Though Murder Has No Tongue (27 page)

I
S
E
LIOT
N
ESS'S
A
CCOUNT OF A
S
ECRET
I
NTERROGATION
I
NVOLVING A
L
IE
D
ETECTOR
T
EST
V
ERIFIABLE
?

Again, the 1983 Florence Schwein–Tom Brown interview with David Cowles remains the most significant and informative surviving document. Since the Cowles account is the only existing hard-copy source of testimony about the entire episode (other than Ness's account as recorded by Oscar Fraley), it is worth quoting at length: “I was telling you about the fella that lived on the edge of the Run and became a doctor, etc. A relative of his was a congressman. He [Eliot Ness] had to be very careful how he handled it. However, we had a detail on him and picked him up. He had been drinking heavy too. We didn't bring him to jail but brought him to the Cleveland Hotel [now the Renaissance on Public Square]. Ray Oldag and I worked with him eight hours a day.”

In response to Florence Schwein's question as to how long this all lasted, Cowles replied: “Possibly a week or two. We had Keeler come in with his lie detector from Chicago and examined him. 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.' We had some other man who worked in the courts in Detroit, and he gave us the same opinion.” Commonly regarded as the father of the modern polygraph machine, Leonard Keeler of Northwestern University reigned as the ultimate authority on the device in the late 1930s—its use and the interpretation of the results. He reportedly had never found an innocent man guilty and had refined his interrogation technique over a lengthy period of testing, during which he had conducted literally thousands of interviews. Ness apparently knew Keeler from his Chicago days and was, no doubt, responsible for bringing him to Cleveland to question Francis Sweeney in secret. Ness always played his cards very close to his chest when it came to talking about potential suspects. Arnold Sagalyn does not remember Ness saying anything specifically about Francis Sweeney's possible guilt, beyond
the comment that he found him “interesting.” But Keeler's presence in that hotel room testifies to just how seriously Ness regarded Sweeney as a viable suspect and the sheer importance he attached to the entire operation.

It is an extraordinary tale of behind-the-scenes, cloak-and-dagger maneuvering worthy of any first-rate spy drama. The entire operation would require—indeed, demand—extremely careful and detailed planning; the coordination would have to be meticulously precise. Arrangements would have to be made with hotel management for a room—a place where those involved could come and go in relative secrecy, and guards of some sort could keep watch outside the door without attracting undue attention from hotel guests. Since an evening of dancing in one of downtown's many elegant ballrooms was one of the safety director's favorite pastimes, Ness probably established and maintained close relations with hotel managements throughout the city; so making arrangements for a place to conduct a secret, off-the-books interrogation session would be fairly easy. Obviously, the room could not be in a high traffic area; it would have to be in a corner somewhere or at the end of a relatively out-of-the-way hotel corridor where few employees and guests were likely to wander. It's unlikely Ness's operatives escorted the inebriated physician through the lobby, passed the registration desk to a hotel elevator, and then down a corridor to the waiting room in broad daylight. All of this must have involved spiriting Sweeney in through a back entrance and up or down a little-used stairway or elevator late at night or early in the morning. Obviously, Sweeney would have to be fed. After all, Cowles said this interrogation lasted anywhere from one to two weeks. This would mean, presumably, a steady stream of meals from the kitchen delivered to the room by hotel staff. Or did Ness arrange for food to be brought in from the outside? Surely, hotel staffers must have wondered and whispered about the strange goings-on—or was this something they were relatively used to? A man like Eliot Ness, accustomed to careful planning and comfortable working in secrecy, may have arranged for a room to be placed permanently at his disposal for contingencies just such as this. Plans would also have to be made to bring Leonard Keeler and his polygraph to Cleveland in relative secrecy; and once here, he would have to stay somewhere. The whole story provides a window to an age when the rules governing law enforcement personnel were considerably more lax than they are today. A modern-day civil libertarian would be horrified: one to two weeks of eight-hour-a-day grilling with, obviously, no Miranda rights having been read and no attorney present!

