The Cleveland Torso Murders

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh.
There's Chuck. Jerry's out there somewhere with a magnifying glass
and toothpick. We don't know what toothpicks for, but this

(00:22):
is stuff you should not Yes, content warning episode, everybody.
This is one of our I was about to stay rare.
They're they're fairly rare, but one of our true crime
episodes that is very grizzly, gruesome, gruesome, but took place
in the nineteen thirties, so there's something about old and

(00:42):
gruesome that makes it a little more palatable for me. Totally.
I don't know why, but you're absolutely right time, I
guess you know. Yeah, he heals all wounds to murders. Yes,
it doesn't. Well, heals all wounds except for some of
the things that happened in the Torso murders, because you
can't come from that. It's pretty crazy. You you were

(01:03):
familiar with the Torso murders already, right, I had heard
of these, and the more I read about them, the
more I was shocked at that there wasn't a good
period movie about this. Yeah. Absolutely, so But if you
haven't heard the Torso Killer, that's fine, You're You're definitely
not alone. A lot of people haven't, which is kind
of surprising because these are they're unsolved murders. There were

(01:23):
a lot of them, and you know, they took place
in the background of a city that was like driven
into a frenzy by this ghastly serial murderer who was
who continued their murders despite this extraordinarily large, you know,
man hunt to try to find them, an unsuccessful man
hunt still to this day. Yeah, I mean, it has

(01:45):
all the makings of a good movie. Um, it's got
a and we'll we'll reveal who this person is. We'll
hang onto it for a second. But they had a
famous investigator. Oh sorry, yes, and he definitely was the
famous investigating Yeah you thought I meant who the murderer was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,
you've got some false starts. You've got some um Coen

(02:06):
Brothers esque whimsy with with the dog discovery. I thought
you'd like that. Yeah, I did like that, And um, yeah,
it has all the makings of a great movie in
a cool period setting, which was depression era nineteen thirties Cleveland, Ohia,
which is almost indistinguishable from current day Cleveland. Come on,

(02:28):
we love Hey man, I'm from Toledo. I can totally
backs Detroit. I was. That's my birthright. That is your birthright. Um.
So let's go back to September of when a woman's
torso is washed up on the shore of Lake Erie.
Her legs are amputated below the knee. There is no head,

(02:49):
which is why I said torso. And it's a suspicious
way to find a body, a very suspicious way. She
was never identified. They called her the Lady of the Lake.
And this was just sort of the beginnings. Nothing was
put together at this point because it would be two
years before any other murders took place, and that they

(03:09):
finally sort of put together that the Lady of the
Lake was perhaps Victim zero, uh, really victim one, but
they called her Victim zero of who would become known
as the Torso murderer or the mad Butcher of Kingsbury. Yes, um,
Kingsbury run. And like you said, it would be about
two years before they started to connect the dots. But

(03:31):
in that time between the time the Lady of the
Lake was found, um about a year past and then
all of a sudden, two more bodies were found, and
all of a sudden, because two bodies were found together,
this really started to capture people's attention to the lady
of the lake. It was a weird thing. It was
a terrible thing to find, but it was singular. This was,

(03:52):
you know, like by definition, not singular, finding two bodies
at once that were both dismembered. Um. And they were
found in the area of Kingsbury Run, which is where
the mad butcher take takes his name. That's right, Um.
They were both men. In this case, they were uh,
they were castrated. They were also decapitated, which would become

(04:16):
sort of a signature. The decapitation and in any kind
of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer. Uh.
And it's interesting in that victim, one of these two men,
was actually one of the only ones that they got
a fairly positive I d for Um actually got some
fingerprints and it matched a man named Edward Uh Andrewsi.

(04:39):
And he was sort of a petty thief that had
you know, the police had brought in before. So he
was believed to be gay and this if he was,
you know, which all accounts should say that he was.
This was at a time when in the nineteen thirties,
certainly it was still illegal, and it was also listed
as a mental disorder in the to call not the

(05:00):
d m V, d U the d m V. The
d m V didn't look too highly on it either. No,
that's right. So he I think was one of only
two that was ever even positively identified of what would
end up being probably maybe twelve murders. Yes. Um. And again,

(05:23):
these guys were found together, not together, like they were
like within, you know, a very short distance of one another,
so that they were found virtually at the same time.
And whenever you find, you know, a body missing its head,
that that is attention grabbing. And when you find two
bodies both missing their heads, that really starts to get
the presses juices running. Um. And like we said, these

(05:46):
were found around Kingsbury Run, and Kingsbury Run is basically
like an old riverbed that cuts through Um. I believe
the west side of Cleveland. Uh No, I'm sorry that
I think the east side of Cleveland down to the
Coyahoga River, and it was basically like the place where
all of the oil companies and all of the heavy

(06:07):
industry along the river and along the lake would dump
all of their waste. The city put a sewer in there.
It was just meant to be kind of like a
waste land, like a literal wasteland. Um. And it kind
of stayed that way until the depression hit. And by
the time the depression had things were so bad that
people were looking to to basically live wherever they could

