Though Murder Has No Tongue Read online

  Conspiracy theories, like stereotypes, don’t just grow from nothing. There is always a grain (or grains) of truth around which the other elements of the case coalesce. Those may be so blown out of shape as to be unrecognizable, have far more weight heaped on them than they can support, be linked in ways that simply defy logic, or be focused on to the exclusion of other pertinent facts; but they are always there. Even though it was never articulated in any detail, a vague outline of the scenario presented here has hovered around the Kingsbury Run case for decades; and it is easy to see how such a tale could grow from the tangle of fact, rumor, and legend swirling through the city in the aftermath of the Kingsbury Run killings, Frank Dolezal’s death, Eliot Ness’s belatedly revealed tale of his unidentified suspect, and the relatively recent revelation that Francis Sweeney was that suspect.

  The name “Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney” first rose out of the murky swamp of Kingsbury Run fact and legend in the early 1970s. Former Clevelander Marilyn Bardsley succumbed to the sheer allure of the city’s most infamous and gruesome unsolved murder cycle and began a doggedly determined search for answers. Some of the major players in the drama—Sam Gerber, David Cowles, and Cuyahoga County psychiatrist Royal Grossman—were still living and willing to talk, but only up to a certain point. The wall of secrecy that Ness had put up around his suspect’s identity thirty years before still held strong. Bardsley coaxed out verbal verification of the interrogation that Ness discussed with Oscar Fraley. (Why keep that part of the story secret? Ness had already broken his silence.) But the suspect’s identity remained stubbornly elusive. The name “Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney” ultimately surfaced thanks to relentless digging on her part, coupled with a series of serendipitous circumstances. With a possible identity in tow, she was then able to pry some extremely reluctant grumbles of confirmation from a few of Eliot Ness’s surviving associates. But that is as far as matters went. Save for a few public records documenting Francis Sweeney’s mental decline, divorce, and admission to the Sandusky facility, there was nothing tangible, nothing that anyone could point to that would link the Sweeney name to the torso killings. Mental disease and alcoholism do not automatically translate into murder and mutilation. And, she further reasoned, publicly throwing around a name so prominent in Cleveland political and legal circles with virtually no backing would probably not be wise.

  Matters changed significantly in 1977. Eliot and Elizabeth (his third wife) Ness were never able to have any children biologically, so they adopted a young boy, whom they named Robert Eliot Ness. Sadly, Robert died of leukemia on August 31, 1976. About a year later, Robert’s widow, Sharon, donated a treasure trove of her late father-in-law’s scrapbooks and papers to the Western Reserve Historical Society library in her husband’s name. It would take a long time to sort through all this material, but during the process of examination and cataloguing some very odd, disturbing documents surfaced: five loose postcards and an incoherent letter, all sent from Dayton, Ohio, in the early 1950s and addressed, in an incredibly bizarre fashion, to Eliot Ness—“Eliot-Am-Big-Uous-Ness,” “Eliot-Direct-Um Ness,” “Eliot (Esophogotic) Ness,” and, perhaps, most revealingly, “Eliot (Head Man) Ness.” Each of the exceedingly weird postcards contains disjointed pronouncements and messages that literally seem to joke and taunt at the same time. The writer underlines words and individual letters seemingly at random and sprinkles everything with a liberal supply of dashes. Dayton’s Deeds Carillon, a tall, thin structure resembling a knife blade, appears on the picture side of one card with a cryptic pronouncement on the message side. “In- das- Freudiology / this-organ-has-the-eminence-of-areamer. / Whether-the-chimes / peal-the-note-for / bell-ringing-effect / or-not-is the / Macbethean-question.” This torturous illusion to Shakespeare’s tragedy most likely refers to Macbeth’s famous lines in act II, scene II: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle before my hand?” The references to Freud and the Bard indicate a certain amount of erudition breaking through the utter chaos of the writer’s thought. And so it was with all five of the postcards: disjointed jokes, wild and sometimes incoherent pronouncements, and seeming taunts. Two things, however, were clear: the writer was suffering from some sort of severe mental disorder and was obviously obsessed with Eliot Ness. The Western Reserve Historical Society eventually duplicated the cards and occasionally put them on display—with the name of the apparent sender discreetly concealed.

