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Speaker 4: Plus, you are now listening to True Murder The most
Speaker 4: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 4: have written about them.
Speaker 2: Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK every week another fascinating
Speaker 2: author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in
Speaker 2: true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and
Speaker 2: author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 5: Good Evening. Boston had its Strangler, California had the Zodiac Killer,
Speaker 5: and in the depths of the Great Depression, Cleveland had
Speaker 5: the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. On September fifth, nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty four, a young beechcomber made a gruesome discovery on
Speaker 5: the shores of Cleveland's Lake Ere the lower half of
Speaker 5: a female torso neatly severed at the waist. The victim,
Speaker 5: dubbed the Lady of the Lake, was only the first
Speaker 5: of a butcher's dozen. Over the next four years, twelve
Speaker 5: more bodies would be scattered across the city. The bodies
Speaker 5: were dismembered with surgical precision and drained of blood. Some
Speaker 5: were beheaded while still alive. Terror gripped the city. Amid
Speaker 5: the growing uproar, Cleveland's besieged mayor turned to his newly
Speaker 5: appointed Director of Public Safety, Eliot Ness. Nass had come
Speaker 5: to Cleveland fresh from his headline grabbing exploits in Chicago,
Speaker 5: where he and his band of untouchables led the frontline
Speaker 5: assault on al Capone's bootlegging empire. Now he would confront
Speaker 5: the case that would redefine his storied career. Award winning
Speaker 5: author Daniel Stashauer shines a fresh light on one of
Speaker 5: the most notorious puddles in the annals of crime and
Speaker 5: uncovers the gripping story of Ness's hunt sadistic killer who
Speaker 5: was as brilliant as he was cool and composed, a
Speaker 5: mastermind who was able to hide in plain sight. American
Speaker 5: Demon reconstructs this ultimate battle of wits between a hero
Speaker 5: and a madman. The book that we're featuring this evening
Speaker 5: is American Demon, Elliot Ness and the Hunt for America's
Speaker 5: Jack the Ripper, with my special guest, journalist and author
Speaker 5: Daniel Stashauer. Welcome to the program. And thank you so
Speaker 5: much for this interview, Daniel Stashauer.
Speaker 3: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: Dan, thank you so much, and congratulations on this incredible,
Speaker 5: incredible story and book.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you.
Speaker 5: Let's get right to September fifth, nineteen thirty four, and
Speaker 5: we had introduced the Lady in the Lake. This is
Speaker 5: the south shore of Lake Erie. September fifth, nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 5: A man named Frank Lagrassey sees something, an object, half
Speaker 5: buried in the sand. What is found on that day,
Speaker 5: September fifth, nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 3: It's a grim, grizzly story that is unfortunately kind of
Speaker 3: typical of the discoveries that were made throughout this series
Speaker 3: of crimes. He was out gathering driftwood and he spots
Speaker 3: something sort of half buried in the sand, and it
Speaker 3: turns out to be a hunk of a female torso.
Speaker 3: And as you would imagine, he in many ways doesn't
Speaker 3: I can't quite process what he's seeing. But over the
Speaker 3: next few days, a second section turns up. It's found
Speaker 3: to be a match with this first hunk of remains,
Speaker 3: and other body parts are found or glimpsed up and
Speaker 3: down the shoreline. There's even an account of a little
Speaker 3: girl who was wading in the waves of the lake
Speaker 3: and thought she saw a hand waving at her from
Speaker 3: beneath the surface. At that early stage it was considered
Speaker 3: naturally enough to be an isolated incident, although the police
Speaker 3: and searchers did mount to pretty pretty exhaustive effort to
Speaker 3: find any further remains and to piece together in every
Speaker 3: sense what had happened to this woman. But it proved
Speaker 3: to be only the beginning.
Speaker 5: What were some of the statements that appeared in the
Speaker 5: press regarding the expertness or amateurness of the dismemberment that
Speaker 5: was done on the body.
Speaker 3: Well, that's the thing, I think, one of the things
Speaker 3: throughout this series of crimes that caught the attention of
Speaker 3: the coroner. There were two coroners in place over the
Speaker 3: series of over the course of the series of crimes,
Speaker 3: but from the beginning, the coroner was struck by the
Speaker 3: fact that the dismemberments appeared to show a surgical precision,
Speaker 3: a practiced hand, and the questions were raised in this
Speaker 3: first instance of whether it was possible that either this
Speaker 3: woman had been chopped up in the blades in the
Speaker 3: propeller blades of a passing boat, or, in a phrase
Speaker 3: that appeared in one of the newspapers, a prankishly inclined
Speaker 3: medical student had disposed of these bodies, or either as
Speaker 3: a prank or was just getting rid of them. The
Speaker 3: coroner did not believe that was the case, and the coroner,
Speaker 3: both at the time and in the crimes to come,
Speaker 3: was struck by the fact that whoever performed these dismemberments
Speaker 3: appeared to have a working knowledge of what he called
Speaker 3: the anatomical landmarks as they were approached. In other words,
Speaker 3: knew how to guide a sharp knife so that it
Speaker 3: would perform these dismemberments with skill, instead of what a
Speaker 3: person without this kind of background would have done, which
Speaker 3: would have involved a great deal more crude cuts and
Speaker 3: hacking and wrenching. That wasn't the case throughout. There were
Speaker 3: examples of a cruder work later on, but throughout the
Speaker 3: series of crimes a hallmark appeared to be this knowledge
Speaker 3: and surgical skill that led investigators to believe that they
Speaker 3: were looking for someone with some kind of medical training
Speaker 3: or background, either a surgeon or a doctor of some kind,
Speaker 3: or perhaps a butcher.
Speaker 5: Now you say that the papers dubbed this victim the
Speaker 5: Lady of the Lake. And then a few days later,
Speaker 5: readers of the Plain Dealer newspaper were introduced to the
Speaker 5: leader of the federal team, elliot Ness. And elliot Ness,
Speaker 5: as you can tell us tell our audience what he
Speaker 5: was fresh off coming from in terms of exploits in Chicago,
Speaker 5: and who had brought him into Cleveland, and what was
Speaker 5: his supposed rule.
Speaker 3: Well, sure, you know, people have their own ideas about
Speaker 3: who eliot Ness was and what he did. You know,
Speaker 3: when we think of elliot Ness, we tend to think
Speaker 3: of Chicago, think of a big truck smashing through the
Speaker 3: doors of one of al Capone's illicit breweries. And in
Speaker 3: many ways, Elliottess is exactly what you think he is.
