The Torso Killer: Eliot Ness' Last Case

On a bridge in Morrison, Colorado, the fate of two men intersected. One man had everything going for him, the other should have. What happened there led to a search, a gruesome discovery and a manhunt through multiple states and two countries. The result wasn’t just the loss of a life, but the destruction of part of the most famous family in Colorado.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Cleveland, Ohio, 1930s. A serial killer was on the loose and his methods reminded a lot of people of Jack the Ripper. A legendary lawman who just a few years before had faced Al Capone was now on the case. But when the lawman focused on one man as the killer, a surprising reason may have prevented him from getting to the truth. According to historian and Cleveland native Paul Derica, the area was not a typical playground.

SPEAKER_05 0:58

It was a fairly industrialized, desolate area deep within the kind of Cuyahoga River Valley. There are high areas and then low areas, and so there's this area called Jackass Hill, and there's these two young boys. It's a September afternoon, they're playing in an abandoned house, and they wander down into the Kingsbury Run area near the train tracks, and they discover the nude body, nude except for a pair of socks of a man without a head. It's been decapitated. And understandably, this scares them. And they're really freaked out. And so they go in and get the authorities.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

When the police arrive, they find the body of a man laying on its side. They note in a report that he was, quote, neatly positioned as though by an undertaker, unquote. Aside from the missing head, he's also been emasculated. Then they find even more.

SPEAKER_05 1:55

They discover that there's a second body there as well, one that looks like it's been there perhaps a little bit longer, but in the same general area. This body, also nude, also without a head. And so the investigators begin to kind of look around in the area, and they notice a kind of like area where it looks like dirt has been kind of piled up and almost looks like the top of onions or something poking out from the top of this mound of earth. And it turns out there's actually two heads, right? Heads of the respective victims. And that's what really kind of like starts what is considered the official cycle of murders, it'll extend ultimately 12 victims.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Before we continue, please remember to leave a comment, like the video, and subscribe to our channel. It will help us continue to make new content. Now, back to the story.

SPEAKER_03 2:47

By the 1920s, Cleveland was an industrial powerhouse with a strong manufacturing base and a great deal of wealth.

SPEAKER_05 2:56

But it was also, like a lot of the other cities in the area around the Great Lakes, was a place that was formed by a lot of the immigrant communities that had come there to take on some of those industrial jobs.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

But when the Depression began in 1929, it changed that.

SPEAKER_05 3:12

Pretty much every part of the United States was impacted by the Great Depression. Unemployment increased, a lot of banks failed, a lot of businesses failed, and initially a lot of the relief efforts were very locally focused.

SPEAKER_03 3:25

People all over the U.S. began riding the rails in search of work and ended up living in tense cities that formed in areas like Kingsbury Run.

SPEAKER_05 3:36

Cuyahoga is a very winding, twisting river. It divides the city of Cleveland into an east side and a west side. And so Cleveland proper was on the east side of the Cuyahoga River, and that's also where you would find what was basically a kind of like dry gully or riverbed that became known as Kingsbury Run. And by the time of the 1930s, there were all these railroad lines that were basically running through Kingsbury Run, including a rapid transit line that serviced local residents.

SPEAKER_03 4:05

That railroad line meant that the people found dead might have been riding the rails, making identification difficult, especially for the second man.

SPEAKER_05 4:14

It looks like some sort of chemical agent had been used on his skin, perhaps a kind of preservative. Not only has he been decapitated, and that's most likely was the cause of death, but he's also been emasculated as well.

SPEAKER_03 4:25

The coroner, Arthur J. Pierce, reported the man with the chemical agent had likely been in his 40s when he was killed about three weeks earlier. The man found by the kids had died more recently. According to the coroner's report, he was a quote, handsome man, unquote, about five foot eleven and 150 pounds.

SPEAKER_05 4:53

He showed on his wrists uh signs of having been uh restrained in some way. And the coroner was pretty much fairly certain that uh he was alive when he was decapitated. So it wasn't done, you know, he wasn't perhaps like asphyxiated first and then his head was cut off, but that decapitation was most likely the cause of death. Because the remains were still relatively fresh, they were able to take a usable set of fingerprints, and this person had a record, and that led the police to identify him as Edward Andrassi.

