Though Murder Has No Tongue (30 page)

In the months following Flo Polillo's murder-dismemberment in January 1936, Cleveland police ransacked her background and sorted through the seemingly unending tally of low-level criminals who moved in and out of her life. One individual of more than casual interest whom they were never able to track down was a mysterious man named “Al,” who allegedly supplied her with drugs. There is at least one report that Francis Sweeney once introduced himself as Al. As a licensed physician, whether or not he was actually practicing, Sweeney could obviously write prescriptions for just about anything and trade them for money, booze, or other favors. The members of my research team always wondered how he managed to support himself financially between 1934, when his practice fell apart, and August 1938, when he entered the Sandusky Soldiers' and Sailors' Home. The obvious answer is that he trafficked in illegal medical favors—writing prescriptions, patching up hoodlums, perhaps even performing abortions. (During the investigation
into the death of victim no. 7—a young woman—in February 1937, the whole issue of illegal abortions and “baby farms” came into play.)

There is substantial evidence, both documentary and anecdotal, that Francis Sweeney did, indeed, survive and feed his addictions to alcohol and drugs, both while on the street and during his various incarcerations, by writing prescriptions for himself and others. The dossier John Fransen compiled on him in 1991–92 contains a letter from Ray Q. Bumgarner, director of the Dayton, Ohio, Veterans Administration Center (dated January 11, 1962) addressed to Dr. H. M. Platter, secretary of the Ohio State Medical Board. “We have a veteran under care in our Domiciliary by the name of Frank E. Sweeney who is a licensed M.D.,” Bumgarner writes. “Although he has been under care at a mental hospital as a psychotic and is still rated as incompetent by the Veterans Administration, we have a continuing problem with him in that he writes prescription[s] for barbiturates and tranquilizers in fictitious names for his own use.” Bumgarner then petitions that Sweeney's medical license be revoked: “We believe it would be very helpful in caring for this veteran if it would be possible to get his license suspended while at this Center and this fact made known to the local pharmacists.” John Fransen's dossier contains other pieces of similar correspondence dealing with the same issue dated right up to Frank Sweeney's death. An October 2, 1953, FBI report addressed to “Director, FBI” (presumably J. Edgar Hoover) contains the following: “Mr. HULL [Coubron Hull, Domiciliary Officer at the Veterans Administration Center in Dayton] stated further that SWEENEY is constantly in trouble at the Veterans Administration Center with the courts there, and has been charged ten times out of twenty appearances in court with being drunk.” In 1938, during Francis Sweeney's initial residence at the Sandusky Soldiers' and Sailors' Home, the facility enjoyed a unique working relationship with the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield. Honor prisoners were allowed to work at the home and live in one of the many cottages on the grounds. Among those so “honored” was Al (Alec or Alex) Archacki, serving a sentence for armed robbery. He had met Frank Sweeney a couple of years before, during a chance encounter in a downtown Cleveland restaurant or bar. (At that time, though Sweeney had bought him a drink, Archacki remained wary of any further contact with him because he sensed he was gay.) Now, in the fall months of 1938, the two men met again in the facility mess hall and immediately established an ideal working relationship: Sweeney wrote Archacki prescriptions for drugs, and Archacki reciprocated by supplying him with booze—just perhaps, the sort of mutually beneficial alliance Sweeney could have forged with Edward Andrassy at City Hospital in 1933–34 and with Flo Polillo in 1935.

There is also an intriguing chain of events and circumstances clustered around the discovery of victims nos. 11 and 12 on August 16, 1938, that would seem to point to Francis Sweeney, just three months after the marathon Ness–Keeler interrogation session. Now, two more victims popped up in a city dump on East 9th—in clear view of City Hall and (tauntingly?) right under Eliot Ness's nose. According to the autopsy protocols, the skeletal remains of no. 12 were about a year old; and very little evidence tied them to Kingsbury Run, save for the knife marks at the joints. But there were serious questions about victim no. 11 that never made the city papers and, in fact, remained undisclosed until the Cowles interview of 1983. County pathologist Reuben Straus performed the examination of the badly decomposed pieces of the corpse and judged the unidentified female one of the Butcher's victims. The woman's remains were then turned over to the Western Reserve Medical School anatomist T. Windgate Todd, one of the principal participants in coroner A. J. Pearce's torso clinic, declared them the pieces of a body that had already been embalmed—not a legitimate torso victim! By phone, Todd immediately summoned David Cowles to his office and—indicating the remains—angrily told the startled Ness associate that they definitely did not belong to a legitimate torso victim; these were pieces of a body that had already been embalmed!