(06:30):
for free, and they started taking up residents in Kingsbury Run.
So by the time the Kingsbury Run murders, the Tords,
the Torso murders started, Um, this was like a full fledged,
full swing shanty town. Basically a Great Depression era Hoover town.
It's what they call them, Yeah, exactly. Um. So it
was a Graham scene down there anyway. Uh, certainly the

(06:51):
fringes of society. Um. During the course of the investigation,
there were accusations of the press that they weren't working
as hard as they needed to because these were people
on the fringes of society and sort of forgotten about.
And I think one of the other people identified. It
was a few months later in January nineteen thirty six,

(07:12):
when they found the body of Flow Palilo Florence Pollilo
was a waitress and bartender and sex worker who was
discovered once again dismembered, wrapped in newspaper and a couple
of bushel baskets, and then about a week and a
half later found other parts of her body. So she
was sort of found in in it's very grizzly, but

(07:33):
found in pieces over the course of a week and
a half in different places. Right, So, so far as
far as anybody can tell, we're up to three and
possibly four victims if you include the Lady of the Lake.
But it wasn't until the following June, about six months
after flow Palilo was discovered, because again, remember these people
were they actually lived on the fringe of society. So

(07:57):
just like today, just like Robert picked in the pig
farmer from Vancouver, so many other serial killers um find
their victims um and like the just I guess, the
lowest stations of society because they're the most vulnerable, they
have the least protection, And that's kind of what was
going on. That's why it took so many victims for
the press to finally be like, Okay, there's something really

(08:18):
going on here. And finally in June, I believe of
ninety six, victim number four as far as canonical victims go,
but possibly the fifth victim was discovered. Um, his head
was found first by two boys who are playing hookey
and fishing along the Coyahoga. No, I can't because they

(08:39):
found like a bald up pair of trousers and I
guess grabbed them and found that there's something in it.
When they opened it up, there was the head of
a man in his twenties. But I've never been identified,
like so many of these victims. Yeah, and not to
trivialize any of this, but again, that stuff is very
ripe for for movie making. Totally, this whole thing is,

(09:01):
and it really is surprising that no one's done this yet,
Like you wouldn't you know, you would write something like
that in a screenplay and this actually happened. There's so
there's I didn't see. I haven't read it, but there's
a graphic novel and maybe it's a series called Torso
that is um about all this, and I'm guessing that
would probably be a pretty good basis for the movie. Yeah,

(09:22):
so victim for uh, they were making great efforts to
find out who this man was. So they actually, um,
the police circulated a photo of his face and made
a death mask. If you don't know what a death
mask is, I encourage you to go listen to our
episode on death masks. It's basically what you would think.
It's a it's a recreation of this man's head and

(09:44):
they put this thing along with a tattoo map. He
had tattoos all over himself. Um, an illustrated map of
his tattoos in this death mask on display at the
Great Lakes Exposition of nineteen thirty six, where you know,
a hundred thousand people could walk. I mean it was
a smart idea in one way, because they had a
you know, could blast it out in the best way

(10:06):
possible to try and identify who this person was. But
it was also again like something from a movie. These
people going to an exposition all of a sudden are
walking behy these this uh tattoo map and the death
mask of this man. Uh. And I'm sure the question
came up, like, well, why is it? Where's the rest
of his body? Why didn't they just show pictures of

(10:26):
the tattoos. They're like, stop asking questions, do you know
the guy or not? No, go get some ice. Cream exactly,
move along. Nothing to see here. But yeah, despite that,
you know, very public um search for an identification. He
was never still has never been identified, and his tattoos
were really he had people's names tattooed on him. He
had a cartoon character named Jigs tattooed on him. So

(10:50):
this guy, you know, you could see his face, they
had all the tattoos, and he still has never been identified.
But his his discovery, and I think the very public,
like the cops circle related a photo of his head
on a gurney in the morgue at first before they
made the death mass, among other um uh police agencies
around the area, and I'm sure to the press as well.

(11:11):
Um So it was kind of public, even though it
was kind of quiet, but it got the press's attention,
and the press started to connect the dots, and all
of a sudden, we now were connecting the Lady of
the Lake to this latest guy and all of the
other ones as well, and it became very clear that
there was what they call the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury

(11:32):
run on the loose um in Cleveland, and no one
had any idea who it was or when or if
they were ever going to stop. Yeah. I think there
were seven more victims over the next two years. Victim
eight were skeletal remains, but they did think they identified
this person as Rose Wallace. Uh, woman in her forties.

(11:55):
She had gone missing about a year earlier, and there
was quicklime use to decomposed this body. And this one
interestingly had evidence of more of a clumsy dismemberment. Um.
To me, this one stands out a little bit as
one that possibly might not be a victim and could
have been misattributed, uh, to the to the mad butcher.

