Eliot Ness (25 page)

That got Young worked up all over again.
He hadn’t been removed, he declared. He had walked out of the union meeting in question. Fine, Eliot said, you walked out. Then the safety director got up and walked out himself.

The next day, coincidence or not, news broke that the Nesses had been separated for the past three months and that Mrs. Ness had left Cleveland. “
We have sort of agreed to disagree,” Eliot stammered when asked about the state of his marriage. “We have, however, visited one another several times during the summer. We are parting as friends.”

Recognizing that they had caught the safety director off guard, reporters pushed for more. “We just agreed a mistake had been made and set about in a sensible way to correct it,” Eliot said. He would be no more forthcoming than that.

Eliot nervously waited to see what Burton would have to say about it. To his surprise, the mayor never publicly addressed the issue. He offered only praise for his safety director’s job performance and waved away all other questions.

***

That summer,
word began to leak out that Al Capone, “the personification of gangster power,” couldn’t handle prison life. He refused to leave his cell for meals and often unexpectedly burst out in song. He’d developed a mania for making and remaking his cot, spending hours at the task. A consulting psychiatrist at Alcatraz Island, where Capone was held, diagnosed him with paresis, or motor-nerve damage. That actually sounded much better than it was. Advanced, untreated syphilis was eating away at his brain.

The man who’d helped bring down Capone had sex on the brain as well. In the aftermath of his and Edna’s separation, Eliot began going out late at night, trawling for female company. The divorce deeply embarrassed him, but once he realized Mayor Burton wasn’t going to ask him to resign, he decided to put it behind him and restart his life. Eliot hadn’t had much fun since arriving in Cleveland more than three years before. Work had been satisfying but stressful, and his marriage had been quiet but tense. He needed an outlet, and now he had found it. The well-known local artist Viktor Schreckengost remembered being introduced to Eliot at a nightclub. “
I was looking for a big fellow,” he said. “And here’s this quiet guy who
never likes to brag but would just sit back and listen. Not the kind of fellow you expected to be a gangbuster at all. In fact, he was the last person you’d think would ever have anything to do with Al Capone.”

Eliot began showing up at downtown ballrooms and nightclubs most weeknights, walking over from the office at 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he’d arrive with a city hall secretary, and they’d quietly knock back drinks. Other times he would join a group of already well-lubricated friends, and he’d hit the dance floor. He was an excellent dancer.
One night he took Betty Seaver out of her husband’s arms for an energetic spin around the floor. The young sculptress had finagled an introduction through friends sometime before; now she laughed high and loud, flying in his arms. She liked to wear half a dozen or so silver bracelets on each wrist, and they clinked and shimmered, causing heads to turn. Hugh Seaver took her home as soon as the dance ended.

“
Women were attracted to him,” recalled Philip Porter, “and during his bachelor period, he never lacked for gals who were charmed by his boyishness.” Eliot knew how to make the most of that natural charm. Unlike most men, he remembered things—details—about the women in his professional and social circle. All the girls around city hall noticed it.
He would tell a secretary or telephone operator, a woman he saw day after day, “I’ll never forget the first time that I saw you. You were wearing a red dress.” He had a soft, confiding voice when he said such things, flattering in its sudden intimacy and endearing for its apparent schoolboy earnestness. Eliot took advantage of the swooning he caused, but strictly on a short-term basis. A few nights of dancing and drinking, maybe a trip back to his apartment in the city, and that was that. “
Few people really knew him,” Porter believed. “To me, he often seemed lonely.”

Women didn’t reach the same conclusion. He appeared to be the happiest, most popular man around. “
He was handsome and charming, very quiet and witty, just as nice as anyone could possibly be,” said Marjorie Mutersbaugh, a local socialite. His flirtatiousness became legendary. He seemed to need the response—the blush and giggle of feminine interest—to prove he was all right. The attention would pull him up from depression or anxiety, as if to a high diving platform, where he would stand on the edge of a knife-like drop into pleasure. But could he make the leap?
One woman confided to a friend that Eliot “didn’t have the essentials to keep [a relationship] going,” surely a polite way of admitting he gave her cab fare and showed her the door when the night had run its course. Another danced
with him a couple of times and became convinced he was falling for her.
He never called for a date, but she would spend years telling friends she once was engaged to Eliot Ness.

