November 11, 2025 • 20 mins
One of histories most famous crimefighters takes on a serial killer, but will it push the untouchable Eliot Ness over the edge?
Thank you The Cleveland Press, The Plain Dealer, history.com, Cleveland.com, CrimeLibrary.org, The Absolute Crime and Biographics YouTube channels and Wikipedia for information contributing to today’s story.
Written by Frederick Crook - check out our other collaboration WRAITHWORKS - Wraithworks at Amazon https://www.amzn.com/dp/B07HXNCW4L (audiobook narrated by John Lordan) Also avaible on iTunes: https://apple.co/2OFXb8L
Do you have any comments, or a case you’d like to suggest? You’ll find a comment form and case submission link at LordanArts.com.
This is not intended to act as a means of proving or disproving anything related to the investigation. It is a conversation about the current known facts and theories being discussed. Everyone directly or indirectly referred to is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
LordanArts 2025
Thank you The Cleveland Press, The Plain Dealer, history.com, Cleveland.com, CrimeLibrary.org, The Absolute Crime and Biographics YouTube channels and Wikipedia for information contributing to today’s story.
Written by Frederick Crook - check out our other collaboration WRAITHWORKS - Wraithworks at Amazon https://www.amzn.com/dp/B07HXNCW4L (audiobook narrated by John Lordan) Also avaible on iTunes: https://apple.co/2OFXb8L
Do you have any comments, or a case you’d like to suggest? You’ll find a comment form and case submission link at LordanArts.com.
This is not intended to act as a means of proving or disproving anything related to the investigation. It is a conversation about the current known facts and theories being discussed. Everyone directly or indirectly referred to is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
LordanArts 2025
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
The name elliot Ness may not sound familiar to the
younger generations of Americans. For the rest of us, it's
a name that invokes the idea of unwavering dedication to
law enforcement. Elliot Ness would become most well known for
his work to bring down infamous gangster Al Capone during
the Prohibition era, a story fictionalized in the Kevin Costner
(00:41):
film The Untouchables, and elliot Ness's view the law, whether
the public agreed with it or not, was to be followed,
and Capone was just one of many criminals targeted by
this incorruptible crime fighter. I'm John Lorden, and today we're
looking into another of elliot Ness's seriously mysterious case, a
(01:01):
serial killer known as the Butcher of Kingsbury. Run Ness
was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April nineteenth, nineteen oh three,
arriving to the Ness family as a late addition. His
next youngest sibling was ten years older. His parents, Peter
Ness and Emma King, were of Norwegian descent, and the
couple ran a bakery in the city. As he grew
(01:23):
to a teenager, he attended the Christian Fenger Academy High School,
and he got very good grades. He would later attend
the University of Chicago, where he studied political science and business,
graduating with a bachelor's degree in nineteen twenty five. He
went to work as an investigator at a credit company,
at first digging into the financial histories of people trying
to secure lines of credit. This is every bit as
(01:46):
boring as it sounds, so Elliott kept an eye out
for something more interesting. He had a brother in law
named Alexander Jamie, who worked for the Bureau of Investigation,
the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI.
He put forth the idea that Elliott should pursue a
career in law enforcement. So Elliot returned to school to
(02:07):
further his education in criminology, and once done, secured a
position with the US Treasury Department. In nineteen twenty six.
He would eventually find his way into what was called
the Bureau of Prohibition Chicago Division for those that may
be unfamiliar. Prohibition was an amendment to the Constitution of
the United States that made the production, sale, and transportation
(02:28):
of alcoholic beverages illegal in all fifty states. It's largely
looked back upon as a silly idea, since the obvious
route that many Americans took was to secretly make beer, wine,
and higher proof alcohols bypassing any regulatory measures that would
preserve the quality or safety of these products. At the
same time, the prices shot up due to scarcity and
(02:52):
the unending demand, effectively creating a large and lucrative black market.
Men like the gangster al Capone were made wealthy in
part by running underground bars called speakeasies and overseeing the
production and distribution of alcohol throughout the city of Chicago.
Silly or not, the eighteenth Amendment was effective from nineteen
(03:12):
twenty until it was repealed in nineteen thirty three by
the twenty first Amendment. During this thirteen year dry spell,
Elliot Ness would make a name for himself and the
men on his squad, who the newspapers labeled the Untouchables.
