Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mind of a Murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: We're joined today by New York Times bestselling author Daniel
Stashauer talking about his book American Demon, elliot Ness and
the Hunt for America's Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 4: Dan, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 6: It's my pleasure start by.
Speaker 5: Telling us a little bit about your personal and professional background,
if you would.
Speaker 6: Gosh, my personal and professional background are intertwined it's hard
to separate them. I was thinking about it. I'm very
lucky because a lot of the things that interested me
personally from childhood forward have become things that have become
the basis of the work I do. I was a
kid who loved Sherlock Holmes, I loved mystery novels, and
that kind of led me into becoming interested in the
history of mystery novels, and that led me to Arthur
Conan Doyle biographies, and it all kind of went from there,
and Conan Doyle himself got interested in various true crime
stories over the course of his career. Just seemed like
everything unfolded fairly naturally. And I've been lucky enough to
be able to follow that thread for many years.
Speaker 5: But your subject matter choices for your books are just
absolutely fascinating, and so they appealed to the teacher and me,
but also the crime lover in me and the history
lover in me. So you've written about Arthur Conan Doyle,
Filo Tie Farnsworth, Eggar Allen Poe, Abraham Lincoln, and now
Elliot nas Is all of this stemming from childhood loves
and interests or has some of it?
Speaker 4: How else? Has the rest of it come around to you.
Speaker 6: I would love to be able to tell you that
there was a well thought out master plan. There hasn't been.
It tended to go where my enthusiasms of the moment
take me. In some cases, like you mentioned Abraham Lincoln,
that was intended to be a book about Alan Pinkerton.
It was a book about Alan Pinkerton to some extent.
When I originally conceived of that book about the Baltimore
Plot of eighteen sixty one, the plot to assassinate Lincoln
on his way to Washington for his first inauguration as president.
I envisioned the story being about how Alan Pinkerton detected
and thwarted the plot within and justice piece of cargo
that was being carried on the train as it sped
towards the Washington And it was only as I dug
into that book that it became as much about Lincoln
and obviously the state of the Union at that time
as it did. But if I try to think of
the books I've written as a whole, I realized that
all of them have at their core some question that
I was unable to answer when I began, And I
think that's what draws me to the subjects, which on
the surface seem many of them unrelated one to the other.
Speaker 2: Is that research driven, Dan? In other words, what are
you saying about the questions that you developed that you
wanted to get answers to. Is that part of the
process where you're learning more about a particular historical character
and then you get to the place where you're like,
wait a minute, what about this?
Speaker 6: Oh? Absolutely, I feel that the research. I think a
lot of nonfiction writers would say the research is the
part they enjoy. The research, to some extent, never ends.
I'm thinking in particular of my Conan Doyle biography, which
was my first nonfiction book. As a kid who loved
Sherlock Holmes and being of a certain bookish turn of mind,
I would start to read the biographies. I read the
biographies that were available to me at the time, and
they were great. There were terrific books, especially the one
by John Dixon Carr, and I enjoyed reading them and
I got a great deal out of them. But there
was a point in everything I read about Conan Doyle
where they got to his interest in spiritualism, and at
that point theyked off. When I was a junior in college.
I did a junior year abroad in England, and I
bought up everything I could find that had Conan Doyle's
name on it. Of course, there were all kinds of
wonderful novels, and I couldn't afford particularly expensive Sherlock Holmes books,
but I could afford his spiritualism books. And I was
just out of a frame of mind by pretty much
everything that he'd written, which was readily available. So the
question began to form in my mind, how did the
greater of Sherlock Holmes find his way to spiritualism, the
belief that it's possible for we the living to communicate
with departed souls through a spirit conduit or medium. And
I turned to the biographies for answers, and it wasn't
that they were avoiding the question, but they did, as
I say, back away at that point, and I remembered
John Dixon Carr in particular, a writer that we all
know and admire, said described it in terms of a
flash that escapes analysis. There was something about Conan Doyle
that defied our efforts to understand, which I understand, and
that was fair enough. But Conan Doyle was interested in
spiritualism for much of his life, and he devoted the
last fourteen years of his life merrily to putting forward
this message, so much so that he became known as
the Saint Paul of spiritualism. So why and how do
you appreciate his whole life without really try and grapple
with where he ended up. I'm not saying I cracked
this riddle, but it was what drove me to do
the research and to write the book that I did.
