Eliot Ness is best known as the character portrayed in The Untouchables, both on television and in film. In both depictions, Ness is seen as a family man with a wife. The television series starring Robert Stack presents a more accurate description, as he gets the correct name from his wife and bears him a son. Brian DePalma’s movie changes his wife’s names and gives him two fictional biological children.
The prohibition agent credited with bringing down Al Capone is also depicted in fictional literature. In Nemesis, he is seen going through a divorce, though the story’s thread is his unsuccessful search for the Cleveland Torso killer. In Chasing Eliot Ness, he is also seen divorcing his first wife, Edna, and by the end of the book he has remarried.
Eliot Ness was married three times. Edna, Evaline and Elizabeth. He never had biological children, although he and his third wife adopted a three-year-old son, Robert. He has no living descendants as his son died before having any children of her own. None of the women he married had biological children.
According to his biography, Edna was his college sweetheart and his first wife. She left Eliot Ness in 1938 and returned to Chicago. At the time, Ness had a high-profile job in Cleveland. This is depicted in both Nemesis and Chasing Eliot Ness.
The second wife was Evaline, an artist. Like the prohibition agent, he liked the nightlife and didn’t seem to want to settle down with children. Ness never owned a home, he always rented and traveled frequently. This marriage was short-lived and ended tumultuously, although neither party discussed what exactly caused the separation.
In the television series, Robert Stack’s character refers to his wife as Betty, although she is never seen on camera. This description is more accurate of the real-life Eliot Ness character, as he is rarely seen at home and his wife or family never get in the way of his enthusiasm for solving crimes. Although the TV series is very fictional when it comes to solving crimes, it is quite accurate when it comes to his marriage.
The reason for the confusion stems from the fact that Ness never told Fraley about her two previous marriages. Fraley was unaware that the crime stopper had been married twice before when he wrote The Untouchables, which is almost as much a work of fiction as Chasing Eliot Ness is regarding this man’s personal life.
Their wives are long dead. None of them went into detail about his personal life with the man credited with Al Capone’s downfall. But according to books written on the subject, both fictional like Chasing Eliot Ness and biographical like The Real Story Of Eliot Ness, every wive had a complaint about him that might explain why he went through two divorces at a time when one was shocking.
He was just never home.