Though Murder Has No Tongue (23 page)

The grandparents of both Congressman Martin L. and Dr. Francis E. Sweeney were John and Catherine (née Mehan or Mahon) Sweeney. Burial records at St. Joseph Cemetery, detailing ages at and dates of death, suggest that the couple may have been the first Sweeneys from that particular branch of the family to emigrate from Ireland to northern Ohio, perhaps sometime in the 1840s or even earlier. At least two of their children turn up near downtown Cleveland during the final quarter of the nineteenth century: Dominic, owner and operator of a bar on Broadway (born 1850 or 1851) and Martin J. ( Joseph), listed in city directories alternately as a laborer or teamster—born sometime between 1861 and 1863. Dominic's first wife, Winifred (née Callery or Collery), died at twenty-nine in 1881 after bearing three children and only seven years of marriage. Dominic married his second wife, Anna (née Cleary) two years later, a union that produced four additional children, including the
future congressman Martin L. (born in 1885). Brother Martin J.'s sole marriage, to Delia O'Mara—or, possibly, simply Mara—resulted in six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Francis Edward, the man who would potentially become his cousin Martin L.'s greatest political liability, was born in 1894. Dominic Sweeney died of pneumonia in 1897 at only forty-seven years of age; his brother Martin J. survived into his sixty-second year, dying in 1923. In an ominous foreshadowing of the lethal and destructive mental disease that would ultimately overwhelm his son Francis, Martin J. Sweeney spent the final years of his life in the mental hospital on Turney Road in Garfield Heights, one of Cleveland's older suburbs, southeast of the city proper. His death was attributed to “Apoplexy,” with “Psychosis and cerebral Arterial Sclerosis” listed as contributing causes.

Though nine years separated Martin L. from his younger cousin Francis Edward, their lives took remarkably similar paths until the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Both suffered the devastating loss of a parent early in their lives. In 1897 the death of his father, Dominic, forced Martin L., then just twelve years old, to find a job to support himself and his widowed mother while he attended St. Bridget's Parochial School; when Delia Sweeney died of heart failure in 1903, her son Francis was barely ten years old. By 1910, his father, Martin J., had been committed to Sunny Acres Hospital with tuberculosis; thus, when he was still in his teens, Francis also found himself thrown suddenly into a very unforgiving adult world. Both men were obviously intelligent, tenacious, and determined; both struggled hard to rise above their working-class backgrounds and achieve some version of the classic American dream: for Martin L., the ultimate goal was law and politics; for Francis Edward, pharmacology and medicine. But the roads were rocky and included stints in blue-collar jobs. In the early years of his adulthood, Francis became an apprentice electrician, while Martin L. worked as a longshoreman and attended Cleveland Law School part-time.

In 1914, Martin L. passed the bar and—after serving a one-year term in the Ohio legislature (1913–14)—entered private practice. In 1917, Francis joined the U.S. Army and was sent to Europe, where he worked in medical supply for the remainder of World War I. The army granted him an honorable discharge with the cessation of hostilities in 1919. Somehow he received an unspecified, non-combat-related injury—serious enough to officially designate him as 25 percent disabled and render him eligible for an adjusted compensation certificate, apparently a monetary payment (or payments) similar to modern VA benefits. When he returned to civilian life, he served as vice chairman of the County Council of the American Legion. But a dark cloud had appeared on the horizon. Already suffering with tuberculosis, Francis's father, Martin J.,
began slipping into some sort of ill-defined mental disorder that forced him into the Turney Road mental hospital in Garfield Heights. The exact nature of his impairment remains impossible to determine; it may have been alcoholrelated or even congenital.

The tenacity and sweat of the two Sweeney cousins began to pay off handsomely; both men stood on the brink of successful careers in their respective chosen fields. In 1922, Francis graduated from the Western Reserve University School of Pharmacy; in 1923, Martin L. was elected a Cleveland Municipal Court judge. That same year, Francis enrolled at John Carroll University, apparently to buttress his science background; for the following year, he enrolled in the medical school of St. Louis University, distinguishing himself as class president in his sophomore year.

