In September of that same year, the lower half of a woman’s torso is found on the shores of Lake Erie, at Euclid Beach. He’s tasked with reforming, and modernizing, the city’s epically corrupt police force as Cleveland’s new safety director. First there’s that of Eliot Ness - a minor police celebrity fresh from defeating Al Capone in Chicago and seasoned from his sojourn battling moonshiners in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee - who arrives in Cleveland in 1934. In “American Demon” Stashower tells two parallel crime stories. Instead, this case presents another roster of unsolved murders, in a country forever haunted by faceless, unnamed, uncaged dealers of death. There’s no Tommy gun showdown with the killer in this story, no chase through tunnels or urban alleys and no triumphant clacking of handcuffs on the wrists of a guilty maniac. I’ll go make the popcorn.īut, as Stashower’s exploration shows, the reality of this case is far more mundane and messy, and far more fascinating. the Cleveland “Torso Killer.” That’s the come-on line for Daniel Stashower’s new true-crime saga, “American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper,” and wow, what a line it is! An iconic police investigator on the hunt for a grisly murderer. The premise is a grind house fever dream. AMERICAN DEMON: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper, by Daniel Stashower
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