Though Murder Has No Tongue Read online

  At the time, Ness remained the only source for this curious coda to the city’s most infamous murders; there seemed no other way to verify it. Some commentators insisted his story just did not add up. First of all, where did the lie detector come from? The East Cleveland Police Department owned the only polygraph in the Cuyahoga County area at the time; and, though Sheriff O’Donnell had—with great press fanfare—escorted Frank Dolezal there for a much ballyhooed test, there was no evidence that anyone else in city law enforcement, especially Safety Director Ness, had ever hauled out a suspect on a similar mission or that the East Cleveland Police Department had ever loaned the machine to Cleveland proper. And who would have administered the test? Certainly not Ness! His law enforcement credentials did not include polygraph expertise. For decades, the story remained either a plausible but unverifiable explanation for the Kingsbury Run horror or an imaginative flight of fancy on the part of the man who had once been the country’s most famous law enforcement officer.

  To this day, Democratic congressman Martin L. Sweeney of the 20th District ranks as one of the most colorful political figures Cleveland has ever seen. He was always good press, and the city’s three dailies loved him. With Martin Sweeney around, there was no such thing as a slow news day. In 1932 he had broken—very publicly and very noisily—with the county party organization and put together his own alliance of disaffected and independent-minded Democrats. From then on, he battled vigorously on two different political fronts: Cuyahoga County’s traditional Democratic Party structure and the city’s Republican administration. His deep and obvious affection for his Irish forebears and their country was coupled with a predictable, virulent, and equally obvious hatred of the British. He was a noisy populist who prided himself on standing up for the working man. Every year he hosted a Cuyahoga River–Lake Erie excursion on the Goodtime for his rebel band of cronies and loyalists. Rather like Orson Welles’s famous newspaper czar, Charles Foster Kane, Congressman Sweeney took a well-defined position on every public and party issue that came his way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he personified “marching to the beat of a different drummer.” The torso murders obviously provided him with the most potent and deadly political hand grenades any opposition party politician could ask for; and the seeming inability of Harold Burton’s Republican administration, specifically Safety Director Eliot Ness, to make any real headway in solving the case ensured the maverick congressman an endless supply of fiery missiles to lob at city hall. Never one to turn away from a political brawl, time and again Sweeney railed at the Burton-Ness regime for wasting valuable time, manpower, and tax dollars on what he saw as relatively insignificant problems, such as the occasional city cop who might accept a dollar or two under the table to turn a blind eye to some bit of minor local corruption when a still unidentified murderer was raging through the decaying inner city, leaving behind human body parts as calling cards. In a typically virulent diatribe before the League of Independent Voter Clubs on March 6, 1937, he blasted Eliot Ness as Mayor Harold Burton’s “alter ego.” “We don’t need ‘Ness men’ or yes men in City Hall,” he raged in the Press on August 16. Over the months and years, Sweeney no doubt watched the endless parade of suspects hauled in by the police for interrogation with as much interest as any other Clevelander: the mentally deranged, the down-and-out, the violent and dangerous, the low-level criminals, the boozers and brawlers, those around whom any rumors of bizarre behavior swirled. There is no extant document of any sort or any bit of oral legend to confirm the discovery; but somehow, somewhere, sometime Congressman Martin L. Sweeney must have learned that Eliot Ness had his eye on a secret suspect in the grisly series of decapitation murders, and that man was not Frank Dolezal or anyone like him. The man upon whom Ness was focusing his attention and the full resources of his office, the man whom the safety director suspected had terrorized the city from the mid-1930s until the end of the decade was Sweeney’s own cousin—the son of his father’s younger brother—Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney.

