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Plus, you are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them.
Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. Boston had its Strangler, California had the Zodiac Killer, and in the depths of the Great Depression, Cleveland had the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. On September fifth, nineteen thirty four, a young beechcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland's Lake Ere the lower half of a female torso neatly severed at the waist. The victim, dubbed the Lady of the Lake, was only the first of a butcher's dozen. Over the next four years, twelve
more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies were dismembered with surgical precision and drained of blood. Some were beheaded while still alive. Terror gripped the city. Amid the growing uproar, Cleveland's besieged mayor turned to his newly appointed Director of Public Safety, Eliot Ness. Nass had come to Cleveland fresh from his headline grabbing exploits in Chicago, where he and his band of untouchables led the frontline
assault on al Capone's bootlegging empire. Now he would confront the case that would redefine his storied career. Award winning author Daniel Stashauer shines a fresh light on one of the most notorious puddles in the annals of crime and uncovers the gripping story of Ness's hunt sadistic killer who was as brilliant as he was cool and composed, a mastermind who was able to hide in plain sight. American Demon reconstructs this ultimate battle of wits between a hero
and a madman. The book that we're featuring this evening is American Demon, Elliot Ness and the Hunt for America's Jack the Ripper, with my special guest, journalist and author Daniel Stashauer. Welcome to the program. And thank you so much for this interview, Daniel Stashauer.
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Dan, thank you so much, and congratulations on this incredible, incredible story and book.
Well, thank you.
Let's get right to September fifth, nineteen thirty four, and we had introduced the Lady in the Lake. This is the south shore of Lake Erie. September fifth, nineteen thirty four, A man named Frank Lagrassey sees something, an object, half buried in the sand. What is found on that day, September fifth, nineteen thirty four.
It's a grim, grizzly story that is unfortunately kind of typical of the discoveries that were made throughout this series of crimes. He was out gathering driftwood and he spots something sort of half buried in the sand, and it turns out to be a hunk of a female torso. And as you would imagine, he in many ways doesn't I can't quite process what he's seeing. But over the
next few days, a second section turns up. It's found to be a match with this first hunk of remains, and other body parts are found or glimpsed up and down the shoreline. There's even an account of a little girl who was wading in the waves of the lake and thought she saw a hand waving at her from
beneath the surface. At that early stage it was considered naturally enough to be an isolated incident, although the police and searchers did mount to pretty pretty exhaustive effort to find any further remains and to piece together in every sense what had happened to this woman. But it proved to be only the beginning.
What were some of the statements that appeared in the press regarding the expertness or amateurness of the dismemberment that was done on the body.
Well, that's the thing, I think, one of the things throughout this series of crimes that caught the attention of
the coroner. There were two coroners in place over the series of over the course of the series of crimes, but from the beginning, the coroner was struck by the fact that the dismemberments appeared to show a surgical precision, a practiced hand, and the questions were raised in this first instance of whether it was possible that either this woman had been chopped up in the blades in the propeller blades of a passing boat, or, in a phrase
that appeared in one of the newspapers, a prankishly inclined medical student had disposed of these bodies, or either as a prank or was just getting rid of them. The coroner did not believe that was the case, and the coroner, both at the time and in the crimes to come, was struck by the fact that whoever performed these dismemberments appeared to have a working knowledge of what he called
the anatomical landmarks as they were approached. In other words, knew how to guide a sharp knife so that it would perform these dismemberments with skill, instead of what a person without this kind of background would have done, which would have involved a great deal more crude cuts and
hacking and wrenching. That wasn't the case throughout. There were examples of a cruder work later on, but throughout the series of crimes a hallmark appeared to be this knowledge and surgical skill that led investigators to believe that they were looking for someone with some kind of medical training or background, either a surgeon or a doctor of some kind, or perhaps a butcher.
Now you say that the papers dubbed this victim the Lady of the Lake. And then a few days later, readers of the Plain Dealer newspaper were introduced to the leader of the federal team, elliot Ness. And elliot Ness, as you can tell us tell our audience what he was fresh off coming from in terms of exploits in Chicago, and who had brought him into Cleveland, and what was his supposed rule.
