Kingsbury RunGetting Ahead in Depression era

ClevelandWilliam Bligh-Glover M.D.

Assistant Professor of Anatomy

Case Western Reserve University

What IS Kingsbury Run?

• Part of Cuyahoga watershed

• River valley

• Now culverted and diverted

• Kinsman road to Broadway

• is part of a winding, natural watershed carrying creeks and storm water from what is today WARRENSVILLE HEIGHTS and MAPLE HEIGHTS to the CUYAHOGA RIVER. East of E. 79th St., the creek and creek beds are culverted and filled in many places, but from E. 79th St. west, Kingsbury Run forms a broad arc, and a deep, rugged valley remains. The area takes its name from JAS. KINGSBURY†, one of the earliest settlers in the WESTERN RESERVE, who in 1797 had been the first inhabitant of NEWBURGH, located on the ridge southeast of Cleveland. Kingsbury Run, the ravine separating Cleveland from Newburgh, became a route for railroads, beginning in 1857 with the Cleveland & Mahoning Valley line. In the 1860s it also became the site of industry, with JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER†'s crude-oil refinery and Wm. Halsey Doan's oil and naphtha works. Spanning Kingsbury Run at Sidaway Ave. is Cleveland's only suspension bridge, the Sidaway Ave. Footbridge, built in 1930 to link the St. Hyacinth (Jackowo) and Garden Valley neighborhoods but no longer used. Kingsbury Run's modern fame, however, is due less to its role in the city's industrial growth than to the infamous Cleveland TORSO MURDERS.

What WAS Kingsbury Run?

• River valley

• Railroad right of way– Nickel Plate– NYC– Shaker Heights Rapid Transit

• Shanty-town

• 0 5 September 1934—Beulah Park• Torso found by Frank LaGosse• Waist—2nd-lumbar interspace—thighs—cut at knees• Female 5’6” 120 # white TAH remote• Body treated with chemical—chloride of lime• N. Perry—Joseph Hejduk• Shoulder blade, thoracic spine chemical burns• Matching • Lady of the Lake 102/3 Potter’s Field Highland Park

Cemetery

• I & II 23 September 1935• James Wagner (16) Peter Costura(12) Raced down Jackass Hill to

bottom of the run. E49th St Praha Ave.• Nude, castrated white male black cotton sox fresh• “handsome, 5’11” 150# light complexion • COD decapitation rope burns• Edward Andrassy 1744 Fulton Road• Decomposed older man• Two pairs of several genitals• Heads • Andrassy drunkard, marijuana user, pornography peddler gambler,

pimp, barroom brawler, bunko artist, “Snotty punk” Rap sheet—concealed weapons, bisexual

• John Doe #1

• III 26 January 1936• 2315 E 20th st• Dismembered woman wrapped in newspaper

right arm, two thighs, torso• Flo Pollito Born in Ashtabula county—hard life

in “Roaring Third” district—protitution barmaid, mean drunk. Doll collector

• Hanging out with Captain Swing and One-armed Willie

• Rest of remains found in thaw 7th February death by decapitiation.

• IV 5th June 1936 The Tattooed Man Near the Shaker Rapid Tracks• Dismembered man clothes found by kids playing hookey to fish in

Lake Erie.• Death Mask at Cleveland Police Museum• Torso killings all tied together by Cleveland Press• Dismemberings accomplished with a sharp knife Duh.• “That’s a Maniac’s trick”• Opportunity to write colour stories about the newspaper slayings is

the answer to a purple newspaperman’s prayer. There he has the perfect chance to write about “charnel houses of horror”,” unspeakable dread”, “grisly shambles”, “unquenchable bloodlust”, and “bloody holocausts”. …While we will be irritated when police get excited over a pile of ham bones found in Kingsbury Run and have to write shorts on silly tips and suspects, we won’t complain about the Mad Butcher. Man, how that man can sell newspapers!”—Peter Bellamy Cleveland Press

• Opportunity to write colour stories about the newspaper slayings is the answer to a purple newspaperman’s prayer. There he has the perfect chance to write about “charnel houses of horror”,” unspeakable dread”, “grisly shambles”, “unquenchable bloodlust”, and “bloody holocausts”. …While we will be irritated when police get excited over a pile of ham bones found in Kingsbury Run and have to write shorts on silly tips and suspects, we won’t complain about the Mad Butcher. Man, how that man can sell newspapers!”—Peter Bellamy Cleveland Press

• V 22 July 1936

• Dismembered man found by Mary Barkley in Big Creek south of Clinton Road

• Hobo camp near B&O tracks. Only West side victim. Caddy seen at scene.