(12:18):
That's just my personal feeling. I don't I don't know
if anyone else is saying this, but it's the one
that stands out to me as being slightly different, same
as the same, same to me. Yeah, she uh, the
killer clearly lacked a dismemberment plan in that case. Is
that a band? Yeah? Are they good? Yeah? They were
really good. They were maybe math rock. I think they

(12:42):
were at the very least they were alternative. Victim nine
was had his heart removed. Um. Victim ten had morphine
in her system. And I think they're they're not quite
sure how they all died. I think at one point
they thought most of them died by the decapitation, but

(13:04):
some were found with uh their blood completely drained from
their body. Like I said, this one woman had morphine
inter system, which could make sense. We'll get to something
else later on of a potential victim that never happened,
where drugs might have been a factor. But um, you know,
it's it's sort of all. You know, there were men,
they were women, There were black people, there were white people.

(13:24):
There wasn't any real rhyme or reason, it seemed like,
aside from the fact that they were probably culled from
this area of Ohio, yes, uh. And the fact that
you know the first two men were emasculated, um, that
there were women involved too. That somebody's hard to been
ripped out like there was. There was clearly a sexual
element of the whole thing, which made the idea that

(13:45):
they were men and women victims UM very confounded. You
just don't normally see that in a sex killer. You
see one or the other, and it's usually the sex
that the person is oriented to. Um are the victims.
And then you know, just to kind of to to
cap that point off, the killer left victims eleven and

(14:06):
twelve within a few yards of one another um on
a dump like a trash dump, and one was a woman,
Victim eleven was a woman, and victim twelve was a man.
Should we take a break? We should because Cleveland doesn't
know it at the time, but those of us looking
through uh, looking backwards through history can tell you that

(14:27):
this was the last canonical victims in August of night.
So the killer, as far as anybody knows, is done.
That's right, and most of the grizzling stuff is out
of the way, and we'll be back to reveal the
famous investigator right after this. How's that for a tease?

(15:13):
It was I can't take it anymore, Chuck, please, please?
Who is it? It's my favorite thing when you play
coy Uh. It was Mr Elliott Nessus, very famous for
being the head of the Untouchables, for putting uh Al
Capone behind bars, good friend of Sean Connery's very good friend.

(15:33):
Oh that was great. That wasn't very good, because you
don't bring your knife to a gunfight. To bring a
gun your dummy. Yeah, I think that was the line.
If you wanted to do country, well, you gotta have
ansh in there, right. But there was no sad didn't
I I thought that was. I thought I nailed it.
There aren't no s is in that sentence, right, They're implied.

(15:55):
And I would have done that had there been ses
don't bring a knife to a gun dunch. How's that right?
You're burger gone your job? All right? Back to the
serious stuff. Elliott Ness was the after that working what
was that Chicago? I think, oh, yeah, that was He
became the alcohol uh investigator in charge of the alcohol

(16:19):
tax unit for Northern Ohio and August of thirty four,
and then the Republican mayoral candidate Harold Burton, who would
go on to win, said, you know what, Ness, you're
a famous guy. I like the cut of your jib um.
Let me make you in December nine the safety director
for Cleveland, and let me nudge you towards this outstanding

(16:42):
case that we have. So yeah, when he was hired,
the the case wasn't quite clear that it was a
big old case when he came in just after like
a couple of months after victims one and two were found,
and just a couple of weeks before flow Polilo was out,
So it wasn't evident that that there was a serial

(17:03):
murderer on the loose. Um, but that also means that
Elliott Nest came in right at the beginning of this thing,
so he was the public safety director for it. He
became the face of the frustrated police effort to capture
the Torso killer, right although the lead investigator, what was
that guy's name, Peter Maurillo, Yeah, he was. He was

(17:29):
I don't know about obsessed, but it became sort of
his main focus of work was to tirelessly find out
who this murderer was. And I assume that it's weird
because I really don't know what a safety director was.
I don't think is that even still a thing? Uh? Yeah,
I think there's a public safety director position still there.
They basically are in charge of the police department, the

(17:50):
fire department, all that stuff. You're there the head of that.
They're like they probably the liaison between the mayor in
those services, but not the guardian angels because they do
what they want to do. Hey man, they're staying on
their own too. Uh. The coroner A. J. Pierce of
the case, I think he was the first corner on
the first case, said you know what we need to do.

