Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer [Hardcover]

Steven Nickel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1989

Most people know Elliot Ness as the unimpeachable FBI agent who led a special Justic Department squad known as the Untouchables in a war against Al Capone. In Torso, Nickel explores Ness's later career, the search for one of America's first serial killers. 20 photos.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

After his "Untouchables" exploits, Eliot Ness became the Cleveland director of public safety in 1934. He launched a mostly successful campaign against crime and corruption, but his record was somewhat marred by a series of gruesome, motiveless murders which were never solved. The "Torso Murderer" was responsible for at least 13 victims--ten never identified and all decapitated and dismembered. Since Ness was not a homicide detective, his Cleveland years are peripheral to the "Torso" case. The latter will be of some interest to crime buffs, but there is just not enough compelling material in this slim volume for a general audience.
- Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: John F Blair Pub; First Edition edition (May 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 089587072X
• ISBN-13: 978-0895870728
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,797,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A surprising book!, May 21, 2000

By 

One Fancy Angel "Life-Lover" (Milwaukee) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer (Hardcover)

Thinking I'd purchased simply a true crime book, I was astonished to find that this book weaves the later career of Eliot Ness with politics in Cleveland in the l930's and 1940's with the unkown identity of a gruesome serial killer at that time. The author's sense of time and place is terrific. I was swept back to that time in history, almost against my will. And I found this to be far more horrifying a book than it appears. When I was two-thirds of the way done, I found that I absolutely had to close and lock my bedroom window. These crimes may have been committed before I was born, but they're still shocking and terrifying. See if you agree with me that Eliot Ness's take on who committed these crimes is the right one! Horrifying, historical, accurate, mesmerizing, all at once. I recommend it to anyone interested in terrific reading.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 50% Ness, 50% Serial Killer, but important document!, March 9, 2005

By 

OverTheMoon ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer (Paperback)

The book's title is somewhat misleading us into believing that the 1930s `The Untouchables' character of Elliot Ness ran a serial killer investigation. Half this book is the life and times of Ness who happened to be Director of Public Safety in Cleveland while his skid row turned up mostly unidentifiable dismembered remains of vagrants, it was Ness who gained the most attention throughout the investigation by eventually burning down the homeless slums of the Kingsbury Run district in an attempt to clean out, tag, and fingerprint potential victims in the making, probably destroying the killer's Cleveland homeless hunting grounds, also a turning point event in Ness's career, a prohibitionist alcohol distillery buster, who once put away the national crime lord Al Capone, sadly failed systematically to progress his ratings with the city, eventually becoming involved in a hit and run accident that cost him an election run as Mayor, the over-hyped but none-the-less interesting account of Ness is all here, but maybe a little bit more than a seasoned non-crime fiction reader would care to expect, means you get only about 100 pages of the Torso investigation, where we concentrate on the city coroner Dr. Samuel Gerber and Detective Peter Merylo.

Ness comes into play now and again, obviously as a propaganda figurehead designed to play to the media, backfires most of the time he does appear by getting involved in the wrong thing at the wrong time, still had a very high success rate in exposing corruption, and did work on a number of highly constructive policies like getting kids off the streets and stressing the fight against disease, obviously behind the scenes worked with the ""good guy"" force heavies getting all the important political prohibition work done (alcohol prohibition was a failure not because alcohol is safe to use but because prohibition itself actually increases the prohibited drugs risks, usage rates and overall crime goes up because of it, a statistical fact). It is reading the situation of these same propaganda violent cops becoming cold case serial killer squads, even before the term serial killer was used, makes it an absurd situation of bad police management for the 21st century reader to contend with, and was the reason Ness went bust in the end and even more importantly, why the killer got away with so much in the first place.

Thus the investigation in Torso is not like any other, the cops are a different breed (just like out of a comic book meaning useless in real life) and the concept of `stranger killing' was not even present then. The classic book "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden" is based on the police records at Scotland Yard of the investigation at the end of the 19th century, news paper clippings and various memorandums that followed with surprising valid detail (all 500 pages of it). Torso reads like trying to find anything factual as if anyone except the leads could read, write or file reports, pounded and smashed their way across Cleveland in the hopes of stumbling across a sexual sadist who would suddenly admit to picking up homeless people, decapitating them with a large blade while they where asleep and or tying them up beforehand so they could not escape, a paraphiliac, expertly removed all the appendages after death with `knowledge of surgery' and bisected the body, sometimes used chemicals or freezers to keep his victims, would then wrap the pieces and begin his very strange dumping process which ranged from never-found victims, to victim's body parts appearing in the middle of the city for everyone to see, going to great lengths to leave two incomplete victims from different time periods together in the same spot, it stands to reason that Dr. Samuel Gerber and Detective Peter Merylo would give us a much better angle, and it is with the medical evidence that Gerber comes off as a sort of new-wave criminology serial killer expert, knowingly prevented other coroners from going near the victim's body parts, rightly asserts himself as a scientist in among all the investigative despair, leading some to suspect and challenge Gerber himself, after his conclusions that a recent severed leg was the work of the same hand, this statement exonerated various numbers of peoples who where obviously rotting in jail on suspicion of being the killer.

Merylo correctly guessed that the killer was somewhat mobile in the area and probably moved on after the killings that did not stop at #12, Merylo at the end of his career guessed that it was probably above forty. Dr. Francis E. Sweeney is the mystery Ness suspect not named in this book but the evidence is circumstantial at best. Gerber may have given the investigators a better idea of who there man was if he did not also subscribe himself to propaganda theories (druggie maniac). It is almost a certainty that if the investigators conducted better searches of abandoned train carts that they would have discovered the killer's `laboratory', a series of abandoned carts containing three different bodies that came from Youngstown after being there for almost a year, was almost certainly that unacknowledged lab of his, but Gerber did not examine these bodies. From the victims that could be identified all where prostitutes or homosexuals. The killer probably killed them away from his home, suggesting that he lived homelessly or with a family, certainly hung around the lower classes of society, befriended vagrants and some other loiterers who where happy enough to sleep with him in train carts (if this fact you are reading now had have been known at the start it would have probably prevented more death), resided in the general area and probably killed and mutilated several times before the first official Torso was found, meaning he learned his `surgical skill' that way.

He should have been caught earlier. Torso is a shallow account of the subject matter but still essential non-fiction crime literature.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book, July 6, 2002

By 

Robert A. Byrne (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer (Hardcover)

Not long after his "Untouchables" days, Eliot Ness experienced many successes as Public Safety Director of Cleveland (OH). Unfortunately, capturing the 'Torso Murderer' was not among them. A relatively little known crime, this serial killer haunted Ness' time in Cleveland. This book is both a look at Ness himself after his Chicago accomplishments, and an examination of one of America's greatest unsolved serial killings. If you are interested in either subject, this is an excellent purchase.