American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper
By Daniel Stashower

The crime:

Between 1935 and 1938 at least twelve people are believed to have been the victims of an unidentified serial killer in Cleveland, Ohio. The bodies were found in a dismembered state, mostly in the area of a shantytown known as Kingsbury Run. Eliot Ness, Cleveland’s Public Safety Director at the time, was in charge of the investigation.

The book:

I’m surprised that the case of the Cleveland Torso Killer, or Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, isn’t better known. But it’s an interesting question – one I’ve addressed before and will again – as to why some crimes grab hold of the public imagination and have more staying power in the culture than others. As an unsolved series of murders with the highest possible gore quotient – “those two qualities guaranteed to compel enduring fascination,” in the words of James Jessen Badal – you’d think it would have attracted greater attention than it has. As it is, American Demon takes its place on my shelf alongside Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders and the comic adaptation Torso by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko, but that’s all I have and I don’t think there’s a whole lot else out there.

Maybe, in part, it’s the absence of good information. As Badal reports (and his book remains the authoritative account), the original case files have vanished and it’s not clear they’d add much anyway. The victims mostly were, and to this day remain, unknown, and the couple we can name we can’t say very much about. Nor is the killer easily pigeonholed. He (assuming it was a he, which seems to me a pretty safe bet) killed men and women, making the sexual nature of the crimes, if there was one, hard to figure. Usually unsolved crimes give us a little more to go on. Here, even the leading suspect – a disturbed ex-doctor named Francis (Frank) Sweeney – seems only the most likely candidate in a thin field.

That said, there was a lot of forensic evidence, from the actual body parts to their distinctive wrappings. I don’t think it’s just the so-called “CSI effect” that makes me think such murders would be easy to solve today. The police at the time were hard working, but before the invention of the term “serial killer” no one seemed sure how to proceed, or what they were looking for. “Is there someone in Cuyahoga county a madman whose god is the guillotine?” a Cleveland newspaper asked. “What fantastic chemistry of the civilized mind converted him into a human butcher?” As Stashower points out, “This was a question that the Cleveland police of 1936 were ill-equipped to answer.” You can tell just from the way the questions were put, the sort of language used (“fantastic chemistry” of the mind), that they had a problem. And when Ness’s external help came in the form of “the first policeman in America with a PhD,” who also happened to be one of the people credited with inventing the pseudoscientific “lie detector” machine, then you get some idea of the lack of professional expertise available.

Still, you would have expected the police to come up with something more. As it is, they couldn’t even identify the “tattooed man” – whose tattoos were far from generic. Nor was forensics up to the job. One coroner mistook a classroom skeleton for a victim of the Butcher, while a couple of others might have missed the fact that the body of one of the later victims had been embalmed. These were not little mistakes.

This general lack of fitness for duty went right to the top. Ness himself had no experience in chasing after killers, and what’s more didn’t see it as his job. “The director of public safety [Ness’s actual title] wasn’t expected to hunt murderers any more than he was expected to put out house fires or rescue cats stranded in trees.” Instead, he saw his mission as busting vice networks and cleaning up police corruption while modernizing the force. And in that he had some success. He apparently wanted nothing to do with the murder investigation and only finally got involved when the job was thrust upon him. That’s not a likely recipe for success.

Did his failure to apprehend the killer contribute to his subsequent breakdown? Or was the golden boy of Untouchables fame just another example of celebrity burnout? Given that this book is as much about him as it is about the Butcher’s killing spree you get enough information to make up your own mind. Whether you actually want this much Ness material mixed in is another question, as I felt it didn’t add much to the story. Ness had an interesting life story, but as this isn’t a biography a lot of it feels out of place and doesn’t add much.

As a final note I have to call out the supporting apparatus. There are no maps provided (and they would have been useful), and only a poor selection of photographs. There actually are a lot of good photos relating to the torso killings available, many of them reproduced in Badal’s book. They aren’t included here, and instead what we get are mainly pictures of Ness, some of them looking like publicity shots. Plus photos of all of Ness’s wives. These were unnecessary, and the way the photo section is tucked away at the back is another thing I didn’t care for.

It’s a good read, but I wouldn’t call it either the best book out there on the Cleveland killings, or the best book available on Ness. As an introduction to these subjects though it doesn’t hurt.

Noted in passing:

Soon after the killings stopped and Ness’s life started to circle the drain he was involved in a car accident in which he was intoxicated. He left the scene and might have got away (he hadn’t identified himself to the other driver) but for the fact that someone had taken note of his distinctive license plate: EN-3.

I think it was about thirty years ago that a thoroughly disreputable person (not a friend) told me to never get vanity license plates. When another person I was with asked him why not he simply replied “Too easy to identify.” So I guess he had a point.

Takeaways:

In the 1930s having six small tattoos about your body was enough to make you a “tattooed man,” and most likely a sailor or ex-con. Today it just means you’re a guy with some ink.

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