The first body appeared in September 1934, when a beachcomber on Lake Erie saw a half-buried “rotting slab of human flesh.” It was the lower half of a woman’s torso, its legs chopped off at the knees. Just two weeks earlier, another man found what appeared to be a human vertebrae and ribs on another beach.
It was enough to make Clevelanders antsy, and soon body parts were being “seen” everywhere. One frantic boater insisted he’d seen a human head bobbing in the waters of Lake Erie, while two fishermen were sure they’d reeled in a hunk of human flesh. One young girl swimming in that Great Lake claimed she’d been confronted by a ghostly hand waving from beneath the waves.
While most of the purported sightings amounted to nothing, this was not the case in Kingsbury Run, a “hobo jungle” in Depression-era Cleveland where the city’s homeless lived in tent cities called Cinder Park, Whiskey Island, and Tin Can Plaza. In September 1935, two boys racing down the steep embankment of Jackass Hill ran right into a “dead man with no head,” writes Daniel Stashower in the new book “American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper” (Minotaur Books). Investigators found the corpse exactly where the boys said, and a second body 30 feet away. Both corpses had been decapitated and castrated.
Later, “a clump of tangled flesh found near one of the bodies proved to be the severed genitals of both men.” One of the victims remained unknown, but the police were able to identify the second through fingerprinting as Edward Andrassy. Cops knew Andrassy as a “snotty punk” from “Rowdy Row” who might’ve dabbled in porn and prostitution, but definitely sold marijuana and “Spanish fly.” There were rumors he’d been in a voodoo cult.
The police began calling the killer “the Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” so-named for the fact that most of the killer’s male victims had been castrated.
When Cleveland cops began interrogating local prostitutes about clients with “bizarre sexual tendencies,” they realized the city was home to more “suspected perverts” than they could ever investigate, writes Stashower.
“That line of inquiry generated a distressingly large pool of candidates.”
Case in point: A man who liked to watch prostitutes decapitate a chicken as he masturbated. He turned out to be mentally disabled and nonviolent.
The Butcher’s first victim appeared roughly 50 years after Jack the Ripper terrorized London, but with an official victim count of at least 12, the “Butcher” was a more prolific killer, and a more savage one: Most of his victims were found with limbs, genitals or heads hacked off. The city coroner believed those dismemberments occurred while the victims were still alive.
Four months after the September 1935 victims were found, the existence of a Cleveland mass murderer was confirmed when a transient rifling through a butcher’s dumpster found two woven baskets filled with wrapped parcels of human flesh: arms and legs in the first, a limb-less female torso the second. The body would be identified as Florence Polillo, an occasional prostitute.
Many Clevelanders took solace in the fact that the Butcher was targeting the city’s less-upstanding citizens, but they also hoped the case might be solved by the city’s new law enforcement boss: Eliot Ness. Ness was famed for taking down Al Capone in Chicago and for being oblivious to threats. Ness was even said to have shrugged off a Capone associate who warned he’d soon be found “laying in a ditch with a hole in your head and your wang sliced off.”
‘I want to see this psycho get caught.’
Famed lawman Eliot Ness, vowing in 1936 to catch the madman known in Cleveland as the Butcher
When Ness began work in Cleveland in December 1935, he focused on combating police corruption, taking on the city’s mob, and even improving traffic safety. He mostly ignored the Butcher, whose bodies continued to pile up.
In June 1936, two boys hiking through Kingsbury Run with fishing poles over their shoulder found a pair of discarded brown pants. When they kicked them hoping for coins, a human head rolled out. Days later, a pair of railroad inspectors found a decapitated male body, which the city coroner confirmed perfectly matched the previous body-less head.
In July of that same year, a 17-year-old girl spied a “brownish, rotting mass” near the B&O railroad tracks that turned out to be another headless male corpse. Two months later, a homeless man beside a muddy creek saw a flash of white, which the police dutifully fished out of the water and identified as the “torso of a white man, sliced in two with [a] skill that has marked each of the slayings,” Stashower writes. The victim’s genitals were “severed with a sharp, brutal cut, leaving a one-inch stump behind.”