  Cleveland writer and journalist Fred McGunagle was the first to break the story of the mysterious postcards in print. In a March 9, 1989, article in the now-defunct Cleveland Edition, McGunagle provided an overview of the entire case and reiterated in detail Eliot Ness’s then relatively familiar story of his secret suspect. He then took his readers along with him on a fascinating trip to the Western Reserve Historical Society library in Cleveland’s University Circle. We sat with him at one of the tables while he waited. “I waited while a page searched and finally emerged with a carton of scrapbooks and folders,” he wrote. “Impatiently, I leafed through them. There they were—the postcards.” Though he described the five cards in detail, McGunagle did not disclose the name that appears on three of them; rather he left his readers hanging with a tantalizing, almost taunting coda. “There is a name on three of the cards which could be that of the sender or an allusion to a legendary mass murderer. Or both.” He then added cryptically, “It’s a common Cleveland name and it was—and is—a highly electable name. It may or not be the name of the murderer. Whether it is or not, I believe the cards I held in my hand came from the hand of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. It’s as close to him as I care to have come.” The “common” and “electable” “Cleveland name” that McGunagle so coyly avoided revealing was, of course, Sweeney. “A-Signatur / The Sweeney Boy / R-member” appears on one card; “Good Cheer / The-American / Sweeney” graces another. McGunagle quite rightly wondered if this later greeting might be a rather sly but obvious reference to Sweeney Todd, the infamous demon barber of Fleet Street who sent his customers tumbling into his basement where they were summarily dispatched, butchered, and turned into meat pies. On the third card to bear the Sweeney name, the sender clearly identifies himself as, “F. E. Sweeney-M.D. / Paranoidal Nemesis.” The obviously deranged doctor seems utterly consumed with Cleveland’s onetime safety director and clearly must have derived some sort of ghoulish pleasure from taunting him with his stream of cryptic jabs. But what led to this fixation, and why would he describe himself as Ness’s “Paranoidal Nemesis”? Was he just some kind of nut taunting a famous public official for his own incomprehensibly twisted reasons, or did he and Ness share a history so secret that virtually no one outside the very tight circle of trusted Ness associates knew about it?

  Chapter 10

  FEARFUL SYMMETRIES AND DAMNING COINCIDENCES

  Eliot Ness really knew the identity of the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, but, because of the perpetrator’s “connections,” he was forced to hold his tongue while the suspect’s family hid him safely away in a mental institution and an innocent man met a cruel and unjust fate in the county jail. Murder, secrecy, dramatis personae in high places, a miscarriage of justice, and a cover-up: it’s a tale to warm the heart and stir the blood of the most dedicated conspiracy buff. And if one merely takes a casual glance at this chain of assumptions, it does make sense. In fact, the outline of this scenario has been a persistent element of the Kingsbury Run saga for the last few decades. But is any of it even remotely true? To arrive at the truth in this morass of fact and assumption—assuming that is even entirely possible, given the amount of time that has passed and the quantity of information that has been lost—this lingering conspiratorial tangle must be pulled apart and each element in it analyzed for verifiability and reasonableness; further, the established facts, the interpretation of them, and the sensible assumptions based on them—the dots, in other words—need to be connected with enormous care and caution, always keeping in mind writer-profiler John Douglas’s warning that every case
has its anomalies. Things will never add up with the precision of an accountant’s ledger.

  WAS DR. FRANCIS EDWARD SWEENEY ELIOT NESS’S PRIME SUSPECT?

  There is only one surviving official document that actually links Sweeney by name to the Kingsbury Run murders and the investigation: a police report submitted by Detective Peter Merylo on February 6, 1940. At the beginning of the two-page report, Merylo writes, “Dr. Sweeney was referred to us [Merylo and his partner Martin Zalewski] by Superintendent [David] Cowles of the Scientific Bureau of Identification for a further check up, as it was believed that Dr. Sweeney might be a good suspect in the Torso Murders.” The date of the report coincides with the first of Sweeney’s on-again, off-again residencies at the Sandusky Solders’ and Sailors’ Home. Merylo notes that the doctor had come to stay with his older sister, Mary, on East 65th (the same sister who took him to court in April 1938 to question his sanity) while his niece underwent a surgical procedure at St. Alexis Hospital, where, ironically, he had served his internship. That it was David Cowles who dispatched Merylo and partner Martin Zalewski to the East 65th address is extremely significant. During Eliot Ness’s Cleveland years, Cowles was a trusted member of the inner circle and one of the very few individuals close enough to the safety director to know precisely what steps his office was taking in the hunt for the Mad Butcher. Further, Cowles was obviously an active participant in Ness’s largely behind-the-scenes maneuvering during the investigation. That Cowles knew to send Merylo and Zalewski to East 65th on February 5 shows clearly that someone from the Ness office was keeping Sweeney under constant surveillance and that that individual, or those individuals, reported back either to David Cowles or, perhaps, Eliot Ness himself. After the hotel-room interrogation in May 1938, the Ness office most likely always knew where Francis Sweeney was and what he was doing.