The truth was, Eliot needed to be in a relationship. He wanted to be married. He was a traditional man who couldn’t stand going home to an empty house. And he knew exactly who he wanted to fill that space. He just had to work up the courage to go get her.

An Unwelcome Surprise

W
hen Eliot Ness left her on a train platform on that warm summer afternoon in 1937, Evaline McAndrew figured she would never see him again. He was just a sweet tourist fling, a romantic day trip, nothing more. And so the encounter ruined her Canadian getaway. She didn’t even bother making her connecting train—or, more likely, she simply forgot all about it. She’d decided, in the heat of her first and only embrace with this perfect stranger, that she had met her “second True Love.” (The first True Love was not her artist husband, but a young Iowa medical student she’d rejected when she was a coed. She had feared a conventional marriage would turn her into her mother.)

Evaline believed in True Love. She believed in Romance. Or at least she thought she did. She hadn’t seen any of it while growing up.
Her father, Albert Michelow, a Swedish émigré, had once been a dashing freelance photographer, but that was before he married and started a family. Evaline grew up in sooty Pontiac, Michigan, the youngest of four—“an unwelcome surprise,” she was certain. From as far back as Evaline could remember, the house was tense, full of resentments and strangled fury. By the time she could walk, her father was an assembly-line worker at Ford Motor Company, his shoulders irretrievably slumped, his eyes watery and unfocused. He slept in his own bed, in a different room than his wife. Evaline’s mother, Myrtle, a former Southern belle, had been beaten down by this life, too. “Too many children. Too much cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing for six people,” Evaline recalled. Most of all, “too little money.” The result was predictable: “My father’s and mother’s romance was over and never revived.” Evaline decided at a young age she wouldn’t let that happen to her.

She was wrong about never seeing Eliot again. His face periodically showed up in national magazines. He always looked so grim in these photos, at least compared to the relaxed, open-faced man who had spent hundreds of miles smiling at her from across the club car’s armrest. (On one occasion, the face peering out from the page looked like it had aged twenty
years since their encounter a few months before.
Newsweek
magazine had accidentally identified Czechoslovakia’s president, Edward Beneš, as Eliot Ness.) His high profile only made Evaline certain that Eliot, this important and impressive man, had forgotten all about her.

Soon after her aborted train trip, she and her husband realized they needed a change and so left Chicago for the teeming anonymity of New York City. She had expected to be revitalized by the country’s biggest, brashest city, but, just as in Chicago, she instead felt empty. Her husband, Mac, immediately found work as a commercial artist, but the less experienced Evaline couldn’t get an assignment, not even to draw a pair of shoes for an advertisement. She tried to work on personal projects, but she began to realize that her work was derivative, uninspired. She returned to modeling for other artists. She hated every moment of it, the being on display, turning her hip when requested, smoothing out her dress just so. She and Mac started to drink—and fight—every night. She had married him to get out of the house, to try something new. She hadn’t thought it out. By now, just the sight of this kind, eager-to-please young man made her sick to her stomach. She began to have dreams of dying, her body breaking apart like an ice floe, her life force crushed into powdery white flakes and swept off by the wind. Evaline realized what was happening but felt powerless to arrest it. “Shades of my father’s dark Swedish despondency,” she worried. “Day by day, my low spirits slumped lower. I bickered with Mac. I refused to laugh. . . . I was tired of living. And I was twenty-five years old.”

Evaline left her husband and moved into a run-down little one-room walkup with the bathroom at the end of the hall. It was all she could afford. She sank deeper into blackness. She walked through her days in a kind of fugue state, the outside world helpless against her gloom. When she wasn’t working—turning her hip, smoothing out the fabric—she was drinking. Or sleeping. After draining a bottle, she could sleep through an entire day. She worshipped the slow, numbing slide into alcoholic unconsciousness, her arms and legs feeling rubbery and alien. She needed another shock, another jolt, something to get her back among the living.

Out of nowhere, she got it. One Sunday afternoon, the phone rang.

“Eliot!”
she exclaimed when she recognized the quiet, calm voice she was hearing—for the first time in more than a year. The lifeline she needed most. He was in New York, he said. “Would you have dinner with me?”