Speaker 3: He was a hero, a man of great integrity and bravery,
Speaker 3: but he's more than the tough guy that we think
Speaker 3: we know from the TV and the movies. He rose
Speaker 3: to fame during the Prohibition years as the man who
Speaker 3: got al Capone, and he's remembered today as the leader
Speaker 3: of the Untouchables. This was a legendary team of Prohibition agents,
Speaker 3: and some people will remember the old black and white
Speaker 3: television series that ran from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty three, and a lot of people, of course will
Speaker 3: have seen the movie with Kevin Costner and Robert de
Speaker 3: Niro that came out in nineteen eighty seven. But as
Speaker 3: I say, they think of Ness as a Chicago guy,
Speaker 3: we think of deep dish Petz, the Wrigley Field de Bears. Elliot. Ness,
Speaker 3: the real guy was more than that. He was an
Speaker 3: astonishingly forward thinking reformer. Yes, he was astonishingly brave, and
Speaker 3: his exploits were spectacular, but he was also interested in
Speaker 3: crime prevention as much as combating crime. And he also
Speaker 3: on screen we see him solving his problems with violence,
Speaker 3: and in real life he rarely carried a gun. In fact,
Speaker 3: he once told a friend he didn't need it, that
Speaker 3: the empty holster was enough. But he brought off some
Speaker 3: remarkable things and some very brave, rave exploits with that
Speaker 3: empty holster.
Speaker 5: Now, so Elliott is brought into Cleveland to as you say,
Speaker 5: some reforms, and he is there to reform the police department.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, time of this first crime, he was
Speaker 3: there doing mop up work as part of as a
Speaker 3: liquor coup. What was you know, prohibition had been repealed,
Speaker 3: that there was still work to be done. But he
Speaker 3: You know, what is often misunderstood about Ness is that
Speaker 3: his career with the Untouchables was brief, and it was
Speaker 3: pretty much wrapped up by the time he was thirty
Speaker 3: years old. He came to Cleveland and he landed a
Speaker 3: job as the director of public Safety, and this is
Speaker 3: a position that put him in charge of the entire
Speaker 3: police department and the fire department and a whole lot more.
Speaker 3: It's a big, big promotion, and in fact, a lot
Speaker 3: of people felt that the job was so big that
Speaker 3: he couldn't be done, particularly by Elliott Nass, who was
Speaker 3: the youngest person ever to hold the position in Chicago.
Speaker 3: With the Untouchables, he'd been in charge of a handful
Speaker 3: of guys, and now he's running thousands of city employees,
Speaker 3: and he's going to have a real struggle not only
Speaker 3: to do the job, but to live up to his
Speaker 3: own press clippings, to the reputation that he'd accrued in Chicago.
Speaker 3: His marching orders in Cleveland are to clean up a
Speaker 3: police department that was basically rotting from within because of corruption,
Speaker 3: and also to try to break the stranglehold that the
Speaker 3: mob had over the city at that time. Time, Cleveland
Speaker 3: was nearly as mobbed up as Chicago was. So you know,
Speaker 3: that's that's a pretty big job the police department take
Speaker 3: down the mob. And the wonder of it all is
Speaker 3: the amount of success he had. His timing was impeccable.
Speaker 3: As one of his reporter friends said, the city seldom
Speaker 3: had needed a hero so badly.
Speaker 5: You write about that. Elliott and Ness had the ability
Speaker 5: to form a gang busting unit with a unique a
Speaker 5: strategy that he employed, and he was able to do
Speaker 5: in that being that he put a elite squad of
Speaker 5: people together that he made sure that we're honest, not
Speaker 5: open to bribery, and he knew their backgrounds and so
Speaker 5: he was able to handpick this this group called the untouchables.
Speaker 5: When he came to Cleveland, he had the same idea.
Speaker 5: Tell us about that, Yeah, that's right, Dan, he's been
Speaker 5: brought in to clean up the police department. There's a
Speaker 5: whole lot of entrenched corruption going on a city that
Speaker 5: runs on bribes and payoffs, which was this was an
Speaker 5: equation that Nests understood. He'd seen it in Chicago. So
Speaker 5: as part of his effort to bring in reform, he's
Speaker 5: looking to younger police officers who haven't had a chance
Speaker 5: to become part of this entrenched network of corruption, but
Speaker 5: also who are going to be more open to the
Speaker 5: kinds of modern policing techniques that he is trying to
Speaker 5: phase in. He had a group called the Unknowns, and
Speaker 5: they were people that he handpicked, worked very closely with,
Speaker 5: and they initially at least were helping him to root
Speaker 5: out the corruption within the force. Now for nests, that
Speaker 5: was the job. The mayor of Cleveland, a guy who'd
Speaker 5: just been elected. His name was Gerald Burton, was trying
Speaker 5: to get the city back on its feet economically after
Speaker 5: the devastating effects of the Great Depression, and Burton believed
Speaker 5: that the city's economic fortune was tied, absolutely tethered to
Speaker 5: this campaign to clean up crime and corruption, that businesses
Speaker 5: and businessmen would not be drawn to the city so
Speaker 5: long as they were going to have to pay theirs
Speaker 5: song as there was this network of racketeering that that
Speaker 5: ran through every level of the city and its government.
Speaker 5: So Ness had the support of the mayor and a
Speaker 5: group of independent businessmen who really wanted to see him succeed.
Speaker 5: And part of what he did, particularly at first, was
Speaker 5: incredibly audacious. He was essentially taking down these incredibly corrupt
Speaker 5: police precinct captains who ran their police precincts like private fiefdoms,
Speaker 5: with in some cases people paying tribute by throwing money
Speaker 5: into a barrel at the center of the room, by
Speaker 5: just all kinds of gambling and things tolerated on their
Speaker 5: premises with police who would look the other way for
Speaker 5: a cut. That's what Ness was trying to do initially,
Speaker 5: was to clean that up. Now you write about Jackass
Speaker 5: Hill and along the Kingsbury Run, tell us who were
Speaker 5: the inhabitants of Kingsbury Run and what it was characterized
Speaker 5: by Before we talk about the gruesome discovery September twenty third,
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty five by two boys.
Speaker 3: In the center of a town and sort of snaking
Speaker 3: through a wide swath of the city was this gloomy
Speaker 3: thread of land called Kingsbury Run. It was an ancient
Speaker 3: dried up river bed and had originally been a garden spot.