  Unfortunately, there is little left of Sweeney’s records in the archives of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home; and what does remain has been transferred to microfilm, some of it virtually unreadable. In the 1970s, however, his file contained a note stating Cleveland police were to be notified if he left the facility. Unfortunately, the note—which has since disappeared—was not dated, so it is virtually impossible to ascertain exactly when official surveillance began. Had it been initiated at the time of Sweeney’s admission to the home on August 25, 1938, or did it commence later, or earlier?

  Arnold Sagalyn, a onetime assistant to Eliot Ness, remains the only other source to link Sweeney’s name to the investigation in general and Eliot Ness in particular. Andrew Schug—a member of my research team and former trustee on the board of the Cleveland Police Historical Society—and I interviewed Sagalyn, then seventy-nine years old, by phone in October 1997. Immediately after his graduation from Oberlin College in 1939, Sagalyn became a trusted Ness associate who worked with him professionally and socialized with him personally both in Cleveland and later in Washington, D.C. Although he could not be certain of the time frame, Sagalyn remembered clearly that Sweeney was being kept under relatively constant surveillance by the Ness office. On one particularly memorable day, the designated tail was apparently indisposed, and Sagalyn drew the last-minute assignment of trailing the doctor around in his various wanderings around the city and keeping an eye on him. Incredibly, Sweeney knew he was being followed and turned the whole affair into a wildly elaborate cat-and-mouse game, jumping on and off street cars to see if poor Sagalyn could keep up with him. Surveillance was apparently not Arnold Sagalyn’s forte, and Sweeney easily lost him in the crowds of downtown Cleveland. In a wicked display of his warped sense of humor, Sweeney later called the police—presumably the central station on Payne Avenue—and announced that he found his tail for the day sadly wanting in tracking skills and if the poor fellow should want to meet up with him later, he would be at Higbee’s department store on Public Square around 2:00 in the afternoon.

  The only other surviving document from a primary source that deals with Ness’s suspect in depth is a taped interview with David Cowles conducted by Florence Schwein and police lieutenant Tom Brown on September 6, 1983. The then eighty-six-year-old Cowles provided a wide-ranging oral history of his days as head of the Cleveland Police Department’s Scientific Investigation Bureau. When he turned his attention to the Kingsbury Run murders, he described Eliot Ness’s prime suspect in minute detail, and there can be absolutely no doubt as to whom he is referring.

  There was a suspect in those murders. I won’t mention any names. He was born and raised as a boy on the edge of the run [ Jessie Avenue, now East 79th]. He later went into the service; in the service, he was in the Medical Corps. He came back, and he went to college [Western Reserve and John Carroll Universities] and went through medical school [St. Louis University’s School of Medicine] and became an M.D. Married a nurse [Mary Josephine Sokol working at Charity Hospital]. Came back, did his internship at St. Alexis Hospital out on Broadway and finally kept going down and down and down with the booze. . . . We played on him for a long time. . . . A relative of his was a congressman [cousin Martin L. Sweeney]. And he [Eliot Ness] had to be very careful how we handled him.

  Significantly, Cowles says, “There was a suspect in those murders.” One suspect! A single, important suspect; not just one among many others! And, perhaps, by implication, he makes it clear that the Ness office did not regard Frank Dolezal as a viable candidate.

