The Cleveland Torso Murders
Between 1934 and 1938, at least 13 men and women were murdered in or around Cleveland’s Kingsbury Run. Dubbed “the Cleveland Torso Killer,” “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” and less commonly “The Headhunter,” the murderer was known for expertly decapitating and dismembering his victims before dumping their body parts…
On September 5, 1934, a 34-year-old man named Frank LaGassie was strolling along the Cleveland shores of Lake Erie. The beaches offered Cleveland residents an escape from the crowded inner city’s dark, polluted streets and walkways. On this particular morning, however, Frank LaGassie got the shock of his life; among the sand-gravel, he found the dismembered torso of a woman. Only the thighs were still attached: no arms, no legs, no head.
The sufficiently startled LaGassie called Cleveland police, and the county coroner at the time, A.J. Pierce, examined the body. He determined the woman had been dead for six months. The murderer dismembered her with expert precision with clean cuts made at the knees and upper waist, indicating the killer had at least a working knowledge of human anatomy. The body was coated in some sort of chemical preservative, enabling it to remain intact in the water for what he estimated was about three months; the skin was tough, leathery, and red.
Who was this woman? Police named her the Lady of the Lake, but they had virtually no clues. This appeared to be a tragic yet isolated incident. No one could conclude it was even a homicide… that is, until almost exactly one year later, in September of 1935, when two more bodies were discovered. Then two more after that. By June 1936, police and the Cleveland press knew that these five bodies, all expertly dismembered, decapitated, and left in the same general area, were more than just disturbing coincidences; this was the work of one sick killer, and he was far from finished.
Several decades before the term was coined, Cleveland had its very own bonafide serial killer.
This is the story of the Cleveland Torso Murderer.
Cleveland, Ohio, like so many other United States cities in the 1930s, was ravaged by economic devastation caused by the Great Depression. At the turn of the 20th century, up until 1927, Cleveland had flourished. With a population of just under 1 million people, it was the sixth-largest city in the U.S. Being located near major waterways, and the sophisticated railway system within its borders made Cleveland a prime location for business and manufacturing. Before the Great Depression hit in 1929, 41% of Cleveland’s workforce held manufacturing jobs, and unemployment was basically nonexistent (Perry, 11).
Cleveland had been a city of prosperity, but by 1931, nearly 100,000 people were out of work, with another 25,000 either laid off or working part-time. Scores of businesses and factories closed by the day. The city’s numerous charitable organizations tried to ease the suffering by orchestrating bread lines and soup kitchens. Still, because the number of desperate people was rising by the day, they had to rely on local government subsidies to keep afloat, and that was money the City of Cleveland didn’t have. People out of work, out of money, and on the verge of eviction rioted on the steps of City Hall: in February 1930, over 1000 protesters tried to storm the City Council chambers in what was known as the Red Job Riot.
One industry that did not suffer through the Depression era was the bootlegging business. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 that ultimately lead to the economic collapse commonly known as the Great Depression occurred when Prohibition, the Federal amendment banning the production and sale of intoxicating liquors, was still in full force. Organized crime flourished, and the people’s relationship with Cleveland law enforcement deteriorated. Cleveland’s police and city government earned a national reputation for being some of the most corrupt in the country. Even after Prohibition was repealed in December of 1933, steep Federal alcohol taxes kept the alcohol black market alive. Police accepted bribes and payouts and looked the other way when necessary. The situation was rife with lawlessness, and things only got worse as the years wore on.
By 1933, 219,000 people in Cleveland were out of work. Homeowners were foreclosed on, and renters evicted. This facilitated the rise of “Hoovervilles,” better known as shantytowns. Scores of people without anywhere to go built makeshift villages on vacant land throughout the city using crates, driftwood, discarded sheet metal, and even old bedsheets to craft shelters. There were a half dozen shanty towns in Cleveland alone, most notably the eastside slum known as Kingsbury Run that housed the red-light district, the Roaring Third, which is the backdrop of our story today.
In September of 1934, a killer began preying upon the vulnerable people in Kingsbury Run, but aside from the first week after the Lady of the Lake was discovered, no one paid much attention to the tragic event; Cleveland had bigger problems to worry about in the throes of the Great Depression.
