Criminal - Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and Cleveland’s Torso Murderer

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

In 1934, a man collecting driftwood along the Lake Erie shore found a human torso on the beach. No one could figure out what had happened. Over the next several years, more bodies were discovered. Eventually, a coroner assembled something he called the “Torso Clinic” to work on the case. It was made up of about 30 people – doctors, professors, police officers, and a young Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness. We're excited to announce Criminal Plus - our new membership program. Sign up to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes, ad-free listening of Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery and members-only merch. Our first bonus episode is available now! Learn more and sign up here: thisiscriminal.com/plus. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please use discretion. I was on a sleepover at a summer camp, and we're roasting s'mores around a campfire. Author Daniel Stashower. And the counselor thought it would be a terrific idea to tell this group of young kids the story of a horrible series of gruesome crimes where the killer had never been caught

that took place in the woods very close to where we were. And I remember while hearing this story unfold, we had to stop him to get him to explain what the word decapitation meant. And he repeated the phrase many times, and the killer is still out there. We're eight or nine years old. I don't think anybody had slept at all that night. But that was the first time I'd heard the story of the Kingsbury Run murders. I mean, you know, most kids make up scary stories for each other around a campfire.

But this one, this is a real story. This is a real nightmare that happened. It is. It's a true story, and it played out at the height of the Great Depression in Cleveland in the 1930s. Just before 8 a.m. on September 5, 1934, a man named Frank Lagasse was out collecting driftwood near Cleveland's Euclid Beach Amusement Park. Euclid Beach is on Lake Erie,

and its amusement park was modeled on Coney Island. The park's slogan was nothing to depress or demoralize. Frank Lagasse would apparently go out collecting driftwood most mornings before he went to work. But on this morning, he saw something he didn't understand. He steps a bit closer, and it turns out to be parts of a human torso that are washed up and partially buried on the beach. It was the lower half of a woman's body. The legs had been cut off at the knees.

He ran to a nearby house to call the police, and when the body was transported to the county morgue, the coroner thought the woman had died six to eight months earlier, but had only been in the water for a short time. The woman's skin appeared to have been treated with some kind of chemical, but the coroner didn't know what the chemical was or why, and determining the woman's identity seemed nearly impossible. What they did notice was that there appeared to be a kind of surgical precision

that had been practiced by the killer, presumably by the killer, while dismembering the body. The coroner said that he seemed able to navigate the difficult joints and ligatures as they were approached, and this led investigators to conclude that he must have some kind of experience, perhaps medical training, maybe he was a surgeon of some kind, or a butcher. But it seemed that he knew what he was doing. It touched off a massive search for the remaining body parts. They even employed the Boy Scouts, if you can imagine such a thing, to help in the search for body parts.

The next morning, a handyman named Joseph Hayduck read about the discovery of the woman's body in the newspaper. He couldn't believe it. Two weeks earlier, he'd found what looked like the upper part of a human torso on a beach outside of the city. There is a dead seagull next to it. Joseph Hadick had called the sheriff, and the sheriff dismissed it as part of an animal.

He told Joseph Hadick to bury it in the sand. When he saw the newspaper story about the woman, he called the police again and took them to the place where he'd buried the remains. When they were analyzed by the coroner, they were determined to be remains of the same woman. That same week, a teenager was swimming in Lake Erie and reportedly saw a human hand under the water. She told her father it looked like it was waving at her.

She wanted him to come and see, and he did, later telling police, quote, I'm sure it was a human hand. But the detectives couldn't find anything. Pieces of body parts were turning up, were being gathered for several days afterwards, which must have been just as horrifying as you can imagine. And the police were stymied. They just didn't know how to move forward. A reporter asked a detective if it was a perfect crime, and the police officer said no, but it was, quote, so close to being perfect that we don't know what to do next.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. One year later, in September of 1935, two boys, 12 and 16, were out throwing a ball. The ball sails wide. It rolls down a hill, a very steep incline called Jackass Hill. And they race each other to the bottom. And the older boy gets there first. And when he gets to the bottom, he spies something poking out from the brush at the bottom of the hill. And he turns around and he says to his friend, turn around, don't come any

closer. There's a man without a head down here. Well, the police got there very quickly, and it turned out there were two bodies, two sets of remains, both decapitated. Police were able to identify one of the men. They referred to him as a police character. Meaning he was known to law enforcement. He'd been in trouble with the law. But the police naturally thought, well, we're on our way. We've identified this guy. We will be able to work backwards, find out what happened here. And they worked very, very hard, but got nowhere.