(18:12):
We need to get together, we need to have a
little summit and start sharing information. I'm gonna call it
the Torso Clinic, which was interesting. I don't know if
he did or the press did, yeah, either way, because
the press was very much involved in this whole run obviously.
But at this conference is where he first put forward
a profile, which was this is someone who would not

(18:32):
stand out in Kingsbury one. Uh, then someone who knew
the area could blend in, uh, somebody, you know. We
think it's a man who is a powerful man because
they need to be able to you know, it takes
a lot of work to dismember a body and to
haul these bodies around and drop them off in different places.
And we think he also might have some anatomical knowledge,

(18:55):
not saying that he's necessarily a doctor or a surgeon, uh,
kind of to jack the ripper thing. But but this,
this person clearsly clearly knows their way around a knife
in a scalpel. Yeah, because I mean, if you really
closely examine a body and like look at the places
where you know the body was separated with the knife,
you can find hesitancy marks, you can find the hacking. Um,

(19:19):
there's all sorts of clues and telltale signs and apparently
this guy had a lot of confidence and had a
lot of skill or knowledge about anatomy. So, like you said,
maybe not a doctor, but at the very least a
very skilled butcher who had studied human anatomy um before.
But eventually they finally were like, this is probably some

(19:39):
sort of doctor. Yeah, And I think they eventually learned
that most of the victims died within a few dame
a few days of being discovered, and most were moved,
except for victim five, where they found a blood bath.
You know that was this didn't happen to the other
crime scenes. It was virtually no blood to be found,
and in fact, I think one was completely drained of blood.

(20:02):
Oh really, so that I mean that takes I don't
know if that happened naturally just because of the nature
of of dismemberment or it was a purposeful thing. But
only one body was found kind of clearly murdered there, right,
So um, yeah, I think that the fact that the
blood wasn't on the scene and it wasn't in the

(20:23):
body any longer means that had to go somewhere. So
that the fact that they were dismembered um and the
and packaged I mean, like a lot of them were found.
You know. Um, the one unidentified tattooed man, his head
was wrapped in trousers, but other people's were wrapped in
newspaper or brown paper like they were meat. Um, someone

(20:45):
was was put in a makeshift box. Um, there was.
There was a lot of time dedicated to the dismemberment
of these bodies, and that that that leaves a lot
of evidence and you need a place where you're not
going to be in erupted and that's not easy to
come by. So that became a really like big point
is you know, we were pretty sure that this person

(21:08):
is is snatching victims from the from the Kingsbury Run area. Um,
but where are they committing these acts? And they tried
to find that that place as much as they tried
to find the killer. Yeah, I mean that would be
a big clue if they had some murder room, uh
Dexter style. Sure, but just giveaway every time. That's coming back.

(21:30):
By the way, I don't know if you ever watched Exter,
what do you mean it's coming back? They're bringing Dexter
back man with the original like Michael C. Hall. No, Yes,
they are, indeed, And I had mixed feelings because we
love that show for a long time, but it is
the end. It is one of the shark jump here
shows of all time. It's it's like the shark itself jumped,

(21:51):
I think. So it's insane, it's amazing. I mean, I
love Michael c Hell though. We were just now finishing
six ft Under again, so I'm always happy to see
him again. But I'll give it again. You see Colden July.
M Mmm, no, what is that. It's a little bit
like a straw Dogs type story. Um, but he's like

(22:12):
having a battle Don Johnson. It's just really like, if
you want I know, it's weird casting, but if you
want to just experience like a constant, you know, mid
to low level dread for two hours, Like, let's go
ahead and watch that. It's well done in that respect.
Or watch the Lighthouse. Probably it's probably better. It's so good.
Let's just stop talking about this and talking about the

(22:34):
Lighthouse for the rest of the time, all right. So, uh,
Peter Morillo, who, like we said, was a lead detective,
he's sort of obsessed with this thing. He starts not
only focusing on uh, this land down by the river.
But I didn't mean that, but that's what it was.
But he started focusing on the rail roads and these

(22:56):
these hoboes the railroads. Okay, you know where trains run
on sure, yeah, I just never heard it pronounced the
way you did, the first railroad. It was hilarious. I
gotta lighten this up. So I were talking about this
membered towards exactly. Um. So he started looking in these
box cars and I don't I mean as hobo an

(23:18):
offensive word. Can you still say that? Don't think so.
I think it's a point of pride, a term of
pride for people to still ride the rails. Okay. Um.
So he's still out there doing his thing at this
press conference, um Elliott and s ends up holding a
meeting with the head of Scientific Investigation Bureau. His name

(23:39):
was David Cowell's uh and an editor of the Cleveland Press. Um.
So this is a big deal. They're actually getting the
press involved at this point, right, But secretly, this wasn't
a press conference. This is like a secret meeting. Oh
no, no no, not a press conference at all. This was
very much in secret. But he's involving the press, and
they said, here's what we're gonna do. Ness says let's
you go and aout eight tough guys that can go undercover,

(24:03):
that that know a lot of bad guys in Cleveland
and have all those connections, will get them the police
support they need, and we'll fund them. How did they
fund them with the press is money? What does that
even mean? I don't know. I think that like maybe um,
the owners of the newspapers chipped in, like the wealthy
owners chipped in quietly to stuff off of the books.

