Though Murder Has No Tongue Read online

  The Erasmus V. Raus & Sons funeral home stood across the street from St. Alexis Hospital (where Sweeney interned) on the north side of Broadway. The Raus establishment handled all of Cleveland’s indigent bodies and stood close to the building that housed the offices of Doctors Edward Peterka and Francis Edward Sweeney in the mid-1930s. “It’s a known fact; we had people who testified, who would testify to it,” Cowles explains in the 1983 interview, “that across the street from the hospital [St. Alexis] was an undertaker who buried all the indigent bodies. And it was a known fact that he’d [Sweeney] go over there and would amputate, or just remove, the way these bodies were found, exactly the same way he would do with unknown bodies in the war.” Unfortunately, Cowles’s statement is hardly a model of clarity, but the potential implications of it are stunningly clear. Sweeney enjoyed some sort of privilege at the Raus funeral establishment that allowed him, apparently, to practice surgical techniques or indulge himself in anatomical study on the unclaimed indigent bodies. Assuming that Sweeney was responsible for depositing the disarticulated remains of an already embalmed body at the East 9th dump site, the motivation and subsequent chain of events might read something like this: Filled with rage and booze over his one-to-two-week ordeal with Ness and company at the Cleveland Hotel, but also boiling over with elation that the safety director and his forces could not charge him with anything in spite of Keeler and his polygraph, Sweeney desperately looked for a way to vent his anger and defiantly thumb his nose at his tormentor. Since he knew the Ness men were watching him carefully, committing another murder-dismemberment was out of the question. So he opted for the next best thing. He disarticulated an embalmed corpse of an unidentified female at the Raus funeral home without the director’s knowledge and somehow managed to spirit the pieces to the East 9th trash heaps, where he dumped them in full view of Eliot Ness’s office—the ultimate “Take that Mr. Ness! Catch me if you can!” (Just how the skeletal remains of no. 12 might fit into this scenario is difficult to say.) Two days after the August 16 discovery of the remains, the safety director led his heavily criticized raid of the shantytown complex sprawling through the Flats and into Kingsbury Run. The dispossessed and otherwise homeless residents were rounded up by the police, and their dilapidated hovels were razed and torched. On August 23, perhaps feeling the heat in more ways than one, Francis Sweeney formally petitioned the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home for admission. Two days later, he officially took up residence.

  Two other chapters from the Kingsbury Run saga are relevant in forging a possible, though circumstantial, link between Francis Sweeney and the killings. In late August 1938, a onetime homeless drifter by the name of Emil Fronek—then working in Chicago as a longshoreman—shared a lurid, potentially valuable tale with Cleveland’s law enforcement and press establishments. In late 1934, Fronek had been wandering aimlessly up Broadway one dark evening toward the East 55th intersection. Unemployed, alone, hungry, and desperate, he somehow managed to wind up on the second floor of a Broadway office building, where he found himself loitering outside a doctor’s office. The affable physician took pity on him and graciously offered him a meal and a badly needed new pair of shoes. Halfway through his simple repast, he began to feel woozy, and, fearing his benefactor had drugged him, bolted from the office and ran down Broadway toward Kingsbury Run, with the doctor in hot pursuit. Fighting desperately to hold on to his senses, Fronek finally managed to lose his pursuer in the sprawling blackness of the Run. Three days later a couple of transients roused him from his deep, drug induced, and comalike slumber. If true, his narrative could have served as a valuable blueprint for how the Butcher overpowered his prey, but Cleveland law enforcement tended to dismiss his undeniably fascinating tale—in part because Fronek could not locate the office four years after the fact, in part because in late 1938 city officialdom believed the Butcher’s lair lay much closer to the center of the city than the Broadway–East 55th intersection. The office (or offices) that Sweeney shared with Edward Peterka were, of course, situated on Broadway, across from St. Alexis Hospital, close to East 55th. Assuming Sweeney had actually been Fronek’s would-be attacker, the later history of the Kingsbury Run murders might have unfolded far differently if the onetime drifter could have led Cleveland police directly to the doctor’s former office door.