“Yes!” she enthusiastically answered.

“Would you meet me at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel?”

Again—“Yes!” In her shock and surprise, she seemed capable only of this single syllable.

Evaline barely had the patience to climb into a dress—the slinkiest, sexiest one she had—before rushing out the door. Even some three decades later she would recall their reunion with the vividness of a perfect dream:

When I saw him in the hotel lobby, he stood still and opened his arms wide. I walked into them and smothered my face against his chest. It was the most comforting feeling that I could remember.

Over dinner, Eliot told Evaline his marriage had come to an end. Evaline said that hers, too, was over; she just had to get a divorce. They smiled at each other across the table like giddy children. “Why don’t you move to Cleveland?” he said. “Where I can see you, touch you, talk to you in the process?”

“I will,” she responded without hesitation.

For Evaline, it was the most natural decision in the world, even though she barely knew this man and had never been to Cleveland. That their intimacy was unearned seemed only to make it more powerful. From the moment she heard his voice on the phone, the fledgling relationship consumed her. Within days she was alone again—Eliot couldn’t wait for her to wrap up her New York life; he had to get back to Ohio—but now she had hope again. And a definitive plan. She was going to be with her True Love, in some place called Cleveland. She lounged in her single bed at night and let her brain roll through what had happened, over and over. She couldn’t believe Eliot Ness had found her. That he’d
wanted
to find her. “Eliot had many talents,” she decided, “but his ‘detective’ skill was the one I liked best.”

***

Eliot believed his detective skill had served him well in the hunt for the torso killer. He’d had to let Francis Sweeney go, but he was convinced he had the right man. Eliot ordered his team to keep a close watch on the doctor, and so they did—for months.
Day after day an investigator fell in behind him as he came out of a restaurant or the latest flophouse he was staying in. Sweeney, crazy but clever, soon figured out what was going on. He would saunter along the street, walking for blocks, pretending to window-shop, until he identified his pursuer. Then he’d start the game. He’d walk into a store, and exit out the back. He’d put down his fork at a diner, step into the restroom—and squeeze out the window.

One rookie investigator attached to the safety department lost track of his quarry when Sweeney, feigning sleep on a streetcar, suddenly jerked to his feet, leapt through the closing doors, and sprinted to catch a crosstown trolley. The investigator wrenched the streetcar’s doors open and jumped out into the road, but he couldn’t make it to the other car before it clacked away. Embarrassed, he returned to city hall to admit he’d screwed up, but Sweeney had beaten him to the punch. The chief torso suspect had called police headquarters a few minutes before. “That kid you had following me wasn’t very good,” Sweeney told a befuddled sergeant. “If he wants to try again tomorrow, tell him I’ll be in the men’s department at Higbee’s Department Store at 2 p.m.” Eliot couldn’t help chuckling when he received the news. He told the rookie to be at Higbee’s the next afternoon and to tip his hat at Sweeney. He’d have another man there to follow the doctor.

Eliot may have been able to see the humor in the situation, but at the same time, his frustration with the case—and with Sweeney—ran deep. Late in the summer, that frustration took a turn for the worse. He figured the weeklong grilling at the hotel and the constant surveillance that followed would put a stop to Sweeney’s rampage, but on Tuesday, August 16, 1938, the same day Eliot reached a divorce settlement with Edna, three men scavenging for scrap at Lakeshore Drive and East Ninth Street came upon a human torso wrapped in butcher paper.
Police soon found more remains in the vacant lot, including the severed head, the thighs (strapped together by a rubber band), and the arms and legs. It was a young white woman, dead about four months. And that wasn’t all. Later in the day police found remains of another person in the garbage-filled lot, this one a man. Victims eleven and twelve. Detective Merylo, who knew nothing about the safety department’s investigation of Sweeney, was one of the first officers on the scene. “He’s changing his technique,” he told a reporter. “Why, I don’t know. But for the first time since the two bodies we found in September 1935, he has left two victims together.”

It would turn out that the killer was changing his method more than Merylo yet realized. The murderer—perhaps because investigators followed him day after day, making it difficult for him to do his bloody business—was using a kind of sleight of hand. Victim number eleven, the coroner would discover, had been embalmed and might not have been murdered.
The corpse may have been stolen from a mortuary.