Speaker 3: People would go there at a picnic and get away
Speaker 3: from the city. But as the city became an industrial center,
Speaker 3: sort of industrial powerhouse, there were a lot of industries
Speaker 3: and foundries and all kinds of apparatus of industry headquartered
Speaker 3: in Kingsbury Run. But during the depression years, as a
Speaker 3: lot of those industries fell silent, a number of homeless
Speaker 3: encampments and shantytowns sprang up in Kingsbury Run. When the
Speaker 3: murders began, the killer appeared to be preying on the
Speaker 3: inhabitants of these shantytowns, indigens, travelers, small time criminals, people
Speaker 3: who were just passing through the city looking for work,
Speaker 3: people who would be hard to identify, people who wouldn't
Speaker 3: be missed. And to be honest with you, Kingsbury Run
Speaker 3: seems to have been about the creepiest a place you
Speaker 3: could possibly imagine. There was a journalist that I became
Speaker 3: very fond of while I was doing the research for
Speaker 3: this book, and he went down there in the middle
Speaker 3: of the night just to have a look, just to
Speaker 3: try to soak up the atmosphere. And he wrote, last midnight,
Speaker 3: I went down to Kingsbury Run, that lonely, mysterious gully
Speaker 3: where Prowl's a mad butcher. Four of his headless victims
Speaker 3: have been found here. He has killed two others. I
Speaker 3: can testify that if you enjoy feeling your flesh creep,
Speaker 3: feeling the small hairs on your neck and your heart
Speaker 3: pound with shameless fear. If that's what you like, just
Speaker 3: take a midnight tour through Kingsbury Run. It might be
Speaker 3: best not to go alone. YEA, well, that's the tone
Speaker 3: of the coverage you were getting at the time.
Speaker 5: Let's go do September twenty third, nineteen thirty five, and
Speaker 5: the two boys discover a victim and then another victim.
Speaker 5: The horror is ramped up in this particular cases. So
Speaker 5: what did they discover?
Speaker 3: It certainly was their Jackass Hill was the name given
Speaker 3: to a steep incline that ran from a neighborhood on
Speaker 3: the edge of one of an area of Kingsbury Run
Speaker 3: and ran sharply down into the gully itself. Two boys
Speaker 3: were playing catch on there as they were walking home
Speaker 3: from school. The ball went wide. They went down a
Speaker 3: hill chasing it, and one of them all but literally
Speaker 3: stumbles over a headless body. Now you can imagine that
Speaker 3: was a terrible, terrible thing for a boy to see.
Speaker 3: They ran, they told an adult what they had seen.
Speaker 3: The police were on the scene very quickly. They discovered
Speaker 3: this headless body lying there nearby another headless body and
Speaker 3: other evidences of the killer's butchery. I should mention that
Speaker 3: the coverage at the time strained the propriety of what
Speaker 3: was considered proper to speak about in newspapers. So the
Speaker 3: papers were very careful tried, at least at first, to
Speaker 3: show some measure of restraint in describing what had happened.
Speaker 3: So the phrase used by the Cleveland Plaine Dealer, which
Speaker 3: was the morning paper at the time, was they had
Speaker 3: been dismembered and otherwise mutilated, which was a family friendly,
Speaker 3: discreet way of saying that they had been castrated and
Speaker 3: their genitalia found sort of in a clump nearby. And
Speaker 3: that gives you some idea of the horrifying scenes that
Speaker 3: faced the investigators as they set to work on these crimes.
Speaker 5: Now, while this is going on, the mayor wants a
Speaker 5: safety director. He has his ideal candidate, but then that
Speaker 5: person can't make it. He asked elliot Ness, and so
Speaker 5: tell us about this announcement and how famous elliot Ness
Speaker 5: is at this time while this butcher is just beginning
Speaker 5: his savagery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, as you would imagine, the elliot Nests from
Speaker 3: television would have strapped on his holster and started kicking
Speaker 3: down doors. But the real elliot Ness was in a
Speaker 3: different position. It's important to point out that he wasn't
Speaker 3: brought to Cleveland. He wasn't hired to catch the butcher
Speaker 3: of Kingsbury Run or any killer. That wasn't his job.
Speaker 3: It wasn't a homicide detective anymore than he was a
Speaker 3: fireman or a crossing guard. He's the director of public safety.
Speaker 3: The chief of police reports to elliot Ness. He's at
Speaker 3: the top of the pyramid. Nobody expected him to solve
Speaker 3: murders or any more than they expected him to walk
Speaker 3: a beat or rescue a cat stuck in a tree.
Speaker 3: But this is elliot Ness talking about People did expect
Speaker 3: action from eliot Ness. They expected heroics. Ness himself had
Speaker 3: made a point of saying he would lead from the
Speaker 3: front lines, and over time, as the pattern of these
Speaker 3: crimes gathered, of course, he had to do something. One
Speaker 3: of his police detectives said he had to do something.
Speaker 3: The mayor was on his neck. It was getting to
Speaker 3: be something of a national disgrace. So he put together
Speaker 3: a team in the mold of the Untouchables, much like
Speaker 3: the Unknowns. There were some overlap between the two. It
Speaker 3: seems they worked outside the system under the radar, and
Speaker 3: they tried to get information off of the criminal grapevine.
Speaker 3: But that's not to say that Ness ignored the official effort.
Speaker 3: He devoted extra resources and manpower to the detective bureau.
Speaker 3: He tried to give them every chance. And believe me,
Speaker 3: the effort that the homicide that the detective Bureau, that the
Speaker 3: police department put forward was heroic, massive. They left no
Speaker 3: stone unturned. But this smaller hands on effort was very
Speaker 3: typical of Ness. He didn't say a lot about this.
Speaker 3: He said very little publicly, but there was one notable statement.
Speaker 3: He said, I want to do all I can to
Speaker 3: aid this investigation. I want to see this psycho caught.
Speaker 5: There were some interesting things found as well. In December
Speaker 5: at the White Front meat Market there was some packages
Speaker 5: and parcels found and interestingly wrapped in newspaper. Again, tell
Speaker 5: us a little bit about these discoveries and the media reaction,
Speaker 5: public reaction and Elliott Ness and the police reaction.
Speaker 3: Well as if it hadn't been gruesome and horrifying enough already.
Speaker 3: It's a man and a butcher running a butcher shop
Speaker 3: the White Front beat market. A woman comes in, there's
Speaker 3: a dog barking behind the store. There's something going on
Speaker 3: behind his shop. He goes out back and in two
Speaker 3: straw baskets in the back, neatly wrapped up in bundles
Speaker 3: of newspapers, there are several dismembered sections of a woman,
Speaker 3: and this man starts unwrapping these parcels, realizes what it is,
Speaker 3: very quickly realizes he's seen enough, runs back calls the police.