  A young man on the way up. Martin L. Sweeney in the early years of his political career. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Cleveland has always been a melting pot, boasting of one of the largest and most diverse immigrant populations in the country, perhaps second only to New York. The first Irish began to trickle into the city during the early 1820s; abandoning the traditional agrarian occupations of their homeland, many found work in the steel mills or as laborers building the Ohio & Erie Canal. However, it was not until the great potato famine of the 1840s that the Irish began settling along the southern shore of Lake Erie in substantial numbers. The exact genealogical history of the Sweeney family (or families) in Cleveland remains almost impossible for an outsider to untangle. As is the case for most common laborers of no particular civic distinction in the nineteenth century, very few traces of them survive in public records; the army of census enumerators, city directory compilers, and other public officials also commit a host of errors involving birth dates, ages, addresses, places of birth, and the proper spelling of names. A relatively small handful of first names, such as John, Joseph, Martin, Francis, Mary, occur over and over again. Middle names or initials that could help to distinguish one “John” from another are rare; and there are even variant spellings of the name Sweeney—“Sweeny” being the most common, “Swaany” the most creatively botched. (The “Swaany” version appears on the record of Francis Edward’s birth. The name would have been provided by Francis’s parents, and it is easy to imagine that, when uttered with a thick Irish brogue, “Sweeney” could easily have sounded like “Swaany” to whomever was recording the information.)

  The grandparents of both Congressman Martin L. and Dr. Francis E. Sweeney were John and Catherine (née Mehan or Mahon) Sweeney. Burial records at St. Joseph Cemetery, detailing ages at and dates of death, suggest that the couple may have been the first Sweeneys from that particular branch of the family to emigrate from Ireland to northern Ohio, perhaps sometime in the 1840s or even earlier. At least two of their children turn up near downtown Cleveland during the final quarter of the nineteenth century: Dominic, owner and operator of a bar on Broadway (born 1850 or 1851) and Martin J. ( Joseph), listed in city directories alternately as a laborer or teamster—born sometime between 1861 and 1863. Dominic’s first wife, Winifred (née Callery or Collery), died at twenty-nine in 1881 after bearing three children and only seven years of marriage. Dominic married his second wife, Anna (née Cleary) two years later, a union that produced four additional children, including the future congressman Martin L. (born in 1885). Brother Martin J.’s sole marriage, to Delia O’Mara—or, possibly, simply Mara—resulted in six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Francis Edward, the man who would potentially become his cousin Martin L.’s greatest political liability, was born in 1894. Dominic Sweeney died of pneumonia in 1897 at only forty-seven years of age; his brother Martin J. survived into his sixty-second year, dying in 1923. In an ominous foreshadowing of the lethal and destructive mental disease that would ultimately overwhelm his son Francis, Martin J. Sweeney spent the final years of his life in the mental hospital on Turney Road in Garfield Heights, one of Cleveland’s older suburbs, southeast of the city proper. His death was attributed to “Apoplexy,” with “Psychosis and cerebral Arterial Sclerosis” listed as contributing causes.

  Though nine years separated Martin L. from his younger cousin Francis Edward, their lives took remarkably similar paths until the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Both suffered the devastating loss of a parent early in their lives. In 1897 the death of his father, Dominic, forced Martin L., then just twelve years old, to find a job to support himself and his widowed mother while he attended St. Bridget’s Parochial School; when Delia Sweeney died of heart failure in 1903, her son Francis was barely ten years old. By 1910, his father, Martin J., had been committed to Sunny Acres Hospital with tuberculosis; thus, when he was still in his teens, Francis also found himself thrown sud
denly into a very unforgiving adult world. Both men were obviously intelligent, tenacious, and determined; both struggled hard to rise above their working-class backgrounds and achieve some version of the classic American dream: for Martin L., the ultimate goal was law and politics; for Francis Edward, pharmacology and medicine. But the roads were rocky and included stints in blue-collar jobs. In the early years of his adulthood, Francis became an apprentice electrician, while Martin L. worked as a longshoreman and attended Cleveland Law School part-time.

