Out of nowhere, she got it. One Sunday afternoon, the phone rang.
“Eliot!” she exclaimed when she recognized the quiet, calm voice she was hearing—for the first time in more than a year. The lifeline she needed most. He was in New York, he said. “Would you have dinner with me?”
“Yes!” she enthusiastically answered.
“Would you meet me at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel?”
Again—“Yes!” In her shock and surprise, she seemed capable only of this single syllable.
Evaline barely had the patience to climb into a dress—the slinkiest, sexiest one she had—before rushing out the door. Even some three decades later she would recall their reunion with the vividness of a perfect dream:
When I saw him in the hotel lobby, he stood still and opened his arms wide. I walked into them and smothered my face against his chest. It was the most comforting feeling that I could remember.
Over dinner, Eliot told Evaline his marriage had come to an end. Evaline said that hers, too, was over; she just had to get a divorce. They smiled at each other across the table like giddy children. “Why don’t you move to Cleveland?” he said. “Where I can see you, touch you, talk to you in the process?”
“I will,” she responded without hesitation.
For Evaline, it was the most natural decision in the world, even though she barely knew this man and had never been to Cleveland. That their intimacy was unearned seemed only to make it more powerful. From the moment she heard his voice on the phone, the fledgling relationship consumed her. Within days she was alone again—Eliot couldn’t wait for her to wrap up her New York life; he had to get back to Ohio—but now she had hope again. And a definitive plan. She was going to be with her True Love, in some place called Cleveland. She lounged in her single bed at night and let her brain roll through what had happened, over and over. She couldn’t believe Eliot Ness had found her. That he’d wanted to find her. “Eliot had many talents,” she decided, “but his ‘detective’ skill was the one I liked best.”
***
Eliot believed his detective skill had served him well in the hunt for the torso killer. He’d had to let Francis Sweeney go, but he was convinced he had the right man. Eliot ordered his team to keep a close watch on the doctor, and so they did—for months. Day after day an investigator fell in behind him as he came out of a restaurant or the latest flophouse he was staying in. Sweeney, crazy but clever, soon figured out what was going on. He would saunter along the street, walking for blocks, pretending to window-shop, until he identified his pursuer. Then he’d start the game. He’d walk into a store, and exit out the back. He’d put down his fork at a diner, step into the restroom—and squeeze out the window.
One rookie investigator attached to the safety department lost track of his quarry when Sweeney, feigning sleep on a streetcar, suddenly jerked to his feet, leapt through the closing doors, and sprinted to catch a crosstown trolley. The investigator wrenched the streetcar’s doors open and jumped out into the road, but he couldn’t make it to the other car before it clacked away. Embarrassed, he returned to city hall to admit he’d screwed up, but Sweeney had beaten him to the punch. The chief torso suspect had called police headquarters a few minutes before. “That kid you had following me wasn’t very good,” Sweeney told a befuddled sergeant. “If he wants to try again tomorrow, tell him I’ll be in the men’s department at Higbee’s Department Store at 2 p.m.” Eliot couldn’t help chuckling when he received the news. He told the rookie to be at Higbee’s the next afternoon and to tip his hat at Sweeney. He’d have another man there to follow the doctor.
Eliot may have been able to see the humor in the situation, but at the same time, his frustration with the case—and with Sweeney—ran deep. Late in the summer, that frustration took a turn for the worse. He figured the weeklong grilling at the hotel and the constant surveillance that followed would put a stop to Sweeney’s rampage, but on Tuesday, August 16, 1938, the same day Eliot reached a divorce settlement with Edna, three men scavenging for scrap at Lakeshore Drive and East Ninth Street came upon a human torso wrapped in butcher paper. Police soon found more remains in the vacant lot, including the severed head, the thighs (strapped together by a rubber band), and the arms and legs. It was a young white woman, dead about four months. And that wasn’t all. Later in the day police found remains of another person in the garbage-filled lot, this one a man. Victims eleven and twelve. Detective Merylo, who knew nothing about the safety department’s investigation of Sweeney, was one of the first officers on the scene. “He’s changing his technique,” he told a reporter. “Why, I don’t know. But for the first time since the two bodies we found in September 1935, he has left two victims together.”
