Fact: Eliot Ness did not stay in Chicago after Capone was convicted. In 1934, he came to Cleveland as the Treasury Department’s Investigator-in-Charge of the Alcohol Tax Unit for Northern Ohio.
Fact: The serial killer began his work in 1934. Parts of a woman’s body washed up on the shore of Lake Erie. The unidentified victim, referred to in the newspapers as the “Lady of the Lake,” did not match any missing persons.
Fact: In September of the following year, a physically strong killer carried the bodies of two naked men down the steep slope of Jackass Hill and lay them in Kingsbury Run, a deep ravine strewn with trash, weeds, and industrial debris. Kingsbury Run was once a stream that had become the bed of numerous railroad tracks that led to the downtown train terminal. Both victims had been drained of blood, decapitated, and emasculated, but not in Kingsbury Run.
Fingerprints identified one of the victims as Edward W. Andrassy, age 29. Andrassy was a physically attractive man who entertained both male and female lovers. He was also a petty criminal without any known means of support. The other man found with him was perhaps forty or older, and had been dead possibly three to four weeks longer. Investigators never learned his name. Like the Lady of the Lake, the older victim’s skin had a chemical applied to it, possibly a preservative.
The autopsy indicated that a killer very familiar with human anatomy decapitated both men with a knife. Murder by expert decapitation is exceedingly rare. Even more disturbing, Andrassy’s wrists had rope burns. Although Andrassy’s autopsy is silent on the subject, there was a rumor among those close to the case that his killer had stuffed his genitals in his mouth.
Fact: Two months after the killer placed victims of the double homicide in Kingsbury Run, Mayor Harold Burton named Eliot Ness Director of Public Safety to fulfill his campaign promise to rid the city of the growing presence of organized crime and police corruption.
Fact: Only two of the thirteen victims were ever identified. One prospective victim described the interview process the killer used to prevent identification in the future: He would buy the person one or more drinks and ask questions like “Are you from around here or just passing through? Do you have a family here? Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo, murdered after Andrassy, created potential problems for the killer because there were witnesses to the victims’ conversations with him before their deaths.
Fact: From numerous news stories, the killer knew that police were closely watching doctors, particularly ones with solitary lives and addictions to drugs and alcohol. He fooled the police for quite a long time by going to an out-of-town veterans hospital for alcoholism treatment, quietly slipping back into Cleveland to kill, and then returning to the veterans hospital. Police finally caught on to the ruse when a dog dug up a leg from a victim he murdered and buried near the veterans hospital.
Fact: The killer’s cat-and-mouse game with Eliot Ness and the police ended in a secret meeting in a Cleveland hotel suite where the court psychiatrist, the head of the forensics department, and Eliot Ness extensively interrogated him. Ness had summoned his friend Leonarde Keeler, the co-inventor of the polygraph, to subject the killer to several polygraph tests. The killer failed all the polygraph tests spectacularly.
Fact: In the hotel suite, Eliot Ness interrogated the killer who was a powerfully-built man. Suddenly, the killer became aggressive, and Ness feared for his own safety and called for reinforcements. It was then Ness realized that the rest of his team had gone to lunch. Fortunately, Ness could get help before any violence occurred, but he confessed to his wife that it was one of the most frightening moments of his life.
Fact: The killer had connections to one of the most powerful men in Cleveland.
Fact: Long after the secret meeting, the killer taunted Eliot Ness with bizarre postcards and phone calls, referring to himself the American Sweeney (Todd).