This group was said to be above reproach, incorruptible by bribes,
and did their jobs despite being threatened with death. Ness
(03:34):
and his Untouchables carried out raids on breweries and warehouses,
shutting down the facilities and destroying barrels of product. Ness's
exploits were dramatized, if not glorified in books on television
and movie screens. But when prohibition was put to an end,
the disbandment of his Untouchables and the Bureau of Prohibition
(03:54):
quickly followed. Ness was transferred to Ohio, where dedicated moonshiners
still attempted to duck the tax on alcohol to make
a living. Ness spent a few years going after illegal
distilleries in that state, as well as Tennessee and Kentucky. Eventually,
the mayor of Cleveland offered him another job, that being
entitled the Safety Director. This put him in charge of
(04:16):
both the police and fire departments, and he could focus
his energies on local gangsters and cracking down on juvenile delinquency.
Though there was much more to it. Ness's reputation and
tenacity went into this new position with success. Initially, however,
the city of Cleveland beheld an evil that even a
man like Ness had never dreamt of Encountering a few
(04:38):
years prior to Elliot Ness's arrival, the city had been
turned into a hunting ground for a predator, a murderer
so determined to inflict bodily harm in the most gruesome
manners possible that dismembered pieces of their victims were often
all that there was to find. In the end, those
victims were largely unidentifiable, and it took investigators a lot
(04:58):
of time and effort to make sense of the pieces
left behind. The first factor tying these victims together was proximity.
Their remains were found in Cleveland's poor district called Kingsbury Run.
The hard economic fallout from the Great Depression still impacted
the inhabitants of this shanty town, where once there were factories.
(05:19):
Amongst the trees, with railroad tracks weaving between and crossing
over themselves. Only the rust colored scars remained, separating rows
of single roomed wooden boxes that lacked windows and sometimes
even doors. It was a chilly morning on Wednesday, September fifth,
nineteen thirty four when the first victim was found along
(05:39):
the shores of Lake Erie. A man was simply out
walking looking for driftwood to burn, when his eyes encountered
a strange object sticking out of the sand. He initially
thought that it was a tree trunk, but quickly noticed
that something was not right. Though the object was dark
in color and clearly resembled the color of wood, it
(05:59):
wasn't He had found human legs sticking out of the sand.
Detectives retrieved the remains, which turned out to be the
bottom half of a woman severed from the rest of
herself with an effective cutting tool and considerable skill. The
flesh was stained red from some sort of chemical treatment.
There was no way of identifying the victim, and though
(06:21):
the case was kept active, it would grow cold quickly.
Just over a year later, two Kingsbury Run boys were
playing when they came across two more victims. Neither corpse
was clothed, and both had been decapitated. When detectives arrived,
they found no signs of struggle and no blood around
the scene, meaning they had likely been killed somewhere else.
(06:44):
The victims appeared to be male, however, both had also
been castrated, Their wrists had been tied and their skin
tanned to the color of oak using another strange chemical.
Near the discarded remains, police found a bucket of an
unknown solution and blood soaked clothes. Only one of those
two victims was identified. He was Edward and Rossi, a
(07:07):
twenty eight year old man who lived nearby. Sergeant Bernard Wolf,
in command of the homicide squad, interviewed in Drossi's parents,
who said that an irate man had come to their
house a few nights prior, threatening to kill their son,
Edward if he didn't stay away from the man's wife.
They could not give a very clear description as the
encounter was brief. The city coroner A. J. Pierce determined
(07:29):
that Androsi had been dead for approximately four days. The
other victim was much more decomposed and had been dead
three weeks at the time of discovery. Whomever placed the
victims where they were found must have carried them there,
as the area was at the bottom of a decline
that had no access by vehicle. While Edward and Drossi
was well known to the police and had a criminal
(07:50):
record for dealing drugs and getting into brawls at bars,
none of his friends or family members knew of any
enemy of Edwards that would have gone to such lengths
to kill him. The murderer remained at large, and at
the time, no one tied this double murder to the
woman killed a year prior. However, a new factor was
going to come into play. Could the man that help
(08:12):
bring down one of history's most infamous gangsters stop a killer.
It was December of nineteen thirty five, when Elliot Ness
(08:33):
took the job as safety director for the City of Cleveland.
