The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  In mid-March 1938, a dog found the severed leg of a man in a swampy area near Sandusky, just down the coast of Lake Erie from Cleveland. Desperate for a lead, Lieutenant Cowles drove out to Sandusky personally to see if there was any link between the leg and the Mad Butcher. However, it was soon discovered that the leg was part of hospital refuse not properly disposed of. It had been removed during legitimate surgery and had nothing to do with the Mad Butcher.

  But while he was in Sandusky, Cowles recalled that one of the doctors who had been a suspect in the Mad Butcher case had been eliminated because he had been at the veterans’ hospital in Sandusky when the Cleveland murders occurred. So Cowles decided to pay the hospital a visit.

  He quickly confirmed that Dr Sweeney had voluntarily admitted himself to the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home to treat his alcoholism at times when the Mad Butcher was at work, confirming his alibi. However, when Cowles enquired further, he discovered that patients were not watched closely and a voluntary patient who had checked in with a drinking problem would not really be watched at all. Security was nonexistent and, at weekends and holidays, there were so many visitors that it would be impossible for the nursing staff to keep track of a patient’s movements. It was not unusual for alcoholics to disappear on a binge for a day or two, then return, without having been discharged. Cowles concluded that it would have been easy for Dr Sweeney to travel to Cleveland by train or car, commit the murders, dump the bodies and return without his absence being recorded.

  Cowles also discovered that the veteran’s hospital shared some of its facilities with the Ohio Penitentiary Honor Farm. In the farm, he met a convicted burglar named Alex Archaki, who had arranged a reciprocal deal with Dr Sweeney. Archaki supplied Dr Sweeney with liquor, while Dr Sweeney wrote Archaki prescriptions for barbiturates and other drugs.

  What’s more, Archaki believed that Sweeney was the Mad Butcher and he told a strange tale. The two had met a few years earlier in a bar in downtown Cleveland. Archaki had been sitting alone when Sweeney came up to him. He bought Archaki drinks and asked a lot of personal questions. Where was he from? Was he married? Did he have any family in the city? At the time, he thought that such a detailed cross-questioning was peculiar. Later, he realized that Sweeney was sizing him up as a victim. This made sense to Cowles as the Mad Butcher would made sure that most of his victims remained unidentified by picking men and women who had no close friends or relatives in the area. Archaki also told Cowles that every time Sweeney got back from one of unexplained absences from the hospital, a new body turned up in Kingsbury Run.

  When Cowles returned to Cleveland, he renewed the investigation of Dr Sweeney, discreetly. He discovered that Francis Edward Sweeney had been born in 1894 into a poor Irish immigrant family who lived on the edge of Kingsbury Run. His father had been crippled in an accident and, when Frank was just nine, his mother had died of a stroke, leaving him and his brothers and sisters in dire poverty. Nevertheless, Frank was intelligent and determined to make a success of himself. He graduated from high school and worked his way through medical school in St Louis while holding down a full-time job. His fellow students elected him vice president of his sophomore class and his professors commended him both in science and medicine.

  In July 1927 he married a beautiful dark-haired young woman who produced two healthy sons. In 1928 he graduated from medical school and took a surgical post at St Alexis hospital near Kingsbury Run. While remaining the consummate professional, he was a deeply compassionate man who loved his family and would take time off to attend to his siblings and their children if they were sick. At St Alexis, he rose quickly through the ranks and seemed destined for great things. But then, in 1929, he began drinking heavily. There might have been a genetic cause for this.

  Sweeney’s father had been an alcoholic who had spent the last years of his life in mental hospital, after being diagnosed as suffering from “psychosis”.

  There might also have been a physical cause. Sweeney had been injured in the head in World War I so badly that he was awarded a disability pension, though he may merely have succumbed to pressure after years of overwork. He was admitted to City Hospital for alcoholism, but his condition seemed resistant to treatment. Drunk all the time, his health deteriorated, along with his career and his marriage. Impossible to work with, he was sacked by the hospital. At home he was abusive and violent. His wife left in September 1934 and, when she filed for divorce and sought custody of the kids two years later, she requested a restraining order preventing him “visiting, interfering, or molesting her”. The break-up of the marriage coincided with the beginnings of the Torso Murders.