(24:24):
That's my impression of what you ever chipped in the
most gut to break the story, Hender, But well no,
I think at the same time, it was a technique
for bringing the press into the fold so that there
weren't outsiders drumming up trouble for the cops anymore. Because
the Cleveland press really made the They didn't make the
police look bad. They pointed out just how badly the

(24:45):
police were handling this or ineffectively, which is not to
say that the police were um not trying really really hard.
Top postedly. I saw a figure of ten thousand suspects
were interviewed over four years during the course of this investigation.
They just couldn't find the guy. They could not find
this killer, and the press kind of almost gleefully kept

(25:05):
pointing that out right, So this is in a way
attempt to assuage them and bring them into the inner
circle a bit, right. That's that was my impression. Yeah,
all right, So the police are they got these undercover
guys working there. They're seeing they're checking cars randomly at
all hours. They're canvassing laundromats and places where you wash

(25:27):
your clothes. So you know, if there are people like
trying to get bloodstains out of something, they're kind of
doing everything they can at this point. Uh. And this
is where the Coen Brothers sort of a moment comes in,
which is in Sandusky a dog and Sandusky is about now,
it's about an hour or ten minutes away by car.
I don't know what it would have been back then,
but probably less than two hours, I would say, even

(25:49):
in an old timy car. A dog shows up in
Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. I want
to say that literally happened in a Coen Brothers movie.
It might have just been a bone of a body,
but I can't think of which one it might be.
Someone will someone will write in and tell us, But
it sounds like a Barton Fink kind of thing. It is,
but it's not, or I might be thinking of the

(26:12):
kids who ripped the two pay off the guy in
uh Miller's Crossing. I remember that part, although I remember
one of the neighbors lost his to pay in the
burbs and they thought it was Evidently, there's definitely a movie,
it might not have been Coming Brothers where dog shows
up with the body part in its mouth. Probably more
than one movie, but this dog shows up in its

(26:33):
mouth and Marello goes to Sandusky and it turns out
that the leg was actually surgically removed during a during
a real surgery, not a not a serial killer surgery,
and just didn't get disposed of right, ended up in
the lake, ended up in the dog's mouth, right. But
the police were so hyped up at the time that

(26:54):
they traveled Sandusky to chase down this lead, which, like
all the other ones, went absolutely no where um. And
so there was there was again like just a tremendous
amount of public pressure, including something you mentioned earlier, to
a lot of allegations and accusations that the police weren't
doing enough because these people were not wealthy, were not

(27:17):
well thought of, They were, you know, very poor. The
poorest of the poor during the Great Depression were the
ones who were having who are suffering this this serial
killer UM. And so there was a tremendous amount of
of pressure UM. And I think my impression is is
that that pressure UM is one of the I guess

(27:38):
the thing that drove Elliott Ness to Um to do
something really terrible. Because the killer was picking from the
shanty towns of Kingsbury Run. Elliott Ness got it in
his head that if you did away with Kingsbury Run,
you do away with the killings. And so he raided
the homeless camps at Kingsbury Run and roused at everybody

(27:58):
and then ordered the place burned to the ground. Yeah,
and I'm sure he thought this was a great idea
at the time, but he really didn't think it through
because the people of Cleveland did not take kindly to
that Um. They they hated him for what he did.
And this was during the depression and everyone was struggling basically,
or not everyone, but most people were struggling at this

(28:19):
point unemployment rate of in Cleveland, and so the idea
of this big shot Chicago g man coming in and
and basically running these homeless people out of their only
option and burning it to the ground was not a
good look at all. However, it that was there were

(28:42):
no more murders after that. I know, it's strangely, it
seemed to have worked, and it depends we'll talk more about.
You know, a lot of different views of whether the
murders stopped or not. But as far as canonical victims go,
this this he burned the place to the ground two
days after victims eleven and twelve or found, and after
that there were no more victims. So it didn't solve

(29:03):
the murders by any stretch of the imagination, but it
seemed to have put an end to him. Weirdly, Yeah,
I think before we take a break, we should mention
there was one and get into the who we think
it's probably the real suspect. There was one suspect in
Cuyahoga County, uh that the sheriff brought in name. He
was a bricklayer named Frank dole Zeal who did confess

(29:25):
he was brought in for the murder of Flow Palilo,
originally because he had lived with her for a little while,
but supposedly he knew Rose Wallis and Edward ANDREWSI as well.
But then they looked into it, and by all accounts
that confession was um not just induced, but in the
days where you would literally beat a victim into confessing. Yeah,

(29:49):
and um then murder him in his cell after he
recanted his confession. So was he murdered. Yeah, Well, he
he hung himself, but he hung himself from a hook
that was shorter than he was, which I mean, I
guess if you really really want to die, you might
you you could do that, you could overcome them the
urge to stand up, disinclination towards self harm, I guess

(30:11):
you'd put it. But uh, his his friends at the
time seemed to be like now that he was murdered.
So it's at the very least his confession was beaten
out of him. And no, no serious scholar of the
crime believes that um Frank do zeal was was the killer.
He didn't have any there was no evidence whatsoever any
kind of surgical knowledge. There was like a lot of boxes.

