Eliot Ness (24 page)

I hope that you enjoy your well earned vacation and will return to your duties here ready to continue the drive with your usual vigor and with increased assurance of success.

With personal regards to Mrs. Ness and yourself,

Yours sincerely,

Harold H. Burton

Mayor

Frank Cullitan, talking to Eliot after the verdict, had offered a more succinct response to the victory. “
Campbell and McGee asked for it,” he said.

***

The convictions, coming on top of the police housecleaning and the gambling-racket assault, made Eliot a national figure once again, even more so than during the Untouchables’ heyday. This time not just newspapers but the glossy national magazines jumped on the Ness bandwagon.

Newsweek
wrote that Eliot had “lifted fear from the hearts of honest men.”
Cosmopolitan
, then a literary and opinion magazine, wrote: “Next time anybody tells you that individual opportunity is as dead as the dodo in this corporate age, and the chance for adventure along with it, please introduce him to Eliot Ness, Director of Public Safety for Cleveland—the remarkable young man who found a dramatic challenge in an ordinary job and who represents a brand-new school of crime smashers.”

Reader’s Digest
noted that Eliot earned $7,500 a year as Cleveland’s safety director and had been offered many times that by private companies to make the leap into the business world. “Someday I may take one of those jobs,” it quoted Eliot as saying. “Right now, however, I want to prove what an honest police force with intelligence and civic pride can do.”

The Doctor

C
leveland’s serial killer kept interrupting Eliot’s good work.

Back in February 1937, the torso of a young woman had swirled out of Lake Erie and thumped ashore near the end of 156th Street. This latest corpse—officially victim number seven—reignited public fascination with the murders, even though the county’s new coroner, Samuel Gerber, couldn’t say for sure it was the work of the same “maniac butcher” who had been scattering body parts around the area for more than two years. Inevitably, the investigation became a political issue. Martin L. Sweeney was a Democratic congressman from Cleveland and a determined Burton antagonist, for the Republican mayor looked to be headed for higher office. That meant Eliot also was on the ambitious congressman’s hit list. (Sweeney called him Burton’s “alter ego.”)
Even though the campaign season hadn’t begun yet, the congressman told Clevelanders that if they rid themselves of Burton, “we can send back to Washington the Prohibition agent who now is safety director.” That line of attack fell flat—no one minded that the city’s hard-charging safety director had once been a liquor cop—but Sweeney kept up his criticism. A couple of weeks after the discovery of victim number seven, the congressman, playing on Clevelanders’ fears, declared that Eliot was wasting precious time on police-corruption cases when he should be focused on catching the city’s serial killer. “There’s a killer out there,” he would declare time and again.

Eliot never highlighted the torso investigation when talking with reporters, but he spent large parts of every week on the case, monitoring Merylo and Zalewski’s progress and at the same running his own counterinvestigation that he kept from them. He decided to let the cocky Merylo be the public face of the case. The detective liked to talk and beat his chest.
Eliot figured that he and his Unknowns could pursue their own leads unnoticed behind Merylo’s gruff razzle-dazzle. Separate from Merylo and Zalewski’s work, the Unknowns broke down each murder fact by fact and reinvestigated it. Slowly, they tied up loose ends, though this
never seemed to lead anywhere useful.
One example: in September 1935, after the discovery of Andrassy and the still unidentified second man on Jackass Hill, detectives had tried to find a Philip Russo. His car had been seen numerous times at the top of the hill, with a man—presumably Russo—surveying the area with binoculars. Police considered it a promising lead, even more so when they couldn’t find him. Now, almost two years later, investigators tracked Russo down, only to quickly strike him from the list of suspects. It turned out that a woman who lived in an apartment facing Jackass Hill had carefully planned out her marital indiscretions. She would sometimes tell Russo, her inamorata at the time, to wait at the top of the hill with binoculars. When her husband left the apartment, she would flap a tablecloth out the window, the sign for her lover to hop in his car and zip over to the building.

When the weather turned nice that summer of 1937, the killer picked up his pace again. On June 6, the neatly severed head of an African American woman was found underneath the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Her torso had been stuffed into a burlap sack and left nearby. Gerber would be able to identify this latest victim—her name was Rose Wallace—based on distinctive dental work. Like Flo Polillo, she had been a part-time prostitute. A month after the discovery of Wallace’s remains, the torso of a white man—along with other pieces of him—turned up in the Cuyahoga River, victim number nine. That was three new bodies in less than six months.