  Certainly Dr Sweeney would have the knowledge and ability to expertly decapitate and dismember the victims. He was also strong enough and large enough to carry Edward Andrassy and his unidentified companion down Jackass Hill in Kingsbury Run. And his alleged bisexuality could possibly explain why the victims were both male and female.

  Cowles was just putting the finishing touches to his case when, on 8 April 1938, a young labourer on his way to work saw what he at first thought was a dead fish in the Cuyahoga River. On closer inspection he saw that it was the lower half of a women’s leg. Eliot Ness was reluctant to believe that this was Victim Ten, hoping that it might be a piece of hospital waste like the leg in Sandusky, a limb lost as the result of a boating accident or another piece of an earlier victim not recovered at the time. Then Gerber announced that the woman’s lower leg was just a few days old. Ness insisted that Gerber hand over the leg for independent evaluation of the time of death. Gerber refused, saying that the voters had elected him as coroner to determine the time of death, not the director of public safety who had so conspicuously failed to catch the Mad Butcher.

  A month later Gerber was vindicated when the police pulled two burlap bags out of the Cuyahoga River that contained the nude torso of a woman that had been cut in half, along with the rest of her legs. The dead woman was between 25 and 30 years old, around 5 feet 3 inches tall, and weighed about 120 pounds. She was flat-chested and her hair was light brown. She had once had given birth by caesarean section and had suffered an injury to her cervix by an abortion or another birth. She had also had her appendix removed. The head was missing and she had probably died from decapitation.

  For the first time Coroner Gerber detected drugs in the system, but it was impossible to tell whether the drugs had been used to immobilize the victim or she was an addict. The arms might have rendered a vital clue but they were never found. With no hands there were no fingerprints and the young woman was never identified.

  This threw the investigation back on Cowles’ new suspect, Dr Sweeney. But the police had to proceed cautiously. If they went after Dr Sweeney directly, they risked Congressman Sweeney launching a new attack on the Burton administration, claiming that Ness was vindictively trying to frame one of his family.

  Cowles tried to put Dr Sweeney under surveillance, but Sweeney soon spotted he was being followed. Once he even introduced himself to his tail, before giving him the slip. But while Sweeney was out, the police searched his lodgings and his office. They even opened his mail, but unearthed no evidence linking the doctor to the murders.

  Despite all the attention being paid to Dr Sweeney, the activities of the Mad Butcher did not stop. On 16 August 1938, three scrap-metal collectors were foraging in a rubbish dump at East Ninth Street and Lakeside—a location overlooked by Eliot Ness’s office when they found the torso of a woman wrapped in a man’s double-breasted blue blazer and an old quilt. Nearby the legs and arms were discovered in a makeshift cardboard box, wrapped in brown paper and secured with rubber bands. The head had been wrapped up in the same way and, uncharacteristically, the hands were also present.

  As the police continued searching the area, an onlooker spotted some bones nearby. Detective Sergeant James Hogan picked up a large tin can nearby to put the bones in, but when he looked inside he saw a skull grimacing back. More skeletal remains were found, some
wrapped in brown paper.

  Gerber estimated that the woman had been a Caucasian in her thirties, approximately 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighing around 120–125 pounds. She had been dismembered, like the others, with a large, sharp knife. The body was so badly decomposed it was impossible to determine the cause of death. However, some parts of her body were remarkably well preserved and Gerber said they looked as if they had been refrigerated. He estimated that she had died sometime between the middle of February and the middle of April, possibly before the first week of April when the tenth victim had been killed. However, he thought that her remains had only been on the dump for a few weeks. Her left thumb was one of those parts still left intact and they were able to lift a fingerprint. But it did not match any on file.

  The skeletal remains found nearby belonged to a white man who was also in his thirties. He was around 5 feet 7 inches and weighed around 135 to 150 pounds. His dark-brown hair was long and coarse. His corpse had also been dismembered with a long, sharp knife. But, again, the cause of death could not be determined.

