The killer had left his victims where everyone would have to see them. Two dismembered bodies, cut apart and stuffed into burlap sacks, had been placed directly outside Elliot Ness’s office window. Ness stared at the scene from behind his desk. He had spent his entire career hunting dangerous men, but this one was different.
This one was sending a message. In the years before, Elliot Ness had become the most famous lawman in America by bringing down Al Capone. He had cleaned up Chicago, or at least made a serious dent in its underworld. He had been hailed as incorruptible in a city where corruption was the norm.
But the case of the Cleveland Torso Killer would become the one thing he could not solve, and it would mark the beginning of his long fall. Elliot Ness was the youngest child in his family, born on April 19, 1903, in the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago. His parents were working-class immigrants, and they had high hopes for their son. Ness delivered on those hopes.
In 1925, he graduated from the University of Chicago with double majors in political science and business administration, finishing in the top ten percent of his class. He used that degree to land a job as an investigator looking into credit card fraud, preparing himself for a future in law enforcement. While Ness was studying on the South Side of Chicago, another family had settled about five miles away. The Capone family.
Elliot Ness and Al Capone did not know each other yet, but their fates were already becoming tangled. It was Ness’s brother-in-law who gave him his big break. The man worked for the Bureau of Investigation and believed Ness might have a future in law enforcement. In 1926, at the age of twenty-three, Ness began working for the U.
S. Treasury Department. His first assignment was enforcing Prohibition, the nationwide ban on alcohol that had created a massive underground economy. Around that same time, the Prohibition Bureau reorganized itself in an effort to root out corruption among its agents.
One of the new rules raised the minimum hiring age to twenty-five. Elliot Ness was twenty-four. He would later build his reputation on honesty, but in this one moment, he decided his only option was to lie about his age. He added a year to his birthday and kept that lie going for the rest of his career.
He would always list his birth year as 1902. In 1929, Ness met Edna Stahle, a woman who worked with his brother-in-law. The two married quickly and settled into a cottage on Lake Erie near Cleveland. It seemed like a happy new beginning, but the marriage soon hit a wall.
The couple realized they could not have children. It was a quiet sorrow that would follow both of them. By 1930, there was no bigger enemy of the American establishment than Al Capone. The mob boss had built his fortune largely on selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition.
President Herbert Hoover wanted Capone brought down, and that was a massive task. Although Ness was only twenty-seven, he was given the job of leading a small group of men tasked with putting Capone behind bars. It was a huge project. And a dangerous one.
Ness knew he needed a team he could trust. Corruption was rampant in the Chicago police force, so he took his time and read the records of the men who served in the Prohibition task force. When he identified six men he believed he could rely on, he assembled his team. He officially named them the Chicago Businessmen’s Committee on Crime and Prevention.
That was a mouthful, so people started calling them the Untouchables. Ness was taking on an enormous challenge. Thousands of officers and hundreds of Prohibition agents had failed to bring down Capone. Ness and his small team decided they would do it, and they would do it unarmed.
Ness hated carrying guns. He considered men who used them to be cowards, and he only armed himself when he felt he had no other choice. His strategy was to squeeze Capone’s main source of income. While other investigators focused on tax evasion, Ness went after the illegal breweries and distilleries that kept Capone rich.
He planned raids, gathered intelligence, and made life miserable for Capone’s bootlegging operation. As the pressure mounted, tension filled the city. In 1931, Ness received an offer. A man connected to Capone said he would pay him two thousand dollars a week, which would be worth well over thirty thousand dollars today.
All Ness had to do was stop targeting Capone’s bootlegging trade. Ness refused. And when word spread that his team had also rejected bribes, they embraced the name the newspapers gave them. They were the Untouchables.
In March 1931, Ness and his men began raiding Capone’s illegal breweries and distilleries. After six months, Capone had lost nearly five hundred thousand dollars. In total, Ness and his team cost Capone more than nine million dollars, the equivalent of two hundred million dollars today. Through his work, Ness gathered five thousand pieces of evidence of Capone’s wrongdoing.
Now it was up to Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson to finish the case. And then the judge did something Ness never expected. Wilkerson decided not to use the evidence Ness had provided.
Instead, he moved Capone to an entirely different jurisdiction. Another team had been working in parallel with Ness, trying to catch Capone on tax evasion charges. The judge decided that was the safest way to guarantee Capone went to prison. Ness was frustrated, but he reminded himself that the important thing was a conviction.
On October 17, 1931, Capone was convicted on three of more than twenty tax evasion charges and sentenced to eleven years in prison. He appealed without success. His first day behind bars was May 3, 1932. The most dangerous mobster in America had been brought down.
With Capone taken care of, Ness had to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. In 1933, Prohibition ended. There was no longer a need for law enforcement agencies to fight illegal alcohol. But fortunately for Ness, bootlegging continued to be a problem in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
He chased bootleggers there and eventually moved to Cleveland, where he took charge of a team of thirty officers. At the time, many people considered Cleveland the most dangerous city in America. The city had a reputation for gang violence, corruption, and organized crime. Ness was promoted to the position of Director of Public Safety in late 1935.
The mayor of Cleveland put him in charge of the city’s law enforcement and fire departments. Ness began improving how both operated. He focused on juvenile delinquency and traffic safety. He also turned his attention to the mafia figures operating in Cleveland.
