Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,75
by federal money, to boost its sagging fortunes. Architects had designed a gleaming modernist expo city on 135 acres on Lake Erie. Rivaling the Chicago World’s Fair’s White City, it was “a city of ivory, a new Baghdad risen in the desert,” one writer said. Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, the future movie Tarzan, and Esther Williams performed on the Aquacade, a floating stage, while jazz from the Bob Crosby Orchestra floated out over the water. In June of that year, Cleveland also was preparing to take a second bow in the national spotlight, hosting the 1936 Republican National Convention, which would send shy Kansas governor Alf Landon to be crushed by FDR in the fall. Yet Ness, absorbed in fighting municipal corruption, showed little interest in the murders. The safety director was letting a serial killer terrorize the city.
But on June 5, as delegates poured into town for the GOP convention set to start in three days, a head detached from the body of a tattooed man was discovered by the train tracks in Kingsbury Run. In a brazen affront to Ness, the killer hid the body in bushes in full sight of a police station. On the Sunday afternoon in September when star Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller struck out seventeen Philadelphia A’s, more than five thousand people gathered around a sewage pit to watch a diver retrieve the arms and legs of the Butcher’s eighth victim.
The mayor ordered Ness to act. The Cleveland Press demanded: “Unusual means must be taken to bring the detection of one of the most horrible killers in criminal history.”
Ness responded by putting twenty detectives on the case, including undercover hoboes. He sought advice from the experts at Scotland Yard. He expanded the investigation to the largest in city history. Police brought in ten thousand possible suspects for interviews, focusing on physically strong men who were surgeons, medical personnel, male nurses, and animal butchers. Detective Pete Merylo paraded through shantytowns in his long johns under the moonlight to “bait” a killer he was convinced was homosexual. Nothing worked. By 1938, the Butcher of Cleveland had killed and dismembered twelve men and women.
Ness’s dragnet finally turned up a prime suspect. Dr. Frank E. Sweeney was a surgeon from a prominent family, the first cousin of a local Democratic Party boss. On the surface an impressive, articulate man, Dr. Sweeney was known to be an alcoholic, mentally unstable, and abusive; his wife had left him. Furthermore, he was physically huge, quite capable of all the cutting and moving about of human remains. His frequent disappearances from the hospital where he worked, timed to some of the killings, had aroused suspicion, and Ness himself had been frightened by the big man’s anger when alone with him.
Ness’s instincts were confirmed when another crime-fighting legend, Leonarde Keeler, inventor of the polygraph machine, came in from Chicago and administered several lie detection tests to Sweeney, who failed them all. The surgeon, the polygrapher told Ness, was “a classic psychopath.” Sweeney was following in the footsteps of his father, an alcoholic, violent schizophrenic who was committed to mental hospitals at the end of his life. Keeler said, “You’ve got your man.”
But Ness faced a quandary. He was reportedly convinced that Sweeney was the Butcher of Cleveland. Yet he didn’t believe he’d ever win a conviction of the politically connected Sweeney. Two days later, in what some suspected was a deal Ness cut with the prominent family, Dr. Sweeney voluntarily committed himself, and never saw the outside of a mental hospital or hospital for the rest of his life. The Cleveland killings stopped, but the murderer moved on to other parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, it was too late for Ness. His reputation had already been damaged by allegations of heavy drinking and skirt-chasing that facilitated the breakup of his marriage. His long failure to stop the serial killer’s reign of terror left him especially vulnerable to political enemies and the press. It was the makings of an American tragedy.
On an icy winter night in 1942, after he fled the scene of a car accident at 4:30 in the morning following a night of drinking and clubbing, Ness was forced to resign his post. His second wife, a young model and art student, left him soon after. The former crime-fighting wunderkind descended through a series of career and business failures in New York and Washington, D.C., to the remote mountain town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where he drank heavily with his third