Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and Cleveland’s Torso Murderer

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1:12This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please use discretion. I was on a sleepover at a summer camp. and we're roasting s'mores around a campfire. Author Daniel Stashauer. And the counselor thought it would be a terrific idea to tell this group of young kids the story of a horrible series of gruesome crimes where the killer had never been caught that took place in the woods very close to where we were. And I remember while hearing this story unfold, We had to stop him to get him to explain what the word decapitation meant. And he repeated the phrase many times, and the killer is still out there.

2:07We're eight or nine years old. I don't think anybody at all slept at all that night. But that was the first time I'd heard the story of the Kingsbury Run murders. I mean, you know, most kids make up scary stories for each other around a campfire. But this one, this is like a, this is a real story. This is a real nightmare that happened. It is. It's a true story. And it played out at the height of the Great Depression in Cleveland in the 1930s. Just before 8 a.m. on September 5th, 1934, a man named Frank Lagasse was out collecting driftwood near Cleveland's Euclid Beach Amusement Park. Euclid Beach is on Lake Erie, and its amusement park was modeled on Coney Island.

2:58The park's slogan was, nothing to depress or demoralize. Frank Lagasse would apparently go out collecting driftwood most mornings before he went to work. But on this morning, he saw something he didn't understand. He steps a bit closer, and it turns out to be parts of a human torso that are washed up and partially buried on the beach. It was the lower half of a woman's body. The legs had been cut off at the knees. He ran to a nearby house to call the police, and when the body was transported to the county morgue, the coroner thought the woman had died six to eight months earlier, but had only been in the water for a short time.

3:49The woman's skin appeared to have been treated with some kind of chemical, but the coroner didn't know what the chemical was or why, and determining the woman's identity seemed nearly impossible. What they did notice was that there appeared to be a kind of surgical precision that had been practiced by the killer, presumably by the killer, while dismembering the body. The coroner said that he seemed able to navigate the difficult joints and ligatures as they were approached. And this led investigators to conclude that he must have some kind of experience, perhaps medical training, maybe he was a surgeon of some kind, or a butcher.

4:36but it seemed that he knew what he was doing. It touched off a massive search for the remaining body parts. They even employed the Boy Scouts, if you can imagine such a thing, to help in the search for body parts. The next morning, a handyman named Joseph Haddock read about the discovery of the woman's body in the newspaper. He couldn't believe it. Two weeks earlier, he'd found what looked like the upper part of a human torso on a beach outside of the city. There was a dead seagull next to it. Joseph Haddock had called the sheriff, and the sheriff dismissed it as part of an animal. He told Joseph Haddock to bury it in the sand.

5:29When he saw the newspaper story about the woman, he called the police again and took them to the place where he'd buried the remains. When they were analyzed by the coroner, they were determined to be remains of the same woman. That same week, a teenager was swimming in Lake Erie and reportedly saw a human hand under the water. She told her father it looked like it was waving at her. She wanted him to come and see, and he did, later telling police, quote, I'm sure it was a human hand. But the detectives couldn't find anything. Pieces of body parts were turning up, were being gathered for several days afterwards, which must have been just as horrifying as you can imagine.

6:17And the police were stymied. They just didn't know how to move forward. A reporter asked a detective if it was a perfect crime, and the police officer said no. But it was, quote, so close to being perfect that we don't know what to do next. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

6:50One year later, in September of 1935, two boys, 12 and 16, were out throwing a ball. The ball sails wide. It rolls down a hill, a very steep incline called Jackass Hill. And they race each other to the bottom. And the older boy gets there first. And when he gets to the bottom, he spies something poking out from the brush at the bottom of the hill. And he turns around and he says to his friend, Turn around. Don't come any closer. There's a man without a head down here. Well, the police got there very quickly. and it turned out there were two bodies, two sets of remains, both decapitated. Police were able to identify one of the men.

7:41They referred to him as a police character. Meaning he was known to law enforcement. He'd been in trouble with the law. But the police naturally thought, well, we're on our way. We've identified this guy. we will be able to work backwards, find out what happened here. And they worked very, very hard, but got nowhere. About four months later, in January 1936, the owner of a meat market walked out of the back of his shop and saw what he said he thought was a wrapped ham in the snow. He unwrapped it to find a human arm wrapped in newspaper. he called the police, who came and unwrapped even more body parts in the snow behind the shop.

8:30So, was there sense that he was trying to make some sort of dramatic, whoever was doing this, the person that was committing these crimes, was trying to make some sort of dramatic reveal for those that were finding these body parts? I mean, he wasn't burying these bodies so that they would never be found ever. No, and that was a big part of the frustration of this case. Why was he leaving these parts? It appeared deliberately leaving them in places where they were likely to be found. Was he taunting the police? Was there some element of gratification in that, that he found he needed people to know what it was he was doing?

9:17It was a very, very strange series of events. The coroner in Cleveland assembled something he called the Torso Clinic. It was made up of about 30 people, including anatomy professors, doctors, police, and a psychiatrist. They brought together these experts in the hope that if they got these varied opinions together in one room, they would come up with a way of moving forward. But they recognized at the time that they had drifted into really uncharted territories and that it would take a truly original and heroic effort to get to the bottom of this thing. One of the members of the so-called Torso Clinic was the city's brand new safety director.