(30:34):
He just didn't check. It was basically, uh, he knew flow,
and he may have known Edward and ROSSI, and he
may have known Rose Wallace and the sheriff basically ran
him in very publicly. All right, So let's take that
break and then we'll come back and talk a little
bit more about the investigation and who people now believe
committed these horrible murders right after this, all right, so

(31:28):
Elliott Ness has run everyone out of the Kingsbury run camps.
Did not go over well. He then says, here's what
we'll do. Let's skirt the warrant rules so we don't
have to require warrants, and let's get together. Since I'm
the safety director and I controlled the fire department too,
let's get let's go around and start searching for quote,

(31:50):
fire code violations end quote. Basically, so they don't have
to get any kind of warrants and they can just
basically go into people's houses and and just at will
and search and do whatever they want to under the
guise of searching for fire code violations. He was desperate,
He was very desperate. And again they were looking not
just for the killer, but really, more than anything, they

(32:12):
were looking for that grizzly workshop, as the Cleveland plain
Dealer had put in a place where he was, you know,
draining the victims of their blood and dismembering their bodies.
They didn't turn anything up, but it really kind of
goes to show like just what lengths elliott Ness, who
was considered like this squeaky clean law man was willing

(32:32):
to go to this is extraordinarily um unconstitutional and underhanded,
and he went he went to that degree and well
beyond it turned out actually too very much. Uh. And
I think we're at the point now where we can
talk about this mystery person, right, Yeah, this is this

(32:52):
is why I said. He went way beyond you know,
um unlawful search of homes. He actually engaged in what
amounts to kidney apping of a private citizen who he
thought was the killer. Yeah, and he kept it very secret.
He even used a pseudonym for this person. He called
this person this gentleman gay lord Sundheim. Pretty good name,

(33:12):
a good hotel check in name. Uh. And privately he
you know, word gets around a little bit what's going on,
But privately he would describe this person as an alcoholic,
uh maybe bisexual, A doctor who came from a wealthy
family and who had a relative in Congress who was
protecting this person and took this man under the dark

(33:36):
of night to a hotel room in Cleveland held there
without charging him for two weeks where they interrogated this person. Yes,
and apparently the guy who this gay lord Sundheim was
in the middle of a bender when he was picked up,
and uh, he had um. He was so profoundly drunk
that it took him three days to become sober again.

(33:58):
Not buy that, I don't, but when he when he did,
I know, But you got to add those two. Um,
thank you for keeping it, keeping it even keel though
they were a little rough, and you're always okay the
next day. I don't know what you're talking about. It's
so weird, like alcohol affects us so differently. Man, I

(34:19):
can have like a drink and a half these days
and I'm like hating life the next day. No, I'm
not talking about a hangover, but you're not still drunk
the next day and two days or three days. I
think that's what they were saying, is that this guy
was he had like a hangover stupor basically that was
my impression, not that he was still just flying high,

(34:42):
but that hating it all right for three day But regardless,
they kept him whether he was sober as a judge
or you know, drunk as a skunk when they picked
him up. They held them in this hotel room without
charge and outside of the legal system for two weeks
and interrogated him for up to eight hours a day. Yeah,
but I think he did it, so who cares. That's

(35:04):
exactly how Elliott ness was approaching this, and again everybody
thought he was this squeaky clean lawman and he's engaged
in kidnapping. But the thing is, he brought in the
guy who was one of the early inventors of the polygraph.
He invented the Keeler polygraph, and it was called that
because his name was Leonard Keeler, and he I think
he brought him from Chicago and Leonard Keeler administered a

(35:26):
couple of different polygraph tests to this gay Lord Sondheim
and said, if this isn't your man, I might as
well throw my machine out the window if I say
anything else, because that guy, that's the guy. It's definitely
the guy. You gotta take that with a grain of salt,
because especially today, polygraphs are just total junk science. But
it's certainly um confirmed Nessa's suspicions that much more at

(35:49):
the time, I think that that polygraph back then was
there wasn't even machine. Keeler would just sit there and
look for a bit of sweat to break out on
the forehead, then punched the guy if it did. That's
right exactly so Uh. The case was never solved. Um
Ness's reputation obviously took a big hit. He eventually got
out of Cleveland after a drunk driving hit and run

(36:10):
accident that he was involved with and tried to cover up.
So he left in great shame. But back to this
gay lord sundheime. Later on, many years later, there were
crime investigators and writers who put two and two together
and basically identified and in fact, in one case, crime
writer Maryland Bardsley came out and said, yeah, this this

(36:34):
is who this person was. It was a former World
War One Army medic who was discharged for mental instability
following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off. Uh.
And he was an alcoholic another big warning light. And
his name was Francis Edward Sweeney, who also happens to
have a relative in Congress, right, a guy named Representative