Well, sure, you know, people have their own ideas about who eliot Ness was and what he did. You know, when we think of elliot Ness, we tend to think of Chicago, think of a big truck smashing through the doors of one of al Capone's illicit breweries. And in many ways, Elliottess is exactly what you think he is. He was a hero, a man of great integrity and bravery, but he's more than the tough guy that we think
we know from the TV and the movies. He rose to fame during the Prohibition years as the man who got al Capone, and he's remembered today as the leader of the Untouchables. This was a legendary team of Prohibition agents, and some people will remember the old black and white television series that ran from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty three, and a lot of people, of course will have seen the movie with Kevin Costner and Robert de
Niro that came out in nineteen eighty seven. But as I say, they think of Ness as a Chicago guy, we think of deep dish Petz, the Wrigley Field de Bears. Elliot. Ness, the real guy was more than that. He was an astonishingly forward thinking reformer. Yes, he was astonishingly brave, and his exploits were spectacular, but he was also interested in crime prevention as much as combating crime. And he also on screen we see him solving his problems with violence,
and in real life he rarely carried a gun. In fact, he once told a friend he didn't need it, that the empty holster was enough. But he brought off some remarkable things and some very brave, rave exploits with that empty holster.
Now, so Elliott is brought into Cleveland to as you say, some reforms, and he is there to reform the police department.
Yes, you know, time of this first crime, he was there doing mop up work as part of as a liquor coup. What was you know, prohibition had been repealed, that there was still work to be done. But he You know, what is often misunderstood about Ness is that his career with the Untouchables was brief, and it was pretty much wrapped up by the time he was thirty
years old. He came to Cleveland and he landed a job as the director of public Safety, and this is a position that put him in charge of the entire police department and the fire department and a whole lot more. It's a big, big promotion, and in fact, a lot of people felt that the job was so big that he couldn't be done, particularly by Elliott Nass, who was the youngest person ever to hold the position in Chicago.
With the Untouchables, he'd been in charge of a handful of guys, and now he's running thousands of city employees, and he's going to have a real struggle not only to do the job, but to live up to his own press clippings, to the reputation that he'd accrued in Chicago. His marching orders in Cleveland are to clean up a police department that was basically rotting from within because of corruption, and also to try to break the stranglehold that the
mob had over the city at that time. Time, Cleveland was nearly as mobbed up as Chicago was. So you know, that's that's a pretty big job the police department take down the mob. And the wonder of it all is the amount of success he had. His timing was impeccable. As one of his reporter friends said, the city seldom had needed a hero so badly.
You write about that. Elliott and Ness had the ability to form a gang busting unit with a unique a strategy that he employed, and he was able to do in that being that he put a elite squad of people together that he made sure that we're honest, not open to bribery, and he knew their backgrounds and so he was able to handpick this this group called the untouchables. When he came to Cleveland, he had the same idea. Tell us about that, Yeah, that's right, Dan, he's been
brought in to clean up the police department. There's a whole lot of entrenched corruption going on a city that runs on bribes and payoffs, which was this was an equation that Nests understood. He'd seen it in Chicago. So as part of his effort to bring in reform, he's looking to younger police officers who haven't had a chance to become part of this entrenched network of corruption, but also who are going to be more open to the kinds of modern policing techniques that he is trying to
phase in. He had a group called the Unknowns, and they were people that he handpicked, worked very closely with, and they initially at least were helping him to root out the corruption within the force. Now for nests, that was the job. The mayor of Cleveland, a guy who'd
just been elected. His name was Gerald Burton, was trying to get the city back on its feet economically after the devastating effects of the Great Depression, and Burton believed that the city's economic fortune was tied, absolutely tethered to this campaign to clean up crime and corruption, that businesses and businessmen would not be drawn to the city so long as they were going to have to pay theirs song as there was this network of racketeering that that
ran through every level of the city and its government. So Ness had the support of the mayor and a group of independent businessmen who really wanted to see him succeed. And part of what he did, particularly at first, was
incredibly audacious. He was essentially taking down these incredibly corrupt police precinct captains who ran their police precincts like private fiefdoms, with in some cases people paying tribute by throwing money into a barrel at the center of the room, by just all kinds of gambling and things tolerated on their premises with police who would look the other way for a cut. That's what Ness was trying to do initially,
was to clean that up. Now you write about Jackass Hill and along the Kingsbury Run, tell us who were the inhabitants of Kingsbury Run and what it was characterized by Before we talk about the gruesome discovery September twenty third, nineteen thirty five by two boys.
