What Happened After THE UNTOUCHABLES

4. After Al Capone: How Eliot Ness Wound Up Investigating The Cleveland Torso Murderer

Following Capone's indictment for tax evasion in 1931, Ness continued to operate in Chicago as the chief of the city's Prohibition Bureau. He later relocated to the south, disrupting moonshiners in Kentucky and Tennessee, before finally being transferred to Cleveland, Ohio, where he would finally be appointed the city's Safety Director in 1935.

Ness' primary aim in Cleveland was to root out police corruption in the department by taking on the mob, which at that time consisted of figures like Moe Dalitz, to name but one. As Safety Director, Ness embarked on a campaign of reform in Cleveland - one that would come crashing to a halt as the city fell victim to one of the most infamous series of murders in American history.

From 1935 to around 1938 (potentially even longer, some have theorised), Cleveland was held in the grip of the Cleveland Torso Murderer. In a three-year-gap, this serial killer - initially dubbed the 'Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run' - is thought to have murdered some twelve-twenty different people, all of whom were killed via decapitation or dismemberment. The killer severed heads, genitals and doused his victims' bodies in a chemical solution to ensure identification was near-enough impossible, and that there'd be little evidence linking himself to the bodies.

One by one, the police discovered more and more torsos in and around the Cleveland area. Only two were ever identified, a consequence of the Great Depression drawing thousands of impoverished workers to the area. Many took residence in some of the newly erected shanty towns in the city, and with few being city natives or having a fixed address, it became clear just how exactly the killer was targeting his victims.

For Ness, the Torso killings would prove to be his biggest challenge yet. While certain accounts and fictional adaptations may have overestimated his involvement with the case, Ness did at one time lead the investigation and was personally targeted by the Torso Murderer while they were active, with the remains of two victims having been placed by the killer in the view of his City Hall office.

Compounding the horror of this case further is the fact that the Torso Murderer was never caught. Just like Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia and Zodiac, he was never apprehended. But it wasn't a simple case of one day he was there and the next he was gone; the investigation into the killings was plagued with controversy, and Ness was right at the centre.

[Content Warning: the next page contains images of 'death masks' made from some of the Torso victims.]