***
Eliot and his investigators watched Francis Sweeney for a month. They wanted to have some solid evidence before hauling him in for questioning, but they couldn’t come up with anything. When he was in their sights, he did nothing much of interest; and when he wasn’t, he seemed to drop into a void. Some of the safety department’s investigators believed the doctor to be a harmless nut, not up to the task of murdering several men and women and expertly covering his tracks. But in April, pieces from a tenth victim bubbled up in the Cuyahoga River, nine months after the last body had been found. Gerber determined that the death had been recent, within days. That prompted Eliot to act. His team grabbed Sweeney off a street corner and took him downtown to the Cleveland Hotel, where they had a suite waiting. They shut the curtains, dropped him into a chair, and began the interrogation.
“We played on him for a long time,” Cowles said in an interview years later. He remembered the suspect being drunk when they brought him in. Cowles and a detective, Louis Oldag, grilled him eight hours a day, day after day. It couldn’t have been pretty: the two policemen didn’t mind securing a confession through sheer brutality. But Sweeney didn’t break. The doctor kept feeding them gibberish and taunts and riddles. He seemed to be enjoying himself. At some point during the weeklong interrogation, Eliot took his turn with the suspect. The safety director believed harsh tactics led to false confessions—a minority opinion in law enforcement at the time. He preferred to throw his subjects off balance, to wear them down with repetitive, rhythmic questioning until they got tangled up in their own lies and began to see the truth as the only way to make it to the finish line. It had worked time and again for him over the years.
Not this time. Sweeney didn’t confess to the murders. He apparently didn’t deny committing them, either. Eliot couldn’t nail him down on anything. The doctor patiently demanded his release. It was the only thing he said that wasn’t open to interpretation. His frustration growing, Eliot stopped the examination. He left the room and placed a call to Leonarde Keeler, who he’d met at the Northwestern crime lab back in 1931. Keeler was the foremost developer of the lie detector, now called the polygraph.
In Chicago, Keeler had met significant resistance to his machine. The police refused to give up the third degree in favor of the “electric detective.” As one cop put it, holding up a meaty fist: “Here’s the best lie detector.” But the polygraph, with its promise of honest, dispassionate justice, long had fascinated Eliot, and he wanted to bring it to Cleveland. Now he had a reason to do so. He knew Keeler had spent years perfecting his apparatus and his technique. Keeler had tested friends, college students, and mental patients, carefully noting the changes in their blood pressure and breathing and sweat production. He was absolutely convinced he could tell when someone was lying.
Keeler came to the safety department’s hotel suite straight from the airport. After a brief consultation with Eliot, he got right to work. Sweeney didn’t object to being tested. To him, it was just one more phase of this interesting, drawn-out game they were playing. He showed no sign of concern as Keeler hooked him up to the machine; he exuded confidence and answered questions with authority. He seemed to think he and Keeler had a nice rapport. The results were unmistakable. Packing up his equipment after multiple tests, Keeler told Eliot that this big, bemused man definitely was the torso killer. “When Keeler got through, he said he was the man, no question about it. ‘I may as well throw my machine out the window if I say anything else,’” Cowles later said. He recalled that Eliot, just to be sure, brought in another expert as well, someone from Detroit, who “gave us the same opinion.”
Eliot and his team believed they had solved the case. But the polygraph remained a controversial, disputed technology, so they had no hard evidence they could take to court. They still couldn’t get Sweeney to confess. With the lack of actionable evidence, and the inconvenient fact that the suspect was related to a congressman who had criticized the safety director’s handling of the torso investigation, Eliot had no choice but to let the doctor go.
After releasing Sweeney back into the world, Eliot returned home to discover that Edna wanted to be let go, too. Back in March, after the Campbell-McGee trial and with the mayor’s best wishes, Eliot and his wife had headed out of town. But it wasn’t for a vacation, as Burton had assumed. The couple drove down to Florida to set up an apartment for Edna so she could establish residency and, when the time was right, return and file for divorce. Now, just a few weeks later, she told him the time was right. His week at the Cleveland Hotel had been the final insult. She didn’t care why he was there; she packed her bags and called ahead to the train station before telling him of her decision.
Once they worked out the divorce settlement, she would never speak to Eliot again.
***
Eliot worried about his future. He was a public man. His political opponents—like Congressman Sweeney—surely would feast on news of a divorce. In Catholic, working-class Cleveland, good men didn’t get divorced. Eliot was not a religious man, but he nevertheless believed in such religious dictates. He believed he had failed a moral test. He even considered stepping down as safety director, before anyone found out about his and Edna’s separation. For weeks, he skirted the edges of depression; he felt alone and adrift. He was touchy, on edge, unsure what to do.
One evening, he settled into a seat at a city council meeting hoping to keep a low profile. Councilman Clarence L. Young noticed him right away. Young brought up a council resolution to hire an additional building inspector. Eliot, as he had done in private conferences with the council, told Young he would be happy to hire more building inspectors if the council provided money for their salaries.
