Though Murder Has No Tongue Page 16

  In her 1936 divorce petition, Mary Sokol Sweeney marked the onset of her husband’s excessive drinking and subsequent mental decline at roughly mid-1929. The initial changes in his mood and behavior were most likely slight, so it’s probably safe to assume that she either did not notice or deliberately ignored the first signs of looming trouble. Obviously, the situation had reached critical mass by December 1933, when she made her first complaint against him in probate court, an extraordinary action for the time in a domestic relations case, which resulted in his arrest and a one-month observation period in City Hospital. Just how conversant were relatives on either side of the family with the troubling details of the unfolding drama in the Sweeney-Sokol household? There is simply no way of knowing for sure. If Mary confided in anyone, she would have most likely done so with other members of the immediate Sokol family also living in the Cleveland area, not with her Sweeney in-laws. (There is evidence that the Sokols maintained close family ties: Mary and the two boys moved in with her sister’s family on East Boulevard after she filed for divorce.) By the early 1930s, only three of Francis Sweeney’s five siblings were still living—two married sisters (Mary older, Agnes younger), and an older brother, Martin J. Jr. (One of his two older brothers did not live beyond his third year, while the other, John Sweeney, died in 1912 of uremia.) What was the relationship dynamic among the surviving children of Martin J. and Delia Sweeney during the late 1920s and early 1930s? Again, there is, unfortunately, no way to know. But three of the four, including both sisters, were married and had children of their own, so there must have been some sort of interaction among the three families—certainly enough to make the two sisters aware of Francis’s increasingly aberrant and dangerous behavior. No doubt the immediate Sweeney clan would have circled the wagons and done their best to keep the news of their brother’s decline from escaping the immediate family. But would any murmurings of this evolving family tragedy have reached the ears of Martin L. Sweeney? And even if they did, would the congressman have taken much notice when he was deeply embroiled in his own local political wars? Just how much, if any, resonance would his cousin’s precipitous decline have with him? Even if he knew about the brewing chaos, would he have regarded it as a sad but personal family nuisance or a potential political liability? Obviously, Sweeney’s political career would not have been helped by public knowledge that he may have had a dangerous, alcoholic, mentally ill blood relative hidden away in the extended family closet. But in the early 1930s, that was not a pressing problem for Congressman Martin L. Sweeney; that dilemma was reserved for the future.

  In his official application for admission into the Sandusky facility, Francis Sweeney enumerated “mitral insufficiency” and herniated discs among his medical problems and disabilities. (An attending physician added obesity and disease of the heart valves.) In a clear sign that his mind was unraveling, Sweeney wrote: “Life & its—stresses. Have contributed—to—the, total—toll, superimposed upon:” in the space where the admission form asked for comment on any “complications of case.” Since his commitment to the institution was voluntary, he could—theoretically—come and go as he pleased; and the fragments of documentary evidence that survive in the archives at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home show that he was in and out of the facility a number of times over the next seventeen years. According to records, he was “Discharged (Dropped)” in July 1940, only to be readmitted in February 1941. (An FBI document also places him in the Veterans Administration Hospital at Fort Custer, Michigan, during this seven-month period.) Discharged again from the facility in January 1942, he was back in December 1946. Hospital records also reveal he was unceremoniously booted from the home in 1951 by the administration; under the date of discharge, June 12, the letters “OC” appear—hospital code for “On Charges,” meaning he was asked to leave for some unspecified reason—according to current staff members, most likely alcohol abuse. Sweeney’s September 1953 petition for readmission was denied.

  In the years between 1938 and 1951, there is little doubt as to where Francis Sweeney was, at least during his residencies at the Sandusky Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home; but when his final stay at the facility ended in June 1951, he literally drops from the radar. In 1963, however, Dr. B. J. Chazin—chief of the Domiciliary Medical Service at the Veterans Administration Center in Dayton, Ohio—summarized both Francis Sweeney’s physical condition and mental state, while also providing the clearest recounting of his winding odyssey through the VA system.

