Discovery of the American Sweeney Todd’s Identity
It was a secret Eliot Ness and a handful of confidantes kept for almost forty years: the solution to one of the most horrific serial murder cases ever recorded at that time. Had the secret endured for much longer, it most likely would have remained a mystery today because the few people who knew the identity of the killer would all be dead.
Cleveland’s most memorable crime stories are the Sam Sheppard murder case and Cleveland Torso Murders case, also known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” Periodically, the newspapers would do feature stories to remind people of key elements of each case.
In the 1970s, Walter Bell, my husband at that time, and I dabbled in writing stories when we came home from work. One of our ideas—the story of a bloody revolution in America by the Weather Underground—got the attention of a producer for the ABC Movie of the Week. The producer urged us to pitch ideas that weren’t violent like the one we had submitted.
I learned that from 1934 to 1938, thirteen decapitation murders took place. The killer put several of the victims in a massive ravine called Kingsbury Run. During much of that period, the legendary Eliot Ness was head of the police force and fire department. Thirteen murders that even Eliot Ness couldn’t solve? Then abruptly in 1938, the killing stopped.
Walter repeatedly reasoned with me to forget about this case and think about story ideas that were not violent. There was no way that ABC’s Movie of the Week would accept a pitch about a serial killer that decapitated his victims. He was right, of course, but I couldn’t let it go. I was hooked. Months later, Walter and I visited his friend’s new playhouse in the Flats, the steel mill and warehouse district on the Cuyahoga River. I happened to mention to the theater’s owner that I thought the theater patio was near one of the places that a victim of the so-called “Mad Butcher” had been discovered. We discussed how spooky it would be to have a play about the murders on the theater’s patio. Walter and I talked about writing the play, but didn’t make any headway on it, mostly because we didn’t have any idea at that time what kind of person the killer was.
Consequently, we were surprised later when the Cleveland Press had a feature article about the play we had supposedly written for the theater in the Flats. The article resulted in a valuable phone call. Dr. Royal Grossman, the former Cuyahoga County court psychiatrist, told me that he was involved when Eliot Ness solved the case in a secret meeting. He explained that Ness had the killer confined to a veterans hospital in 1938. Dr. Grossman refused to divulge the murderer’s name because Ness had insisted that the few people who knew the killer’s identity would keep it secret. The doctor offered to give us the details of the meeting if we learned the man’s identity. Now, at least, we knew why the murders stopped in 1938.
We had already collected a large amount of information on the case from the local newspapers and had the written several chapters of a novel when we learned that someone had broken into our typist’s home and stole the manuscript. The event was at once frightening and annoying. Scary, because someone was watching what we were writing. Annoying, because the stolen papers were our only copy of the manuscript and Walter wasn’t willing to spend any more time on projects that wouldn’t be appropriate for the Movie of the Week.
I had an idea that might yield more information about who Eliot Ness thought was the killer and, at the same time, renew Walter’s interest in the case. I put an ad in the “Personals” section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer that read “ANYONE having evidence to convict Kingsbury Run Murderer, please call Walter Bell.” and provided—without his knowledge—his office number at Cuyahoga Community College. The next day, I could hardly keep my mind on my work and was disappointed that Walter hadn’t called about the ad that had been running since the morning. I assumed that no one had called about the ad. When he came home after work, he said, “Oh, by the way, the only call I got from your ad was a Plain Dealer reporter. He wants to interview us tomorrow morning.”
I was thrilled. An article appeared on the back of the first section of the newspaper the next day. A couple of days later, my close friend Georgiana and I went out to celebrate the newspaper publicity at an upscale restaurant and bar in Shaker Square. We sat for a while in the small bar when I noticed an older man enter the bar and sit directly across from us. His demeanor and clothing seemed out of place for the sophisticated restaurant. He stared at us continuously, making us nervous about staying there.
Georgiana suggested that we leave and go to a restaurant in Mayfield Heights that had a band. The Mayfield Heights restaurant was virtually empty when we arrived around eight o’clock because the band didn’t start until nine. We sat at the empty bar and ordered drinks. Shortly afterward, the bartender answered the phone at the bar, looked over at us, said something, and hung up. He immediately brought each of us two free drinks. We mistakenly assumed that he was giving us free drinks to keep us there so the establishment wouldn’t appear so empty.
Some twenty minutes later, a well-dressed man in a suit came into the restaurant and sat next to me at the bar. I figured this man was looking for female companionship and turned toward my friend, with my back to the stranger.
“You look familiar,” he said in a friendly tone. “Weren’t you in the newspaper a few days ago?”
I agreed, but it troubled me that only my husband’s photo was in the article, not mine. I began to understand that someone was having me followed. The next thing he asked was why I was interested in a case from the thirties. I explained that my husband and I were going to write a book and a screenplay that would reveal the new information we had learned.
Then, his demeanor became considerably less friendly. “Are the Republicans putting you up to this?”
I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so, but he didn’t believe me.
“You don’t fool around with Bob Sweeney and get away with it,” he warned. “My advice to you is to drop it before you’re sorry. You could just disappear one day.”
That said, he paid for our drinks and left the restaurant. I figured the man who stared at us in the Shaker Heights restaurant was also connected with this Bob Sweeney as well. But who was Bob Sweeney and what was his problem with “the Republicans?” And more importantly, why was he having me followed?