  On July 22, 1950, a couple of residents from the Wayfarer’s Lodge on Lakeside out for an afternoon stroll happened upon the badly decomposed disarticulated remains of a white male at Norris Brothers, a moving company on Davenport Avenue. Sickening odors had been permeating the area for some time, but apparently no one could pinpoint exactly from where they were coming. The dismemberments had been carried out with a familiar and frightening skill not seen in Cleveland since the Mad Butcher left the remains of his last two officially recognized victims in a dump site at the corner of East 9th and Lakeside twelve years before. “Was he back?” asked nervous city residents. Eventually identified as Robert Robertson, a drifter and resident of the Wayfarer’s Lodge, the unfortunate man dominated city papers for weeks as private citizens and public officials alike wrestled with the disturbing notion that the horror of the 1930s had returned. Interestingly, in the weeks before Robertson’s remains had turned up, Norris Brothers employees had watched in bemused incredulity as a heavyset man in his fifties with thinning gray hair had ascended a pile of steel girders stored on the west end of company property on a daily basis for about twenty minutes of sunbathing. After six weeks of this bizarre ritual, the sunbather, as he was known to Norris Brothers workers, suddenly ceased his regular visits—just about the time the unpleasantly oppressive odors began to circulate through company grounds.

  In July 1950 Francis Sweeney still resided at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. It would be another year before facility administrators summarily booted him out, apparently due to his alcoholism. The admittedly vague description of the mysterious sunbather provided by Norris Brothers Company employees eerily matches what Sweeney would probably have looked like in mid-1950. At fifty-six years of age and with his hair, indeed, thinning, he was severely overweight. In his official police report of February 5, 1940, Merylo labeled him “fat and soft”; and Sweeney’s surviving medical records actually use the word “obese” in describing his physical condition. The VA would not officially judge Sweeney incompetent until the mid-1950s; and since his residencies in Sandusky were voluntary, he could have left facility grounds whenever he felt like it. Conceivably, he could still haunt the Cleveland area at will, staying, perhaps, with his older sister as he had in 1940 while his niece underwent surgery at St. Alexis. The entire six-week sunbathing ritual, virtually on top of the dismembered remains of a corpse, smacks of the taunting and the twisted humor that characterized Francis Sweeney’s bits of “correspondence” and his antics when he knew he was being watched. Though he had clearly been under close surveillance by the police through the late 1930s and very early 1940s, there is simply no way to know whether that had continued after Eliot Ness left Cleveland in 1942.

  Was Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run? He clearly fits the profile worked out in Coroner A. J. Pearce’s torso clinic. He possessed both the necessary familiarity with the Run to move through it easily while avoiding detection and the requisite surgical skills to perform the expert dismemberments. As someone who had once been a practicing physician, he may have owned an automobile or at least had access to one, thus transporting the remains of his victims would not have been a problem. According to the very few existing physical descriptions, he was big and strong enough to have done the job. His documented mental disease, alcoholism, and drug abuse could easily serve as the catalysts for those brutal bursts of murder and mutilation. The progressive nature of his mental and physical afflictions could explain the relative sloppiness in the dissection Gerber noted in some of the later victims. His deterioration over time could also explain the curious shift from the careful staging of the earlier crime scenes (no. 4’s head rolle
d up in his pants, parts of Flo Polillo’s body neatly packed in produce baskets, et cetera) to the seemingly casual dumping of later victims in the Cuyahoga River or Lake Erie. And insofar as Sweeney’s movements can be traced, it can be said that over and over again, he was more or less in the right place at the right time. He was clearly the primary focus of Ness’s investigative efforts; the safety director kept him under relatively constant and tight surveillance for at least the three-year period 1938–40. Unfortunately, it is now impossible to determine how many other serious suspects the safety director may have considered and who they may have been. Several physicians crop up in the extant official police reports, many of them named. Some, such as a certain “Dr. Kerr” appear more than once, but none of these leads seems to have panned out. Ness also believed strongly enough in the possibility of Sweeney’s guilt that he went to the considerable trouble of arranging the secret hotel-room interrogation and polygraph examination of May 1938, an extraordinary, well-planned operation as detailed and intricate as any dreamed up by a Hollywood scriptwriter, and not the sort of initiative Ness would have undertaken lightly.