  In 1914, Martin L. passed the bar and—after serving a one-year term in the Ohio legislature (1913–14)—entered private practice. In 1917, Francis joined the U.S. Army and was sent to Europe, where he worked in medical supply for the remainder of World War I. The army granted him an honorable discharge with the cessation of hostilities in 1919. Somehow he received an unspecified, non-combat-related injury—serious enough to officially designate him as 25 percent disabled and render him eligible for an adjusted compensation certificate, apparently a monetary payment (or payments) similar to modern VA benefits. When he returned to civilian life, he served as vice chairman of the County Council of the American Legion. But a dark cloud had appeared on the horizon. Already suffering with tuberculosis, Francis’s father, Martin J., began slipping into some sort of ill-defined mental disorder that forced him into the Turney Road mental hospital in Garfield Heights. The exact nature of his impairment remains impossible to determine; it may have been alcoholrelated or even congenital.

  The tenacity and sweat of the two Sweeney cousins began to pay off handsomely; both men stood on the brink of successful careers in their respective chosen fields. In 1922, Francis graduated from the Western Reserve University School of Pharmacy; in 1923, Martin L. was elected a Cleveland Municipal Court judge. That same year, Francis enrolled at John Carroll University, apparently to buttress his science background; for the following year, he enrolled in the medical school of St. Louis University, distinguishing himself as class president in his sophomore year.

  During the 1920s, both men married and started families. Martin L. married Marie Carlin in 1921; Francis wedded Mary Josephine Sokol—a New York native working as a nurse at Cleveland’s Charity Hospital—in 1927. The latter ceremony was performed by the Reverend Dominic J. Sweeney—Francis’s cousin and brother of Martin L.—a circumstance that suggests that relations between the two branches of the family were at least cordial, if not particularly close. Francis completed the four-year medical school regimen at St. Louis University and graduated in 1928; he then returned to Cleveland to serve his internship at St. Alexis Hospital in the Broadway–East 55th neighborhood, close to where his older sister and her husband lived on East 65th. Francis and Mary settled in Garfield Heights, relatively close to St. Alexis Hospital by car or public transportation, and, coincidentally, also close to the mental institution where Francis’s father had died only six years before. The Ohio State Medical Board granted him his certificate to practice medicine and surgery in 1929. The few surviving scraps of testimony relating to Francis Sweeney from his internship at St. Alexis and the early years of his medical practice paint a portrait of a dedicated, talented physician with a good sense of humor.

  The 1929 stock market crash devastated Cleveland, as it had every other major American industrial center. The fiscal collapse left city fathers wrestling with a host of erupting socioeconomic catastrophes that were only exacerbated by the subsequent Depression. The early 1930s were, therefore, a pivotal period in Cleveland history. It was also a crucial time in the lives of the Sweeney cousins, for the courses of their respective lives began to diverge radically. In 1931, Martin L. successfully ran for the congressional seat left vacant by the sudden death of Charles A. Mooney of the 20th District. He launched his government career in the House of Representatives by lambasting his senior colleagues as “a lot of old women” in his inaugural speech—the sort of fiery diatribe that got him noticed, made him enemies, and became the hallmark of his oratorical style. A year later, the Cuyahoga County Democratic machine named Martin L. a delegate to the party’s national convention and sent him off pledged to support Al Smith’s bid for the presidential nomination. When he unexpectedly bucked the party bosses back home by switching his allegiance to Franklin D. Roosevelt, he precipitated a deep rift in the local Democratic Party structure, which festered for years. From that time on, Martin L. Sweeney was rarely out of the newspapers and never out of the public spotlight. The life of Francis Sweeney, however, was unraveling, though layers of family secrecy masked his precipitous downward spiral. In a twist of fate, Francis Edward, though he remained anonymous and was not identified publicly as a Butcher suspect, might have also dominated city newspapers during the latter half of the 1930s and was never out of the public’s awareness.