Still, the discoveries hit Eliot hard. He’d had his chance to break Sweeney, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t impress him—or charm him or scare
him—like he had with so many other suspects over the years. The press had begun pounding the war drums again, calling for accountability from the police and city hall, disgorging an array of new theories about the killer. Congressman Sweeney issued a statement decrying the latest murder or murders and the police department’s inability to stop the killings. Eliot felt like a failure. Worse, he felt responsible. This was the first time the killer had left bodies downtown. The dumping ground was within easy view of the window in Eliot’s city hall office. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, as the papers were now calling the killer, was taunting the safety director, Eliot was sure of it. The detainment and interrogation of Dr. Sweeney, rather than scaring him straight, may have spurred him on. Eliot, always so careful and deliberate, made a snap decision.

***

Two days later, in the dead of night, twenty-five policemen stood along the top of a ridge near Commercial and Canal Roads. They hefted axes, truncheons, and hammers. The safety director, about a hundred feet ahead of them, waved a flashlight. The men began to move out. As they closed in on the string of hobo camps that stretched along Kingsbury Run’s high ground, big lights attached to fire trucks clapped on. The lights caught many of the officers holding their breath. The stench of sweat, food scraps, and excrement washed over them as they approached their quarry. The detectives and patrolmen knocked over tents and used crowbars to split open makeshift homes built from cardboard and tin.

Officers pulled disheveled, bleary-eyed men out of the huts, many of them drunk or in a permanent haze. Yelling at them to keep quiet and not to resist, the policemen herded everyone into a big huddle and began searching their pathetic homes. Eliot strode into this human wreckage in a crisp suit, his hair slicked perfectly into place. He looked through many of the hovels and questioned some of the shantytown residents, taking notes in a little black book. One man, in a state of shock, began to cry as Eliot asked him questions. The safety director patted him on the shoulder and led him to the lieutenant charged with gathering up the homeless men.

The officers moved farther down the embankment to another collection of makeshift homes. It was now past one in the morning. Dozens of men in this second shantytown had rushed out of their tents and cardboard houses when they heard scuffling and dogs barking at the other hobo camp, but they didn’t get far. Squads of officers covered all available exits. As the raiders began to search this second encampment, a large, bellowing man
emerged from a hut swinging a shovel. Eliot, leading the officers, dropped to the ground to avoid the attack. The shovel missed the top of his head by inches. Officers jumped on the man, pummeling him with truncheons until he toppled and his body went limp. Blood poured out of his ear when they lifted him onto a cot. Using axes, clubs, and shovels, policemen pounded the encampment into splinters.

Police placed about sixty shantytown residents in paddy wagons for the trip to Central Police Station. As the wagons trundled away from the area, the Animal Protective League came through and rounded up the homeless men’s pets. Fire officials moved in last, soaking everything with oil. The safety director stared at what remained of the shantytowns for a long time before turning to his fire chief. “Burn it,” he said. “Burn it to the ground.”

Huge orange flames soon snapped into the sky, visible from blocks away. Clevelanders awakened by the flash of light leaned out their windows and wondered if there’d been a terrible third-shift accident at one of the city’s great factories. Eliot had convinced himself this was the right thing to do.
The killer needed Kingsbury Run’s homeless camps—Eliot believed they were his best hunting ground—and so they had to be destroyed. The safety director ordered that all of the shantytown residents be fingerprinted so they could be identified if they ended up becoming murder victims. The men who could prove they had jobs were then released. The rest were held, without charges.

Eliot thought he was being responsible and sympathetic by destroying the homeless camps and holding dozens of men in hopes of finding family members who would take them in, but not everyone saw it that way. An editorial in the
Press
lambasted Eliot “for the jailing of jobless and penniless men and the wrecking of their miserable hovels without permitting them to collect their personal belongings.”
The paper, slapping him for his “misguided zeal,” added: “That such Shantytowns exist is a sorrowful reflection upon the state of society. The throwing into jail of men broken by experience and the burning of their wretched places of habitation will not solve the economic problem. Nor is it likely to lead to the solution of the most macabre mystery in Cleveland’s history.” Piling on, the
News
and the
Plain Dealer
called for Eliot to release the shantytown men from police custody immediately.