His new position was more of a desk job than
his previous work, but much larger in scope. As he
began to reshape the City of Cleveland's law enforcement and
fire departments, he would soon learn about the true evil
living in the city, which he oversaw. On January twenty sixth,
nineteen thirty six, two baskets were found abandoned in a
(08:56):
snow covered yard of a factory. Inside them, parts of
a female were found, all wrapped in newspaper. The body
was far from complete, and of course the victim was unidentifiable,
but a few weeks later, as snow began to melt,
the rest of her body, all except for the woman's head,
was eventually found. Police identified her by fingerprints. Her name
(09:20):
Laurence Pallillo. She was a known alcoholic with two failed marriages,
and had turned a prostitution for a living. June fifth,
nineteen thirty six, another headless body was found dumped near
the rapid transit tracks in Kingsbury Run. This one was
male and he had numerous tattoos. A heart with an
arrow had been tattooed on one calf, while the other
(09:42):
had the name Jigs. The initials WCG had been inked
onto an arm, along with an anchor and a flag.
The other arm displayed the names Helen and Paul with
the picture of a dove. Later, the victim's head was
found stuffed inside a pair of pants, most likely belonging
to the victim. One might think that a body soil
marked would be quickly identified, especially considering that tattoos were
(10:06):
far more rare at the time, but that just wasn't
the case. Desperate the coroner's office took a death mask
casting from the victim and placed it on display. People
were welcome to come to the coroner's office to view it,
with the hopes that someone could put a name to
the man. However, he remained and still remains unidentified. With
(10:28):
no one of authority on his heels, the mad Butcher
of Kingsbury Run, as he was so called in the newspapers,
continued his sporadic rampage. Two more dead men were discovered
soon after the tattooed man. To this day, neither have
been identified. By this time, it was the butcher who
seemed untouchable elliot Ness relied on his most experienced detectives
(10:49):
to gather what clues they could, but the body parts
and their differing states of decomposition muddled the picture. Whoever
this butcher of Kingsbury run was, they had a place
to take the victims too, do whatever he wanted to them,
and even possibly stored them for a time before dumping them.
The remains seemed to suddenly appear too unfortunate passers by.
(11:12):
Was this something else that the butcher took joy in?
Did he read about himself in the paper and want
to keep taunting the Cleveland Police department. After a public
forum that brought Cleveland police detectives and the press into
the same room to discuss the case and share facts,
Mayor Burton was more than displeased. Article after article had
(11:33):
been published about the murders frightening the people of Cleveland.
Mayor Burton ordered elliot Ness to take direct control of
the investigation. The Chief of Police contacted Detective Peter Marillo
and instructed him to assist Ness. Marillo was a seventeen
year veteran of the force, a Ukrainian by birth that
spoke several European languages. It was hoped that he could
(11:55):
glean more information from the populace of Kingsbury Run, as
many of them were US European. Ness built up a
squad of homicide detectives around him, very much like he
did with the Untouchables. It is said that Marilla was
so obsessed with the Butcher case that he even patrolled
the streets of Kingsbury Run for several nights, dressed only
in long John's to bait the perpetrator. Nonetheless, the Butcher
(12:19):
didn't bite, and through nineteen thirty six he remained out
of Ness's reach. In February of nineteen thirty seven, the
remains of a woman were found on the beach of
Lake Erie. The following June, a sack of bones was
discovered beneath a bridge. The coroner discovered that the sack
contained the remains of one victim, an African American woman
that had been killed at least a year before discovery.
(12:41):
She was later identified by dental records as Rose Wallace,
a resident of Cleveland. In July of nineteen thirty seven,
another headless male victim was dragged out of the Cuyahoga River,
but he was not identified. Ness, Marillo and the rest
of the butcher of the Kingsbury Run detail were frustrated endlessly.
(13:02):
There seemed to be no pattern to the murders, and
no one was safe from his clutches. Ness was used
to tracking down an operation that left Leeds tracks a
trail of evidence to follow. Not the butcher. This monster
was unpredictable and left no trace of his deeds beyond
the body parts. In May of nineteen thirty eight, Ness's
(13:22):
attention was drawn to a particular suspect. The man was
someone outside the expected profile of a murderer, but yet
Ness became convinced that he may have found his man.
He decided to try to break the man down to
a confession. So driven and desperate, Ness decided to do
the last thing that you could imagine, break the law itself.
(13:45):
He and his men took their suspect into custody, but
they weren't taking him to jail. The interrogation was not official,
not documented, and certainly not legal. For three days, the
man Ness had abducted was kept in a hotel and
put under guard. The identity of this suspect was a
mystery in itself until recent times. His name was doctor
Francis Edward Sweeney. Sweeney, it is said, had been a
(14:09):
long time abuser of alcohol and drugs, and he was
judged to be schizophrenic. He had a reputation for violent behavior.