“The director says he’ll do this if we find the money for him,” Young declaimed in full oratorical mode. “Well, then, I’d like to find out right now what he has done with that extra $17,000 in his department for common labor this year. It’s going to pay all those secretaries in his department. I’d like to find out what all those secretaries are doing.”
Eliot leapt to his feet. He feared rumors were circulating about his wife leaving him. He’d been seen at a nightclub recently with one of the city hall pool secretaries, a small, pretty girl who sometimes worked late into the evening with him. He simply could not allow this kind of insinuation to go unchallenged.
“Mr. Young has been sharpshooting at my department for a long time,” Eliot barked. “Principally because we indicted and convicted officials of a union he was thrown out of the other night.”
“That’s a lie!” Young responded, pounding the table. “That’s a lie, and don’t go saying those things around here. I was never thrown out of any union.”
Council watchers hadn’t expected this. Most of those in attendance didn’t realize the screaming match wasn’t actually about building inspectors. Nor was it about Eliot’s personal life, it turned out. Young was poking the safety director not about his marriage or any rumored infidelity but about his “secret” budget for special investigators. A longtime member of Campbell’s painters’ union, he resented Eliot and his Unknowns for making union racketeering front-page news with the trial of Campbell and McGee.
Chamberlin took his boss aside. “Don’t let ’em get your goat,” his assistant said. Eliot, embarrassed, quickly calmed himself. But he refused to back down on the importance of the Unknowns. “I apologize for engaging in personalities,” he told the council. “But I can tell what those ‘secretaries’ are doing. They’re helping in the many things we’ve been doing to right wrongs in this town. We’ve saved the citizens a lot of money in our safety work. We’re engaging in a complete reorganization of the police department. All that requires extra help. The job would cost the city $100,000 if you brought outsiders in to do it.” He added that he didn’t mean to say Young had been booted out of the painters’ union, only that he’d been removed from a recent meeting.
That got Young w
orked up all over again. He hadn’t been removed, he declared. He had walked out of the union meeting in question. Fine, Eliot said, you walked out. Then the safety director got up and walked out himself.
The next day, coincidence or not, news broke that the Nesses had been separated for the past three months and that Mrs. Ness had left Cleveland. “We have sort of agreed to disagree,” Eliot stammered when asked about the state of his marriage. “We have, however, visited one another several times during the summer. We are parting as friends.”
Recognizing that they had caught the safety director off guard, reporters pushed for more. “We just agreed a mistake had been made and set about in a sensible way to correct it,” Eliot said. He would be no more forthcoming than that.
Eliot nervously waited to see what Burton would have to say about it. To his surprise, the mayor never publicly addressed the issue. He offered only praise for his safety director’s job performance and waved away all other questions.
***
That summer, word began to leak out that Al Capone, “the personification of gangster power,” couldn’t handle prison life. He refused to leave his cell for meals and often unexpectedly burst out in song. He’d developed a mania for making and remaking his cot, spending hours at the task. A consulting psychiatrist at Alcatraz Island, where Capone was held, diagnosed him with paresis, or motor-nerve damage. That actually sounded much better than it was. Advanced, untreated syphilis was eating away at his brain.
The man who’d helped bring down Capone had sex on the brain as well. In the aftermath of his and Edna’s separation, Eliot began going out late at night, trawling for female company. The divorce deeply embarrassed him, but once he realized Mayor Burton wasn’t going to ask him to resign, he decided to put it behind him and restart his life. Eliot hadn’t had much fun since arriving in Cleveland more than three years before. Work had been satisfying but stressful, and his marriage had been quiet but tense. He needed an outlet, and now he had found it. The well-known local artist Viktor Schreckengost remembered being introduced to Eliot at a nightclub. “I was looking for a big fellow,” he said. “And here’s this quiet guy who never likes to brag but would just sit back and listen. Not the kind of fellow you expected to be a gangbuster at all. In fact, he was the last person you’d think would ever have anything to do with Al Capone.”
Eliot began showing up at downtown ballrooms and nightclubs most weeknights, walking over from the office at 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he’d arrive with a city hall secretary, and they’d quietly knock back drinks. Other times he would join a group of already well-lubricated friends, and he’d hit the dance floor. He was an excellent dancer. One night he took Betty Seaver out of her husband’s arms for an energetic spin around the floor. The young sculptress had finagled an introduction through friends sometime before; now she laughed high and loud, flying in his arms. She liked to wear half a dozen or so silver bracelets on each wrist, and they clinked and shimmered, causing heads to turn. Hugh Seaver took her home as soon as the dance ended.
“Women were attracted to him,” recalled Philip Porter, “and during his bachelor period, he never lacked for gals who were charmed by his boyishness.” Eliot knew how to make the most of that natural charm. Unlike most men, he remembered things—details—about the women in his professional and social circle. All the girls around city hall noticed it. He would tell a secretary or telephone operator, a woman he saw day after day, “I’ll never forget the first time that I saw you. You were wearing a red dress.” He had a soft, confiding voice when he said such things, flattering in its sudden intimacy and endearing for its apparent schoolboy earnestness. Eliot took advantage of the swooning he caused, but strictly on a short-term basis. A few nights of dancing and drinking, maybe a trip back to his apartment in the city, and that was that. “Few people really knew him,” Porter believed. “To me, he often seemed lonely.”
