This episode of "CSI" is real. Yes, it stars a brutal killer. A city in panic. A supercop. But the story doesn't get neatly wrapped up in 60 minutes. Try 75 years -- and counting --of messy mayhem.

The killer of Kingsbury Run continues to taunt his followers -- three-quarters of a century after his first victim was discovered on a sunny afternoon on the East Side. They obsess over his grisly methods. The killer's psychology. The Untouchable who was never able to finger him. They even call the Cleveland Police Department with leads about the unresolved case.

That last fact, of course, is central to the Torso Murders cottage industry -- one that has spawned countless books, a play, a movie, even a sightseeing tour.

"The Torso Murders case is one of the darkest episodes in Cleveland history," says Chuck Gove, detective in the Cleveland Police Homicide Unit. "It continues to fascinate people because it's so intertwined with the city's past and yet it's still a mystery."

A brutal one at that.

Between September 1935 and August 1938, the bodies of seven men and five women were discovered in or near Kingsbury Run, a shantytown in a creek bed running from East 90th Street and Kinsman Road to the Cuyahoga River. A 13th body, found washed up near Bratenahl in 1934, later was added to the tally.

Gove has traveled the trail of blood countless times -- and not because he's a cop in search of clues that would lead him to the killer in the still-open case.

Since 2003, he's been conducting the "Mystery, Mayhem and Murder Tour," a three-hour bus trip that recounts the rampage.

"At first, I was a little worried that it would be all these people obsessed with serial killers," Gove says. "I was surprised to find that it's just regular people fascinated with Cleveland history."

Torso Murders alive in pop culture

The Torso Killer was never caught. And he continues to live on in pop culture. Here are some of the appearances -- 75 years after the killer gripped the city:

The three-hour "Mystery, Mayhem and Murder" bus tour. Go to

An episode of "Criminal Minds" that pays homage to the spree.

"Torso," a comic series by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko.

"Eliot Ness in Cleveland," a Cleveland Play House production about Ness and the case.

"Butcher's Dozen," a novel by Max Allan Collins.

"The Maniac in the Bushes and More Tales of Cleveland Woe," by John Stark Bellamy II.

"In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders" and "Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland's Mad Butcher," by James Jessen Badal.

An episode of "Unsolved Mysteries" that links the murders with Los Angeles' "Black Dahlia slaying.

Most Clevelanders look back fondly at a time when the city was on the rise. The murders provided a gruesome counterpoint.

"The Torso Murders came at a time when the city was experiencing so much growth and making a name for itself," says Gove. "Then came this panic that gripped the city for years."

The bus tour begins as the panic did -- at Jackass Hill, a slope near East 49th Street and Praha Avenue, where the public first learned of the killing spree, on Sept. 23, 1935.

"Two boys playing softball found the naked, emasculated, headless corpse of Edward Andrassy," according to James Jessen Badal, author of "In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland Torso Murders. "It was left out in the open, as if the killer was taunting people to find it."

He was, as Eliot Ness discovered.

The famous Chicago mob buster came to Cleveland in December 1935 to serve as safety director.

Cleveland, the sixth-largest city in America in the 1930s, was considered the nation's most dangerous -- high in traffic accidents and organized crime and in need of updating the police force and improving response times.

"Ness was effective at cleaning up the city and reducing accidents," Badal says. "But the police had never dealt with anything like the Torso Murders."

Like Jack the Ripper, who brutalized prostitutes in Victorian England, the Torso Killer revealed himself only in his methods and victim types.

"He was one of the first serial killers [to gain notoriety] in the country," adds Badal. "Police had been used to dealing with a killer who knew the victim, but here you were dealing with a madman killing complete strangers."

Most of the victims were homeless or transients, their bodies mutilated with such precision that the killings had to be the work of someone familiar with anatomy.

That led Ness to Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, whom Badal considers the prime suspect.

"He was a surgeon who started developing paranoid schizophrenia in 1929," says Badal. "In May 1938, Ness interrogated him for two weeks in a room in what is now the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel. He gave Sweeney two polygraph tests. He failed both.

But Ness lacked evidence to link Sweeney to the crime, says Badal.

Sweeney voluntarily entered an institution in Sandusky shortly after the last recorded murder was discovered. Over the years, says Badal, Ness received taunting postcards -- including one signed "F.E. Sweeney, Paranoidal Nemesis" --from someone claiming to be Sweeney, who died in 1964. (Ness died in 1957.)

Another suspect, Frank Dolezal, died under mysterious circumstances in the Cuyahoga County Jail in 1939.

"There was a political battle going on between the administration and the sheriff's office," says Badal. "Well, the sheriff beat a confession out of him, breaking six ribs in the process."

Some theorize that there were multiple killers -- and that the lack of DNA testing or experience with serial killers led police to attribute the crimes to one person.

"These days, you have security cameras on buildings, DNA -- and there are more people out at night making for more potential witnesses," Gove says. "You also have psychological profiles -- something we didn't have back then."

The murderer displayed an extreme degree of sexual deviance, not to mention a virulent anti-social streak that led him to leave victims out in the open. It is a stark contrast to John Wayne Gacy's killings in Chicago or the recent Imperial Avenue slayings, in which victims were hidden.

"You really see the portrait of a serial killer coming into view with the Torso Murders," says Gove.

They continue to fascinate because they make everyone an amateur detective, though.

"Most serial killers are discovered with a pile of bodies," says Badal. "But this case will live on forever, as long the killer is not found."

Of course, he's long dead. But that hasn't stopped people from tracking him.

"We still have people calling with tips to the killer," Gove says. "But the trail always goes cold."

The trail, perhaps. But not the tale. For 75 years, the killer is still in business.

No knives and no blood -- just books and bus trips.