One year later, however, in September of 1935, after the bodies of two men were found at the bottom of Jackass Hill (unfortunate name), the situation became more alarming. A 16-year-old boy walking about in Kingsbury Run came across the headless and castrated torso of a male. The man, determined to be in his late twenties, was completely naked save for a pair of cotton socks. Police showed up and located not only the head of the victim but also a second victim entirely, a man in his forties, also dismembered, decapitated, and castrated. Again, Coroner A.J. Pierce examined the bodies and determined they’d been skillfully disarticulated with confident cuts at the joints. He found their skin had been coated in a preservative and looked reddish and leathery, just like the Lady of the Lake. What makes these murders particularly brutal, aside from the total dismemberment of the body, is the coroner determined their cause of death had been decapitation; they had been killed by having their heads chopped off.
Fortunately for the police, the younger man’s body still had his hands attached. Through fingerprints, they were able to identify him as Edward Andrassy, a twenty-eight-year-old former hospital orderly and Kingsbury Run resident, who had previous run-ins with the police for carrying concealed weapons. Andrassy had been living with his parents when he disappeared. His father told police he’d had an altercation with a local mobster a few weeks prior and was in constant fear for his life. This led police to wonder if these crimes hadn’t been mob hits, distinctive murders to make a point and scare some people. Andrassy often frequented the Roaring Third, a district rife with mob activity, sex work, and gambling. A few months went by without any additional leads, and public interest in the cases went dormant, not to mention police and city officials were preoccupied with a new development: they were about to get a new sheriff in town.
In fall 1935, around the same time Edward Andrassy’s body and the second unidentified male were found in Kingsbury Run, Cleveland’s newly elected mayor, Harold Burton, was working on cleaning up Cleveland’s law enforcement. His first step? Find a law enforcement officer with integrity to take on the momentous job of becoming Cleveland’s Public Safety Director. The position had high stakes: the Director was essentially the overlord of the police and fire departments, both of whom by 1935 were understaffed, poorly trained, ill-equipped, and wholly corrupted by the city’s organized crime. Even after prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933, the high federal tax on liquor kept bootleggers selling under-the-table booze in business. Police officers regularly accepted bribes to look the other way, and Mayor Burton was tired of the terrible reputation Cleveland had sustained. He turned his efforts to woo a very famous and very young lawman living in Cincinnati named Eliot Ness.
31-year-old Ness made a name for himself in Chicago during the late 1920s for busting up illegal alcohol operations, notably Al Capone and his Chicago Outfit. Ness’s team was nicknamed the Untouchables for their seemingly incorruptible integrity and refusal to accept bribes. Ness had even been the inspiration behind Dick Tracy, the comic about a tough and quick-witted detective, created in 1931 by Chester Gould.
In late 1933, Ness was transferred from Chicago to Cincinnati as assistant investigator in charge of the Cincinnati Alcohol Tax Unit. That’s where he was when Mayor Barton called to offer him the job in December 1935.
Eliot Ness immediately accepted the job as Cleveland’s Public Safety Director. He packed up the house with his wife Edna, and the family moved to Cleveland. He expected to clean up the town by busting illegal clubs, firing corrupt police officers, and upgrading department equipment and training; all in all, he was going to revitalize Cleveland law enforcement. Little did he know the crimes of a deranged killer would overshadow his many achievements and become a defining part of his career.
While Ness hit the ground running on reducing police corruption, residents of Kingsbury Run were about to find another dismembered corpse. On January 26, 1936, a barking dog behind Hart Manufacturing drew the attention of a woman nearby. The pup was straining against its chain to get to two bushel baskets covered in burlap. The woman lifted the covering, took a quick peek, then made her way to a nearby butcher shop to tell the owner there were a couple of baskets of ham in the alleyway. Thinking he’d been burglarized, the owner rushed outside to take a look, but upon seeing the contents, his stomach turned. Those weren’t hams in those baskets; they were human body parts: a female torso, arms, and legs wrapped neatly in newspaper. Her reproductive organs had been removed, again, with the same technical precision as the last several victims. The head was never recovered. (NOTE* some sources say that it was one basket that held her torso and an arm, and the rest of her body parts were found two weeks later in a dump yard. Other sources say one basket containing her torso and one arm was found in the alley, and another basket was found a few streets over with her second arm and her legs. There is no way to know which one is correct since the original case files were destroyed long ago.)
