Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - The Cleveland Torso Murders Pt. 2

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Eliot Ness went to the grave in 1957 without ever convicting the Cleveland Torso Murderer. Decades later, his family would reveal a secret suspect hidden within his notes, that was too well-connected to be accused publicly. This episode originally aired in April 2019.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Due to the graphic nature of these killers' crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder and assault that some people may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. The afternoon of May 3, 1940, a couple of yardmen in Stowe Township, Pennsylvania were running a random maintenance check on some old box cars. The yardmen, admittedly, couldn't see the purpose behind the task. The boxcars had first been abandoned in Youngstown, Ohio. They'd later been moved to Struthers, Ohio, and then finally to stow township in April of 1940.

They hadn't been used in over a year. But the country was only just now coming out of the Great Depression. So the Yardmen appreciated the work, however trivial. It would be a short, easy day in the job, merely checking that the boxcars had been emptied and was still usable. until the yard men flung open the door to a musty box car and were overwhelmed by the smell of rotting meat. The men recoiled and disgust. It took them a moment to realize what they were looking at. Three corpses decomposing on the floor, dismembered and decapitated.

The boxcars had not been in operation for over a year, but someone, it seems, had been putting them to good years. Hi, I'm Vanessa Richardson. This is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. Every Monday, we dive into the minds and madness of serial killers. Today, we continue our deep dive into the life of the Cleveland torso murderer, also known as the torso killer and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Starting in 1935, he dismembered at least 12 people, scattering their body parts around Cleveland.

I'm here with my co-host, Greg Polson. If you enjoy today's episode, the best way to help us is to leave a five-star review wherever you're listening. It really does help us. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Whether you're hiring for a role or searching for a killer, the hunt can be exhausting. When detectives looked and searched to find any kind of evidence to find the person they were looking for, like Jack the Ripper, the Golden State Killer, the Unit Bomber. It's tedious work to find what you're looking for.

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But who many believe continued to kill well into the 1940s and 50s. Last week, we discussed the international attention these brutal crimes received. and the immense pressure put on the Cleveland police force to catch the killer. We also discussed the convergence of the torso clinic, a first of its kind law enforcement conference designed to profile the murderer who came to be known as the torso killer, or the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. They hoped to catch him before he was able to kill again. Finally, we examined the 12 murders widely credited to the torso killer.

This week we'll take a look at law enforcement's most promising suspect and explore some of the other murders that many attribute to the torso killer. Some believe these subsequent murders were the work of a copycat, but until the torso killer is identified, there's no way to know how many he truly slayed. On May 3, 1940, Stowe Township Police received a call about three headless dismembered victims lying at the bottom of a train car. The same thought raced through all their minds. After almost two years of quiet, had Cleveland's torso murderer moved on to Pennsylvania? Not wanting to take any chances, they put in a call to the Cleveland police. The call was unwelcome to say the least. No torsos had shown up in Cleveland since the summer of 1938, over two years previous. Police hoped the killer had met an untimely end, or was

was perhaps in jail on a different offense. Over the past two years, Cleveland's director for public safety, Elliot Ness, an acting detective inspector, Charles O'Neville, had been taken off the case, as more urgent assignments called them elsewhere. There were still three officers assigned to the cold case, police chief George Maddoz, Detective Peter Marillo, and Sergeant James Hogan. But as there were no leads on the case, the three hadn't worked on it very much in passing months. Any work on the case was largely done for show. The torso killer had tormented the city for three long years, and people were constantly worried he would pop back up again. And their fears were not necessarily unjustified, because while no bodies officially belonging to the torso

killer had shown up since 1938, several bodies had been discovered around the greater Cleveland area, which many citizens believed were the work of the torso killer. In each case, Matowitz, Marillo, and Hogan had hotly debated whether the bodies belonged to the torso killer. Some of the bodies had shown signs of dismemberment or similar levels of brutality. But none of them bore the torso killer's telltale decapitation, and some of them have been found outside of Cleveland.