SPEAKER_03 5:23

Twenty-nine-year-old Edward Andrassi was not a transient who rode the rails to Cleveland. He lived with his parents on the city's west side.

SPEAKER_05 5:32

He had held a variety of jobs in the years leading up to 1935 and his death. At one point, he had been a hospital orderly and a mental hospital. But at the time of his death, he was really kind of unclear how he was sort of making a living if he was at all.

SPEAKER_03 5:47

Unclear, because Andrassi had been involved in a number of illegal businesses.

SPEAKER_05 5:52

He had been arrested for public intoxication, disorderly conduct, pandering, which is just a term basically to say that he was involved in being a pimp, and also had been arrested for assault as well.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

He was known to get into fights when he was drunk, which was often. He had abused his wife in a marriage that lasted only a few weeks, and he sometimes pretended to be a medical professional to con women into allowing him to perform exams on them. There were a lot of possible motives for his death, but that left police wondering about the motive for killing the second man. And they wondered, too, about something missing from the scene. There was no blood at the place where they'd been found. The bodies had been moved there, along with the detached body parts, and no one saw a thing.

SPEAKER_05 6:40

Putting them where the bodies were recovered would have taken some effort, because it seems like they were sort of deliberately positioned and placed, and it wasn't an area where, even though somewhat remote and a sort of industrial area, like people did come through, but like no one really saw anything. Investigators thought there must be some kind of like lab or abattoir or something.

SPEAKER_03 7:00

Before police could answer the many questions they had about the case, another victim was discovered. In January of 1936, parts of a woman were found in half-bushel baskets left near the heart manufacturing building.

SPEAKER_05 7:22

First it's like a section of her torso, and then a portion of her thigh, and ultimately most of her body is recovered and uh reconstructed, but her head is among those things that isn't. And again, what's really sort of suspicious about how all this unfolds is the degree to which like no one actually witnessed her or saw anything.

SPEAKER_03 7:46

Fingerprints were used to identify the woman as 42-year-old waitress Florence Bolulo.

SPEAKER_05 7:53

Palulo, like Andresy, really sort of seemed to sort of sustain herself in ways that were potentially illicit and certainly inconsistent. So there is evidence to suggest that she occasionally engaged in prostitution, but that doesn't seem to be the only thing that she did. She was estranged from a husband who lived in Buffalo, and she was living in a rooming house at that time. She seemed to have several male companions who varied in terms of their extent and the length of their relationships with her. But she was also like a human being who was known by the woman from whom she rented a room. I guess she had a collection of dolls that she kept in the room that she was very proud of, and she would let her landlady's children like play with the dolls. And I think those kind of human qualities of the victims in this case often get lost.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

In June, two boys found a man's head. The next day, his body was found nearby.

SPEAKER_05 9:19

And they're very distinct tattoos. One is like a set of initials, another is are the names Helen and Paul with like a dove of the names. There's the cartoon character Jiggs, who probably nobody today remembers, but was very popular in the 1930s in a strip called Bringing Up Father.

SPEAKER_03 9:36

The police felt that the tattoos would almost certainly lead to the man's name. And they had a unique idea of how to get the word out.

SPEAKER_05 9:45

Summer 36 is very big for the city of Cleveland. It's basically hosting its version of the World's Fair, the Great Lakes Exposition. Lots of people are coming to Cleveland. It's big time. And the police see this as an opportunity. So they have their own pavilion at the Great Lakes Exposition. And so they actually have like a cast made of the fourth victim, the tattooed man, and a chart made of his body with illustrations of all the tattoos, and they put that on display at the exposition, hoping that millions of people who are coming through the exposition grounds and who will pass the police pavilion might recognize this individual and help in his identification. And that's the truly mystifying thing, is that nobody seems to remember or recall this individual.

