A boat ride on a hot Friday afternoon on June 28, 1935, changed the fate of Cleveland’s once-popular mayor Harry E. Davis and gave rise to the Cleveland career of Chicago’s crimefighting “Untouchable” — Eliot Ness.
On that fateful day, Mildred Brockman, an employee of the city public works department, fell from a boat in Lake Erie and drowned. The problem was this was no mere boat ride. Later accounts describe it as a “drinking party,” whose guests included Public Safety Director Martin Lavelle — an appointee of Mayor Davis. The boat was owned by a well-known Cleveland area bootlegger and racketeer. The press immediately smelled a rat.
When Lavelle failed to investigate — “I don’t know what we can do about it” — the media pounced. Mayor Davis stood by his man. But his opponent in the upcoming mayoral race, Harold Burton, took to the hustings alleging foul. Waging a law-and-order campaign and pointing the finger at Lavelle as an example of corruption in the Davis administration, Burton won the November election for mayor. He would go on to be the United States Senator from Ohio and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Eliot Ness, the man made famous by putting Chicago’s Al Capone behind bars — he was convicted of income tax evasion — was by then in Cleveland working for the Treasury Department in a relatively low-level job, busting stills in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee and collecting tax revenue on the same substance that he had battled in his early career. But he brought his famous name and his unique ability to get his name in the papers to Cleveland. When Burton’s first choice for safety director turned him down, he turned to the 31-year-old Ness, who had no administrative experience in running a large city public safety force, to become Cleveland’s “top cop.”
All of this and more is described in a new book by Clevelander Daniel Stashower, American Demon – Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (St. Martin Publishing Group: New York, 2022.)
The book centers on the unsolved murders that occurred in Cleveland between 1934 and 1938 — the so-called Torso Murders, also known as the hunt for the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. They were a series of gruesome killings that filled the newspapers with stories of decapitations, mutilations, castrations and decaying body parts. Was there a Cleveland version of Jack the Ripper?
The body parts were found mostly around Kingsbury Run, the area that we now go through as the Shaker Rapid whisks passengers to downtown Cleveland. Others were found in Lake Erie. Most body parts — torsos, limbs and heads — were in advanced stages of decomposition making identification difficult to impossible. In an age before DNA and CSI, the amount of information that the police and the coroner were able to gather makes for interesting reading.
Stashower tells of Ness’ fights against corruption within the ranks of the Cleveland Police Department and frequent showboating in attempts to rekindle his Chicago image as a crime fighter. At the same time, his police department was dealing with the gruesome murders, an investigation complicated by competing agencies — the county sheriff, the county prosecutor, the coroner and the media — all seeking their own turf and engaging in separate investigations.
In an age before the protections awarded criminal defendants by the Warren Court in the 1960s, Ness and other law enforcement agencies engaged in wholesale arrests, unlawful detentions, unauthorized searches and brutal interrogations while attempting to find the killer, none of which produced results. On one occasion, Ness burned an entire shanty town to flush out suspects in the Torso Murder case, leaving hundreds of homeless more homeless without the meager hovels that gave them some shelter from the elements.
Shashower describes the key suspects that police focused on in trying to solve the crime and leaves the reader with his belief that the real killer may have been a relative of a prominent Cleveland political family. The inference was that Ness did not prosecute the person, not wanting to incur possible political wrath of the accused family if he was wrong, leaving his integrity in serious question.
Shashower’s Eliot Ness is not the Robert Stack of the late 1950s TV show or the Kevin Costner of the 1987 movie version of The Untouchables. This Ness is a hard-drinking womanizer who played mean practical jokes and was not a likable person. A 1942 traffic accident was labeled by the media as the “L’Affaire Ness” with allegations of a drunken Ness leaving the scene of the accident. It was a major blow to his good-guy image.
He resigned as safety director in 1941 and spent the war years in Washington working in a program that warned soldiers of venereal disease. After the war he returned to Cleveland, running for mayor in 1947. But his glory days were over. Kicking around from job to job, he engaged in several failed businesses. By the mid 1950s he collaborated with sportswriter Oscar Fraley to write his memoirs, mainly for the money. With the help of Fraley, he embellished his life story to an extent hardly recognizable from the Ness of real life.
In 1957 Ness was living in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, with his third wife and adopted son, attempting to make a go of a failing business. On May 15, he stopped on his way home to buy a bottle of gin with some of the advance money from his upcoming memoir. In his pocket were two checks from his failing business. Both were worthless because of the company’s current state of decline. Later that day he collapsed in the kitchen of his home and died of a heart attack. He was 54 years old.
In 1997 I attended the internment of the ashes of Ness, his wife and son at Lakeview Cemetery. Thanks to Cleveland crime writer Allan May, the ashes were discovered in the garage of Ness’ daughter-in law. May worked with Lakeview Cemetery and the Cleveland Police Museum and Historical Society to organize an impressive and well-attended ceremony where the ashes were scattered in the lake next to Wade Chapel. A headstone, marking the spot, was donated by the cemetery. It is Cleveland’s only marker to its once famous safety director.
There are not a lot of second acts for a youthful crime fighter whose days of glory are past. Ness would never regain the fame of his Chicago days. Had he solved the torso murders — one of Cleveland’s most famous murder cases — history would clearly have recorded him differently.
There is a lot of Cleveland history in American Demon and a lot of familiar names. There are also a lot of unanswered questions as to why these crimes were never solved and Stashower attempts to point some of the blame on Ness.
In a recent visit to the Western Reserve Historical Society, where Ness’ papers are housed, I was told by the curator that several 21st century investigators have asked for the taunting post cards sent to Ness from a person purporting to be the killer. These items have postage stamps on them, which would have to have been licked by the sender. The thought is that DNA could be obtained. The WRHS declined the request because of the damage that the removal would do to the items, but they hope that someday, technology will be such that such evidence can be removed without destruction of the item.
If that happens, the real killer — obviously long dead — will at least be named. Perhaps that would put an end to the decades of speculation by authors and investigators, all of whom have varying theories as to the identity of the real torso murderer.
Through his comprehensive research, Stashower provides lots of food for thought as to the identity of the torso murder or murderers while also painting a new and not so pretty face of the real Eliot Ness. Clevelanders will especially enjoy the read.
C. Ellen Connally is a retired judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. From 2010 to 2014 she served as the President of the Cuyahoga County Council. An avid reader and student of American history, she serves on the Board of the Ohio History Connection, is currently vice president of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission and past president of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table. She holds degrees from BGSU, CSU and is all but dissertation for a PhD from the University of Akron.