And that's the part that's interesting to me in terms
of your question about if are they research driven? That
book was published more than twenty years ago. I'm still
researching it. Great things go up all the time. That's
a well that you never quite get to the bottom up.
Speaker 5: So what was the question that was driving you when
you started looking into the I've seen them called the
Cleveland Torso killings, but I've also heard it called Butcher
of Kingsbury Run. What was driving you when you started
doing the research into the Butcher of Kingsbury Run?
Speaker 6: That one? That story, It's a fairly simple answer, And
I've read other books about unsolved crimes. I think people
are drawn to that story, to Kingsbury Run and Matt Butcher,
the Torso Killer, what have you. People are drawn to
that story for the same reason they're drawn to Jack
the Ripper. It's a notorious series of crimes and it's unsolved,
and there is this sense, this lingering sense of mystery
that hangs over and that's a temptation not just for writers,
but for anyone who's interested in the nature of crime,
true crime in.
Speaker 2: Particular, seeing as how we are a true crime podcast.
Why do you think this horrific series of murders went unsolved?
Speaker 6: It is sometimes observed that it was just beyond the
abilities of the investigators in the Cleveland Police at the time.
The more I dug into it, the more struck I
was by how diligent, how hard working, and also how
creative the investigators in Cleveland were in their approach to
this crime. They threw everything they had at this crime.
They worked incredibly hard, and they even tried, to the
best of their ability to push through the limitations of
forensic science and the time to improvise new techniques as
they went along. And there are two examples that come
to mind. The coroner at the time when the investigation
began pulled together a panel of experts to discuss the
crime and to pool their thoughts and their various perspectives
on the case to produce what they called a synthetic
portrait of the killer. Today, we would understand that as
criminal profiling. They just instinctively were groping towards it in
their efforts to get a handle on this crime. And
there was another instance that really struck me where there
was a particular suspect that they were looking that they
were looking for, but they couldn't find a picture of him.
But they only had a picture of him as a child.
So what they did was they took this picture, they
projected it onto a piece of canvas, and an artist,
using descriptions, embellished it to age up to approximate what
the suspect might look like. Today today we've seen that
on any number of shows and movies age progression songs.
But I find it remarkable that the investigators in Cleveland
at that time, who really there was nothing in their
rule book that would had prepared them for this, They
really were doing their best to push through and find
the handle on this case. As with any unsolved crime.
You guys know this as well as anyone. There are frustrations,
there are conflicts, there are all kinds of things that
bubble up and then fall through the cracks. Again, in
this case, it sure wasn't from lack of effort. They
did their absolute damnedest.
Speaker 2: So within the limits of nineteen thirty's investigative technology, they
did everything they could. You're actually describing things that are
commonplace now weren't commonplace ten or twenty years ago, never
mind ninety years ago.
Speaker 6: If it could have been solved just through sheer effort,
through the number of man hours spent on it, yeah,
they'd have gotten there.
Speaker 5: So, ultimately, if it wasn't lack of effort on the
part of the Cleveland Police Department, and it certainly sounds
like it wasn't that, what else was it that kept
this from making it across the finish line? Do you think?
Speaker 6: It's very difficult to say because there are so many
contradictions and so many different angles on this story. But
so a lot of the coverage at the time made
note of the fact that these crimes unfolded on a
timeline that over that coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of
Jack the Ripper's crime. There were a lot of similarities
but there were also differences, and it was and those
differences also fold into why it posed such a challenge
to the Cleveland investigators. We know what type of victim
Jack the Ripper was preying on. Yeah, in Cleveland, there
didn't seem to be a pattern. Women, black and white,
all over the all over the spectrum of people. What
they seemed to have in common was that they were transient,
indigent people on the margins of society, in a phrase
that was used again and again at the time, people
who would not be missed, which suggests an opportunistic killer,
which made it all the more troubling for the investigators.