• VI 10 September, 1936• E37th St. Bridge Jerry Harris trying to hop

a freight train tripped over a torso. Went to oil company

• Under 34th St Viaduct culvert empties into stagnant pool. 25-35 fit white man, kernels of corn in stomach, well built, emasculated. Missing head, arms, gentials. Mouth of Kingsbury Run

• VII 23 February 1937• Beulah Park—Robert Smith found

headless torso of a woman. Nude white female 5’4—5’8” slender, small boned, fair complected, brown hair. Given birth once, two days dead.

• Killer right handed, anatomically trained.• Searched storm sewers underground to E

171st st.

• VIII 6th June 1937• Peter Merylo “Voodoo Doctor”• Chupacabra type • Russel Tower under Lorain Carnegie Bridge to watch

dragging of river for a body• Kicked at a pile of stones and found a head with gold

bridgework• Decomposed skeletal remains with PD from June 1936

Dead for a year, lime• Black woman, Rose Wallace—prostitute of ephemeral

loyalties and peculiar friends• One friend was “One-armed Willie”

Chupacabra

• IX 6th July 1937 W 3rd St. Bridge—Ohio National guardsmen find body parts of a male torso white male 25-25 180-190 # 6” coarse brown hair

• X 1938 male leg.

• Acrimony between investigators

• Gerber vs. Ness—want to bring in WRU pathologists

• Peter Merylo and Martin Zaleweski

• More material found

• Becoming old news

• 16 August 1938 E 9th St. Dump—now highway

• XI and XII found in the dump by James Dawson. Skeletal torso of a woman

• & pm Todd Bartholomew found skeletal remains of man with head attached

• A cunning madman with the strength of an ox. That’s the Torso killer—the murderer who has ruthlessly slain 13 men and women, then dismembered their bodies and hidden the parts in lonely places. He’s as regular, as coldly efficient and as relentless as an executioner when the mood to kill comes over him. Never has an intended victim escapes his relentless knife, never has a friend lived to tell the tale…Many of these acquaintances are in the lower walks of life. They are the sort of people whom nobody misses…The slayer doesn’t harm men and women who have families, homes and friends. His victims are perverts; some of them probably penniless transients and some just drifters who have lost their friends and their standing in the community.

• Cowles held out a glimmer of hope with his new suspect, Dr. Sweeney. Cowles was by nature a cautious man and he fully understood that any investigation of a congressman's physician cousin must be exceptionally discreet. The last thing his boss needed was the flamboyant orator Martin L. Sweeney finding out that the police suspected his relative of being The Mad Butcher. It would look to everybody as though Ness was exacting political vengeance for Congressman Sweeney's attacks on the Burton administration. Ness already felt plenty of heat from the mayor for not solving these serious crimes. No additional political liabilities would be tolerated.

• Surveillance of Dr. Sweeney required someone smart and trustworthy, who could be counted on to keep his mouth shut about who he was following and why. Thomas Whalen, a promising young rookie cop, was one of the men chosen to follow the doctor wherever he went.

• The young rookie was no match for the brilliant Dr. Sweeney. One day, the doctor was shopping in a large department store while Whalen watched from a distance. He followed Sweeney down the length of the store until he made an abrupt right turn near the elevators and disappeared from Whalen's sight. When Whalen turned right, Dr. Sweeney was waiting for him.

• Shocked and embarrassed, Whalen said nothing and started to walk away. But Dr. Sweeney smiled, introduced himself and asked Whalen his name. "If we're going to be together so often, we might as well be acquainted."

• Whalen, completely nonplussed, told him his name and continued to follow Sweeney at a suitable distance. It really did not matter whether Sweeney knew he was being followed as long as he could be kept under surveillance. Unfortunately, Sweeney was able to slip away from Whalen and one of the other policemen assigned to follow him.

• Whalen came to appreciate Sweeney's perverse sense of humor when he followed the doctor to an all black bar. Whalen took a seat at the far end of the bar from Sweeney. The crowd, unused to two white strangers, stared suspiciously at Whalen and Sweeney. All evening long, Sweeney sent down mugs of beer to Whalen at the other end of the bar.

• While Whalen and his colleagues did their best to keep Dr. Sweeney under surveillance, the police searched every inch of his office and rooms. The police even monitored his mail.

