The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (16 page)

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.

Another headless corpse of a man was found dumped on a slagheap belonging to the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad at New Castle Junction on 1 July 1936. His head was never found, and he remains unidentified. However, newspapers spread under the body included editions from July 1933, from both Pittsburgh and Cleveland – tying the corpse to the Cleveland Torso Murders. Detective Merylo concluded that these were the work of the same killer, as were some 20 to 30 other murders, nationwide.

Working some 70 years later, criminologist William T. Rasmussen also tied the Cleveland and Ohio cases to the murders of Maoma Ridings, socialite Georgette Bauerdorf, the Red Lipstick Murders attributed to William Heirens and the famous Black Dahlia case.

On 28 August 1943, Maoma Ridings, the 32-year old daughter of a prominent Georgia family, checked into Room 729 of the Claypool Hotel in Indianapolis. She was a corporal in the Women’s Army Corps, but before the war she had been a physiotherapist for Franklin D. Roosevelt in her hometown of Warm Springs, where the president had a summer home.

Stationed at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, she just had arrived in Indianapolis by bus on a weekend pass. On her way from the bus depot, she had bought a fifth of whiskey and went directly to her room in an isolated corner of the seventh floor, flanked by two stairwells.

At 5.30 p.m. she called down to room service for ice and a soft drink. A bellhop came within ten minutes. Later he told police, a woman dressed in black was lying on the bed smoking a cigarette. She had changed out of her uniform apparently. She told him to take a quarter from the dresser. He did so, thanked her and left.

Around an hour later there was another order for ice from Room 729. This time the bellboy saw no one, but a woman’s voice from the bathroom told him to put the ice on the dresser and take 25 cents for his trouble. Again, he did so, thanked her and left.

Meanwhile Corporal Emanuel Fisher, who was also stationed at Camp Atterbury, arrived at the Claypool. He called up to Room 729 from the lobby. Getting no reply, he said, he left the hotel.

At 8 p.m., the housekeeper knocked on the door of the Ridings’ room and called out: “Linen for 729.” There was no answer, so she opened the door to find Maoma Ridings lying dead on the floor near the bed in a pool of blood. A quarter was found next to the body.

She was partially dressed and had just had sex, though the authorities could not determine if this was consensual or she had been raped. The cause of death was a blow to the head with the whiskey bottle, though the body had been slashed repeatedly. Gashes around the neck severed the jugular vein. There were more cuts on her wrists. The body was still warm when she was found. Only 43 cents were found in the room. Fisher was ruled out as a suspect because he called again after the body had been discovered. When a man answered the phone, he hung up. The murder remains unsolved.

Eighteen hundred miles away in Los Angeles, 20-year-old oil heiress Georgette Bauderdorf was doing her bit for the war effort by dancing with enlisted men at the Hollywood Canteen. After lunching with her father’s secretary on 12 October 1944, she planned to fly to El Paso to see her boyfriend. The following morning the maid found Bauderdorf’s partially clothed body face down in the bathtub in her apartment. She had been strangled. It was thought that a man was awaiting her when she returned home that night. She put a up a tremendous struggle but was overwhelmed. The case remains unsolved.