Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's out there somewhere with a magnifying glass and toothpick. We don't know what toothpicks for, but this is stuff you should not Yes, content warning episode, everybody. This is one of our I was about to stay rare. They're they're fairly rare, but one of our true crime episodes that is very grizzly, gruesome, gruesome, but took place in the nineteen thirties, 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, he heals all wounds to murders. Yes, it doesn't. Well, heals all wounds except for some of the things that happened in the Torso murders, because you can't come from that. It's pretty crazy. You you were familiar with the Torso murders already, right, I had heard of these, and the more I read about them, the more I was shocked at that there wasn't a good period movie about this. Yeah. Absolutely, so But if you haven't heard the Torso Killer, that's fine, You're 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 you know, they took place in the background of a city that was like driven into a frenzy by this ghastly serial murderer who was who continued their murders despite this extraordinarily large, you know, man hunt to try to find them, an unsuccessful man hunt still to this day. Yeah, I mean, it has all the makings of a good movie. Um, it's got a and we'll we'll reveal who this person is. We'll hang onto it for a second. But they had a famous investigator. Oh sorry, yes, and he definitely was the famous investigating Yeah you thought I meant who the murderer was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you've got some false starts. You've got some um Coen Brothers esque whimsy with with the dog discovery. I thought you'd like that. Yeah, I did like that, And um, yeah, it has all the makings of a great movie in a cool period setting, which was depression era nineteen thirties Cleveland, Ohia, which is almost indistinguishable from current day Cleveland. Come on, we love Hey man, I'm from Toledo. I can totally backs Detroit. I was. That's my birthright. That is your birthright. Um. So let's go back to September of 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 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, uh, 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, um, Kingsbury run. And like you said, it would 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, um about a year past and then all of a sudden, two more bodies were found, and all of a sudden, because two bodies were found together, this really started to capture people's attention to 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, like by definition, not singular, finding two bodies at once that were both dismembered. Um. And they were found in the area of Kingsbury Run, which is where the mad butcher take takes his name. That's right, Um. They were both men. In this case, they were uh, they were castrated. They were also decapitated, which would become sort of a signature. The decapitation and in any kind of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer. Uh. And it's interesting in that victim, one of these two men, was actually one of the only ones that they got a fairly positive I d for Um actually got some fingerprints and it matched a man named Edward Uh Andrewsi. And he was sort of a petty thief that had you know, the police had brought in before. So he was believed to be gay and this if he was, you know, which all accounts should say that he was. This was at a time when in the nineteen thirties, certainly it was still illegal, and it was also listed as a mental disorder in the to call not the d m V, d U the d m V. The d m V 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 maybe twelve murders. Yes. Um. And again, these guys were found together, not together, like they were like within, you know, a very short distance of one another, so that they were found virtually at the same time. And whenever you find, you know, a body missing its head, that that is attention grabbing. And when you find two bodies both missing their heads, that really starts to get the presses juices running. Um. And like we said, these were found around Kingsbury Run, and Kingsbury Run is basically like an old riverbed that cuts through Um. I believe the west side of Cleveland. Uh No, I'm sorry that I think the east side of Cleveland down to the Coyahoga 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 waste land, like a literal wasteland. Um. And it kind of stayed that way until the depression hit. And by the time the depression had things were so bad that people were looking to to basically live wherever they could for free, and they started taking up residents in Kingsbury Run. So by the time the Kingsbury Run murders, the Tords, the Torso murders started, Um, this was like a full fledged, full swing shanty town. Basically a Great Depression era Hoover town. It's what they call them, Yeah, exactly. Um. So it was a Graham scene down there anyway. Uh, certainly the fringes of society. Um. 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. It was a few months later in January nineteen thirty six, when they found the body of Flow Palilo Florence Pollilo was a waitress and bartender and 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 in it's very grizzly, but found in pieces over the course of a week and a half in different places. Right, So, so far 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 flow Palilo was discovered, because again, remember these people were they actually lived on the fringe of society. So just like today, just like Robert picked in the pig farmer from Vancouver, so many other serial killers um find their victims um and like the just 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 ninety six, victim number four as far as canonical victims go, but possibly the fifth victim was discovered. Um, his head was found first by two boys who are playing hookey and fishing along the Coyahoga. No, I can't because they found like a bald up pair of trousers and I guess grabbed them and found that there's something in it. When they opened it up, there was the head of a man in his twenties. But I've 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. There's so there's 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 um about all this, and I'm guessing that would probably be a pretty good basis for the movie. Yeah, so victim for uh, they were making great efforts to find out who this man was. So they actually, um, 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. It's basically what you would think. It's a 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. Um, an illustrated map of his tattoos in this death mask on display at the Great Lakes Exposition of nineteen thirty six, 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 behy these this uh tattoo map and the death mask of this man. Uh. 