Selects: The Cleveland Torso Murders

Summary

Summary of "The Cleveland Torso Murders" Episode from "Stuff You Should Know"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Stuff You Should Know
• Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts
• Episode: Selects: The Cleveland Torso Murders

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Introduction

The episode titled "The Cleveland Torso Murders" delves into one of America's most gruesome and lesser-known true crime cases from the 1930s. Hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant guide listeners through the chilling series of unsolved killings that terrorized Cleveland, Ohio, during the Great Depression.

Notable Quote:

Josh Clark [01:06]: "Once in a while we do some true crime episodes, and in my opinion this might be our best one ever."

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Background and Initial Crimes

The Cleveland Torso Murders began in September 1934 with the discovery of a woman's torso on the shore of Lake Erie, later dubbed the "Lady of the Lake." This victim was gruesomely dismembered, with legs amputated below the knee and the head missing, setting the macabre pattern for future murders.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [04:08]: "In September of 1934, a woman's torso is washed up on the shore of Lake Erie. Her legs are amputated below the knee. There is no head."

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Escalation of Murders

Two years later, in January 1936, Florence "Flo" Polillo, a waitress, bartender, and sex worker, became the second known victim. Discovered dismembered and wrapped in newspaper and bushels of baskets, her remains were found over a span of a week and a half, heightening public fear and media attention.

Notable Quote:

Josh Clark [06:42]: "But for some reason, the torso murders persisted despite the manhunt, and they are still unsolved to this day."

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Victims and Modus Operandi

By June 1936, with the discovery of a fourth victim—an unidentified man whose head was found by boys fishing—the pattern became unmistakable. The killer exhibited a signature brutality, including decapitation and, in some cases, castration and blood draining from victims.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [05:48]: "The decapitation or any kind of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer."

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Investigation and Profiling

Eliot Ness, famed for his role in bringing down Al Capone, was appointed as the safety director for Cleveland in December 1935. Upon taking charge, Ness sought to profile the murderer by convening what was called the "Torso Clinic" with other investigators and the press.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [22:08]: "Peter Murillo was the lead investigator, obsessed with finding the killer."

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Challenges Faced by Law Enforcement

The investigation was plagued by numerous challenges, including accusations that the police were neglecting the case due to the victims' marginalized status. Over four years, approximately 10,000 suspects were interviewed, but the killer remained elusive.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [29:00]: "They tried to find that place as much as they tried to find the killer."

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Eliot Ness’s Controversial Actions

In a desperate attempt to curb the killings, Eliot Ness ordered the raid and burning of the shantytowns in Kingsbury Run, where many victims resided. This move was met with public backlash as it displaced the homeless during the struggling Depression era but was eerily followed by the cessation of murders.

Notable Quote:

Josh Clark [32:47]: "Eliot Ness got it in his head that if you did away with Kingsbury Run, you'd do away with the killings."

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Suspect: Francis Edward Sweeney

The investigation eventually pointed towards Francis Edward Sweeney, a former World War I army medic with a history of mental instability due to head trauma, alcoholism, and surgical training. Sweeney was suspected due to his access to surgical tools and a potential motive stemming from personal grievances.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [49:25]: "Francis Edward Sweeney, who was discharged for mental instability following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off."

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Framing and False Confessions

Frank Dolezal, a bricklayer, was falsely implicated after an coerced confession under duress. His confession was extracted through physical abuse, leading to his tragic death, which further complicated the investigation and cast a shadow over Ness’s methods.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [34:33]: "He was murdered? He hung himself from a hook that was shorter than he was."

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Public Perception and Media Involvement

The case highlighted the intricate relationship between law enforcement and the media. The press played a pivotal role in both shaping public opinion and applying pressure on the police, often criticizing them for the inability to solve the murders quickly.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [28:34]: "They tried to bring the press into the Fold so that there weren't outsiders drumming up trouble for the cops anymore."

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Conclusion and Unresolved Mysteries

Despite Ness’s drastic measures, including unauthorized raids and covert operations, the Cleveland Torso Murders remain unsolved. Francis Sweeney was never definitively proven to be the killer, leaving the case shrouded in mystery and speculative theories.

Notable Quote:

Josh Clark [53:03]: "You just basically choose a side. Either you know it's Francis Sweeney or it wasn't."

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Final Thoughts

Josh and Chuck emphasize the enduring fascination with the Cleveland Torso Murders, noting its complex interplay of crime, investigation, and societal issues during the Depression era. They encourage listeners to explore further through available literature and internet resources for those intrigued by this haunting chapter of American true crime history.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [53:57]: "If you want to know more about the Cleveland torso murders, there's a whole rabbit hole on the Internet and in books."

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Listener Interaction

The episode concludes with listener stories and feedback, highlighting the podcast’s engaged and diverse audience.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [54:02]: "Looking forward to getting the book. I wish you guys the best and looking forward to many more. And that is from John Goodman."

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Overall, this episode provides a comprehensive and engaging exploration of the Cleveland Torso Murders, blending historical facts with insightful commentary, while maintaining a respectful tone towards the victims and the complexities of the investigation.