  Though not as blatantly obvious as the Cowles description, there are a few other references that clearly point to Francis Sweeney. Perhaps the most remarkable came over the radio from legendary newsman Walter Winchell one Sunday evening in October 1938. “Attention Cleveland, Ohio,” he trumpeted in his familiar “I’ve got a scoop!” manner. “The unsolved torso murders, more than a dozen of them in Cleveland, may result one day in the apprehension of one of Cleveland’s outstanding citizens. . . . A fanatic, a medical man with great skill is allegedly responsible for the gruesome crimes in which all the murdered were dismembered.” (The Winchell broadcast demonstrates how easily the details of a story can get warped in the retelling. Francis Sweeney was certainly “a medical man with great skill” but hardly “one of Cleveland’s outstanding citizens.”) The same elusive medical man to whom Winchell referred had previously made a brief but tantalizing appearance in the pages of the Cleveland News on April 9, 1938. “A once-prominent Clevelander, described as a physician in disrepute with his profession, is under suspicion in Cleveland’s 11 unsolved torso murders. The man, said to have discontinued his practice [a charge made by Mary Sokol Sweeney in her petitions for divorce], is middle-aged [Francis Sweeney was forty-four in 1938], has some surgical skill and is described as being a powerfully built, chronic alcoholic [also one of Mary Sokol Sweeney’s allegations] with apparent sadistic tendencies.” Both Ness assistant Robert Chamberlin and Coroner Sam Gerber verified the News story, and Gerber obligingly added the rather startling revelation that the unidentified physician had been a suspect for about two years—in other words roughly since early 1936. Former county coroner A. J. Pearce had convened his torso clinic on September 15, 1936. The deliberations at that groundbreaking profiling session clearly pointed to someone with anatomical knowledge and surgical skill; and though the attendees seemed to go out of their way to avoid labeling the Butcher a doctor, the notion that Cleveland’s infamous killer could be a deranged physician was soon abroad in the land. But if Gerber’s assertion about the time element is correct, Frank Sweeney had attracted official attention several months before the clinic ever took place. As David Cowles reflected in 1983, “We played on him for a long time.”

  The years 1984–89 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Cleveland’s notorious period of horror, and a number of “celebratory” retrospective pieces appeared in the local press to mark the occasion. An article by former Plain Dealer columnist George Condon appeared in the March 1984 issue of Cleveland Magazine. Coroner Sam Gerber was not only still living but was—incredibly—still on the job after forty-eight years. While researchi
ng his article, Condon confronted Gerber with a description of the killer that the coroner had given to the press forty-five years before: the Kingsbury Run murderer was a “broken-down doctor who becomes frenzied with drugs or liquor.” The ever-combative Gerber denied he had ever said any such thing and insisted that “the newspapers made up that stuff.” Cleveland journalistic standards may have been a tad looser in the 1930s and 1940s than they are today, but it still strains credulity to believe any reporter would make up something that specific without support or manage to manufacture a description that just happened to be exactly on target.

  In 1988–89, then Plain Dealer staff writer Brian Albrecht published a similar retrospective piece and, in the process, became the resident local expert on the Kingsbury Run atrocities. By then, Gerber was gone. (He had retired in 1986 and died the following year.) But Albrecht was able to talk to David Kerr, the retired head of the homicide unit. ( James Hogan had held that position during the Butcher’s reign of terror, and Kerr was his immediate successor.) Kerr remembered, in Albrecht’s words, that rumors about a renegade physician “related to a well-known political family, who had fallen into disrepute after receiving treatment in an insane asylum,” still swirled through the Cleveland Police Department long after the killings had passed into history and “that police had focused their search on a once prominent, middle-aged physician said to be powerfully built and a chronic alcoholic with sadistic tendencies.” Again, some of the details have become mangled. Francis Sweeney was not particularly prominent in the social sense; and he had fallen into disrepute, at least with his own family, long before he ever saw the insides of an institution. But, as with Gerber’s alleged description of the killer, the specifics clearly point to him. In 2004, Thomas G. Matowitz Sr. (son of George J. Matowitz, Cleveland chief of police during the Ness years) recalled those same departmental rumors. “They had, I think, a very strong suspicion as to who was doing it. And they realized that they couldn’t really prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. He [George Matowitz? Eliot Ness?] felt . . . that it was this doctor . . . who was doing it who apparently had gone around the bend. In fact, he wound up in a rubber room, I think, in some institution, if I remember correctly.”