Police used fingerprints to determine her identity; the fourth victim was Flo Polillo, a 42-year-old part-time sex worker, barmaid, and housewife who spent copious amounts of time on the Roaring Third, just like Edward Andrassy. Police again wondered if this was a mob hit as Flo was connected with this seedy underworld. Press noted the similarities between Flo’s murder and the Lady of the Lake in 1934. Beads of sweat were starting to form on law-enforcement foreheads; all of these macabre killings were a little too similar for comfort.
All doubt about a multiple murderer was removed in June 1936 when a 5th dismembered victim was found.
Two young boys were skipping school and wandering around Jackass Hill when they found a pair of balled-up pants at the base of a tree. They unrolled the pants, thinking they might find something interesting. They weren’t wrong: staring back at them was the decapitated head of a man in his twenties. Terrified, the boys ran home and told their mothers, who then took them to the police to tell their gruesome tale.
Police found the body of the man a few hundred yards away from his head. He’d been drained of blood, castrated, and covered in the same chemical preservative as the other victims. Just like Edward Andrassy, he was young, but police couldn’t identify him via fingerprints. He had several distinctive tattoos on his arms, so detectives decided to ask the public for help identifying the man. They set up a public viewing of the body at the morgue, where hundreds of Clevelanders lined up to catch a glimpse of the mystery man. No luck.
Eliot Ness decided to take it to a larger audience. He had the man’s plaster death mask and a drawn tattoo map of his body art displayed at the Great Lakes Exposition, a world’s fair-style exhibit that attracted over 100,000 visitors. No one identified him.
At this point, two full-time investigators, Peter Merylo and Martin Zelewski, were assigned to the case, but Eliot Ness still kept it at arms-length. He was busting up corrupt police precincts all over Cleveland, but come September 1936, he couldn’t keep out of it any longer.
On September 10, 1936, a transient man riding the rails was running to catch a train when he spotted a body floating in a nearby cesspool (according to other sources, he tripped over some body parts). He alerted police, and soon word got out to the public; hundreds of spectators crowded around the crime scene to watch police fish the 6th Torso victim out of the dirty water. They found his upper torso and his extremities, but just like the others, the body had been castrated and drained of blood. His head was never found.
Tensions were rising. After the discovery of the 6th victim, the county coroner told the press, “The killer is apparently a sex maniac of the sadistic type. This is indicated by the condition of his victims. He is probably a muscular man. The slayer definitely has expert knowledge of human anatomy. The incisions of his knife are clean and were made in each case without guesswork. He may have gathered his knowledge of anatomy as a medical student. Or it is possible that he is a butcher.” (Perry, p. 171)
This statement turned the situation into a public relations nightmare. Suddenly, the public was in an uproar. Who was this sadistic killer? Why hadn’t the police found him after six victims!
Mayor Burton and his administration went into damage control mode, and Eliot Ness was instructed to make the Torso Killer his top priority. Unfortunately, Ness was very much out of his depth with this sort of crime. He dealt with organized crime, not sporadic, unpredictable serial murderers. Despite this, Ness threw the full weight of the Cleveland PD at the investigation. When it was all said and done, Detectives Peter Merylo and Martin Zelewski interviewed over 1000 people over the course of the investigation, and the police department as a whole interviewed over 5000. And it still didn’t make any difference.
On February 23, 1937, what’s described as “a young mother’s” upper torso washed up on Beulah Park Beach, almost in the exact spot as the Lady of the Lake. Police couldn’t identify her.
On June 6, 1937, the skeletal remains of a woman in her forties were found under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge near downtown Cleveland. The county coroner noted some unique dental work and was able to identify her as Rose Wallace, a part-time sex worker and another regular of the Roaring Third. Despite the identification, police had no leads on who might have killed and dismembered her.
A month later in July, police recovered pieces of a male body from Cuyahoga River. The victim’s torso had all the internal organs removed except for the lungs. Police were unable to make an identification.
Things went cold for about eight months after the quick succession of victims 7, 8, and 9. Eliot Ness had no new leads, and his detectives were exhausting all of the old ones. The press was relentless- why couldn't the police catch this man? How many people had to die before they figured out his identity?
Then, in March of 1938, a man walking his dog in the nearby town of Sandusky got the shock of his life. His dog came running out of the woods with a human leg in its mouth. The local coroner noted the precision of the amputation and immediately called the police. The head of Cleveland’s Scientific Identification Bureau, David Cowles, went to Sandusky to investigate. It just so happened Cowles had an informant in the nearby Osborne State Prison who wouldn’t stop talking about a character named Francis Sweeney. Sweeney was a Cleveland doctor with a drinking problem, and he often checked himself into rehab at the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Home.... in Sandusky. (Perry, p. 213)
Who was this Francis Sweeney?