They ruled all of them the work of a copycat. When Sergeant Hogan received the call from Stowe Township Police, he was justifiably anxious. He knew that whether this was a copycat or the torso killer himself, there would be widespread panic the moment the murders hit the papers. Hogan was a pragmatist. The way he saw it, the less the public knew, the better. No need to alarm a city that could do little to stop the killer and would only get in the way. He remembered the days when the Cleveland Police Department would receive hundreds of phone calls a week, bearing false leads about the torso killer. Anything to avoid that disaster again.

Detective Marillo, on the other hand, wanted to sound the alarm immediately, although he agreed that the three officers on the case should take a trip east to Pennsylvania and see the bodies for themselves before jumping to conclusions. They made the quick three-hour drive east, where Stowe Police accompanied, Hogan, Murillo, and Madowitz to the train yard. They stepped into the box car, which reeked of decay. Even Hogan had to admit the body parts littering the floor were eerily reminiscent of the torso killer. The heads were cleanly severed, and the limbs were wrapped neatly in burlap,

which matched the MMO specific to the Cleveland torso murderer. Marillo was the first to step into the car and crouch down over the reeking bodies. He covered his nose with a handkerchief, which did little to block the rot, but he quickly stood up, almost relieved. Carved into one torso across the chest was the word Nazi with an inverted Z. For the torso killer, the dismemberment of his victim's bodies was ritualistic, and any disruption to that ritual was a near guarantee that the murderer was merely a copycat, not the mad butcher himself. According to a study about ritual and signature and serial murders, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, serial killers typically do not change the ritual elements of their crimes. Vanessa is going to take over on the psychology here and throughout the episode. Please note, Vanessa is not a licensed psychologist, but she has done a lot of research for this show.

Thanks, Greg. According to a study published in Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, A ritual is defined as a behavior that is unnecessary in the commission of the homicide, but is repeated every time the killer attacks. This is typically because the ritual satisfies some kind of psychosexual desire. There will be uniformity across all of a killer's murders. So Marillo felt that the word Nazi indicated that this murder was personal, perhaps a revenge killing. To him, it was easy proof that the bodies did not belong to the torso. Chief Madowitz was quick to assure the public that this was not another torso murder,

but after receiving the coroner's report, he realized he may have spoken too soon. The report indicated that the bodies had been cut by someone who either had expert knowledge of human anatomy or was a butcher, a detail that had been specific to the torso murders. But the three officers were confused. If the crimes were indeed committed by the torso killer, then why had he carved Nazi into this victim's chest? Had this murder been personal, or were his psychosexual desires escalating? After some debate, Hogan maintained that these torsos were the work of a copycat,

while Marillo found himself convinced that the torso killer was back. Only Madowitz landed on the fence. Unsure they had enough evidence to make a call either way. saw an opportunity in Madowitz's indecision. He asked Madowitz to let him go undercover as a vagrant and ride the rails between Ohio and Pennsylvania to see if any fellow passengers sparked suspicion. Maddoz groaned. Marillo had been pushing this agenda since 1935, when the killer had first started attacking the down-and-out inhabitants of the Kingsbury slums. Marillo argued that in the five years since the first torso started turning up, police had yet to locate the torso killer's laboratory.

They hadn't found so much as a scrap of evidence linking the butcher to a crime scene. But what if, Merlele reasoned, that was because the chop shop was mobile. If the torso killer was riding the rails, slaying victims and empty box cars, he would have hours to clean up his crime scene and disappear. If the killer was mobile, Merle said, then the police needed to be mobile too. Chief Madowitz had thought the idea was a waste of time in 1935, and he thought it was a waste of time now. But he also knew that inaction would look far worse

