The Murder Room

failures in New York and Washington, D.C., to the remote mountain town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where he drank heavily with his third wife and continued to tell wild stories in the bars about Al Capone that few believed. An old friend, sportswriter Oscar Fraley, embellished those stories in his highly fictionalized account of Ness’s life, The Untouchables, which made Ness an American legend. But Ness didn’t live to see the book. In May 1957, he walked back to his small-town apartment from the liquor store with another whiskey bottle and died of a heart attack at the kitchen sink, at the age of fifty-four. It was said the Butcher had taken yet another victim.

The subject seemed “graphic” to the Times reporter. Philadelphia boasted “enough bizarre killings . . . to keep a full house at the morgue and make homicide detectives and medical examiners wish they could get away from it all,” he said, marveling that “when some of them do take a break, they like to sit back and listen to the one about the Cleveland torso murders.”

Adding to the sense of drama in the room, the case would be presented by two renowned investigators from sharply different traditions that were increasingly in conflict. Philadelphia homicide captain Frank Friel was an old- school, shoe-leather detective, rooted in the solid nineteenth-century procedure of building a case from fact- gathering at the crime scene. He would be followed by forensic psychologist Richard Walter, one of a small group of pioneers who read bloodstains and patterns at murder scenes like Rorschach tests. At their best, they seemed to be wizards capable of reading a killer’s thoughts. It was a face-off between natural opponents—two proud, strong-willed figures who were oddly well matched, both tall, lean, and charismatic men who used wit to mask a fierce demeanor.

As lunch dishes were cleared, Friel opened the floor to questions. He challenged the Vidocqeans: Who was the Butcher of Cleveland? Fleisher was delighted. It was just the kind of forensic puzzle he had imagined. Could a college of top investigators surpass Eliot Ness? Could they solve the mystery of “The American Jack the Ripper”?

The question-and-answer period was brisk. Friel and others maintained that Ness correctly focused the investigation on cutting trades such as surgeons and butchers. “The principal characteristic of the assailant was that he decapitated the victims while they were still alive,” Friel said.

Customs agent Frank Dufner saw it as the work of an angry medical student. “Did anyone flunk out of medical school?” he asked.

The fact that the bodies were drained, did anyone consider an undertaker? a police officer asked.

Yes, Friel said, medical students and undertakers had been questioned.

“Seven out of twelve of the heads were not found,” Dufner continued. “Were they kept as trophies?” Friel couldn’t say.

Fleisher had scribbled in a notebook: undertaker, butcher, abattoir. But by the end of the presentation, he was convinced the surgeon, Dr. Sweeney, was the killer. “If Leonarde Keeler says he was the guy, he was the guy. Keeler was one of the inventors of the polygraph, and a master at it.”

While busboys removed the lunch plates, “the fact of the matter is, Eliot Ness did some good things, was a hero to an extent,” Walter said, “but was out of his depth in this case because of his limited knowledge in the 1930s of serial killers.”

Walter leaned in and said, sotto voce, “Of course, the FBI still doesn’t understand much of this, so we shouldn’t be so hard on Ness.” Several VSMs chuckled along with him.

To start, Walter said, Ness was mistaken to narrow the investigation to large, strong men and professionals or tradesmen expert with a knife. “You don’t have to be a butcher to carve someone into little pieces or an undertaker to drain them of blood. The fact of the matter is anyone can do it, and do it competently. You just have to want to.” He smiled coldly, and went on. “In addition the killer doesn’t have to be big or powerful. He can be a small man. All he has to be is clever. He gets them drunk, then he can do anything to them.”

Second, Walter said, Dr. Sweeney, Ness’s main suspect, “was a lousy choice to be the Butcher, for all the reasons that supposedly implicate him. He’s violent, alcoholic, schizophrenic. That makes him an asshole, but it doesn’t make him a sadist.” It was clear from the corpses that the Butcher of Cleveland was a sadistic serial killer, and Sweeney didn’t fit that profile.

“There’s a big qualitative difference between a guy who is just unpredictably violent, like Sweeney, and a guy who had a system like the Butcher,” Walter went on. “A sadist has a long complicated growth pattern to fulfill his darkest desires. He’s organized, cunning, he plans, has the ability to change direction when things go awry.”

Sweeney is also eliminated by the fact that the killings didn’t stop, Walter said. “The police at the time couldn’t understand it, but more than twenty other killings and dismemberments in eastern Ohio and even western Pennsylvania clearly bear the mark of the Butcher,” Walter said. “I believe the killings stopped only when he died of natural causes, was killed, or committed suicide in 1950.”

Given Ness’s limited knowledge at the time, the Butcher was basically an unstoppable killing machine, he said. “The Butcher was smarter than Ness, and proved it.” The Butcher gained sexual pleasure by creating dependency, dread, and degradation in his victims. It was the same desire that governed the behavior of modern serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. The sadist’s pleasure is almost always sexual, and is insatiable.

Hoboes were an easy target. “The Butcher would lure them off into the woods with offers of booze, food, sex, whatever. That’s the ruse. They go into the woods and they don’t leave—that’s an exciting story for him. It’s not enough for the sadist to bash somebody in, he has to enjoy it, and part of that enjoyment is the ruse. Then he gets them into a situation they can’t get out of, reveals himself as a monster. He creates situations where he can systematically triumph.”

As dessert was served, Walter said, “Yes, he took the heads as trophies, like Bundy did.” In his secret lair, Bundy masturbated over his female victims’ decapitated heads. What the Butcher did with the heads will never be known. But the drained bodies are a profound clue to his perverted sexual pleasures.

When the waiters came around with fresh coffee, Walter urged the Vidocqeans to try to imagine the pleasure the killer experienced when he drained his victims of all their blood in water. “The water heightens the pleasure. Try squeezing a sponge under water at home. When you feel the water gently tickling the hairs on your arms, it’s sensual. That’s the kind of pleasure the Butcher experienced, an intense sexual pleasure.”

Fleisher was beaming. The meeting was a success. He bragged to the Times reporter, “Sherlock Holmes was a great detective. But he was all imagination. We’re the real thing.” The Vidocq Society, he said, was “like a college of detectives. You couldn’t get a more astute group of detectives.” But the question was, would the society be a college that discussed murders as an academic exercise, or would the detectives come down from their ivory tower and try to solve crimes? The Times reporter asked Fleisher, “When are you going to actually solve a murder?”

Fleisher said the Butcher of Cleveland was probably past solving. He was confident after just a handful of meetings that “we will solve ninety percent of these cases that come before us. Everyone in the room knows who did it. But it’s a lot more complicated bringing a cold killer to justice.”

“We haven’t solved one yet,” Fleisher added. “But we’re getting close.”

When he saw his words conveyed around the world to millions of readers in the pages of The New York Times, Fleisher only wished it were true.

“Clearly this is not another show at the local mystery dinner theater,” the Times concluded, “nor a meeting of Sherlock Holmes buffs.”

“He did a grand job of saying who we aren’t,” Walter quipped. “But who the hell are we?”

• CHAPTER 26 •

IMPLORING GOD

As the lights dimmed in the Texas ballroom, the faces of the dead appeared, larger than life yet so young and small, to soft music accompanied by a staccato of gasps and sobs from the audience. Each child’s face brought another cry from a banquet table, another candle sizzling in the dark, until the great hall glimmered like a concert—a hushed and otherworldly concert where parents implored fate or God for an encore.