About four months later, in January 1936, the owner of a meat market walked out of the back of his shop and saw what he said he thought was a wrapped ham in the snow. He unwrapped it to find a human arm wrapped in newspaper. He called the police, who came and unwrapped even more body parts in the snow behind the shop. So, was there a sense that he was trying to make some sort of dramatic, whoever was doing this, the person that was committing these crimes,

was trying to make some sort of dramatic reveal for those that were finding these body parts? I mean, he wasn't burying these bodies so that they would never be found ever. No, and that was a big part of the frustration of this case. Why was he leaving these parts, it appeared, deliberately leaving them in places where they were likely to be found. Was he taunting the police? Was there some element of gratification in that that he found he needed people to know what it was he was doing? It was a very, very strange series of events. The coroner in Cleveland assembled something he called the Torso Clinic. It was made up of about 30 people, including anatomy professors, doctors, police, and a psychiatrist. They brought together these experts in the hope that if they got these varied opinions together in one room, they would come up with a way of moving forward.

But they recognized at the time that they had drifted into really uncharted territories and that it would take a truly original and heroic effort to get to the bottom of this thing. One of the members of the so-called Torso Clinic was the city's brand new safety director, a young man named Elliot Ness, who'd moved to Cleveland after living in Chicago, where he'd made a name for himself as the guy who'd brought down Al Capone. We'll be right back. One series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives,

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Elliott Ness started his career running credit checks and then got a job with the U.S. Treasury Department's Prohibition Bureau. They had a big problem, Al Capone. In June of 1931, the Chicago Tribune reported on the, quote, sensational rise of Al Capone on a tidal wave of beer, ministering to a $20 million a year thirst. He had a $50,000 pinky ring. He rode around town in an armor-plated Cadillac. He passed out diamond-studded belt buckles to his friends.

And supposedly he once said, you can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile. And it seemed that nothing could be done about it. By some estimates, the Chicago bootlegging machine, at the height of the Prohibition years, had set aside $1 million each month, that's each month, to grease the

palms of crooked officials. In November of 1930, Al Capone rented a storefront and put up a banner that read, Free Soup, Coffee and Donuts for the Unemployed. His soup kitchen became the largest in the city, serving three meals a day. Second helpings were allowed. No questions were ever asked. On Thanksgiving of 1930, his soup kitchen reportedly served dinner to 5,000 people in Chicago. An unnamed source identified as a Capone associate told the Associated Press he couldn't stand it to see those poor devils starving,

and nobody else seemed to be doing much, so the big boy decided to do it himself. People called him Good-Hearted Al. Elliot Ness, as a young Prohibition agent, assembled a team and planned raids to uncover Al Capone's hidden breweries around the city and arrest the men working them, sometimes called Alky Cookers. How was Al Capone, what did he do to make all this beer, to make this happen?

It was very clever. And Ness himself admired Capone's business sense, his cleverness in setting up this network of illicit breweries that pumped out beer. paid off officials to look the other way, or had a series of moves in place that allowed them to move their operations from place to place, always staying just a step ahead of investigators. So it was a real challenge just to find these breweries, much less to shut them down. Ness, in particular, tried to bring diligence and integrity to the Prohibition Bureau, which was generally thought to have been incompetent or corrupt. And Ness, for Ness, it was more than just about prohibition. He that Prohibition had allowed more serious forms of crime to flourish because so many police and politicians were on the take. This was a theme that he returned to again and again throughout his career, that Prohibition had put power into the hands of the mob. And a lot has been written about the failures of Prohibition.

A congressman at the time basically said it was just all a ghastly farce. One official said that enforcing the law was like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter. But it was Ness's job, and he was determined to do it. But before he could raid an Al Capone brewery, Elliot Ness and his colleagues had to find one, which they were able to do when they realized that Al Capone was reusing his beer barrels.