SPEAKER_03 10:31

In July, a decapitated 40-ish man was found in the woods. In September, another man's torso was found by a train tracks. This man was likely in his twenties and, like the first two victims, had been emasculated. Police found most of the rest of his body nearby, but they were unable to identify him. The coroner, Dr. Pierce, made clear the killer understood anatomy and was, he said, a very confident killer.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

The killer is apparently a sex maniac of the sadistic type. This is indicated by the condition of his victims. He is probably a muscular man. The slayer definitely has expert knowledge of human anatomy. The incisions of his knife are clean and were made in each case without guesswork. While the killer is obviously obsessed and insane, he is also shrewd, works alone, and is clever enough to avoid detection indefinitely.

SPEAKER_03 11:26

Because the ages, gender, and conditions of the bodies were so different, the police, unlike the coroner, were initially concerned about calling this the work of one man.

SPEAKER_05 11:36

It took a while for individuals to even begin to contemplate that certain crimes might be connected and that there might be a single individual involved who's perpetrating them.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

But the press, like Pierce, had decided it was one person. And though they couldn't give him a name, it didn't stop them from giving him lots of nicknames.

SPEAKER_05 11:57

The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the Kingsbury Run torso murderer, the torso murderer, the headsman, the Mad Butcher without the Kingsbury Run part, Cleveland torso murderer. Yeah, there's there are a lot different names applied.

SPEAKER_03 12:10

And with the investigation making headlines and bodies turning up repeatedly, Mayor Harold Burton turned to the city's safety director, Elliot Nass.

SPEAKER_05 12:20

Elliot Ness is very much associated with the city of Chicago and the Prohibition era. Unless today is being remembered as you know someone who like went after Capone in Chicago and engaged in all of these daring raids against like gangsters and rated breweries and speakeasies and things like that.

SPEAKER_03 12:37

Though his work in Chicago had made him as famous as the gangsters he helped take down, it wasn't satisfying, Ness would later admit.

SPEAKER_02 12:46

Did you ever think you wanted something more than anything else in the world? And then after you got it, it was half as good as you expected.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

By 1935, Prohibition was over and El Capone was in prison. Elliot Ness had moved to Cleveland and was now the city's director of public safety.

SPEAKER_05 13:04

And it was an interesting role because it basically provided him with oversight of both the police department and also like the fire department. That the position in Cleveland really allowed Ness to play to his strengths. And what I mean by that is that he was actually a very competent and effective administrator. So while he did take on organized crime in Cleveland and actually did a very good job of responding to it and lessening it and then breaking up some of the gangs that existed there, his really brilliance showed in like police reform and modernizing the department. So he made sure the Cleveland police got all like modern vehicles with like two-way radios. He kind of like rationalized police beats to make investigations more efficient.

SPEAKER_03 13:45

Before his reforms, Cleveland had one of the worst traffic fatality records in America's large cities. By 1938, the city had been given the National Safety Council's title of Safest Large City in America. But Ness was not resting on his laurels.

SPEAKER_05 14:03

In one of his earliest press conferences upon taking the role, he has a quotation that will come back to haunt him, where he states, and I love this line, he says, Every crime has a cure. He doesn't think there's a single situation that doesn't exist for which like a solution can be found through effective law enforcement.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

The killings were putting that belief to the test.

SPEAKER_05 14:25

Early on, Ness isn't too involved in the case given his role with within the city. But as the sequence continues, there's something that's called the torso clinic, which is convened, where the coroner gets together with the head of the police and some of the other investigators and involved in the case, and they begin to kind of like look at the crimes collectively and sort of see what they can learn and what they can kind of parse out about the killer based on the number of victims that have been recovered up to that point. And Ness is there for that torso clinic. Reportedly, he doesn't like actually say much as it's unfolding, and as people are like looking at the evidence again and asking questions, but he is taking a lot of notes.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

The clinic was in the summer of 1936, which was also this summer the city hosted the exposition and something else.