  Francis Sweeney has been here in the Domiciliary on and off since 1946 [clearly establishing that he bounced back and forth between Dayton and Cleveland between 1946 and 1951]. In 1956 he was hospitalized. He was in Chillicothe Veterans Administration Hospital and returned from there with the diagnoses of schizoid personality, heart disease and cardiac enlargement. Since then he had numerous admissions to Brown Hospital [also in Dayton], mostly with the diagnoses of alcohol intoxication (he is being treated for it now on our Psychiatric Service). He is also a known drug addict with addiction to barbiturates. His most recent diagnoses are: acute brain syndrome due to alcoholism and chronic brain syndrome. He is considered incompetent by the Veterans Administration. [According to records at the Ohio State Medical Board, the assessment of incompetence was initially made in 1956 and substantiated by numerous subsequent examinations.]

  The card showing Frank Sweeney’s record of admissions and discharges from the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Sandusky. The “OC” written under the date 6-12-51 stands for “On Charges,” indicating that he was asked to leave for an unspecified reason, most likely alcoholism. Courtesy of the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, Sandusky, Ohio.

  Francis Edward Sweeney died in the Dayton VA facility on July 9, 1964. Family members had his body returned to Cleveland, where he was quietly buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery. When Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell had Frank Dolezal arrested in July 1939 for his alleged involvement in the torso murders, Francis Sweeney had officially been a resident at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home for slightly less than a year. His movements around Cleveland after his return to the city from medical school in St. Louis in 1928 until his wife, Mary, sued for divorce in 1934 are easily established through city directories. But his whereabouts from late 1934 until his admission to the Sandusky home on August 25, 1938—an obviously crucial four-year span—remain a total mystery. Where was he? And, far more important, what was he doing?

  Even for a highly trained investigator, the tangle of Sweeney genealogy stubbornly resists unraveling. In 1991–92, Sergeant John Fransen (since retired) of the Cleveland Police Homicide Unit received orders from then chief Edward Kovacic to explore a possible connection between the Kingsbury Run murders and the infamous Black Dahlia murder-bisection in 1947 Los Angeles, which ultimately led him to consider Francis Sweeney as the most likely suspect in the Cleveland killings. In his lengthy final report to his superiors, Fransen noted, “While reviewing the Directories, the names of MARTIN and JOHN SWEENEY appear multiple times. It cannot be determined if any though are brothers or if any were related in some manner to Francis E. Sweeney.”

  To twist the branches of the family tree to an even greater degree, public records indicate that Dominic and Martin J. Sweeney (the fathers of Martin L. and Francis E.) seem to have had a close relative, perhaps even a brother, named Myles (or Miles). The clearest indications of this are marriage records from the year 1874 and records from St. Joseph Cemetery. Dominic Sweeney married his first wife, Winifred Callery, on August 31; on August 17, Myles Sweeney had married Honora Callery. At first blush, this would seem to be a matter of two brothers courting and wedding two sisters. Records at St. Joseph Cemetery also show that Dominic and Myles Sweeney, along with “S. Marah” (a variation of Mara or O’Mara, the family into which Martin J. Sweeney married?), jointly bought about a dozen plots on September 28, 1881, the precipitating cause clearly being the death of John Sweeney (the father of Dominic and Martin J. and pe
rhaps Myles) at the age of seventy-two. The last names of those interred in this substantial grouping of plots—Cullely [sic] (a probable perversion of Callery), Mehan, Mara, Colb, Hugger, and, of course, Sweeney—all occur in the genealogical record stemming directly from Dominic Sweeney and his two wives. The final burial in the family plots occurred in 1944. Although the name Mara appears in cemetery records in connection with this series of graves (probable relatives of Martin J.’s wife, Delia), there is no trace of Martin J. Sweeney, his wife, or any of their children in this grouping of family plots at St. Joseph; rather, in 1903, upon the death of his wife, Martin J. Sweeney bought a similar group of plots, some of which remain unused to this day, in Calvary Cemetery. Why did he choose a final resting place for himself and his immediate family in a different cemetery, away from his parents and Delia’s relatives? Is there a simple, innocent explanation for his decision, or did it signal something decidedly more significant, such as a serious rupture in family relations? There is simply no way to know. Other than a rather pointed and nasty comment about excessive drinking, aimed at some distant members of the clan, the very few pieces of Sweeney family lore I have managed to uncover from this early period do not provide a satisfactory answer.