Speaker 5: So, and I asked you this already off air, because
I couldn't stand to wait until Wednesday to get this
answer from you. And I asked you which interest of
yours came first? Was it the mad Butcher of Kingsbury
run case that was interesting to you? Or was it
Elliot mess Because I can see how both would be
very interesting.
Speaker 4: So which of them came first.
Speaker 6: For me personally? Yes, it was the It was the
Butcher story. I heard it for the first time around
a campfire when I was eight or nine years old.
I was a summer camp, so imagine it. I'm there,
we're roasting s'mores, and one of the counselors starts telling us,
essentially a campfire ghost stories on the butcher. I remember
at one point we had to stop to get an
explanation of what the word decapitated meant. And I remember
that there were many repetitions of the phrase, and the
killer is still out.
Speaker 2: There inappropriate for a little kids.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if even one of today, if even one kid
went home and said there'd be there would be a
lot of irate parents on the phone. Yeah, but you
didn't have to embellish this story a whole lot to
turn it into the stuff at nightmares. And I don't
think anybody slept that night. So for me that came first.
It was the story of the butcher, and it would
be for me and for a lot of people. I
would imagine it was a childhood boogeyman, especially for people
growing up as I did in the Cleveland area.
Speaker 2: Kristin asked that question, and I didn't know the She
obviously had talked to you about this a little bit beforehand.
When you started, I thought to myself, he's going to say,
Elliott Ness. It was exactly the opposite.
Speaker 6: It's funny because I grew up very aware of Ness.
Elliot Ness. He's the hero of Chicago, Leefield, Deep Dish, Pizza.
Elliot Ness.
Speaker 2: We know him.
Speaker 6: We remember him as a Chicago guy, leader of the Untouchables.
When we think of elliot Ness, we think of a
truck bursting through the doors of one of al Capone's breweries.
We don't think of Cleveland. But that chapter of his
life was pretty much wrapped up with the repeal of Prohibition,
and it was more or less over by the time
he turned thirty. So Ness was a very young man
when he was a leader of the Untouchables. He was
a very young man in Chicago. He needed a second act,
and he found one in Cleveland as director of public Safety.
When I was growing up, you heard about Ness, you
heard about him being in Cleveland. But it was always
or at least to me age twelve thirteen, whatever I was,
it was always a little contradictory. We were told when
I was growing up in Cleveland Heights, his widow had
lived nearby. I know his son went to my junior
high school. There were things like that, but at that
time I hadn't really grasped until I started looking at
newspaper headlines and things like that, just how important to
figure he had been in Cleveland as as director of
public safety. Was a big job, a big promotion. The
chief of police reported to Elliot Ness, who got the
job when he was thirty two years old, and the
fire chief also, and the building department. He's in Chicago.
He'd been in charge of a handful of guys and
now he's running a department that's in charge of thousands
of city employees. I mean, it was huge, and a
lot of people expected him to fall flat on his face.
His marching orders were to clean up the police department,
which was essentially rotting from the inside out because of
corrupt and also to try to address the stranglehold that
the mob had on the city. Clean up the police department,
take down the mob.
Speaker 2: And take down the mob. Break for lunch with a
quick at police department. That was rifeless, corruption incredible.
Speaker 6: But the miracle of it is the degree the success
that he had, the degree to which he succeeded in
cleaning up the town. It's a really a remarkable story.
But when we think of Ness, of course, we think
of Chicago. Because of the TV book, the TV and
the movie.
Speaker 5: The moment that I picked up your book and started
to read it, you hit me with a bombshell. Page
one is when you were talking about the fact that
Elliott and ness kept tabs on your grandfather, and I
was like, this is a whole new ballgame.
Speaker 4: This is crazy.
Speaker 5: Tell us a little bit about the fact that can
Dadiel Elliott mess it's crazy.
Speaker 6: I did not know that going in, and I can't
tell you what a surprise it was.
Speaker 4: I bet it was.