Transcript

[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Hey everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's select, I've chosen our Cleveland Torso murders episode from May 2021. Once in a while we do some true crime episodes, and in my opinion, this might be our best one ever. It's a semi little known series of gruesome killings that became an engrossing story with a lot to keep up with. I should probably mention there's a lot of frank talk about some really grisly stuff in here, so be forewarned. Hope you enjoy it as much as one can enjoy this kind of stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, Jerry's out there somewhere with the magnifying glass and toothpick. We don't know what the toothpick's for, but this is stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. Content Warning Episode everybody. This is one of our, I was about to say rare. They're fairly rare, but one of our true crime episodes that is very grisly. Gruesome, gruesome, but took place in the 1930s. So there's something about old and gruesome that makes it a little more palatable for me.

[Josh Clark]

Totally. I don't know why, but you're absolutely right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Time, I guess, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, time heals all wounds. The torso murders.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, it does. Well, it heals all wounds except for some of the things that happened in the Torso Murders. Because you can't come back from that.

[Josh Clark]

It's pretty crazy. You were familiar with the torso murders already, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

I had heard of these. And the more I read about them, the more I was shocked that there wasn't a good period movie about this.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, absolutely. So. But if you haven't heard of the torso killer, that's fine. You're definitely not alone. A lot of people haven't, which is kind of surprising because these are. They are unsolved murders. There were a lot of them. And, you know, they took place in the background of a city that was like, driven into a frenzy by this ghastly serial murderer who was. Who continued their murders despite this extraordinarily large, you know, manhunt, to try to find them. An unsuccessful manhunt still to this day.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, it has all the makings of a good movie. It's got a. And we'll reveal who this person is. We'll hang onto it for a second. But he's got a famous investigator.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, oh, sorry. Yes, he definitely was the famous investigator.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Oh, you thought I meant who the murderer was.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

You've got some false starts. You've got some Coen brothers esque whimsy with the dog discovery.

[Josh Clark]

I thought you'd like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I did like that. And yeah, it has all the makings of a great movie and a cool period setting, which was depression era 1930s.

[Josh Clark]

Cleveland, Ohio, which is almost indistinguishable from current day 2021. Cleveland, Ohio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, come on, we love cleaning.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, man, I'm from Toledo. I can totally bag on Cleveland and Detroit. That's my birthright.

[Chuck Bryant]

That is your birthright. So let's go back to September of 1934, when a woman's torso is washed up on the shore of Lake Erie. Her legs are amputated below the knee. There is no head, which is why I said torso and arms.

[Josh Clark]

It's a suspicious way to find a body.

[Chuck Bryant]

A very suspicious way. She was never identified. They called her the lady of the Lake. And this was just sort of the beginnings. Nothing was put together at this point because it would be two years before any other murders took place. And that they finally sort of put together that the lady of the lake was perhaps victim zero, really Victim one, but they called her victim zero of who would become known as the torso murderer or the mad Butcher of Kingsbury.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, Kingsbury. Run. And like you said, it'd be about two years before they started to connect the dots. But in that time between the time the lady of the lake was found, about a year Passed. And then all of a sudden, two more bodies were found. And now all of a sudden, because two bodies were found together, this really started to capture people's attention. The lady of the Lake. It was a weird thing. It was a terrible thing to find, but it was singular. This was, you know, like by definition, not singular. Finding two bodies at once that were both dismembered. And they were found in the area of Kingsbury Run, which is where the mad butcher takes. Takes his name.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. They were both men in this case. They were castrated. They were also decapitated, which would become sort of a signature. The decapitation or any kind of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer. And it's interesting in that victim, one of these two men was actually one of the only ones that they got a fairly positive ID for. They actually got some fingerprints and it matched a man named Edward Andrassy. And he was sort of a petty thief that had, you know, the police had brought in before. So he was believed to be gay. And this, if he was, you know, which all accounts say that he was, this was at a time when in the 1930s, certainly it was still illegal. And it was also listed as a mental disorder in the. What's it called? Not the dmv.

[Josh Clark]

Dsm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Dsm.

[Josh Clark]

The dmv. The DMV didn't look too highly on it either.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, that's right. So he, I think, was one of only two that was ever even positively identified of what would end up being probably 13, maybe 12 murders.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And again, these guys were found together. Not together like they were like within, you know, a very short distance of one another. So they were found virtually at the same time. And whenever you find, you know, a body missing. Missing its head, that is attention grabbing. And when you find two bodies both missing their heads, that really starts to get the presses. Juices running. And like we said, these were found around Kingsbury Run. And Kingsbury Run is basically like an old riverbed that cuts through, I believe, the west side of Cleveland. No, I'm sorry, I think the east side of Cleveland down to the Cuyahoga River. And it was basically like the place where all of the oil companies and all of the heavy industry along the river and along the lake would dump all of their waste. The city put a sewer in there. It was just meant to be kind of like a wasteland, like a literal wasteland. And it kind of stayed that way until the Depression hit. And by the time the Depression hit, Things were so bad that people were looking to basically live wherever they could for free, and they started taking up residence in Kingsbury Run. So by the time the Kingsbury Run murders, the torso murder started, this was like a full fledged, full swing shanty town. Basically a Great Depression era Hoover town is what they call them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. So it was a grim scene down there anyway. Certainly the fringes of society. During the course of the investigation, there were accusations of the press that they weren't working as hard as they needed to because these were people on the fringes of society and sort of forgotten about. And I think one of the other people identified was a few months later in January 1936, when they found the body of Flo Polillo. Florence Polillo was a waitress and bartender and sex worker who was discovered once again dismembered, wrapped in newspaper and a couple of bushel baskets. And then about a week and a half later found other parts of her body. So she was sort of found in. It's very grisly, but found in pieces over the course of a week and a half in different places.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So as far as anybody can tell, we're up to three and possibly four victims, if you include the lady of the Lake. But it wasn't until the following June, about six months after Flo Polillo was discovered, because again, remember, these people were. They actually lived on the fringe of society. So just like today, just like Robert Picton, the pig farmer from Vancouver, so many other serial killers find their victims in like the just, I guess, the lowest stations of society because they're the most vulnerable, they have the least protection. And that's kind of what was going on. That's why it took so many victims for the press to finally be like, okay, there's something really going on here. And finally, in June, I believe, of 1936, victim number four, as far as canonical victims go. But possibly the fifth victim was discovered. His head was found first by two boys who were playing hooky and fishing along the Cuyahoga.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can you imagine that man?

