The Maniac in the Bushes

More Tales of Cleveland Woe

by John Stark Bellamy II

  • Format: Softcover, 302 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 inches
  • Illustrations: 90 black-and-white photographs
  • ISBN: 978-1-886228-19-1
  • Price: $13.95
Description

Here are 13 more incredible but true crime stories from the streets of Cleveland, Ohio— and from the author of They Died Crawling And Other Tales of Cleveland Woe. Included are northeast Ohio's most terrifying unsolved cases: the Torso Murders, which stumped Eliot Ness and dozens of other local lawmen; the historic and tragic Collinwood School fire; the enduring Beverly Potts disappearance mystery; and over a dozen more equally compelling tales of mayhem, melancholy, and mystery.

Book Excerpt:
Torso Prologue: The Mystery Begins

It's even questionable whether it is proper to begin the Torso melodrama in the 1930s, much less in Kingsbury Run, the topographical remnant of an ancient stream that once fed the Cuyahoga River south of the Flats area. Headless torsos have ever been an attractive resort for killers with inconvenient corpses on their hands, and the first historical mention of a headless body found in the Run appeared in the Cleveland Leader on November 13, 1905. A poor woman scavenging for saleable refuse in a Case Avenue dump came upon the body of a man who had been fatally shot in the chest, decapitated, and dumped in the Run. No suspects were forthcoming, and the unsolved homicide was soon added to a roster of fascinating contemporary mysteries, like the brutal killing of Anna Kinkopf in Payne's Pastures and the locked-room mystery of Minnie Peter's hammer murder. Questions regarding the chronology of the Torso murders become all the more confusing when one discovers that for decades Cleveland police refused to acknowledge the Kingsbury killer's first undoubted casualty— a headless human female washed up on the Lake Erie shore near Euclid Beach on September 9, 1934— as one of the fabled serial . . . [ Read More Free Samples ]

Reviews
Morbidly fascinating and wickedly entertaining . . . John Stark Bellamy II is the historian your mother warned you about . . . he offers bad guys and wanton women, unspeakable tragedy and murder most foul . . . Strange? Yes, you can certainly say that about a lot of the tales Bellamy includes in his second (and, one can only hope, not his last) collection of Cleveland crime and catastrophe stories. Strange, but awfully entertaining. — The Plain Dealer
Murder, shoot-outs, serial killers, damsels in distress, roller coasters headed to nowhere, killers in the attic, matricide, patricide, black widows ... Cleveland had it all, as Bellamy deftly and floridly notes in page turners like this. Who knew history could be such great, bloody fun? — The Plain Dealer
Bellamy . . . [is a] Homer of our homicides, wandering through dark places and remembering. — Free Times
You'd have a tough time finding somebody in town more learned--or enthusiastic--about the city's history of death and disaster. — Scene Magazine
Take the titles of his past books and you get the idea. The Maniac in the Bushes, They Died Crawling, Corpse in the Cellar, and Killer in the Attic probably reside in half the residential book cases on northern Ohio. Certainly in mine. They are a guilty pleasure if your mind works that way . . . [Bellamy's] the best writer and historian to come out of Cleveland since George Condon. — News Journal
If you like stories about murder, then this recount of local deaths will thrill you to no end. — Sun Newspapers
John Bellamy II has turned crime into an art with the second of his books on local crimes and disasters. . . . [He] is a thorough researcher and has mined so much definitive material, you almost believe you are reading and reliving the stories of a current crime. The characters come alive with well defined narrative strength and you are swept up in their lives. — The Times... Of Your Life
Audio for The Maniac in the Bushes

Click to listen to John Stark Bellamy II share his own personal disaster:

Audio was provided by Stephen Bellamy

About John Stark Bellamy II
John Stark Bellamy II

John Stark Bellamy II is the author of six books and two anthologies about Cleveland crime and disaster. The former history specialist for the Cuyahoga County Public Library, he comes by his taste for the sensational honestly, having grown up reading stories about Cleveland crime and disaster written by his grandfather, Paul, who was editor of the Plain Dealer, and his father, Peter, who wrote for the Cleveland News and the Plain Dealer. More About John Stark Bellamy II

Contains References to:

1908 Collinwood Fire, Accidents, Beverly Potts, Blinky Morgan, Cleveland Fires, Cleveland Gothic Tales, Cleveland Homicide, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland Press, Cleveland True Crime, J.J. Phillips, Janet Blood, Kingsbury Run, Martha Wise, Torso Murders, Velma West

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