10:10A young man named Elliot Ness, who'd moved to Cleveland after living in Chicago, where he'd made a name for himself as the guy who'd brought down Al Capone.

10:26We'll be right back.

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12:44elliott ness started his career running credit checks and then got a job with the u.s treasury Department's Prohibition Bureau. They had a big problem, Al Capone. In June of 1931, the Chicago Tribune reported on the, quote, sensational rise of Al Capone on a tidal wave of beer, ministering to a$20 million a year thirst. He had a, you know,$50 ,000 pinky ring. He rode around town in an armor-plated Cadillac. He passed out diamond-studded belt buckles to his friends. And supposedly he once said, you can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile. And it seemed that nothing could be done about it.

13:34By some estimates, the Chicago bootlegging machine, at the height of the Prohibition years, had set aside$1 million each month. That's each month to grease the palms of crooked officials. In November of 1930, Al Capone rented a storefront and put up a banner that read, Free Soup, Coffee and Donuts for the Unemployed. His soup kitchen became the largest in the city, serving three meals a day. Second helpings were allowed. No questions were ever asked. On Thanksgiving of 1930, his soup kitchen reportedly served dinner to 5 ,000 people in Chicago. An unnamed source identified as a Capone associate told the Associated Press he couldn't stand it to see those poor devils starving, and nobody else seemed to be doing much, so the big boy decided to do it himself.

14:32People called him Good-Hearted Al. Elliot Ness, as a young Prohibition agent, assembled a team and planned raids to uncover Al Capone's hidden breweries around the city and arrest the men working them, sometimes called Alky Cookers. How was Al Capone... What did he do to make all this beer, to make this happen? It was very clever. And Ness himself admired Capone's business sense, his cleverness in setting up this network of illicit breweries that pumped out beer. and they either paid off officials to look the other way or had a series of moves in place that allowed them to move their operations from place to place, always staying just a step ahead of investigators.

15:31So it was a real challenge just to find these breweries, much less to shut them down. Ness, in particular, tried to bring diligence and integrity to the Prohibition Bureau, which was generally thought to have been incompetent or corrupt. And for Ness, it was more than just about Prohibition. He understood that Prohibition had allowed more serious forms of crime to flourish because so many police and politicians were on the take. This was a theme that he returned to again and again throughout his career, that Prohibition had put power into the hands of the mob. And a lot has been written about the failures of Prohibition.

16:25A congressman at the time basically said it was just all a ghastly farce. One official said that enforcing the law was like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter. But it was Ness's job. and he was determined to do it. But before he could raid an Al Capone brewery, Elliot Ness and his colleagues had to find one, which they were able to do when they realized that Al Capone was reusing his beer barrels. There'd be a delivery of beer. After the barrels were empty, they were picked up, taken back to one of Capone's plants, washed out, and used again. So Ness and his men began tailing not the beer itself, but the barrels in which it was being delivered.

17:15And that was how they worked backwards, kind of paddled upstream, as it were, to the source. In March of 1931, Eliot Ness planned a very big raid. Ness's belief was they had to strike hard and fast so that these guys wouldn't be able to slip away. He said,

18:06up to the top of the roof, but not make a lot of noise while they were doing it so that they'd be able to come in from the top as well, cover all the exits. On a signal from Ness, the truck went into gear, picked up speed, and at the same time men are climbing onto the roof and covering the rear exits, and the truck slams through the front doors. Ness jumps out of the truck, and he thinks, oh no, it looks like somehow they got word. They were staring at a blank wall. Ness took a closer look, realized that the blank wall had actually just been painted to look like an empty room. There was a doorway in it.

18:49They popped through that and managed to scoop up the brewmaster and quite a few of his accomplices. It was the first time, Ness said, that prisoners had been taken in a Capone brewery raid.

19:06Did Capone do anything? Did he try to buy off Elliot Ness? Oh, yeah. I mean, that was, that had been the business model. Capone was great at buying people off. and Ness told this one story about some of Capone's men driving by, some of his men, basically throwing a big wad of cash at them. And the men picked it up and threw it back, which made Ness very, very proud indeed. And when they found that they couldn't buy off these men, these supposedly untouchable men, there were threats, but those didn't work either. Untouchable meaning what? Untouchable meaning they couldn't be touched by bribes. They conducted more raids in the first half of 1931, and Elliot Ness said they found and seized 25 breweries.

20:07Did Elliot Ness make a dent on Al Capone's business? At one time, newspapers were saying that Ness had so dried up Capone's network that it was costing him millions of dollars. Ness understood his role as part of a larger effort to bring down Capone. In June of 1931, Al Capone was charged with 23 counts of income tax evasion. A week after that, he was charged with prohibition violations. Elliot Ness describes it as 5 ,000 violations of the liquor law. He told a reporter,

20:58But let's face it. You've got a story here where Capone may or may not be sent to prison based on a strict interpretation of tax law on information gathered by a room full of accountants. And at the center of it, there's this handsome, young Prohibition agent driving a truck through the doors of breweries. That's the story that the reporters latched onto. And let's face it, which movie would you rather see? What happened to Al Capone? Well, it was a long and a spectacular trial, at the end of which Capone was actually convicted of tax evasions and sent to prison. But something that, an aspect of this story that doesn't often get told is even after that conviction, for a while, Ness and the Prohibition team kept working on the assumption that Capone would do his time, get out, and as Capone himself said, the organization would kind of hold together while I was away.