Speaker 3: So the police are now confronted with a killer who
Speaker 3: appears to be gift wrapping body parts and leaving them
Speaker 3: to be discovered. And once again the scale of the
Speaker 3: thing begins to gather force, the tone of it is
Speaker 3: gathering heat. But even now at this stage, they were
Speaker 3: slow to connect that there was a series of crimes underway,
Speaker 3: and there was some discussion of it at the time.
Speaker 3: But in this case, as in the case of one
Speaker 3: of the two bodies found at Jackass Hill, they were
Speaker 3: able to identify the remains. The ones at the White
Speaker 3: Front meat Market were a prostitute by the name of
Speaker 3: Florence Bloo, and the police quite naturally investigated trying to
Speaker 3: find trying to uncover things about her background, her story
Speaker 3: that might have led to this horror, horrifying end but
Speaker 3: even at that stage, the notion of it being a
Speaker 3: series of connected crimes had been slow to take shape.
Speaker 5: Now at the same time, again, you said that Elliott
Speaker 5: Ness is brought in to fix the police department, not
Speaker 5: this Kingsbury run that just came at around the same time.
Speaker 5: But what he is also employed to do is that
Speaker 5: he meets a Frank Cullaton, a prosecutor, and they team
Speaker 5: up to be able to do the things that need
Speaker 5: to get done as a prosecutor and somebody else that's
Speaker 5: routing out eruption in the police force. And this also
Speaker 5: lands them in a situation where there is this dramatic
Speaker 5: showdown between gangsters and the police department, and then Elliott
Speaker 5: Ness to rescue. This is a story unto itself, but
Speaker 5: can you briefly tell us what happens in this dramatic story?
Speaker 3: Sure thing. One of the things that concerned Nests very
Speaker 3: greatly was what he called the sinister offshoots of prohibition.
Speaker 3: That the outlawing of alcohol had originally placed power in
Speaker 3: the hands of the underworld. As they were supplying alcohol,
Speaker 3: they also had money, resources and power to strengthen their
Speaker 3: position in gambling and prostitution and other forms of crime.
Speaker 3: Cleveland had a very very serious problem with gambling. One
Speaker 3: commentator said that before there was a Las Vegas, there
Speaker 3: was Cleveland. There were people coming from out of towns
Speaker 3: to drop a bundle at the gaming tables in these
Speaker 3: gambling clubs that were set up to take their money.
Speaker 3: One of these places was a place he's called the
Speaker 3: Harvard Club. And the county prosecutor at that time was
Speaker 3: a man named Frank Cullett, and he decided that he
Speaker 3: was going to mount a raid on the Harvard Club
Speaker 3: and another club on the same evening. And because he
Speaker 3: knew that if any word of his intentions got out
Speaker 3: to the police force, the clubs would be shut down
Speaker 3: when he got there and the equipment would be emptied out.
Speaker 3: So he went out with a force of private detectives
Speaker 3: so that the word wouldn't get out, and he shut
Speaker 3: down one of the clubs, and then they converged on
Speaker 3: the Harvard Club, where they met unexpectedly stiff resistance. The
Speaker 3: guards at the club were lining up with heavy artillery
Speaker 3: and they appeared ready to defend this club by opening
Speaker 3: fire if need be. Cull Ittton had not expected that.
Speaker 3: He called the sheriff couldn't get any action out of them.
Speaker 3: He called the mayor of this suburb where the club was.
Speaker 3: Couldn't get any action out of them, so he picks
Speaker 3: up the phone and he calls Elliot Nets. It's important
Speaker 3: to point out that this club was outside of the
Speaker 3: Cleveland city limits, outside of Ness's jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Ness says,
Speaker 3: I will come. I'll come as a private citizen. I'll
Speaker 3: bring police. Old Tight will be there. Ness drives over
Speaker 3: to police headquarters. He rallies a bunch of officers who
Speaker 3: are just coming off of their shift. Explains to them
Speaker 3: that they're going to be off the clock while they're
Speaker 3: doing this, but he hopes that they'll go with them
Speaker 3: to help shut down this club and strike a blow
Speaker 3: against gambling in the city. He drives out to the
Speaker 3: Harvard Club. Ness has got police on all sides of
Speaker 3: him and cull Iton's men, but he hasn't even got
Speaker 3: a gun himself. He pins on his gold badge and
Speaker 3: he says, let's go, and they just march forward, even
Speaker 3: though the men guarding the club have threatened more than
Speaker 3: once that they're going to mow down the police with
Speaker 3: automatic weapons fire if they try to get inside the club,
Speaker 3: Ness is gambling that nobody's going to have the brass
Speaker 3: to shoot him down in cold blood. And sure enough,
Speaker 3: they walk forward, they sweep through the club, and they
Speaker 3: shut him down. They shut the club down. I'm at night.
Speaker 3: Ness formed this partnership with Frank Culletton, the county prosecutor,
Speaker 3: who was a Democrat while Ness was serving a Republican mayor,
Speaker 3: and together they formed this partnership that became enormously influential. Basically,
Speaker 3: Ness would make the arrest and Cullletton would put him away.
Speaker 3: Ness would set him up and cull Itton would send
Speaker 3: him to jail. And it was a very very effective
Speaker 3: partnership that lasted for years.
Speaker 5: Now. Meanwhile, back to the butcher of Kingsbury Run, he's
Speaker 5: been busy and June sixth there is another discovery and
Speaker 5: there are conclusions from two people involved, the doctor Pierce
Speaker 5: and a doctor Strauss, and they are not in agreement
Speaker 5: with certain things. Maybe you can explain what their disagreement
Speaker 5: is and also some of the statements that are made
Speaker 5: in terms of the cause of death.