SPEAKER_05 15:15

It's hosting the Republican National Convention. Ness was a Republican, certainly a Republican with political aspirations that went beyond his current position in the city of Cleveland. And so to have this sort of killer on the loose and scaring people, I mean that's just not good public relations.

SPEAKER_03 15:32

Though Ness was given the job of welcoming important guests to the convention, he was clear that he didn't take his eye off the ball.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

I'm gonna do all I can to aid in the investigation. I want to see this psycho caught.

SPEAKER_03 15:45

By November of 1936, the story of the torso killer had become national true crime news. Official Detective Stories magazine published a lengthy article about the case and offered a $5,000 reward, over $116,000 now, to anyone who gave them exclusive information that led to the arrest and conviction of the killer. The pressure was growing daily, but Ness believed he would find his man.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

In crime, in accidents, and in any series of events menacing public safety, the case, the why, is the thing to fare it out. As the pattern evolves, experience and intelligence points to a solution on the basis of those facts, and a course of action becomes crystal clear.

SPEAKER_03 16:31

Around this time, another victim had the potential to be added to the list, but not because of a new killing. A woman's body parts had been found in September of 1934, a year before the two men at Kingsbury Run.

SPEAKER_05 16:45

Oftentimes that individual is considered victim number zero because she was later sort of retroactively fit in into the sequence. Sometimes she's romantically referred to as the Lady in the Lake because her remains were found right along the shore of Lake Erie. And I think in terms of some of those early killings, it was kind of easy to sort of overlook as far as the broader public was concerned. And investigators don't really begin to start to piece things together until about the fourth or fifth victim in the official sequence.

SPEAKER_03 17:14

She is, to this day, considered a possible victim, but not part of the official body count. It's impossible for the police to know then or now whether to include her.

SPEAKER_05 17:25

Most likely these victims are coming from the margins of a society, and uh perhaps they're all transients, simply passing through Cleveland, or they're individuals who would inredibly be missed. And so that perhaps is like the one sort of consistent trait uh among victims.

SPEAKER_03 17:44

In February of 1937, the torso of a woman in her mid-twenties was found. Like many of the other victims, she could not be identified. But like all the others, she was white. But that changed in June when an eighth victim, a black woman, was found under the Lorraine Carnegie Bridge. The body was so badly decomposed it was partially a skeleton. A death mask was made to help identify her. The woman had gold dental work, and with that information, a young African-American man said the body was of his mother, Rose Wallace, a 40-year-old woman who'd worked as a prostitute in the area. She'd been missing for about 10 months. While Ness led the investigation, Detective Peter Merlot was put on the case full-time.

SPEAKER_05 18:35

Peter Merlow, like so many other people in Cleveland, was a child of immigrants, a very kind of like hard-nosed practical investigator. He would go so far as to try to go undercover, like dressed as a transient, basically kind of setting himself out as like bait to see if he could like kind of lure the killer out.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

Detective Merlot had a theory about the killer, which would have made him very difficult to find.

SPEAKER_05 19:23

And that's what made him so difficult to identify and to capture.

SPEAKER_03 19:28

Merlow and Detective Martin Zalouski eventually interviewed more than 1,500 people, while other officers interviewed several thousand more, making this the largest investigation in the city's history. But there were cracks in the department, namely between Ness and Merlot. Within a few months, Ness had created a secret squad to look into the case, similar to the Untouchables in Chicago. He even visited the two boys that found the first bodies. But Merlo was not in the squad, and there's no indication that Ness shared any information with him. So now there were essentially two investigations. And this was in addition to Ness's main job of weeding out corruption and updating methods of police work. Cleveland Congressman Martin Sweeney criticized Ness for exaggerating police corruption. He said the mayor and his quote, alter ego, the great G-Man, unquote, based their findings on outdated information.

SPEAKER_04 20:29

They are entertaining us with the prosecution of policemen when we have Jack the Ripper in the city.

SPEAKER_03 20:35

And it wasn't just Congressman Sweeney who appeared to be criticizing Ness. The killer was, perhaps, making a statement of his own.