During the 1920s, both men married and started families. Martin L. married Marie Carlin in 1921; Francis wedded Mary Josephine Sokol—a New York native working as a nurse at Cleveland's Charity Hospital—in 1927. The latter ceremony was performed by the Reverend Dominic J. Sweeney—Francis's cousin and brother of Martin L.—a circumstance that suggests that relations between the two branches of the family were at least cordial, if not particularly close. Francis completed the four-year medical school regimen at St. Louis University and graduated in 1928; he then returned to Cleveland to serve his internship at St. Alexis Hospital in the Broadway–East 55th neighborhood, close to where his older sister and her husband lived on East 65th. Francis and Mary settled in Garfield Heights, relatively close to St. Alexis Hospital by car or public transportation, and, coincidentally, also close to the mental institution where Francis's father had died only six years before. The Ohio State Medical Board granted him his certificate to practice medicine and surgery in 1929. The few surviving scraps of testimony relating to Francis Sweeney from his internship at St. Alexis and the early years of his medical practice paint a portrait of a dedicated, talented physician with a good sense of humor.

The 1929 stock market crash devastated Cleveland, as it had every other major American industrial center. The fiscal collapse left city fathers wrestling with a host of erupting socioeconomic catastrophes that were only exacerbated by the subsequent Depression. The early 1930s were, therefore, a pivotal period in Cleveland history. It was also a crucial time in the lives of the Sweeney cousins, for the courses of their respective lives began to diverge radically. In 1931, Martin L. successfully ran for the congressional seat left vacant by the sudden death of Charles A. Mooney of the 20th District. He launched his government career in the House of Representatives by lambasting his senior colleagues as “a lot of old women” in his inaugural speech—the sort of fiery diatribe that got him noticed, made him enemies,
and became the hallmark of his oratorical style. A year later, the Cuyahoga County Democratic machine named Martin L. a delegate to the party's national convention and sent him off pledged to support Al Smith's bid for the presidential nomination. When he unexpectedly bucked the party bosses back home by switching his allegiance to Franklin D. Roosevelt, he precipitated a deep rift in the local Democratic Party structure, which festered for years. From that time on, Martin L. Sweeney was rarely out of the newspapers and never out of the public spotlight. The life of Francis Sweeney, however, was unraveling, though layers of family secrecy masked his precipitous downward spiral. In a twist of fate, Francis Edward, though he remained anonymous and was not identified publicly as a Butcher suspect, might have also dominated city newspapers during the latter half of the 1930s and was never out of the public's awareness.

The evidentiary traces of Francis Edward Sweeney's initial descent into the chaos of alcoholism and drug abuse survive only in the divorce and civil appearance docket records in the archives of the Cuyahoga County Probate Court. The first documented sign of trouble appears on December 1, 1933, when Mary Sweeney filed a complaint in Judge Nelson J. Brewer's court, questioning her husband's sanity. After the formal inquest the following day, an arrest warrant was duly issued and executed on December 5, which landed Dr. Francis E. Sweeney in a “Detention Hospital” for observation. (Civil Appearance Docket No. 250 does not specify the exact nature of Mary's complaint, but subsequent divorce papers, filed in 1934 and 1936, paint a deeply troubling picture of alcoholism, violence, and erratic behavior.) The facility in which Sweeney was temporarily incarcerated was City Hospital, on the near west side. Ironically, Edward Andrassy—killed in late September 1935 and usually designated the Butcher's first official victim—had been employed on and off as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the hospital over an eight-year period, beginning in 1925, when he was nineteen. If there had ever been any contact between the two men, the initial meeting would have most likely occurred during Sweeney's period of observation in early December 1933. (Francis Sweeney remained at the hospital for a month. Whether this period of confinement overlapped with Andrassy's final weeks and days as an orderly at the facility is impossible to say; the hospital's employment records from that period do not survive.) On January 3, 1934, consulting psychiatrists K. S. West and C. W. Stone must have judged Francis Sweeney sane, for he was discharged into his wife's custody and care. Within ten days Mary was back in court standing before Judge Brewer a second time and filing another complaint. After three additional weeks at the hospital, the court system again discharged Francis.

During the first half of 1934 and into the fall months, Francis Sweeney's mental state undoubtedly continued to deteriorate, and his behavior became more violent and erratic. Life in the Sweeney household undoubtedly grew frighteningly unpredictable for Mary and her two boys—James Anthony, age three, and Francis Edward Jr., age five—at least during those periods when Francis was home. On September 11, 1934, Mary Sokol Sweeney filed for divorce, custody of her children, and the restoration of her maiden name—all of which the court granted in 1936. Though her first petition does not provide any specifics, the document does preserve a deeply disturbing portrait of a man sinking into a profound psychological disturbance. He would disappear from the family home frequently, for extended periods, without providing any explanation of where he was going or what he was doing. “She further states,” reads the petition, “that he has upon many occasions humiliated her before her friends and has been abusive to her and their children both physically and mentally.” Mary's second petition, filed in 1936, repeats these allegations and adds an extreme case of “Habitual Drunkenness” and “Gross Neglect” to the troubling mix. “The defendant became intoxicated almost continually beginning about two years after his marriage to this plaintiff, and remained in that condition practically all of the time until his separation from this plaintiff, which occurred in September, 1934.”

