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Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's select, I've chosen our Cleveland Torso Murders episode from May 2021.
Once in a while, we do some true crime episodes and in my opinion, this might be our best one ever.
It's a semi -little known series of gruesome killings that became an engrossing story with a lot to keep up with.
I should probably mention there's a lot of frank talk about some really grisly stuff in here, so be forewarned.
Hope you enjoy it as much as one can enjoy this kind of stuff.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
Jerry's out there somewhere with a magnifying glass and a toothpick.
We don't know what the toothpick's for, but this is Stuff You Should Know.
Yes. Content warning episode, everybody.
This is one of our...
I was about to say rare.
They're fairly rare, but one of our true crime episodes that is very grisly.
Gruesome. Gruesome, but took place in the 1930s, so there's something about old and gruesome that makes it a little more palatable for me.
Totally. I don't know why, but you're absolutely right.
Time, I guess, you know.
Yeah, time heals all wounds, including the Torso Murders.
Yes, it does. Well, it heals all wounds except for some of the things that happened in the Torso Murders, because you can't come back from that.
It's pretty crazy. You're familiar with the Torso Murders already, right?
I had heard of these, and the more I read about them, the more I was shocked that there wasn't a good period movie about this.
Yeah, absolutely. But if you haven't heard of the Torso Killer, that's fine.
You're definitely not alone.
A lot of people haven't, which is kind of surprising, because these are...
they're unsolved murders.
There were a lot of them, and they took place in the background of a city that was driven into a frenzy by this ghastly serial murderer who continued their murders despite this extraordinarily large manhunt to try to find them.
An unsuccessful manhunt still to this day.
Yeah, I mean, it has all the makings of a good movie.
It's got a... and we'll reveal who this person is.
We'll hang onto it for a second.
It may have been. But it's got a famous investigator.
Oh, oh, sorry. Yes.
He definitely was the famous investigator.
Yeah. Oh, you thought it meant who the murderer was?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you've got some false starts.
You've got some Coen Brothers -esque whimsy with the dog discovery.
I thought you'd like that.
Yeah, I did like that.
And yeah, it has all the makings of a great movie in a cool period setting, which was Depression -era 1930s Cleveland, Ohio.
Which is almost indistinguishable from current -day 2021 Cleveland, Ohio.
Oh, come on. We love Cleveland.
Hey, man, I'm from Toledo.
I can totally back on Cleveland and Detroit.
I was... that's my birthright.
That is your birthright.
So let's go back to September of 1934, when a woman's torso is washed up on the shore of Lake Erie.
Her legs are amputated below the knee.
There is no head, which is why I said torso, and arms.
It's a suspicious way to find a body.
A very suspicious way.
She was never identified.
They called her the lady of the lake.
And this was just sort of the beginnings.
Nothing was put together at this point, because it would be two years before any other murders took place, and that they finally sort of put together that the lady of the lake was perhaps victim zero.
Right. Really victim one, but they called her victim zero of who would become known as the torso murderer or the mad butcher of Kingsbury.
Yes, Kingsbury Run.
And like you said, it'd be about two years before they started to connect the dots.
But in that time, between the time the lady of the lake was found, about a year passed, and then all of a sudden, two more bodies were found.
And now all of a sudden, because two bodies were found together, this really started to capture people's attention.
The lady of the lake, it was a weird thing.
It was a terrible thing to find, but it was singular.
This was, you know, by definition, not singular.
Finding two bodies at once that were both dismembered.
And they were found in that area of Kingsbury Run, which is where the mad butcher takes his name.
That's right. They were both men in this case.
They were castrated.
They were also decapitated, which would become sort of a signature.
The decapitation and any kind of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer.
And it's interesting in that Victim 1 of these two men was actually one of the only ones that they got a fairly positive ID for.
They actually got some fingerprints and matched a man named Edward Andressy.
And he was sort of a petty thief that the police had brought in before.
So he was believed to be gay, and if he was, which all accounts say that he was, this was at a time when, in the 1930s, certainly it was still illegal, and it was also listed as a mental disorder in the, what's it called, not the DMV.
DSM. DSM. The DMV. The DMV didn't look too highly on it either.
No, that's right. So he, I think, was one of only two that was ever even positively identified of what would end up being probably 13, maybe 12 murders.
Yes. And again, these guys were found together, not together like they were within a very short distance of one another so that they were found virtually at the same time.
And whenever you find a body missing its head, that is attention grabbing.
And when you find two bodies both missing their heads, that really starts to get the press's juices running.
And like we said, these were found around Kingsbury Run.
And Kingsbury Run is basically like an old riverbed that cuts through, I believe, the west side of Cleveland.
