Nemesis: The Final Case of Eliot Ness

Epilogue

FEBRUARY 16, 1957

Ness stared at the postcard clenched in his trembling hands.

PARANOIDAL-NEMESIS, it said, in shaky handwriting. And just above that: F. E. S WEENEY, M.D. He had pasted down an article about poison. It was postmarked DAYTON, OH.

How many of these had he received over the years? Ness wondered, as he ambled back to his armchair. More than he could count. They’d started in Cleveland and followed him his entire life. Every time he moved, the postcards still managed to find him. He had tried to keep it from his wives. His third and current wife, Betty, knew nothing about them, or about Frank Sweeney, or why he had been permanently institutionalized in a Dayton mental home. Where they kept him under lock and key. But apparently allowed him mail privileges.

Ness took a drink, and as the dark whiskey coated his throat and warmed his gut a flood of memories returned. He didn’t miss Cleveland. The press had been hard enough on him when he supposedly failed to apprehend the Torso Murderer. But after the alleged hit-and-run incident-he’d been drinking-they savaged him. Oh, the irony. The great Prohibition agent caught drunk driving. It was just too marvelous for the press to resist. He spent the World War II years traveling from one place to the next, advising soldiers on the horrors of venereal disease.

After the war, he returned to Cleveland and someone got the crazy idea that he should run for mayor. Worse, Ness was crazy enough to listen. Harold Burton was gone and the Democratic incumbent ran him ragged. What did he know about politics? Small wonder he was trounced. When the reporters asked Ness about his opponent’s time in office, he admitted the man had done a pretty good job. And of course, the campaign gave the press another opportunity to bring up the torso murders.

The torso murders. His great failure. It was enough to make a man sick.

He should never have gone along with that deal. Letting Sweeney go. Never should’ve agreed. But what choice did he have?

After the war, Ness decided to go into business. The watermark venture, insurance, others. None of it panned out. He had a head for law enforcement, not business. He lost all the money he invested and a lot more besides. And now he was stuck in Pennsylvania, dirt-poor, forced to sell his life story for three hundred dollars.

It wasn’t enough, not for all he had done over the years. But they needed grocery money.

“What do you think was the problem in Cleveland?” Oscar Fraley asked. “Why couldn’t they catch the guy?”

“I said I didn’t want anything about that in the book.”

“I know, I know. Indulge my curiosity.”

Ness did not answer the question. “You heard anything about profiling?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“I got some friends over at the FBI. I used to want to be in the FBI, did I tell you that? Wanted it more than anything in the world. Turns out J. Edgar Hoover was jealous of me. Yeah, I got it on the best authority. He was jealous of all the publicity I attracted. He liked being the only guy in law enforcement who got good press. That’s why he shafted poor Melvin Purvis. That’s why he never let me in. Even spread some nasty gossip about me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. But that’s not my point. Nowadays the Feds got this new thing they call behavioral science. They’re looking closely at these crazy cases, the people who go around killing, sometimes torturing and mutilating, for no apparent reason. Crazy, yeah, but crazy how? Turns out all these guys have stuff in common, and if you know what it is, it helps you track them down. Like what the alienists used to say, only a thousand times better, more detailed. Maybe someday might even make it possible to identify these kooks before they strike. At least that’s what the Feds are hoping.”

Fraley whistled. “Bet you wish you’d had that back in Cleveland.”

Ness nodded. “Even after I got out of there, Merylo continued to investigate the case whenever he could. I wanted to tell him, but-”

“Tell him what?”

“Never mind.” Ness took another drink, a long hard pull. “Look, I really don’t want to talk about Cleveland.”

“But it’s such a big part of your life.”

“Yeah, but not such a good part. No safety director. No Torso Killer. No hit-and-run. No mayoral race. No Edna. Just write about Capone.” He fell back into his chair, his eyes fogged. “Those were the good years. Write about Capone.”

“If you say so.”

“That’s the story worth telling. The rest I just want to forget. Now if you’ll excuse me, Oscar… I’d like to take a little nap. Before Bobby gets home.”

Fraley put away his notes and collected his hat. “All right, Eliot. We’ll do it your way. But are you sure? It really is a great story. And people are always intrigued by an unsolved mystery.”

Ness closed his eyes, shutting out the pain. “Unsolved to you, maybe.”