Speaker 3: Yes, there was some disagreement not only between coroner Peers
Speaker 3: and Strauss, but also the coroner who followed Pierce, whose
Speaker 3: name was Sam Gerber. As to the nature. They agreed
Speaker 3: on certain specifics. They disagreed on certain specifics of the crime,
Speaker 3: particularly where some of the surgical dismemberment appeared to have
Speaker 3: given way to more force, as if the killer had
Speaker 3: flown into a rage and at one stage was just
Speaker 3: wrenching the body parts apart. There was also some disagreement
Speaker 3: about whether among some of the experts, about whether all
Speaker 3: of the crimes were linked, or whether perhaps there were
Speaker 3: two killers at work, or perhaps even more. But as
Speaker 3: I said earlier, it took a while before the police
Speaker 3: realized that they were actually dealing with a series of
Speaker 3: connected crimes. But you mentioned jackass Hill. A short time later,
Speaker 3: another body was discovered barely a mile away from where
Speaker 3: those earlier two sets of remains were discovered, and the
Speaker 3: scale of thing just snapped into place. An investigator told
Speaker 3: the press that he and his detectives were on the
Speaker 3: trail of a crazed killer with a flair for butchery.
Speaker 3: And it has to be said that at least some
Speaker 3: of these victims appeared to have been beheaded while still alive.
Speaker 3: Remember this is the nineteen thirties, so modern forensics. A
Speaker 3: lot of it is still in its infancy things or
Speaker 3: some of it hasn't hasn't happened yet. Even so, the
Speaker 3: police threw everything they had at it, and they even
Speaker 3: improvised new techniques, trying to push through the limitations of
Speaker 3: their resources and their technology. The coroner pulled together a
Speaker 3: panel of experts to produce what they called a synthetic
Speaker 3: portrait of the killer. Well, we would understand that today
Speaker 3: is criminal profiling another stage. The police were looking for
Speaker 3: a particular suspect and they couldn't find a recent photograph.
Speaker 3: So had they found a photo of their suspect at
Speaker 3: the age of twelve, and they projected it onto canvas
Speaker 3: and an artist altered and embellished the image to approximate
Speaker 3: the man's current appearance, like the age progression software that
Speaker 3: we have today. As I say, they the police spared
Speaker 3: no effort. It was called the greatest manhunt in city history.
Speaker 3: That's undoubtedly true. But they were working just as hard
Speaker 3: as they could to run this killer to ground.
Speaker 5: Now while they wait for other and another discovery for
Speaker 5: the shoot of fall, how do they continue with their investigation?
Speaker 5: I know they run down leads, but any suspects emerge.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, and if anything, too many suspects. There were
Speaker 3: hundreds and hundreds of people brought in for questioning. Anybody
Speaker 3: discovered behaving suspiciously or with a knife in their possession,
Speaker 3: or a wrong place, wrong time type of thing, people
Speaker 3: could be brought in questioned. A lot of it was
Speaker 3: catch and release, but they also the police closed the
Speaker 3: books on a lot of other crimes just because they
Speaker 3: had spread their manhunts so wide, brought in so many people,
Speaker 3: and done so many so much questioning. But they were frustrated,
Speaker 3: and there was this cycle of frustration that repeated again
Speaker 3: and again. Remains would be discovered, the police would go
Speaker 3: in hot work very hard, check their results against missing
Speaker 3: persons reports, and then slowly and frustrate the trail would
Speaker 3: grow cold and they would begin to realize that it
Speaker 3: was only a question of time before the killer struck again.
Speaker 5: Now Mayor Burton, frustrated, appoints Elliott and has to be
Speaker 5: the director of this squad to be able this investigation
Speaker 5: to find the mad butcher. And they said he has
Speaker 5: to be stopped.
Speaker 3: That's right. It was getting to be a public relations issue.
Speaker 3: It was getting to be a problem for the city,
Speaker 3: and it was, and it had gotten to the point
Speaker 3: where this climate of fear was such that people were
Speaker 3: demanding action. There was an editorial that said the fact
Speaker 3: that I'm paraphrasing, but it said, the fact that this
Speaker 3: killer should go unchallenged and uncaught like some character from
Speaker 3: a pose story, should be Cleveland's shame, and the idea
Speaker 3: of it bringing Shane down on the city was very
Speaker 3: much alive time, and the mayor wanted to see this
Speaker 3: taken care of.
Speaker 5: We always you always include the media's response and the
Speaker 5: incredible headlines that emerge. But they also talking about a
Speaker 5: story about a murder laboratory, theorizing that since there was
Speaker 5: no blood at these crime scenes, that there was some
Speaker 5: sort of laboratory. Tell us about some of the things
Speaker 5: that are bandied about in the press regarding a murder
Speaker 5: room or murder laboratory.
Speaker 3: Yes, there was this idea that the killer must have
Speaker 3: some kind of secret layer. It was variously called murder
Speaker 3: studio or a butcher's den, things like that, where he
Speaker 3: carried out the crimes and then took the body parts
Speaker 3: to be disposed of in Kingsbury Run and elsewhere. So
Speaker 3: this as you would imagine really took on the air
Speaker 3: of horror film. The idea that this killer was luring
Speaker 3: unsuspecting victims into this place where they would be perhaps
Speaker 3: drugged or otherwise overpowered, and then beheaded, perhaps while still
Speaker 3: alive and dismembered, really fired the public imagination. And so yes,
Speaker 3: the press went to town on that, and it also
Speaker 3: bears mentioning these crimes are playing out. They happened to
Speaker 3: overlap with the fiftieth anniversary of Jack the Ripper's crimes
Speaker 3: in London, and a lot of people threw explicit parallels
Speaker 3: to the reign of terror in Whitechapel, London and what
Speaker 3: was going on in Cleveland. There was a headline that
Speaker 3: said Cleveland's Torso killer slays in the same manner as
Speaker 3: Jack the Ripper.
Speaker 5: These bodies continued to be found. But you introduce somebody
Speaker 5: named Bardsley. Bardsley, Marilynd Bardsley. Yes, and so again when
Speaker 5: we talk about suspects emerging, what does Bardsley find out
Speaker 5: and how.
Speaker 3: Marilyn Bardsley, a true crime researcher, was fascinated with the
Speaker 3: case and was working on it some years later. Ness
Speaker 3: was gone by that time, but some of the investigators
Speaker 3: were still around, and it had long been rumored that
Speaker 3: there was a suspect that ness and his team liked
Speaker 3: for the crime. For a while, he was known as
Speaker 3: Doctor X. He was known to be a doctor who'd
Speaker 3: fallen on hard times. He had a substance abuse problem.
