Suburban Cumminsville is normally a peaceful place, but in the six-year period from 1904 to 1910 it earned the grisly reputation of a "murder zone," where women walked in fear and dreaded riding street cars after nightfall. A ferocious "mad killer" was on the loose, claiming five victims within a mile of the point where Spring Grove Avenue meets Winton Road, eluding the police and neighborhood patrols to leave a nagging legacy of doubt and mystery behind. Mary McDonald, 31, had "been around" before she met her killer in the predawn hours of May 4, 1904. An ill-fated affair with her late sister's husband had left her to find solace in whiskey, but things were looking up that spring, with her engagement to be married. Shortly after 1:30 a.m., she left a local tavern in company with her fiancee, and he saw her safely aboard an "owl car," homeward bound. Near daybreak, the switchman on a train near Ludlow Avenue spied Mary's body by the tracks and help was summoned. She was still alive but incoherent, with a fractured skull and one leg severed, dying hours later from her injuries. Police initially dismissed her death as "accidental," later shifting to the view that she was beaten and pushed in front of a train in a deliberate act of murder. Louise Mueller, 21, was the next to die, leaving home for a stroll on October 1, 1904. She never returned, and her body was found next morning the skull battered to pulp, in a gully beside some disused railroad tracks. Her killer had scooped a shallow grave from the soft earth nearby, but the corpse lay above ground, as if some passerby had disturbed the hasty burial. At 9 p.m. on November 2, 18-year-old Alma Steinigewig left her job as an operator at the local telephone exchange, vanishing before she reached her home. The next morning, a street car conductor spotted her corpse in a nearby vacant lot, her skull crushed by savage blows. The victim's clothes were muddy after being dragged across the lot, and officers discovered suspect footprints that would ultimately lead them nowhere. Clutched in Alma's hand, they found a street car transfer punched at 9:40 p.m. on the day of her death. An ugly pattern had begun to form, and homicide investigators hauled in suspects by the dozens, forced to free them all for lack of evidence . One who eluded them, a stocky man remembered for his heavy beard, had turned up at the Mueller crime scene , wringing his hands and crying out, "It was an accident!" Other witnesses placed him at the scene of Alma Steinigewig's death, but he was never identified, his link -- if any -- with the case remaining open to conjecture. Six years passed before the killer struck again, claiming 43-year-old Anna Lloyd on December 31, 1909. Employed as a secretary at a local lumber yard, the victim worked until 5:30 p.m. that New Year's Eve, her body found hours later, a short distance from the office. She had been gagged with a cheap black muffler, her skull crushed, her throat slashed, leaving signs of a fierce struggle behind. A single strand of black hair was clutched in her fist, but primitive forensics tests of the day rendered it worthless as evidence. Police initially called the slaying a contract murder, but no suspect or motive was ever identified. The stalker claimed his final victim on October 25, 1910, when 26-year-old Mary Hackney was found in her cottage on Dane Street, her skull fractured and throat slashed. Suspicion focused briefly on her husband, but police discovered Mary was alive when he reported to his job. A spate of letters, signed with the initials "S.D.M.," were mailed by someone claiming knowledge of the crimes, but homicide investigators finally dismissed them as a hoax. The fading memories of murder were revived in December 1913, by investigators of the Burns Detective Agency, assigned to check out unsolved acts of violence in a recent street car strike. Detectives told the mayor they had discovered an "indefinite" solution in the case of Anna Lloyd, pointing the finger of suspicion at a one time conductor, now confined to a sanitarium as hopelessly insane. A search of his lodgings had turned up a threatening letter, addressed to persons "who saw him in the act of Dec. 31," and authorities leaped to a theoretical connection with the three-year-old murder. Ultimately fruitless, the investigation petered out a few days later, and the crimes in Cumminsville remain unsolved.