(36:59):
Martin Sweeney who was a huge critic of the Burton administration,
of which Elliott Ness was a major part um, and
he was just the kind of guy who was a
political opponent to the degree that I'm sure Elliott Ness
thought if he tried to arrest Clarence or um Francis Sweeney,
he would, uh, he would he would be obstructed, you know,

(37:21):
from up on high by this congress person. Whether he
would have or not, I don't know. I saw some
references to the idea that Martin Sweeney was well aware
that Elliott Ness was looking at his cousin for this
and was already getting in the way. Um, But I
only saw that on one place, so I'm not sure
if that's the case or not. Either way, his presence

(37:41):
and his connection to Francis Sweeney was enough that Elliott
Nest never charged Francis Sweeney, despite apparently going to his
grave believing that that Dr Francis Edward Sweeney was the
Cleveland Torso murderer. Have you seen a picture of the guy, dude,
he looks like the definition of a towards our murderer.
If you who if you like seriously, you have to

(38:02):
be careful with that stuff, because can you ever end
up a juror you can't be like you look like
a killer. This guy looks like a Torso murderer. You're
exactly right. Uh. The quick sidebar, I'm not sure if
I ever mentioned it on this show. I know I've
talked about on a movie Crush, but I want to
recommend this great, great documentary And forgive me if I'm
repeating myself here, but it's called Crazy not Insane. Uh.

(38:24):
It's an HBO documentary about this doctor, doctor Dorothy at
no Lewis, who basically spent her life trying to understand
serial killers and one of the main she was kind
of one of the first people to really try and
understand what's actually going on, and she put together I
think like three very common uh common commonalities among serial killers.

(38:46):
But one of them is is head trauma. And that's
why this really stands out of me about Frances Edward Sweeney,
was that he was discharged from the Army because of
head trauma leading to mental instability. It's a commonality and
most serial killers is some sort of head trauma, especially
when you're younger. Wow, that's interesting. I did not know that. Yeah,

(39:07):
and the I may have thought I talked about on this,
but it was uh the uh who was the guy
in l a that that also just had a great
docuseries on the night Stalker. Richard Ramirez he suffered multiple
head traumas when he was younger as well. So I
think it's it's I can't remember the third one. It's
head trauma, some sort of physical uh, and even sexual

(39:29):
abuse as a child. And then there was like one
more thing and those are like that's just a recipe
for ending up some sort of sociopath or serial killer.
I think the third one is disappointing birthday presents. Yeah. Maybe,
So it's a great you'd really love it's a really
good documentary. Um, yeah, I'll check that out for sure.
It sounds like it's totally at my alley. I'm actually

(39:50):
a dog that I've not heard of it. Don't be
a dog. I'm I'm a little dog, all right, come back. So,
like you said, Marilyn Bardsley confirmed from one of the
investigators that Francis Sweeney was gay Lord Sondheim. But that
does not mean that Francis Sweeney was the Torso murderer.
Although again, like you were saying, if you look at

(40:11):
a picture of Francis Sweeney, that's totally the Torso murderer. Well,
another stuff, you know, the head trauma, the medical training.
He was a surgeon in residence at Saint Alexis Hospital.
His career deteriorated because of his drinking right around the
time the first murderer victims started showing up to Yeah,
he also had a deal apparently with a local mortuary

(40:35):
where they would give him bodies to practice surgery on,
which would explain maybe the kill room or the dismemberment room.
He would have a place to go, uh and dispose
of these bodies without you know, they're being a big
blood trail, you know, right, I mean, this is a
place where it wouldn't seem weird that somebody was decapitating
a body or draining the body of all of its blood.

(40:57):
Like that's exactly the kind of place. And that didn't
turn up until years later, And it was thanks to
a guy named James Baddall who's written some books on
it um on the Torso murderers, And he interviewed one
of the one of the early investigators and found out
that he had privileges at that funeral home and started
to put two and two together. Yeah, there was one

(41:18):
a couple of other things. Um, he did send taunting
letters to Elliott Ness for years. Uh. Some one of
them was signed F. E. Sweeney paranoidal Nemesis. But was
this after he had been kidnapped by Ness? Yes, so
he knew Ness by this time. And he also didn't
say like I didn't you didn't catch me anything like that.

(41:41):
I get the impression it was more like, you didn't
catch the guy. You're terrible at this, everybody hates you.
But still taunting stuff. But yes, this would have been
after he was kidnapped, because this was up into like
the forties. Yeah, that's true. Uh. And then I think
to me, one of the biggest red flags pointing in
the direction of enye is I mentioned a nearer victim

(42:02):
earlier in the episode. This was a transient. His name
was E. Meal Fronick, and he was living in Cleveland
and thirty four and one day he was lured into
a doctor's office on the second floor along Broadway Avenue
and the doctor said, here, I'll give you some shoes
and a meal if you come up here. Frown. It
goes up, eats a little bit of the meal, starts