It would turn out that the killer was changing his method more than Merylo yet realized. The murderer—perhaps because investigators followed him day after day, making it difficult for him to do his bloody business—was using a kind of sleight of hand. Victim number eleven, the coroner would discover, had been embalmed and might not have been murdered. The corpse may have been stolen from a mortuary.
Still, the discoveries hit Eliot hard. He’d had his chance to break Sweeney, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t impress him—or charm him or scare him—like he had with so many other suspects over the years. The press had begun pounding the war drums again, calling for accountability from the police and city hall, disgorging an array of new theories about the killer. Congressman Sweeney issued a statement decrying the latest murder or murders and the police department’s inability to stop the killings. Eliot felt like a failure. Worse, he felt responsible. This was the first time the killer had left bodies downtown. The dumping ground was within easy view of the window in Eliot’s city hall office. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, as the papers were now calling the killer, was taunting the safety director, Eliot was sure of it. The detainment and interrogation of Dr. Sweeney, rather than scaring him straight, may have spurred him on. Eliot, always so careful and deliberate, made a snap decision.
***
Two days later, in the dead of night, twenty-five policemen stood along the top of a ridge near Commercial and Canal Roads. They hefted axes, truncheons, and hammers. The safety director, about a hundred feet ahead of them, waved a flashlight. The men began to move out. As they closed in on the string of hobo camps that stretched along Kingsbury Run’s high ground, big lights attached to fire trucks clapped on. The lights caught many of the officers holding their breath. The stench of sweat, food scraps, and excrement washed over them as they approached their quarry. The detectives and patrolmen knocked over tents and used crowbars to split open makeshift homes built from cardboard and tin.
Officers pulled disheveled, bleary-eyed men out of the huts, many of them drunk or in a permanent haze. Yelling at them to keep quiet and not to resist, the policemen herded everyone into a big huddle and began searching their pathetic homes. Eliot strode into this human wreckage in a crisp suit, his hair slicked perfectly into place. He looked through many of the hovels and questioned some of the shantytown residents, taking notes in a little black book. One man, in a state of shock, began to cry as Eliot asked him questions. The safety director patted him on the shoulder and led him to the lieutenant charged with gathering up the homeless men.
The officers moved farther down the embankment to another collection of makeshift homes. It was now past one in the morning. Dozens of men in this second shantytown had rushed out of their tents and cardboard houses when they heard scuffling and dogs barking at the other hobo camp, but they didn’t get far. Squads of officers covered all available exits. As the raiders began to search this second encampment, a large, bellowing man emerged from a hut swinging a shovel. Eliot, leading the officers, dropped to the ground to avoid the attack. The shovel missed the top of his head by inches. Officers jumped on the man, pummeling him with truncheons until he toppled and his body went limp. Blood poured out of his ear when they lifted him
onto a cot. Using axes, clubs, and shovels, policemen pounded the encampment into splinters.
Police placed about sixty shantytown residents in paddy wagons for the trip to Central Police Station. As the wagons trundled away from the area, the Animal Protective League came through and rounded up the homeless men’s pets. Fire officials moved in last, soaking everything with oil. The safety director stared at what remained of the shantytowns for a long time before turning to his fire chief. “Burn it,” he said. “Burn it to the ground.”
Huge orange flames soon snapped into the sky, visible from blocks away. Clevelanders awakened by the flash of light leaned out their windows and wondered if there’d been a terrible third-shift accident at one of the city’s great factories. Eliot had convinced himself this was the right thing to do. The killer needed Kingsbury Run’s homeless camps—Eliot believed they were his best hunting ground—and so they had to be destroyed. The safety director ordered that all of the shantytown residents be fingerprinted so they could be identified if they ended up becoming murder victims. The men who could prove they had jobs were then released. The rest were held, without charges.
