Elliot Ness: The Director of Public Safety

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Elliot Ness was sworn in as the safety director in Cleveland in December of 1935. He moved to Cleveland right around the time people started finding body parts all over the city. Nobody expects a director of public safety to solve a murder any more than they expect him to walk a beat or rescue cats stranded in trees.

In 1934, a man collecting driftwood along the Lake Erie shore found a human torso on the beach. No one could figure out what had happened. Over the next several years, more bodies were discovered. Eventually, a coroner assembled something he called the “Torso Clinic” to work on the case. It was made up of about 30 people – doctors, professors, police officers, and a young Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness.

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