Though Murder Has No Tongue (3 page)

Authorities were at a loss as to what to make of the crime scenes; even a modern-day forensic investigator thoroughly schooled in profiling would find the disparate details conflicting, troubling, and ultimately bewildering. The police seemed to be dealing with some sort of diabolical joker, a twisted artist who packaged and arranged the pieces of his victims as if they were flowers, as if he were decorating his own personal chamber of horrors. In September 1935, police found the heads of the first two officially recognized victims buried in the dirt, close to their emasculated corpses and near enough to the surface to ensure that even the most unobservant of investigators could not overlook them. The first of two different sets of remains belonging to victim no. 3, Florence Polillo—found in late January 1936—had been carefully wrapped in newspapers, packed neatly into two produce baskets, and covered with burlap.
The killer had then placed his two surprise packages in the snow behind Hart Manufacturing on East 20th, (jokingly?) close to a butcher shop. Victim no. 4's head had been carefully wrapped in his pants and deposited under a small tree or large bush, where two terrified African American youngsters discovered it in early June 1936. It was impossible to escape the notion that the killer was taunting both the police and the public, thumbing his nose and laughing at a city fascinated by his horrific activities even as it turned away and shuddered in revulsion. However, he was also an artist who seemed to suddenly lose interest in his own canvases, one who simply turned away after casually dumping body parts in the Cuyahoga River or Lake Erie, abandoning his handiwork to the vagaries of wind, wave, and current.

If politics is a blood sport, then Depression-era Cleveland was a gladiatorial arena. A life of public service was certainly not for the fainthearted, thinskinned, or easily intimidated in the city along the Erie shore during the 1930s. Some would assert, not without cause, that the political life in Cleveland and the rest of Cuyahoga County was not for the honest and upstanding either. By the mid-1930s, the once-prosperous industrial center had virtually collapsed into the economic doldrums; the numbers of unemployed workers in the area sometimes skyrocketed to close to a quarter of a million. Hobo jungles and shantytowns sprawled through the Flats and crept into the desolate areas surrounding the railroad lines in Kingsbury Run. In a deeply partisan atmosphere, it was inevitable that local political positioning and posturing would turn the torso murders into a soccer ball. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party machine ranked among the strongest and most formidable political organizations in local history. W. Burr Gongwer, often regarded as one of the last old-time political bosses, assumed chairmanship of the county organization in 1924, controlling both the patronage system and the fortunes of the party faithful with a proverbial iron hand. Born near Mansfield, Ohio, Gongwer actually started his political career as a Republican but shifted party allegiance in the early years of the twentieth century, when he fell under the charismatic spell of Cleveland's Democratic mayor Tom Johnson. The Democrats consolidated control over local political affairs in 1931, when, following the death of Congressman Charles A. Monney, lawyer and former Cleveland Municipal Court judge Martin L. Sweeney won election to the 20th Congressional District and again in 1932, when the city electorate voted Raymond T. Miller into the mayor's office. (The activist Miller immediately adopted tough but necessary
measures to cope with the disastrous economic consequences of the Great Depression; he cut city spending drastically and successfully urged utility companies to slash their rates.)

Sweeney was a political maverick in the best (or, perhaps, worst) sense of the term. A staunch opponent of Prohibition, he used his seat on the court as a bully pulpit for launching strident vocal attacks on a law that he regarded as idiotic and virtually unenforceable. Often dubbed “colorful,” “feisty,” and “a rebel,” he held strong opinions on just about everything; and he had no qualms about sharing them or indulging in very public verbal sparring matches to defend them. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Father Charles Coughlin, the Canadian-born, ultra-conservative Roman Catholic priest who used his radio program to rail against everything that displeased him, including the Jews, international bankers, and Roosevelt's New Deal. Upon arriving in Washington in 1931, Sweeney startled and angered many of his congressional colleagues by complaining that they were behaving like a bunch of old women; in 1940, he got into a fistfight on the floor of the House with Representative Vincent of Kentucky. Love him or hate him, Martin Sweeney was always good copy for Cleveland's daily papers.

The Democrats were truly riding high, but all that changed at the 1932 Democratic National Convention when delegate Sweeney—pledged to support Al Smith's bid for the presidency—suddenly switched his allegiance to Franklin Roosevelt. (In 1936, Sweeney would abruptly turn against Roosevelt—a man he had once praised as a “second Messiah.”) Since Gongwer prized party loyalty and obedience as the highest of all political virtues, Sweeney's renegade move predictably precipitated a deep split in the county's Democratic structure, with both men publicly jockeying for power and control. By 1939, even though every county office was under Democratic control, destructive wrangling and internal mud slinging had so tarnished the party image that the
Press
openly lamented, “The party of Cleveland's grand Mayor Tom L. Johnson” was “in the hands of so-called leaders” who were “filled with the lust for power and personal aggrandizement.”