[Josh Clark]

No, I can't, because they found like a balled up pair of trousers and I guess grabbed them and found that there was something in it. And when they opened it up, it was the head of a man in his 20s. He's never been identified, like so many of these victims.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And not to trivialize any of this, but again, that stuff is very ripe for movie making.

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[Josh Clark]

This whole thing is. And it really is surprising that no one's done this yet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, you wouldn't you know, you would write something like that in a screenplay, and this actually happened. It's.

[Josh Clark]

So there's. I didn't see. I haven't read it, but there's a graphic novel, and maybe it's a series called Torso that is about all this, and I'm guessing that would probably be a pretty good basis for the movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So Victim four, they were making great efforts to find out who this man was, so they actually, the police, circulated a photo of his face and made a death mask. If you don't know what a death mask is, I encourage you to go listen to our episode on death masks.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's basically what you would think. It's a recreation of this man's head, and they put this thing along with a tattoo map. He had tattoos all over himself. An illustrated map of his tattoos in this death mask on display at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936, where 100,000 people could walk. I mean, it was a smart idea in one way, because they could blast it out in the best way possible to try and identify who this person was. But it was also, again, like something from a movie. These people going to an exposition all of a sudden are walking by this tattoo map and the death mask of this man. And I'm sure the question came up like, well, why is it? Where's the rest of his body? Why didn't they just show pictures of the tattoos?

[Josh Clark]

They're like, stop asking questions. Do you know the guy or not? No. Go get some ice cream.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

Move along. Nothing to see here. But, yeah, despite that, you know, very public search for an identification, he was never. Still has never been identified. And his tattoos were really. He had people's names tattooed on them. He had a cartoon character named Jiggs tattooed on him. So this guy, you know, you could see his face. They had all his tattoos, and he still has never been identified. But his discovery, and I think the very public, like the cops circulated a photo of his head on a gurney in the morgue at first, before they made the death mask, among other police agencies around the area, and I'm sure to the press as well. So it was kind of public, even though it was kind of quiet, but it got the press's attention, and the press started to connect the dots. And all of a sudden, we now were connecting the lady of the LA to this latest guy and all of the other ones as well. And it became very clear that there was what they call the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury run on the loose in Cleveland, and no one had any idea who it was or when or if they were ever going to stop.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I think there were seven more victims over the next two years. Victim eight were skeletal remains, but they did think they identified this person as Rose Wallace, a woman in her 40s. She had gone missing about a year earlier. And there was quicklime use to decompose this body. And this one, interestingly, had evidence of more of a clumsy dismemberment. To me, this one stands out a little bit as one that possibly might not be a victim and could have been misattributed to the. To the Mad Butcher. That's just my personal feeling. I don't know if anyone else is saying this, but it's the one that stands out to me as being slightly different.

[Josh Clark]

Same as same to me. Yeah. The killer clearly lacked a dismemberment plan in that case.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is that a ban?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Are they good?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they were really good. They were maybe math rock.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. Dismemberment.

[Josh Clark]

I think they were.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice work.

[Josh Clark]

At the very least, they were alternative.

[Chuck Bryant]

Victim 9 had his heart removed. Victim 10 had morphine in her system. And I think they're not quite sure how they all died. I think at one point they thought most of them died by the decapitation, but some were found with their blood completely drained from their body. Like I said, this one woman had morphine in her system, which could make sense. We'll get to something else later on of a potential victim that never happened. Where drugs might have been a factor, but it's sort of all. There were men, there were women, there were black people, there were white people. There wasn't any real rhyme or reason. It seemed like aside from the fact that they were probably culled from this area of Ohio.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And the fact that the first two men were emasculated, that there were women involved, too, that somebody's heart had been ripped out. There was clearly a sexual element to the whole thing, which made the idea that they were men and women victims very confounding. You just don't normally see that in a sex killer. You see one or the other, and it's usually the sex that the person is oriented to or the victims. And then, you know, just to kind of. To cap that point off, the killer left victims 11 and 12 within a few yards of one another on a dump, like a trash dump. And one was a woman. Victim 11 was a woman. And victim 12 was a man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take a break?

[Josh Clark]

We should, because Cleveland doesn't know it at the time. But those of us looking through, looking backward through history can tell you that this was the last canonical victims in August of 1938. So the killer, as far as anybody knows, is done.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And most of the grizzly stuff is out of the way. And we'll be back to reveal the famous investigator right after this.

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[Josh Clark]

It was. I can't take it anymore, Chuck. Please, please. Who is it?