With more than a half-dozen bodies now being credited to the Butcher of Kingsbury Run, Cleveland’s mayor told Ness to get on the case. Ness took personal charge of the investigation in September 1936, declaring, “I want to see this psycho get caught.”
Hunting the Butcher, Ness had Cleveland PD haul in every kind of weirdo: There was a homeless man who lived under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge with 500 pairs of women’s shoes; a man who regularly performed acrobatics on a tight-rope nearly 50 feet above Kingsbury Run and another man bedecked with beads and amulets who claimed to be able to transfer heads from one person to another.
When those leads amounted to nothing, Ness looked for evidence by leading raids on the houses situated nearest to Kingsbury Run. He later directing the ransacking of a homeless encampment to search for clues, and when none resulted he — in the first stain on his impeccable reputation — OK’d burning the place to the ground.
But the body count continued to mount. The matching upper and lower halves of a woman’s torso were found the first months of 1937, then in June a 14-year-old boy walking under a Cuyahoga River bridge looked down to see a “human skull grinning back at him,” Stashower writes. Next to that was a bag of human bones.
In August, three homeless men scavenging in the 9th Street dump dug up what may have been the Butcher’s last victims, finding a number of parcels filled with severed thighs, parts of arms and legs, and a head. As police investigated that crime, one onlooker fell over what turned out to be another corpse.
“The Butcher had now killed so many people that bystanders were tripping over bodies,” the book detailed.
Ness’ police department went to great lengths to catch the “Butcher” — once even having a naked detective race through Kingsbury Run to lure the killer from the shadows — but didn’t accomplish much. Cleveland’s coppers mostly ended up questioning and incarcerating myriad men for “sodomy” — instead of finding a sex-mad serial killer, they mostly arrested gay men.
Ness’ failure to catch the Cleveland’s serial killer quickly took some of the burnish off his reputation as one of the country’s greatest lawmen, but so did his actions during those Cleveland years. Although he had made his name as a Prohibition agent, Ness drank so much that he often careened around town like a “sozzled frat boy.” He was also a ladies’ man, or as his second wife (of three) put it, Eliot “screwed everything in a skirt.”
But no evidence of the Butcher’s handiwork was seen after 1938, possibly because Ness had solved the case on the down low. The press had heard shadowy stories that the prime suspect was a mysterious Dr. X, a “discredited physician with a history of mental problems.” He turned out to be Francis Edward Sweeney, scion to a respectable Cleveland family and cousin to a sitting US congressman.
Sweeney doled out medical supplies for the US military during World War I before becoming a pharmacist and doctor back home in Cleveland. He was happily married, briefly, until his barbiturate addiction, heavy drinking and violent outbursts led his wife to question his sanity. Five times between 1933-1938 — or the very years the “Butcher’s” bodies accrued — he was subjected to and barely passed competency hearings.
Ness was convinced of Sweeney’s guilt but worried about his family connections, so he quietly hauled him in for what ended up a two-week interrogation. Notably, Ness’ investigation didn’t happen at police HQ but at the Cleveland Hotel, where the press wouldn’t find out about the suspect. Ness kept Sweeney isolated, without an attorney, and subject to endless hours of questioning.
Sweeney never cracked, though. He met all police questions with witty asides and jibes, deflecting everything. Even asked his name, the suspect “identified himself as Gaylord Sundheim before collapsing in a fit of spiteful laughter,” Stashower writes.
But soon after his sit-down with Ness, Francis Edward Sweeney was placed into the first of many mental institutions, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, “The Butcher of Kingsbury Run” was never heard from again, nor the guilty party officially identified.
When he unsuccessfully ran for Cleveland mayor in 1947, Ness was asked by a reporter whatever happened to the “Butcher.” Ness paused to think before slowly enunciating his answer.
“That case,” he said, “has been solved.”