Speaker 3: He checked at a lot of boxes. So Ness's team
Speaker 3: was tailed him around and seems that this suspect took
Speaker 3: a perverse form of pleasure in it, like as if
Speaker 3: he was playing hide and seek with the investigators. There
Speaker 3: are stories that even called into police headquarters to comment
Speaker 3: on the poor quality of the surveillance effort, and the
Speaker 3: even offered helpful tips about where he planned to be
Speaker 3: the next day. Well, Marilyn Bardsley threw her investigative diligence,
Speaker 3: managed to produce a name that managed to attach a
Speaker 3: name to this suspect, and she called up a man
Speaker 3: named Cowles who was a scientific expert who'd worked on
Speaker 3: the crimes. All she did was she spoke the name
Speaker 3: into the phone and he said, who gave you that name?
Speaker 3: And he hung up. Well, believe me when I tell
Speaker 3: you that the details of this suspect and Nessa's pursuit
Speaker 3: of him are going to be debated. As long as
Speaker 3: people talk about these crimes, people are going to argue
Speaker 3: until the end of time about whether doctor X was
Speaker 3: the killer, in the same way that people debate the
Speaker 3: Grassy Knoll and Jack the Ripper himself. Ness was alert
Speaker 3: to the possibility of other suspects, but he seems to
Speaker 3: believe he seems to have believed that this man was
Speaker 3: the killer.
Speaker 5: Now, let's you write and give a background about this
Speaker 5: Francis Sweeney, this doctor and we won't get to this
Speaker 5: incredible moment where a photograph is shown to some authorities,
Speaker 5: But let's talk about this Francis Sweeney and who he's
Speaker 5: related to and some of his background. Did you dug
Speaker 5: up that would point to him as a pretty good suspect?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't claim to be to be the person
Speaker 3: who dug up the information on Francis Sweeney. He's been
Speaker 3: written about by Bardsley and others. There's particularly a scholar
Speaker 3: in Cleveland named James Badel who's done incredible work on
Speaker 3: this case. But Sweeney had powerful political connections in that
Speaker 3: he was a cousin, he was part of a family
Speaker 3: of a Cleveland congressman, and it just so happened that
Speaker 3: this Congressman was a particular killer thorn in the side
Speaker 3: of Mayor Burton and elliott Ness. He was always very
Speaker 3: often giving speeches in which he was firing shots at
Speaker 3: Mayor Burton and his alter ego, elliot Ness, as he
Speaker 3: called it. And there was there were intimations that Sweeney
Speaker 3: would challenge Mayor Burton for the Mayor's for the mayor's job.
Speaker 3: And but so you'd have expected Ness if he really
Speaker 3: had the goods on this Doctor X suspect, you'd expected
Speaker 3: him to shout it from the top of the terminal
Speaker 3: tower in Cleveland. A lot of people feel that there
Speaker 3: must have been some bargain of silence struck so that
Speaker 3: the details never came out. Martin Sweeney Fell fell notably
Speaker 3: silent about these killings, and Francis Sweeney, the suspect known
Speaker 3: as Doctor removed himself to a series of institutions where
Speaker 3: it's thought that he had done so to place himself
Speaker 3: beyond the reach of the law, although he was free
Speaker 3: to come and go as he pleased, but he was
Speaker 3: always under surveillance from that point forward, and the killings
Speaker 3: did come to a close. Whether this has caused and
Speaker 3: effect is the points that's going to be debated forever.
Speaker 5: At the same time that there was this silence and
Speaker 5: Elliott Ness working behind the scenes to not blow this
Speaker 5: that did not scare off the congressmen, did not scare
Speaker 5: off doctor X. At the same time, there was a
Speaker 5: person that came forward a police say that he confessed
Speaker 5: and this is Dolazol.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So this really complicates things because there are law enforcement
Speaker 5: that believe that he is good for this, whereas there
Speaker 5: is law enforcement that even though the interview Frank Sweeney,
Speaker 5: don't think he's very good for this.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely, and there were at the time and there
Speaker 3: still are people who believe that Frank Sweeney had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with it. But this very unfortunate man, Frank Dolosol,
Speaker 3: surfaced right in the middle of things. It's important to
Speaker 3: understand that from the first with this standoff the Harvard
Speaker 3: Club and elsewhere, there was no lost love between Ness
Speaker 3: and some of the county sheriffs and other law enforcement
Speaker 3: officials who felt that they were being showed up by
Speaker 3: Elliot Ness. Well, a sheriff in one of the suburbs
Speaker 3: comes across this suspect. Private detective had been hired and
Speaker 3: he was gathering information, and he one thing leads to another,
Speaker 3: and he comes upon this suspect named Frank Dolazol, and
Speaker 3: they moved on him. They arrested him, They brought him out,
Speaker 3: and they said that they had obtained confession from Dolasol
Speaker 3: for the murder of Florence Bolillo. She was the prostitute
Speaker 3: whose remains were found in baskets behind the butcher shop
Speaker 3: at the White Front Meat Market. Well, this is big news.
Speaker 3: This looks like the case has been broken wide open,
Speaker 3: and papers are quick to point out that if this
Speaker 3: confession holds up, Elliott Ness and the mayor really are
Speaker 3: going to have egg on their faces. This was widely reported,
Speaker 3: including in Time magazine, how this sheriff appeared to have
Speaker 3: succeeded in breaking the case wide open, where elliot Ness,
Speaker 3: with all his resources, had foundered. Ness kept quiet, He
Speaker 3: said the right things, He congratulated, the sheriff offered to
Speaker 3: lend whatever assistance he needed, and very quickly the case
Speaker 3: against Dolazol began to began to unravel. They couldn't make
Speaker 3: it stick. There was evidence that Dolazol had been beaten
Speaker 3: while in custody. Of course, raising suspicions that the confession
Speaker 3: had been raised under duress, and it all ended tragically
Speaker 3: with Dolazol's while in custody. It's a very sad chapter
Speaker 3: in an already sad story. Today, there's almost no one
Speaker 3: who believes that Dola'sol was the butcher, but the attention
Speaker 3: paid to him at a crucial moment in the investigation
Speaker 3: can only have served to derail things.
Speaker 5: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a
Speaker 5: second for these messages.
Speaker 1: Lucky Land Casino asking people what's the weirdest place you've
Speaker 1: gotten lucky?
Speaker 5: Lucky?
Speaker 1: In line at the Delhi I guess ah, in my
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Speaker 2: Actually do I.
Speaker 1: Have to say?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 4: You do?
Speaker 1: In the car before my kid's PTA meeting? Really yes,
Speaker 1: excuse me?
Speaker 2: What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
Speaker 3: I never win?
Speaker 4: And tell well, there you have it.
Speaker 1: You could get lucky anywhere playing at lucky landsloughts dot
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Speaker 2: Are you feeling lucky?