  NOTES

  When John Fransen turned in to his superiors his final report on Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney, he also submitted an impressively substantial dossier of related documents culled from a variety of sources, including the Ohio State Medical Board, the Montgomery County Medical Society, the Cleveland Probate Court system, and the Veterans Administration. This voluminous collection of official correspondence and other documents relating to Frank Sweeney’s life and career is currently housed in the archives of the Cleveland Police Department.

  The account of Martin L. Sweeney’s early life and career is drawn from The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, edited by David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski. The congressman’s subsequent public career is fully covered by Cleveland’s three daily newspapers from the period.

  The surviving records of Francis Sweeney’s residencies at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home are in the facility’s archives.

  Former Clevelander Marilyn Bardsley was the first researcher to breach the wall of secrecy that had been so carefully erected around Eliot Ness’s fabled “secret suspect” and identify him as Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney. She obtained the FBI document briefly alluded to in the text through the Freedom of Information Act.

  See the bibliography for a fuller description of these sources.

  Chapter 9

  CONSPIRACY AND COVER-UP

  Conspiracy theories in public affairs have always been insidiously attractive—in part because a belief in nefarious plots protects us from having to confront the disturbing possibility of utter randomness in human affairs; in part because a good, meaty conspiracy appeals to some universal streak of paranoia in the human psyche—the disturbing yet, for some, curiously comforting notion that dark forces are forever working away behind the scenes, chipping relentlessly at society’s security and peace of mind. When politics and fame are wed with high crimes and misdemeanors, conspiracy theories grow with the alarming rapidity of mold in a wet basement. The bigger and more complex the theory, the more attractive it becomes to the potential true believer. John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination actually grew out of the evil machinations of a gigantic international cabal of individuals and agencies, official and otherwise, including the CIA, the KGB, the Mafia, and the entire island nation of Cuba! But, as Benjamin Franklin once so wryly observed, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead: grand conspiracies invariably require the implausible cooperation of an enormous number of people—far, far too many to maintain a code of silence over time. Human nature being what it is, someone, sometime, somewhere is going to start leaking the details. In his book The Cases That Haunt Us former FBI profiler John Douglas notes that every case has its anomalies, those pesky details that don’t seem to quite fit as neatly as we would like. And, as Vincent Bugliosi argues in both Outrage: Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder and Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, those who concoct and put forth theories about infamous crimes that are utterly at odds with the accepted wisdom of the official versions usually base their assertions on a couple of nuggets of information, those pieces of the puzzle that stubbornly refuse to fit comfortably with the rest, those anomalies that John Douglas says are a feature of virtually every case. These become the grains of sand discretely embedded in the oyster’s shell, around which the theory’s proponents form their pearls. Aspects of the case that do not fit the theory are twisted out of shape or—even worse—blithely ignored all together. Queen Victoria’s grandson the Duke of Wales was really Jack the Ripper; Charles Lindbergh accidentally killed his own young son while playing a sick joke on his wife.

