UBC: Badal, In the Wake of the Butcher

In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders by James Jessen Badal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[There is apparently a revised and updated edition of this book, which I will be keeping an eye out for.]

This was a much better book than Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer. Badal is a good writer, he's done extensive primary research, and he's not trying to argue an indefensible thesis. He lays the baffling story of the Cleveland Torso Murders (as baffling in their way as The Thames Torso Murders) out clearly and with careful attention both to maintaining narrative and to exploring the sheer weirdness both of the murders and of the (exonerated) suspects.

Ironically, because Badal has a better command of his material, he does a better job of smoothing out the homophobia and racism that Nickel's more awkward book left on display. (The classism is still there. There's nothing you can do about the classism in this story.) And Badal's hero in this book is very clearly Peter Merylo, the Cleveland detective who became obsessed with the Butcher, but who was never able to catch him (and not coincidentally, whose daughter gave Badal open access to the previously untapped wealth of primary material of her father's papers). So Badal is pro-Cleveland police (as opposed to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office, which behaved disgracefully and which Badal ignores as much as possible). Badal does not talk about racism. And it's telling that his only apparent interest in questions of sexual identity and homophobia is to defend Edward Andrassy from the widespread accusations of being homosexual--instead of taking the stance I would have preferred to see, of pointing out that there's nothing wrong with non-heterosexual preferences, and what does it say about the detectives, the press, and the researchers that they treat it as "deviancy"?

And, to finish out my round of caveats, Badal is very distinctly an apologist for Eliot Ness, always looking for the best interpretation of his actions. He says about the disastrous mistake of the shantytown raid in August 1938:

Whether his actions in the final weeks of August were the knee jerk responses of a man desperately in need of results or the appropriate, well-planned measures of an accomplished professional seems to be a matter of personal interpretation, not to say prejudice. In either case, there remains something both wonderfully heroic and perhaps sadly anachronistic in the image of the onetime G-man standing resolutely in Kingsbury Run, ax handle in hand, overseeing his men on their methodical march of destruction through the shantytown.
(150)

. . . "wonderfully heroic"? In what alternate universe is there anything even remotely heroic about this ill-thought-out piece of security theater? In his desperate attempt to be seen to be doing something (even though in cold reality there was nothing he or anyone else could do), Ness chose this midnight raid, persecuting the destitute, homeless, and innocent men living in Kingsbury Run. That's not heroic. And it is totally Eliot Ness' just desserts that it backfired spectacularly, creating a PR debacle that his career never recovered from.

So Badal has his biases. As social history of Cleveland during the Kingsbury Run murders, this is not great. But as true crime, in terms of talking about the murders and the investigation--these poor detectives who have no conceptual framework for the Butcher and only the most primitive forensic science to help them, doing the best they can with the methodology they have--it is very good. He is very careful in talking about the victims, only two or maybe three of whom were ever identified, out of twelve or possibly thirteen--and that's the conservative estimate--not just lumping them together as unidentified transients, but remembering that each of them was a human being. And I feel like I came away from this book with a stronger sense of both the murders and the men who investigated them.

So, flawed but well worth reading.



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