In 1935, Republicans exploited the division among the Democrats by plunging a wedge deep into the unhealed fracture. Perhaps in response to the unsettling fact that Cleveland ranked as the country's most dangerous city, voters elected Republican Harold Burton as mayor. He would win reelection to the high city office twice, go on to serve in the U.S. Senate, and ultimately win appointment to the Supreme Court. (In 1936, local Democrats regained some of their lost territory, partially through a Sweeney-engineered-and-led coalition of disaffected party members. Independent Democrat Martin L. O'Donnell, one of Sweeney's staunchest allies and personal friends, won the
race for Cuyahoga County sheriff, and Dr. Samuel R. Gerber became the new county coroner. O'Donnell would die of a heart attack five years later, but Gerber would serve as coroner for the next fifty years.) Called a reformer by his supporters and sarcastically dubbed a do-gooder by his enemies, Burton moved quickly to clean up a metropolis blighted by gang activity, labor racketeering, corruption in the police department, illegal gambling, political patronage, a high rate of homicide, and an off-the-chart number of traffic fatalities. In December 1935, Burton offered the job of city safety director to the most famous lawman in the country, Eliot Ness—who, according to well-crafted legend, finally brought down Al Capone. Armed with what he clearly regarded as a political and public mandate to do whatever it took to get the job done, the former G-man immediately attacked the festering social ills that had been brought on, at least in part, by the economic devastation of the Great Depression; and in the process, he would anger some very powerful men and create—in the person of Martin L. Sweeney—a virulent and very noisy enemy. Nominally a Republican, but essentially apolitical, Ness may have seen himself as a white knight riding to the rescue of a city held hostage by any number of deeply entrenched social dragons; but at least some of the battles he waged could not be so easily resolved into simple black and white terms. Gambling, for example, was illegal; and Democratic sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell often took heat from various quarters—specifically William Edwards, head of the crime commission—for allegedly being soft on vice. But O'Donnell saw the issue as one of “home rule” or “states' rights.” Gambling may have been illegal, but it was not the job of Cuyahoga County—or the city of Cleveland, for that matter—to police what went on in the suburbs. That responsibility rested with the individual municipalities. (O'Donnell also turned a partially blind eye to gambling because he knew that some good Irish boys were earning their college tuition by working in the illegal gaming parlors.) This local witch's brew of fierce political wrangling and posturing came to a ferocious boil in 1935 when circumstances added the torso murders to the unsavory mix.

Responding to intense pressure from all sides—press, public, and the political establishment—Cuyahoga County coroner A. J. Pearce (immediate predecessor of the county's most famous coroner, Samuel Gerber) orchestrated what the newspapers dubbed the torso clinic in September 1936. Mindful that law enforcement had hit an impasse and, perhaps, painfully aware that city police, due to a simple lack of understanding of exactly what they were dealing with (the term “serial killer” wasn't
coined until the 1970s), did not possess the investigative tools necessary for dealing with a possibly psychotic perpetrator who murdered total strangers for reasons known only to himself, Pearce invited to a meeting all the police officers who had worked the case so far, anatomists from the Western Reserve Medical School, and mental health professionals from area psychiatric institutions. His idea was to bring together knowledgeable individuals from these various professional fields to share and analyze all the information that had so far been collected. This was revolutionary for the time; in the 1930s the police did not routinely consult with psychiatrists while trying to solve a crime. Though no one in the journalism fraternity fully appreciated the coroner's foresight, the meeting was a brilliant, forward-looking move on Pearce's part. It stands as, perhaps, one of the first examples of what we might regard as modern FBI profiling. There was no preexisting game plan or path for the assembled participants to follow; they were truly feeling their way and formulating the rules as they went along.

The portrait that finally emerged from this collective endeavor was remarkably detailed. No one was sure whether or not drugs were involved with incapacitating the victims, so they decided the killer had to be a large and powerful man—strong enough to overpower his prey (or suave enough to lull them into a false sense of momentary security); large enough to carry the remains—in some cases, a corpse intact except for the head—over substantial distances of occasionally rugged terrain at night. He probably owned or at least enjoyed access to a car, hardly a common situation during the Great Depression. Coroner Pearce noted the obvious skill behind the decapitations and dismemberments, and the doctors from the medical school concurred: no hacking or sawing, few (if any) signs of hesitation. Whoever was committing these grisly crimes possessed considerable knowledge of human anatomy. A butcher or a hunter, perhaps? More likely an intern or a medical student? The killer was obviously no stranger to Kingsbury Run. He knew the geography of the desolate landscape and the adjacent industrial areas as well as he knew the geography of a dead body. He could move purposefully through the darkness with uncanny assurance, without attracting any attention. He either lived nearby or had grown up in the area. He must live alone and, perhaps, work odd hours, since he appeared to come and go as he pleased without notice. The lack of blood at or near most of the discovery sites clearly pointed to a hidden laboratory of some sort—a place where the murderer could dismember his victims in relative security, dispose of the blood, and clean up the corpses before he got rid of them. A derelict, abandoned building, perhaps? There would certainly be no lack of such structures in a rustbelt metropolis reeling
under near economic collapse. Perhaps an undertaking establishment? Most frighteningly, he probably appeared normal and went through his daily activities without attracting any attention. The city's newspapers may revel in notions of werewolves, ghouls, and vampire killers, but the ease with which the Butcher accomplished his work and disposed of the remains argued against anyone so luridly obvious.