Serial Killer of the Month: Frank Sweeney

In 1894, Frank Sweeney was born into an impoverished Irish family who lived on the East Side of Cleveland at the edge of Kingsbury Run. Intelligence and a strong work ethic allowed Frank to work his way through medical school while holding down full-time jobs. After decades of exhausting effort, he graduated from medical school in 1928 and became an intern in Cleveland’s St. Alexis Hospital. Soon his intelligence and hard work caught the attention of Dr. Carl Hamann, one of the finest teaching physicians in Cleveland. As Dr. Hamann’s protégé, Frank Sweeney had an excellent career as a surgeon before him.

In his junior year in medical school, he married a beautiful nurse and had two sons. His siblings remembered him as a man who was almost completely absorbed in science and medicine. Even so, he would stop what he was doing and immediately attend to a family member who was injured or sick. His concern for the health of his siblings and their children endeared him to them. They all respected his intelligence and medical expertise.

Unfortunately for Frank, just at the eve of his promising career, destructive pres­sures were building inside him. Some of these problems may have been genetic, others caused by an injury during World War I and some by overwork. Alcoholism ran in Frank’s family and had gripped both Frank and his father. Mental illness was also a problem. Later in his life, Frank was diagnosed as manic and schizoid. In 1917 he received severe head injuries in WWI and was subsequently awarded a partial disability pension.

According to his wife’s divorce peti­tion, his alcoholism became very acute in 1929 and worsened as time went on. In early September of 1934, the lower half of a woman’s torso washed up on the shores of Lake Erie. A couple of days later, the upper portion of the torso was found on the beach some thirty miles east.

The woman’s naked torso had been expertly bisected and decapitated. Her legs had been cut off at the knees and her arms had been dead perhaps a month before that. A preserva­tive had been applied to the skin to prevent quick decompo­sition. Unsuccessfully identified as any known person, she remained what the newspapers had called her: “the Lady of the Lake.”

On September 23, 1935, some boys found the decapitat­ed and emasculated nude bodies of two men in Kingsbury Run. The bodies were found a few feet apart at the base of a steep hill. The heads were found buried in shallow graves nearby. The older of the two victims, known only as Victim One, was the first victim officially included in the Kingsbury Run murders series, even though subsequent murders support the belief that “the Lady of the Lake” was really the first victim in this ser­ial murder case. Victim One was a man approximately forty-five-years-old who was short and heavy. His skin had been treated with a preservative which left his skin discol­ored and tough.

Fingerprints identified the younger man as Edward Andrassy, a tall, slender, hand­some young man with a reputedly strong appetite for both women and men.

On the bitterly cold Sunday, January 26, 1936, a woman around E. 20th and Central Avenue asked her neighborhood butcher if she could have the “meat in the baskets” outside of his shop. Inside the baskets, wrapped in newspaper and burlap bags, were the lower half of a woman’s torso, two thighs, and a right arm. Later, the rest of the woman’s body, except for her head, was found. 

On July 5, 1936, two boys found the head of a man rolled up in a pair of pants. The next day, the police found the decapitated body of a young man 200 feet away. The head had been decapitated while the victim was alive, although there were no signs of a struggle, or drugs. This time, it appeared as though the killer may have allowed the young man to bleed to death before he completed the removal of the head. The body was in good condition which led the coroner to believe that the man had been killed late July 3rd or early July 4th.

This slender, handsome man in his mid-twenties had several very distinctive tattoos: on his left leg, the cartoon character “Jiggs”; on his left arm, a standard of crossed flags and the initials W.C.G.

The pants in which the man’s head had been hidden were new and made of cashmere. A white knit polo shirt was torn and bloody at the neck and shoulders. Like the other victims, this man was killed and cleaned up before he was transported to Kingsbury Run.

Police thought that the good condi­tion of the body and the unique tattoos would make it easy to identify this victim, so the body was put on display at the morgue and some two thousand people showed up the first night to see it. Photos of the fact and tattoos were carried by all of the detectives investigating the case. Even a plaster cast of the face was put at an art exhibit at the Great Lakes Exposition in 1936 and 1937. The man was never identified.

In December of 1935, Eliot Ness, the young hero of The Untouchables, capitalized on his Chicago reputation and became the head of Cleveland’s 2,400 man police and safety forces.