(42:24):
to feel lightheaded, and bolts and makes it to a
train car and basically passes out for three days, and
then later on I think in night was being interviewed
after the cops here about this old Morello goes to
pick come up, and they narrowed down the area to
fifty streets along Broadway, where Sweeney had a doctor's office. Yeah,

(42:49):
he couldn't specifically say that was the place where it happened,
and that that author James but All says that he
thinks he came in the back way rather than the
front way where they were showing him. Um and and
but he did say that's he had an office right there,
right around that area, so uh, and he was there
at the time. So I mean that's some pretty serious

(43:09):
circumstantial stuff. But the thing is there's no smoking gun,
there's no anything that says definitively and we probably will
never have anything definitively it says it's Francis Sweeney. So
we've kind of reached this point, this plateau where it's
like you just basically choose a side. Either you know
it's Francis Sweeney or it wasn't. And some people who

(43:30):
say no, I don't think it was Francis Sweeney makes
some pretty good cases. Um, there were other similar murders
in the area starting in the twenties and going into
the fifties. Um, that that really bore a lot of
resemblance to the Torso murders. Um. And then other people say, okay, um,
I feel the opposite of that, where there's like I

(43:53):
don't think Rose Wallace was one of the victims. I
think there were multiple killers doing similar ish stuff, maybe
copycats even, um, And that it wasn't all just one person. Um, there,
there's there's, there's is, and there's probably always going to
be a lot of competing theories about what, you know,
who is responsible. Yeah. The one theory that it wasn't

(44:15):
him that I don't buy. Did you say where he
was living in Sandusky? No? Huh? All right, So here's
the deal. He Francis Sweeney was apparently enrolled or checked
into the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Sandusky, which I
guess is an old like a veteran's home, right, Yeah, yeah,

(44:36):
I think yes, So that's what it seems like. So
he was checked in there, and one of the reasons
that people say he didn't do it was because he
was checked in in this place in Sandusky, like a
couple hours away, and I just don't buy that. They
later came out and said, you know, they could come
and go as they pleased. He could easily have if
he didn't want to get caught be committing these murders
in Cleveland and then going back to Sandusky as well. Right, Yeah,

(45:00):
because he was there voluntarily, so he would not have
been watched or monitored, or they wouldn't have kept tabs
on him. And when they figured this out, it was
years later, so no one would have been able to
recall where he was or wasn't on a certain day.
You know, I think it's Sweeney. Yeah, I think there's
because of this picture, but there's so there were other

(45:20):
murders in the area that you know, it could have
still been Sweeney. To Some people connect the Black Dolly
a murder to it because there was a taunting note
that the cops got that said the cops can rest
easy because the killers moved to sunny California. Um, but
if you look at the Black Dolly murder, there's really
not a lot of resemblance between the two. Um. The

(45:42):
ms are really rather different, so that's probably not the case. Well,
if you want to know more about the Cleveland, Torso murders.
There's a whole rabbit hole on the internet and in books,
including one by James Bidal and another by Maryland Bardsley.
UM that you can follow, and uh, if you do,
good luck with that. Since I said good luck with that,

(46:03):
it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this.
Uh we we did not help out this, gentleman. Okay, Hey, guys,
love the podcast. I've been listening for the past several years.
I've almost gotten through. The whole library has some left
from apparently. I work as a music musical instrument repair

(46:24):
technician at a local university and independently in Greensboro, North Carolina,
so I usually listen while I work on repadding clarinets
and cleaning two butts. Nice cool job. Anyway, I was
listening to your show this evening on Korean fan death,
remember that or work? We talked about it. I don't
think it was all about that, but it was. It
was a short stuff about it. Was it? Okay? I

(46:47):
remember that being like a top ten or something. Anyway,
immediately thought, finally a way that I can find some
legit reason for getting rid of the fan in our room.
My fiance, Abby loves having a fan and that noise
when you go to sleep. It's something I can deal with,
but honestly I do not care for it. So when
I finally got home, I told Abby, hey, we got
a serious episode. Stuff you should know we should listen to.

(47:09):
I started the episode without pre screening and trusted you
guys would pull through for me. Needless to say, an
interesting episode, but I did not get the confirmation bias
I was looking for. Instead, we had a good laugh
in a great evening, looking forward to getting the book,
want you guys the best, and looking forward to anymore.
And that is from John Goodman. Holy cow, John Goodman,

(47:30):
we love you. In the Coen Brothers stuff. His name
is John good I'm gonna plug his business. Goodman Custom
would winds. If you're in the Greensboro, North Carolina area
and you need that clarinet repadded, go to John Goodman
for sure. And even if you're not, it's probably worth
the drive, right, I mean, we're else you gonna do it, Charlotte, Yeah,
come on keep back now. Well, thanks a lot, John Goodman.

(47:51):
We appreciate that. Sorry we couldn't help you output at
least you enjoyed the episode and ultimately in that what
counts Yes. If you want to get in touch of this,
like John Goodman did, you can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For

(48:12):
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
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