SPEAKER_05 20:43

But as the crimes progress, the bodies are coming closer and closer to the kind of heart of the city. So that by the time the final two bodies, 11 and 12, are recovered in a dump uh on the near east side of Cleveland, Ness can actually like look out from his office window and see that site where those bodies are found. And so there's a sense that maybe the Cleveland police are starting to be taunted a little bit more by the killer, although it's never substantiated.

SPEAKER_03 21:11

In August of 1938, Ness made a startling choice in the hopes of ending the killings.

SPEAKER_05 21:17

If they can't apprehend the killer, they are going to do everything that they can to cut off his source of victims. So what unfolds is these sort of midnight raids on the kind of shantytowns and the Hoovervilles that are kind of all throughout Cleveland, you know, near the railroad tracks, under the bridges, led by the Cleveland police, led by the Cleveland Fire Department. Ness himself actually goes on some of these. I think something like over 60 individuals are arrested, all transients. They're all fingerprinted, and that's key because should their bodies ever turn up in the future without heads, at least now, there's you know fingerprints to be able to identify them. And then not only are these individuals arrested and basically sort of put on a train and like shipped out of Cleveland. And but then they're like shanties and all their possessions are set on fire and they're burned. And it's basically like kind of cleaning out these homeless encampments.

SPEAKER_03 22:08

It did not go over well with the city.

SPEAKER_05 22:11

The Cleveland press really kind of takes Ness and other officials to task for this. Basically saying, you know, maybe you should put be putting your energies more into like actually identifying the perpetrator than like fingerprinting potential future victims. And also like, these are already people suffering enough through the impact of the Great Depression, really kind of adding to their misery and like setting fire to their very humble homes. Perhaps, you know, it's not showing a great deal of empathy or care.

SPEAKER_03 22:39

And Congressman Martin Sweeney went one step further. He saw Ness as a man who didn't have the skills to find the killer.

SPEAKER_04 22:46

He was a prohibition agent and he never caught Capone. His only claim to fame is that in Chicago, he and his squad happened to run into a brewery where some old man was tending a still. They found out later that Capone had an interest in it.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

Despite being called out in the press and by politicians, Ness told reporters that he had actually done a good thing for the men staying in shanty towns by redirecting them out of town or to local shelters.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

So they prefer the flats.

SPEAKER_03 23:32

And Ness could count the raids as successful in the one way that mattered.

SPEAKER_05 23:37

What happens, and then the aftermath of this is the killings abruptly stop. And so after August 1938, there are no more bodies that are recovered in the Cleveland area, at least.

SPEAKER_03 23:48

But did that mean that the police had fingerprinted the killer, put him on a train, and sent him elsewhere?

SPEAKER_05 23:54

The whole time that the Cleveland killings are unfolding, there have been bodies that somewhat fit the pattern of the crimes being found in other places, in particular in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, and then also outside Pittsburgh. And there are along railroad lines. And so these cases that are similar, so bodies of transients, the victims are often nude, their heads have been removed, sometimes they've been further disarticulated. But investigators are never able to conclusively connect these other cases to the killings in Cleveland. They just seem very similar and they're kind of contemporaneous. So perhaps one theory, and this is a theory that one of the lead investigators of the case, Peter Merlot, had, is that the Cleveland killer basically just left Cleveland and began committing the crimes elsewhere. But that's only like one theory. There's no sort of like definitive evidence to prove that.

SPEAKER_03 24:50

By October, there was another theory in the form of a tip to nationally famous radio commentator and gossip columnist Walter Winchell, which he announced to the 20 million listeners of his radio show. The suspect, he said, was an outstanding citizen in Cleveland, a man with great medical skills, though police denied having anyone who fit that description in their list of suspects. Ness did have his eye on someone who sort of fit that description. He'd been paying attention to a man named Francis Sweeney, a surgeon who lived near Kingsbury Run.