On August 23, 1938—four years after separation from his wife and two years after his divorce—Francis Sweeney made application and was formally admitted to the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Home in Sandusky, a few hours west of Cleveland. The date is significant on three counts. First, a week before, on August 16, three black scrap collectors and dealers uncovered the remains of victims nos. 11 and 12—the final two officially recognized torso victims—in a dump at the corner of East 9th and Lake Shore Drive. Second, on August 18, Eliot Ness led a highly publicized and heavily criticized raid of the shantytown sprawl in the Flats and Kingsbury Run that resulted in the arrest or incarceration of the inhabitants and the total destruction by fire of the hobo jungles themselves. Ness defended the Draconian measure by insisting it deprived the Butcher of victims. That only two of the officially recognized victims had been positively identified led authorities to assume that the killer selected his targets from among the socially dispossessed who gathered in the shantytowns—people who would probably not be missed and would certainly remain difficult for the police to identify, especially cases in which the corpses were not fresh enough to yield useable fingerprints. Finally, Francis Sweeney passed through the local justice system two additional times in the months leading up to his August 23 application for admission to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Home. On February 11, 1938, Dr. Leonard F. Prendergast, a
dentist and probable friend, or at least acquaintance, of Francis Sweeney's, filed a complaint in Judge Nelson Brewer's court, questioning his sanity. This was the third time such a legal action against Sweeney had been undertaken in Judge Brewer's court. On February 28, the complaint was dismissed. On April 12, Francis's older sister, Mary, dragged her brother before Judge Brewer, only to have her complaint dismissed on April 25.

In her 1936 divorce petition, Mary Sokol Sweeney marked the onset of her husband's excessive drinking and subsequent mental decline at roughly mid-1929. The initial changes in his mood and behavior were most likely slight, so it's probably safe to assume that she either did not notice or deliberately ignored the first signs of looming trouble. Obviously, the situation had reached critical mass by December 1933, when she made her first complaint against him in probate court, an extraordinary action for the time in a domestic relations case, which resulted in his arrest and a one-month observation period in City Hospital. Just how conversant were relatives on either side of the family with the troubling details of the unfolding drama in the Sweeney-Sokol household? There is simply no way of knowing for sure. If Mary confided in anyone, she would have most likely done so with other members of the immediate Sokol family also living in the Cleveland area, not with her Sweeney in-laws. (There is evidence that the Sokols maintained close family ties: Mary and the two boys moved in with her sister's family on East Boulevard after she filed for divorce.) By the early 1930s, only three of Francis Sweeney's five siblings were still living—two married sisters (Mary older, Agnes younger), and an older brother, Martin J. Jr. (One of his two older brothers did not live beyond his third year, while the other, John Sweeney, died in 1912 of uremia.) What was the relationship dynamic among the surviving children of Martin J. and Delia Sweeney during the late 1920s and early 1930s? Again, there is, unfortunately, no way to know. But three of the four, including both sisters, were married and had children of their own, so there must have been some sort of interaction among the three families—certainly enough to make the two sisters aware of Francis's increasingly aberrant and dangerous behavior. No doubt the immediate Sweeney clan would have circled the wagons and done their best to keep the news of their brother's decline from escaping the immediate family. But would any murmurings of this evolving family tragedy have reached the ears of Martin L. Sweeney? And even if they did, would the congressman have taken much notice when he was deeply embroiled in his own local political wars? Just how much, if any, resonance would his cousin's precipitous decline have with him? Even if he knew about the brewing chaos, would he have regarded it as a sad but personal family nuisance or a potential political liability? Obviously, Sweeney's
political career would not have been helped by public knowledge that he may have had a dangerous, alcoholic, mentally ill blood relative hidden away in the extended family closet. But in the early 1930s, that was not a pressing problem for Congressman Martin L. Sweeney; that dilemma was reserved for the future.