He was so out of control that his wife left
him in nineteen thirty four. Ness had been pointed in
the doctor's direction by a homeless man that had come
forward to say that a man fitting doctor Sweeney's description
had come to him one night and offered him a
(14:30):
place to stay, a meal, and a pair of shoes.
Thinking that the man was genuine and kind, the homeless
man went with him and was taken to a facility
that was a doctor's office, complete with an operating room
and an adjoining mortuary. This kindly doctor brought the homeless
man some food, but as he ate, he began to
(14:50):
feel lightheaded. Immediately he suspected that the food had been drugged,
so he fled. During those first three days in the hotel,
doctor Sweeney could not even leave the bed. Slowly, away
from the influences of drugs and alcohol, he dried out.
A polygraph machine was brought to the room when the
suspect finally became coherent and the interrogation began Despite an
(15:12):
intense standoff between Ness, his investigators and doctor Sweeney that
lasted another four days. The only thing that hinted that
the doctor was their man was the polygraph machine evidence.
Even to this day, this type of analysis is unreliable
at best and inadmissible in a court of law. In
the end, doctor Sweeney was reluctantly released, convinced that he
(15:35):
was right, but unable to pressure doctor Sweeney any further.
As Sweeney had a cousin in Congress, Ness focused his
temper on Kingsbury run itself in true untouchable style, only
on a much larger scale. Ness led a raid into Kingsbury.
His men arrested anyone they could find with a criminal
record of any kind and hauled them into jail. This
(15:57):
was approximately sixty three individuals. Once done, the rest of
the populace was run off, and Ness's men took down
the shanties, burning the remains to ashes and removing the
destitute neighborhood entirely. Of course, this drew public criticism in
the newspapers. Not satisfied with that, Ness twisted the law further,
(16:17):
using the excuse of fire inspections. A fire warden would
accompany police detectives as they would force their way into
homes under the guise of fire prevention. This practice was
quickly shut down when the story of Ness's overreach hit
the papers. In the summer of nineteen thirty nine, another
suspect came forward and actually confessed to the murder of
(16:38):
Florence Polillo. Frank Dolazol, a resident of Cleveland, stated that
he had dismembered Polilo in his bathtub. Cuyahoga County Sheriff
Martin O'Donnell and Coroner S. R. Gerber were proponents of
Dolazol's involvement in not just her killing, but all the
others that could be attributed to the Butcher of Kingsbury Run. However,
(16:58):
it was determined by psycho chiatrist that he suffered from
mental illness. His accounts of the murders changed multiple times,
and no physical evidence ever tied Frank to the crimes.
He would not be charged. By nineteen forty there were
at least twelve victims of the Butcher of Kingsbury Run,
though many believed that the butcher operated elsewhere as well,
(17:20):
giving him a tallly of approximately forty. Rillo became focused
on the railways that ran through town. Thinking that the
butcher preyed upon hoboes, he surmised that most of the victims,
those that were unidentified, were not Clevelanders at all, but
had come in by rail from points unknown. Rillo was
eventually allowed to play the part of a hobo and
(17:41):
ride throughout the regions in box cars. While a valiant
and risky idea, sadly nothing came of it. He returned
to Cleveland after a while with nothing new to add
to the investigation. The stress of this job, mostly the
investigation into the Butcher of Kingsbury Run had an ironic twist.
Elliot Ness, who had destroyed an unknown number of casks, barrels,
(18:05):
and bottles of alcohol in his prohibition days, had turned
to the substance himself. He had become a raging alcoholic,
leading to several failed marriages and an automobile accident where
he fled the scene on foot. The Butcher of Kingsbury
Run seemingly escaped his grasp, never being identified. Of course,
(18:27):
Ness was fully convinced that doctor Sweeney had been his man.
It said that doctor Sweeney sent Ness postcards and letters
for years, all was reminding Ness of the incident at
the hotel. Could it be that these taunts were proof
of his guilt? All this proved to be far too
much for elliot Ness. He died of a heart attack
(18:47):
in nineteen fifty seven at the age of fifty four.
Sweeney bounced in and out of psychiatric hospitals until his
death in nineteen sixty four. As for Detective Peter Morillo,
he continued his pursuit of the butcher until his retirement
from the Cleveland Police Department in nineteen forty three. He
was never convinced that doctor Francis Sweeney was a viable suspect.
