CLEVELAND, Ohio -- He has gone by many names over the past 78 years, most notably the Torso Killer or the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.

He claimed a dozen victims in the late 1930s, seven more than Jack the Ripper. They were male and female, black and white, most never identified, all of them decapitated, dismembered and drained of blood. The killer was never caught or officially identified.

Probably no one alive knows more about him than James Jessen Badal. The story won't let him go.

Badal knows enough about it, in fact, that he's been able to add another victim to the toll: Frank Dolezal, a laborer held as a suspect in the killings. His death in custody was ruled a suicide, but Badal found Dolezal was almost certainly murdered by his jailers.

Badal drew on unpublished testimony and modern forensic analysis to tell that story in the book "Though Murder Has No Tongue," which followed "In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders," his groundbreaking examination of the unsolved killings, published in 2001.

Now he goes a step further in an expanded and revised edition of "In the Wake of the Butcher." Published by Kent State University Press, it will be released officially on Thursday, with an event from 6-9 p.m. at Dante Next Door, 2247 Professor Ave. in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood.

Badal, who will speak and sign copies, had long resisted a revised edition unless he had something substantial to add. Then he met Ted Krejsa, the great-nephew of a doctor who once practiced with Francis Sweeney -- the insane and drug-addicted but politically connected physician who was identified only in the 1970s as the "secret suspect" of Eliot Ness, the former G-man who became Cleveland's safety director and oversaw the investigation.

Krejsa had photos and diagrams of the long-since bulldozed building and block on Broadway, near East 55th Street, where Sweeney worked. Key pieces to the puzzle, they enabled Badal to plot the overlapping movements of both Sweeney and the Mad Butcher on a map he accurately pronounces "creepy as hell."

With additional research, Badal was able to solve several mysteries about the murders, and to turn the suspicion that the killer was Sweeney into a firm conclusion.

"I think I put together a pretty good circumstantial case. I realize you couldn't take it to court," he said. "And Ness realized back then he couldn't take it to court.

"This is legitimate history," Badal added in an interview in a Tremont coffeehouse not far from where he lives. "This is not blood and guts sensationalism. You treat something like this with the dignity you would treat any historical event. You don't build card castles out of nothing."

The case is convincing. The story is compelling. Is it over?

"God, I hope so," he said. "I've lived with it for 18 years. But I thought I was done in 2001. I don't know. Never say never. I suppose bits and pieces of evidence are going to continue to come forward."

He paused.

"I don't know if I want to be done," he said.

Not that it matters. The real question is whether the story is done with him.

More than an avocation, unsolved mysteries have become a calling for Badal, 71, a dogged researcher and skilled storyteller whose real job is assistant professor of English and journalism at Cuyahoga Community College.

Questions about whether Cleveland's Mad Butcher also struck in Pennsylvania led him to write last year's "Hell's Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders," a book whose research adds to the heft of the revised "In the Wake of the Butcher."

The seed of another book about unsolved crime, "Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts," published in 2005, was planted when he was 7 or 8 years old, growing up in Shaker Heights. A stranger in a car asked if he wanted to go for a ride. It was around the time in 1951 when 10-year-old Beverly vanished from Halloran Park on Cleveland's West Side.

"I said no and ran home," he said. "Jim Badal was lucky. Beverly Potts wasn't."

He's currently working on another unsolved case that haunts Cleveland, the brutal midday murder of 16-year-old Beverly Jarosz, in her Garfield Heights home on Dec. 28, 1964. He daily passes the cemetery where she is buried.

"I look and in my own way say a little prayer for Beverly," he said. "This is the hardest book I've had to do in an emotional sense. I've seen things I wish I never did."

He hopes the book will provide a measure of comfort, if not closure, to her surviving family members.

He has seen before how the history he writes is not dead -- it's not even past.

In 2010, he and his research team on "Though Murder Has No Tongue" helped raise money to put a stone on the grave of Frank Dolezal, the suspect whom the book vindicated. Either because his family lacked the money or because they were afraid of vandalism, it previously was unmarked.

The gravestone, set at a ceremony attended by family members in August 2010, reads simply, "Rest Now."