In the center of a town and sort of snaking through a wide swath of the city was this gloomy thread of land called Kingsbury Run. It was an ancient dried up river bed and had originally been a garden spot. People would go there at a picnic and get away from the city. But as the city became an industrial center, sort of industrial powerhouse, there were a lot of industries and foundries and all kinds of apparatus of industry headquartered
in Kingsbury Run. But during the depression years, as a lot of those industries fell silent, a number of homeless encampments and shantytowns sprang up in Kingsbury Run. When the murders began, the killer appeared to be preying on the inhabitants of these shantytowns, indigens, travelers, small time criminals, people who were just passing through the city looking for work, people who would be hard to identify, people who wouldn't
be missed. And to be honest with you, Kingsbury Run seems to have been about the creepiest a place you could possibly imagine. There was a journalist that I became very fond of while I was doing the research for this book, and he went down there in the middle of the night just to have a look, just to try to soak up the atmosphere. And he wrote, last midnight, I went down to Kingsbury Run, that lonely, mysterious gully where Prowl's a mad butcher. Four of his headless victims
have been found here. He has killed two others. I can testify that if you enjoy feeling your flesh creep, feeling the small hairs on your neck and your heart pound with shameless fear. If that's what you like, just take a midnight tour through Kingsbury Run. It might be best not to go alone. YEA, well, that's the tone of the coverage you were getting at the time.
Let's go do September twenty third, nineteen thirty five, and the two boys discover a victim and then another victim. The horror is ramped up in this particular cases. So what did they discover?
It certainly was their Jackass Hill was the name given to a steep incline that ran from a neighborhood on the edge of one of an area of Kingsbury Run and ran sharply down into the gully itself. Two boys were playing catch on there as they were walking home from school. The ball went wide. They went down a hill chasing it, and one of them all but literally stumbles over a headless body. Now you can imagine that was a terrible, terrible thing for a boy to see.
They ran, they told an adult what they had seen. The police were on the scene very quickly. They discovered this headless body lying there nearby another headless body and other evidences of the killer's butchery. I should mention that the coverage at the time strained the propriety of what was considered proper to speak about in newspapers. So the papers were very careful tried, at least at first, to show some measure of restraint in describing what had happened.
So the phrase used by the Cleveland Plaine Dealer, which was the morning paper at the time, was they had been dismembered and otherwise mutilated, which was a family friendly, discreet way of saying that they had been castrated and their genitalia found sort of in a clump nearby. And that gives you some idea of the horrifying scenes that faced the investigators as they set to work on these crimes.
Now, while this is going on, the mayor wants a safety director. He has his ideal candidate, but then that person can't make it. He asked elliot Ness, and so tell us about this announcement and how famous elliot Ness is at this time while this butcher is just beginning his savagery.
Yeah, Well, as you would imagine, the elliot Nests from television would have strapped on his holster and started kicking down doors. But the real elliot Ness was in a different position. It's important to point out that he wasn't brought to Cleveland. He wasn't hired to catch the butcher of Kingsbury Run or any killer. That wasn't his job. It wasn't a homicide detective anymore than he was a fireman or a crossing guard. He's the director of public safety.
The chief of police reports to elliot Ness. He's at the top of the pyramid. Nobody expected him to solve murders or any more than they expected him to walk a beat or rescue a cat stuck in a tree. But this is elliot Ness talking about People did expect action from eliot Ness. They expected heroics. Ness himself had made a point of saying he would lead from the front lines, and over time, as the pattern of these
crimes gathered, of course, he had to do something. One of his police detectives said he had to do something. The mayor was on his neck. It was getting to be something of a national disgrace. So he put together a team in the mold of the Untouchables, much like the Unknowns. There were some overlap between the two. It seems they worked outside the system under the radar, and they tried to get information off of the criminal grapevine. But that's not to say that Ness ignored the official effort.
He devoted extra resources and manpower to the detective bureau. He tried to give them every chance. And believe me, the effort that the homicide that the detective Bureau, that the police department put forward was heroic, massive. They left no stone unturned. But this smaller hands on effort was very typical of Ness. He didn't say a lot about this. He said very little publicly, but there was one notable statement. He said, I want to do all I can to
aid this investigation. I want to see this psycho caught.
There were some interesting things found as well. In December at the White Front meat Market there was some packages and parcels found and interestingly wrapped in newspaper. Again, tell us a little bit about these discoveries and the media reaction, public reaction and Elliott Ness and the police reaction.