Eliot thought he was being responsible and sympathetic by destroying the homeless camps and holding dozens of men in hopes of finding family members who would take them in, but not everyone saw it that way. An editorial in the Press lambasted Eliot “for the jailing of jobless and penniless men and the wrecking of their miserable hovels without permitting them to collect their personal belongings.” The paper, slapping him for his “misguided zeal,” added: “That such Shantytowns exist is a sorrowful reflection upon the state of society. The throwing into jail of men broken by experience and the burning of their wretched places of habitation will not solve the economic problem. Nor is it likely to lead to the solution of the most macabre mystery in Cleveland’s history.” Piling on, the News and the Plain Dealer called for Eliot to release the shantytown men from police custody immediately.
This was a new development. No newspaper had seriously criticized the safety director since his first weeks on the job. He’d always held the moral high ground, and he’d always appeared to be on top of the situation, whatever it was. But now, with the torso murders, he was flailing, desperate. The newspapers had finally noticed. They mused in print over whether he had too much power. Eliot remained immensely popular in Cleveland, but his cloak of invincibility was suddenly gone.
The bad press made Eliot even more determined to show results in the torso case. On Monday, August 22, Eliot teamed police officers with fire wardens—a clever way around the need for search warrants. For the next five days the teams went door to door in a ten-square-mile area around Kingsbury Run. They were officially looking for fire-code violations, and there were plenty of them. They poked through dilapidated buildings where they frequently found up to a dozen people living in one room. They searched basements where frayed wiring hung from the ceiling like tinsel. But they issued few citations, for they actually were looking for a killing room—the murderer’s “death laboratory.” Eliot was sure it existed. But even though officers and fire wardens pawed through hundreds of homes, they didn’t find anything of the sort.
The fevered activity wasn’t for nothing, though. With the Kingsbury Run shantytowns destroyed and the door-to-door searches getting started, Dr. Francis Sweeney showed up in Sandusky, where he committed himself to the veterans’ hospital. Eliot couldn’t boast of an arrest, but he had managed to remove from the streets the man he believed responsible for the gruesome murders.
Of course, Sweeney still could sign himself out of the facility whenever he wanted to.
CHAPTER 28
Full of Love
Eliot loved to fall in love, and Evaline was easy for fall for. He had no idea what he was getting himself into.
The woman he had met on a train nearly two years before was flirtatious and sexy and smart, with a wit as dry as Death Valley. She was unlike any woman Eliot had ever known. What he didn’t know was that it was all an act. Evaline’s confidence—her belief in herself and in the power of romance and possibility—depended on willpower. And it couldn’t be maintained. She was a talented artist. She painted and sketched, made her own clothes and furniture and tapestries, but this overflow of creativity was her way of fighting off ghosts. A low-boil dissatisfaction roiled constantly inside her, though she refused to acknowledge it, even with intimates. She struggled to keep her composure—that was something she admired about Eliot, his composure, calling him “the most controlled man I ever met.” The pressure she put on herself to live up to Eliot’s example would become intense—unbearable. “She was an extraordinarily beautiful and talented woman, but she had demons,” said Steve Resnick, her step-grandson. “God knows what they were. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was abused as a child.” Ann Durell saw the same darkness in her. “Oh, what was it about Eve?” she mused, calling Evaline by her nickname. “She was very elegant, very aware, but it was hard being around her. She was not a relaxed person.”
***
Her first few months in Cleveland offered few opportunities for relaxation.
“Cleveland wasn’t New York but my life was exciting, busy, and full of love,” Evaline would write of her introduction to Ohio’s biggest city. It was all because of Eliot. He was her dashing “fair-haired boy.” She thrilled at the late-night calls that sent him charging out the door, at the newspaper stories describing his latest attacks on corruption, at the interruptions at restaurants from people who just wanted to shake his hand. She would even attend an extortion trial to see him in action. She sat in the front row wearing an exotic turban, intent on being noticed. She listened carefully to the testimony of mobsters and “stool pigeons,” now and again sneaking a look at Eliot and smiling. She was in love, but more than that, Eliot made her proud. She’d never really been proud of anyone before—certainly not of herself—and she enjoyed the novelty of it.