(19:11):
To this day, the butcher of Kingsbury Run has never
been identified. Do you have any comments or a case
you'd like to suggest. You'll find a comment form and
case submission link at lordnarts dot com. Thank you, the
Cleveland Press, the Plaindealer, History dot com, Cleveland dot com,
Crimelibrary dot org, the Absolute Crime and Biographics YouTube channels,
(19:35):
and Wikipedia for information contributing to today's story. This episode
was written by Frederick Crook, edited by John Lordon, and
produced by Lord Narts. If you appreciated today's episode, please
check out the novel Wraithworks another collaboration between Frederick Crook
and myself. It's available in hard coffee or audiobook format.
You can find more information about Wraithworks at Lordnarts dot
(19:56):
com or by searching for it on Amazon. Thank you
to our audience here for the live recording session hosted
on the YouTube channel Lord and Arts Studio two. Special
thanks to seriously Mysterious financial supporters Robert Martin, B. Jones
and Susie. Most of all, thank you for listening. I'm
John Lord. Please join me again next week for another
(20:19):
case I know you'll find seriously mysterious
The name elliot Ness may not sound familiar to the
younger generations of Americans. For the rest of us, it's
a name that invokes the idea of unwavering dedication to
law enforcement. Elliot Ness would become most well known for
his work to bring down infamous gangster Al Capone during
the Prohibition era, a story fictionalized in the Kevin Costner
(00:41):
film The Untouchables, and elliot Ness's view the law, whether
the public agreed with it or not, was to be followed,
and Capone was just one of many criminals targeted by
this incorruptible crime fighter. I'm John Lorden, and today we're
looking into another of elliot Ness's seriously mysterious case, a
(01:01):
serial killer known as the Butcher of Kingsbury. Run Ness
was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April nineteenth, nineteen oh three,
arriving to the Ness family as a late addition. His
next youngest sibling was ten years older. His parents, Peter
Ness and Emma King, were of Norwegian descent, and the
couple ran a bakery in the city. As he grew
(01:23):
to a teenager, he attended the Christian Fenger Academy High School,
and he got very good grades. He would later attend
the University of Chicago, where he studied political science and business,
graduating with a bachelor's degree in nineteen twenty five. He
went to work as an investigator at a credit company,
at first digging into the financial histories of people trying
to secure lines of credit. This is every bit as
(01:46):
boring as it sounds, so Elliott kept an eye out
for something more interesting. He had a brother in law
named Alexander Jamie, who worked for the Bureau of Investigation,
the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI.
He put forth the idea that Elliott should pursue a
career in law enforcement. So Elliot returned to school to
(02:07):
further his education in criminology, and once done, secured a
position with the US Treasury Department. In nineteen twenty six.
He would eventually find his way into what was called
the Bureau of Prohibition Chicago Division for those that may
be unfamiliar. Prohibition was an amendment to the Constitution of
the United States that made the production, sale, and transportation
(02:28):
of alcoholic beverages illegal in all fifty states. It's largely
looked back upon as a silly idea, since the obvious
route that many Americans took was to secretly make beer, wine,
and higher proof alcohols bypassing any regulatory measures that would
preserve the quality or safety of these products. At the
same time, the prices shot up due to scarcity and
(02:52):
the unending demand, effectively creating a large and lucrative black market.
Men like the gangster al Capone were made wealthy in
part by running underground bars called speakeasies and overseeing the
production and distribution of alcohol throughout the city of Chicago.
Silly or not, the eighteenth Amendment was effective from nineteen
(03:12):
twenty until it was repealed in nineteen thirty three by
the twenty first Amendment. During this thirteen year dry spell,
Elliot Ness would make a name for himself and the
men on his squad, who the newspapers labeled the Untouchables.
This group was said to be above reproach, incorruptible by bribes,
and did their jobs despite being threatened with death. Ness
(03:34):
and his Untouchables carried out raids on breweries and warehouses,
shutting down the facilities and destroying barrels of product. Ness's
exploits were dramatized, if not glorified in books on television
and movie screens. But when prohibition was put to an end,
the disbandment of his Untouchables and the Bureau of Prohibition
(03:54):
quickly followed. Ness was transferred to Ohio, where dedicated moonshiners
still attempted to duck the tax on alcohol to make
a living. Ness spent a few years going after illegal
distilleries in that state, as well as Tennessee and Kentucky. Eventually,
the mayor of Cleveland offered him another job, that being
entitled the Safety Director. This put him in charge of
(04:16):
both the police and fire departments, and he could focus
his energies on local gangsters and cracking down on juvenile delinquency.