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 um 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 Jigs tattooed on him. So this guy, you know, you could see his face, they had all the tattoos, and he still has never been identified. But his his discovery, and I think the very public, like the cops circle related a photo of his head on a gurney in the morgue at first before they made the death mass, among other um uh police agencies around the area, and I'm sure to the press as well. Um 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 were 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 um 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. Uh, woman in her forties. She had gone missing about a year earlier, and there was quicklime use to decomposed this body. And this one interestingly had evidence of more of a clumsy dismemberment. Um. To me, this one stands out a little bit as one that possibly might not be a victim and could have been misattributed, uh, to the to the mad butcher. That's just my personal feeling. I don't 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 as the same, same to me. Yeah, she uh, the killer clearly lacked a dismemberment plan in that case. Is that a band? Yeah? Are they good? Yeah? They were really good. They were maybe math rock. I think they were at the very least they were alternative. Victim nine was had his heart removed. Um. Victim ten had morphine in her system. And I think they're 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 uh their blood completely drained from their body. Like I said, this one woman had morphine inter 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 um, you know, it's it's sort of all. You know, there were men, they 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, uh. And the fact that you know the first two men were emasculated, um, that there were women involved too. That somebody's hard to been ripped out like there was. There was clearly a sexual element of the whole thing, which made the idea that they were men and women victims UM very confounded. 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. Um are the victims. And then you know, just to kind of to to cap that point off, the killer left victims eleven and twelve within a few yards of one another um on a dump like a trash dump, and one was a woman, Victim eleven was a woman, and victim twelve 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 uh, looking backwards through history can tell you that this was the last canonical victims in August of night. So the killer, as far as anybody knows, is done. That's right, and most of the grizzling stuff is out of the way, and we'll be back to reveal the famous investigator right after this. How's that for a tease? It was I can't take it anymore, Chuck, please, please? Who is it? It's my favorite thing when you play coy Uh. It was Mr Elliott Nessus, very famous for being the head of the Untouchables, for putting uh Al Capone behind bars, good friend of Sean Connery's very good friend. Oh that was great. That wasn't very good, because you don't bring your knife to a gunfight. To bring a gun your dummy. Yeah, I think that was the line. If you wanted to do country, well, you gotta have ansh in there, right. But there was no sad didn't I I thought that was. I thought I nailed it. There aren't no s is in that sentence, right, They're implied. And I would have done that had there been ses don't bring a knife to a gun dunch. How's that right? You're burger gone your job? All right? Back to the serious stuff. Elliott Ness was the after that working what was that Chicago? I think, oh, yeah, that was He became the alcohol uh investigator in charge of the alcohol tax unit for Northern Ohio and August of thirty four, and then the Republican mayoral candidate Harold Burton, who would go on to win, said, you know what, Ness, you're a famous guy. I like the cut of your jib um. Let me make you in December nine the safety director for Cleveland, and let me nudge you towards this outstanding case that we have. So yeah, when he was hired, the the case wasn't quite clear that it was a big old case when he came in just after like a couple of months after victims one and two were found, and just a couple of weeks before flow Polilo was out, So it wasn't evident that that there was a serial murderer on the loose. Um, but that also means that Elliott Nest 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 Maurillo, Yeah, he was. 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? Uh? Yeah, I think there's a public safety director position still there. They basically are in charge of the police department, the fire department, all that stuff. You're there the head of that. They're like they probably the liaison between the mayor in those services, but not the guardian angels because they do what they want to do. Hey man, they're staying on their own too. Uh. The coroner A. J. Pierce of the case, I think he was the first corner 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 gonna 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. Uh, then someone who knew the area could blend in, uh, 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, uh, kind of to jack the ripper thing. But but this, this person clearsly clearly knows their way around a knife in 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. Um, 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 um 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 dame a few days of being discovered, and most were moved, except for victim five, where they found a blood bath. You know that was this didn't happen to the other crime scenes. It was virtually no blood to be found, and