than wasting a month of his best detective's time. Begrudgingly, he agreed. Chief Maddoz made a public announcement that the three tors recovered in Stowe Township were not the work of the torso killer. And secretly, Detective Marillo got ready to take another trip east. On the morning of July 14, 1940, Detective Marillo, accompanied by patrolman Frank Varell, suited up in ragged clothes and prepared to ride the rails. They spent the next three weeks

until August 5th, joyriding between eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, always on the lookout for anything amiss. But they saw little more than passing scenery. Aside from a couple of drug busts, their undercover work had been fruitless. But Marillo remained certain the key to solving the murders lay within the train system, though he would never gain enough traction to go back undercover. Over the next couple of years, the torso murders case grew cold again. Marillo's partners were moved to more demanding assignments, and because the killer had been declared inactive for the past several years,

Marillo was left to work the case alone. Which left Marillo frustrated. First, he didn't believe the killer was inactive. at all. He felt certain that Cleveland's torso killer was still out there, inflicting his terror on other cities in other states. Second, there was still a great deal of work to be done on the case, more than one man could manage alone. Since the three torsos were found in stow, the tip hotline had started ringing again and hadn't let up in two years. Marillo was forced to spend his evenings and weekends chasing down one far-fetched lead after another. He spent months chasing down dead-end

after dead-end. It was maddening. But then, in January of 1942, nearly two years after finding the bodies in the box car, Marillo caught his first real break in the case. He received a letter that felt too authentic to ignore. It read, quote, A Killer at Large, Albany, New York. Saturday, January forth. Sir, is there any reward for the so-called mad butcher of Kingsbury Run? If so, right at once. Norman Carter, Railroad YMCA, 607 Broadway, Albany, New York, end quote. The thing that caught Marillo's attention was the handwriting. The individual letters bore a striking resemblance to the way the word Nazi had been carved into the boxcar victim's chest. Marillo knew it was a long shot, but couldn't help but wonder if the note had been written by the killer himself.

The letter asked Marillo to write to a Norman W. Carter in Albany. Marillo traced the name to a former railway mail service worker by the same name. Marillo was curious. Could Norman Carter be the killer or know who the killer was? Or was he just a brown-noseder trying to involve himself in the case? Detective Marillo reached out to Carter's former employer with Bays. breath. But the employer had some bad news for Marillo. During his employment with the railway mail service, Norman Carter had been extremely dependable and had reported to work consistently during the time the torsos were turning up in Cleveland. It seemed impossible that he could be connected to the case. Marillo then tried to track down anyone who might want to pin a triple homicide

on Carter, but the man also seemed to have no enemies. At the end of a long and draining goose chase, Marillo had no idea who had written the letter or why. It was a crushing blow. Meanwhile, Marillo had grown frustrated with his superiors in the Cleveland Police Department, who were constantly pulling him away from the torso murders case by assigning him other duties. Detective Marillo wrote, quote, I advised my commanding officer that I cannot meet the citizens and make them believe that I was going to clean up this crime when the true fact is that I never had time to even make a thorough investigation, end quote. Finally, in October of 1942, Chief Maddochitz removed Marilla from the case entirely.

The chief explained that the case had been inactive since August of 1938, and there were new cases that were far more pressing. But although he had been taken off the case, Barillo vowed to never cease working on it. He wrote, quote, I will never give up my work on these torso murder. as long as the killer is still at large, the torso murders investigation had developed into a habit with me." But the anonymous letter would be the final lead he ever ran down on the torso murders. The case went cold for nearly 10 years until a new murder reminded Cleveland that a brutal

killer was still on the loose. We'll learn more about this echo from the past in a moment. Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about Zepbound, terseptite. The first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and adults with obesity. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5 or 15 milligram injection. Zepound contains terseptide and should not be used with other terseptide containing products or any GLP1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepound is

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Don't miss Sol de Janeiro's limited edition perfume mist collection only at Sephora. Now, back to the story. In 1942, the last detective was taken off the Cleveland torso murder case, and it was locked away in a filing cabinet, where it slowly faded into obscurity. But nearly ten years later, a new murder convinced many that the mad butcher had never truly left. The year was now 1950, and Cleveland was in the midst of a hot sticky July. For most, it was a time to stay inside with fans oscillating in every room. But one man was enjoying this sunshine.