No, I'm sorry, I think the east side of Cleveland, down to the Cuyahoga River.
And it was basically like the place where all of the oil companies and all of the heavy industry along the river and along the lake would dump all of their waste.
The city put a sewer in there.
It was just meant to be kind of like a wasteland, like a literal wasteland.
And it kind of stayed that way until the Depression hit.
And by the time the Depression hit, things were so bad that people were looking to basically live wherever they could for free.
And they started taking up residence in Kingsbury Run.
So by the time the Kingsbury Run murders, the torso murders started.
This was like a full -fledged, full -swing, shanty town, basically, a Great Depression -era hoover town is what they call them.
Yeah, exactly. So it was a grim scene down there anyway.
Certainly the fringes of society.
During the course of the investigation, there were accusations of the press that they weren't working as hard as they needed to because these were people on the fringes of society and sort of forgotten about.
And I think one of the other people identified was a few months later in January 1936, when they found the body of Flo Palillo.
Florence Palillo was a waitress and bartender and a sex worker who was discovered once again, dismembered, wrapped in newspaper and a couple of bushel baskets.
And then about a week and a half later, found other parts of her body.
So she was sort of found in, it's very grisly, but found in pieces over the course of a week and a half in different places.
Yeah. Right. So as far as anybody can tell, we're up to three and possibly four victims, if you include the Lady of the Lake.
But it wasn't until the following June, about six months after Flo Palillo was discovered, because again, remember, these people actually lived on the fringe of society.
So just like today, just like Robert Picton, the pig farmer from Vancouver, so many other serial killers find their victims in, I guess, the lowest stations of society because they're the most vulnerable.
They have the least protection, and that's kind of what was going on.
That's why it took so many victims for the press to finally be like, okay, there's something really going on here.
And finally, in June, I believe, of 1936, victim number four, as far as canonical victims go, but possibly the fifth victim was discovered.
His head was found first by two boys who were playing hooky and fishing along the Cuyahoga.
Can you imagine that, man?
No, I can't because they found like a balled up pair of trousers and I guess grabbed them and found that there's something in it, and when they opened it up, it was the head of a man in his twenties.
But again - He's never been identified like so many of these victims.
Yeah, and not to trivialize any of this, but again, that stuff is very ripe for for movie making.
Totally. This whole thing is, and it really is surprising that no one's done this yet.
Like you wouldn't, you know, you would write something like that in a screenplay and this actually happened.
I didn't see, I haven't read it, but there's a graphic novel, and maybe it's a series called Torso that is about all this, and I'm guessing that would probably be a pretty good basis for the movie.
Yeah, so victim four, they were making great efforts to find out who this man was.
So they actually, the police circulated a photo of his face and made a death mask.
If you don't know what a death mask is, I encourage you to go listen to our episode on death masks.
Nice. It's basically what you would think, it's a recreation of this man's head, and they put this thing along with a tattoo map.
He had tattoos all over himself.
An illustrated map of his tattoos in this death mask on display at the Great Lakes exposition of 1936, where, you know, a hundred thousand people could walk.
I mean, it was a smart idea in one way because they had a, you know, could blast it out in the best way possible to try and identify who this person was.
But it was also, again, like something from a movie, these people going to an exposition all of a sudden are walking by these, this tattoo map and the death mask of this man.
And I'm sure the question came up like, well, why is it, where's the rest of his body?
Why didn't they just show pictures of the tattoos?
They're like, stop asking questions.
Do you know the guy or not?
No, go get some ice cream.
Exactly. Move along.
Nothing to see here.
But yeah, despite that, you know, very public search for an identification, he was never, still has never been identified.
And his tattoos were really, he had people's names tattooed on him.
He had a cartoon character named Jiggs tattooed on him.
So this guy, you know, you could see his face, they had all those tattoos and he still has never been identified.
But his his discovery and I think the very public, like the cops circulated a photo of his head on a gurney in the morgue at first before they made the death mask, among other police agencies around the area.
And I'm sure to the press as well.
So it was kind of public, even though it was kind of quiet, but it got the press's attention and the press started to connect the dots.
And all of a sudden, we now we're connecting the lady of the lake to this latest guy and all of the other ones as well.
And it became very clear that there was what they call the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run on the loose in Cleveland.
And no one had any idea who it was or when or if they were ever going to stop.
Yeah, I think there were seven more victims over the next two years.
Victim eight were skeletal remains, but they did think they identified this person as Rose Wallace, a woman in her forties.
She had gone missing about a year earlier and there was quick lime use to decompose this body.
And this one interestingly had evidence of more of a clumsy dismemberment.