in fact, I think one was completely drained of blood. Oh really, so that I mean that takes I don't know if that happened naturally just because of the nature of of dismemberment or it was a purposeful thing. But only one body was found kind of clearly murdered there, right, So um, yeah, I think that the fact that the blood wasn't on the scene and it wasn't in the body any longer means that had to go somewhere. So that the fact that they were dismembered um and the and packaged I mean, like a lot of them were found. You know. Um, the one unidentified tattooed man, his head was wrapped in trousers, but other people's were wrapped in newspaper or brown paper like they were meat. Um, someone was was put in a makeshift box. Um, there was. There was a lot of time dedicated to the dismemberment of these bodies, and that that that leaves a lot of evidence and you need a place where you're not going to be in erupted and that's not easy to come by. So that became a really like big point is you know, we were pretty sure that this person is is snatching victims from the from the Kingsbury Run area. Um, but where are they committing these acts? And they tried to find that 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, uh Dexter style. Sure, but just giveaway every time. That's coming back. By the way, I don't know if you ever watched Exter, what do you mean it's coming back? They're bringing Dexter back man with the original like Michael C. Hall. No, Yes, they are, indeed, And I had mixed feelings because we love that show for a long time, but it is the end. It is one of the shark jump here shows of all time. It's it's like the shark itself jumped, I think. So it's insane, it's amazing. I mean, I love Michael c Hell though. We were just now finishing six ft Under again, so I'm always happy to see him again. But I'll give it again. You see Colden July. M Mmm, no, what is that. It's a little bit like a straw Dogs type story. Um, 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, let's go ahead and watch that. It's well done in that respect. Or watch the Lighthouse. Probably it's probably better. It's so good. Let's just stop talking about this and talking about the Lighthouse for the rest of the time, all right. So, uh, Peter Morillo, who, like we said, was a lead detective, he's sort of obsessed with this thing. He starts not only focusing on uh, this land down by the river. But I didn't mean that, but that's what it was. But he started focusing on the rail roads and these these hoboes the railroads. Okay, you know where trains run on sure, yeah, I just never heard it pronounced the way you did, the first railroad. It was hilarious. I gotta lighten this up. So I were talking about this membered towards exactly. Um. So he started looking in these box cars and I don't I mean as hobo an offensive word. Can you still say that? Don't think so. I think it's a point of pride, a term of pride for people to still ride the rails. Okay. Um. So he's still out there doing his thing at this press conference, um Elliott and s ends up holding a meeting with the head of Scientific Investigation Bureau. His name was David Cowell's uh and an editor of the Cleveland Press. Um. 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 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 gonna do. Ness says let's you go and aout eight tough guys that can go undercover, that that know a lot of bad guys in Cleveland and have all those connections, will get them the police support they need, and we'll fund them. How did they fund them with the press is money? What does that even mean? I don't know. I think that like maybe um, the owners of the newspapers chipped in, like the wealthy owners chipped in quietly to stuff off of the books. That's my impression of what you ever chipped in the most gut to break the story, Hender, 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. 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 um not trying really really hard. Top postedly. I saw a figure of ten thousand 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's that was my impression. Yeah, all right, So the police are they got these undercover guys working there. They're seeing 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. Uh. And this is where the Coen Brothers sort of a moment comes in, which is in Sandusky a dog and Sandusky is about now, it's about an hour or ten 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 timy car. A dog shows up in Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. I want to say that literally happened in a Coen 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 someone will write in and tell us, But 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 two pay off the guy in uh Miller's Crossing. I remember that part, although I remember one of the neighbors lost his to pay in the burbs and they thought it was Evidently, there's definitely a movie, it might not have been Coming Brothers where dog shows up with the body part in its mouth. Probably more than one movie, but this dog shows up in its mouth and Marello goes to Sandusky and it turns out that the leg was actually surgically removed during a during a real surgery, not a 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 at the time that they traveled Sandusky to chase down this lead, which, like all the other ones, went absolutely no where um. And so there was there was again like just a tremendous amount of public pressure, including something you mentioned earlier, to 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, you know, very poor. The poorest of the poor during the Great Depression were the ones who were having who are suffering this this serial killer UM. And so there was a tremendous amount of of pressure UM. And I think my impression is is that that pressure UM is one of the I guess the thing that drove Elliott Ness to Um to do something really terrible. Because the killer was picking from the shanty towns of Kingsbury Run. Elliott Ness got it in his head that if you did away with Kingsbury Run, you do away with the killings. And so he raided the homeless camps at Kingsbury Run and roused at 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 Um. They 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 in Cleveland, and