Well as if it hadn't been gruesome and horrifying enough already. It's a man and a butcher running a butcher shop the White Front beat market. A woman comes in, there's a dog barking behind the store. There's something going on
behind his shop. He goes out back and in two straw baskets in the back, neatly wrapped up in bundles of newspapers, there are several dismembered sections of a woman, and this man starts unwrapping these parcels, realizes what it is, very quickly realizes he's seen enough, runs back calls the police. So the police are now confronted with a killer who appears to be gift wrapping body parts and leaving them
to be discovered. And once again the scale of the thing begins to gather force, the tone of it is gathering heat. But even now at this stage, they were slow to connect that there was a series of crimes underway, and there was some discussion of it at the time. But in this case, as in the case of one of the two bodies found at Jackass Hill, they were
able to identify the remains. The ones at the White Front meat Market were a prostitute by the name of Florence Bloo, and the police quite naturally investigated trying to find trying to uncover things about her background, her story that might have led to this horror, horrifying end but even at that stage, the notion of it being a series of connected crimes had been slow to take shape.
Now at the same time, again, you said that Elliott Ness is brought in to fix the police department, not this Kingsbury run that just came at around the same time. But what he is also employed to do is that he meets a Frank Cullaton, a prosecutor, and they team up to be able to do the things that need to get done as a prosecutor and somebody else that's
routing out eruption in the police force. And this also lands them in a situation where there is this dramatic showdown between gangsters and the police department, and then Elliott Ness to rescue. This is a story unto itself, but can you briefly tell us what happens in this dramatic story?
Sure thing. One of the things that concerned Nests very greatly was what he called the sinister offshoots of prohibition. That the outlawing of alcohol had originally placed power in the hands of the underworld. As they were supplying alcohol, they also had money, resources and power to strengthen their position in gambling and prostitution and other forms of crime. Cleveland had a very very serious problem with gambling. One commentator said that before there was a Las Vegas, there
was Cleveland. There were people coming from out of towns to drop a bundle at the gaming tables in these gambling clubs that were set up to take their money. One of these places was a place he's called the Harvard Club. And the county prosecutor at that time was a man named Frank Cullett, and he decided that he was going to mount a raid on the Harvard Club
and another club on the same evening. And because he knew that if any word of his intentions got out to the police force, the clubs would be shut down when he got there and the equipment would be emptied out. So he went out with a force of private detectives so that the word wouldn't get out, and he shut down one of the clubs, and then they converged on
the Harvard Club, where they met unexpectedly stiff resistance. The guards at the club were lining up with heavy artillery and they appeared ready to defend this club by opening fire if need be. Cull Ittton had not expected that. He called the sheriff couldn't get any action out of them. He called the mayor of this suburb where the club was. Couldn't get any action out of them, so he picks up the phone and he calls Elliot Nets. It's important to point out that this club was outside of the
Cleveland city limits, outside of Ness's jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Ness says, I will come. I'll come as a private citizen. I'll bring police. Old Tight will be there. Ness drives over to police headquarters. He rallies a bunch of officers who are just coming off of their shift. Explains to them that they're going to be off the clock while they're doing this, but he hopes that they'll go with them to help shut down this club and strike a blow against gambling in the city. He drives out to the
Harvard Club. Ness has got police on all sides of him and cull Iton's men, but he hasn't even got a gun himself. He pins on his gold badge and he says, let's go, and they just march forward, even though the men guarding the club have threatened more than once that they're going to mow down the police with automatic weapons fire if they try to get inside the club, Ness is gambling that nobody's going to have the brass
to shoot him down in cold blood. And sure enough, they walk forward, they sweep through the club, and they shut him down. They shut the club down. I'm at night. Ness formed this partnership with Frank Culletton, the county prosecutor, who was a Democrat while Ness was serving a Republican mayor, and together they formed this partnership that became enormously influential. Basically, Ness would make the arrest and Cullletton would put him away. Ness would set him up and cull Itton would send
him to jail. And it was a very very effective partnership that lasted for years.
Now. Meanwhile, back to the butcher of Kingsbury Run, he's been busy and June sixth there is another discovery and there are conclusions from two people involved, the doctor Pierce and a doctor Strauss, and they are not in agreement with certain things. Maybe you can explain what their disagreement is and also some of the statements that are made in terms of the cause of death.