Gaylord Sondheim?

• Francis Sweeny

• Alibi—OVH

• Poor security

• Found bones in Sandusky

Interrogation of Sweeney

• Dried out in Hotel Cleveland

• Talked with police and psychiatrist – Evasive and vague

• Polygraph– Failed polygraph– Repeated—multiple failures

• What exactly happened next is shrouded in mystery to this day. The only thing that is clear is that Dr. Sweeney admitted himself to the Sandusky veterans' hospital two days after the interrogation. From August 25, 1938 until his death in 1965, Sweeney went from one hospital to another, both state mental hospitals and veterans' hospitals, in various parts of the country. He was not a prisoner and could leave the hospital voluntarily for days and months at a time. However, at least in the Sandusky hospital, there was a note attached to his records insisting that if the doctor ever left the hospital grounds that the hospital was to immediately notify the police in Sandusky and Cleveland. In October of 1955, Dr. Sweeney was committed to the Dayton veteran's hospital for the remaining decade of his life. Still, he was free to wander around the neighborhood, writing prescriptions for himself and his friends, until the hospital campaigned with the local pharmacists to cut off his drug supply.

• What is unknown is why Dr. Sweeney admitted himself to the hospital and why he voluntarily stayed institutionalized for the most of the rest of his life. Did Congressman Martin L. Sweeney get involved and work out some kind of deal with Ness? Did Sweeney's sisters urge him to get help and spare him and them all the humiliation of an eventual arrest and trial? Did Sweeney feel that the police were too close and put an end to his killing spree? Or was this man, who Eliot Ness firmly believed to be the Mad Butcher, really an innocent nut who got his kicks from playing with the police?

• As Frank Sweeney's alcoholism worsened, his sense of humor became more bizarre. One of his family members speculated that he hid his natural melancholy with his humor. When he was at the veteran's hospital in Dayton, Ohio, he sent a series of strange and incomprehensible, jeering postcards to Eliot Ness. Despite Frank's bizarre postcards, his siblings never believed that Frank was capable of violence. They saw him as a tragic figure who had everything within his grasp and then lost it all, a brilliant man, destroyed by alcoholism and his own demons.

It Gets Weirder

• Sheriff hired private detective– Sheriff HAS detectives– Sheriff was related to Congressman Sweeney

• Found Frank Dolzeal– Drunk– Hung out at the same bar as Polito and

Andrassy

Gaylord II?

• Frank Dolzeal

• Associate of Flo Polito

• Arrested by Sherriff– Beaten– Evidence of blunt force injury

• Confessed to her murder

• Found hanged in his cell

• A few months after Dr. Sweeney had himself admitted into the Sandusky veteran's hospital, Sheriff O'Donnell hired a private detective, Pat Lyons, to investigate the Kingsbury Run murders. After many months, Lyons focused on a middle-aged alcoholic named Frank Dolezal. Supposedly Lyons had found a tavern that had been frequented by Andrassy and Polillo. Dolezal was another patron of this particular saloon.

• The sheriff had his men search a room, which Dolezal had previously rented and they found stains on the floor and on a knife. Lyons had his chemist brother analyze the stains and the results came back that they were human blood.

• Meanwhile, Cleveland Detective Peter Merylo got wind of this investigation of a Dolezal, a suspect that Merylo had already investigated and rejected. O'Donnell wanted to move fast before the Cleveland police could interfere with his suspect, so he had Dolezal arrested July 5, 1939. After a rough night with the sheriff's jailer Michael Kilbane, Dolezal "confessed" to the murder of Flo Polillo. Kilbane had a reputation for cruelty, so "Gentleman" Harry Brown, not Kilbane, officially took the confession.

• • Dolezal (left) with Officials• Claiming that he and Flo had a fight, Dolezal said she went at him with a butcher knife. To defend himself, he hit

her and she fell against a bathtub. Assuming that she was dead, he cut her up and carried part of her to the alley in which she was found. Her head and other parts of her body he supposedly dumped into Lake Erie.

• There was other "evidence" against Dolezal. Lyons had heard that a young woman who was also an alcoholic had a suspicious encounter with Dolezal. Lyons took a bottle of cheap whiskey when he went to interview the woman. There was still some whiskey left when she claimed that Dolezal had come at her with a knife and she jumped out of a second story window to escape him. Miraculously, she had only broken the heel on her shoe in this daring escape.