[Chuck Bryant]

It's my favorite thing when you play koi. It was Mr. Elliot Ness. Very famous, ahead of the Untouchables for putting Al Capone behind bars.

[Josh Clark]

Good friend of Sean Connery's.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very good friend.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that was great.

[Chuck Bryant]

That wasn't very good.

[Josh Clark]

Because to do bring a knife to a gunfight, you bring a gun, you dummy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think that was the line. If you go on to do countere, you gotta have an esh in there, right? But there was no.

[Josh Clark]

I did that, didn't I? I thought that was. I thought I nailed it.

[Chuck Bryant]

There aren't no S's in that sentence, Right?

[Josh Clark]

They're implied that I would have done that had there been S's.

[Chuck Bryant]

Don't bring a knife to a gun donch. How's that right?

[Josh Clark]

You bring a gun, you drummer.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, back to the serious stuff. Eliot Ness was the. After that work in. What was that? Chicago, I think. Oh, yeah, that was. He became the alcohol investigator in charge of the Alcohol Tax Unit for Northern Ohio in August of 34. And then the Republican mayoral candidate Harold Burton, who had gone to win, said, you know what, Ness? You're a famous guy. I like the cut of your jib. Let me make you, in December 1935, the safety director for Cleveland, and let me nudge you towards this outstanding case that we have.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, when he was hired, the case wasn't quite clear, that it was a big old case. When he came in, just after, like, A couple of months after Victims 1 and 2 were found, and just a couple of weeks before Flo Polillo was found. So it wasn't evident that there was a serial murderer on the loose. But that also means that Elliot Ness came in right at the beginning of this thing. So he was the public safety director for it. He became the face of the frustrated police effort to capture the torso killer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Although the lead investigator. What was that guy's name?

[Josh Clark]

Peter Murillo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he was. He was. I don't know about obsessed, but it became sort of his main focus of work was to tirelessly find out who this murderer was. And I assume that it's weird because I really don't know what a safety director was. I don't think. Is that even still a thing?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think there is a public safety director position still. They basically are in charge of the police department, the fire department, basically, all that stuff. They're the head of that. They're probably the liaison between the mayor.

[Chuck Bryant]

And those services, but not the guardian angels, because they do what they want to do.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, man, they're staying on their own, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

The coroner, A.J. pierce of the case, I think he was the first coroner on the first case, said, you know what we need to do? We need to get together, we need to have a little summit and start sharing information. I'm going to call it the Torso clinic, which was interesting.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know if he did or the press did.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, either way, because the press was very much involved in this whole run, obviously. But at this conference is where he first put forward a profile which was, this is someone who would not stand out in Kingsbury one run. Someone who knew the area could blend in somebody. We think it's a man who is a powerful man because they need to be able to. It takes a lot of work to dismember a body and to haul these bodies around and drop them off in different places. And we think he also might have some anatomical knowledge. Not saying that he's necessarily a doctor or a surgeon, kind of like the Jack the Ripper thing, but this person clearly knows their way around a knife and a scalpel.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, because, I mean, if you really closely examine a body and look at the places where the body was separated with the knife, you can find hesitancy marks, you can find the hacking. There's all sorts of clues and telltale signs. And apparently this guy had a lot of confidence and had a lot of skill or knowledge about anatomy. So, like you said, maybe not a doctor, but at the very least, a very skilled butcher who had studied human anatomy before. But eventually they finally were like, this is probably some sort of doctor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think they eventually learned that most of the victims died within a few days of being discovered, and most were moved except for victim five, where they found a bloodbath. You know, this didn't happen at the other crime scenes. There was virtually no blood to be found. In fact, I think one was completely drained of blood.

[Josh Clark]

Many were.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? So that, I mean, that takes. I don't know if that happened naturally just because of the nature of dismemberment or if it was a purposeful thing, but only one body was found. Kind of clearly murdered there.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So, yeah, I think the. The fact that the blood wasn't on the scene and it wasn't in the body any longer means that it had to go somewhere. So that the fact that they were dismembered and the. And packaged. I mean, like, a lot of them were found. You know, the one identified, Tattooed man, his head was wrapped in trousers, but other people's were wrapped in newspaper or brown paper like they were meat. One was put in a makeshift box. There was a lot of time dedicated to the dismemberment of these bodies, and that leaves a lot of evidence. And you need a place where you're not going to be interrupted, and that's not easy to come by. So that became a really big point, is we're pretty sure that this person is snatching victims from. From the Kingsbury Run area. But where are they committing these acts? And they tried to find that place as much as they tried to find the killer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, that would be a big clue if they had some murder room Dexter style.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. With a dead giveaway every time.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's coming back, by the way. I don't know if you ever watched Dexter.

[Josh Clark]

What do you mean it's coming back?

[Chuck Bryant]

They're bringing Dexter back, man.

[Josh Clark]

With the original. Like Mike and C. Hall. No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, they are indeed. And I have mixed feelings because we love that show for a long time, but it is. It is one of the shark jumpier shows of all time.

[Josh Clark]

It's crazy. It's like the shark itself jumped a shark.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so.

[Josh Clark]

It's insane. It's amazing.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, I love Michael C. Hall, though. We're just now finishing Six Feet under again, so I'm always happy to see him again, but I'll give it a go.

[Josh Clark]

Did you see Cold in July?

[Chuck Bryant]

No. What is that?