This man, who workmen dubbed the sunbather, came to sunbathe every day for six weeks, lying along a stretch of industrial wasteland near the Norris Brothers Movers Company. Employees of the company grew used to the heavyset man in his 50s, with his thinning gray hair and appreciation of warm weather. Every day he would camp out on top of a pile of steel girders on the company property, taking the sunshine for about 20 minutes, then leave. Employees at Norris Brothers found him strange, if a little endearing. But one day, without explanation, the sunbather stopped coming.

In the days following, the employees at the Norris Company began to notice a terrible stench near where the sunbather had spent his afternoons. And finally, on July 22nd, the source of the sickening odor was discovered. That afternoon, a couple of locals, Mike Girauts and John Cooper, were walking through the neighborhood surrounding the Norse Company when they came upon a partially decomposed leg that had been carelessly tossed into a field. Clevelanders knew the grisly history of their city well enough to put two and two together, and immediately sounded the alarm.

They called the police department. to let them know that Cleveland torso murderer was back. Police arrived at the scene, but already at a major disadvantage, because every officer who had ever run point on the torso murders had since been reassigned to other cases. Nobody on the scene was very familiar with the case. After all, it had been 10 years since the three torsos had turned up in stow, and 12 years since the last official torso killer victim.

Nevertheless, police surveyed the surrounding area and located a dismembered torso, two severed arms, and one leg. The victim was headless in an advanced state of decomposition and wrapped in sports pages from a May 1949 issue of the Cleveland News. These same newspapers were quick to sensationalize the crimes. Meanwhile, coroner Samuel Gerber, the coroner who had taken point on the torso murders back in the 1930s, did the autopsy on the victim. And while Gerber had to admit that the ligature marks did share a great number of similarities with the torso murders, he insisted there was no proof that these crimes were the work of the same killer.

Gerber had become close friends with Chief Maddoz over the years of working on the case. And like Maddoz, Gerber was hesitant to alarm the public by declaring that the torso killer was active again. Police believed that identifying the victim would shed light on whether or not this murder was the work of the torso killer. The torso killer had always chosen a similar type of victim, individuals who were impoverished and often homeless. Eventually, police identified the victim as 41-year-old Robert Robertson. In many ways, Robertson fit the profile of the torso killer's victims perfectly. He had suffered from a stroke that left him paralyzed.

and with a speech defect, rendering him unable to work. Robertson had been arrested over a dozen times for intoxication in 1949 alone, and he'd been evicted by his landlady due to heavy drinking. He'd been forced to sleep on the streets of Kingsbury Run. In an effort to quell mass panic, police decided to operate as if this was an isolated murder, completely unconnected to the torso killings. Police began to question employees working in the area

about whether they'd seen anyone suspicious in the days leading up to the murder. They were surprised to find that the employees at Norris Brothers Moving Company all had the same question. Had the victim been the sunbather? Police were confused. Who was the sunbather? The employees described the heavyset, middle-aged man wondering if he was okay. After all, he'd disappeared right around the same time the body showed up. Police were happy to confirm that the sunbather did not. match the description of the victim and was almost certainly not him. But that left a much more

enticing question. What if the sunbather had been the torso killer himself? This certainly would have explained the sunbather's odd choice of tanning location and his sudden disappearance after Robertson's murder. Police began to theorize that perhaps the sunbather hadn't been tanning at all. Maybe he had been scoping out a new victim. The police at the moving company described the sunbather as a large, heavy-set man, who probably would have been strong enough to dismember and move a body, and the details of the crime scene were eerily reminiscent of the torso killer's attacks. The police began chasing down Leeds, spooked by the notion that the killer might still be in town.

