CHAPTER 26
Cleveland’s serial killer kept interrupting Eliot’s good work.
Back in February 1937, the torso of a young woman had swirled out of Lake Erie and thumped ashore near the end of 156th Street. This latest corpse—officially victim number seven—reignited public fascination with the murders, even though the county’s new coroner, Samuel Gerber, couldn’t say for sure it was the work of the same “maniac butcher” who had been scattering body parts around the area for more than two years. Inevitably, the investigation became a political issue. Martin L. Sweeney was a Democratic congressman from Cleveland and a determined Burton antagonist, for the Republican mayor looked to be headed for higher office. That meant Eliot also was on the ambitious congressman’s hit list. (Sweeney called him Burton’s “alter ego.”) Even though the campaign season hadn’t begun yet, the congressman told Clevelanders that if they rid themselves of Burton, “we can send back to Washington the Prohibition agent who now is safety director.” That line of attack fell flat—no one minded that the city’s hard-charging safety director had once been a liquor cop—but Sweeney kept up his criticism. A couple of weeks after the discovery of victim number seven, the congressman, playing on Clevelanders’ fears, declared that Eliot was wasting precious time on police-corruption cases when he should be focused on catching the city’s serial killer. “There’s a killer out there,” he would declare time and again.
Eliot never highlighted the torso investigation when talking with reporters, but he spent large parts of every week on the case, monitoring Merylo and Zalewski’s progress and at the same running his own counterinvestigation that he kept from them. He decided to let the cocky Merylo be the public face of the case. The detective liked to talk and beat his chest. Eliot figured that he and his Unknowns could pursue their own leads unnoticed behind Merylo’s gruff razzle-dazzle. Separate from Merylo and Zalewski’s work, the Unknowns broke down each murder fact by fact and reinvestigated it. Slowly, they tied up loose ends, though this never seemed to lead anywhere useful. One example: in September 1935, after the discovery of Andrassy and the still unidentified second man on Jackass Hill, detectives had tried to find a Philip Russo. His car had been seen numerous times at the top of the hill, with a man—presumably Russo—surveying the area with binoculars. Police considered it a promising lead, even more so when they couldn’t find him. Now, almost two years later, investigators tracked Russo down, only to quickly strike him from the list of suspects. It turned out that a woman who lived in an apartment facing Jackass Hill had carefully planned out her marital indiscretions. She would sometimes tell Russo, her inamorata at the time, to wait at the top of the hill with binoculars. When her husband left the apartment, she would flap a tablecloth out the window, the sign for her lover to hop in his car and zip over to the building.
When the weather turned nice that summer of 1937, the killer picked up his pace again. On June 6, the neatly severed head of an African American woman was found underneath the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Her torso had been stuffed into a burlap sack and left nearby. Gerber would be able to identify this latest victim—her name was Rose Wallace—based on distinctive dental work. Like Flo Polillo, she had been a part-time prostitute. A month after the discovery of Wallace’s remains, the torso of a white man—along with other pieces of him—turned up in the Cuyahoga River, victim number nine. That was three new bodies in less than six months.
Eliot and his team finally got a break in the case eight long months later. On a warm, breezy day in March 1938, with the Campbell-McGee trial heading toward a verdict, a dog bounded out of the woods near the town of Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. The dog’s owner, horrified, called the county sheriff’s office. The local coroner, E. J. Meckstroth, would determine that the appendage belonged to a young woman. “The leg shows as neat a job of amputation as I ever saw,” he remarked. This raised a red flag sixty miles away in Cleveland. David Cowles, the police department’s superintendent of criminal identification, drove out to Sandusky to inspect the mystery leg.
Cowles’s work in the lab had earned Eliot’s respect over the past two years. The feeling wasn’t mutual. Like Merylo, the short, round Cowles resisted Eliot’s natural friendliness. After all, Eliot was everything—good-looking, charming, intrepid—that Cowles wanted to be but never could manage. But if Eliot recognized the antipathy, he ignored it. Cowles, a self-taught chemist, was a strong advocate for ballistics and lie-detector technology, two much-derided scientific innovations that also fascinated Eliot. Their agreement on the value of scientific policing led Eliot to begin giving Cowles fieldwork. Most notably, he had put him in charge of running informants for the safety department’s under-the-radar torso investigation.
Cowles believed this severed limb found far from the city represented a major breakthrough. He had cultivated a source at the Osborn State Prison Honor Farm who was providing him with tantalizing information about a disgraced forty-four-year-old doctor, Francis Sweeney, who periodically checked himself into the veterans’ hospital at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. The six-hundred-bed hospital stood near the prison work farm in Sandusky. Now, on Cowles’s recommendation, Eliot and his Unknowns turned their attention to Sweeney.
Dr. Sweeney was a big man, certainly strong enough to subdue and hack up prostitutes and even young, fit men. The investigators dug into his background. They learned he had been gassed during the World War and never really recovered. He spiraled into mental illness in the years that followed—“going down and down and down with the booze,” in Cowles’s description. Sweeney’s wife, a nurse, sued for divorce and full custody of their two children in 1934, after twice trying to have him committed to an institution. Sweeney’s medical career had collapsed by then, and with his wife gone, he fell off the map, slipping into the netherworld where no one keeps records or asks for your name. The only official sign of him came from his stays at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, where, as a voluntary patient, he could come and go as he pleased. The investigators obtained an old psychiatric evaluation that stated Sweeney had a “frustrated desire to operate.” Excitement swept the group. This looked like their man. They also discovered something else, something that could complicate their pursuit of the suspect. Francis Sweeney was a cousin of Martin Sweeney, the congressman who frequently criticized Eliot’s handling of the torso investigation.
***
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 worked 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.