Speaker 6: His papers are held in Cleveland at the Western Reserve
Historical Society Library at the History Center in Cleveland. It's
a wonderful facility. There are some big, bulging scrap books
of Nessa's personal material there, and a lot of it
is what you'd expect. It's newspaper clippings about ness and
about articles of interest. And there are a lot of
familiar names, people whose names we know and remember today.
There are gangsters, There's Capone and others. And there are
other of the eras Bright fdr and John D. Rockefeller
and j Edgar Hoover. I'm turning the pages and yep,
j Edgar Hoover, Fred P. Stash hour, I'm turning to
the page. Wait what Fred P. Stash? I thought, surely
I have fallen asleep at the library, which is not
unknown it has happened. But I look again, and sure enough,
there he is my grandfather, a man I knew. Well.
I'd love to be able to come on here and
tell you that my grandfather was a bootlegger, or he
was a bank robber, or best of all, a murder suspect.
No such luck. It turns out that he and Ness
crossed paths at least once a year at something called
the Annville Review. Grandfather was a member of Cleveland City Club,
where these otherwise sober minded businessmen got together and they
put on a program of sketches and comedy bits and
songs meant to poke fun at the city's leaders and
fat cats, which included Elliott Ness. So at least once
a year and perhaps more, they'd have been in the
same room, and my grandfather would have been on stage
participating in these sketches. It was like the Washington Correspondence
Dinner or a Comedy Central roast or something like that.
And Ness apparently was tickled by it, because he cut
out articles about it. And there's one set of caricatures
of the actors on stage, including my grandfather, pasted into
the scrap book. And there's also a picture of Ness
with his hand pressed to his forehead, laughing in appreciation
of a joke at his own expense. It's the craziest
thing because I knew my grandfather very well for thirty
four years, and I don't recall him ever mentioning elliot
Ness my name.
Speaker 2: Wow, I'm picturing these guys in drag doing.
Speaker 6: These You're not wrong, Bill. There was some of that,
and there was somebody who took the stage to parody
Ness wearing short pants and a peter Pan collar and
a little beanie like a scouting uniform that was meant
to be parodying Ness's enthusiasm. Ness's youth and his genie
is enthusiasm. And he would say come in, spouting these
sort of naive sentiments. And in one year they had
him with a pair of angel wings clipped to his
back and he gives his line and he says, wait
the sound of a siren, I fly, and he turned
sort of flutters away. I wish they I wish there
were recordings.
Speaker 2: Oh I know, if only there were a video at
a last note, And this for a guy who believed
in myth making on a lot of levels, it sounds
like he didn't mind being poked fun at.
Speaker 6: I know he may have been untouchable, but he could
take a joke. And it's one of many things about
him that I find completely admirable, very just. He just
seems to have enjoyed it and didn't take himself at
least in that instance. Certainly he wasn't taking himself too seriously.
Speaker 5: Given the fact, like Bill just alluded to, Elliott Ness
has this whole larger than life persona, especially when he
was at the height of his fame, and then again
when The Untouchables came out again, we've got this version
of Elliot mess It's writ large in the public consciousness.
Was it difficult to determine what was fact and what
was fiction or expedinging exaggeration when it came to Elliot
Ness and who exploits?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is. And it starts with the book The Untouchables,
which was written when Ness believed himself to be a
forgotten figure and with a collaborator, a sportswriter named Oscar Fraley.
There's some of the there's some correspondence, but by no
means all between Frehley and Ness in Cleveland that you
can look at, and they also spent some time together.
The story goes that they met while Ness was in
New York on a business trip with a partner, and
his partner knew Frehley, and they had met up in
a bar and it was pretty clear that no business
was going to get done because Freyley was in no
position to invest in this business that the Ness and
his partner had going on. So these two friends were
just catching up while Ness sat quietly at the bar drinking,
and at one point Ness's friend turns to Freiley and says,
you want to get Elliott to tell you his story.
He's got some amazing stories about his time in Chicago.
