The Unknown Beloved(128)
“Yes, Dani.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Eliot Ness died of a heart attack when he was only fifty-four. He was an interesting figure for me, a man I liked. As so often happens in these historical journeys I take, the sadness of the history often overwhelms me, and I wonder how I’m going to give my readers a happy ending—or even a sense of an ending—when history is messy and hard and often sad. The thing that stands out for me with people like Eliot Ness is that he was good. Not perfect. Not by any stretch. But good. He tried. He wanted to make things better. He wanted to do the right thing, and even though he had his flaws and his selfish ambitions, he was not ruled by them. Maybe that is what makes heroes of regular men and what makes regular men (and women) heroes.
Which brings me to Michael Malone. He was a special agent for the Treasury Department, one of the famed T-men. But he is not at all well-known. The rough sketch of his life that I use in my novel does follow the real man. His older sister, Molly, a side character in this story, was a constant in his life after he lost his mother at a young age. He and his wife, Irene, were estranged for most of their marriage after losing two children, and Michael spent the rest of his life embedded in big cases, doing work that very few people ever knew about. His friendship with Eliot Ness was not documented, nor did Malone help Ness with the Cleveland Torso Murders, but I have no doubt that the two knew one another and worked together on the Capone case, where Michael was undercover for eighteen months and served a pivotal role in bringing the organization down. I made him younger than he would have been in 1938—he was born in 1893—and used creative license with many aspects of his life, but the man and his career highlights are factual.
By all accounts, Michael Malone was a quiet, dedicated crime fighter who never received or wanted the credit. I learned about him in a documentary on Al Capone and the mob and started digging into his story. As always happens, once you start pulling on threads, one leads to another and another. He became my leading man, mostly because I wanted to give his story an ending I felt he deserved. His love and life with Dani was all fiction, but the real Michael Malone earned it, and part of me wonders if Dani and Malone might need to go on a few more adventures together, solve a few more mysteries, and pull a few more secrets from the cloth. I think they make a very good team.
And now for the villains of our story. Even though Francis E. Sweeney is widely believed to have been the Butcher, that case was never brought nor proven. All evidence in the eighty years since those murders occurred only strengthens the case against him. His bio, his connections, his employment, his temporary residence above the medical clinic, and his access to the morgue on Mead Avenue are all factual. I left the details of each of the Butcher’s victims true to the case—the condition they were found in, the details outlined by the detectives, etc. The circumstances around Victim #12—known in this book as Nettie—were just as I described. Unlike all of his other victims, the Butcher did not kill her. She was dead before he got ahold of her. He simply cut her up and left her remains to be found in that tattered yellow quilt, months after her death.
The timeline was as close to the real timeline as I could make it. Eliot Ness had managed to coerce or corral Sweeney into an institution until that August in 1938, when he was once again on the loose, back in the game, leaving the remains of two bodies to be found not far from Eliot Ness’s downtown office. I don’t know if Sweeney took the remains from the morgue on Mead Avenue, but seeing as he had access and it was the perfect spot to carry out his murders, it’s very probable that he did. He seemed to greatly enjoy leaving clues that no one ever understood.
His cousin, the congressman Martin L. Sweeney, was indeed a vocal critic of Eliot Ness and, as is always true in politics, had pull and power. But he is not here to defend himself, and whatever heinous murders Francis Sweeney might have been guilty of, Martin L. Sweeney was not. So we will leave his role in the events of the time as the book leaves it: highly suspicious, highly likely, and completely unproven.
The interrogation at the Hotel Cleveland, the use of the Keeler polygraph, and the details of the Torso Murders themselves, including dates and known data, were documented by people who were there. The account of Emil Fronek and his drugged dinner is also factual, as is the unsolved hit-and-run on Peter Kostura, one of the youngsters who found Victims #1 and #2 at the bottom of Jackass Hill. What is fictionalized are conversations, coercion by federal officials, and an official intervention by powerful forces of the government.
Francis Sweeney lived on after 1938, though the Torso Murders, at least in Cleveland, ceased. Like Michael Malone, I gave Francis Sweeney an ending that he did not receive in real life, but for whatever reason, his activities in Cleveland did cease. He died in a veterans’ hospital in 1964.
The mystery surrounding the Cleveland Torso Murders dogged Eliot Ness for the rest of his career. As he said in the story, finding the Butcher wasn’t like taking out Al Capone. Ness never talked to the papers or pointed the finger of blame at Sweeney or anyone else, but I think Eliot Ness knew who the Butcher of Kingsbury Run was, and he did his best to bring the carnage to an end. Many believe those years in Cleveland cost him his health, his first marriage, and his career. I wish him peace.
The saddest thing for Dani in The Unknown Beloved was the fact that so many of the Butcher’s victims were never named. They died alone and unknown. The plight of the unknown was the theme of this book. Unknown people, unknown pain, unknown acts of heroism, and unknown acts of horror. Some of the Butcher’s victims were named, most were not, but I tried to make them as real as I could, if only to shine light on the sadness of their stories.