Women didn’t reach the same conclusion. He appeared to be the happiest, most popular man around. “He was handsome and charming, very quiet and witty, just as nice as anyone could possibly be,” said Marjorie Mutersbaugh, a local socialite. His flirtatiousness became legendary. He seemed to need the response—the blush and giggle of feminine interest—to prove he was all right. The attention would pull him up from depression or anxiety, as if to a high diving platform, where he would stand on the edge of a knife-like drop into pleasure. But could he make the leap? One woman confided to a friend that Eliot “didn’t have the essentials to keep [a relationship] going,” surely a polite way of admitting he gave her cab fare and showed her the door when the night had run its course. Another danced with him a couple of times and became convinced he was falling for her. He never called for a date, but she would spend years telling friends she once was engaged to Eliot Ness.
The truth was, Eliot needed to be in a relationship. He wanted to be married. He was a traditional man who couldn’t stand going home to an empty house. And he knew exactly who he wanted to fill that space. He just had to work up the courage to go get her.
CHAPTER 27
An Unwelcome Surprise
When Eliot Ness left her on a train platform on that warm summer afternoon in 1937, Evaline McAndrew figured she would never see him again. He was just a sweet tourist fling, a romantic day trip, nothing more. And so the encounter ruined her Canadian getaway. She didn’t even bother making her connecting train—or, more likely, she simply forgot all about it. She’d decided, in the heat of her first and only embrace with this perfect stranger, that she had met her “second True Love.” (The first True Love was not her artist husband, but a young Iowa medical student she’d rejected when she was a coed. She had feared a conventional marriage would turn her into her mother.)
Evaline believed in True Love. She believed in Romance. Or at least she thought she did. She hadn’t seen any of it while growing up. Her father, Albert Michelow, a Swedish émigré, had once been a dashing freelance photographer, but that was before he married and started a family. Evaline grew up in sooty Pontiac, Michigan, the youngest of four—“an unwelcome surprise,” she was certain. From as far back as Evaline could remember, the house was tense, full of resentments and strangled fury. By the time she could walk, her father was an assembly-line worker at Ford Motor Company, his shoulders irretrievably slumped, his eyes watery and unfocused. He slept in his own bed, in a different room than his wife. Evaline’s mother, Myrtle, a former Southern belle, had been beaten down by this life, too. “Too many children. Too much cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing for six people,” Evaline recalled. Most of all, “too little money.” The result was predictable: “My father’s and mother’s romance was over and never revived.” Evaline decided at a young age she wouldn’t let that happen to her.
She was wrong about never seeing Eliot again. His face periodically showed up in national magazines. He always looked so grim in these photos, at least compared to the relaxed, open-faced man who had spent hundreds of miles smiling at her from across the club car’s armrest. (On one occasion, the face peering out from the page looked like it had aged twenty years since their encounter a few months before. Newsweek magazine had accidentally identified Czechoslovakia’s president, Edward Beneš, as Eliot Ness.) His high profile only made Evaline certain that Eliot, this important and impressive man, had forgotten all about her.
Soon after her aborted train trip, she and her husband realized they needed a change and so left Chicago for the teeming anonymity of New York City. She had expected to be revitalized by the country’s biggest, brashest city, but, just as in Chicago, she instead felt empty. Her husband, Mac, immediately found work as a commercial artist, but the less experienced Evaline couldn’t get an assignment, not even to draw a pair of shoes for an advertisement. She tried to work on personal projects, but she began to realize that her work was derivative, uninspired. She returned to modeling for other artists. She hated every moment of it, the being on display, turning her hip when requested, smoothin
g out her dress just so. She and Mac started to drink—and fight—every night. She had married him to get out of the house, to try something new. She hadn’t thought it out. By now, just the sight of this kind, eager-to-please young man made her sick to her stomach. She began to have dreams of dying, her body breaking apart like an ice floe, her life force crushed into powdery white flakes and swept off by the wind. Evaline realized what was happening but felt powerless to arrest it. “Shades of my father’s dark Swedish despondency,” she worried. “Day by day, my low spirits slumped lower. I bickered with Mac. I refused to laugh. . . . I was tired of living. And I was twenty-five years old.”
Evaline left her husband and moved into a run-down little one-room walkup with the bathroom at the end of the hall. It was all she could afford. She sank deeper into blackness. She walked through her days in a kind of fugue state, the outside world helpless against her gloom. When she wasn’t working—turning her hip, smoothing out the fabric—she was drinking. Or sleeping. After draining a bottle, she could sleep through an entire day. She worshipped the slow, numbing slide into alcoholic unconsciousness, her arms and legs feeling rubbery and alien. She needed another shock, another jolt, something to get her back among the living.
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