We learned that Robert E. Sweeney was a prominent Democratic politician and attorney. He was the son of the powerful Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, who was a major critic of Eliot Ness and the Republican mayor who had hired Ness. What we didn’t know was his connection to the serial murder case.
We also received calls from Tommy Whelan, an attorney who had been a police officer during the thirties, and Dr. Hosler, a friend of Ness. Both men confirmed Dr. Grossman’s story of the secret meeting and, like Grossman, had promised not to reveal the identity of the killer. However, Whalen and Hosler agreed to tell us the details if we learned the identity of the murderer.
At some point, Walter received a call from Alex Archaki, a former armed robber, who said he knew who the serial killer was. He wanted to meet with us late one rainy night at a bar on the Case-Western Reserve campus. Archaki had a shotgun concealed under his raincoat, in case he was attacked for revealing what he knew.
We learned from the meeting with Archaki that Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney was the first cousin of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney. Bob Sweeney was Martin’s son. Archaki said that the Sandusky, Ohio veterans hospital shared grounds with the Ohio Penitentiary Honor Farm, which is how he met Dr. Sweeney. He and the doctor had a symbiotic relationship: Sweeney would write barbiturate prescriptions for Archaki and Archaki would get liquor for Sweeney.
When the murder victims started to appear in Kingsbury Run, the coroner believed that the killer was likely either a doctor, male nurse, or possibly even a hunter. The decapitations and other dissections showed a professional understanding of the human body. Consequently, detectives focused on area doctors, male nurses, undertakers, and hunters. Archaki noticed that sometimes Dr. Sweeney would be at the VA hospital in the timeframe police estimated a murder had occurred, but Archaki couldn’t find him during the time he was supposedly in residence there. Upon two occasions at least, Archaki recalled that Dr. Sweeney had driven to the Sandusky hospital and then disappeared for a day or two before returning, without checking himself out of the hospital. Subsequently, when I contacted the VA hospital, an administrator said that Dr. Sweeney’s record had a note to call the Cleveland Police Chief if he left the grounds.
Betty Andersen Ness, Eliot’s widow, was another valuable source. She was living in California when I called her and she laughed when I mentioned Dr. Sweeney. “He used to get drunk and call Eliot frequently at his office to taunt him,” she said. “He’d tell Eliot things that only the killer could know.” There was no doubt in her mind, or her husband’s that the doctor was guilty of the murders.
Now that we were certain we had the name of the key suspect, we called Dr. Grossman, Dr. Hosler, and Tommy Whalen, all of whom confirmed the identity of Dr. Frank Sweeney. When I contacted David Cowles, the retired head of the Cleveland PD crime lab, he angrily demanded to know who have given me that name and, because I didn’t reveal my sources, he slammed the phone down.
As I gathered reams of documents about Dr. Sweeney: his medical and court records, his correspondence with the FBI, the threats to my safety continued, even at my place of work. I was the editor of five business reference publications for Predicasts, Inc. at University Circle. One of the publications focused on international industries and companies. An important component of that publication was content from German business journals, and my German language expert had just graduated from college and moved away. For more than a month, the German newspapers piled up and then I thought I got lucky. A very distinguished attorney in his sixties came to my office. He was fluent in German, having been born and raised there. He said he had practiced trial law in Cleveland until he had a heart attack and could not risk the stress of continuing in that line of work. He offered to abstract the German publications for no compensation other than having “something interesting and useful” to do with his time.
He often asked me about what I had learned in my investigation of Dr. Sweeney until one day he told me he had to resign. He was going to work for Bob Sweeney. When I accused him of working for Bob Sweeney all along, he offered me a serious warning. “You’re a nice girl,” he said. “You need to drop this investigation right now. You have no idea what can happen to you. They’ll never even find your body.”
At that time, Walter was working downtown with Channel 5’s eleven o’clock news team and didn’t get home until after one a.m. Alone in a big old house in Cleveland Heights that seemed to me to creak and groan every night. Alone with seven children—his, mine, and ours. I would get phone calls with threats and calls after midnight where no one would speak. I was genuinely frightened for myself and the children.
Walter called the Cleveland Heights police every time there was a threat. Then, for a couple of hours that night, there would be a police car outside the house. One of the detectives listened to our belief as to the source of the threats. “They don’t want you to reveal Dr. Sweeney’s name because it could damage Bob Sweeney’s political goals. So why doesn’t Walter, since he works at Channel 5, get the people there to let him tell the audience what you found out about Dr. Sweeney. That way, if anything happens to you, we’ll go after Bob Sweeney.”
Walter did what the officer suggested and announced on air what we had learned about Dr. Frank Sweeney. The following night on Channel 5, a Sweeney family member claimed that Bob Sweeney wasn’t related to Dr. Sweeney, even though we had all the birth and death certificates to prove it. It was a sensible suggestion, and it worked. There were no more threats.
When we completed our research into the Kingsbury Run murders in the seventies, we had planned to write a nonfiction book on that subject, having collected so much information. We never did. Walter and I had both remarried, and I had moved to Virginia. Over time, I had worked my way up to an executive in the blossoming Internet business. In my spare time, I wrote the journals of the American Sweeney Todd and started the Crime Library website, hiring detectives, law librarians, crime reporters, profilers, and forensic professors to write informative stories about major crimes, trials, and forensic science. In 2000, I sold the Crime Library to Time Warner’s Court TV and worked for the next seven years as its executive editor to make it the premier crime site on the Net.