The only other accounts of this hotel-room episode are anecdotal and would probably be regarded as hearsay in today's legal environment. When, in the early 1970s, former Clevelander Marilyn Bardsley began digging into
the Kingsbury Run mystery, her probings eventually attracted the attention of Royal H. Grossman, a practicing psychiatrist working for Cuyahoga County, who had been among the chosen few present at Sweeney's interrogation. Without naming the suspect, Grossman broke three decades of silence on the case and described the hotel-room scene in detail. He fixed the month of the marathon interrogation session as May 1938, and some of the specifics he supplied corroborate the details in David Cowles's oral account. Cowles maintained, for example, that Sweeney had “been drinking heavy”; Grossman alleged that the doctor was so intoxicated that it took them three days just to dry him out sufficiently for questioning. Elizabeth Ness also shared what she remembered from her husband's recounting of the session and added a fascinating detail of her own. At one point, Sweeney glared at Ness with such intense hatred and barely suppressed rage that the safety director stepped back toward the room door in case he needed assistance from those on watch outside in the corridor. But no one was there; the official changing of the guard had not yet been completed. Ness confided to his wife that he experienced a moment of genuine panic when he realized he was utterly alone with his unpredictable, possibly, exceedingly dangerous, quarry. A really startling admission, considering the dangers Ness had faced and the bullets he had dodged in his career!

Cowles's authoritative recounting of the entire hotel-room episode—recollected at the age of eighty-six and twenty-five years after the fact—may not be as precise and detailed as one could wish; but his story is solid; and it also addresses, in passing, the most nagging questions generated by Ness's account: where the lie detector had come from and who had conducted the examination. In the face of Cowles's testimony, there can be no serious doubts that both the nonstop interrogation and the lie detector examination did take place. Today, the old hotel, now refurbished, is one of Cleveland's most glamorous and glitzy establishments. Somewhere, though, in this spacious, glittering, upscale world from a bygone age there is a corridor where ghosts still hover; somewhere there is a room where the voices of the country's most famous lawman and his mentally unbalanced, potentially dangerous nemesis still echo.

W
AS
T
HERE A
D
EAL TO
K
EEP
F
RANCIS
S
WEENEY'S
N
AME
S
ECRET
? (P
ART
1)

Though the very concept of a deal would be implicit in any story or legend that involved protecting a suspect's identity because of his connections,
there is no surviving hard evidence of any sort to support such a claim. Obviously, such an arrangement—if it even existed—would be the epitome of the proverbial secret, smoke-filled backroom agreement; there would be no contract on file anywhere that anyone could point to. But, besides Francis, the only person in Cleveland who would benefit from any such backroom shenanigans was Martin L. Sweeney; the public revelation that the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was his own cousin would not only utterly destroy his political career but splinter his coalition of rebel Democrats as well. But the reputation of maverick Democratic congressman Sweeney was probably the last thing on earth the leaders of Cleveland's Republican administration would care to protect—especially since Sweeney had attacked Mayor Burton and Ness so vociferously over a host of issues, notably their inability to catch or even identify the city's most notorious killer.

The issue of how much Congressman Sweeney actually knew about his cousin's predicaments and the nature of Ness's investigation is central to the whole notion of a secret deal; or, to repeat the famous question about President Richard Nixon from the days of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s with a slight variation, “How much did Martin L. Sweeney know, and when did he know it?” The
Cleveland News
story that pegged a degenerate physician plagued by alcoholism as a central suspect in the murders appeared on April 9, 1938; in the same story, Gerber acknowledged the existence of the mysterious medical man and added that law enforcement had been watching him, among others, for almost two years. Though Martin Sweeney undoubtedly knew Francis's life and medical career were unraveling, would he have guessed the unnamed suspect of the
Cleveland News
story was his cousin? As a good, loyal Democrat, would Gerber have alerted his fellow party member to that fact? Gerber's position was extremely delicate, difficult, even dangerous—his loyalties potentially divided sharply between his political party, on the one hand, and his duties to law enforcement, on the other. Walter Winchell's radio story about the potentially imminent arrest of “a medical man of great skill” hit Cleveland one Sunday evening in the middle of October 1938. Assuming Martin Sweeney heard the broadcast, would he have recognized the suspect Winchell described as his cousin? The
Cleveland News
and Walter Winchell stories are perhaps the only two accounts describing the unidentified renegade physician that have survived from the April–October 1938 period. How many other similar stories may there have been swirling through the city at the time, tales that an astute politician such as Martin Sweeney—with one ear to the ground, the other cocked to the wind, and surrounded by well-positioned cronies—would hear? It is probably safe to assume that by the middle of 1938, Cleveland's colorful congressman knew that his dissolute cousin had attracted
the ever-watchful eye of the city's safety director. Ness's secret interrogation of Francis Sweeney occurred in May 1938—between the
Cleveland News
story and the Winchell announcement. Did Congressman Sweeney know about it? Probably not. It would be helpful at this point to recall David Cowles's statement from the 1983 interview: “I was telling you about the fella that lived on the edge of the Run and became a doctor, etc. A relative of his was a congressman.
He
[Ness]
had to be very careful how he handled it”
(my italics). The entire hotel-room episode had been the most carefully planned and secret element in the long-running hunt for the Butcher, so it is probably equally safe to assume that Ness and company successfully kept any news of it away from the public in general and Martin Sweeney in particular.