SPEAKER_05 25:26

Francis Sweeney had medical training. He was a veteran of the First World War. He, I believe, had lost his license because he was struggling with substance abuse, both alcohol and uh drug addiction. And Ness's account is to be believed. Sweeney frequented the area where a lot of the potential victims were. So there was, you know, Cleveland was divided into wards. The third ward was basically the area where the kind of Skid Row and slum areas really were, and that seemed to be where at least Florence Pelillo came from. But Edward Andres was also known to like frequent a lot of the bars and saloons and then places in that area. And Sweeney was there too. He was part of that milieu.

SPEAKER_03 26:04

In the spring of that year, Ness had brought Sweeney, who he nicknamed Dr. X in his reports, to the Hotel Cleveland for questioning.

SPEAKER_05 26:13

When he's brought in to be interrogated, again, this is Ness's account. Apparently, he's like so intoxicated at the time that he can't even be effectively interviewed. And so they have to detain him until he can dry out.

SPEAKER_03 26:25

Ness's caution, bringing him to a hotel and giving him an alias, might have had something to do with who Dr. Sweeney was related to. His cousin was Congressman Martin Sweeney. Though Dr. Sweeney had been watched by police for several years and he wasn't the only one who thought he was guilty, Ness understood that he would have to have real evidence against the man to accuse the cousin of one of his most ardent critics of being a serial killer. When Dr. Sweeney sobered up, Ness questioned him.

SPEAKER_05 26:58

Then he undergoes a couple polygraph tests and he fails the polygraph tests, but there's no like conclusive evidence tying him to the crime, so ultimately he's not charged.

SPEAKER_03 27:08

In August of 1938, a man named Emile Fronick had come forward to say that a doctor had tried to drug him four years earlier, and he now believed that man was the torso killer. Fronich had been a transient when the doctor offered him food, but the food made him sick and suspicious of the doctor. Fronich fled. He led police back to the area where he'd received the meal, but he was unable to point out the exact location, and his story was dismissed. It was later discovered that years earlier Dr. Sweeney had an office on the same street Fronick had brought the police to. And Sweeney's office was next to a corner. Sweeney had access to the morgue, which could have been the lair where he killed and dismembered his victims. There are rumors to this day that perhaps his family is part of the reason Dr. Sweeney was never charged.

SPEAKER_05 28:04

There's this political pressure on Ness and others not to pursue this line of investigation.

SPEAKER_03 28:10

The questioning of Dr. Sweeney was hidden from the public for years, but when another man was picked up, a bricklayer named Frank Dolezal, he was paraded before the press.

SPEAKER_05 28:22

He was an immigrant. He, you know, had a pretty like working-class background, lived with his sisters, um, and he knew Florence Polillo and had an association with her. And when police found about this and began to kind of like investigate, and I should say too, county police, and that's an important part of Dolazole's story, is that it wasn't the Cleveland police.

SPEAKER_03 28:48

If he was guilty, his arrest, not by Ness or the Cleveland police, could seriously derail any future ambitions Ness had. But Detective Peter Merlot had questioned Dolazole twice and investigated his whereabouts at the times of the killings. He had already been eliminated by the Cleveland police.

SPEAKER_05 29:08

The county police, for whatever reason, became fixated on him, and I think the Cuyahoga County Sheriff really wanted to be able to solve this case for political purposes and the sort of benefit that it would bring to him.

SPEAKER_03 29:20

At first, Dolezal denied any involvement. His home was searched, and a knife was found with blood on it.

SPEAKER_05 29:27

He admits to knowing Flopolillo, and then later, under very intense interrogation, admits to accidentally killing her, like they'd gotten into an argument, he had sheltered, she'd hit her head, I believe, against a sink, and he thought that she was dead, and in a panic, he dismembered her body and disposed of it because he wasn't certain that it would be treated as an accidental death.

SPEAKER_03 29:47

But Dolazal, a Slovakian immigrant who spoke little English, might not have understood what he was admitting to. In any case, he quickly recanted, and the knife found at his home had pig's blood on it, not human. While in police custody, he was found hanged in his jail cell.