He's the guy who took down al Capone. In Freiley's
telling the story, he didn't believe it. Ness looks like
this mild manner guy. And Ness got to talking. The
stories just flowed out, and the next thing they knew,
it was morning, and wow, Ness came to have snapped
out of it, seemed a little abashed, and said, oh,
let's cut this out. Let's go get some breakfast. And
Fraley said you should write a book. One thing led
to another and they collaborated on it together. There's a
document that the Ness pull called the Incident. That's a
fairly straightforward recounting of some of the incidents that took
place in Chicago. There's also stuff from Freyley saying, listen,
don't get worried if we embroider the facts a little,
if we embellish, have poetic license. Seems to have troubled ness.
And so that's where some of the myth making and
some of the exaggerations and all that began. And then
the TV series obviously took that punched it through to
the next level.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder. I think you said a moment ago, Dan
brought me up short. Why would elliot Ness looking at
this from a twenty twenty two perspective, why would he
regard himself as a forgotten figure even back then? Was
this myth all after the book and then the television
series and the movies, and is that more of a
recent creation? This myth of elliot ness Ness.
Speaker 6: Was extremely famous at the height of the Untouchables drama.
There was all kinds of newspaper coverage that focused on
Ness and the untouchables. And he was very careful at
the time and afterwards to be clear in saying, look,
and I'm paraphrasing here, this isn't I do quote it
directly in the book. But he said, we did our part,
of course, but the real work of putting Copone behind
bars was done by the taxman. Ness wasn't a taxman.
He said, we did our part. Our job was more spectacular,
that was all. But he was careful to give credit
to the treasury agents who had done the careful work
of building this tax case against Copone. And of course
it was the tax case that is what put them away.
Ness did an important job of cutting off capons, sources
of revenue payoffs. And while this was going on, and
also there had been a plan in place to also
bring forward evidence on violations, not just tax issues. That
case was never cared forward. But if you're a newspaper
man covering that story at the time, you're either going
to write about a strict interpretation of tax law or
this handsome young prohibition agent who drove a truck through
the doors of an alcophone brewery. Which story are you
going to focus off? Which movie would you rather see?
The tex stuff at dry so Ness got a lot
of attention, and that carried over into his years in Cleveland.
He still was getting a lot of attention, but the
Untouchables began to that chapter of his career began to
fade a little bit into the rearview mirror. Then is
a time as director of public safety came to an end.
He did some work in Washington during World War Two,
and when he came back, he decided he was going
to become a businessman. And he said, I may fall
flat on my face, but I'm sure having fun. In fact,
he did fall flat on his face. He didn't do
terribly well as a businessman, and again not for lack
of trying. But during those years, as one of his
friends said, his career became a check board that defies analysis.
And he tried very hard to translate his work as
director of public Safety and as leader of the Untouchables
into into a business career he took. He had a
pretty good innings, but he hitched his He hitched himself
to some horses that didn't exactly that did not pan out.
Then there was a he decided he would make a
run at becoming mayor of Cleveland, and that didn't that
didn't pan out. But I'm sorry to go on at
such length about it. But to answer your original question,
although Ness participated in the writing of the book The Untouchables,
he didn't live to see it published, and he did
not live to see the television series that began two
years after the publication, And he did not live to
see the thunderclap of celebrity that that that attended the
particularly the television show How Old Was Ness? And he
died He was in his fifties, and he died of
a heart attack, pretty young. So none of that. And
so he didn't see Robert Stack portraying him in the
television series. He certainly didn't see Kevin Costner portraying him
in nineteen eighty seven. He was long gone. Maybe if
he had been around, he'd have cashed in. Maybe he
would have had a moderating effect on some of the mythologizing,
on some of the myth making that went on, particularly
in the TV show Who Can. But but there's a
point at which he's no longer around to have any
role at all in the legend of aalians Ness.
Speaker 2: In the myth making. Kristin and I were talking about
this in a recent podcast. We were reading Edgar Allan Poe,
and of course Poe is from an era pre recording
devices for the most part, and there even aren't very
many photographs of the man. Kristin was saying, we didn't
know what his voice sounded like. And actually, when we
talk about elliot Ness today, in my head, I'm actually
picturing Robert Stack. Oh, of course, because he played the
part so well.