so the idea of this big shot Chicago g man coming in and 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, it that was there were no more murders after that. I know, it's strangely, it seemed to have worked, and it depends we'll talk more about. You know, a lot of different views of whether the murders stopped or not. But as far as canonical victims go, this this he burned the place to the ground two days after victims eleven and twelve or 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 him. Weirdly, Yeah, I think before we take a break, we should mention there was one and get into the who we think it's probably the real suspect. There was one suspect in Cuyahoga County, uh that the sheriff brought in name. He was a bricklayer named Frank dole Zeal who did confess he was brought in for the murder of Flow Palilo, originally because he had lived with her for a little while, but supposedly he knew Rose Wallis and Edward ANDREWSI as well. But then they looked into it, and by all accounts that confession was um not just induced, but in the days where you would literally beat a victim into confessing. Yeah, and um then murder him in his cell after he recanted his confession. So was he murdered. Yeah, Well, he he hung himself, but he hung himself from a hook that was shorter than he was, which I mean, I guess if you really really want to die, you might you you could do that, you could overcome them the urge to stand up, disinclination towards self harm, I guess you'd put it. But uh, his his friends at the time seemed to be like now that he was murdered. So it's at the very least his confession was beaten out of him. And no, no serious scholar of the crime believes that um Frank do zeal was was the killer. He didn't have any there was no evidence whatsoever any kind of surgical knowledge. There was like a lot of boxes. He just didn't check. It was basically, uh, he knew flow, and he may have known Edward and ROSSI, and he may have known Rose Wallace and the sheriff basically ran him in very publicly. 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, all right, so Elliott 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 controlled the fire department too, let's get 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 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 grizzly workshop, as the Cleveland plain Dealer had put in a place where he was, you know, 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 elliott Ness, who was considered like this squeaky clean law man was willing to go to this is extraordinarily um unconstitutional and underhanded, and he went he went to that degree and well beyond it turned out actually too very much. Uh. And I think we're at the point now where we can talk about this mystery person, right, Yeah, this is this is why I said. He went way beyond you know, um unlawful search of homes. He actually engaged in what amounts to kidney apping 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 gay lord Sundheim. Pretty good name, a good hotel check in name. Uh. And privately he you know, word gets around a little bit what's going on, But privately he would describe this person as an alcoholic, uh maybe bisexual, A doctor who came from a wealthy family and who had a relative in Congress who was protecting this person 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 gay lord Sundheim was in the middle of a bender when he was picked up, and uh, he had um. He was so profoundly drunk that it took him three days to become sober again. Not buy that, I don't, but when he when he did, I know, But you got to add those two. Um, thank you for keeping it, keeping it even keel though they 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, like alcohol affects us so differently. Man, I can have like a drink and a half these days and I'm like hating life the next day. No, I'm not talking about a hangover, but you're not still drunk the next day and two days or three days. I think that's what they were saying, is that this guy was he had like a hangover stupor basically that was my impression, not that he was still just flying high, but that hating it all right for three day But regardless, they kept him whether he was sober as a judge or you know, drunk as a skunk when they picked him up. They held them 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 Elliott 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 he I think he brought him from Chicago and Leonard Keeler administered a couple of different polygraph tests to this gay Lord Sondheim and said, if this isn't your man, I might as well throw my machine out the window if I say anything else, because that guy, that's the guy. It's definitely the guy. You gotta take that with a grain of salt, because especially today, polygraphs are just total junk science. But it's certainly um confirmed Nessa's suspicions that much more at the time, I think that that polygraph back then was there wasn't even machine. Keeler would just sit there and look for a bit of sweat to break out on the forehead, then punched the guy if it did. That's right exactly so Uh. The case was never solved. Um 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 gay lord sundheime. 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 Maryland Bardsley came out and said, yeah, this this is who this person was. It was a former World War One Army medic who was discharged for mental instability following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off. Uh. 