Yes, there was some disagreement not only between coroner Peers and Strauss, but also the coroner who followed Pierce, whose name was Sam Gerber. As to the nature. They agreed on certain specifics. They disagreed on certain specifics of the crime, particularly where some of the surgical dismemberment appeared to have given way to more force, as if the killer had flown into a rage and at one stage was just
wrenching the body parts apart. There was also some disagreement about whether among some of the experts, about whether all of the crimes were linked, or whether perhaps there were two killers at work, or perhaps even more. But as I said earlier, it took a while before the police realized that they were actually dealing with a series of
connected crimes. But you mentioned jackass Hill. A short time later, another body was discovered barely a mile away from where those earlier two sets of remains were discovered, and the scale of thing just snapped into place. An investigator told the press that he and his detectives were on the trail of a crazed killer with a flair for butchery. And it has to be said that at least some of these victims appeared to have been beheaded while still alive.
Remember this is the nineteen thirties, so modern forensics. A lot of it is still in its infancy things or some of it hasn't hasn't happened yet. Even so, the police threw everything they had at it, and they even improvised new techniques, trying to push through the limitations of their resources and their technology. The coroner pulled together a panel of experts to produce what they called a synthetic portrait of the killer. Well, we would understand that today
is criminal profiling another stage. The police were looking for a particular suspect and they couldn't find a recent photograph. So had they found a photo of their suspect at the age of twelve, and they projected it onto canvas and an artist altered and embellished the image to approximate the man's current appearance, like the age progression software that we have today. As I say, they the police spared no effort. It was called the greatest manhunt in city history.
That's undoubtedly true. But they were working just as hard as they could to run this killer to ground.
Now while they wait for other and another discovery for the shoot of fall, how do they continue with their investigation? I know they run down leads, but any suspects emerge.
Yes, absolutely, and if anything, too many suspects. There were hundreds and hundreds of people brought in for questioning. Anybody discovered behaving suspiciously or with a knife in their possession, or a wrong place, wrong time type of thing, people could be brought in questioned. A lot of it was catch and release, but they also the police closed the books on a lot of other crimes just because they had spread their manhunts so wide, brought in so many people,
and done so many so much questioning. But they were frustrated, and there was this cycle of frustration that repeated again and again. Remains would be discovered, the police would go in hot work very hard, check their results against missing persons reports, and then slowly and frustrate the trail would grow cold and they would begin to realize that it was only a question of time before the killer struck again.
Now Mayor Burton, frustrated, appoints Elliott and has to be the director of this squad to be able this investigation to find the mad butcher. And they said he has to be stopped.
That's right. It was getting to be a public relations issue. It was getting to be a problem for the city, and it was, and it had gotten to the point where this climate of fear was such that people were
demanding action. There was an editorial that said the fact that I'm paraphrasing, but it said, the fact that this killer should go unchallenged and uncaught like some character from a pose story, should be Cleveland's shame, and the idea of it bringing Shane down on the city was very much alive time, and the mayor wanted to see this taken care of.
We always you always include the media's response and the incredible headlines that emerge. But they also talking about a story about a murder laboratory, theorizing that since there was no blood at these crime scenes, that there was some sort of laboratory. Tell us about some of the things that are bandied about in the press regarding a murder room or murder laboratory.
Yes, there was this idea that the killer must have some kind of secret layer. It was variously called murder studio or a butcher's den, things like that, where he carried out the crimes and then took the body parts to be disposed of in Kingsbury Run and elsewhere. So this as you would imagine really took on the air
of horror film. The idea that this killer was luring unsuspecting victims into this place where they would be perhaps drugged or otherwise overpowered, and then beheaded, perhaps while still alive and dismembered, really fired the public imagination. And so yes, the press went to town on that, and it also
bears mentioning these crimes are playing out. They happened to overlap with the fiftieth anniversary of Jack the Ripper's crimes in London, and a lot of people threw explicit parallels to the reign of terror in Whitechapel, London and what was going on in Cleveland. There was a headline that said Cleveland's Torso killer slays in the same manner as Jack the Ripper.
These bodies continued to be found. But you introduce somebody named Bardsley. Bardsley, Marilynd Bardsley. Yes, and so again when we talk about suspects emerging, what does Bardsley find out and how.
Marilyn Bardsley, a true crime researcher, was fascinated with the case and was working on it some years later. Ness was gone by that time, but some of the investigators were still around, and it had long been rumored that there was a suspect that ness and his team liked for the crime. For a while, he was known as Doctor X. He was known to be a doctor who'd fallen on hard times. He had a substance abuse problem.