To me, this one stands out a little bit as one that possibly might not be a victim and could have been misattributed to the Mad Butcher.
That's just my personal feeling.
I don't know if anyone else is saying this, but it's the one that stands out to me as being slightly different.
Same to me. The killer clearly lacked a dismemberment plan in that case.
Is that a ban? Yeah.
Are they good? Yeah, they were really good.
They were maybe Mathrock.
Okay. I think they were.
At the very least, they were alternative.
Victim nine had his heart removed.
Victim 10 had morphine in her system.
And I think they're not quite sure how they all died.
I think at one point they thought most of them died by the decapitation, but some were found with their blood completely drained from their body.
Like I said, this one woman had morphine in her system, which could make sense.
We'll get to something else later on of a potential victim that never happened where drugs might have been a factor.
But you know, it's sort of all, you know, there were men, there were women, there were black people, there were white people.
There wasn't any real rhyme or reason, it seemed like, aside from the fact that they were probably culled from this area of Ohio.
Yes. In the fact that, you know, the first two men were emasculated, that there were women involved too, that somebody's heart had been ripped out.
Like there was clearly a sexual element to the whole thing, which made the idea that they were men and woman victims very confounding.
You just don't normally see that in a sex killer.
You see one or the other, and it's usually the sex that the person is oriented to, or the victims.
And then, you know, just to kind of, to cap that point off, the killer left victims 11 and 12 within a few yards of one another on a dump, like a trash dump, and one was a woman, victim 11 was a woman, and victim 12 was a man.
Should we take a break?
We should, because Cleveland doesn't know it at the time, but those of us looking through, looking backwards through history can tell you that this was the last canonical victims in August of 1938.
So the killer, as far as anybody knows, is done.
That's right. And most of the grizzly stuff is out of the way, and we'll be back to reveal the famous investigator right after this.
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How's that for a tease?
I can't take it anymore, Chuck.
Please, please, who is it?
It's my favorite thing when you play coy.
It was Mr. Elliot Ness, very famous for being the head of the untouchables, for putting Al Capone behind bars.
Good friend of Sean Connery's?
Very good friend. Oh, that was great.
That wasn't very good.
Because to do Connery - Don't bring your knife to a gunfight, you bring a gun, you dummy.
Yeah, I think that was the line.
If you go on to do Connery, well, you gotta have an S in there.
Right. But there was no S.
I did that, didn't I?
I thought I nailed it.
There are no S's in that sentence.
Right. They're implied that I would have done that had there been S's.
Don't bring a knife to a gun, Donch.
How's that? Right. You bring a gun, you dummy.
All right. Back to the serious stuff.
Elliot Ness was the - after that work in - what was that, Chicago, I think?
Oh, yeah. That was - he became the alcohol investigator in charge of the alcohol tax unit for Northern Ohio in August of 1934.
And then the Republican mayoral candidate, Harold Burton, who had gone to win, said, you know what, Ness, you're a famous guy.
I like the cut of your jib.
Let me make you, in December 1935, the safety director for Cleveland, and let me nudge you towards this outstanding case that we have.
So, yeah, when he was hired, the case wasn't quite clear that it was a big old case.
He came in just after - like a couple of months after victims one and two were found, and just a couple of weeks before Flo Pallillo was found.
So it wasn't evident that there was a serial murderer on the loose, but that also means that Elliot Ness came in right at the beginning of this thing.
So he was the public safety director for it.
He became the face of the frustrated police effort to capture the torso killer.
Right. Although the lead investigator - what was that guy's name?
Peter Marillo. Yeah.
He was - I don't know about obsessed, but it became sort of his main focus of work, was to tirelessly find out who this murderer was.
And I assume that it's weird because I really don't know what a safety director was.
I don't think - is that even still a thing?
Yeah, I think there is a public safety director position still.
They basically are in charge of the police department, the fire department - Oh, okay.
Basically all that stuff.
They're the head of that.
They're like probably the liaison between the mayor and those services.
But not the guardian angels because they do what they want to do.
Hey, man, they're staying on their own too.
The coroner, A .J. Pierce of the case - I think he was the first coroner on the first case, said, you know what we need to do?
We need to get together.
We need to have a little summit and start sharing information.
I'm going to call it the torso clinic, which was interesting.
I don't know if he did or the press did.
Yeah, either way, because the press was very much involved in this whole run, obviously.
But at this conference is where he first put forward a profile, which was, this is someone who would not stand out in Kingsbury One.
It's a big one. Someone who knew the area could blend in.