The Erasmus V. Raus & Sons funeral home stood across the street from St. Alexis Hospital (where Sweeney interned) on the north side of Broadway. The Raus establishment handled all of Cleveland's indigent bodies and stood close to the building that housed the offices of Doctors Edward Peterka and Francis Edward Sweeney in the mid-1930s. “It's a known fact; we had people who testified, who would testify to it,” Cowles explains in the 1983 interview, “that across the street from the hospital [St. Alexis] was an undertaker who buried all the indigent bodies. And it was a known fact that he'd [Sweeney] go over there and would amputate, or just remove, the way these bodies were found, exactly the same way he would do with unknown bodies in the war.” Unfortunately, Cowles's statement is hardly a model of clarity, but the potential implications of it are stunningly clear. Sweeney enjoyed some sort of privilege at the Raus funeral establishment that allowed him, apparently, to practice surgical techniques or indulge himself in anatomical study on the unclaimed indigent bodies. Assuming that Sweeney was responsible for depositing the disarticulated remains of an already embalmed body at the East 9th dump site, the motivation and subsequent chain of events might read something like this: Filled with rage and booze over his one-to-two-week ordeal with Ness and company at the Cleveland Hotel, but also boiling over with elation that the safety director
and his forces could not charge him with anything in spite of Keeler and his polygraph, Sweeney desperately looked for a way to vent his anger and defiantly thumb his nose at his tormentor. Since he knew the Ness men were watching him carefully, committing another murder-dismemberment was out of the question. So he opted for the next best thing. He disarticulated an embalmed corpse of an unidentified female at the Raus funeral home without the director's knowledge and somehow managed to spirit the pieces to the East 9th trash heaps, where he dumped them in full view of Eliot Ness's office—the ultimate “Take that Mr. Ness! Catch me if you can!” (Just how the skeletal remains of no. 12 might fit into this scenario is difficult to say.) Two days after the August 16 discovery of the remains, the safety director led his heavily criticized raid of the shantytown complex sprawling through the Flats and into Kingsbury Run. The dispossessed and otherwise homeless residents were rounded up by the police, and their dilapidated hovels were razed and torched. On August 23, perhaps feeling the heat in more ways than one, Francis Sweeney formally petitioned the Sandusky Soldiers' and Sailors' Home for admission. Two days later, he officially took up residence.

Two other chapters from the Kingsbury Run saga are relevant in forging a possible, though circumstantial, link between Francis Sweeney and the killings. In late August 1938, a onetime homeless drifter by the name of Emil Fronek—then working in Chicago as a longshoreman—shared a lurid, potentially valuable tale with Cleveland's law enforcement and press establishments. In late 1934, Fronek had been wandering aimlessly up Broadway one dark evening toward the East 55th intersection. Unemployed, alone, hungry, and desperate, he somehow managed to wind up on the second floor of a Broadway office building, where he found himself loitering outside a doctor's office. The affable physician took pity on him and graciously offered him a meal and a badly needed new pair of shoes. Halfway through his simple repast, he began to feel woozy, and, fearing his benefactor had drugged him, bolted from the office and ran down Broadway toward Kingsbury Run, with the doctor in hot pursuit. Fighting desperately to hold on to his senses, Fronek finally managed to lose his pursuer in the sprawling blackness of the Run. Three days later a couple of transients roused him from his deep, drug induced, and comalike slumber. If true, his narrative could have served as a valuable blueprint for how the Butcher overpowered his prey, but Cleveland law enforcement tended to dismiss his undeniably fascinating tale—in part because Fronek could not locate the office four years after the fact, in part because in late 1938 city officialdom believed the Butcher's lair lay much closer to the center of the city than the Broadway–East 55th intersection. The office (or offices) that Sweeney shared with Edward Peterka were, of course,
situated on Broadway, across from St. Alexis Hospital, close to East 55th. Assuming Sweeney had actually been Fronek's would-be attacker, the later history of the Kingsbury Run murders might have unfolded far differently if the onetime drifter could have led Cleveland police directly to the doctor's former office door.