Indiscriminate Nature of Killer

• Victim Selection– Male and female– White and black

• NESS, ELIOT (19 Apr. 1903-16 May 1957), nationally known for leading the Chicago "Untouchables," was Cleveland's safety director. Born in Chicago, son of Peter and Emma (King) Ness, he graduated from the University of Chicago (1925) before joining the U.S. Prohibition Bureau in 1929, forming the "Untouchables," who obtained the conviction of Al Capone. Following Prohibition's repeal, Ness was transferred to the Treasury Dept.'s Alcohol Tax Unit in Cincinnati, arriving in Cleveland in 1934 as the head of the alcohol tax unit for the northern district of Ohio. His reputation as honest and capable led Mayor HAROLD H. BURTON† to appoint Ness city safety director in 1935 to clean up the scandal-ridden police department. Ness formed his own Cleveland "Untouchables," funded by an anonymous group of businessmen known as the "Secret 6," and quickly reformed, reorganized, and upgraded the department, motorizing the patrol and using car radios to enhance communication. He established a separate traffic section, hired a traffic engineer, and enabling Cleveland, which had the worst U.S. traffic-fatality record, to twice win awards for reducing traffic deaths. Ness also modernized the fire department, created the Police Academy and Welfare Bureau, and helped found the local chapter of BOYSTOWNS.

• Ness crackdowned on labor-union protection rackets, illegal liquor suppliers, and gambling. He closed down the HARVARD CLUB, a notorious gambling house located just outside the city limits in NEWBURGH Critics called for Ness's removal, citing his social drinking, divorce, work with the federal government, and a traffic accident that looked suspiciously like a hit-skip incident. Mayor Frank Lausche, however, retained Ness; however Ness left Cleveland in 1942 to direct the Div. of Social Protection of the Federal Security Agency. After the war Ness returned to Cleveland, ran unsuccessfully as Republican candidate for mayor in 1947, then devoted himself to business, finally leaving for Coudersport, Pa., in 1956. Shortly before his death, suffering financial reverses, Ness collaborated with journalist Oscar Fraley to produce the book The Untouchables. Ness, however, died before the book was published.

• Ness was married 3 times. His first marriage was in 1929 to Edna Staley, they divorced in 1938. On 14 Oct. 1939, Ness married Evaline McAndrew, they divorced in 1945. His third marriage was to Elizabeth Anderson Seaver on 31 Jan. 1946; in 1947 he adopted a son, Robert Warner.

Elliot Ness’ Gun

Elliot Ness’ Cat

Elliot Ness’ Grave

Samuel R. Gerber• GERBER, SAMUEL R., M.D. (22 Aug. 1898-16 May 1987) modernized the office of Cuyahoga

County Coroner during his long tenure (1937-15 Dec. 1986, afterwards, coroner emeritus) and contributed to such celebrated cases as the TORSO MURDERS and the SHEPPARD MURDER CASE. He was honored as Mr. Coroner of North America by the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners (1976). Gerber was born in Hagerstown, MD to Bessie (Nachenson) and Julius H. Gerber and studied at Valparaiso University before enrolling at Cincinnati Eclectic Medical College, where he graduated in 1922. After an internship and residency in New York City, Gerber served as a cruise ship physician and then had a private practice in Scott, OH, in Van Wert County, where he was elected mayor.

• Gerber came to Cleveland in 1925 as a member of the city's Department of Health and Welfare, first as physician of the Warrensville Workhouse and 3 years later, of the city's parochial schools. For 15 years, he also maintained a private practice. In March 1933 Gerber was named physician in charge of the Wayfarers Lodge. Although he lost his first bid for coroner on the Democratic ticket in 1934, he won 13 consecutive elections thereafter. In 1949 Gerber graduated from the Cleveland Marshall Law School of CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY and passed the bar, becoming qualified to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court (1955) and the U.S. District Courts (1961). He served on the faculty of the medical school of Western Reserve University (WRU), as associate professor of legal medicine (1952-67), and of CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, as assistant clinical professor of legal medicine (1967-81) and professor emeritus (1981-87). Gerber presided over the GREATER CLEVELAND SAFETY COUNCIL and the medical-legal committee of the ACADEMY OF MEDICINE OF CLEVELAND.

• Gerber was first married on 4 Oct. 1926 to Myrtle M. Norcross. They divorced in 1935. His second marriage was to Alma Lee Quartullo on 1 Mar. 1939; the couple divorced in 1948. They had one daughter, Roberta Lee.