Author: Max Allan Collins
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006288199X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 560
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Book Description
"The thrilling history of the torso murderer. The tale of the ‘Untouchable’ who got Al Capone but failed to solve his goriest case." —Dan Jones, The Sunday Times In the spirit of Devil in the White City comes a true detective tale of the highest standard: the haunting story of Eliot Ness's forgotten final case–his years-long hunt for "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," a serial killer who terrorized Cleveland through the Great Depression. “After helping to put Al Capone behind bars, lawman Eliot Ness came to Cleveland, where he did battle with a vicious killer. ... Even Ness was stumped trying to apprehend the ‘torso murderer’ responsible for a series of ghoulish killings. ... The authors have done Ness justice." —Wall Street Journal In 1934, the nation’s most legendary crime-fighter–fresh from taking on the greatest gangster in American history–arrived in Cleveland, a corrupt and dangerous town about to host a world's fair. It was to be his coronation, as well as the city's. Instead, terror descended, as headless bodies started turning up. The young detective, already battling the mob and crooked cops, found his drive to transform American policing subverted by a menace largely unknown to law enforcement: a serial murderer. Eliot Ness's greatest case had begun. Now, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz–the acclaimed writing team behind Scarface and the Untouchable–uncover this lost crime epic, delivering a gripping and unforgettable nonfiction account based on decades of groundbreaking research. Ness had risen to fame in 1931 for leading the “Untouchables,” which helped put Chicago’s Al Capone behind bars. As Cleveland's public safety director, in charge of the police and fire departments, Ness offered a radical new vision for better law enforcement. Crime-ridden and devastated by the Depression, Cleveland was preparing for a star-turn itself: in 1936, it would host the "Great Lakes Exposition," which would be visited by seven million people. Late in the summer of 1934, however, pieces of a woman’s body began washing up on the Lake Erie shore–first her ribs, then part of her backbone, then the lower half of her torso. The body count soon grew to five, then ten, then more, all dismembered in gruesome ways. As Ness zeroed in on a suspect–a doctor tied to a prominent political family–powerful forces thwarted his quest for justice. In this battle between a flawed hero and a twisted monster–by turns horror story, political drama, and detective thriller–Collins and Schwartz find an American tragedy, classic in structure, epic in scope.
Author: James Jessen Badal
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873386890
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
"In the Wake of the Butcher is based on police reports, autopsy protocols, personal interviews with the descendants of victims and investigators, and unpublished manuscripts and is illustrated with maps, rare crime scene and morgue photographs, and newspaper photos. The author dispels some long-held rumors about the crimes and confirms others. In the Wake of the Butcher presents its compelling case and leaves readers to come to their own conclusions about the notorious Cleveland murders."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Kenneth Tucker
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786488778
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Lawman Eliot Ness has been transformed into legend by the films and television programs that depicted the war he and his "Untouchables" waged against Al Capone and the mobsters of Prohibition-era Chicago. Published by McFarland in 2000, the first edition of this volume analyzed both Ness the person and Ness the myth. This updated and expanded second edition is enhanced by information gathered through interviews with members of the original casts of the television and film versions of The Untouchables. Also included is new material on the historical Frank Nitti and "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," along with several gangsters whom Ness never actually encountered except in his media portrayals, among them Mad Dog Coll and Dutch Schultz. The author concludes by evaluating the life and accomplishments of Eliot Ness, and his impact as a cultural icon.
Author: Max Allan Collins
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062441965
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 873
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Book Description
The new definitive history of gangster-era Chicago–a landmark work that is as riveting as a thriller. Now featuring a new preface, plus 115 photographs and a map of gangland Chicago. A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year “Gripping. ... Reads like a novel.” —Chicago “Revolutionizes our understanding of Al Capone and Eliot Ness." —Matthew Pearl In 1929, thirty-year-old gangster Al Capone ruled both Chicago's underworld and its corrupt government. To a public who scorned Prohibition, "Scarface" became a local hero and national celebrity. But after the brutal St. Valentine's Day Massacre transformed Capone into "Public Enemy Number One," the federal government found an unlikely new hero in a twenty-seven-year-old Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness. Chosen to head the legendary law enforcement team known as "The Untouchables," Ness set his sights on crippling Capone's criminal empire. Today, no underworld figure is more iconic than Al Capone and no lawman as renowned as Eliot Ness. Yet in 2016 the Chicago Tribune wrote, "Al Capone still awaits the biographer who can fully untangle, and balance, the complexities of his life," while revisionist historians have continued to misrepresent Ness and his remarkable career. Enter Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, a unique and vibrant writing team combining the narrative skill of a master novelist with the scholarly rigor of a trained historian. Collins is the New York Times bestselling author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition. Schwartz is a rising-star historian whose work anticipated the fake-news phenomenon. Scarface and the Untouchable draws upon decades of primary source research—including the personal papers of Ness and his associates, newly released federal files, and long-forgotten crime magazines containing interviews with the gangsters and G-men themselves. Collins and Schwartz have recaptured a bygone bullet-ridden era while uncovering the previously unrevealed truth behind Scarface's downfall. Together they have crafted the definitive work on Capone, Ness, and the battle for Chicago.
