The Maniac in the Bushes and More Tales of Cleveland Woe by John Stark Bellamy

The Maniac in the Bushes and More Tales of Cleveland Woe by John Stark Bellamy

Morbidly fascinating and wickedly entertaining. -- The Plain Dealer

The second volume in Bellamy's popular series includes 13 more incredible true stories of Cleveland crime and disaster, including . . .

- Martha Wise, Medina's not-so-merry widow, who poisoned a dozen relatives with arsenic--including her own husband, mother, brother, niece, and nephews--because she enjoyed attending funerals;

- The legendary Torso Murders, which baffled Cleveland safety directory Eliot Ness, two Cuyahoga County coroners, and the entire Cleveland police force as they tried in vain to catch the perpetrator--whom newspapers dubbed the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run;

- The unspeakably horrible Collinwood School Fire of 1908, in which 172 schoolchildren perished in panic because of obstructed fire exits;

- Hammer-wielding Velma West, a big-city girl of Cleveland's Jazz Age driven to murder her small-town husband by the slow pace of life of Painesville--and her own obsession with another woman;

- The Flats lumber fire of 1914, which leveled Cleveland's industrial Flats, melted bridges, and very nearly set the entire city ablaze;

- The enduring mystery of ten-year-old Beverly Potts, whose puzzling disappearance from west-side Halloran Park in 1951 launched Cleveland's greatest manhunt;

And many other local heroes and villains in these compelling tales of mayhem, melancholy, and mystery.

Carleton University's John Bellamy is a Distinguished Research Professor of History. He is the author of The Law of Treason in the Later Middle Ages, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England, and Criminal Law and Society in Late Medieval and Tudor England, among other books on criminal history.