ELIOT NESS AND THE MAD BUTCHER

A sharp history of crusading detective Eliot Ness (1903-1957), a man who was vastly more complicated than the square-jawed hero of The Untouchables.

Ness began his career as a hard-charging special agent tasked with enforcing Prohibition in gangster-ruled Chicago. As crime writer Collins and historian Schwartz chronicle, he ended up a heavy drinker with a heart condition, thrice-married and unhappy. Having moved to Cleveland to take the post of head of public safety, he’d been broken by “one case he could never publicly close—the monster who emerged to prey on the city’s weakest and most vulnerable even as Eliot Ness began cleaning up their town, a killer who made Capone seem benign by comparison, branded in the press a ‘Butcher’ for what he did to his victims.” And what he did to his victims—most of them marginal people whose disappearances didn’t excite much interest from the police—was horrific: The Butcher, “a killer who preyed on strangers, for reasons incomprehensible outside his own twisted pathology,” cut off heads and genitals, eviscerated and dissected, left torsos and arms scattered along the shore of Lake Erie. Finally, upon Ness’ arrival, the police began to take notice, but they never could quite piece together the serial killer’s pattern until a resident of a veterans’ convalescent home in Sandusky voiced his suspicion that the killer was a resident there. The cat-and-mouse game that ensued makes for a careening read that’s full of surprises, especially once the killer decided that he ought to take the opportunity to taunt his pursuer. Collins and Schwartz deliver a nimble, taut tale. More importantly, they offer a portrait of a complex crime fighter who believed in science and reason at a time when most officers smacked suspects around with a blackjack, a portrait set against a backdrop of ethnic and class collisions, labor unrest, and political intrigue.

Catnip for true-crime buffs.