On July 22, 1950, a couple of residents from the Wayfarer's Lodge on Lakeside out for an afternoon stroll happened upon the badly decomposed disarticulated remains of a white male at Norris Brothers, a moving company on Davenport Avenue. Sickening odors had been permeating the area for some time, but apparently no one could pinpoint exactly from where they were coming. The dismemberments had been carried out with a familiar and frightening skill not seen in Cleveland since the Mad Butcher left the remains of his last two officially recognized victims in a dump site at the corner of East 9th and Lakeside twelve years before. “Was he back?” asked nervous city residents. Eventually identified as Robert Robertson, a drifter and resident of the Wayfarer's Lodge, the unfortunate man dominated city papers for weeks as private citizens and public officials alike wrestled with the disturbing notion that the horror of the 1930s had returned. Interestingly, in the weeks before Robertson's remains had turned up, Norris Brothers employees had watched in bemused incredulity as a heavyset man in his fifties with thinning gray hair had ascended a pile of steel girders stored on the west end of company property on a daily basis for about twenty minutes of sunbathing. After six weeks of this bizarre ritual, the sunbather, as he was known to Norris Brothers workers, suddenly ceased his regular visits—just about the time the unpleasantly oppressive odors began to circulate through company grounds.

In July 1950 Francis Sweeney still resided at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Home. It would be another year before facility administrators summarily booted him out, apparently due to his alcoholism. The admittedly vague description of the mysterious sunbather provided by Norris Brothers Company employees eerily matches what Sweeney would probably have looked like in mid-1950. At fifty-six years of age and with his hair, indeed, thinning, he was severely overweight. In his official police report of February 5, 1940, Merylo labeled him “fat and soft”; and Sweeney's surviving medical records actually use the word “obese” in describing his physical condition. The VA would not officially judge Sweeney incompetent until the mid-1950s; and since his residencies in Sandusky were voluntary, he could have left facility grounds whenever he felt like it. Conceivably, he could still haunt the Cleveland area at will, staying, perhaps, with his older sister as he had in 1940 while his niece underwent surgery at St. Alexis. The entire six-week sunbathing
ritual, virtually on top of the dismembered remains of a corpse, smacks of the taunting and the twisted humor that characterized Francis Sweeney's bits of “correspondence” and his antics when he knew he was being watched. Though he had clearly been under close surveillance by the police through the late 1930s and very early 1940s, there is simply no way to know whether that had continued after Eliot Ness left Cleveland in 1942.

Was Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run? He clearly fits the profile worked out in Coroner A. J. Pearce's torso clinic. He possessed both the necessary familiarity with the Run to move through it easily while avoiding detection and the requisite surgical skills to perform the expert dismemberments. As someone who had once been a practicing physician, he may have owned an automobile or at least had access to one, thus transporting the remains of his victims would not have been a problem. According to the very few existing physical descriptions, he was big and strong enough to have done the job. His documented mental disease, alcoholism, and drug abuse could easily serve as the catalysts for those brutal bursts of murder and mutilation. The progressive nature of his mental and physical afflictions could explain the relative sloppiness in the dissection Gerber noted in some of the later victims. His deterioration over time could also explain the curious shift from the careful staging of the earlier crime scenes (no. 4's head rolled up in his pants, parts of Flo Polillo's body neatly packed in produce baskets, et cetera) to the seemingly casual dumping of later victims in the Cuyahoga River or Lake Erie. And insofar as Sweeney's movements can be traced, it can be said that over and over again, he was more or less in the right place at the right time. He was clearly the primary focus of Ness's investigative efforts; the safety director kept him under relatively constant and tight surveillance for at least the three-year period 1938–40. Unfortunately, it is now impossible to determine how many other serious suspects the safety director may have considered and who they may have been. Several physicians crop up in the extant official police reports, many of them named. Some, such as a certain “Dr. Kerr” appear more than once, but none of these leads seems to have panned out. Ness also believed strongly enough in the possibility of Sweeney's guilt that he went to the considerable trouble of arranging the secret hotel-room interrogation and polygraph examination of May 1938, an extraordinary, well-planned operation as detailed and intricate as any dreamed up by a Hollywood scriptwriter, and not the sort of initiative Ness would have undertaken lightly.