A World War 1 veteran, he appeared to suffer from intense PTSD back when it was still called “Shell Shock.” He also apparently suffered nerve damage after being gassed in battle. Due to a lack of understanding around psychological issues like PTSD at the time, Sweeney’s mental health allegedly deteriorated over time despite being a brilliant doctor and surgeon. Twice, his wife appeared in Probate court to have Francis committed to a psychiatric institution before she finally filed for divorce in 1934. She told them he neglected his medical practice, drank excessively, and disappeared for days at a time.
In an ironic and unfortunate twist for the investigators, Sweeney’s cousin was a Democratic congressman in Ohio named Martin Sweeney. Congressman Sweeney had been relentlessly criticizing Mayor Burton and Eliot Ness for their handling of the Torso Murders.
Ness put Francis Sweeney under surveillance as a “secret suspect.” If word got back to Congressman Sweeney that his cousin was the main suspect in the Torso Murders, things might get ugly for investigators. Nothing came of the tails. It’s almost as if Francis Sweeney had experience hiding his whereabouts from others.
A month later, in April 1938, the torso of a female victim washed up on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in two burlap bags. This was the first victim in which the coroner found drugs in the system. Were they used to incapacitate her?
This tenth victim was apparently too much for Eliot Ness. He had investigators kidnap Francis Sweeney from a downtown street corner and take him to a darkened suite at the Cleveland Hotel.
Eliot Ness kept Sweeney in that hotel room for over a week while his investigators interrogated him. Notably, David Cowles was also there (this becomes important later). They believed they had their man, and they weren’t leaving that hotel room until they secured their confession. There was only one problem: Sweeney wouldn’t give it up.
When they nabbed him, Sweeney was on the tail end of a bender. It allegedly took him several days to sober up before they could get coherent answers out of him, and even then, he answered in the form of riddles and cryptic messages. After days of this, Ness became so frustrated he called in an expert: Leonard Keeler. Keeler was a pioneer in the then-cutting edge technology of the polygraph test, aka, the Lie Detector. Keeler administered the test to Sweeney several times, and when he was done, he reportedly told Ness, “That’s your man. Might as well throw my machine at the window if I say anything different.”
Still, Sweeney didn’t say anything legally incriminating, even after (presumably) several beatings from labored and frustrated detectives. Plus, there was the matter of Sweeney’s powerful congressional cousin. Ness had no choice but to let him go.
There were only two more Torso victims after the unofficial interrogation of Dr. Francis Sweeney.
On August 16th 1938, 3 vagrants were scrounging for goods at a dumpsite when they uncovered the torso of a woman. She was wrapped once in a blue men’s blazer and again in a threadbare quilt. While police processed the scene, they found the dismembered body of a man. Both of these bodies were placed within sight of Eliot Ness’s office.
Two days later, in what looked like absolute irrational fury, Eliot Ness mustered a few dozen police officers and firefighters and performed a raid on Kingsbury Run. They evicted over 300 people and arrested as many as 65 for being homeless before burning the shantytown to the ground.
Ness believed his logic was sound: Kingsbury Run was the killer’s hunting ground, and if you want to get rid of a predator, you have to get rid of its food source.
The press and public were outraged. Ness had torn needy people away from the only place they had to go and burned their only belongings. This was the Great Depression; times were tough. Papers called him a man with “misguided zeal” and pointed out this action would in no way help him solve the Torso Murders. But, for some inexplicable reason, the murders stopped.
It should be noted that Francis Sweeney checked himself back into rehab two weeks later.
One year later, in July 1939, police did finally make an arrest in connection to the case: a 54-year-old bricklayer named Frank Dolezal. Dolezal had lived with Flo Polillo in the early 30s and had known both Rose Wallace and Edward Andrassy from time spent in the Roaring Third. Investigators thought it was a slam dunk and allegedly beat Dolezal until he confessed to Flo’s murder. He recanted soon after, but in August, he was found dead in his cell from an apparent suicide, though few believed he actually killed himself. Frank Dolezal was five feet, eight inches tall, and he was found hanging from a hook that was an inch shorter than he was. Plus, he didn’t have the skills to carve up bodies like the Torso killer. Very few people believe that Frank Dolezal had the know-how or the capacity to commit such murders.