He checked at a lot of boxes. So Ness's team was tailed him around and seems that this suspect took a perverse form of pleasure in it, like as if he was playing hide and seek with the investigators. There are stories that even called into police headquarters to comment on the poor quality of the surveillance effort, and the even offered helpful tips about where he planned to be
the next day. Well, Marilyn Bardsley threw her investigative diligence, managed to produce a name that managed to attach a name to this suspect, and she called up a man named Cowles who was a scientific expert who'd worked on the crimes. All she did was she spoke the name into the phone and he said, who gave you that name? And he hung up. Well, believe me when I tell you that the details of this suspect and Nessa's pursuit
of him are going to be debated. As long as people talk about these crimes, people are going to argue until the end of time about whether doctor X was the killer, in the same way that people debate the Grassy Knoll and Jack the Ripper himself. Ness was alert to the possibility of other suspects, but he seems to believe he seems to have believed that this man was the killer.
Now, let's you write and give a background about this Francis Sweeney, this doctor and we won't get to this incredible moment where a photograph is shown to some authorities, But let's talk about this Francis Sweeney and who he's related to and some of his background. Did you dug up that would point to him as a pretty good suspect?
Yeah, I can't claim to be to be the person who dug up the information on Francis Sweeney. He's been written about by Bardsley and others. There's particularly a scholar in Cleveland named James Badel who's done incredible work on this case. But Sweeney had powerful political connections in that he was a cousin, he was part of a family of a Cleveland congressman, and it just so happened that this Congressman was a particular killer thorn in the side
of Mayor Burton and elliott Ness. He was always very often giving speeches in which he was firing shots at Mayor Burton and his alter ego, elliot Ness, as he called it. And there was there were intimations that Sweeney would challenge Mayor Burton for the Mayor's for the mayor's job. And but so you'd have expected Ness if he really had the goods on this Doctor X suspect, you'd expected him to shout it from the top of the terminal
tower in Cleveland. A lot of people feel that there must have been some bargain of silence struck so that
the details never came out. Martin Sweeney Fell fell notably silent about these killings, and Francis Sweeney, the suspect known as Doctor removed himself to a series of institutions where it's thought that he had done so to place himself beyond the reach of the law, although he was free to come and go as he pleased, but he was always under surveillance from that point forward, and the killings
did come to a close. Whether this has caused and effect is the points that's going to be debated forever.
At the same time that there was this silence and Elliott Ness working behind the scenes to not blow this that did not scare off the congressmen, did not scare off doctor X. At the same time, there was a person that came forward a police say that he confessed and this is Dolazol.
Yeah.
So this really complicates things because there are law enforcement that believe that he is good for this, whereas there is law enforcement that even though the interview Frank Sweeney, don't think he's very good for this.
No, absolutely, and there were at the time and there still are people who believe that Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it. But this very unfortunate man, Frank Dolosol, surfaced right in the middle of things. It's important to understand that from the first with this standoff the Harvard Club and elsewhere, there was no lost love between Ness and some of the county sheriffs and other law enforcement officials who felt that they were being showed up by
Elliot Ness. Well, a sheriff in one of the suburbs comes across this suspect. Private detective had been hired and he was gathering information, and he one thing leads to another, and he comes upon this suspect named Frank Dolazol, and they moved on him. They arrested him, They brought him out, and they said that they had obtained confession from Dolasol for the murder of Florence Bolillo. She was the prostitute whose remains were found in baskets behind the butcher shop
at the White Front Meat Market. Well, this is big news. This looks like the case has been broken wide open, and papers are quick to point out that if this confession holds up, Elliott Ness and the mayor really are going to have egg on their faces. This was widely reported, including in Time magazine, how this sheriff appeared to have succeeded in breaking the case wide open, where elliot Ness,
with all his resources, had foundered. Ness kept quiet, He said the right things, He congratulated, the sheriff offered to lend whatever assistance he needed, and very quickly the case against Dolazol began to began to unravel. They couldn't make it stick. There was evidence that Dolazol had been beaten while in custody. Of course, raising suspicions that the confession had been raised under duress, and it all ended tragically with Dolazol's while in custody. It's a very sad chapter
in an already sad story. Today, there's almost no one who believes that Dola'sol was the butcher, but the attention paid to him at a crucial moment in the investigation can only have served to derail things.
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Are you feeling lucky?
No, we're just necessary Flodever my long eighteen plus terms conditions plus see what's ever going to answer?