  There were some doubt that these two were the victims of the the Mad Butcher as they did not conform to his developing MO. He had not left the hands and heads with the bodies of his victims since 1936. Usually he dumped bodies in the Cuyahoga River or in Kingsbury Run, or somewhere else where they would be found easily. These two had been discovered by accident—though leaving them in plain sight of Eliot Ness’s office smacked of the audacity he had exhibited before.

  Although unofficially listed as Victims Ten and Eleven, as no cause of death had been determined, these two might not even have been victims of homicide. The man and woman might have died of natural causes then had their bodies mutilated either as a prank or by a necrophiliac. Such things were not uncommon. Receiving an anonymous tip-off, the police investigated a man who ran an embalming college. Though no charges were ever brought against him, the man quickly moved out of town.

  Whether the two new bodies were the work of the Mad Butcher or not, the people of Cleveland believed they were and radical action was required. Ness conferred with Mayor Burton and two days later, at 12.40 a.m. on 18 August, Ness and 35 police officers and detectives raided the hobo shantytowns bordering Kingsbury Run. Eleven squad cars, two police vans and three fire trucks descended on the largest cluster of makeshift shacks where the Cuyahoga River twists behind Cleveland’s main Public Square. Ness’s raiders worked their way south up the Run, arrested 63 men, fingerprinted them and sent them to the workhouse. At dawn, police and firemen searched the deserted shanties for clues. Then, on orders from Director of Public Safety Eliot Ness, the shacks were set on fire and burned to the ground. This backfired. It brought adverse reaction in the press as it did nothing to help catch the Mad Butcher. Now Ness had to solve the murders.

  There was only one course open to him. He pulled in Dr Sweeney. But instead of taking him to police headquarters Sweeney was held discreetly in a suite at the Cleveland Hotel in Public Square. However, it was made clear to the doctor that if he did not co-operate he would be marched downtown surrounded by a howling mob of the reporters.

  Sweeney was left to dry out for three days. Then, on 23 August 1938, the interrogation began. It was conducted by Ness, Cowles and Dr Royal Grossman, a court psychiatrist. In an adjoining room Dr Leonard Keeler, co-inventor of the polygraph, set up his equipment.

  The first thing his interrogators noticed was what a large and powerful man Sweeney was. Cowles and Grossman cross-questioned him for two hours, while Ness listened intensely. They got nowhere, so Ness took him through to the next room where Dr Keeler was waiting. Sweeney was rigged up to the polygraph sensors, then asked a series of innocuous questions. Was his name Francis Edward Sweeney? Had he been born in Ohio? Did he have two sons? The machine registered that Sweeney was telling the truth.

  Then Keeler turned to a list of questions prepared by Cowles. Had he ever met Edward Andrassy? Did he kill Edward Andrassy? Had he ever met Florence Polillo? Did he kill Florence Polillo? Had he ever met Rose Wallace? Did he kill Rose Wallace? The needles of the polygraph kicked as Sweeney made his denials.

  Afterwards Dr Keeler told Eliot Ness: “He’s your guy.”

  Dr Grossman agreed that Sweeney was a psychopath with a violent schizoid personality aggravated by chronic alcoholism. Ness was not so sure. He found it hard to reconcile the intelligent, articulate, educated man he saw with the homicidal maniac he knew the Mad Butcher to be. Ness then went through to the other room to interrogate Sweeney on his own.

  “Well?” asked Sweeney asked. “Are you satisfied now?”

  “Yes,” said Ness. “I think you’re the killer.”

  “You think?” said Sweeney then, with his face inches from Ness’s, he hissed: “Then prove it!”

  Ness was suddenly acutely aware of the size and strength of Sweeney. He called for Cowles and Grossman. There was no reply.

  “Looks like they went to lunch,” said Sweeney.

  Ness quickly phoned down to the coffee shop and asked Cowles to return, immediately. Later, Ness said that he had never been so scared in his life.