Somebody, you know, we think it's a man who is a powerful man because they need to be able to, you know, it takes a lot of work to dismember a body and to haul these bodies around and drop them off in different places.
And we think he also might have some anatomical knowledge, not saying that he's necessarily a doctor or a surgeon, kind of like the Jack the Ripper thing.
But this person clearly knows their way around a knife and a scalpel.
Yeah, because, I mean, if you really closely examine a body and like look at the places where, you know, the body was separated with the knife, you can find hesitancy marks.
You can find the hacking.
There's all sorts of clues and telltale signs.
And apparently this guy had a lot of confidence and had a lot of skill or knowledge about anatomy.
So, like you said, maybe not a doctor, but at the very least, a very skilled butcher who had studied human anatomy before.
But eventually they finally were like, this is probably some sort of doctor.
Yeah, and I think they eventually learned that most of the victims died within a few days of being discovered.
And most were moved, except for victim five, where they found a bloodbath, you know, that was, this didn't happen at the other crime scenes.
It was virtually no blood to be found.
And in fact, I think one was completely drained of blood.
Many were. Oh, really?
I mean, that takes, I don't know if that happened naturally, just because of the nature of dismemberment or if it was a purposeful thing, but only one body was found kind of clearly murdered there.
So, yeah, I think the fact that the blood wasn't on the scene and it wasn't in the body any longer means that it had to go somewhere.
So that, the fact that they were dismembered and packaged, I mean, like, a lot of them were found, you know, the one unidentified tattooed man, his head was wrapped in trousers, but other peoples were wrapped in newspaper or brown paper, like they were meat.
Someone was put in a makeshift box.
There was a lot of time dedicated to the dismemberment of these bodies, and that leaves a lot of evidence, and you need a place where you're not going to be interrupted.
That's not easy to come by.
So that became a really big point, is, you know, we're pretty sure that this person is snatching victims from the Kingsbury Run area.
But where are they committing these acts?
And they tried to find that place as much as they tried to find the killer.
Yeah, I mean, that would be a big clue if they had some murder room, Dexter style.
Sure. That's a dead giveaway every time.
That's coming back, by the way.
I don't know if you ever watched Dexter.
What do you mean it's coming back?
They're bringing Dexter back, man.
With the original, like, Michael C.
Hall? Yeah. No. Yes, they are, indeed.
And I had mixed feelings because we loved that show for a long time, but it is one of the shark jumpier shows of all time.
It's like the shark itself jumped a shark.
I think so. It's insane.
It's amazing. I mean, I love Michael C.
Hall, though. We're just now finishing Six Feet Under again, so.
I'm always happy to see him again, but I'll give it a go.
Did you see Cold In July?
No. What is that? It's a little bit like a straw dogs type story, but he's like having a battle Don Johnson.
It's just really, like, if you want, I know, it's weird casting, but if you want to just experience, like, a constant, you know, mid to low level dread for two hours, like, just go ahead and watch that.
It's well done in that respect.
Or watch The Lighthouse.
It's probably better.
God, it's so good. Let's just stop talking about this and talk about The Lighthouse for the rest of the time.
All right, so Peter Morello, who, like we said, was a lead detective, he's sort of obsessed with this thing.
He starts not only focusing on this land down by the river, but I didn't mean that, but that's what it was.
But he started focusing on the railroads and these hobos.
What? The railroads.
Oh, okay. You know where trains run on?
Sure, yeah. I just never heard it pronounced the way you do the first time.
Railroad? The railroads.
It was hilarious. I gotta lighten this up somehow.
We're talking about dismembered torsos.
I know, exactly. So he started looking in these boxcars and I don't, I mean, is hobo an offensive word?
Can you still say that?
I don't think so. I think it's a point of pride, a term of pride.
For people who still ride the rails?
Mm -hmm. Okay. So he's still out there doing his thing.
At this press conference, Elliot Ness ends up holding a meeting with the head of Scientific Investigation Bureau.
His name was David Cowles, and an editor of the Cleveland Press.
So this is a big deal.
They're actually getting the press involved at this point.
Right, but secretly, this wasn't a press conference.
This is like a secret meeting.
Oh, no, no, not a press conference at all.
This was very much in secret.
But he's involving the press and they said, here's what we're going to do.
Ness says, let's, you go and pick out eight tough guys that can go undercover that know a lot of bad guys in Cleveland and have all those connections.
We'll give them the police support they need and we'll fund them.
How did they fund them with the press's money?
What does that even mean?
I don't, I think that like maybe the owners of the newspapers chipped in, like the wealthy owners chipped in quietly to pay.
And they just took the stuff off of the books.
That's my impression of what this happened.
And you ever chipped in the most gut to break the story, I wonder?