Now? We have this incredible turn and twist with Dalival dying in custody, but again very few people believing that he was guilty. He had recanted his confession about the Palilo, and at the same time it had never said that he was the Torso killer whatsoever. What we haven't talked about, very interestingly is in this book is the You write about elliot Ness being complicated person, and in the end somebody describes them as being the most disciplined person, the
most person that followed a set of rules strictly. But you write that elliot Ness did fall off the wagon in terms of protocol and good police procedure, and one of those being this interrogation of Sweeney. Now, how did they get around the normal rules of interrogation? Tell us about this hotel meeting and how long and some of the features of this interrogation.
The details are pretty sketchy, but it is known that at one stage Ness and his team scooped up doctor x Francis Sweeney off the street and they skirted him off to the Hope what was then called the Hotel Cleveland on Public Square, and by one account held him there for close to two weeks, subjecting him to interrogation. In eight hour stretches. Elliott Ness had made a big point out of trying to reform the methods of interrogation
and the methods generally used by the police. Only the previous year, one of his lieutenants had said, the third degree doesn't exist in Cleveland anymore. But in this case is the measure of the desperation and frustration that Ness
and his team were feeling around this case. That they held this guy without charge for days and perhaps a couple of weeks, grilling him, hoping that he would crack, hoping that they would get a confession out of it, at a time when there was an extraordinary amount of heat being heaped on this sheriff and what had happened to Frank Dolisol while in police custody. Ness was grilling
this guy, holding him without charge. And that's not to say that he was ever that it ever got to the point that the that it did with Frank Dolisol, But he never he never broke and due to lack of evidence, you know, they could, they just couldn't hold him forever. Ness was forced to let him go. You can only imagine the level of frustration that Elliott Ness, who was a huge believer in the latest advances and scientific criminal to investigation, who was trying to modernize things.
He had fallen back on these on these strong arm tactics, and it didn't work. It must have been a huge disappointment and an enormous frustration and left an incredibly bad taste in his mouth.
Now, he always had threatened that the surveillance on Frank Sweeney would be forever and he believed, as you say, I'm near the end of the book, and we'll talk about that this one statement regarding this case and being solved or not solved. But you write about that Elliott ness kept all of this suspicion secret. He didn't go to the media with this at all. He didn't share it with too many people. He kept this to himself.
And you say, there are a few things like him not coming forward when this Dolavs was charged seems to not make very much sense to you.
Some of that, No, and I do think there are a lot of things in play there. I do believe that felt that he had his man, but he remained alert to the possibility that he was wrong. And that's that there were that that somebody else had committed the crimes, or that someone else had committed some of the crimes there were. There were both men and women among the tally of victims. Maybe the women had had been slain
by one person and the men by another. Ness was, even in the late stages of the investigation, willing to go where the investigation led. He had not closed his mind at least, it seems to me to the possibilities of whatever the evidence showed. But there's this fantastic level of secrecy attached to his suspicions of this Sweeney doctor X. That was honored even after Nessa's death. And I don't think it's enough to say that it was simply because
of the powerful political connections in play. There has to be more to it than that. But long after ness was gone, people who worked with him, people who were in on the secret, honored his wish that the details be kept secret.
You mentioned James Biddell this. I believe you call him the scholar of evil. He's considered he's You asked whether Ness believed wholeheartedly that Frank Sweeney was the butcher of Kingsbury. Run tell us about that exchange.
Well, Jim Badele is a terrific guy who has written, you know, who has devoted a great deal of time and energy and written very compellingly on these crimes. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him last week and on an earlier night out where we were discussing the case, you know, I asked him, do you really believe that Ness thought he had his man? And I'll just never forget the steel in his voice. He said he knew it. Well, you know, Jim Badel is a
is an excellent scholar and a very careful researcher. He has been careful to say that he's not you know, he's not one hundred percent ready to say that the case is solved, that the case is put to bed, you know, and he believes as I do, that unless there is some smoking gun that surfaces at this late stage, some signed confession or deathbed confession or something, which seems
increasingly unlikely as the years passed. You know, we may never know for sure, but James Batel seems pretty sure that that that this was the guy and that Ness knew it.
Given the history that you present in this book of Frank Sweeney, the political connections that would explain the tiptoeing around of police somewhat, and just the how he would fit this profile at that time and even the profile today with some of the taunting postcards included in that profile. What do you think?
