he even introduced himself to his tail, before giving him the slip. But while Sweeney was out, the police searched his lodgings and his office. They even opened his mail, but unearthed no evidence linking the doctor to the murders.
Despite all the attention being paid to Dr Sweeney, the activities of the Mad Butcher did not stop. On 16 August 1938, three scrap-metal collectors were foraging in a rubbish dump at East Ninth Street and Lakeside—a location overlooked by Eliot Ness’s office when they found the torso of a woman wrapped in a man’s double- breasted blue blazer and an old quilt. Nearby the legs and arms were discovered in a makeshift cardboard box, wrapped in brown paper and secured with rubber bands. The head had been wrapped up in the same way and, uncharacteristically, the hands were also present.
As the police continued searching the area, an onlooker spotted some bones nearby. Detective Sergeant James Hogan picked up a large tin can nearby to put the bones in, but when he looked inside he saw a skull grimacing back. More skeletal remains were found, some wrapped in brown paper.
Gerber estimated that the woman had been a Caucasian in her thirties, approximately 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighing around 120–125 pounds. She had been dismembered, like the others, with a large, sharp knife. The body was so badly decomposed it was impossible to determine the cause of death. However, some parts of her body were remarkably well preserved and Gerber said they looked as if they had been refrigerated. He estimated that she had died sometime between the middle of February and the middle of April, possibly before the first week of April when the tenth victim had been killed. However, he thought that her remains had only been on the dump for a few weeks. Her left thumb was one of those parts still left intact and they were able to lift a fingerprint. But it did not match any on file.
The skeletal remains found nearby belonged to a white man who was also in his thirties. He was around 5 feet 7 inches and weighed around 135 to 150 pounds. His dark-brown hair was long and coarse. His corpse had also been dismembered with a long, sharp knife. But, again, the cause of death could not be determined.
There were some doubt that these two were the victims of the the Mad Butcher as they did not conform to his developing MO. He had not left the hands and heads with the bodies of his victims since 1936. Usually he dumped bodies in the Cuyahoga River or in Kingsbury Run, or somewhere else where they would be found easily. These two had been discovered by accident—though leaving them in plain sight of Eliot Ness’s office smacked of the audacity he had exhibited before.
Although unofficially listed as Victims Ten and Eleven, as no cause of death had been determined, these two might not even have been victims of homicide. The man and woman might have died of natural causes then had their bodies mutilated either as a prank or by a necrophiliac. Such things were not uncommon. Receiving an anonymous tip-off, the police investigated a man who ran an embalming college. Though no charges were ever brought against him, the man quickly moved out of town.
Whether the two new bodies were the work of the Mad Butcher or not, the people of Cleveland believed they were and radical action was required. Ness conferred with Mayor Burton and two days later, at 12.40 a.m. on 18 August, Ness and 35 police officers and detectives raided the hobo shantytowns bordering Kingsbury Run. Eleven squad cars, two police vans and three fire trucks descended on the largest cluster of makeshift shacks where the Cuyahoga River twists behind Cleveland’s main Public Square. Ness’s raiders worked their way south up the Run, arrested 63 men, fingerprinted them and sent them to the workhouse. At dawn, police and firemen searched the deserted shanties for clues. Then, on orders from Director of Public Safety Eliot Ness, the shacks were set on fire and burned to the ground. This backfired. It brought adverse reaction in the press as it did nothing to help catch the Mad Butcher. Now Ness had to solve the murders.
There was only one course open to him. He pulled in Dr Sweeney. But instead of taking him to police headquarters Sweeney was held discreetly in a suite at the Cleveland Hotel in Public Square. However, it was made clear to the doctor that if he did not co-operate he would be marched downtown surrounded by a howling mob of the reporters.
Sweeney was left to dry out for three days. Then, on 23 August 1938, the interrogation began. It was conducted by Ness, Cowles and Dr Royal Grossman, a court psychiatrist. In an adjoining room Dr Leonard Keeler, co-inventor of the polygraph, set up his equipment.