Though there was much more to it. Ness's reputation and
tenacity went into this new position with success. Initially, however,
the city of Cleveland beheld an evil that even a
man like Ness had never dreamt of Encountering a few
(04:38):
years prior to Elliot Ness's arrival, the city had been
turned into a hunting ground for a predator, a murderer
so determined to inflict bodily harm in the most gruesome
manners possible that dismembered pieces of their victims were often
all that there was to find. In the end, those
victims were largely unidentifiable, and it took investigators a lot
(04:58):
of time and effort to make sense of the pieces
left behind. The first factor tying these victims together was proximity.
Their remains were found in Cleveland's poor district called Kingsbury Run.
The hard economic fallout from the Great Depression still impacted
the inhabitants of this shanty town, where once there were factories.
(05:19):
Amongst the trees, with railroad tracks weaving between and crossing
over themselves. Only the rust colored scars remained, separating rows
of single roomed wooden boxes that lacked windows and sometimes
even doors. It was a chilly morning on Wednesday, September fifth,
nineteen thirty four when the first victim was found along
(05:39):
the shores of Lake Erie. A man was simply out
walking looking for driftwood to burn, when his eyes encountered
a strange object sticking out of the sand. He initially
thought that it was a tree trunk, but quickly noticed
that something was not right. Though the object was dark
in color and clearly resembled the color of wood, it
(05:59):
wasn't He had found human legs sticking out of the sand.
Detectives retrieved the remains, which turned out to be the
bottom half of a woman severed from the rest of
herself with an effective cutting tool and considerable skill. The
flesh was stained red from some sort of chemical treatment.
There was no way of identifying the victim, and though
(06:21):
the case was kept active, it would grow cold quickly.
Just over a year later, two Kingsbury Run boys were
playing when they came across two more victims. Neither corpse
was clothed, and both had been decapitated. When detectives arrived,
they found no signs of struggle and no blood around
the scene, meaning they had likely been killed somewhere else.
(06:44):
The victims appeared to be male, however, both had also
been castrated, Their wrists had been tied and their skin
tanned to the color of oak using another strange chemical.
Near the discarded remains, police found a bucket of an
unknown solution and blood soaked clothes. Only one of those
two victims was identified. He was Edward and Rossi, a
(07:07):
twenty eight year old man who lived nearby. Sergeant Bernard Wolf,
in command of the homicide squad, interviewed in Drossi's parents,
who said that an irate man had come to their
house a few nights prior, threatening to kill their son,
Edward if he didn't stay away from the man's wife.
They could not give a very clear description as the
encounter was brief. The city coroner A. J. Pierce determined
(07:29):
that Androsi had been dead for approximately four days. The
other victim was much more decomposed and had been dead
three weeks at the time of discovery. Whomever placed the
victims where they were found must have carried them there,
as the area was at the bottom of a decline
that had no access by vehicle. While Edward and Drossi
was well known to the police and had a criminal
(07:50):
record for dealing drugs and getting into brawls at bars,
none of his friends or family members knew of any
enemy of Edwards that would have gone to such lengths
to kill him. The murderer remained at large, and at
the time, no one tied this double murder to the
woman killed a year prior. However, a new factor was
going to come into play. Could the man that help
(08:12):
bring down one of history's most infamous gangsters stop a killer.
It was December of nineteen thirty five, when Elliot Ness
(08:33):
took the job as safety director for the City of Cleveland.
His new position was more of a desk job than
his previous work, but much larger in scope. As he
began to reshape the City of Cleveland's law enforcement and
fire departments, he would soon learn about the true evil
living in the city, which he oversaw. On January twenty sixth,
nineteen thirty six, two baskets were found abandoned in a
(08:56):
snow covered yard of a factory. Inside them, parts of
a female were found, all wrapped in newspaper. The body
was far from complete, and of course the victim was unidentifiable,
but a few weeks later, as snow began to melt,
the rest of her body, all except for the woman's head,
was eventually found. Police identified her by fingerprints. Her name
(09:20):
Laurence Pallillo. She was a known alcoholic with two failed marriages,
and had turned a prostitution for a living. June fifth,
nineteen thirty six, another headless body was found dumped near
the rapid transit tracks in Kingsbury Run. This one was
male and he had numerous tattoos. A heart with an
arrow had been tattooed on one calf, while the other
(09:42):
had the name Jigs. The initials WCG had been inked
onto an arm, along with an anchor and a flag.