Speaker 6: But that speaks to your point about the mythmaking. Who
do you see when I say Sherlock Holmes, you see
your first one? Yeah, that was a wrath bone. Maybe
you see Jeremy Brett.
Speaker 2: With the crazy hat.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Elliott Ness was a real guy, but people tend
to think of him as being Robert Stack of that
clipped delivery, maybe with a Tommy gun in his hand.
Speaker 2: Oh exactly, I was doing that when you first mentioned
his na with the Tommy.
Speaker 6: Absolutely absolutely, and believe me, the real Eliot Nests I
yield to no one in my admiration for the nineteen
eighty seven movie. But believe me, when I tell you,
the real alien Ness did not throw Frank Nitti off
the roof of the Chicago Courthouse building. Just didn't happen
that way. But it makes a great story.
Speaker 5: You've taken on two really tremendous subjects here that they
must have a ton of research material that you had
to sift through. Can you give us a little insight
into your research process, because I imagine there was a ton
of it to do.
Speaker 6: Oh sure, And believe me when I say when I
talk about the story versus the real man, I'm not
in any way diminish it. The Nessa's career or what
he accomplished. He was astonishingly brave, and he accomplished incredible things.
He just didn't do some of the things that he's
portrayed as doing, particularly in the Robert Stack TV series,
where obviously they had to keep there had to be
a problem of the week to be sorted out. But
the research was tremendous fun because a lot of it
is in the newspapers of the time, and you can
see Ness in particular in the early days in Chicago,
not quite finding his feet yet in dealing with the
with reporters, being a little awkward to not quite sure.
There's one interview that I particularly like where he's speaking
to a young woman, an attractive young woman who this
should have brought out the best in him, because she
was a young woman who had a particular interest in
crime detection. She'd actually taken courses and gotten a terrific
education in criminology, and she managed to draw out a
great deal from Ness in about his views on criminology.
But there was also this note of artifice that kept
creeping into it, where you could see that he was
trying on a persona of a devil may care young
man who just happened into his career, and he was
using the phrases like I had afforded a great deal
of amusement too, things like that, And another reporter who
recalled Ness speaking to him but then dropping his mask
and giving a wink as if it was all a
joke between the two of them. He said something like
he is in short and an sigma and again I'm
paraphrasing here, but an enigma with lots of potential. And
seeing that develop over time in the newspaper coverage was
fascinating because Ness was very canny or became incredibly canny
about using the press. As Sherlock Holmes, he was a
boyhood enthusiast. He loved the Sherlock Holms story as Sherlock Holmes,
the Sherlock Holmes stories. As Holmes once said, the press
is a valuable institution if only you know how to
use it. Ness learned how to, particularly in Cleveland when
he was new in town. He knew that the press
was going to be able to show him around at
a time when he was literally learning his way around
as well as figuratively, and that they knew where the
bodies were buried. So he forged very close relationships with reporters,
and that proved useful to him in every phase of
his career.
Speaker 2: You mentioned going down rabbit holes, which is one of
our favorite expressions on Mind over Murder. We talked about
it a lot in the Colonial Park and other cases.
You mentioned going down rabbit holes regarding the Torso murders,
the subject of American demon What were some of the
rabbit holes you found yourself going down.
Speaker 6: I think you've probably seen this more than once. I
think every writer who approaches an unsolved crime comes at
it with the hope that they'll spot something, or stumble
across something that has lain hidden or undisturbed all these years.
We live in hope, and I think approaching a crime
that way, even if you don't seriously believe that, say
you're going to rip the jack the Ripper case wide
open after all these years, I do think it's a
useful hat to wear in terms of coming to grips
with material and developing and understanding of the case. There's
no better way to get your arms around the details
of the case than actually imagine yourself investigating. The more
time that passes, of course, the trail grows colder and
colder on this in any case, but of course you
live in hope of something bubbling up or in some
way modern criminology, modern crime techniques being able to shed
some light on it. There were a couple of victims
of the Torso Killer about whom we do know something.