As far as the Cleveland press was concerned, the Torso Murders remained unsolved, but Eliot Ness always maintained that he’d figured it out. He just couldn’t prove it. The officials who participated in Sweeney’s hotel interrogation were sworn to secrecy and remained so until David Cowles gave an interview to the Cleveland Police Historical Society in 1983. He refused to name names, but he gave enough details to make it obvious he was talking about Francis Sweeney, i.e., the man was a doctor and had a cousin who was a senator. Sound familiar?
In August 1938, Cleveland investigators caught wind of a story that happened in November 1934. A man named Emil Fronek had been a drifter wandering around downtown Cleveland looking for a meal when a doctor approached him. He said he wound up in a second-floor doctor’s office, but he began to feel dizzy and was afraid he’d been drugged. After running out of the building, he said he ended up on a train and slept for three days before coming to. When he went back to look for the doctor’s office, he couldn’t find it.
Investigators drove Fronek down Broadway hoping he would recall something, but he didn’t.
According to Cleveland Torso Killer researcher James Badal, the great-nephew of a doctor named Edward Peterka approached him after a lecture sometime in the early 2000s with a very old photo. It was a picture of several doctors from the 1930s. Francis Sweeney was in this photo, and the great-nephew of Edward Peterka told Badal that the doctors in that picture practiced together in a building at the Broadway and Pershing Avenues.
If true, this legitimizes Fronek’s story and makes a strong case for Sweeney being the perpetrator.
Then there were the postcards. In the 1950s, Eliot Ness started receiving taunting postcards signed “F.E. Sweeney, paranoidal [sic] nemesis.” According to James Badal, they mainly were incoherent but taunted Ness for not finding the killer.
Sadly, Eliot Ness's reputation - as an honest crimefighter with a propensity for justice - would never recover from his disastrous run in Cleveland. His behavior during his hunt for the Torso Killer burned many professional bridges, and a series of high-profile failures in his personal life - including a few divorces and a drunk driving arrest (that he tried to have covered up) - resulted in him eventually leaving town.
Eliot Ness died of a heart attack in his home in 1957, having spent his final years in relative squalor and obscurity. Following his death, however, his image was rehabilitated in a number of creative mediums (including a 1959 TV series, "The Untouchables," in which Ness was portrayed by "Unsolved Mysteries" host Robert Stack, and a 1987 film of the same name, in which he was played by Kevin Costner).
His apparent foil, Dr. Francis Sweeney, didn't make it much longer than him. Sweeney, who had been found sane following two court-order psychiatric evaluations in 1938, was eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic in 1956. He had committed himself to a veteran's hospital in 1938, emerging the following year - which Ness claims helped him avoid prosecution. In the years to come, Sweeney would reportedly send taunting messages to Eliot Ness - the aforementioned postcards - but would himself die in 1964, having not been charged with any of the Torso killings.
Of the victims, only three were ever identified: Edward Andrassy, Florence Polillo, and Rose Wallace. The other nine souls - whose lives were taken by this unknown menace - remain forever unknown. Altogether, their stories remain unresolved.
Episode Information
Episode Information
Research & writing by Maggie Coomer
Hosting & production by Micheal Whelan
Published on on July 11th, 2021
Producers: Roberta Janson, Travis Scsepko, Ben Krokum, Gabriella Bromley, Bryan Hall, Quil Carter, Steven Wilson, Laura Hannan, Jo Wong, Damion Moore, Scott Meesey, Marie Vanglund, Scott Patzold, Astrid Kneier, Aimee McGregor, Sara Moscaritolo, Sydney Scotton, Thomas Ahearn, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Tatum Bautista, Denise Grogan, Teunia Elzinga, Sally Ranford, Rebecca O'Sullivan, Ryan Green, Jacinda Class, Stephanie Joyner, James Weis, Kevin McCracken, Lauren Nicole, Matthew Traywick, Sara Rosario, and Stacey Houser
Music Credits
Original music created by Micheal Whelan through Amper Music
Theme music created and composed by Ailsa Traves
Sources and other reading
“Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero” by Douglas Perry
Cleveland Police Museum - “The Kingsbury Run Murders”
Teaching Cleveland Digital - “The Depression in Cleveland/Ohio”
Cleveland Historical - “Kingsbury Run”
The Miami News - “Torso Murders Baffle Many Police Experts”
Oshkosh Daily Northwestern - “Police Grill Torso Killer, Seek Details”