[Josh Clark]

It's a little bit like A straw dogs type story, but he's like having to battle Don Johnson. It's just really like. If you want. I know it's weird casting, but if you want to just experience, like, a constant mid to low level dread for two hours, just go ahead and watch that. It's well done in that respect.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or watch the lighthouse. It's probably better.

[Josh Clark]

God, it's so good. Let's just stop talking about this and talk about the lighthouse for the rest of the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so Peter Murillo, who, like we said, was a lead detective, he's sort of obsessed with this thing. He starts not only focusing on this land down by the river. But I didn't mean that. But that's what it was. But he started focusing on the railroad roads and these hobos.

[Josh Clark]

What?

[Chuck Bryant]

The railroads.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know where trains run on?

[Josh Clark]

Sure, yeah. I just never heard it pronounced the way you did.

[Chuck Bryant]

The first railroad.

[Josh Clark]

The railroads. It was hilarious. I gotta lighten this up somehow. We're talking about dismembered tours.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know, exactly. So he started looking in these boxcars, and I don't. I mean, is hobo an offensive word? Can you still say that?

[Josh Clark]

Don't. I don't think so. I think it's a point of pride, a term of pride for people who.

[Chuck Bryant]

Still ride the rails.

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. So he's still out there doing his thing at this press conference. Eliot Ness ends up holding a meeting with the head of Scientific Investigation Bureau. His name was David Cowles, and an editor of the Cleveland press. So this is a big deal. They're actually getting the press involved at this point.

[Josh Clark]

Right, but secretly, this wasn't a press conference. This is like a secret meeting.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no. Not a press conference at all. This was very much in secret. But he's involving the press, and they said, here's what we're gonna do. Ness says, let's you go and pick out eight tough guys that can go undercover that know a lot of bad guys in Cleveland and have all those connections. We'll give them the police support they need, and we'll fund them. How did they fund them? With the press's money. What does that even mean?

[Josh Clark]

I don't. I think that, like, maybe the owners of the newspapers chipped in. Like the wealthy owners chipped in quietly to pay for stu. The books. That's my impression of what this is.

[Chuck Bryant]

And whoever chipped in the most got to break the story. I wonder.

[Josh Clark]

Well, no, I think at the same time, it was a technique for bringing the press into the Fold so that there weren't outsiders drumming up trouble for the cops anymore. Because the Cleveland press really made the. They didn't make the police look bad. They pointed out just how badly the police were handling this or ineffectively. Which is not to say that the police were not trying really, really hard. Supposedly I saw a figure of 10,000 suspects were interviewed over four years during the course of this investigation. They just couldn't find the guy. They could not find this killer. And the press kind of almost gleefully kept pointing that out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So this is, in a way, attempt to assuage them and bring them into the inner circle a bit.

[Josh Clark]

Right? That was my impression, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so the police are. They've got these undercover guys working their scene. They're checking cars randomly at all hours. They're canvassing laundromats and places where you wash your clothes. So if there are people trying to get bloodstains out of something, they're kind of doing everything they can at this point. And this is where the Coen brothers sort of moment comes in, which is in Sandusky, a dog. And Sandusky's about now. It's about an hour or 10 minutes away by car. I don't know what it would have been back then, but probably less than two hours. I would say. Even in an old timey car, a dog shows up in Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. I want to say that literally happened in a Coen brothers movie. It might have just been a bone of a body, but I can't think of which one it might be. Someone will write in and tell us.

[Josh Clark]

But it sounds like a Barton Fink kind of thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is, but it's not. Or I might be thinking of the kids who ripped the toupee off the guy in Miller's Crossing in the alleyway.

[Josh Clark]

I don't remember that part, although I remember one of the neighbors lost his toupee in the burbs and they thought it was evidence of his murder.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's definitely a movie, it might not have been Coen brothers, where a dog shows up with a body part in its mouth. Probably more than one movie, but this dog shows up in its mouth. And Morello goes to Sandusky and it turns out that the leg was actually surgically removed during a real surgery, Not a serial killer surgery. And just didn't get disposed of. Right. Ended up in the lake, ended up in the dog's mouth.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But the police were so hyped up in Cleveland at the time that they traveled to Sandusky to chase down this lead, which, like all the other ones, went absolutely nowhere. And so there was. There was again, like just a tremendous amount of public pressure, including something you mentioned earlier, too. A lot of allegations and accusations that the police weren't doing enough because these people were not wealthy, were not well thought of, they were very poor. The poorest of the poor during the Great Depression were the ones who were suffering, the serial killer. And so there was a tremendous amount of pressure. And I. I think my impression is that that pressure is one of the. I guess the thing that drove Elliot Ness to do something really terrible because the killer was picking from the shantytowns of Kingsbury Run. Eliot Ness got it in his head that if you did away with Kingsbury Run, you'd do away with the killings. And so he raided the homeless camps at Kingsbury Run and rousted everybody and then ordered the place burned to the ground.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and I'm sure he thought this was a great idea at the time, but he really didn't think it through because the people of Cleveland did not take kindly to that. They hated him for what he did. And this was during the Depression, and everyone was struggling, basically, or not everyone, but most people were struggling at this point. Unemployment rate of 20% in Cleveland. And so the idea of this big shot Chicago G man coming in and basically running these homeless people out of their only option and burning it to the ground was not a good look at all. However, there were no more murders after that.