But after several months of looking, there was no trace of the sunbather anywhere. Police were eventually forced to end the investigation. But whether Robertson's murder was committed at the hand of the notorious torso killer or by someone else entirely, his death would be the final killing ever possibly attributed to the torso killer. After this, the case went quiet for another two decades. Then, in 1976, a surprising blast from the past sparked a shocking new connection to the torso murders of the 1930s. In August of 1976, Robert Ness, the son of the late Elliot Ness, died of leukemia at age 30. You might recall that Elliott Ness had occupied an important chapter in Cleveland police history.

He had been the public safety director in the 1930s during the height of the torso murders. It had been Ness who had instigated the famous torso clinic of 1936. After Robert Ness's death, his wife Sharon undertook a little bit of the torso. the arduous task of going through Robert's belongings, and among them she found scrapbooks belonging to her father-in-law, Elliot. They contained meticulously sorted notes, newspaper clippings, and mementos chronicling Ness's illustrious career. Not knowing quite what to do with the scrapbooks, Sharon donated them to the library at the Western Reserve Historical Society. But as librarians began to go through the scrapbooks, they noticed a couple of items that stuck out

strange, one nearly incoherent letter, and five loose postcards, each bearing cryptic messages and taunting jokes. The cards were all dated around the mid-1950s and postmarked from Dayton, Ohio. They addressed Ness using odd nicknames that appeared to be jokes, including Elliot Esophagiotic Ness, Elliott Ambiguous Ness, Elliot Headman Ness, and And Elliot Directum Ness. In the body of the postcards, the writer frequently underlined words, or connected them with dashes. The messages themselves read like nearly illegible gobbledygook.

For instance, quote, in Dosphroidiology, this organ has the eminence of a reamer. Whether the chimes peel the note for bell-wringing effect or not is the Macbethian question. End quote. To be clear, we have no idea what that. message means, but it appears to be an inside joke between Ness and whoever wrote the postcard, or maybe just something the sender found to be personally amusing. The other four cards bear similar messages, all of which appeared to have a clear meaning in the mind of the sender, but they definitely weren't immediately decipherable to the outside reader. The writer also attached

illustrations to four of the cards and left messages under the pictures, as if captioning a comic. In one card he attached an ad for pansy seeds, then wrote, quote, No nothing explosive herein, end quote. Cleveland's public safety director, it seems, had been receiving strange messages from a pen pal with a very odd sense of humor. And the letters were obviously important to Ness, because he'd saved them for all these years as part of his highly curated personal collection.

The volunteers at Western Reserve wondered, Could Ness have saved these letters because he suspected the writer was also the torso killer? Although it might seem strange that the torso killer was writing to Ness, serial killers have historically enjoyed toying with law enforcement. Jack the Ripper, the BTK killer, and the Zodiac killer, all corresponded with police officials in some capacity. The FBI shed some light on this in the report, serial killers, multidisciplinary perspective for investigators.

Serial killers gain confidence with each attack. Every time they evade law enforcement, they grow empowered, feeling as if they may never be identified. They sometimes get a rush from taunting police, often on par with the rush they experience from the crimes themselves. If Ness was indeed communicating with the torso killer, the letters could be interpreted as the killer toying, with Cleveland's public safety director.

When law enforcement officials took a look at these letters, they revealed something else. At the time of the torso murders, Ness would sometimes speak of a secret suspect. Apparently, Ness had pursued a suspect for the duration of the case. But due to the man's family ties, he had never been able to discuss the suspect freely. And since he was never able to find conclusive evidence,

the suspect retained his anonymity. Unfortunately, Ness's mysterious pen pal didn't sign any of his letters by name. However, he did sign a few with the same one name, Sweeney. A couple of the letters were signed F.E. Sweeney M.D. and the American Sweeney. Sweeney M.D. was a telling signature. After all, the torso killer was highly suspected of being a doctor. For Cleveland law enforcement, the letters felt like Christmas morning, With each new piece of evidence, the puzzle grew vastly more complicated and intriguing.