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 Elliott Ness was a major part um, and he was just the kind of guy who was a political opponent to the degree that I'm sure Elliott Ness thought if he tried to arrest Clarence or um Francis Sweeney, he would, uh, he would he would be obstructed, you know, 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 Elliott Ness was looking at his cousin for this and was already getting in the way. Um, But I only saw that on one place, 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 Elliott Nest never charged Francis Sweeney, despite apparently going to his grave believing that 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 towards our murderer. If you who if you like seriously, you have to be careful with that stuff, because can you ever end up a juror you can't be like you look like a killer. This guy looks like a Torso murderer. You're exactly right. Uh. The quick sidebar, I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it on this show. I know I've talked about 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. Uh. It's an HBO documentary about this doctor, doctor Dorothy at no 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 uh common commonalities among serial killers. But one of them is is head trauma. And that's why this really stands out of me about Frances Edward Sweeney, was that he was discharged from the Army because of head trauma leading to mental instability. It's a commonality and 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 uh the uh who was the guy in l a that that also just had a great docuseries on the night Stalker. Richard Ramirez he suffered multiple head traumas when he was younger as well. So I think it's it's I can't remember the third one. It's head trauma, some sort of physical uh, 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's a really good documentary. Um, yeah, I'll check that out for sure. It sounds like it's totally at my alley. I'm actually a dog that I've not heard of it. Don't be a dog. I'm I'm a little dog, all right, come back. So, like you said, Marilyn Bardsley confirmed from one of the investigators that Francis Sweeney was gay Lord Sondheim. But that does not mean that Francis Sweeney was the Torso murderer. Although again, like you were saying, if you look at a picture of Francis Sweeney, that's totally the Torso murderer. Well, another stuff, you know, the head trauma, the medical training. He was a surgeon in residence at Saint Alexis Hospital. His career deteriorated because of his drinking right around the time the first murderer victims started showing up to 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, uh and dispose of these bodies without you know, they're 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 Baddall who's written some books on it um on the Torso murderers, And he interviewed one of the 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 one a couple of other things. Um, he did send taunting letters to Elliott Ness for years. Uh. Some one of them was signed F. E. Sweeney paranoidal Nemesis. 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 didn't 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, 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. Uh. And then I think to me, one of the biggest red flags pointing in the direction of enye is I mentioned a nearer victim earlier in the episode. This was a transient. His name was E. Meal Fronick, and he was living in Cleveland and thirty four 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. Frown. It 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 night was being interviewed after the cops here about this old Morello goes to pick come up, and they narrowed down the area to fifty 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 that author James but All says that he thinks he came in the back way rather than the front way where they were showing him. Um and and but he did say that's he had an office right there, right around that area, so uh, and he was there at the time. So I mean that's some pretty serious circumstantial stuff. But the thing is there's no smoking gun, there's no anything that says definitively and we probably will never have anything definitively it says it's Francis Sweeney. 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 makes some pretty good cases. Um, there were other similar murders in the area starting in the twenties and going into the fifties. Um, that that really bore a lot of resemblance to the Torso murders. Um. And then other people say, okay, um, 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, um, And that it wasn't all just one person. Um, there, there's there's, there's 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. 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, I think it's Sweeney. Yeah, I think there's because of this picture, but there's so there were other murders in the area that you know, it could have still been Sweeney. To Some people connect the Black Dolly a murder to it because there was a taunting note that the cops got that said the cops can rest easy because the killers moved to sunny California. Um, but if you look at the Black Dolly murder, there's really not a lot of resemblance between the two. Um. The ms are really rather different, so that's probably not the case. 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 Bidal and another by Maryland Bardsley. UM that you can follow, and uh, if you do, good luck with that. Since I said good luck with that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this. Uh we we did not help out this, gentleman. Okay, Hey, guys, love the podcast. I've been listening for the past several years. I've almost gotten through. The whole library has some left from apparently. I work as a music 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 two butts. Nice cool job. Anyway, I was listening to your show this evening on Korean fan death, remember that or work? We talked about it. I don't think it was all about that, but it was. It was a short stuff about it. Was it? Okay? I remember that being like a top ten or something. Anyway, immediately thought, finally a way that I can find some legit reason for getting rid of the fan in our room. My fiance, Abby loves having a fan and 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. 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 in a great evening, looking forward to getting the book, want you guys the best, and looking forward to anymore. And that is from John Goodman. Holy cow, John Goodman, we love you. In the Coen Brothers stuff. His name is John good I'm gonna plug his business. Goodman Custom would winds. 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, we're else you gonna do it, Charlotte, Yeah, come on keep back now. Well, thanks a lot, John Goodman. We appreciate that. Sorry we couldn't help you output at least you enjoyed the episode and ultimately in that what counts Yes. If you want to get in touch of this, like John Goodman did, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H