History & local legend
Murder Swamp was the name newspapers gave the marshy land between New Castle Junction and West Pittsburg after a series of discoveries beginning in 1925. On October 6, steelworker Samuel Hares went duck hunting and noticed a human leg beneath a fallen tree. Investigators recovered a headless body and later found the head nearby. Before the month ended, another body and a separate skull had been found in the swamp.
The killings remained unsolved. In October 1939, boys gathering walnuts discovered another victim in the weeds. A railroad inspector subsequently found the head in a freight car near the marsh. The railway connection and the treatment of the bodies encouraged comparisons with the Cleveland torso murders at Kingsbury Run.
Those comparisons became a lasting part of Murder Swamp’s notoriety, but a shared killer was never established.
Sources
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Notorious Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania torso murder chronology drawn from period newspapers
- Lawrence County Memoirs, Murder Swamp, Taylor Township, historic newspaper excerpts and named witness
- Case Western Reserve University, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Torso Murders
- New Castle Junction, GNIS geographic feature 1204273, coordinates