During his brief singlehood, Eliot had grown accustomed to closing up his office at eight or nine (instead of the usual eleven or twelve) and heading over to one of downtown Cleveland’s grand hotels, where he’d drink and dance and schmooze, sometimes until it was time to go back to work in the morning. It turned out that this work-hard-and-play-harder lifestyle suited Eliot far more than the dull-boy routine he’d stuck with for so long. Drinking loosened him up, pulled him out his shell. It liberated him. “Eliot was a gay, convivial soul who liked nothing better than to sit around till all hours, drinking with friends, or dancing,” recalled Phillip Porter. “It seemed to unwind him to visit night clubs and hotel dance spots. He was not a heavy drinker, but he could keep at it for long periods without giving any appearance of being swacked.”
Edna had wanted only to stay at home with her husband in the evening, to have him all to herself for a few hours a day. Not Evaline. Eliot had found someone who enjoyed the nightlife as much as he did. “That may have been the best part of his life,” Evaline said years later. “He loved it.” They’d go to the Vogue Room at the Hollenden Hotel or the Bronze Room at the Hotel Cleveland. They became regulars at the Statler’s Terrace Room. When the Terrace Room’s bandleader, Manny Landers, saw them come through the doors, he’d stop the band midsong and launch into “I Live the Life I Love,” the couple’s favorite. Inevitably, Eliot would run into men on his hit list: the Statler was still the Mob’s hotel of choice. This wasn’t nearly as awkward as one might expect. Eliot and Evaline, and whoever else they had brought along, would settle in at the bar, and the pimps and enforcers and numbers-racket monkeys would all shift to the other side. Now and again, one of the tough boys would make a crack about Eliot or the police or the latest “trumped up” charges, and Eliot would look up and laugh along with them and offer a rejoinder. They’d parry back and forth, the women watching with bemused expressions, until one of the parties moved to a table in the main room. It might have seemed all too congenial to an outsider, but it was a vast improvement from just a
couple of years before, when cops and mobsters spent night after night huddled together in back-room booths at the club.
While the gangsters on the other side of the bar put Eliot in an excellent mood, they didn’t become part of dinnertime conversation. “He never really talked much about what he was doing,” Evaline recalled. “We’d go out at night and have a good time, but there would never be any talk about his work.” By this time Evaline had moved into Eliot’s rented place on Lake Avenue in all but name; she maintained her own apartment for propriety’s sake. She also began to take on some freelance illustrating work for Higbee’s department store, thanks to Eliot calling in a favor. Working as an artist during the day, going out every night drinking and dancing, Evaline realized she was actually happy, consistently and truly happy. She wanted this feeling to go on forever—and Eliot promised her it could. In the fall of 1939 the couple sneaked out of town to get married. They both selected “single” on the marriage certificate, perhaps worried the minister wouldn’t marry them if they admitted to being divorced. Inexplicably, Eliot listed his occupation as “Writer.” (There wasn’t a box provided for the wife to put down an occupation.) It was a quick, makeshift ceremony, presided over by a Methodist minister and witnessed by two men who were strangers to the happy couple. Eliot didn’t mind being married by a clergyman outside his Christian Science faith. Two weeks later, when word finally trickled out that the safety director had married his young artist girlfriend, the Plain Dealer swooned: “The director’s bride is a slender, attractive, friendly person, a smart girl and an unusual one. For example, she was reported as two years older than she is, and she isn’t going to sue. She is 25.” (Actually, the initial report was correct: She was twenty-seven.) The Press, for its part, excitedly announced, “Aside from her art work, she is interested in music, the theater and tennis.”
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