Though Murder Has No Tongue (26 page)

The only other surviving document from a primary source that deals with Ness's suspect in depth is a taped interview with David Cowles conducted by Florence Schwein and police lieutenant Tom Brown on September 6, 1983. The then eighty-six-year-old Cowles provided a wide-ranging oral history of his days as head of the Cleveland Police Department's Scientific Investigation Bureau. When he turned his attention to the Kingsbury Run murders, he described Eliot Ness's prime suspect in minute detail, and there can be absolutely no doubt as to whom he is referring.

There was a suspect in those murders. I won't mention any names. He was born and raised as a boy on the edge of the run [ Jessie Avenue, now East 79th]. He later went into the service; in the service, he was in the Medical Corps. He came back, and he went to college [Western Reserve and John Carroll Universities] and went through medical school [St. Louis University's School of Medicine] and became an M.D. Married a nurse [Mary Josephine Sokol working at Charity Hospital]. Came back, did his internship at St. Alexis Hospital out on Broadway and finally kept going down and down and down with the booze. . . . We played on him for a long time. . . . A relative of his was a congressman [cousin Martin L. Sweeney]. And he [Eliot Ness] had to be very careful how we handled him.

Significantly, Cowles says, “There was a suspect in those murders.” One suspect! A single, important suspect; not just one among many others! And, perhaps, by implication, he makes it clear that the Ness office did not regard Frank Dolezal as a viable candidate.

Though not as blatantly obvious as the Cowles description, there are a few other references that clearly point to Francis Sweeney. Perhaps the most remarkable came over the radio from legendary newsman Walter Winchell
one Sunday evening in October 1938. “Attention Cleveland, Ohio,” he trumpeted in his familiar “I've got a scoop!” manner. “The unsolved torso murders, more than a dozen of them in Cleveland, may result one day in the apprehension of one of Cleveland's outstanding citizens. . . . A fanatic, a medical man with great skill is allegedly responsible for the gruesome crimes in which all the murdered were dismembered.” (The Winchell broadcast demonstrates how easily the details of a story can get warped in the retelling. Francis Sweeney was certainly “a medical man with great skill” but hardly “one of Cleveland's outstanding citizens.”) The same elusive medical man to whom Winchell referred had previously made a brief but tantalizing appearance in the pages of the
Cleveland News
on April 9, 1938. “A once-prominent Clevelander, described as a physician in disrepute with his profession, is under suspicion in Cleveland's 11 unsolved torso murders. The man, said to have discontinued his practice [a charge made by Mary Sokol Sweeney in her petitions for divorce], is middle-aged [Francis Sweeney was forty-four in 1938], has some surgical skill and is described as being a powerfully built, chronic alcoholic [also one of Mary Sokol Sweeney's allegations] with apparent sadistic tendencies.” Both Ness assistant Robert Chamberlin and Coroner Sam Gerber verified the
News
story, and Gerber obligingly added the rather startling revelation that the unidentified physician had been a suspect for about two years—in other words roughly since early 1936. Former county coroner A. J. Pearce had convened his torso clinic on September 15, 1936. The deliberations at that groundbreaking profiling session clearly pointed to someone with anatomical knowledge and surgical skill; and though the attendees seemed to go out of their way to avoid labeling the Butcher a doctor, the notion that Cleveland's infamous killer could be a deranged physician was soon abroad in the land. But if Gerber's assertion about the time element is correct, Frank Sweeney had attracted official attention several months before the clinic ever took place. As David Cowles reflected in 1983, “We played on him for a long time.”

The years 1984–89 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Cleveland's notorious period of horror, and a number of “celebratory” retrospective pieces appeared in the local press to mark the occasion. An article by former
Plain Dealer
columnist George Condon appeared in the March 1984 issue of
Cleveland Magazine.
Coroner Sam Gerber was not only still living but was—incredibly—still on the job after forty-eight years. While researching his article, Condon confronted Gerber with a description of the killer that the coroner had given to the press forty-five years before: the Kingsbury Run murderer was a “broken-down doctor who becomes frenzied with drugs or liquor.” The ever-combative Gerber denied he had ever said any such thing and insisted that “the
newspapers made up that stuff.” Cleveland journalistic standards may have been a tad looser in the 1930s and 1940s than they are today, but it still strains credulity to believe any reporter would make up something that specific without support or manage to manufacture a description that just happened to be exactly on target.

In 1988–89, then
Plain Dealer
staff writer Brian Albrecht published a similar retrospective piece and, in the process, became the resident local expert on the Kingsbury Run atrocities. By then, Gerber was gone. (He had retired in 1986 and died the following year.) But Albrecht was able to talk to David Kerr, the retired head of the homicide unit. ( James Hogan had held that position during the Butcher's reign of terror, and Kerr was his immediate successor.) Kerr remembered, in Albrecht's words, that rumors about a renegade physician “related to a well-known political family, who had fallen into disrepute after receiving treatment in an insane asylum,” still swirled through the Cleveland Police Department long after the killings had passed into history and “that police had focused their search on a once prominent, middle-aged physician said to be powerfully built and a chronic alcoholic with sadistic tendencies.” Again, some of the details have become mangled. Francis Sweeney was not particularly prominent in the social sense; and he had fallen into disrepute, at least with his own family, long before he ever saw the insides of an institution. But, as with Gerber's alleged description of the killer, the specifics clearly point to him. In 2004, Thomas G. Matowitz Sr. (son of George J. Matowitz, Cleveland chief of police during the Ness years) recalled those same departmental rumors. “They had, I think, a very strong suspicion as to who was doing it. And they realized that they couldn't really prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. He [George Matowitz? Eliot Ness?] felt . . . that it was this doctor . . . who was doing it who apparently had gone around the bend. In fact, he wound up in a rubber room, I think, in some institution, if I remember correctly.”