There'd be a delivery of beer. After the barrels were empty, they were picked up, taken back to one of Capone's plants, washed out, and used again. So Ness and his men began tailing not the beer itself, but the barrels in which it was being delivered. And that was how they worked backwards, kind of paddled upstream, as it were, to the source.

In March of 1931, Elliot Ness planned a very big raid. Ness's belief was they had to strike hard and fast so that these guys wouldn't be able to slip away. He said, I had at my disposal this big truck, and they rigged up a sort of snowplow battering ram type of thing on the front so that they could batter their way into the brewery and basically just fall on the guys so quickly they wouldn't have a chance to slip away. There were also guys using special ladders that were padded so that they could quickly climb up to the top of the roof, but not make a lot of noise while they were doing it,

so that they'd be able to come in from the top as well, cover all the exits. On a signal from Ness, the truck went into gear, picked up speed, and at the same time, men are climbing onto the roof and covering the rear exits, and the truck slams through the front doors. Ness jumps out of the truck, and he thinks, oh no, it looks like somehow they got word. They were staring at a blank wall. Ness took a closer look, realized that the blank wall had actually just been painted to look like an empty room. There was a doorway in it. They popped through that and managed to scoop up the brewmaster and quite a few of his accomplices. It was the first time, Ness said, that prisoners had been taken in a Capone brewery raid.

Did Capone do anything? Did he try to buy off Elliot Ness? Oh, yeah. I mean, that had been the business model. Capone was great at buying people off. And Ness told this one story about some of Capone's men driving by, some of his men basically throwing a big wad of cash at them.

And the men picked it up and threw it back, which made Ness very, very proud indeed. And when they found that they couldn't buy off these men, these supposedly untouchable men, there were threats. But those didn't work either. Untouchable meaning what? Untouchable meaning they couldn't be touched by bribes. They conducted more raids in the first half of 1931,

and Elliot Ness said they found and seized 25 breweries. Did Eliot Ness make a dent on Al Capone's business? At one time, newspapers were saying that Ness had so dried up Capone's network that it was costing him millions of dollars. Ness understood his role as part of a larger effort to bring down Capone. In June of 1931, Al Capone was charged with 23 counts of income tax evasion. A week after that, he was charged with prohibition violations. Eliot Ness describes it as 5,000 violations of the liquor law.

He told a reporter, We did our part, but the real work of sending Capone to prison was done by the tax investigators. Our job was more spectacular. That was all. But let's face it. You've got a story here where Capone may or may not be sent to prison based on a strict interpretation of tax law, on information gathered by a room full of accountants, and at the center of it, there's this handsome, young prohibition agent driving a truck through the doors of breweries. That's the story that the reporters latched onto.

And let's face it, which movie would you rather see? What happened to which Capone was actually convicted of tax evasions and sent to prison. that conviction. For a while, Ness and the prohibition team kept working on the assumption that Capone would do his time, get out, and as Capone himself said, the organization would kind of hold together while I was away. And there was this thinking that Capone would get out of prison and just sort of pick up where he'd left off. So it was very important to Ness and to others that the conspiracy case be kept current so that additional charges could be brought to bear. That never happened, as it turned out,

because very quickly after Capone arrived in prison, it was discovered that he was already in the advanced stages of syphilis. And although he did eventually get out of prison, he was never the same man and never took power again. In June of 1931, the New York Times wrote that the Untouchables, quote, impervious to threats of death and bribes, have accomplished their mission. The peace ends. The untouchables are waiting for further orders. I mean, the press about Eliot Ness was really over the top. One paper said, no soldier on the battlefield ever performed more heroic work than has Eliot Ness.

Yes, and he's going to have a real struggle to live up to his own reputation, to fill his own shoes. By the end of 1933, Prohibition was over. Al Capone was in prison. Eliot Ness reportedly said to a colleague, Did you ever think you wanted something more than anything else in the world? And then, after you got it, it wasn't half as good as you expected.

Has that ever happened to you? At 31, Elliot Ness moved to Cleveland. 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 was a big, big promotion. So big, in fact, that a lot of people assumed he would fall flat on his face. In Chicago, he'd been in charge of a handful of guys.

