Strange History

What Agent Ness Did Next by T.E. Hodden

Elliot Ness is used to receiving threats and taunts from criminals. As a Treasury Agent he was famously the head of the Untouchables, the taskforce who took down Al Capone, and the gin runners evading prohibition in Chicago. This is something very different. Since moving to Cleveland, as the Public Safety Director, with oversight of the city police, fire brigade, and other services, Ness has found himself entangled, albeit as a distant supervisor, with a strange new foe. Not a gangster, or an organised crime, but something far more horrific. A murderer has been stalking the shanty towns around the city, choosing his victims from the penniless and displaced, the victims of the Great Depression with no homes, no work, and no lives. Those who nobody would miss.

Bits and pieces of them have been found for some time now. Of the twelve confirmed victims, only two will be identified. Six men, and four women, will never be named. Bits of two of them have been left close to city hall, in view of Ness’s window. Let’s rewind.

On September 23 rd , 1935, in Kingsbury Run, Most of Edward Andrassy, and most of another unidentified person, were discovered. The bodies had been horrifically butchered (I shall spare you the gruesome details) and the unknown man had been chemically treated, in some kind of experimental preservative.

Thus began the spate of crimes that would continue until 1938, with some suggesting that the murders continued long after. There are twelve confirmed victims of the “Butcher of Kingsbury Run”, but there were suspicions of more.

Eliot Ness joined the Bureau of Prohibition in 1927, assembling a team of Prohibition enforcement personnel known as "The Untouchables" to combat the activities of gangster Al Capone. Ness's career in law enforcement ended in 1944. Following a stint in business and a run for the Cleveland mayorship, Ness sank into debt. He died on May 7, 1957, in Coudersport, Pennsylvania.

Many of the victims were drifters, or members of the working poor, passing through the shanty towns and camps of Cleveland Flats, amongst the many made destitute in the depression, with nowhere else to go, and literally no other options.

We should acknowledge that although Ness had oversight of the police, this was not really ‘his’ case. The detectives of the city’s police force did all they could to hunt the killer, but they faced a daunting task. There was only so much information that forensic science of the time could tell them about the bits of bodies, often discovered long after death, some with signs of chemical preservation muddying the waters. With the victims taken from a transient community, they often had no links or ties, and nobody to miss them, or identify them, which made the prospect of tracing their last movements all but impossible. None of these, however, prevented Congressman Martin Sweeney from hounding Ness for his failure to protect the city. The actions Ness did take in the course of the investigation were controversial. Deeming the shanty towns as a public safety menace, he evicted the residents, clearing them out, and burning Kingsbury

Run to the ground. Ness was no bystander simply stamping the orders, he took personal charge of the raids. In 1938 the murders seemed to stop. In 1939 somebody claiming to be the killer would contact the authorities, to direct them to another victim, but only animal bones were found, and it was deemed to be no more than a hoax. So, what did happen to the Butcher Of Kingsbury Run? Had the opportunity passed? With Ness’s destruction of the encampments and shanty towns, was the killer unable to snare victims that would go unnoticed? Perhaps. We can only speculate. There were some suspects of interest. One of the few victims to be formally identified was Florence Polillo, who was found a few days after her death in January, 1936. She is generally considered the third victim of the butcher. However, in 1939 a suspect for her murder, Frank Dolezal, was arrested. Dolezal, an immigrant brick layer in his early fifties, was arrested by a county sheriff. He had lived with Polillo for a while, and had some tenuous links to Edward Andrassy, and Rose Wallace, a potential, but unproven, identity for one of the other victims. Dolezal was interrogated for some time, and eventually made a number of confessions. He died before he could go to trial, he was found hanged in his cell, under circumstances that are incredibly suspicious. The Cleveland Police Museum (clevelandpolicemuseum.org) called his confessions: ‘A bewildering blend of incoherent ramblings and neat precise details, almost as though he had been coached.’ They also point out that 5’8” Dolezal hanged himself from 5’7” hook, and had six broken ribs at the time of his death, all of them sustained in custody.

If Dolezal’s death was by his own hand, or murder, it remains a tragedy. His confessions simply did not hold up to either scrutiny or investigation, and he was not considered a serious suspect by anybody other than the County Sheriff, on the slender reason that he lived with Polillo.

There was another suspect.

Ness himself took a direct hand in the investigation to interrogate a suspect, brought into custody, and given two polygraph tests that he failed to pass, satisfying the expert on hand, of the suspects guilt. The mysterious suspect was said to be a veteran of the Great War, who had (it was said) been assigned to a medical unit, performing many amputations, under horrific circumstances. Ness was not confident there was enough evidence to successfully prosecute, and the investigation was hampered when the suspect committed themselves, putting themselves out of reach of the Police. In 2001 James Badal identified Ness’s suspect as Doctor FE Sweeney, the first cousin of Congressman Sweeney, Ness’s political rival. Badal’s research has given us a compelling case for what Ness knew, or believed about Sweeney.

Sweeney remained in hospital, and died in a Veteran’s Hospital in 1964. Until the 1950s he had written taunting letters and postcards, threatening Ness and his family. It is, of course, prudent to note that identifying Sweeney as Ness’s suspect is not the same as proving that he was the Butcher, but ‘The Ness Suspect’ remains the most compelling theory on this haunting, mystery of history.

T.E. Hodden trained in engineering and works in a specialized role in the transport industry. He is a life long fan of comic books, science fiction, myths, legends, and history. In the past he has contributed

to podcasts, blogs, and anthologies. Discover more on Mom’s Favorite Reads website: https://moms-favorite-reads.com/moms-authors/t-e-hodden/