Speaker 1: No, we're just necessary Flodever my long eighteen plus terms
Speaker 1: conditions plus see what's ever going to answer?
Speaker 5: Now? We have this incredible turn and twist with Dalival
Speaker 5: dying in custody, but again very few people believing that
Speaker 5: he was guilty. He had recanted his confession about the Palilo,
Speaker 5: and at the same time it had never said that
Speaker 5: he was the Torso killer whatsoever. What we haven't talked about,
Speaker 5: very interestingly is in this book is the You write
Speaker 5: about elliot Ness being complicated person, and in the end
Speaker 5: somebody describes them as being the most disciplined person, the
Speaker 5: most person that followed a set of rules strictly. But
Speaker 5: you write that elliot Ness did fall off the wagon
Speaker 5: in terms of protocol and good police procedure, and one
Speaker 5: of those being this interrogation of Sweeney. Now, how did
Speaker 5: they get around the normal rules of interrogation? Tell us
Speaker 5: about this hotel meeting and how long and some of
Speaker 5: the features of this interrogation.
Speaker 3: The details are pretty sketchy, but it is known that
Speaker 3: at one stage Ness and his team scooped up doctor
Speaker 3: x Francis Sweeney off the street and they skirted him
Speaker 3: off to the Hope what was then called the Hotel
Speaker 3: Cleveland on Public Square, and by one account held him
Speaker 3: there for close to two weeks, subjecting him to interrogation.
Speaker 3: In eight hour stretches. Elliott Ness had made a big
Speaker 3: point out of trying to reform the methods of interrogation
Speaker 3: and the methods generally used by the police. Only the
Speaker 3: previous year, one of his lieutenants had said, the third
Speaker 3: degree doesn't exist in Cleveland anymore. But in this case
Speaker 3: is the measure of the desperation and frustration that Ness
Speaker 3: and his team were feeling around this case. That they
Speaker 3: held this guy without charge for days and perhaps a
Speaker 3: couple of weeks, grilling him, hoping that he would crack,
Speaker 3: hoping that they would get a confession out of it,
Speaker 3: at a time when there was an extraordinary amount of
Speaker 3: heat being heaped on this sheriff and what had happened
Speaker 3: to Frank Dolisol while in police custody. Ness was grilling
Speaker 3: this guy, holding him without charge. And that's not to
Speaker 3: say that he was ever that it ever got to
Speaker 3: the point that the that it did with Frank Dolisol,
Speaker 3: But he never he never broke and due to lack
Speaker 3: of evidence, you know, they could, they just couldn't hold
Speaker 3: him forever. Ness was forced to let him go. You
Speaker 3: can only imagine the level of frustration that Elliott Ness,
Speaker 3: who was a huge believer in the latest advances and
Speaker 3: scientific criminal to investigation, who was trying to modernize things.
Speaker 3: He had fallen back on these on these strong arm tactics,
Speaker 3: and it didn't work. It must have been a huge
Speaker 3: disappointment and an enormous frustration and left an incredibly bad
Speaker 3: taste in his mouth.
Speaker 5: Now, he always had threatened that the surveillance on Frank
Speaker 5: Sweeney would be forever and he believed, as you say,
Speaker 5: I'm near the end of the book, and we'll talk
Speaker 5: about that this one statement regarding this case and being
Speaker 5: solved or not solved. But you write about that Elliott
Speaker 5: ness kept all of this suspicion secret. He didn't go
Speaker 5: to the media with this at all. He didn't share
Speaker 5: it with too many people. He kept this to himself.
Speaker 5: And you say, there are a few things like him
Speaker 5: not coming forward when this Dolavs was charged seems to
Speaker 5: not make very much sense to you.
Speaker 3: Some of that, No, and I do think there are
Speaker 3: a lot of things in play there. I do believe
Speaker 3: that felt that he had his man, but he remained
Speaker 3: alert to the possibility that he was wrong. And that's
Speaker 3: that there were that that somebody else had committed the crimes,
Speaker 3: or that someone else had committed some of the crimes
Speaker 3: there were. There were both men and women among the
Speaker 3: tally of victims. Maybe the women had had been slain
Speaker 3: by one person and the men by another. Ness was,
Speaker 3: even in the late stages of the investigation, willing to
Speaker 3: go where the investigation led. He had not closed his
Speaker 3: mind at least, it seems to me to the possibilities
Speaker 3: of whatever the evidence showed. But there's this fantastic level
Speaker 3: of secrecy attached to his suspicions of this Sweeney doctor X.
Speaker 3: That was honored even after Nessa's death. And I don't
Speaker 3: think it's enough to say that it was simply because
Speaker 3: of the powerful political connections in play. There has to
Speaker 3: be more to it than that. But long after ness
Speaker 3: was gone, people who worked with him, people who were
Speaker 3: in on the secret, honored his wish that the details
Speaker 3: be kept secret.
Speaker 5: You mentioned James Biddell this. I believe you call him
Speaker 5: the scholar of evil. He's considered he's You asked whether
Speaker 5: Ness believed wholeheartedly that Frank Sweeney was the butcher of Kingsbury.
Speaker 5: Run tell us about that exchange.
Speaker 3: Well, Jim Badele is a terrific guy who has written,
Speaker 3: you know, who has devoted a great deal of time
Speaker 3: and energy and written very compellingly on these crimes. I
Speaker 3: was fortunate enough to have dinner with him last week
Speaker 3: and on an earlier night out where we were discussing
Speaker 3: the case, you know, I asked him, do you really
Speaker 3: believe that Ness thought he had his man? And I'll
Speaker 3: just never forget the steel in his voice. He said
Speaker 3: he knew it. Well, you know, Jim Badel is a
Speaker 3: is an excellent scholar and a very careful researcher. He
Speaker 3: has been careful to say that he's not you know,
Speaker 3: he's not one hundred percent ready to say that the
Speaker 3: case is solved, that the case is put to bed,
Speaker 3: you know, and he believes as I do, that unless
Speaker 3: there is some smoking gun that surfaces at this late stage,
Speaker 3: some signed confession or deathbed confession or something, which seems
Speaker 3: increasingly unlikely as the years passed. You know, we may
Speaker 3: never know for sure, but James Batel seems pretty sure
Speaker 3: that that that this was the guy and that Ness
Speaker 3: knew it.
Speaker 5: Given the history that you present in this book of
Speaker 5: Frank Sweeney, the political connections that would explain the tiptoeing
Speaker 5: around of police somewhat, and just the how he would
Speaker 5: fit this profile at that time and even the profile
Speaker 5: today with some of the taunting postcards included in that profile.