[Josh Clark]

I know. Strangely, it seemed to have worked. And it depends. We'll talk more about a lot of different views of whether the murder stopped or not. But as far as canonical victims go, he burned the place to the ground two days after victims 11 and 2012 were found. And after that, there were no more victims. So it didn't solve the murders by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed to have put an end to them, weirdly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I think before we take a break, we should mention there was one and get into who we think is probably the real suspect. There was one suspect in Cuyahoga county that the sheriff brought in. He was a bricklayer named Frank Dolezal who did confess. He was brought in for the murder of Flo Polillo originally because he had lived with her for a little while. But supposedly he knew Rose Wallace and Edward Andrassy as well. But then they looked into it, and by all accounts, that confession was not just induced, but in the days where you would literally beat a victim into.

[Josh Clark]

Confessing yeah, and then murder him in his cell after he recanted his confession.

[Chuck Bryant]

So was he murdered?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well, he hung himself, but he hung himself from a hook that was shorter than he was. Which, I mean, I guess if you really, really want to die, you might. You could do that. You could overcome the.

[Chuck Bryant]

The urge to stand up.

[Josh Clark]

Disinclination towards self harm, I guess you'd put it. Yeah, but his friends at the time seemed to be like, no, he was murdered. So it's. At the very least, his confession was beaten out of him. And no serious scholar of the crime believes that Frank Dozeal was the killer. He didn't have any. There was no evidence whatsoever of any kind of surgical knowledge. There was like, a lot of boxes he just didn't check. It was basically, he knew Flo and he may have known Edward Andrassi and he may have known Rose Wallace. And the sheriff basically ran him in very publicly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. All right, so let's take that break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the investigation and who people now believe committed these horrible murders. Right after this.

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[Josh Clark]

What a game he's had.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Yeah, a lot of us don't really think twice about having our tech, our phones, our laptops, our wifi. But not everyone has access to those things, which is why what AT and T is doing is just amazing.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, everybody want to talk to you.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so Eliot Ness has run everyone out of the Kingsbury run camps. Did not go over well. He then says, here's what we'll do. Let's skirt the warrant rules so we don't have to require warrants. And let's get together, since I'm the safety director and I control the fire department, too, let's go around and start searching for, quote, fire code violations, end quote. Basically, so they don't have to get any kind of warrants and they can just basically go into people's houses and just at will and search and do whatever they want to under the guise of searching for fire code violations. He was desperate.

[Josh Clark]

He was very desperate. And again, they were looking not just for the killer. But really, more than anything, they were looking for that grizzly workshop, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer had put it. A place where he was, you know, draining the victims of their blood and dismembering their bodies. They didn't turn anything up, but it really kind of goes to show, like, just what lengths Eliot Ness, who was considered, like, this squeaky clean lawman, was willing to go to. This is extraordinarily unconstitutional and underhanded. And he went to that degree and well beyond. It turned out actually, too very much.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I think we're at the point now where we can talk about this mystery person, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. This is why I said he went way beyond unlawful search of homes. He actually engaged in what amounts to kidnapping of a private citizen who he thought was the killer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he kept it very secret. He even used a pseudonym for this person. He called this person, this gentleman, Gaylord Sundheim. Pretty good name. Good hotel check in name.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And privately, word gets around a little bit what's going on. But privately, he would describe this person as an alcoholic, maybe bisexual, a doctor who came from a wealthy family and who had a relative in Congress who was protecting this person.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

And took this man under the dark of night to a hotel room in Cleveland, held there without charging him for two weeks, where they interrogated this person.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And apparently the guy who. This Gaylord Sondheim was in the middle of a bender when he was picked up, and he was so profoundly drunk that it took him three days to become sober again.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't buy that.

[Josh Clark]

I know, but when he did. I know, but you gotta add those, too. Sure. Thank you for keeping it keeping an even keel, though.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, I've had nights that were a little rough, and you're always okay the next day.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know what you're talking about. It's so weird. Like, alcohol affects us so differently, man. I can have, like, a drink and a half these days, and I'm, like, hating life the next day.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, I'm not talking about a hangover, but. But you're not still drunk the next day.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or in two days or three days.

[Josh Clark]

I think that's what they were saying is that this guy was. He had, like, a hangover stupor, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

I could buy that then.

[Josh Clark]

That was my impression.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

Not that he was still just flying.

[Chuck Bryant]

High, but that he was nitpicky anyway.

[Josh Clark]

Hating it. All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I should have just shut up about the whole thing.

[Josh Clark]

But regardless, they kept him. Whether he was Sober as a judge or drunk as a skunk. When they picked him up, they held him in this hotel room without charge and outside of the legal system for two weeks and interrogated him for up to eight hours a day.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but I think he did it, so who cares?