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

This novel is based on true events. In Cleveland in the 1930s, a serial killer murdered and mutilated at least twelve people, probably more. Eliot Ness, as Cleveland’s safety director, worked on the case for more than two years. The Torso Murderer was never caught, at least not according to the official records. Although I have invented dialogue and in some cases telescoped events, all the scenes relating to the case involving Ness and Merylo, prior to the climactic scene at the brewery, really happened. Most of the newspaper and radio excerpts are extracted from or based upon actual passages from journalistic accounts of the time. For dramatic purposes, in a few cases, I moved events forward in time and conflated some characters. For instance, I have allowed Merylo and Zalewski to perform acts actually performed by other officers before Merylo was officially assigned to the case. Similarly, I have combined Ness’s two assistants-the first of whom was required to resign following a scandal-into the single character Robert Chamberlin, and I combined the two coroners who worked on the case into the far more prominent of the two, Arthur Pearce.

Ness never recaptured his former glory. The so-called hit-and-run incident, following a night of drinking with Edna, tarnished his reputation even further, as proved perhaps by his pitiful showing in a subsequent mayoral race. His business ventures were all failures and when he met the writer Oscar Fraley he was desperate for money. The book Fraley produced, The Untouchables, was a success, and after it was adapted into a television series by Desilu Studios, Eliot Ness became a household name and an American folk hero. Ironically, the series was narrated by Walter Winchell, the same journalist who broke the story that Ness was interrogating a suspect with a medical background. Ness died in 1957, about a month before the book was released, due to a massive heart attack, possibly exacerbated by alcohol abuse.

Late in his life, during his conversations with Fraley and others, Ness claimed that he had a suspect that he believed was the Torso Killer, but the suspect was well connected to a prominent politician who arranged for him to be committed permanently to a mental institution, thus escaping arrest. At the time and for many years thereafter, no one believed him. But when Ness ’s adopted son died of leukemia, his wife donated Eliot Ness’s scrapbooks to the Western Reserve Historical Society. Among the fascinating things contained therein were postcards from someone threatening Ness with cryptic messages and bizarre jokes. One of the postcards bears a name: F. E. Sweeney, M.D.

More recently, John Hansen, a police officer fascinated by the torso murder case, began investigating it in his spare time. His efforts revealed that the cards were sent by Francis Edward Sweeney from a mental institution in Dayton, Ohio. Sweeney was a former doctor who had been in Cleveland at the time of the murders, had been repeatedly certified as dangerously insane, and whose cousin was Congressman Martin Sweeney. He was permanently institutionalized shortly after the last torso murder victim was discovered. Additionally, the diaries left behind by Peter Merylo reveal that Ness and others did in fact bring a suspect, under the pseudonym Gaylord Sundheim, to a room at the Cleveland Hotel and interrogated him for more than a week. Merylo writes that the interviews were promising, but they were forced to release him because he was well connected.

Suddenly Eliot Ness’s tall tale looked a lot more credible.

A book such as this one inevitably involves an enormous amount of research. I’ve made several visits to Cleveland and have had the pleasure of talking with many knowledgeable people, experts on the case, the period, and the man-including two people who actually knew Eliot Ness and were invaluable sources of information about him. I am greatly indebted to the archives of the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Press Archives at Cleveland State University, and the Plain Dealer archive at the Cleveland Public Library. There are two nonfiction accounts of the torso murder case: Torso, by Steven Nickel and In the Wake of the Butcher, by James Jessen Badal. The most prominent biography of my lead character is Eliot Ness: The Real Story, by Paul W. Heimel. All three books were extremely useful to me as I researched and wrote this novel and I am indebted to the authors. I also want to thank John Hansen for his investigative work; writer Max Allan Collins, one of the first researchers to understand the significance of the postcards; and Rebecca McFarland, librarian, historian, and trustee of the Cleveland Police Historical Society, for suggesting that the Torso Killer might well have operated out of one of Cleveland ’s many abandoned breweries.

As one of my characters says, America, and certainly the media, seem fascinated with watching heroes fail. Eliot Ness was a major force for justice in the early part of America ’s twentieth century, and he deserved a better end than he received. I hope this book might play some small part in helping him receive the attention and praise he deserves, even with respect to this: his least favorite investigation, that of America ’s first true serial killer. What we should remember is his tireless pursuit of a madman he simply did not have the tools to catch. I can perhaps be forgiven for forging an ending, consistent with the historical record, that still allows Eliot Ness to solve his last big case.

William Bernhardt