And now, he's running a department of thousands of city employees in one of America's biggest cities. And what's more, he's the youngest person ever to hold the position. He moved to Cleveland right around the time people started finding body parts all over the city. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? Thank you. to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

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understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings, and it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Elliot Ness was sworn in as the safety director in Cleveland in December of 1935, less than three months after the two boys found a body with no head at the bottom of Jackass Hill, and more than a year after the man collecting driftwood had found a woman's torso near Euclid Beach Amusement Park.

He was the director of public safety. He was at the top of the pyramid. The police chief reported to him, nobody expects a director of public safety to solve a murder any more than they expect him to walk a beat or rescue cats stranded in trees, except when it's Elliot Ness. People did expect action from Elliot Ness. They expected heroics. Ness had made a point of saying that he would lead from the front lines. One month into the job, he told a reporter he'd use the same tactics we used against Capone. He went on to say, quote, all crime is alike.

And then more body parts appeared. Two kids found a man's head under a willow tree when they skipped school to go fishing. More than a month later, a teenager was walking on a path through the woods and came across a body without a head. Police later found the head nearby. And then, that September, a man was about to hop onto a moving train

when he looked down into a creek and saw a torso. The mayor told Elliot Ness to take this whole thing over personally. Yes, the mayor dropped it on his desk. This was at a time when the city of Cleveland was struggling mightily to had put together this series of events to broadcast, to put forward the notion that Cleveland was a place to do business. All roads led to Cleveland. It was a place where there should be business conventions. And all the railroads converged, and they were building a spectacular skyscraper to anchor the whole effort. And at the margins of this, there's this uncaught serial killer.

It didn't look good for the city's image. The mayor was concerned, and he put Ness directly on it. So Ness put together a team in the mold of the Untouchables, and they worked outside the system and under the radar trying to get information off the criminal grapevine. And he said very little publicly, but there was one notable statement. He said, I'm going to do all I can to aid in the investigation. I want to see this psycho caught. In February of 1937, a man found another torso, almost in the same place where the first had been found in 1934, near Euclid Beach Amusement Park. A head with gold teeth was found that June. In March of 1938, a dog came running out of some woods

about 60 miles outside of Cleveland in Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. The coroner said, from the appearance of the bone, it looks like a professional job, and I'm sure a surgeon's saw was used. It puts the investigators onto a suspect that hadn't gotten any serious scrutiny before. From the beginning, investigators had believed that the killer must have knowledge and training that allowed for the surgical precision of the dismemberments performed on the victims, a doctor or a butcher. That was the

theory. And this severed limb that was discovered near Sandusky, Ohio, put them on the trail of a particular suspect. They called him Dr. X. His real name was Frank Sweeney. He was a doctor who had fallen on hard times and had a substance abuse problem. He checked a lot of boxes. Ness's team started tailing Dr. X, and apparently the suspect took a perverse pleasure in it, like a form of hide-and-seek. There are stories that he even called police headquarters to taunt them on the poor quality of the surveillance effort. He'd say something to the effect of, wow, that guy you had tailing me wasn't very good. If he wants to try again, I'll be at such-and-such a department store tomorrow afternoon. Well, at one stage, Ness and his men scooped this guy up and grilled him for a very

long time in a hotel suite. The details are sketchy and contradictory, but one of Ness's colleagues said that the interrogation went on for a week or possibly two in eight-hour stretches. But the suspect never cracked, and Ness finally had to let him go. Three months later, a woman's torso was found at the dump. As police searched the area, people came to watch. One man saw the investigation on his way home from work and decided to go back to the dump later that evening

and bring his wife and a friend. And when he did, he stumbled onto the remains of a man. Civilians offered to try to help police officers make sure there weren't more bodies in the dump, and the police accepted help from about a hundred volunteers. Daniel Stashower says they were called torso detectives. One newspaper characterized the uncaught serial killer as Cleveland's shame. For a time, Ness was seen to be doing all he could to run the killer to ground. But it was natural that over time, no matter what he was doing behind the scenes,

and he wasn't talking about it very much, about what he was doing behind the scenes, the press began to turn. They began to wonder, why is this killer still out there? Two days after the search, Elliot Ness organized a raid on a part of town where a lot of people had built shelters.