  The evidentiary traces of Francis Edward Sweeney’s initial descent into the chaos of alcoholism and drug abuse survive only in the divorce and civil appearance docket records in the archives of the Cuyahoga County Probate Court. The first documented sign of trouble appears on December 1, 1933, when Mary Sweeney filed a complaint in Judge Nelson J. Brewer’s court, questioning her husband’s sanity. After the formal inquest the following day, an arrest warrant was duly issued and executed on December 5, which landed Dr. Francis E. Sweeney in a “Detention Hospital” for observation. (Civil Appearance Docket No. 250 does not specify the exact nature of Mary’s complaint, but subsequent divorce papers, filed in 1934 and 1936, paint a deeply troubling picture of alcoholism, violence, and erratic behavior.) The facility in which Sweeney was temporarily incarcerated was City Hospital, on the near west side. Ironically, Edward Andrassy—killed in late September 1935 and usually designated the Butcher’s first official victim—had been employed on and off as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the hospital over an eight-year period, beginning in 1925, when he was nineteen. If there had ever been any contact between the two men, the initial meeting would have most likely occurred during Sweeney’s period of observation in early December 1933. (Francis Sweeney remained at the hospital for a month. Whether this period of confinement overlapped with Andrassy’s final weeks and days as an orderly at the facility is impossible to say; the hospital’s employment records from that period do not survive.) On January 3, 1934, consulting psychiatrists K. S. West and C. W. Stone must have judged Francis Sweeney sane, for he was discharged into his wife’s custody and care. Within ten days Mary was back in court standing before Judge Brewer a second time and filing another complaint. After three additional weeks at the hospital, the court system again discharged Francis.

  During the first half of 1934 and into the fall months, Francis Sweeney’s mental state undoubtedly continued to deteriorate, and his behavior became more violent and erratic. Life in the Sweeney household undoubtedly grew frighteningly unpredictable for Mary and her two boys—James Anthony, age three, and Francis Edward Jr., age five—at least during those periods when Francis was home. On September 11, 1934, Mary Sokol Sweeney filed for divorce, custody of her children, and the restoration of her maiden name—all of which the court granted in 1936. Though her first petition does not provide any specifics, the document does preserve a deeply disturbing portrait of a man sinking into a profound psychological disturbance. He would disappear from the family home frequently, for extended periods, without providing any explanation of where he was going or what he was doing. “She further states,” reads the petition, “that he has upon many occasions humiliated her before her friends and has been abusive to her and their children both physically and mentally.” Mary’s second petition, filed in 1936, repeats these allegations and adds an extreme case of “Habitual Drunkenness” and “Gross Neglect” to the troubling mix. “The defendant became intoxicated almost continually beginning about two years after his marriage to this plaintiff, and remained in that condition practically all of the time until his separation from this plaintiff, which occurred in September, 1934.”

  On August 23, 1938—four years after separation fr
om his wife and two years after his divorce—Francis Sweeney made application and was formally admitted to the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Sandusky, a few hours west of Cleveland. The date is significant on three counts. First, a week before, on August 16, three black scrap collectors and dealers uncovered the remains of victims nos. 11 and 12—the final two officially recognized torso victims—in a dump at the corner of East 9th and Lake Shore Drive. Second, on August 18, Eliot Ness led a highly publicized and heavily criticized raid of the shantytown sprawl in the Flats and Kingsbury Run that resulted in the arrest or incarceration of the inhabitants and the total destruction by fire of the hobo jungles themselves. Ness defended the Draconian measure by insisting it deprived the Butcher of victims. That only two of the officially recognized victims had been positively identified led authorities to assume that the killer selected his targets from among the socially dispossessed who gathered in the shantytowns—people who would probably not be missed and would certainly remain difficult for the police to identify, especially cases in which the corpses were not fresh enough to yield useable fingerprints. Finally, Francis Sweeney passed through the local justice system two additional times in the months leading up to his August 23 application for admission to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. On February 11, 1938, Dr. Leonard F. Prendergast, a dentist and probable friend, or at least acquaintance, of Francis Sweeney’s, filed a complaint in Judge Nelson Brewer’s court, questioning his sanity. This was the third time such a legal action against Sweeney had been undertaken in Judge Brewer’s court. On February 28, the complaint was dismissed. On April 12, Francis’s older sister, Mary, dragged her brother before Judge Brewer, only to have her complaint dismissed on April 25.