[Josh Clark]

That's exactly how Eliot Ness was approaching this. And again, everybody thought he was this squeaky clean lawman and he's engaged in kidnapping. But the thing is, he brought in the guy who was one of the early inventors of the polygraph. He invented the Keeler Polygraph, and it was called that because his name was Leonard Keeler. And he. I think he brought him from Chicago. And Leonard Keillor administered a couple of different polygraph tests to this Gaylord Sondheim and said, if this isn't your man, I might as well throw my machine out the window if I say anything else, because that guy. That's the guy. It's definitely the guy. You got to take that with a grain of salt, because especially today, polygraphs are just total junk science. But it certainly confirm Ness's suspicions that much more at the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think that polygraph back then was there wasn't even a machine. Keeler would just sit there and look for a bead of sweat to break out on the forehead, then punch the guy if it did.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

So the case was never solved. Ness's reputation obviously took a big hit. He eventually got out of Cleveland after a drunk driving, hit and run accident that he was involved with and tried to cover up. So he left in great shame. But back to this Gaylord son time later on, many years later, there were crime investigators and writers who put two and two together and basically identified and in fact, in one case, crime writer Marilyn Bardsley came out and said, yeah, this is who this person was. It was a former World War I army medic who was discharged for mental instability following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off. And he was an alcoholic, another big warning light. And his name was Francis Edward Sweeney, who also happens to have a relative in Congress.

[Josh Clark]

Right. A guy named Representative Martin Sweeney, who was a huge critic of the Burton administration, of which Eliot Ness was a major part. And he was just the kind of guy who was a political opponent to the degree that I'm sure Eliot Ness thought if he tried to arrest Clarence or Francis Sweeney, he would be obstructed from up on high by this congressperson. Whether he would have or not, I don't know. I saw some references to the idea that Martin Sweeney was well aware that Eliot Ness was looking at his cousin for this and was already getting in the way. But I only saw that in one place, so I'm not sure if that's the case or not. Either way, his presence and his connection to Francis Sweeney was enough that Eliot Ness never charged Francis Sweeney, despite apparently going to his grave believing that Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney was the Cleveland torso murderer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Have you seen a picture of the guy? Dude, he looks like the definition of a torso murderer.

[Josh Clark]

If you like. Seriously, you have to be careful with that stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know.

[Josh Clark]

If you ever end up a juror, you can't be like, you look like a killer, but this guy looks like a torso murderer. You're exactly right.

[Chuck Bryant]

The quick sidebar. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it on this show. I know I've talked about it on a movie crush, but I want to recommend this great, great documentary. And forgive me if I'm repeating myself here, but it's called Crazy, not Insane. It's an HBO documentary about this doctor, Dr. Dorothy Otno Lewis, who basically spent her life trying to understand serial killers. And one of the. She was kind of one of the first people to really try and understand what's actually going on. And she put together, I think, like, three very common, common commonalities among serial killers, but one of them is head trauma. And that's why this really stands out to me about Francis Edward Sweeney was that he was discharged from the army because of head trauma leading to mental instability. It's a commonality in most serial killers is some sort of head trauma, especially when you're younger.

[Josh Clark]

Wow, that's interesting. I did not know that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the. I may have. I thought I talked about on this, but it was the. Who was the guy in LA that also just had a great docu series on the Night stalker, Richard Ramirez. He suffered multiple head traumas when he was younger as well. So I think it's. I can't remember the third one. It's head trauma, some sort of physical and even sexual abuse as a child. And then there was, like, one more thing. And those are like. That's just a recipe for ending up some sort of sociopath or serial killer.

[Josh Clark]

I think the third one is disappointing birthday presents.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, maybe.

[Josh Clark]

So be warned.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a great. You'd really love it. It's a really good documentary.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I'll check that out for sure. It sounds like it's totally up my alley. I'm actually a gog that I've not heard of it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Don't be agog.

[Josh Clark]

I'm a little agog.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, come back.

[Josh Clark]

So, like you said, Marilyn Bardsley confirmed from one of the investigators that Francis Sweeney was Gaylord Sondheim, but that does not mean that Francis Sweeney was the torso murderer.

[Chuck Bryant]

True.

[Josh Clark]

Although, again, like you were saying, if you look at a picture of Francis Sweeney, you're like, that's totally the torso murderer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, another stuff, you know, the head trauma, the medical training. He was a surgeon in residence at St. Alexis Hospital. His career deteriorated because of his drinking.

[Josh Clark]

Right around the time the first murderer victims started showing up, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He also had a deal, apparently, with a local mortuary where they would give him bodies to practice surgery on, which would explain maybe the kill room or the dismemberment room. He would have a place to go and dispose of these bodies without there being a big blood trail, you know?

[Josh Clark]

Right. I mean, this is a place where it wouldn't seem weird that somebody was decapitating a body or draining the body of all of its blood. Like, that's exactly the kind of place. And that didn't turn up until years later. And it was thanks to a guy named James Bedall, who's written some books on it on the torso murders. And he interviewed one of the. One of the early investigators and found out that he had privileges at that funeral home and started to put two and two together.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, there was a couple of other things. He did send taunting letters to Eliot Ness for years. One of them was signed FE Sweeney, paranoidal Nemesis. But was this after he had been kidnapped by Ness?

[Josh Clark]

Yes. So he knew Ness by this time. And he also didn't say, like, I did it. You didn't catch me anything like that. I get the impression it was more like, you didn't catch the guy. You're terrible at this. Everybody hates you. But still taunting stuff. But, yes, this would have been after he was kidnapped, because this was up into, like, the 40s.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's true. And then I think to me, one of the biggest red flags pointing in the direction of Sweeney is I mentioned a near victim earlier in the episode. This was a transient. His name was Emil Fronick, and he was living in Cleveland in 34. And one day he was lured into a doctor's office on the second floor along Broadway Avenue. And the doctor said, here, I'll give you some shoes and a meal if you come up here. Fronig goes up, eats a little bit of the meal, starts to feel lightheaded and bolts and makes it to a train car and Basically passes out for three days. And then later on, I think in 1938, was being interviewed after the cops hear about this, old Morello goes to pick him up. And they narrow down the area to 50th to 55th Streets along Broadway. Where Sweeney had a doctor's office.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he couldn't specifically say that was the place where it happened. And that author James Bedall, says that he thinks he came in the back way rather than the front way where they were showing him. But he did say he had an office right there, right around that area, and he was there at the time. I mean, that's some pretty serious circumstantial stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so.

