The Torso Murders Part 2: San Jacinto County

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Three years after a suitcase containing a man’s torso surfaced in the Rio Grande near El Paso, another horror emerged—this time in the pine woods of East Texas. On February 3, 1962, two brothers seining minnows in a roadside ditch off U.S. Highway 59 north of Cleveland discovered two cardboard boxes wired together and packed with cement. Inside was the severed torso of a woman. Her head, arms, and legs were missing.

San Jacinto County Sheriff Lewis Woodruff and Constable Collis Everitt called in the Texas Rangers and Houston pathologist Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk. The autopsy revealed crude dismemberment, a missing heart, and faint teeth marks on the torso. Nine pieces of women’s clothing surrounded the body, all stripped of laundry tags. Every clue, as few as there were, pointed toward Houston.

Investigators chased leads across Texas and beyond.

Between the 1959 discovery in El Paso and the 1962 killing in San Jacinto County lay nearly eight hundred miles, three years, and two nameless victims—each drained of blood, each missing a heart. The phantom butcher once dubbed “Mack the Knifer” disappeared without a trace, leaving the questions of who they were and why they died buried with them.

If you have any information about the 1962 San Jacinto Torso Case, please call the sheriff’s office there at (936) 653-4367.

Sources: The El Paso Times, The El Paso Herald-Post, The Houston Post, The Houston Chronicle, The Sarasota Journal, The Fort Lauderdale News

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.
0:08.7	Nearly three years had passed since a black suitcase rose out of the Rio Grande west of El Paso.
0:16.0	The torso inside had sent El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey and his deputies down many paths, some more
0:23.9	promising than others, and all led absolutely nowhere. Even after other body parts were found,
0:31.6	including the hands, authorities couldn't catch a break in the case. Bailey could still smell the river on the day of the first discovery.
0:41.2	Mud, diesel drifting off the border bridge, decay.
0:46.6	Every so often, even when there wasn't a lead to follow,
0:50.4	the sheriff would pull the case file, look at the photographs,
0:54.1	and imagine the current carrying the killer's secrets, the body's head, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
1:01.8	Whoever did this was a madman, but without identifying the victim, Bailey knew finding the killer would be next to impossible.
1:11.2	The torso case had long gone cold.
1:15.5	By 1962, much of the other side of Texas was unrecognizable to a lot of old-timers.
1:24.0	The interstates were carving concrete paths through Pine Country.
1:28.3	Houston's skyline bristled with cranes, and the behemoth city was swallowing up all the small communities that surrounded it.
1:37.5	Oil towns pulsed with new money.
1:40.8	But the quiet stretches still looked the same, semis carrying wood for lumber down two-lane highways, air nearly as thick as water, and bar ditches full of cat-tails.
1:54.3	On a gray day in early February, two brothers cast their nets for minnows in one of those ditches off Highway 59 north of Cleveland.
2:04.6	They expected mud and the occasional beer can, maybe a tire.
2:09.6	What they found instead was the kind of sight that makes a person gasp in horror.
2:15.6	Another box. Another nightmare.
2:17.8	I'm going to... Saturday, February 3, 1962.
2:48.7	Jim Sumner, a maintenance man for the Texas Highway Department, and his brother, John Sumner,
	...

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