You know, as I said in the book, I could cheerfully argue either side of this equation. You know, if I were on a high school debate team and I had been assigned one side or the other, I could argue it. And I think that speaks to the frustrations involved in not only the amount of time that has passed since it happened, but also contradictory details that were apparent at the time. The thing about Sweeney is, you
know you alluded to these postcards. He seems to have found strange satisfaction in being a suspect and in attracting the attention of Elliott Ness, and in letters that he wrote at the time, postcards that he sent to Ness, and he also complained directly to j Edgar Hoover of
the FBI. He spoke immoderately, but he never crossed the line, said things like, you know, he addressed elliot Ness calling himself his paranoidal nemesis, and he signed one of the postcard cheers the American Sweeney, which of course is a reference to Sweeney Todd, the demon Butcher of Fleet Street. But there was never anything that crossed the line and congealed into hard evidence. Sweeney is a man widely judged to have been at least partly crazy, but he never crossed that line.
You say that what is missed sometimes in this story, or if they don't read this book, I would think, is that the miracle that he did bring to Cleveland.
That's absolutely right. This case has shadowed Ness's legacy to some extent, but even more so when we think of Elliot Ness, when we speak of him now, we talk about Chicago, talk about the untouchables, we talk about al Capone. And it's important to understand that there's been some controversy attached to Ness because you know, I thought to have been kind of a publicity hog, that he gets the credit for taking down al Capone, when when in fact
he was only part of a multi pronged effort. Ness himself was alert to those criticisms and very aware of it. He made a very forceful statement in his early days in Cleveland, saying the real work putting Capone in jail was done by the tax investigators. He said of himself and the untouchables. We played our part, of course, but the real work was done by the tax men. Our job was more spectacular. That was all right. It's important to point that out, because in Cleveland, he was the
guy in charge. He was the person who pulled the levers of power. He was the one who rode into town and really cleaned it up. They're one of his friends, a excellent journalist, said that when Ness arrived, policemen were expected to tip their hats if they passed a gangster on the street, and when he left they no longer did. Ness had really managed to do the job that he was hired to do. He had cleaned up the force, He had loosened the rivets of this absolute hold that
the mob had on the city. He left it better than he found it. But even people in Cleveland, and I grew up there, tend to be not to know this, not to have any sense of what happened, what he accomplished. It's an amazing story, and it tends to get overlooked. More as the pity.
You also include that he did some made some decisions that weren't very good, like cleaning out Kingsbury Run, sort of cleaning out the hobo jungle, and that met with a lot of criticists them and later in life financial decisions and personal decisions, and he fell from grace. However,
just the legacy of elliot ness. Before I let you go as well, you include just an interesting side note that when you went to the Western Reserve Historical Society that you read the name of your grandfather in those passages.
Yeah, thank you for mentioning that, Dan. I can't tell you what a surprise that was. I Nessa's papers and some family scrap books are in Cleveland, and I was paging through one rainy afternoon, and a lot of what's in there is what you'd expect. It's newspaper clippings and testimonials and other documents, and there are a lot of familiar faces. There's Capone and other gangsters. There's some of the eras, other shining lights like FDR and John D. Rockefeller.
And I'm looking through and this familiar face jumps out at me and it's my grandfather. I'd love to be able to tell you that my grandfather was a bootlegger or bankcomber, or you know better. Yet, as suspect as the butcher of Kingsbury Run. He wasn't any of those things. Yeah, it turns out that Ness and my grandfather crossed paths at a political roast at least once a year. This was something I sort of on the lines of the
Washington Correspondence dinner or a Comedy Central roast. And my grandfather was part of a group of businessmen who put on skits and songs and dances poking fun at the city's fat cats. They called them the goats, and one of them was Ness, and Ness apparently took it in stride there he clipped articles about this. This review was called the Anvil Review. Put him in his scrap book, along with a picture of himself with his hand pressed to his forehead, apparently laughing at a joke at his
own expense. You know, he may have been untouchable, but he could take a joke. I knew my grandfather for thirty four years. He never mentioned it. I wish I could speak to him now.
Absolutely. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about American demon Elliot Ness and the hunt for America's Jack the Ripper. Daniel Stashauer, can you tell us. Do you do any social media at our website can for people that might want to find out more.
About this, sure, Facebook and Twitter at Daniel stash Hour.
Thank you so much. American demon elliot ness and the hunt for America's Jack the Ripper. It's been a fascinating interview. Thank you so much, Daniel Stashauer.
Good night,