But well, no, I think at the same time, it was a technique for bringing the press into the fold so that there weren't outsiders drumming up trouble for the cops anymore.
Gotcha. Because the Cleveland Press really made the, they didn't make the police look bad.
They pointed out just how badly the police were handling this or ineffectively, which is not to say that the police were not trying really, really hard.
Supposedly, I saw a figure of 10 ,000 suspects were interviewed over four years during the course of this investigation.
They just couldn't find the guy.
They could not find this killer.
And the press kind of almost gleefully kept pointing that out.
Right. So this is in a way attempt to assuage them and bring them into the inner circle a bit.
Right. That was my impression.
All right. So the police are, they've got these undercover guys working their scene.
They're checking cars randomly at all hours.
They're canvassing laundromats and places where you wash your clothes.
So, you know, if there are people like trying to get bloodstains out of something, they're kind of doing everything they can at this point.
And this is where the Cullen Brothers sort of moment comes in, which is in Sandusky, a dog.
And Sandusky is about, now it's about an hour, 10 minutes away by car.
I don't know what it would have been back then, but probably less than two hours, I would say.
Even in an old -timey car.
A dog shows up in Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth.
I want to say that literally happened in a Cullen Brothers movie.
It might have just been a bone of a body.
But I can't think of which one it might be.
Someone will write in and tell us.
It sounds like a Barton Fink kind of thing.
It is, but it's not.
Or I might be thinking of the kids who ripped the toupee off the guy in Miller's Crossing.
I don't remember that part.
Although I remember one of the neighbors lost his toupee in the burbs and they thought it was evidence it was murdered.
There's definitely a movie.
It might not have been Cullen Brothers where a dog shows up with a body part in its mouth.
Probably more than one movie.
But this dog shows up in its mouth and Morello goes to Sandusky and it turns out that the leg was actually surgically removed during a real surgery, not a serial killer surgery.
And just didn't get disposed of right.
Ended up in the lake, ended up in the dog's mouth.
Right, but the police were so hyped up in Cleveland at the time that they traveled to Sandusky to chase down this lead.
Which like all the other ones went absolutely nowhere.
And so there was, again, just a tremendous amount of public pressure, including something you mentioned earlier too, a lot of allegations and accusations that the police weren't doing enough because these people were not wealthy, were not well thought of.
They were very poor.
The poorest of the poor during the Great Depression were the ones who were suffering the serial killer.
And so there was a tremendous amount of pressure.
And I think my impression is that that pressure is one of the, I guess, the thing that drove Eliot Ness to do something really terrible.
Because the killer was picking from the shantytowns of Kingsbury Run, Eliot Ness got it in his head that if you did away with Kingsbury Run, you'd do away with the killings.
And so he raided the homeless camps at Kingsbury Run and rousted everybody and then ordered the place burned to the ground.
Yeah, and I'm sure he thought this was a great idea at the time, but he really didn't think it through because the people of Cleveland did not take kindly to that.
They hated him for what he did, and this was during the Depression, and everyone was struggling basically, or not everyone, but most people were struggling at this point.
Unemployment rate of 20 % in Cleveland.
And so the idea of this big shot Chicago G -man coming in and basically running these homeless people out of their only option and burning it to the ground was not a good look at all.
However, there were no more murders after that.
I know. Strangely, it seemed to have worked.
And it depends. We'll talk more about a lot of different views of whether the murders stopped or not.
But as far as canonical victims go, he burned the place to the ground two days after victims 11 and 12 were found.
And after that, there were no more victims.
So it didn't solve the murders by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed to have put an end to them weirdly.
Yeah. I think before we take a break, we should mention there was one and get into who we think is probably the real suspect.
There was one suspect in Cuyahoga County that the sheriff brought in, he was a bricklayer named Frank Doleziel, who did confess.
He was brought in for the murder of Flo Palillo originally because he had lived with her for a little while, but supposedly he knew Rose Wallace and Edward Andressy as well.
But then they looked into it, and by all accounts, that confession was not just induced, but in the days where you would literally beat a victim into confessing.
Yeah, and then murder him in his cell after he recanted his confession.
So was he murdered?
Yeah. Well, he hung himself, but he hung himself from a hook that was shorter than he was.
I mean, I guess if you really, really want to die, you could do that.
You could overcome the...
The urge to stand up.
Disinclination towards self -harm, I guess you'd put it.
But his friends at the time seemed to be like, no, he was murdered.
So at the very least his confession was beaten out of him.
No serious scholar of the crime believes that Frank Doleziel was the killer.
He didn't have any...
There was no evidence whatsoever of any kind of surgical knowledge.