SPEAKER_05 30:08

When his body is examined, it's discovered that several ribs of his have been broken, and it's most historians today believe that he was a victim of a very intense police interrogation, and perhaps like a confession was actually beaten out of him that wasn't an accurate one. No other evidence has ever emerged since to really connect Dolezal to the case, and a lot of historians today don't believe that he was the killer.

SPEAKER_03 30:33

There were rumors, other possible suspects, but no solution.

unknown 30:38

Dr.

SPEAKER_03 30:38

Sweeney committed himself to an institution after the interrogation. Elliot Ness remained convinced that he was the killer, but no new evidence was ever found against him.

SPEAKER_05 30:50

He's the sort of figure that we want to be responsible for these crimes, because he sort of like fits, you know, someone who came from a respectable background but had kind of fallen on hard times. My actual real theory, or the the one that I like, is that there actually wasn't one killer, that there were like multiple killers. To me, the killer is as more interesting as like a concept, as this desire to try to find some sort of meaning and order in the midst of these violent acts. And then by creating this concept, you create this kind of meaning and then you can make sense of what's ultimately senseless. So for me, thinking about the Kingsbury run, torso murderer, as this kind of boogeyman figure, that's what I find really interesting and intriguing.

SPEAKER_03 31:33

The case with no new bodies and no new leads faded from the headlines.

SPEAKER_05 31:38

It becomes one of those stories that sort of haunts the sort of subconscious of the city.

SPEAKER_03 31:44

By 1942, Ness had moved to Washington to help with the war effort. When he returned to Cleveland, he ran for mayor and lost by a wide margin. His time as a crime-busting hero had come to an end, and the lack of a solution to the torso killings had something to do with that. But the torso killings, in a way, did not end for Ness.

SPEAKER_05 32:07

This entire time, these like strange postcards that are almost kind of like photo collages, like somebody's taken like newspaper clippings and posted or pasted a bunch of things on these postcards. And they're basically like sort of taunting Ness for having not solved the Kingsbury Run torso murders. And many of them are signed your paranoid nemesis. And so Ness was convinced that he was receiving these postcards from Francis Sweeney, and that Sweeney was taunting him for having failed to like solve the case. And they continue basically all the way up until Ness's death.

SPEAKER_03 32:37

By 1954, Ness was broke and forgotten. He cooperated with his sports writer, Oscar Fraley, to write about his time in Chicago during Prohibition. Ness gave him a 21-page accounting of his work, which Fraley transformed into the book The Untouchables. Ness didn't like it and signed away his rights to it. He died penniless in 1957 at the age of 54, just months before the book was released, and became a massive success. That book became the basis for the image of Elliot Ness that has gone down through the decades.

SPEAKER_05 33:15

He really sort of lived up to that image of being, you know, a very effective lawman. Now, granted, what's also interesting about that time in Cleveland is also that's when his personal flaws really began to come to the fore. Um so he certainly was someone known for a certain amount of self-agurdizement, which culminates in something like the Untouchables. He developed a seems like a pretty severe drinking problem as well during that time. But to me, you know, those flaws actually make him much more relatable than the figure that you find in the form of Kevin Costner or Robert Stack. I mean, I think the fact that he was actually able to accomplish and do as much as he did despite those human failings, actually makes him much more relatable. And as someone who's a Cleveland native, it makes him just much more understandable.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

Elliot Nass, though now a legend in American law enforcement, did not solve his last case. And neither did Peter Merlot, the detective who dressed as a transient to lure the torso killer. The evidence the police had collected now lives at the Cleveland Police Museum, where theories on the case are still debated.

SPEAKER_05 34:40

Oftentimes these stories have some kind of ending or resolution, right? The perpetrator is identified and then brought to justice. The mystery is resolved in some ways. And in this case, you don't have that. You just get this kind of really rich and provocative middle, but you don't really have a beginning because you don't know what who these people were who were the victims and kind of what led to their deaths in a lot of situations. And then you don't know who was responsible for it. And so it just continues to kind of like frustrate and and tantalize.

SPEAKER_03 35:15

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SPEAKER_05 35:48

Swift slice, like pretty much right at the collar line.