Some police officers were cooperating with the criminals. Ness quickly identified eight officers tied to the mafia and charged them. The move terrified other officers who were not entirely honest, and several resigned from the force. Ness replaced them with men of his own choosing, preferring university graduates who had no ties to the underworld.
To make the streets safer, Ness focused on juvenile delinquents. He started Boy Scout troops to keep children busy with useful activities instead of trouble. He assigned his officers to serve as troop leaders. The result was an eighty percent drop in juvenile crime.
But those kids were nothing compared to Cleveland’s biggest problem. Ness quickly imprisoned two major gangsters. Then he managed to get rid of other gang members, either by sending them to prison or forcing them out of the city. The result was a two-year period in which no gang-related deaths were recorded in Cleveland.
Ness’s integrity and hard work made headlines. The Veterans of Foreign Wars awarded him a medal as a distinguished citizen. He seemed immune to the corruption that was practically a national pastime in America. He was untouchable in every sense of the word.
But there was one case he could not crack. While Elliot Ness was Director of Public Safety in Cleveland, a notorious serial killer haunted the city. He was known as the Cleveland Torso Killer. Ness was not directly connected to the case, but the deranged killer who dismembered his victims certainly knew who he was.
Of the thirteen victims, two bodies were left right outside Ness’s office window. The killer struck in the poorest neighborhoods of Cleveland. Ness tried everything to catch him. And then he did something completely out of character.
He ordered the evacuation of those poor neighborhoods and had them burned to the ground, hoping to smoke out the killer. The plan failed. Hundreds of people who were already homeless and vulnerable were left without anything. By 1938, everyone knew what Ness had done in Cleveland.
He received tempting offers from private companies that wanted to hire him for his expertise. The offers sometimes paid five or six times more than his government salary. But even those offers did not tempt him to leave public service. His intense focus on work, however, was destroying his marriage.
He and his wife moved often, and he rarely came home before ten or eleven at night. The long hours and the pressure of the job made the marriage almost impossible to maintain. In January 1939, his wife Edna filed for divorce. The divorce cast a shadow over Ness’s image as a good man.
At the same time, the press began reporting that he was drinking heavily. The man who had once been seen as a symbol of integrity was now being described as an alcoholic. It was a strange and painful turn of events. Ness had spent years enforcing Prohibition, but he could not stop himself from drinking.
Then came the final straw. Despite his campaign against alcohol, everyone knew Ness was addicted to it. One night, he was involved in a car accident while drunk. There were no injuries, but Ness tried to cover up his involvement.
In the past, the media had praised him. Now they reported the exact opposite. Ness had been driving drunk, gotten into an accident, and tried to hide it. Calls for his resignation followed, but the mayor of Cleveland decided to keep him in his position.
Ten months after his divorce, Ness remarried. His new wife, Evaline Michelow, had an excellent reputation. She was an artist who worked on children’s books and was a high-society woman popular in Cleveland. The public was fascinated by Ness and his new wife.
Evaline’s ability to balance running a household and working was a relatively new idea at the time. Their life on a charming houseboat inspired envy and admiration. For a while, it seemed Ness had recovered his standing in Cleveland. But problems soon appeared in this marriage as well.
One of Evaline’s children’s books was about a girl who wished for only one thing: a real baby to take care of. That was true for Ness and Evaline. Unfortunately, they could not have children either. In 1940, Ness decided to take a position in Washington to escape the pressure.
It was before World War II, and the government needed someone to warn new recruits about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. Ness traveled across the country, urging soldiers to abstain from sex. It was a strange job for a man who had once brought down Al Capone. After the war ended, Ness finally did something he had been postponing for a long time.
He went into the private sector. His first attempts failed because he lacked experience in the business world. In 1944, he accepted the position of chairman of the board at Diebold, a security company based in Ohio. Because they were both busy with their careers, Ness and Evaline rarely saw each other.
They divorced in 1945. Ness’s third wife, Elisabeth Andersen Seaver, had been a friend of his second wife. The two had spent time together at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 1947, Ness ran for mayor of Cleveland.
He lost. In 1949, he and his new wife adopted a three-year-old boy named Robert. With a new mouth to feed, Ness worked odd jobs. He was a clerk.
He was a wholesale dealer of frozen hamburger patties. The man who had taken down Al Capone was living a painfully ordinary life. His next job was at Guaranty Paper, a company that had an innovative way of putting watermarks on documents to prevent forgery. The company went bankrupt shortly after Ness joined it.
After that disaster, Elliot Ness seemed to give up. All those years fighting bootleggers had not stopped him from drinking, and now it was completely out of control. In 1955, he agreed to write his memoirs with sportswriter Oscar Fraley. Fraley took Ness’s twenty-one pages and turned them into a book.
When Ness read the book, he did not like it and decided to give up his rights to it. The book, called The Untouchables, became a massive success. Ness never saw a single cent from its profits. A few months after the book was published, Elliot Ness died of a heart attack at his home.
His estate was burdened with eight thousand dollars in debt. His widow could only afford to have him cremated. Ness never lived to see the fame of the book, the television series, or the film in which Kevin Costner played him.
But at least his legend would live on.