In January, one month after Eliot Ness took office, the body of prostitute Flo Polillo was found outside a butcher shop. She, too, was decapitated and dismembered like “The Lady in the Lake” in 1934, but was not connected to the 1934 homicide.

After the July 5 discovery of the tattooed young man’s corpse, Eliot Ness had no choice but to get involved. The police chief went into overtime. He knew that the killer was large, strong and was very familiar with Kingsbury Run. He knew anatomy, but may not have had medical training. The vic­tims, all of whom were most likely from the lowest echelons of society, were taken to a place where the killer could kill, dismember, and clean the bodies.

The year 1937 brought with it three more decapitated bodies which, after extensive investigation, were only known as Victim Seven, Victim Eight, and Victim Nine. Victim Ten had been a young woman before she was dismembered and thrown into the Cuyahoga River. Police morale was at a low point. Ness persuaded the city’s newspapers to give the crimes minimal publicity.

By the spring of 1938, it appeared as though the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” had left the city. The last victim had been found in early July of the previous year. Then an odd tip came to the Cleveland police in March. A recently severed leg has been found by a dog in Sandusky, Ohio. Lieutenant David Cowles, Eliot Ness’s trusted officer overseeing the investigation, went to Sandusky to determine if there was any connection to the Cleveland murders.

As a result, attention focused quickly on a physician. Lieutenant Cowles personally took a close look at Dr. Frank Sweeney, who had, over the past two years, periodically checked himself into the veterans hospital in Sandusky for alcohol treatment. Cowles realised that Dr. Sweeney could have checked himself into the hospital, quietly disappeared for a day or two and taken the train or car into Cleveland. For a man being treated for alcoholism he could easily explain a day or two absence as a relapse.

Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney had been an early suspect in the Kingsbury Run murders because he fit the police profile very closely. Ness and his police force had interrogated several thousand suspects and numerous police experts from around the world had vol­unteered their views on the crimes. Nothing was working. The only solid suspect Ness had was the alcoholic surgeon. After Victim Ten, Dr. Sweeney was followed almost continuously. Unfortunately for the policemen who followed, Dr. Sweeney became adept at losing his “tail.” Far from being alarmed, Dr. Sweeney saw the treatment as a joke. Unable to see Ness, Dr. Sweeney had to make do with Lieutenant Cowles. He taunted Cowles by bringing him articles on the murders for his “Sweeney file.” He sent Cowles drawings of dismembered bodies. He handcrafted a papier-mache torso and mailed it to Cowles.

On August 16, 1938, the remains of two people who had been killed before Victim Ten were found not far from Ness’s office. The pressure on Ness to resolve the murders was so intense that he cap­tured his chief suspect for interrogation.

After three days in the luxurious hotel suite, a finally sober and amused Dr. Sweeney was interrogated by four men: Eliot Ness, the court psychiatrist, Lieutenant David Cowles, and Dr. Leonard Keeler, the inventor of the polygraph.

Secrecy was critical because Dr. Sweeney was the first cousin of Congressman Sweeney, a vocal critic of Ness and the city adminis­tration. Ness had to treat this suspect carefully, at any moment, the doctor could call in the congressman and the interrogation would end. After the interrogation and repeated poly­graph tests, which Dr. Sweeney failed each time, Ness and the others were convinced that Dr. Sweeney was the serial killer. Dr. Sweeney defied Ness to prove his theories.

Ness’s widow told the story years later that when her husband was alone with Dr. Sweeney, trying to per­suade him to confess, he called for David Cowles to join him. No one answered his call and he realized he was alone with the doctor. Ness’s problem, now that he had found the killer, was that all his evidence was circumstantial, insufficient to prosecute a doctor with such a high-profile cousin. He could contin­ue to have the brilliant Dr. Sweeney followed constantly, but the physi­cian had already shown that he could evade the surveillance. Even if Ness chose to have the doctor followed, the congressman would almost certainly do something to prevent any further surveillance.

One thing is documented: Dr. Sweeney voluntarily entered the Sandusky veterans hospital right after the interrogation on August 23, 1938. Whether a deal was worked out by Ness, the doctor and his family or whether Dr. Sweeney took the action solely on his own, continues to be a mystery. The physician remained in veterans hospitals until his death in 1964. The murders ended with the murder in April 1938. —St. Feltcher

Read more Serial Killer of the Month (if you can…):
Serial Killer of the Month: Ivan Milat
Serial Killer of the Month: Larry Eyler

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