I worked pretty hard running some of those details through
computer databases and doing work down at the Library of
Congress and at the National Archives. Didn't particularly go anywhere,
but I feel that I developed a better understanding. It
helped me look through some of the murkier areas of
the crime, and at least try to understand at least
some of the challenges that would have faced the investigators
at the.
Speaker 5: Time, and writing about true crime can be very challenging,
especially those crimes are as gruesome as they are. How
did you step outside of your subject matter at the
end of the day so that you could continue to
interact and not constantly have brutalized bodies in your head?
This is something that I know we both share as
people who report on crimes.
Speaker 4: This is hard. It's tough to do. How did you
manage to separate yourself from it?
Speaker 6: Or did you I wasn't entirely successful. I have to
say this story got under my skin in a way
that surprised me. I've written about true crime before, but
the Beautiful Scargirl, which was a terrible murder, it was
one crime rather than a rather than a series of them.
There were a lot of things about this case that
just converged to make it very hard to shake off
at the end of the day. And this is the
last for your indulgence here because it's difficult to talk
about this with it. I'm always suspicious of writers who
talk about how very sensitive they are and their magical
unicorns experience things so much more deeply than other people,
that anybody would be mortified by the boot horror of
these crimes, and that there were so many of them.
But I came to this story because I'd always wanted
to do a story set in my hometown of Cleveland,
and my father was ill, and I knew I would
be spending a lot of time in Cleveland, and it
seemed like the timing was good if I were to
do a story in Cleveland, because I was going to
be going back and forth, and my father remembered some
of the details. My father was very small and this
was unfolding, but there were elements of this case. For instance,
there's nests. At the time, Cleveland was putting on this
Great Lakes Exposition, great Big World's Fair that was patterned
on the Chicago Exposition. My father remembered going to it.
There were things about nests. There were parades and things
that happened during this time period that my father remembered,
and it started to become personal through that. My father
and I talked about it a lot. It gave us
something to talk about during those during those years, and
that made it hard to leave behind. At the end
of the day, so it was something that, again, this
sounds so self serving and in a way that I
don't intend it to be. I found myself when the
book came out, just needing to try to shake it
off in some ways, and a friend suggested something that
if I were a bit younger, I would have poo poo.
Did Itosur said, Oh, that sounds ridiculous. There's a memorial
tribute Nessa's grave marker. Memorial is in the same cemetery
where my parents are buried and my grandparents, so I
visited it often, and I'm in the habit when I
visit my father's gravestone of leaving a little airplane sized
bottle of Jamison's Irish whiskey there.
Speaker 2: Oh, very appropriate.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, the last time I was there, I also
went to Nessa's memorial and left the copy of the book.
Oh just felt like a way of not believe me.
I don't for a minute. I don't intend that is. Look, Elliott,
I did this for you because it's not that the
story continues. The story has been began long before I
got there, and it will continue. A lot and lots
of people are involved in it. There's been all kinds
of wonderful work done on this case and will continue
to be in the future. But it was trying to
at least signal that I had tried to tried to
do my best.
Speaker 4: That's fantastic.
Speaker 2: I love that I do too. When you were talking
about your research, Dan, I was thinking about you going
back and digging into these newspaper archives for all of
the arts articles from Cleveland, Chicago and elsewhere. Does microfiche
still play a part in your life? Or have we
digitized all of these microspapers?
Speaker 6: Microfish plays a huge part though, that same hand crank
or though with a little button that makes it go,
and I swear it takes you right back to junior
high school. Yes, because that hasn't changed a whole lot,
the reel to reel of microfilm. But yeah, the microfiche
where you put it on that hot glass plate, you
can almost smell it cooking under there, and you.
Speaker 2: Turn the crank on some of the models of Yeah. Yeah,
but I like that both of us do too. But
one of the things that Kristin and I have talked
about is, in addition to finding the articles, which can
take some time, you also see all sorts of other
articles and even the advertisements in a lot of these newspapers,
so you're actually looking at an old newspaper page by page,
which is.