But as had happened so many times before, no new information was uncovered, and eventually, interest in the letters fizzled out. Then in the late 1970s, Cleveland native Marilyn Bardsley decided to write a play about the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. As Bardsley began researching her subject matter, she reached out to anyone who considered themselves knowledgeable on the case, trying to gather as many details as she could. One day, Bardsley received a phone call from a man who identified himself as Dr. Royal Grossman. He explained that he was a psychiatrist from Chiajaga County and had heard that Bardsley was

conducting research about the torso murders. Grossman claimed to have a story to tell. one which he had kept secret for over 30 years. In a moment, the true story of the torso killer. Want to support your gut health? Take Activia's gut health challenge by enjoying two Activio yoghurt today for two weeks and see if you feel a difference. With billions of probiotics and 20 years of scientific expertise, Activia is one of the easiest and tastiest ways to start your gut health ritual.

Try Activia today. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balance. diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. Now back to the story. In the late 1970s, playwright Marilyn Bardsley began a deep dive into the Cleveland torso murders in an attempt to write about the case for a stage play. It was then that she received a mysterious call from a Dr. Royal Grossman,

who had a secret he wanted to tell for over 30 years. According to Grossman, in 1938, Elliot Ness had spent a week interrogating a secret suspect in a hotel suite. According to Grossman, Ness was absolutely positive this man was the torso killer, but he was unable to obtain concrete proof. Ness had to tread carefully. The suspect had ties to a prominent political figure in Cleveland, which was why the entire interrogation had taken place in a hotel.

Ultimately, Ness was forced to drop the case against his prime suspect. But Ness never stopped believing this man was the torso killer. Bardsley pressed Grossman about the suspect's name, but he claimed not to know. Following her conversation with Grossman, Bardsley put in a call to David Cowles, the former head of the Scientific Investigation Bureau, to try to corroborate Grossman's story. confirmed that Grossman's story was true. But like Grossman, he refused to divulge the suspect's name, citing a promise he had made to Ness years prior. In an effort to put a little pressure on Cowles, Bardsley gave the story to the press, which gained some local interest. And it was then

that Bardsley received yet another curious phone call. This time, the caller was named Al Archackie, and he was calling with more information about Elliot Ness's secret suspect. Our Chacky, a former burglar, explained that in 1934 he had met a tall, well-dressed man in the upstairs of the Cleveland Club. The two had shared a round of drinks, and the man began asking Archaqui questions about where he lived and whether or not he was married. The questions made Archaqie uncomfortable, so he pardoned himself and headed home. But a couple years later, Archacki ran into the strange man again. This time, the two men began a symbiotic relationship. Archacki supplied the man with liquor, and the man, who was a

doctor, wrote Archaki prescriptions for barbitals. But after some time in this arrangement, Archacki began to notice a distinct pattern between the torso killings and the nights he would see his friend out drinking at bars in Kingsbury Run. Privately, Archie began to wonder if his new friend could be responsible for the torso murders. At this point in Archaqui's In Chackie's story, Bardsley asked him the question she had asked twice before. Did Archackie know his friend's name? Archackie responded that the fellow's name was Francis Edward Sweeney. Francis Edward Sweeney, F.E. Sweeney, M.D.

Bardsley wasted no time. She rang David Cowles and greeted him with simply Francis Edward Sweeney. He gasped, who gave you that name? Although none of this was concrete proof, it all struck Bardsley as incredibly compelling. So she began to research Francis Sweeney's background, and the further she dug, the more she became convinced that Sweeney had been Elliot Ness's secret suspect and indeed the torso killer. Francis Edward Sweeney was born in Cleveland on May 5, 1894, to Martin J. and Delia Sweeney. He was the fifth of six children, and as an infant he was showered with love and attention. But those blissful years were fleeting.

