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Shocking Discoveries by the River
In part three of the Western Pennsylvania Mutilation Murders Series, we travel the river south to Pittsburgh.
October 3, 1923, was a typical busy morning at the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad on Pittsburgh’s Southside. Around 9:45 am, Stephen Cass, a mill worker handling the derrick, was taking a break. “I had just walked down across the tracks behind a truck,” talking to Pittsburgh Press that day, saying he “sent the truck to Twenty-third St. along the Monongahela river for a load of stone when I wandered over to the shed used by girls for dressing for a swim.”
At the time, it was illegal to smoke on the job site, so Cass and other millworkers would often go to the shack when it was empty and relax for a moment with a cigarette.
“I stood in front of the shed for a few minutes before I looked in, and when I did I think I must have been overcome by dizziness.”
Inside the shed lay the headless corpse of a male body. The corpse was naked except for socks, and thrown over the man’s stomach was a pile of bloody clothing.
Cass called out for a nearby watchman and then the police. The blood-spattered shed so worked him up that he steered clear of it until police arrived to question him.