22:15and there was this thinking that Capone would get out of prison and just sort of pick up where he'd left off. So it was very important to Ness and to others that the conspiracy case be kept current so that additional charges could be brought to bear. That never happened, as it turned out, because very quickly after Capone arrived in prison, It was discovered that he was already in the advanced stages of syphilis. And although he did eventually get out of prison, he was never the same man and never took power again. In June of 1931, the New York Times wrote that the Untouchables, quote, impervious to threats of death and bribes, have accomplished their mission.

23:06The peace ends. The untouchables are waiting for further orders. I mean, the press about Eliot Ness was really over the top. One paper said no soldier on the battlefield ever performed more heroic work than has Eliot Ness. Yes. And he's going to have a real struggle to live up to his own reputation, to fill his own shoes. By the end of 1933, Prohibition was over. Al Capone was in prison. Elliot Ness reportedly said to a colleague, Did you ever think you wanted something more than anything else in the world? And then, after you got it, it wasn't half as good as you expected. Has that ever happened to you?

23:57At 31, Elliot Ness moved to Cleveland. He landed a job as the director of public safety. And this is a position that put him in charge of the entire police department and the fire department and a whole lot more. It was a big, big promotion. So big, in fact, that a lot of people assumed he would fall flat on his face. In Chicago, he'd been in charge of a handful of guys. And now he's running a department of thousands of city employees in one of America's biggest cities. And what's more, he's the youngest person ever to hold the position. He moved to Cleveland right around the time people started finding body parts all over the city.

24:49We'll be right back.

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25:45Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Elliot Ness was sworn in as the safety director in Cleveland in December of 1935, less than three months after the two boys found a body with no head at the bottom of Jackass Hill, and more than a year after the man collecting driftwood had found a woman's torso near Euclid Beach Amusement Park. He was the director of public safety. He was at the top of the pyramid. The police chief reported to him, nobody expects a director of public safety to solve a murder any more than they expect him to walk a beat or rescue cats stranded in trees, except when it's Elliot Ness.

26:44People did expect action from Elliot Ness. They expected heroics. Ness had made a point of saying that he would lead from the front lines. One month into the job, he told a reporter he'd use the same tactics we used against Capone. He went on to say, quote, And then more body parts appeared. Two kids found a man's head under a willow tree when they skipped school to go fishing. More than a month later, a teenager was walking on a path through the woods and came across a body without a head. Police later found the head nearby. And then, that September, a man was about to hop onto a moving train when he looked down into a creek and saw a torso.

27:37The mayor told Elliot Ness to take this whole thing over personally. Yes, the mayor dropped it on his desk. This was at a time when the city of Cleveland was struggling mightily to shake off the lingering effects of the Great Depression. And the mayor, a man named Harold Burton, had put together this series of events to broadcast, to put forward the notion that Cleveland was a place to do business. All roads led to Cleveland. It was a place where there should be business conventions, and all the railroads converged, and they were building a spectacular skyscraper to anchor the whole effort. And at the margins of this, there's this uncaught serial killer.

28:28It didn't look good for the city's image. The mayor was concerned, and he put Ness directly on it. So Ness put together a team. in the mold of the untouchables, and they worked outside the system and under the radar trying to get information off the criminal grapevine. And he said very little publicly, but there was one notable statement. He said, I'm going to do all I can to aid in the investigation. I want to see this psycho caught. In February of 1937, a man found another torso almost in the same place where the first had been found in 1934, near Euclid Beach Amusement Park. A head with gold teeth was found that June.

29:17In March of 1938, a dog came running out of some woods about 60 miles outside of Cleveland in Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. The coroner said, From the appearance of the bone, it looks like a professional job, and I'm sure a surgeon's saw was used. It puts the investigators onto a suspect that hadn't gotten any serious scrutiny before. From the beginning, investigators had believed that the killer must have knowledge and training that allowed for the surgical precision of the dismemberments performed on the victims, a doctor or a butcher. That was the theory. And this severed limb that was discovered near Sandusky, Ohio, put them on the trail of a particular suspect.

30:15They called him Dr. X. His real name was Frank Sweeney. He was a doctor who had fallen on hard times and had a substance abuse problem. He checked a lot of boxes. Ness's team started tailing Dr. X and apparently the suspect took a perverse pleasure in it like a form of hide and seek there are stories that he even called police headquarters to taunt them on the poor quality of the surveillance effort he'd say something to the effect of wow that guy you had tailing me wasn't very good if he wants to try again I'll be at such and such a department store tomorrow afternoon Well, at one stage, Ness and his men scooped this guy up and grilled him for a very long time in a hotel suite.