  Peter Merylo remained the only prominent figure in local law enforcement deeply involved in the Kingsbury Run investigation who seems not to have accepted Sweeney’s guilt—or, at the very least, to have entertained serious doubts. Although he left the Cleveland Police force in 1943, he pushed forward his own investigation into the torso killings and pursued other suspects he considered viable until his death in 1958. A dedicated lawman like Merylo would never have wasted his time and energy in such a fashion if he were convinced that Sweeney was the Butcher.

  At some undetermined time, Sweeney began sending his nemesis Eliot Ness jeering cards and letters, though it is difficult to tell whether he was simply venting his rage at the individual who, in his mind, unfairly tormented him or taunting the most famous lawman in the country for not being able to build a case against him—perhaps both. (In 1948, his growing obsessions with the safety director even prompted a rambling and incoherent four-page missive to J. Edgar Hoover complaining of “Nessism”—an action that triggered a minor FBI investigation into who he was and whether his communications to the bureau should be taken seriously.) But no matter how twisted and unhinged his logic became during his various rants at Eliot Ness, Sweeney always remained clever enough to never admit anything openly. He slipped only once—and even that seeming admission is subject to interpretation. If he was, indeed, referring to Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, when he identified himself as “The-American / Sweeney” on one of his postcards to Ness, then this is as close as he comes to a confession.

  With any cold case, especially one this old, a researcher-commentator is going to be limited by the material that has survived. Usually, there is simply no way of telling how much potential evidence may have been lost and what the nature of that evidence may have been. Though an investigator must always be mindful that the body of extant fact and evidence—simply by the luck of the draw—may produce a somewhat skewed picture of events, he should not, indeed, cannot, build castles in the air by speculating about what is not there to be analyzed. In cold case research, the dots must be connected conservatively and with extraordinary caution. Jack the Ripper still remains the best known and most infamous serial murderer in history, and the vast catalogue of books detailing his crimes and searching for his identity run the gamut from lurid, tabloid sensationalism to carefully reasoned scholarship. Donald Rumbelow, however, one of the most renowned Ripper scholars, confesses that students of the crimes are occasionally haunted by the notion that when Jack’s true identity is finally revealed in the hereafter, all the Ripperologists will stare blankly at each other and mumble, “Who?” Is it similarly conceivable that the Butcher could turn out to be someone of whom no one has ever heard or just a name buried in a corner of an obscure police report? Cleveland’s official search for the Butcher was certainly not perfect, and law enforcement personnel may not have fully understood the serial killer dynamic; but by the standards of the day, the investigation—the most massive and intense in city history—was professional and thorough. Though possible, it is difficult to believe that the perpetrator could pass so completely unnoticed with so many trained professionals searching for him. As of this writing, most of the existing evidence—circumstantial though some if it may be—and all the accumulated Kingsbury Run legends point, fairly or unfairly, to a single individual: Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney.

  NOTES

  The Merylo report of February 6, 1940, describing his and partner Martin Zalewski’s interrogation of Francis Sweeney is among the detective’s collection of reports, papers, and manuscripts. See the bibliography for a fuller description.

  The taped interview with David Cowles and the transcripts of that interview are both on file at the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum.

  The account of the Walter Winchell announcement concerning the imminent arrest of a suspect in the torso murders appears in the unpublished manuscript Peter Merylo coauthored with Cleveland News staff writer Frank Otwell. It is a part of the collection referred to above.

