Timothy O'Bryan

popular name: Dr. Francis E. Sweeney

date_of_death: July 9, 1964

age: 70

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: From 1935 to 1938, 12 bodies – some people say 13 - were dumped in the area known as Kingsbury Run, a creek bed that ran from East 90th Street and Kinsman Road to the Cuyahoga River. The victims included seven men and five women. Most were hobos and prostitutes, people living on the edge at a time when Cleveland was hard hit by the Great Depression. Many weren't missed for months. Then 80 years after Frank Dolezal was murdered in his prison cell as the suspected serial killer, multiple investigators have uncovered both old and new evidence that most certainly points to Dr. Francis Sweeney as the actual Cleveland Torso Murderer. Dr. Sweeney perfectly fit the profile of the Cleveland Torso Murderer and had the medical expertise required for dismembering human bodies. Alas we was never arrested as he committed himself to a mental hospital after extensive questioning by Eliot Ness, special agent assigned to the killings. He died in 1964 and was interred at Calvary Cemetery in Cleveland, OH.

popular name: Sam DeStefano

date_of_death: April 14, 1973

age: 63

cause_of_death: Homicide - gunshot wounds

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Notorious Italian-American gangster with the Chicago Outfit, Sam "Mad Sam" DeStefano was known to be one of its most vicious loan sharks, serial rapists and sociopathic killers in organized crime. DeStefano was too mentally unstable to serve as a boss, but he still gained much respect within the gang and was used as a loan collector, hitman and mob fixer.

popular name: Velma Barfield

date_of_death: November 2, 1984

age: 52

cause_of_death: Execution by lethal injection

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Velma Barfield was an American female serial killer and is remembered for being one of the first women to be executed in the United States after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Barfield was 1 of 9 children born in South Carolina into abject poverty. As the eldest girl, she was expected at a young age to cook, clean and mend clothes for the entire family (no easy task in a house with no electricity, no running water and no toilet facilities). A childhood marked by abuse and a difficult relationship with her family, she met and married Thomas Burke in 1949 and had two children. It was during her marriage to Burke that she developed a debilitating addiction to narcotics to treat depression and pain from several surgeries. Over a period of 16 years, Velma Barfield poisoned several victims when they discovered she was forging checks to fund her drug habit. Those victims include her own mother, her fiancé, and her mother-in-law, among others. She used arsenic to kill them, often claiming they had died from natural causes. After the death of Stuart Taylor (Barfield's boyfriend and a relative of victim #6 Dollie Edwards) the local police were tipped-off by Barfield's sister in 1976, thus investigators were able to link the deaths to her through forensic evidence. Upon her arrest and without a lawyer present, she confessed initially to 3 of the murders. In 1978 she was convicted of the death of her fiancé, Stuart Taylor, and sentenced to death. After 2 appeals and 6 years on death row, the "Death Row Granny" Velma Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984, by lethal injection in North Carolina. Her execution was notable because she was the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962 and one of the few women executed in the 20th century. She was buried next to her first husband in a grave that remains unmarked in Parkton Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.