By some accounts, because he believed that the murderer was targeting the city's poorest men and women. And by some accounts, so he could search the shelters for knives or other evidence. At least 60 men were arrested, and then Elliot Ness ordered the fire chief to soak the entire area in coal oil and light it on fire. An editorial in the Cleveland Press on August 19, 1938, read, Safety Director Elliot Ness's raid upon the packing box homes may contribute something to the capture of the torso killer. We doubt it. Many of the men arrested were charged with vagrancy and sentenced to workhouses. One week later, Frank Sweeney, Dr. X, had himself admitted to a veterans' facility

called the Soldiers' and Sailors' Home. And it's often reported that when Sweeney checked himself into this veteran's home, he had placed himself beyond the reach of law, that it was the equivalent of getting himself locked up in an asylum where the law couldn't touch him. That wasn't strictly the case. He could come and go almost at will, and Ness arranged to have him followed when he did. But the killings appeared to have stopped at that point. And although the investigation continued and Sweeney remained under surveillance, by 1938, the killings appeared to have come to an end. By this point, Elliot Ness's wife had left him.

He also seemed to be blowing off steam in a way that began to draw attention. And it's an unhappy irony that the most famous prohibition agent of all time had some real momentum with alcohol, and this problem began to get worse over time. There were nightclubs and hotels that reserved tables for his exclusive use. And at least one friend insisted that, you know, he wasn't a heavy drinker, but that he could keep at it for long periods without giving any appearance of being swacked. Well, I don't know if that was true or not, but he appeared to be swacked much of the time, and people were beginning to notice.

Around 5 a.m. one morning in 1942, when he was 38, he was driving home from a bar called the Vogue Room and got into an accident. His car slips on an icy patch, slams into another one, and a gentleman is hurt and has to be taken to the hospital. And the details are a little sketchy and a little confused, but there was some criticism that Ness did not identify himself and left the scene before police arrived. And it seemed that the time had come to step down from the post of safety director. He tried to make something work for himself in the private sector. But it turned out Ness didn't have much of a head for business.

Still, he worked very hard at it, but without a great deal of success. An editor at Cleveland's Plain Dealer said that Elliot Ness had peaked too young. A friend said, quote, he simply ran out of gas. At one point, he got a job at a bookstore. And then one day, he was at a bar with a friend in New York. His friend had invited a writer named Oscar Fraley to join them. So the two friends are just catching up while Ness sits at the bar drinking.

And after a while, when Ness's friend has kind of talked out, he turns to Fraley and he says, you know, you ought to talk to this guy. This is the guy who took down Al Capone, he says. It was very dangerous. He's got stories to tell. Fraley sort of looks at Ness and in Fraley's words, he says, you know, he couldn't believe this mild-mannered guy had anything to do with it. Ness looks back at him and says, it was dangerous. And for whatever reason, Ness just starts talking. And they talk through the night.

And Ness is telling stories of Chicago and the Untouchables and Capone. And Fraley is mesmerized. And when it's all over, Fraley says, you know, you should write a book. And one thing leads to another, and they collaborate on the book that became The Untouchables. Ness did not live to see The Untouchables published. He died in 1957 of a heart attack at the age of 55, and the book appeared a few months later. The book was adapted into a TV show in 1959. It ran for four seasons.

And then it was made into a movie, with Kevin Costner playing Elliot Ness and Robert De Niro playing Al Capone. He died hoping that the book would be a success, but believing himself to be a forgotten figure. Do you think Frank Sweeney was the torso murderer? For my purposes, it's enough that Elliot Ness believed it. I could argue this case up or down. Frank Sweeney was definitely not a good guy, and in Ness's papers in Cleveland, there are taunting postcards that Sweeney sent to Ness over the course of years. Ness had clearly gotten under Sweeney's skin in a big way, and he wrote him these postcards that are very hard to understand.

They're full of bizarre references, and they're strange underlinings and attempts at humor. And Sweeney walks right up to the edge of saying something that appears to implicate himself but he never crosses over there was nothing there that rises to the level of a confession it's possible that Sweeney just bitterly resented what it what Ness had put him through but do I think he did it? Yeah, I do. Learn more about Elliot Ness in Daniel Stashower's book,

American Demon, Elliot Ness and the Hunt for America's Jack the Ripper. We'll have a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers.

Veronica Simonetti mixed this episode. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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