Eliot and his team finally got a break in the case eight long months later. On a warm, breezy day in March 1938, with the Campbell-McGee trial heading toward a verdict, a dog bounded out of the woods near the town of Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. The dog’s owner, horrified, called the county sheriff’s office. The local coroner, E. J. Meckstroth, would determine that the appendage belonged to a young woman. “The leg shows as neat a job of amputation as I ever saw,” he remarked. This raised a red flag sixty miles away in Cleveland. David Cowles, the police department’s superintendent of criminal identification, drove out to Sandusky to inspect the mystery leg.

Cowles’s work in the lab had earned Eliot’s respect over the past two years. The feeling wasn’t mutual. Like Merylo, the short, round Cowles resisted Eliot’s natural friendliness. After all, Eliot was everything—good-looking, charming, intrepid—that Cowles wanted to be but never could manage. But if Eliot recognized the antipathy, he ignored it. Cowles, a self-taught chemist, was a strong advocate for ballistics and lie-detector
technology, two much-derided scientific innovations that also fascinated Eliot. Their agreement on the value of scientific policing led Eliot to begin giving Cowles fieldwork. Most notably, he had put him in charge of running informants for the safety department’s under-the-radar torso investigation.

Cowles believed this severed limb found far from the city represented a major breakthrough. He had cultivated a source at the Osborn State Prison Honor Farm who was providing him with tantalizing information about a disgraced forty-four-year-old doctor, Francis Sweeney, who periodically checked himself into the veterans’ hospital at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. The six-hundred-bed hospital stood near the prison work farm in Sandusky. Now, on Cowles’s recommendation, Eliot and his Unknowns turned their attention to Sweeney.

Dr. Sweeney was a big man, certainly strong enough to subdue and hack up prostitutes and even young, fit men. The investigators dug into his background. They learned he had been gassed during the World War and never really recovered. He spiraled into mental illness in the years that followed—“going down and down and down with the booze,” in Cowles’s description. Sweeney’s wife, a nurse, sued for divorce and full custody of their two children in 1934, after twice trying to have him committed to an institution. Sweeney’s medical career had collapsed by then, and with his wife gone, he fell off the map, slipping into the netherworld where no one keeps records or asks for your name. The only official sign of him came from his stays at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, where, as a voluntary patient, he could come and go as he pleased. The investigators obtained an old psychiatric evaluation that stated Sweeney had a “frustrated desire to operate.” Excitement swept the group. This looked like their man. They also discovered something else, something that could complicate their pursuit of the suspect. Francis Sweeney was a cousin of Martin Sweeney, the congressman who frequently criticized Eliot’s handling of the torso investigation.

***

Eliot and his investigators watched Francis Sweeney for a month. They wanted to have some solid evidence before hauling him in for questioning, but they couldn’t come up with anything. When he was in their sights, he did nothing much of interest; and when he wasn’t, he seemed to drop into a void. Some of the safety department’s investigators believed the doctor to be a harmless nut, not up to the task of murdering several men and women and expertly covering his tracks. But in April, pieces from a tenth victim bubbled up in the Cuyahoga River, nine months after the last body had
been found. Gerber determined that the death had been recent, within days. That prompted Eliot to act. His team grabbed Sweeney off a street corner and took him downtown to the Cleveland Hotel, where they had a suite waiting. They shut the curtains, dropped him into a chair, and began the interrogation.

“
We played on him for a long time,” Cowles said in an interview years later. He remembered the suspect being drunk when they brought him in. Cowles and a detective, Louis Oldag, grilled him eight hours a day, day after day. It couldn’t have been pretty: the two policemen didn’t mind securing a confession through sheer brutality. But Sweeney didn’t break. The doctor kept feeding them gibberish and taunts and riddles. He seemed to be enjoying himself. At some point during the weeklong interrogation, Eliot took his turn with the suspect. The safety director believed harsh tactics led to false confessions—a minority opinion in law enforcement at the time. He preferred to throw his subjects off balance, to wear them down with repetitive, rhythmic questioning until they got tangled up in their own lies and began to see the truth as the only way to make it to the finish line. It had worked time and again for him over the years.

Not this time. Sweeney didn’t confess to the murders. He apparently didn’t deny committing them, either. Eliot couldn’t nail him down on anything. The doctor patiently demanded his release. It was the only thing he said that wasn’t open to interpretation. His frustration growing, Eliot stopped the examination. He left the room and placed a call to Leonarde Keeler, who he’d met at the Northwestern crime lab back in 1931. Keeler was the foremost developer of the lie detector, now called the polygraph.