In late 1991 or early 1992, then Cleveland chief of police Edward Kovacic received an intriguing and rather strange request from the Los Angeles Police Department: investigate a possible link between the Kingsbury Run murders and the infamous 1947 murder-mutilation of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, in Los Angeles. (There had been a flurry of speculation in the popular media, primarily on television, that the torso killings could be related to the Short murder, and this may have prompted the official request.) Kovacic turned this plum assignment over to Sergeant John Fransen, now retired, of the Homicide Unit. It didn't take long for Fransen to decide that, though the notion of a link remained undeniably intriguing, there was no connection between the Black Dahlia and the Kingsbury Run victims. (The modi
operandi of the respective perpetrators were significantly different. Though her face had been viciously mutilated, Elizabeth Short's killer left her head attached to the upper trunk. Whatever other indignities the Butcher may have visited upon the corpses of his victims, he always removed the heads. Decapitation, more than anything else, remained his signature—hence one of his sobriquets, the Head Hunter of Kingsbury Run. Also, though Elizabeth Short had been neatly bisected roughly at the waist—as had some of the Cleveland victims, the other mutilations to her corpse did not match the Butcher's methods. Last, the Dahlia had obviously been tortured before her grisly death. With the possible exception of victim no. 1, Edward Andrassy, who bore rope burns on his wrists, all of the Kingsbury Run victims seemed to have been dispatched quickly.)

As a savvy cop with a lot of investigative experience behind him, Fransen quickly picked up the vague remnants of Francis Sweeney's then fifty-some-year-old trail. The Kingsbury Run murders may rank among the very coldest of cold cases, but it is still officially open. As an investigator working on an infamous open case with the full weight of the Cleveland Police Department behind him, Fransen could compel the cooperation of official agencies far more readily than a layman might and compile an impressively substantial dossier on Dr. Francis Sweeney from a variety of sources, including the local probate court, the Cleveland Catholic diocese, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the University of St. Louis's School of Medicine, and the State Medical Board of Ohio. When he submitted his final report to his superiors, along with all the corroborating documentation he had amassed, Fransen harbored no doubts that the tale about his secret suspect that Eliot Ness had shared with Oscar Fraley was entirely true and that the man he described was Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney.

On May 6, 2003, the family of Officer James M. Limber donated to the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum material relating to Kingsbury Run from his estate. The documents include several snapshot-sized photographs attached to individual pages, obviously removed from a small sixringed notebook measuring approximately six-and-one-half by four inches. A brief, typed caption appears under each picture. Most of the photos are relatively neutral—shots of Kingsbury Run, the surrounding area, and piles of trash. Among these grim landscape studies, however, is a formal portrait of Francis Sweeney, the caption beneath it reading “Doctor X.” The photographs are obviously not official police material; the format is too small, the mounting too casual, and the captions personal rather than officially formal. It would be easy to miss the importance of this small collection of material. Since Limber did not join the force until 1937 (toward the end of the Butcher's activities) and his name does not appear in any of the extant police reports, it would seem logical to assume that whatever contact he may have had with the investigation remained strictly tangential. Yet this small collection of photographs constitutes one of the more significant pieces in the vast Kingsbury Run puzzle.

The photograph of Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney donated to the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum by the family of Officer James M. Limber (dates of service, 1937–74). This is one of a series of pictures related to the Kingsbury Run investigation. It is shown here as mounted on a page taken from a small, ringed notebook. The “Doctor X” caption beneath the photo is part of the original document. It is obviously a formal portrait. Courtesy of the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum.

Sometime
after former coroner Pearce's torso clinic, David Cowles put together a handpicked team of eight operatives, culled from the ranks of the police and low-level criminals, to work behind the scenes on the torso murders. Since Cowles controlled every aspect of their activities, nothing was known about this top-secret group until Cowles broke his silence during his 1983 interview with Florence Schwein and Tom Brown. When James Limber and a second officer, Tommy Whelan, graduated from the police academy in 1937, they were immediately assigned to work under Cowles. Since no one knew they were police officers, Cowles used them freely in undercover assignments related to the Kingsbury Run investigation. The Limber photographs (including the portrait of Francis Sweeney), therefore, come from the highest investigative levels, from the very heart of the search for the Mad Butcher.

Finally, there is that strange pseudonym “Gaylord Sundheim” that Eliot Ness used with Oscar Fraley to identify his prime suspect. It remains an extraordinarily curious concoction for a no-nonsense lawman like Ness to come up with. “Gaylord” was English slang for homosexual (there were suggestions that Sweeney might be gay); and “Sundheim” could be read as a rather elitist joke created by combining the two German nouns “die Sünde” (sin, misdeed, transgression) and “das Heim” (home): Gaylord Sundheim—Homosexual (or Gay) Home of Sin. It's all too convoluted and obscure for someone such as Eliot Ness to use, but it is right in line with the bizarre taunting and fractured phraseology that Francis Sweeney employed on the five surviving postcards he sent Cleveland's former safety director in the early 1950s. Gaylord Sundheim: a private joke Sweeney may have enjoyed with himself, perhaps something he shouted out at some point during the marathon interrogation of May 1938. Admittedly, this remains speculation; there is no way to know for sure.

The
rumors about the secret suspect, the legendary but unidentified individual who enjoyed some sort of connections, the man who apparently wound up in an institution, had been swirling around in the Cleveland Police Department since at least the 1940s. Eliot Ness himself first went public in leaking the tale of his mysterious suspect to Oscar Fraley, and both David Cowles and Royal Grossman later added their own personal bits and pieces to the story. Was Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney Eliot Ness's legendary secret suspect? Emphatically, yes! Given all the evidence presented here, there can be no doubt that he was.