  In the immediate aftermath of the torso murders and in the years that followed, the poisonous seeds of potentially alluring conspiracies were planted deeply and liberally watered. Actually, there are two separate alleged conspiracies in the history of Kingsbury Run, each accompanied by its own attendant rumor of cover-up. First, a troubled bricklayer by the name of Frank Dolezal had been charged in the murder-dismemberments but died under very questionable circumstances while in the sheriff’s custody before he could go on trial. Was he murdered, and was there a concerted effort on the parts of everyone in the sheriff’s office to conceal the crime and pass it off as a suicide? Second, Eliot Ness revealed that he had once had a secret suspect who may have been the elusive Mad Butcher, someone who may have escaped the justice system due to some sort of unspecified connection. There was a local doctor in town named Francis Edward Sweeney who, after a promising start in life, had tumbled into the abyss of drug addiction, alcoholism, and madness. And that doctor was, indeed, connected; his cousin was the colorful congressman from Cleveland’s 20th Congressional District, Martin L. Sweeney. Could Ness’s suspect and Sweeney be one and the same, and was there some sort of agreement among the elements of Cleveland’s law enforcement community to keep Sweeney’s name under wraps as long as he was safely hidden away in a mental institution? And if these two murky cover-ups could be linked, the result would be one of the grandest and most alluring conspiracies of all. In other words, is there enough surviving evidence to say with any certainty that there was a link between Ness’s focus on Francis Sweeney and the tragic fate of the bricklayer while in the hands of Sheriff O’Donnell? A determined conspiracy buff could easily take the established facts and the documented events of the Dolezal affair and the Sweeney question and—by applying a little creative imagination and adopting a casual approach to connecting the dots—create a wonderfully complex theory as lurid and fascinating as any ever hatched by a Hollywood scriptwriter or penned by a veteran crime novelist. It would read something like this: after a couple years of pummeling the city’s Republican administration with its failure to solve the Kingsbury Run murders, Congressman Martin L. Sweeney suddenly becomes aware that Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney, his own cousin, is Eliot Ness’s prime suspect in the gruesome killings. To protect both the family name and his own career in public life, the congressman forges a desperate deal with his political enemies, Mayor Harold Burton and Safety Director Ness, to keep his errant relative’s guilt secret, as long as the mentally unbalanced and murderous doctor is safely tucked away in an institution where he can do no further harm. A very public arrest and trial would accomplish little, save the humiliation of Francis’s immediate family, his siblings, and their families. Since any formal proceedings would most likely result in Francis’s institutionalization anyway, why not bypass the lurid spectacle of an official trial and send him straight to a mental hospital? That way everyone wins: the public is protected because the murderer is off the street; Francis’s family is spared extreme embarrassment; and Martin L. Sweeney saves both family name and his reputation. But the murderer has never been identified publicly, and the populace still clamors fo
r closure. So, to deflect any potential lingering or growing suspicion from his cousin, with his good friend and political ally Sheriff O’Donnell, Martin L. hatches an insidious plot to offer up a plausible alternative. Conveniently, special sheriff’s deputy Pat Lyons has just fingered Frank Dolezal—an alcoholic, probably homosexual bricklayer with a shady past and a suspicious lifestyle, who is already known to, and at one time suspected by, the police—as a likely candidate in the brutal series of murder-dismemberments. Hence, Dolezal is arrested by the sheriff’s office. But the fragile circumstantial case against him starts to unravel almost immediately after his arrest, and he also stubbornly refuses to confess to anything. A series of beatings administered over time by O’Donnell’s deputies finally convinces Dolezal to make a trio of confessions, none of which holds up well under press scrutiny. If Frank Dolezal goes to trial, the entire case against him will likely collapse like the proverbial house of cards; the press will reexamine the circumstances surrounding his arrest with even greater intensity; and the City of Cleveland will look elsewhere for the actual perpetrator. To prevent this scenario from playing out, Sweeney and O’Donnell plot to have the bricklayer murdered and pass the death off as a suicide. That way the notion of Frank Dolezal’s guilt will still be firmly lodged in the public mind, and O’Donnell can reinforce it by arguing that his suicide was a virtual admission from a man too frightened and guilt-ridden to face the rigors of the justice system.