After the marathon interrogation, because of a total lack of hard evidence against him, save for Leonard Keeler's polygraph examination, Ness was forced to release Francis. There was simply nothing with which to charge him. In August 1938, neither Congressman Sweeney nor Safety Director Ness possessed the necessary ammunition to force a deal. Ness had nothing he could take to court, and he was far too much the straight-arrow lawman to allow malicious leaks about Francis Sweeney to escape his office. And unless there was at least the threat of some sort of public move on Francis, Martin Sweeney would have had nothing to react to. The two political adversaries most likely camped in their respective corners and glared at each other in stony silence.

Politics does, indeed, make strange bedfellows. On October 21, 1938—two months after the discovery of victims nos. 11 and 12, Ness's shantytown raid, and Francis Sweeney's admission to the Sandusky Soldiers' and Sailors' Home—two sworn political enemies, Mayor Harold Burton and Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, appeared together before the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C., to lobby for the construction of a new VA hospital in Cleveland. The timing of this unlikely alliance will no doubt tweak the noses of the conspiratorially minded, prompting them to catch the faintest whiff of a deal. Why, they will ask, would Martin Sweeney cooperate with Harold Burton unless he were forced to somehow? But the motivation behind this uneasy partnership could conceivably be far more innocent. Those hearings had most likely been set up months in advance—long before the events of August 1938; no doubt both men saw the potential for their own personal political gain and the city's economic gain in such a rapprochement. It was a win-win situation; after all, who could possibly object to a project that would benefit the country's servicemen? If there was a deal to keep suspicions about Francis Sweeney quiet, it was most likely not struck in August of 1938.

W
AS
F
RANK
D
OLEZAL
A
RRESTED AND
C
HARGED TO
D
EFLECT
A
TTENTION FROM
F
RANCIS
S
WEENEY
?

The only set of circumstances that would support such an allegation is the apparent desperation on the part of Sheriff O'Donnell and his office to get a confession out of Dolezal and have him officially charged as quickly as possible once he had been arrested, in July 1939. But there had to be a reason for this haste; something would have had to have happened in spring or summer 1939 that would have provoked the need for a scapegoat. There is, however, no surviving evidence that there was such a trigger. Francis Sweeney had been safely tucked away in Sandusky for almost a year and would not be discharged until July 30, 1940; if he left on his own, he would be shadowed by the Ness office; there had not been any new torso victims for almost a year—since August 1938. The Butcher had never allowed a gap that long to lapse between victims—save for the period between the Lady of the Lake, assuming she was one of the Butcher's targets (September 1934), and the deaths of Edward Andrassy and his never-identified companion (September 1935). What reason would there be for a scapegoat in July 1939? The
Plain Dealer
did resuscitate the Kingsbury Run story on April 2 of that year, with a full-page piece, complete with pictures, exploring the question of what type of person the perpetrator must be; but that retrospective rumination hardly seems sufficient in itself to provoke the Dolezal affair a couple months later. There had to be something else.