Officials in Cleveland They are paired with a nonprofit organization to use genetic genealogy to identify body parts left behind by one of America’s oldest known serial killers, almost a century after they were found.

The “Body Killer,” also known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” killed at least 12 people between 1935 and 1938, according to the Cleveland Police Museum website. However, recent research has suggested the total number of victims could be 20 or more, Cleveland.com reported.

Only two of the killer’s victims have been identified. Bodies were rarely found whole, often missing heads that were never recovered.

According to, those with heads located far from the rest of their bodies Cleveland Police Museum, The sketches distributed are believed to feature unrecognizable vagabonds.

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Confused since 1934 about the identity of Cleveland’s “Crazy Body Killer,” Cleveland Police had a new problem to solve when bridge tenders over the murky Cuyahoga River dragged five parts of a woman’s body out of the water. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Two victims linked to the unknown killer have been positively identified as Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo, according to the museum.

Andrassy, ​​a 28-year-old white man, was found decapitated, castrated, wearing only socks and drained of blood in July 1939. The museum said his fingertips identified him.

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Police searched the scene and found the body of an unidentified woman, probably in her 40s. The parts of the waiter and bartender Polillo were found carefully wrapped in newspaper in January 1936. The rest of his body, except his head, was found elsewhere 10 days later. He was also identified from his fingerprints.

Dental records allowed for the “unofficial” identification of the third victim, Rose Wallace. However, according to the museum, the police could not reach a definitive decision.

Despite no arrests were ever madePolice believe a surgeon named Francis E. Sweeney, who had the expertise and equipment to dismember the bodies, was responsible for the murders. He was questioned by police for a week but never confessed, according to the Cleveland Police Museum. But after he committed himself to an institution, the murders came to a halt.

The DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization that performs and helps fund genetic genealogy testing on cold cases, matched with the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office to name some of the 10 people. unidentified victims.

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Detectives and a medical examiner examine the bones of two murder victims found Aug. 16, 1938, in the East 9th Street Lakeshore Dump in Cleveland. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Genetic genealogist CeCe Moore told Fox News Digital that “the DNA Doe project is very likely to be successful in identifying these individuals.”

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“There was no such thing as DNA testing in 1938. It was something they probably couldn’t have imagined. So the advances we’ve seen over almost 100 years are incomprehensible to the people who were working on this to begin with, no doubt,” he said.

“You know, in the ’80s, DNA started to be examined in criminal applications. And in the ’90s, it really started to be used in the United States. But it really took a while for it to be accepted. So, for example, when juries had to weigh DNA as heavily as we do today,” he said. We can then look at the OJ Simpson case, which is not well understood. We have taken another step forward in investigative genetic genealogy in the last six years.

“Direct-to-consumer DNA testing was introduced in 2000 by a company called Family Tree DNA. This was the first time we were able to test our own DNA to learn more about our family tree and genetic heritage,” Moore explained. “This has become what is now called genetic genealogy. It is a combination of DNA testing and the use of genealogical records.

“So people have been genealogists for decades, hundreds of years, and they’ve used records to build family trees. And today we’re really lucky that there are billions of records that have been digitized online, and most of us can build our family trees that go way back.” On time, in the comfort of our own home.”

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Two bodies have been exhumed so far. One of them, whom WOIO-TV described as the killer’s “most famous” victim, is known as “The Tattooed Man.”

The unidentified man’s head, left near railroad tracks in the summer of 1936, was found approximately 400 meters from his body. She was never identified, even after police fingerprinted her and widely distributed images of her six tattoos, including the names “Helen” and “Paul,” according to the Cleveland Police Museum.

At the 1936 Great Lakes Exposition, more than 100,000 people saw an exhibit that included a plaster cast of the man’s head and images of his tattoos, but no one reported recognizing him.

The second body to be tested was found on Cleveland’s lakeshore in the summer of 1938 and is believed to be the killer’s sixth victim.

Kingsbury Run is dotted on this map with the locations of 10 of the 11 hull murders that occurred there in the 1930s. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

A single anonymous donor covered the lab costs, DNA Doe told CBS News. Although the remains were contaminated or degraded due to their age, DNA Doe identified older remains, said Jennifer Randolph, the nonprofit’s director of case management.

“We’ll figure out who the DNA related matches are. We’ll build their trees, we’ll find those common ancestors, and then, we’ll move forward, or maybe we’ll go back a little bit and see who the unidentified individual was.” Randolph told WOIO-TV.

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“So there may still be people alive who know that these are individuals who disappeared from their families and no one knows what happened to them,” Randolph said. “And whatever that piece is, they deserve the dignity and justice of being remembered by name, especially considering how they died.”

Digital scientists will face many challenges working with such ancient artifacts, Moore told Fox News.

“We’re faced with deterioration, potential contamination from bacteria. It’s very difficult to study what we call ‘ancient ruins,'” Moore explained. “When you work with very old cases, you almost certainly run into a breakdown where you can’t analyze all the DNA.

“Some o DNA will be lost. And then we see that with contamination, bacteria actually insert their own genome into the human genome. “And so, before we can do our genetic ancestry research, you need to have skilled scientists who can extract this bacterial genome, separate it from the human genome.”

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However, even older remains were detected using the application, Moore said, adding that the family of at least one victim of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was finally notified in July of this year.

Accordingly fox 59World War I veteran CL Daniel was identified as one of the victims of the 1921 tragedy and his family was notified 103 years later.

“I have some inside information on this, and it has been very difficult to obtain the DNA needed to do genetic genealogical research from these very old remains,” Moore said. “But there were some successes, and sometimes it took more than one round of the lab to finally get the DNA that was valid for our study. It’s quite comparable, and it’s been very difficult.”