Northeast Ohio's History of Killers

CLEVELAND -- The discovery of at least 10 decomposing bodies at a home on the east side of Cleveland adds another chapter in a long history of serial killers and mass murderers with their roots in the northeast corner of Ohio.

Jeffrey Dahmer, who devoured some of his 17 victims; Jeffrey Lundgren, the defrocked Mormon minister who buried his slain followers in a barn; and James Huberty, the man behind the 1984 McDonald's massacre, are among the fiendish felons with ties to the Cleveland-Akron-Canton region.

At first glance, their atrocities seem to have little in common with this latest ghastly case. The killers are all white men, and they all committed their crimes far from where they grew up. Fifty-year-old suspect Anthony Sowell, who Cleveland police arrested Saturday, lived in the house where the bodies were found. The women all appear to have been from the area.

Yet a Cleveland State University criminologist sees at least one link among all these horrors: The neighborhood where the women were killed, the Mount Pleasant section of Cleveland, is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest cities in America. The victims were probably easy targets, he said.

"People who live these under-the-radar lives are more likely to be victims, especially women," said James Chriss, who is finishing a book, "Beyond Community Policing: From the Wild West to 9/11."

"Studies show that demographics of population make some people easy targets because they're not as easily missed," he said.

A University of Akron criminal justice professor, Mary Myers, sees another similarity in the cases. "In Cleveland, it appears these women were lured into the killer's comfort zone," said Myers, a former Akron police captain who teaches criminal profiling. "That happens with many serial killers: He brings people into his place of residence, or a place where he's comfortable."

There could be more bodies in Cleveland, she said. "It's going to take months for police to check every place where he's ever felt comfortable."

Three of the most gruesome killers from the region fit both patterns.

Jeffrey Dahmer grew up in affluent Bath, Ohio, near Akron, just south of Cleveland. He moved to Wisconsin in the 1980s, then to an apartment in a poor section of Milwaukee, where he lured transient young men and boys, most from gay bars. He raped and tortured them and even ate some of their body parts. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 15 murders. Two other cases were dropped. Dahmer was killed in prison in 1994.

Bob Berdella lived in a declining urban neighborhood in Kansas City. Like Dahmer, he grew up in an Akron suburb, Cuyahoga Falls, moving away when he was a young man. Berdella also used sex and drugs to lure his victims to his home. He confessed to torturing, drugging, killing and dismembering six young men from 1984 to 1988 in the bedroom of his home in Kansas City. He told authorities he also took snapshots of the men in agony before dismembering their bodies, according to Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Berdella avoided the death penalty by confessing.

Gary M. Heidnik, who grew up in a troubled home in Eastlake, a suburb of Cleveland, was sentenced to death in 1988 for the murder of two women in a poor section of Philadelphia. Again, he had enticed them to come to his residence. One woman escaped, and when she led police to Heidnik's home, they found three women chained in his basement and 24 pounds of human body parts in the freezer. He was executed in 1999.

Poor victims were also targeted in Cleveland's Torso Murders. From 1935 to 1938, at least 12 people who lived in a shantytown section of the city were murdered and dismembered. Not even Elliott Ness could solve the crimes, but after a suspect, a well-connected doctor, committed himself to a mental institution, the killings stopped. The doctor had performed battlefield amputations during World War I.

Another northeast Ohio killer, Thomas Lee Dillon, who worked for the Canton Water Department, found his comfort zone in the forests of central Ohio, where lone hunters and hikers were easy prey. He gunned down five men with a rifle before he was caught just before the start of deer-hunting season in 1992. Dillon pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 165 years, but he never expressed remorse. "I'm not a heartless person," he said during frequent calls from his prison cell to an Akron Beacon Journal reporter. "I just don't feel guilty."

Myers said that, too, is common. "They dehumanize their victims," she said. "They don't feel bad when they kill a spider."

She said neither Huberty nor Lundgren could be classified as serial killers because they murdered all at once.

But Lundgren certainly had captive victims, his small band of followers. The defrocked minister with the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints formed his own sect in Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland. In 1989, he killed five of his followers, a couple and their three children, inside a Kirtland barn. He was executed in 2006.

Huberty lived in Massillon, Ohio, near Canton and southwest of Akron, until he moved to the West Coast in 1984. On July 18 that year, Huberty opened fire at a McDonald's in San Ysidro , Calif., killing 21 and wounding 19, most poor people of Mexican descent, during a 77-minute shooting spree. The rampage ended when he was shot to death by a SWAT team sniper. His widow sued McDonald's, claiming the fast-food chain's food affected his mental health. The case was thrown out.

Neither Chriss nor Myers knows of any direct link between northeast Ohio and the number of prominent killers it has spawned. Myers said one Web site lists Ohio as the capital of serial killers, "but my research indicates that's not true." She cited a study that listed Ohio ranking sixth in the nation among serial killings behind California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Florida. But those figures wouldn't include the likes of Dahmer, Berdella and Heidnik, who did most of their damage out of state.

"Studies have shown that place can be a factor in producing deviancy," Chriss said. "It would be interesting to study the data."