  Thomas Matowitz’s quotations are from an interview conducted by Mark stone on June 10, 2004.

  John Fransen’s dossier on Francis Edward Sweeney is on file at the Cleveland Police Department.

  The letter to Pat Lyons from the law firm of Minshall & Mosier is in his collection of documents. See the bibliography for a fuller description.

  Mary Sokol Sweeney’s two divorce petitions are in the Cuyahoga County Probate Court Archives.

  Marilyn Bardsley provided me the account of Al Archacki’s encounters with Frank Sweeney.

  Marilyn Bardsley obtained the FBI documents relevant to Frank Sweeney through the Freedom of Information Act. See the bibliography for a more detailed breakdown.

  Chapter 11

  CONCLUSIONS, FRAGMENTS, AND LOOSE ENDS

  All the recoverable pieces of the huge puzzle have been gathered and arranged as carefully as possible. From newspaper accounts, police reports, and other documents—both public and private—it is clear that certain events took place, that certain statements were made. From those same sources it can be inferred that some things apparently did not happen or seem not to have been said. Silences and inactivity assume significance through timing. If common sense dictates or suggests that a particular player in the drama would most likely respond in some way to a single occurrence or chain of events, and that individual remains inactive or silent, then that lack of response becomes at least interesting and, perhaps, significant. Does all this add up to a premeditated murder as part of a grand conspiracy and cover-up to shield the identity of a suspected killer? A tabloid journalist would undoubtedly scream “yes”; but I can only say, “Murder, apparently; cover-up, obviously; conspiracy, perhaps!”

  At first blush, Eliot Ness’s almost total silence during the period of Frank Dolezal’s arrest, incarceration, and death seems strangely uncharacteristic of a man who enjoyed such a glowing reputation for honesty and incorruptibility. If the safety director knew—or, at least, suspected—that Francis Sweeney was guilty of the Kingsbury Run murders, why would he sit idly by while the local press meticulously raked over and reported every lurid detail, charge, and countercharge in the unfolding Dolezal saga? Wouldn’t the country’s most famous G-man, the straight shooter sporting a Boy Scout reputation, have intervened in some way, especially when it became clear to him that Dolezal’s rights under the law were being so seriously violated that the ACLU had to ride to the rescue? But, realistically speaking, what could Eliot Ness have done? The only avenue open to him would have been a legal one; and as safety director of the City of Cleveland, he did not have the authority to wield any control over the sheriff of Cuyahoga County. When Detective Peter Merylo stormed into Chief of Police George Matowitz’s office after Dolezal’s arrest, loudly declaring that his own careful investigation had cleared the man of any involvement, his boss counseled him that
political realities in the city were such that the sheriff must be allowed to build his own case without any interference from other law enforcement agencies. Presumably, those same political realities would have constrained Eliot Ness as well.

  Peter Merylo, however, was something of a bull in a china shop. He would never have allowed political considerations to interfere with the apprehension and prosecution of criminals; for him, a guilty man was a guilty man. It isn’t clear from his memoirs whether the press came to him, seeking his opinions, or he went to them. Either way, Merylo became the Deep Throat of the entire Dolezal affair. As long as reporters respected his anonymity, he exposed the holes in Dolezal’s trio of confessions and the sheriff’s case to the eager gentlemen of the press establishment who dutifully repeated every nugget of information he gave them. Did Ness know of the veteran cop’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering? I suspect he did; thanks to his group of secret operatives, sometimes referred to as the Unknowns, there was very little going on in the underbelly and back alleys of Cleveland that the safety director didn’t know about. The working relationship between Ness and Merylo was professional but strained. Merylo didn’t particularly care for the safety director, but he did outwardly respect the lines of authority. I also suspect Ness would have turned a blind eye to Merylo’s activities because, at the very least, the detective’s anonymous whistle-blowing was a way of challenging the sheriff’s office without violating some code of public political decorum.