The other arm displayed the names Helen and Paul with
the picture of a dove. Later, the victim's head was
found stuffed inside a pair of pants, most likely belonging
to the victim. One might think that a body soil
marked would be quickly identified, especially considering that tattoos were
(10:06):
far more rare at the time, but that just wasn't
the case. Desperate the coroner's office took a death mask
casting from the victim and placed it on display. People
were welcome to come to the coroner's office to view it,
with the hopes that someone could put a name to
the man. However, he remained and still remains unidentified. With
(10:28):
no one of authority on his heels, the mad Butcher
of Kingsbury Run, as he was so called in the newspapers,
continued his sporadic rampage. Two more dead men were discovered
soon after the tattooed man. To this day, neither have
been identified. By this time, it was the butcher who
seemed untouchable elliot Ness relied on his most experienced detectives
(10:49):
to gather what clues they could, but the body parts
and their differing states of decomposition muddled the picture. Whoever
this butcher of Kingsbury run was, they had a place
to take the victims too, do whatever he wanted to them,
and even possibly stored them for a time before dumping them.
The remains seemed to suddenly appear too unfortunate passers by.
(11:12):
Was this something else that the butcher took joy in?
Did he read about himself in the paper and want
to keep taunting the Cleveland Police department. After a public
forum that brought Cleveland police detectives and the press into
the same room to discuss the case and share facts,
Mayor Burton was more than displeased. Article after article had
(11:33):
been published about the murders frightening the people of Cleveland.
Mayor Burton ordered elliot Ness to take direct control of
the investigation. The Chief of Police contacted Detective Peter Marillo
and instructed him to assist Ness. Marillo was a seventeen
year veteran of the force, a Ukrainian by birth that
spoke several European languages. It was hoped that he could
(11:55):
glean more information from the populace of Kingsbury Run, as
many of them were US European. Ness built up a
squad of homicide detectives around him, very much like he
did with the Untouchables. It is said that Marilla was
so obsessed with the Butcher case that he even patrolled
the streets of Kingsbury Run for several nights, dressed only
in long John's to bait the perpetrator. Nonetheless, the Butcher
(12:19):
didn't bite, and through nineteen thirty six he remained out
of Ness's reach. In February of nineteen thirty seven, the
remains of a woman were found on the beach of
Lake Erie. The following June, a sack of bones was
discovered beneath a bridge. The coroner discovered that the sack
contained the remains of one victim, an African American woman
that had been killed at least a year before discovery.
(12:41):
She was later identified by dental records as Rose Wallace,
a resident of Cleveland. In July of nineteen thirty seven,
another headless male victim was dragged out of the Cuyahoga River,
but he was not identified. Ness, Marillo and the rest
of the butcher of the Kingsbury Run detail were frustrated endlessly.
(13:02):
There seemed to be no pattern to the murders, and
no one was safe from his clutches. Ness was used
to tracking down an operation that left Leeds tracks a
trail of evidence to follow. Not the butcher. This monster
was unpredictable and left no trace of his deeds beyond
the body parts. In May of nineteen thirty eight, Ness's
(13:22):
attention was drawn to a particular suspect. The man was
someone outside the expected profile of a murderer, but yet
Ness became convinced that he may have found his man.
He decided to try to break the man down to
a confession. So driven and desperate, Ness decided to do
the last thing that you could imagine, break the law itself.
(13:45):
He and his men took their suspect into custody, but
they weren't taking him to jail. The interrogation was not official,
not documented, and certainly not legal. For three days, the
man Ness had abducted was kept in a hotel and
put under guard. The identity of this suspect was a
mystery in itself until recent times. His name was doctor
Francis Edward Sweeney. Sweeney, it is said, had been a
(14:09):
long time abuser of alcohol and drugs, and he was
judged to be schizophrenic. He had a reputation for violent behavior.
He was so out of control that his wife left
him in nineteen thirty four. Ness had been pointed in
the doctor's direction by a homeless man that had come
forward to say that a man fitting doctor Sweeney's description
had come to him one night and offered him a
(14:30):
place to stay, a meal, and a pair of shoes.
Thinking that the man was genuine and kind, the homeless
man went with him and was taken to a facility
that was a doctor's office, complete with an operating room
and an adjoining mortuary. This kindly doctor brought the homeless
man some food, but as he ate, he began to
(14:50):
feel lightheaded. Immediately he suspected that the food had been drugged,
so he fled. During those first three days in the hotel,
doctor Sweeney could not even leave the bed. Slowly, away
from the influences of drugs and alcohol, he dried out.
A polygraph machine was brought to the room when the
suspect finally became coherent and the interrogation began Despite an
(15:12):
intense standoff between Ness, his investigators and doctor Sweeney that
lasted another four days. The only thing that hinted that
the doctor was their man was the polygraph machine evidence.