There was like a lot of boxes he just didn't check.
It was basically he knew Flo, and he may have known Edward Andressy, and he may have known Rose Wallace, and the sheriff basically ran him in very publicly.
Right. All right, so let's take that break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the investigation and who people now believe committed these horrible murders right after this.
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All right, so Eliot Ness has run everyone out of the Kingsbury Run camps, did not go over well.
He then says, here's what we'll do.
Let's skirt the warrant rules so we don't have to require warrants.
And let's get together since I'm the safety director and I control the fire department too, let's go around and start searching for quote, fire code violations, end quote, basically so they don't have to get any kind of warrants and they can just basically go into people's houses and just at will and search
and do whatever they want to under the guise of searching for fire code violations.
He was desperate. He was very desperate.
And again, they were looking not just for the killer, but really more than anything.
They were looking for that grisly workshop, as the Cleveland plane dealer had put it, a place where he was draining the victims of their blood and dismembering their bodies.
They didn't turn anything up, but it really kind of goes to show like just what lengths Eliot Ness, who was considered like this squeaky clean lawman, was willing to go to.
This is extraordinarily unconstitutional and underhanded and he went to that degree and well beyond it turned out actually too.
Very much. And I think we're at the point now where we can talk about this mystery person, right?
Yeah, this is why I said he went way beyond, you know, unlawful search of homes.
He actually engaged in what amounts to kidnapping of a private citizen who he thought was the killer.
Yeah, and he kept it very secret.
He even used a pseudonym for this person.
He called this person, this gentleman Gaylord Sundheim, pretty good name.
The good hotel check -in name.
And privately, word gets around a little bit what's going on, but privately he would describe this person as an alcoholic, maybe bisexual, a doctor who came from a wealthy family and who had a relative in Congress who was protecting this person.
Yes. And took this man under the dark of night to a hotel room in Cleveland, held there without charging him for two weeks where they interrogated this person.
Yes, and apparently the guy who, this Gaylord Sundheim, was in the middle of a bender when he was picked up and he was so profoundly drunk that it took him three days to become sober again.
I don't buy that. I know, but when he did, I know, but you got to add those two.
Sure. Thank you for keeping it even keel though.
I mean, I've had nights that were a little rough and you're always okay the next day.
I don't know what you're talking about.
It's so weird. Alcohol affects us so differently, man.
I can have a drink and a half these days and I'm like hating life the next day.
No, no. I'm not talking about a hangover, but you're not still drunk the next day.
Oh, gotcha. Or in two days or three days.
I think that's what they were saying is that this guy was, he had a hangover stupor basically that lasted three days.
I could buy that then.
That was my impression.
All right. Not that he was still just flying high, but that he was just hating it.
All right. I should have just shut up about the whole thing.
But regardless, they kept him, whether he was sober as a judge or drunk as a skunk when they picked him up, they held him in this hotel room without charge and outside of the legal system for two weeks and interrogated him for up to eight hours a day.
Yeah, but I think he did it, so who cares?
That's exactly how Eliot Ness was approaching this.
And again, everybody thought he was this squeaky clean lawman and he's engaged in kidnapping, but the thing is he brought in the guy who was one of the early inventors of the polygraph.
He invented the Keeler polygraph, and it was called that because his name was Leonard Keeler.
And I think he brought him from Chicago, and Leonard Keeler administered a couple of different polygraph tests to this Gaylord Sondheim and said, if this isn't your man, I might as well throw my machine out the window or if I say anything else because that guy, that's the guy.
It's definitely the guy.
You've got to take that with a grain of salt, because especially today, polygraphs are just total junk science, but it certainly confirmed Ness's suspicions that much more at the time.
I think that polygraph back then was there wasn't even a machine.
Keeler would just sit there and look for a bead of sweat to break out on the forehead, then punch the guy if it did.
That's right. Exactly.
So the case was never solved.
Ness's reputation obviously took a big hit.
He eventually got out of Cleveland after a drunk driving hit and run accident that he was involved with and tried to cover up, so he left in great shame.
But back to this Gaylord Sondheim, later on, many years later, there were crime investigators and writers who put two and two together and basically identified, and in fact, in one case, crime writer Marilyn Bardsley came out and said, yeah, this is who this person was.
It was a former World War I army medic who was discharged for mental instability following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off, and he was an alcoholic, another big warning light.
And his name was Francis Edward Sweeney, who also happens to have a relative in Congress.
Right. A guy named Representative Martin Sweeney, who was a huge critic of the Burton administration, of which Eliot Ness was a major part.