Speaker 6: Fascinating, fascinating, but also useful because it does give you
some very important context about the way the story was
weighted compared to other things that were going on at
the time. When one of the bodies in Cleveland was discovered,
the headline that day was help sinking Amelia Radios. It
was Emilia Earhart had disappeared while this was going on,
and things like that. You just see all kinds of
remarkable things happening at the same time, competing for a
bandwidth with the developments of these stories. You see what
people were concerned with, and I think that's very useful,
But I also have to say it was also very
interesting looking at the scrap books that looking at the
articles the Nest Preserve. Very early on, there was an
article about himself had a sort of some kind of
civic dinner where he's dressed up in the evening clothes
and he's with his wife and they are all a
lot of the city's leaders are there. It's a grand
night out with the city's wheelers and dealers, and he's
clipped this article out very carefully and put it in
a scrap book. When I came across the same article
in the newspaper. One of the things that he had
clipped around was the discovery of some body parts in
one of the in one of these killings. And it
was very interesting to see how, at least in the
early days as Director of public Safety, that wasn't something
nobody expected the Director of public Safety, at least at
the beginning, to become involved in this. He wasn't brought
on to investigate murders anymore than he was investigated than
he was brought in to put out house fires or
rescue cats stranded in trees, although the fire chief also
reported to him, but this is elliot ness we're talking about,
and you, over time, as the coverage continues, he did
get drawn into it. Well did expect action, And he
himself had said, look, I'm not gonna I'm not I'm
going to lead from the front lines. I'm not going
to be in a remote director and stuck in my
office at city Hall. I'm going to be out there.
I'm going to be out there doing the job.
Speaker 5: And he did you describe yourself A couple times in
the book as being a true crime officionado, and I
know that you are. What are some other cases that
you feel like you'd like to sink your teeth into,
although I imagine you'd need a break from it for a
little bit after dealing with the Torso killings.
Speaker 6: I think a lot of true crime you must see
this all the time. But I think a lot of
true crime enthusiasts and a lot of true crime writers
would say the same thing. One of the things, the
most important thing perhaps that draws me into a particular
story is character who when I was a beautiful scargirl,
I was drawn in by the character of Edgar Allan Poe.
It's a very interesting story, and with our peril, I
was originally drawn in by my interest in the character
of Alan Pinkerton. Another remarkable story, this barefoot cooper in Dundee, Illinois,
who suddenly finds that suddenly, but by slow degrees, finds
himself America's first private eye. Just a fantastic and elliot
Ness is a similar character that's just fascinating. Even if
you were to strip the Torso murders out of it,
elliott Ness would still be this spectacularly interesting character. For me,
that's what draws me in, the really interesting figures who
you can build the story around. I mentioned at the
beginning when we started talking about childhood enthusiasms, another childhood
enthusiasm of mine is was magic, magic and magicians. I
was crazy about it. I've been a member of the
Society of American Magicians for more than forty years. Although
I am a terrible magician because I don't because I
don't practice. But I've always dreamed of finding a story
that some involved magicians, magic to some extent, but also
true crime. There's never been anything that quite where they
quite intersected to the degree that I would need to
be able to spin, to be able to spin something
out of it. Well, now that would be the dream.
Speaker 4: I look for something for it.
Speaker 2: Unless you moved back to the fictional.
Speaker 6: Thing. Yeah, yeah, I used to love reading books by
people like Clayton Rawson and Walter B. Gibson, John Dixon Carr,
where there'd be an elegant, top headed magician with an
opera cape who just happens to be great at solving crime.
Speaker 2: That's a different approach, though you're.
Speaker 6: Not a very different approach.
Speaker 2: No, this is fascinating Dan.
Speaker 5: The book is American Demon Elliott Nass and the Hunt
for America is Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 4: And we can find.
Speaker 6: If fine books are sold or my website stash hour
dot com, but really most anywhere.
Speaker 5: Dan, thank you so much for coming on and talking
with us today about American Demon. It's an amazing book,
and all of your books are amazing. We do encourage
our listeners to buy all of Dan's other books as well.
Speaker 4: They are fantastic.
Speaker 6: Kind of you to say thanks, Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: For listening to this episode of mind Over Murder. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mindover Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another
Dog Productions.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.