4), a prostitute, and Edward W. Andrassy (No. 2), a pervert. From their friends Pat Lyons learned that one Frank Dolezal knew them both, that he was with the Polillo woman the night police believed she was killed. Frank Dolezal drank a good deal, was fond of knives. Block-jawed, muscular, he used to be a butcher, now laid bricks.

In rooms formerly occupied by Dolezal, Pat Lyons found crumbs of human blood between the floor boards, behind the bathtub. Arrested, Dolezal withstood 40 hours of questioning before he blurted: "Yes, I cut her up."

Hopeful that he had the author of all 13 atrocities, Cleveland's Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell breathed a long sigh of relief. Politically, his skin was saved. Professionally, he had triumphed over Sleuth Eliot Ness, famed G-Man who "got" Al Capone and is now Cleveland's Director of Public Safety.

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