And he was just the kind of guy who was a political opponent to the degree that I'm sure Eliot Ness thought if he tried to arrest Clarence or Francis Sweeney, he would be obstructed from up on high by this Congress person.
Whether he would have or not, I don't know.
I saw some references to the idea that Martin Sweeney was well aware that Eliot Ness was looking at his cousin for this and was already getting in the way.
But I only saw that on one plate, so I'm not sure if that's the case or not.
Either way, his presence and his connection to Francis Sweeney was enough that Eliot Ness never charged Francis Sweeney despite apparently going to his grave believing that Dr.
Francis Edward Sweeney was the Cleveland torso murderer.
Have you seen a picture of the guy?
Dude. He looks like the definition of a torso murderer.
Seriously, you have to be careful with that stuff.
I know, of course. Especially if you ever end up a juror, you can't be like, you look like a killer, but this guy looks like a torso murderer.
You're exactly right.
The quick sidebar. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it on this show.
I know I've talked about it on a movie crush, but I want to recommend this great, great documentary.
And forgive me if I'm repeating myself here, but it's called Crazy Not Insane.
It's an HBO documentary about this doctor, Dr.
Dorothy Otno Lewis, who basically spent her life trying to understand serial killers.
And one of the main, she was kind of one of the first people to really try and understand what's actually going on.
And she put together, I think, like three very common common commonalities among serial killers, but one of them is head trauma.
And that's why this really stands out to me about Francis Edward Sweeney, was that he was discharged from the army because of head trauma leading to mental instability.
It's a commonality in most serial killers, is some sort of head trauma, especially when you're younger.
Wow, that's interesting.
I did not know that.
Yeah, and the, I may have thought I talked about on this, but it was the, who was the guy in LA that also just had a great docu -series on, The Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez.
He suffered multiple head traumas when he was younger as well.
So I think it's, I can't remember the third one.
It's head trauma, some sort of physical and even sexual abuse as a child.
And then there was like one more thing, and those are like, that's just a recipe for ending up some sort of sociopath or serial killer.
I think the third one is disappointing birthday presents.
Yeah, maybe so. It's a great, you'd really love it.
It's a really good documentary.
Yeah, I'll check that out for sure.
It sounds like it's totally in my alley.
I'm actually a gog that I've not heard of it.
Don't be a gog. I'm a little gog.
All right, come back.
So like you said, Marilyn Bardsley confirmed from one of the investigators that Frances Sweeney was Gaylord Sondheim.
But that does not mean that Frances Sweeney was the torso murderer.
True. Although again, like you were saying, if you look at a picture of Frances Sweeney, you're like, that's totally the torso murderer.
Well, and other stuff, you know, the head trauma, the medical training.
He was a surgeon -in -residence at St.
Alexis Hospital. His career deteriorated because of his drinking.
Right around the time the first murderer victims started showing up too.
Yeah, he also had a deal apparently with a local mortuary where they would give him bodies to practice surgery on, which would explain maybe the kill room or the dismemberment room.
He would have a place to go and dispose of these bodies without, you know, there being a big blood trail, you know?
Right. I mean, this is a place where it wouldn't seem weird that somebody was decapitating a body or draining the body of all of its blood.
Like that's exactly the kind of place.
And that didn't turn up until years later.
And it was thanks to a guy named James Badal who's written some books on it, on the torso murderers.
And he interviewed one of the early investigators and found out that he had privileges at that funeral home and started to put two and two together.
Yeah, there was a couple of other things.
He did send taunting letters to Elliot Ness for years.
One of them was signed F .E.
Sweeney Paranoidal Nemesis.
Yeah. But was this after he had been kidnapped by Ness?
Yes, so he knew Ness by this time.
And he also didn't say like, I did it.
You didn't catch me anything like that.
I get the impression it was more like, you didn't catch the guy.
You're terrible at this.
Right. Everybody hates you.
But still taunting stuff.
But yes, this would have been after he was kidnapped because this was up into like the forties.
Yeah, that's true. And then I think to me, one of the biggest red flags pointing in the direction of Sweeney is I mentioned a near victim earlier in the episode.
This was a transient.
His name was Emil Fronik, and he was living in Cleveland in 34.
And one day he was lured into a doctor's office on the second floor along Broadway Avenue.
And the doctor said, here, I'll give you some shoes and a meal.
If you come up here, Fronik goes up, eats a little bit of the meal, starts to feel lightheaded, and bolts, and makes it to a train car, and basically passes out for three days.
And then later on, I think in 1938 was being interviewed after the cops year about this, old Morello goes to pick him up, and they narrow down the area to 50th to 55th streets along Broadway where Sweeney had a doctor's office.