In Chicago, Keeler had met significant resistance to his machine. The police refused to give up the third degree in favor of the “electric detective.” As one cop put it, holding up a meaty fist: “Here’s the best lie detector.” But the polygraph, with its promise of honest, dispassionate justice, long had fascinated Eliot, and he wanted to bring it to Cleveland. Now he had a reason to do so. He knew Keeler had spent years perfecting his apparatus and his technique. Keeler had tested friends, college students, and mental patients, carefully noting the changes in their blood pressure and breathing and sweat production. He was absolutely convinced he could tell when someone was lying.

Keeler came to the safety department’s hotel suite straight from the airport. After a brief consultation with Eliot, he got right to work. Sweeney didn’t object to being tested. To him, it was just one more phase of this
interesting, drawn-out game they were playing. He showed no sign of concern as Keeler hooked him up to the machine; he exuded confidence and answered questions with authority. He seemed to think he and Keeler had a nice rapport. The results were unmistakable. Packing up his equipment after multiple tests, Keeler told Eliot that this big, bemused man definitely was the torso killer. “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,’” Cowles later said. He recalled that Eliot, just to be sure, brought in another expert as well, someone from Detroit, who “gave us the same opinion.”

Eliot and his team believed they had solved the case. But the polygraph remained a controversial, disputed technology, so they had no hard evidence they could take to court. They still couldn’t get Sweeney to confess. With the lack of actionable evidence, and the inconvenient fact that the suspect was related to a congressman who had criticized the safety director’s handling of the torso investigation, Eliot had no choice but to let the doctor go.

After releasing Sweeney back into the world, Eliot returned home to discover that Edna wanted to be let go, too. Back in March, after the Campbell-McGee trial and with the mayor’s best wishes, Eliot and his wife had headed out of town. But it wasn’t for a vacation, as Burton had assumed. The couple drove down to Florida to set up an apartment for Edna so she could establish residency and, when the time was right, return and file for divorce. Now, just a few weeks later, she told him the time was right. His week at the Cleveland Hotel had been the final insult. She didn’t care why he was there; she packed her bags and called ahead to the train station before telling him of her decision.

Once they worked out the divorce settlement, she would never speak to Eliot again.

***

Eliot worried about his future. He was a public man. His political opponents—like Congressman Sweeney—surely would feast on news of a divorce. In Catholic, working-class Cleveland, good men didn’t get divorced. Eliot was not a religious man, but he nevertheless believed in such religious dictates. He believed he had failed a moral test.
He even considered stepping down as safety director, before anyone found out about his and Edna’s separation. For weeks, he skirted the edges of depression; he felt alone and adrift. He was touchy, on edge, unsure what to do.

One evening, he settled into a seat at a city council meeting hoping to keep a low profile. Councilman Clarence L. Young noticed him right away. Young brought up a council resolution to hire an additional building inspector. Eliot, as he had done in private conferences with the council, told Young he would be happy to hire more building inspectors if the council provided money for their salaries.

“
The director says he’ll do this if we find the money for him,” Young declaimed in full oratorical mode. “Well, then, I’d like to find out right now what he has done with that extra $17,000 in his department for common labor this year. It’s going to pay all those secretaries in his department. I’d like to find out what all those secretaries are doing.”

Eliot leapt to his feet. He feared rumors were circulating about his wife leaving him.
He’d been seen at a nightclub recently with one of the city hall pool secretaries, a small, pretty girl who sometimes worked late into the evening with him. He simply could not allow this kind of insinuation to go unchallenged.

“Mr. Young has been sharpshooting at my department for a long time,” Eliot barked. “Principally because we indicted and convicted officials of a union he was thrown out of the other night.”

“That’s a lie!” Young responded, pounding the table. “That’s a lie, and don’t go saying those things around here. I was never thrown out of any union.”

Council watchers hadn’t expected this. Most of those in attendance didn’t realize the screaming match wasn’t actually about building inspectors. Nor was it about Eliot’s personal life, it turned out. Young was poking the safety director not about his marriage or any rumored infidelity but about his “secret” budget for special investigators. A longtime member of Campbell’s painters’ union, he resented Eliot and his Unknowns for making union racketeering front-page news with the trial of Campbell and McGee.

Chamberlin took his boss aside. “
Don’t let ’em get your goat,” his assistant said. Eliot, embarrassed, quickly calmed himself. But he refused to back down on the importance of the Unknowns. “I apologize for engaging in personalities,” he told the council. “But I can tell what those ‘secretaries’ are doing. They’re helping in the many things we’ve been doing to right wrongs in this town. We’ve saved the citizens a lot of money in our safety work. We’re engaging in a complete reorganization of the police department. All that requires extra help. The job would cost the city $100,000 if
you brought outsiders in to do it.” He added that he didn’t mean to say Young had been booted out of the painters’ union, only that he’d been removed from a recent meeting.