Author: A. Brad Schwartz
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 0809031639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With sirens blaring in the background, announcers in the field described mysterious creatures, terrifying war machines, and thick clouds of poison gas moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached Manhattan, some listeners sat transfixed, while others ran to alert neighbors or to call the police. Some even fled their homes. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles's adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic The War of the Worlds. In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles's famed radio play and its impact. Did it really spawn a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times reported? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent to Orson Welles himself in the days after the broadcast, and his findings challenge the conventional wisdom. Few listeners believed an actual attack was under way. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welles's broadcast became a major scandal, prompting a different kind of mass panic as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerability in a time of crisis. When the debate was over, American broadcasting had changed for good, but not for the better. As Schwartz tells this story, we observe how an atmosphere of natural disaster and impending war permitted broadcasters to create shared live national experiences for the first time. We follow Orson Welles's rise to fame and watch his manic energy and artistic genius at work in the play's hurried yet innovative production. And we trace the present-day popularity of "fake news" back to its source in Welles's show and its many imitators. Schwartz's original research, gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking new look at a crucial but little-understood episode in American history.
Author: Tim Huddleston
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781490337579
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
It's one of the most infamous unsolved cases of all time...a mad butcher in Cleveland who decapitated and mutilated several victims in the 1930s and was never caught. When the famous Untouchable Elliot Ness is brought in the killer is tracked down and the verge of being arrested. So why was this killer allowed to walk free and never be arrested? Find out in this page-turning book!
Author: Richard Berg
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573626494
Category : Country musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
Author: James Jessen Badal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781606351536
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Did the Mad Butcher of Cleveland also strike in Pennsylvania? From 1934 to 1938, Cleveland, Ohio, was racked by a classic battle between good and evil. On one side was the city's safety director, Eliot Ness. On the other was a nameless phantom dubbed the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," who littered the inner city with the remains of decapitated and dismembered corpses. Never caught or even officially identified, the Butcher simply faded into history, leaving behind a frightening legend that both haunts and fascinates Cleveland to this day. In 2001 the Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal's In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders, the first serious, book-length treatment of this dark chapter in true crime history. Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland's Mad Butcher--a detailed study of the arrest and mysterious death of Frank Dolezal, the only man ever charged in the killings--followed in 2010. Now Badal concludes his examination of the horrific cycle of murder-dismemberments with Hell's Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders. During the mid-1920s, a vast, swampy area just across the Ohio border near New Castle, Pennsylvania, revealed a series of decapitated and otherwise mutilated bodies. In 1940 railroad workers found the rotting remains of three naked and decapitated bodies in a string of derelict boxcars awaiting destruction in Pennsylvania's Stowe Township. Were all of these terrible murders the work of Cleveland's Mad Butcher? Many in Ohio and Pennsylvania law enforcement thought they were, and that assumption led to a massive, well-coordinated two-state investigation. In Hell's Wasteland, Badal explores that nagging question in depth for the first time. Relying on police reports, unpublished memoirs, and the surviving autopsy protocols--as well as contemporary newspaper coverage-- Badal provides a detailed examination of the murder-dismemberments and weighs the evidence that potentially links them to the Cleveland carnage. Hell's Wasteland is the last piece in the gigantic torso murder puzzle that spanned three decades, covered two states, and involved law enforcement from as many as five different cities.
Author: Kate Winkler Dawson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593420071
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Acclaimed crime historian, podcaster, and author of American Sherlock Kate Winkler Dawson tells the thrilling story of Edward Rulloff—a serial murderer who was called “too intelligent to be killed”—and the array of 19th century investigators who were convinced his brain held the key to finally understanding the criminal mind. Edward Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a “Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter”—whose crimes spanned decades and whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity. From his humble beginnings in upstate New York to the dazzling salons and social life he established in New York City, at every turn Rulloff used his intelligence and regal bearing to evade detection and avoid punishment. He could talk his way out of any crime...until one day, Rulloff's luck ran out. By 1871 Rulloff sat chained in his cell—a psychopath holding court while curious 19th-century "mindhunters" tried to understand what made him tick. From alienists (early psychiatrists who tried to analyze the source of his madness) to neurologists (who wanted to dissect his brain) to phrenologists (who analyzed the bumps on his head to determine his character), each one thought he held the key to understanding the essential question: is evil born or made? Eventually, Rulloff’s brain would be placed in a jar at Cornell University as the prize specimen of their anatomy collection...where it still sits today, slowly moldering in a dusty jar. But his story—and its implications for the emerging field of criminal psychology—were just beginning. Expanded from season one of her hit podcast on the Exactly Right network (7 million downloads and growing), in All That Is Wicked Kate Winkler Dawson draws on hundreds of source materials and never-before-shared historical documents to present one of the first glimpses into the mind of a serial killer—a century before the term was coined—through the scientists whose work would come to influence criminal justice for decades to come.
Author: Brian Michael Bendis
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
ISBN: 1506730256
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The true story of the hunt for America's first serial killer! Brian Michael Bendis, the New York Times bestselling co-creator of Miles Morales, Naomi, Jessica Jones, and POWERS teams up with Manhunter writer Marc Andreyko for this gripping true tale of Eliot Ness’ hunt for America's first serial killer: Cleveland's torso killer! Cleveland. 1935. Eliot Ness, fresh from his legendary Chicago triumph over Al Capone and associates, set his sights on Cleveland. He went on a crusade that matched, and sometimes even surpassed, his past accomplishments. But dismembered body parts started washing up in a concentrated area of Lake Erie Sound. Headless torsos that left no clues to their identity or reason for death. Eliot Ness and his colorful gang of The Unknowns chased this killer through the underbelly of Cleveland for years. As far as the public was concerned, he was never captured. But what really happened is even more shocking. This 1999 Eisner Award-winner for Comic Book Excellence is re-designed in this latest edition to the Dark Horse/Jinxworld library!