  That afternoon, Dr Keeler retested Sweeney repeatedly, each time with the same result. Keeler, Ness, Grossman and Cowles were all convinced of Sweeney’s guilt. But there was nothing they could do about it. Polygraph tests were inadmissible and the only evidence they had against him—that he was absent from the Sandusky veterans’ hospital at the times of the murders—was circumstantial at best and was provided by a convicted criminal who would be viewed by the court as an unreliable witness at best. However, the story then took a strange twist.

  Two days after the interrogation Dr Sweeney checked back into the Sandusky veterans’ hospital. A note attached to his records said that if he left the hospital grounds the police were to be informed. From 25 August 1938 until his death in 1965, Sweeney remained confined voluntarily to various veterans’ and state mental hospitals. However, it is not clear whether Sweeney was the Mad Butcher or found a twisted pleasure in taunting the police. He sent a series of incomprehensible and jeering postcards to Eliot Ness from the veterans’ hospital in Dayton, Ohio, where he was confined in 1955. Despite this, his brothers and sisters never believed that Sweeney was a man capable of violence. Indeed another man confessed to the crimes.

  A few months after Dr Sweeney admitted himself to Sandusky veterans’ hospital, the newly elected Cuyahoga Country Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell moved in on the case. He was a political ally of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney—his son was married to the congressman’s daughter. O’Donnell hired a private detective named Pat Lyons to investigate the Kingsbury Run murders. Lyons’ investigation narrowed down the suspects to a 52-year-old alcoholic bricklayer named Frank Dolezal. Merylo had already investigated Dolezal and rejected him.

  Nevertheless Sheriff O’Donnell had his men search a room Dolezal had previously rented. They found a knife and stains on the floor. Lyons’ brother was a chemist who concluded the stains were human blood.

  On 5 July 1939, Dolezal was arrested and after a rough night in the cells, he confessed to the murder of Florence Polillo. Apparently they had lived together for a while. He and Flo had a fight. Dolezal claimed that she attacked him with a butcher’s knife. In self defence, he hit her and she fell against a bathtub. Assuming that he had killed her, he cut up her body and dumped it in the alley where she was found. Her head and other missing parts were thrown into Lake Erie.

  Lyons also discovered that a tavern Dolezal and Polillo used was also frequented by Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace. Another young woman claimed that Dolezal had come at her with a knife and she jumped out of a second storey window to escape him, but it seems that she was an alcoholic and the interview was conducted with the aid of a bottle of whiskey.

  Dolezal’s “confession” turned out to be a blend of incoherent ramblings, punctuated with precise details of the crimes which could have been planted by his interrogators. But before he could go to trial, Dolezal was found
dead in his cell. Apparently five-foot-eight Dolezal had hanged himself from a hook that was only five feet seven inches from the floor. Gerber’s post mortem revealed that he had six broken ribs, presumably obtained while in the Sheriff’s custody. To this day no one thinks Frank Dolezal was the Torso Murderer. But was Sweeney the killer, or did the killer remain at large?

  Although the Torso Murders officially ended in August 1938, that December Cleveland Police Chief Matowitz received a letter mailed in Los Angeles. It read: “You can rest easy now as I have come out to sunny California for the winter.”

  Between 1939 and 1942 there were five more torso murders across the state line in Pennsylvania. On 13 October 1939, the headless, decomposing corpse of a man was fished out of the swamp near West Pittsburgh. The victim’s head was found nearby, in an abandoned box car, five days later. Charred newspapers surrounding the remains of the body included month-old copies from Youngstown, Ohio. This was intriguing as the railroad lines from Cleveland to Pittsburgh run through Youngstown. However, decapitated corpses had appeared in that area before. The headless body of a young man was found in a marshy area between New Castle and West Pittsburgh on 6 October 1925. This, again, lay on the railroad track from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. The man was naked and had been dead at least three weeks. His severed head was found two days later but, like the other victim, he remained unidentified.

  Soon after, on 17 October 1925, a headless male skeleton was found in the same “murder swamp”. Two days later, the skull was found, along with the skull of a woman killed at least a year before. Her body was never found and neither victim was identified.