Tragedy began to plague his family when he was still a young child. One of Sweeney's older brothers died when he was only three, and Sweeney's mother died suddenly after suffering from a stroke in 2003 when Sweeney was nine. Only four years later, in 1907, Sweeney's father was hospitalized. And in 1912, Sweeney's second brother died of kidney failure at the age of 25. In 1920, Sweeney's father was incarcerated in the state mental hospital, and he died three years later in 1923 of apoplexy, with psychosis also listed as a cause of death.

Although Sweeney's family worked hard to provide a good life for their children, tragedy ravaged Sweeney's would-be happy home. According to an article titled Making of a Murderer by Lisa Firestone, a clinical psychologist and the Director of Research and Education for the Glendon Association, childhood trauma is a common thread throughout many serial killers in history. Childhood trauma can be defined as any event that takes place in a child's formative years that causes them to feel abused, neglected, ashamed, or insecure in their personal attachments or surrounding environments. The onslaught of deaths in Sweeney's family might have made him feel insecure in his attachments to others, which could have damaged his ability to form human connections and feel basic empathy from an early age. But despite his difficult childhood, Francis Sweeney was highly intelligent and very ambitious,

and he was determined to rise above his blue-collar beginnings, an unhappy familial history. He joined the Army in October 1917 and went to Europe, where he spent two years working in medical supply. He eventually obtained an honorable discharge with a note, 25% disabled attached to his record. It's unclear what this 25% disabled note referred to, but when Sweeney returned to America, he began planning for his future. He enrolled in the Case Western Reserve School of Pharmacy in 1920 and graduated with his certificate two years later, and then in 1924, at age 30, he began attending St. Louis University's School of Medicine. Sweeney continued to excel in medical school, serving as vice president of his class sophomore year. After medical school, Francis returned to Cleveland and married a 27-year-old nurse named

Mary Josephine Schoeckel, and in 1929, the state of Ohio officially granted Dr. Sweeney a certificate to practice medicine and surgery. Sweeney's good fortune continued into 1929 when his first son, Francis Edward Sweeney Jr. was born. Their second son, James Anthony, was born in 1931. It appeared, at least to the outside eye, that Dr. Francis Sweeney was a family man successfully pursuing the American dream. As Bardsley consulted Sweeney's few remaining friends and acquaintances, she got the sense that he was bright, compassionate and hardworking. Friends recalled that he had an excellent sense of humor,

and everyone imagined he would go on to have a happy, successful future. But in the early 1930s, Sweeney's mental health began to decline. He began to drink heavily, and he started to disappear from his family's home for days at a time. He began to neglect his medical practice, and he even became violent. Francis's wife, Mary, reported that he often would come home during the middle of the day reeking of alcohol. He would scream incoherent criticisms out his wife and children, and sometimes even threatened his family with physical violence. In 1933, Mary finally had enough of her husband's abuse. She filed an affidavit in probate court stating that she feared for her husband's sanity and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

In late 1933, Sweeney was committed to City Hospital for observation. and treatment for alcoholism. But he was discharged to his wife a month later in January of 1934. But within a week of Sweeney's discharge, his wife returned to court with a second affidavit. The judge dismissed the complaint, and so Mary filed for divorce. Concerned for her children's safety, Mary packed up, took her children to live with her sister's family, and sued for full custody. For a man who was already struggling with his mental health, the stress of a divorce and an ensuing custody battle must have put Sweeney over the edge, because shortly thereafter, Francis Sweeney simply disappeared. And a few months later, the first torso was found. But almost as soon as she'd picked up the trail, Bardsley's research reached a frustrating dead end.