Speaker 5: What do you think?
Speaker 3: You know, as I said in the book, I could
Speaker 3: cheerfully argue either side of this equation. You know, if
Speaker 3: I were on a high school debate team and I
Speaker 3: had been assigned one side or the other, I could
Speaker 3: argue it. And I think that speaks to the frustrations
Speaker 3: involved in not only the amount of time that has
Speaker 3: passed since it happened, but also contradictory details that were
Speaker 3: apparent at the time. The thing about Sweeney is, you
Speaker 3: know you alluded to these postcards. He seems to have
Speaker 3: found strange satisfaction in being a suspect and in attracting
Speaker 3: the attention of Elliott Ness, and in letters that he
Speaker 3: wrote at the time, postcards that he sent to Ness,
Speaker 3: and he also complained directly to j Edgar Hoover of
Speaker 3: the FBI. He spoke immoderately, but he never crossed the line,
Speaker 3: said things like, you know, he addressed elliot Ness calling
Speaker 3: himself his paranoidal nemesis, and he signed one of the
Speaker 3: postcard cheers the American Sweeney, which of course is a
Speaker 3: reference to Sweeney Todd, the demon Butcher of Fleet Street.
Speaker 3: But there was never anything that crossed the line and
Speaker 3: congealed into hard evidence. Sweeney is a man widely judged
Speaker 3: to have been at least partly crazy, but he never
Speaker 3: crossed that line.
Speaker 5: You say that what is missed sometimes in this story,
Speaker 5: or if they don't read this book, I would think,
Speaker 5: is that the miracle that he did bring to Cleveland.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely right. This case has shadowed Ness's legacy to
Speaker 3: some extent, but even more so when we think of
Speaker 3: Elliot Ness, when we speak of him now, we talk
Speaker 3: about Chicago, talk about the untouchables, we talk about al Capone.
Speaker 3: And it's important to understand that there's been some controversy
Speaker 3: attached to Ness because you know, I thought to have
Speaker 3: been kind of a publicity hog, that he gets the
Speaker 3: credit for taking down al Capone, when when in fact
Speaker 3: he was only part of a multi pronged effort. Ness
Speaker 3: himself was alert to those criticisms and very aware of it.
Speaker 3: He made a very forceful statement in his early days
Speaker 3: in Cleveland, saying the real work putting Capone in jail
Speaker 3: was done by the tax investigators. He said of himself
Speaker 3: and the untouchables. We played our part, of course, but
Speaker 3: the real work was done by the tax men. Our
Speaker 3: job was more spectacular. That was all right. It's important
Speaker 3: to point that out, because in Cleveland, he was the
Speaker 3: guy in charge. He was the person who pulled the
Speaker 3: levers of power. He was the one who rode into
Speaker 3: town and really cleaned it up. They're one of his friends,
Speaker 3: a excellent journalist, said that when Ness arrived, policemen were
Speaker 3: expected to tip their hats if they passed a gangster
Speaker 3: on the street, and when he left they no longer did.
Speaker 3: Ness had really managed to do the job that he
Speaker 3: was hired to do. He had cleaned up the force,
Speaker 3: He had loosened the rivets of this absolute hold that
Speaker 3: the mob had on the city. He left it better
Speaker 3: than he found it. But even people in Cleveland, and
Speaker 3: I grew up there, tend to be not to know this,
Speaker 3: not to have any sense of what happened, what he accomplished.
Speaker 3: It's an amazing story, and it tends to get overlooked.
Speaker 3: More as the pity.
Speaker 5: You also include that he did some made some decisions
Speaker 5: that weren't very good, like cleaning out Kingsbury Run, sort
Speaker 5: of cleaning out the hobo jungle, and that met with
Speaker 5: a lot of criticists them and later in life financial
Speaker 5: decisions and personal decisions, and he fell from grace. However,
Speaker 5: just the legacy of elliot ness. Before I let you
Speaker 5: go as well, you include just an interesting side note
Speaker 5: that when you went to the Western Reserve Historical Society
Speaker 5: that you read the name of your grandfather in those passages.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for mentioning that, Dan. I can't tell
Speaker 3: you what a surprise that was. I Nessa's papers and
Speaker 3: some family scrap books are in Cleveland, and I was
Speaker 3: paging through one rainy afternoon, and a lot of what's
Speaker 3: in there is what you'd expect. It's newspaper clippings and
Speaker 3: testimonials and other documents, and there are a lot of
Speaker 3: familiar faces. There's Capone and other gangsters. There's some of
Speaker 3: the eras, other shining lights like FDR and John D. Rockefeller.
Speaker 3: And I'm looking through and this familiar face jumps out
Speaker 3: at me and it's my grandfather. I'd love to be
Speaker 3: able to tell you that my grandfather was a bootlegger
Speaker 3: or bankcomber, or you know better. Yet, as suspect as
Speaker 3: the butcher of Kingsbury Run. He wasn't any of those things. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it turns out that Ness and my grandfather crossed paths
Speaker 3: at a political roast at least once a year. This
Speaker 3: was something I sort of on the lines of the
Speaker 3: Washington Correspondence dinner or a Comedy Central roast. And my
Speaker 3: grandfather was part of a group of businessmen who put
Speaker 3: on skits and songs and dances poking fun at the
Speaker 3: city's fat cats. They called them the goats, and one
Speaker 3: of them was Ness, and Ness apparently took it in
Speaker 3: stride there he clipped articles about this. This review was
Speaker 3: called the Anvil Review. Put him in his scrap book,
Speaker 3: along with a picture of himself with his hand pressed
Speaker 3: to his forehead, apparently laughing at a joke at his
Speaker 3: own expense. You know, he may have been untouchable, but
Speaker 3: he could take a joke. I knew my grandfather for
Speaker 3: thirty four years. He never mentioned it. I wish I
Speaker 3: could speak to him now.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. I want to thank you so much for coming
Speaker 5: on and talking about American demon Elliot Ness and the
Speaker 5: hunt for America's Jack the Ripper. Daniel Stashauer, can you
Speaker 5: tell us. Do you do any social media at our
Speaker 5: website can for people that might want to find out more.
Speaker 3: About this, sure, Facebook and Twitter at Daniel stash Hour.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. American demon elliot ness and the
Speaker 5: hunt for America's Jack the Ripper. It's been a fascinating interview.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, Daniel Stashauer.
Speaker 3: Good night,