Even to this day, this type of analysis is unreliable
at best and inadmissible in a court of law. In
the end, doctor Sweeney was reluctantly released, convinced that he
(15:35):
was right, but unable to pressure doctor Sweeney any further.
As Sweeney had a cousin in Congress, Ness focused his
temper on Kingsbury run itself in true untouchable style, only
on a much larger scale. Ness led a raid into Kingsbury.
His men arrested anyone they could find with a criminal
record of any kind and hauled them into jail. This
(15:57):
was approximately sixty three individuals. Once done, the rest of
the populace was run off, and Ness's men took down
the shanties, burning the remains to ashes and removing the
destitute neighborhood entirely. Of course, this drew public criticism in
the newspapers. Not satisfied with that, Ness twisted the law further,
(16:17):
using the excuse of fire inspections. A fire warden would
accompany police detectives as they would force their way into
homes under the guise of fire prevention. This practice was
quickly shut down when the story of Ness's overreach hit
the papers. In the summer of nineteen thirty nine, another
suspect came forward and actually confessed to the murder of
(16:38):
Florence Polillo. Frank Dolazol, a resident of Cleveland, stated that
he had dismembered Polilo in his bathtub. Cuyahoga County Sheriff
Martin O'Donnell and Coroner S. R. Gerber were proponents of
Dolazol's involvement in not just her killing, but all the
others that could be attributed to the Butcher of Kingsbury Run. However,
(16:58):
it was determined by psycho chiatrist that he suffered from
mental illness. His accounts of the murders changed multiple times,
and no physical evidence ever tied Frank to the crimes.
He would not be charged. By nineteen forty there were
at least twelve victims of the Butcher of Kingsbury Run,
though many believed that the butcher operated elsewhere as well,
(17:20):
giving him a tallly of approximately forty. Rillo became focused
on the railways that ran through town. Thinking that the
butcher preyed upon hoboes, he surmised that most of the victims,
those that were unidentified, were not Clevelanders at all, but
had come in by rail from points unknown. Rillo was
eventually allowed to play the part of a hobo and
(17:41):
ride throughout the regions in box cars. While a valiant
and risky idea, sadly nothing came of it. He returned
to Cleveland after a while with nothing new to add
to the investigation. The stress of this job, mostly the
investigation into the Butcher of Kingsbury Run had an ironic twist.
Elliot Ness, who had destroyed an unknown number of casks, barrels,
(18:05):
and bottles of alcohol in his prohibition days, had turned
to the substance himself. He had become a raging alcoholic,
leading to several failed marriages and an automobile accident where
he fled the scene on foot. The Butcher of Kingsbury
Run seemingly escaped his grasp, never being identified. Of course,
(18:27):
Ness was fully convinced that doctor Sweeney had been his man.
It said that doctor Sweeney sent Ness postcards and letters
for years, all was reminding Ness of the incident at
the hotel. Could it be that these taunts were proof
of his guilt? All this proved to be far too
much for elliot Ness. He died of a heart attack
(18:47):
in nineteen fifty seven at the age of fifty four.
Sweeney bounced in and out of psychiatric hospitals until his
death in nineteen sixty four. As for Detective Peter Morillo,
he continued his pursuit of the butcher until his retirement
from the Cleveland Police Department in nineteen forty three. He
was never convinced that doctor Francis Sweeney was a viable suspect.
(19:11):
To this day, the butcher of Kingsbury Run has never
been identified. Do you have any comments or a case
you'd like to suggest. You'll find a comment form and
case submission link at lordnarts dot com. Thank you, the
Cleveland Press, the Plaindealer, History dot com, Cleveland dot com,
Crimelibrary dot org, the Absolute Crime and Biographics YouTube channels,
(19:35):
and Wikipedia for information contributing to today's story. This episode
was written by Frederick Crook, edited by John Lordon, and
produced by Lord Narts. If you appreciated today's episode, please
check out the novel Wraithworks another collaboration between Frederick Crook
and myself. It's available in hard coffee or audiobook format.
You can find more information about Wraithworks at Lordnarts dot
(19:56):
com or by searching for it on Amazon. Thank you
to our audience here for the live recording session hosted
on the YouTube channel Lord and Arts Studio two. Special
thanks to seriously Mysterious financial supporters Robert Martin, B. Jones
and Susie. Most of all, thank you for listening. I'm
John Lord. Please join me again next week for another
(20:19):
case I know you'll find seriously mysterious
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