Try as she might, she simply could not find any additional details that further connected Sweeney to Cleveland's torso murders. Until 1983, when Cowles met with Florence Schwine, the first director of the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum. At this point, Cowles had long since retired. He was in poor health and believed he was nearing the end of his life. His conversation with Schwine was an attempt to chronicle his life in currant. before he died. And so, in his conversation with Schwine, Coles finally broke his silence about

the torso case and shared details about a suspect who would fit Sweeney's background to a T. Cowell said, quote, there was a suspect in those murders. He went to college and went through medical school and became an MD, married a nurse, came back, did his internship at St. Alexis Hospital out on Broadway and finally kept going down and down and down with the booze, end quote. Cowles went on to explain that a relative of the suspects was a congressman, so they had to proceed carefully. And indeed, Democratic Congressman Martin L. Sweeney from Cleveland's 20th District was

Francis's cousin. According to Cowell's statement, Ness went on to question Sweeney for days on end at the Cleveland Hotel, but although Sweeney failed a polygraph test, there was no direct evidence to suggest his guilt. However, once Ness knew Sweeney's identity, a cat and mouse game began between the two that apparently lasted into 1940. Between 1933 and his death in 1964, Sweeney bounced in and out of various hospitals and mental institutions, which could have explained some of the time gaps between the torso killer's crimes. And during his various incarcerations, he became obsessed with Elliot Ness, so much so that he even wrote to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI to complain about

Nessism. Sweeney ended his letter to Hoover with a joke about having to tolerate his weak Ness, a play on words that also rings similar to the off-kilter jokes on the postcards in Ness's personal collection. In his statement, Cowles also shared one more story that shed some interesting light on the case. The story of Emil Fronick, a man who believed he had narrowly dodged being murdered at the hand of the torso killer. In 1934, the year the torso murders began, Fronick had been living on the streets of Kingsbury Run. One evening that winter, he encountered a man who told Froneck he was a doctor. The doctor invited Fronek to his son.

second floor office and offered him a warm meal and a new pair of shoes. But as he ate, Fronick began to feel strange. At first, he assumed the rich food was just as shock to his system. But when he started to feel even worse, Fronick realized he'd been drugged. He bolted for the door as the doctor lunged after him, but Fronick was too quick and made it out onto the street before the doctor could grab him. In 1938, Ness managed to track down Fronick to corroborate the details, namely the location of the man's office. Although Fronick could not recall the exact location, he was certain the office where he was drugged was on the second story of a building in Kingsbury Run, somewhere between East 50th and East 55th on the north side of the street. And as luck would have it,

Dr. Francis Sweeney held a second-story office just past East 50th on the north side of the street. The area was mostly deserted at night, and the building had a rear entrance that was hidden almost entirely from the view of the street. So if Sweeney had returned to his office to kill and dismember his victims at night, he would have had plenty of time to commit his crimes and clean up before the practice opened again the next morning. But law enforcement never had enough concrete evidence to obtain a warrant to search his office, possibly because of his ties to a prominent politician. But as far as Ness was concerned, he'd found his man. Ness devoted his life to trying to track down that missing piece of evidence that would

concretely tie Sweeney to the torso murders. And based on the taunting letters he sent to Ness, Sweeney evidently enjoyed watching Ness struggle. But sadly, Ness went to his grave without knowing for certain who was responsible for the torso killings. At least on paper, Ness's life's work had never been completed. It's likely that Francis Sweeney will never be concretely tied to the torso murders. But as the old adage goes, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

It's hard to imagine how Sweeney filled his time between 1938 and his death in 1964. But if the theories are correct, there could be countless bodies still lying undiscovered. The handiwork of the American Sweeney, the mad butcher of Kingsbury Run, the Cleveland torso murderer. Thanks again for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We'll be back again Monday with a new episode. Have a killer week. Serial Killers was created by Max Cutler. a production of Cutler Media and is part of the Parcast Network. It is produced by Max and Ron Cutler,

sound design by Andy Waits, with production assistants by Ron Shapiro and Paul Mahler. Additional production assistance by Carly Madden and Maggie Admeier. Serial Killers is written by Zoe Broad and stars Greg Polson and Vanessa Richardson. A beloved 75-year-old man washing up, getting ready for bed, is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year,

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