The first thing his interrogators noticed was what a large and powerful man Sweeney was. Cowles and Grossman cross-questioned him for two hours, while Ness listened intensely. They got nowhere, so Ness took him through to the next room where Dr Keeler was waiting. Sweeney was rigged up to the polygraph sensors, then asked a series of innocuous questions. Was his name Francis Edward Sweeney? Had he been born in Ohio? Did he have two sons? The machine registered that Sweeney was telling the truth.
Then Keeler turned to a list of questions prepared by Cowles. Had he ever met Edward Andrassy? Did he kill Edward Andrassy? Had he ever met Florence Polillo? Did he kill Florence Polillo? Had he ever met Rose Wallace? Did he kill Rose Wallace? The needles of the polygraph kicked as Sweeney made his denials.
Afterwards Dr Keeler told Eliot Ness: “He’s your guy.”
Dr Grossman agreed that Sweeney was a psychopath with a violent schizoid personality aggravated by chronic alcoholism. Ness was not so sure. He found it hard to reconcile the intelligent, articulate, educated man he saw with the homicidal maniac he knew the Mad Butcher to be. Ness then went through to the other room to interrogate Sweeney on his own.
“Well?” asked Sweeney asked. “Are you satisfied now?”
“Yes,” said Ness. “I think you’re the killer.”
“You think?” said Sweeney then, with his face inches from Ness’s, he hissed: “Then prove it!”
Ness was suddenly acutely aware of the size and strength of Sweeney. He called for Cowles and Grossman. There was no reply.
“Looks like they went to lunch,” said Sweeney.
Ness quickly phoned down to the coffee shop and asked Cowles to return, immediately. Later, Ness said that he had never been so scared in his life.
That afternoon, Dr Keeler retested Sweeney repeatedly, each time with the same result. Keeler, Ness, Grossman and Cowles were all convinced of Sweeney’s guilt. But there was nothing they could do about it. Polygraph tests were inadmissible and the only evidence they had against him—that he was absent from the Sandusky veterans’ hospital at the times of the murders—was circumstantial at best and was provided by a convicted criminal who would be viewed by the court as an unreliable witness at best. However, the story then took a strange twist.
Two days after the interrogation Dr Sweeney checked back into the Sandusky veterans’ hospital. A note attached to his records said that if he left the hospital grounds the police were to be informed. From 25 August 1938 until his death in 1965, Sweeney remained confined voluntarily to various veterans’ and state mental hospitals. However, it is not clear whether Sweeney was the Mad Butcher or found a twisted pleasure in taunting the police. He sent a series of incomprehensible and jeering postcards to Eliot Ness from the veterans’ hospital in Dayton, Ohio, where he was confined in 1955. Despite this, his brothers and sisters never believed that Sweeney was a man capable of violence. Indeed another man confessed to the crimes.
A few months after Dr Sweeney admitted himself to Sandusky veterans’ hospital, the newly elected Cuyahoga Country Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell moved in on the case. He was a political ally of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney—his son was married to the congressman’s daughter. O’Donnell hired a private detective named Pat Lyons to investigate the Kingsbury Run murders. Lyons’ investigation narrowed down the suspects to a 52-year-old alcoholic bricklayer named Frank Dolezal. Merylo had already investigated Dolezal and rejected him.
Nevertheless Sheriff O’Donnell had his men search a room Dolezal had previously rented. They found a knife and stains on the floor. Lyons’ brother was a chemist who concluded the stains were human blood.
On 5 July 1939, Dolezal was arrested and after a rough night in the cells, he confessed to the murder of Florence Polillo. Apparently they had lived together for a while. He and Flo had a fight. Dolezal claimed that she attacked him with a butcher’s knife. In self defence, he hit her and she fell against a bathtub. Assuming that he had killed her, he cut up her body and dumped it in the alley where she was found. Her head and other missing parts were thrown into Lake Erie.
Lyons also discovered that a tavern Dolezal and Polillo used was also frequented by Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace. Another young woman claimed that Dolezal had come at her with a knife and she jumped out of a second storey window to escape him, but it seems that she was an alcoholic and the interview was conducted with the aid of a bottle of whiskey.
