The Case of a Dead Seagull

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Two weeks earlier, a handyman had found what looked like the upper part of a human torso on a beach. That same week, a teenager was swimming in Lake Erie and reportedly saw a human hand under the water. The police were stymied. They just didn't know how to move forward. A reporter asked a detective if it was a perfect crime, and the police officer said no, but it was so close to being perfect that we don't know what to do next.

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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