[Josh Clark]

But the thing is, there's no smoking gun. There's no anything that says definitively, and we probably will never have anything definitively. It says it's Frances Sweeney. So we've kind of reached this point, this plateau where it's like you just basically choose a side. Either you know it's Francis Sweeney or it wasn't. And some people who say, no, I don't think it was Francis Sweeney make some pretty good cases. There were other similar murders in the area starting in the 20s and going into the 50s that really bore a lot of resemblance to the torso murders. And then other people say, okay, I feel the opposite of that. Where there's like, I don't think Rose Wallace was one of the victims. I think there were multiple killers doing similar Ish stuff, maybe copycats even, and that it wasn't all just one person. There is. And there's probably always going to be a lot of competing theories about who is responsible.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The one theory that it wasn't him, that I don't buy. Did you say where he was living in Sandusky?

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No.

[Josh Clark]

Huh.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so here's the deal. Francis Sweeney was apparently enrolled or checked into the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Sandusky, which I guess is an old. Like a veteran's home, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Yeah, I think. Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that's what it seems like. So he was checked in there. And one of the reasons that people say he didn't do it was because he was checked in. In this place in Sandusky, like a couple hours away. And I just don't buy that they later came out and said, you know, they could come and go as they pleased. He could easily have, if he didn't want to get caught, be committing these murders in Cleveland and then going back to Sandusky as well.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Yeah. Because he was there voluntarily. So he would not have been watched or monitored or they wouldn't have kept tabs on him. And when they figured this out, it was years later, so no one would have been able to recall where he was or wasn't on a certain day, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think it's Sweeney.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think it's interesting. And not because of his picture, but there are. So there were other murders in the area that, you know, it could have still been Sweeney, too. Some people connect the Black Dahlia murder to it because there was a taunting note that the cops got in 1938 that said the cops can rest easy because the killers moved to sunny California. But if you look at the Black Dahlia murder, there's really not a lot of resemblance between the two. The MOs are really rather different, so that's probably not the case.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed.

[Josh Clark]

Well, if you want to know more about the Cleveland torso murders, there's a whole rabbit hole on the Internet and in books, including one by James Bedall and another by Marilyn Bards, that you can follow. And if you do, good luck with that. Since I said good luck with that, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna call this we did not help out this gentleman.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Oh, no.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, guys. Love the podcast. I've been listening for the past several years. I've almost gotten through the whole library. Has some left from 2018, apparently. I work as a musical instrument repair technician at a local university and independently in Greensboro, North Carolina. So I usually listen while I work on repadding clarinets and cleaning tubas.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cool job. Anyway, I was listening to your show this evening on Korean Fan Death. Remember that? We talked about it. I don't think it was all about that, but it was.

[Josh Clark]

It was the short stuff about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was it?

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. I remember that being like a top 10 or something. Anyway, I immediately thought, finally a way that I can find some legit reason for getting rid of the fan in our room. My fiance, Abby, loves having a fan. And that noise when you go to sleep. It's something I can deal with, but honestly, I do not care for it. So when I finally got home, I told Abby, hey, we got a serious episode. Stuff you should know we should listen to. I started the episode without pre screening and trusted you guys would pull through for me. Needless to say, an interesting episode. But I did not get the confirmation bias I was looking for. Instead, we had a good laugh and a great evening. Looking forward to getting the book. I wish you guys the best and looking forward to many more. And that is from John Goodman.

[Josh Clark]

Holy cow, John Goodman. We love you in the Coen Brothers stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

His name's John Goodwin. I'm gonna plug his business, Goodman Custom Woodwinds. If you're in the Greensboro, North Carolina area and you need that clarinet repatted, go to John Goodman for sure.

[Josh Clark]

And even if you're not not, it's probably worth the drive, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, where else are you going to do it? Charlotte?

[Josh Clark]

I don't. Yeah, come on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Heck no.

[Josh Clark]

Well, thanks a lot, John Goodman. We appreciate that. Sorry we couldn't help you out, but at least you enjoyed the episode. And ultimately, isn't that what counts?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to get in touch with us like John Goodman did, you can send us an email to stuff podcastheartradio.com Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

[Chuck Bryant]

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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[Josh Clark]

What a game he's had.

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On your mobile device, you can access live local Sunday afternoon games and all the prime time action from Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football.

[Josh Clark]

Tonight was definitely their night.

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[AT&T Ad]

This is Dr. Joy Harnon Bradford from Therapy for Black Girls. Reading books gives you feelings. I mean, that's what they do. And with millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. Like there's an awestruck Whoa. Feeling you get when you read about a dragon flying across the sky. But that's different from the surprised whoa. You get when you read that the best friend did it. And that's totally different than the hubba hubba whoa. When the stable boy becomes a stable man and Amazon's got all the woes. Amazon Books that reading feeling awaits.

[Vizio Ad]

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