Yeah, he couldn't specifically say that was the place where it happened, and that author James Bidal says that he thinks he came in the back way rather than the front way where they were showing him.
But he did say that's, he had an office right there, right around that area.
So, and he was there at the time.
So, I mean, that's some pretty serious, circumstantial stuff.
I think so. But the thing is, there's no smoking gun.
There's no, anything that says definitively, and we probably will never have anything definitively that says it's Francis Sweeney.
Right. So, we've kind of reached this point, this plateau where it's like, you just basically choose a side, either, you know, it's Francis Sweeney or it wasn't.
And some people who say, no, I don't think it was Francis Sweeney, make some pretty good cases.
There were other similar murders in the area, starting in the 20s and going into the 50s, that really bore a lot of resemblance to the torso murders.
And then other people say, okay, I feel the opposite of that, where there's, like, I don't think Rose Wallace was one of the victims.
I think there were multiple killers doing similar -ish stuff, maybe copycats even, and that it wasn't all just one person.
There is and there's probably always going to be a lot of competing theories about what, you know, who is responsible.
Yeah, the one theory that it wasn't him that I don't buy, did you say where he was living in Sandusky?
No, huh? All right, so here's the deal.
He, Francis Sweeney was apparently enrolled or checked into the Soldiers and Sailors' Home in Sandusky, which I guess is an old, like a veteran's home, right?
Yeah, yeah, I think, yes.
So that's what it seems like.
So he was checked in there, and one of the reasons that people say he didn't do it was because he was checked in, in this place in Sandusky, like a couple hours away.
And I just don't buy that.
They later came out and said, you know, they could come and go as they pleased.
He could easily have, if he didn't want to get caught, be committing these murders in Cleveland, and then going back to Sandusky as well.
Right, yeah, because he was there voluntarily, so he would not have been watched or monitored, or they wouldn't have kept tabs on him.
Right. And when they figured this out, it was years later, so no one would have been able to recall where he was or wasn't on a certain day, you know.
Yeah, and I think it's Sweeney.
Yeah, yeah. And not because of his picture.
But there were other murders in the area that, you know, it could have still been Sweeney, too.
Some people connect the Black Dahlia murder to it because there was a taunting note that the cops got in 1938 that said the cops can rest easy because the killers moved to sunny California.
But if you look at the Black Dahlia murder, there's really not a lot of resemblance between the two.
The MOs are really rather different, so that's probably not the case.
Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about the Cleveland torso murders, there's a whole rabbit hole on the Internet and in books, including one by James Bedall and another by Marilyn Bardsley that you can follow.
And if you do, good luck with that.
Since I said good luck with that, it's time for a listener mail.
I'm going to call this, we did not help out this gentleman.
Okay. Oh, no. Hey, guys, love the podcast.
I've been listening for the past several years.
I've almost gotten through the whole library.
I have some left from 2018, apparently.
I work as a musical instrument repair technician at a local university and independently in Greensboro, North Carolina.
So I usually listen while I work on repadding clarinets and cleaning tubas.
Nice. Cool job. Anyway, I was listening to your show this evening on Korean Fanda.
Do you remember that?
Yeah, oh, yeah. We talked about it.
I don't think it was all about that, but it was...
It was the short stuff about it.
Was it? Mm -hmm. Okay.
I remember that being like a top 10 or something.
Anyway, I immediately thought, finally, a way that I can find some legit reason for getting rid of the fan in our room.
My fiancé, Abby, loves having a fan in that noise when you go to sleep.
It's something I can deal with, but honestly, I do not care for it.
So when I finally got home, I told Abby, hey, we got a serious episode of stuff you should know we should listen to.
I started the episode without pre -screening and trusted you guys would pull through for me.
Needless to say, an interesting episode, but I did not get the confirmation bias I was looking for.
Instead, we had a good laugh and a great evening.
Looking forward to getting the book.
I want you guys the best and looking forward to many more.
And that is from John Goodman.
Holy cow, John Goodman.
We love you and the Coen brothers stuff.
His name's John Goodman.
I'm going to plug his business, Goodman Custom Woodwinds.
If you're in the Greensboro, North Carolina area and you need that clarinet repadded, go to John Goodman.
For sure. And even if you're not, it's probably worth the drive, right?
I mean, where else are you going to do it?
Charlotte? I don't.
Yeah. Come on. Heck no.
Well, thanks a lot, John Goodman.
We appreciate that.
Sorry, we couldn't help you output.
At least you enjoyed the episode.
And ultimately, isn't that what counts?
Yes. If you want to get in touch with us like John Goodman did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at IHeartRadio .com.
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