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.

True Crime Files

Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
By Bruce Watson

The crime:

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were a pair of Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the commission of an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Despite a weak case against them they were convicted at trial, in part because of prejudice due to their being immigrants and anarchists but also because of poor representation by a grandstanding defence lawyer at trial. They were sentenced to death in 1921, and after years of appeals (but no retrial) and a global outcry were finally sent to the electric chair in 1927.

The book:

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti actually wasn’t that big a deal initially, and nowhere near “trial of the century” billing. But it became an enormous cause célèbre, attracting media attention around the world. As I understand it this book is the fullest treatment of a case that had enormous political significance at the time and that has become something of a legend in the annals of criminal justice.

It was also a very complicated case, and I don’t think Bruce Watson explains it all that well. To be sure, this is a fair-minded and exhaustive account, but I got confused trying to follow things like the ballistics evidence and the varying eyewitness reports. Though in fairness they seemed to confuse the jury too. The witnesses in particular were all over the map with their testimony, not just because eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable but because some people will do anything for attention, to feel important, or just to be listened to. It has always been thus.

Watson doesn’t argue a side but I think he lines up with what is the general consensus, which is that Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded. So how did things go so wrong?

Albert Einstein remarked, with specific respect to this case, that “even the most perfectly planned democratic institutions are no better than the people whose instruments they are.” As we’ve seen in our own time, the guardrails can’t be expected to hold if there’s something rotten in the culture. And it seems there’s always something rotten in the culture. Watson speculates on the social and political psychology of the jazz era in ways that really strike home today.

In Watson’s analysis the 1920s were a time of “culture war,” driven by cults of celebrity, newness, and consumerism. “But of all the decade’s casualties,” Watson writes, “the least lamented was the death of compassion.” In such a time the defence lawyers “would never rally the American masses to their cause.”

An amusement park is a poor place to gather marchers. Radicals had been shouting for decades – about the McNamaras, Tom Mooney, the “capitalist” war, and now Sacco and Vanzetti – and what good had their carping done? Labor unions were shrinking, the war had whipped patriotism to an all-time high, and the flu’s staggering toll suggested how unforgiving this world could be. In the midst of frivolity, the idea of risking one’s reputation for two down-and-out anarchists seemed quaint. . . . Had they been condemned during a sober decade, they might have tapped a collective sense of justice. Yet Sacco and Vanzetti were men of their times, and their times were too hurried to care about immigrants, radicals, or so-called frame-ups. Besides, hadn’t the papers said they were guilty?

Reading this I had to wonder what decade in America’s history Watson would count as “sober.” Certainly in the years since compassion hasn’t had much of a rebound, and I don’t think there’s any evidence of a growing “collective sense of justice” in our own time. Perhaps among the so-called “greatest generation,” those who survived the Depression and the Second World War, there might have been the requisite sobriety for the guardrails to have held. But I can’t think of any other time I would have bet on it.

Noted in passing:

Watson mentions the discomfort of the (all-male) jury, who had to swelter sequestered through a miserably hot trial and who had not been able to bathe in more than two weeks before being taken to the basement of a local jail to wash up. I’m sure they were in need of a good bath, but it’s also true that it’s only in our present day and age, with the convenience of modern baths and showers, that daily bathing has come to be seen as a requirement. It was typical of working men just a generation older than me to only properly bathe once a week. This was usually on a Sunday. They did, however, wash their hands and face more frequently than people do today.

Takeaways:

One of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to become the target of a police investigation. The dreaded “tunnel vision” locks in and the whole point of the investigation becomes to prove, even frame, your guilt, to the exclusion of any other function. Even worse is when the judicial process has run its course and found you guilty. From that point on the establishment (police, judiciary, media), backed by all the resources of the state, will go to any length to defend itself, doing anything to “protect the verdict” and their own reputations. Even if you can overturn the verdict and gain your freedom, it’s unlikely you’ll get any admission from the authorities that they did anything wrong or made any mistake, since apologies only lead to liability. The case of Ron Williamson, as described in John Grisham’s The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, is a good true-crime example. That of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, mentioned here as precursors to the Sacco and Vanzetti hysteria, is another. Of course the classic historical instance was the Dreyfus case, which also illustrated how public opinion can join establishment forces and ally itself against the innocent.

This was the terrible situation Sacco and Vanzetti found themselves in. While there was a groundswell of sympathy and support for them nationwide and globally, this only made local media dig in more strongly against them.

To “Cold Roast Boston,” Sacco and Vanzetti were more than symbols; they were the line between the venerated Victorian age and the chaotic twentieth century. If a Massachusetts judge and jury could be overruled by a worldwide radical uprising for “these two murderers,” then the old Commonwealth and all its institutions would be fair game for modern mayhem. “No two lives,” one lawyer told a civic club, “are of greater import than the stability of our courts.” In the prideful state there were few dissenters, very few. . . . Touring New England, the populist editor William Allen White sensed only “bitterness and hate” toward the demonized men. Before visiting Massachusetts, White wrote [Massachusetts Governor] Fuller, “I had no idea that one could let their passions so completely sweep their judgment into fears and hatreds, so deeply confuse their sanity. I now know why the witches were persecuted and hanged by upright and godly people.”

This is a takeaway that I’ve expanded on because of its importance. Even proving your innocence, a near impossible task, won’t always be enough. The “stability” of the system will always take precedence, even at the cost of innocent lives. There is no worse trap to be snared in than the law.

True Crime Files